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The Trump Administration has taken steps to block federal funding to Ivy League universities; for example, the freeze on $2 billion worth of payments to Harvard. One could desire more vigorous action, but this is a good start. Combined with a few other power plays, such as deportation of foreign agitators, the withholding of funds at the very least puts a dent in the chutzpah of these “prestigious” institutions of higher “learning,” which in reality function as ideological incubators for the colossal Leftist ecosystem of fraud and subversion. The message is clear: America no longer wants to bankroll its own demise.
Speaking of bankrolling our own demise, that $2 billion taxpayer subsidy of Harvard’s shenanigans is small potatoes compared with the student loan mess, now sitting at around $1.7 trillion in outstanding debt. Imagine how many lectures on “white racism” were funded with that pile of cash. The scandalous transformation of American universities into brainwashing factories is matched by the junior-varsity team of Progressive indoctrination: the nation’s public schools, which purport to engage in primary and secondary “education.” Total spending on this monstrosity is running about $1 trillion annually. Yes, we spend a trillion dollars per year to churn out masses of illiterate, sickly, ignorant, confused morons who don’t know which sex they are. Couldn’t this prodigious feat be achieved for, say, half a trillion? The skool racket is funded in large part by the immense swindle known as property tax. On my last property tax statement, the municipal authorities informed me that 25 percent of my payment was destined for the public schools. I should be happy; this figure is actually lower than the national average, which is about 35 percent. Property tax is an outrage on multiple levels, beyond the forced funding of the K-12 Leftist indoctrination camps. It is an affront to private property. It is taxation of unrealized gains. It is disruptive to the building of stable communities. It is bankrupting numerous homeowners, and making home ownership increasingly unaffordable. Not to mention the fraud involved in the valuation process. If this weren’t enough, additional money is shoveled into the babysitting grift via federal subsidies, local and state programs of all sorts, and the issuance of municipal bonds. And still they howl for more. We are truly digging our own grave. There is so much institutionalized fraud in this country, it is difficult to name a front-runner. But the property tax/public school scam is surely one of the most pernicious and devious ways the citizenry is fleeced by the government.
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"If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian [in 96 AD] to the accession of Commodus [in 180]."
—Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire This past Friday (4/18/25), the boys at The Duran released a good podcast exploring the current transformation of Europe into an open-air insane asylum. The 25-minute discussion nicely summarizes the situation.
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution has several components, some more accepted than others. Natural selection/survival of the fittest is generally seen as a reasonable template for explaining gradual change, at least among animals in the wild. But speciation—the appearance of entirely new species—has always been more elusive. Scientists have had to work hard in this domain; speciation events are seldom discovered, and when they are, they tend to be found among the lower orders of the animal kingdom, and for minimal biological variation.
I think it is possible that such an event may be taking place right under our nose, and for a most unexpected species. The other day, at the supermarket, I beheld two women who apparently were vying for the Most Obvious Lesbian Couple of the Year award. They would certainly get my vote: testosterone-laden tubs of lard with the most vulgar tattoos and piercings, green crewcuts, and mean, repulsive mugs. The question arises: If such cases of extreme divergence from the norm continue apace, will these creatures at some point become a new species? If so, we will have a front-row seat for an historic development in human evolution. But, you may protest, hasn’t it always been like this? Haven’t we always had people who are outliers in body form, intelligence, sexuality, etc.? Yes, we have always had outliers, but this is different, in quality and quantity. Members of the potential new species exhibit many or all of the following traits: — Physical defects: disproportionate body parts; lack of symmetry; overall repulsiveness; body weight at either extreme (usually obese). — Declining intelligence. This has been a trend for a very long time, but for these people it seems to be falling off a cliff. — Static facial expression; blank stares; inability to communicate effectively both verbally and non-verbally; aversion to jokes and spontaneous banter; difficulty performing tasks that involve any level of complexity. — Antisocial behavior; self-mutilation; resentment; nasty disposition. — Low or nonexistent sex drive; disappearance of clear dimorphic (male/female) sexual characteristics; atrophy of secondary sexual characteristics. Many elements in the list above, taken separately, could be explained by environmental factors. The deviants could be modifying their behavior to better adapt (at least in their eyes) to life in our dysfunctional world. Also, constant exposure to electronic stimuli certainly takes its toll. But when the traits consistently manifest as a cluster, and when these deep alterations are both behavioral and physical, a genetic explanation becomes more plausible. The shift could have iatrogenic causes, such as the wildly excessive childhood vaccination schedule; mRNA-based genetic "therapies," such as the Covid injections; and a host of other pharmaceutical concoctions fed to the population from cradle to grave. And none of this shows any sign of letting up. Now we are faced with the prospect of Neuralink and other “brain-computer interfaces.” This opens up further pathways to fundamental modification of the human being. It would not be a stretch to assert that genetic profiles could be irretrievably altered. Moreover, I am certain that the likes of Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, Albert Bourla, and their minions are busy cooking up ever more ingenious ways to defile the human genome. In sum: The data are strong enough, in my opinion, to support the hypothesis that a significant genetic divergence is underway. But the question remains, is this the prelude to speciation, or merely to a new, degraded subspecies or race of homo sapiens? "Just as the observance of divine worship is the cause of the greatness of republics, so the disregard of divine worship is the cause of their ruin, because where fear of God is lacking, that kingdom must either come to ruin or be sustained through fear of a prince who makes up for the shortcomings in its religion. Since princes are short-lived, such a kingdom must quickly fail when it loses its exceptional ability....The salvation of a republic or a kingdom is not, therefore, merely to have a prince who governs prudently while he lives, but rather one who organizes the government in such a way that after his death it can be maintained."
—Machiavelli Trump did this, Trump did that. The Trump Effect. Trump is purposely collapsing the economy. Trump is saving the economy. The tariffs will lead to war. The tariffs will lead to peace. Trump is sticking it to Wall Street. Trump is working for Wall Street.
Many observers, pro and con, are assuming a tight causal linkage between two events: the implementation of the tariffs and the wild fluctuations in the financial markets. As the commentariat bloviates on the situation, they forget that correlation is not causation. President Trump and his associates are not causing anything. On the contrary, they are struggling to keep pace with a rapidly changing landscape that is mostly beyond their control, and for which the die was cast well before the advent of Trump 2.0. Like a person sinking into quicksand, the Administration will grasp at any stick within reach. Here is the quicksand they stepped into: The mother of all bubbles, an agglomeration of bubbles such as the world has never seen. A financial bubble. A debt bubble. A real estate bubble. A bubble of lies and fraud. A bubble of Progressive ideology, of Keynesianism, of central control, of fake science, of media propaganda. Of pure idiocy, of hypocrisy, of insanity. This megabubble is at its bursting point; a balloon in search of a pin. The tariffs are related to the bursting bubble, but not in the way that many think. Sure, they might advance or postpone certain aspects of the bursting, but those aspects are baked into the cake. Looking at the big picture, the imposition of these trade restrictions is an attempt to outwit processes that are already in motion. The Trump policy is not causing the stock market to be unstable, nor is it causing the demise of free trade and the Bretton Woods economic order; it is rather a reaction to the crumbling of the order and its constituent parts, a movement that has been accelerating for several years. The post-World War II international order, led by the United States, is dead as a doornail, with or without tariffs. The West is bankrupt, financially and in every other sense of the word. The financial system is a house of cards. NATO has been defeated in Ukraine. Europe is ruled by shrieking hags and ghoulish fanatics. Meanwhile, the BRICS countries are severing their connection with the Western system of global economic fraud. They no longer want to play the game of make-believe. Thus the frantic accumulation of gold, the anti-bubble par excellence. (The BRICS may end up with their own fraudulent system, but it will be their fraudulent system.) The tariffs are a reaction to this massive realignment. The Titanic is sinking, and this is a handy lifeboat, albeit one that has been in mothballs for a while. Will it really help rebuild manufacturing in the U.S.? I certainly hope so, because the extreme market volatility is only the start of the Great Bursting. The phony-baloney financialized economy, along with its ecosystem of institutionalized grift, is disintegrating before our eyes. When it’s all said and done, the only edifice left standing may very well be manufacturing, energy, mining, and agriculture, and the networks that surround these sectors. [SERVICE NOTICE: For the foreseeable future, I am going to publish one article per week, every Friday. There will still be a smattering of other quick posts, such as quotes, and links to interesting posts on other websites. But Friday will be the day for the real "thought pieces."]
In my post of 3/24/2025, I discussed Conquest’s Second Law of Politics, which states that any organization that is not explicitly right-wing, sooner or later becomes left-wing. Part of my analysis revolved around the question of high versus low culture, and the difficulty in maintaining the higher form, which is a bedrock of civilization. The entropic forces in society, always present, tend to drag us down to the level of low culture, which is one of the symptoms of Leftism. In the article below, first published on the original AWOL Civilization blog just after the 2008 presidential election, I examined this issue from a somewhat different perspective. * * * So it finally happened: a bonafide neo-Marxist has been elected President of the United States. He will have a sympathetic majority in both houses of Congress, along with a choir comprising the judiciary, the press, academia, the cultural “elite," and the most hardened enemies of America at home and abroad. This is not a macabre scene from a dystopian novel. It is our reality. In order to grasp the full significance of the catastrophe that has enveloped America—and indeed, Western civilization—we must cast our intellectual net far and wide, so that it encompasses the great thinkers of the past. They can guide and inspire us as we confront a phenomenon with which we, in America, have no experience. They can help us re-examine our approach to politics, the arts, education, and a host of other realms, a task that is part and parcel of salvaging and reinvigorating our culture. We can start by reconnecting with the thinkers of the ancient world. It is there, in the literary masterpieces of Athens and Rome and Jerusalem, that one finds clues to the riddles that present themselves to us. It is there that one sees how people prevailed in the face of upheavals that defy the imagination. In this spirit, I would like to present two ancient literary references that have been in the forefront of my mind in recent days. The first is from the Bible, the second is from the comic theater of Athens. In Genesis 25:29-33, a moving scene occurs between Esau and Jacob, the sons of Isaac. Esau sells his birthright to his brother Jacob for a bowl of pottage (a type of stew): “And Jacob cooked pottage, and Esau came from the field, and he was faint, and Esau said to Jacob, Give me to swallow, I pray thee, of that red pottage, for I am faint…And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright. And Esau said, Behold, I am going to die, and what benefit is this birthright to me? And Jacob said, Swear to me this day, and he swore to him; and he sold his birthright…” The American people possess an impressive birthright: Living in a land of liberty, with all that is necessary to pursue their dreams. All the accoutrements are available: natural resources, a beautiful landscape, vast spaces, a noble history, brain power, and a deep tradition of opportunity. But we have sold our birthright for the slick visage of Barack Hussein Obama, our latter-day bowl of pottage. The moaning, self-proclaimed victims have thrown away their heritage. What good is it? they ask. “Behold, I am going to die," so just feed me and clothe me, and let me forget the rest. The second reference from the ancient world is The Frogs, a comedy by the great Athenian playwright Aristophanes (c. 450 – 388 BC). The play was written in 405 BC, as the Athenian empire stood on the brink of destruction. Dissension was rife in the city, and defeat at the hands of the Spartans was nigh (it occurred in 404). The plot is simple. Dionysus, patron of the drama, descends into Hades (the underworld) to find the greatest Greek playwright. The intent is to bring the champion back to the land of the living, to Athens, where he might be able to rescue the city’s decomposing culture. The selection process for best playwright boils down to a contest between Aeschylus and Euripides, in which each attempts to demonstrate that he is the greatest practitioner of the art of tragedy. Dionysus acts as moderator of the debate. Aeschylus (525 – 456 BC) represents the old world, with its fine manners, its gymnastics, its piety, and its honor. Euripides (484 – 406 BC), by contrast, is presented as the poet of decadence, sophistry, and philosophical relativism. Euripides accuses Aeschylus of using highfalutin language, of ignoring romantic love, and of being an elitist divorced from the taste and temperament of the people. Aeschylus, for his part, accuses Euripides of contributing in no small measure to the downfall of the city: “You have taught boasting and quibbling; the wrestling schools are deserted and the young fellows have submitted themselves to outrage, in order that they might learn to reel off idle chatter, and the sailors have dared to bandy words with their officers…Of what crimes is [Euripides] not the author? Has he not shown us procurers, women who get delivered in the temples, have traffic with their brothers, and say that life is not life? ‘Tis thanks to him that our city if full of scribes and buffoons, veritable apes, whose grimaces are incessantly deceiving the people…” Then there is the following exchange between Dionysus and Euripides, almost creepy in its applicability to our current predicament: DIONYSUS: And you, Euripides, prove yourself [fit] to sprinkle incense on the brazier. EURIPIDES: Thanks, but I sacrifice to other gods. DIONYSUS: To private gods of your own, which you have made after your own image? EURIPIDES: Why, certainly! DIONYSUS: Well then, invoke your gods. EURIPIDES: Oh! Ether, on which I feed, oh! Thou Volubility of Speech, oh! Craftiness, oh! Subtle Scent! Enable me to crush the arguments of my opponents. We learn that Aeschylus used only heroes and god-like figures in his plays, whereas Euripides invented every sort of vulgar character imaginable. Euripides explains that his intent was to “please the people." Moreover, he says, “I introduced our private life upon the stage, our common habits…I did not burst out into big noisy words to prevent their comprehension; nor did I terrify the audience by showing them Cycni and Memnons on chariots harnessed with steeds and jingling bells. Look at his disciples and look at mine. His are…all a-bristle with long beards, spears and trumpets, and grinning with sardonic and ferocious laughter, while my disciples are [the effeminate and loquacious] Clitophon and the graceful Theramenes.” Euripides democratized the theater. He catered to the popular desire to portray the vulgar, the seedy side of life. Often, his characters were beggars dressed in rags. Theater was now for everyone, and about everyone. It is tempting to speculate: How similar was the situation in the Athens of 405 BC, the year The Frogs was written, to the America of today? Could one not easily think of a contemporary Euripides, some best-selling author or popular screenwriter, succeeding handsomely here in our dumbed-down victimocracy, with its effeminate and sophistic king, crowned by the rampaging mob? Which great cultural figure would Dionysus bring back to help save us? We cry out for our Aeschylus—who would it be? [Quotes from The Frogs taken from Aristophanes, the Eleven Comedies, vol. 2, Immortal Classics republication of the 1912 London Athenian Society edition, pp. 227, 245-46, 235, 239-40.] “The greatest unmet medical need in the world is the care of the Covid mRNA vaccine injured. Period. Full Stop.”
—Dr. Pierre Kory Why are Leftists so obsessed with the continual march of “progress”? Where does this notion originate? These are important questions because this worldview prevents its adherents from dealing with reality, keeping them forever locked in a fantasy world.
The intellectual malediction of seeing history as a linear progression from bad to good has afflicted Western thought for centuries. But it is necessary if one is to engage in constant disruption of society, which is the cornerstone of Progressive behavior. If we are always moving from worse to better, then radical “change” comes with a built-in justification, regardless of its advisability. The realist, by contrast, scours the past for both good and bad decisions, policies, and thought patterns. History provides a virtually endless laboratory, whose examples, both philosophical and practical, we can evaluate and apply to our own lives. The future is the arena for the application of lessons learned. It holds no intrinsic quality; the future societal landscape could be good, bad, or indifferent. We won’t know until we get there. This more sober view has been the norm throughout most of European history, up until the Enlightenment. Non-Western cultures, for their part, have never adopted the idea of linear progress. With the exception of the post-Enlightenment West, the world’s various intellectual traditions have most often viewed history as fitting into one of three templates: cyclical; continual decline; or anarchic/indeterminate. The Hindu tradition is a clear example of the cyclical view. Ancient Greek mythology tended to see the unfolding of history as a steady decline, with the world of the gods taking a step down to a society with demigods, and from there a further descent to a fully human world. Hesiod described the full process of deterioration (though with some interruption) in his Five Ages of Man, starting with the Golden and ending with the Iron. In the Jewish tradition, there is the concept of yeridat ha-dorot, the decline of the generations, with each one being inferior to the one before it. Seeing the “arc of history” trending downward rather than upward also dovetails nicely with veneration of ancestors. Our predecessors were superior to us—so goes the default case—so it behooves us to admire them and treat them with respect. Nietzsche gives us the anarchic/indeterminate view: “Let us not be deceived! Time marches forward; we’d like to believe that everything in it marches forward, that the development is also one that moves forward. The most level-headed are led astray by this illusion … ‘Mankind’ does not advance; it does not even exist. The overall aspect is that of a tremendous experimental laboratory in which a few successes are scored, scattered throughout all ages, while there are untold failures, and all order, logic, union, and obligingness are lacking.” These worldviews are clearly much closer to reality, as we can see when observing the broad sweep of history. Civilizations rise and fall; tremendous accomplishments are often closely followed by sensational collapse (end of the Bronze age, Rome, contemporary America). And sometimes, as in ancient Egypt, thousands of years pass with seemingly little change. But then came the Enlightenment, which despite its veneer of scientific approach, ignored all logic and historical evidence when it promoted the idea of continual progress. The notion was expanded and buttressed over time; for example, the view of some Darwinians that evolution implies constant positive development. Just think of the famous graphic representation of man’s progress from hunched-over ape to upright modern human. In contemporary Western society, the idea of linear progress shackles us with a conceptual framework that is myopic and delusional. We are intellectually handicapped, and I doubt whether anyone is completely free of the bias. The past is scorned, whereas the future becomes a glorious bed of roses, with utopia just around the corner if we could all simply embrace Progress. Remember “Hope and Change”? This could be one reason for various outbursts of insanity, such as Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is now morphing into the Elon Musk version. How can a former hero of the Left, champion of the holy electric car, be the subject of such animosity, merely for exposing waste and fraud? Naturally, there are many causes, not least of which is the derailment of the government/NGO gravy train. But I believe that part of the story is the challenge to Progress represented by DOGE. Rolling back any Leftist program, even if it is based on obvious fraud, opens the door for a potential return to the dreaded past. And this can never be allowed to happen. We have discussed in several posts one of the major challenges facing America at this late stage of its cultural meltdown: the seizure of power by rogue judges. This threatens to derail many of the reforms instituted by the Trump Administration, and to further tighten the stranglehold of the Left on our collective throat. The question I ask today: From what ideological septic tank percolates this audacious assault on the political system?
To begin with, let us note that this is nothing new, though admittedly the current surge is rather extreme. Degradation of judicial practice in the United States has a long and storied history. It received notoriety during the tenure of the Warren Court (1953-1969), i.e. the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren. That period overlapped the Civil Rights Era, and the Court (along with the rest of the federal judiciary) did its utmost to stretch the Bill of Rights to a degree that would have made the Founding Fathers spin in their graves. Earlier instances of creative interpretation still bore some relation, however shaky, to the actual wording of the Constitution. But in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Court gave itself the authority to extract from the Constitution whatever principles they desired. In the words of Justice William O. Douglas, “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” Penumbras and emanations, got it. Translation: We can invent any legal principle we want. The actual text of the Constitution became irrelevant; the door was opened to Leftist bullying under cover of supposed constitutional law. This brazen attack on the foundations of the American republic paved the way for the eventual complete disregard, by Leftist judges, of due process of law; nay, of the entire Anglo-Saxon legal tradition. Our current judicial insurrection is an outgrowth of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ seemingly inexorable march toward totalitarianism; more specifically, the expansion of the modern administrative state to monstrous proportions. This springs from a compulsion to control human behavior by means of central planning. If it can be achieved in the realms of health, economics, education, etc., then why not the political machinery itself? It is up to us, says the federal bench, to ensure that the federal government (and state and local, for that matter) dutifully obey the maxims of the Progressive canon. In this view of the world, everything is justiciable. There can be no sphere of life that remains outside the purview of the black-robed priesthood. Whether it be the laws passed by the legislature, the executive functions of the president, or the way a man interacts with a woman, they consider it their proper role to intervene, at any time and for any reason. A natural result of this infinite justiciability and destruction of the rule of law is the proliferation of lawyers, courts, and lawsuits. The legal system has become the arena for the settling of every imaginable type of dispute or moral controversy, across nearly all tiers of society. Normal human life, under these conditions, is gradually asphyxiated. To my knowledge, no individual or institution has ever slowed the progress of this bulldozer. And here we are. |
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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