donald-trump

Sedition

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

The Parthenon — One of the interesting things about it is how small it is — Athens, Greece

On a personal note, it’s super-depressing to be writing about the events of the past week on the day before Thanksgiving. Hoping these simply pass means that when you unearth this post a couple of years from now, you won’t know what I’m talking about.

Last week, six Democratic senators decided to make a large-scale announcement on X, telling the troops of the US Military that they didn’t have to obey “illegal” orders. They didn’t give any examples of illegal orders, doing nothing but admonishing the rank-and-file with the implication that Trump has in the past given them illegal orders, and that at a minimum, they need to be insubordinate to these. As I said, there are no examples — just a broad brush telling them of the oath to the Constitution. The Constitution itself is notoriously sparse when it comes to telling the military exactly how to run itself, other than members of the Army and Navy (that’s all there was at the time) should obey the orders of the Commander in Chief, and the Commander in Chief was the President of the United States. I don’t think our Founding Fathers quite anticipated the psychopathic information wars (they were not totally naive to the ways of manipulation, but still) we are encountering today. I kinda think they wouldn’t have imagined senators and congress-critters as using gross stupidity as a defense, or the notion that language should be parsed without any implication.

But here we are — where we’ve had the Democratic Party shrieking that the current President is a fascist (once again, total Humpty Dumpty with this word.). For those that need a Humpty Dumpty refresher, showing psychopathic manipulation was alive and well even during Lewis Carroll’s day, here’s the famous quote from Through the Looking Glass —

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

What is fascinating, if you follow this blog, is the memetic tricks being played by the various actors — in particular Mark Kelly, D-AZ. While he admonishes the military rank-and-file (he is a decorated veteran and Space Shuttle pilot) in a tone that implies they’re being given illegal orders, he beats feet away from this position in subsequent interviews. He poses his comments as some kind of avuncular reminder to the troops as a post-statement interpretation. It’s totally whack, of course. But decide for yourself. (Youtube has problems embedding in WordPress pages, but the link should work.)

Arguing against the original posting by the Six is a fools errand, and I won’t do it here. But what is fascinating is the Six surf the wave of memetic understanding, arguing that what is obviously a context-laden message, full of insinuation, should be taken literally and completely fragmented, and out of context. The perpetrators use memetic simplicity, along with a follow-on message of assertion of the First Amendment as their escape hatch. They have the right to say anything they want, of course, and they get to pull the Humpty Dumpty.

When Trump responded on X and Truth Social by angrily reminding them that basically what they have done could be considered an act of sedition, punishable by hanging, there’s a cascade of angry pearl-clutching in unison across the entire Left. What’s wild is that they all ran Trump’s statement of fact into “Trump wants to hang all of us.” Well, he might, but Trump didn’t say that at all. They are counting on psychopathic manipulation — clever deletion of a few words, while counting on the Neo-tribal politics I discuss in this piece to hold sway. The Left has spent the last nine or so years demonizing Trump — certainly the public must realize he is an illegitimate President, disposable by violence.

What is wild is that the Left continues to lay ground for what is known as a Color Revolution. And what is a Color Revolution? From ChatGPT –

Large-scale public demonstrations calling for political reform or resignation of leaders.

Unified branding (e.g., a color, flower, or simple symbol on clothing, banners, etc.).

Civil resistance tactics such as marches, strikes, and occupation of public spaces.

Rapid mobilization often sparked by disputed elections, corruption, or economic crises.

Focus on nonviolent action, although violence may occur around the edges.

This Color Revolution is focused on Trump, obviously, in attempts to brand him as a fascist and some kind of ersatz King. Even considering the argument a year into Trump’s Presidency is exhausting. The force of the current Color Revolution derives from endless haranguing using generic terms that the general public really can’t define. If Trump was a real fascist, the various operatives on the Left would at a minimum be in jail, and likely have already been executed. But the drumbeat of social media repetition goes on. The immiseration process never stops.

And the people doing this are pros. One of the Seditious Six, Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) is a former CIA officer. Her bio is incomplete, but it doesn’t take much reading in between the lines that she helped subvert active organizations for a living. The others are trading on their service records in a “how could I possibly want to subvert the government” sleight of hand.

As of tonight, November 26, there have two National Guard members critically injured by an illegal immigrant from Afghanistan. There’s no question that the constant direct emboldening by specific members of the Seditious Six contributed to the atmosphere allowing these killings. Slotkin herself was warning that National Guard members were likely to start shooting US citizens in the various cities that they’ve been deployed to only last week, which translates to legitimacy of various aggrieved parties taking shots of their own. It’s going to be a wild week seeing how this latest development gets spun.

Stay tuned.

Identifying Collapse Narrative Purveyors

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know how I get anything done around here.

If there’s one particularly execrable, gaslighting icon in our journalistic night, it would have to be The Atlantic. Owned basically by Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow, it is a textbook piece of narcissistic fabulism — a complex brew of half truths, polemics, and status elevators set in front of a background of a lack of reporting on a variety of issues. It is an amazing example of the manipulation of what I call the “dark matter” of the information space. The Atlantic counts on you NOT being exposed to the other side of the story.

And when this dynamic is combined with structurally sound writing by top professionals — truth be damned — the structural coherence of the prose is very compelling for making and changing narratives inside the brains of the readership. It’s a magazine of perfect, pathological brainworms for the predisposed readership on the Left. Look at the success of write Ed Yong, who ended up winning a Pulitzer Prize for his largely incorrect take on COVID, that contributed to the panic of millions, and destruction of trillions of dollars in economic value.

The latest thing to fly across The Atlantic’s radar is the recent Department of War attacks on Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan narco-cartel, who are busy importing all the necessary ingredients for fentanyl production into the Unite States. Primarily a problem within the last ten years, fentanyl abuse hits people that no one really cares about in society. As such, the need to take care of their problems are largely sublimated, and then occasionally used as a psychopathic moral racket by the Left. Legal NGO industries around homeless people, who are often fentanyl addicts, have sprung up around supplying needles, homes, substitutes and conditions, all funded through a variety of local and state governments. Why would the Left want to solve the fentanyl crisis? They’re making bank.

In the background of all these efforts has been the cultural drumbeat that source interdiction doesn’t work. That drugs, even if they’re not legal, should be almost legal. And swimming upstream against this notion will get you banned inside an increasingly exclusionary Left.

So in walks Trump, determined to end the potential national gaslighting on this issue. Trump orders his Secretary of War to start sinking the boats bringing the requisite chemicals, or the product itself, into the US. Governments like the Venezuelan government are marginally legal in and of themselves, and the globe is a big place. The idea that, considering the enormous amount of money in the drug trade, there are not going to be quasi-illegal narco states is ridiculous.

So Trump sends the Navy and the US Coast Guard out to just sink the boats – a classic Gordian knot perspective. It’s not very hard to identify them — satellite telemetry show boats filled with barrels, stacked in an orderly fashion, right before their sinking. Some of the boats are really submersibles — they ride just under the surface of the ocean. No one is fishing off these boats.

Venezuelan drug-running submersible, sunk by the USN

Here’s where things get interesting. The problem of fentanyl interdiction has been intractable. At the same time, the US has been fighting a quasi-narco state that has been busy shipping its military-aged men here. The Venezuelan government, through corruption and mismanagement, has created such an internal crisis that its entire professional class has run out of its own country to roughly adjacent states in Central America. The government continues to fund itself, at least in part, with money from cartels. It has continued as well to threaten its more peaceful neighbors like Guyana. Short version — the bad guy chits keep piling up.

But what side does one of the primary writers for The Atlantic line up on? Persistence of current paths of action are a Collapse Narrative. What we’re doing now is definitely not stopping the running of fentanyl and supplies into the US. At the same time, the rule of law to prevent the trafficking has obviously broken down, and brandishing it as a weapon against US military action only serves to further weaken the USA.

And there’s little concern for that consequentiality exhibited by Friedersdorf – just an assertion of a moral racket. The lives of the drug runners are paramount, and the people suffering in the US are incidental. One of the first things that popped into my head is that when Trump sank a couple of these obvious drug runners, the word would spread that this is really a great way, if you’re a local, to be guaranteed to get killed. The gloves are off — Trump is going to defend an appropriate locus of his constituency, and this is a profound sea change in the messaging being spread internationally. In a memetic sense, Trump is forcing the Venezuelan and Colombian drug lords, and especially their minions, down into a Survival v-Meme crisis. But such actions are intolerable to Friedersdorf. Collapse and anarchy is the game, and forcing drug interdiction agents to jump through hoops is the path forward.

It is fair to ask — Does Trump’s strategy work? Look at the ‘intractable’ border crisis. Since Trump was elected, illegal immigration into the US has also collapsed. The dominant Collapse Narrative, that illegal immigration was fundamentally unstoppable, has been proven to be a sham.

I’ve written about how this works from an empathy perspective in this piece on Moral Heat Maps. The reality is, at this point in time, that at least in the Trump administration, the actors are far more grounded and pragmatic in how they get results that the current Lefties, which remain committed to the collapse of the US.

Whether Trump’s strategies will actually work or not remains to be seen. But the way the elites veritably seethe when they declare his philosophies “populist” gives me some hope. And if you want to hedge on all this, buy Yamaha stock. That seems to be the brand for most of the outboards used on the drug boats, now on their way to Davy Jones’ locker.

How Psychopaths Weaponize Free Speech

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 3 Comments

Cascade Mountains, WA — Winter is Coming

One of the craziest things that’s happened in the last six or so years is the blatant injection of speech control by the Left in all aspects of what I’ve called Collapse Narratives. What is a Collapse Narrative? It is the story and framing of a “moral racket” to bully others into silence, and that if you follow the narrative thread, your society will collapse. “If you say that, not only are you evil, but we will ostracize you from society AND kill the baby panda. And it will be ALL YOUR OWN FAULT.”

The technique works best when utilizing sexual taboos, which the psychopaths are allowed to discuss in celebration. But if you protest, you are (pick one or all) a bigot, a racist, and so on. And you better shut up.

No better example could be found than when Sam Brinton, former undersecretary in the Department of Energy, in charge of nuclear waste disposal went on various tours promoting his kink, which I can’t quite characterize. It involves being surrounded by other men dressed up in leather dog costumes, complete with butt plug tails inserted into their poopers.

Brinton was later dismissed for a particularly pernicious habit he had of stealing other people’s luggage off airport baggage carousels, then going home and wearing the dresses in public.

But while Brinton was in play, we, the public, were subjected to what I’d call “Walsh’s Progression” (credit to Matt Walsh at the Daily Wire) regarding all this psychopathic nonsense. We were supposed to Tolerate this reprehensible behavior, followed by Accept this as normative, then forced to Celebrate this as somehow adding to the modern cultural zeitgeist, leading to Normalization, and ending, of course, in Coercion and Punishment if you can’t follow the script.

All these types of manipulations depend on the psychopathic entity violating taboos and norms in society, followed by a pronouncement that only they are allowed to discuss this. The only allowable response across society is sycophancy. What they are promoting is usually, by their standards, some ostensibly necessary sexual deviancy. Why does it have to center around that deviancy, in the larger psychosocial picture? Because it mainstreams a channel for sexual abuse, mostly directed at children, who once traumatized, will then increase the odds of them developing a personality disorder and joining the ranks. It’s a combo psychosocial control/memetic reproductive act.

And that’s why it’s necessary to be done in public, especially publics containing children. It simply doesn’t work behind closed doors.

To repeat — psychopaths take taboo subjects, self-identify, demand acceptance and then use these to shut down broader debate. And because these subjects are ALREADY taboo in the larger cultural zeitgeist (call it polite society), it’s not that hard a task.

Let’s take another example — illegal immigration. While LEGAL immigration policy is a debatable good, illegal immigration is truly a consolidated blight on society. They are not the same. Illegal immigration often involves human trafficking. And human trafficking is inordinately profitable, both for the Mexican cartels that pipeline people into the US, as well as the various entities in the US exploiting the labor.

How does this work? Let’s say you are a contractor bidding a federal contract. You must bid this contract at prevailing wage rates, or it will be rejected. But if you fill your workforce with illegal aliens, you can likely pay these people half or less that same wage rate, resulting in a windfall for you. This becomes money that both you and the cartels can pump into the political machine to “look the other way” in whatever regional market you occupy.

Now pour on the psychopathic messaging. “These are hardworking families (growing dope in Ventura County.) “If you don’t support them, you’re a racist!” and so on. One pours on the messaging because there is an extensive web of government support services that are also profiting off the existence of these people, with housing, food and medical assistance, all part of the associated moral racket. “They are only looking for a better life, you monster!” And unless you’re made of sterner stuff (like me) you’re going to wilt.

Folks on the other side can’t even open their mouths regarding the very immediate impact to their own circumstance — especially in adjacent, poor communities. In the Scandinavian countries, rapes increased some 50% from baseline with the importation of migrants from Africa. And heaven forbid if you actually discuss the demographics of the illegal migrants — mostly young men in their 20s and 30s, and the inevitable characteristics of letting in an uneducated army into your country, while housing and feeding them. It’s all booby-trapped with psychopathic taboos designed to make you keep your mouth shut.

It’s even difficult for me, writing in the abstract, to imagine using the very real argument that my friends’ daughters will increase the chance of them being raped by allowing this illegal wave in.

That’s the power of psychopathic taboos.

One can also see the extreme reaction from the Left on this issue against Donald Trump. Tom Homan, Trump’s deportation czar, attacks the psychopaths head on. Instead of deferring to their manipulation of taboos, he confronts them with stories of direct experience. But because the majority of our mainstream media has abandoned their own ethics, or are willingly supporting the psychopaths, there is no amplification.

And, as with all things psychopathic, in the v-Meme space, the psychopaths take any dissent, as well as detail, and shove it down into the macerator of reality. The only “appropriate” response is conformity. And that requires relational disruption and loss of agency — THE key psychopathic identifiers — for all adjacent actors. And so the folks responding to the use of these psychopathic taboos march down into Tribal v-Meme knowledge structures of myths about past immigration. Nuance or reasonable policy is not acceptable.

Do the psychopaths know they’re doing this? I think the ones at the top do. But much of this turns into an emergent cascade — once the masters at the top, interested in some strange brew of anarchy, chaos and low level control, set the tune, the local dynamics of relationships comes into play. Understanding the complex web of both illegal actors, and legal institutions in perpetuation of all this strains the brains of all but a few of us.

Diabolical.

What’s the remedy? The modest thing is resist the psychopath’s efforts to rename pathological behaviors into more palatable forms. Don’t use the language of the psychopath. Call illegal immigration “illegal immigration” — not undocumented workers. Do not use the phrase “children’s gender affirming care.” Call it child castration. You’ll see an immediate revulsion for describing these various things as they are. But if we cannot reclaim the language, we will see the psychopaths carry the day on the field.

Let’s get going.

Forks in the Timeline and the Future of the West

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 7 Comments

Countryside in Winter, outside Milton-Freewater, OR

One of the more interesting plot lines of stories, along the lines of musing about the Multiverse, is the alternate timeline idea. Of course, “what ifs” along historical perspectives are nothing really new. And as far as literature goes, my intellectual engagement with the idea probably goes back to Michael Moorcock and the Elric series. But more recently, I’m a fan of the TV series Community, which has lots of fun with this particular literary trope. Community is a show about the producer’s idealized community college experience, which seems fantastical in all ways as someone who has worked in academia for most of their lives. There are study groups, engaged individuals, and of course, hot women and men who occasionally sleep with each other. This does not resemble in any way, shape or form, the modern university, which is more akin to a modern gulag, where students stare disinterestedly at professors, work 40 hours/week outside their classes, and the only community-building ritual is football.

But that brings one to the notion of an alternate timeline. Community has lots of shows contained therein where characters step outside of themselves at various branching points, with dramatically different outcomes dependent on varying choices the cast members make in their lives.

And as go the cast members, one can draw parallels to nations. Across Western civilization right now, there are all sorts of nations, making all sorts of timeline choices regarding civilizational outcomes, that are far more likely to yield unpleasant ends, or civil wars, than a make-out session in a car in the community college parking lot.

In the most recent election in the U.S., Kamala Harris, VP under Joe Biden, ran a strong negative campaign based on turning the country more Woke, and lost to Donald Trump, who, with a preselected “dream team” of counter-elites, managed a modest win in the national elections. While Donald Trump, an elite himself, runs as a counter-elite, officially aligning himself with the Republican Party, a firm majority in that party still identifies itself with an elite globalist agenda. Make no mistake.

More importantly, Elon Musk, billionaire and owner of multiple paradigm-busting companies himself, maneuvered himself into a key role, along with fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, as chief advisor to Trump. Even before Trump’s election, Musk had spoken out against many of the Woke issues of the day, such as continued support of the war in Ukraine, Internet censorship, and the elevation of transgender rights. And consistently, both Trump and Musk have spoken out against the key Immiserators in contemporary society, which Harris had passionately embraced.

When Harris lost, it was a profound fork in the timeline for the US. Harris had promised more Internet and social media censorship, under the mask of fighting “disinformation” and “misinformation”, more enforcement of DEI policies, as well as control of AI development. The press had (and still is) lined up behind Harris. Even as I write this, a moribund economy is being billed by the mainstream media as the strongest in the last 20 years. It’s easy to get paranoid and assume that the financial press believes there will be a fall, and that will be blamed on Trump, even though the lag times for any economic policy implementation is at least a year or two. But regardless, Musk and others have been running numerous moments of grounding validity across the political landscape, from buying Twitter (now X) and wading into the various culture war agenda items like transgenderism, and DEI policies that I’ve explained are prime tools of the Immiserators. At least for the present, the United States is on the upward path toward increased personal agency, and less government. As an example, Trump himself announced the creation of the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), eponymously named after a meme based on a Shiba Inu dog. DOGE’s job will be elimination of government regulations — a subject of a post in itself.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Great Britain, an entire nation is in the middle of a horrific branch in their timeline involving a sex scandal where primarily Pakistani immigrants ran large rape rings targeting white, underage girls in a variety of towns, including Rotherham, Telford, and other towns in the north of England. Authorities from both the local communities, and all the way up to the top ranks of British governance suppressed the scandal on the basis of maintaining racial harmony by not naming or prosecuting the Pakistani perps. The magnitude of the numbers involved is mind-boggling. Some 7000+ rapes were documented through these rape rings even this year, with basically no law enforcement efforts to stop the crimes, as well as plenty of victim-blaming.

Initially, when I heard about these crimes, I was very suspicious of a mass hysteria event, similar to the early ’80s McMartin pre-school trials in the U.S. In that situation, children had been interviewed for ostensibly repressed memories of devil worship inside of daycare centers. All of it turned out to be false, and you can read about it at this link. Instead, what the rape rings are shaping up to be is a civilization-ending event. Musk is tweeting about it on X even as I write this, and the British high command is condemning him for bringing up the unpleasantness. Apparently, the behavior has been historic, and tracks with surges in immigration in Britain — even dating back to the early 2000s.

Both these events — Trump’s ascendancy, as well as Britain’s collapse, would be worthy of a book. But what they show in the context of this blog is how during times of Elite Overproduction, which manifests itself in multiple ways, where the number of chairs available for both elites and their children shrink, and the number of elites themselves grow, there is profound societal pressure on immiserating the larger populace. As I wrote in a previous piece, in the US, the trans issue quickly gained ground as an elite signaling device, and luxury belief that elites could communicate with each other that they deserved to win the game of Musical Chairs.

The fact they were creating a more oppressive, authoritarian social environment for the larger population they believed to be in their favor. But fortunately, the votes and the governance system was in place in the U.S. that hopefully this will stop peacefully. We were simply not that far gone. While the immiseration of the populace was indeed real, what was also true was that the actual grounding of the entire trans issue involved a minute number of people. The number of trans male->female athletes, while high profile, were/are still relatively small. It’s wrong and vexatious, but it’s not civilization-ending if a man posing as a woman wins a bicycle race. And DEI has been noxious, but once again, not civilization-ending.

Nothing gives that impression of the rape rings in Great Britain. There have been massive numbers of British girls raped in a systematic fashion, by primarily Pakistani immigrants. Incredible system failure, under the guise of Woke policies and ostensible racial harmony, has been covered up. And Musk, and the entire X platform, has given voices to both the advocates for the victims, as well, incredibly enough, to the proponents of the coverup. Predictable elites have called the non-prosecution of these heinous crimes a “noble cause” and any notion that the people responsible, such as Jess Phillips, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, should be held to account as immodest and unfair. As I write this, the British press is in alignment against Musk, protecting obvious Immiserators. It can be argued that Britain, for all of its history, has a far more comprehensive culture of elites getting away with literal murder. So it’s no surprise that Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and even King Charles, have lined up with fellow elites to defend the mass immiseration scheme. The problem with all authoritarian regimes, de facto or official, is that the people under them can only take so much. Then, psychopathic revolution becomes the stock in trade. Talk about a grounding validity moment.

The other key element to note here is that both large scandals, in both the US and Great Britain, are at their core sex scandals involving sexual abuse of minors. Transgender surgery on youth is the one thing that has profoundly fired up the larger population, as well as access of grown men to women’s spaces so that sexual violence can more easily occur. In Great Britain, the massive size of the rape ring scandal, once again directed at children, is emergent out of elite desires for immiseration in this latest regime of Elite Overproduction. As I’ve written before, sexual abuse of children is psychopathic in nature. But worse, it has the growth effect of producing even more psychopaths. And those relational disruptors go on to create broader psychosocial devolution across societies. You want to destroy the collective conscience of a culture? Rape a significant number of its young people. That train is never late. And it arrives at the station hosting the Tribal/Magical v-Meme. Which is no way to run a large, multi-cultural contemporary society.

This plays into larger psychosocial trends in the collective psyche of all of Western society. We are at a point where we have not kept up the agency-driven developmental needs of our societies. As such, we see elites establish elite coding to sort their kids into the winners’ circle, and everyone else into the loser’s category. How we reverse this, and prompt what in the short term will likely manifest itself as decentralization is an open question. But at the U.S. has some breathing room.

In the U.K., it’s going to be decentralization, followed by relational devolution. Stay tuned.

Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment and Elite Overproduction

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 3 Comments

Cold Desert Rain, US 95 north of Winnemucca

One of the better pieces I’ve read recently is this one: titled Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment, by David Samuels in Tablet Magazine. Samuels is obviously an Old Dog, and describes in detail the head game that the combo of David Axelrod, a communication specialist and marketing guru, and Barack Obama played on the American people — especially the American tech. elite, that led to the incredibly destructive political climate of the last 16 years.

The short version of Samuels’ thesis is that Obama, with Axelrod’s help, took Axelrod’s strategy utilizing permission structures,(the linked piece is pretty good!) that Axelrod had successfully used in various Chicago races (Harold Washington’s mayoral success is highlighted) to get white folks to vote for black candidates, often against their own interests. They did this by creating a false morality inside people’s value structures to make them believe that morally it was a greater good to vote against both their own interests, and their own grounded intuition. The closest analogy I can come up with essentially Obama’s and Axelrod strategy was the equivalent of unleashing an HIV virus on the natural belief immune systems that any cohort develops, that insures long-term cultural continuity. Once convinced that moral posturing and virtue signaling was somehow in their long-term interest. And it worked — something like 80% of white folks voted for Washington in the mayoral contest, as opposed to only 35% of African-Americans.

The problem with completely disconnecting any group of humans from what I call grounding validity — making sure what you believe has some actual, observable data to back it up– is that it has unintended consequences. My favorite go-to of an entire civilizational collapse due to a lack of it is the parable of the Aztecs, who obsessed on raiding neighboring tribes for human sacrificial tribute to make sure the Sun would rise by cutting out their hearts on the Pyramid of the Sun. Once you believe that level of bullshit, your civilization is uniquely fragile. And 500 badass Spaniards, led by Hernan Cortes, and accompanied by his translator and personal consort Malinche, proved the point. The consequences for ungrounding are wildly tragic. My fun statistic is that 95% of the Aztec genome is carried on the X chromosome. Which mean those conquistadores killed all the men and literally raped all the women.

What is great about this piece is it is obviously written by a pro, who can describe the ins and outs of how they actually did it, as well as the consequences of it coming undone. My analogy of why when these systems fail, they fail rapidly, is that ungrounded systems are prone to what we call signal drift — the difference between a signal with appropriate ground, and whatever the rest of systems and society decide to make up as true. This seems to have a pernicious effect on human brains. When you practice unreality, your brain gets worse and worse detecting reality. It simply doesn’t practice it. And what THAT means is that it is far easier for a cult (or national) leader to seize control and program people with whatever beliefs they want. Like 50 year old men wearing a wig have a right to enter women’s spaces. Or if you want to get into a women’s prison, and you’re a man, just tell the guard you’re a woman. But I digress.

The other thing that happens when you practice unreality, is that your belief system for navigating the actual world is prone, just like an electrical circuit, to arcing when it has to ground itself against actual reality. Arcing is inherently destructive (it’s how we weld metal) and there are sparks. I think it’s a worthy analogy — and we’re witnessing it right now in the aftermath of the Trump election. Samuels makes the point in the piece (and I agree with him wholeheartedly) that Kamala Harris was perhaps the worst presidential candidate in the last 100 years, and the permission structuring around attempting to force people to vote for her using racial and misogynistic guilt (she’s a woman! She’s African-American even though she’s not!) just couldn’t work. It was so unbelievable that enough of the electorate couldn’t just party line NPC it in. And she lost to a candidate who was widely reviled, and the entire press corps had fallen into lockstep of chronically attacking. The result was truly a silent revolution. Because of social shaming, you couldn’t even admit that you might consider voting for Trump without public ostracism. I voted for Trump myself, and still can’t bring up that issue with the majority of liberal friends I still hold. That’s majorly fucked up.

Where Samuels’ analogy falls apart, though, is that these types of outcomes and conflicts are literally occurring across Western civilization. The tendency that Samuels exhibits is to attribute the temporary success of Obama’s campaign to an amalgamation of old and new cunning, and particular individuals. If that were the case, though, we would not be seeing similar types of conflicts across a spectrum of countries, with different outcomes across a variety of countries. One might rack up conservative victories in Hungary/Orban and Italy/Meloni to nations that are in the process of re-grounding toward more appropriate national self-interest. As well, one might consider nations like France, Britain and Canada still in flux.

What is far more likely the overriding dynamic is that we are seeing Turchin’s Elite Overproduction in action across the globalist landscape. Elite Overproduction comes once every 150 years or so (do read Turchin’s book linked here) and happens when there just are too many elites’ kids, and not enough spots for them to assume the same social position as their parents. Why does that matter? If you look out across the political landscape, what we’re actually witnessing is emergent behavior, with the tools of elite manipulation being pulled out of the last century’s toolbox, and finally having the appropriate environmental conditions that they proved to be useful. And it’s U.S. – agnostic. Obama and Axelrod may be clever. But they are just men of their time.

Further, this also gives potential insights into how wider wars get started through Elite Overproduction. When you have too many people competing for too few chairs, then what’s not to like about a Crusade to seize Jerusalem back from the Turks? And the worst conditions for this kind of social virus are when you have an In-group and Out-group that hit the same point of Elite Overproduction at the same time. Then everyone’s raring to go.

If there’s a bigger lesson here, it’s that you’ve got to ground your kids — especially the elite ones — in reality. Or there’s a proclivity for elites to make up self-serving fantasies, and use lots of fancy words to project a preferred image of reality that has nothing to do with it. In our case, I feel like we got lucky by having a robust enough electoral system to elect Donald Trump, and his A-team level staff of advisors. Because the current crop of elites were converging on burning it all down. Or make us vulnerable to a modern day Cortes burning the ships at Veracruz.

P.S. — one thing that is interesting about Samuels’ take on all this is it links Turchin’s book, End Times, that I’ve written about with Rob Henderson’s Troubled — in particular his concept of ‘luxury beliefs’ — with the actual modality — permission structures — that’s a how-to for generating political anarchy. But the circumstances have to be right. Otherwise, the virality you need just ain’t there.

P.P.S. I’ve also recently been taken by Mike Benz. His Joe Rogan podcast lays it out. Another post-mortem way worth listening to.

On Trump’s Assassination Attempt, Civil War, and Leaky LARPs

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Yosemite Fire Sunset, 2024

It’s increasingly hard to keep up with any cogent view of the news cycle, in these last couple of weeks in July. Short version — Donald Trump was nearly assassinated on July 13, 2024, at a rally in Butler, PA. The breathless press first didn’t want to admit that Trump was shot, but then that was followed by an endless litany of calls for essentially civil war, especially in the subjunctive (“If Trump had been killed,” for all of those that weren’t forced to study Latin) and then followed on the heels of all this, the announcement by Joe Biden on July 21 that he was dropping out of the presidential race.

Screenshot from CNN after Trump was shot. Even then, CNN was attempting to monkey with the script

Everyone assumes that each of these events are independently momentous, finally, FINALLY leading to some Manichaean conclusion and Götterdämmerung, after which the world will be destroyed and born anew. History must have SOME inflection point, no? The press insists.

But no one’s asking any structural questions on any of this (except for a few voices like this blog.) If Donald Trump had died, how would that civil war actually have taken place? Other than gathering for meetings in the town square, or local park, with their pussy hats, or marching along avenues reserved by the multi-billion dollar entertainment mountebanks known as Black Lives Matter, Americans can’t hardly organize anything political. I have yet to be at a large rally where anyone was collecting names and phone numbers for future contacts. The Old Gods in both parties know this. But the show must go on.

And it does. Geography, as I’ve explained, is functionally dead, save for looting stores in Blue states. What you see on your computer screens, via TikTok, or X, is a postcards-from-the-edge approach to news. Some people manage to get together and break some windows. But more and more, what’s really happening is a slow slide into decay. I visited an old friend in Portland a little more than a month ago. There was some evidence of rioting activity present in downtown Portland. But the biggest sign obvious to me was the lack of shopping in what was once an energetic downtown retail district, as well as miles of dilapidated RVs parked along Lombard Street.

And fat people everywhere, of course. The national obesity rate has passed 42%. The real crisis is in the metabolic health of Americans, as well as a constant slide into poverty and homelessness. As well as the adaptive reality that if you’re going to live in a broken down RV, it’s a whole lot more comfortable to do it someplace where it is warm, and food is still relatively cheap. Folks have some eatin’ to do.

I still marvel at the people in the press claiming that the nation is on the brink of civil war. Wars are physical things, historically fought by young, healthy males. That’s just a statement of fact, with the truth of it aligned in our genes. When all your young males are fat, you’re not fighting anyone. Regardless of how many AR-15s you spread around.

And I still am impressed with the raw stupidity associated with calling January 6, 2021, an insurrection. Do people have any idea how utterly impossible it is to control anything from the U.S. Capitol? The elected officials on salaries of $200K, with a complete complement of near-slaves, in the guise of interns, can’t do it. Insurrections put different people in power that actually command some level of authority and respect. Not dudes with buffalo headdresses made from Gray Owl kits. It is a mystery to me how to get the federal government to do anything. How would the ostensible insurrectionists even know who to call to bark orders or threaten? I’ve said over and over that most people don’t even have any idea where their electricity or water comes from (give yourself a quiz and see if you can accurately answer that question before feeling smug.) “The Grid” is not a valid answer, though I’d be impressed if most people could even say that.

What’s really going on in front of our eyes is what I’ve decided to name a Leaky LARP. LARP stands for Live Action Role Playing game, a combination of re-enactment, storytelling and gaming—players are given a role and act out their character’s actions within an overarching story, from the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The reporters on said LARP are actually intrinsic, and important Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in the game. They certainly can’t comprehend the extent of complexity of modern society themselves. But they do know where they’re supposed to line up with the general story line. And they also know their paycheck depends on them delivering, through clicks and other measures of engagement on the Internet. So the story must be exciting.

The problem is, with all this “through a glass darkly” stuff, is that it’s like a fictional movie that leads with a trailer that says “this movie, while a work of fiction, is based on historical events.” Except those historical events are actually real, and are happening, and usually involve the harm or death of someone in the Real World. It’s all scripted. Until, well, it isn’t. Trump was nearly killed by a 20-year-old male (at least at this current time I’m writing) who set himself up as a LARP-player extraordinaire. The incompetent bureaucracy assigned to President Trump played their part as incompetent bureaucrats, replete with local law enforcement clowns, and DEI agent hires unable to holster their guns. Trump dutifully played his part as well, not dying, of course, but then standing up with the help of agents and raising his fist in the air and mouthing “fight, fight, fight!”

Of all the players in this Leaky LARP, Trump has known he’s a central figure, and his performance didn’t disappoint. Whether he authentically, instantaneously shoved his fist into the air, or did a great piece of improv. doesn’t in the end really matter. When someone nearly blows your head off, at least in my book, they get the benefit of the doubt. Fight, fight, fight it is. He was still a 30 degree twist of his head from getting his brains blown out.

I wrote a piece on Donald Trump back in 2016, right after he was elected the first time. It still holds up, and contains one of my favorite lines I’ve ever written. It’s solid, and I recommend reading it.

But in the larger Theory of Empathetic Evolution scheme of things, he’s just another relational disruptor inside a system declining for other reasons. 

And like a play based on characters violating the Fourth Wall with the audience, our LARP only occasionally grounds itself to the outside world in real terms. Bullets hit ears of presidential candidates. Small sections of major urban areas get turned into No-Man’s Lands, with looted Walgreens, or spin-out competitions in intersections. And while the line may seem blurred between fantasy and reality, the other truth is that people actually die, and lives are wrecked in the context of those grounding moments. As Melania Trump’s letter to the American people elegantly stated, Donald Trump has a family too. Regardless of which part of his brain center lifted his fist into the air.

If there’s a takeaway from this, it’s that we need to pay more attention to the backdrop, and less to the scripted moments. Shit never stopped getting real. And it would behoove us to focus on the long line of trailers on Lombard St. in Portland, or the fat folks waddling through the local Walmart — or Food Co-op. Not nearly as exciting — but a telling signal in a pattern of nationwide decline.