Author: Hermes of the Threshold

  • Fool’s Gold: How Trump’s Populist Return Is a Trap for the Naive

    This piece critiques the optimistic writers who continue to champion Donald Trump as a populist force, arguing that they fail to see his capitulation to global financial elites. It warns against blind cheerleading for Trump’s 2025 presidency which is set to advance a globalist agenda cloaked in the rhetoric of populism without actually fulfilling meaningful populist promises. To be clear, the purpose of this post is not to turn a reader anti-Trump, but rather to set very low expectations for the next four years and, ultimately, advocates not to cheerlead for a party or a man but to hold these people to higher standards. “Facilius decipere dulcedine quam dolore” is Latin for “It is easier to deceive with sweetness than with pain.”

    People think of a political figure and his supporters as a monolith, but that is almost never the case. Trump ran as a far-right populist during his 2015-2016 run for president, and he was supported by aspects of the elites such as the Clinton’s who encouraged him to run in order to blow up the Republican party (which he had done during his prior run for president in 2000 by undermining the campaign of Pat Buchanan) – everyone including Trump was surprised that he won; he spent his 2017-2020 presidency slowly purging the populist elements, including Steve Bannon, and unsuccessfully trying to accommodate himself to the establishment; he spent 2021-2023 locked in a battle for his life, facing massive criminal and civil charges that could have bankrupted him and put him in prison for life; and then you have the 2024 campaign and the start of Trump’s presidency now, where I contend that Trump completely caved behind closed doors to the upper elites to do whatever they wanted so long as he could win the controlled, rigged election, get rich and avoid prison.1 I covered the Trump campaign, presidency, and his 2020 run for re-election in this three part series which delves into the details of this narrative. The clue and giveaway that Trump caved in 2024 is that, other than the fact that he was allowed to win a controlled election2, Trump’s criminal and civil trials disappeared, the elite-owned media stopped endlessly calling him the equivalent of Hitler and started treating him neutrally to even positively, and the shitlib NPC mobs were placed on idle-mode stand-down — this would literally not have happened unless they were comfortable and accepting of whatever role they now have for Trump.

    This framework explains, for example, why he is now chummy with Barack Obama, even though Obama ran the wildly criminal and unpunished Spygate against Trump which made Watergate look like child’s play. They understand, on some level, that they both now work for the same people (Bill Clinton would also be friendly with him but he’s deathly afraid of Hillary, who continues to hold a massive grudge against Trump; Jon Hampton had a strong Note on this dynamic). Video of Trump/Obama laughing together is here.

    “And that’s when I told the Rothschilds – whatever you want, guys! I’m in. And we danced to hava nagila.”

    In 2017 I documented in great detail the specific moves that Trump did as he shifted from populism to globalism, and I don’t plan to do that again this time around. Basically, personnel is policy and the overarching themes of Trump’s personnel choices (which, remember, also have to receive Senate confirmation, and the Senate maybe has 15 populist or populist-adjacent members as explained here) is extreme pro-Zionism (an anti-Zionist Tweet by Matt Gaetz is the reason why his nomination for Attorney General was sunk), pro-cryptocurrency3, pro-technocracy, pro-integration into an Orwellian superstate, and a pseudo-”anti-wokeness”. It’s power derives from the West Coast Straussian nationalist-level counter-elite which I went into detail about here and which INRI_07 covered well here, which is to a large extent lipstick on a pig as the upper levels of the international financial elite structure remain totally unchanged and unchallenged.

    As I explained in my 2025 prediction post and in this recent NoteI expect Trump’s presidency to start with a bang of surface-level populist moves in order to build up capital and momentum among the white populist base and then that capital and momentum will be cashed in during his term in return for war with Iran (or at least a CIA overthrow of Iran), the introduction of central bank digital currencies which will result in the greatest loss of freedom in human history (i.e. the digital panopticon), unlimited H1b Jeet immigration, the furtherance of the Greater Israel project, previously discussed here, along with other actions unsupported by Trump’s base. It also brings to mind this 2023 4chan comment:

    As such, various DEI initiatives with great fanfare are being put back in their bottle. Victory, the woke are destroyed! Right? Akshully, DEI was astroturfed elite-sponsored slop from the get-go and, after getting what they wanted out of it, they are phasing it out and moving on to the next stage of their plan. Otherwise how do you explain such a sudden and instantaneous spike in media attention paid to DEI after the corrupt public bailouts of major banks after the 2008 crash? It was designed to shift public attention away from class warfare so the masses would infight along the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation and not focus on the extreme elite theft! Also see Balaji noting in February 2023 that the NYT was transitioning away from woke to statism. He wrote: “NYT is transitioning from wokism to statism. Because the US establishment doesn’t want domestic chaos anymore. They’re in control. So you’ll see less riots calling for abolishing police, more funding for riot police. Less on toxic masculinity, more on troops for foreign wars.” The World Economic Forum is playing their own role in the fake drama, fake-whining, “We Have Lost To Trump!” Uh huh.

    Shitlibs, who are unthinking NPC robots who simply do whatever the media and so-called “experts” tell them to, are claiming to be against DEI now because the elite switch for it has been turned off. They are now in zombie idle mode, appearing momentarily “reasonable” until the elites decide to flip another switch on. Nothing underlying this reality has changed.

    With that said, let’s now assess what Trump has done in the first couple days of his presidency. In the first day he correctly let the J6’ers out of prison (although I argued that he should have pardoned them before he left office in January 2021 as it was clear that our elites were concocting a giant scam out of 1/6), starting much hyped but transparently ineffective ICE deportations (all the ugly optics with little upcoming results4), and unleashed a flurry of executive orders such as a ban on birthright immigration (which will very likely be shot down by the courts; it was immediately blocked), a sham one on banning CBDC research (sham because of the advanced state of CBDC development and because the research on the U.S. version is finished, ready to deploy as soon as the appropriate crisis is unleashed), and a 90 day suspension of foreign aid (including to Palestinians but not for Israel). The Senate suspiciously passed a bipartisan Laken Riley Act “cracking down” on illegal immigration. Meanwhile, Trump has removed sanctions on West Bank settlers and is lifting restrictions on supplying 2,000 lb bombs to Israel. He’s also supported Musk and Vivek Scammerswamy’s intense push for unlimited H1b visa immigration from India, where Musk repeatedly called the anti-immigration Middle America Trump base scum5 and which, after massive blowback, he tried to change the topic of conversation by publicly Sieg Heiling like a strange autistic retard. Trump doubled down on his support for massive H1b expansion on January 22. He is also calling for Orwellian superstate integration and has also engaged in perhaps the most egregious piece of public corruption I’ve ever seen with the launch of Trumpcoin (see here and this post by Michel de Cryptadamus) along with the cherry on top of a $40 million bribe by Bezos to Trump. On day two of his administration Trump announced support for Project Stargate, a $500 billion project by a performative Trump hater to create the AI infrastructure to create personalized mRNA vaccines, i.e. Operation War Speed on hyperdrive. Did you expect anything else from the “father of the vaccine”?

    As I wrote in the above Note:

    You can only meet someone at the level of their personal, spiritual, or political development. If you try to explain concepts at a higher level than where they are at, their eyes will glaze over with an almost total lack of understanding. This is why I try to avoid conversations with “normies”, because they don’t get it and it’s a waste of my time.

    The current danger is not from the shitlib, who has been rendered mute into a catatonic zombie state, serving as NPCs in idle mode (turned off by their media and “expert” handlers for the moment), but rather from the Trumpenprole who will get ultra-excited by Trump’s surface-level populist moves as he works meaningfully behind the scenes toward establishing the Palantir digital panopticon, regional integration into a continental superstate, and the Greater Israel project, all while engaged in a level of graft that will be unprecedented in American history.

    This brings me to the topic of today’s piece. There are certain inflection points that reveal a person’s inner character; whether to support or not support Trump in 2015/2016 was one of them. How to respond to the COVID fraud at it’s peak intensity was another one; the vast majority of public figures failed, including blubbering crybaby Jordan Peterson and “screw your freedoms” “he-man” Arnold Schwarzenegger, while creating new figures worthy of respect like Ian Smith who resisted shutdowns of his gym under intense pressure. Another narrative was one’s position on the fake Russia/Ukraine war, which is controlled on both sides by upper level elites (FYI: Trump will likely “end” the war, although it didn’t happen in 24 hours as he claimed, which will be a Minsk III-style affair and be a total and complete elite victory, despite any propaganda to the contrary, as Rurik Skywalker properly explains here). And another inflection point is now but from the opposite perspective: who can keep their wits about them, to soberly analyze a situation without blind cheerleading for one’s side, now that Trump has “won” and the “right wing populists” are “back in control”?

    I did a post awhile back on dissident right Substack authors, where I put those that I covered on an optimism/pessimism and level-of-focus (metaphysical, cultural, or political) chart, which was as follows:

    Basically, it’s been pretty instructive on how the authors are approaching the Trump presidency. The higher-level pessimist authors have been far more level-headed about it than the optimist authors. I hate to put these guys on blast as I’m friendly with them and my apologies in advance, but John Carter , Librarian of Celaeno, Tree of Woe, Morgthorak the Undead etc. have been extremely excited that the right is “back in the saddle” and that the astroturfed woke nonsense is being put away; Tree of Woe was in particular so excited that he called the moment the end of Faustian civilization (which has been ongoing for hundreds of years!) and the start of a new dawn of a radically different civilization (although, to be fair, he later tempered his enthusiasm with more sour 2025 predictions). Their argument is essentially: take your wins where you can get them, politics is a messy affair, wins can build on themselves, you’re too perfectionist and nitpicky and negative and if you had your way you’d never get anything done, etc. After all, there was a binary election with two choices and would you rather have Kamala as president??? (The answer is no, see footnote 1). Aristotle in Exile attacks those who sit back in their cushy chairs, criticizing thinkers who think without organizing in real life: What would you have us do, NLF, sit back and do nothing? And hey, maybe they’re right, maybe they’re right; the proof is in the pudding, though, and my contention is that the Trump of 2025 is nothing like the Trump of 2015 or 2016, that there was an orderly handoff of power from globalist left-wing secular Jews to Greater Israel religious right-wing Jews in line with dialectical realities (i.e. America was far too whipped with crushing financial pressure and ultra in-your-face intense woke nonsense; the left had served it’s purpose by putting America on an irreversible path of total destruction, so now the baton has been passed to the next phase of the agenda and the astroturfed woke stuff orderly put back in it’s cage), and the global financial order is in such control, and it’s enemies so confused and shattered, that there is nothing to be done about it at this point other than learning and educating others. By getting excited about the process, by buying into the new narrative one feeds it and gives it energy, as I previously discussed. I prefer to sit back and watch the nonsense unfold. I put my predictions in writing for 2025 here, and we will see who is correct at the end of 2025 and throughout Trump’s term.

    Ultimately I don’t care about culture war goyslop, seeing it as always being a complete distraction; we live in a hierarchical global order based around privately owned central bank usury and mass communications used to keep the masses confused and broken as slaves. Trump has totally capitulated to this order, been integrated into it, and no longer serves as any kind of threat to it at all (unlike in 2017 when the upper level elites panicked and revealed themselves to the public; now, they are trying to recede back into the shadows). As J.R.R. Tolkien stated, “The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or, what is most important of all, the banker of the backer.”

    But just as this is an opportunity for naive writers who buy into the upper elite’s dialectical synthesis to fool their audiences, either intentionally or unintentionally, it is also an opportunity for new figures to stake out a case that Trump is now controlled and his administration will be a failure judged by his original populist promises (to understand what Trump would have to do for his administration to not be a failure in my eyes, see this post). Such new figures include Paul Cudenec here, Leo Hohmann here, Geopolitics & Empire here, Derrick Broze here, dgp here, and INRI_07 here. It’s interesting to see how after every new big narrative the people who I’ve ultimately agreed with becomes more selective, more curated – new writers to follow, many old writers to discard. Rurik Skywalker has so far been pretty consistently aligned with my perspective.

    With that said, I fully expect that only a minority of the right will resist the lure of Trump 3.0 and that the Trump optimist Substackers will continue to be far more popular than the Trump “doomers”. It’s another spiritual test, only this time a spiritual test with a carrot instead of a stick – facilius decipere dulcedine quam dolore – so it’s harder in certain respects. The pull to treat politics as sports is too strong for most – “Support our team against the other team, if you’re not with us you’re against us!” – and furthermore the masses are reactive and have no political memory whatsoever. When they get screwed on a false narrative they very slowly wise up to it, but they forget the lesson when the next narrative comes down from above to hit them from an unexpected direction.

    Anyway, I hope you found this post helpful and informative in your own process. As I continuously stress, one needs a grounding mechanism for which to assess endless streams of new information, and the one I recommend is one based on recursive prediction. Make predictions about the future based on your current level of understanding, and then go back and assess whether those predictions turned out to be right or not. No one is perfect, including and especially myself, and I always have a lot of new things to learn and update. We are all finite, fallible, imperfect beings, but the important thing when viewing politics, spirituality or anything else is remaining open minded and flexible to updating one’s worldview if one happens to be wrong. Do not put your faith in anyone else, no one can be your hero and if you try to make someone yours you will always be disappointed. Be your own hero. But to do that requires deep introspection and holding oneself to task.

    Ultimately what is required is a transvaluation of values away from egalitarianism and the world uniting as one in overthrowing the parasitical central bank system. One requires hope in order to live, and as a “blackpiller” I personally find hope in Jung’s process of individuation as well as my exploration of gnosticism. Regarding fundamental change, though, I believe it won’t be accomplished through Trump who this time around will, as Caitlin Johnstone argues, show the empire unmasked – which, ultimately, may be necessary before more fundamental change is possible.

    Thanks for reading.

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    1 For clarity, I voted for Trump in 2016 enthusiastically, in 2020 reluctantly, and in 2024 at the last second solely because I thought Kamala would let in another 20 million illegals like Biden did during his term if she won. As I stated here, “This isn’t a sports match, you don’t have to pick a side and stick to it loyally. Support public figures to the extent they support the positions you care about, mock and ridicule them to the extent they don’t. Welcome to adulthood.”

    2 All elections post-2020 are rigged: between permanent nationwide vote-by-mail overseen by a Marc Elias-approved Democrat post office voting “tsar”, electronic Dominion machine fraud, ubiquitous ballot harvesting, ballot stuffing in key precincts, etc, 2020 marked the end of managed elections and the institution of fundamentally rigged elections.

    3 For example, Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Commerce Secretary and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, is deeply enmeshed in Tether (which is an enormous and transparent scam). Tether is bailing out the federal government by printing unlimited amounts of dollar equivalents out of thin air and purchasing Treasuries with them – see here and here – in return for the CIA/NSA’s krisha of institutional protection and guarantees of backstopped against losses by the American public, which is these criminal’s end goal here: to trade worthless cryptocurrency for backstopped American fiat, socializing the losses and having the American taxpayer pay for it in the form of massive inflation. Really ugly stuff.

    4 It’s actually quite easy to solve the illegal immigration problem without doing any actual evictions if the political will is there: you enforce already existing criminal penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants, you ban the sending of U.S. dollars abroad by illegals, and you cut off all U.S. taxpayer aid to them (they receive thousands of dollars worth of free housing, free debit cards, etc.). It’s easy and simple and doesn’t involve what many will perceive as poor optics.

    5  is the recording. You can fast forward to 1 hour 49 minutes when Musk really starts going buckwild. Here is a description of what transpired. Even though Musk is a known shill for the elites, previously discussed here, the level of intense vitriol he spewed was still surprising.

  • Opiate for the Masses: Narratives of Distraction

    The following offers a critique of the modern spectacle, where political and social issues are churned through a constant feedback loop of entertainment and distraction while preventing real change or accountability. It underscores a system where truth is malleable and the masses remain passive participants in their own subjugation. This was a fun post to write and I may revisit it on a yearly basis to review the narrative goyslop from the prior year.

    Welcome back. The wonderful Guido Preparata likens humanity to a slave-making ant colony, which I’ve covered previously. Under this perspective our upper elites (i.e. the Rothschilds and their allies, along with select international organizations who translate their orders into policy, plus the security services worldwide who enforces their dictates at the point of a gun, all in a hierarchical structure) hate and fear the masses, but they also need them.1 If the elites don’t push hard enough against the masses revolution may occur; if they push too hard, too many people may give up into Netflix, video game, porn, and drug goyslop lethargy, to the point where not enough people are productive to maintain society. They need the population working, grinding it out in economic slavery, and satisfied enough with their lot in life not to create trouble, covered previously here. They need to maintain a fine line between the two extremes, and as part of that process they release narratives to entertain and titillate the masses as they steal from them and advance their longer term agendas. Whether these narratives are true or false is irrelevant and largely unknowable; Baudrillard’s hyperreality manifested.

    Our elites, despite using high-level AI behind the scenes to help them strategize, do not know to what extent their narratives will be accepted by the public, how long that acceptance will last or how the public will evolve from it. As I wrote in an older Note: “There are three competing perspectives about the nature of [our elites]: (1) it’s fully controlled from the top, (2) it’s not controlled at all, it is a blind fungus or swarm…or (3) it’s a combination…I see it as #3.” For example, regarding COVID, “[our elites] backed off of vaccine passports, ultimately, because compliance rates were not high enough; something like 80% of adult[s]…in the U.S. got the first death jab, but compliance rates on the booster were only 50%.” There is always a push-pull dance between the elites and the masses (and underlying it is the egalitarian ratchet effect); by paying attention to their narratives one feeds them and gives them power, and by withdrawing attention (not just consent, but attention) it makes it harder for our elites to maintain their control. Jobst Landgrebe argues in this interview that the elites cannot pursue a narrative if 30% of the population opts out of it, which everyone would if they understood the parasitical nature of our ruling elites.

    In order to counter the democratizing of information on the internet, our elites have flooded the zone with a huge amount of garbage (in line with Cass Sunstein’s recommendation for cognitive infiltration of disfavored groups) which has blurred the lines between truth and falsehood to such an extent that no one knows what’s real anymore. As demented cretin Yuval Harari states, “Censorship no longer works by hiding information from you; censorship works by flooding you with immense amounts of misinformation, of irrelevant information, of funny cat videos, until you’re just unable to focus.” Hence, the importance of having a grounding mechanism for which to parse new information.

    In this post I thought it would be fun to revisit the dead husks of recently dead, but still perhaps smoldering, narratives fed to the masses, which they’ve promptly forgotten about as they chase the new shiny thing, no lessons learned, and where no one involved in the narratives has been punished in any way. I’ve spent plenty of time in the past heaping endless scorn on the left-wing “shitlib” non-playable character “NPCs” who imbibes endless leftist propaganda against their own interests, where they trust official figures blindly regardless of the underlying evidence or coherence, but in the upcoming age of Orange Man 2.0, who I believe will be a colossal failure judging against his previous positions and campaign promises, it is the starry eyed Trump worshipper, the Trumpenprole, who carries just as much danger from the right (danger in terms of lack of adherence to principles versus cult of personality worship). Their views are wildly divorced from reality: as Academic Agent argued, “[the online right are] entirely consumed by Baudrillard’s simulation and engages almost totally in surrogate activities in lieu of real politics.” He doubled down in a recent post about right-wing “influencers”, which applies just as much to changing narratives:

    Naturally, the plebian, the average internet user, the great unwashed anon, is staggeringly stupid – rightly called stupid hobbitses by Curtis Yarvin – and therefore cannot tell the difference [between genuine versus astroturfed “influencers”]. In any case, he (or, less likely, she) does not really care because this is all a strange form of postmodern entertainment to them anyway. It is a surrogate activity like watching a soap opera, so it does not really matter if their favourite e-celebrity is an astroturfed paid shill, because to them, it makes no real difference. As I said, they do not care if their ‘discourse’ is basically fake, what matters to them is that they are fed their daily dose of slop. The clowns can change, but the show must go on.

    For clarity, the following is a list of public and prominent but now dead narratives with the following elements: there was (1) no official, transparent or believable inquiry into what happened, (2) no public policy changes resulting from what happened, (3) no officials were punished for negligence or intentional improper behavior, and (4) no lessons were absorbed by the public to wisen them up. It’s almost as if these events never happened at all…


    See how many you can recognize – like Pokemon, gotta catch ‘em all!

    BLM

    1. NFL players kneeling during National Anthem / Colin Kaepernick
    2. BLM riots during COVID destroying small businesses
    3. “Defunding the Police” movement and its real-world impacts
    4. Black Lives Matter’s financials and leadership lack of accountability
    5. Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax
    6. Blacks featured in 50%+ of television advertisements despite making up ~10% of the population; replacement of staff, coaches, quarterbacks and other players with the same sort of lopsided racial quotas

    Assassinations/attempts/shooters

    1. Thomas Matthew Crooks / Trump assassin attempt 1 – no real investigation, almost nothing known
    2. Ryan Wesley Routh / Trump assassin attempt 2 – no real investigation, almost nothing known
    3. The unsolved mass shooting at Las Vegas (Stephen Paddock)
    4. Luigi Mangione (in the process of being memoryholed)
    5. The murder of Seth Rich
    6. The murder of Jamal Khashoggi and its international fallout
    7. Political assassinations in Africa and Haiti during COVID

    COVID

    1. The so-called dangers of COVID-19
    2. Fauci’s gain-of-function research/COVID lab leak theory/Wuhan Institute of Virology and its ties to US funding
    3. “Two weeks [of shutdowns] to stop the spread”
    4. The duty to wear masks while standing for safety reasons but you won’t catch COVID while eating maskless sitting down
    5. School closures during COVID and their long-term effects
    6. COVID vaccine adverse reactions or complications
    7. The widespread censorship of anti-lockdown protestors
    8. The “great resignation” and post-COVID labor shortages
    9. The dancing nurses
    10. Children testing positive for monkeypox

    Health/environment

    1. E-cigarette vaping crisis and its potential long-term health risks
    2. Big Pharma’s role in the opioid crisis / the Sacklers
    3. The opioid settlement funds (how they were allocated and their effectiveness)
    4. The dark side of “Big Pharma” marketing strategies (opioids, antidepressants, etc.)
    5. Rising sea levels and the consequences of climate change on island nations
    6. The Brazilian Amazon deforestation and its international consequences
    7. Environmental lawsuits against Big Oil and long-term damage settlements
    8. Killer bees and their spread in the U.S. (and the fear-mongering that came with it)
    9. The ozone hole

    Israel

    1. Israel/Gaza war
    2. University protests over the war
    3. The self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell
    4. Israel invasion of Syria
    5. Israel invasion of Lebanon
    6. Hezbollah “exploding pagers”
    7. Jeffrey Epstein’s associates and “client list”
    8. Jeffrey Epstein’s shadowy death
    9. Ghislaine Maxwell trial and her connections to powerful figures
    10. Tunnel Jews in NYC

    Corruption

    1. Hunter Biden’s laptop – “10 for the Big Guy”
    2. Biden’s classified documents scandal
    3. Clinton Foundation corruption
    4. Hillary Clinton’s emails (and her server)
    5. “Cash-for-access” scandals involving politicians (e.g., Clinton’s speaking fees)
    6. Hunter Biden’s business dealings with China and Ukraine
    7. Hunter Biden’s art sold for extreme amounts
    8. Jared Kushner shady business dealings with Saudi Arabia and China
    9. Operation Fast and Furious and its international gun-running implications
    10. Sex trafficking in Hollywood and other elites / Harvey Weinstein

    Big tech

    1. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon monopoly practices
    2. Amazon and its labor conditions (worker strikes, warehouse injuries)
    3. The rise of “cancel culture” and its impacts on free speech
    4. Massive data leaks from companies like Facebook/Meta
    5. Big Tech censorship and its influence on elections
    6. Political bias within social media and search algorithms
    7. Indian takeover of Silicon Valley
    8. The rise of surveillance capitalism (Facebook, Google tracking user data)
    9. The rise of autonomous vehicles and their potential dangers (e.g., Uber’s fatal crash)
    10. The impact of artificial intelligence in military and surveillance operations

    Politics

    1. Christine Blasey Ford and the Kavanaugh rape allegations
    2. Adam Schiff’s insane anti-Trump vitriol from 2017-2020
    3. John Brennan’s anti-Trump vitriol until 2024
    4. The Trump-Russia dossier (Steele dossier)
    5. 51 former intelligence “officers” who claimed the Biden laptop was fake right before the 2020 election
    6. Massive voter fraud claims (especially 2020 election)
    7. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and its aftermath
    8. “QAnon” conspiracy theory
    9. Hillary Clinton’s role in Benghazi and its aftermath
    10. Government surveillance (NSA leaks, Patriot Act concerns)
    11. Media’s role in amplifying misinformation on both sides
    12. The hacking of political figures’ emails (e.g., Democratic National Committee, Macron’s campaign)
    13. Government contracts to develop “smart cities”
    14. The role of social media influencers in shaping political opinions
    15. The case of Julian Assange and the consequences for free speech

    Espionage/world politics

    1. The Myanmar military coup and the role of international institutions (UN, ICC)
    2. The suppression of the Rohingyas in Myanmar and the Chinese Uyghurs
    3. China’s social media censorship (Great Firewall, Xinjiang camps)
    4. Imran Awan Congress scandal spying for Pakistan
    5. Russian interference in 2016 election (and its ongoing investigation)
    6. Fentanyl trafficking by Chinese nationals through Mexico
    7. Trudeau invoking the Emergency Powers Act during COVID
    8. China’s espionage on U.S. soil (e.g. Swalwell mistress, Senator Feinstein’s driver)
    9. China’s “social credit system” and its implications
    10. The US’s involvement in overthrowing foreign governments (e.g., Libya, Syria)
    11. The rise of “authoritarian” leadership in Hungary and Poland
    12. The mysterious deaths of Russian oligarchs and connections to the Kremlin
    13. Crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo (mineral exploitation and violence)
    14. The return of the Taliban in Afghanistan and its implications for human rights
    15. The trade war between the U.S. and China
    16. Hacking of the U.S. power grid (e.g., Russian interference in energy infrastructure)

    Immigration

    1. Antiwhite rape gangs in Britain and it’s coverup
    2. Endless open borders immigration into Europe from Africa
    3. Illegal immigration and cartel involvement
    4. Migrant caravans moving through Central America to the U.S.
    5. Elon Musk’s push for H1b enlargement
    6. CIA/Homeland Security/governmental role in facilitating open southern border
    7. Lack of border wall

    “Accidents”

    1. Palestine, Ohio toxic chemical spell derailment
    2. Giant Hawaii fire that killed hundreds
    3. Disappearance of MH370 (Malaysia Airlines flight)
    4. The 2019 Notre Dame fire and subsequent lack of investigation into the cause
    5. The strange case of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 (shot down over Ukraine)

    Transsexualism

    1. Transgender athletes in women’s sports
    2. Transgender bathrooms at Target / Target boycott
    3. Bud Light trans controversy
    4. 2023 Nashville school shooting by transgendered person

    Strange stories

    1. Haitians eating cats in Ohio
    2. The “Karen” phenomenon in viral videos
    3. The military’s unexplained UFO sightings (Pentagon reports)
    4. The ethical concerns surrounding gene editing (CRISPR, designer babies)

    Conclusions

    Our upper elites are constantly managing the tension between exploiting the public and preventing unrest. The narrative-driven distractions they use are essential to maintaining control, and the public’s indifference to the truth makes them complicit, willingly feeding into a cycle of forgetfulness and manipulation. At its core, our elites engineer narratives — whether true or false — to keep society distracted and docile, using media and technology as tools of control. The rapid turnover of “shiny new things” prevents the public from reflecting on past scandals or understanding the bigger picture, while also ensuring that no meaningful accountability is ever achieved. As κρῠπτός explains,

    Even though driven by the deeper currents of pre-propaganda, propaganda really begins with the news, with current events. The idea is to get the public trained to be sensitive to the latest events, to want to be constantly catching up on the current thing that is in the news.

    What the news does is that it creates a perpetual present. Stories cross in and out of one’s attention. Before this item of news is digested, it is pushed aside by some new event. Your mind never has time to rest, to process this constant stream of reports and integrate them into a larger cohesive whole, to give them shape or meaning. They just come, one after the other, in a constant stream….

    Whether it is a newspaper, the radio, the television, your Facebook or Twitter feed, the effect is similar….

    There is immense social pressure to always be up on the latest news, whether that is in politics, sports or entertainment, whatever is valued by one’s social circles. This is itself an expression of the mythic structure of western society that we discussed in the last piece. History is supposed to unfold in endless progress. This sets up a society wide attention bias upon what is new as opposed to what is old. There is a hunger for what is new and novel. The traditional, the old is forgotten. One of the functions of the news is that is destroys our connection with the past, with tradition, with that which has been passed onto us. Why tell the old stories again when there is the news demanding your attention. And so, you now just float, bobbing and weaving, driven by a constant stream of news. You have forgotten the past and there is no future, there is just the present moment, happening now, that demands attention now. A man such as this is no longer grounded in anything. He has no continuity of existence. There is nothing to anchor him. He is now the ready target for propaganda. In this environment the idea of an objective reality or that truth is anchored in facts is meaningless.

    “What makes it news is its dissemination, not its objective reality.”

    Meanwhile, as these hyperreal narratives jump from one to the next, there are deeper, and far more nefarious, elite objectives at play. As I wrote awhile back on Notes,

    The system of [international central bank] financial parasitism only works so long as there is a host to consume, and the host, as everyone can see (white western civilization) is dying. Unlimited economic growth is also impossible in a world of finite natural resources and a greatly expanding world population as it hits up against neo-Malthusian limits.

    The central bank parasitical system is inherently unstable because it relies on constantly fooling the masses using endless fake media narratives in order to maintain their power. But over time the masses start waking up a bit (see Trump 2016) and it becomes harder and harder to maintain the illusion.

    The elites must always be striving toward something, some far-off end goal, in order to keep their coalition together. Without such an end goal they will end up squabbling among themselves and the project falls apart.

    The goal: They want a more stable system where they don’t have to worry about the opinion of the masses and their rule will not be subject to being overthrown. In other words, their ultimate objective is not money, but control. Money is easy to create out of thin air if they have control.

    When one puts together the contradictions and instability of the system – both via increased populism and via decreased worldwide natural resources, the necessity of elite consensus, and the far-off goal keeping the elites together, and it necessarily requires a radically different system than what we currently have. It requires the physical extermination of those groups with higher IQs who would balk at this system and it requires a much lower worldwide population.

    To compare where we are today with where we were politically a decade ago represents a stark difference. When Trump unexpectedly won the presidency in 2016, the so-called “deep state” and their higher level financial owners panicked. The “alt-right” populist movement surged, and there was a real energy in the air for a little bit of dynamism, of danger, of possibility for meaningful change; do you feel even slightly the same energy in the air now? It is a very clear and stark no: Trump has been absorbed, they no longer fear him or his followers who have been destroyed and cast to the winds, with it’s leadership replaced by astroturfed guys like CIA affiliate or agent Tucker Carlson, skin-suited Joe Rogan, retard Don Jr., squished prole face J.D. Vance, homosexual, hypocritical deviant Peter Thiel and “dark elf” Curtis Yarvin. We are a world away from the 2017 energy and possibilities. But the trends also show how much Baudrillard’s hyperreality has softened the opposition to our elites; violence in the West in the modern era is highly performative. As Ross Barkan wrote pre-election,

    Not long ago, I speculated on whether a Trump victory could trigger another great “awokening” in the United States. This refers to the period, from 2016 through 2020, when social justice politics were most in vogue, the anti-Trump resistance was at its height, and identity concerns, often shallow, were fretted over most. It was the peak of performative radicalism. Unlike the 1960s, the 2010s and 2020 did little to inculcate genuine radicalism, except perhaps on the far-right when it came to the deluded Trumpists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. There were no neo-Weathermen, no neo-Black Panthers, nothing like the domestic terrorism that flared up in the nation in the late 1960s and 1970s. No one was blowing up government buildings or plotting violent kidnappings. The right-wing, too, lacked the ferocity of groups like the Minutemen, which may have produced the Zodiac killer. Antifa, with its call for punching Nazis, was a frail echo, at best, of the Maoists, Marxists, and Black separatists who mobilized a half century ago.

    When one looks at January 6 or Charlottesville, where one person died at each, and the subsequent crackdown by the elites, it took them only minimal physical effort, and instead a giant reliance on manufacturing the hyperreality of the event, blowing them way out of proportion in the media, in order to reach their desired goals. Compare that to the early Soviet Union which required imprisoning and murdering millions of people to effectuate their desired goals. Technological development both makes the elite more secure in their positions, and also results in much less physical violence.

    I hope this has been an interesting exercise for you in the nature of our elite’s cycling narrative propaganda, and that the best way to fight it is both to tune out of it and to assist others in recognizing the process so that they tune out as well.

    Thanks for reading.

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    1 At least historically, and for now, although labor has been consistently devalued with technology development; we’ll see how things develop with AI.

  • The Ukraine War did not take place

    This is a post about the simulated nature of modern political reality, especially involving war.

    “All those journalists who set themselves up as bearers of the universal conscience, all those presenters who set themselves up as strategists, all the while overwhelming us with a flood of useless images. Emotional blackmail by massacre, fraud. Instead of discussing the threshold of social tolerance for immigration we would do better to discuss the threshold of mental tolerance for information. With regard to the latter, we can say that it was deliberately crossed.” – Jean Baudrillard

    I recently re-watched Wag the Dog (1997) after a couple decades, which I reviewed here (along with some scenes from the dreadful The West Wing as a counterpoint). In the film black operatives concoct a fake war to distract from the president’s sex scandal at the peak of election season. Their media allies build an entire narrative out of thin air, creating a closed feedback loop and snowball effect between media-government-spook state to achieve the desired result. It was a powerful film with an important dissident message, and real life events shortly thereafter mimicked it when Bill Clinton distracted from his own sex scandal by bombing Afghanistan and Sudan. The Atlantic summed up the film’s message well in it’s review:

    It’s a common trope in films and shows about politics: the one person, standing up to the Hollywood-produced machinery of Washington. The individual, fighting for authenticity in a political culture that wants nothing more than to be fake. What Wag the Dog suggests, though, is something both gentler and infinitely more cynical: Here, there is no one to push back. Here, there is no one to stand up for authenticity or truth or the empowerment of the individual. Here, it’s all a production; we citizens double as audiences. And the thing of it is that, in the movie’s dark vision, there is no difference between the two.

    To me, the film raised the questions: is there a limit to elite propaganda? Does it have to be based in reality at all, especially in the modern era? Under what circumstances does it need to be based in reality, or at least to adjust itself to feedback received from the audience/masses? It’s a really interesting question and one worth exploring.

    The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) explored this question in his short book the gulf war did not take place (1991). The book is stupidly expensive ($30.00 on Amazon) even though it clocks in at less than a hundred pages, apparently because it had a limited print run, although there are lots of free versions online such as here. I found it to be poorly written and poorly argued, meandering, unstructured and disjointed (to which Dr. Monzo agrees) in a typical French style. I also tried reading his travelogue America (1986) but it was even more poorly written and essentially unreadable dreck, although I gave it a fair chance. Regardless, the particular ideas he explores in gulf war are worth commenting on.

    Baudrillard. I feel neutral toward his physiognomy.

    Baudrillard is most well known for his Simulacra and Simulation (1981) where he introduced the ideas that he would later explore in the gulf war and which inspired The Matrix. It was better than America but worse than gulf war1; THE LETHAL TEXT liked it better than I did. In the book Baudrillard referenced the term simulacrum, where in his formulation there are four stages of reality: (1) basic reflection of reality; (2) perversion of reality; (3) pretense of reality (i.e. masking that there is no reality); and (4) simulacrum, which “bears no relation to any reality whatsoever” which is also known as hyperreality. This is an example of what he means by the four stages:

    Baudrillard associates each of those distortions of reality with periods of increasing technical sophistication:

    1. Stage one and two: Associated with the premodern period, it’s representation is an artificial placemarker for the real item. The uniqueness of objects and situations marks them as real and signification gropes towards this reality.
    2. Stage three: Associated with the modernity of the Industrial Revolution where distinctions between representation and reality break down due to the proliferation of mass-reproducible copies of items, turning them into commodities. The commodity’s ability to imitate reality threatens to replace the authority of the original version, because the copy is just as “real” as its prototype.
    3. Stage four: Associated with the postmodernity of late capitalism where the simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes. There is only the simulation, and originality becomes a totally meaningless concept.

    We are currently deeply enmeshed in Baudrillard’s conception of stage four and can see it’s manifestation in all sorts of ways. In all of the following cases the relationship between the underlying event, if one even exists, and the hyperreality created are entirely different things: the created hyperreality both supplants actual reality and then morphs actual reality into something totally different. Examples can be seen in advertising (the Bud Light tranny controversy comes to mind), in media narratives which are deployed for political purposes and then vanish once their use is over (Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting Ben Rhodes bragged about this2), after 9/11 where we stayed in Afghanistan for twenty years to wash money out of the U.S. taxpayer basis back into the hands of the transnational security elite and to control the world’s heroin production while invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam even though he had nothing to do with it, in the COVID narrative where the entire hysteria around it was concocted for political reasons and then discarded (including the creepy dancing fake nurses), in the stock market which is held up by unlimited Federal Reserve monetary printing despite it no longer bearing any relation between profitability and stock market prices. We can even see it in the establishment’s reaction to the 1/6 protests which was called an attempt to overthrow the government even though it was FBI-led and initiated (and they had a fake bomb plot as a backup in case it didn’t work), no one died other than a protester, Ashley Babbitt, no weapons were involved, and there was no way to transition a protest at the capitol into seizing political power. In this sense, Baudrillard argues, we live in a hyperreality which results from the fusion of the virtual and the real into a third order of reality. As Baudrillard argues in his article on the 1989 Romanian revolution, the indignant attempt to maintain a moral defense against the principle of simulation which governs all forms of representation misses the point: “The image and information are subject to no principle of truth or reality.” What matters to our elites is controlling the production and interpretation of information in a given context. The MAGA right unfortunately seem to totally fail to understand this point and engage with the simulation on it’s own terms, per Academic Agent where he argues that “[the online right are] entirely consumed by Baudrillard’s simulation and engages almost totally in surrogate activities in lieu of real politics.”

    What is real anymore?

    The Gulf War did not take place

    This also happened during the Gulf War, which was perhaps the first full manifestation of a created hyperreality during war. While prior wars were heavily manipulated and controlled – I think of the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the Vietnam war in general, or FDR’s foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor (which he pushed Japan into by cutting off their access to oil) – but the Gulf War was the first war which allowed the instantaneous media-government-spook state feedback mechanisms that allowed for hyperreality to manifest itself:

    It was not the first time that images of war had appeared on TV screens, but it was the first time that they were relayed “live” from the battlefront. It was not the first occasion on which the military censored what could be reported, but it did involve a new level of military control of reportage and images. Military planners had clearly learnt a great deal since Vietnam: procedures for controlling the media were developed and tested in the Falklands, Grenada and Panama. As a result, what we saw was for the most part a “clean” war, with lots of pictures of weaponry, including the amazing footage from the nose-cameras of “smart bombs,” and relatively few images of human casualties, none from the Allied forces. In the words of one commentator, for the first time, “the power to create a crisis merges with the power to direct the movie about it…Desert Storm was the first major global media crisis orchestration that made instant history.”

    Here, it was not a war at all: Saddam was tricked into invading Kuwait by the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie (the above L.A. Times article hints at the confusion and fog-of-war around the underlying incident, which should tell you all you need to know about the actual reality), Iraq had no ability to fight against the vastly technologically superior air forces of the United States, and the U.S. killed up to 100,000 people without suffering almost any casualties of their own – in other words, it was a one sided massacre initiated by the United States! Yet it was called a “war” and hyped up as a “war” despite having nothing to do with the underlying reality. Then the U.S. stood idly by as Saddam brutally crushed incipient rebellions by the Shia and Kurds under his rule and re-established his control – what kind of war was this exactly? “State-of-the-art military power is now virtual in the sense that it is deployed in an abstract, electronic and informational space, and in the sense that its primary mechanism is no longer the use of force. Virtual war is therefore not simply the image or imaginary representation of real war, but a qualitatively different kind of war, the effects of which include the suppression of war in the old sense.” And:

    The most widespread belief is in a logical progression from virtual to actual, according to which no available weapon will not one day be used and such a concentration of force cannot but lead to conflict. However, this is an Aristotelian logic which is no longer our own. Our virtual has definitively overtaken the actual and we must be content with this extreme virtuality which, unlike the Aristotelian, deters any passage to action. We are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual.

    undefined
    Demolished vehicles line Highway 80, also known as the “Highway of Death”, the route fleeing Iraqi forces took as they retreated from Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm.

    Here, the progress of the hyperreal war is measured not by objective war achievements but by it’s ability to hold the public’s attention, to draw ratings:

    The media promote the war, the war promotes the media, and advertising competes with the war. Promotion is the most thick-skinned parasite in our culture. It would undoubtedly survive a nuclear conflict. It is our Last Judgment. But it is also like a biological function: it devours our substance, but it also allows us to metabolize what we absorb, like a parasitic plant or intestinal flora, it allows us to turn the world and the violence of the world into a consumable substance. So, war or promotion?

    The war, along with the fake and presumptive warriors, generals, experts and television presenters we see speculating about it all through the day, watches itself in a mirror: am I pretty enough, am I operational enough, am I spectacular enough, am I sophisticated enough to make an entry onto the historical stage?….

    In the absence of the (greatly diminished) will to power, and the (problematic) will to knowledge, there remains today the widespread will to spectacle, and with it the obstinate desire to preserve its spectre or fiction.

    The purpose of the spectre is to produce “consensus by flat encephalogram. The complement of the unconditional simulacrum in the field is to train everyone in the unconditional reception of broadcast simulacra. Abolish any intelligence of the event. The result is a suffocating atmosphere of deception and stupidity. And if people are vaguely aware of being caught up in this appeasement and this disillusion by images, they swallow the deception and remain fascinated by the evidence of the montage of this war with which we are inoculated everywhere: through the eyes, the senses and in discourse.” We are ultimately responsible for this as we desire it, we demand it: “We have neither need of nor the taste for real drama or real war. What we require is the aphrodisiac spice of the multiplication of fakes and the hallucination of violence, for we have a hallucinogenic pleasure in all things, which, as in the case of drugs, is also the pleasure in our indifference and our irresponsibility and thus in our true liberty. Here is the supreme form of democracy. Through it our definitive retreat from the world takes shape.”

    Baudrillard maintains that we do not have the objective information necessary to assess what information the media provides us is real or false even if we wanted to. Therefore, a default high level of suspicion toward any information is appropriate:

    The author of The Persian Gulf TV War, Douglas Kellner, recounts his herculean efforts to obtain and cross-check information about the Gulf War. Despite this, his book opens with an admission of failure: he cannot decide conclusively for or against the conspiracy theory according to which the US enticed Iraq to invade Kuwait since “other accounts are also plausible.” It is the desire to avoid this kind of informational aporia which lies behind Baudrillard’s injunction: “Resist the probability of any image or information whatever. Be more virtual than the events themselves, do not seek to re-establish the truth, we do not have the means, but do not be duped, and to that end re-immerse the war and all information in the virtuality from whence they came…Be meteorologically sensitive to stupidity.” Not only does the real vanish in the virtual through an excess of information, it leaves an archival deposit such that “generations of video-zombies…will never cease reconstituting the event.”…Indeed, the tone and argument of Baudrillard’s essays is entirely directed against the complicity which results from the failure to question the reality and the nature of these events.

    This goes back to the importance of having a grounding mechanism by which one can ascertain truth even in light of massive disinformation and propaganda. There are at least two such mechanisms: (1) the scientific method where results can be repeated by third parties and (2) using recursive predictions to gradually refine and update one’s view of the world; the more one is proven wrong about predictions, the more one should refine one’s worldview. This is my preferred approach. Through trial and error, making a fool of oneself, one may achieve clarification about why and how this world actually operates – one will never achieve total understanding or predictive ability, of course; there is always room to grow, but one can get much closer to the truth using this method than one might get otherwise. This is complicated by the fact that paradoxically the more information we receive, the greater the corresponding loss of meaning associated with it.

    Clausewitz famously said “War is merely the continuation of policy by other means” but here, simulated war is the politics of persuasion by other means. Who/what was the target? According to Baudrillard it was not Saddam, ultimately, but Islam itself:

    The use of force remains carefully circumscribed, a lever of last resort employed only to the extent that is necessary to bring the recalcitrant party into line. The crucial stake in the Gulf affair, Baudrillard argues, was the subordination of Islam to the global order [later continued with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq under George W. Bush]: “Our wars thus have less to do with the confrontation of warriors than with the domestication of the refractory forces on the planet…All that is singular and irreducible must be reduced and absorbed. This is the law of democracy and the New World Order.”

    There are other but complimentary ways of looking at our elite’s control mechanisms: Rurik Skywalker discusses the Wallerstein theory of geopolitics here where the third world acts basically as slaves and provides the first world with products and natural resources for consumption, and Julian Assange’s perspective that the third world goes through a three phase process of integration into the global world order, which I will cover in a separate post:

    1. Install a strongman who will supervise the implementation of a security state to suppress populism,
    2. Develop industry within the nation to assist in suppressing economic unrest further, and
    3. Transition from/overthrow the strongman so the country can be controlled via neoliberal debt practices.

    The speed of transition from one step to the next depends on the particular characteristics of each nation, and sometimes there are failed transition attempts (such as Egypt reverting to El Sisi after our elites overthrew Mubarak and installed the Muslim Brotherhood). Because dictators do not understand how this process works, they are surprised when their former benefactors viciously turn on them and destroy them: Saddam, who was backed by the West for many decades to fight Iran, was very surprised to be given the green light to invade Kuwait by the U.S. and then backstabbed.


    The Ukraine War did not take place

    This brings us around to the Ukraine war. I’ve covered it twice before in May 2023 and February 2024 and I think they hold up quite well if you decide to read them, but basically it is a perfect example of Baudrillard’s conception of hyperreality, touched on briefly in this UnHerd post. The real objectives of the war are nothing like the official explanations for it, and the information allowed out of the conflict zone has been and remains tightly constricted on both sides. There are basically no reporters allowed in the area and our elites murdered Gonzalo Lira (whose understanding was lousy) for even trying to report from Kharkiv. There’s a bunch of gore porn released of drones murdering hapless Russian soldiers, but other than that the information released is incredibly propagandized and distorted. Some of the best information which Rurik Skywalker covered was from Prigozhin, the head of the Russian mercenary outfit Wagner, who complained that the Ministry of Defense was sending his soldiers to die in frontal assaults against heavily fortified positions without sufficient artillery or other support, until he too was murdered, and also from the Russian patriot Igor Strelkov, who was thrown in prison for asking razor-sharp questions about the nature of the war on a nonsensical pretext. Now very little information that isn’t approved by either Russia (where Putin is a globohomo lackey) or from the West reaches the public. Have any of you guys following Simplicius gotten tired of the ridiculous hopium coverage promising Russian victory at-any-moment even as the war drags to year four and even as Ukraine has invaded Russia and is utilizing state-of-the-art Western arms after breaching Russia’s fifteenth or whatever red line with no response? Baudrillard is directly on point about the pundits on both sides:

    While one fraction of the intellectuals and politicians, specialists in the reserve army of mental labour, are whole-heartedly in favor of the war, and another fraction are against it from the bottom of their hearts, but for reasons no less disturbing, all are agreed on one point: this war exists, we have seen it. There is no interrogation into the event itself or its reality; or into the fraudulence of this war, the programmed and always delayed illusion of battle; or into the machination of this war and its amplification by information, not to mention the improbable orgy of material, the systemic manipulation of data, the artificial dramatisation…If we do not have practical intelligence about the war (and none among us has), at least let us have a skeptical intelligence toward it, without renouncing the pathetic feeling of its absurdity.

    But there is more than one kind of absurdity: that of the massacre and that of being caught up in the illusion of massacre. It is just as in La Fontaine’s fable: the day there is a real war you will not even be able to tell the difference. The real victory of the simulators of war is to have drawn everyone into this rotten simulation.

    As Rurik’s tagline states, “The wars are fake, but the massacres are real.” Our elites own both Russia and the West, and it has multiple goals for the Ukraine war none of which are publicly acknowledged.3 We can see, then, that the media information provided in this “war” is heavily managed and controlled, and the propaganda fed to the public has very little or nothing to do with the underlying reality, which is meant as a winless grind-fest to maximize casualty rates on both sides. Welcome to hyperreality.

    I hope that you’ve found this post helpful as you navigate trying to determine what is real and what is fake. I suggest you adopt a grounding mechanism if you don’t have one already – my recommendation is recursive prediction – because without one you will be forever blowing in the winds of whatever fake elite narratives they decide to throw at you.

    To end on a positive note, as Baudrillard wrote, “the more the hegemony of the global consensus is reinforced, the greater the risk, or the chances, of its collapse.”

    Thanks for reading.

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    1 I got carried away with the concept of hyperreality when I came across it and bought three of Baudrillard’s books at the same time, which in retrospect I regret because he’s such a terrible writer. Dr. Monzo argues that he was writing in the style he was describing. HamburgerToday believes that Baudrillard’s style is “counter-seductive.”

    2 Rhodes gave a rare look into the process of creating media echo chambers to further policy goals, bragging about how adept the administration was in building a circular reporting echo chamber to increase support for the 2007 Iranian nuclear deal: 

    “We created an echo chamber. They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say,” he admitted in the Times interview when asked about the plethora of “experts” praising the deal in the press. The Times article, which will appear in the paper’s Sunday magazine, notes Rhodes, who has a writing degree from NYU, was skilled as a “storyteller.” “He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials,” reporter David Samuels writes. “He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives.” 

    Asked about his misleading version of the deal, Rhodes said, “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this. “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like [the anti-nuke group] Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked. We drove them crazy,” he said of Republicans and others who opposed the deal, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

    Rhodes bashed the media for not properly reporting on foreign affairs and revealed how he fed information to reporters such as Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, a respected “Beltway insider,” as the Times called him. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. “Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” Rhodes’ assistant, Ned Price, gave an example of how they would shape the news by feeding a narrative to their “compadres” in the press corps and letting it echo across social media. “I’ll give them some color,” Price said, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”

    3 These goals include emptying out the Slavlands and genociding white Christian slavs on both sides, being able to test new weapons of war technologies, using Ukraine as a way to wash many hundreds of billions of dollars out of the U.S. taxpayer basis back into the hands of the transnational security elite, and possibly betraying Putin in accordance with Assange’s three phase process of integration described above in order to be able to more directly exploit Russia’s trillions of dollars worth of natural resources. I go into these reasons in my prior posts above.

  • The Midlife Transition: Confronting Mortality and Rebirth

    Liminality (from Latin limen ‘a threshold’) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite’s liminal stage, participants “stand at the threshold”between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way (which completing the rite establishes).

    This is a post about the midlife crisis. I have a number of other posts queue’d up for publication, but this one spoke to me as the right topic to start 2025.

    As a preamble, I’m not an old man yet, but I’m no longer young either. Our society exclusively celebrates youth and wealth, leaving those who are aging or struggling with illness to the margins. As a result, most men face aging without proper guidance, perspective or role models. Instead of embracing memento mori (remember death) which leads to living more fully in the moment, we practice oblivisci mori (forget death) with a focus on making money and the hopes of tomorrow. This fear of mortality, rooted in an almost ubiquitous secular materialism – despite pretensions by some to religion – leads us to avoid confronting the realities of aging and death until it hits us in the form of a now cliche midlife crisis. When this crisis manifests usually around 35-40 years old (the Wiki states 40-64, but I think that’s too broad) it has an especially difficult impact. This crisis occurs as men start their decline from their peak sexual market value which for most men (so long as you’re not balding, obese, or jobless, all of which impact SMV) occurs around this period of time:

    Notice how the decline of male SMV corresponds to the period of midlife crisis

    Approaching middle age introduces an unavoidable reality: the body’s decline. Weight slowly piles on and becomes harder to keep off, one develops wrinkles and higher Norwood levels, perhaps one’s sight declines and you need “reader” glasses for books. Maybe you start developing serious health issues which can come up suddenly. The passage of time takes on a new urgency and people make life-altering decisions: this can result in new wives, fancy cars, mental or emotional breakdowns, career changes.

    Nassim Talib wrote, “The first part of life is spent worrying about what women think of us; the second part about what other men think of us; and the third part about what we think of ourselves”, or to put it another way: the first third of life is spent worrying about women, the second part about money, and the third part about health (mental and physical). During this period the older generations are dying off, perhaps one has growing children, time is speeding up (the older you get the faster time passes) and one begins to understand that their turn “up to deck” to death is approaching. As Schopenhauer wrote, “Just remember, once you’re over the hill you begin to pick up speed” and “A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is.” While Jung was in touch with his unconscious from a very young age (unlike other luminaries such as Nietzsche1), he still experienced a midlife crisis from age 35-43.

    Jung argues that men spend the first half of their lives living for others — for their parents and for society, to meet their expectations – but in midlife circumstances arise that shake them out of their worldview, forcing a gut-check, an assessment of one’s limitations and looming mortality, and he realizes he has to start living for himself. It is a time when one’s ego and persona – the image one presents to the world – is shaken by losses outside of one’s control (death in the family, health scares, children leaving the nest, divorces) and the unconscious – the neglected, suppressed, discarded parts of ourselves that don’t correspond to society’s expectations and demands – starts to manifest itself in urgent ways. According to a Jungian website,

    Crudely put, the first half of life is the stage in which we receive our education, choose our careers, begin a family, acquire the trappings of success such as a home, a car, and establish our persona(s). Jungians may also refer to this stage as Ego-Self Separation, i.e. we focus on developing a strong ego, and in so doing, slowly lose touch with the rest of the psyche. It is for this reason that when we reach mid-life, things may be going wrong.

    The second half of life is less about acquiring things and knowledge, and more about finding meaning. We are faced with questions such as ‘What is the point of my life?’ or ‘What makes me feel I am useful in this world?’ As we ponder these questions we often realize that life has not turned out the way we expected it to.

    At mid-life we may experience alarm messages from the psyche – often in the form of affective disorders or somatic symptoms – we may become anxious or depressed and begin to suffer many physical ailments. At first, most of us go to our physician and get something for the anxiety or depression, or something for our blood pressure or poor digestion. But, it is seldom enough.

    In other words, mid-life is when the strong ego we developed to get through the first half of life is pierced: we can and will actually die, we are not superheroes with egos that will save us, and we start wrestling with how to react to this information. Sean Lannin wrote in a Note pertaining to this (emphasis added in #1):

    A hospice nurse compiled a list of hundreds of hospice patients regrets who were dying.

    Top 5 Regrets of dying people:

    1. I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not what others expected of me.

    2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard

    3. I wish I had the courage to express my feelings

    4. I wish I had stayed in touch with friends

    5. I wish I had let myself be happier

    Do you see yourself on that list?

    “The courage to life a life true to myself” is the individuation process, which is not a given: plenty of people suppress who they really are and who they are meant to become because they are too afraid to face it. But there is a price to pay for everything: avoiding self-reflection and staying attached to societal expectations leads to these common deathbed realizations. Contrary to popular belief, one does not usually get wiser or more moral with age – you just get older, as the great pessimist philosopher Emil Cioran wrote in his A Short History of Decay: “One doesn’t become better on the moral plane with old age. Nor wiser. Contrary to what people think. One gains nothing in getting old. But as one is more tired, one gives the impression of wisdom….There is no progress in life. There are small changes.” If you are unwilling to listen to your unconscious, to integrate it in order to become a more whole person, to be who you were intended to be, that is going to manifest in your life in very negative ways, greatly disrupting your life balance.

    Wisdom comes from subsuming one’s ego and listening (but not blindly) to one’s intuition and following it, leading to surprising and creative results. This is why one becomes more introspective with age, as Schopenhauer argues: “In youth it is the outward aspect of things that most engages us; while in age, thought or reflection is the predominating quality of the mind. Hence, youth is the time for poetry, and age is more inclined to philosophy. In practical affairs it is the same: a man shapes his resolutions in youth more by the impression that the outward world makes upon him; whereas, when he is old, it is thought that determines his actions.” And time is short: “… everyone desires to achieve old age, that is to say a condition in which one can say: “Today is bad, and day by day it will get worse – until at last the worst of all arrives.”

    This brings us to the concept of liminality. For this I picked up Jungian psychologist Murray Stein’s book In Midlife (1983)2, which used mythology – specifically focusing on the Olympic deity Hermes, the God of transitions (“Hermes’ presence is sudden gain, a stroke of luck, but the accent is also strongly on the element of fear and the feeling of the uncanny”) – as well as ancient literature such as the Iliad and the Odyssey to demonstrate the trials and tribulations, the challenges and possibilities inherent in this transformative period. Stein defines liminality as follows:

    Liminality is created whenever the ego is unable any longer to identify fully with a former self-image, which it had formed by selective attachments to specific internal images and embodied in certain roles accepted and performed. It had been embedded in a context created and supported by an archetypal pattern of self-organization, and now, since this matrix has dissolved or broken down, there is a sense of an amputated past and a vague future. Yet while this ego hangs there in suspension, still it remembers the ghost of a former self whose home has been furnished with the presence of persons and objects now absent and had been placed in a psychological landscape now bare and uninhabitable without them.

    According to Stein there are three phases of the midlife transition: separation, liminality and re-integration. This process occurs for other things, too, of course, but in the midlife transition it occurs due to increased knowledge of one’s mortality – that time is running out: “The pivotal experience of the psychological change that unfolds at midlife, and the element that most unmistakably declares its uniqueness and brings it to its deepest meaning, is the lucid realization of death as life’s personal, fated conclusion. The chilling awareness of this fact grips a person’s consciousness at midlife as it has not gripped it before, and the sense of an absolute limit to personal extension in time spreads into every corner of consciousness and affects everything it touches.” If the path is followed properly, “clues begin to appear for what will become a person’s sense of core and for the life tasks that remain to be carried out.”


    The First Phase: Separation

    In the first phase, that of separation, there is a feeling of loss which can be hard to pin down:

    As the midlife transition begins, whether it begins gradually or abruptly, persons generally feel gripped by a sense of loss and all of its emotional attendants: moody and nostalgic periods of grieving for some vaguely felt absence, a keen and growing sense of life’s limits, attacks of panic about one’s own death, and exercises in rationalization and denial….From an intrapsychic point of view, what needs to be separated from in the first phase of the midlife transition is an earlier identity, the persona. The ego needs to let go of this attachment before it can float through the necessary period of liminality that is preliminary to a deeper discovery fo the Self. To do this thoroughly and decisively, the person needs to “find the corpse” and then to bury it: to identify the source of pain and then to put the past to rest by grieving, mourning, and burying it. But the nature of the loss needs to be understood and worked through before a person can go on.


    The Second Phase: Liminality

    The second phase, liminality, does not begin until one accepts that one’s earlier identity has died, which can involve a heavy mourning period of grief over the loss of who one used to be. This comes about from loss that one’s ego/persona cannot properly deal with, hence the rising fear of death and loss (especially of loss of control): “When life is no longer seen from a perspective of beginnings through a fantasy of continuous expansion and growth, but rather from the perspective of ends and of death through a fantasy of fate and limitations, midlife has arrived….What will come of all this? What will become of me? These are wrenching questions as the soul comes free of its attachments and identifications”. There is always a danger that such loss is not accepted that one retreats into egoism, using self-repression and denial to suppress the necessary psychological changes. To participate in this process requires one’s full attention and use of one’s skills; cut free from one’s persona, one is adrift, “floating freely, by associate wandering, by apercu, by backtracking and rhetorical repetition, by stealth and thievery. Brainstorms, insights, lucky finds, intuitions, the play of dreams – if these are threaded together and held somewhat loosely in hand, will we not have a style that belongs to Hermes?” This process cannot be half-assed if one is to benefit from it:

    There is one additional feature to this Hermetic method, however, and this must be recognized and consciously incorporated if the method is to be exploited to greatest advantage. This pertains to what is done with the lucky find, the thieved thought, the sudden psychological insight once it is in hand, and to the attitude that informs this action. Hermes is not just a collector, and the Hermetic method, if true to its master practitioner, cannot simply pile up random collections of interesting and loosely related observations. The ‘find’ must be taken up and craftily transformed in a characteristic Hermetic manner….

    Like the methods of the social sciences, the Hermetic method is empirical in that it begins with and constantly adverts to ‘facts,’ but for the collection of data relevant for the discussion of these facts it relies largely on loose associations and synchronistic occurrences (‘finds’), and then it employs craftiness and even what might be called distortions in working over these materials and transforming them to its own ends. The test of this method must be strictly pragmatic – is the interpretation that results from it useful because it succeeds in portraying the quality and the dimensions of midlife liminality and elucidating its meanings? or is it too idiosyncratic and therefore without cash value to anyone but perhaps the user of it?

    So, for example, my separation process from my persona was a drawn-out and very painful process; when I eventually entered my period of liminality, my instincts combined with my intellect, feelings, and senses and eventually compelled me to write a 137,000 word Substack essay on how this world is organized, followed by my current regular Substack writing here. This is a listening process and not an ego derived one; when a thought pops into my head I check it with my intellect, and if it appears insightful I have to immediately write it down for future use. This process propels me forward. I cannot let ideas disappear and they will if I am not ready and willing to grab the idea as soon as it comes to me. I am still in the process of liminality; I still feel unstructured, adrift, acutely aware of my mortality and with a regular sense of fear. I have not exited this stage at this time. And this process is being played for keeps:

    To be in true liminality, or in liminality truly, however , is to be in for keeps. This belongs to the nature of the experience. It is absolute, and there is no way back to pre-liminal existence. The soul senses that this passage is one-way and that this condition will endure through all time, or until perhaps it fades away.

    Interesting, looking at my astrological transits which show one’s current astrological influences (you can see yours here if you plug in your info and for today’s date3), I’ve had the following strong influence impacting my chart for a number of years now:

    Opposition Pluto – Sun

    Challenging aspect: This is a long-lasting transit that suggests a period of great transformation and change. It marks an important stage in the development of the ego. You are intense and passionate, but you need to avoid holding on tightly to that which has outgrown its purpose in your life. Changes in your life’s direction are in order, and you may initially do everything you can to resist them. It is best to go with the flow at this point in time, although it can be very hard to do so, as you may be lacking in objectivity for the time being. It can be hard for you to see that the changes taking place now will benefit you down the road….

    Pluto transits to the Sun challenge us to face up to unexpressed or poorly expressed traits of our Sun sign and house, as well as Sun aspects. We discover our own power and strength, and we re-work our very sense of identity, which invariably affects our life path. How we have defined ourselves to date is now challenged. In some cases, people live this transit through key figures in their lives. These transits force us to confront our will, power, assertion, and authority. Sometimes, a relationship comes into focus. We face the need to be more independent, assertive, and autonomous. Perhaps most importantly, Pluto transiting our Sun puts us face to face with exactly what it is that has been holding us back from living life more fully and meaningfully.

    This transit calls you to redefine your value system and life attitudes, and generates intense energy in your life. You are likely to experience events that highlight the need to trust, let go, and have faith. You may have to deal with willfulness and issues of power and competition this year–in others and in yourself. There is an inner drama taking place, and a feeling that external circumstances are undermining your own feeling of powerfulness. In the process, you may be able to get in touch with your internal motivations.

    A tendency to want to control your life through some form of manipulation is strong during this influence. You may act in a more selfish or ambitious manner, and this intensity might even surprise you. Meeting with obstacles in your path, however, can force you into the position of using all of your resources to fight back, and you can discover resources you never knew you had in the process. You are likely to emerge from this cycle perhaps feeling a little battered but certainly more in touch with your deeper needs. You may have learned to stand up for yourself or to have faith in your strength. You most likely have experienced some form of psychological transformation or rebirth of sorts.


    The Third Phase: Re-Integration

    The third phase of Stein’s process of dealing with midlife is that of re-integration, which first requires dealing with one’s anima (for a man, one’s suppressed feminine side; for a woman, the animus as one’s suppressed male side). The anima is a trickster; it tries to lure the unweary to it’s doom unless one is prepared for it, in which case it can be used in a positive manner. For example, I feel a bit of a call toward exploring becoming a Jungian analyst myself, but I also don’t feel that is the right direction for me (at least not at this time) – that pull is from my anima. Many years ago I was highly tempted to abandon a career to pursue something that, looking back, would have led to total ruination – that was also a call by the anima. But identifying the call, being suspicious of it but not denying it, perhaps working with it, may further one’s individuation process: “It seems necessary to go through an encounter with the anima at midlife if the individuation journey is to continue and if the midlife transition is to move from liminality into the next stage of integrating the personality around a new core. To shy away, to repress, to run from the [anima] and declare it hostile and unsafe territory…is to abort the process.”

    If one comes through the process of separation, liminality and re-integration successfully, “negatively, he acquires a precise knowledge of limits; positively, he receives a long-range life task. This combination, the knowledge of limits and the conviction of a future life task, constitutes the essence of a meaningful recovery from the experience of midlife liminality. It is a product of this initiation, and a person’s future sense of identity and purpose is based on it.” But there is no guarantee of a successful transition: “Ambiguity and complexity define the Hermetic journey, and the qualities of it and its outcome are largely unpredictable. We may think we are being led home when we are actually only being taken for a ride.”


    Conclusion

    This long-range life task creates an ethical obligation to shape life according to the limitations and challenges imposed by the insights won during the initiatory ascent, producing an inner sense of direction and meaning. Jung commented in his autobiography on what he gleaned from his long-term midlife crisis:

    When I look back upon it all today and consider what happened to me during the period of my work on the fantasies, it seems as though a message had come to me with overwhelming force. There were things in the images which concerned not only myself but many others also. It was then that I ceased to belong to myself alone, ceased to have the right to do so. From then on, my life belonged to the generality. The knowledge I was concerned with, or was seeking, still could not be found in the science of those days. I myself had to undergo the original experience, and, moreover, try to plant the results of my experience in the soil of reality; otherwise they would have remained subjective assumptions without validity. It was then that I dedicated myself to service of the psyche. I loved it and hated it, but it was my greatest wealth. My delivering myself over to it, as it were, was the only way by which I could endure my existence and live it as fully as possible.

    I, too, feel an obligation with my writing here pertaining to my own particular skillset and outlook, which is very different from others’, including Jung’s, and I am doing what I can to honor it, give it expression, and symbolize it for others, although we will see how it develops further. In some ways, it is a heavy and scary weight; seen from a certain perspective, it would have been easier to have been a normie, abdicating my personal responsibility and critical thinking to the herd. The individuation journey is an uncharted balancing act above a void; but as L.P. Koch has argued, some of us will be satisfied with nothing less.

    Thanks for reading.

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    1 Jung noticed that Nietzsche only came in contact with his unconscious later in life, which Nietzsche misunderstood and misinterpreted, as stated in Jung’s autobiography:

    Zarathustra was Nietzsche’s Faust, his No. 2 [i.e. his unexplored subconscious], and my No. 2 now corresponded to Zarathustra–though this was rather like comparing a molehill with Mount Blanc….Nietzsche had discovered his No. 2 only late in life, when he was already past middle age, whereas I had known mine ever since boyhood….He was moved by the childish hope of finding people who would be able to share his ecstasies and could grasp his “transvaluation of all values.” But he found only educated Philistines–tragi-comically, he was one himself. Like the rest of them, he did not understand himself when he fell head first into the unutterable mystery and wanted to sing its praises to the dull, godforsaken masses. That was the reason for the bombastic language, the piling up of metaphors, the hymnlike raptures–all a vain attempt to catch the ear of a world which had sold its soul for a mass of disconnected facts. And he fell – tightrope-walker that he proclaimed himself to be – into depths far beyond himself. He did not know his way about in this world and was like a man possessed, one who could be handled only with the utmost caution….

    Just as Faust had opened a door for me, Zarathustra slammed one shut, and it remained shut for a long time to come. I felt like the old peasant who discovered that two of his cows had evidently been bewitched and had got their heads in the same halter. “How did that happen?” asked his small son. “Boy, one doesn’t talk about such things,” replied his father.

    2 I have other books coming to read on midlife that havn’t arrived as of this post’s publication date: Midlife: Humanity’s Secret Weapon(2022) by Andrew Jamieson, Jung And Aging: Possibilities And Potentials For The Second Half Of Life(2021) edited by Leslie Sawin, and Weird Wisdom for the Second Half of Life: A Book for Men (and those who value them) (2023) by James Hazelwood. Depending on how these books speak to me there may eventually be a follow-up post or perhaps just Note reviews.

    3 Note that sometimes astrological influences conflict, and that some are weak, short-term influences while others can be medium -term or long-term, varying in intensity and influence. I find it helpful to look at when I have unarticulated feelings or influences that I want to bring to conscious awareness but, like anything, it should be taken with a grain of salt.

  • 2024 Predictions Review and 2025 Forecast

    “It takes greater virtues to bear good fortune than bad.” – La Rochefoucauld, relevant to the right’s hopium surrounding Trump’s recent election win

    Welcome back to the second annual prediction post for upcoming 2025 and a review of last year’s predictions. There were also certain predictions made earlier in 2024 about the subsequent months that will be assessed.

    What is the purpose of this? As I regularly stress, one needs a grounding mechanism to assess new information, tying one’s views to reality as best one can. If you don’t have one it is easy to end up with beliefs that are wrong and detrimental to one’s own interests, a plaything for other’s shadowy schemes. My preferred grounding mechanism is one of recursive prediction where I make predictions about the future and, to the extent I am wrong, I updates my views accordingly. I’ve done this for about a decade now, where I eventually ended up with beliefs like the world order order as centralized above the level of the nation statethe egalitarian ratchet effect explaining society’s ever-lurch leftwards, and the Rothschilds owning the world central banks. These predictions don’t need to be absolute: I generally prefer framing them in terms of probability— for example, “it’s likely” or “highly likely” that something will or won’t happen – because the decision-making processes of our elites occur behind closed doors and we’re not privy to the full details. Without insider knowledge, it’s impossible to make predictions with absolute certainty. Still, there are reasonable guesses that can be inferred based upon social and economic trends and society’s underlying beliefs that influence their decision making processes.

    I think it’s important to engage with a variety of viewpoints even if the author turn out to be wrong, just as long as he (it’s usually a he) remains humble and demonstrates a willingness to update his views if necessary. No one is perfect; we are all finite and limited beings, myself included, and the important thing is being transparent and sharing one’s thought process – the opposite of the horrific Operation Trust-tier Q phenomenon which fooled so many gullible people – and then revising them. In practice this is much rarer than it should be, unfortunately. The vast majority of writers prefer to gloss over their prior wrong predictions, learn nothing from them, and titillate the ADD-addled public over the next shiny, attention-grabbing prediction (and the vast majority of the public doesn’t hold these “experts” to account either).

    Okay, let’s begin.


    2024 predictions made in 2023

    Below are the predictions for 2024 that I made in 2023, along with my current assessment of the prediction in bold.

    1. “The U.S. continues to allow in 5-7+ million illegals like every year since Biden took power, even if Democrats offer the gullible masses a fig leaf by pretending to close the border and using the media to hype it. Expect media reporting a drop in crossings or an increase in border enforcement to be fake.” Dead accurate prediction: Kamala/Biden issued some fake executive order pretending to go tougher on immigration even as they kept borders open. Even though we don’t know actual numbers, a good rule of thumb was that 20 million left-leaning illegals were let into the country 2021-end of 2024 and there was basically no letup at all in 2024.
    2. “$2-5 trillion dollar deficit spending continues like every year since Biden took power, which isn’t much different than under Trump.” $2+ trillion deficit in 2024.
    3. “Food inflation will continue to be 15-20% even as official inflation numbers are heavily manipulated downwards.” Accurate prediction; my gauge on 2024 inflation was 20% despite laughable official statistics.
    4. “AI censorship of dissidents will continue to get worse, perhaps much worse.” While AI continues to improve, censorship was not quite as bad in 2024 due in part to globohomo’s switch to allowing “team Republican” to win the election. Limiting disfavored speech continues to be heavily utilized on Twitter via reach limitations. I’ll take the L on this one but don’t think much of a worldview update is needed: I continue to believe heavier censorship is around the corner.
    5. “Regardless of #4, anti-semitism levels throughout the West will continue to intensify.” A very accurate prediction.
    6. “The Russia/Ukraine war will continue either in a hot or cold form as a way to continue to rape the American taxpayer. In other words, if there is a truce, like the earlier Minsk agreements, it will be a temporary truce to recharge for the next round of conflict and the American taxpayer will continue to pay a massive and highly corrupt bill, the vast majority of which will be funneled back into the hands of the transnational security elite. There are signs that such a ridiculous “truce” will happen. This is also foreboding as it frees up the U.S. military for war elsewhere: Iran, China, or a brutal crackdown against white Middle America.” The Russia/Ukraine war continues with Russia and the U.S. taxpayer massively losing, although there remain talks of a freeze along current lines. There are also major hints that the U.S. wants war with Iran; if Trump had been assassinated it also could have resulted in such a war (killed by the FBI/CIA but blamed on Iran) and/or a “redneck rebellion” in order for the establishment to then brutally crush it. I think this prediction was pretty good.
    7. “There will be further movement toward the implementation of CBDCs worldwide. The beta-testing through crypto (controlled via the Tether scam) is over, and now globohomo just needs a triggering event if they want to implement it quickly, or they could slowly introduce it over time. CBDCs will be the greatest power grab in human history and turn humanity into impoverished serfs.” CBDC development continues and is ready to be rolled out; Russia is implementing it in 2025. The Tether scam’s exit strategy is horrifically to backstop the scam onto the American public. Good prediction.
    8. “The Fed will lower interest rates through 2024 to help Biden but then spike rates significantly in 2025 regardless of who wins.” 2024 prediction confirmed; 2025 prediction remains on track.
    9. “Unpopular and astroturfed Nimarata Randhawa “Nikki Haley” and rapidly fading “Shoelift Meatball” Ron DeSantis are clearly hoping Trump is either removed from the ballot and/or imprisoned so they can swoop in. If this happens whoever emerges as the victor will lose against the Democrat as Trump voters stay home (Vivek disagrees). Alternatively, Randhawa is angling for a VP role where she would serve as a globohomo deep state plant, much like Mike Pence was.” This one didn’t pan out due to Haley and DeSantis’s lack of popularity and whatever deal was worked out between Trump and higher level elites for the 2024 election. The assassination attempts (made by national-level elites and initiated by the FBI, CIA and Secret Service) may have scared Trump into picking Vance.
    10. “Despite the real economy being terrible, the Fed will keep the stock market propped up with infinite printed loldollars, also to help Democrats.” Accurate.
    11. “Polling will continue to be used to massage and manipulate, to lead public opinion instead of reflect it. Expect all polling to be largely fake.” Accurate.
    12. “RFK Jr.’s third party candidacy will be boosted by the media so long as Trump is running, because Trump voters are attracted to his anti-COVID vaccine stance even though RFK is otherwise a standard liberal with a screechy, terrible voice. In other words, his third party bid will be highlighted to undermine Trump.” Wrong prediction as RFK joined forces with Trump; I attribute this to whatever backroom deal Trump worked out with higher level elites.
    13. “The biggest and easiest prediction though is:our quality of life will continue to get worse, just as it has for every year since the 1970s despite the performance of the stock market. Higher prices, flat or lower income, fewer jobs, increased crime and homelessness, and the media will blame you for it, if they cover it at all.” Accurate.

    Overall I would grade my predictions in that post as strong overall, with some minor tweaks to worldview to account for whatever backroom deal Trump worked out in order to win the election. There were also some possibilities discussed in the prediction post which were labeled as possibilities and not predictions, and those were more hit-or-miss.

    Other predictions made in 2023 and early 2024 about 2024 made in other posts: globohomo likely ordered Biden out of the running for re-election (prediction from February 2024, accurate and confirmed in June, although I was wrong thinking that his replacement wouldn’t be Kamala); concern October 7 would be the start of a regional or global war which has not taken place yet, although our elites are now itching for war with Iran; Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson as fundamentally untrustworthy, which seems worthy of highlight now; and concern that Trump’s multiple criminal trials would be used to give him the Romanov treatment — although there were two assassination attempts, they ultimately skinsuited him behind closed doors and let him win the election. Notably I did not make a prediction about who would win the 2024 election; while I knew it would be controlled, it was unclear what path our elites would decide on behind closed doors.


    2025+ predictions

    My predictions for 2025 and during Trump’s second term are as follows:

    1. Inflation: Real inflation is likely to stay around or above 20% annually. The high national debt and deficit leave the Fed with limited options: raising rates would lead to a market crash, while lowering them would further exacerbate inflation. The debt to GDP ratio is at an all-time high. Trump wants to lower taxes and he can’t cut enough government waste even with DOGE and tariffs – the vast majority of government spending is entitlement spending (Medicair, Medicaid, Social Security) and defense spending, and Trump will not be able to touch any of those. As such, people’s quality of living will continue to massively decrease. I would not be surprised if the fake economy numbers painting a rosy picture were revised downwards in order to give Trump political trouble.
    2. Deficit: The deficit will remain massive no matter what Trump or Musk does.
    3. Immigration: Trump’s immigration expulsions will be a failure. Attempting to go hard on expulsions will galvanize the left and lawfare, many RINOs won’t go along with it, while all he would have to do is withdraw financial support from the illegals (they live in the country in free housing and receive debit cards with many thousands of dollars on them), criminally punish employers who hire them (laws already on the books!) and offer illegals one way ticket homes and mass emigration could be carried out humanely and cheaply. Even if he were somewhat effective though, which I doubt (the media will highlight his limited deportations either way), he will not be able to evict the 20 million let into the country in the past four years alone nor the tens of millions who came before them. He may get fig-leaf wins such as being able to build more parts of the southern wall and to evict some of the worst of the illegal felons. The WSJ is already trying to prime failure on this issue by falsely claiming it will cost $88,000 for each deported illegalNote: Despite Trump’s (elite allowed) 2024 election win, America remains on the verge of becoming a permanent one party Democrat state due to demographic changes much like California, which I discussed previously. Even taking the election at face value, Trump “won” by 1% against a constantly drunk, non-white, inarticulate, low IQ hooker who everyone – including everyone in the Democrat party – actively disliked. This is a grim picture for the future without radical action.
    4. Immigration continued: Expect Trump/Musk his tech supporters to dramatically expand legal immigration; Musk is bragging about it, also see here, and Trump supports it. Your “choice” is unlimited illegal population replacement or almost-just-as-unlimited “legal” population replacement – enjoy your choice!
    5. Censorship: As part of the flip to dramatically expanded legal immigration as well as other nefarious “counter elite” priorities expect to see censorship wrapped up massively against the right on Twitter. This is what the elites did in part to shatter the alt-right after Trump’s 2016 election win; anyone identified as a “thought leader” or “network node” leading the charge against elite priorities will be shadow banned or banned. These tactics will be mostly effective.
    6. Censorship continued: Anti-free speech measures under the guise of public safety will be passed, but with the real intent of preventing populist messaging on the internet, much like Australia just passed under the false guise of protecting minors.
    7. Anti-semitism: Just like last year’s prediction, anti-semitism will continue to grow even as the ADL forces its blackmailed politicians to eviscerate the First Amendment with anti-free speech laws.
    8. Palantir: Palantir will dramatically expand it’s spying operations on American citizens on behalf of the U.S. government, which is their core function (while it’s co-owner homosexual power-hungry deviant Peter Thiel continues to larp publicly as a dissident, a particular personality quirk of his).
    9. Election reform: There will be no meaningful election law reform with respect to vote-by-mail fraud, ballot harvesting fraud, electronic voting machine fraud or direct ballot stuffing fraud. Even though the upper elites let Trump win this time, they will maintain this current structure so they can simply decide elections moving forward.
    10. Rule by hard power: Right wing populist movements will continue to be crushed as the West continues it’s transition from a managed model via propaganda and election “influencing” to a formal boots-on-face model. This is a process that will not resolve in a year but we will continue to see further steps in this direction.
    11. Populist rage to increase: At the same time, populist rage against the elites will intensify – much like the public’s reaction to Mangione’s assassination of the UHC CEO, the dynamic will shift to an extent from Republican vs. Democrat to populist vs. elitist (and Trump/Musk, despite put in place to redirect populism into ineffective ends, will have trouble managing it).
    12. Corralled dissent: Our elites will try to bring back a form of Q-level Trust the Plan/Operation Trust via the curated “counter-elite” BAP/Moldbug/Thiel/HP Lovecraft network and their associates but it won’t work very well this time; disenchantment with Trump is already growing on the right.
    13. Major negative events incoming: I expect at least one of the following to occur over the next four years and Trump will be blamed for it: war with Iran (or a CIA-initiated internal “rebellion” against it to overthrow it), World War 3, civil war and/or a stock market crash. He was allowed to win to be the fall guy in order to smear nationalism and keep blame away from the Rothschild central bank owners while ushering in CBDC hell. Of these possibilities the signs currently point to war with Iran and/or instigating an internal CIA-directed “rebellion” there, and the CIA may try to assassinate Trump and blame it on Iran again to jumpstart the war.
    14. Trump as a “peace president”: Trump will not be known as a “peace president” by the end of his second term, if he survives it. One of the things he agreed to behind closed doors to be allowed to win the entirely elite-controlled 2024 election was to turn warmonger, and everyone in his cabinet is a Zionist neocon.
    15. Greater Israel: The Greater Israel project will continue at lightning speed, i.e. a Middle East map resulting in something like this:Israel will annex the West Bank and Trump will formally recognize it. The Gaza population will be permanently ethnically cleansed from at minimum north Gaza although there will likely be successful attempts to expel Gaza’s population elsewhere, probably into the West.
    16. Stock market: The stock market a year from now will likely be significantly lower than it is today, in line with this Note.Uh oh; the elites always take the opposite trade against extreme sentiment.
    17. Crypto: The CIA/NSA plan to backstop the horrific, flimsy and obvious Tether scam (discussed here) with public funding will likely be successful based on Trump’s personnel decisions such as Howard Lutnick. It seems that under this scenario that crypto prices will continue to do well, absent a broad-based stock market crash perhaps, even though crypto is entirely dependent on Tether (more Tether is traded daily than the top ten coins combined).
    18. CBDC: CBDC implementation will continue apace both in the U.S. and worldwide. This is/will be horrific as discussed in my post about the digital panopticon.
    19. Populist legislation: As the Senate is 53-47 Republican but only 15 or so of those Republicans are even quasi-MAGA (previously discussed here), Trump will not be able to pass meaningful populist legislation. Again, there may be some weak figleaves like some minor funding to build some portion of the southern wall, but nothing major. Tax cuts for the ultra rich will pass. I would not be surprised for the Republican RINO Senate to prevent Trump from recess appointments, but I am not sure about that part specifically.
    20. Ukraine: Either Trump does not stop the Ukraine war which may escalate further, or if he does it will be as a temporary measure and major loss to Russia with NATO right on Russia’s doorstep and the next round of fighting around the corner. The Putin shills will try to downplay this humiliation even though it will be and already is an unequivocal globohomo win. As I wrote elsewhere:In my opinion Russia has already lost this war. It’s goals were to keep Ukraine out of NATO and the E.U. and both of those things will now happen; Ukraine will end up hosting NATO troops and nukes. The East half of the country which broadly supported Russia is permanently lost to them. Russia has bled half a million troops for almost no gains (sacrificing their soldiers in frontline assaults against heavily fortified positions with little to no artillery or air support while simultaneously continuing to send Ukraine massive amounts of oil/gas and failing, intentionally, to bomb the Dniper bridges that Ukraine uses to resupply itself in the East), versus the West has used Ukrainian conscription without caring about their casualties while losing none of their own. Russia has lost Syria and lost access to the European oil and gas market with Nordstream 2 destroyed; with Assad gone there will be a pipeline built from Qatar into Europe to bypass Russian oil. The conflict may be frozen along current lines or close to them, but that is not and will not be a Putin “win”. It is a ruinous Russian defeat, and an intentional one [i.e. Putin is a globohomo lackey obeying orders from the central bank owners]: if you want to understand why, I suggest you start by looking at Strelkov’s 39 questions from early 2023 about the curious state of the conflict.
    21. The dissident right will sour on Trump while the left/centrists warm to him: The dissident right will sour on Trump and grow more blackpilled as he implements whatever backroom deal he worked out with the upper elites, with a silver lining that it is necessary pain to lead to increased spiritual depth. Elites will attempt to funnel that dissatisfaction into the BAP/Moldbug/Zero HP Lovecraft “counter-elite” network as they have been successfully doing, but those tactics will be less effective over time. Normal lower-information MAGA Republicans will be torn and confused – inflation will continue to make them poorer which they will desperately try to shift blame away from Trump, but at the same time our elites will continue to back off of DEI and in-your-face race baiting in the hopes of luring these suckers to buy back into the system they were growing weary of and especially rejoin the military to go get their legs blown off in another Middle East war. It is possible that liberal and “moderate” voters continue to warm to skin-suited Trump.
    22. Race-blind policies: Trump will continue to pivot toward race-blind policies, going for a big tent strategy appealing to blacks, hispanics, and homosexuals with whites ignored and Jews emphasized and promoted. This is the consolidation phase of the egalitarian ratchet effect.
    23. Gold/silver: Gold and silver prices will continue to rise longterm (perhaps not in 2025).
    24. No justice: There will be no justice brought against Fauci or the other COVID perpetrators in part because that would make Operation Warp Speed head Trump look bad.
    25. Musk: Despite not being a big fan of his, and especially listening to his recent Twitter space discussion where he comes across as having a level of arrogance and hubris I’ve never seen before – he basically thinks he’s God (see  at 1 hour 49 minutes) – based on Elon Musk’s astrological chart (both natal and progressed) he will continue to lead a charmed life, which will last the rest of his life except his motivations will get even kookier down the road (a couple decades out).

    I’ll revisit these predictions at the end of 2025, although one may note that many of these are in relation to Trump’s second term and may not manifest within the first year.

    Lastly, I expect major world events to happen much faster now: globohomo has started it’s sprint toward achieving radical world change in line with Agenda 2030, which seems to have some occult and/or astrological association to it: the timetable set 2,000 years after the death of Christ in AD 30. Trump’s surprise 2016 win threatened to derail the schedule, but Trump has caved to everything behind closed doors and the agenda is back on pace. We are going to see major unusual things happen at a breakneck speed compared to historical norms that will shock the unprepared. If you want to see bigger picture where things are going, see this post on the digital panopticon and this post on the End Times and the Antichrist.

    Oh, one more thing: in the near future I’ll do a post on the worst predictions I’ve made in the past and what I learned from them. Everyone makes mistakes and under a recursive prediction model it is not a shameful part of growing but a necessary one. The important thing is being transparent with one’s thought process and errors and adjusting one’s understanding of the world to try to account for it. At some point thereafter I may look at some of the predictions made within the most popular posts of various large Substack accounts and see how they have held up over time, which I expect to be very poor. A bit more on the thought behind this is here.

    Thanks for reading, and Happy New Year.

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    ADDENDUM: Additional predictions that come to mind over the next couple weeks will be added below, along with the date of addition.

    1. Greater bloc integration (added 12/29): There has already been some chatter of the U.S. integrating/absorbing Canada (see here and here). This seems silly on it’s face, yet there is more to this than meets the eye, as long-term trends point toward future consolidation along the lines of Orwellian continental blocs as previously discussed here:
    2. Unprecedented, blatant corruption (added 1/20): Part of Trump’s caving behind closed doors to the international elite requires them to make him much richer than he currently is. We can see this with the extreme corruption involved with Trumpcoin, unveiled two days before his inauguration, explained here, and Bezos’s $40 million bribe to Trump regarding a stupid Melania documentary, explained here. This is just the start and it’s going to both get much worse and be completely shoved in the public’s faces, with no consequences.

  • The Core Themes of this Substack

    This post offers a brief overview of the core themes expressed on this Substack for new readers, as the ideas expressed here are unusual and it’s not possible to offer such an overview in each weekly post.

    “The first – and virtually the only – condition of a good style is having something to say.” – Arthur Schopenhauer

    When a reader subscribes to someone new, very few comb through the archives of the writer. Rather, a post catches his (usually his) eye, he hits the subscribe button, and then he reads new posts at his leisure, sometimes clicking links that lead elsewhere. I know this is how I do it; there’s been only a handful of Substacks that I read where I felt compelled to go through some degree of older posts.

    Most of what I see on Substack are repackaged ideas seen elsewhere. Unique ideas are rare, diamond in the rough. There’s nothing wrong with that; there are plenty of good writers who can repackage ideas and share them with readers who have not seen them before, spreading the original message. For example, neither of the core neo-feudal ideas expressed on this Substack are unique: that (1) Christianity was a transvaluation of values from master to slave morality, an idea that originated with Nietzsche in his On the Genealogy of Morality; and (2) that the Rothschilds and their allies secretly own the central banks of the world (also covered here), an idea that originated from many sources including G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature From Jekyll Island. However, the combination of these ideas is I think unique: that Christian society allowed Jewish families carveouts to be exclusive money lenders during the Middle Ages because it was considered an errant cousin religion, and those carveouts morphed into the central bank system of today. Hopefully I’ve done a decent job of hitting on this combination in my writing, but I also have what I think is a unique 137,000 word Substack essay covering it.

    There are a couple concepts deriving from this perspective that I havn’t seen elsewhere and that I also think are unique. These include:

    1. The egalitarian ratchet effect. Societies double down on their core values over time unless those values are transvalued or that society is conquered or collapses. Because egalitarianism is at the heart of Christianity, egalitarian doubles down on itself over time in shifting forms (spiritual egalitarianism in Rome, economic egalitarianism in the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, and now race/gender/sexual orientation egalitarianism as the West implodes). The idea is that a transvaluation of values is the only alternative to the destruction of the West, which may take the form of either a full or (my preference) a partial transvaluation. Based on this understanding Trump’s second term will fail and merely serve as a consolidation phase of the egalitarian ratchet effect.
    2. The complicated relationship between the Jewish people and the central bank owners. The central bank owners use the Jewish people as a bulwark between their endless economic theft and the majority populations over whom they rule; in return they offer the Jewish people a degree of preferment in society, but the relationship is stranger and more strained than it appears on first glance.
    3. Relating to #2, the nation-state counter elite forming (Thiel, Vance, Moldbug, BAP, Anton, etc.) have certain red lines of discussion that are simply off-limits: the Rothschild central bank ownership and the structure of the modern world, the deliberate falsehoods of the prevailing World War 2 narrative where the war was set up from the get-go by our elites, the inappropriate role of the Holocaust as the foundation origin myth of the West, and discussion of Jewish behavior.
    4. The combination of upcoming CBDCs plus a ubiquitous, malevolent woke AI will be used to establish social credit scores and modify human behavior in radical ways, and will serve as the equivalent of the biblical Mark of the Beast, ushering in the digital panopticon.
    5. The increased worldwide centralization trends may ultimately lead, from a psychological and historical view, to maximum centralization in the form of the Antichrist, whose failure will formally usher in a transition from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius much as Jesus ushered in the Age of Pisces.
    6. Lastly and most importantly, the importance of having a grounding mechanism for which to assess new information. The grounding mechanism I use is one of recursive prediction; making predictions about the future, and if they turn out to be wrong then I update my worldview to account for it. Do this over and over again over many years and one’s predictive accuracy will go up (never to 100%, as we are limited and flawed beings) and therefore one’s understanding of the world will increase. All of the ideas above and below are derived from this approach.1

    I also embrace the idea that governments generally take one of two forms: (1) an oligarchy disguised as “democracy” where elites control the media and manipulate public opinion, using use the lower classes to extract wealth from the middle class, which ultimately leads to widespread poverty except for the oligarchy; or (2) a monarchy or dictatorship that leverages the middle class to resist the rise of oligarchy, though this doesn’t necessarily result in greater wealth for society overall. Here and here are two posts on this.

    I apply this framework when evaluating figures like Julian Assange, who was recently released from prison (though I can’t help but wonder about the hidden conditions of his release). I assess him based on three factors: (1) how well he understands the structure of the modern world, (2) how deeply he grasps the egalitarian ideologies shaping that structure, and (3) how much insight he has into the relationship between oligarchy and its opposition. His understanding is mixed, which is more than can be said for most. I filter and analyze much of what I read in this way, even when it comes to low-status topics like astrology or physiognomy — both of which have been sidelined in modern discourse because they challenge the core principles of egalitarianism.

    I also write about other things that are tangental to these filters, and I am increasingly exploring the esoteric tradition and especially gnosticism (also see here and here) that appeals to me.

    I ask Substack authors reading this: what are your core ideas and your unique ideas, if any? What is your filtering process for how you take in new information? Feel free to link to the relevant posts in the comments and hopefully you’ll get some new readers out of it.

    Thanks for reading.

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    1

    Unless something big happens in the next week which I will feel the need to cover (like Luis Mangione last week) my next post will be a review of my 2024 predictions made at the end of 2023 and offer my upcoming 2025 predictions.

  • Luigi Mangione and the spectre of populist, non-partisan political violence

    This is a post about how technological advancement has made it almost impossible to avoid detection and punishment if our elite’s willpower to catch a perpetrator exists, the climate which is going to make higher-level assassinations more common regardless, and how upper elites will respond to that threat.

    This is actually a topic I’ve thought about covering for awhile, but it was a lower priority compared to others. I’ve increased it to high priority due to current events.

    In the days after the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO I saw a large number of poor takes around the internet, arguing that the UHC CEO assassin would get away with murder. I wrote a Note arguing that he would definitely be caught and caught quickly, which I was sure of even before the image of him de-masked at the hostel he was staying at was released. The poor take argument went more-or-less as follows: the perpetrator covered his face with a mask almost the whole time he was in New York City, he rode a bike (not a public e-bike), he disappeared into central park which lacked cameras, he used a silencer, he wasn’t caught in or around the scene of the crime, most crimes are solved because they had a personal relationship to the victim and here there likely was none, etc. Furthermore, the U.S. has a historically low below 50% homicide clearance rate (i.e.conviction rate), which is pretty crazy all things considered. See here:

    Therefore, because of the U.S.’s low clearance rate, the many precautions the attacker had taken and his lack of personal connection with the victim, it was only reasonable, these people argued, to assume he would get away with murder.

    Let’s highlight the problems with this argument. Yes, the homicide conviction rate is very low, but that is because most murders are of people that the system doesn’t care about. A large percent of those murders are low income black-on-black violence, and relatively few of those murders result in a conviction:

    Here, the victim was a globohomo cog in the machine who made $10 mil+ a year — he was important. Because of that, our elites were certain to spend resources as a high priority to find and track down the killer, especially to disincentivize something like this from happening again. Criminal violence in our system can be applied against the powerless, but never the powerful (unless it’s an intra-elite spat, which this did not seem to be). Additionally, the murder happened in NYC which is one of the most surveilled cities in the world, and all it would take is one wrong move in order to be discovered. Our elites could find him if he had his cell phone on him, they could find him if he left a fingerprint somewhere, they could find him if his silencer was registered (as there would only be a small pool of buyers), they could find him if he de-masked at some point (which he did) or if he used his credit card somewhere. Facial recognition software is quite advanced at this point and they could narrow the list of suspects even if he was wearing a mask by looking at facial characteristics such as facial shape, eyebrow shape, and the distance between the suspect’s eyes. Facial recognition technology isn’t quite there yet to identify people just by the eyes, but it’s not far off either: see this journal submission which states “Multimodality (voice, iris, fingerprint…), soft facial biometrics, infrared imaging, sketches, and deep learning without neglecting conventional machine learning methods are tracks to be considered in the near future” (with that said, Mayor Eric Adams is asking NYC businesses moving forward to ask people to remove face masks (what happened to fraudvirus, libs?) so the masks may still be proving to be a bit difficult for identification, although that technology is also progressing). There are so many ways with modern technology they could track this guy down if the political will is there, which in this case there was. One wrong move and the perp was done for.

    This isn’t the past; we live in the era of the omnipresent security state. Perhaps if he had done this ten or twenty years ago he would have gotten away with it. Still, the perpetrator’s tiny odds of escaping these days would have been higher if the crime happened in a remote area and not the most surveilled place on the planet, but still low odds if the political will was there to track him down. Soon with the implementation of Real ID and everyone needing to submit your biometrics to access public events, combined with the digital panopticon previously discussed where Sundance argues that Peter Thiel, his Palantir partner Alex Karp and Musk are galloping the country toward as quickly as they can, such identification will happen almost instantaneously. The noose is tightening and the public is asleep.

    With the attacker caught (although it’s strange he apparently didn’t ditch the murder weapon), one is going to see the book thrown at him and he is going to be made to suffer – solitary confinement, or genpop with contracted sexual assaults against him – to try to prevent copycats from happening in the future. The official story of how Mangione was caught – that of a McDonalds worker recognizing him and reporting him to the police – is possible, as there are always plenty of people in the public ready to report on a fugitive (reminiscent of the great book The Running Man, not to be confused with the terrible movie, which I will cover in the future) but it’s also possible – if not probable – that he was caught via abuse of the technological security state and then parallel construction was used as an excuse for how he was actually tracked down.

    r/conspiracy - Why are they releasing soo many pictures of this guy, Seems fishy...
    Release of this non-mugshot photo by authorities is highly unusual and just the start of the humiliation ritual. This photo is on the Daily Mail and is not a fake
    The media is also running with the very worst photo of him they could take.

    The public is broadly supportive of the attacker

    The public response to this assassination is interesting to watch on social media: it is broadly supportive of it, believing that UnitedHealthcare is highly predatory and that the CEO’s actions resulted in the deaths of many people. See this Rolling Stone article about it. Mangione’s possible manifesto can be seen here, or a different one hereThis assassination transcended traditional left/right dynamics and represents more of a populist vs. elitist dynamics given that the attacker is hard to pigeonhole: he was a good looking guy (Twitter profile here), apparently an Ivy League graduate1, the valedictorian of his high school class, who was worried about global warming and praised Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and it’s Future even as he seemed proficient with guns:

    To Mangione’s point, UHC has the highest coverage denial rate in the insurance industry, double the national average, leading to record profits for the company (which the CEO was on his way to announcing when he was killed):

    UHC took down the biographies of it’s executives from its website and is fearfully putting up a fence around it’s headquarters. Comments to it’s posts on social media are turned off and they sent out an internal memo for employees not to comment publicly. It’s stock went up the day after the attack, but then fell a lot the day after that, almost 10% between 12/5 and 12/6. The other top executive called the public’s response deplorable.


    Widening wealth disparities increase social instability

    There is no middle class in America anymore; people have talked for a long time about how the middle class is dying, but it isn’t dying anymore – it is dead. Dead, dead, dead. There is simply the ultra rich and everyone else. A shitbox in a major metropolitan area costs well over $1 million if not double that with interest rates on mortgages at 7% – no one can afford to buy a home anymore. The traditional middle class lifestyle – home ownership, two cars, put kids through college, retirement, perhaps only one parent working – is now reserved for the top 1% if not higher.

    This is why the public is generally approving of the attacker’s actions – the general population is angry and upset as it’s quality of life continues to erode, which is only going to get worse (much worse) given the extreme amount of federal debt, which at 125% debt to GDP ratio is higher than it was at the peak of World War 2. We see 20%+ inflation on foodstuff, health care, housing costs, even as the Fed claims that real inflation is 2%. It’s a joke. You can see all the charts here how the wealth disparity really skyrocketed after getting off the gold standard in 1971, and it accelerated further after the decline of the Soviet Union – without fear of communism holding financial predators in check they were free to dramatically jack up executive compensation while ruthlessly decreasing worker pay.

    If people feel like they don’t have a stake in society, if they can’t afford to have a family and if they think the future is going to be worse than it is now, then you are going to see a much greater rise in attacks like this moving forward. I’m kind of surprised that it hasn’t happened more, to be honest; this is the first big one I can think of in recent memory where a higher up executive was targeted instead of terror attacks instigated by our elites against the public.

    As these attacks grow over time, there will be a response from the elites: both in terms of limiting free speech online, to increasing propaganda by labeling such attacks as terrorism, and also result in a vast proliferation of private security forces and walled ultra-rich enclaves, much like one sees in South Africa and Brazil. It will become dangerous for the ultra rich to go out in public without armed security. This is coming and it is neo-feudalism in action. But it will also be interesting to see if UHC quietly lowers their claim rejection rates moving forward – will a CEO want to bear the risk of assassination even if he has a giant private security force (or is the CEO just an expendable cog and shareholders will force him to bear that risk regardless)? What about top bankers or the central bank owners if they become subject to the public’s wrath such as the 1920 Wall Street bombing? The upper elites have never been targeted historically: not a single Rothschild was killed in World War 2 despite many of them living in Europe before and during the war because they controlled Germany’s finances (via the Bank for International Settlements, the Dawes loans, financing and supply of IG Farben, and via Germany’s central bank). Yet the structure of the modern world is slowly, ever-so-slowly leaking out to people (also see here and here). Will the rising risk of assassination in turn serve as a limiting factor for upper elites who may have to ultimately take personal risk into their calculations?

    Bill Gates was photographed by his PR team in 2019 getting a burger to try to appeal to the common man; there are probably two dozen security officers just out of camera sight.

    Mangione’s attack was qualitatively different than other shootings, such as the Las Vegas shooting (buried by the FBI and media), the Trump assassination attempts (buried by the FBI and media; we already know much more about Mangione than about Matthew Crooks), or terrorist attacks (most of them sponsored by the FBI), because this is a populist response to the elites and not the regular elite crushing of the masses with associated mind-games. Psychopolitics touched on this concept a bit in this post. There are very few assassinations in the modern era and most of them are against dissidents or populists both on the right and left, or of strongmen who globohomo used to support but they became tired of (Qaddafi, Saddam). Historically one may think of Huey Long and the Kennedys as victims of this too. Future attacks under this shifting paradigm may be done by lone wolfs without official government sanction or support, and how would elites protect oneself from such nebulous threats? What kind of general anxiety would that endanger? It is interesting that the media is hyping up this attack; perhaps they don’t quite understand what to make of the paradigm shift he represents, or alternatively the media’s owners may want to highlight him in order to further their goals of pushing ubiquitous internet censorship in the future (“We need to clamp down on free speech for public safety!”).

    I hope you found this exploration helpful. Perhaps it’s not a bad thing if our upper elites, utterly materialistic and atheistic2, would have to factor public blowback to them personally as a check on their unlimited rapaciousness and greed.

    Thanks for reading.

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    1 This raises an interesting point about the personality and background profile of this shooter: a likely upper middle class resentment brought about by access to the upper class but an inability to convert that access to money or power; entitlement without payoff. Indeed, the upper middle class has always been biggest threat to the elites, not the middle or lower lumpenproletariat who would not likely feel the toxic resentment/entitlement combination to target higher elites.

    2 According to Eustace Mullins, the central bank owners “adopted the Hegelian dialectic, the dialectic of materialism, which regards the World as Power, and the World as Reality. It denies all other powers and all other realities. It functions on the principle of thesis, antithesis and a synthesis…Thus the World Order organizes and finances Jewish groups; it then organizes and finances anti-Jewish groups; it organizes Communist groups; it then organizes and finances anti-Communist groups. It is not necessary for the Order to throw these groups against each other; they seek each other out like heat-seeking missiles and try to destroy each other. By controlling the size and resources of each group, the World Order can always predetermine the outcome. In this technique, members of the World Order are often identified with one side or the other. John Foster Dulles arranged financing for Hitler, but he was never a Nazi. David Rockefeller may be cheered in Moscow, but he is not a Communist…a distinguishing trait of a member of the World Order, although it may not be admitted, is that he does not believe in anything but the World Order. Another distinguishing trait is his absolute contempt for anyone who actually believes in the tenets of Communism, Zionism, Christianity, or any national, religious or fraternal group…If you are a sincere Christian, Zionist or Moslem, the World Order regards you as a moron unworthy of respect. You can and will be used, but you will never be respected.”

  • La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims

    This is a lighter, simpler post about the maxims of La Rochefoucauld.

    I really like the aphoristic style (i.e. a concise, terse, or laconic expression of a general truth or principle) as a palette cleanser between heavier reads/posts; it allows for a mental recharge. I previously covered these expressions with respect to Diogenes of Sinope, the philosopher who told Alexander the Great to stop blocking his sunlight as he lay relaxing on the ground. Other early practitioners were Theognis, Hippocrates, and Seneca. I will be covering Emil Cioran’s, the pessimistic Romanian philosopher of aphorisms whose perspective was often compared to Nietzsche. I attempted some of my own political ones here, which could be improved upon (perhaps I’ll try again).

    What do I like about the style? I like it’s directness. I like the disconnectedness between ideas. I like how good ones make you stop and think. It’s nice to be able to pick up a book on aphorisms, read as many or as few as I like and then do something else. Nietzsche is also known for his aphorisms, and it was his praise of the aristocratic French moralist writer La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) both generally and in his Human, All Too Human (1878) that piqued my interest. They had similar approaches in the sense that La Rochefoucald believed everyone acted from what he referred to as “self-love” while Nietzsche believed that everyone acted from a similar “will to power”. Schopenhauer, who I covered previously in my post on philosophical pessimism, also praised La Rochefoucauld. Voltaire, Marcel Proust, Charles de Gaulle, Balzac, Conan Doyle and Blake were also inspired by him.

    François de La Rochefoucauld
    Portrait of La Rochefoucauld

    La Rochefoucauld called his short, pithy comments maxims instead of aphorisms, and they were shorter than Cioran’s or Diogenes’. They’re basically the same thing, though, except for length.


    A brief history

    La Rochefoucauld was a member of a prominent French aristocratic family, participating in military life where he supported the hereditary French aristocracy against both foreign armies and also against the king, who eventually won out against the nobles. La Rochefoucault then retired from public life and eventually published his Reflexions ou Sentences et Maximes morales (Moral Reflections or Sententiae and Maxims), which was revised several times and had a significant impact among the French upper class.

    I picked up the Oxford World’s Classics edition La Rochefoucauld: Collected Maxims and Other Reflections (2008) which seemed like a decent translation, although it also includes the French original which was not necessary for my purposes. It also included unpublished longer essays that were stuffy and boring. I’m going to quote some of the maxims that stood out to me below, ignoring the many average and lower quality ones, and hopefully they are interesting and worthy of further consideration. Like from the Collected Maxims, they are not arranged in any particular order.

    La Rochefoucauld Maxims by La Rochefoucauld: New - Picture 1 of 1

    The maxims

    • We have no more control over the duration of our passions than over the duration of our lives. (V:5)
    • Passions are the only orators who always succeed in persuading. They are, so to speak, a natural art, with infallible rules; and the most artless man who is passionate is more persuasive than the most eloquent man who is not. (V:8)
    • Passions are unjust and self-interested, which makes it dangerous to follow them; so we should mistrust them even when they seem most reasonable. (V:9)
    • It takes greater virtues to bear good fortune than bad. (V:25)
    • Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily. (V:26)
    • The philosophers’ disdain for wealth was a hidden desire to compensate their own merit for the injustices of fortune, by showing contempt for the very possessions that she was keeping from them. It was a secret method of protecting themselves against the degradations of poverty; it was an indirect way of attaining the respect that they could not gain by wealth. (V:54)
    • It seems that our deeds have lucky or unlucky stars, to which they owe a large part of the praise or blame that is bestowed on them. (V:58)
    • No disguise can long hide love where it exists, or simulate it where it does not exist. (V:70)
    • If love is judged by most of its results, it is more like hatred than friendship. (V:72)
    • Silence is the safest policy for someone who does not trust himself. (V:79)
    • What makes us so inconstant in our friendships is the fact that it is hard to know the qualities of the soul, and easy to know those of the mind. (V:80)
    • Men would not live long in social contact unless they were deceived by one another. (V:87)
    • Old people like to give good advice, as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples. (V:93)
    • To know things well, we must know the details; and as they are almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect. (V:106)
    • The sure way to be deceived is to think yourself more astute than other people. (V:127)
    • It is easier to be wise for other people than for yourself. (V:132)
    • We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from other people. (V:135)
    • The ability to make good use of average talents is an art that extorts respect, and often wins more repute than real merit does. (V:162)
    • There are relapses in the soul’s illnesses, just as there are in the body’s. What we take to be a cure is most often merely a respite or a change of illness. (V:193)
    • Someone who thinks he can find enough in himself to do without everyone else is greatly deceived; but someone who thinks that other people cannot do without him is still more deceived. (V:201)
    • It is a great folly to want to be wise on your own. (V:231)
    • It is more often pride than lack of enlightenment that makes us oppose so stubbornly the generally accepted view of something. We find the front seats already taken on the correct side, and we do not want any of the back ones. (V:234)
    • Supreme cleverness lies in knowing the exact value of things. (V:244)
    • True eloquence consists of saying all that is needed and only what is needed. (V:250)
    • Humility is often merely a pretense of submissiveness, which we use to make other people submit to us. It is an artifice by which pride debases itself in order to exalt itself; and though it can transform itself in thousands of ways, pride is never better disguised and more receptive than when it is hidden behind the mask of humility. (V:254)
    • Solemnity is an outward mystification devised to hide inner faults. (V:257)
    • We are deceiving ourselves if we think that only the violent passions, such as ambition and love, can conquer the others. Laziness, sluggish though it is, often manages to dominate them; it wrests from us all of life’s plans and deeds, where it imperceptibly destroys and devours the passions and virtues alike. (V:266)
    • The body’s humours follow a normal, regular course, which imperceptibly impels and bends our will. They progress together and successively exercise secret dominion over us, so that they play an important part in all our deeds, though we do not know it. (V:297)
    • Whatever good is said about us never teaches us anything new. (V:303)
    • What usually prevents us from showing the depths of our hearts to our friends is not so much mistrust of them as mistrust of ourselves. (V:315)
    • Circumstances reveal our nature to other people, and still more to ourselves. (V:345)
    • Injuries done to us by others often cause us less pain than those that we do to ourselves. (V:363)
    • Most virtuous women are hidden treasures: they are safe only because they are not sought after. (V:368)
    • Nothing should astonish us except the fact that we are still capable of being astonished. (V:384)
    • Nobody is more often wrong than someone who cannot bear being wrong. (V:386)
    • In the depths of our minds, it seems, nature has hidden away talents and forms of cleverness unknown to us; only the passions have the power of bringing them to light, sometimes giving us surer and more complete insights than art could possibly do. (V:404)
    • We may look great in a position that is less than we deserve, but we often look small in a position that is too great or us. (V:419) [or see the Peter Principle]
    • Most friends make us lose our taste for friendship, and most pious people make us lose our taste for piety. (V:427)
    • We should not judge a man’s merits by his great qualities, but by the use he makes of them. (V:437)
    • When fortune catches us by surprise and gives us a position of greatness without having led us to it step by step, and without our having hoped for it, it is almost impossible to fill it well and seem worthy of holding it. (V:449)
    • In great matters we should strive less to create favourable circumstances than to profit from those that arise. (V:453)
    • We would gain more by showing ourselves as we are than by trying to appear to be what we are not. (V:457)
    • Our enemies’ judgments of us are nearer the truth than our own. (V:458)
    • All our qualities, good as well as bad, are doubtful and indeterminate, and almost all of them are at the mercy of circumstances. (V:470)
    • Imagination could never invent the number of different contradictions that exist innately in each person’s heart. (V:478)
    • Nothing is rarer than true kindness: usually, the very people who think they possess it are merely weak or polite. (V:481)
    • Young people just entering society should look shamefaced or half-witted; a confident, assured manner usually turns into insolence. (V:495)
    • Quarrels would not last long if the fault was only on one side. (V:496)

    And some maxims from earlier editions which were deleted in the later ones:

    • Everyone objects to something in other people that they object to in him. (I:33)
    • Justice is merely an intense fear that our belongings will be taken away from us. That is what leads us to be considerate and respectful for all our neighbour’s interests, and scrupulously diligent never to harm him. This fear keeps man within the limits of the possessions that birth or fortune has given him; and without such fear, he would be constantly making raids on other people. (I:88)
    • When we no longer hope to find sense in other people, we have lost it ourselves. (I:103)
    • The most refined folly is begotten by the most refined wisdom. (I:134)
    • Every kind of human talent, like every kind of tree, has its own unique characteristics and bears its own unique fruits. (I:138)
    • You cannot answer for your courage when you have never been in danger. (I:236)
    • When you cannot find peace within yourself, it is useless to look for it elsewhere (II:49)
    • How can we expect another person to keep our secret, if we cannot keep it ourselves? (IV:87)
    • Keeping your health by means of too strict a diet is itself a tiresome illness. (IV:274)

    Maxims never published:

    • Just as the happiest person in the world is the one who is satisfied with few things, the great and the ambitious are the most wretched in that respect – because they need to accumulate innumerable possessions in order to be happy. (L. 38)
    • Physical labour frees people from mental pain; and that is what makes the poor happy. (VIS: 2)

    I hope you found these select maxims interesting and worthy of reflection. The pithy and concise statements are different than the longer aphorisms, but in some ways they inspire more thought by the reader. This should be the hope of a good writer, i.e. not to feed you arguments but to help you develop your own.

    Thanks for reading.

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  • On the End Times and the Antichrist

    This post envisions a scenario of the End Times and the Antichrist based on historical trends and psychological incentives toward ever-increasing centralization and control.

    Welcome back.

    I previously wrote a post about how upcoming central bank digital currencies (CBDC) will be combined with a ubiquitous woke AI spying on everyone’s electronic data to form the rough equivalent of the biblical Mark of the Beast, which I called the digital panopticon. I think that post was successful because the pieces are already in place, the evidence sharable and it’s already being implemented on a smaller scale. All it needs is a triggering event such as World War 3, an enormous stock market crash, or a terrorist attack (Cyber Polygon?) to roll out comprehensively, providing the pre-determined “solution” to the artificial crisis. Such a shift will also mark an end to growth-centered capitalism and slow-moving first world erasure, applied not just throughout the white West but also in Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and the inception of a formalized boots-on-face tyranny, which is now required for elite survival because of how the internet pierces false establishment narratives.

    This post aims to take the biblical Mark of the Beast theme further: into the realm of the End Times and the Antichrist. I am neither a biblical scholar nor can this topic be covered to the extent it deserves to be within a single Substack post, but nonetheless I’m interested in offering the theory in it’s broad strokes. It will arrive at religious conclusions based on certain historical and psychological understandings and the argument is not reliant on religious belief itself. As Robert Browning said, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or else what’s a heaven for?” I want to state that the following is an idea I’ve been playing around with; I do not necessarily subscribe to it. It is simply a possibility I am considering among others. The hope is that it may serve as food for thought and offer a perspective, especially to those outside of an exoteric Abrahamic religion framework, that has either not been previously considered or has otherwise been sneeringly dismissed out-of-hand as belonging to low status, closed-minded, backwater religious bigots.

    Let’s start with a recent Note referencing a different but related topic: some of the far-right’s mono-causalism where they attribute everything wrong in the world to Jews. I wrote:

    The monocausalists blaming Jews for everything wrong in the world is an over-simplification that I don’t agree with.

    I am at least a quad-causalist: (1) the malevolent Jewish central bank owners parasiting off humanity, (2) the egalitarianism rooted in Christianity that allowed this parasitical system to develop, (3) humanity’s trends toward ever-increasing centralization and decrease of autonomy and privacy, and (4) underneath it all the Demiurge who loves torturing God souls for nefarious purposes. But there’s lots of other reasons for things generally; over-simplification is a useful heuristic, but this is a complicated world.

    Rurik Skywalker and aux playing@radio phanærozoic offered pretty similar pushback here and here, basically arguing that either the first three or all four of these tie directly into the monocausal argument. I responded to them, but on reflection I thought it was worth elaborating on further, which will then lead into this post’s topic.

    Let’s begin with a broad story about human history.


    Human history as ever-increasing centralization

    For almost all of humanity’s history our species was comprised of small hunter gatherer tribes. We roamed the land and the men hunted and made war while the women raised children, cooked and foraged for fruits and nuts. These tribes were small and egalitarian and the tribe listened without reservation to it’s leader, who in turn was responsible for his actions and accountable to the tribe. This is why we have the Dunbar number where we can only maintain ~150 relationships and why so many people believe authority figures without pushback, leading to the NPC meme. Prior to technological society there was an intimate relationship between the ruler and the ruled, a symbiotic relationship of power and accountability that doesn’t exist today.

    About ten thousand years ago, for reasons unknown, humanity underwent the neolithic agricultural revolution where humanity discovered agriculture and became sedentary, along with domesticating animals. This resulted in major population expansions and a rapidly changing genetic makeup, covered previously here. There were all sorts of new diseases that humanity endured and adapted to arising from living in crowded, unsanitary environments (which provided a huge advantage when conquering North America; 90% of Native Americans died of smallpox which they had no genetic resistance against), and a development of alcohol and lactose tolerances, for example. The neolithic agricultural revolution also resulted in major economic inequality that had not existed previously: in a hunter gatherer society everyone was fairly equal, but in sedentary agricultural communities a king could demand the excess production of farmers under penalty of death. Those who resisted the king were killed and removed from the gene pool, as were violent or disruptive individuals who interfered with tax collections, leading to more docile populations over time.

    This development of agricultural communities eventually gave way to cities, from there to the written word, and from there to the creation and dissemination of exoteric, left-brain, liturgical religions, which over time out-competed the right-brain, esoteric, experiential, shamanistic religions of the hunter gatherers (which I have significant sympathy for and interest in). They were successful in outcompeting shamanistic religion because esoteric experiential religions do not scale to size the way exoteric liturgical religions do, where you can have a priest telling the masses what to believe. Getting a large group to believe the same thing allowed a much larger group of people with similar ideas to outcompete smaller groups with much more individualistic beliefs.

    What we see from this story is one of ever-increasing centralization over hundreds and thousands of years. Humanity went from small hunter gatherer tribes to being centralized in agricultural communities, which then gave birth to more centralized cities with much greater populations and religion centralized in written liturgical forms in order to scale for size and to centralize power in priests. These groups grew larger and larger because it’s easier and safer to cooperate with others instead of fight to the death over resources, and also because larger entities are both stronger and create economies of scale in a way that smaller communities don’t. This centralization was therefore natural and inevitable.

    We can look at the development of Christianity as an extension of this process: the switch from polytheism to monotheism centralized the realm of the Gods. It’s push for spiritual egalitarianism aimed to treat everyone within society more or less equally and therefore in a more standardized, efficient way. Christianity had certain developments that aided strongly in this process: it’s belief in Heaven and Hell, it’s division of the world into regional administrative areas headed by priests, and it’s focus on almsgiving as examples.

    With respect to Heaven and Hell, belief in it allowed authorities to harass believers and spy on them in a way previously unheard of in tolerant, polytheistic Hellenism, where everyone ended up in Hades regardless of one’s actions. Under Christianity Christ was the way, the truth and the light, and every other religion was not merely wrong but plunged its followers into a demonic darkness and risked them eternal damnation.  To allow someone to continue in an alternative form of worship or a heretical form of Christianity was not to allow religious freedom; it was to allow Satan to thrive. With each individual soul the battlefield between Heaven and Hell, John Chrysostom preached that Christians should spy on each other and everyone else to root out sin.  They should watch their fellow congregation and when they found them sinning, they should hound them, shun them, report them.  Nowhere was to be beyond the gaze of the good Christian informer, even private homes.  “Let us be meddlesome and search out those who had fallen,” he advised in a sermon that encouraged Christians to hunt out those who were lapsing from true Christian ritual.  “Even if we must enter into the fallen one’s home, let us not shrink back from it.”  Lest any of his flock felt awkward about such an intrusion, Chrysostom reassured them that what they were doing was not done to harm others but to help them.  To turn on, hound and hunt their fellows in this way was not to harm them — it was to save them.

    Indeed, when the last Hellenic emperor Julian the Apostate (who I covered previously here) tried to roll back Christianity and save Hellenism, he adopted the Christian centralization strategies of establishing regional Hellenic priests to be in charge of large administrative areas (as recounted by Gore Vidal, “I suggest we fight them on their own ground. I plan a world priesthood, governed by the Roman Pontifex Maximus. We shall divide the world into administrative units, the way the Galileans have done, and each diocese will have its own hierarchy of priests under a single high priest, responsible to me”) and offered alms to the poor (“I set about reorganizing…no, organizing Hellenism. The Galileans have received much credit for giving charity to anyone who asks for it. We are now doing the same. Their priests impress the ignorant with their so-called holy lives. I now insist that our priests be truly holy. I have given them full instructions on how to comport themselves in public and private”). Historian Tom Holland believes Christianity impacted Julian’s value system more than he acknowledged publicly or even probably to himself. So we can see here that these centralization and control technologies found in religion were highly adaptive; even Hellenism would have needed to adapt them if Julian had been successful!

    Even though Christianity’s ascension ultimately helped result in the destruction of Roman art, science, architecture, etc. and plunged the world into a much more decentralized Dark Ages which lasted hundreds of years, humanity eventually came out of this process ready for more centralization and control given the egalitarianism that had taken hold in the prior centuries, which would allow governments to treat giant populations equally in standardized processes. One step back, two steps forward on a long enough timeline. While humanity’s centralization processes have undergone long reverses that lasted depending on the region for hundreds of years, judging from this story, they should be seen as eras of consolidation and change necessary for even more control in the future. This can also be seen in how technology developed over time.


    Technological innovation as hyper-increases in centralization

    First, let’s define technology. “Technology” as used herein means the technical processes that create efficiencies for standardized, expected outcomes. Picking up a rock and bashing in your enemy’s skull is a use of technology. Lighting a fire is technology. The benefits of technology are that it allows one to dominate others who are less technologically advanced. A man with an iron sword will defeat a man with a bronze sword. A man with a steel sword will defeat a man with an iron sword. A man with a gun will defeat a man with any sword, etc. Because people do not enjoy being dominated, there is a constant and ever-present competitive arms race for stronger and better technologies. When China resisted England shoving opium down it’s throat, England went to war and forced China to accept the opium and then to pay for the cost of the wars (the family behind it, the Sassoon’s, remains ultra-wealthy to this day). China didn’t like that very much and they were in the right, but no matter; England’s technology was better, they won and China had to suffer the consequences. So what we can say is that technological advancement is always going to happen; the luddite Kaczynski’s analysis was wrong. Technology may have terrible things associated with it – it does! – but technological advancement is inevitable regardless (one can argue that technology advances can be steered and directed, of course).

    Now, technology is limited by the traditions, beliefs, culture, and religions of a people. This is because technology causes unforeseen changes in society, which can be disruptive and unpleasant and may therefore be resisted. As an example Rome had invented water mill technology but did not make widespread use of it; they were based on a slave economy and either could not envision or received too much pushback from slave-owners for widespread implementation of such a radical technology. But because a higher-tech society will dominate a lower-tech one, the long-term trends are to discard tradition, belief, culture, and religions in order to effectively pursue technological advancement, which is what we see today. Interestingly, increases in technology are occurring at a faster and faster pace as humanity develops. As those prior roadblocks to technical advancement withered and died, people’s willingness to adopt new technologies occurs at an increasingly faster and faster pace. Rene Guenon in his The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Timespreviously covered here and here, notes how time speeds up and technology advances more rapidly in this age, which he calls the Kali Yuga. Ernst Junger also recognized this process, reviewed by Michele di Adelaide here.

    Let’s continue with our story after the rise of Christianity and the decline of Rome. After Rome fell and Catholicism arose the West entered the Dark Ages, which lasted many hundreds of years. Increases in technology began in earnest after Muslims reintroduced Aristotle to the West, whose works had almost been entirely purged during Christianity’s ascension. Aquinas’s integration of Aristotlean logic into Catholicism paved the way for the Renaissance and massive increases in technological innovation. Inventions during the Renaissance included the compound microscope, the telescope, the thermometer, the barometer, the air pump, greatly and improved clocks, and the world was discovered by Columbus, Vasco de Gama and Magellan.  Manuscripts of the Hellenists were unearthed and translated.  Many of the schools of the ancient world flourished again.

    Technological innovation sped up global centralization efforts and standardized people’s thoughts. Gutenberg’s printing press made the communication of ideas cheaply available to the public and led to Protestantism taking power out of the hands of the Catholic Church. The wide dissemination of the written word made people more similar via written propaganda. Tocqueville described the NPC meme in 1895: “What is still more strange is that all these men, who kept themselves so apart from each other, had become so much alike that it would have been impossible to distinguish them if their places had been changed.” He was talking about the effects of reading books mass-produced by the printing press. The effects of the printing press then gave rise to the modern nation state by tying larger groups of people together via ideologies and propaganda in ways that were previously not possible. The world transitioned from a world controlled by kings to a world controlled by the owners of mass media and banking, but one which worked carefully, indirectly, and in the shadows away from the potential outrage of the masses. This system of indirect control gave rise to ever-expanding managerialism, which N.S. Lyons commented on in a recent post where he wrote:

    Now, the evolutionary genius, so to speak, of managerialism is that it functions constantly to justify its own perpetual expansion. The larger and more complex any organization or system grows, the exponentially more managers seem needed to manage that complexity and the inefficiencies it generates; managers therefore have a strong incentive to ensure that their organization continues to grow larger and more complex, resulting in greater relative power and resources for the managers as a group within the system; more growth means more managers must be hired, who then push for more expansion by rationalizing a need for their cancerous bureaucratic apparatus to take over an ever-larger range of functions; as more and more territory is surrendered to bureaucratic management, more managers must be trained and educated, which requires more managers… and on and on. I call this expansionary dialectic the managerial doom loop.

    But this process works just the same at the level of a country, or even an entire civilization, as it does for a company, non-profit, or government agency. The result, in the case of our societies, has been the exponential growth of a “professional managerial class,” with a permanent interest in seeing the continual expansion of managerial control into every area of state, economy, culture, and even international affairs. In this it has wildly succeeded, producing a new kind of regime — the managerial regime — staffed by a constituent managerial class and dominated by a distinct managerial elite. These elites all behave with flock-like similarity, no matter what institution or part of the world they are located in, because they all have the same basic managerial interests and personality….

    Whereas once these managers’ drive for technocratic control, social engineering, and cultural bulldozing had been largely restricted to the national level, these impulses could now be advanced to their maximum extent — i.e. to the whole world. And so we see the managerial elite almost immediately declare the nation-state obsolete once grander supranational opportunities beckon. The objects of managerial ambition become “global problems” necessitating “global solutions” and indeed “global governance.” Suddenly issues like the flow of “human capital” (aka mass migration) become complexities to be managed at the level of a global system, removing them from the legitimate concern of mere nations. This is the true meaning of the “globalism” which happened to appear at this moment in history: not free trade or anything so utilitarian, per se, but the conceptual expansion of the managerial elite’s eager, grasping reach to the entire planet.

    The extremely bloody wars of the 20th century, along with further increases in communications and propaganda technologies (telegraph, phone, internet, television) gave rise to this managerial state, as well as the United Nations, global economic and military groupings like the United States’s worldwide military and cultural domination and the Soviet Union, along with smaller economic units like the European Union and NAFTA. In the current era we are seeing further integration into almost Orwellian continental worldwide blocks through forced immigration and increased trade akin to this:

    So one of the things that the reactionary nationalist right gets wrong is that they want to return to a bygone era of nation states; they do not see the story of humanity as one of ever-increasing centralization and control. The nation state was a product of technological innovation and it was rendered obsolete by further increases in technological innovation and control.

    If these four Orwellian-type zones are formalized and fully integrated, would that be the last form of centralization and control by our elites? Not likely. Perhaps there would be further attempts to integrate into a simple One World government. Perhaps there would be further attempts to control worldwide populations on an individual level. Perhaps the control gets so extreme they simply wipe out most of the world’s population (they take up too many natural resources, as Yuval Harari argues) and blend the remaining population into a permanent 500 million or one billion slave class to be used for medical and sexual exploitation. Perhaps humanity itself is simply the biological bootstrap for A.I. to take over the world or galaxy.

    But there is another possibility: the world centralizing in Greater Israel according to biblical prophecy.


    Biblical end times

    One of the possibilities of the final stage of centralization and control is the Greater Israel project, the rebuilding of the Third Temple and the return of the “Messiah”. As the central bank owners are mostly or entirely Jewish, since it’s inception Israel – directed by Lionel Rothschild via the Balfour Declaration – has been treated unlike any other country on the planet, i.e. it is allowed ethnic and religious exceptionalism in a world that otherwise forbids it. What we are seeing today is astonishing in it’s rapidity:

    1. Hamas is wiped out and Gaza’s population forced into the southern part of the strip (with steps being made to ship them out permanently),
    2. Israel is about to annex the West Bank,
    3. Hezbollah is totally decimated (with Israelis calling for settling southern Lebanon in opinion pieces in their newspapers and Israel secretly sending archaeologists to create Israeli claims for the area),
    4. Iran, Israel’s last enemy, is sitting quietly and toothlessly in response even as its proxies are destroyed, its generals are assassinated, it’s president dies in a mysterious plane crash, and foreign dignitaries on its soil are murdered (as Iran is, like other so-called enemy countries like Russia and China, controlled by the central bank owners). Even Israel’s propaganda outlet the Jerusalem Post gloats about how weak Iran is.1
    5. Saudi Arabia wants to sign a peace treaty with Israel as soon as it can, just like Jordan and Egypt have done.
    6. Syria is destroyed – Israel regularly bombs Assad’s remaining territory with no response and Israel/the U.S. are secretly sponsoring the Islamic attacks in Aleppo.

    Two years ago it would have been impossible to believe that Israel would have completely destroyed its neighboring enemies and that Iran would be so toothless, but here we are, as Rurik Skywalker also points out here and here.

    It was the 10/7 Hamas attack that set Israel’s extremely aggressive response in motion. Of course, Israel at minimum knew about the attack ahead of time and let it happen; there are plenty of reports about front-line soldiers reporting military build-up and being ignored. Are we supposed to believe that Israel had detailed knowledge of every aspect of Hezbollah’s chain of command to the point of placing explosive beepers and assassinating all twenty of its top leaders but it didn’t know that Hamas had a military build-up right on the border? The concept is ludicrous. It was allowed and possibly even planned by Israel as a casus belli for wiping out Gaza to pave the way for oil and gas pipelines and the Ben Gurion canal and to remake the face of the Middle East.

    The Greater Israel project won’t happen today or tomorrow – Israel doesn’t have the population for it yet – but in a couple more generations based on Orthodox/ultra-Orthodox birthrates?2 What would stop it, perhaps an Iranian nuke? Jewish, Christian and Islamic messianism have prepared the Abrahamic world for the rebuilding of the Third Temple to usher in the End Times; whether or not biblical prophecy is real or not is irrelevant – what matters is the nature of belief itself, because belief can summon an egregore and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, even if there is no true biblical prophecy, if enough people believe in it then their beliefs can lead to such an outcome. According to Chabad, “One of the principles of Jewish faith enumerated by Maimonides is that one day there will arise a dynamic Jewish leader, a direct descendant of the Davidic dynasty, who will rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, and gather Jews from all over the world and bring them back to the Land of Israel. All the nations of the world will recognize Moshiach to be a world leader, and will accept his dominion.”

    This seems to play into developing trends. With Greater Israel effectuated, the Third Temple rebuilt, with the CBDC/woke AI social credit score Mark of the Beast applied everywhere, and with extreme control technologies cutting out anyone from society who disobey, would that not be the right time to proclaim the Messiah and the End Times? This Messiah would be the apotheosis, the cumulation, of all the world’s power centralized in the hands of one man and his backers, formalized and open for all to see; the fulfillment of divine prophecy.

    undefined
    Antichrist in the Catalan Atlas (1375). The label reads: “Antichrist. He will be raised in Goraym of Galilea, and at the age of thirty he will start to preach in Jerusalem; contrary to the truth, he will proclaim that he is Christ, the living son of God. It is said that he will rebuild the Temple.”

    At the same time, anti-semitism is rising quickly in the West as it’s quality of life dramatically decreases into neoliberal feudalism – would that stop this project, or perhaps advance it in accordance with “gather[ing] Jews from all over the world and bring them back to the Land of Israel”? Is there a time limit involved, is there enough competence to pull this off? Is that why it seems like our elites are sprinting ahead to enact their schemes?

    This leads into the next question: what happens if or after this Messiah occurs? Where can power centralize further after it is entirely centralized? The Tower of Babel rebuilt – then what? One can envision the cumulation of thousands of years of human history which labored so hard toward centralization: crystallized into it’s maximum form, there would be only one direction left for humanity to go, where it would have to go as change is inevitable in life: de-centralization and a loss of centralized power, permanent, in the long term. The Kali Yuga would be over; it would be an entirely different world.3 Under this conception the Messiah would be revealed as the Antichrist; psychologically and spiritually, Carl Jung stated in his Answer to Job that the God figure of Christ must eventually result in it’s polar opposite, as God would need that experience in order to grow spiritually as well.

    The Preaching of the Antichrist (1500-1504) by Luca Signorelli. A Jesus-like figure is preaching on the pedestal; note Satan is whispering in his ear.

    Nikolai Berdyaev, too, believed this period of global technological subjugation would give way to a spiritual revolution which would accompany widespread dissolution of state power. The true Messiah would be the one who ends the centralized system and collapses the Tower of Babel. It wouldn’t be the Rapture with bodies disappearing into Heaven, but it would result in an entirely and radically new paradigm for living.

    The energy released by such an event would be incalculable; the memory of pure maximized centralization and the horrors it would unleash onto the world’s population (which will/would be beyond our nightmares) would serve as an enduring reminder about the dangers of believing authority figures and trusting in ideology; it could usher in formally the Age of Aquarius, much as Jesus ushered in the Age of Pisces.4 As Jung wrote, “The astrological sign of Pisces consists of two fishes which were frequently regarded as moving in opposite directions. Traditionally, the reign of Christ corresponds to the first fish and ended with the first millennium, whereas the second fish coincides with the reign of Antichrist, now nearing its end with the entry of the vernal equinox into the sign of Aquarius.”


    Analysis

    Would such a scenario outlined (and as stated at the start, it is not one I necessarily subscribe to) somehow justify all the horrors, the pain and suffering that came before and is yet to come? Would it redeem that suffering in the eyes, ears and hearts of those who lived through it and experienced it by giving meaning to it? How would it explain the Jewish role in world history – always at the forefront of disruptive revolution, of terrifying control and deceptiveness and insane will-to-power couched as “tikkun olam” in an inverted horror-simulacra? Would it show that the Jews, indeed, had an important if dreadful role to play in the ensuing drama?

    Waiting for this or any other scenario to play out is, of course, a fool’s errand. Every generation since the time of Christ has thought that this would be the End Times; all were disappointed. The early Christians thought that the Antichrist would arise out of Rome and that the End Times were imminent; the stories told inspire and provide hope to each generation carrying their own cross today. There is so much we can do individually within our own power to further our individuation process (not to be confused with individualism) and try to build life balance without waiting for a magical new era to begin.

    Still, it’s strange that we are living in a moment of such rapid technological change where it feels like it is heading to some sort of final cumulation, the crux of thousands of years of history which will likely be horrible. Does our placement as humans in this particular time and place give weight to the simulation hypothesis? Could this process have happened before, with the final trauma searing into our collective unconscious ala Jung and remembered as the Tower of Babel, Atlantis, Noah’s flood?

    I hope you found this to be an interesting story. I’m not sure I necessarily buy it, but it’s an explanation worth exploring and wrestling with, and it does another thing: it offers long-term hope and perspective that if things get much worse, that there may yet be a dawn and a new day after the nightmares to come. On the flip side, just as everything on this plane contains both positive and negative elements within it, taking the theory too seriously could be de-motivating for action against globohomo in the present.

    Thanks for reading.

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    1 From here: “It is evident that the succession and escalation of Israeli assassination operations against prominent Iranian leaders or Iran loyalists has not resulted in any significant cost to Israel; the reaction of the Islamic Republic did not exceed verbal threats and the firing of antiquated missiles – which were intercepted by Israel and its allies – to satisfy the psychological needs of the pro-Iranian public. 

    These minimal consequences will encourage Israel to target Iran’s top leaders, including Khamenei himself.

    It turns out Israel’s successive and escalating assassinations of prominent Iranian or pro-Iranian leaders have not, as of now, resulted in a cost that would compel the Israeli security establishment to discontinue of these bold operations, even if they hit the head of the Iranian regime.”

    2 The ultra-Orthodox have the highest birthrates in the developed world, their population increased by 50% between 2009 and 2019, and per this report are projected to increase from 1.1 million to 6.2 million by 2064, a mind-boggling increase:

    3 Rene Guenon came to the same conclusions, although he approached it from a different angle, discussed here. To him humanity is experiencing the “solidification” of the world as part of a cosmic cycle where energies increasingly descend from the higher levels of spirituality and connection to God down into the most secular materialism imaginable. Eventually the point is reached where it was not possible to become any more secular or materialistic, that spirituality had been entirely excised from people’s lives, and there would be nowhere left to go once that process completed except into a new paradigm, a new age where connection to God would be everywhere and the cycle of descent would begin anew.

    4 Stephan Hoeller argues in an interview that Carl Jung, the greatest gnostic of our era, believes that we are entering, with great difficulty and pain, the Age of Aquarius where mankind’s spiritual abilities will be changed and uplifted in accordance with gnosis. He states (and is discussed further here and here):

    [Hoeller]: Speaking of Jung, it is no doubt known to many that his mysterious and long-awaited book Liber Novus (The Red Book) has been published at last. One of the principal disclosures to be found in this work is Jung’s belief that the Age of Aquarius is upon us, that significant changes in the consciousness of humanity are taking place, and that more of the same may be expected in the future. The “Aeon of Aquarius,” as Jung calls it, will eventually bring great psychological changes in its wake, amounting to a new religious consciousness which will differ greatly from the religious consciousness of the Piscean Age. It will manifest primarily in a new God-image that was very important to the ancient Gnostics and that in various ways has made its appearance throughout history in the esoteric tradition.

    Two thousand and some years ago a new religion constellated itself in the Mediterranean region. With that religion came a new myth of redemption, centred in the image of Jesus, the Saviour God. Now Jung is telling us in The Red Book that the Aeon of Aquarius is upon us, and with it comes the new God-image of the God within. This image is of course none other than the God to whom St. Paul referred as “the Christ in you, our hope of glory.” It is also the indwelling Christ affirmed and venerated in the Gnostic tradition.

    There is no doubt that Jung saw in the new Gnostic Renaissance, which began with the discovery in 1945 of the Nag Hammadi library, a manifestation of his own prophecy in the then still secret Red Book. The connection of Jung’s prophecy with the tradition of Gnosis is unmistakable.

    In his Red Book, Jung stated clearly that the task of the present and near future was “to give birth to the ancient in a new time,” and he clearly meant the Gnostic tradition is in fact that ancient thing to which he and others were giving birth.

    I have spent a very large portion of my adult life studying and commenting upon the work of Jung and the Gnostic sacred writings. I should say, then, that humanity today is experiencing the rebirth of Gnosticism, and its principal God-image is being born in a new time. The esoteric as well as the exoteric implications of this process are momentous.

  • The consolidation phase of the egalitarian ratchet effect

    This post argues that, on top of expecting Trump’s presidency to be a failure on correcting core governmental issues, it will lock in the liberal social gains made over the last decade. Hic sunt dracones.

    Welcome back.

    In INRI_07’s dour post where he recommends viewing the 2024 election through the prism of power politics and which I linked to within my last post, he wrote: “Crucially, this is not to blackpill—I’m not a ‘doomer’. This is simply an attempt to honestly and critically assess the situation, which is necessary for effective political action. Action requires strategy, and strategy requires predictive power. Accordingly, if we want to operate effectively and help bring about real change, there is an absolute imperative to evaluate the political situation, at any given time, in power-political terms, rather than ideological ones.

    He is correct about this. One cannot fight what one doesn’t understand, and one can’t understand something without a grounding mechanism to interpret and incorporate new information. A grounding mechanism is a tool that one uses to assess whether new data is true or false and in what respects it is true or false. The main grounding mechanism I use is one of recursive prediction. It works as follows: based on your understanding of the world you make predictions about what will happen in the future. If they turn out to be wrong, you ask why they were wrong, then update your worldview in light of that new information. Do it over and over again, get lots of predictions wrong and make an ass out of yourself enough, and if you honestly look into why you were wrong each time and learn and grow from those errors then your worldview’s accuracy will eventually increase – never to 100% because we are all limited, finite beings and there is always more to learn and understand – “man plans, God laughs” – but we can get closer. Or as Robert Browning wrote, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?” Eventually I ended up with beliefs like the world order order as centralized above the level of the nation statethe egalitarian ratchet effect explaining society’s ever-lurch leftwards and the Rothschilds owning the world central banks.

    When looking at the 2024 Trump re-election three things stand out:

    1. He was facing multiple criminal trials just a year ago where he could have spent the rest of his life in prison, all of which have magically disappeared – poof! – even as many of his most committed underlings have been criminally and civilly convicted for allegations just as flimsy, while his most ardent supporters who showed up to protest election fraud on 1/6 rot in prison. Why were these charges dropped and pushed out for him and him alone?
    2. Second, the ridiculously high value of Truth Social on the stock market – almost $7 billion, compared to Twitter’s current estimated $9.4 billion valuation – which very few people use. For example, Trump has 8 million followers on Truth Social compared to Twitter where he has 95 million, and no one else on Truth Social is anywhere close to as big a draw. Truth Social was allowed to be listed on the stock market back in 2022 while Trump faced multiple serious criminal trials. One may rationally perceive this as a backdoor $2.3 billion payoff.
    3. Third, the institutional election fraud established in 2020 is still fully operational with nationwide mail-in-voting, Dominion electronic fraud, ballot harvesting, etc. None of that has gone away, it is all still right there to see. Anglin had a nice piece over at Unz where he correctly identified this core issue.1

    Many otherwise intelligent people are hopelessly confused over the difference between Trump “winning” a rigged election and Trump winning an actual election (even though I ultimately voted for him). None of the blindly optimistic Trump cheerleaders can answer this question because the truth is self evident: Trump was turned behind closed doors and was allowed to win. Whatever he secretly agreed to in order to avoid prison and destruction is really bad stuff, at least in part related to total capitulation to the Israel agenda, and the extent of the humiliation will be revealed over time. This is why I believe his victory speech was so subdued. I understand the psychology of the cheerleading – it feels really good in the moment, it results in a lot of new subscribers because people love optimism, and what was the alternative to Trump? No one – but it’s cheap and does a disservice to one’s intellect and soul.

    As I wrote on Notes and as a footnote in my last post, “There are certain times which serve as clarifying when one seeks to introspect into one’s own and other’s souls. The response to fraudvirus (“COVID”) was one of those times; I saw things from people I never would have expected otherwise. But an act of election winning serves a similar function from the other side; who is able to keep their wits about them, their reason in check, and not get carried way in the moment? Who can remain level-headed? I may not be doing any call-outs (what’s the point of drama?) but I’m always watching, always observing – mostly in disappointment.”

    The red lines of the counter-elite are in play, manifesting as personnel is policy:

    These picks should signal that Trump will not be serious about combating the “deep state” and that he will pursue a neocon foreign policy.2 This isn’t entirely his fault, as cabinet nominees must be confirmed by a Senate which is hopelessly and permanently RINO due to the nature of democracy itself. Trump is apparently not even going to blanket pardon the 1/6 political prisoners, instead issuing pardons on a “case-by-case basis” which feeds into the false establishment narrative that some of the political prosecutions were justified. We’ll also likely see a play for West Bank settlement annexation and a continuation of the Greater Israel project. If you want a good cabinet, place Rand Paul and other MAGA Senators with strong proven voting records and who are confirmable in important positions. But that’s too much to ask, I guess. As Joseph Hex wrote,

    Step 1. Use publicly popular pro-America/Anti-Deepstate figures on campaign.

    Step 2. Upon assuming power, dump these people or give them meaningless roles, all the while loudly trumpeting their words but not their (lack of) action.

    Step 3. Appoint the same old war-mongers and bankers.

    Trump did the same the first time – Bannon out within a year, Jared Kushner running his administration – so this really shouldn’t be a surprise. But I guess it is to most of Substack’s “dissident right” community. This isn’t anything new, either; 2008 “hope and change” Obama famously let Citigroup appoint his entire cabinet.


    The consolidation phase of the egalitarian ratchet effect

    I’d like to delve into an aspect I touched on only briefly in my last post. To succeed by dissident standards would require radical action: mass deportations on a scale never seen before in U.S. history (20 million left-leaning illegals were let into the country in the past four years alone) because America in on the verge of transformation into a permanent one party Democrat state, vote-by-mail election laws and Dominion electronic voting machines would need to be abolished nationally, and the Federal Reserve would either need to be nationalized or abolished based on the unfixable state of our national finances. These things won’t happen, and Trump looks poised to walk into a trap on immigration. But what will happen is what I call the consolidation phase of the egalitarian ratchet effect. I’ll explain what I mean by this, but first, a couple of comments by others.

    Joshua Derrick argued in a comment to my last post that Trump represents the ascendancy and total victory of social liberalism:

    At the end of the day, the gushing over trump represents a failure of conservatism in this country just as absolute as election of Biden represented for real leftists in this country in 2020. The man is personally a liberal: has had many marriages and divorces, is promiscuous, doesn’t engage with western culture on more than a superficial level, has and ordered many abortions. He’s allied with arch liberals tech bros Peter Thiel, Zuckerberg and Elon Musk for gods sake. In some ways he’s anti-woke, but he supports gay and transgender rights that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. The based trad Christian substack warriors who voted for trump are just as cucked if not more than the libs they think they’re owning.

    Joshua is right about this. Social conservatives ultimately threw their lot behind the secular populist rebellion against Hillary in 2016 – voting for the lesser of two evils is such a tempting thing to do – but the price they paid for it was the evisceration of their beliefs. As INRI_07 similarly argued,

    Republican Pivot Away from Heteronormativity, Toward Abortion: To be somewhat crass, I believe the GOP will continue to get gayer and try to put away the abortion issue. The reality is that abortion restrictions, even at the state level, may represent an electoral liability for Republicans going forward. Accordingly, under Trump’s watch, I suspect that the party will continue its move away from its traditional stance on the issue and potentially leave pro-life efforts on the state level to flounder. I believe the United States will basically reconstruct the conditions imposed by Roe v. Wade by enshrining it into state constitutions across the country.

    Although I had problems with this post by Deep Left Analysis where he argues that “the deep left” won with Trump’s election – he conflates three types of leftism which are often at odds, i.e. social leftism of race/gender/LGBTQ egalitarianism, economic leftism (socialism), and religious leftism (secularism and atheism), which he mixes interchangeably which is way too sloppy for my tastes – he is correct that Trump is further normalizing homosexuality, transsexualism, giving up on abortion (leaving it to the states after Roe), and pursuing a level of race blindness that were simply unacceptable pre-Trump. As DLA states,

    “The Trump 2024 coalition was Elon Musk (a Reddit atheist), Tulsi Gabbard (a Hindu), RFK (a liberal hippie environmentalist), Vivek (another Hindu), Kushner (Jewish), JD Vance (married to a Hindu), Peter Thiel (gay), Steven Cheung (Chinese immigrant), Susan Wiles (divorced), Jason Miller (public extramarital affair), and Stephen Miller (Jewish).” And: “The Christian right were the cucks in this election. They sat in the corner of the Republican National Convention and watched as atheists, porn stars, Sikhs, and Hindus took over their party….During the first Trump term, white evangelical Protestants went from 15.3% of the population to 14.6% of the population. Trump can’t save these people, even if he wanted to.”

    The craziest part of the 2024 RNC was Shabbos Kestenbaum’s speech gloating that he was suing Harvard for not being pro-Jewish enough. What a mind-boggling level of narcissistic arrogance or chutzpuh, what a total inability to read an audience – or simply not caring. Thinking that Jews just totally dominate the Republican party and no one can say anything different now.

    On the opposite side, the self-admitted neo-Nazi Cesar Tort, who bitterly turned on Catholicism due to sexual abuse he suffered as a child, whose website is here and who grew up in Latin America, bitterly complains how de-racianated politics in Latin America are. There are right wing and left wing parties, of course, but these are entirely economic and religious parties; there is no concept of racial politics at all in the region. That is where the trends are headed within America as it continues to becomes a less white country. Because one requires a broad coalition to win national elections, as the country continues to become less white to win requires a permanent shift toward appealing to other groups. 2016 was historic white America’s last gasp for running on identity politics unless long-running trends dramatically change somehow.

    This was from 2013. Imagine how much more advanced the changes are now.

    Let’s put this together. The Biden/Kamala administration brought in 20 million left-leaning illegals within the past four years alone. Globohomo has normalized homosexuality, gay marriage, and increasingly transsexualism. Evangelicals, by supporting Trump as the lesser of two evils have given up on social conservatism, and the right has accepted a twice divorced, rampant cheater as their standard bearer. The right is now increasingly de-racianated, accepting homosexuals and transsexuals within it’s ranks (see “Caitlyn” Jenner), and after the repeal of Roe it will or has already given up on abortion as a national issue (correctly from a political perspective, as anti-abortion measures are wildly unpopular, although I think it should be banned after the first trimester except for the health of the mother). This is what we call the consolidation phase of the egalitarian ratchet effect.

    This was actually from 2016
    Tho based, tho conservative.

    The egalitarian ratchet effect was previously described here. Basically, the core values of a society ratchet or double down on itself over time unless or until that society collapses, is militarily conquered from without, or transvalues it’s core values into something else. The core values of Western society are egalitarianism rooted in Christianity, even though society is quite secular at this time. The “left” lead society leftward, then the “right” serve as the consolidation phase which integrates the gains made by the left before the left ratchet even further leftwards. Robert Lewis Dabney, the chief of staff of Stonewall Jackson, commented on how this process works in a bitter screed in 1897:

    It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent: Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. . . . Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now serves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.

    This is why elections ping-pong from Democrat to Republican and back again, cycle to cycle – burning the good will and unmet expectations until there’s a media blitz, a party shift and the process repeats itself as society lurches ever-leftwards:

    So there you have it. Not only will Trump’s presidency be a failure in terms of fixing the national debt, cutting down on inflation (impossible without addressing the debt issue), kicking out the tens of millions hordes of left-leaning illegal immigrants (he may evict some of the worst criminal offenders and build some miles of wall as a very shallow “win”, but even that he may go about the wrong way), restoring proper election law, punishing the worst of the deep state offenders, dismantling the administrative state or pursuing America First instead of Israel First, as well as likely being the fall guy for war with Iran, World War 3, civil war or a stock market implosion, but his presidency will further solidify the cultural gains made by the left within the past ten years – after which society will rapidly lurch leftwards yet again.

    I hope that I am wrong and that more positive things are ahead than what I’ve laid out. I would rather be surprised to the upside than to the downside, though, and based on my recursive prediction model as a grounding mechanism I’ll be happy to adjust my worldview accordingly to the extent I am wrong.

    Let’s end this post with a mock predictive One Day in the Life of Donald Trump’s Greater Israel, inspired by Ivan Denisovich:

    7:00 AM: You wake up groaning under 40% annual inflation. Fox News is extolling what a great honor it is to send Israel $50 billion dollars (the latest monthly extension) and what a great honor it is that the draft is being reinstated to fight in war against Iran which, unfortunately, requires boots on the ground. News claims that giant corporations have scaled back DEI, though, and they recommend doing your patriotic duty and signing up as soon as possible to help our greatest ally!

    8:00 AM: You head to work (early, you need to work 2-3 jobs to not even make ends meet). The number of non-whites despite Trump’s “mass deportations of illegals” is greater than ever – it almost seems like he’s “illegally deporting” in reverse and bringing more in. Well, he did expand the H1b visa program for Indians by 2 million per year, but at least that’s legal immigration, right?

    9:00 AM: You receive an email announcing your draft number. Luckily selective service is digital and they have all of your information, so you don’t have to go into a physical location! It’s very convenient. Your draft number puts you at least a couple months out from service – the war will have to be over by then, right? …right?

    12:00 PM: You use your Trump-sponsored CBDC to buy lunch. Luckily it’s not programmed yet to prohibit you from purchasing meat, but the news says those regulations are coming to help combat global warming.

    2:00 PM: You try to go on the internet to Substack but, after the “Iranian hack”, internet use is strictly monitored – for your own good, of course. Reddit and Fox News are still easily accessible, though, so you can take comfort in that.

    3:00 PM: It’s always a strange thing watching liberals on the street wear pro-Trump t-shirts, but that’s what it’s come to. You observe liberals, obese boomers, and even a smattering of Mexicans and blacks wearing Trump t-shirts — he’s brought them all together. It almost brings a tear to the eye.

    6:00 PM: Your obese liberal girlfriend is wearing her Trump t-shirt again as she waddles around your small, dimly lit apartment. “Look how reasonable and moderate I am, I can update my opinion to take in new information. Look, even Reddit has come around on him!” she exclaims proudly. You want to die.

    8:00 PM: You look at your account balances – they’re negative, you will need to take out another payday loan. You can’t let yourself get fired either as Trump cut back on unemployment benefits (but not for non-whites).

    10:00 PM: You can’t take it any longer; you cry, and cry some more. There is no hope. You turn on Fox News and, like O’Brien, try to appreciate that it’s all worth it because Israel just annexed parts of Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. You’re doing your part.

    Thanks for reading.

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    1 He wrote in part: “I think people are getting way too excited, and many or even most of the material I see is bordering on delusional, QAnon tier lunacy. Bobby Kennedy is not going to be installed as the head of the CIA and uncover the mystery of the murders of his father and uncle, nor is Ron Paul going to abolish the fed. The FBI is not going to be sent into the tunnels under Comet Pizza. No one from the Biden Administration is going to be prosecuted, the coronavirus vaccine will not be investigated, there will not be mass deportations. You can screenshot this. None of that stuff is happening.”

    2 I never analyzed the Biden cabinet in this manner because it wasn’t needed – dissidents knew he would hungrily serve his globohomo masters like the flimsy puppet that he was. There is a lot of confusion on the right over who and what Trump represents, though.