Propaganda – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Falling Down: A Movie You Should Hate, Because It Hates You

“I am not a vigilante. I am just trying to get home to my little girl’s birthday and if everybody’ll stay out of my way, then nobody’ll get hurt.” – Falling Down

I think I’m done with the “It Came From . . . “ series. Now I’ll probably just spend some time (once a month) looking at propaganda in movies and TV and how it was used to manipulate us. I’ll miss those because they were fun, but I’ve just nearly run out of good years to review.

For no reason other than I was thinking about it for some reason, I’d like to look back at the movie Falling Down to discuss how, even though it was popular among some people on the TradRight, it wasn’t a love letter: it was a hate letter. Back in 1993, the movie Falling Down came out. I went and saw it that one time in the theater. I recall being repulsed.

I wasn’t very wise then. I didn’t and couldn’t exactly put a finger on why I was repulsed other than walking out of a movie with the distinct feeling that I was just in the presence of Evil. It was a memorable movie, though. I still remember many of the scenes and the setups and the way those scenes made me feel even though it’s been nearly 33 years since I watched them.

This movie is pure propaganda dressed up as action-adventure.

First, the propaganda is firmly against white people. There is something very wrong with all of the white people in the movie, and we’ll get into more details on that. Second, it’s against families as no intact family is shown in a positive light. Third, it’s utterly against not just white people, but white men in particular.

That’s where our protagonist comes in, with Micheal Douglas playing a white guy. Michael Douglas plays D-FENS (he has a name, but who cares), a generic replaceable technical guy or manager in the defense industry in Los Angeles.

The main technique used by quite gay and quite leftist director was to put the quite white main character into a sympathetic position so that the audience, mainly white men for “action” movies in 1993, sympathizes with him.

So, it starts in traffic. Everyone hates traffic. Everyone has been in traffic.

We see D-FENS stuck in traffic and his air conditioner fails, and he says “screw it, I’m not parking it, I’m abandoning it.” Every single man I know has fantasized about at abandoning at least one car.

We understand D-FENS.

The fact they choose minor things to make the character relatable is in Wilder’s Rule 7: The biggest fights are over the smallest things. This is the trick to make you feel what he feels. They chose to do that by picking relatable things, and then magnifying the reaction to them to the level of the darkest fantasy that I’ve ever had.

Then, D-FENS is confronted with another minor annoyance, this time a crappy convenience store with an asshole owner/clerk and ludicrous prices. In this case, it’s a Korean who D-FENS tags as being insufficiently grateful to America.

It’s that pattern again. But we’ve all been there to the shitty convenience store with outrageous prices offset by surly service. In this case, though, after being threatened with a baseball bat after asking for the owner/clerk to make change so he could use a pay phone, D-FENS takes the bat from the owner/clerk and smashes the place up.

Again, we’ve all been there.

Except we didn’t smash the place up, though deep down we understand and sympathize with D-FENS. Heck, to show how morally righteous he is, D-FENS even pays the inflated price for his beverage.

He ends up fighting with some gang members over a pay-phone, beats one with a bat so they try to shoot him. They crash their car after trying to kill him (convenient, that), and D-FENS takes their convenient bag of weapons. The GloboLeftist critics HATED this, because the gang members were Hispanic.

“How dare you show anyone but a white, blonde man as a member of a gang. Or not have one of those multi-racial gangs that only exist in movies?” This is a second point aimed at the white male audience. “See, we’re on your side. Ethnics in gangs with no adherence to Western values are scary. See, we’re not GloboLeftists if we show we’re race realists.”

As we go through this, we find that D-FENS was laid off from his defense job.

Why as he laid off?

The Soviets no longer existed, so why did we need a defense industry? It was going to be nothing but peace forever, and in fact the only question was which moslem country was first going to turn into a liberal democracy and make celebrating gay sex a national requirement.

Except . . . well, here are the words of the guy who actually wrote the screenplay:

“To me, even though the movie deals with complicated urban issues, it really is just about one basic thing: The main character represents the old power structure of the U.S. that has now become archaic, and hopelessly lost. And that way, I guess you could say D-FENS is like Los Angeles. For both of them, it’s adjust-or-die time–that’s what the movie is about.”

If you’re a white guy and thought that this movie was about you, from your frustrations with fast food to the epidemic of divorced dads who couldn’t see their kids, notsofastguido. The author hates you. The director hates you.

They hate you and want not only to replace you but to eradicate you from memory. In the end, D-FENS is shot to death in front of his ex-wife and kid. Erased from history just like he was erased from his job and erased from his family. His life, his dedication, turns to dust. Even the lines, “I’m the bad guy? How’d that happen? I did everything they told me to,” are meant to demoralize you.

When a bad guy that you’re meant to see yourself in is killed and his legacy is wiped away the intent is clear: to demoralize you. You have been symbolically sacrificed by the movie.

They want you to know how they feel: Nothing you do matters, white guy. Your life is meaningless. Worse than meaningless. We will tear your statues down. We will erase your genes from history.

Oh, and who kills D-FENS? Robert Duvall, a retiring cop. And the precinct he’s retiring from?

Almost all of they younger cops are black or Asian or Hispanic. Duvall’s character is being replaced, too by a sassy Latina. But since Duvall is going gracefully, he gets to live.

The lesson that you were meant to take away as a white guy was simple: you are being replaced. You will lose. Resist, and we will erase you. Retire, and we will give your culture a retirement while you whither and die.

The California the writer and director lived in wasn’t the California they wanted.

Not long after this movie came out, the populace voted to deny welfare benefits to illegals.

“Not constitutional,” said the judge.

Then California voters mandated that nearly all public school instruction be in English. Student performance increased. Yet, in 2016, that new California, the California the director and writer of Falling Down wanted, the California without room for people like D-FENS, voted to overturn it.

So, I hate this movie. And unlike younger me, I now know why.

Because it hated me first.

Every Where You Look: The Game

“I’m giving you a choice: either put on these glasses or start eating that trash can.” – They Live

“I’m hear to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.” (all memes as found)

Most posts aren’t connected, outside of they’re all written by me. However, the last few have been following a theme that’s pretty old: mistaking The Game for reality, even Plato wrote about it. There are times we all get stuck in it. It’s pretty seductive. We mistake The Game for reality, often to our own detriment.

What’s The Game?

The Game is where life moves away from reality. Money (or currency, or cash, which are not the same thing but we’ll use interchangeably in this post) was invented as a way to make trade easier. Gold and silver were great because they didn’t rust, could be split up in itty bitty increments, and couldn’t be printed.

Money is an invention. Collectively, humans made it.

We also invented interest rates. Back a year or so ago (I’m too lazy to look it up) I invited everyone to think differently about the world by changing one simple thing: eliminate interest on money.

If you haven’t seen the movie They Live, you should. But when I suggested that “Let’s pretend that interest rates don’t exist,” I felt like Rowdy Roddy Piper trying to get Keith David to put on the ZZTop® sunglasses that (spoiler) allowed humans to see that half the people around him were aliens.

I mean, we didn’t get in a fistfight that lasted 20 minutes, but no one wanted to play a different version of The Game. It was such a fundamental departure from the way the current world worked that people just couldn’t imagine it.

This is what The Game does.

I’ll guarantee that your great grandparents moving across the American West or settling in Kentucky or working a farm in Virginny could have imagined life without interest rates. Many of them may not have borrowed money at interest at all.

In their lives.

It’s not that money didn’t matter, it most certainly did. But if you grubstaked a house on the prairie you might have had to borrow a dollar or two until the crop came in, but it was probably to the store, and it probably wasn’t at interest. Who would even loan against a farm? Land was free for those that could homestead it. Banking for everyone is a new invention. Just like interest rates, it was just a new rule for The Game.

The reason? Why not extend The Game to everyone so that they could transfer their wealth at six percent per year to the owners of a bank?

Large amounts of society are like this. It is a large part of why it was so crucial to the COVID tRUsT tHe ScIENce crowd. This was in a time of general insanity as the “trans-women are women” and “women are exactly like men” and “black people are really oppressed and George Floyd was murdered” hysteria hit peaks.

All of these are symptoms that The Game is afoot, and there is nothing a person who has bought into The Game will fight more than having the rules of The Game challenged. And if individuals fight hard, the system will fight even harder.

January 6, anyone?

If I were a suspicious man, I’d think this was all an intentional plan to move away from the real to the fantasy world of make-believe things like money. The transition for money moved from:

Money is something tangible. Gold, yes. Silver, maybe along with some copper and nickel. But I don’t trust silver or copper or nickel much.
Okay, gold is so important you can’t touch it but you can keep your silver coins. Only the government. Oh, and the gold that we just took from you? We’re going to immediately double its value. But the dollar will always be backed by gold.
Silver in coins are too expensive to make. We’ll just make them out of base metals.
Gold? We’re just going to have dollars. You can buy your gold back.
Pennies? Too expensive to make, we lose money on every single one we make. We’ll skip ‘em.
Say, have you tried some of this electronic digital cash so we can track everything you buy? So convenient and easy!

The reality has been twisted, and taking your money from you via interest payments and taxes wasn’t enough, they had to take the money, too. The rules of The Game have been changed.

And me arguing that getting rid of interest rates is a crazy thought experiment?

The way your money was taken the same way your rights are taken. They are removed slowly, people are nudged. If you follow the Supreme Court, the plain language of the document has been twisted so far as for some judges to believe that somewhere in the Constitution is the protected right of dual citizens to

Exist, and
Serve in jobs like congressman or as a federal judge.

But, yet, the plain language allowing me to own military-grade weapons means that I shouldn’t be allowed anything more powerful than a shotgun pellet gun bb-gun squirt gun dart gun Nerf™ gun, and my right to the Nerf® gun isn’t absolute.

The rules of The Game have been changed.

Okay, I made this one.

The same way that your rights are taken is the same way your values are taken.

Imagine society in 1950. Perfect? No. If you didn’t mow your lawn, you couldn’t get a job or a loan. Society rejected you, but those may have been features, rather than bugs.

Likewise, gays couldn’t adopt and certainly couldn’t get jobs where they would be alone with children – that would be insane! But then The Game changed. The Catholic Church decided that they could trust gay priests, since priests were celibate and, besides, God loves gay people, too, right?

Ouch. Not so much. It wasn’t the “priest” that caused the problem, it was the “gay”.

Gay people existed then. Not in such large numbers because, for large numbers of gay people today “gay” is a choice. And back then, the choice was made for you, and communities who had sexual fetishes about latex-covered toasters didn’t exist because there was no Reddit™ to connect them all.

That was better. Rule changes to The Game have spread farther, faster in our connected world.

But our values have been ripped away via rule changes to The Game. Nothing is wrong, except thinking something is wrong. Silly. The Game is about inclusion. Even to the point of including people who hate you. This is what is wrong with the world today.

Yeah. See what that’s doing with birth rates. But its also on purpose. These values have been chipped at every year since at least the 1950s until the only value that The Game will leave you with is the value of money.

And they’ll even take that away from you.

Just try on the damn glasses, why don’t you?

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About Society, Values, And Waffles

“One time I bit hard into a marble ashtray, thinking it was a savory waffle.” – Anchorman 2

I bought The Mrs. a beautiful diamond ring, but she asked why I didn’t spend that money on a car instead. Silly wife! They don’t make fake cars.

I’ve spent hours reviewing why the country I grew up in felt like it ran on autopilot: lawns were mowed, kids were in school, and front doors were unlocked at night and then turned into . . . this. The version I see in 2026 feels like it’s held together with duct tape, threats, with little nothing shared.

Friday, I wrote about how real personal change only happens when emotion rewires values from the inside.

I think that same principle scales up to the societal level.

A highly functioning society doesn’t run on rules and cops. It runs on a shared vision and voluntary self-enforcement: you don’t have fist fights between naked people in Waffle House® at 3AM where I end up losing a shoe because that’s simply not done. When that vision fades, you get more rules, more monitors, more guys with badges and attitude. And the whole thing gets heavier, slower, and meaner. And less free.

I went to my first Fight Club meeting last night. I showed up late so I missed the first few rules, but it was awesome! I love Fight Club!

Let me tell you what doesn’t build a free, cohesive society.

First, someone making people comply. North Korea proves it works if your goal is terrified people who cry when the Dear Leader walks by and you don’t mind the occasional public execution for wearing the wrong socks. Compliance by force is easy. Loyalty? Not so much. People smile on the outside and cringe on the inside. That’s not a society. That’s just a prison with better choreography.

Second, someone with power monitoring me to make me comply. Remember 2020-2021? It wasn’t technically illegal to say no to the clotshot, but tell that to the people who lost their jobs, their airline seat, or couldn’t put their kids in school without it. A whole lot of people who would’ve skipped it folded under the overt pressure of “your papers, please.” Some complied, without believing. Big difference between that and the True Believers.

Third, someone moving society to monitor my behavior. The GloboLeftElite tried to turn the internet into one giant hall monitor. COVID was the big opportunity. Disagree on Twitter® about anything, (masks, origins, side effects) and poof, banned. The goal was simple: only the approved narrative gets to be broadcast. The goal was: brainwash the populace into one artificial shared vision by deleting every other idea.

I was fat but I identified as slim. I guess that made me trans-slender.

But we didn’t need any of that garbage back when the country actually worked. Back then we had a shared set of values. Values kept lawns mowed without code enforcement officers. Values kept people showing up to work, paying their bills, and not stealing the neighbor’s Amazon® packages. Values were the invisible fence that let a free people stay free.

A huge part of the collapse is the deliberate feminization of society. Women are wonderful creatures. Their nurturing and care are the reason families exist and babies don’t die in the woods. But scale that instinct up to the level of national policy and it turns horrifying.

An illiterate military-age man crossing the border illegally triggers the exact same emotional circuit as a crying baby, especially in the spinster wine-aunt who never had kids. The illegal becomes a surrogate for the kid her barren womb never produced. Must help. Must clean it up. Must give it a chance.

And when it rapes or murders? Well, punishing it is so mean. It just needs more care. That same instinct created the victimhood hierarchy we see everywhere now. Who’s crying the loudest today? Which baby gets the most snacks, the most attention, the most special rules? The entire GloboLeft runs on sorting victims by volume.

I heard that one of Bob Ross’ victims said, “I’m scared” as they walked into the woods. Bob replied, “You’re scared? I have to walk out of here all by myself.”

The attempt to replace old values ran for decades through every TV show from M*A*S*H to Maude to Diff’rent Strokes to Golden Girls. Every single “very special episode” was a Trojan horse. Archie Bunker® would land a zinger, then spend the last two minutes being proven to be the world’s biggest idiot.

The message was clear: your grandparents’ values are dumb and mean. Here, try these shiny new ones instead.

The replacement values, however, weren’t built on what is True, Beautiful, and Good.

They were built on lies.

“There’s only one race, the human race.”
“They’re just like us!”
“This isn’t a nation, it’s a country built only on ideas, not on the posterity of the Founders.”
“Every idea is equally valuable.”
“Love is love.”

The biggest lie of all time? “I have read and accept the terms and conditions to use this software.”

I could go on. The lies are finally becoming visible to the general public, the way they always do when reality shows up with receipts. What’s coming back are the old values, because those are the only ones that actually work at scale.

Getting there won’t be easy. Societies don’t pivot on a dime. There will be stunning levels of violence, which is the pain that comes from feminists not understanding that foreigners aren’t the same thing as babies.

The emotional foundation of the country is shift.

I think we will win, because we represent what’s True, Beautiful, and Good, and those that represent that will control the switch on the society that rises from the rubble. If the nation that follows is lucky, they will have the shared values that once made voluntary self-enforcement the norm and not the shattered “all against all” values of an India or a Haiti.

Seriously, is this the world we want?

Rejecting Hollywood’s® propaganda, the GloboLeftist victim Olympics, must be replaced by the old, sturdy values, the ones rooted in family, work, truth, and a common language and culture. Importing millions who share none of that doesn’t enrich: it dilutes until the shared vision evaporates and only the cops remain.

I’m not naive. The GloboLeftElite won’t surrender the microphone quietly. The lies have been lucrative. But lies always collapse under their own weight.

And that shoe I lost at Waffle House®? I’ve developed a solution:

IHOP®.

Change, Propaganda, And Painting Lessons

“You were looking for a way to change your life.” – Fight Club

His pizza was also burnt and his beer was frozen. He couldn’t pull anything out on time.

I’ve stared at the ceiling at 3 a.m. more times than I care to count in the past, wondering why some things in my life change and others stay stuck like a rusted engine nut on a ’78 Jeep® pickup.

Change.

It sounds simple. Turn left instead of right. Take the red pill or the blue pill or both. Eat the salad. Quit the habit I want to quit. But the real change, the kind that rewires who I am, doesn’t happen because somebody tells me to change. Change doesn’t happen because the boss is watching or the government posts another billboard. Change happens when something inside me finally decides it’s time.

And the crazy part?

I control that switch. No matter what my situation looks like right now, no matter how many birthdays I’ve stacked up, that control is still mine.

Let me tell you what doesn’t work.

But the boarding agent said she could have pie once we got to our seats: “There’ll be a piece when you are done.”

First, someone trying to make me change.

Forget it. I’m stubborn. Bull-headed, really. Push me, and I’ll dig in like a moist Missouri mule afflicted with mucus. I’ve sent pushy salesmen packing more times than I can remember. They come at me with the hard sell, the guilt trip, the “you really should” speech, and my natural reaction is to do the exact opposite.

It’s not rational.

It’s not even smart sometimes. But it’s me.

Second, someone with power hovering over my shoulder, monitoring me.

Sure, I’ll toe the line while they’re looking. I’ll smile, nod, and change exactly enough to get them off my back. The minute the spotlight moves, though? Back to business as usual. No buy-in. No real shift. Just temporary theater. I know I’m not the only one.

Third, the whole society-is-watching angle.

This is Big Brother with a million little henchmen. I’ll admit it: back when I was a kid, the “Give a hoot, don’t pollute®” campaign actually worked on wee Wilder. I picked up trash and felt good about it. But that was simple. Today it’s different. Now it’s algorithms written for the fat-breasted blue-haired virtue warbler. It’s social pressure and cameras everywhere, all trying to nudge behavior.

My kids wanted a puppy for Christmas, but I told them they were eating ham like everyone else.

I see it for what it is: a fancier version of the same old “boss is watching me” game.

I might play along in public when I absolutely must, but inside?

Still no sale.

So, what actually moves the needle?

Only one thing I’ve ever found works that works on me or anyone else:

changing values.

And values don’t change because of logic. They change because of emotion, and not common emotions like “cold” or “sleepy” or “salt.” No. Raw, strong, gut-punch emotion.

I posed naked for a magazine once. The lady at the 7-11® counter sure overreacted.

Take when I became a new father. One minute the world revolved around me. The next minute I was holding this tiny human who depended on me for everything, and I realized the universe didn’t orbit John Wilder anymore unless I put on enough weight to create my own gravity well. That was a big deal.

Not a lecture.

Not a chart.

Just pure, overwhelming emotion. My values shifted: “providing” and “protecting” now were more important than “buzzed” and “sleepy”. Everything else got rearranged around that.

I’ve seen the same thing in guys who barely survive a heart attack.

One day they’re carrying an extra seventy pounds, puffing on cigs, eating like a fat girl on a date with a blind man.

The next day after their slow dance with the reaper?

They drop the weight, kill the habits, start running, and turn into the most irritating health evangelists you’ve ever met, nearly as bad as bicycling atheist vegan transexual Harvard™ grads.

Nearly dying does that, I guess.

When I’m surrounded by my family, with my last breath I want to say: “Hey, you guys want to see a dead body?”

It’s not a gentle suggestion from a doctor. It’s terror and relief and gratitude and fear all slamming together at once into the conclusion that there are a finite amount of seconds left on that clock.

Emotion rewires the hardware.

That’s also exactly how propaganda works. It skips the logic and goes straight for the deepest buttons we have: lust, fear, the need to belong, pain, despair and the need for PEZ™. Most of them are negative, because negative is easy to manufacture, and negative sticks.

And in 2026 we’re swimming in it.

Screens, news, ads, entertainment are a constant bombardment trying to shift what we value without us even noticing.

One excellent YouTuber® on this subject is Screenwashed™, and he talks about how films are used to destroy our culture. He breaks down the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways Hollywood rewires what we think is normal, what we think is heroic, what we think we should want. I’m not sure exactly how long it’ll be before they come to get this guy, but I’d suggest you give him a look. Here’s one of his videos.

Even I, the mighty John Wilder, am not immune from propaganda. I’ve caught myself feeling emotions I didn’t ask for after watching something “harmless.” That’s why I’ve gotten deliberate about what I let into my head.

I pick and choose.

I pause and ask: What emotion is this feeding me right now?

Why?

Does it line up with the man I want to be, or is it nudging me toward someone else’s script?

The external stuff can scream all it wants. The pressures, the trends, the crises, the propaganda machines can poke and prod and threaten. But the final decision on what I value? That’s mine. Always has been.

The best addiction to have is injecting yourself with brake fluid. You can stop anytime you want.

We can all flip it.

Not because some expert or politician or trending hashtag told us to. Not because someone’s watching or shaming. But because we decide to let in an emotion strong enough to move the values that actually run your life.

Starve the propaganda. Examine every emotion that shows up at your door and decide if it gets to stay.

Change isn’t a mystery. It’s not reserved for the young or the lucky or the disciplined. It’s a simple, stubborn fact: I control the basis of it. I always have. And so do you.

The world can keep pushing.

I’ll keep deciding.

How To Break A Society, Part II: Destroy The Family

“You can do anything, but never go against the family.” – The Godfather

Women are like the IRS: they won’t tell you what they want until you make a mistake. (memes as-found)

Picture this: A young guy in finishes high school, gets a factory job paying enough for a house, a car, and a stay-at-home wife. They pop out 2.5 kids (the .5 is for Kevin, who isn’t too bright). They go to church on Sunday, and the kids argue about whose turn it is to mow the lawn.

There is no prenup, no Tinder® swipes, no OnlyFans™ side hustle and no Facebook™ telling the wife that every other woman has it better. Just stability. Boring?

No. Enriching. But this isn’t 2026, it’s the standard from 1956 before the rot set in.

Today: That same guy’s grandkid is 28, drowning in student debt for that degree she got in degree in the Ethnography of Colonialism and its impact on Basket Weaving techniques of Amazonian tribes. She’s living in a pod with five roommates, and swiping right on profiles of 6’2”, six figure Chads, trading her youth to chase a fleeting thrill.

Are barbarians people who cut hair in a library?

Marriage? Ha! She’s living her “best life” on a carousel of dates with men that would never marry her, but sure would give her horizontal attention for an evening.

Kids? Such a constraint!

The idea is simple: everything is made of atoms, and those atoms are the smallest piece that makes up whatever it is we’re looking at. At the core of any society is an atom, too.

This isn’t the proton-neutron-electron kind. No, this is the atom of society, the family, a Dad, a Mom, and kids. Throughout all of recorded history, societies that crank out the next generation survive. The ones that don’t? They end up as footnotes in dusty history books.

The most stable setup? Dad in charge, Mom raising the rugrats, everyone pulling in the same direction. Young men get wives, which calms their inner caveman urges. Kids give them purpose beyond leveling up in Call of Duty®.

A society of married dads with skin in the game? They build. They invest. They don’t riot over pronouns. This setup is so rock-solid it’s baked into every enduring culture from Rome to the Amish. It’s also morally encoded. It’s True, Beautiful, and Good. The Bible talks about this from the earliest through the latest books, with not a single mention of gay marriage being stunning and brave.

I told a female cop she was stunning to get out of a ticket. Shouldn’t have added, “and that’s not even the booze talking.”

But since the late 1800s, there’s been a full-court press to dismantle the family.

Why? Because stable families are hard to control. Families don’t need government handouts or therapy apps because they self-regulate.

Enter the wrecking crew.

First?

Women voting. It sounds innocent and there’s a broad consensus in the United States that it’s a good thing.

“Equality!” the women yelled. But it fails for a simple reason. It’s based upon the concept that society’s basic unit isn’t the family, instead it’s the individual. Individuals don’t reproduce; families do. An island of just women in a few decades will produce an island where no one lives at all, and when the last two women die it’s nearly certain they wouldn’t have talked to each other in years.

I’ve said it before: if I was in charge, I’d restrict voting to folks with stake in the future. How about married men who are net taxpayers, wed to women under 35. This would produce serious elections with no pandering to cat ladies or trust-fund socialists. You could make the argument that married women vote rationally because, “Hey, low taxes mean more for the kids.” But unmarried women? They lean heavily toward anti-family voting, like funding endless welfare that rewards single moms over intact homes, endless immigration because refugees are like the children they didn’t have that they didn’t care for.

And they really get mad when you go to the library and put all the women’s rights books in the fiction section.

Continuing our trip back in history, hand-in-hand with suffrage came the push for contraception. The big push for legalization kicked off around 1914, right alongside the suffragettes.

Perhaps the reason that these old battle axes were in favor of contraception was because if sex meant that a man had the chance of being chained to one of them, they’d never get laid. Look at old photos of those gals, they were coyotes-ugly in corsets.

Regardless, the goal was decoupling sex from consequences. Fun? Sure. But families? Optional now. The Four Horsemen of the Family-pocalypse were galloping at around this time.

They consisted of: Women’s voting, spiritualism (because nothing says “stable society” like séances with your dead aunt), contraception, and free love.

All of these are profoundly anti-family.

The roots for these movements are as far away from True, Beautiful, and Good as you can get: they were ugly, communist, and family-hating. A generation after the 19th Amendment, Planned Parenthood® rebranded. Their pitch? Legal abortion and, later, the Pill. No kids? No family. Sex is all about fun.

People who casually use hyperbole are the worst.

Then Roe v. Wade in 1973 led to abortion on demand. “My body, my choice,” except the body inside isn’t yours, but hey, logic is optional in revolutions. The result? Millions of potential families and children vaporized before they started.

Add in the other sacrament of Evil: no-fault divorce. Marriage used to mean something and was difficult to get out of. Now? “Irreconcilable differences” means that divorces are on the menu. In marriages with college-educated women, over 90% are initiated by the woman.

Why? “I’m unhaaaaappy. Pay me.”

Disposable vows means meaningless commitment. Families shatter like dropped PEZ® dispensers.

And the cherry on top? Gay marriage. French historian Emmanuel Todd (LINK) called this the final shark-jump for Western society. It redefines marriage from a “procreation unit” to a “feel-good contract.”

Society’s now officially anti-family. Proof? Heritage Americans’ birthrate dipped below replacement. In 55 years, we went from a tight-knit nation of shared blood, faith, and language to a balkanized mess where the only glue is “we all breathe oxygen . . . mostly.”

Media’s been the propaganda arm on steroids for this anti-family movement. Hollywood has been anti-family at least since Archie Bunker first stepped on stage. Now? Every script’s a checklist:

All bad guys: White, straight heritage Americans.
Women: Kick butt like Rambo, but in heels. Physics? Who needs that?
Dads: Bumbling idiots who can’t tie their shoes without Mom’s help.
Moms: Boss queens running the show, because empowerment.
Kids: Precocious sexualized objects wiser than adults.
Traditional values: Mocked as uncool, if shown at all. Religion is shown only to show how evil it is. Children of the Corn, anyone?

It’s like Hollywood hired the Antichrist as script consultant and he became a network executive. Peak America was built on strong families.

Now? We’re force-fed “Modern Family®” as the new normal, where Dad is optional and kids are accessories.

None of this was accidental and every bit of it was engineered. The GloboLeftElite saw stable families as roadblocks. Families teach self-reliance, morality, and “no, you can’t have everything.”

My new hobby is going up to young women who are staring at their phones and asking if they’re my Tinder® date.

Government wants dependence: “We’ll be your family, citizen. Just vote blue and hand over your paycheck.” They splintered us with migration, welfare that punished marriage, schools that indoctrinate instead of educate, and a culture that celebrates “my truth” over “our future.”

The absurdity? We did this during our peak prosperity where we could have invested our wealth and energy to take us to the stars.

We were fat, happy, and gullible.

We were perfect marks for the con. “Break the old norms, women, they’re oppressive!”

Why do college-educated GloboLeftist women buy pit bulls? A lot of them go after their masters.

Now we’ve got fatherless homes breeding crime waves, women wondering where the good men went, and a birthrate that screams extinction event. A society without families is a house of cards in a hurricane.

Young men without purpose? They don’t create since there’s no reason to.

Women without kids? They adopt causes or cats.

Kids without dads? Statistics waiting to happen.

The bill? As I said before, it’s coming due, with interest.

The AWFUL Truth About Minnesota

“There’s an awful lot of moisture in here.” – Empire Strikes Back

One kind of bird sticks together: vel-crows.

Ah, the AWFULs. If you haven’t heard the term yet, it stands for Affluent White Female Urban Liberal. It’s the kind of acronym that makes mainstream media clutch their pearls. (Note that even the most-used cliché term for this behavior assumes Affluent White Female behavior.) GloboLeftists are wringing their hands in performative outrage and sending out a virtue signal so bright it can be seen from six light years (500 grams) away.

“How dare you label these empowered women!” they cry, as if the term isn’t a spot-on descriptor for the screeching harpies we’ve seen dominating headlines from Minneapolis to Manhattan. You can always tell when you’re over weak spots of the GloboLeft: they turn to the media to try to create a narrative so that they can fabricate a crime.

The term bothers them because it’s true.

AWFUL also exposes a deeper rot in their ideology. AWFUL isn’t just a label. It’s a symptom of a society where their ascendant political power has left GloboLeft women unfulfilled and GloboLeft men emasculated.

An AWFUL was invited to a battle of wits. She was mentally challenged.

Let’s start with the examples that made AWFUL go viral. Minneapolis is a petri dish for leftist lunacy, and AWFULs are the germs that created the fuzzy mold in the agar. Renee Good, an affluent, white, urban liberal woman, attempted murder by vehicle. She rammed her car into an ICE agent because well, her sex fetish partner yelled, “Drive, baby, drive,” which sounds like an accomplice to me.

Even the GloboLeftElite newspapers can’t make Renee become sympathetic enough so she could be their Georgette Floyd.

Another Minneapolis example is the classic harpy that was screeching at Nick Shirley outside the “Quality Learing Center.” There she was, a picture of entitled fury, howling like a banshee because reality, in the form of competent white men, dared intrude on her bubble and threaten her pet minorities.

These aren’t isolated incidents; they are the face of a movement where AWFULs lead the charge, amplified by the weak GloboLeft men who let them run wild.

I taught Naomi how to self-reflect. She’s now an aware Wolf.

Enter Naomi Wolf, feminist icon turned truth-teller. In a January 9 Xeet®, Wolf nailed the root cause: GloboLeft men are weak, submissive, and estrogenized. They’re soy-latte sippers who wouldn’t fight for a parking spot, let alone their women. And women hate it. Deep down, women crave men who will fight for them, can fight for them, and would kill for them if needed. They want dangerous men.

But crucially, they want that lethal potential aimed outward, not at them. It’s the thrill of controlled danger: the knowledge that their man has murder in his heart but chooses love instead. This is literally the basis for all of women’s porn literature. Fifty Shades of Grey is about a powerful billionaire who would do anything for a mousey reporter.

Fat girls know how to get what they desire: a ten-chin.

GloboLeft men, with their man-buns, therapy-speak, and pipe-cleaner arms offer none of that. They’re safe, soft, spineless, and sexless. No wonder AWFULs are unhinged; their men have left them adrift, starving for dominance.

This dynamic isn’t new, it’s always been here.

Women test men constantly, pushing boundaries to see if he’ll push back. AWFULs take it to extremes because their men won’t. These women fight because they want to lose. They crave submission but rebel against it, creating a cycle of frustration.

Why do they put themselves in danger, marching into riots, screaming at strangers, or laying down in front of vehicles in the roadways? It’s a cry to be controlled. They want a man to dominate, to say “no” and to mean it. Without that, they spiral into rage, lashing out at the world.

This has been common knowledge for all of civilization.

As is slid my finger up and down her g-string, she whispered to me, “I want my guitar back.”

Also, these women are programmed to be takers. Feminism sold them “strength and independence,” but in reality, they’re dependent on systems that extract wealth from others to give to them. DEI hands them jobs they might not earn on merit: affirmative action for the affluent, daycare for the female set. Government funding props up their lifestyles: welfare for single moms, child support laws that bleed men dry.

I’ll not get into how modern “churches” support this, but if a church wants men to “man up” on Father’s Day and exalts single mothers on Mother’s Day, well, their message might be a bit scrambled.

Few single women are net positive taxpayers. They consume much more in services than they contribute. This entitlement breeds resentment. Without responsibilities, they demand more, and more for everyone. Thus, they become the L of AWFUL. Liberal. They want free things. Free healthcare, free student loan forgiveness, endless “rights” without reciprocity or regard on who has to pay for it.

Feminism freed women from traditional constraints, but at what cost? It removed duties like family, home, and fidelity, replacing them with “empowerment.” Now, the hill they die on is abortion rights: the ultimate rejection of responsibility. Killing their babies whenever, wherever, is their sacred cow.

It’s not about choice; it’s about avoiding consequences.

But think of the clicks!

George Orwell saw it coming in 1984. In the Party’s dystopia, the women are the most fanatical: “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”

AWFULs are modern versions of those women Orwell wrote about: fanatical, slogan-chanting, spying on “wrongthink” via social media. They police language, cancel dissent, all while their weak men nod along. Orwell knew. Without strong men, women become the regime’s enforcers.

So, why the handwringing over AWFUL?

It hits too close to home. The term exposes the GloboLeft’s failure: a society of emasculated men and entitled women, spiraling into dysfunction.

AWFULs are the symptom. Weak men and unchecked feminism the disease.

What wins? Strength.

Reclaim constraints, responsibilities, and yes, dominance. Women want it. Men need it. Civilization demands it.

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.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Mass Deportation Is The Moderate Position

“There may be no criminal charges, but I’ll see these files reach Calcutta with the advice you be deported as political undesirables.” – The Man Who Would Be King

A Russian acrobat was deported, and now our human pyramid doesn’t have Oleg to stand on.

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 4

Most memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”. I have kept the Clock O’Doom to 8., given the open support of criminality in Blue cities becoming clearer by the day with their own words. They feel the violence in Chicago and Baltimore and New York and Los Angeles is justified. Beware: the number can climb quickly. Right now (as of publishing) we are dropping below Level Rittenhouse and it looks like we avoided Level Rooftop Korean. For now.

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 – Mass Deportation Is Now The Moderate Position – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Imperial Presidency – 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.

Mass Deportation Is Now The Moderate Position

Finally, and after years of absolutely no one voting for the mass immigration, legal and illegal, native peoples appear to have had enough:

enough of the violence and rape directed at them,
enough of the migrant murderers,
enough of having to work to pay taxes for freeloaders,
enough of the being told they are racist for complaining about having to conform to customs and behaviors that range from bizarre to barely civilized,
enough for having to support the children of other nations and being unable to afford their own,
enough propaganda about how they should seek to be childfree and kill themselves,
enough telling them that they should be happy to be replaced (even though that’s totally not happening and they should still be happy about if it was),
enough government censorship,
enough loss of free speech rights,
enough of being told that their flag is racist,
enough of being told that their economy can’t survive without cheap imported labor, and
enough of having to become strangers in a country they were born in.

If this weren’t Western Europe being invaded by endless hordes of third-worlders, I’d imagine the GloboLeft would scream for arming the invaded, look at Ukraine. They’d be hounding Trump to air-drop in small arms and ammunition and declaring a no-fly zone, giving aid and intelligence to the partisan freedom fighters that were being displaced in their own country.

China, no friend to the West, is amused. Their projections are that the West will cease to exist in any shape of consequence by the year 2050 due to multiculturalism. And, they’re right. Balkanization will lead to a squabbling group of states and atrocities that make the current state of Gaza seem tame by comparison, but no one will be photographing it, because no one will care.

The imported cultures coming into the West are fundamentally incompatible with the West. A group of 320 Africans killed 70 people on their boated headed towards Spain last month. Why? Witchcraft. Sure, I’m all for burning witches, but what chance is there that these sub-Saharan Africans or their descendants will ever enhance Spain? How long will the Spanish take this? The English? The Scots? The Irish? The Danes? Right now, the Poles are having none of it, and are outperforming the rest of the West. The GloboLeft Germans are frightened – having killed 6 or 7 candidates for AfD in the last two weeks, right before their election.

Based on what is obviously coming, the obvious conclusion is this:

Mass deportation is now the moderate position.

Violence and Censorship Update

Violence takes the center stage this month, as Germans on the “right” (they’d be center-left in the US) have been dying – specifically seven candidates right before the election.

Staying in Europe – a young Scottish girl defended herself against some (now arrested) alien invaders. Why is the mainstream media ignoring this story?

In the States, it appears that if you’re beaten up badly, the local politicians will say you had it coming.

And in other cities, the law is only a suggestion.

And, lawmakers themselves are avoiding their elected responsibilities:

Moving to censorship, Great Britain is trying to fight 4Chan.

A 4Chan anon notes that this is all part of the plan:

And games sellers are folding to financial blackmail to censor games from banks threatening to cut them off from banking:

Wikipedia® is a biased source, but some want it to be a controlled source:

Regardless:

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red. Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery numbers as Trump’s policies apparently have been stunning at reversing the tide. We’ll see, as the long term trend is not good.

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 slightly this month, again. Has Trump broken them?

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went slightly up this month even though Democrats have never been more unhappy.

Economic:

The economy is up a bit this month, again. But the H-1B program still exists.

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.

The Imperial Presidency

I wonder how chapped Obama’s butt is every morning when he gets up and looks to see what Trump has done. Really, Obama started it, with his, “I don’t have the Constitutional authority to do it, but I’m doing it anyway” “stroke of the pen, law of the land, kinda cool” executive orders.

Those were bad. I’ve never liked executive orders, since they seem to take the Legislative work and turn it over to the Executive. But the Executive writes all the regulations and Congress never reads them, because, I think, they don’t have enough time because they need to spend the evening eating bacon-wrapped shrimp at the lobbyist parties. So, the Executive has become more and more powerful.

Trump has decided, I think, that “I’m nearly 80, I’m not going to live all that long, I’m not going to be re-elected, they’re going to hate me anyway, so let’s put the pedal to the metal and see how fast this baby will go.” It’s probably never a great idea to put someone who is deep into IDGAF territory and who also has a really short time horizon in charge, but here we are.

It’s amusing, at least for now. Trump has greatly expanded the powers of the Executive, and no one outside of some foreign judges (who claim to be American) has tried to stop him, including the Supreme Court. I could go back in time and blame everyone from Teddy R. to Wilson on up, but, whatever.

It is what it is – the federal government has grown to massive proportions, and Donald Trump has become the Imperial President. It won’t be him, mind you, but the next guy, or the guy after that that will cross the Rubicon and become the “president” for a lot longer. The sort of power that is being unleashed is just the same as before Augustus seized final power in Rome, after Caesar (Trump) set the stage.

Buckle up, because it will be messy getting there.

LINKS

BAD GUYS

https://x.com/i/status/1952491475666878745
https://x.com/TheKevinDalton/status/1954189984594092107
https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/1956137380995588439
https://x.com/i/status/1951772080359473416

GOOD GUYS

https://x.com/TheImmortal007/status/1955711189293654316
https://x.com/i/status/1955639211685765450
https://x.com/billysandytodd/status/1957566944753701169

ONE GUY

https://realclearwire.com/articles/2025/08/01/another_armed_civilian_saves_the_day_153123.html

BODY COUNT

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/20/trans-people-us-data
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/08/21/u-s-unauthorized-immigrant-population-reached-a-record-14-million-in-2023/
https://cis.org/Report/Overall-ForeignBorn-Population-Down-22-Million-January-July
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/08/12/ice-receives-100000-applications-patriotic-americans-who-want-help-remove-murderers
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Trumps-Federal-Layoffs_03-web.jpg?itok=r8mse-D1
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/The-American-Workforce-in-2002-v.jpg?itok=HdYKJcPT
https://classsolidarity.org/billionaires/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fewer-young-adults-reaching-adulthood-milestones-census-report/
https://www.newsweek.com/less-religion-less-babies-declining-birth-rate-2110254

VOTE COUNT

https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1960686967273738382
https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1956450577593848041
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/us/politics/democratic-party-voter-registration-crisis.html?unlocked_article_code=1.fk8.l6c4.j2Uq_wX_yelU&smid=url-share
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2025/08/22/mail-in_ballots_need_to_go_153204.html

CIVIL WAR

https://modernity.news/2025/08/16/british-army-colonel-civil-war-is-coming/
https://off-guardian.org/2025/08/10/stirrings-of-rebellion-in-unhappy-britain/
https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/14/who-has-been-busy-destroying-democracy/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/new-device-data-reveals-exactly-who-showed-white-house-protests
https://forwardobserver.com/color-revolution-a-strategic-assessment-2025-2028/
https://archive.is/VYDs2
https://archive.is/MKs8n
https://www.foxnews.com/media/new-york-times-essay-hoping-military-would-stand-up-trump-draws-fire-social-media
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2025/08/18/what-is-the-democrats-endgame-n2661929#google_vignette
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/pentagon-plan-would-create-military-reaction-force-for-civil-unrest/ar-AA1KmDsZ
https://www.newsweek.com/campus-guardian-angel-school-shooting-drone-2106792

It Should Have Been . . . 1970s

“Does your physical disability preclude you from coming to the point?” – The Eiger Sanction

In 1970, baseball pitcher Doc Ellis pitched a no-hitter while stoned on LSD, which is less impressive when you realize that in 1970 all the batters were on LSD, too.

The Oscar® is, after piles of cash, the biggest award in Hollywood™. It is when the industry votes on who they feel is the best of their very, very visible profession. Oh, sure, the people who influence more lives, like the guys who invent ways to clean water or manage the building of the interstate highway system get awards, but those are ignored because illegal aliens hadn’t made driving spicey again.

I’ve decided that I’d go through the decades (at least a few of them) and start comparing who won the Oscar™ versus who I think should have won for both best picture and best actor. Since Hollywood® now thinks that men are exactly the same as women, I’ve decided to skip the best actress and just name the one I think is hottest.

After going through all of the movies of the 1970s, they sucked. The 1970s was a dismal, joyless decade of crappy movies, for the most part, which is why my “It Came From . . . “ series is done going backwards into the past.

All movies are from the ones I’ve seen. There are a lot of movies I haven’t seen from the 1970s, and I’m probably better off for that.

Here we go:

1970

Best Picture: Patton. Biopic of, perhaps, the greatest tactical Allied general of World War II.

Should have been: Patton. Reason: I like tanks.

Best Actor: George C. Scott, Patton. Perhaps the best choice possible of someone who could play Patton.

Should have been: Donald Sutherland, Kelly’s Heroes. Disagree? Always with the negative waves, man. Plus, still has tanks.

Hottest Actress: Sandra Dee, The Dunwich Horror. Especially in that one outfit.

1971

Best picture: The French Connection. Didn’t see it because I don’t like the French.

Should have been: Dirty Harry or Vanishing Point (Tie). So hard to choose, so I decided I didn’t have to.

Best Actor: Gene Hackman, The French Connection.

Should have been: Kurt Russell, The Barefoot Executive. A very reserved performance from Kurt Russell of what should have been a long string of Oscars™.

Hottest Actress: Jill St. John, Diamonds are Forever. Honorable mention: The “more buoyant than her sister” Lana Wood (also Diamonds are Forever) in her role as Plenty O’Toole (named after her father).

1972

Best Picture: The Godfather. A movie that came together perfectly for Francis Ford Coppola and is now one that many view as one of the best movies ever made.

Should have been: The Night Stalker. This made-for-TV movie featuring veteran actor Darren McGavin about the exploits of a plucky Chicago newsman is simply more fun.

Best Actor: Marlon Brando, The Godfather.

Should have been: Ned Beatty, Deliverance. What goes on in the mountains, stays in the mountains.

1973

Best Picture: The Sting. Long documentary about how people develop allergic reactions to insect venom that I saw in health class. I’ll pass, thank you.

Should have been: The Exorcist. Long documentary about Rosie O’Donnell’s childhood.

Best Actor: Jack Lemmon, Save the Tiger. No idea what this even is.

Should have been: Clint Eastwood, High Plains Drifter. Yeah. Guns. Dynamite. Retribution from beyond the grave. Yeah.

Hottest Actress: Mariana Hill from High Plains Drifter gets the nod – she is also Norman Schwartzkopf’s cousin, so, more tanks.

1974

Best Picture: The Godfather, Part II. Some people like it even better than the first one making it even more classic-er.

Should have been: The Man with the Golden Gun. Bond putting a midget in a basket so he can bang hotties? Yes.

Best Actor: Art Carney, Harry and Tonto. Seriously? Who voted for this crap?

Should have been: Sean Connery, Zardoz. Any actor that can wear that orange jockstrap for an entire movie and not laugh wins.

Hottest Actress: Susan Penhaligon, Land That Time Forgot. Not a lot of competition this year, and she looked great struggling against that quicksand.

1975

Best Picture: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Revenge fantasy where a Native American kills a white guy in the end.

Should have been: The Eiger Sanction. Clint Eastwood, spies, mountain climbing, double crossing, murder.

Best Actor: Jack Nicholson, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Should have been: Kurt Russell, The Strongest Man in the World. It should have been Kurt’s year, with this poignant portrayal of a victim of science gone mad.

Hottest Actress: That girl at the beginning of Jaws, but I think she was an acquired taste.

1976

Best Picture: Rocky. Tale of a bum who became a boxer. I can play the theme on a bass drum.

Should have been: Rocky or The Outlaw Josey Wales. I’ve seen Rocky two times, I think. I’ve seen The Outlaw Josey Wales about twenty, because when I flipped through the channels, regardless of where it was in the movie I’d watch it.

Best Actor: Peter Finch, Network. Sure, I’ve seen the same clip, but that’s all I’ve seen.

Should have been: Sylvester Stallone, Rocky. His perfect movie.

Hottest Actress: Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Logan’s Run. Close second? Jennie Agutter, Logan’s Run.

1977

Best Picture: Annie Hall. Crap.

Should have been: Smokey and the Bandit. Not crap.

Best Actor: Richard Dreyfuss, The Goodbye Girl, meh actor in crap movie.

Should have been: The Car, The Car. A much better actor with a much better range than Dreyfuss, since during The Car’s scenes, you could hardly tell he was a 1971 Lincoln Continental Mark III, which is pretty impressive acting.

Hottest Actress: Marilyn Chambers, Rabid. The Ivory Snow™ girl grown way up. Way up.

1978

Best Picture: The Deer Hunter, a how-to video on how to win at high-stakes Asian gambling.

Should have been: National Lampoon’s Animal House. Animal House was unique, in that it was a comedy that had a plot, yet the comedy never overwhelmed the plot until the end, and the writers gave up.

Best Actor: John Voight, Coming Home. The world did not need this movie. I don’t have anything against Voight personally, since he’s never hit me up for that $20 I borrowed from him.

Should have been: Tommy Chong, Up in Smoke. It’s amazing what life a Shakespearean-trained actor at Julliard and former astrophysicist Tommy Chong can bring to a role. Or in this case a rolled joint.

Hottest Actress: Annie Potts, Corvette Summer. Another rough year, I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find Annie.

1979

Best Picture: Kramer vs. Kramer. Kramer vs. Kramer was used to normalize divorce to a public that still regarded it as skeevy. Plus? Boring. It would have been better if it were just Michael Richards from Seinfeld arguing with himself for two hours.

Should have been: Alien, Apocalypse Now, The Jerk, literally anything but Kramer vs. Kramer.

Best Actor: Dustin Hoffman, Kramer vs. Kramer. Watching Kramer vs. Kramer made me wish that I could ask Dustin “Is it safe?” for a few hours.

Should have been: Angus Scrimm, Phantasm. Being the Tall Man was an understated role, all he had to do was be evil while the evil dwarves and spike-spheres had to do all the hard work.

Hottest Actress: Bernadette Peters, The Jerk. It was her or Sigourney Weaver in Alien, so I went with cute over space underwear.

Movies got (generally) better and women got hotter as the decade went on. Still, a far weaker decade than we’ll see when (in November) we get to the 1980s where the women were hotter and the movies were better. Oscar®? He still missed most of the best movies and performances, since even though movies were better, the voters of The Academy™ were stuck getting high on their own supply. Your take?

Living In The Past: The World War II Hangover

“This watch I got here was first purchased by your great-grandfather during the First World War. It was bought in a little general store in Knoxville, Tennessee.” – Pulp Fiction

Iran is stuck between Iraq and a hard place.

Every group has a story that defines them: the myth, the memory, the moment that crystallizes who they are and what they value. For Christians, it’s the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the ultimate sacrifice and triumph of life. For the Chinese, it’s the Century of Humiliation, a wound that fuels their drive for global dominance. For Three Stooges® fans, it’s the seismic shift when Shemp replaced Curly, forever splitting the purists from the heretics, and don’t even get me started on the anti-Curly, Joe Besser.

But for too many groups the Second World War is the foundational story, a crucible that forged their modern identities. And for most, it’s a scar that still festers, shaping their worldview in ways that are often more curse than blessing like the time I found a genie but didn’t get a wish because I rubbed him the wrong way.

Let’s start with the United States.

For the United States, WWII cemented the idea that big government is the ultimate and best problem-solver and has our best interests at heart. The war effort, which would have cost $4.1 trillion in today’s dollars, mobilized industry, science, and bureaucracy like never before, birthing the military-industrial complex that Ike warned us about. I hear JFK was going to work on that, but they changed his mind.

Biden’s final executive order: “Purple crayons will now taste like grapes.”

The lesson of the war was simple: if you throw enough tax dollars and central planning at a problem, you can save the world. Never mind that the failed New Deal had already disproved this; WWII made it gospel. Blacks can’t read? Throw money and central planning at it. Poor people keep doing the things that made them poor? Throw money and central planning at it. Women complaining about . . . whatever? Throw money and central planning at it. The result of all this was the United States giving DEI grants for difficult tasks, like breathing.

The war also taught Americans that war is noble when the British say so. Pearl Harbor was the trigger for the entry of the United States, but Britain’s pleas for aid via Lend-Lease pulled us into Europe’s mess for the second time in a generation. Post-1945, the U.S. embraced its role as the world’s foremost military power and world policeman, from Korea to Kabul, with a budget to match, spending trillions to give democracy to those that don’t care about it.

Another lingering ghost: the myth of the “Greatest Generation,” implying every war since is just as righteous, no matter the cost in blood or treasure. This is the same generation that voted in all of Johnson’s Great Society crap, and the generation you can thank for the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1965. Our victory in World War II blinds us to overreach, ballooning debt, and the erosion of liberty at home as the state grows ever fatter.

My friend’s grandfather killed six Germans on the beach at Normandy. It’s not as heroic as it sounds: he did it last week.

Moving across the sea to Bongland, where they have a big tower that goes “Bong” every hour, Britain’s WWII story is one of defiance. The “stiff upper lip” against Hitler’s bombs during the Blitz, with Churchill’s speeches rallying a nation under siege. But the war’s cost, $120 billion in debt, 450,000 dead, cities like London and Coventry in jumbled rubble all askew like Yorkshireman’s teeth, broke the back of the Empire.

The foundational lesson twisted: instead of pride in survival, Britain internalized a twisted guilt, spinning off colonies that weren’t quite ready to govern themselves like India and Nigeria faster than you can say “Commonwealth.”

Worse, the “we’re all in this together” myth morphed into a masochistic anti-colonialism, where importing millions of non-British migrants became a moral crusade to atone for empire, starting with the H.M.S. Windrush bringing hundreds of non-British to Great Britain to keep wages down. The result? A cultural identity crisis, where “Britishness” is now a dirty word, and cities like London are less British than Bombay was in 1850. The war taught Britain to survive, but it lost its soul. But, hey, think of all the great food!

Stop spreading the lie that moslem women have to wear the hijabs. It’s their choice – they can also be stoned to death.

Germany got it the worst, or wurst: their national policy became self-hatred. Germany’s WWII story is Hitler and defeat, a double blow that turned national pride into a mortal sin and Hitler into a replacement for Satan. The war toll of German death and destruction: 5.3 million military deaths, 2 million civilian, cities like Cologne and Dresden reduced to rubble or ash was compounded by the framing of Germany as the sole reason for war.

The foundational lesson? Germans can’t be trusted with power or tanks or a sense of humor. Post-war, this bred an anti-nationalism so intense it’s practically policy. Germany’s “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (reckoning with the past) demands eternal penance as if this was a racial punishment where current Germans who in no way were responsible for World War II have to take the blame.

Foot fetishes are on the rise in Germany, probably because of the smell of defeat.

The result? Immigration surged, with 20% of Germany’s population now foreign-born, often seen as a way to dilute the “German” identity that led to 1939. The war’s shadow stifles dissent: question migration or EU mandates, and you’re a Nazi and your entire political party might be banned. This self-hatred paralyzes Germany’s ability to act decisively, even as its economy stagnates and its culture frays.

For Russia and/or the Soviets, World War II was the triumph of the iron fist. For the Soviets, the Great Patriotic War was proof the Soviet system worked. Despite 27 million deaths (8.7 million military, 19 million civilian), the Red Army’s push to Berlin showed that the sheer scale of production of hundreds of thousands of crappy tanks and endless conscripted bodies could crush any foe. Stalin famously removed seat padding from the T-34 after finding the average lifespan of a T-34 in combat was only a few minutes.

The foundational lesson they learned? Central control, especially when done with brutality, gets results. Stalin’s paternalism became Putin’s playbook: the state over individual, quantity over quality. Post-war, the USSR’s occupation of Eastern Europe and refusal of Marshall Plan aid cemented this mindset. Even today, Russia’s drones are glorified T-34s—cheap, mass-produced, barely competitive, but there are thousands of them. The war’s myth of invincibility fuels Moscow’s paranoia and aggression, from Ukraine to cyberwars, while its economy limps along on vodka, oil, duct tape, and nostalgia.

I guess those are all tank tops?

World War II was a cataclysm. 70-85 million dead and borders were changed as if they were drawn by a hyperactive kid with an Etch-a-Sketch™. For the U.S., it birthed a bloated state and a messianic complex. For Britain, it turned pride into shame. Germany traded nationalism for self-loathing. Russia doubled down on authoritarianism. And, although we didn’t go into it, World War II is the singular foundational event for modern Jewish people, which is why they treat it with religious reverence and questioning any aspect of their narrative is treated as heresy.

The U.S. got off the lightest: our homeland unscathed, our economy booming post-war, but we’re chained to the idea that we must police the globe for some reason. For the others, the scars are deeper, twisting their cultures into knots of guilt, paranoia, or apology. These foundational stories aren’t just history, they’re shackles.

Maybe it’s time to write new stories, before the old ones drag us all into another war, or the anti-Curly returns?