The Bright Side of Cultural Collapse

“A date gives you a corsage, not a multiple fracture.” – Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

At the LEGO® hospital, almost every operation is plastic surgery.

If you’ve ever felt like America’s cultural compass is spinning like a drunk uncle at a Latvian wedding reception, you’re not wrong. I believe most of my readers can remember back to the 1970s and 1980s.At that time, Americans had a (mostly) shared reality, love it or hate it.

That shared reality kept the country rowing in roughly the same direction. Getting out of Vietnam was a political choice, and (we know now) hard-GloboLeftist Walter Cronkite was instrumental in getting us out after hard-GloboLeftist president LBJ got us involved. The media could start and stop wars, at will.

Now?

It’s a fractured funhouse mirror where the Super Bowl® and presidential elections seem to be the last gasps of collective attention, like family reunions where everyone shows up but nobody talks afterwards. The rest of the time, we’re each siloed in our respective algorithm alcoves, each getting a different view of reality, sort of like the way she looked after six beers and the way she looked at 8AM.

I’m always polite to people who wear glasses, after all, they paid money to see me.

How’d we get here?

Blame the usual suspects: tech titans and open-border overlords who can’t get enough of cheap labor and expensive ballots.

Picture this: pre-1930 America, a patchwork quilt of immigrants fresh off the boat around 1900, all crammed into cities like Ellis Island escapees. Cultures clashed harder than a bad blind date. Languages tangled, traditions tussled, and the “melting pot” was more like a slow simmer with occasional boil-overs. How bad was it? Immigration was essentially shut down with the Immigration Act of 1924 which sharply restricted numbers and essentially banned immigration from most non-Western cultures.

At this time, however, technology makes its appearance: enter radio, then television. These were the great homogenizers of America. From FDR’s fireside chats in the ’30s to Reagan’s ranch riffs in the ’80s, these boxes beamed a single narrative into every living room with little competition. Three networks – ABC®, CBS©, NBC™ – dictated the national conversation.

Commie Cronkite signed off with “And that’s the way it is,” and America, by and large, believed him. Why? Mainly because there were no other options except some fringe samizdat.

Radio had replaced the town square and TV turbocharged it. Now it was I Love Lucy laughs for all, and heavy-handed M*A*S*H moralizing nationwide, with Johnny Carson‘s couch as the national nightcap.

I heard the national origami championship is tonight. It’s on paper view.

This centralized media forced most of the immigrants into and ersatz Americana because there weren’t Slavic-language radio stations in most places. Right or wrong, it forged a (more or less) unified American ethos from 1930 to the mid-1990s.

Sure, it was sanitized suburbia with a side of Cold War conformity and liberal-left inclusion, but it worked: shared heroes (John Wayne, anyone?), shared villains (Commies), shared laughs from non-stereotypical minorities who were, after all, just like us (Cosby before the fall and his final TV show: Women Say The Darndest Things).

We were one nation under three channels, indivisible, with sitcoms and soaps for all.

Then the cracks came.

First, cable TV in the 1980s splintered the spectrum, MTV™ for the kids, CNN® for the news junkies, ESPN© for the jocks. But the real wrecking ball?

Then, the Internet appeared in the mid-1990s, and was supercharged by smartphones in 2007.

Suddenly, infinite choices: blogs, YouTube®, TikTok©, X®. Everyone is a broadcaster, nobody is the boss. Literally no one tells me what to write, I’m free to bring up uncomfortable truths. This resulted in something the GloboLeft hates: attention is atomized. Their rescue, though, is that now Faceborg™ and Google© could manipulate results and (mostly) keep ideas within politically acceptable limits.

Annnnnd she runs an NGO whose mission is to restrict speech.

The Super Bowl® still pulls 100M+ viewers, a rare ritual that the NFL™ is trying to destroy by featuring increasingly divisive halftime shows. Elections? They glue us to screens every four years, like national therapy sessions.

But otherwise?

The GloboLefties lap up MSNBC® memes, righties rally on Rumble™ and there is no overlap. Also, there are no more “water cooler” moments since the odds of anyone watching the same things as you are very low.

Worse, massive immigration since the ’90s poured gasoline on the fire. Post-1965 reforms flipped the script: waves after wave from Latin America, Asia, Africa from clashing cultures. Traditional American values? Now they’re “racist,” “xenophobic,” “bigoted,” “transphobic,” “climate-denying,” “patriarchal” poison.

Family, faith, freedom? Hate crimes.

The people didn’t vote for this mosaic meltdown; The GloboLeftElite engineered it. Cheap labor lured corporations; votes lured Democrats. As Lenin reportedly quipped, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

Here, the “rope” was imported workers who tilt 80% GloboLeft, hanging the old republic with demographic destiny.

By 2026’s doorstep, consensus is kaput. COVID crackdowns under Biden tried to muzzle dissent: shadowbans, deplatforms, “disinfo” dossiers. But the dam burst.

GloboLeftElite’s iron fist? In the United States in 2025, it appears to be wholly rusted. Political correctness, once their shield, lies in tatters.

Why?

Dissenting elites like Musk and Trump flipped the script. X™ became a free-fire zone.

He has a lot of X employees.

Ideas flowed unfettered, exposing the emperor’s empty ethos. “Woke” went from weapon to punchline; folks stopped fearing the “racist” label like it was yesterday’s news.

So, where does this cultural shatter take us?

Short-term: more balkanization. Red states redline GloboLeft policies, banning DEI diktats, booting illegals, building walls (literal and legal).

Blue bubbles boil over with sanctuary silliness and virtue-vomiting, with California leading the country in giving free money to illegal freeloaders.

No national narrative means that, right now, there are no peaceful national solutions.

America does have quite an advantage, though an armed citizenry and what remains of federalism, where I expect state freedoms will increase as the central government weakens. American was built as a country that could fight back against overlords with the preservation of the 1^st and 2^nd Amendments being so crucial to us not falling into the horrific tyranny we see places like England currently entering.

Ah, a raft filled with Marxmen. (meme as found)

My take, long term? Free ideas forge fresh foundations, with a Tradright renaissance entirely possible: young men gymming, girls gardening, families flourishing in flyover fortresses.

I do see that the GloboLeft’s grip will have to slips as their “diversity” devolves into division because the moslems in Dearborn and Somalisota hate gays and want Sharia. The GloboLeft cannot understand, at all, why their pets hate diversity.

We’re not done. The rope the GloboLeftists sold? We’ll use it to climb.

Is Everything Fake?

“Happy premise number three: even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won’t.” – Bowfinger

My ex-wife was more versatile than carbon: she could form more than four bonds at the same time.

The economy recently feels to me like a(nother) bad sequel to The Matrix: smoke, mirrors, simulated steaks and guys pretending to be girls directing everything.

It made me think of Bowfinger, a 1999 Steve Martin flick. Steve Martin plays the titular producer, Bobby Bowfinger. His character drops this gem while trying to scam a crew into working on his latest film:

“That’s after gross net deduction profit percentage deferment ten percent of the nut. Cash? Every movie costs $2,184.”

The rest, it’s like Hollywood? Fake sets, fake stars, fake everything. Our economy, I think, has officially hit 8.9 out of 10 on the Bowfinger scale.

It’s a façade of trillions propped on fraud, fiat, and fairy dust. The evidence is everywhere: from federal slush funds laundering cash to “charities” that fund political hit squads, to Somali scams siphoning billions for terrorist toys, to the AI hype train where Nvidia’s® GPUs vanish into vaporware voids. It makes me ask one question:

Have we peaked at “peak fake”?

Genghis Khan stayed in shape during conquests by making sure he hit his steppe goal each day.

Start with the government’s golden shower of “aid.” In the last few months, we’ve watched as the public found out that billions flood from Uncle Sam’s coffers to “nonprofits” and foundations that, surprise, boomerang right back to commentators, politicians, and partisan ops that give the opinions to the Democratically-appointed judges to make sure that their cash lifeline is safe from scrutiny. Sibling marriages are less incestuous.

Remember the post-election blitz Democratic blitz? A Free Press® investigation uncovered a $27 billion rush-out-the-door bonanza, with $20B hitting eight leftist nonprofits faster than Kamala could say “unbourboned by what has been.”

It would be one thing if these were soup kitchens serving the starving, but these are slush funds for radical agendas, exploiting tax dollars to bankroll everything from election meddling to “community organizing” that looks suspiciously like astroturf Antifa® activism. It’s like if United Way™ funded Trotsky but funded by the Czar.

Robespierre, Trotsky, and Pol Pot walk into a bar. There were no survivors.

And USAID? They shelled $44K to Politico™ for subscriptions chump change, but emblematic of how federal funds feather media nests. Nonprofits are NGO scams, funneling billions to progressive power grabs, sometimes even recycling it from overseas. Ukraine is the country that just keeps giving. I mean, if you’re a Democratic politician.

House hearings exposed how these networks weaponize your taxes for ideological insurgency. You’re paying for the people who keep bleating: “muh democracy.” This is Bowfinger budgeting: real costs hidden, profits pocketed by players who script the narrative.

Speaking of Minnesota Somalisota . . . (otherwise known as Mogadishu on the Mississippi), the relentless spotlight has turned from Indian invaders to Somalian swindlers. The “Feeding Our Future” fraud, where Somali networks allegedly pilfered over $250M from child nutrition programs during COVID. That’s bad enough, but state audits have found broader scams at over $1 billion in taxpayer theft, with funds funneled overseas to anti-American terrorists.

Terrorist training: “C-4 yourself.”

I mean, not just anti-American Democrats, but actual “was given a dowry of AK-47s, goats, and C-4” dirka-dirka terrorists.

This isn’t petty theft: this is peak fake philanthropy that rivals the Clinton Foundation. “Charities” as cover for African clan cash grabs, shipping your dollars to fund foes abroad. If you watch videos of interviews with these people, they have no connection philosophically to the United States, wish to live under sharia law, don’t speak English, and don’t have jobs, other than stealing. I guess the only saving grace is that at least these “charities” didn’t pay for Chelsea Clinton’s wedding and the terrorists are fine with using standard NATO rounds.

The next fake? I’ve mentioned it again and again, Nvidia®.

It’s not so much Nvidia™ as the hype around A.I. Nvidia® seems to (mostly) be just selling computer chips. Mostly. Their stock has been exploding upward like a Somalian with a grenade, doubling since April, with a market capitalization flirting with $4 trillion.

Who is buying all those GPUs, and for what? Is it kids playing Fortnite®?

Ed Zitron, tech industry writer, estimates Big Tech needs $2T in AI revenue by 2030 just to justify their A.I. spending binge, or it’s going to lead to a fall that will leave a mark. We’re back to Wilder’s A.I. Paradox: if A.I. is valuable enough to be worth the money that’s being invested in it, it will wreck the economy with a wave of unemployment. If it’s not, it’ll wreck the economy because it failed.

Yay! It’s almost like we don’t have a choice!

My quantum computer wasn’t working, so tech support told me to turn it on and off at the same time.

It’s a lot like the French having a military: if they fight, they lose, and if they run, they lose.

Who is buying this stuff? The usual suspects: OpenAI®, Microsoft™, Oracle©, Amazon™, and Google©. As we’ve shown here before, this investment simply doesn’t have the infrastructure like electricity, PEZ®, or clean water production to support it even if they could build all that stuff. It smells like tulips in the Dutch Republic back around 1637.

Me? I think it’s entirely possible that we’re building a multi-trillion-dollar computer that might wreck our economy if it works. And it might wreck the economy if it doesn’t.

So, is this peak fake?

We’ve got governments gifting billions to grifters on an endless cash spin-cycle. We’ve got immigrants importing scams and exporting cash to jihadi Jamal in Jowhar. Also, we have A.I. alchemists turning silicon into massive debts that might be decadal mistakes.

If it was just that, yeah, it might all work out. But there’s this: the economy is a house of cards built on counterfeit confidence: $36 trillion in fiat debt, infinite inflation, and innovations that might wreck everything if they don’t become a robotic overlord. Is it any wonder that the smallest pebble dropped onto this slope might cause a landslide?

How much dirt is in a six foot deep, three foot diameter hole? None. It’s a hole.

Fake fails eventually, but often lasts longer than almost anyone would believe during inertia.

Will we reset? I think that’s almost certain. When will we reset?

That I can’t tell. As long as everyone agrees that the market is up, the market is up. But Wendy’s™ is getting ready to close 5% of its restaurants because the business is so great. I think the lower end of the income spectrum has thrown in the towel.

“A Dave’s Single™? What, do I look like a Rockefeller?”

Going back to The Matrix: “You know, I know this steak Dave’s Single® doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.”

Ignorance, bliss? What do those words even mean? In other news, I’m in a great mood!

Disclaimer: This isn’t investment advice, this is an Internet humor column. You might want to try those little cartoons they had in Bazooka Joe® gum for better advice on timing and market direction than I could give you. I don’t own any positions in any stock mentioned in this post, and I also do not own (much) real estate on the Moon, though I was sold a 1/10^th share in some bridge in New York by an Albanian.

The Economy: Is It All Fake?

“This is my costume. I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everybody else.” – The Addams Family (1991)

The upside of burkas is that if you divorce and remarry, you can keep the same photo on your desk.

October is supposed to be the weird month in the markets. Why? Harvest. Halloween sugar highs and fake vampires going “trunk or treat” because “trick or treat” is just too much walking for parents, who can’t let the kids out by themselves because . . . 2025. Me, I remember lining up at the neighbor’s house to get decent-sized Snickers®.

Maybe it’s just that less daylight makes people crazy.

Who can say?

But this year, the market is throwing a tantrum that makes a toddler with a baby bottle full of Red Bull® look chill. The Dow© was down 800 points yesterday (my yesterday, not yours). The NASDAQ™ is nursing a Nvidia®-sized hangover, and Bitcoin?

If you give a Bitcoin to an exotic dancer, is it a Striptocurrency?

It’s a Bitcoin bear market, baby. Bitcoin crumbed from $127k highs to $88k like it just discovered gravity after a night of tequila and strippers. I’ve never quite understood the allure of Bitcoin, though many people have made tons of profit with it, and I think that Fartcoin (yes, this is real) proves my point.

I think the big thing that’s different is Trump. Trump is absolutely going to choose a Fed® chairman that will lower rates like a frat bro bringing out the backup keg at midnight. Why? Because Trump wants lower rates, so he’s auditioning like it’s The Apprentice: Interest Rate Edition.

But here’s the punchline: Lower rates for an economy dealing with continual high inflation and fiat currency disease? It’s like lighting a cigar with a jet engine. Sure, it gets the job done, but if you stand too close, you’ll end up medium well.

What do you do if you find Michael J. Fox in your hot tub? Add laundry.

Big banks love lower interest rates. It allows them to cover the losses they stood while whistling like nothing was going on, the same losses that took down Silicon Valley Bank. Businesses usually like low interest rate because it makes stuff easier to buy, yet there has to be something worth buying, some revenue stream to capture.

The result? Bankers win. Again. At a certain point people begin to feel like Wile E. Coyote.

But the financial shenanigans aren’t limited to the United States. Stimulus, that economic equivalent of jumper cables is showing up around the world. Japan’s GDP shrank, so they thought they’d toss out $110 billion to convince the Japanese to, what, buy more manga and sushi on top of Japan’s current sky-high debt?

China will not be left out. They’ve decided to sell a bunch of bonds and deficit spend because it’s worked out so well for us. That’s $1.4 trillion to add to the dragon’s fire.

And the United States? Our “annual stimulus” is the $1.8 trillion federal deficit for FY2025, down a smidge from last year’s binge but still ballooning debt to $36T like a bad hair day on steroids.

You know what chicks love? Sweeping generalizations.

Where does all this money go?

Apple®. Apple© is swimming in cash, with $200B stuck in the seat cushions, while small companies pay rent with expired McDonald’s™ Filet o’ Fish® coupons. And Nvidia®, which is the other stimulus program of the United States.

And low interest rates tend to drive stock prices up. Yet, the valuations are already high, and most of the economic growth of the country over the last year (if not all) has been buying Nvidia® chips and building places to house Nvidia™ chips and building power to allow the Nvidia© chips to depreciate into e-waste so they can be replaced by . . . more Nvidia® chips.

It’s sort of like we decided to dedicate the entire economy to create an Ouroboros meme. Or, let A.I. make an Ouroboros meme.

As found. 90% of why I wrote this post is because I wanted to use this meme.

And even though the market is going down right now, it seems like it’s going to go back up. Why?

I guess so we can do more stimulus and create more data centers. So, the interest rates can go lower and . . . we can do more stimulus?

Don’t know. I just know that Warren Buffet retired with Berkshire Hathaway sitting with a pile of $381 billion in cash. Buffett normally tried to buy stocks that were undervalued and let them run. To be fair, I’d be hard put to find a place to invest $381 billion in cash where I thought it would make money since I can’t seem to do that with the little horde of cash that I personally have.

This, from a guy who had to work until he was 95.

Regardless, despite Halloween being over, the whole thing seems . . . fake and artificial. It’s like “trunk or treat” is today’s stock market, a big fake line.

To me, it feels like a gigantic faux queue.

Disclaimer: I don’t own any stocks mentioned in this post, or at least I don’t think I don’t think I do nor do I intend to buy any by Friday. However, I may have a Snicker’s® bar on Friday, so, don’t front-run that trade since I didn’t buy any Snicker’s™ futures. If you think taking financial advice from an Internet humorist is a good idea, you should consider getting psychological advice from Hannibal Lechter.

From American Dream To Renter’s Hell: How Unrestricted Immigration Created Indentured Servants In Suburbia . . . On Purpose

“You won’t lose the house. Everybody has three mortgages nowadays.” – Ghostbusters

What do you call a woman who sets her mortgage on fire? Bernadette.

I think we can mark November, 2025 as the time when everyone under 40 officially became a tenant in the People’s Republic of Rent. Remember when “owning a home” meant apple pie, picket fences, and fighting with the HOA over the definition of lawn ornaments and why your butter statue of Adrienne Barbeau was definitely not prohibited?

Yeah, that’s as gone as dialing a phone number and not having to listen to someone blabber in a foreign language about what number to press so that illegals can live here easily and comfortably.

Now?

Housing has morphed into a Wall Street rent farm, where millennials and Zoomers wheelbarrow their student loans in a feeble attempt to bid against hedge funds and the latest border-crossing brigade. A free market? Sure, but it’s a free market where Pee Wee Herman has to box Mike Tyson.

Trump highlighted the problem with a misstep: his genius plan for 50-year mortgages while comparing himself to that MAGA hero . . . FDR?

I mean, it is a plan that is ultimately worthy of FDR. That is, if kids like dying with a noose of interest around their necks.

It’s dark. A 50-year mortgage is crack for the financially illiterate. It shaves off a few hundred dollars a month in interest payments to delay actual ownership of the house for fifty years. Some anon did an analysis. On X®, Darth Powell (@vladtheinflator) did a decent analysis. It’s below:

The new pickup line: “Are you a house loan? Because I’ll have you around for the rest of my life.”

Double the interest paid. And even worse, since people often sell after seven years or so, they never build up any real equity in the house, just paying off interest. Oh, and did I mention that they’re floating fifteen year car loans?

Yeah. Though people have been getting damaged on cars for quite a while.

She was really thankful to them, she even said, “I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you!”

Debt is a drug. It gets something now, for selling a bit of my life in the future, sort of like selling myself into indentured servitude. And housing is, while not a necessity, something that makes it easier to have a family. I myself have a mortgage. I could pay it off, but it’s at such a low interest rate, there’s not a good reason for me to do so since the interest rate I’m getting on that amount of cash higher.

Yay!

But Robert A. Heinlein had a quote: “Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage: Pay cash or do without. Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats of domestic felicity.”

He’s right. I’ve made the point before, and I’ll make it again: money and banks exist for us to do things in the real world. To manifest them and the markets as tools of profit is really the biggest infection our society has right now. To be clear – it’s possible to make any sort of bet that one would like to make in the market. It’s gambling. And in the end, go back to the beginning: the first rule of gambling is that The House always wins.

I could never get a loan for the distillery I wanted to start. They said it was a whiskey business.

Letting The House make the decisions is why we are in this mess. Americans are too wealthy an don’t take on enough debt? Import poor people! They need debt, so we can sell debt to them!

A major reason that there are unending streams of illegal and legal immigrants flooding the shores of this nation like EBT users showing up at the soda pop and chip aisle after the SNAP benefits reload is that they are profitable.

What about the current situation isn’t perfect for banks? Large numbers of consumers taking loans longer than the life of the asset. I recall that one gentleman I was acquainted with owned a large number of apartments. He described that is, “It’s like I have an army of slaves. They go out and work, and every month they give me money that they worked for.”

That is how banks think of everyone, even their mothers. What about 2025 is something they don’t like? Owning all the houses? Having millions work hours each week just to pay interest?

They love 2025.

They don’t particularly care about the outcome or if they destroy all of Western Civilization, as long as there’s a quarterly profit in it for them.

What could go wrong?

Again, illegal and legal aliens are being subsidized both via direct welfare like SNAP, but also through programs like FHA loans. Not all of our problems with housing are downstream of immigration, but most of them are.

The most fundamental step is remigration. Voluntary, involuntary, it doesn’t matter. They need to go home. And, you can help. At least for the next three years, ICE is actually trying to get rid of illegals, so report them. They have quotas, so help them. Also, don’t be polite to them. They may be humans, sure, but they can be humans somewhere else.

Second, don’t buy products from companies that have replaced Americans with H-1Bs. This is harder since once an Indian gets in a company, their only goal is to go full Invasion of the Body Snatchers and replace everyone with Indians of their family (if possible) or caste (if they can’t hire their family). It’s like the Mafia, but without deodorant. Let your politicians know, especially if you’re living in a red state. Not about the deodorant bit, but about the replacement bit.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Spicy With A Side Order Of Unravelling

“Oh, I’m unravelling.” – The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

I have a joke about midnight, but it’s probably too dark.

Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Open War.

Volume VII, Issue 6

Most memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”. I have maintained the Clock O’Doom at 9., given the open support of assassination and criminality by the GloboLeft and the increase in violence as well as direct interference with ICE and the insertion of the military into law enforcement. Beware: the number can climb quickly.

My advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – Escalation – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Unravelling, Part II – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Escalation

One of the hallmarks of previous Republican presidencies, including Trump’s first term, was that there would be an attempt to move to the center, to compromise. That’s how we got things like the illegal alien amnesty under Reagan. Not so with Trump. I think it’s because the second term was interrupted by Joe Biden’s Residency, and Trump really doesn’t care, he’s going to do what he wants to. Let’s look

Let’s start with revenge. The indictments have started, and Trump is even threatening to jail state governors.

The state-level government is also being used to try to gerrymander more Republican seats in the House. Will that work? I know that I’ve got concerns, since, even in Red states Democrats are very, very good at creating votes. But if this scheme worked, it thins out the Republican vote, making a minor shift towards the GloboLeft in those states leading to a Democratic supermajority. There is opportunity, but there is also danger if avenues for vote fraud like mail-in ballots and not requiring proof of citizenship to vote.

Trump is also, apparently, aware that major unrest is around the corner. While I certainly doubt that ICE is stockpiling “guided missile warheads”, they do appear to be getting ready to deal with armed resistance. Cartels?

And it’s not just here. We’re not alone. Unrest is spreading, and just needs a spark.

Violence and Censorship Update

Several years ago, the majority of the Violence and Censorship update was about censorship. Now, violence predominates. Here are text messages from the new Attorney General of Virginia, musing about killing his opponent and their family:

And judges love terrorists, I guess:

And if you try to report on it and aren’t part of the GloboLeft, you were asking for it.

When you talk about Civil War, it makes it more likely.

And nearly killing a white guy isn’t even worth jail time, if you’re black.

On to censorship. We certainly can’t have St. MLK shown in any manner that isn’t approved.

And a group, funded by tax dollars, that was intended to make sure that victims of racial violence didn’t say the wrong thing is now disbanded. But since you’ve never heard of them until now, they managed to censor the news at the source for decades.

And on to foreign nations. In Canada, if you ask certain questions, you’ll go to jail.

Updated Misery Index

Far better performance than Biden – so far.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Violence indicators are down this month, but still elevated.

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went up again this month. People are realizing that voting won’t solve the problems.

Economic:

The economy is up a bit this month, but I think this is cloaking the middle-class crunch.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the lowest level since the Weather Report started. Remember, they care nothing for our country, nothing for our history, and only want money and political power and our country will be gone if they win.

The Unravelling, Part II

Presented without comment.

LINKS

The links are again done by Ricky this month. Thanks, Ricky!

BAD GUYS

https://x.com/ArmageddonProse/status/1980948293388579094
https://x.com/firearmvideos/status/1977810281750470903
https://x.com/i/status/1978160493484249557
https://x.com/CaughtCam404/status/1975110773354737985
https://x.com/CaughtCam404/status/1982854809830195433
https://x.com/i/status/1981658405371818368
https://x.com/TheDMVLive/status/1984435570198585554

GOOD GUYS

https://x.com/CaughtCam404/status/1983217194344591549
https://x.com/i/status/1973040140798091264

ONE GUY

https://www.11alive.com/article/news/douglas-county-mother-uncovers-new-evidence-in-sons-death-challenges-self-defense-ruling/85-194fe2c2-fed2-4060-8da9-81d450b4403b

BODY COUNT

https://stateline.org/2025/10/17/trump-isnt-sending-troops-to-cities-with-highest-crime-rates-data-shows/
https://www.sandboxx.us/news/which-service-did-best-in-the-military-recruiting-boom-the-numbers-are-in/
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/almost-100-000-young-men-171406110.html

VOTE COUNT

https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/live-redistricting-tracker/
https://www.vox.com/politics/466253/why-democrats-unpopular-polls-welcome
https://canarymission.org/campaign/DSA
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1983370733028778255

CIVIL WAR

https://x.com/EricLDaugh/status/1975319131105767638
https://jonathanturley.org/2025/10/24/we-may-be-nearing-when-the-resistance-looks-completely-different-democrat-leaders-ramp-up-resistance-rhetoric/
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/its-time-for-soft-secession/
https://alt-market.us/are-democrats-trying-to-start-a-civil-war/
https://archive.ph/0WhU7
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/savingandinvesting/ray-dalio-sounds-alarm-over-looming-civil-war-in-america-claims-our-power-to-hurt-each-other-has-never-been-greater-are-you-at-risk/ar-AA1PClD8?ocid=finance-verthp-feeds
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/17/donald-trump-president-peace-civil-war-national-guard
https://www.csis.org/analysis/united-states-headed-toward-civil-war
https://www.vox.com/politics/464354/barbara-walter-charlie-kirk-gray-area-violence

The Big Short Part 2: AI Boogaloo?

“Well, we pay roughly 80 to 90 million each year, which is high but I was the first to do this trade. Watch, it will pay. I may have been early, but I’m not wrong.” – The Big Short

I don’t think it’s true that Michael Burry is a giant psychic who is skeptical of high stock prices, since that would make him a tall medium short. (all memes and Tweets as-found)

“Sometimes, we see bubbles. Sometimes, there is something to do about it. Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play.” – Michael Burry, October 31, 2025

Ah, Michael Burry. I love him for several reasons. First, the man who turned the financial Armageddon of the Great Recession into a personal piggy bank. While the rest of Wall Street was busy high-fiving over adjustable-rate mortgages like they were the next Beanie Babies™, Burry had it right.

Beanie there, done that.

If life’s a casino, Burry was the guy who spotted the rigged roulette wheel, bet it all against red, and walked away repeatedly tossing the croupier’s pinky ring in the air. But more on that.

Let’s rewind the tape, because Burry’s backstory isn’t just a hedge fund horror story; it’s the stuff of legend. Born in 1971, Burry was that kid dissecting frog guts and getting into high school early, and leaving it earlier than a Chicago inner-city kid, but instead of hitting the streets, Burry hit Vanderbilt med school by age 19. He got an ophthalmology residency at Stanford, because nothing says “future financial legend” like peering into eyeballs.

But Burry’s peepers were always fixed on the fine print of balance sheets, not dilated pupils. In 1997, he launched a value-investing blog that read like Warren Buffett’s fever dream crossed with a pathology report. By 2000, he’d parlayed his blog into Scion Capital™, a $600 million fund where he played the markets like a man solving a Rubik’s Cube® blindfolded.

Then came the subprime saga during the Housing Bubble.

It was 2005, and America was drunk on easy credit. Flippers were flipping houses, banks bundling toxic multiple hundred-thousand-dollar home loans made to $14,000 a year illegal alien strawberry pickers.

Yes, this happened.

They called these triple-A quality financial treasures. Why not jump in? Everyone from soccer moms to strip-mall moguls mortgaging their McMansions to the hilt.

The cheapest parts of the house should be the roof and exterior paint, since they’re on the house.

Burry?

He saw the rot. He pored over mortgage prospectuses like they were Penthouse centerfolds, spotting the emperor’s new clothes in the form of adjustable-rate mortgages that would reset into huge payments. I was offered a mortgage of over seven times my salary.

I asked the banker, “Why are you offering this? I can’t afford to pay that.”

“I’m required to tell you that you qualify for it.”

Burry’s investors threatened mutiny as the carrying cost for his bets mounted. Undeterred, Burry plunked down to buy $1 billion in credit default swaps, essentially insurance policies on the housing house of cards

He bet that it all would burn. And burn it did.

By 2008, Lehman® imploded, and Bear plowed its Stearns© into oblivion

Burry’s investors pocketed $720 million after fees. Burry personally cleared $100 million, enough to buy a lifetime supply of black market Asian kidneys. He could even do the occasional eye exam for fun and pleasure since his medical license remains intact.

The kicker? He shut down Scion in 2008, tired of the thankless grind, and because nothing says “peak contrarian” like cashing out as the casino explodes behind you.

I had a dream about Roman numerals last night: 5, 4, 1 and 500. It was VIVID.

His payment was that he was played in a movie about this epic heist, The Big Short (recommended), and that he was played by Christian Bale, who actually asked Burry for his actual clothing (cargo shorts and shirts) so he could wear them in the movie. I hope Micheal Chiklis asks to borrow my deodorant when he plays me in a movie.

Bale nailed the eccentric genius vibe: the twitching eye, the Asperger’s-adjacent intensity, the social awkwardness that makes Elon look like a prom king. Bale even learned to drum (Burry’s hobby) for the role. Imagine Chiklis having to learn to get in my daily step count – I’m up to 29.

Now, in a market puffed up like a Kardashian’s hooters, Burry is whispering (okay, Tweeting®) the dad wisdom of all dad wisdoms: sometimes, son, you just sit this hand out. No bluster, just a quiet nod to the sucker’s paradise we’re all pretending isn’t a powder keg from ACME™ while a drunken stripper pole-dances next to it lit cigar.

Burry and Bale, wearing the big shorts.

Generally, Burry’s X® feed is a cryptic cocktail of charts, quips, and quiet alarms.

That October 31 post? It’s the mic-drop missive in a string of sidelong swipes at the surreal stock spectacle that AI has wrought. Just days prior, Burry had tweeted innocuous eye charts and “move along” memes, like a oracle playing coy before the deluge.

On Tuesday (November 4, 2025), Burry is making jokes about being short (where you sell stock you don’t own in order to buy it back later after it goes down in price – it’s like selling cars you don’t own). Or maybe about shorts.

But peeling back the posts, Burry’s brewing a bearish broth. He’s been wrong before, just like me he’s predicted seven of the last two stock market crashes. In 2023, he warned of a “bubble of all bubbles,” while dumping his positions.

He also admitted he was wrong.

Now?

His latest dispatches echo that eerie prescience: bubbles abound, but betting against them isn’t always the balm. Sometimes, the house wins by default, by luring you in. It’s irony incarnate: the man who shorted the subprime supernova is now advising abstinence over aggression. Why play when the poker table’s tilted toward the trillion-dollar trusts and AI hype machines?

Burry’s not yelling “fire” in a crowded theater; he’s slipping a note under the door: “evacuate quietly, kids.”

And boy, does the timing tickle like a tetanus shot. Today, Bitcoin dropped from $109,500 at dawn to a dippy $99,800 by lunch, rebounding to $101k like a drunk uncle at last call.

Is crypto’s crashing alone, or is it the canary in the coal mine, signaling strains in the broader bedlam where Nvidia’s notched north of $5 trillion (more than Germany’s GDP)?

But, I think Burry is trying to tell us something simpler. Shorting the subprime was surgical; shorting everything now? That’s swinging a scalpel at a swarm of bees.

Better to bank your bullets, brew your beans, and watch the wasps war from the porch swing.

In this everything-extravaganza, where your grandma’s got GameStop™ options and your neighbor’s mining Monero® in the man-cave it pays to at least pay attention to Burry. Play if you must, and maybe, just maybe, those Beanie Babies™ will once surge in value.

After all, it’s different this time.

Note: This is not financial advice. I am an Internet humorist who gets paid nothing for writing this. If you take this humor column as financial advice (which I didn’t give anyway) you’re more stoned than Cheech and Chong were in 1977. And if you like Burry’s right, great— just don’t blame me if stocks surge and bite your shorts (borrowed or not).

Disclosure: I didn’t mention any stocks because I might buy some. Or sell some. Or do nothing.

Oh, SNAP: The Waste, The Fraud, The Envy, And You’re Not Alone

“He must have just snapped!” – Groundhog Day

Matt has come a long way.

Each time the Trump Administration does something, they bubble things up to the public consciousness that The Powers That Be would rather people not think about. Yeah, Trump is part of The Powers That Be, but this .gov shutdown is exactly what I voted for.

What have you missed during the shutdown?

Oh, nothing?

What if it went on for two months? Four? What if only the “essential” parts (ICE, the actual warfighting part of .mil, and . . . wait, I’m running out of essential) restarted?

It seems like we have discovered (this is not an original idea, /pol/ discusses this frequently) that SNAP (Sheer Nonsense And Plunder) is a program that works like this:

Infinity illegal aliens are
encouraged to come to the country
to make cheap carbohydrates
to feed to minorities
so that Herculean medical efforts are expended to solve the problems caused by the cheap carbs.

Who profits?

Illegals.
Farmers.
Big Agribusiness, Big Soda, and Big Sloppa.
Minorities (short term, until the untimely heart attack).
Hospitals.
Doctors.
Insurance Companies.

Is it all just a machine to turn your tax dollars into illegals, obesity, and corporate profits?

You decide. Regardless, I think the Democrats will blink. Maybe. I sure hope note, I mean, this is what I voted for.

First: The Waste, The Luxury, and The Outrage

Second: The Fraud

Third: The Recipients Despise You

Fourth: You’re Not Alone

From Hyperinflation to Hypergamy: The Weimar Playbook and Why America’s Wallet (and Morals) Are Feeling the Pinch: A Play In Three Acts

“She died of skin suffocation. It’s been known to happen to cabaret dancers.” – Goldfinger

The Mrs. was great at putting the kids to bed. She is one cool mother tucker. (Meme as found)

(Also, this is post 1500 here. Time flies.)

Ah, who doesn’t long for the Weimar Republic?

That glorious interlude between the trenches of mud-filled World War I and the Austrian led sequel. What was the Weimar Republic like?

It was like your grandma’s bingo night turned into a rave with existential dread and paper money for confetti. But beneath the jazz hands and cocaine-fueled cabarets, the Weimar Republic wasn’t just an economic dumpster fire, even though that’s what it’s best known as.

No, it was also a masterclass in how crumbling finances torch traditional values, especially when it comes to the birds-and-bees department. The ladies? Let’s just say that they were dumping their morals during that time period faster than you can say “Ruhr Occupation.”

It’s probably time to dust off the Weimar playbook to see what it teaches us in 2025 since history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme, not like one of those stupid haikus.

My aunt always said
Slow and steady wins the race
She died in a fire

Act 1: The Money Meltdown (1923 – The Great Devaluation)

The upside is my salary is 5 billion marks a month.

The downside? It’s Germany in 1923, where everyone is a billionaire.

But that five billion is enough to buy SpaceX®, right? No. Enough for a loaf of bread? No. By noon, it costs 3 trillion for a single Triscuit® without any Cheez Whiz™. Hyperinflation, sparked by French troops squatting in the Ruhr (while smoking cigarettes and eating baguettes) over unpaid war reparations and a fevered central banker who thought that inflation stemmed from not having enough paper cash, wiped out the middle class overnight.

Wheelbarrows of cash for groceries? That really happened. Suicides spiking? Check.

And the ladies? Well . . . .

Biologically, women are drawn to men with power and resources. They like nice things, like sitting on couches eating bon-bons and not working jobs that will kill them. Consequently, they choose men who have power and resources because otherwise they have to work. It makes sense – somebody has to raise the kids, and if they spend all their time hunting mammoth, the kids will die.

Not all power is useful.

So, Wuma like Grug. Grug big strong. Grug bring food. Grug like Wuma because warm and make zug-zug. And Mortimer? His genes didn’t get passed down.

In Weimar Germany, however, all the thousands of years between Hans and Grug evaporated. Women, sensing the ship sinking, entered into Hypergamy Mode™.

Stable accountant husbands toiling for stacks of worthless cash?

Adios.

Black-market speculators with coal or ham?

Jackpot.

Prostitution boomed and I’m not going to get into the horrible details – you can look them up yourself, though I highly advise you not to. Economic desperation flipped the script and a moral and prosperous people disappeared. I think this time in history showed that most fräuleins were just three hot meals away from working the streets.

Chastity? Loyalty?

Those were luxuries for men who could still afford to pay for dinner.

The result was predictable: birth rates tanked, divorces doubled, and Berlin became a petri dish for STDs.

It’s hard for people with this condition to be teachers – they can’t control their pupils.

Act 2: 1924-1928 – Stabilization to Sizzle

By 1924, Germany put up the surrender flag again and rolled out the Rentenmark, a mortgage-backed currency that halted the fiscal freefall. Unemployment goes, down and wages climb 10% in 1928 alone.

Golden Twenties! But the morality break from the hyperinflation remained.

Berlin’s nightlife is a bisexual, androgynous fever dream.

Divorces? Up 20 per 100 marriages.

Abortions? From taboo to two-for-Tuesday.

Prostitutes? The 1927 Venereal Disease Law decriminalized prostitution, shifting it from being a cop problem to a social worker problem. Really, this was just formalizing the side-hustle economy.

Society, or at least those little things we call morals, were ignored.

Leave the steady scientist for the jazz-club owner? Why not? Resources signaled survival, and with the past experiences, women valued power and money more than, well, value. Long-term vows were for suckers.

Men, emasculated by inflation scars, either joined in the debauchery or brewed resentment in beer halls.

I told the state trooper that the other guy at the car accident was drinking beer and staring at his cell phone when I hit him. “Mr. Wilder, he can do anything he wants, it’s his living room.” (meme as found)

Act 3: Crash and Backlash (1929-1933 – Depression to Despot)

Wall Street sneezed in October 1929 and Germany caught pneumonia. Unemployment hits 30%, and banks implode.

The result? An insignificant party led by an Austrian painter rocketed from fringe to 37% of the vote in the 1932 elections. The promise? Crushed cabarets. Mandated motherhood. Homeownership, and the house is free after a certain number of kids. Oh, and most people don’t ask exactly what books were burned.

Why the rise?

Economics eroded trust and broke down traditional male-female relationships. This bred fury.

America’s Weimar Remix: Where are we now?

Fast-forward to the U.S.

We’ve been doing inflation for years, since the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank®. Will we see hyperinflation? Almost certainly. There are two ways the debt will clear – either we pay it or we default on it.

Want to take bets on which we do?

The morality failure is in play:

“Hot girl summers,”
Situationships,
Chastity is cringe,
Birth rates echo Berlin in the 1920s,
30% of Zoomers were aborted,
Female body counts are soaring, and
OnlyFans®.

OnlyFans© itself paints a picture of depravity: OnlyFans™ has over 3 million women willing to show you their naked body, most of whom earn less than $50 a month. Not only are they tramps, they’re cheap tramps. Femininity is utterly degraded: motherhood in a loving family is now considered oppressive, while being married in a loving relationship is oppression.

He also thinks she’s a drug dealer. He answered her cellphone and some guy said, “Is that dope still there?”

Are we in Act 1, Scene 2 – A Financial Puzzle, or Act 2, Scene 3 – The Hangover Before the Headache, or Act 3, Scene 1 – Enter the Man With the Plan?

I don’t know. I know it’s bad. 60%-80% of Gen Z men aren’t dating. Less than 30% of them identify with the Republican or Democratic parties. Video games and A.I. girlfriends aren’t going to replace actual wives, so the instability in society is growing, and quickly.

As I said at the top – history doesn’t repeat, but it surely does rhyme. The late Roman Republic and the Late Roman Empire are also parallels, and I could keep going. Bad economic decisions lead to the breakdown of human relationships. Those broken relationships lead to a change in government type.

The good news? We won’t run out of wheelbarrows for the money. We don’t need to print it, just add a few ones and zeros into a program.

Isn’t progress grand?

Enserfification, It’s No Accident

“Oh my God! Movable printed type! We must keep this from the serfs lest they gain literacy and threaten the landed gentry!” – Family Guy

Bernie in a bar: “Free drinks for everyone! Now, who is buying?” (meme as-found)

“The moral and Constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy to our people.” – Ron Paul

Okay, maybe Ron was a bit of a downer, but if he could see the average millennial staring at blankly at their TikTok® feed while wondering if ramen counts as a vegetable, he’d probably nod and say:

“Told ya so.”

America isn’t only circling the drain, it’s installing a fancy gold-plated one, imported from China, because why not add insult to bankruptcy?

If Hunter Biden was a duck, what would he do? Crack.

Let’s talk about “Enserfification.” While I cannot find any reference to this word (I did find “enserfify”) on the Internet, A.I. claims that it’s okay, so that’s good enough for me even though Word™ draws an angry, squiggly line under it.

Enserfification is not quite feudalism, where the lord hands you a pitchfork and a plot of mud and some ugly facial moles in exchange for your firstborn. Nope, it’s sneakier. It’s the slow, corporate/bureaucratic boil where the middle class gets squeezed until the middle class plops, slowly mind you, into the ranks of a serf.

Let’s face it, the middle class is shrinking, and those that are in it are not building dreams anymore. They’re just trying not to default on the electric bill for their bread and circuses Netflix™ indoctrination videos.

What do you get when you cross a polar bear with a seal? A polar bear. (meme as-found)

And the statistics? They are brutal.

Those under 40 with a STEM degree and a car payment, life is hitting them like a tax audit from the IRS’s agent that they hired directly from the DMV because she regularly made Marine Drill Instructors cry.

Let’s start with jobs.

Remember when Mom and Dad said, “Get a degree in engineering or computers, kid, and you’ll be set for life”? Yeah, that was before the H-1B visa tsunami turned Silicon Valley into a global import mall with accents thicker than a deaf Russian that learned English in South Carolina.

In 2024 alone, the U.S. approved a whopping 399,395 H-1B petitions—basically a free-for-all green light for companies to hire cheaper talent from abroad instead of the fresh-faced Americans they just saddled with $100k in student debt. Oh, and did anyone mention that these invaders can bring their spouses, and that they can work, too?

That 400,000 number is up 3% from the year before, because nothing says “meritocracy” like importing coders who mainly lie about their degree and qualifications.

The other night The Mrs. asked, “Are you even listening to me?” which I thought was an odd way to start a conversation.

Recent American college grads with physics degrees are sitting at a 7.8% unemployment rate, second-worst among majors.

Computer engineering? 7.5%.

Computer science? 6.1%.

These aren’t lazy trust-funders: these are they (mainly) guys who aced calculus while discovering new an unique ways to self-administer caffeine, only to hit the job market and find a “park’s closed, moose out front should have told you” meme. Why hire Johnny from Boston when you can snag Judgish from Bangalore for 30% less, besides, he’s the nephew of the HR lady?

I do know that the Canadian Army used to communicate via moose code.

Enserfification Step One: Lock the gates on opportunity, import infinity Indians, then blame the peasants for not climbing the walls.

Let’s move to step two . . . .

Cars are the great American symbol of freedom in the postwar era: cruising the open road with the wind in your hair and AC/DC® describing how to Shoot to Thrill. Me? Back then when I listened to AC/DC™, the neighbors did, too.

Except now, that freedom costs more than a down payment on a small ranch would have in the 1980s, and I’m not exaggerating: the average new car price in 2025 is now solidly over $50,000. I have no idea who is buying cars at these prices, outside of federal governments, state governments, local governments and corporations.

Back in 2000, you could snag a reliable sedan for under $20,000. Oh, and that number is adjusted for inflation. But now, most people don’t buy cars with any view towards the price, they look at the monthly payment, so adding leather seats on a . . . pickup . . . becomes the norm.

My chickens really enjoyed the coupe, though.

Today? Forget it. Folks are hanging onto their rustbuckets like they’re family heirlooms, because the average age of vehicles on U.S. roads hit a record 12.8 years in 2025. The newest Wilder family vehicle is nearly a decade old.

Why the delay? First, value. Most of the new cars are loaded with crap that I don’t value. Heated seats? A.I.-enabled cup holders? Sound systems that have monthly fees.?

The idea is to turn a “here, you bought a car, it’s yours” to “here, you bought a limited-term license to have title to a car that will require $47.50 monthly so it will report your driving habits and destinations to your insurance company without your consent”.

Me? I’d much rather own a 2012 Civic™ with rubber floormats and a passenger-side electric mirror that doesn’t work.

This is Enserfification Step Two: Make mobility a luxury, so you’re stuck in your 30-minute commute hell, pondering if that cheap Prius® with just one dead owner from Craigslist© is haunted. (Spoiler alert: it is.) Just like the meme says: in 2030 you’ll own nothing, but you will represent a reliable monthly income stream because to the corporations and governmental entities, that’s what you are. Which is?

A serf.

I could go on and on, but I’ve been wordy recently, and you get the picture. I detail housing and our lack of choices there (killed by legal and illegal immigration), federal, state, and local laws that never seem to get rolled back but keep moving in the direction where everything that isn’t mandatory will be prohibited and the other aspects of the subscription economy where a million companies want.

The only two times you can have too much ammo is if you’re on fire or if you’re drowining.

The middle class isn’t shrinking naturally. It is being pulverized into gig-economy paste on purpose on the twin altars of multiculturalism and corporate profits. Their solution: bread and circuses, updated for the smartphone age.

How do they make the middle class go quietly onto that good night?

Cell phones that ping into dopamine oblivion,
YouTube® rabbit holes that make three hours vanish like your savings, and
Netflix queues longer than the line at the DMV.

It’s genius, really. Why allow the serfs to revolt when they can be made to doomscroll through cat videos and true crime docs that make their problems seem quaint? Distract the serfs and they’ll never notice the chains.

Enserfification isn’t inevitable.

It’s engineered, and requires our consent to win. Don’t patronize businesses that use H-1B employees. Don’t patronize businesses that are owned by foreigners.

And, yes, ramen is a vegetable.

Hoe_Math And Why Levels Of Thought Caused This Mess

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” – No Country for Old Men

But, hey, they all have the same tote bag. (all memes as-found)

There is a YouTube® creator named hoe_math that I watch regularly. I’d guess that he and I have fairly similar worldviews in many cases, and I recommend his channel (LINK). One of the trademark issues Mr. _math has discussed is the breakdown between men and women in our modern, technological age and how government has made it worse.

One thing he’s brought up several times in his videos is the concept of “levels of thinking” which I’ll just call “Levels” from here on out. It’s a variation of Maslow’s Hierarchy, but it’s been refined by Ken Wilber, to walk back the sources. But let’s stick to hoe_math.

hoe_math’s main success has been as a guy who draws stick figures with colored pencils to explain why your relationships suck and society is unraveling. Rather than Levels being a new age mystical tool, Mr. _math uses Levels as a tool, and as a powerful one. Keep in mind, it’s not reality, it’s just another way to model it. In this case, however, it explains a lot of what would otherwise be mystical behavior and magical thinking of people who really should know better.

The version of Levels that hoe_math has been distilled down to nine stages of thinking, each building on the last like a Jenga™ tower of the soul. Today, though, I want to stick to the first seven levels. Why? Because Level 6 is the root of so much GloboLeft® insanity, and Level 7 shows, maybe, a way out.

Let’s climb the Levels ladder, one sticky rung at a time.

Level 1: Survival And Desire

Picture this: a toddler covered in spaghetti sauce. Life isn’t about stocks or status. It’s a confusing set of seemingly unrelated events. Life is about not dying and emotional control doesn’t yet exist..

Hunger gnaws, cold bites, and that pain from having fingernails cut? That’s the worst pain the baby has ever felt. Thinking at Level 1 is pure reflex: see food, eat. See threat, run or smash. No plans, just sensory overload driving you to grab what feels good and dodge what hurts.

Every human starts at this level, but most outgrow it. Except in pathology: think severe autism or that guy at the grocery store yelling about expired coupons.

And toxic masculinity? Level 1 is the primal protector that men become when times become grim: the father who stays up all night by the fire with a shotgun when the wolves are howling outside. It’s raw, unapologetic drive when there’s a positive motivation.

In the negative, it’s the low-I.Q. murderer who kills someone for $5. These people stuck at this level cannot survive by themselves.

Level 2: Connect

Now the world gets a little less lonely. I’ve got senses, sure, but suddenly, so does everyone else. Thinking now shifts: life is bonding and not being alone. Emotions now project outward because at this level, people now understand that others have needs, too. And, when others are happy, I get what I want. I clean my room, I get cookies.

hoe_math notes that this is where tribes form – but for people stuck at this level, there is nearly zero trust for outsiders. Probably the largest useful structure that this level produces is the family.

Level 3: Control

If the first level had no bonds, the second level had bonds between one person and another, this level is third person: the realization that other people have connections to each other. And that’s a great tool to use to get control of them.

If Level 3 was a decade, it would be The Me Decade, the 1970s. Since all of humanity can live at Level 1 or Level 2, fully 92% of humanity can make it to Level 3 every day, according to hoe_math, who you should trust because “math” is in his name.

At this stage, the strong exploit the week, and morality is an afterthought. If India was a level, it would be Level 3. It’s a war of all against all with a billion caste systems.

Level 4: Conform

This is all about the rules. Only 40% of humanity gets here every day. That should scare you.

Yeouch! That tells you that my India comment on Level 3 is probably spot on. This is the level that gives us useful structures like functional civilizations and businesses and religion. It is here that ethics and the study of rules start. This is where morality takes over in judgements.

People compete for power here, yet compete using rules that are agreed on. Chaos unchecked? No thanks. Now the flip side of the lower levels becomes apparent: selfishness breeds anarchy, so rules it is. It’s Good vs. Evil, us vs. them. Life demands order.

Level 4 birthed all higher-level civilizations.

Level 5: Achieve

Now we’re into the land of libertarians, big L and little l versions. About 28% of people reach this level on a daily basis.

Rules are for rubes. Freedom über alles. Good and bad? That’s subjective. Life is about results. Set goals, crunch the numbers, win big, add sawdust to the raisin bran if nobody notices.

Why bow to a boss or a Bible?

The Level 5 achiever is the builder, the provider, the man who turns dirt into dynasties. It’s the dad working doubles so the kids eat steak, not ramen. I think the majority of the success of the United States has been entirely due to Level 5 behavior, so therefore it is called toxic masculinity.

Level 6: Understand

Here’s where the wheels start wobbling off the cart, and also where higher-level thinking is observably worse than lower-level thinking.

In Level 6, uniqueness reigns; old rules are chains. Life celebrates diversity! Every truth is a perspective, every culture is valid, except (in the Western version) that mean old Christian patriarchy. Reject hierarchies, listen to the oppressed, seek consensus, live, laugh, love. Subjectivity rules; impose nothing.

Sounds noble, right? Until you try validating all cultures and beliefs and fetishes.

That’s the rot. I mean, it’s well-meaning, but it rests upon a fundamental denial of reality.

Seek “understanding” without boundaries, and boom: moslims torch the gay bar that the Level 6 people thought would be just fine right next to the mosque as hoe_math described it.

Because why?

Because no matter how much Level 6 thinkers want 82 I.Q. people from Somalia to be accepting, tolerant, and embrace the gay lifestyle, they are Level 3 thinkers that want to chuck the gays off cliffs just to see what sound the make when they hit bottom.

This leads to the GloboLeftElite® importing clash after clash into the nation, then cries “tolerance!” while cities burn.

Truth dies on the altar of feelings.

Pathologies? Narcissistic echo chambers and spineless relativism. It’s why campuses are safe spaces for screams of GloboLeftist rage but not debate and England will tolerate rape and murder as a moslem/hindu team sport but not tolerate people noticing it.

Level 7: Harmonize

Finally, wisdom dawns.

Despite being only 5% of the population, I would bet that most of my regular readers get here or hang out at Level 5. On either side of this, we’ve seen the mess that Level 6 is. The problem with Level 6 is that it’s based on lies. Pretty lies, but lies nonetheless.

The rules we made up at Level 4?

Some of them make fundamental sense in a way that, if you ignore them, birthrates of smart people plummet and the birth of idiots is reinforced. Or crime rate increases. Or we decide that creating fiat currencies is a good thing, just like they did in Weimar Germany.

But reality exists. Those Level 4 rules aren’t random! It is folly of the highest order to ignore them. Complex systems demand rules and judgement in order to work, and mixing cultures sometimes ends up with the result that border walls are way better than immigration.

This is toxic masculinity, yet again: the harmonizer is the statesman, the elder who balances freedom with fences, innovation with inheritance. It’s the patriarch reading the room—protecting the tribe by pruning threats, not hugging them.

The dangers here are existential drift that leads to nihilism or half-baked gurus with books to sell.

As I said, only 5% get here regularly.

Why?

It takes I.Q. to juggle viewpoints, model systems empirically, and see patterns in the interactions. Low I.Q. folks stall at Level 4 conformity and Level 6 is a trap for people who want to see a beautiful world that could never exist.

So, why fixate on these? Because Level 6 thinking led, at least partially, to the trouble we’re in now. Endless “understanding” ignores that not all cultures play nice and that our people need jobs, too. Validate it all, and you get Paris no-go zones or Rotherham horrors. Level 6 whispers “coexist,” but Level 7 shouts “think about this.”

The same level of thinking that got us into this mess isn’t going to get us out of it, and, sadly we’re going to have to continue to go after and eliminate Level 6 thinking where we see it.

And we will, because the result of losing?

It’s Level 3. And the world already has way too much India.