The Double Debt Mountain of 2026

“It’s just a metaphor, dude.” – Guardians of the Galaxy

I had bad credit, so I asked my high school geometry teacher if she’d cosine for me.

The economy looks “fine” on the surface.  Fine, that is, if you believe the headlines.  I sense, though, underneath it’s a double debt mountain that’s getting closer to a landslide every day, and someone is planting bombs along the slope.  Okay, that’s a lot of metaphor.  Let me see if I can pilot this ship home.

Damn.  Another metaphor.

One bomb is the wallets of the kids.

The other bomb is in Washington.

Both are set to blow up the same people:  Millennials and Gen Z, generations already hammered by housing costs, stagnant real wages, hordes of legal and illegal aliens soaking up employment, and women who forgot that the main reason they exist is to make more humans.

Good news?  Yeah, there’s a tiny sliver.  Credit card delinquencies on some non-housing debt leveled out in late 2025 according to the New York Fed®.  But that’s like saying the fire department showed up and has the fire down to burning one house an hour in the neighborhood.  The real picture is as ugly as an Antifa swimsuit pageant.

Yeah, it’s grim.

And all of their older women are coming down with prostate cancer.

Credit cards have become the new paycheck for millions of young Americans, and new companies have shown up to monetize even the smallest debts.  Want to go to Taco Bell™ and pay for that Super Crunchwrap Supreme Bellgrande™ over the next six months?

You can do that.

Total credit card debt hit a record $1.28 trillion in 2025, up $44 billion in just three months.  That’s not a blip:  that’s paying for groceries on credit cards and only paying the minimum monthly payment.  Delinquencies on household debt overall jumped to 4.8 percent, led by the kids.  For people under 39, the transition into serious delinquency on credit cards is nearly double the national average.

Surveys show 56 percent of Gen Z are forced to use cards just to make ends meet because prices keep climbing.  Sixty-six percent of Millennials say they rely on plastic to get through the month.  Thirty-five percent of Millennials are carrying more than $10,000 in card debt.

Credit card debt, the gateway drug of insolvency.  Sure, payday lenders and “buy here, pay here” car places are the crack cocaine and meth of debt, but it all starts somewhere.

Gen Z is running around $3,500 in average balances, while Millennials are pushing $7,000.  They’re not buying yachts or avocado toast, they’re financing groceries, gas, and rent.

It’s Avocado’s number.

Here’s why this mess is worse than it looks:

First, real wages aren’t keeping up, and the system is rigged against the young.  Gen Z and Millennials entered the workforce during the pandemic hangover, got crushed by housing prices we already talked about, and now face interest rates that make every purchase a long-term loan.  The GloboLeftElite told them to “follow your passion” and rack up student debt for useless degrees that qualify them for entry-level retail jobs in malls that don’t exist anymore.

And they listened.

Credit cards fill the gap at 20-25 percent interest.  For those that didn’t choose wisely and avoid jobs taken by Jugdish, life is not luxury.  It’s debt, roommates, and used couches that smell vaguely of fish.  Forever.  One bad month due to a mandatory car repair, unexpected medical bill, or if Egyptians convince them to invest in a pyramid scheme, and they’re in the hole they can’t climb out of.

Chuck Norris had a grizzly bear carpet in his bedroom.  It’s not dead, just scared to move.

Second, banks and card companies love debt.  People don’t get poor because they don’t make enough money, they get poor because they give it away to everyone else:  ask the Amish.

Banks are making fat margins on revolving debt while pretending everything is peachy.  Delinquency rates are rising, but not fast enough for the suits to panic yet.  They know the game:  extend and pretend and as long as we get this quarter’s bonus, it’s all copacetic.  Just like with the housing market in 2008.

Meanwhile, the official unemployment rate looks fine because more paper-pushers are getting hired in the last growth industry:  government jobs.

The real economy?  Productive private-sector work is stagnant.  Young people are borrowing to eat.

Third, this consumer debt bomb feeds right into the bigger federal debt bomb.  Washington has its own plastic problem, except it’s measured in trillions.  National debt sits north of $38.5 trillion.  Net interest payments are projected to hit $1 trillion in fiscal year 2026 and interest payments are already bigger than defense spending in the first quarter of this year.

Interest already eats 19% of all federal revenue.  By 2036, CBO says it doubles to $2.1 trillion and consumes nearly a quarter of everything the government takes in, but the CBO is always low, because they have to use the assumptions that Congress made up.  Yes.  AOC is responsible for the rules of the game.

But what do we want to spend our money on?

Defense?  Medicare? Infrastructure? Sorry, the interest check has to clear first.

What you get when you cross a human with a moose?  Arrested, apparently.

Fourth, the GloboLeftElite solution is always the same: print more, borrow more, kick the can.  National debt doubles every eight years.  The Fed and Congress act like debt is free because they control the printer and don’t have to worry.  Higher debt, though, means higher interest rates, which means even more debt service, which means . . . you get it.  It’s a doom loop.

Every time they “stimulate” to keep the economy looking good for the next election, they make the next crisis worse.  And who pays?  Not the politicians.  Not the connected class in D.C.

It’s the taxpayers, especially the young ones who haven’t built wealth yet, but yet were forced to watch the abomination that is Scrappy Doo™.

Fifth, the generational theft is obvious.  Boomers got cheap debt, rising home values, and that long summer of the 1980s and 1990s.  Oh, and pensions that actually worked.  Millennials and Gen Z get 24 percent credit card APRs, $1 trillion in federal interest payments crowding out future programs, and a promise that “we’ll import more workers” to fix the birth rate collapse caused by imported workers, interest payments, and . . .

Female empowerment.

Female hypergamy and economic despair already delayed families, and they’ve reached civilization-ending levels with Gen Z and Millennial female solipsism.  Now add maxed-out cards and a government that can’t even pay its own interest without borrowing more.

The kids who should be having kids are busy paying Visa® instead.

Before I was adopted, my selfies were called “family photos”.

The result? Gen Z and Millennials fall even further behind.  They delay marriage, delay kids, delay life.  Birth rates keep dropping.  The GloboLeftElite flips from “stop having babies, save the planet!” to “import babies, we’re not having enough!” in one generation because their policies broke the math.

Young couples look at the spreadsheet listing rent, cards, future taxes for Boomer pensions and federal interest and decide “maybe later.”

Or never.

But me?  Debt mountains?  Debt landslides?  I think I need to stop with my metaphors because they’re making me sneeze.  Metaphors really set off my analogies.

The Housing Mess of 2026: At Least We Have Ramen

“They’re only noodles, Micheal.” – The Lost Boys

I entered a contest and won a lifetime supply of ramen.  I took the $20 instead.

Let’s start with the sliver of good news, because in this market it’s rare enough to mention:  Many illegals have left the country.  Not enough, mind you, but enough to show just how fake this economy is.  The result is real.  Rents are down where illegals live.

At least a little.  I found a great place to rent, fully furnished, but then the clerk told me it was a liquor store.

Sigh.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development to straight-up say illegals drove up to two-thirds of rental demand growth in recent years, so when .gov admits the problem, you know it’s really worse.  After years of unrestricted immigration flooding the rental market, the brakes got tapped.  Studies show that renter household growth cooled once immigration restrictions hit.

Average rent that hovering around $2,000 a month are finally showing some give instead of the nonstop 36% climb we saw the last five years.  This is, at least a small win for the working guy who just wants to keep the roof over his head while he eats ramen and smokes recreational weed.

Now the bad news.

And there’s plenty of bad news.

Housing is now unaffordable to Gen Z, and it is far worse as a percentage of their income than for any previous generation.  67% of Gen Z adults say they’re struggling to cover housing costs. That’s higher than Millennials (53%), Gen X (54%), or Boomers (36%).

When I grounded my Gen Z kids, their punishment was to go out and socialize. (meme as-found)

Homeownership for Gen Z sits at just 27.1% in 2025 data rolling into this year, which is a tiny bump from the year before, but miles behind where previous generations stood at the same age.  Zoomers need to earn over $112,000 a year to afford the median house.

The problem?  Median household income lags by about $25,000.  Nearly two million young households simply vanished from the market in 2025 because the math doesn’t work.  Housing is chewing up 40-50% of take-home pay.  That’s not a stepping stone to a family and 2.6 kids.  That’s a millstone.

Let’s delve deeper into the problem.

First, housing areas are limited, and the mass blight of urban hellscapes led to the creation and flowering of suburbia, where people could move and raise a family in relative safety.  Let’s be honest, a huge part of suburbia was economic segregation from . . . economic factors.  Suburbs?  You have to have a certain income level to live there.

When I think about the meaning of life, I think about three factors:  2, 3, and 7. (cartoon as-found)

Good schools.  Low crime.  Space to breathe.  No economic factors.

That flight from the cities created the demand, but supply never kept up.  Zoning, NIMBYs, and decades of stupid policy turned safe family neighborhoods into a scarce luxury good.  Housing prices have risen much more than inflation. While wages wobbled along like me on a Saturday night, home values sprinted like me out of the office on Friday afternoon.  Suburbia went from attainable dream to gated fortress most young people can only stare at through the fence.

Second, interest rates are up.  That’s the sort of thing that happens when the cash printer is on high and the oil pump is on low.  Higher interest rates lead to higher home costs for the same price house, as interest eats up more and more of the (now higher) payment.

Mortgage rates eased to around 6.2% by the end of 2025, but that’s still double the pandemic-era giveaway lows.  A $400,000 house that felt doable at 3% now demands a monthly payment that feels like indentured servitude.  Equity builds slower.  Gen Z runs the numbers on their phones and decide roommates, ramen, and the low-rizz life beat the alternative.

Third, houses are treated like an economic appreciation machine whose values never go down. This has led to many borrowers taking out loans near the peak value of their houses, and that peak value locks them in.  If they sell at a loss, they lose actual money, so they can’t sell for less than they owe.

We’re actually at an all-time high for the Google® search term “can’t sell my house.”  Google Trends just hit record levels in February 2026:  higher than 2008, higher than the COVID frenzy.  Sellers are frozen.  Buyers can’t bridge the gap.  The shut down like a date with a Kardashian when you tell them you’re broke.  Houses stopped being homes and turned into leveraged bets on eternal growth.

Markets don’t do eternal.

“There are no mistakes, just happy little accidents.”  Bob was a horrible nuclear physicist.

Fourth, banks don’t want foreclosures to hit the market. Why? It makes the rest of the loans in their portfolio worth less, so they’re incentivized to sit on houses rather than sell them and realize the loss on the books.  Foreclosure filings jumped 14% in 2025 to 367,460 properties, but that’s still historically low and banks are dragging their feet with modifications and delays.  How much of the current private credit crisis is due to just this?  My guess is:  plenty.  Those balance sheets are stuffed with crappy paper because it was different this time.

Fifth, those nice suburban houses with a thirty minute to sixty-minute commute are now even more expensive because the fuel to drive to where the jobs are at is much higher thanks to Gulf War IV. Or is it Gulf War VI?  I forget.  That suburban split-level two towns over suddenly costs a fortune just to reach.  The effective price of the dream just went up again.

The result of this mess is that Gen Z gets further behind.  The kids that should be having kids aren’t.  There are several factors to this, especially female hypergamy where every female (thinks she) is above average, but every male is below her standards.  But the sheer difficulty in having a home in which to raise kids is massive is also killing family formation.  No stability, no backyard, no “let’s start a family” talk that ends in anything but spreadsheets that fill with negative numbers.

Is a 4 with a 6-pack a perfect 10?

Birth rates keep dropping.  In one generation, we went from the GloboLeftElite telling us to stop having kids because “the planet can’t handle more!” to the GloboLeftElite telling us we need to import kids because we need workers.

They break the system, then demand more system to patch the system they created.  Young couples look at the numbers and decide “maybe later.”  Or never.  Unless they’re from (spins wheel) Somalia.  In that case, it’s free fun and prizes while you bring in an alien people with an alien religion.

The good news?

This type of mess always sorts itself out.  The cure for high prices is default and deflation.  If the market is too far cooked, well, look out below.  The United States doesn’t have magic dirt to turn Somalis into Americans, and houses aren’t magic wealth machines.  When enough locked-in owners and over-leveraged banks finally crack, inventory floods, prices reset, and affordability returns.

It won’t be pretty.  Foreclosures will spike.  Portfolios will bleed.  Credit markets may lock up.  The Google® searches for “can’t sell my house” will turn into actual sales at prices that make sense again.

I used to have a really funny polio joke, but no one gets it anymore.

A housing crisis wouldn’t be big for the country, would it?

Nah. Just trillions in pretend wealth gone, generational transfers halted, and the kind of reset that makes 2008 look like practice.

Prepare accordingly.  The reset is coming.

I’m glad I like ramen.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: A Chilly February

“Wayne coming back is change. Change is either good or bad. l vote bad.” – The Dark Knight

Is your refrigerator running?  If so, I might vote for it.

  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 10

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

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

In this issue:  Front Matter – Gerrymandering Risks – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index  – But Who Will We Be? – 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 840 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Gerrymandering Risks

I’ve been concerned for some time that Trump’s attempt to redo the gerrymandering of the states with Republican control will end up not working out the way he thinks they will.  Right now, there are a total of 218 Republicans in the House of Representatives, the minimum number required for a majority of a full House.  There are a few vacancies.

Trump’s strategy has been to drive the strongly Republican-controlled states to gerrymander so that more Republican representatives would be elected.  The difficulty with this is that there is an optimum number so that the seats are safe for the party drawing the districts, yet impossible to lose.  The impact has been the change in districting so, if things work well for the Republicans they would pick up between 7 to 9 additional seats.  The Democrats weren’t idle, changes they initiated will likely end up driving 5 or 6 states their way.  That is, however, dependent upon the Republicans maintaining their current level of support.

In 2018, Republicans lost 26 House seats in Trump’s first term.  Even with gerrymandering, a similar performance would lead to Republicans losing 23 House seats.  However, with the remaining Republican vote spread thinner in states like Texas, what’s the likelihood that 30, 40, or even 50 seats are lost?

That’s not enough to override presidential vetoes, but it is enough to pass a never-ending stream of impeachments against every Republican appointee.  Would they be convicted in the Senate?

No.  But it would create a series of political events that would further polarize the public, and pull us closer to Civil War, and Trump’s ability to impact the laws of the nation will be crippled.

Violence and Censorship Update

More censorship that violence this month, as usual (until it’s not).  Let’s start with the United States:

According to GloboLeftists, being okay with being white is evidence of hate:

And, apparently GloboLeftists are unfamiliar with hydrology, and always look like this crazy-eyed cat lady:

Who is unfamiliar with maps:

But there is still far too much censorship among a certain set of files.  Why?

Before we get to Europe, let’s look at how the Europeans are being used to try to shut down our ability to say what we want:

And certain speech is especially hated, even in Islamic France:

And Germans have utterly lost the plot:

Although this is parody:

This isn’t.  Police yourself, citizen, because even legal speech can be illegal.

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red.  Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery numbers.

But nobody is buying houses, and the war with Iran won’t help that, but deflationary housing would be good for the kids.

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 up sharply this month, and, although they aren’t George Floyd-levels, you can see that from here.  And there’s a lot of frustration with illegals who are killing us:

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went up slightly this month.  I anticipate it going up again in March, especially since half of the population hates Americans and 40% of the other half don’t want a war with Iran.

Economic:

The economy up just a smidge this month, but I think the bubble has some pretty grey hair and some other headwinds are on the horizon.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the lowest level since the Weather Report started.

But Who Will We Be?

Imagine a country that no one wants to fight for, because no one thinks of it as anything but a short-term economic investment?

As an American, I can trace my ancestry through about three main nations.  Even the word nation is based on the Latin word “natio”, meaning birth.  My ancestors have been here for a minimum on three generations, and many fought back in the Revolutionary War.  When I was born, I was born into a nation.  Most of Americans were in the same basket, we had no fealty nor acceptance in any other place in the world.  We were here and this was our land.

Now, in the West, it has become the norm to look down on the natives, and turn the United States from a nation into a country.  An example I’ve mentioned many times are Indians.  Indians have nothing in common with heritage Americans.  Nothing, except, perhaps that they like oxygen, too.

Can you imagine a presidential candidate creating a monument to a foreign leaders for worship?  Okay, I should ask that after the Iran war.  Although I think the picture below is probably A.I., you could certainly see someone like Vivek doing something like this, because they are nothing like us.

Judges with dual citizenship.  FEDERAL JUDGES with dual citizenship and Star Wars™ names ruling on citizenship.  These people have only the barest understanding of America, but they create rulings that impact a country they barely understand.

Europe is ahead of us on this track.  Germans have been taught since 1945 to hate Germany.  Is it any wonder that Germans won’t fight for their once proud nation, especially since in 2050 or so it will be Turkish?

And England, our mother country has ceased to have Englishmen that are willing to fight and die for it.  Why?

An increasingly fragmented country is one that will lead towards Balkanization and terror.  The GloboLeft do not understand this, but it is still the case that mass deportation is the most moderate choice that we can hope for.

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS
https://x.com/kmbc/status/2022104782240940391
https://x.com/Dapper_Det/status/2023206053878321607
https://x.com/JeremyHarrisTV/status/2023254443748397064
https://x.com/iAnonPatriot/status/2019206205605077017

GOOD GUYS
https://www.police1.com/investigations/r-i-pd-credits-good-samaritan-with-stopping-shooter-who-killed-2-at-youth-hockey-game
https://www.wpri.com/news/local-news/se-mass/just-trying-to-help-good-samaritan-seriously-hurt-trying-to-assist-driver-in-freetown/
https://www.therepublic.com/2026/03/07/person-reported-missing-after-airboat-capsizes-in-floodwaters-near-cortland/

ONE GUY
https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/law-and-life/flashing-a-gun-self-defense-or-brandishing/

BODY COUNT
https://www.lifenews.com/2026/02/20/canada-is-killing-people-in-assisted-suicide-the-same-day-they-request-it/
https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-public/inline-images/chance-of-being-born-on-continen.jpg?itok=FKOx1vzK
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Where_Americans_Having_Most_Babi.jpg?itok=bYt31T_L
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Share-of-Babies-Born-Outside-of.jpg?itok=6CY3ehVw
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2026-02-15_12-13-18.png?itok=2SeS4jAZ
https://pjmedia.com/scott-pinsker/2026/02/13/the-least-laid-generation-in-history-gen-z-is-ghosting-sex-and-the-implications-are-huge-n4949466

VOTE COUNT
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/panic-ensues-after-trump-orders-cia-give-2020-election-intel-stop-steal-lawyer
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/visualizing-changing-political-affiliation-generation-us

CIVIL WAR (OURS)
https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-states-where-support-for-seceding-from-us-is-rising-11515967
https://nataliegwinters.substack.com/p/exc-usaid-funded-revolution-consultants
https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trump-ice-immigration-protests-minneapolis/
https://www.washingtontimes.com/cartoons/state-states/civil-war-in-america/
https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/us-politics/the-second-american-civil-war-is-already-here/
https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/386290/time-to-take-civil-war-seriously/
https://www.newamericanjournal.net/2026/02/you-cant-call-it-a-civil-war-if-one-side-refuses-to-fight/
https://baptistnews.com/article/americas-unfinished-civil-war/

CIVIL WAR (THEIRS)
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-fix-is-in-to-defeat-alberta-independence/
https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-war-comes-to-the-west-part-ii-strategic-realities/

How To Break A Society, Part I

“Half measures are the curse of it.  A rational society would either kill me or put me to some use.” – Red Dragon

The Andrew formerly known as Prince.

Picture this:  I leave my keys in the truck overnight.  Windows down.  Wallet on the dash.  Next morning?  Still there.  Nothing missing, though a cat might have explored an empty burger wrapper.  No viral TikTok™ of some “youth” doing donuts in my F-150®.

Absurd?  No.

And not because Big Brother has cameras up the backside of every squirrel, but because back in the day people just didn’t do that crap.  The neighbors would have known who did it.  Moms would have heard about it at church, and the father of the kid would have heard about it from his boss.

Shame, accountability, and consequences work better than ankle monitors.

That was the power of societal norms.  Invisible fences made of “What will people think?”  And the Founding Fathers knew it.  They told us so.

Benjamin Franklin walked out of the Constitutional Convention and some lady asked what they’d given us. “A republic,” he said, “if you can keep it.” Not “if the government keeps it for you.” Not “if we pass enough laws.” If you can keep it.

John Adams was even blunter in 1798: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

They weren’t kidding.

I shocked the postman by opening the door completely nude.  I think what surprised him the most was that I knew where he lives.

Just like the Constitution, the libertarian dream only works when people self-circumscribe their own behavior.  An 85,000-page federal code of regulations telling me not to steal if my conscience (and the fear of my neighbors shunning me like a rabid raccoon with diarrhea at a picnic) already does the job.  The Constitution assumed a pretty genetically homogeneous people who spoke the same language, mostly went to the same church, read the same Bible, and agreed that punching your neighbor over a fence line was a last resort, not the premise of a YouTube™ video.

Some people broke the rules.  Always have, always will no matter the civilization.  But back then the system didn’t turn justice into a CBS® series lasting twenty years.  The mean time from sentence to rope?

Often weeks or a few months, not the decades-long death-row vacation with three hots, cable, and taxpayer-funded lawyers we enjoy today.  Were innocents sometimes executed?

Almost certainly.

But swift, mostly impartial justice beat the hell out of vigilante posses or letting killers out on technicalities to murder yet again.  A society that can’t punish the guilty quickly loses the ability to protect the innocent at all.

I stand behind Alec.  It’s safer than standing in front of him.

Fast-forward to post-World War II America.  Streets were so safe kids rode bikes until the streetlights came on.  Doors stayed unlocked.  Factories hummed, wages rose, and the biggest scandal in most towns was somebody skipping the church potluck.  Prosperity wasn’t just money:  it was a stable and predictable life.

That bored the revolutionaries of the 1960s half to death.

They looked at this overwhelmingly safe, secure, prosperous society made of families in traditional family roles and said, “Nah, too square.”  The GloboLeftist project kicked into high gear with the Great Society.

Lyndon Johnson and his crew didn’t just want to help the poor.  No.  They wanted to remake society.  The guardrails of conformity had to go.  Why?  Because the norms of self-restraint, local reputation, and actual community stood in the way of central control.

Take lending, for example.  Let’s say I wanted a home loan in 1955.  My local banker didn’t just run a credit score, because they didn’t exist.  He would have called my pastor:  “Does Wilder show up on Sundays,?  He does?  Any rumors about his behavior?  PEZ®, eh?  That’s a bit odd.”

Local money stayed local. My mortgage would have literally been made from the savings of the people I saw at the grocery store.  Or, rather that The Mrs. saw at the grocery store, since why would a married man go to the store?

Good families got a break if junior was speeding?  Sure.  Outsiders had to prove themselves?  Absolutely.  But it worked because everyone was playing the same cultural game.

If King Charles was anymore inbred, he’d be a sandwich.

Then came the 1960s and beyond.

Mass migration became deliberate policy.  Civil rights were the noble public excuse, but the real play was splintering the old society so it could be replaced with something more compliant. Free association?

Gone.

You can’t choose who you hire or rent to without risking a lawsuit. Schools?

Prayer out, social engineering in.

Education standards?

Lowered faster than a politician’s principles.

Family?

Oh, boy.

Women used to save themselves for marriage.  Even when I was a kid, that was still the norm in most places and led to more than one frustrating Saturday night.

Body count back in the 1950s?  Usually one, and it came with a ring and a white dress.  Fast-forward one lifetime from the Great Society:  sophomore year of college and some girls are racking up body count numbers higher than a Call of Duty™ leaderboard.

No-fault divorce, welfare that paid better for single moms than married couples, and a nonstop cultural drumbeat that “settling down” was oppression led not to the Great Society but the Great Breakdown.  The nuclear family, once our bedrock, got nuked.  Fatherless homes exploded.  The Great Society didn’t cure poverty:  it subsidized it while making dads optional and government mandatory.

My WIFI router is in the basement.  You could say this post comes from a LAN down under.

Every facet of life got the treatment.

Religion was pushed out of the public square.  “Under God” became hate speech.  Local norms replaced by federal mandates.  You couldn’t even form a private club without worrying about quotas.

The explicit goal?

Fragment the connections that made America 1960 a powerhouse.  Replace them with government strings.  Make people dependent on D.C. instead of their neighbors, their church, or their own character.

And it worked.

One generation. That’s all it took.

We went from “mind your own business but don’t be a jerk” to needing sensitivity training to say “good morning” without committing a microaggression.  We went from “your reputation follows you” to “my truth” where accountability is optional and consequences are for white men.

The absurdity peaks when you realize the same people who tore down the norms now act shocked at the results.

“Why is crime up? Why are families falling apart? Why can’t we have nice things?”

Because they spent 60 years telling people the guardrails were bigotry.  They replaced “don’t do that, people will talk” with “do whatever feels good, you slay, queen.”  They swapped local bankers who knew your grandma for algorithms that approve loans based on your zip code, skin tone, and whether your social media likes the right causes.

A fragmented society built on ephemeral values:  “my feelings, my identity, my government check” cannot magically produce the disciplined, self-restrained people who built the 1960 powerhouse. We can’t have a republic of free men when half the population thinks “freedom” means no consequences and the other half thinks the Constitution constrains the government too much.

The fall wasn’t accidental.

I ate in an all-you-can-eat Italian restaurant buffet.  There were endless pastabilities.

It was engineered during a time of plenty, when people were fat and happy enough to believe the sales pitch.  “Break the old norms, they’re oppressive!” Turns out the oppression was mostly keeping humans from doing what humans do when they’re not in a civilization and are left unchecked.

I don’t think we can keep the republic Franklin talked about from where we are.  Adams knew the reason: paper and ink don’t enforce morality.  People do.

Or they don’t.  And when they don’t, the government is happy to step in with a smile and a 10,000-page regulation.

The norms are gone. The absurdity remains. And the bill?

It’s due, with interest.

The Defeat Of The West?

“Victory has defeated you.” – The Dark Knight Rises

I once forgot the rules to chess, but they told me it was okay to check.

I just wrapped up Emmanuel Todd’s latest book, La Défaite de l’Occident (that’s “The Defeat of the West” for those of us that hate the metric system), and it lines up perfectly with what I’ve been posting about for years here.  In fact, this isn’t the first time I’ve written about Dr. Todd, having written about his Family Structure/Geopolitics Theory.

Another Key To Understanding It All: Family Structure

Family Structure, Part II: Orphans Still Not Required

The book isn’t in English yet, but somebody cut and pasted it into Google® to have it translated, and you can find it out there if you look.

In this book, Todd is using the Ukraine mess as a lens to autopsy what he calls the West’s self-inflicted doom.  In Todd’s view, the collective West is collapsing, compared to “stable” powers like Russia and China.  The West’s decline isn’t from bad luck or Russian super-spies, nope.  It comes from the rotting foundations of the West itself.

Why did Princess Diana cross the road?  She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt.

I’ve written extensively about the deindustrialization that’s left the economy hollowed out, so that should be familiar.  Add to that a slide into nihilism stemming from the death of Protestant Christianity in the United States.  Protestants used to stand for something, but the last time I went to a Protestant church it was very much them not wanting to be against anything and the female pastor went on a long “men are bad” speech.

On the other side, Russia, lagging on almost everything by about 50 years, is experiencing a resurgence in families, a religious revival, and an ethnonational cohesion that allowed them to (mostly) take the hit from sanctions and keep going.  The Ukraine war?  It’s the litmus test exposing our bluff:  we’re great at low-intensity or short duration conflicts with things like coups, sanctions, and drone strikes on weaklings (Iran, Venezuela, you name it), but don’t have the industry for real, prolonged industrial slugfests.

One example:  Russia can produce three million rounds of artillery a year, with one recent estimate that they produced seven million rounds last year.  Even at the lower three million number, that is three times the amount that the United States and other NATO countries, combined can produce.  And, yeah, Russia is fighting Ukraine and the United States has lots of amazing tech that nobody but people with top clearance or Chinese spies know about.

That’s why Ukraine keeps facing ammo droughts.  The West’s “superior” economies are finance-bloated illusions where we just keep swapping pictures of silver for electronic dollars that we’re too cheap to bother printing anymore.

I am really good at predicting the scores of the Super Bowls® before they start.  0-0.

US manufacturing jobs?  These dropped from 20 million in 1980 to 13 million today, with 80% of GDP now in services and Wall Street Pokémon® card swapping.

Russia simply isn’t the basketcase the MSM paints.  Yes, their nominal GDP’s around $2T vs. the US’s $27T and EU’s $20T, but in purchasing parity (what their money can really buy them) terms, Russia’s at $6T, edging out Germany as the world’s fourth largest economy.

Why?  The sanctions (starting in 2014) forced them to become independent.  After nearly a decade, when the United States hit them with sanctions after their 2022 invasion of the Ukraine, well, they were ready to survive without trade from the West.  Even though Russia has a much smaller population (roughly half) than the United States, Russia has more engineers aged 20 to 34 than the United States.  Russia has 2 million, the United States around 1.3 million.

Once a European midget asked me to hide him.  I guess I can cache a small Czech.

Contrast that with what Todd calls the West’s “shallow state” since it’s (his view) an oligarchic mess lacking soul or cohesion.  Todd mainly blames this on religious evolution:  Protestantism (Weber’s ethic of work, literacy, discipline) powered the rise of the West, but we’ve hit the stage where the United States is a secular void.  Zombie Protestant churches linger, channeling energy into welfare states.

Now we find that culture in the West is pure nihilism: no morals, just primitive urges for pleasure, cash, and violence.  Todd’s view is that the moral low point where we finally jumped the shark was around 2015.  “Marriage for all” symbolizing the final shredding of Christian norms and rise of GloboLeftism.  In Todd’s words, “If the people and the elite no longer agree to function together, the notion of representative democracy no longer makes sense:  we end up with an elite who no longer wants to represent the people and a people who are no longer represented.”

This certainly defines the state of the West now.  A huge majority of the people want all illegals gone, and some want legals gone, too.  And yet, the illegals are here and we fight to make the line up and to the right in what is now, according to Todd, a “liberal oligarchy”.  That leads to a national weakness.

This weakness is structural and has been building for decades as the United States in particular (and the West in general) worked as fast as it could to de-industrialize.  This offshoring has consequences, and can’t be changed in a heartbeat.  To rebuild, we have to build factories, build supply chains, build up a workforce, and remember how to make stuff.  To explain how difficult this may prove to be, in 2024 China reached 10,000 Terawatt hours of electrical production.  That’s more than the United States, Europe and India combined.

My favorite Asian stereotype is Sony®.

Back to Todd:  “Producing the world’s currency, at minimal or no cost, makes all activities other than monetary creation unprofitable and therefore unattractive.”  Why do we spend so much effort on finance in the United States?  It’s just so profitable and so much easier than making stuff, which requires real effort.

Todd’s conclusion:  Ukraine was a trap for the United States. The United States, flush from the victory over the Soviets was unbound.  It could do whatever it wanted.  The United States expanded its global reach from the early 90s to 2022.  But we ignored Russia’s 2021 ultimatum because we thought sanctions would crush them like they did in 2014.

The opposite happened.  Ukraine remains resilient but allowing 60+ year olds into the army isn’t really a sign that you expect when you’re winning.  I expect the end of Ukraine’s resistance to be amazingly abrupt and to occur sometime in the next year, with August being a midpoint.  Russia will win, and as near as I can see, their economy is stronger and more independent than it was before the start of the war.

I asked Sydney “How do you get into that tight shirt?” and she said, “For starters, you could buy me a drink.”

Now, my two cents:  Todd’s spot-on that West’s weakness is structural, not just spineless leaders.  Pain is coming.  NATO/EU has ceased to be a bloc; it’s a squabbling conglomerate with clashing interests and seems to have lost its will to live.

Todd’s book substantiates the politically incorrect that I’ve been championing forever:  nationalism trumps globalism.  The West is exhausted, defeated not by conquest but by its own nihilism leading to that most Evil philosophy of all:  “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

As for me?  I still refuse to learn to speak or read French.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Stochastic Warfare

“Don’t you know we in a war here?” – Forrest Gump

War isn’t always about who is right, but it always is about who is left.

  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 8

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

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

In this issue:  Front Matter – Stochastic Warfare – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – 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 840 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Stochastic Warfare

The Tweet® really does outline what many readers have been saying, namely, that we are under attack.  Is it open warfare?  Not exactly.  It’s 5th or 6th generation warfare, fought on a civilizational scale on the timeline of generations.  Against you.

And the person being attacked is . . . you.  You don’t have to die now.  First, they’ll encourage feminism and promote the idea of female empowerment meaning, “hey, let’s whore ourselves out during our twenties so we can’t pair-bond with men in our most fertile years” to create an environment where there is a “shortage” of people.

Again, this is not a company.  It’s a country.  A business can have a shortage of workers, a country can’t have a shortage of its own citizens.  That’s nonsensical.  It’s like saying my family has a shortage of members, so I’ll bring in an Indian.  See?  Nonsense.  A country is much closer to a family than a company.  If there’s a shortage of workers, the answer is to do things that increase native childbirth.

That’s it.  If they liked you.  Instead they work white men and women to pay for people who hate them.

This is how Stochastic War works.

No, their next step is to import millions of people that support the ideology of the progressive state, of globalism, of communalism.  When these people arrive, inject them with the idea that they deserve the country.  Now, since they don’t want to be American, and since they would fight against America if (say) America entered a war against Somalia or India they’re not committed to America.  They’re just here to extract economic resources.

Once these people are imported, what then?  They take your money.  Your world is made poorer as the grift/scam/cash grab continues and recycles that money to foreigners and to GloboLeftist politicians.  If you look at the graph below, you see that race plays a part in the way people vote and in who the Democrats want to import to retain power.  Why do they want a lot of Indians (Gujarati)?  Because they vote for the warmth of collectivism because more government systems mean more scams and corruption.  Also, they have never had to deal with the Berlin Wall, which was built to contain the warmth of collectivism behind concrete and barbed wire, as collectivism always ends up.

This is how Stochastic War works.

There are ramifications of this war against you.  If you didn’t hear, a black man stabbed a white guy.  The white guy then said the evil gamer-word after being stabbed.  This is not an unreasonable reaction, and is a far lesser offense than stabbing someone.  The jury acquitted the black man, despite clear video of the attack.

This is Stochastic Warfare.  Blacks learn that they can stab with impunity.

Black jurors, though, aren’t a jury of “peers” since statistically, they have been proven to be biased in favor of blacks.  This destroys the justice system:  it’s supposed to be blind, and your skin color or wealth or age or sex shouldn’t matter.  We’re human, though, and rich guys can buy great lawyers, so the system has always had a skew to it.  But without a functioning justice system, or worse, a justice system skewed to convict white people for crimes that are far beyond the offense (Derek Chauvin for murder) vigilantism will return.

Not might.  Will.

Even when people are found not guilty, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend a murder case, and Daniel Penny rightly walked free, but what’s the cost?

This is how Stochastic War works.

This bias applies everywhere and you can see that black people hate white people, a lot, in Great Britian.

And The Washington Times story, below, is behind a paywall, but the headline speaks for itself:

The problem of a multicultural society isn’t limited to blacks.  Other racial/ethnic groups like themselves best.  Hispanics like Hispanics most.  Blacks like blacks most.  Asians like Asians most.  But whites?  They like everyone the same.  That egalitarianism is crucial to making a multicultural society work, but multicultural societies never work.

And Great Britain now realizes this.  Would they ask their moslem or Indian invaders to fight for them?  Of course not, because they know that the moslems want to conquer the English rather than Crimea.  The Indians?  The Indians mostly are there for a buck and would run away back to Mumbai if they felt even slightly threatened.  That leaves the white guys.  Who will, once again, be faced with disproportionate death and injury.

Which is how Stochastic War works.

The mayor of London, who isn’t British, wants to make white people disappear.  Literally:

And, you have people like this.  This is in America.

It’s time to push back.  It appears that the rapes and killings and theft have been enough and the Irish are pushing back against Stochastic War.

I think that @dystopiangf is right.  We are in the midst of a quiet, Stochastic War that has been going on for decades, almost certainly since before I was born.  What we are sensing right now is the time when people realize, and finally accept that this Forgotten War (I wrote a song about this LINK, you should listen to it because it’s pretty badass) against cultures we vanquished centuries or thousands of years ago is going on.

As people awaken, we’ll see what people have always seen as demographic changes occur:  open war.  Remigration is the kindest choice, but here we are.

Buckle up.

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red.  Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery numbers.  The advance is at a near minimum, given the Fed®’s policy.

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 up slightly this month, and still elevated.

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went down this month after the budget fight ended.  I think the Somilisota scandal may increase pressures in a few months.

Economic:

The economy up just a smidge this month, but I think this is still cloaking the middle-class crunch and perhaps a bubble.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the lowest level since the Weather Report started.

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS
https://x.com/CaughtCam404/status/1998766070623252802
https://x.com/FoxNews/status/2006823362182394125

GOOD GUYS
https://x.com/StealthQE4/status/2006266481001001437
https://x.com/nickshirleyy/status/2004642794862961123

ONE GUY
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/oklahoma-man-target-practice-backyard-accused-fatally-shooting/story?id=128707327
https://realclearwire.com/articles/2025/12/13/wsjs_fearmongering_doesnt_survive_contact_with_evidence_153631.html

BODY COUNT
https://wir2026.wid.world/insight/executive-summary/
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/All_the_Worlds_Births_Web-1.jpg?itok=z3Ci7zG4
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/business/us-immigration-trump-1920s.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AFA.WFF9.w9QS69D5L2fG&smid=url-share
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Homicide_Rates_Web.jpg?itok=rn1aSBmf
https://studyfinds.org/churches-kept-americans-alive-states-made-a-decision/
https://www.thewrap.com/industry-news/business/entertainment-media-layoffs-2025-analysis/
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2025/12/19/dumber-sicker-poorer/

VOTE COUNT
https://thefederalist.com/2025/12/17/fulton-county-we-dont-dispute-315000-votes-lacking-poll-workers-signatures-were-counted-in-2020/
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/longtime-trump-pollster-reveals-ugly-forecast-for-republicans-heading-into-2026/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/fight-young-men-2026-midterm-elections-rcna249513
https://www.cnn.com/politics/state-redistricting-maps-vis

CIVIL WAR
https://financialpreparedness.substack.com/p/who-are-the-bad-guys
https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/12/the-eu-could-be-gone-in-four-years-a-revolutionary-eruption-is-coming/
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/12/the_stages_of_a_color_revolution_and_where_the_u_s_is_right_now.html
https://rollcall.com/2025/10/08/civil-war-national-guard-midterm-elections/
https://www.civilbeat.org/2025/12/is-a-civil-war-possible-in-america-or-hawaii/
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2025/12/08/mass-collective-societal-suicide/
https://victorhanson.com/can-the-dark-ages-return/

Tranquility Was Never The Goal

“Our Great War is a spiritual war.  Our Great Depression is our lives.” – Fight Club

The ultimate participation award.

As humans, we’re wired wrong.  Or right, depending on how you look at it.

We chase peace like it’s the ultimate prize at the carnival of life.  We say that we want a world without war, without struggle, where everyone has a comfy couch, unlimited Wi-Fi, more liver capacity, and steak that cooks and delivers itself.

Sounds like Heaven, right?

Wrong.  When I was a wee Wilder, Grandma McWilder would talk about how I should do nice things in life rather than bathing the cat in a paste made from DDT® and Lysol™ so I could go to Heaven.  Obviously, I asked, “What is Heaven like?”

Grandma told me it was nice and peaceful and that nothing bad ever happened up there.  I believe I said something like, “That sounds boring.”  Grandma did not look pleased, but I don’t know if it was about my statement or the cat.

Let’s just say I was a technicolor handful as a kid.  Oh, the stories I could tell.

But I wasn’t wrong.

But wait, there’s more!

Tranquility isn’t the goal.  Tranquility is the trap.

Peace isn’t just boring; it is deadly to the human spirit.  We need the fight, the blood, the steel. Without it, we rot from the inside out.  And that’s not me, John Wilder making crap up again.  We have actual studies where the government tortured mice to verify that I’m right.

Take John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiments, please.  I’ve written about them a couple times before, you can use the search thingy in the upper right hand of the screen to find them.  I would have done that for you but you’re not my supervisor and I could type this sentence way faster.  Short summary:

In the 1960s, Calhoun built paradise for mice: unlimited food, water, space, unlimited beef jerky, no predators, SNAP benefits.

What happened?  At first, boom, the population soared.  But then, the weirdness set in.  The mice stopped breeding normally.  Males became either passive or hyper-aggressive or “beautiful ones,” preening themselves instead of fighting or mating.

Females abandoned pups.  Society collapsed into violence, isolation, and extinction.  All of this happened in a “utopia”.

No threats, no struggles:  just free cheese forever.  And they died out.  Stop me if you’ve seen this recently in other mammals.

I’m not going sugarcoat my jokes about diabetes.

Humans aren’t mice, but we’re close enough if you ask my parole officer.  Look at the downward spiral of the United States after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.  The Cold War ended.  We “won.”  Yay!  No more Soviet boogeyman lurking with nukes and unibrows.

Instead?  Peace!  Prosperity!

What did we do?  Got fat, lazy, bored and divided:  music went from “I’m gonna kick your ass” in the 1980s to “Oh, man, I need lithium because I’m sad”.  The ‘90s brought endless economic booms, but also the seeds of today’s mess:  identity politics, endless entertainment, and a generation starting to get hooked on screens instead of life.

Without a real enemy, we turned inward, fighting over pronouns and safe spaces.  Tranquility bred complacency, and complacency bred decay.

Same story with the Moon landing. July 20, 1969:  Armstrong steps on the lunar surface.  Humanity’s greatest leap.  We beat gravity, the Soviets, and the odds.  Then?  Crickets as the ratings dropped.

We went back a few times, planted flags, played golf (shoutout to Alan Shepard), and then just . . .stopped.

And then she refused to talk to them for six hours.

NASA shifted to the gay space trucks shuttles and looking for non-binary muslims and lesbians to shoot into orbit.  No more bold frontiers.  Why?  We won.  The Sea of Tranquility turned space exploration into a budget line item.

Need another example:  a Syrian teen in London.

Picture this:  an eighteen-year-old from war-torn Syria, resettled in a taxpayer-funded flat in London.  Free food.  Free education.  Free X-Box®.

Utopia, right?

Wrong.  He drops the controller and goes to Syria andjoins ISIS or stays in London and joins a gang and becomes a rapefugee with a machete.

Why?

Blood calls to blood.  Iron to Iron.  That flat was Mouse Utopia 2.0:  safe, soft, soulless and, let’s face it, that kid was inbred and not very bright to start with.  He craved the jihad, the struggle, the validation of existence through fire and fight.  Comfort didn’t kill his spirit, comfort starved it.  In part, this is why allowing refugees from incompatible countries is immoral.

I played hide and seek and ended up in the hospital.  ICU!

Why do we have wars?

We want wars.  If they weren’t popular, we’d have stopped having them a very long time ago.

Why do we want them?  Not because we’re monsters, but because we’re human.  Struggle validates us.  High stakes forge character.  Leaders like Alexander or Churchill didn’t thrive in peace; they rose in the crises they created.

Without enemies, we manufacture them, internal or imaginary.  Look at modern “wars”: culture wars, gender wars, class wars, cola wars.  We can’t help it.  Tranquility isn’t our default; it’s a rare condition that, when it lasts long enough we pop our collective corks.

Think about it:  our history has wired us for survival, not spa days.  Hunter-gatherers fought for food, territory, mates and because it was Tuesday.  Civilizations brought people together and made a professional league and channeled that into empires, exploration, and innovations. Remove the fight?

We devolve.

Mouse Utopia showed it: no threats equates to no purpose.  Humans need the arena, the sweat, the sand, and the blood.  We were built for the Colosseum, not the couch.

But here’s the rub:  the struggle creates a spot for growth, it’s literally the engine of history.  Without high stakes, we fail to thrive.

We back ourselves into existential corners: depression epidemics, fertility crashes, societies crumbling under their own weight and people who need drugs to stop that nagging feeling that they should be doing something that matters.  Oddly enough, our very humanity appears to be built upon the fight.

If you meet a dolphin and feel a connection, can you say that you just clicked?

So, what now?

We can’t “prosperity” the struggle out of us.  We need leaders who rally us to real frontiers and put real goals out in front of us, not fake fights over tweets®.  Stakes high enough to matter: colonize Mars, cure aging, harness fusion.  And something for the masses to do, like watching re-runs of Ow, My Balls.

Something.  If we don’t have something, we’ll make something.  Give us blood (metaphorical or not), steel, the feel of it all.  In the end, tranquility was never the goal.

The struggle is the point.  It’s what makes us scream, fight, and conquer.  As I’ve seen in memes:  “I want to go out of this world the same way I came into it: screaming and covered in someone else’s blood.”

And Heaven?

I think it isn’t at all as Grandma Wilder described.  I think it’s more like:

Player 1:  Ready Level 2.

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

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

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

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

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

Now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yay!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They love 2025.

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

What could go wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the ladies?  Well . . . .

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

Not all power is useful.

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

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

Stable accountant husbands toiling for stacks of worthless cash?

Adios.

Black-market speculators with coal or ham?

Jackpot.

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

Chastity?  Loyalty?

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

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

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

Act 2:  1924-1928 – Stabilization to Sizzle

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

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

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

Divorces? Up 20 per 100 marriages.

Abortions? From taboo to two-for-Tuesday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the rise?

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

America’s Weimar Remix: Where are we now?

Fast-forward to the U.S.

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

Want to take bets on which we do?

The morality failure is in play:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn’t progress grand?