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Few people alive today in the West can remember a time when people were free to associate with whomever they chose. It requires some mental exertion to imagine a society in which a tavern or men’s club could legally exclude women, or a commercial enterprise could hire (or refuse to hire) a person for any reason it pleased—and nobody saw it as any of their damn business.
Though human nature can be suppressed, it usually manages to reassert itself in one form or another. “Birds of a feather flock together” and all that. People find workarounds. In our current world, an approximation of free association is most often achieved via narrowly-defined interest groups. If you establish a gun club, specializing in cowboy-style revolver shooting, you will probably not be bothered by the presence of too many woke lesbian illegal aliens. But this method is far from airtight, and one is always fearful of complaints, lawsuits, and other harassment. There are, however, a number of loopholes that are entirely legal. For example, the family business, which I believe is still exempt from certain kinds of interference. Another is the residential community with an “over 55” age restriction. Money certainly helps. If you have a lot of it, you can buy your way into association with a better class of people. You can live in the best neighborhood, send the kids to private school, etc. But this path is not what it used to be, as every word and action is under scrutiny. A path to free association that once saw widespread use in the U.S. was the ethnic enclave. Remember the tapestry of ethnic neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and other large cities? The iron fist of “civil rights,” notably the destruction of neighborhood schools via forced integration, put an end to that culture. Once a common feature of American life, today a successful enclave requires extremely high levels of homogeneity and unity. The groups that can still pull it off include the Amish, Orthodox Jews, lower-class blacks, and various Asian nationalities. And let us not forget the Indian reservation, which is the gold standard of exclusivity. Strong communities and a true aristocracy cannot develop unless people are allowed to segregate themselves into micro-worlds, based on any number of parameters: education, political views, religion, wealth, to name just a few. The difficulty in achieving this detachment accounts for much of the reticence to form families. Free association manifests itself in effective separation between classes, and in social and occupational groupings that are composed exclusively of a specific human type. These types evolve and are maintained by means of closely-held traditions, and strict rules for recruitment. Naturally, the rules are set by the people within a given domain, not by the legislature. This ancient social foundation was largely in effect in the U.S. until the 1960s. In Western Europe, it lasted even longer. Today, we still have traces of this structure. Almost every field retains an image, however archaic, of its consummate type: the orchestral conductor with long, unkempt hair; the stocky, wisecracking taxi driver; the stoic, unflappable nurse; the absent-minded professor; the slimy salesman; and so on. Until recently, when you stepped onto a commercial airliner and peered into the cockpit, you were almost guaranteed to see two physically fit white men, former Air Force pilots, clean shaven, with short hair. This is the human type most suited to the task at hand. And it could develop and be sustained only under conditions of free association. Obviously, this logical and natural organization of society has been largely destroyed. This accounts for much of our dysfunction and chaos. However, as we transition back to a reality-based world (see my post of 2/10/25), perhaps free association will make a comeback. The dismantling of DEI and other forms of government meddling is an encouraging sign. This must continue until the entire “civil rights” edifice is demolished, to be replaced by a resurgent zeitgeist of liberty, and its corollary, a decentralized, spontaneous ordering of society.
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It seems that the career of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, otherwise known as Pope Francis, is drawing to a close. Bergoglio has managed to do an excellent imitation of a pope, a sinecure that enabled him to push the woke and Globalist agenda worldwide, these past twelve years. He is a textbook case of infiltrating an organization in order to subvert it.
I will always remember Bergoglio for his impressive 2016 publicity stunt, in which he washed the feet of some Third World savages who were imported into Europe to destroy Western civilization. Well, this neo-Marxist piece of trash will have all of eternity to ponder his complicity in the ongoing stabbing attacks across the continent, not to speak of all the other mayhem. I have a suggestion for his handlers: Before Bergoglio goes to his resting place in the underworld, administer the PCR test to His Holiness. Then it can be announced that “the Pope died of Covid.” What a splendid finale to his illustrious career! Martyrdom to top it all off! By now everyone has probably heard about the unfathomable stupidity and ignorance of “journalist” Margaret Brennan, host of CBS’s Face the Nation, who put forth a peculiar thesis about the Holocaust. In a February 16 interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, she expressed her horror that Vice-President JD Vance, in his visit to Germany, was meeting with representatives of “the far-right party known as the AfD.” To add to her dismay, Vance “was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”
Just when you thought these neo-Marxist apparatchiks could not possibly be more biased, ignorant, and corrupt, they come up with something like this. But it’s par for the course, and no one should be surprised. The Trump Administration has announced measures to combat the Fake News industry. These include ethics probes by the FCC, cancellation of subscriptions, and elimination of privileges given to certain outlets at the White House and the Pentagon. This in addition to the ongoing elimination of Federal slush funds for Leftist organizations (such as the BBC), money that had been laundered via US AID and other channels. These are excellent first steps, but much more is needed. If the goal is to stop and reverse this malignant disease, we first need a more accurate diagnosis. As happens so often, the road to recovery begins with the use of correct terminology. Calling them the Mainstream media or even the Legacy media gives them credibility as news media. When Americans, particularly the older cohort, think of the press, we naively imagine hard-nosed reporters fighting organized crime or city hall, and otherwise serving the public, like this. But anything remotely resembling this quaint image ceased to exist years ago. The likes of CNN, the New York Times, Yahoo, CBS, the Washington Post, Associated Press, etc. are not news media. They are propaganda organs of the Leftist establishment; its public relations arm, if you will. They serve the same function as Pravda in the Soviet Union. We must stop referring to them as “the media,” of any kind whatsoever. There is no reason to have Soviet-style propaganda organs present at any government event, especially press conferences—which should be reserved for the press. Why on earth should these degenerates-in-a-suit be there, badgering the President (or some other official) with lies, distortions, and “gotcha” questions? Any “journalists” engaging in this practise should be forthwith excluded from the privilege of attending a press conference. Everyone has their personal biases, but shifty and deceitful Leftist behavior should not be tolerated. Instead, reserve these slots for legitimate producers of news. The internet is bursting at the seams with organizations and individuals who fit the bill. They are the real media, serving the public by providing useful information in an intelligent manner. The Trump Administration is cleaning house, eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse throughout Washington, DC. They are vigorously purging entrenched woke ideologues from all government institutions. There should be no exemption for the Deep State’s propaganda mouthpieces. Cut off the money and cut off the access. They can exercise their First Amendment rights from their mother’s basement. We began this post with the Nazis; let us end there: Allowing these fraudsters to be the filter through which millions of people receive information about the government would be like the Allied armies, after crossing the Rhine into Germany in 1945, appointing Joseph Goebbels as their press secretary. As more and more of the business of life is conducted electronically, one might be tempted to pause and consider the advisability of this trend. I believe that in most cases, the abandonment or minimization of in-person contact is detrimental to the future health of mankind.
Our species has a deep need for community, and the online world is a cheap substitute for the real item. Think of the small town or urban neighborhood of yesteryear. Its beating heart is Main Street, the primary thoroughfare of commerce, where flesh-and-blood humans interact to meet each other’s basic needs. They exchange physical money for physical goods; a value-for-value transaction occurs. Meanwhile, the humans speak to each other, cementing the bonds of community. Even the most trivial small talk helps to fulfill this function. This is one reason why using cash is so important. Granted, our fiat currency is a pale derivative, far removed from real money. Nevertheless, some-thing at least is being exchanged. Cash is a key vestige of meaningful human interaction in commerce. This is gone when you interract with a screen, avoiding the direct transfer of an object of value to the person with whom the transaction is made (if a person is even present). Returning now to the small town/urban neighborhood model: Expanding outward from the commerce of Main Street, we see schools, churches, playgrounds, parks, stadiums, courts, and the private offices of physicians. All of these are the scene of face-to-face encounters, most involving (gasp) actual physical contact. Schools, universities, and the learning of trades can never complete their mission in an online environment. Sure, via a computer screen a person can accumulate facts, but not craft. Craftsmanship, including in the white-collar world, can be acquired only from live human interaction. One must see the trade being practised, and receive on-the-spot feedback for one’s own tentative efforts. This is why true experts almost always had a tutor, mentor, master, or coach to guide them in the early days, and even throughout their careers. Let us take a step back from this later stage of education, and consider child-rearing. The creation of offspring is obviously a physical, in-person act, but so is proper upbringing. Once again, only live human role models can do the job. Integrity, character, honesty, etc. cannot be transmitted on line. My heart breaks when I see a parent giving a child, often a very small one, a screen of some kind to play with. I wonder whether this phenomenon contributes to the plague of autism-like behavior among our youth. We lament the rise of loneliness and alienation in our society. The causes are many and varied, but part of the story is surely the factors cited above. Of all the manifestations of the dehumanized society, one that is emblematic, in my mind, is “working from home.” Very few individuals possess the maturity and intelligence to work effectively in this manner. For the vast majority, it is the adult equivalent of playing hooky. This computer-age farce contributes to the angst that sits on us like a heavy fog. The infamous lockdowns, along with other totalitarian measures, led to the normalization of “working” from home. The bonds of human society were degraded. Small business was dealt a blow. Feelings of alienation were exacerbated. The building of real community, from out of the miasma that is contemporary Western civilization, would require the curtailment of lawlessness on our city streets. It also would require the restoration of freedom of association. I will cover this concept in a separate post. “What the gentleman seeks, he seeks within himself; what the small man seeks, he seeks in others.”
— Confucious (The Analects, XV.21) In my post of 12/14/24 (“Annoyances”), I listed some of the more annoying aspects of current human behavior. One item was the following:
“Uptalk. Enunciating a statement as if it were a question; constant rising intonation. Especially annoying on men. Makes them sound like little girls.” I had hoped that with the change in atmosphere following the advent of the Trump Administration, a more masculine manner of speech would be heard across the land. Sure, I expected to still be subjected to pathetic feminized uptalking from a twenty-something woke moron working at Whole Foods, but among our thought leaders, absolutely not. Unfortunately, it seems that everywhere I look, even among bright individuals with good ideas, the plague has not ceased; if anything, it has worsened. Another verbal tic that has spread far and wide is the constant use of the words “kind of” and “sort of.” Or, in more rapid speech, kinda and sorta. Yesterday I began watching a podcast featuring an expert in economic and financial affairs. This was an intelligent person, not a Leftist by any stretch of the imagination. Almost every definitive statement was preceded by kind of or sort of. I was not able to watch more than a couple of minutes. It was kind of, sort of, like, you know, well, very exhausting. These words do have a use case. There are times that one wishes to qualify an assertion, as in “her demeanor was sort of hostile, though I couldn’t point to anything explicit.” But when making a factual statement, the usage is inappropriate. There is no reason to say “the Fed kind of held interest rates where they are, with no change.” The Fed didn’t kind of hold them, they held them, period. The effect is the same as with uptalking: information ceases to be communicated as cold, hard facts. Everything is in question, and nobody wants to commit. Given the multiple crises and challenges we face today, there has never been a time that demands more forceful, unequivocal speech. What we do not need to convey is weakness, uncertainty, and self-doubt. As the Trump Administration takes action to crush DEI, and put an end to this disgraceful chapter of American history, it is important to examine the ideological antecedents that gave birth to the plague. In this vein, I invite you to read an article I wrote in 2007 for American Thinker, entitled “Diversity, Nihilism, and the Anti-Rational Mind.”
When hysterical Leftists claim that President Trump and his associates are seizing power, or engaged in a coup d’état, in a sense they are correct. Over the course of the last century, the Deep State spread its tentacles into every nook and cranny of the Federal apparatus. On January 19, 2025, this entrenched Leftist administrative juggernaut was, for all practical purposes, the government of the United States. The president had become window dressing, a quaint relic of the bygone constitutional republic.
So when Donald Trump & Co. asserted authority over the Executive branch, thinking that the elected president and his appointees are actually in charge of their agencies, they really were trying to overthrow the government. Let us not forget that “our democracy” is a codeword for the Deep State; the function of an election, as in the USSR, is for the People to show their love and affection for the legitimate rulers of the country, not—Lenin forbid—to replace them. How can you replace the true representatives of the People? And thus we have this bizarre coup d’état, where the president is seizing control of the presidency. We need a new word to describe this phenomenon. Autocoup? Retrocoup? Whatever it’s called, Trump really is overturning the established order. This situation produces a host of ludicrous scenes. As I watched one of the signing ceremonies/press conferences, this one featuring Musk, I thought to myself: Trump and Musk are taking a much-deserved victory lap after uncovering the tip of the iceberg of what may be the biggest fraud in the history of man. This is how a normal human being would view it. But the audience in the room is the White House press corps, mostly composed of “journalists” who are essentially propaganda attachés of the Deep State. Musk is taking away their rice bowl. To them, US AID is not subject to the authority of the president, rather it is an independent branch of the government; dismantling it would be akin to abolishing Congress. Trump could expose waste, fraud, and abuse until the cows come home, and the Left wouldn’t care a whit. If a thousand worthless bureaucrats and consultants inside the Beltway each have to pocket a million dollars so that the election of one conservative East European prime minister is nullified, so be it. This is how the U.S. government works. It is absolutely normal, standard operating procedure. And now we have low-level Federal judges ordering President Trump and his Cabinet to keep their hands off the agencies under their purview. This galactic level of chutzpah is the natural outgrowth of the judiciary’s illegal usurpation of power, growing in intensity for decades. Of all the genies that must be stuffed back into the bottle, this is one of the most urgent. I cringed when I heard Trump say, at the aforementioned press conference, that he would obey the judges, and appeal the rulings. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed this policy the following day. Did it ever occur to him that the President of the United States is not obligated to obey an illegal order conjured up in the feverish mind of a Leftist lunatic? If a judge tomorrow rules that Trump cannot speak with world leaders, or that the White House staff must all appear in public with ice cream cones protruding from the top of their heads, would he obey that as well? What is the limit of this farce? The Administration is going to appeal?! Does Trump not realize that in the eyes of the Left, he just surrendered to the authority of the Deep State? Does he not remember that his first administration was neutered in the same manner? This cannot be allowed to stand. Where’s our new Attorney-General Pam Bondi, that supposedly tough-as-nails supergirl? Oh, she’s busy bringing lawsuits against governors and other top officials of states (most recently New York) that are sabotaging the Administration’s enforcement of the law against illegal aliens. What is it with conservatives and lawsuits? For goodness sake, we are dealing here with criminals. Appoint a prosecutor, and slap on the handcuffs. The state officials are clearly engaged in obstruction of justice and aiding and abetting a felony, and the judges are fomenting insurrection. These apparatchiks must be behind bars, pronto. Otherwise, the autocoup may fail, and Trump will have little else to do but attend MAGA rallies and rearrange the furniture in the White House. In summary, I will repeat the words of Curtis Yarvin that I quoted in my post of 1/20/25: “Progressives do not believe in the American system of government, only in power. Conservatives do not believe in power, only in the American system of government. Therefore, progressives always win and conservatives always lose.” "Vaccine worship looks like religious worship...I take a drug, put the word vaccine on it, and magically and miraculously it's perfect, like it came directly from God."
— Robert Barnes The Trump Administration has launched a multi-front attack on the slimy tentacles of the Deep State. We have all been witness to the blitzkrieg, and it has provided warmth for our hearts.
This campaign represents the end of an era; or more precisely, it heralds the transition from one era to another. Coming to an end is the modern era of Fantasy, perhaps the greatest and longest of its kind in world history; opening before us is the age of Reality, which is the default state of mankind. To whatever degree Trump and his associates succeed in resuscitating our bruised and battered country, there is no going back to Fantasy world. Even if they fail, whoever takes the reins of power will be staring Reality in the face. It’s here to stay. Our era of Fantasy began with the French Revolution, which instituted a slate of false, imaginary precepts by which man was expected to live. This constituted a mythological system that would put any primitive, superstitious culture to shame. The worst ideas and idols of the Enlightenment were dredged up and repackaged, forming the foundation of the Fantasy system, a foundation upon which we still stand. But not for long. The key ingredient is the myth of Equality. This is the biggest pipe dream of all, and the one upon which all else depends. It has enabled, over time, the construction of a mirror world, a parallel universe. Society devolved into two main divisions: those who perform productive work that results in the fulfillment of real human needs, and a steadily growing parasitic class. Today, virtually every sector is plagued with an internal and antagonistic Reality/Fantasy split. For example, agriculture. The Reality side: farmers, distributors, slaughterhouses, etc. The Fantasy side includes the bureaucrats and “thought leaders” that tell us to stop eating meat, and who bully the farmers into adulterating or destroying their crops and livestock. Once the Big Lie of Equality became entrenched, many other lies followed. Over time, we reach the postmodern society, in which misrepresentation is ubiquitous. We are saddled with fake art, fake religion, fake education, fake scholarship, fake jurisprudence, fake healthcare, and on and on. The never-ending train of lies has been interpreted by some observers to be the approach of the “Leftist singularity”: infinite Leftism in finite time. I believe that we reached something approximating this state of affairs as the Biden regime drew to a close. This is the hornet’s nest that was sliced open by Trump and his people, exposing unimaginable levels of corruption, malfeasance, and treason. In the Leftist singularity, or Fantasy world run amok, society deteriorates into a chaotic, dysfunctional mess. This has caused wealthy, powerful individuals like Elon Musk to defect from Fantasy world to Reality world. A type of fraud that is crucial to the operation of Fantasy world is fake money. Since time immemorial, money has been gold and silver. These are tokens of Reality world. In Fantasy world, money has been abstracted and transmuted, by degrees, into ever more empty and worthless derivatives. Cryptocurrency, the final divorce from Reality, is only the latest in a long line of these progressively more counterfeit forms of “money.” Fake money and its intellectual handmaiden, Keynesian economic theory, transformed debt from an embarrassing, temporary situation to an unquestioned and even praiseworthy status quo. Exponentially rising debt, like the universe exploding outward from the Big Bang, enabled the expansion of government to obscene levels. Needless to say, this has flooded Fantasy world with virtually unlimited resources. Until now. Of all the countless unsustainable aspects of Fantasy world, one in particular is the proximate cause of its demise, the spark that lit the fuse: the unfolding economic and financial collapse of the West. The debt/fake money system has reached the end of the road. The wealth is gone; the productive sector has been hollowed out by the parasites, and the rest of the world is no longer enthusiastic about supplying the goods or buying the debt. There are no suckers left to pay for the fun and games. Small wonder, then, that gold—prime symbol of Reality world—is experiencing a resurgence on the world stage. When it comes to international relations, Trump and everyone else knows that the jig is up. This was acknowledged by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when he admitted in a recent interview that the unipolar era of American dominance is over, and that we are now reverting to the historical norm of a multipolar world. Say goodbye to American exceptionalism; the dollar as reserve currency; “Pride” flags flying over U.S. embassies; the Fukuyama “end of history” nonsense; neoconservatism; and all the rest of the hokum. Incidentally, the Trump proposal for Gaza, whatever its merits and whatever its eventual result, is the first time an American president has proposed a solution that is based in Reality world. All previous Middle East “peace plans” were rooted in concepts derived from Leftist mythology, and thus doomed to failure. Fantasy world is in its death throes. Sure, it can still twitch in frightening ways, but it is a rotting corpse nevertheless. If Trump didn’t exist, he would have to be invented; someone was needed to officiate at the funeral service. The same applies to the other countries of the "collective West," many of whom are still testing the limits of the Leftist singularity. I do not intend to convey the impression that we are embarking upon some new, golden age. The Trump presidency is only the beginning of a lengthy journey into the unknown. All such interregnums are by definition unstable. We may very well emerge on the other side, healthier and happier. But it is quite possible that we descend into totalitarian madness; a host of thoroughly dystopian scenarios could ambush us. Whichever way it goes, the world as we knew it, the Fantasy world that emerged from the French Revolution, is over. Whatever comes next, good or bad, will be based in Reality. |
Dystopian literatureWelcome to the blog! While you're here, check out the six dystopian novels by Gary Wolf. His latest is The Cubist Supremacy. 
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