1. Mexico has for years encouraged and assisted an illegal invasion of the United States by its citizens and those of countries throughout world, many of which are sworn enemies of our people

2. Mexico has for years dumped raw sewage into the United States as a form of biological warfare

3. Mexico sends its citizens illegally into the United States for the purpose of looting our people through “remittances” and other means for the purpose of enriching the Mexican government

4. Mexico has enabled a network of cartels to develop means to carry out paramilitary terrorist

5. attacks on US citizens on American soil

6. Mexico has flooded America with deadly poisons disguised as recreational drugs

7. Mexico’s president has and continues to incite terrorism within the United States, effectively ordering Mexican citizens illegally present in the United States to wage war against us. Therefore, a state of war does exist between our country and Mexico. The question becomes, how to resolve it.

https://x.com/arnemx/status/1931721420343492959

Declare War

The most humane and efficient means of resolving the illegal invasion of the United States available to Congress and the President is a formal declaration of war against, in the first place, Mexico.

Before you set your hair on fire, please understand that a declaration of war does not obligate the United States to “attack” Mexico. Such a declaration, in fact, can be resolved without bombing the enemy nation, particularly when that enemy’s combat troops are already inside the United States. Rather, a formal declaration of war simply tells the world that we recognize a state of war exists between the United States and one other sovereign nation, in this case, Mexico. Put another way, a Congressional declaration of war would prove Congress recognizes the state of affairs.

According to GovFact.org, a formal declaration of war provides an internationally recognized set of legal options to the United States. Among these options:

• Seizing enemy property

• Apprehension of enemy aliens

• Termination of diplomatic recognition

• Termination of all contracts between the US or its citizens and Mexico or its citizens

• Abrogation of treaties involving the United States and Mexico

A declared war also unleashes certain domestic powers:

• Trading With the Enemy Act provides serious criminal penalties for individuals and companies that do business with the enemy

• Alien Enemies Act allows the president to apprehend any citizen, subject, or denizen of the enemy country

• Gives the President the power to attack the enemy by air, land, or sea without additional Congressional oversight or limits

• Allows prosecution of the crime of treason to any American citizen who aids and abets citizens of the enemy country

Declaring war against Mexico, then, would immediately end the riots in Los Angeles and prevent the riots planned for over 100 cities this week and, particularly, Saturday, 14 June 2025. Rioters would be declared enemy combatants, allowing local and state police as well as National Guard or US Armed Forces to capture or kill anyone involved in such riots. It’s safe to assume such authorization would quickly quell the uprising, but there would be other instantaneous effects:

• All remittences from the US to Mexico would stop, and anyone transferring money to Mexico would be guilty of numerous offenses and punishments, including execution for treason.

• All trade between the US and Mexico would stop immediately and for the duration of the war.

• Deadly force would be authorized across all points of the border.

• Numerous treaties would bar most US treaty partners from conducting trade with Mexico.

The economic effects of these realities would plunge the Mexican economy into a depression almost overnight.

Declared War Differs from Use of Force Authorization

While the United States’ last declaration of war was against Romania in 1942, our nation has been in almost constant combat since:

• Greece

• Korea

• Vietnam

• Cuba

• El Salvador

• Lebanon

• Grenada

• Iraq

• Bosnia

• Sudan

• Yemen

• Afghanistan

• Iraq (again)

• Syria

Because these actions lacked a formal declaration, or acknowledgement of a “state of war,” none of the tools mentioned above was available. Yes, the US could unilaterally impose sanctions, but no country was obliged to honor the request. Yes, the president was authorized to use force, but international law limited the use of force with UN oversight. No, the president could not legally seize assets, though many presidents did anyway. In other words, use-of-force authorizes allowed for killing and being killed without the availability of less lethal tools to achieve political objectives. As George Friedman explains of formal war declaration:

First, it holds both Congress and the president equally responsible for the decision, and does so unambiguously. Second, it affirms to the people that their lives have now changed and that they will be bearing burdens. Third, it gives the president the political and moral authority he needs to wage war on their behalf and forces everyone to share in the moral responsibility of war. And finally, by submitting it to a political process, many wars might be avoided . . . . A declaration of war both frees and restrains the president, as it was meant to do.

Perhaps most importantly, a formal declaration of war would finally and resoundingly tell the world “we mean business” with regard to our national sovereignty. Brigadier General (retired) Charles Dunlap emphasized this in a 2016 Harvard Law School article responding to academic researchers who claimed formal war declarations have become irrelevant:

Internationally, it is hard to imagine that in the real world a formal declaration of war by a superpower like the United States would be considered “irrelevant” as the Post article suggests most legal scholars believe. Indeed, the fact that such a declaration is rare these days might signal to friend and foe alike a renewed and reinforced commitment to a particular conflict. In the real world, it could be quite significant.

You can expect Canada, England, France, Germany, the United Nations, and the European Union to take notice and give greater focus on President Trump’s insistent that those countries stop their Orwellian censorship programs. “America means business” would take on a whole new meaning.

Lesser Effective Means

I am under no delusions that Congress would move swiftly to pass a war declaration bill, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue it.

Congressional hearings and debates, even if compressed into a week or two, on the question of a declared war would capture world attention like no event since 9/11. Every national leader and legislature would stop activity, knowing the outcome of the debate in Congress would have a massive effect on every country’s planning. There would be no point in passing any legislation--or in businesses making any decisions--until the question of war between the US and Mexico was resolved.

Moreover, the war resolution debate would make the marauders in our cities take notice. Without availing the tools of a declared war, the debate would strike in the heart of illegal aliens currently conducting terrorist attacks in Los Angeles and planning attacks in other cities. They would, rightly or wrongly, realize a war declaration means any American citizen with a shotgun can hunt them down for detention or deportation and apply lethal force if they fail to comply. In other words, it would put Americans on equal footing with the invaders, and there are more of us than there are of them.

Finally, beginning the legislative process of a war declaration would force the realities of the invasion onto the minds of Americans and the press. The gravity of the decision would force CNN, MSNBC, ABC, and CBS to cover the hearings and debates gavel to gavel. It would force every military-aged American to recognize the grave danger posed by illegal invasions to their futures, perhaps by forcing a draft to defend, not Ukraine or Kuwait City, but Dallas, St. Louis, and DesMoines. America would stop for a week, holding its collective breath. And, regardless of the final vote, we would see the problem in a whole new light with a renewed urgency to seal the border and expel the miscreants who illegally reside in our country, pillaging our resources and demolishing our culture.

I, therefore, call on Congress to begin the process of declaring war on Mexico.

In the next four weeks, we will come to know the true nature of the relationship between the states and the people, on one hand, to the federal government on the other.

We keep seeing these videos and posts from lifelong Democrats who've had their eyes opened. They're angry they were lied to for decades, and they love Trump for helping them see the truth. Here’s just on example.

Now, imagine how angry they will be to learn elections have no consequences because their masters never appear on ballots. How will they respond if they learn their true masters are bureaucrats and judges who decide everything for the people.

Combine the fury of the neophytes with the long-simmering anger of the Day One MAGA crowd and you'll see just how perilous the future is.

What happens when a hundred million Americans realize, not just how much of their potential wealth was stolen by these bureaucrats, judges, and politicians, but that democracy itself was long ago mummified and entombed? How will those 100 million respond to know elections are shams, no matter who wins?

Right now, seven judges have reversed every Trump action, ordered trillions more in taxes to be taken from your paycheck, and effectively declared the election null and void. Meanwhile, Republicans in the House of Representatives are about to ignore the election and order the President to continue taxing and spending as prescribed by Joe Biden in order stay in the good graces of the Democrat colleagues.

To paraphrase Hyman Roth in Godfather II, we're going to lie down for a bit. When we wake up, if we find a Congressional budget that guts rogue agencies and a Supreme Court smackdown of the Deep State judges, we'll know we have a republic. If not, we'll know we don't.

Obama, though a Gen Xer, was surrounded by Boomers and even a few Silents (the people born from 1925 to 1942). The institutions, still mostly intact and respected, were designed by and for the post-WWII era. The corporations that mattered were the same—run by Boomers and Silents and designed and operated for the post-WWII world. No matter how Obama tried to change them, he couldn’t. They were too big and too stable.

But Obama could do something: he could destabilize them.

And he did.

Like the CIA, Obama mistakenly believed that his destabilization would work in his favor since he thought of it. So, he destabilized the institutions that were rock solid from 60 years of care, maintenance, and refinement. The FBI, the CIA, the State Department, universities, public health institutions, great American corporations, the armed forces—name the institution, Obama destabilized it.

But destabilization is not the same as destruction. Obama did not tear down the institutions; he built them up! He expected the institutions to fix their stability problems in his Image and Likeness. POWs are brainwashed by, first, being mentally, emotionally, and, if necessary, physically destabilized, then exposed to a new reality—a reality that stops the pain. When they operate in this new reality, they are not beaten or frightened or tricked. When they slip back into their old reality, the horrors return. Likewise, when an institution is is destabilized and offered a path to safety, it takes it. Joe Biden arrived just in time to throw the institutions their lifelines.

But just as the CIA’s best laid plan, perfectly executed, rarely achieve the Nirvana final outcomes dreamed of, Obama’s destabilization and Joe Biden’s ineptness exposed the rot inside these institutions for all to see. Not all said, “w—- t— f——?” but all saw and knew. The WTF crowd said, “burn it down.” The anti-WTF crowd said, “OMG! There’s nothing see here. Everything’s fine. Joy!” The WTFers paid for those institutions; the anti-WTFers did not. The anti-WTFers actual made bank from the unstable institutions, which lost all accounting functions in the destabilization process. They became ATMs for the “everything’s fine” crowd who, in turn, became the institutions’ greatest champions to point of censoring, canceling, and even trying to kill the WTFers. They created snappy slogans. “When you attack me, you’re attacking science.” “Diversity is our strength.” “I want to understand white rage.” “Listen here, Jack.”

But the WTFers, who were throughout the post-WWII, the champions of these institutions, were like, “Sorry, dude, but this is my money they’re wasting, my kids they’re mutilating, my house they’re squatting, and my store they’re looting.” WTFers responded with their own slogans: “Let’s Go Brandon,” “FAFO,” “Based and red-pilled.” The WTFers became rabidly irreverent. They laughed at the unlaughable. They parodied and ridiculed and mocked and demand extreme measures. They were unemotional, unless you count snark and sarcasm as emotions. They became cold, ruthless dismantlers of the very institutions they once idolized because they saw the rot inside and knew they were looking at a tear-down, not a renovation.

Total role reversal.

Now, let’s look at some descriptions of Gen X from the men who defined the generation even before Douglas Coupland named it. From Howe and Strauss’s The Fourth Turning: (remember that Howe and Strauss labeled this generation “13ers” before Coupland’s book, Generation X, was published.)

• The first 13ers engaged in high-risk behavior coming of age, but today’s fledgling householders are beginning to turn against personal and public risk. (p. 97)

• 13ers have come to expect little of themselves as a generation—a fact that itself has become part of their collective persona. A similar trait arose in the generations of George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower. (p. 68)

• The 13ers’ global peers, today’s youthful “90s generation” (in France, the Bof generation, as in “who cares?”) are described in the media as fun-loving and rootless, environmentalist and entrepreneurial, pragmatic and market-oriented, globalist economically yet xenophobic socially, and less interested in politics than in making money. (p. 120)

• Throughout the 13ers’ childhood era, the adult media battered their collective reputation and, over time, began to portray this generation as having absorbed the negative message. “We’re rotten to the core,” sang the preteen thug-boys in Bugsy Malone. “We’re the very worst—each of us contemptible, criticized, and cursed.” As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, teenagers began repeating this line, as when one student mockingly tells his friends in River’s Edge: “You young people are a disgrace to all living things, to plants even. You shouldn’t even be seen in the same room as a cactus.” (p. 195)

• Parents were shunned if they tried to bring small children into restaurants or theaters. Many rental apartments started banning children. The ascendant Zero Population Growth movement declared each extra child to be “pollution,” a burden on scarce resources. (p. 195)

• “Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said after the crash that hit his peers at the cusp of what should have been their highest-earning years. (p. 287)

• Nomad generations—what Christian Slater refers to as “a long list of dead, famous wild people”—have always been the ones who lose ground in wealth, education, security, longevity, and other measures of progress. Yet they have also been the generations who lay at the fulcrum between triumph and tragedy, the ones who hoist their society through the darkest days of Crisis. (p. 288)

• In a recent [1997] genre of action films (from War Games and Back to the Future to Terminator and Independence Day), a stock drama unfolds. A young protagonist—alone, unprepared, and immersed in a junky culture—is chosen by chance to decide the fate of humanity. The situation looks dicey. The protagonist, too, has slim expectations of success. But at a pivotal moment, this lonely wayfarer challenges destiny, deals with the stress, zeroes in on what matters, does what is required, and comes out on top. The most popular video games, following the same script, stress one-on-one action and deft timing: Find a treasure, grab the tools, rescue a princess, save the kingdom, slay the enemy, and get out alive. Everything is yes-no, full of code words and secret places—in a style one TV executive calls “Indiana Jones meets a game show.” (p. 288)

• They will carry the reputation for having come of age at a time when good manners and civic habits were not emphasized in homes and schools. With their arrival, midlife will lose moral authority and gain toughness. Their culture will be a hodgepodge of unblending styles and polyethnic currents that will reflect the centrifugal impulse from which many Americans (including 13ers) will now be eager to escape. (p. 288)

• They will never have known a time when America felt good about itself, when its civic and cultural life didn’t seem to be decaying. From childhood into midlife, they will have always sensed that the nation’s core institutions mainly served the interests of people other than themselves. (p. 290)

• “I’ve glimpsed our future,” warns a high school valedictorian in the film Say Anything, “and all I can say is—go back.” (p. 288)

  The 13er mind-set will be hardboiled and avuncular, the risk taking now mellowed by a Crisis-era need for security. (p. 289)

• Throughout the economy, 13ers will be associated with risk and dirty jobs.

• They will seek workable outcomes more than inner truths.

• “We won’t have a bad backlash against our lost idealism,” predicts Slacker filmmaker Richard Linklater, since his generation “never had that to begin with.”

• 13ers’ ironic self-deprecation will render their claims unusually selfless. “We may not get what we want. We may not get what we need,” chanted the young adults in True Colors. “Just so we don’t get what we deserve.” (p. 290)

• 13ers could emerge as the leaders of a Crisis-era populism based on the notion of taking raw action now and justifying it later. (p. 291)

• They will vote against their own short-term interests if persuaded that the community’s long-term survival requires it. Where the Silent once agonized over procedural braking mechanisms, where Boomers had huge arguments over gesture and symbolism, 13er voters will disregard motive and ideology, and will simply ask if public programs get results that are worth the money. (p. 290)

• This generation’s institutional rootlessness will make its leaders and electorates highly volatile, capable of extreme crosscurrents. Lacking much stake in the old order, many 13ers might impulsively welcome the notion of watching it break into pieces. They won’t regard the traditional safety nets as important to their lives. The real-life experience of their own circles will reinforce their view that when people lose jobs or money, they can find a way to cope, deal with it, and move on. Looking back on their own lives, they will conclude that many of the Awakening- and Unraveling-era trends that may have felt good to older generations didn’t work so well for them—or for the nation. Come the Crisis, many 13ers will feel that emergency action is necessary to re-create the kind of secure world they will feel was denied them in childhood. (p. 291)

Does any of that sound familiar?

We saw glimpses of this Gen X world from 2017 to 2020. But that administration was bleeding from the walls with Boomer and Silent angst. Even Gen Xers of that era—Paul Ryan, Reince Preibus, Jared Kushner—were Boomers or Silents trapped in middle-aged bodies. Trump, Bannon, and a few other from that administration exuded Gex X, but the administration as a whole did not.

But the intervening administration revealed the rot of more than just institutions—it exposed the fact the entire post-WWII world had corroded and grown hopelessly corrupt. The corporations, entertainment, science, medicine, technology, markets, the FBI, DOJ, and Defense Department, the CIA—all of it was rotting from the foundation up, as if someone had soaked the inner walls and sprinkled black mold spores throughout. When Biden came to office, the smell was impossible to ignore or explain away.

Everything Trump is doing is exactly what a good Hollywood screenwriter and director would have their hero do in one of the Gen X movies mentioned. Everything Trump has been through would have explained and justified his actions and his attitude. Even before he won the 2016 election, he was spied on, lied about, falsely prosecuted, impeached twice, lied about, called stupid and mean, investigated, indicted, arrested, finger-printed, mug-shot, rifle shot, hunted, convicted, and left for dead.

But, like the protagonists in War Games and Back to the Future, he picked himself up, put a bandage on his ear, and determined to fix a country in rapid decline—so rapid and so deep that many of us (myself included) believed it was past the point of no return. (A possible I would still keep a hedge on.)

Trump’s second act is peak Gen X. Almost all of his key appoints are Gen Xers, and they’re acting like Gen Xers. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a warrior Colonel, and he’s discharging his duties much more like a colonel than like the career State Department seat warmers that preceded him. (Lloyd Austin was a career office goon, as was Colin Powell.) Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, spent her first weekend in office kicking in doors with ICE, a .40 on her hip. Kash Patel, next head of the FBI, has forced dozens of top FBI people to resign—and he hasn’t even been confirmed. Trump has ordered the end of the Department of Education, gutted and reassigned USAID, tricked Canada and Mexico to adopt his will on border security and drug infiltration, deported thousands of illegals, banned DEI, BLM, CRT, transgender everything, all identity months, and sexual mutilation of children (which has been our vaunted medical industries chief source of amusement for the past six years.) He has wrestled the Panama Canal away from China and is on the verge of making Greenland the 51st state. Trump also found time to humiliate the president of Colombia while playing golf, get a billion dollars from Saudi Arabia, reach the highest approval rating of his life. And he’s only been in office two weeks.

What this means, of course, is that we’ve had the final political realignment of the 4th Turning. MAGA is not a moment in time, but the start of an era. The next 80 to 100 years will see 4.5 seasons (the final four or five years of Crises of the outgoing saeculum and the four seasons of the next) that be as distinct culturally, politically, and even architecturally as the 1970s were from the 1910s. Many brands and companies you grew up with and felt had always been and will always be will disappear forever. New “forever” companies will emerge or rise to take their place. We see this already in Tesla, Starlink, and X. (Oddly, the big tech companies are, in many way, more post-WWII than MAGA. Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Apple—they might not make it.)

70 years from now some young scholars find a dusty copy of The Fourth Turning and become inspired to write a new pre-eulogy for this saeculum we are about to enter. They will probably be of the Prophet archetype, like the Boomers Howe and Strauss. They will like be most fascinated by their younger Nomad siblings, as Howe and Strauss were, because the Nomads will be coming of age about the time they begin their venture. They will expand on what Howe and Strauss started, but will update their models with new research and better data. They will probably rate the accuracy of The Fourth Turning’s prophecies and find them remarkably good. (We can already judge that.) Then, they will fill in the time between 1997 and 2097 or so. They will identify the Gray Champion who saved America in its darkest hour—a champion too old to belong to the generation that defined the new epoch, but, at the same time, the epitome of that generation’s mood, temperament, and ethos. They will look back to the last two week of January 2025 and remark: “This two-week binge of change and reform was the dividing line between the post-WWII era and the MAGA era. They will be struck by how the country has sunk in significance but grown in reputation. They will note the American empire dissolved into the new American Republic and compare us favorably to the Romans who never found their way back to their roots. Finally, they will note that the foundation for this peaceful, prosperous, and quiet America was laid by the least likely group of all: wild, irreverent, slackers led by a Gray Champion pitchman, hotel magnate, and TV star.

And perhaps they’ll end by updating the second-last paragraph of Howe and Strauss’s masterpiece:

If the saeculum continues, a girl born today will come of age just before the Fourth Turning’s Crisis climax, enter midlife during the ensuing High, and reach old age during an Awakening. In all likelihood, she will live to glimpse another Unraveling. If health and history treat her well, she could (as a centenarian) witness another Crisis catalyze on the eve of the twenty-second century. She will have much to tell her youngest grandson—who, if he survives that circa-2100 Crisis, can teach the saeculum’s lessons to his own grandson who, in time, could grow old as another in a long line of Gray Champions. (p. 334)

With a kind note to one author’s mom who told him the stories that caused him to stop and read The Fourth Turning at moment when everything seemed to be falling apart.

1. I forgot about 90% of the book.

2. The key precepts of the book are engrained in all my thinking.

How is it possible, you might wonder, that a person can incorporate a book’s content into his constant thinking but doesn’t remember the book? My hypothesis is that the brain discards (or buries) what it doesn’t need. Gödel Escher Bach became embedded in my mental operating system, so its details were no longer needed. Do you keep assembly instructions for things you’ll never take apart? You might, but why? I can see keeping instructions for, say, a lawnmower because the assembly instructions will be important when you go to repair the lawnmower or replace parts. For machines and structures with an expected maintenance routine, holding onto the instructions makes sense, at least until you’ve memorized the process. Watches—keep the manual. Outdoor furniture? Probably not.

For example, you can probably do basic mathematics operations, like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, but do you remember the text of your first math book? No. 1 + 1 =2 has become embedded in your operating system. (My first math book was red, I think, and that’s all remember about it—and that detail might be remembered incorrectly!)

Thus, re-reading Gödel Escher Bach is like reading anew with the added benefit of finding an affirmation of my default thinking on almost every page. Plus, I’m picking up a conversational familiarity with some deeper concepts that are central to artificial intelligence is far more useful now than it was in 2001 when I read the book the first time. Moreover, I’m discovering some new concepts that I must have read 23 years ago, but they did not embed themselves in my brain, and my brain did not carefully store the assembly instructions. (The instructions are probably still in there, but my filing system is just too disorganized to retrieve them at will. Likely, I will stumble across them whilst looking for something else, or in the cold shower.)

One of those ideas newly discovered (or recovered) I summarized in my notebook thus:

Attempts to outlaw or eliminate paradoxes are artificial and limiting. [Such attempts effectively] outlaw truth and, therefore frustrate intuition. People will eventually rise and overthrow any system that attempts to outlaw truth.

As with the X post referenced in my previous post, this scribbled note was stream of consciousness, as shown by the bracketed edit in the above quote. So, I wasn’t trying to make some profound assertion but deciphering in my mind—synthesizing, if you will—the passages of the book I had just consumed. My mind insisted on working out on paper those ideas just presented to it. It also wanted to memorialize this synthesis forming. At the time, I had no idea what my brain was thinking, but here I am writing about it 72 hours later. Part of my brain must have said, “hey, there’s blog post in there,” just not loud enough for me to hear.

The paragraph, in form, looks like syllogism. Blur your eyes a bit and you’ll see the pattern. It’s not a syllogism—not even close, but the form looks like one. It’s with the axiom and ends with conclusion, but the middle part does not turn on the axiom. Something else is needed to get from a to c.

a. Outlawing paradoxes are artificial.

b. ???

c. Therefore, people will eventually rise up and overthrow any system that attempts to outlaw truth.

Yeah, I don’t think I’m clever enough to bridge the gap between a and c. But I might be able to insert a new b after an and form a syllogism from that. Lets’ see.

Now we have:

a. Outlawing paradoxes are artificial.

b. Truth is opposed to artificial.

c. Therefore, [Such attempts effectively] outlaw truth.

Not good, but closer. Close enough to spend the rest of this post considering—a consideration that, if done well, will lead to prove the last part, now part d: People will overthrow systems that attempt to abolish paradoxes because they have an innate love of truth.

First, we should probably explain what a paradox is. A paradox is a self-contradictory statement or situation. The classic example Hoffstadter uses in Gödel Escher Bach is the statement: “This sentence is false.” Have fun with that. If the sentence is true, then it is false. But, if it’s false, it’s true. Or, my favorite, “I am lying.” If I’m lying, the sentence is true, but for the sentence to be true, I must be lying.

Going beyond Hoffstadter, I would argue that both statements are true and false. Not partly true, but completely true. At the same time, they’re completely false. And I don’t accept alternating outcomes. The sentences are not interpreted as true, which turns them false, which turns them true, ad infinitum. Rather, they are simultaneously true and false. If you ponder it a few minutes, you will agree. Try it.

And, even if you can’t accept that the sentences are simultaneously true and false, I may not need to prove that to complete the syllogism. My axiom, outlawing paradoxes is artificial, does not require a finding of falsity. Rather, it asserts that a world without paradoxes is artificial. Such a world is not false, just fake, counterfeit, synthetic, plastic, bogus, and, yes, artificial. Artificial is not false. A paradox-free world is true, it’s just fake.

Consider LED lights, the highest-quality of which produce only about 94% of the visible light spectrum. Those missing colors are true, though you cannot see them. The world you can see is fake, though you can plainly see it. What you see under LED lighting is not what it is. Under sunlight, it would be different. And, yet, it would not be different, except, perhaps in enough time, more tan. The type or intensity of light does not change the essence of something, but its essence does you no good if you can’t see it. So, under LED lights, your vision of the thing is true because it is really there, but it’s also artificial because it is not what you see. To the degree your vision lacks fidelity with the true visual appearance of the object, your vision is false because it is artificial, just as a supermarket fruit is inorganic because its growth and appearance relied on artificial chemicals.

Summarizing that last paragraph, then, artificiality obscures truth, and truth obscured is like justice delayed. Artificiality hides the truth, approximating falsity. So, the difference between artificiality and falsity are rather meaningless. The presence of either denies us access to truth.

You might be asking what do LED lights and all these other things have to do with the beginning of this post, which talks about paradoxes and such? Well, this entire post is paradoxical, and LED lights are the most paradoxical product you have ever been compelled to buy. They make light, but hide the truth. They let see while making things invisible. They are simultaneously light and darkness, revelation and concealment, visible and invisible. (Or, as we say in the Mass of the Ages, “Visibilium et invisibilium,” which is much more fun to say, especially if you enunciate those beautiful Latin vowels!) Paradoxes separate man from, not only lower beasts, but from all artificial systems. Artificial systems cannot tolerate paradoxes, but people can. People actually seek out paradoxes because we intuit the ultimate paradoxes of the universe:

1. The is one God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

2. God became Man—whole God, and whole man, simultaneously creator and created.

Those are aspects of the sacred mystery, but they are, simultaneously, paradoxes.

Man is a paradox-seeking machine because man seeks God and God is a paradox and God is Truth itself. Therefore, to banish paradoxes is to banish Truth which man intuits and desires and man will, by his nature, will always demand and obtain recourse to the Truth.

Scott is only a little older than I am, so the motion picture, “The Matrix,” was not around when he was eleven. But the idea was. The idea that what we can observe and measure—which is quit a lot—is not all there is. That idea has been around as long as man has walked the earth. Possibly longer, as we shall see.

This idea allows that what we cannot observe and measure may be far more important and powerful than what we can. And, this unseen, unmeasured flux is actually the final cause and effect of the entire universe, from the Big Bang to the fleck of crust you removed from your that little divot between your eye and nose this morning.

This “flux,” to use a term borrowed from Steven Brust’s To Reign in Hell, is the matrix, and one’s ability to “see” it is the ultimate measure of understanding.

We can’t really “see” the matrix, though. The matrix—this flux—exists in a dimension our senses are blind to. No amount of science can detect it, measure it, or operate against it. The flux is to creation what physics is to a bird, in that physics might explain a bird’s flight, but birds cannot comprehend or alter physics. Birds fly and ask not why. The matrix is physically unknowable to man. We cannot know what we cannot see, hear, feel, touch, or smell.

So, how do some of us “see” it?

Scientism rejects the existence of anything man cannot observe and measure. Science proper, however, allows for the unobserved. In 1980, scientism rejected the existence of a bacterium that causes stomach ulcers, but two Australian doctors—brothers—proved such a bacterium not only exists but causes most peptic ulcers. They were rewarded by having their licenses revoked by the arbiters of scientism. The same thing happened to poor old Doctor Semmelweis who was driven out of medicine and to an early grave for the sin of discovering germ theory.

Again, science allows for discovery; scientism does not. Scientism says “what you see is all there is.” Science says, “here’s our best guess.”

Scientism is also a hypocrite. Scientism compels us to say, “human activity is causing an alarming increase in earth’s temperature,” while science proper says, “there might be a correlation between certain gasses and temperature, and human activity might be increasing the volume of these gasses.” To the scientist—to those who cannot “see” the matrix—the two statements are identical. To those who can “see,” the two statements are not. One statement is hubristic and vainglorious, while the other is humble. The former statement is a conclusion; the latter is an observation which tacitly acknowledges uncertainty. The first parallel’s MacArthur’s promise, “I shall return.” The latter, Elon Musk’s reply to suggestions he buy MSNBC: “It’s crazy, but it just might work.”

Hold that thought.

I replied to Scott Adams’s one-word post with one of those posts that starts off simple, then expands like one of those compressed mattresses that arrives in a small box and blows up to a 12-inch thick king size mattress upon cutting the plastic wrap surrounding it.

@amgreaberThe Magnificent Inflating Mattress! @Tuft & Needle #mattress #unbox #timelapse #SamsClubScanAndGo #tuftandneedle

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My reply expanded because Elon’s question, while simple, triggered a series of complex operations in my brain.

• “How old were you” causes one’s life to flash before his eyes.

• “Others” triggers theory of mind.

• “The matrix” conjures up, first, the movie, then what the movie portends.

Three completely different kinds of thought and reasoning working together simultaneously as the mind desperately tries to formulate an answer that’s either honest and true or snarky and funny. Or, both, if you’re lucky.

My answer was honest and, I hope, true, but it also came without much conscious thought. I answered in a stream of consciousness.

I began programming later in life (20s). Having learned lessons from Tony Robbins, I spent as much time learning how top programmers thought as learning the syntax and grammar of languages. The thing that stood out was “patterns.” The great programmers—the rare, true architects—emphasized pattern recognition in a strange-loops (Gödel, Escher, Bach) context that opened my mind to seeing systems as a whole rather than as mere parts. This mindset sort of magically applied itself to everything else: people, institutions, politics, math, theology. This led me to Stoicism, then to a renewal and extension of the Catholic faith my parents lovingly raised me to know. This is what I think of as seeing the matrix.

The careful reader will notice I left out the theory of mind part and, as a result, did not answer Elon’s query.

Or did I?

After I replied, I took off for Holy Mass, then lunch with my wife. Throughout, the question and answer intruded upon other mental operations, driving me to finally sit down and type about it. Clearly, some part of my mind was not satisfied with the answer I gave. Was it the fact that I did not answer the question? That I did not address the middle part about others?

Or is there a strange loop in operation here?

Theory of mind has to do with one’s ability to put himself in someone else’s shoes. “If I eat the last cookie, my wife will be mad because she hasn’t had one, and I’ve had three,” is an example of our ability to predict or assess what’s going on in someone else’s head. It might be as simple as deciding whether or not to eat the fourth and last cookie or as complicated as influencing half plus one of a group to vote the way you wish them to vote.

But, to some degree, we must also apply theory of mind to ourselves. And this is where the strange loop comes in. “I will be happy if I buy a truck,” is a theory of mind as much as “She will be angry if I eat the last cookie.” Isn’t it strange, though, to apply a tool meant to assess the thoughts and feelings of other people to oneself?1

If you re-read my reply to Scott Adams’s reply to Elon Musk’s question, you will find that I do, indeed, contemplate others, but I have placed myself among the others, as if I have no more control over my post hoc2 emotions than I have over my wife’s.

My reply goes on to mention Stoicism. What the hell does a 2,000-year-old philosophical school have to do with science, scientism, and the matrix? Why did my brain toss that in?

Unlike most philosophical schools that keep philosophical reasoning in a logic-tight compartment isolated from how one lives, Stoicism emphasizes first how we live and reason. To the Stoic mind, happiness depends primarily on knowing what we can control and what we cannot control.

The Stoic, Epictetus, was a slave whose master crippled him for kicks as a young boy. In his Enchiridion, he warns us of the consequences of failing to make and live by this distinction:

If you think you can control things over which you have no control, then you will be hindered and disturbed. You will start complaining and become a fault-finding person.3

And lures us with happiness if we do live by that distinction:

But if you deal with only those things under your control, no one can force you to do anything you don’t want to do; no one can stop you. You will have no enemy, and no harm will come to you.4

Stoicism, then, is something of a strange loop itself. It is a philosophy that deals with how one lives his life day to day and demands harmony with nature. Not just biological nature, but the nature of things in general—the nature of man, man’s purpose. Thus, the Roman Emperor and Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, leaves us with this theory-of-mind examination of his own mind; literally writing to himself:

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: 'I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?'

—But it’s nicer here…

So you were born to feel ‘nice’? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?

(Marcus Aurelius, Meditations V.1)5

Strange loops, indeed. Man’s job is to do man’s work, but man avoids his work—his nature—because the bed is soft and warm. The dog does not reject the dog’s nature, but man constantly rejects man’s. Some men reject being men and pretend, instead, they are women. Some women pretend they are cats, even obtaining surgery to give them the outward appearance of a cat. But a cat would never sit still for someone to make it into a pseudo-human (which, to a cat, would be to take about nine steps down the evolutionary ladder, like a prince becoming a pauper.)

And this brings us back to Gödel Escher Bach, the book by cognitive scientist, Douglas Hofstadter. The simplest explanation of a strange loop is, for me, his introduction to J.S. Bach’s canons and fugues, musical forms with rules which Bach could bend without breaking in ways that seem impossible and, perhaps, are impossible, at least, according to scientism.

There is one canon in the Musical Offering which is particularly unusual. Labeled simply "Canon per Tonos", it has three voices. The uppermost voice sings a variant of the Royal Theme, while underneath it, two voices provide a canonic harmonization based on a second theme. The lower of this pair sings its theme in C minor (which is the key of the canon as a whole), and the upper of the pair sings the same theme displaced upwards in pitch by an interval of a fifth. What makes this canon different from any other, however, is that when it concludes-or, rather, seems to conclude-it is no longer in the key of C minor, but now is in D minor. Somehow Bach has contrived to modulate (change keys) right under the listener's nose. And it is so constructed that this "ending" ties smoothly onto the beginning again; thus one can repeat the process and return in the key of E, only to join again to the beginning. These successive modulations lead the ear to increasingly remote provinces of tonality, so that after several of them, one would expect to be hopelessly far away from the starting key. And yet magically, after exactly six such modulations, the original key of C minor has been restored! All the voices are exactly one octave higher than they were at the beginning, and here the piece may be broken off in a musically agreeable way. Such, one imagines, was Bach's intention; but Bach indubitably also relished the implication that this process could go on ad infinitum, which is perhaps why he wrote in the margin "As the modulation rises, so may the King's Glory." To emphasize its potentially infinite aspect, I like to call this the "Endlessly Rising Canon".

In this canon, Bach has given us our first example of the notion of Strange Loops. The "Strange Loop" phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started. (Here, the system is that of musical keys.)6

Which brings us back to Elon’s question, “How old were you when you realized others couldn’t see the matrix?”

My answer, which seems on the surface not to answer the question, does answer the question when considering the context of the answer itself. If theory of mind requires some examination of our own minds in relationship to the minds of others, when my answer is complete: I am the other who doesn’t see the matrix. And, yet, I am also the self who does. In other words, there was a time when I did not see the matrix and time when I did see the matrix but I’m not sure when the latter overcame the former. But it was sometime between my introduction to writing software and the time I began complaining, “why can’t these idiots see what I see?”

Perhaps it was when a fellow programmer handed me the book Gödel Escher Bach and told me it was the secret to understanding coding for systems rather than functions and methods and pointers. Perhaps it was when my uncle Pat gave me Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations without explanation except to say, “It helped me get through the war,” referring to World War II. Perhaps it was when I wanted to stay in bed all day instead of working like a man for the first time as a man with children and responsibilities. Perhaps, I do not “see” the matrix still because I cannot see what I cannot see. I could be imagining the matrix because I saw a movie about it and everybody talks about it.

Or, perhaps, I realized the matrix was there and others do not see it simply because God has bestowed sufficient graces on me to see that everything is a strange loop. Creation is a strange loop that moves through Him, with Him, and in Him in the unity of the Holy Spirit, the alpha and the omega, the sine qua non without Whom all is naught.

When, then, did I first realize others could not see the matrix?

I’ve always known it, and, yet, I am still blind myself.

And that is the strange loop we must simply accept as being beyond our powers of observation and measurement though we know implicitly it is with us and in us and we belong to Him.

When ancestral generations passed through these great gates of history, they saw in the Gray Champion a type of elder very different from the bustling senior citizens of America’s recent past and from the old “Uncle Sams,” the Revolutionary War survivors of the 1830s, when Hawthorne wrote his tale. Who were these old priest-warriors? They were elder expressions of the Prophet archetype. And their arrival into old age heralded a new constellation of generations.1

Popular culture follows power and nothing else.

A culture shift is happening.

People who were pop stars yesterday are invisible today. They’ve been replaced in the imagination by a different cast . . . some familiar, some new. The very definitions of “cool” and “connected” were surgically removed from the old and reattached to the MAGA set.

Henry Kissinger Was the Sexiest Man Alive in the 1970s

We’ve seen something like this before.

Richard Nixon rode the biggest popular vote landslide in modern history into his second term as President of the United States in 1972. Suddenly, everyone wanted a photo with Nixon and his inner circle.

Nixon acolytes started showing up on popular TV shows like Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. And one man epitomized this cultural phenomenon more than any other: Henry Kissinger.

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Mark Tooley wrote in Providence Magazine last year (my emphasis):

Beyond any other Secretary of State in history, much less National Security Advisor, Kissinger was a superstar.  After his shuttle diplomacy between Israel and Arab capitals during and after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he became known as “Super K.” His reputed romantic life with Hollywood stars, supposedly suggested by Nixon to make him appear human, was much reported.  He was declared the “sexiest man alive” based not on his short and pudgy looks but his brilliant mind.

When a CIA plot forced Nixon’s resignation in 1974, Kissinger remained a cultural and Washington institution. He continued as Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State, successfully ending the Vietnam War. He advised, in one way or another, every president through Joe Biden. Until Kissinger’s death one year ago this month, Kissinger was my generations human link to 1970s politics.

But the political wave that lifted Kissinger to the heights of pop stardom failed to sustain itself. Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate op sent an already weird and synthetic pop culture into something like a tailspin. By 1976, when the country celebrated its 200th birthday, the vivid colors of the early 70s were fading, replaced in spots by traditional red, white, and blue. Jimmy Carter’s work shirts and jeans, down home farmer accent, and “natural” style appealed to a culture tired of plastic and polyester.

Unfortunately for Carter, attire and accents weren’t authentic enough for a nation sick of the sixties and dizzy from the seventies, so the people retired Carter after his first term and replaced him with a man equally cotton-clad but more in tune with the interior desire for authenticity and tradition: Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Now, in the waning hours of the year of our Lord twenty twenty-four, a culture shift larger than Nixon’s, Carter’s, or Reagan’s is underway, and it’s washing over America faster than a tsunami.

The New “It”

America has turned the page, but many pages remain to be turned. While everyone knows Trump will close the border, deport the invaders, end wars and support of wars, unleash oil, and Make America Great Again, there are larger changes in store. Trump 47’s administration will be dramatically different from Trump 45 simply because, not only has Trump learned from his first administration, but he has had four years to fully grasp how rotten Washington, DC, and the Republican Party are. It’s no mistake the people most associated with Trump today are all from outside the GOP establishment. To name a few:

• Tucker Carlson

• Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

• Tulsi Gabbard

• Kid Rock

• Elon Musk

• Joe Rogan

• Dana White

While Conservative Inc. laments that “these people are not conservatives,” all are Americans in the truest, interior, organic sense the word. They value the things we once all agreed on:

• Faith

• Family

• Prosperity

• Vigorous health

• Peace

• Independence

• Opportunity

• Work

• Service

• National pride

• People

Their adherence to these core values put many of them at odds with the party they were, until now, associated with: the Democrats. What many on the right still fail to admit is that the people who ran the Republican Party for the past 20 years have more in common with the Democrats than with the people on Trump’s BFF list. Mitch McConnell and John Thune are much more comfortable with Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi than they are with Joe Rogan or Kid Rock.

Both Democrat and Republican lifers put the DC cabal far ahead of the American people or even American interests. Democrats and Republicans alike turned the federal government into a private operation whose sole interest is concentrating more and more power into fewer and fewer hands, so long as those hands were reachable by the political elites. Most important to keep in mind, both Democrat and Republican establishmentarians exist for the edifices and pop-star aspects of politics, wanting to see and be seen at the “it” events with the “it” people.

Soon after the catalyst, a national election will produce a sweeping political realignment, as one faction or coalition capitalizes on a new public demand for decisive action. Republicans, Democrats, or perhaps a new party will decisively win the long partisan tug-of-war, ending the era of split government that had lasted through four decades of Awakening and Unraveling. The winners will now have the power to pursue the more potent, less incrementalist agenda about which they had long dreamed and against which their adversaries had darkly warned. This new regime will enthrone itself for the duration of the Crisis. Regardless of its ideology, that new leadership will assert public authority and demand private sacrifice. Where leaders had once been inclined to alleviate societal pressures, they will now aggravate them to command the nation’s attention. The regeneracy will be solidly under way.

Over the past 4 years, enough Americans have realized that old labels for parties and ideologies lost their meaning. Terms like liberal, conservative, Democrat, and Republican have melded into the same blob of “them.” All four groups are the “them” that wants to screw the “us.” It’s a blob that is adamantly in favor of:

• War and global belligerence

• Laissez faire treatment of large corporations, especially pharmaceutical companies but micro-management of entrepreneurship

• Strict limitation and regulation of small and medium business

• Coddling criminals

• Preferential treatment of illegal aliens over American citizens

• Ridicule and belittlement of the working class

• Racial segregation

• Synthetic food and food laced with potentially dangerous chemicals

• Sexual exploitation of women and children

• Prohibition of Judeo-Christian beliefs and practices

• Unlimited debt

From 1945 until 2020, these issues were the issues the two parties, the two ideologies, fought over. Then, suddenly, both parties and both ideologies embraced them all. War, corporatism, artificiality, synthetics, subservience, dependence, and conformity became the de facto planks of both Democrat and Republican Party platforms. Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Trey Gowdy—all considered emblematic of “conservative” just a few years ago—are suddenly the poster children of the Washington establishment, a true bi-partisanship like no one’s every imagined possible. Dick Cheney’s equally warmongering daughter Liz is a hero of Code Pink, if that gives you any idea how things have changed.

I get the feeling, though, that the weird period of 2020 to 2024 is akin to the Ford and Carter administrations—an interlude of subterranean change in which everyone knew there was no going back but uncertain about what was to come. The pieces were in place: cotton and wool over nylon and polyester, authentic over synthetic, organic over artificial, individual over the collective. The amorphous era of the late 1970s rallied around the Reagan Revolution, buoyed by his trouncing of Jimmy Carter on the backs of Reagan Democrats who broke with their union bosses to vote for the guy they’d like to have a beer with. The “Reagan Democrat” was born.

Similarly, from the outbreak of Covid in the winter of 2020 through Trump’s inauguration on 20 January next, we have been in the midst of a transitional era of American culture. Not just politics, but the culture itself.

Hard Death and New Beginnings

In other words, we are standing on the threshold of great change, possibly as great as the Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II. And we should be prepared for turmoil and disruption and, even, deaths that rival or surpass those inflection points wherein the old order’s death throes resist, but succumb to, the birth of the new.

Decisive events will occur—events so vast, powerful, and unique that they lie beyond today’s wildest hypotheses. These events will inspire great documents and speeches, visions of a new political order being framed. People will discover a hitherto unimagined capacity to fight and die, and to let their children fight and die, for a communal cause. The Spirit of America will return, because there will be no other choice.2

Frightening, right?

But wait; there’s more.

Just as a woman bears the pain of pregnancy and labor to bring forth a new life, made in God’s image and likeness, so nations and civilizations must endure the sufferings of a dying regime to arrive at the next golden epoch. As Strauss and Howe forecast in 1997:

Emerging in this Crisis climax will be a great entropy reversal, that miracle of human history in which trust is reborn. Through the Fourth Turning, the old order will die, but only after having produced the seed containing the new civic order within it. In the moment of maximum danger, that seed will implant, and a new social contract will take root. For a brief time, the American firmament will be malleable in ways that would stagger the today’s Unraveling-era mindset. “Everything is new and yielding,” enthused Benjamin Rush to his friends at the climax of the American Revolution. So will everything be again.3

Not to be a downer, but Donald Trump is of that old order, just as FDR was, just as Lincoln was, and just as Benjamin Franklin was. These great turnings cannot be led by the young who have no memory of their era’s founding and lack the perspective to see the entire period with clear eyes. Only someone born around the birth of the era can recognize its unfitness. When a man my age meets a peer, we both know that, at some level, we know the same things. My counterpart remembers the waning days of Vietnam, the debuts of certain television shows, the fashion trends that emerged and disappeared, the introduction of personal computers and and the audio cassette, the 1980 Winter Olympics, and so on. And, yet, even we are too young to remember the early post-war days of the late 40s or the golden age of Ike, the moment every home had a television, and the terrors of needing a backyard fallout shelter. The safe transport from the old to new must be led by someone who remembers the birth of the old, not through books, but through lived experience and oral tradition.

In The Fourth Turning, Strauss and Howe introduce us to the Gray Champion, an elder member of that generation that lived through the entire era, a man of 80 years who had seen it all. He emerges only at a make-or-break moment and plants himself, his ideals, and the society’s fundamental values between the people and the approaching menace:

One afternoon in April 1689, as the American colonies boiled with rumors that King James II was about to strip them of their liberties, the king’s hand-picked governor of New England, Sir Edmund Andros, marched his troops menacingly through Boston. His purpose was to crush any thought of colonial self-rule. To everyone present, the future looked grim.

Just at that moment, seemingly from nowhere, there appeared on the streets “the figure of an ancient man” with “the eye, the face, the attitude of command.” His manner “combining the leader and the saint,” the old man planted himself directly in the path of the approaching British soldiers and demanded that they stop. “The solemn, yet warlike peal of that voice, fit either to rule a host in the battlefield or be raised to God in prayer, were irresistible. At the old man’s word and outstretched arm, the roll of the drum was hushed at once, and the advancing line stood still.”

Inspired by this single act of defiance, the people of Boston roused their courage and acted. Within the day, Andros was deposed and jailed, the liberty of Boston saved, and the corner turned on the colonial Glorious Revolution.4

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in 1837 of the next coming of this Gray Champion, as retold by Strauss and Howe:

Posterity had to wait a while before seeing him again—the length of another long human life, in fact. “When eighty years had passed,” wrote Hawthorne, the Gray Champion reappeared. The occasion was the revolutionary summer of 1775—when America’s elders once again appealed to God, summoned the young to battle, and dared the hated enemy to fire. “When our fathers were toiling at the breastwork on Bunker’s Hill,” Hawthorne continued, “all through that night the old warrior walked his rounds.” This old warrior—this graying peer of Sam Adams or Ben Franklin or Samuel Langdon (the Harvard president who preached to the Bunker Hill troops)—belonged to the Awakening Generation, whose youth had provided the spiritual taproot of the republic secured in their old age.5

Everyone who remembers either Hawthorne’s Twice-told Tales or its references in The Fourth Turning recalled the tales on 6 July, no doubt.

Once again, Hawthorne might say, the Gray Champion has appeared at the moment of greatest danger to the republic, to walk amongst the young and inspire them, not with academic lectures on the nature of freedom and liberty nor rousing speeches like Henry V’s “band of brothers,’ but to stand in the breach and prove that the fight is worth the blood, the war is worth cost, and the victory to come will be all the sweeter for it.

It is the Gray Champion who rips way the facade of culture to reveal the granite substance upon which that culture rests, shifting and morphing on a whim while the base remains firm and permanent, rooted, not in man’s whimsical tastes, but in God Almighty’s fixed and knowable plan.

The Gray Champion walks among us once again.

My answer: “I want to destroy the American medical industry.”

Praise Jesus that Donald J. Trump has appointed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to do just that: destroy the medical industry as we’ve known it for the past 45 years.

This post explains why you, too, should hate the medical industry, distrust your doctor, and cheer for Kennedy’s success in the war against a crooked, ill-educated, smug, overpaid, greedy, and deceitful class.

A Sick, Sick Land

Despite spending more on healthcare in gross dollars and per capital than any nation in the history of humanity, the United States is the sickest wealthy country that ever existed. Each additional dollar spent on healthcare reduces life expectancy, destroys quality of life, and increases the incidence of chronic disease.

Meanwhile, healthcare is the fastest growing segment of the US economy and has been since the late 1970s. Only education costs increase as fast.

The uninitiated might say, “well, the medical industry doesn’t know what it’s doing.” What if I told you, though, that the medical industry knows exactly what’s it doing?

America’s modern medical industry—which includes the FDA, CDC, NIH, the major medical and specialty associations, hospitals, doctors groups, medical universities, and, of course, big pharmaceutical companies—copied the Michelin Tire company’s star rating system in order create demand for their products.

The Michelin Star System

If you’ve ever wondered why an automobile tire company started rating restaurants, I’ll treat you to a little history courtesy of Capital One:

The Michelins believed that a travel-promotion guide with information on trip planning, do-it-yourself maintenance, and a little food along the way would encourage those early adopters of automobiles to drive more — and create more rubber-tire business at the same time. They started the Michelin Guide in 1900 to further that goal.

In 1920, Michelin expanded their guide from a single star to one, two, or three stars. Though the company denies it, three star restaurants tended to be remote, requiring a longer drive than one- or two-star eateries. The guide encourages people with automobiles to get out of the house and drive an hour for dinner—putting wear and tear on their tires. As evidence, here is the rating guide from 1932:

1 star meant – high quality cooking, worth a stop

2 stars meant – excellent cooking, worth a detour

3 stars meant – exceptional cuisine, worth a detour

It’s as simple as that. Michelin created demand for road trips to excellent restaurants that would lead to faster tire replacement. As the number one or number two tire manufacturer in the world, Michelin didn’t need to promote its brand. When consumers replaced tires, there was high probability they would choose Michelin tires simply because Michelin was the most available. (Anheuser Busch in the late 1990s used the same tactic of growing the beer market independent of its own brand advertising because AB products dominated store beer fridges. They knew the hands of consumers needing beer were most likely to land on a case of their product, so the goal was to get to people to drink their beer stock faster.)

The Medical Industry’s Business Model Is Chronic Disease

The medical industry has three ways to make money:

• Prevention

• Acute care

• Chronic care

Prevention can be lucrative, but it’s hard work. People are resistant to prevention except in particular moments, like when a child is growing up. And prevention requires a constant supply of new humans. Once a human has had all the vaccines and acquired all the healthy habits, the medical industry might not see them for years until they encounter a need for acute care.

Acute care is (or was) what you got at the emergency room: deep cuts, broken bones, bullet wounds, appendicitis, tonsillitis, the usual fare. But acute care could also cover more extreme problems. Accute care can be very expensive to the consumer, but it presents numerous problems for the medical industry. For one, it’s unpredictable. Injuries and acute illness happen at inconvenient times, requiring hospitals and other care facilities to over staff for peaks that may not happen. That means paying for more building than you need most of the time and paying salaries to staff who are often idle. Another problem with acute medicine is that, once the acute condition is properly treated, the customer goes away and never returns. Which is the point of this famous cartoon.

What the medical industry wanted was a steady stream of mildly sick people who never get better but require constant treatment, a form of annuity income.

Chronic care is the panacea. Chronic conditions are those the medical industry deems “incurable” (which is usually a lie) and requiring monitoring, counseling, tests, pharmaceuticals, and regular visits to the doctor. Chronic conditions provide the system with an annuity income stream of high-margin interventions. Diabetes, dyslipidemia, chronic pain, certain cancers, heart disease, hypertension, arthritis, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dermatological conditions, and, everyone’s favorite, depression fit into the chronic condition category. Chronic disease management costs $42 trillion a year, a number that increases much faster than inflation, even when Joe Biden’s president.

Chronic disease management (never prevention or cure) is what drives ALL of modern medicine, now that the Covid scam has subsided. Chronic disease management does everything prevention and acute treatment cannot: it provides predictable recurring revenue to the system. Hospitals no longer need to over staff ERs in the hopes a kid breaks a leg skateboarding. They can schedule the kid’s dad for a monthly blood test to “manage” his type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and national-debt-dwarfing triglyceride count.

Some will say, “sure, but the increase in chronic conditions is a natural result of an aging population.” You would think. But the numbers tell a different story.

A recent study comparing the prevalence of 17 chronic diseases among various age groups between 2005 and 2014 found increases in nearly every disease, including in the youngest groups in the study: 35-50 years old and 51-65 years old.Children have similarly suffered from increasing rates of chronic disease. Less than 2 percent of children in 1960 had a health condition severe enough to interfere with activities of daily life; 50 years later, more than 8 percent of children had such a condition. 1

In other words, age-related chronic disease is becoming more prevalent among the young than among the old. But the aging population explains how this screwed up system came about in the first place. And, like most problems in the world today, it all began with the Baby Boomers.

The Baby Bust Threatened the Medical Industry

Until the the late 1960s, the medical industry was content with dispensing routine vaccines and good advice to patients (prevention) and setting broken arms or removing hot appendixes (acute). As we said earlier, these two aspects of medicine need only a new crop of humans to provide adequate revenue, and the Baby Boom (1946 to 1961) was supplying all the fresh kids they could ask for. But the boom ended about the time of JFK’s assassination when the world’s attention shifted to the risk of nuclear war and birth control pills flooded the market.

By 1965, demographers and medical chief financial officers realized the boom was ending, that the next generation would be tiny in comparison the present generation of young people, and that hospitals, doctors, and their vendors were “overbuilt” for the future. Either the industry would need to shrink, or it would need a new excuse to drag people in.

About the same time, researchers were discovering statistical links between behaviors and chronic conditions that grandmothers always knew about but scientists somehow missed. Smoking, heavy drinking, sedentary lifestyles, and, most distinctly, obesity all correlated with high incidence of chronic illness, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Public health organizations began campaigns to discourage risky behaviors, including the first surgeon-general warning about cigarettes in 1964. But the more creative folks in the medical industry were not so fast to condemn disease-causing behaviors. These financial geniuses realized what we outlined above: chronic disease is an annuity revenue stream par excellence. With the cigarette cat out of the bag, they looked at the next-leading cause of chronic illness: obesity.

Obesity, and the chronic inflammation associated with it, is the lifeblood of the modern medical industry. Obesity works two ways:

1. The diet required to achieve obesity is, itself, a leading cause of inflammation.

2. Once achieved, obesity triggers additional chronic conditions.

Making Medical Customers Through Government

In the 1970s, the medical industry decided to leverage the federal government to push people to get fat and sick, working alongside big agriculture to use grains as the primary vehicle. The timing was spectacular.

Richard Nixon agreed in 1971 to sell huge amounts of grain to the Soviet Union. To meet the demand without driving up consumer prices, Congress provided massive incentives to grain farmers who responded the way you’d expect. They produced, year after year, bumper crops of grains—too much grain.

Working with nutritional “experts,” the Department of Agriculture revised an old food-groups guide. While the experts proposed recommending three to four servings of grains daily, pressure from medical and agricultural lobbyists persuaded the USDA to make the recommendation six to eleven servings a day. And, in 1980, the USDA unveiled the new “food pyramid” under guise of “healthy diet” but actually for the purpose of selling more grain and increasing the incidences of chronic disease.

For simplicity, let’s use a slice of whole-grain bread as an example of one serving of grain. Eleven slices of bread delivers 142 grams of carbohydrates and 759 calories. Eating according to the food pyramid, even using the minimum servings from each group, produces a 2,500 to 4,800 calorie a day diet, while the average 170 pound man burns about 1,800 calories a day. (See where this is going?) What’s worse is the distribution of calories, because, despite what your idiot doctor reads from a CDC poster, a calorie is not a calorie.

Those 142 grams of carbohydrates unleash an insulin storm in the body. Repeated day after day, the body stores the extra sugar derived from grains and fruits in fat cells throughout the body. And, because of the overabundance of insulin in the blood, cells start ignoring the growth signal insulin is supposed to trigger. So, the sugars attach to red blood cells, displacing oxygen. Sugar also requires cells to carry extra water molecules, and extra water is what we mean by “inflammation.”

The results were predictable by anyone who understands metabolism, which excludes 99% of licensed physicians.

When I was born, about 13 percent of American adults suffered from obesity, and just 3 percent were morbidly obese. Today, the majority of US adults are obese and over 10 percent morbidly so.

Now, look at the chart from USA Facts again. When did the jump occur?

Immediately after the introduction of the new food pyramid.

If you were in school when the new pyramid rolled out, you remember what a big deal it was. If you or a family worked in the medical field (as many in my family did), you remember the fridge and pantry being purged of fats and proteins which were replaced with Triscuits and Doritos, guaranteed “healthy” and “slimming” by every dietician, nutritionist, doctor, nurse, and public health agency in the country.

Then, you watched your belt disappear in a tunnel of fat that grew inexplicably around your waist.

Next, your energy disappeared like Jeb Bush’s. This was because insulin resistance meant cells were getting less sugar energy as sugar was diverted from kinetic fuel to potential fuel. Type II diabetes rates soared.

Look at the line before and after 1990, tens years after the new food pyramid debuted, exactly as would be expected from a decade of eating 200 grams of carbohydrates a day.

Now, we’ve seen how the food pyramid’s introduction, with a billion dollar PR campaign, affected rates of obesity and diabetes. But, did the scheme work? Did it feed cash into the greedy medical industry?

The largest decadal jump in healthcare spending happened in the decade of the 1980s—the decade immediately following the new food pyramid—at a whopping 157.12 percent. The second-largest jump of 70.8 percent occurred in the 1990s, as obesity, triggered by the food pyramid, developed into Type II diabetes.

Doctors Are Waking Up

Robert Lufkin MD is a physician, researcher, and medical school professor at the University of Los Angeles. His book, Lies I Taught in Medical School, destroys many mythical images we have of the all-knowing medical expert class. Lufkin wrote the book after curing himself (and many others) of metabolic diseases by doing the opposite of what he taught his students, who are now your doctors.

Lufkin’s mother was a registered hospital dietician who forced her family to eat according to the food pyramid religiously—a practice he carried into adulthood and fatherhood. He should have been the healthiest 40-year-old alive, but here is what happened.

Then I developed four diseases that I had been taught (and had taught others) were aging related with possibly a genetic component:

•​Hypertension, which needed high blood pressure medicine;

•​Gout arthritis, which I was prescribed drugs to control;

•​Dyslipidemia (abnormal blood lipids), for which I was prescribed statins;

•​Prediabetes (where glucose levels fall in a prediabetic range), for which I was prescribed another drug.2

Lufkin summarizes his shock (emphasis mine):

Obviously, I was concerned. And confused. How could this be happening? All the settled science told me this was impossible. I had been raised by a professional nutrition specialist, a certified dietitian, so I had eaten exactly as recommended by health organizations and the food pyramid. I’d been raised from birth in a system that assured me this couldn’t happen to someone my age.

I did everything right, and I was going to die.3

Lufkin spends the rest of the book teaching you about metabolism and its central (or solo) role in disease development and prevention. Obesity, type 2 diabetes, neurological diseases, heart diseases, cancer, joint pain are all caused by metabolic imbalances from diet or other environmental stresses. Yet, as Dr. Lufkin states, very few doctors know anything about metabolism.

We never talked about metabolism. To say that it was not the most popular or exciting subject in medical education would be an understatement. To us students, metabolism was just related to food and how it got broken down into building blocks for different cells. More commonly, we were taught about how food was metabolized into energy. I thought that was all there was to it. We all did.4

The damning confession here should be obvious:

1. Doctors who know almost nothing about metabolism

2. advising patients on what to eat

3. by regurgitating the government’s advice

4. which was designed to sell grain and produce lifelong customers for doctors.

Asking a doctor what you should eat is akin to walking into the local car dealership and asking the first salesman you see if you should buy a new car. Doctors are trained and financially incentivized to intervene, even in the healthiest of patients. We’ve all heard a doctor justify a prescription with words to the effect, “can’t hurt to feel even better, now, can it?”

The dietary interventions prescribed by government for the benefit of political donors and mindlessly parroted by supposed health experts (doctors) has turned the United States into the chronically sickest nation in the world. Were a meteor or coronal mass ejection wipe out modern technology, the United States as a whole would repeat the Roanoke lost colony. We would simply cease to exist as a people. A country like America cannot be built or sustained by fat, diabetic people who need seven daily prescriptions and monthly injections just to stay alive.

America is dying a slow, miserable death due to bad medical and dietary advice promulgated by the government and doctors for their own benefit.

Americans Sense Something Is Wrong

Some of my most vitriolic and sensational posts decrying the evils of modern medicine are also among the most read. And the centerpiece of this body of work was a 2017 post:

That post went viral because, through it, people recognized their own situations. Statistically speaking, readers of my blog are obese with three or more chronic conditions—because my readers are typical Americans over the age of 45. In 2017, I had shed fat and changed my diet and exercise routines in direct opposition to the advice of my doctors and the public health industry. My blood panels (which I buy myself to target very specific metrics that most doctors don’t even know exist) improved dramatically. And, though I still smoked the occasional cigarette, I was able to hold my breath up to 3.5 minutes. (It’s a gimmick, really. The need to breathe is triggered, not by lack of oxygen, but by too much carbon dioxide in the blood. Ketosis releases only about 1/10th the CO2 as sugar metabolism.)

It’s never popular to viciously attack the most trusted profession in the country, and, in 2017, medical workers were the most trusted people in the country. And, yet, my post accusing doctors of killing their patients (three years before Covid) went viral. Why?

Again, I believe the popularity of the post stemmed from recognition. Readers recognized the truth in what they were reading despite simultaneously believing doctors to be health experts concerned primarily with their patients’ wellbeing.

Readers also sensed that America’s trust in the medical industry was unjustified. How could our medical industry be both knowledgeable and altruistic when Americans, including my readers and their families, were getting sicker by the day?

Moreover, readers realized that costs and inconvenience of their conditions were not the worst part. The worst part was quality of life.

Another doctor, Jonathon Sullivan, wrote in his book The Barbell Prescription, a fantastic summary of life under the food pyramid and modern medical advice:

Will’s twin brother Phil displays the more common phenotype. Somewhere along the line, he took up smoking, drinking, and lots of quality time with his big screen TV. He’s planning on watching the entire third season of Battlestar Galactica this weekend…for the fourth time. To keep his edge, he drinks lots of Pepsi, and keeps scrupulously up to date on his Netflix queue. He’s a fiend for Domino’s Pizza and Doritos. He likes to cook with frozen ingredients and a microwave. His bodyfat is through the roof – he’s about 48% fat by weight – and he tips the scale at 283, about 70 lbs on his twin brother. He doesn’t like doctors, although he’s known to make frequent trips to the ER for chest pain, fatigue, sore joints, or a skin infection. He hasn’t had a real erection since the start of the Obama Administration. He has Type 2 diabetes, arthritis, messed-up serum lipids, and high blood pressure. He doesn’t know it yet, but he also has a ticking time bomb in his left anterior descending coronary artery. Three years from now, this lesion will clamp off the blood flow to Phil’s left ventricle in the middle of a Die Hard movie marathon. He’ll breathe his last in the cardiac ICU 6 weeks later, age 58.5

Tell me you don’t know at least one person whom Dr. Sullivan could be describing. Of course you do. It might be you.

A New Day Dawning

The good news for you or your brother or whomever this paragraph describes is two-fold:

1. It’s not your fault.

2. Help is on the way.

It’s not your fault because you, like Dr. Lufkin, simply did what you were told by people you were taught to defer to on all things health.

Help is on the way because Donald Trump rose from the deck to fight, fight, fight for you and our country, enlisting the help of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to destroy the modern medical industry as we’ve known it and replace it with a simple system that works.

Here is what Bobby Junior posted on X following Trump’s announcement of his appointment to head Health

https://x.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1857198805919138235

But an earlier post made me jump up and cheer. This one could have been a paragraph in my 2017 post about doctor killing people. It’s exactly what Americans want to hear (emphasis added):

FDA’s war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can't be patented by Pharma. If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.

If Robert F. Kennedy succeeds in his mission to reform the FDA, CDC, NIH, and Department of Health and Human Services, his appointment might well be the most important reform wrought by President Trump’s second term. No other reform will affect so many people, so intimately, and so permanently as reforms that reverse America’s physical decay into blobs of inflamed boils and tumors dying slowly and painful on Dorito-stained sofas.

When Jim asked me what keeps me going, it was not the Constitution or the republic or the flag. It was certainly not the pursuit of wealth or even a good five-dollar drunk. It was to upturn a corrupt and stupid medical industry that is robbing families of their wealth and killing us slowly with bad advice, toxic foods, and dangerous drugs.

Bobby Kennedy says he spent 30 minutes in prayer every morning 19 years asking God to give him the job of making America healthy again. God spared Trump’s life, in part, to grant Kennedy’s wish.

Deo gratias!

The chant—the sentiment—comes in response to Donald J. Trump’s historical (and I mean that in its most dramatic sense) victory on November 5. No man in modern history has come back from so low a point as Trump found himself on 21 January 2021. And not a single political figure in history has ascended such a sheer cliff against powerful opposition throwing rocks.

Countless fraudulent indictments, raids on his residence, assassination attempts, vilification, abandonment by his own party. The 9-year assault against Donald Trump has been something few humans, living or dead, could have withstood without losing their minds. Trump not only maintained his faculties, he committed himself to helping the very human detritus that assaults him.

And part of Trump’s mission is to deliver retributive justice upon those who destroyed the institutions and fabric of American society in their bloodlust to “get Trump.” It is that promise—to be our retribution—that ultimately motivates his enemies—the just targets of retribution— to cry out for unity.

I have seen numerous misguided Christians join their calls for unity, rejecting the notion of retributive justice. I say, “misguided,” because Christian doctrine demands punishment for wrongdoers. A century of nonsense from self-proclaimed theologians, ethicists, and moralists has diluted Western understanding of justice, replacing justice almost uniformly with a misguided sense of “mercy.” So let’s review that moral history, reject modernist revisions, and pursue justice, no matter how unpleasant that might be.

Fr. James Schall, SJ, writing for That Catholic Thing, tells us:

In his In Defence of War, Nigel Biggar wrote: “As I believe in the gross and intractable wickedness, so I believe that punishment is necessary and that it has a basic, broadly retributive dimension. . . .I do not think of retribution as necessarily or properly vengeful. I think of it merely as a hostile response to wrongdoing, which might be and should be proportionate.

We might add here that vengeance is not retribution. Vengeance is the desire to repay injury with equal or greater injury. While retribution may be injurious to the wrongdoer, injury is not the objective of retribution: restoration is. Retributive justice restores, to the best of our ability, the status quo ante. Retribution also expresses the community’s standards and clearly demonstrates the consequences for violating those standards. Third, retribution satisfies the wrongdoer’s need to atone for his sins.

Father Schall uses Plato’s Gorgias to illustrate this last point:

Callicles, in the Gorgias, was dumbfounded when he heard Socrates suggesting that the one who commits a crime or sin should not only repent, but he also should willingly suffer punishment. The man who puts evil things in the world can best let the world know that he has changed, that he accepts proper order, by himself undergoing a suitable punishment. This penance is not just vengeance. It is what is due. It restores the order of things in the best way open to us.

Chesterton observed that sin is not the absence of virtue but, rather, a single virtue operating in isolation. Thus, mercy, untempered by justice, becomes a sin itself. Fr. Schall agrees:

We live in a world transfixed with a type of mercy/compassion that seeks to bypass justice. But the one who is treated mercifully, who is forgiven, does not escape the consequences of his disordered act. Forgiveness is something given by the one we have injured.

Mercy cannot be seen as a step in mitigating the consequences of evil acts. The one who is shown mercy must restore what he caused to be disordered.  This acknowledgment of one’s sins is not yet punishment. Paying a fine, spending time in jail, being restricted in travel or work, these are punishments inflicted precisely as due retribution.

When we combine Plato, Chesterton, and Schall, we might conclude that theological mercy demands retribution, for only retribution can partially satisfy victims, reinforce the community’s standards, and provide the penitent wrongdoer a means of proving his remorse, thus allowing his return to the community. To withhold punishment denies all three—victim, community, and sinner—of something owed them, something without which all are left wanting.

The only thing I ever shoplifted was a cork ball from the old Venture store on South Kingshighway in St. Louis. I was nine or ten, the summer between 4th and 5th grades. I was with my sister who was busy looking at clothes or some girly nonsense, leaving me alone in the sporting goods. I had just begun playing “fuzz ball,” a variation of cork ball that used worn tennis balls. I put the ball in my pocket, found my sister, and played nonchalant the rest of the trip.

I never got caught. No one asked me where I got a pristine cork ball, and the ball remained pristine until I threw it away several years later. I never used it. I never tried to use it. I never desired to use it. It weighed on me until, when school began in August with confessions and Mass, I confessed to Father Bernell. My penance was a decade of the Rosary, but my punishment was to give at least the price of the ball to the missions from my own allowance. The ball was $2.50, which was half of my weekly allowance for cutting the grass and taking out the trash.

Like any miscreant 5th grader, I stalled. I didn’t put the $2.50 in the missions the first chance I got. Nor the second. I don’t remember exactly when I served my sentence, but I eventually did sometime before Christmas. And my memory of that cork ball ends with slipping three dollar bills into the little lunch bag that Sister Catherine Marie placed on her desk each Monday. (I didn’t ask for change only because I was afraid to draw attention to my “generous” gift to the orphans which might require an explanation of my sharp break in character.)

I forgot about the ball after that because, finally, I was somewhat whole. The confession did not cure me; only the punishment could.

Pop psychology tells us criminals want their crimes to be known out of vainglory. Perhaps. If criminals do want their crimes known—and to receive due credit for them—the motivation could be a desire for punishment. If the conscience serves any purpose, this is surely it.

Back to Trump.

Beginning with the Russia hoax, a cabal of government and media have conspired to “get Trump” and to demoralize his base of support. In the process, they broke every bond of trust our society placed in police forces, law, the military, science, medicine, and journalism. The Departments of Justice, Defense, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and more conspired to use, not the law itself, but the power lent to government in order to destroy the duly elected President of the United State, in office and out. Elected officials and bureaucrats committed the ultimate breaches of trust, shredding the Constitutional limitations of powers, and destroying public faith in the most important institutions our society built through centuries. Their crimes were epic.

Epic crimes demand epic retribution. Thousands of individuals knowingly and willing participated in these crimes. Thousands more looked the other way, begrudgingly followed unlawful orders, or simply pretended to approve, fearful of the consequences of speaking the truth. Each of these wrongdoers deserves the sense of release and wholeness I felt by dropping three dollars into a paper bag.

Further, our entire society deserves to have its standards reaffirmed—standards have been developed since Abraham.

Finally, the victims deserve to know our country recognizes their loss by making some attempt to right the wrong. As the survivors of murder say, punishing the murderer can’t bring their loved one back, but it can bring dramatic closure to their suffering and pave the way for a more satisfying denouement.

Thus, we have entered the season for retribution, which, if properly executed, will pave the way to making America great again with a clear national conscience and better understanding of right and wrong.

P.S. Those two groups who are not clamoring for “unity?” First, the direct victims of the crimes: Trump, his family, his associates who were jailed, indicted, disbarred, fired, banned, and sued, plus the larger base of support that was cancelled, calumniated, ostracized, and ridiculed as racists, fascists, and trash. Second, the main criminals who committed those crimes, the ones vowing still to “get Trump” and destroy MAGA. In other words, the two groups who want and need retribution the most.

Dellena and her 8-year-old daughter, Summer, became homeless yesterday, having been evicted from the house she’d been renting for 10 years.

If you’ve seen enough and are ready to help with prayers and assistance, click this button now.

Get Dellena a New Home

We learned that the riots hurt her business in multiple ways. First, the immediate violence that broke her windows, ransacked her salon, and stole her equipment and products. Then came the downturn in business, as people stayed away from the Ferguson business district out of fear.

Over time, the home she rented on Falcon Drive in Florissant, became unlivable. Her landlord failed to perform basic maintenance. One of her two bathrooms was completely unusable. A basement water issue led to a mold problem that exacerbated her daughter’s asthma. Her kitchen appliances failed.

Each time Dellena reported a problem, the landlord ignored.

In March, she’d had enough. She couldn’t afford to move, and she couldn’t live in the conditions wrought by the building’s dilapidation. To get the landlord’s attention, she refused to pay rent until something was done.

The landlord went to court. Unable to afford an attorney, Dellena represented herself. “The judge helped me a lot,” she told me. “He said I needed to pay the back rent, and I did.” She texted me the receipt and the landlord’s acknowledgment. (The landlord’s property manager, Lisa Dzafic of Emerald Key Property Management, did not respond to requests for comment.)

Emerald Key Property Management, according to Dellena, fixed nothing. She sent her daughter live with relatives and she is living in her car.

What’s worse is that Dellena had been self-sufficient. When her old shop in Ferguson was rendered unviable due to rioting surrounding Michael Brown’s death and subsequent trials, Dellena had moved her business to her home, as many stylists do. Without a home, Dellena is effectively out of business.

Please help.

You can donate to a GiveSendGo campaign I began last week:

Help for Dellena

If you have know of a home for rent in the Ferguson/Florissant area, please let me know, and I’ll pass the information to Dellena.

As a Christian, your duty is to minimize evil before maximizing good.

In the 2024 presidential election, many names will appear on ballots, but only two have any logical chance of winning: Kamala Harris and Donald J. Trump.

Both are flawed, fallen creatures like the rest of us. One of them, though flawed, at least strives for the good. The other, also flawed, revels in pure evil. Anything we do as individual that increases the likelihood of victory for the candidate who consorts and promotes evil is obviously a grave sin.

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This wasn’t the first Trump policy Kamala has stolen. She’s also promised (unconvincingly) that she will seal the border and reduce inflation. Kamala is basically reading Trump’s stump speech without all the genius ad libs.

I’m not going to go all political on this. Instead, I’m going to explain why Kamala is copying all of Trump’s moves.

The answer is game theory.

In a competition where a player’s moves are immediately visible to other players, the best strategy—the unbeatable strategy—is for the leader to copy the moves of the trailer.

To explain why this works, let’s looke at one of my favorite strategy books, Thinking Strategically by mathematicians Dixit and Nalebuff.

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The authors tell us the story of Dennis Connor’s famous collapse at the 1983 America’s Cup finals. Connor’s boat Liberty was wildly in the lead going into the final races against Australia. All he head to do to win was to jump out into the lead in the next race (which he did) and then imitate whatever the Aussies did.

Connor had another idea.

At the start, Liberty got off to a 37-second lead when Australia II jumped the gun and had to recross the starting line. The Australian skipper, John Bertrand, tried to catch up by sailing way over to the left of the course in the hopes of catching a wind shift. Dennis Conner chose to keep Liberty on the right-hand side of the course. Bertrand’s gamble paid off. The wind shifted five degrees in Australia II’s favor and she won the race by one minute and forty-seven seconds. Conner was criticized for his strategic failure to follow Australia II’s path. Two races later, Australia II won the series.1

Why was Connor’s error so obvious? Because this strategy of game theory is widely known among sailboat racers—and racers of all stripes, frankly.

Sailboat racing offers the chance to observe an interesting reversal of a “follow the leader” strategy. The leading sailboat usually copies the strategy of the trailing boat. When the follower tacks, so does the leader. The leader imitates the follower even when the follower is clearly pursuing a poor strategy. Why? Because in sailboat racing (unlike ballroom dancing) close doesn’t count: only winning matters. If you have the lead, the surest way to stay ahead is to play monkey see, monkey do.2

We can expect Harris to continue stealing Trump’s moves unless her campaign becomes convinced she is behind. Even though copying the opponent’s positions on everything is crass and fake, it works. Scott Adams pointed out today that, regardless of whether you believe Harris is sincere about eliminating taxes on tips, millions of hospitality workers who might have begrudgingly voted for Trump because of the no-tax pledge have a “fake because” to vote for Harris, instead.

Aside: “Fake because” is a Scott Adams concept that offers a plausible excuse for a behavior that is logically inconsistent with one’s interests. It gives women, in particular, cover to vote for consensus rather than for actual results. I discussed this phenomenon here:

The potential good new for America: if Kamala is not in the lead, this strategy will steer her boat right into a rocky shoal.

One way or another, Kamala’s team believes its candidate is in the lead. Her team will continue to imitate Trump until it is convinced otherwise through internal polling.

Now, it’s up to Trump to do something Kamala will not imitate. And foreign policy is the one place Kamala cannot deviate from her charted course.

William F. Buckley announced the birth of National Review with those words. Sort of of a mission statement. To stand athwart history, yelling, “Stop!” I can think of no better definition of “conservatism.”

If Buckley is too pithy for you, try this extended quote from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:

The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. But this which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and terrible sense true of all human things. An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old.1

The reader will find no conflict between Buckley and Chesterton on this point. To stop history is to leave the post to rot.

The other night, an old friend accused me of not being a conservative. I agreed with him. He was shocked. “But that’s your entire identity,” he said.

And it was. I wrote a book called The Conservative Manifesto in 1993 that was a featured alternate selection of the Conservative Book Club in April and May of 1994. Even in high school my friends mockingly called me, “Mister Conservative.”

It might be, however, that I never was a conservative. Rather, it’s possible that conservatism seemed the best expression of what I believed. Professing myself “a conservative” might have been a bit of self-deception, for, even then, there were neo-conservatives and paleo-conservatives and other hyphenated conservatives. Which sort was I?2

As Buckley lamented in Up From Liberalism, there is no sure definition of conservatism and its boundaries. It is not a place on a map or a chapter in a book. Attempts to define conservatism always piss off one faction claiming to be conservative. Thus, the Birchers hated Buckley and Buckley hated the Randians, and the Randians hated the Republicans, and the Republicans hated them all. My little book of 120 pages was an attempt to lop off the modifiers and expose conservatism in its barest, unfestooned essence. And it presented the boundaries of conservatism that I still hold today, as well as the prescriptions I would still endorse, such as withdrawing the United States from the United Nations, replacing the income tax with a flat tax, and prohibiting use of US troops outside the United States except in Congressionally declared war where the lone objective is the unconditional surrender of the enemy.

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I wanted to let you all know that I will be abstaining from all social media and news from August 15 to September 29, 2024, in observance of St. Michael's Lent. This period is a time for reflection, spiritual growth, and disconnecting from the constant influx of information and distractions.

During this time, I will not be active on any social media platforms, and I will not be consuming any news. I believe this will allow me to focus more deeply on my personal and spiritual development, as well as spend more quality time with my loved ones.

St. Michael's Lent, also known as the Lenten Fast of St. Michael, is a period of fasting and spiritual preparation in honor of St. Michael the Archangel. It traditionally begins on August 15, the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, and continues until September 29, the Feast of St. Michael. This period was promoted by St. Francis of Assisi as a time for penance, prayer, and reflection. It serves as a way for the faithful to deepen their spiritual lives and prepare for the feast day of the archangel, who is often seen as a protector and leader in the fight against evil.

This election year, many of you have taken on additional “duties” to keep the republic and stave off the Marxist hoards scratching at the gate. These additional duties might include ballot harvesting or voter registration for TP Action, volunteering for MAGA candidates, working the polls on election day, or simply encouraging family and friends to vote and vote right for a change. These are all worthy pursuits. But there is more to be done, and you might know exactly where I’m heading.

One more thing to do is prayer and fasting. That sounds like two things, but it is really one.

We are surrounded always and everywhere by angels, good and bad. Our guardian angel, whom most of us rudely neglect most of the time, stands ready to protect us, body and soul, from the wickedness and snares of the devil, if only we would avail ourselves of his loving assistance. Good angels recognize our free will, though, and, if we ignore his counsel, we ignore God’s wisdom, for good angels are always perfectly aligned with God’s holy will.

But we are also surrounded by bad angels on all sides and at all times. These wicked creatures seek the destruction of our souls. They fell from God’s grace because of His holy plan for humanity. Demons are jealous and mean spirits who corrupt the beauty and desirability of this world—meant to reflect and magnify the Lord. Demons tempt us, threaten us, frighten us, and entice us into sins of all kinds. Demons love nothing better than to make man’s actions work against man’s salvation, thereby working against God’s plan.

I have written extensively about the unprecedented level of demonic activity in the world today. We see it everywhere, including in the record number of psychologically impaired people wandering the streets, the growth of that demonic sect called Islam and of many other pagan cults, in the destruction of the family, the corruption of youth, the decay of institutions, the loss of faith in God, sexual anarchy, and inversion of all things holy. That demonic activity influences million of Americans to vote for their own destruction, body and soul.

Though I have a long history of political activism, being constantly aware of every new story and tweet does nothing for me or the country. Therefore, my political activism for 40 days this summer and early fall will be to withdraw from the daily hyperventilation that constant awareness engenders, and to use the time saved for an increase in prayer and fasting.

There is but one struggle in all of human existence. William F. Buckley described that singular battle as that between God and Satan fought on difference planes. While many must fight on the ground, many, too, are called to fight in the heavens, to combat the wicked powers and principalities in high places, not with fists and words, but with prayer and fasting. Christ told the Apostles that some demons can be driven out only with prayer and fasting, which He treats almost as a singular action—asceticism and reverence in a single act of contrition and humility. It is an acknowledgment that I am powerless in the celestial war, except to give myself, body and soul, to the God through the angels.

Of all the angels, St. Michael the Archangel is most associated with spiritual warfare, making this time a fitting period for withdrawal from the temporal plane upon which our strengths are often thwarted by demonic counters. For forty days, I will ask God’s graces to flow, not to me, but to the men and women who pound the pavement to save our Christian nation from Satan’s minions. The disciplines involved include daily prayer, fasting, cold showers, avoidance of news and social media, a weekly holy hour, and much silence. Though these might sound like “giving up,” they are, rather, a pulling-in of that hideous strength that man cannot fathom—the strength of the powers of heaven and the army of angels that once defeated and expelled the fallen angels from heaven.

So, if my writing soon seems out of touch with the events of the day, do not grumble—rejoice. For, the less I know about the world, the more He may mold the world and strengthen the Church Militant.

God bless.

P.S. If interested in joining this 40-day fast, learn more on Exodus 90’s St. Michael’s Lent.

Let me explain why.

If there’s every been a rocker who symbolized “free spirit,” it was Neil Young. From Buffalo Springfield (whose “For What It’s Worth” was my favorite ‘protest’ song of the 60s and became a Tea Party favorite in 2010) to one of the most prolific solo careers in rock music history. Neil Young’s credits include 17 solo albums and two memberships in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

And he always portrayed himself as the ultimate rebel and anti-war absolutist. He got his early breaks as part of the anti-Vietnam War music movement, and his 2006 album “Living With War,” which was written, recorded, and released in one month in opposition to the second war with Iraq. One song’s title was “Let’s Impeach the President.” (Neil Young was not an American citizen at the time, by the way.)

Young is also a naturalist and environmentalist. He was never a fan of big corporations, and his recent work has been almost exclusively environmentalist panic. Young is, of course, virulently pro-abortion. He fights for the rights of small family farmers, the downtrodden, and the homeless.

He is also amazingly talented and committed to his art and work. It’s difficult not to respect a guy who, basically, turned down his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction with a letter to the board stating, among other things, that the Hall of Fame “has nothing to do with the spirit of Rock and Roll. It has everything to do with making money.” Young likely wrote the letter from his 2,000 acre California ranch, which he later gave to his ex-wife in a divorce, uncontested.

One verse from “Rockin’ in the Free World” struck me.

We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler machine gun hand
We've got department stores and toilet paper
Got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive

Written in February 1989 in one day after his scheduled concert tour of the Soviet Union was cancelled, the song was an attack on George H.W. Bush who had been in office only a month. Young’s entire life in one verse:

• The poor, downtrodden, and homeless

• Anti-war

• Environmentalism

It was that verse that depressed me.

Neil Young is almost 80 years old and he built his life around music to inspire a fight for three things: the common man over the corporate fat cats, the peaceful loving people over the war merchants, and nature over profits.

But he wasn’t allowed to die with such dedication.

No. Young’s masters have turned him into shill for war and big pharma. Young famously quit Spotify because the platform refused to cancel Joe Rogan after Rogan railed against the poison Pfizer vax. (Young returned to Spotify two years later. Turns out, Spotify can produce a lot of money for celebrities who rejected an awarded that was all about making money.) Young’s paymasters made him do it—there’s no way the man who wrote a song to protest Starbuck’s selling genetically modified food would, of his own volition, demand every human on earth become a genetically modified organism.

Young also rails against Donald Trump even though Trump is an anti-war champion who brings troops home and eschews military intervention in other people’s fights. Trump was against the Gulf Wars, just like Young. Certainly, if Neil Young was free to support whomever he wished, he would support the only president in generations who did not start a war. The only explanation I can think of is: Neil Young is not free to do what he wishes or support politicians he likes.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to be forced to endorse ideas repugnant to one’s values just to make a living.

Let us say a prayer that this rock legend’s oppressors will free him to be Neil Young once again.

Lori Rook for Missouri Treasurer

When the Treasurer’s office was vacated by Eric Schmitt’s ascent to Attorney General, Missouri Governor Mike Parson passed over Lori Rook because, “you’re an outsider,” he told her.

Big mistake—which is par for the course with Parson.

In the process of being considered as Schmitt’s replace, Lori did her research and realized Missouri taxpayers are getting screwed six ways to Sunday. And she decided to interrupt her life to fix the problem as Missouri’s next State Treasurer.

Lori Rook is a lawyer and a fighter who is fed up with the waste and fraud in Missouri government. She recognizes that Missouri is fiscal mess, mostly because Governor Parson and his crooked Lieutenant Governor tax and spend like drunken Democrats.

Lori will OPEN THE BOOKS (which we’ve already done once, but Jay Nixon and Mike Parson sealed them up like an Egyptian tomb). She will be an Adam Andrzejewski of Missouri government. Here’s Lori’s commitment:

For too long, Missouri investments have been used to fund foreign enemies, support radical woke agendas, and pad the pockets of the lobbyists who are controlling our politicians like puppets (even the so-called Republicans).

​It's all going on behind closed doors, and it's time for it to stop.​

I will restore transparency back to Missouri citizens and make all politicians' spending easily accessible on a public website so that you can see where your tax dollars are really going. 

Lori thoroughly impressed the Franklin County Republican candidate forum on 25 July, and she will thoroughly impress the entire state as Treasurer.

Vote for Lori Rook on August 6.

Rafael Madrigal for Missouri House District 119

(southern Franklin County)

Rafael Madrigal is a fiery and joyful speaker who represents the best of Franklin County, Missouri, and America. He and his wife fled California in 2017 to settle in their “forever home” of Pacific, Missouri. Rafael writes:

I grew up in California and saw first hand how a state went from being the best place to live to being one of the least in less than a generation due to poor leadership. I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley where I had the opportunity of being mentored by Professor William “Sandy” Muir who was the personal advisor to President Ronald Reagan.

His values are our values:

DEFENDING OUR RIGHTS

A proud member of the NRA, Rafael Madrigal will stand strong to defend our Constitutional rights. He will also ensure parents’ rights are protected, so they always have the final say in what their children and learning and seeing at school.

EXPANDING OUR OPPORTUNITIES

A local business owner and current Pacific alderman, Rafael Madrigal will work to reduce our tax burden and create family-supporting jobs. Rafael will use his expertise to help bring more state support to the Highway 44 corridor, attracting high-quality employers.

PROTECTING OUR COMMUNITIES

A consultant for local law enforcement organizations, Rafael Madrigal will support our brave first responders and lead the effort to crack down on deadly drugs like Fentanyl.

If you see Rafael Madrigal on your ballot, fill in the box next to his name.

If you follow Hennessy’s View, you know I’ve already endorsed:

and

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Pfeifer at the Franklin County Republican candidate forum on 25 July, and I was amazed at the enthusiasm for the St. Louis County business owner.

Pfeifer is running against 6-term career RINO Ann Wagner who is more aligned with the extreme leftist Claire McCaskill than with Donald Trump or JD Vance. Wagner was installed in Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District by the executives at Enterprise Rental Cars specifically to make one of Missouri’s richest families even richer through government. Ann lost me forever when she supported continuation of the Import-Export Bank, a money-laundering scheme that helps large corporations funnel money through foreign operations.

Pfeifer is a MAGA Republican who will help President Trump pass legislation to restore sanity to the US government. As a commercial real estate professional, Peter Pfeifer helps entrepreneurs and business find plants to employee Missouri workers. He has helped bring good jobs to the entire 2nd District over his years in business, and his knowledge and experience will help Congress bring organic growth to Missouri and America.

Vote Peter Pfeifer on August 6.

I realize that many of us on the right get a kick out of the lawsuits filed by Andrew Bailey, appointed to fill out the term of now Senator Eric Schmidt. I realize most citizens don’t scrutinize those suits for their probability of success. I also don’t expect most voters to weigh the full merits of Bailey’s term as Missouri AG. If you look into it, Bailey has been a net negative for the state. We will cover some of the details below.

What’s more important than Bailey’s sketchy past is Missouri’s future.

Missouri is deep red state that’s governed like Connecticut. We suck up more federal dollars than any state in the union—tax dollars that come with chains of iron to do the will of the administrative state in Washington. Meanwhile, the Deep State is working overtime to erase all state authority. They want to take away Missourians’ rights to life, liberty, and property, making our state offices mere regional administrative centers of the Washington (or Brussels) overlords.

If Missourians want to keep their freedom of speech, worship, and weapons, they damn well better have a governor and attorney general who, not only believes in such liberty, but have track records of prevailing in fights with the feds. I’ve already endorsed Bill Eigel for Governor on these grounds, but the governor cannot protect you without an allied Attorney General who knows how to win in the federal court system.

Will Scharf is simply the ablest federal lawyer in the United States today. He protected Trump when numerous states sought ban his name from ballots. And just a few weeks ago, he won Trump’s against Jack Smith on presidential immunity, successfully arguing that the president must be protected in his official acts just as members of Congress and judges are protected in their official acts.

No, these cases were not as sexy as some of the click-bait cases Bailey has filed. But they were vitally important to your right to vote the candidate of your choice. And, unlike most of Bailey’s suits, Will Scharf wins time and time again.

As a federal prosecutor, Will Scharf had a 100% conviction rate trying actual criminals—drug dealers, terrorist, murderers, and frauds. He knows the federal judicial process better than the judges he argues before. He knows when and how to sue the government and how to win when he does.

While I appreciate Bailey’s ability to garner headlines as much as the next guy, Bailey’s results have been abysmal. He files suits likely to be dismissed for lack of standing just to get a “hrumph” from conservative voters. In the meantime, his inept handling of suits against our state have taxpayers $28 million in just two years.

Justin Smith (@justinsmithMO) recently outlined Bailey’s overall performance as AG:

Justin Smith

@JustinSmithMO

Let's take a look at Andrew Bailey's record in cases that reached the Supreme Court while he was AG. It's not good.

1. Freedom of speech. Bailey called the case he inherited against Biden's social media censorship the "most important First Amendment case in this nation's history." Bailey lost, 6-3.

2. Second Amendment Preservation Act. After losing at the Eighth Circuit, Bailey asked the Supreme Court to let SAPA stay in effect. Bailey lost, 8-1.

3. Abortion. Bailey moved to intervene in the case challenging the FDA's approval of the abortion drug. Bailey lost, 9-0.

4. Freedom of religion. Bailey asked the Court to hear a case involving the religious beliefs of jurors. Bailey lost, 9-0. Justice Alito noted that Bailey raised the wrong constitutional argument.

5. Climate change. Bailey asked the Court to hear a case challenging Biden's use of climate change calculations in regulations. Bailey lost, 9-0.

6. Unions. Bailey asked the Court for more time to challenge a lower court order requiring Missouri to restart union dues deductions without an opt-in. Bailey let the deadline expire without ever filing the appeal. In February 2024, Bailey paid the union attorneys $57,000 for losing the case.

7. State criminal law. While Fani Willis was prosecuting President Trump in Georgia, Bailey filed an amicus brief arguing the Court should respect Georgia's chosen criminal procedures and not impose its own policies on state criminal courts. The Court ruled 9-0 that it did not need to reach Bailey's arguments.

With election day approaching, Bailey contradicted his amicus brief arguments in his recent lawsuit against New York.

Every day that Bailey remains in office, Missourians like you and me get poorer and less free. It’s not that Bailey’s heart is not in the right place; it’s that he’s in way over his head.

Let’s look, now, at Will Scharf’s life of conservative legal winning:

1. Federal Courts. Will Scharf is a career federal court lawyer. He has prevailed in numerous cases before the Supreme Court and inferior courts. Scharf knows the federal landscape like no other AG candidate in the country.

2. Government. Will Scharf led the Senate confirmation fights for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

3. Criminal Prosecution: As a criminal prosecutor for DOJ’s Eastern Missouri division, Scharf put over 100 horrible criminals in prison.

4. Vision (from Scharf’s website: “Scharf's vision for Missouri is clear: to push back against the encroachment of the radical woke left and the overreach of the federal government. He believes that now, more than ever, Missourians need leaders who will boldly confront these challenges and defend conservative principles without compromise.

On 25 July, I had the pleasure of seeing Will Scharf in action at the Franklin County Republican candidate forum at Triple 3 Vineyards. Will spoke last. It was a long night. But Scharf’s incredible prosecution of his case to be Missouri’s next Attorney General brought the crowd to its feet.

The previously polite crowd turned into a Trump rally with shouts, whistles, and spontaneous chants of “Scharf! Scharf! Scharf!” I was so jacked up by the end, I couldn’t get to sleep for hours.

I tweeted last night:

If you want to thump your chest while your rights are sucked down the drain, keep AG Bailey.

But if you want to live free in a state that’s safe from violent criminals and tyrannical Washington oligarchs, you have no choice to elect Will Scharf Attorney General on August 6 and November 5.

I wanted everyone to read the book. Most of my shipmates had no idea just how drab and empty were the lives of people condemned by history to live in the Soviet Union. No one took me up on the offer.

Thirty-six years later, those shipmates still alive are in danger of finding out firsthand what Heller warned us about when we were young.

Heller’s style reminded me of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s, with its rhythmic repetition of points the reader must internalize to fully understand the text. Heller was a historian and a Russian emigre who amplified Solzhenitsyn’s warning to the world about the dangers of Soviet communism and its effects on the human mind and spirit. Unlike The Gulag Archipeligo, Heller’s book was relatively short and focused directly on the dehumanizing effects of communism rather than on the history and structures of the system itself.

Lee Congdon reviewed the book for the Los Angeles Times in 1988, which may seem surprising today. No mainstream media outlet in 2024 would dare publish a review of a book that condemns what Heller’s condemned, “the Bolsheviks’ oft-stated intention to transform human nature, to create a compliant, collectivized New Man: Homo sovieticus.”

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Nearly four decades later, a cabal of globalist Republicans, Democrats, Hollywood, acacemia, the US government, and the news industry now conspire to finish that transformation of God’s highest creatures into mere automatons serving the state as cogs in a godless and heartless machine.

Congdon writes a pivotal paragraph (emphases added). As you read the following, you will wonder whether Heller was writing about the old Soviet Union or present-day United States:

Heller devotes the longest section of his book to the “instruments” Soviet leaders have used to form New Men. Along with police terror, educational indoctrination, cultural propaganda, labor organization, and political mythology, he cites the way in which the Stalinist state destroyed family loyalties by inducing children to inform on their parents. And in his finest chapter, on language, he confirms W. H. Auden’s insight that both Hitler and Stalin “recognized . . . that there is something dangerous about language itself and tried to create a pseudo-German and pseudo-Russian in which it would be impossible to make genuine statements about anything.” That impossibility, Heller warns, is no longer restricted to two Indo-European dialects, for growing numbers of people around the world have come to accept Soviet definitions of words and thus, unwittingly, to extend the empire of thought control.

Heller was a prophet. Every instrument used by that Evil Empire to dehumanize and degrade the peoples of Russia and Eastern Europe from 1917 to 1991 are now operating in plain sight on the peoples of Western Europe and North America.

• Police terror: See J6, the anti-Trump lawfare, and the rounding up of pro-life activists.

• Educational indoctrination: Consider that most of the school day in America’s public elementary schools are spent in “specials,” not core subjects. Specials are indoctrination camps.

• Cultural propaganda: Watch four hours of commercial television and count the number of references, in plots or ads, to a stable nuclear family or non-deviant sexual situation.

• Political mythology: For four years Joe Biden was the sharpest mind in Washington and statements to the contrary were “disinformation” that must be outlawed; then Joe Biden is a mentally incapable of running for office and must be replaced by the machine for the good of the country.

Most chilling, think of the destruction of language as a means of communication. That’s gone. Words have no meaning. Any given word means both what it indicates and its opposite at all times. For example, within the last 24 hours, CBS News reported that Kamala Harris never raised money for George Floyd terrorists in Minnesota, even while acknowledging Harris did, in fact, raise money for terrorists. Those who point out CBS’s obvious doublespeak and mutually eliminating statement are branded racists, misogynists, and conspiracy theorists who will be banned from public life when Ms. Harris becomes dictator President (for the good of democracy).

Revolver.news editor Darren Beattie, in this clip from today’s War Room, describes our political moment in terms clearly recognizable in Heller’s warning.

What we face in 2024 and for decades beyond is the battle between man and machine, between human beings and an evil system for which humans a mere fuel.

Thus, we, as humans, have a dual duty. First, we must fight for humanity and against the machine. Second, we must fight to remain, ourselves, human beings, refusing by any means necessary to become cogs in their Satanic wheel.

The first duty is fulfilled in ways we’ve always known about: support human candidates at every level. Fight the enemy at every turn. Never cooperate with the state or its instruments. Use resistance, silence, shouting, and sabotage to break the system. (Example, never cooperate with the FBI or DOJ no matter the supposed seriousness of the situation or the seeming sincerity of the agents.)

The second duty is fulfilled by even simpler and more ancient methods: pray, live well, and raise your family right.

Lee Congdon closed his 1988 review with inspiring and hopeful words—far more hopeful than Heller’s:

After 70 years of Soviet rule, there remain in Russia many of those incorrigible individualists whom Dostoevsky called “Underground Men.” Willing to pay the price for their errant ways, they insist, in the great writer’s words, that a man may sometimes “wish upon himself, in full awareness, something harmful, stupid, and even completely idiotic. He will do it in order to establish his right to wish for the most idiotic things and not to be obliged to have only sensible wishes.”

Honest historian that he is, Heller does not fail to call attention to Soviet men and women who have acted “idiotically,” even insanely, by official standards: nationalists and religious believers, a trade unionist, a ballerina, a biologist. He would have performed an even greater service had he subtitled his book “The Survival of Homo Sapiens.”

The “idiotic” thing for us to do is to fight the machine. The “smart” money would fall in line and hope for favors. But, contra Green Day, I wanna be an American idiot.

Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec recently published a modern warning: Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and how to crush). It is national bestseller that, not only warns of the dehumanizing effects of communism, but how to recognize the Communist takeover of American that’s in its late stages today. I strongly recommend reading Unhumans now, and if the book doesn’t scare you, follow it up with Cogs in the Wheel, which is still available from used book sellers.

This election is not about the relative position of two political parties; this election is the decision point between life and mere existence, between the human and the machine.

Choose humanity. Choose life. Be an idiot like me.

What I mean by that is everything is getting worse. Software is, in general, less reliable, less usable, and less satisfying than it was in 2014, which was probably its peak. (See Crowdstrike.) The hardware devices software powers is worse. My iPhone 15’s ergonomics lead to about 4 user errors per hour of use compared to the iPhone 4 which clocked only one user error per 12 hours of use. (I measure such things as part of my job.) On my first “smart” phone, the T-Mobile Dash, with its excellent physical keyboard, I could type 34 error-free words per minute. On my iPhone, I can type about 12. I haven’t lost any typing skills—the device is just inferior for typing.

Airlines are less reliable than they were in 2010, and flights are far more miserable. And flying in 2010 was a worse experience than in 2000. (I’ve travelled a lot on business since the 1990s.)

Some products or categories of products have improved in the past 24 years, I’m sure, but most categories have become worse in the last four. Combined with insanely higher prices, the bang per buck is at an all-time low, at least as far back as I can remember, and I can remember Nixon’s first inauguration. (Barely. But I remember being perplexed that President Johnson wasn’t going to be president any longer, and my mom trying to explain to me why that was a good thing.)

This relates to a conversation I had with my old boss before he retired in about 2015. I asked him why our company seemed unable to solve problems everyone agreed were problems. He attributed our rigidness to the retirement of the “World War II guys.” He explained that the WWII generation of leaders had sent men to their death and realized business was pretty insignificant by comparison. They made decisions quickly, relying more on someone’s track record than on “data.” When problems arose, they told one person to “fix it.” But, once they were gone, problems lingered as senior executives demanded more “data” and formed committees and wrung their hands. Everything since the World War II guys retired is like a bad production of Hamlet.

We see this at every level of life. Problems get worse despite spending billions of dollars studying them. Society becomes more divided despite hordes of psychologists and counsellors making $500 an hour to consult on team building. Each graduating class from every level of schooling knows less than the class before despite per-pupil spending at 12x the level of our peak of knowledge in the 1960s.

When I say, “everything sucks,” I mean, everything sucks.

But why?

My old boss was right. It’s the loss of World War II guys.

Those guys were all what we now (erroneously) call “alpha males.” The pop-sociologists claim a culture can tolerate only about 1 alpha per 100 people, which is based on their observation of modern life. But in the 1950s and 1960s, we had about 20-30 alphas for every 100 workers because most workers were men and most men had been in the service in World War II or Korea (or, in the case of my father and most of friends, both.) The presence of so many alphas didn’t cause some social breakdown from constant fights to lead the pack, either. One thing war teaches is how to appreciate the strengths of others and how to protect the pack from weaknesses. (Watch Band of Brothers and how they dealt with Russ Nixon’s drinking.)

But in the 1970s and beyond, we tried to neuter the alphas and reduce them to 1 per 100. Then, in this century, we decided to eliminate alphas altogether. The result?

Everything sucks.

Last night, someone posted a brilliant explanation for this. It’s just a short forum post from a Brit (I assume by the flag in the bio) that tries to explain why Western societies are about to disappear from the face of the earth. I’m going to post the screenshot downloaded from the X post, but I’m also posting the text itself, because it’s that important.

The anonymous post was published on 01 February 2021, just after Joe Biden took office. (Could be 02 January 2021, but I am guessing the author was a Brit and, therefore, uses logical date order instead of the convoluted American structure.)

And the text:

People who can't defend themselves physically (women and low T men) parse information through a consensus filter as a safety mechanism. They literally do not ask "is this true", they ask "will others be OK with me thinking this is true". This makes them very malleable to brute force manufactured consensus; if every screen they look at says the same thing they will adopt that position because their brain interprets it as everyone in the tribe believing it.

Only high T alpha males and aneurotypical people (hey autists!) are actually free to parse new information with an objective "is this true?" filter.

This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.

How could someone explain so much in so few words?

I want you to read that post three times and think about what frustrates you about the world today. Think about the pandemic lockdowns and why people went along with idiotic, tyrannical “rules” about masks and social distancing and hand-washing and no handshaking and no hugging and no large gatherings and no Christmas or Thanksgiving.

Think about the “consensus” that the unvaccinated should be taken out and shot. And the consensus that MAGA is evil, that Ukraine must defended at cost of our own freedom, that affirming transgender psychosis is love.

Everything sucks because we’ve become a society that lives on consensus without any questioning of what is true or what is just or what is right.

As Margaret Thatcher said 40 years ago, “consensus is the absence of leadership.” When she said that, the World War II generation was still mostly running things. Ronald Reagan was President of the United States, she was Prime Minister of Great Britain, Helmut Kohl was Chancellor of West Germany. But the multi-colored constrictor called “consensus” was beginning to coil itself around the world’s institutions, demanding ever more committees and task forces and “democratic” processes to arrive at decisions that dissatisfied all parties equally and without ever addressing the problem they were commissioned to solve. By the time George H. W. Bush succeeded Reagan, and that wimpy second-husband-looking dude replaced Thatcher, leadership had succumbed to 1,000 points of light and a new world order under the thumb of that colossus of consensus, the United Nations.

And here we are.

The college-educated, suburban women problem that vexes Republican candidates at every level is the epitome of this fact of biology: women and low-testosterone men filter everything through a consensus lens without regard for truth. They don’t even care if it’s good for them or their children, only what the majority of people like them and people they need to encounter will consider acceptable. Good ideas get trampled under the stampede to be seen as agreeing with the majority who espouse error. In game theory, this called the “common knowledge game,” and it is the primary determinant of stock prices, bond prices, and rates of savings and investments. We act in accordance with the way we believe others expect us to act regardless of the logic or consequences. It’s peer pressure at the cultural level.

Like or not, we have allowed the female knee-jerk to rule the world, and it’s going to get us all killed. Men gravitate to dangerous, physical things because we are biologically required to kill for food and safety. Women gravitate to consensus because they are less able to kill. They huddle to protect the weakest—children and the elderly. The author of that post said it all in the first two sentences: those who cannot defend themselves physically do whatever is necessary to form into tight groups. Those who can physically defend themselves turn out to fight the monster head-on.

When Donald Trump rose from the deck before the referee counted ten, thrust a defiant fist in the air, and ordered his tribe to “fight,” millions of women in America nearly fainted in a swoon. As one 20-something former feminist wrote on X: “I’m voting for that.” I wrote about her last week:

That is the World War II guy, the alpha, the biologically necessary “man.” That is who Trump has always been. It’s why he accomplished what he did in life.

In another era—any other era in human history—Trump would have been king. Humans were once good at identifying and elevating the bravest among them, as Tucker Carlson discussed in his brilliant talk at the RNC convention.

We, as a nation and as a culture, have tried to “rise above” our biology to replace leadership with consensus, and it has failed miserably.

“But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ.” (1 Cor. 11:3).

The need for men to be men and for society to, not just accept it but demand it is not just biological, of course, but divine. Our biology was ordered by God and attempts to violate His order will always end in tears. God gave us biology to make this distinction easy to understand, but in our hedonistic hubris we close our eyes and try to violate both God and nature. To our own demise.

This election is probably our final test. It’s the make-up exam for the final we tanked last time. It is altogether fitting and proper that God and nature and the heads of the DNC have ordained that we should choose between an alpha male and a nincompoop. A simple multiple choice question with only two options upon which the fate of the entire Western world depends.

Don’t screw this up.

In the hours following the announcement, I’ve seen at least 20 opportunities for red states, the Republican National Committee, and the Trump campaign to challenge various realities and possibilities about the Democrat presidential ticket. I won’t go into those here, because that’s not the point of this post.

Here’s the point: Republicans are losers.

By “Republicans,” I mean the Republicans I grew up with. The Bushes, the Cheneys, the McCains, Paul Ryan, Romney, the usual suspects, the generic Republicans. Generic, indeed. Milquetoast, lukewarm, pudgy white men, as they were called in the late eighties. Boring, weak, and ineffective.

Establishment Republicans are not fighters. They are accommodationalists. (I made that word up because the English language needed it.) An accommodationalist values getting along over winning. An accommodationalist negotiates his own position in exchange for an “honorable loss.” Benedict Arnold was an accommodationalist, and he’s (secretly) the patron saint of establishment Republicans. (I’m looking at you, Ann Wagner.)

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What we saw last week at the MAGA National Convention was something totally different. How different?

As I texted some Tea Party friends last night:

Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, and Dana White were the run ups to the nomination acceptance. No Bushes, no Romneys, no McCains, no Fortune 100 CEOs, no Paul Ryan. But there were two union heads, a dozen nobodies who've never voted Republican before, and delegates who actually knew how to dance.

There is nothing left of the old GOP. Nothing.

Kid Rock recently (2021) began his concerts with a tune called “We the People” that drops more F-bombs than an F35. With no shame, I link it here so you can enjoy the show. (NSFW)

Hulk Hogan ripped his shirt off to expose a Trump-Vance wife-beater underneath:

UFC founder Dana White introduced Trump the way he’d introduce an ultimate fighting champion about to defend his title.

But nothing these men did came close to the fight demonstrated by the MAGA candidate, Donald J. Trump just 5 days earlier:

Trump’s defiance in the face of a government-assisted assassination attempt even wowed Facebook founder (thief) and avowed Trump-hater, Mark Zuckerberg to call it “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen.”

Republicans don’t fight. And it why the Republican Party of my youth and most of my adulthood is gone. It’s been replaced by those worthy.

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