“Ireland Is A Powder Keg”: Tucker Carlson And Steve Bannon On Ireland Stabbing Insanity And Immigration
Tucker Carlson sat down with Steve Bannon to discuss last week’s terrorist incident in Ireland – where an Algerian immigrant went on a stabbing spree in downtown Dublin, attacking five people – including three children. Following the stabbing, anti-immigrant riots broke out across the country over the government’s general pro-immigrant policies.
Watch:
Ep. 41 Dublin in flames. What’s happening in Ireland will happen here, at scale. Steve Bannon explains. pic.twitter.com/KzrRUJq0ZL
Vivek Ramaswamy has a favorite term for his enemies on foreign policy: “neocon,” short for neoconservative.
“I want to be careful to avoid making the mistakes from the neocon establishment of the past,” he told moderator Lester Holt during the third Republican presidential debate on Nov. 8 in Miami.
“Corrupt politicians in both parties spent trillions, killed millions, made billions for themselves in places like Iraq and Afghanistan fighting wars that sent thousands of our sons and daughters, people my age, to die in wars,” the millennial businessman continued, rattling off criticisms of pre-Trump foreign policy.
“Do you want Dick Cheney in three-inch heels?” Mr. Ramaswamy asked. “Because we have two of them on this stage tonight,” taking a swing at Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Ms. Haley later hit back on social media: “I wear heels. They’re not for a fashion statement. They’re for ammunition.”
As Ms. Haley pushes past 10 percent in the polls, she is drawing attention from influential donors amid the Israel–Hamas war and the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict. In Miami, she indicated she was willing to bomb Iran in response to proxy attacks against Israel and the United States.
Alongside foreign policy assumptions from the George H.W. Bush administration, neoconservatism has helped set the tone for foreign policy views that still dominate the GOP establishment, according to both Col. Douglas MacGregor, a senior defense adviser under President Trump, and Steve Bannon, who served as the White House’s chief strategist early in the Trump presidency, and host of the “Bannon’s War Room” podcast.
They spoke with The Epoch Times, along with several others, about the neoconservative streak in American politics and what it means for 2024.
Rise of the Neocons
The word “neocon” conjures up some familiar faces from the last several decades of American politics.
Aside from Mr. Cheney, there’s John Bolton, U.N. ambassador under President George W. Bush and a national security adviser for President Trump. Mr. Bolton has since repudiated the 45th president.
In the Senate, there’s the late John McCain (R-Ariz.) and the living Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). On the other side of the aisle, there’s former Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) and, from the Cold War era, the late Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.).
But behind the names that get quoted in mass media, is a tight network of intellectuals.
In 2004, Francis Fukuyama, a one-time fellow traveler of the movement, wrote about “the neoconservative moment” for The National Interest.
Mr. Fukuyama, then a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), linked the thinking that guided defense policy in the Bush administration to highly exclusive Washington dinners held during the 1990s. Attendees ranged from columnist Charles Krauthammer to political scientist Samuel Huntington to the “godfather of neoconservatism,” Irving Kristol, and his son, future “Never Trumper” Bill Kristol.
The Kristol family tradition continues today in various influential institutions, including the Washington Free Beacon. Selected by the Republican National Committee (RNC) as a co-host of the upcoming fourth presidential debate in Alabama, the periodical was co-founded by Bill Kristol’s son-in-law.
Like many other first-generation neoconservatives, Irving Kristol began as a follower of communist Leon Trotsky before falling out with the Left during the Cold War. In place of internationalist socialism, Mr. Kristol and his friends pursued a different kind of internationalism—one that relied on the powerful military during and, in Mr. Fukuyama’s reflections, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“It was at one of those dinners that Charles Krauthammer first articulated the idea of American unipolarity,” Mr. Fukuyama wrote.
The Soviet Union had fallen—though communist China remained standing—and the United States was the lone superpower. In the decade before 9/11, that mostly meant peace, at least for the American people.
Joshua Muravchik, an influential neoconservative whose pedigree includes service with Mr. Jackson and work at Hopkins’ SAIS, told The Epoch Times that his movement emerged against the backdrop of the Vietnam War.
While he and a few other liberals still supported the containment doctrine advanced by diplomat George Kennan during the Truman administration, the unpopular conflict in Southeast Asia brought anti-communism into disrepute among American liberals.
The term “neoconservative” was, he said, “meant as an insult because we still regarded ourselves as liberals back in the ’70s.”
Soon afterward—sooner than many thought possible—the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War was over.
“I think we neoconservatives were vindicated,” Mr. Muravchik said.
In narrating the history of neoconservatism, Mr. Muravchik moved quickly from the post-Cold War “unipolar moment” to 9/11 and, in short order, the Iraq War.
“The people who had kind of advocated an aggressive international approach, which came to be called the Global War on Terror, were largely from the old group of neoconservatives,” he said.
But history didn’t quite stop between the two periods. In 1996, for example, neoconservative strategist Richard Perle, another “Scoop” Jackson veteran, wrote the “Clean Break” memo for Mr. Netanyahu, who was then about to become Israel’s prime minister. The front page of the report states it drew on a conversation with Douglas Feith, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., and David Wurmser, among others in the movement.
Mr. Perle, who later advised Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during the Bush administration, argued that Israel should be “weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.”
“This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq,” it continued.
Alongside policies under the second Bush administration, the “Clean Break” memo has led critics of neoconservatism to link the movement to strong U.S. support for Israel, or even a blurring of the lines between the two countries’ respective interests.
Indeed, in “The Neoconservative Moment,” Mr. Fukuyama suggested that Mr. Krauthammer conflated the two countries’ strategic realities during a speech to the American Enterprise Institute.
But very pro-Israel politicians don’t always enjoy the favor of neoconservatives. Notably, many neoconservatives have vocally opposed one of the most pro-Israel presidents in American history, Donald Trump. This placed them in an uneasy alliance with President Joe Biden, one of a small and dwindling number of living lawmakers from the Mr. Jackson era of the Senate.
Saurabh Sharma, a man in his 20s who leads the American Moment networking organization for young conservatives, pointed out that the neoconservative commentator Max Boot had argued for Israel to send weapons to Ukraine.
According to Mr. Sharma, if Israel had done what Mr. Boot suggested “they would have been woefully unprepared when this conflict began.”
Mr. Muravchik, the influential neoconservative, noted the apparent discrepancy between President Trump’s support for Israel and neoconservatives’ views in a 2020 article for American Purpose.
In his interview with The Epoch Times, he elaborated on his objections to President Trump’s approach to foreign affairs.
“He’s been nothing but a suck-up to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. He said he fell in love with [North Korean leader] Kim-Jong Un. He said he thought [Chinese leader Xi Jinping] was a great guy,” he told The Epoch Times.
President Trump’s allies might counter that his maneuvers on the world stage actually put America first by defusing tension while also showing strength. But to Mr. Muravchik and other neoconservatives, Trump’s statecraft looks less like crafty realism and more like appeasement of anti-democratic leaders.
“A hallmark of neoconservatism was the idea, not just having military strength, but trying to make the world an easier place to deal with by making it more democratic,” Mr. Muravchik said.
“If we can encourage the world to become more democratic—if we can encourage more countries to turn away from dictatorship to democracy—it will make the world a more peaceful place and a more pro-American place,” he added.
He said “democracy” hasn’t spread as broadly this century as it did at the end of the 20th century.
“It’s stopped,” he said before correcting himself: “It’s stalled.”
Mr. Sharma suggested President Trump made enemies of the neocons early in his candidacy when he criticized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“[The neoconservatives] made egregious mistakes in the Global War on Terror, and they want to get away with it,” he said, adding that a reorientation of the GOP against wars in the Middle East “means they’re all out of a job.”
Some America First critics of neoconservatism suggest the movement is only part of the story. Understanding why President Trump’s “America First” message provoked such fury requires a broader perspective.
“Control of the [RNC] rests in the hands of the same people that took us into the Middle East—Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, and so forth—under Bush Sr.,” said Col. MacGregor, referring to President George H.W. Bush.
According to Mr. Bannon, President Trump’s apparent rejection of the global order that emerged after World War II—“the postwar, international, rules-based order”—united the establishment against him.
“You’re in this situation where the postwar international rules-based order, which has been underwritten financially by American taxpayers and paid for by their sons’ and daughters’ sacrifice and blood, has done nothing but gut jobs and ship every high-value manufacturing job out of the United States into China and other places in the Eurasian landmass,” Mr. Bannon said. “At the same time, our capital all financed it—our private equity capital, all the pension funds. … That order is the order that America First is against.”
Both men rejected the isolationist label often applied to America Firsters.
Col. MacGregor outlined the limited circumstances in which force might be justified.
“Unless we ourselves are attacked, or what we deem to be interests that are vitally strategic to us, we should not attack anyone,” Col. MacGregor said.
“It’s not that we don’t understand how the world is interconnected,” Mr. Bannon said. “It’s obviously interconnected. But the difference in Trump and the American First movement was, you will put America’s interest first—and, particularly, we will not support an international order that allows the Chinese Communist Party to rise from basically a destitute, third world country into an economic superpower on the backs of the American taxpayer.”
Mr. Muravchik argued that Trump-style rhetoric against the Chinese regime is ultimately insincere.
“They’re not worried about China. When it comes time to face up to China, they’re not going to do that,” he said.
The Next Generation
In Col. MacGregor’s view, the RNC hasn’t shifted on foreign policy in decades.
“I don’t think anything, anything has fundamentally changed with the institutional Republican Party,” he said. “And the institutional Republican Party does not represent most of the American citizens who refer to themselves as traditional conservatives.”
Mr. Ramaswamy has targeted neoconservatism with more zeal than anyone gunning for the White House, President Trump possibly excepted.
Before the debate at which he unleashed his “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels” line, he circulated a “No to Neocons” pledge.
Mr. Ramaswamy also called on RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel to resign, while on stage in Miami. According to reporting from Timcast, she then loudly insulted him from the audience, pledging that he wouldn’t get “a cent” from the RNC.
“It’s not her money. It’s the Republican voters’ money,” Ramaswamy senior adviser Tricia McLaughlin told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Ramaswamy has since filed a petition to oust Ms. McDaniel as RNC chair.
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Muravchik, the neoconservative intellectual, is no fan of Mr. Ramaswamy.
WaPo’s Taylor Lorenz Helps Biden Admin Peddle Inflation Propaganda
The Washington Post‘s Taylor Lorenz (and some other guy) have penned an ‘explainer’ on why a TikTok video of a $16 McDonald’s hamburger is misleading, inflation isn’t that bad, and the viral clip is just some guy who ordered a ‘novelty item’ which ended up with him ‘racking up hundreds of thousands of views.’
Lorenz (and sidekick), noting that it wasn’t just a ‘Big Mac meal,’ smelled blood in the water.
Even though he had ordered a novelty item, Olive’s video about a $16 McDonald’s order went viral, racking up hundreds of thousands of views. After a McDonald’s revenue report recently, the same post went viral again earlier this month, with at least a half-dozen news outlets — including the Washington Examiner, the New York Post and Newsmax — picking up the story of Olive’s pricey patty. One YouTube video from this month with 2 million views inaccurately describes it as “a Big Mac meal” that cost $16. Posts on Reddit, the conservative site Twitchy and elsewhere tied the cost to President Biden’s economic management: Inflation, the theory went, had gotten so out of control that the price of a fast-food burger was approaching $20.
The article then proffers this ‘viral’ hamburger incident as “one of many exaggerated examples of the nation’s economic woes.”
I bought a Sausage McMuffin combo the other day for $8.37. It cost $4.78 two years ago. Go figure.
An anonymous White House official then whispered in Lorenz’ ear, after she wrote: “In reality, inflation has been steadily subsiding, and last week the government reported price hikes had eased yet again in October. The average Big Mac nationally as of this summer cost $5.58, up from $4.89 — or roughly 70 cents — before Biden took office, according to an index maintained by the Economist. That’s up more than 10 percent, but it’s not $16.“
The Big Mac conundrum reflects what Biden aides and senior Democratic officials regard as one of their most vexing challenges ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Even as inflation has fallen to a manageable 3 percent, and although the labor market has remained hot amid strong growth, voters still don’t like the economy, and they blame the president. -WaPo
The WaPo piece aligns perfectly with a White House campaign to convince Americans things are better than ever, and Biden rocks, and he was only inspecting those children for lice.
KJP: “This holiday season, families are seeing lower prices on everyday items from gas to groceries.” pic.twitter.com/6RE0nSQlJ0
Of course, regular readers know better than to believe the Biden administration and its media tentacles.
And when you exclude food and energy:
And what’s this, buried towards the bottom of the WaPo report, they admit that disposable income has fallen like a rock.
So it’s officially less shitty than the shittiest it’s been under Biden, but still not as good as it was under Trump. Thanks Taylor (and guy) for explaining Bidenomics!
Since Texas weathered its second-hottest summer on record and faced unprecedented demands on its power grid, the future of energy supply and use in the state—and across the country—has become the subject of national discussion. Air conditioners were in constant use in Texas over the summer as average temperatures reached 85.3 degrees between June and August and didn’t dip below 100 degrees for weeks on end in some cities.
The strain that the soaring temperatures put on the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s energy distribution network, is severe, no matter the circumstances.
Making that situation all the more dire is the rapid growth of the state’s population and the rising number of tech companies that are installing or expanding facilities in Texas that require massive amounts of power to operate.
More and more people live and work in a state that’s woefully unprepared to cope with soaring demand.
“Peak demand in ERCOT has grown 14 percent since 2019, while our supply of thermal generation—gas, coal, nuclear—has remained essentially flat,” Brent Bennett, policy director of Life:Powered, an initiative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told The Epoch Times.
The investment of $99 billion in wind and solar infrastructure in Texas and about $10 billion more in green energy transmission lines has not only failed to improve energy supply but has exacerbated the problem, he said.
Mr. Bennett and others say overinvestment in green energy comes at the expense of investment in sources that actually work.
Texas Swelters
The summer of 2023 was so hot that officials in some areas came close to adopting daily “load shedding,” or power outages, at least as a temporary expedient—protocols similar to those that have made life miserable for many people living in South Africa, whose state-run energy distributor, Eskom, is notoriously ill-managed.
Texas cities sweltered at 105 degrees or hotter for the most days in a row on record.
On Aug. 20, ERCOT hit a milestone: an all-time weekend peak demand record of 84,805 megawatts (MW), according to Alexander Stevens, manager of policy and communications at the Institute for Energy Research, a Washington-based nonprofit agency. Mr. Stevens compared that figure to the August 2022 peak demand of 78,485 MW.
Even that Aug. 20 weekend peak demand wasn’t as high as the demand on individual days this past summer. On Aug. 10, ERCOT grappled with 85,435 MW of demand and hit 81,674 MW on Sept. 5.
Mr. Stevens attributes the records partly to population growth, noting that from 2000 to 2022, Texas received an influx of 9,085,073 new residents, a record among states and 3 million more than the runner-up, Florida.
The retreat of excruciatingly hot weather over the autumn doesn’t mean that the Lone Star State is out of trouble. With winter approaching and posing its own set of challenges, ERCOT last month began soliciting bids from power providers in the hope of ramping up its reserves by at least 3,000 MW.
Given that 2023 was far from the first hot summer in Texas and that the demographic trends have been underway for many years, some may wonder why the state is scrambling now to try to expand its reserves and avoid more emergencies.
Mr. Stevens and other experts who spoke to The Epoch Times agree that while renewable energy isn’t sufficient to meet demand, politicians who want to appear forward-looking and in line with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) imperatives aren’t listening.
A Green Energy Panacea?
Even with policies specifically tailored to meet Texas’s acute needs, the market would be a challenging one. But, in the face of all these trends, Texas doesn’t receive anything close to the level of investment in energy production and distribution systems and facilities that it requires to meet demand.
In fact, policies that encourage wind, solar, and other so-called green and renewable energy sources not only fail to meet the demand but actively undermine any efforts to sustain and broaden supply networks that aren’t cyclical in nature and vulnerable to changes in the amount of wind or solar energy available at a given time, specialists in energy use have told The Epoch Times.
Part of the issue here is cultural and political. Some people assume that only political and social regressives living in flyover states, with a callous attitude about the environment, would harbor doubts about or oppose generous subsidies for ESG policies.
Many view ESG as essentially well-intentioned and lack any understanding of how such policies actually divert resources from and wreck the competitiveness of the utilities on which millions of people depend for their day-to-day existence, according to energy sector experts.
The escalating crisis in Texas has implications for the availability and reliability of energy throughout the nation, given the tendency in other states to favor ESG-based solutions and the demographic trends that expand energy use without regard for available resources, the experts say.
Misdirected Allocations
The problem comes down to flawed energy policy, William Keffer, director of the Energy Law Programs at Texas Tech University, told The Epoch Times.
“As a general observation, we have allowed our sources for electricity in the state to become lopsided, so that we have too much dependence on the renewables sector—wind and solar—and not as much capacity as we should have when it comes to the dispatchable sources like natural gas, coal, and nuclear,” he said.
Investors looking at opportunities in Texas and elsewhere obviously seek out assets that they expect to generate high returns, and the federal tax credits lavished on wind and solar facilities have helped bring about this lopsided market, he said.
The original idea of providing subsidies to foster renewable energy sources back in the 1990s was understandable, even laudable, but legislators have gone on renewing tax credits for such projects without regard for market dynamics, Mr. Keffer said.
A clause of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act extends the Investment Tax Credit, offering a 30 percent credit for wind, solar, storage, and other renewable initiatives, he pointed out.
The Biden administration is a huge backer of tax credits for investments in wind and solar projects. On May 31, the Treasury Department, the Energy Department, and the IRS released new guidance regarding an allocated credit program, offering a 20 percent tax credit on top of the existing 30 percent credit for wind and solar facilities in low-income communities.
“We just keep on extending these tax credits, which is going to continue to disrupt the market, with people spending their money in ways they would not otherwise,” Mr. Keffer said.
Undercutting the Dispatchables
With such lavish tax credits, wind and solar facilities can essentially sell their energy for close to zero dollars and still turn a profit, according to Mr. Keffer. The producers of dispatchable and badly needed energy sources aren’t in this position, hence they aren’t attractive investment targets, and no one wants to finance the building or expansion of coal, natural gas, or nuclear facilities.
“Wind and solar are always going to beat them to the punch with an artificially low price, such that they can’t sell their electricity at a price that gives them a return on their investment,” he said.
“Coal plants continue to be shut down, and natural gas plants don’t add to their lineup, because nobody wants to invest in a new one.”
“We’re Entering A Whole New Era”: AI Video Generation Becoming ‘Shockingly Good’
AI may be a few years away from creating custom-tailored VR movies based on whatever you can imagine, but it’s become surprisingly good over a very short period of time.
As Rowan Cheung of Therundown.ai opines on X, “We’re entering a whole new era of film.”
1. Generating an AI image in Midjourney, and turning it into a video using Runway’s Motion Brush pic.twitter.com/i20SWZvjRr
On a side note, I wonder how many people still think there’s, just, like, a bazillion images just sitting there in the AI model like some kind of huge compressed folder.
Can’t imagine there’s too many busty teddy bear MILFs in the dataset. pic.twitter.com/6nC1Xgrrks
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announced on social media platform X that Sunday marked the busiest day for air travel at airports nationwide, setting a new record.
Yesterday was the busiest day ever at airports in the US, with the @TSA reporting 2,884,783 people screened. It was also an incredibly smooth day of travel with fewer than one-half of one percent of 51,332 scheduled flights canceled. pic.twitter.com/6ZUVmaHyDR
“BREAKING NEWS: Yesterday (Nov. 26), TSA screened just over 2.9M individuals at airports nationwide, which represents an agency record – the busiest day ever for air travel,” TSA wrote on X.
BREAKING NEWS: Yesterday (Nov. 26), TSA screened just over 2.9M individuals at airports nationwide, which represents an agency record – the busiest day ever for air travel.
As #HolidayTravel season continues, we remind passengers to please arrive at the airport early.
Data via Bloomberg shows the number of people passing through security checkpoints at airports was 2.9 million, surpassing pre-Covid levels (2019) and hitting a record high.
Despite the news, airline stocks failed to rally on the news and remained at levels seen during the Covid era. This lackluster performance is mainly attributed to the waning of ‘revenge travel’ and the increasing fuel costs that are squeezing profit margins.
Additionally, despite the severe pilot and air traffic controllers shortage that has disrupted the industry throughout the year, there were no significant delays reported yesterday.
Great job, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg! You’re still employed.
The New York Timesreported Saturday that Israel is killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza at a historic pace. The huge civilian death toll in Gaza is explained by the scale of the bombing campaign and Israel’s willingness to drop US-provided 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated areas that are packed with civilians.
Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon analyst who advises the Dutch NGO PAX, told the Times that he’s never seen anything like it. “It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,” he said. Garlasco added that to find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, one would have to “go back to Vietnam or the Second World War.”
Israeli officials have frequently cited the Allied strategic bombings of Japan and Germany during World War II to justify their onslaught in Gaza. The comparison includes the US fire bombings of Japanese cities, which killed around 100,000 civilians in Tokyo in one night in 1945, as well as the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Israel has also invoked the US air campaign against ISIS, which killed tens of thousands of civilians in Iraq and Syria. But even the most brutal battle of the ISIS war does not compare to Israel’s onslaught in Gaza. According to an AP investigation, between 9,000 and 11,000 civilians died during the Battle of Mosul. About a third were killed by US-led coalition airstrikes or Iraqi forces, a third were killed by ISIS, and the cause of death for the rest is undetermined.
The Battle of Mosul lasted for nine months, from October 2016 to July 2017. In less than two months in Gaza, the Israeli bombardment has killed at least 10,000 civilians, based on a conservative estimate cited by The Times.
The Times report said, “People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they say, than in even the deadliest moments of US-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups.”
The Israeli onslaught also dwarves the civilian casualties in the war in Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022. In one year and nine months of fighting, the UN estimatesat least 10,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine, including 560 children.
The last update released by Gaza’s Health Ministry on November 10, after just 35 days of Israel’s campaign, said over 4,500 Palestinian children had been killed in Gaza, which the US State Department acknowledged was considered to be a low estimate at the time.
John Mearsheimer: The Israeli for example, have killed more civilians in Gaza in one month than the Russians have killed over 18 months in Ukraine.
The idea that Vladimir Putin is waging a punishment campaign and killing on purpose, large number of civilians is simply not true. pic.twitter.com/joZWb9jnXV
— Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) November 19, 2023
Despite the massive civilian and child death toll, the US continues to provide Israel with unconditional military aid. The White House has acknowledged that Israel is killing thousands of innocent people in Gaza but has said there are no “red lines” that would impact US support.
As the Great Unravelling progresses, we shall be seeing many negative developments, some of them unprecedented…
Only a year ago, the average person was still hanging on to the belief that the world is in a state of recovery, that, however tentative, the economy was on the mend.
And this is understandable. After all, the media have been doing a bang-up job of explaining the situation in a way that treats recovery as a general assumption. The only point of discussion is the method applied to achieve the recovery, but the recovery itself is treated as a given.
However, as thorough a distraction as the media (and the governments of the world) have provided, the average person has begun to recognise that something is fundamentally wrong. He now has a gut feeling that, even if he is not well-versed enough to describe in economic terms what is incorrect in the endless chatter he sees on his television, he now senses that the situation will not end well.
I tend to liken his situation to someone who suddenly finds all the lights off in his house. He stumbles around in the dark, trying to feel his way. Although he can picture in his mind what the layout of his house is, he is having trouble navigating, often bumping into things. This is similar to the attempt to see through the media and government smokescreens during normal times.
But soon, as his government undergoes collapse, he will be getting some bigger surprises. He will find that the furniture has inexplicably been moved around. Objects are not where they are supposed to be, and it is no longer possible to reason his way through the problem of navigating in the dark.
Many of those who observe the daily news reports are beginning to figure out that they are being fed misinformation. Many are beginning to recognise that neither political party truly represents them or, for that matter, is even concerned for their welfare.
These folks are now navigating in the dark.
But the bigger surprises have not yet occurred. There will be a certain amount of lead-up, plus a great deal of confusion, but the actual occurrences will be sudden. No one will be able to predict the dates on which they occur, except those very few people who control the triggers to these events.
Crashes in the Markets
Major bull markets rarely end with a whimper. They end with a major upside spike. And, unfortunately, brokers and investors alike tend to think that, if the market has been up for the last week, the last month, or the last year, it can be expected to be up again tomorrow. This makes them prime pickings for governments who may choose to falsely inflate a given market, creating an upside spike to encourage investors to toss their last few coins into the pot, just before the bottom drops out.
In previous eras, it could take time for people to sell, and even in panic times, the bloodletting was not instantaneous. However, with the Internet, all that is necessary is a major sell-off by one entity—one that goes through the stops of a large number of investors, and in a flash, the market goes though the floor. (Editor’s note: Stops are orders placed with a broker to sell a security when it reaches a certain price.) The average investor wakes in the morning to find that he has been wiped out.
Commitments by Governments
Should there be a currency crash, as is expected in many countries, promises made by governments will be abandoned suddenly, as though they had never existed. Whilst millions of people will find themselves lost, unable to function without their entitlements, governments will evade their guilt through finger-pointing. Tories will blame Labour; Labour will blame the Tories. (The equivalent will take place in other countries.) The net result will be the disappearance of entitlements, either in part or in total. The public will take out its anger through increased hatred of whichever party it is that they already consider to be the evil one. They will fail to understand that collapse was unavoidable.
Assumed National Strengths Will Vanish
International alliances will fall away. Former allies will suddenly not be at the side of the failing nation.
Former friends will sign alliances with the other side.
Trade agreements will suddenly cease.
Wealth, initiative, and favour will flow to the new foremost country and its allies.
All of the above will happen incrementally—not by any means on the same day—but in each case, the actual occurrence will be sudden.
Just as Julius Caesar was at his peak of power when his fellow members of the Senate drew their knives, a powerful nation is coddled right until the time of its fall. In this regard, the US will see the greatest abandonment of loyalties that any nation will experience.
(The greater the empire, the greater the pretence of loyalty to it. And the greater the abandonment when the fall comes.)
When an empire collapses, it dies slowly. Unless it comes to an end through conquest, it deteriorates in a series of sudden jolts. Its leaders grasp at anything that might cause a delay, even if this means a worse outcome in the end. The process may take years and even decades. However, it is in the first few years that the major events occur—the events that create the most significant damage.
This occurs for two reasons. The first is that the leaders of the country, believing in their own power, believe that they can maintain control of their trade, their overseas control, their military, etc. and find that, when the crashes come, the rats desert the ship in every area. The second reason is that any empire builds its strength upon lies and exaggeration as much as it builds on its true attributes. After a crash, these lies and exaggerations fall away, and in a short time, it becomes clear that the empire was, in its latter stages, a house of cards.
The warning signs are already taking place but are not heavily publicised.
The stage is set, and we are approaching the first major events.
The victims in this play are, unfortunately, the average people, who simply hope to have a decent life. They will be caught unawares and unable to even understand what has occurred, let alone take action to save themselves. Those who have not spent the previous years educating themselves and preparing an alternative life will suffer most greatly.
All who live in a country that is undergoing collapse will be negatively affected. Some will do better than others, but to live on this slim hope is much like being fortunate enough to live on the outskirts of Hiroshima in 1945.
There is little comfort in being one of the least injured. Better to have been in another country altogether – both during the actual event and during the terrible time that is sure to follow.
* * *
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Jeff Bezos’ Superyacht Generates 447 Times The Yearly Carbon Emissions Of Average US Household
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ triple-masted $500 million superyacht is far from climate-friendly, generating hundreds of times the annual carbon footprint of a typical American household.
At 417 feet, “Koru” is the world’s largest sailing yacht. It produces a whopping 7,154 tons of greenhouse gasses on a per-annum basis, or about 447 times the entire annual carbon footprint of the average US household, the New York Post reported, citing Indiana researchers.
Indiana anthropology Ph.D. candidate Beatriz Barros and anthropologist Richard Wilk led the research into Koru’s emissions.
Barros said, “But because they are so rich and so powerful, they feel like they are entitled [to travel in carbon-producing superyachts], whereas you and I should drive less, should eat less meat.”
Despite Koru’s “green” ability to travel via the three masts, she said plenty of greenhouse gasses are still released to provide electricity on the vessel – typically by diesel marine generators.
Meanwhile, the billionaires advocate for climate change while sailing around the world in luxury superyachts and jetting across continents in Gulfstream G500s that emit large amounts of carbon emissions. Then they advocate for laws to ban gas stoves, phase out petrol vehicles, ban cow farts with the eventual goal of insect burgers, and other radical structural changes to society that mirror WEF’s global reset plan.
This all comes days before Thursday’s United Nations climate summit begins in Dubai.
The two-week summit, COP28, also comes as the ‘green’ energy bubble is melting.
In just the last week, the chainsaw-wielding“anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei won the presidential election in Argentina, the Freedom Party of Islamo-realist Geert Wilders trounced its opponents in the snap general election in the Netherlands, and, here at home, a Republican was elected mayor of Charleston for the first time since 1877.
The Zeitgeist would seem to be awake and on the move.
In this context, it is not irrelevant to point out that Donald Trump, who has consistently been leading in almost all GOP polls since the 2024 election campaign began, has surged even further ahead. As I write, an Emerson poll has Trump ahead of his competition by 64 to 8 for DeSantis, and 9 for Nikki Haley. The hoary meme of conventional wisdom cautions that even if Trump wins the nomination it won’t matter because he is unpopular with the American people. Alas for that scrap of anti-Trump prognostication, the former president has also pulled ahead of his likely opponent Joe Biden. Some earlier polls had Trump tied or ahead by a fraction of a point. The current polls have him ahead in the general election by some 4, 6, or more points.
Are these phenomena related? I say yes. They are all part of a growing revulsion against the real-world, reality-show version of The Camp of the Saints, the dystopian novel, originally published in French, about what happens when mass immigration from the third-world overwhelms Europeand America. I will not be giving anything away when I note that the result is the collapse of civilization. If you look up “Camp of the Saints” on Wikipedia, you will be told that the book has been criticized “for conveying themes”—odd locution—of “racism, xenophobia, nativism, monoculturalism, and anti-immigration.” “The novel,” we read, “is popular within far-right and white nationalist circles.” It is popular with me, too. But good luck, if you don’t already know the book, finding out for yourself. Camp of the Saints has been out of print for years and efforts to prise loose the rights from its publisher have been for naught. Currently, a paperback copy of the English version sells for about $200 on Amazon; the hardcover will set you back $4,155.15. (I think the 15¢ is a nice touch).
Of course, the fate of Camp of the Saints is but one thread in the larger tapestry we see being woven in world politics now.
What makes that thread important is its underlying theme. Which is—what?
The superficial, but not incorrect, answer is immigration.
Push a little on “immigration” and you wind up talking about such things as national identity, the location of sovereignty, and the lineaments of political legitimacy.
What makes a regime legitimate? What tends to undermine that legitimacy? Ponder that and you will find yourself contemplating the role of political elites in the metabolism of Western “democracy.” I supply air quotes because in many cases we are not talking about the rule of the people, which of course is what democracy means, but rather rule of the bureaucrats, not all of whom are made or can be unmade by elections. This is where “the administrative state” comes in, a phrase that did not gain general circulation (though the reality it names is decades older) until the advent of Donald Trump. In the United States, as I have often observed, the people who are really in charge of the governmental apparatus implicitly believe that “democracy” means “rule by Democrats.” Anything else they regard as contra naturam, against the nature of (virtuous) things, and therefore beneath consideration.
All of that is background to the dramas unfolding in places like the Netherlands and Argentina. The Guardian, an old-school repository of leftwing sentiment, claims to be agitated by the unexpected triumph of Geert Wilders in the recent Dutch general election. Wilders’s victory, The Guardian warns,“threatens to take the normalisation of nativist populist politics in Europe to a dangerous new level.” The bit about the “normalisation of nativist populist politics” is correct, if impolitely phrased, but the question is: is it proper to describe that as “dangerous”? Maybe “salvific” would be closer to the truth? The Guardian complains that Wilders campaigned on “a nakedly Islamophobic manifesto.”
But is “Islamophobia” the correct term? Back when Islamists were steering airliners into skyscrapers, beheading journalists, and murdering filmmakers in broad daylight, I was fond of pointing out that “Islamophobia” was a striking misnomer. A “phobia” describes an irrational fear. But what is irrational about fearing people who loudly, repeatedly, ostentatiously declare their intention to destroy you and then follow up on those declarations with murderous actions? Just to stick with the post-9/11 world, I am thinking of such things as the Bali bombing of 2022 (204 dead, 240 injured), the Madrid train bombing of 2004 (192 dead, 2,050 injured), the London bombings of 2005 (52 dead, nearly 800 injured), the Mumbai train bombings of 2006 (209 dead, 700 injured), and more, so many more.
Wilders made a name for himself combatting the murderous rage of Muslim extremists.The Guardian doesn’t like what it describes as his “anti-migrant agenda.” But since most of those “migrants” are Muslim, a good many of whom have indicated their preference for establishing Sharia law in the Netherlands, I think that Wilders has political reality, if not progressive ideology, on his side.
Will he actually be able to form a government? That remains to be seen.
I’d say the odds were in his favor, especially at a moment when lunatic jihadists groups like Hamas have not only indulged in their favorite kinetic sport of killing Jews en masse but have also mobilized anencephalic progressive ideologues on campuses across the Western world.
We don’t have to wait to to discover the political fate of Javier Milei. He handily won the presidential election on November 19, 56 percent to 44 percent, and will take power on December 10.
I think Milei is one of the most refreshing figures to appear on the political scene in a long time. I suspect that his flamboyant style makes him easy to underestimate. How appalling, for example, that this son of a bus driver should dismiss the Argentinian political establishment as “shit socialists” and “libtards,” “collectivists” who want to destroy their opponents. “You can’t give them an inch,” he warns, “you can’t negotiate with leftards because they will kill you.” Impolitic, yes. But is it untrue?
In a remarkable speech he gave on November 24, Milei used burgeoning power to speak truth to power. He has not come, he said in a phrase he has used often, to “guide lambs but to awaken lions.” A new Argentina is impossible with “the same old people.” But the party is over, Milei warned. Henceforth, politicians, formerly the privileged elite, will be treated like ordinary honest Argentine citizens. The people, he said, are those awakening lions who will “devour the thieving politicians. They will devour the prebendary businessmen. They will devour the unionists who betray their people.”
Milei believes that a turning point has been reached and that change of the sort he envisions is inevitable.
“This works just like an exponential function,” he said.
“At some point, there was a turning point and now they cannot stop it!”
I hope that he is right. The forces of inertia, to say nothing of the forces of entrenched interest, are still with the establishment and they are powerful.
But the point is that figures like Milei, Wilders, and William Cogswell, the new Republican mayor of Charleston, show that a counter-narrative is brewing.
Will it prevail over the dominant “progressive” dispensation?
No one knows for sure.
I take the panic sweeping like a tsunami through the fetid corridors of the Left as a good sign. They are worried, which means that the rest of us have grounds for hope.
