Inevitable Victory – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Knowing The Face Of Your Father, or, The Best Post I’ve Ever Written About Bronze Age Europe

(Inspired by a comment on Monday’s post)

“It is indeed a pleasure to introduce to you a gentleman we picked up in medieval Mongolia, please welcome the very excellent barbarian Mr. Genghis Khan!” – Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

I wonder if the most common sandwich in Rome was a plebian J?

The rooster crowed.

Tark opened one eye, peering through the heavy hide covering him. He could see light.

Motion was already starting in the longhouse, and he could see the oak beams above him dimly in the firelight. He could smell the barley and mutton stew that would be his breakfast. Always in a hurry, he jumped up and dressed into his pleasantly cool tunic and pants and bolted down a bowl of the stew. It was warm. It was good.

Tark was eight.

Tark hummed a song to the sky father, the one who had spoken the world into existence, according to the stories the men told around the fire. Tark’s first job was to feed the chickens so mother could get the eggs for tomorrow.

His father, Wulfric, was already up, as usual. Tark had seen that his father was up later and up earlier. Tark noticed that Wulfric always had a wary look in his eye, as if he was never relaxing, always assessing. When other men talked after too much drink, Wulfric listened. Wulfric was tending the tribe’s cattle, their major stock of wealth and the way that they would be sure that they would make it through the winter, even if it was a long one.

Tark’s older brother Branoc, now 16, was already up and practicing with a battle axe – sweat already dripping from him despite the cool air. Branoc was a man, and to be a man, one fought. And to be a man, one married. Branoc would soon be bonded to Lunara. A man protects his woman, a man protects his family. All is right with the world.

Tark and Branoc go through the forest, intermittent sunlight flashing in Tark’s light blonde hair. His blue-gray eyes lit up as they caught deer sign. Maybe a hunt soon. That would be good.

Later, after a day of work and mock combat with wooden weapons and a laughing Branoc, Tark and the family gathered by the fire. Wulfric speaks slowly, telling the stories of their Yamnaya ancestors who rode the steppe and died valiantly. Those tales are the last thing that Tark heard as he drifted off to sleep – dreaming of becoming worthy enough to have a final burial place, a kurgan, worthy of a man of honor. The last thing he saw in the flickering firelight was the face of his father.

Okay, enough of Tark’s life.

Tark was a member of the Corded Ware people, a successor to the Yamnaya. This culture (and its associated genetics) first show up on the steppe in what is today Russia and the Ukraine thousands of years ago and then spread throughout Europe during the thousands of years that followed.

Blockbuster™ franchises followed the Corded Ware people wherever they went, but were ultimately unsuccessful because the VCR had not yet been invented.

This land was harsh, and not only in climate – some writers have referred to it as the bloodlands. Steppe warriors. These were the first humans to effectively use the horse as transport, and were fierce warriors. Most of the skeletons that we’ve found of these people have evidence of combat injuries. This isn’t uncommon.

In roughly 1250 BC, a band of warriors descended on a settlement in the Tollense Valley. The Tollense Valley is in present day Germany. On the day of the battle, current estimates are that perhaps 2,000 warriors fought during the battle – an immense battle for that time in Europe.

Who won? Civilization won.

Steppe warriors have been a sort-of periodic vaccination against societal complacency. Urban areas exist, and the steppe warriors, be they Mongol, Hun, Turk, Scythian, or Yamnaya, have been a cleansing fire that keeps those urban and settled areas vital. I mean, would you build a giant great wall to protect you from cosplay LARPers or furries?

No, not from LARPers. But I would build a fiery moat to keep furries out.

The Corded Ware people were also known to avoid video games. (meme as found)

This crashing wave of martial prowess was built on a selection process that favored honor, planning, and daring. Genghis Khan is related to something like one out of eight east Asians, so I think his strategy paid off. It also forced societies out of their complacence, and kept them invigorated. Stagnant empires in decline were exactly the sort of thing these steppe barbarians were looking for.

I mean, don’t threaten them with a good time.

Wave after wave of first Yamnaya and then Corded Ware people replaced almost all of the neolithic farmers in the region from the Volga to the Rhine on the east and west, and from the Arctic in the north to the Alps in the south, a huge range.

But they also pushed into places like Gaul, the Iberian Peninsula, and into Italy. In the Iberian Peninsula, for instance, many villages consist only of the offspring from the Y chromosome of the Yamnaya/Corded Ware people. They invaded, killed all the men and male children, and took over. The men from those places are erased from genetic history.

Is this how you retrace your steppes? (meme as found)

To a lesser extent, this happened in both Greece and Italy. The early emperors were blonde or sandy brown in hair color, with eyes that were light grey or blue – the Steppe Chads like Tark had found a home, and their genes lived on in emperors. And in people like Alexander the Great, who had heterochromia.

What’s heterochromia? One blue eye, one brown. Steppe Chad’s blood flowed in Alexander’s veins, and probably made up 30% of the genome of some populations of the ancient Greeks and Macedonians.

In Italy, it was also pronounced, with early Latin DNA being 30% or more of Corded Ware origin. Nero was blonde and had blue eyes.

I guess that makes the Yamnaya steppe daddies?

The Italians and Greeks of today are, of course still related to the Italians and Greeks of 2,000 years ago, but there has been a huge admixture of the peoples of the Mediterranean because these were the capital cities of empire. Think New York of 2025 is genetically even remotely close to New York of 1825?

Nope, not at all. And neither was Rome of 200 AD genetically similar to Rome of 100 BC, except, perhaps, in the royal families.

I hear that Nero hid when they went to find him to execute him, covering himself in a cloak. I guess that makes that coat the first chicken Caesar wrap.

The genetics of three to five thousand years of brutal struggle in the bloodlands were flowing in the veins of Octavian, even until the years just before his death . . .

A rooster, somewhere, crowed. Augustus (who had been Octavian) opened one eye. A servant was already there.

One of the joys of youth was solitude, one of the banes of being Caesar was never being really alone. After Julius was murdered, Octavian never let a single man guard him. That would be folly. Besides, Augustus was 74, and when he woke, everything hurt. He remembered bounding up as a boy, but now everything was slow.

Even his waking was an event that set in motion a cascade of events. Three men entered the room. His bath was ready, and, as usual, already at perfect temperature. One had deeply absorbent towels. One had a chalice of wine. The third had brought in a fresh toga, trimmed in the Tyrian murex that was the amazingly expensive purple coloring of the Caesar.

The gardens of his palace by the Tiber were a place of quiet contemplation. He walked them slowly, in silence, his formerly blonde and now grey hair catching the morning Sun, reflecting off of his blue-gray eyes.

A soft echo of the sounds of his guard, training, bring Actium back to his mind, where he finally ended Mark Antony’s planned usurpation of his power. Such glory. The entire world in the balance!

In the afternoon, Senators. Roads. Gaul. Plans of Empire, details for lesser men.

That night, Augustus sits by the fire. Alone. In an unguarded moment, he allows himself to think about what he already knows awaits him: a marble tomb.

He pondered: was he a man of honor? He thought, briefly, of a memory from when he was a child of perhaps four, of the face of his father in dim light, illuminated by the flickering light of a lamp.

The blood of Tark had made a very long journey, indeed.

Lost The Plot: 17 True Things We Forgot

“To tell you the truth, Bilbo has been a bit odd lately.” – The Fellowship of the Ring

Would you call someone who microwaved hot dogs Frank Zappa?

Something went off the rails in the twentieth century. If I were to try to pinpoint it, it would probably be around when Woodrow Wilson was president, as if a large darkness began to descend and ooze through society. It has been slowly corrosive for decades, but the post-2000 years, and especially the Obama years really saw it make insidious . . . progress.

Why?

At least in part because we forgot many of the really important things that we have always known, for the existence of mankind at least, to be true.

Below is a list of 17 True things that people “forgot” for a few decades that have pushed our civilization to collapse:

Men and Women Are Physiologically Different

This has fed the current trans nonsense, and still exists when every single scientific study has shown that the average man over twice as strong as the average woman, and almost always the strongest woman in a study is weaker than the weakest man.

I wrote a book on penguins once. In hindsight, I should have used paper.

Men/Women Cognitively Different

Again, there are basic differences in the way that a woman’s mind and a man’s mind work. Men are better at spatial thinking, reasoning, and math, whereas women are exceptional at waging personal vendettas for petty reasons. Oh, and empathy. Women are good at that, too.

Race Is A Real Biological Fact

Race is really more than skin deep. I once saw a post where the Red Cross™ was looking for more black donors because of the various cofactors that make it a better match for black recipients. More than that, A.I. can tell the race of a patient by an x-ray. So, besides being blood, skin, and bone deep, each race was isolated and separated in time, in some cases by more than 70,000 years (Australian Aborigines). So, yeah, people of different races are different.

Intelligence Is Mostly Influenced By Biology

Anyone who studies intelligence will tell you that at least 50% of intelligence is inherited, and the number might be 80%. Does that mean two absolute idiots might not birth a genius? Sure. It could happen. And there might also be desperate single MILFs less than a mile away, like my computer keeps telling me.

Einstein married his cousin, proving that even his marriage was relative.

Character Is Mostly Influenced By Biology

Growing up in a small town, people would say things like, “That family is no good,” and they were generally right. Are we slaves to it? No. Whereas with intelligence, you can’t hone it, with character you can, which means that maybe not all is lost for Hunter Bi . . . oh, too late.

The Family Is Society’s Atom

Feminism requires that the individual be the atom of society so that women can be EmpOwERed grrlbosses, but that is clearly insanity. No family, no society – it all falls apart.

Culture Isn’t Interchangeable

Tacos aren’t Viking. And culture is far more than a taco. Why lots of people don’t recognize American culture is the same reason that fish don’t recognize water – they’re surrounded by it all the time and can’t imagine life without it.

Borders, Language, Culture, and People Define Nations

Without those, it’s either a country or an empire and not a nation. And if it’s a country, it will Balkanize or be led by an authoritarian.

GDP Growth ≠ Happiness

GDP growth was a focus during the Cold War. Why? We needed stuff to beat the horrific ideology of the commies. We won. But now we try to make an economy larger at the expense of the people. How many rich couples were happier when they were young and poor?

I’m joining a Cold War reenactor group – we get together on weekends with a keg and without cell phones and listen to heavy metal.

Work Has Intrinsic Value

Sweat builds your soul and gives you freedom—UBI and welfare are cages for the human soul.

Competition Drives Progress

And war is the ultimate competition. What has happened to the vitality of Europe as it has the longest war-free period in its history?

Death Is Inevitable

Blue Öyster Cult® said that you shouldn’t fear the reaper, and that’s fairly sound advice. We’re all going to die. The parade will end. To paraphrase Monty Python, we will all become ex-parrots. Focus on the living bit, and add in a little more cowbell.

I hear that when ducks fly over the pyramids, they flock like an Egyptian.

Equality Doesn’t Exist

Equality under the law can exist, equality of rights can exist, but people are unequal in every possible physical, cognitive or moral way.

Authority Exists For A Reason

The Founding Fathers thought long and hard about how to set up self-governance in the United States. They didn’t settle on, “everyone do whatever they want”. Authority in society is required because:

Humans Are Imperfectible

Chasing communist Utopia led to more deaths in the twentieth century than any other man-made condition. People are flawed, and systems have to take that into account.

Is a classy fish sofishticated?

Truth, Beauty, And Goodness Exist

Not GloboLeftist “My truth” but Truth, with a capital T. The same with Beauty and Goodness, both of which the GloboLeft similarly tried to define as nonexistent.

A Divine Presence Exists

YMMV, but everything I’ve seen shows that this is both a physical and mathematical certainty.

That’s a start at the list, and I’m sure you have more. Whenever a society becomes based on ideas that aren’t real, it becomes unstable. Whenever a Man With A Plan® says that they’re going to rebuild society, run.

And when people spout corrosive philosophies that tear apart families and create societal misery, why do we reward them by sending them to congress and or giving them prestigious professorships?

What other things that everyone knew in 1025 A.D. have we forgotten?

What Will Come From The Current Recession?

“No tomorrow? That means there’d be no consequences. No hangovers. We could do whatever we wanted!” – Groundhog Day

An economist falls off a cliff. During the fall, he notes, “So far, so good. It’s different this time. Soft landing ahead!”

Note: no podcast this week. Hoping to have a new computer that can hear things as soon as my staff gets the specifications together.

Last week I let on that I thought a recession was coming. I mean, I always think a recession is coming, so that was no big surprise, but it looks like from preliminary data that the economy is actually contracting this quarter, so, if we match it with one more quarter of contraction that’s the textbook definition of a recession. Or maybe the economy is having a baby. I slept through that part of health class.

It is a long-used trick of sitting presidents to treat the economy like a 1980s high school kegger in order to get re-elected. The plan is generally simple: lower interest rates, make great big troughs of money available, and, bada-bing, the economy is bada-booming on election day and the cheerleaders are doing keg stands.

Nixon mastered this with his re-election bid in 1972.

Well, add the hangover from Nixon’s economic Everclear™ to the crude oil embargo (thanks, Israel) and the result was the miasma of suck that was the 1970s economy – stagflation. Every president has done some variation of this act since then, with varying degrees of success, but since 2000 or so, each president has tried to avoid all of the consequences of the Boozing. How? Boozing some more.

And I heard they were banning cheese in Great Britain. Or at least extra sharp cheddar.

I’m guessing that one can avoid a hangover by staying drunk all the time, though I don’t have personal experience in attempting that strategy. Although it is probably more enjoyable than a hangover, there are always consequences to replacing all of your blood with ethanol.

There is a difference with this current economic hangover that we’re working on because, first, we’ve been drinking soooooo long. Like I said, this has been going on since at least 2000.

So, there’s that. But that’s not the only thing impacting the economy right now.

Another major factor is Trump. I think, like many people, Trump sees the size of the national debt and knows that this can’t go on. He’s also a guy who has nothing at all to lose. He can shoot the Moon and try to go for all of it.

He’s doing exactly that. Tariffs? As I’ve written before, when the United States had tariffs, we were a strong economy with manufacturing. Post WW2, when we went away from tariffs to help the rest of the world rebuild out of the rubble? Not so much.

If Trump puts tariffs on Canadian goods, no one can say he has ties to Poutine.

Trump’s America also (so far) is an America that wants peace. For decades we’ve been shadowboxing against Russia, which is like Hulk Hogan™ attempting to defeat a room full of kittens. I mean, jeez, Hulk®, their eyes aren’t even open yet. Russia is not a threat to the United States. Except for the nukes.

Others want war, though. The neocons and people like Victoria Zoolander want war the in the Ukraine, probably because Russia gave them a wedgie in the 1980s or because they have Raytheon© stock. I saw one Canadian tweet, “Well played, Americans, look at all of the billions of dollars in weapons you won’t get to sell.”

To be clear, I’m all in favor of weapons, just ask The Mrs. when I make goo-goo eyes at a .50 cal. I think every father should be given their choice of an M2 or an M60. But to try to mock the United States for not getting profits on weapons that are killing people, right now?

That’s . . . disturbing.

Also as a factor, in Trump’s America government is likely to be D.O.G.E.’d into shrinking for the first time since we demobilized from World War II. When that happened, we transitioned more-or-less seamlessly into the economic boom of the 1950s, but it didn’t hurt that the rest of the world was like Sergeant Hulka: “All blown up, sir!”

This shrinking government sector will take the heat off of inflation in many things, but tariffs will raise prices. Where it ends up is uncertainty.

Who doesn’t like uncertainty? Wall Street®.

Physicists should never look down at their speedometers. If they do, they’ll have no idea where they are.

The final big factor in this recession is that the insiders who have been putting the Bacardi 151™ into the punch bowl for all these decades don’t want to help Trump. That’s probably a good thing. The more government meddling into the economy, the longer it normally takes to shake itself back into order.

I want the recession to be:

Short.

Sharp.

Cleansing.

Like hangovers, recessions are painful. They can wreck lives. But they are required to clean out the economy from time to time.

And the economy hasn’t been cleaned out in forever. Some areas where it really does need a bit of sprucing up:

Government.
Banks.
Real Estate.
Manufacturing.
Education,

These spring cleanings will be painful. A lot of people in these industries are out there doing the important work of going to Zoom™ meetings and making PowerPoints©, rather than engaging in useless tasks like growing and making food, or fixing potholes, or picking up the trash.

So, yes, this is probably a recession coming. The Government-Media-Education complex will certainly try to blame Trump, just as they tried to blame him on day two that he hadn’t yet fixed all of Biden’s booby traps.

Is the most popular red wine in prison Penal Noir?

To be clear, Trump will be partially at fault, but if the result is a true cleansing of the economy? It will be worth it. Now, where’s that black coffee?

Deflatormaus, Or, Watch The Economy Rise From The Ashes Of The Left

“It’ll do the job of funneling the Persians into the Hot Gates.” – 300

Crime doesn’t pay is outdated. “Crime doesn’t pay as well as politics” is probably more accurate. (All memes “as found”)

As a kind poster on X® pointed out earlier this month, 20% of America’s “jobs” are essentially a Universal Basic Income for the GloboLeft. Think of it as welfare for the woke.

This 20% are government jobs, sure, but they’re also the jobs at all of the NGO foundations and organizations that siphon off your tax money to do things that nobody but the GloboLeftElite wants and that they certainly don’t want voters to know about.

Think: billions of your tax dollars going to induce illegal aliens to move to the United States. Trump, however, has started cutting the funding and this has already had a dramatic effect: D.C.’s home prices are already down 10%, and the soy-latte crowd are already feeling the pain.

None of this is new. As I’ve written in the past, Peter Turchin calls the process of the GloboLeftElite extracting cash from the populace the Wealth Pump. And, if you control the Wealth Pump, why not pump part of the wealth to the people who vote for you?

How GloboLeft are government workers? 75%? 80%? I’d imagine at most NGOs the number is nearing 95%, and the other 5% are Green party voters.

When I was young, Ma Wilder would feed me and say, “here comes the choo-choo train”. If I didn’t eat, she wouldn’t untie me from the tracks.

The NGO cash is especially damaging. It circulates through a network of intertwined foundations and charities and think-tanks whose boards often are the same cast of characters. Not all grants fall into this cycle, but plenty of the grants do.

Now the cash is being tracked, and it is being shut down at the source. It’s also likely that tens to hundreds of thousands of .gov employees will soon not be. Now, generally I feel compassion. I like people. Really.

But when it comes to .gov and NGO jobs, they’re not jobs, many of them are just members of a publicly financed voting bloc. Just go onto Reddit® and read the unhinged reactions to being asked to write five simple sentences about what they did last week. Five sentences. Even at the slothful speed of, say, Health and Human Services, it shouldn’t take more than fifty minutes and a smoke break.

Just work through the tears.

The only reason to resist it? If the employee added no value. That’s it. The only reason. I refuse to feel sorry for work-from-homers afraid about losing their remote-work herbal-wrap lifestyles.

But this brings out an interesting concept: deflation. During the Biden Residency, people on the GloboLeft couldn’t understand why flyover America was angry. The had no idea, since their lifestyles of Pilates in the morning before going to buy more ill-advised yoga pants wasn’t impacted at all. They were, as I noted, living the “$90,000 a year for making PowerPoints™ about gender” dream.

If they’re unemployed, their spending dries up. If government spending dries up as well, or even if the growth of government spending dries up, well, there goes your inflation. Those who used to tip baristas will fight to become baristas because they don’t have any other quantifiable skills.

First, who voted for Ukrainians to psyop us? Second, is there even $140,000,000 in cabbage, vodka and despair in all of Ukraine?

In fact, on the higher end, you could see cuts that would amount to 5% to 7% of GDP. Oh, and Starbucks™ just announced it is laying off 1,100 people right as D.O.G.E. is attacking the heart of the lair.

Tax cuts and regulation cuts, however, will end up increasing real jobs that add to economic wealth. Welders and truckers and men who build things, and not just the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate market. Berkshire-Hathaway™ has a record amount of cash sitting in a pile, all ready to pounce on assets as Wall Street reacts because they see this coming.

Tariffs won’t be as bad as anyone thought. One recent study predicts a whopping 0.3% increase in consumer prices related to tariffs. In the best case, we see a D.C. and blue city bust, while flyover country booms.

How many people have the Department of Education educated? How much energy has the Department of Energy added to the grid?

But that’s after the recession. We’re due one, and we’re due a market correction, and not a small one. Here’s hoping that we have the good sense to not try to “fix” things like they did during the Great Depression, but instead have a short, sharp recession to clean out the rot that has creeped in over the last 15 years.

The other side of the tunnel is bright, however.

Imagine:

5 million few fed/NGO jobs.
10 regulations hacked out for every new regulation.
Productivity jumping and real (not inflated) wages jumping since illegals have been rooted out and sent back to their homes.
Free PEZ™, elephant rides, and pantyhose for everyone!

Not everyone is going to win, however. If D.C. is finally hollowed out, home prices there will crater without the GloboLeft UBI jobs. Home prices there drop 25%. 50%.

What happens when a middle-aged CIA dude has to find a real job?

The other downside is that blue urban areas explode with violence. They lose the NGO cash, they lose the loose GloboLeftPartyGirl spending, and crime will spike, especially if Kennedy makes EBT funding work only for actual food and not pizza rolls.

Is a crime spike of 20% realistic? 40%?

Guess those Soros District Attorneys weren’t a bargain, after all.

But this won’t happen in Texas. Not in Florida. Not in Montana. Those states mostly flourish. Ranchers don’t need diversity consultants, avocado body balm, or hot stone carbuncle massage.

But let’s not spend a lot of tears on the GloboLeft who no longer are consuming kale smoothies. They didn’t build anything, they just consumed.

Remember all those transgender Rangers that stormed Pointe du Hoc? Yeah, me neither.

But, hey, good news!

I’ll bet you can get a place around D.C. pretty cheap nowadays. Maybe might even have that fresh GloboLeftist tears smell.

I love winning.

Inside The Machine: How The Left Created A Manipulation Machine, And How Musk And Trump Broke It

“He knows too well how to manipulate the mob.” – Gladiator

I did know a 6’6” psychic who manipulated the stock market. He was a tall medium who shorts.

It’s rare that The Mrs. texts me an article, so rare that years go by between texts containing links. In this case, the article The Mrs. texted me was Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment, from Tablet® magazine (LINK). I’d never heard of the author, David Samuels, but it’s likely he’s never heard of me, either, so we were tied on that count.

The piece dives into how the mainstream machine seduced the American electorate and how normie voters finally snapped out of it. It’s looooong, and I’ve got a different spin on what broke the spell. This isn’t a review—it’s my take, sparked by Samuels’ fire.

So here we go – this isn’t so much a review, but rather a self-contained post inspired by Mr. Samuels’ article.

Mankind was once an oral civilization. The stories that we told were handed down from one mouth to another around campfires under the stars. The stories that came down are still spoken of, and remnants of that civilization remain in the names of stars with names so ancient we have no idea where they came from, like Canopus.

Over time, though, we invented writing because we needed to write down tax regulations, and for a time we became a literate civilization, with people moving far away from the preceding oral civilization. This had some pretty significant impacts, the biggest of which was the great increase of words available to the human vocabulary. In an oral civilization, each member of the tribe knows all (or almost all) of the words that exist in the language.

In a literate civilization, these words can be written down, and there is space for new words to be added that are beyond the capacity of the average dude to remember. Language got complex. That let us think bigger, and writing smashed space and time. A Greek could read about Alexander’s exploits in far Persia, and that same account would be available for centuries or even millennia if properly stored.

As a literate people, we produced many of the finest works of art, science, and literature in human history. Don’t forget, the Greeks and the Romans were similarly a literate society in the upper strata, and you can clearly see that when literate society devolved away, so did the culture and art it created.

Reading takes time. The average person’s reading speed is 200 to 250 words per minute, though obviously the complexity of the text and the complexity of the thoughts expressed can speed up or slow down the input rate.

Kim Jong Un is just like Dominos® Pizza – they can both deliver a crispy Hawaiian in less than 30 minutes.

Although watching television takes even more time (about 135 words per minute output) it requires far less effort than reading, so the person is much less engaged on a logical level, but the addition of pictures engages the person at an emotional level. Going further into the future, the Internet introduced the meme to common culture in around the year 2000.

The meme is an emotion laden image with a brief text around it to give context. It’s basically a cave painting along with the story that Uncle Grug wanted to tell.

Yes. 4000 years from cave painting to cave painting.

This really did revolutionize the way that people took in information. Gone were long articles with complex language, and back were literally the shortest bits of coherent thought, emotion and a short message. Guttenberg’s press was no match for iPhone® screens and Grumpy Cat.

I found an old Gutenberg Bible but had to throw it away. Some guy named Martin Luther had scribbled notes all over it.

This is a fundamental change in the way that information is given, and as we transition back from a literary to an oral culture, people actually think less, and think in less complex ways. There is an opening built upon this simplification for manipulation.

Of course, someone would use this change in information as a tool to manipulate public opinion just as the radio was used prior to World War II, as television was used in Vietnam, and as cable news was used by Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II for their manipulations. The Internet was the next iteration, and of course politicians would use it to create and disseminate propaganda on the largest and quickest scale in history. The first real person to use this immense power inherent in the ascendency of the social networks, Samuels maintains, was Obama.

Why Obama? The iPhone® really was the game changer when combined with social media. It made ideas shorter and self-contained, but also made them immediate with the advent of social media that wasn’t quite ripe when Bush II was president.

Obama created a machine that provided information. It pulsed. The idea was simple, and I’ve sketched it out a bit in another post but here it is in much deeper detail.

First – an event occurs. AP® or some other news outlet reports the facts. Now, if the facts don’t support the Narrative, they are brutally suppressed – they’re just not reported on. There was a mass murder where The Mrs. and I lived, and it was reported in the local papers and on the radio. It was horrific. Was it covered nationwide? No. When the family went to go visit my in-laws, they had not heard of this horrific mass murder at all even though they only lived 90 miles from the murders.

Why?

The killers were black and the victims were white. They couldn’t cover up the mass murder locally, but nationally? They shut it down. Even regionally all reporting was shut down, because this didn’t fit the erroneous idea that only white people were serial killers.

This event may be a real story, or something manipulated to be a story – it’s here that Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) stage events that “make news” or are magnified. Think about the George Floyd death as one such event.

If you found out your wife wanted to dissect people from Southeast Asia, would you cut Thais with her?

Second – that event is interpreted in a way that fits with the Narrative. Events which are at odds with the Narrative are suppressed. The central clearing house is generally the New York Times, which uses experts from various NGOs and “think tanks” to further refine how the event fits the Narrative. The prestige of the experts of the various NGOs are validated because they’re respected by people from . . . other NGOs.

Words like ‘false’ and ‘baseless’ tag stories—‘baseless mRNA vaccine injury claims’ or ‘false vote fraud accusations’—to smother anything off-Narrative. The idea of an impartial news media is dead, and now j-schools are teaching young reporters that they should be activists as well as reporters. I’d bet that the NGOs are part of making those suggestions.

The secret sauce in this step is based on David Axelrod’s strategy of making people change their opinion based upon convincing people to act based on how they wanted to be seen by others. In essence, the entire GloboLeftistElite strategy is based on virtue signaling.

Who does this work most stunningly well on? Unmarried white women, hard-core leftists, and people not paying attention much to politics. These are clearly shown in the exit polls, and a study I read on virtue signaling point out that: women virtue signal because that’s a core part of what they generally do – group membership is absolutely a survival mechanism for women. Hard core leftists are often atheists, and their morality is, shall we say, often fluid. Finally, people not paying attention want to be thought of as having a good reputation, so virtue signaling is a cheap way to maintain that reputation.

Third – media outlets report the interpreted event out – the bigger the event, the harder the push. The Late Night TV Funny Joke Men like Colbert and Kimmel join on. The message is slickly packaged, but the language is the same from everyone. How did the words “Russian Asset” get in everyone’s mouth at the exact same time?

It’s simple. They read the memo.

Fourth – repeat and grow the Narrative to make sure it remains an accepted fact to the targets being manipulated. Note, that the Narrative doesn’t have to be internally consistent. For instance, we must utterly cater to racial differences. But there are no races. We must also respect the rights of women. Oh, and a woman is absolutely anyone who says they’re a woman.

What comprises the Narrative is less important than that it serve the purpose of the moment. The Narrative changes over time: free speech was the stated goal of the GloboLeftElite in the early 1970s, but now free speech must be controlled.

That control of speech? That’s the last part of the process.

Fifth – deplatform anyone who tries to tell any story that is counter to the Narrative.

Silicon Valley was, at least in its early days, a libertarian enterprise. The entire industry was about conquering a space where there weren’t any rules. To the extent that libertarians identify with a major political party, it’s generally the Right since the Right typically wants fewer rules.

In 2012, however, the maturing industry was taken in by the GloboLeft and bought into the Narrative. When Trump was elected, they became part of the machine.

The Narrative is a very fragile thing, and since it’s fragile, the one thing it can’t stand is scrutiny. One of the wonderful things that the Internet allowed early on were comments sections. Comment sections are wonderful because they often add more information to a news story, and give a direct voice to the readers impacted by the news.

That’s intolerable. So, comment sections have to go.

Do sardines think submarines are just cans of people?

It then moved into Twitter™. Anyone not expressing opinions against the Narrative or any component thereof would be banned. Question the safety of mRNA? Banned. Question the official story of the origin of COVID? Banned. Question the 2020 election results? Banned. Show information from Hunter Biden’s laptop? Banned.

On the laptop, they even got 51 former U.S. intelligence officials to say that Russia did it.

Then, Twitter© even banned the sitting president of the United States. Reddit© is still (in 2025!) banning communities where badthink takes place.

To quote the Tablet article, this “structure is neither modern nor conservative,” but . . .

“Rather it is totalitarian in its essence, a device for getting people to act against their beliefs by substituting new and better beliefs through the top-down controlled and leveraged application of social pressure, which among other things eliminates the position of the spectator. The integrity of the individual is violated in order to further the superior interests of the superego of humanity, the party, which knows which beliefs are right and which are wrong.”

Elon broke the machine by allowing actual free speech on X®, and cleared the way for Trump’s landslide.

Why did he do it? Was it power? Was it the best way to get to Mars? Regardless, the illusion of the machine is toast.

How? The machine made people believe things that were silly. The machine fed people silly crap —‘men in dresses are women’—and now they’re pretending they never bought it. Memes laid it bare: short, sharp, and too raw for the Narrative’s lies. Once fooled, at least some normies question everything now. That’s good.

A large part of the machine being broken now is that Trump is moving too fast for the machine to cope with his initiatives, and he’s throwing in ragebait to drive the GloboLeft conformity persuasion machine crazy. On offensive, Trump is moving so fast that they can’t initiate the second phase listed above to drive people to conformity.

Maybe next year Trump will rename it to Sea Seῆor.

Besides, X® is now close to indistinguishable from /pol/ in the ability to share almost any opinion again. I don’t know if it’s entirely the algorithm, but when I see a GloboLeftist try to advance the Narrative on X©, the responses with Narrative-breaking comments is immediate and utterly complete. Spin no longer works and the conformity persuasion machine is stuck because it’s clogged with Greenland Redwhiteandblueland and the Gulf of America, both of which are perfectly tuned to drive GloboLeftists nuts.

The conformity persuasion machine is broken, not destroyed. Destroying it entirely would require destroying the government/think tank/NGO complex, which Trump is working on. Likewise, the media is sick and since the Internet has destroyed a lot of its revenue, and X™ really is the biggest news aggregator on the planet. When an event happens, I go to X® now to find out what’s going on.

Unless The Mrs. texts me about it. And, I wonder if people in the distant future will look from the City of Musk on Mars into the night sky and wonder why one of the moons of Mars is named Trump?

Is The Bottom 20% Killing America?

“Attention students, m’kay. There will be a presentation by the special education department in the gymnasium Friday during lunch and recess, m’kay.” – South Park

If they make a show about the Biden Administration, will it be titled “House of Tards”?

In what will probably be one of the more controversial posts I put up, I figured it’s time to discuss the boat anchor on Western Civilization: the bottom 20%. It’s in response to seeing the X® up above, because it got me thinking of just how right the author is.

Let’s look at high schools, for instance. When I was in high school, there was a room for the special ed kids (we called them speds) so impacted by genetic or environmental trauma that they were effectively never going to do much in society. Think Down’s syndrome. We didn’t have a lot of interaction with those kids, because they were so far down the rabbit hole of human cognition that they were operating, on their best day, at the level of a four- to eight-year-old.

The second set of low achievers were tossed into the school’s “alternative” program. This, as far as I could see, consisted of coming to school and smoking cigarettes outside the alternative building. I recall my AP Chemistry teacher glancing out the window and remarking to the eight students in class, “Oh, look, the alternative kids are out playing advanced volleyball.”

I recall this really cracking me up.

How does the Spanish Dr. Who greet people? Buenos TARDIS.

When I was in high school, this wasn’t nearly as prevalent as it is today. To be a sped was a social stigma. Not that we treated them poorly – far from it. But the cheerleaders weren’t going to date the dude who was 4’2” and communicated in a series of grunts and hoots.

Today, there are roughly 7.5 million kids with learning disabilities so profound that they are required by federal law to have an Individual Education Plan, so, per one article that’s 15% of kids in schools (school being between the ages of 5 and 18 for most kids). Most of these IEPs are not for gifted kids, rather they’re for people who can demonstrate disabilities.

I hear Michael J. Fox and his kids set up a parking lot just for disabled people. Park n’ Sons.

Parents, especially low-income urban parents, love having their children on IEPs. Why? Having an IEP does quite a few things:

Bulletproofs the child from being flunked. It can be done, but it requires more paperwork than would be required to launch the Boeing® Starliner™ again.
Bulletproofs the child (mostly) from being suspended for behavior. Until they curb-stomp a teacher for taking away their Nintendo Switch® and are charged with a felony. But, hey, the parents say, “He’s a good boy, he was on an IEP.”
Depending on the IEP, the current trend is to require that they be placed in classrooms with “normal” children, becoming a boat anchor on the rest of the class, dragging down progress. Think about having a class with Whoopi Goldberg in it. But she’s violent. It would be like that.
Depending on income, an IEP may make the family eligible for up to an extra $943 a month – tax free. We give parents incentives to have children that have the impulse control of Diddy at an Epstein party.
Depending on the IEP, the school district may need to provide what counts as essentially free day care until the age of 22, thus providing an environment where free-range 22-year-olds can stalk kids as young as 13. Thankfully, I think most of the 22-year-olds are out killing people rather than stalking 13-year-olds.
Using Pennsylvania as a guide, having a student with an IEP costs between $5,000 and $77,000 more per year than having a “normal” kid.
Children with IEPs are often given more time for things like tests, and are excused from things like deadlines. This one ropes in the parents of low-performing children of GloboLeftist parents who want Rachel to get into Harvard®.

Yeah, you can see just this one program from just one federal law (the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, with the horrible acronym IDEA) has spawned trillions of dollars in direct spending, but has also destroyed the educational experiences for those left in the normie-tier classrooms.

If you win a pumpkin carving contest, is it a hollow victory?

In my experience, after I was out of the general education part of high school (think P.E. and Earth Science) I was in very few classes with any Special Ed kids – it’s not like they were going to sign up for Physics or Advanced Algebra. I guess in 2024, Rachel might try to do that and her parents would berate the teacher with all of Rachel’s special needs, “Oh, did she not get a Hostess® Cupcake™ and an extra two hours to take the test? She must have had a low blood sugar and been under stress that’s why she got 40% on the test, you monster!”

But in the classes I did share with special ed kids (P.E.), they were horribly disruptive. In one case, one of the students – Down’s syndrome – managed to lock himself in an unused gym locker. These lockers were big enough to hold a 4’2” kid if they hunkered down, since they were designed to hold football gear. I’ll spare you the details, but I’m sure that coach went home that night going, “They don’t pay me enough to do this job.”

What would happen if we didn’t spend these misplaced compassion dollars into society? First, the parents would have to foot the bill.

Tough, right?

Well, that’s life.

I’m oddly proud of that one.

Second, classrooms could eliminate students who wouldn’t or couldn’t behave. Having a child lacking that much in control indicates that structured education won’t help them at all unless it’s enforced with an electric cattle prod. That horrible law, IDEA, just turns school into a holding pen for unsocialized brutes.

Eliminating those disruptive “students” would allow the rest of the students to learn. And, perhaps, just a few of those disruptive students with poor self-control with appropriate and judicious use of cattle prods might just learn some self-control.

Again, the parents could and should be held responsible, and if the kid is booted from school, lift child labor laws and allow them to work 40 hours. Oh, and unless the child is profoundly (Down’s syndrome or worse) disabled? No SSI benefits. Did I say parents? Yeah, let’s be real. 90% of these kids don’t have parents, just a parent.

This one misguided GloboLeftist program, IDEA, has probably cost the United States between $1.5 trillion (low end) to $3.3 trillion (median) over the last 20 years. The result?

What’s the difference between a Taliban outpost and a Pakistani wedding? I don’t know, man, I just fly the drone.

Our schools are in shambles, and our test scores are dropping, and the environment makes The Road Warrior look like a conversation between reasonable people. All of this is for the lowest 20%. Imagine how bad it would be if we had spent double that.

Certainly, there are kids that can do wonders with a little bit of additional help. Dyslexia, for instance, is very treatable. I mean, what would happen if famous dyslexics Whoopi Goldberg or Alyssa Milano could actually read? They might not be the grifters that they are today.

But we can probably do that for less than $4,000 a year per kid.

This is only one example where the lowest 20% sets the rules for everyone.

Who are the people doing the crimes on the subways? I assure you, these are the crimes of the lowest 20%. Why do we not have clean and affordable public transportation? The lowest 20%.
Who are consuming the most public services? Yup, the same, and the perverse nature of our welfare system provides incentives for these people to have lots of children, which they often do via a revolving carousel of gene donors, who are also of the lowest 20%.
Who are doing the vast majority of murders? Eliminate the lowest 20% of the population from the statistics, and the United States would be the very safest nation on the planet.
The kid who shot up Parkland High School? I’ll bet a No Prize that he had an IEP, and was of the lowest 20%.

The solution is glaringly simple.

We have to stop coddling and funding the lowest 20%. Period. Social Darwinism only works if those who are exhibiting negative qualities face negative consequences. People respond to incentives, and if your incentive is to produce a never-ending stream of children that get rewarded for having no impulse control, well, you’ll get what we see in the cities.

Did Darwin tell his children that they were adapted?

The good news is the same as I have been preaching forever: bad times will winnow out this most artificial construction. A society cannot long produce a feral fraction that creates a low-trust society.

This particular boat anchor won’t cause society to fail, but the anchor will surely be surprised when it is cut loose.

High Trust Societies, Wealth, and PEZ

“These are volatile times, Your Highness. The American Revolution lost your father the Colonies, the French Revolution murdered brave King Louis, and there are tremendous rumblings in Prussia, although that might have something to do with the sausages.” – Black Adder the Third

What was Bismarck’s favorite Queen song? Under Prussia.

The world that most of us grew up in was far different from the world that we’re seeing today. Among the biggest differences is that the United States was unequivocally the strongest economic power in the world. Couple it with the “Western” bloc of non-Soviet Europe and Japan, it was amazingly dominant. The United States even stood next to smaller nations at the urinal, right next to them even though there were other urinals open, just to show that dominance.

When people today talk about cultural appropriation, they seem to forget that it’s largely American and British Commonwealth culture that was appropriated throughout the world. Blue jeans? Not invented nor popularized by Commiebloc nations, nope. Nor rock and roll.

In that Western world, there was actually a stunning lack of diversity. Want rock and roll? Sure you could listen to the Scorpions® from Germany, AC/DC™ from Australia, Iron Maiden© from Bongland, or Dio™ from the United States, but it was all the same root. The western world was a very homogeneous place, filled with trust due in large part to that shared sense of purpose and values.

A Catholic friend gave up cleaning the dryer filter. For Lent.

The level of trust probably peaked in around 1965 in the United States. In 1965, 77% of people felt that most people in the country were trustworthy, and now it’s down to 58%. We lived (well, those who were alive in 1965) in a high trust society that rivals the top levels of trust in the world today, sort of like Denmark but without all the smørrebrød, bicycles, and yurp-de-yur sounds.

The thing about a high trust society is that transactions are easy when we have trust in one another. If you show up to buy a 1884 Iron Chancellor Bismarck® PEZ™ dispenser that I’ve got for sale, well, you trust me that I own the PEZ® dispenser, that it’s real, and I trust you that the check you just gave me will clear or the cash you just gave me isn’t stolen.

And if the check doesn’t clear, you trust the local cops will solve the problem for you. They’re not corrupt, or if they are, they’re not so corrupt as to ignore crimes, especially when they involve the Franco-Prussian War Limited Series PEZ® dispenser set. A belief that crime is low and corruption is low is the key to creating the social trust to make a high trust society.

In a high trust world, this works well.

Is a sketchy Italian neighborhood called a spaghetto?

A high trust world, though, is not an anonymous world. Conmen from Nigeria and India use the anonymity of the Internet to create situations where they can create the relationship required, the “confidence” that is the “con” in conman. They then prey on people based on the residual trust from their high trust past. There is a reason that the elderly are primary targets – they remember an America where predation was not the norm.

Right now, oddly, one of the highest trust cultures in the world (according to the Integrated Values Surveys, 2022) is China. There are certainly several reasons for this. First, the government will kill bankers for fraud. Second, they’re almost all actually Chinese, which makes them a nation, not a country. They (mainly) share the same culture, values, genes, and language. That goes a long way – blood is thicker than water is a cliché that exists for a reason.

Generally, the higher the trust in a society, the greater the level of GDP per capita. Denmark has the highest trust on the world, and is fourth in world GDP per capita. It’s not perfectly correlated, though, the Chinese are high trust, they are low income. But compare with India, which is close to the worst country, with a trust level of 17% and an annual GDP per capita of a used 2000 Nissan® Xterra© with a broken air conditioner.

I hear that Biden has just signed an order to combat global warming on his way out. He sent three battalions of Marines to invade the Sun.

It doesn’t take much, though to turn a high trust world into a low trust world. Basics like faith that elections are fair, and that only valid votes are counted go a long way toward maintaining stability. You’d think that would be easy in 2024, but it’s not, since at least a third of the electorate wants any vote cast to be counted, rather than just valid ones. But a conflict of visions like that lowers trust in our basic systems.

Additionally, trust that criminal prosecution will be fair and unbiased has to be held very highly, otherwise gangs of people seeking a justice that the courts didn’t give them will replace the system. I’m thinking the political prosecution of the January 6 protesters is a horrible indicator.

In turn, this will lower the amount of wealth that can be created in society. Trust is a form of wealth, but it’s also (mostly) a precondition for a country getting wealthy.

When I was born, I had four kidneys. But as I grew up, two turned into adult knees.

But trust in society isn’t the same at every single place in society: in Modern Mayberry, trust is pretty high.

Crimes are rarer here in Modern Mayberry, especially major crimes. Mainly, we all know each other, and so except for drifters and tweakers, people are (mostly) honest. People even drive more politely and more forgivingly in small towns because, if you’re a tool, sooner or later everyone will know. Oh, and we have guns and constitutional carry and crime rates are much lower in places where people aren’t walking victims. And the local prosecutor won’t charge a store owner with shooting a robber if the robber was armed.

Here in Modern Mayberry, it is still pretty high trust. My kid drops off our car to get fixed and picks it up when the tire’s been replaced even before I pay. The guy knows I’m good for it – I’ve been going to his business for over a decade. Commerce is easy here, and so are most transactions.

Part of that, I think, is that the world here is still mainly local. We don’t have a big-name chain bank, instead we have a few local banks run by local people that already know the families that live here. For a farmer getting a loan, it’s much more about reputation than credit score, and a banker giving a loan that might wreck a borrower . . . won’t wreck the borrower.

There’s a moral implication when we work together as a community, a moral implication. Huges systems are efficient, but the rob us of something

As we become more atomized and less homogeneous, trust is replaced by systems and barriers. Our relatively homogeneous culture is replaced by a disingenuous god of diversity, where the beliefs of every culture but our own are celebrated.

Not all jokes about agriculture are corny.

A low trust culture is part of the definition of those “bad times that are brought about by weak men”. And we have seen countries around the world be low trust for millennia. That, though, has never been the fate of the West, at least not for long.

As I have long said, none of this will be easy. But there is one problem – in a low trust society, how can I be sure my Limited Edition® Franco-Prussian War Commemorative Series™ PEZ© dispensers will be authentic?

Are We Seeing A Crack In Leftist Control?

“By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society.” – Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Smoking will give you diseases, but it cures salmon.

The GloboLeftElite have long been planning the takeover of the United States. It’s obvious that this is the case because their thinkers have been plotting the roadmap since, well, forever. Antonio Gramsci was one such leader, and here’s a quote from him:

“Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”

Gramsci may have been a (really) sub-60-inch-tall Albanian cripple who was in constant pain, born to a criminal father, but let’s let bygones be bygones. This is nearly exactly what the GloboLeftElite did. Their scholars left Europe ahead of certain German extended continental excursions in the 1930s, and many of them made their home in the United States.

Note, they didn’t all go to the socialist paradise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Nope. The Soviets were too busy starving themselves, executing each other, and building GULAGs for fun and profit.

Instead, these “Socialists” wanted to come to a functional society that was producing wealth and wreck it. Gramsci didn’t join them, because he died. Based on the list of things that Antonio was suffering from at the time – spinal deformity, arteriosclerosis, pulmonary tuberculosis, high blood pressure, angina, gout, and acute gastric disorders – if he was a dog his name would have been “Lucky”.

The functional society that they wanted to wreck? The United States.

If a deaf person goes to court, is it still called a “hearing”?

The United States during pre-WWII time wasn’t the same as Europe. Europe had always been a class-driven society, and from conversations with friends it still is. Moving from one class to another is difficult, unless you’re a family-wrecking divorced tramp like Meghan Markle. In the United States, not so much, since we view Meghan as classless.

Many successful businesses were made by people of humble beginnings, and even our presidents didn’t all come from wealth. Mobility was very possible and that was visible. People could see that if they came up with a great idea, great wealth was available. The ideas of class that had driven division in largely racially homogeneous Europe to create revolution didn’t work, so they had to work on other things.

They chose race and sex. For whatever reason, our most prestigious colleges snapped up these horrible foreign commies – people like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and the like. There are dozens more that infected the country at that time and given cushy jobs with nothing to do but try to create rot in our country. Oh, wait, I just described Biden’s appointees.

What’s key to a good mailman joke? The delivery.

And it worked. Infiltration of the schools, especially the normal schools that taught teachers took a decade or two, and a decade or two later the teachers started their indoctrination work inside the school system – first slowly and covertly, then quickly and openly.

Christianity has flirted with this hardcore communism for years, but since commies don’t go to church, it has largely been thwarted, though the “send more refugees while we have lesbian pastors and free abortions during Passover” churches are slowly gaining ground, though there’s not a lot of enthusiasm for them. So, Gramsci has had a harder road there.

The last on Gramsci’s list is the media. That has been firmly in the hands of the GloboLeftElite for decades, shows like All in the Family and Maude were the first “in your face” move to take over television. In 20 years we went from Lucy and Ricky not being able to share a bed . . . to Maude, who in a “comedy”, decided to kill her child because it wouldn’t be convenient to have one.

I’d go onto LGBTQ characters introduced in cartoons for young children, but that started, firmly, in 2013. If I were a parent with small children, let’s just say they wouldn’t be watching Cartoon Network®.

To further this, more and more “mainstream” social media like Twitter™ and content aggregators like YouTube® turned the screws – cancelling people as innocuous as Stefan Molyneux, who just liked to talk about philosophy and preached that you shouldn’t spank your kids. Obviously, he never met my kids. Regardless, Molyneux was frozen out.

Chuck Norris invalidated the periodic table, because Norris only recognizes the element of surprise.

Recently, though, I sense a thaw when it comes to the media. The biggest cause of this thaw is because the American public no longer believes in mainstream media, at all. Depending on the poll, over 70% of Americans have little to no trust in mainstream media. 70%. That means that only 30% give it any trust. This is nearly an exact flip from 1972. We now know when the mainstream media is lying: when they’re talking.

This has led to a wholesale rejection of what the mainstream says. Now, in many cases, like the Vaxx®, ignoring the mainstream was a good idea. They have to admit it because the science is now in – the Vaxx™ has been shown to be worse than the ‘vid.

And that had to be shut down. After COVID, after the George Floyd Mostly Peaceful Riots®, the idea that control of information was crucial became the mantra of the GloboLeftElite. It still is. Hillary Clinton said the quiet part out loud when she said, “. . . if the platforms, whether it’s Facebook® or Twitter© or X™ or Instagram® or TikTok©, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control . . . .”

All of those Clinton friends who killed themselves that never left notes . . . would it have killed them to write a few lines?

Yeah, she trots out the “it’s about the children” but Hillary’s version of the perfect world is the GloboLeftElite version of the perfect world. They want a world ruled by their bureaucracy, managed by and for them where coloring outside of the lines really does go in your permanent record.

But, please. The Earth is not flat. You can prove that yourself with a car, 24 hours, a map, a protractor, and a Sharpie™. I think this nonsense is a psyop to make anyone with a “conspiracy” theory sound unhinged, despite so many of those theories being found to be 100% founded in reality.

And enter Elon Musk. I’ll admit that I didn’t think that much would change when he purchased Twitter™ and rebranded it X®. Now, though, I go on X™ and regularly see memes that I’d only seen on /pol/ as produced by that hacker, 4chan. (Mostly) free discourse is now allowed, out in the open.

/POL/ – it’s not just for breakfast anymore.

It is respectable once again to talk about ideas that had been cancelled, not because it’s fashionable, but because the ideas are True. The biggest enemy of those that would lie is the Truth. I left Twitter™ when it was kicking off people telling the Truth, and returned when it again (mostly) allowed the Truth.

Can you say anything on X®? No. But is it much, much closer? Yes.

Gramsci won’t win and turn Socialism into a new religion, because at the heart of Socialism are lies meant for controlling man. And Truth, along with Beauty and the Good, always wins.

And you can tell any short Albanian commie named Lucky that you meet that Wilder says so.

Project 2026: A Joint Trump/Wilder Project

“I believe in cutting useless government projects. I also believe in cutting useful projects, future projects, and past projects.” – Parks and Recreation

People in my town are tired of useless projects. They even put up signs that say “End Construction”.

I know that Project 2025® got a really bad reputation during the election. At every point, Democrats and their GloboLeftElite tried to convince voters that Trump was going to implement Project 2025™. Well, he isn’t going to implement Project 2025©.

Instead, President Trump secretly called me through the voices in my dreams and told me, “John Wilder, after we win bigly, and want to bring to the people Project 2026. See? It’s one better already. It will be such a good program, precisely because I’m looking to you to write it for me. And, also, if you look behind you, you’ll see your cat is melting into a puddle of butter. Very disgusting. You should fix that.”

If I steal a rich man’s dinner rolls, is that highfalutin gluten lootin?

When I woke up, I immediately got to work. So, here, without further introduction is Trump’s Project 2026®™©. It’s the best.

Project 2026 is magnanimous in our inevitable victory. As such, we decree the following for the GloboLeftists who have been left a shattered shell of their former selves:

First, to our opponent, Kamala Harris, Project 2026 hereby grants you an unlimited supply of cocaine, box wine, and pantyhose.
To our dedicated GloboLeftist opponents, Project 2026 grants exclusive access to a portion of the Internet that has been cleansed of all ideas that you might find disturbing or triggering. Thankfully, it has already been created and is called “Reddit™”.
Don’t despair. Project 2026 will commit to a peaceful transfer of power back to the GloboLeftElite sometime after the Sun expands to consume the orbit of the Earth.
You are not required to call Donald Trump “president”. He doesn’t care what you think. You are, however, required to have his picture on your bedside table and publicly praise him during the daily Trump Praise Minute. While optional, your tears will make Trump stronger.
Finally, to the rank and file, you are welcome to live in either Portland or Seattle. I hear Puget Sound is lovely. The train cars will be available shortly for quick and easy carbon-friendly transport.

But if she and Hillary team up for 2028, we could have Cackles and Cankles.

Project 2026 believes that sports are a healthy aspiration for every American. As such:

Football players will now be treated like indentured servants again. Free agency is hereby forever suspended, and athletes will be required to live in the cities they play in and will be paid no more than $23.45 an hour. After their sports career is finished, successful athletes will be allowed to sell used automobiles.
Trans females will now be known as “dudes” and will be allowed to compete in female leagues, made of other dudes.

The Economy will be a priority, and Project 2026 put Elon Musk and Ron Paul in charge of managing it. Our working title for this is the Elonomy.

Imports from the Free Mars Colony will be tariff-free.
The five-dollar footlong will return.

If you work at the Federal Reserve®, are you required to drive a Fiat™?

Project 2026 realizes the immense hardship that illegal aliens have wrought on our nation. As such, we will act quickly to fix these issues.

Birthright citizenship is ended, retroactively, by Project 2026. Barack Obama will be sent either to Cuba or the newly-formed People’s Republic of Hawaii.
The Department of Exmigration will be officially formed, and every celebrity who posted that they will be leaving the country will be leaving the country. By Wednesday. The motto of the Department will be “Buh-bye”.
The Department of Exmigration will also enforce the repatriation of all illegal immigrants starting Wednesday. And ending Thursday, though if you are in line by Wednesday, we’ll give you another 24 hours. Any illegals left after that will be sent to our choice of either India or Nigeria.
Only females of exceptional beauty will be allowed to illegally immigrate. Our policy is, “9 or 10, come on in!” The judging panel will consist of Mel Gibson, Elon Musk, and Johnny Depp. The anticipated formation of GloboLeftist Wine Drinking Cat Lady Einsatzgruppen to hunt down this new national resource will be put down brutally.

Project 2026 has a goal of two hot chicks for every dude.

Marriage and children are important to the United States, so:

Starting in 2026 unmarried mothers will receive no child support nor governmental support of any type. Widows are exempt.
No fault divorce is abolished.
Women and men are barred from receiving child support payments or alimony.
Only married women and men between the ages of 21 and 63 can vote.
An era of free power will follow based on Project 2026’s projection that we can exploit the power of suffragettes spinning in their graves at near lightspeed after hearing that GloboLeftist women, after hearing about Trump’s win, promise to be celibate outside of committed relationships.

I went to a farmer’s party. They really knew how to turn up the beets!

Government reform is top on the list of Project 2026:

95% of all federal employees are hereby terminated. Pack your stuff. The remaining 5% are park rangers and the US Postal Service®. Project 2026 thought for a long time about other groups, but they all have to go. All of them. Except for the Department of the Treasury to collect tariffs and the Department of Exmigration.
The ATF’s mission will be radically changed: their new mission will be to make firearms plentiful and low cost.
The FBI headquarters will be relocated to the Swanson Motel, in Bismarck, North Dakota.
All federal employees except for the Federal Marshall Service will be disarmed, as Project 2026 realizes someone has to bring horse thieves to justice.
Project 2026 understands and values the role of education in society, and therefore will remove the greatest impediment to education: The Department of Education. All employees will be fired, and will be barred from ever working in any educational role again.

Project 2026 realizes that the United States is just one of a whole host of nations. The best one, but still just one. Here follows the changes to International Relations.

International relations, imports, all financial transactions and all telecommunications are hereby ended with India and Nigeria until they show proof that they’ve executed every scammer in the country, or turned them into valuable mulch.
Our new policy in dealing with other nations is, “Why should I care?” If any other nation contacts us for aid, our official response will be “Rub some dirt on it.”

Those guys were always cold as ice.

Project 2026 realizes a strong military is important to protecting our borders, which is all we’re going to do with it.

Every young man will be sent to bootcamp, and will continue in bootcamp until they pass or reach the age of 40. After passing bootcamp, each young man is sent home with all the weapons and ammunition they can carry, including C-4. Additionally, Project 2026 will officially rename C-4 as “serious putty”.
The bootcamps will be along the southern and northern borders of the United States, and a “free fire” zone will be established within fifty yards (six decaliters) of the border. This includes people attempting to escape Trudeauistan.
Most overseas bases will be returned to the host country, with the exception that all on-base fast-food restaurants will remain. Exceptions to this are Diego Garcia and Guantanamo, because Project 2026 finds them amusing.

This is a work in progress, so any suggestions for additions can be provided before I transmit this to President-Elect Donald Trump tonight in my dreams. I hope the cat doesn’t melt again. Such a mess. So buttery. Very disrespectful.

The Most Important War: The War Between The Sexes

“I am opposed to the women’s libs.” – Revenge of the Pink Panther

If I write a novel about the different shades of the color blue, is that cyans fiction?

Note: No podcast tomorrow. I’ve got a work thing that will take me right up until showtime, so I won’t have time to create the quality notes that drive the show, so I guess you’ll just have to wait until next week for the podcast that listeners describe as “usually punctual”.

While we spend a lot of time reading about the war in Ukraine or the war that Israel is involved in and realize that right now the only winners are Raytheon®, Boeing™, and Lockheed Martin©. I mean, it must be a relief for Boeing™ to try to design something that’s supposed to experience kinetic failure at high impact killing dozens. Sadly, their new Nerf™ ClusterBomb© isn’t having the combat impact they had hoped for.

I think, however, that those wars distract us from a much more important war: the war between the sexes.

This is Wednesday, so obviously we’ll be talking about the economic costs as well as the social costs, so we might as well start talking about that right now:

The root of the problem is that women are working. This was seen back in the day as a mechanism to get more cheap labor for business. Oh, that wasn’t the main point of Women’s Lib, just a nice byproduct. No, Women’s “Liberation” was first and foremost a tool of the GloboLeftElite to try to break apart the true atom of society, the family.

My brake pedal, though, wants therapy. It’s tired of being depressed.

And it worked, swimmingly. They knew it would, of course. When Edward Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to get more women to smoke, he paid a lot of women to smoke during one Easter Day Parade in NYC. He tipped off the press that women suffragettes would be smoking “torches of freedom” and they took it from there. 99% of women over 45 at that day and time didn’t smoke.

Thankfully, for Marlboro®, the women were very susceptible to propaganda.

Just like at work. The progression went from, “get out and work” to “you don’t need no man” to “go to college and get an education and make big bucks”.

Now, as the meme goes, women are taught that devoting themselves to a husband and their children is slavery, but going to work at a faceless corporation for a man, which is, I guess, empowerment.

Women can be very capable and driven, so those that apply themselves early in their career (like men used to be taught to do) and push the long hours can reach success, in many cases, more easily than a man. And there are multiple problems embedded in this.

When women are working fifty-hour weeks, regardless of if they’re in a relationship, they defer having children. When they defer, that often means that their window of fertility closes without even a FedEx® envelope showing up marked, “Urgent, your chance to have a baby expires in 28 days.”

I hear that AOC occupied a fertility clinic. Being a communist, she wanted to seize the means of reproduction.

I recall one article I read about a fortysomething who had frozen a plethora of her eggs in anticipation that one day she’d have enough, that she’d be where she wanted to be to have those children that she had neglected to have when she was 23.

Oops. I can’t quote it exactly, but she talked about “raging, screaming like an animal” when she found out that her frozen eggs were about as viable as a Bernie Sanders presidential run. Although I’m not completely evil, I did enjoy a bit of epicaricacy at the thought. I know, it’s a bad habit, but in this case I was hoping that some 23-year-old read the news and decided to not become a regretful wine aunt.

But just the mechanism of women wanting to have great jobs is killing them. Women are (as far as I can see) programmed to find men that are better than them. They want a man who makes more money, but they also want to be high powered corporate lawyers, which takes, at minimum, enough effort to push to and through 35.

And those men that make more money than the women? They’re not looking for 35-year-old lawyer women, they’re looking for a 23-year-old Stacy who isn’t cynical after spending over a decade climbing the ladder. Women in that position have rendered themselves simultaneously undesirable and incapable of finding a man.

This one woman said she was a trophy wife, but her ears stuck out and the previous winners’ names were all tattooed down her back.

The Mrs. and I were having a conversation. Her thesis was that women were monogamous – they just had to find the right man. That would make sense. Again, from the newspaper, another 40 something woman (there are a lot of these stories), blows up her marriage of fifteen or twenty years. Leaves it to find and reconnect with the man that had been The One that she had dated for a month or six before she met her husband.

In my favorite version, the man has no, absolutely zero, recollection of the woman. She is an Alpha Widow, forever pining for that Alpha she had back in the day.

The probability that a woman becomes an Alpha Widow increases with every sex partner that she has. Whether or not The Mrs. is right, the facts show that if a woman spends her 20s in dissolute sex, the chances that she’ll be psychologically able to remain faithful to man number thirty or sixty plummets to zero. For women who view that their sexual worth is not determined by massive numbers of partners, I’d ask who wants to buy a pair of shoes that have been worn by 126 dudes?

Almost any woman can have an Alpha for a night, but the problem is that once they’ve had one, they feel that’s what they deserve.

All of this, together, is what I call The Big Lie that women have been told.

I weigh a fraction of what I did in school. An improper fraction, but still, a fraction.

This has consequences. The first is that the average Alpha loves it. He can get as much sex as he wants, when he wants it. The Beta, though, is getting wise, and having an Alpha Widow isn’t what he’s interested in.

The consequences are lowered male investment and engagement in society. Women expect to be protected by men on the subway, but elect the District Attorney that turns the rapists back to the street, and sit on the juries that convict men attempting to protect them.

Additionally, men are shying away from doing the things that make them high value. Why engage in those behaviors if they can’t attract the attention of a decent woman? Despite modernity’s challenges, what men really want is a marriage and children. That’s it. It’s wickedly simple.

Women ask, “Where have all the good men gone?” The answer is simple. They’re either married to someone else, or the men never chose the path of radical self-improvement required to make them better. Why work fifty hours and then work out when the prospect of a family is raising Chad’s kid with Chad’s Alpha Widow?

Yup, that’s an Alpha Widow.

Outside of the political consequences, this has also created a sharp political divide. The younger groups are skewing away from each other, based on sex. Women seek the party of least responsibility so they can kill babies at will and thus make the big bucks making PowerPoints™. Men are tired of the game, and are seeking what has been lost to them, which they see being fulfilled through nationalism and populism.

It’s a train wreck ready to happen.

Again, the good news is we always win this one. Will it be horrible and difficult? Yes. But it is a battle that has been fought for centuries, and always, the family ends up winning in the end.

Otherwise? None of us would be here. Which will also be the outcome if someone doesn’t stop Boeing®. Seriously. These guys need to be stopped before . . . oh, too late.