Category: Propaganda

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 1st and 2nd 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.

  1. Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
  2. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
  3. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  4. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  5. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  6. 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.

Hottest Actress:  No entry.  I looked.  Dismal.  1972 was probably the nadir for hot chicks in Hollywood©.

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?

Making The Invisible Hand Visible: Psyops and the War for Our Minds

So, if you watch The Matrix backwards, it’s just the story of a guy who quits drugs and gets a job.  (most memes as-found today)

Back in 1995, I think, I saw an editorial cartoon.  One was a picture of an American G.I. holding a dead child in 1945.  Next to it was an American G.I. holding a dead child in 1995.  The message was simple:  Americans needed to go and fight in a place that Americans couldn’t find on a map.  Bosnia?  Why was this a picture in a newspaper, trying to get me, John Wilder, to be on board attacking Serbians?

Why Serbians?  I mean, it sounded like an alien race of creatures that spent their lives curb surfing.

Something felt off – I think the only thing of value in the whole country was the last thirty Yugo™ transmissions.

And, I wasn’t wrong.  This was propaganda.  I (and the rest of America) was caught in a psychological operation, or psyops, a calculated effort to hijack my thoughts and bend my will.  About . . . Serbia.

Did you hear about the group in the Balkans who think the world started 6,000 years ago?  Croatianists.

Psyops, per the Army’s FM 3-05.301 (LINK), are “planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to . . . audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”

What’s that in language that is less like The Terminator® is talking?  It is the art of making me think what someone else wants, without me ever spotting the strings of the puppetmaster.

The story doesn’t start with Edward Bernays, but he’s a pretty convenient on-ramp for discussion.  Bernays gets that distinction because he, more than anyone else, is why the world feels like a scripted reality show.

I guess the bridge had a Twitter account, but it’s now suspended.

Born in 1891, this nephew of Sigmund Freud took his uncle’s insights into the human psyche and turned them into a weapon. In his 1928 book Propaganda, Bernays didn’t mince words: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”

Translation?

The GloboLeftElites think Americans are too dumb to think for ourselves, so they’ll do it for you. Bernays called this “the engineering of consent,” and he was as good at it as a tick is at finding blood or as Zuck is at mining your soul with InstaFace™.  Take his 1929 “Torches of Freedom” stunt. To sell more cigarettes, Bernays paid fashionable women to light up during New York’s Easter parade, framing smoking as a feminist rebellion against stuffy norms.  The result?

The media ate it up, women started puffing, and tobacco companies doubled their market.  Women?  They traded motherhood and bras for Camels™ and lung cancer.

Bernays didn’t stop at commerce.

I sometimes wear a tinfoil hat.  I’m not nuts, it just makes it more interesting when I stick my head in the microwave.

In the 1950s, he worked with the CIA to paint Guatemala’s elected government as a communist menace (true, they president was buds with Castro later), justifying putting pressure on the president to resign.  He did, and United Fruit Company (a story for another time) got Guatemala back into their orbit.  Bernays proved that by tapping into the primal emotions of fear, desire, and identity, anything could be sold, be it a product, a war, or a worldview.

Bernays’ playbook became the blueprint for government and corporate psyops and I could spend a book describing them, but ain’t nobody got that kind of time this morning.  But one thing is clear:  psyops are cheap and effective.  Thankfully, we abandoned the use of such technology.

Whoops.  Guess not.

Here 2025, and psyops have gone high-tech and are used more than ever.  The core, though, remains Bernays’ emotional manipulation.  Here’s how they work now:

  • Framing and Narrative Control:  Words shape reality.  Calling illegal aliens “undocumented workers” or “asylum seekers” turns lawbreakers into victims.  Meanwhile, people who just want to live in their own country without unending streams of infinity third-worlders are smeared as “racists.”  Whoops.  Guess that word doesn’t have the power it did even two years ago.  This is also why control of every platform is important to them.  Just one kid saying that the emperor is nekkid is enough to bring the whole charade down.

I sometimes can’t tell which psyop is more fun to watch.

  • Emotional Manipulation:  Fear and identity are big guns.  During COVID, “flatten the curve” and “trust the science” were hammered into us day after day, justifying lockdowns and mandates and a not-vaccine while dissenters were silenced and fired.  On race, media amplifies the “man bites dog” rarity of white-on-black violence to stoke division, ignoring the reality that the violence is almost all one-way.  Emotional manipulation was also that editorial making me feel sad for dead kids in a place I’ve never heard of.
  • Social Media Amplification:  Algorithms on all social media are designed to boost outrage because clicks mean cash for Zuck.  Bots and influencers push phrases like Black Lives Matter, making manufactured narratives feel organic.
  • Astroturfing: Fake grassroots movements, like funded protests or viral campaigns, create the illusion of public consensus.  Remember the 2020 “defund the police” push?  It looked spontaneous but was backed by big money, just like the “no kings” protest against Trump.  There really isn’t a group supporting it, it’s a cause in search of supporters.
  • Gaslighting: The ultimate mind-screw, telling us what we see isn’t real.  Worried about illegal immigration’s strain on schools or hospitals?  We’re “xenophobic.”  Notice crime spikes in certain areas or that moslems are pretty rape-y?  We’re “bigoted.”  The goal? Make us doubt our own eyes, believe that no one else thinks the same way that we do.

Psyops in Action:  Race and Immigration

The American public is a prime target, especially on race and illegal immigration, where psyops fuel division and push GloboLeftElite agendas.  After George Floyd’s overdose in 2020, the media ran a relentless campaign framing police as systematically racist.  Every white-cop-on-black-suspect incident became proof of a grand conspiracy, while DOJ reports (like the 2014 Ferguson findings clearing Officer Darren Wilson) were buried.

The result?

I get the creeps because it seems like Sting is still watching every breath I take. (my meme)

Riots, “defund the police” mania, and corporations tripping over themselves to push DEI policies that pit races against each other. It’s Bernays 101: amplify emotion, ignore facts, and, in this case, watch society fracture because it’s always easier to destroy than to build.

Illegal immigration is another psyops goldmine.

Since the 2021 border surge, outlets like CNN and MSNBC have framed illegal immigrants as “migrants” fleeing persecution, spotlighting tear-jerking stories of families while ignoring the stunningly high costs that these people bring to our country.

Crime stats, like DHS reports showing 66% of released detainees reoffend, are swept under the rug.  Ignore that diseases that were eradicated are again showing up in our country.

The narrative?  Open borders are humane, and anyone who disagrees hates brown people.  This isn’t an accident.  This is a deliberate push to erode national sovereignty, weaken cultural cohesion, and make Americans feel guilty for wanting secure borders.

COVID was a masterclass in psyops too, as was the January 6 “Insurrection” and a thousand other public lies meant to manipulate you.  But never forget those who are in full service of the Lie:  The Court Jesters of the GloboLeftElite.

The Capitol was in less danger on January 6 than it was during the revolution scenes from the D.C. production of Lés Misérables.

Jon Stewart and John Oliver, among many others, are the smirking faces of psyops disguised as comedy. Stewart, helming The Daily Show from 1999 to 2015, and Oliver, with Last Week Tonight since 2014, aren’t just entertainers (and it’s arguable that they’re even entertaining).  Nope.

They’re narrative enforcers peddling DEI with a laugh track.  Their weapon?  Humor that makes their audience feel smart and superior while feeding them a script of what the Narrative wants them to believe.

Their techniques are pure Bernays:

  • Selective Framing: Stewart’s 2010 Tea Party takedowns painted fiscal conservatives as racist rubes, ignoring their legitimate gripes about government bloat.  Oliver’s 2020 border segments framed ICE as heartless, glossing over data like the millions of illegals flooding over the border.
  • Ridicule as Persuasion:  Mockery is their hammer. Stewart’s smirks and Oliver’s exasperated sighs make conservative ideas:  border walls, voter ID, traditional values seem absurd to their hand-picked audiences. Laughter shuts down critical thinking:  nobody argues with a punchline.
  • Moral Superiority: Both position themselves as the voice of reason. Oliver’s 2021 “critical race theory” bit dismissed critics as clueless, never engaging their actual concerns about divisive curriculums.  Stewart’s post-Ferguson rants leaned on emotion over evidence, amplifying the “systemic racism” narrative while ignoring the exoneration of the cop that shot the “gentle giant” that had just roughed up a convenience store clerk.

Their impact is insidious.  By blending humor with half-truths, they make progressive dogma feel like common sense.  Their audiences are urban, educated, and often young, who walk away feeling informed, not manipulated.  But it’s psyops all the same:  control the frame, mock the dissenters, and let laughter do the rest.  The GloboLeft couldn’t ask for better foot soldiers.

Seeing this is half the battle.  The other half is reflection.  Psyops work best when they’re fast and jump out at you unexpectedly, like that editorial cartoon did decades ago.  I remember it because it was effective at emotional manipulation, but when I realized that I had no idea what a Serb ate for lunch or if Bosnians wore special hats while they ate PEZ® I came to the conclusion that my opinion on the subject was the product.  I was meant to be mad at one side or the other, but, thankfully, I had no idea which side I was supposed to be mad at.

Does throwing the discus make you want to hurl? (my meme)

What I try to do now is to ask myself:  what are they trying to make me feel?  Why?  Why should I care about Ukraine?  I thought about it and did some research, and, made the conscious decision that I don’t care about Ukraine unless someone is asking me to pay for it or unless it’s the source huge corruption.

It is?  Well let’s stop paying for it and let’s arrest and try those who were paid off.  Simple.

The GloboLeftElite’s goals are at least partially clear:  they want a borderless, divided America, where the people are too scared, guilty, or distracted to fight back.

We don’t have to play along.  Question everything.  Dig for primary sources.

Be careful what you feed your head.

And if something connects in a particularly emotional way, ask yourself:  why should I care?

Then make your own choice, and if you’re lucky, you might get your hands on some cherry Yugo® transmissions.  I mean, if you have goats to trade because I’m not sure they use money.

It Came From . . . 1995

“Man, there’s not a year that goes by, not a year, that I don’t read about some escalator accident involving some bastard kid that could’ve easily been avoided had some parent, I don’t care which one, but some parent conditioned him to fear and respect the escalator.” – Mallrats

Is that Neandergibson? Joe Piscopo?

While the 1980s allowed for gonzo productions of very uneven quality to become classics (Better Off Dead, for instance) the 1990s box office was much more crowded and the studios began to spend even more on the films. I’d say that a random movie from 1995 was more professionally made than a random movie from any year in the 1980s, but had a lot less heart.

As to the continuation of the series, I’m not sure if we’ll do 1996 or end it here. I think I’m done with the 1970s, though I have another idea that amuses me that we’ll try in late August. As always, I’m also willing to consider lists of genre flicks, but pretty soon that ends up with movies no one ever saw.

As usual, sequels are excluded on the list. I don’t consider Mallrats a sequel. Thankfully, I make the rules. You may appeal. It will be denied.

As an aside, I don’t think you can overestimate the propaganda impact of films. Just like listening to music puts your brain into a state of suggestable hypnosis (which is why I like to listen to kick-ass music rather than sad stuff most days) so does film. Film takes the next dimension above music by adding visual stimulus, making the hypnosis even more effective. What I take in does impact me, so I consider that more and more as I grow older and as it’s thrown in our faces with the last decade’s worth of propaganda films. I understand now why some don’t like horror films for just that reason. I do like them, still, but I’ve become much more selective as to what I let in the transom.

Speaking of which . . . .

That poster gives me tentacles. I mean tingles. And it looks like Ralph Macchio.

In the Mouth of Madness – I love good Lovecraftian horror. Cosmic horror is at its best when it sketches a universe of limitless expanse where we’re just nubs sitting in the darkness while titanic forces beyond our understanding play out around us. It’s like whistling through the graveyard, if you will. When I first saw In the Mouth of Madness I hated it, because I didn’t get it. Now? My opinion is that it’s great cosmic horror, and shows off Sam Neill as he unwittingly brings about the end of the world. With popcorn. Like most of Carpenter’s work, it has a large following, but was box office poison. But he gets the last laugh in this one.

I have a particular set of skills. Murder and guitar solos.

Rob Roy – Scots fighting to be fiercely independent, while being swindled and taken advantage of by rape-y foreigners? If only they would do that in 2025. Tim Roth steals the show in a perfectly creepy performance with hair appropriate for Isaac Newton if he played guitar for Queen®. It did okay at the box office.

If you’ve seen the movie, this makes a little bit of sense.

Crimson Tide – Another submarine movie because, well, why not? In this one, though, Tony Scott (same guy who cooked a Goose in Top Gun) gets the most out of Denzel Washington and the late Gene Hackman. To be clear, Hackman was still alive during the movie. The two are officers on a nuclear missile submarine that have to decide if they’re going to shoot off nuclear missiles after losing communications with Starfleet®. Me? I would have launched the missiles because that’s one way to get in the history books.

Should this one be called “Bravefelt”?

Braveheart – Tons of historical inaccuracy? Check. Mel Gibson with more hair than an 80’s glam band? Check. Ludicrously long runtime of nearly three hours? Also check. In spite of these things, this was a huge hit. Swords. Women. Bravery. Sophie Marceau at her peak Marceau-ness. What’s not to love?

I still remember when he outran Kevin Spacey to maintain his virginity in the climax.

Apollo 13 – This movie follows the life of a young transgender long-distance runner (Tom Hanks) who needs an older mentor (Kevin Bacon) to buy him shoes because he grew up in a third-world country that couldn’t afford to have a Nike® store or electricity or food.

I need to post this on Rob’s X® feed.

Judge Dredd – Some comic book purists don’t like this version because in the comic books Dredd never takes off his helmet, but Stallone wanted to show off his hair. The (much darker) 2012 reboot Dredd features a Dredd™ that always covers his hedd. I didn’t care, really, since I found this movie both stupid and hilarious and one of Rob Schneider’s best roles. Huge flop. I wouldn’t recommend it, but yet I enjoyed it. Does that mean I hate myself? Anyway, the 2012 version is a much better movie.

Wait, what if every suspect was Rob Schneider? That would be wacky!

The Usual Suspects – Cost $6 million, made nearly $70 million. This one gets the most out of fairly talented cast in a crime mystery, and I will admit that the ending did surprise me when I watched it on a rental VHS tape from Blockbuster™, because I did not know that late fees could get that high. I still don’t know how the tape ended up behind the couch. Maybe it was Keyser Söze?

Wow, those guys are more swole than I recalled. The 90s rocked!

Mallrats – A $6 million dollar budget. $2 million in ticket sales. I think the budget skips all the advertisement for this thing – you couldn’t go anywhere young adults were in 1995 without seeing ads for this movie months before it came out. This movie is a very stupid comedy that brings us Jason Lee (My Name is Earl) as a guy on a quest to get his girlfriend back. I think. It’s funny in a juvenile way, but was also the product of its time. Watched it with my boys, they thought it was hilarious, but were also fascinated, like anthropologists studying a world that existed a thousand years ago.

I hope it’s as good as the sequel to Hamlet.

Leaving Las Vegas – Darkest movie on this list. Watched it once, not sure I have it in me to watch it again. The guy who wrote the semi-autographical novel it was based on killed himself when he found out it was going to be a movie. Guess he really, really, really, really didn’t like Nic Cage.

Heat – I was debating if I was going to do “It Came From . . . . 1995” at all, but the meme above (as found) convinced me that I should. Big hit that I somehow missed and watched a few years ago after Aesop mentioned it. No weapons were injured during the filming of this movie, but not for lack of ammo. Thank heavens Sig® hadn’t introduced the P320™ yet or else half of the ammo fired wouldn’t have needed an actor fanning the trigger. Related news: I hear Alec Baldwin is going to be Sig©’s spokesman.

Four Rooms or Fur Rooms?

Four Rooms – An anthology film that I saw in an arthouse theater (the only time I’ve ever been to one) with a buddy. I guess being in an arthouse theater is with another dude is the gayest thing I’ve ever done in my life, besides that one time I had a wine cooler. Regardless, I enjoyed it, since each one of the four films was essentially a joke tied together by Tim Roth’s best comedic performance. The first film is by far the weakest, but, I can’t call it awful because, boobs.

“Waiter, there’s a rubber chicken in my soup.”
“No there isn’t.”
“Yes, there is. What is it doing there.”
“The backstroke, I believe.”
Now for something completely different.

12 Monkeys – Is he crazy, or is it time travel? Why not both? Terry Gilliam was generally the weakest member of Monty Python®, but he’s done much better as a director. Regardless, this movie brings together Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt in roles very much against the stuff they normally did, with Pitt even getting nominated for an Oscar™.

Not included? Seven. Species. Strange Days. Sense and Sensibility. Really, any movie starting with ‘S’ from 1995. I kid. Things to do in Denver When You’re Dead also nearly made the list.

What did I miss?