One of the craziest things to happen in the past week is the shooting of Alex Pretti, a protester/obstructionist in the current insurrection occurring around ICE operations in Minneapolis, MN. The actual micro-facts of exactly how Pretti ended up getting shot by ICE agents are in dispute, which are where arguments occur nowadays.
But we can learn a lot about where our country’s memetics are by listening to the arguments around his killing. We know for example:
He had a pistol — a 9 mm Sig Sauer.
He had been involved in prior protests, and apparently had broken a rib.
He had a concealed carry permit for his handgun.
He was reacting to a woman in an altercation with ICE agents.
He was part of a Signal app text network that sent individuals to ICE arrest scenarios.
He’s dead.
What follows is more fascinating than just his death. What is interesting to me is HOW people discuss it.
The biggest element is his legality in carrying a gun into such a situation. The lower complexity discussion centers around whether he had a Second Amendment right to carry a pistol in that situation. I believe he absolutely did. Various people have argued that he didn’t have his papers on him. OK. Another correct, but ungrounded, low responsibility argument. Having papers stuffed in his pocket would not have prevented him from getting shot.
But what is completely ignored is whether he SHOULD have carried a gun.
When someone argues he had the right, what they’re really telling you is that the person speaking understands relationships as externally defined. He had the right to carry the gun. Society gave him that right. But what it doesn’t consider is his level of personal agency and independent responsibility in carrying it. It was lethally stupid to decontextualize his decision making into some kind of absolute right. And now he’s dead.
When I was involved in a lengthy Civil Disobedience campaign regarding protection of native wildlands in Idaho, we had a rule for the encampment I helped construct. NO GUNS. We had that rule because it was a good rule — that guns and the chaos inherent in protest, civil or illegal, don’t mix. And that guns far too often give law enforcement a reason to shoot you. And while the legal part may grind on, if you’re on the receiving end of a bullet, you’re still likely to be dead. Activists involved in the campaign did all sorts of crazy stuff — from living in trees, to extended blockades of roads. But NO activists were killed.
And the cops had guns. You better believe it. As the campaign dragged on, US Forest Service law enforcement even upped their training/recruitment, and produced essentially Special Forces, trained to go into the forest after activists, who were pulling all sorts of shenanigans to slow down logging activities. These guys had machine guns, the whole bit. Yet not one activist was shot in the whole crazy shitshow that were the latter years of the Cove-Mallard campaign.
The reason that we did not carry guns was because we were GROUNDED in reality. It wasn’t that hard to figure out someone would get shot in the context of the largely peaceful protests (there was vandalism, make no mistake about it.). But we were independently thoughtful. And the structure of the campaign promoted agency. Anyone wanting to do “night work” was people the rest of us did NOT want to hear about. People organized themselves into Affinity Groups of 2-3 people, and no one wanted to hear about anyone’s plans, unless it was a formal public action that was intended to be a demonstration, for media consumption. In fact, the way our brains were wired at the time, if SOMEONE wanted to hear, that probably meant they were a fed. And we had a few.
What Alex Pretti’s shooting shows, more than anything else, is not how ICE has changed. It shows the principles I’ve discussed in this piece — that the Left has become ungrounded from the actual reality of their actions. If you’re rushing a cop, and you are wearing a weapon, and you DON’T get shot, that’s a miracle. What is fascinating is to see how the Left is papering over the shooting, somehow trying to re-write rules of engagement with law enforcement, that now cops must delay action in an altercation if they see someone with a gun. The only thing that LEOs will do in that situation is exactly what they did to Alex Pretti. Unload a clip into him.
Attempting to have the system take revenge on itself is a more than cynical maneuver by leadership to create martyrs.
I’ve got some bad news. Ain’t gonna happen. And Pretti paid the price.
One of my favorite pieces of mental work that I figured out in the old noggin is this piece here — the origins of memetic conflict that happens when different value systems collide. In order to completely grok it, you’re going to have to read a little about v-Memes — it’s not that hard. But the short answer is that when different societies, based on different social structures, run into each other over contested ground, how evolved those systems are will definitely decide the outcome.
The short version is that in the classic Spiral Dynamics progression of societies — Survival, Tribal, Authoritarian, Legalistic, Performance-Based, Communitarian and on into the Second Tier — misunderstanding and conflict will depend on the memetic spacing of levels between the two conflicting social structures. Two levels (e.g. between Tribal and Legalistic) will result in Incomprehension — the two systems cannot understand each other. Three levels? What I describe as the Insanity/Barbarism conflict, which is what is happening currently in the conflict over ICE in Minnesota.
Here’s the social structures from Don Beck as a refresher.
Through a complicated path, mostly committed by psychopaths seizing control of dominant foundational myths in the Lefty Noosphere, the current Democratic Party has reverted primarily to Tribal knowledge structures. That drives emergent focus on Donald Trump as some version of The Great Satan, and a pathology across Lefties of all stripes, but especially their intellectual caste, with what is called Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). The justification for TDS is honestly monotonous, and is an exemplar of how higher knowledge structures that may have been present in individuals, necessarily simplify and rigidify when downconverted into Tribal forms. Trump is evil, Trump is corrupt, Trump is buddies with Epstein and a pedophile, and so on. No amount of context can derail this myth structure, other than the Left being forced to recognize that Trump is still President.
This is powerful when coded into some form of exchangeable morality — numerous folks don’t have to know much to “virtue signal” — communicate to others in the tribe their status through ostensible piety, of these foundational myths. It IS true that most of these Tribal myths are all centered around “Trump as a dishonorable, evil man.” The problem is that the world is a more complex place than whether you hate Donald Trump or not. And to some extent, the Republicans aren’t helping much, either. The current Republican administration is hardcore Performance/Goal-Based thinking. The one thing that matters is getting done whatever the governing item is. And Trump engages in constant negotiations with his adversaries, obviously due to his background as a New York real estate mogul.
This comes off as absolutely insane to the Lefty In-group/Out-group Tribalists, who, with poor consequential thinking, cannot perceive how they’ve been co-opted by their parasitic psychopath class, who had prior to Trump and Elon Musk showing up, had established a rich vein of revenue through exploitation of face-value virtue-laden topics that the majority of their base had lapped right up. “USAID is saving starving kids in Africa!” is one of my favorites. Why? I worked for USAID in Egypt, and had the surreal opportunity of seeing how they actually worked. I was window dressing for some competing ruling faction in Egypt at the time, supposedly working on a fertilizer plant control system, which then was one of the projects providing cover for the deep political machinations going on, facilitated by political US meddling. The end result of which was the Arab Spring, one of the original Color Revolutions, which did not quite go the way we planned.
The larger Republican Party is not completely Performance-based. There are still components that have strong Authoritarian bents (the Christian Right) as well as a large institutional caste of actors, named along with their Democratic counterparts, the Deep State, occupying the Legalistic v-Meme. If the Republicans seem diffuse as far as worldview, it’s because they are. While the Democrats are spiraling out of control on pure Tribalism, the Republicans face a queasy coalition centered around less government and traditional government favors to corporations and businesses. Which is problematic, because while the Democrats can coalesce around absolutely insane myths, like gender identity is only determined by how a person feels today. And because of their simplicity, these information structures are truncated, based on emotional appeal and very viral.
And so we end up in the current disaster in Minneapolis. In the last few weeks, two “activists” have been shot and killed. Theoretically, these “activists” are somehow nonviolent Legal Observers and merely traveling around after ICE and documenting arrests made by ICE. The videos of what actually is happening, and other recent disclosures regarding their organization, do, in no way shape or form, support any of this. The activists are extremely well-organized and coordinated in a network where individuals are dispatched via the messaging app Signal to tail ICE vehicles, and upon arriving on the scene, disrupt ICE arrests of illegal immigrants. When they arrive, they act literally like insane monkeys on meth, often closing distance with ICE agents face-to-face, while blowing whistles and horns. With the recent information regarding Signal app organizing, it is my belief that they could actually be considered a criminal conspiracy, subject to Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) sanctions.
Of course, the PROBLEM is within the context of their Tribal situation, sprinkled with fragmented myths about Constitutional function, is that they don’t perceive themselves as a criminal operation. Self awareness is pathetically low. And that is deeply problematic when dealing with the outside world. The second person shot, Alex Pretti, a 37 year old ER nurse — far past the age to rationalize this kind of behavior with youthful ignorance, showed up for his round in the “chase the ICE agents and harass them” sporting a handgun — a Sig Sauer 9mm. One of the unbreakable rules in my world, when I was helping run a large civil disobedience campaign, was NO GUNS. You don’t have guns at a protest, because if things go south, and sometimes they do, LEOs can kill you legally. And then you’re dead.
This particular type of Sig Sauer also has a handling misfire problem, and if dropped, can go off. It’s also no surprise to me that it was an ER nurse who made such a bad judgment call. ER staff were the worst of the COVID alarmist crowd, and there’s also no question that trauma can stack up and cause erratic reactions in stressful situations. Immediately, the propaganda side on the Left seized on the notion that Alex had a legal concealed carry permit, and in the classic distortion of thought that is haunting the Left nowadays, put that in the blender and came out with “ICE needs to adapt their tactics to support Legal Observers’ Second Amendment rights to carry hand guns into violent situations and conflicts with ICE officers.” Are you kidding me?
Even while they’re acting like meth-crazed monkeys. I watched the videos involving the incident where the gun went off (my guess is likely a misfire) and then what happened is what can happen in any LEO arrest scenario. Once the cop thinks either he or his buddy is under threat from a firearm, the cop will proceed to empty their clip into the suspect. Which usually means a dead perp. Much was also made in this Lefty propaganda round about how he was defending a woman “activist/Legal observer.” The clip I saw didn’t include the prior where she got into it with the ICE agents. But I’ve been in enough situations to know that a certain subset of women will fly off the handle, and believe they are the reincarnation of an invincible Valkyrie, and aggressively attack even LEOs. Call it the Mama Bear Social Control response. I even trained my two sons, now ages 25 and 27, when they were 16 and 18, what to do in a situation with potential law enforcement involvement (say a fight at a party.). They are both strapping young lads, and they both know that they are supposed to grab their girlfriends and run like hell, preferably before the cops show up. And if the girlfriend is dancing on his arm, screaming about her honor, and won’t leave — then ditch her. Cops will always threat-assess, and my two sons are 6’3″ and 6’5″. Which means one is going on the bumper with the bracelets, and the other is going in the backseat of the cruiser. The cop is not going to care about any dancing fairy princess.
Once again, the arguments from the Left to support their position are the result of projection and supposition — perceived moral order. Not validity grounding with anything resembling reality. I think it’s hard to understand this completely. I think a lot of the people involved in the obstruction of ICE in MN are likely middle-class, and have little to no experience with law enforcement. So they view themselves as White Knights, endorsed by their communities, and encouraged by local and state leadership in these actions. They view that because these various state and local officials have endorsed their moral position, and said they are brave and courageous, that somehow these ostensibly powerful people will rescue them. Little do they realize that their distorted sense of morality has no real power in a federal courtroom. And the other key fact is that they also are patsies ripe for disavowal by exactly those same individuals.
And what to think of the state and other government officials encouraging the insurrection? They’re locked in a deal with utter personal destruction once all is revealed. There’s tons of Somali daycare and medical service fraud that it is simply impossible to believe local and state officials either ignored, or were directly on the take. Fraud in Blue States is going to be an emergent issue in the coming New Year. While the Minnesota cabal, including Tim Walz and his lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, seem to be mostly passively raking in the cash, and NOT involving the crazy gangland violence on the US southern border, it still means that this will be certainly the end of their political careers and inflated standard of living (Walz has already stepped down from running in the next election.)
But there are larger implications nationally. It’s through a glass darkly on what has been going on in our western southern tier, whose political caste is thoroughly intertwined with far more malevolent actors than the displaced Somali pirates in Ohio and Minnesota. You don’t have to stretch the Overton Window too far to see how the CIA facilitated Somali immigration, starting in the ’90s. But most of what came across the southern border during Joe Biden’s disastrous presidency came courtesy of the Sinaloan and other cartels. Walz and his crooked cohort may just end their lives in the big house. But that’s not the same for the various political forces across California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The cartels are fond of torture and execution. And the Pandora’s box of inflated human trafficking revenue that happened through the betrayal of the Biden administration, and in particular Alejandro Mayorkas, has collapsed. No real natural born killer is going to take that lying down. The cockroaches are going to eat themselves.
Getting back to the primary point of this piece — the Left has left itself open to destruction in the context of memetic understanding by viewing the current administration as insane. They’re not. The problem is the flip side of the memetic conflict is that the Right views them as barbarians, which is decidedly not how the Left views themselves. The Left better get over its fascination with its self-generated moral order, and quick. The federal government, as well as most of the country, is nowhere near the point of collapse. And while the Left may not view themselves that way, the Trump administration, especially in the context of its goal-oriented focus of clearing out illegal aliens doesn’t give a shit about their moral order. They possess the reins of law and order on their side. And in the end, law and order are popular with the general population.
And as the effects of brainwashing using permission structures, started by David Axelrod and Barack Obama, wash off, my bet is no one is going to give a damn about the ginned up Lefty moral order that was potentially not created, but certainly accelerated, during the fractured COVID years. And grounding back to reality is brutal. It involves arcing.
And that means someone is going to get severely burned.
One of the largest problems facing society in the current complexity crisis is the chronic persistence of innumeracy. If we remember that expanded relational sense actually relies on understandings of time and space, then innumeracy is a root cause. You can’t have a sense of history if you have no anchoring in what it means to live 50 years ago — let alone 1000 years ago. And our understanding of spatial scales is also tied to innumeracy. One of my favorite tells of being American is identification with the state in which you reside. If you’re talking to anyone outside the US, unless you’re in California, Texas or New York, you’re going to get a bemused blank stare. Certainly not going to help you understand where Vietnam is.
And in a world increasingly dominated by numbers, that’s a problem. Because you’re supposed to ‘get’ this locational sense. And that means when you don’t, people are going to think you’re an idiot. A classic emperor’s new clothes deal — folks oughta know better. But they just don’t.
Of course, understanding any number is key on establishing context — which may include even more numbers, or transforms of numbers. And when that’s the case, you have to add either algorithms, or best guesses, or maybe even shared perceptions. It gets complicated quickly. Or rather, complex. And what does that mean? The minute things get too scrambled, we scurry around looking for an authority to tell us what this means.
Which is where the problem arises. The minute you go looking for that authority, you are now playing in the field of psychopathy. Psychopaths are the ones that are more than happy to take your perceptions — maybe in your conscious mind — and turn them into emotions. And once that happens, you’re open to manipulation. The psychopath doesn’t even have to understand the numbers, nor their meaning, themselves. One of the aspects of beauty of the new world of AI and LLMs is we are seeing you don’t really need any understanding of anything to train your own personal LLM inside your head in spitting out an actionable response that will move a token around on the game board. You just have to have run that program through enough training data to know you’re going to get the outcome you want. One of my favorite scenes, in one of my favorite movies, ‘The Dark Knight” (with Heath Ledger’s Joker) is in the hospital, where Two-Face accuses him of having a plan. “Do I look like a guy with a plan? I’m just a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it.”
So that’s what psychopaths do. And it’s wickedly effective in a society that refuses to slow down and think.
One of my favorite uses of innumeracy as a weapon of terror is the current kerfuffle over Greenland. If you go out on the street, and ask folks how many people live in Greenland, you’re likely to get puzzled looks from most folks. Most people have no idea how many people live anywhere, let alone Greenland. Don’t believe me? Go ask folks how many people live in Germany.
But some brave souls will guess. 1 million? 10 million?
The actual answer is 56 thousand, give or take. (FWIW — this is the population size of the isolated area I live in.) And if they’re tuned into the news at all, they’ve likely heard that Donald Trump is currently machinating to take control of Greenland. 51st state or whatever. The real reason, besides some degree of personal ego, is that, if you look at a polar projection map of Greenland, you’ll see it is extremely strategically located for missile and sea defense. We actually own the only military base on Greenland — Pituffik Space Base, where we have a bunch of enormous ballistic missile early warning systems (BMEWS) that look across the polar region to see if Russia is attempting to annihilate us. Greenland is important in the context of creating Trump’s “Golden Dome” plan for missile defense.
Now here’s where the innumeracy and confusion comes in. Headlines regularly blare “US will go to war with Europe over Greenland!” or “The European Union sends troops to Greenland to defend against US aggression or threats of seizure!” Troops are obviously an amalgam mental model inside media market heads — and the transformation algorithm is to take some idea of the situation and move it into people’s limbic/emotional regions, so they can, well, basically, hate Donald Trump.
The number of troops from European partners sent to Greenland? At the time, less than 50. And Greenland, with only a couple of small towns on it (and some more abandoned US military facilities) wouldn’t have much of a place to host them. Maybe they could get located at the facility at Pituffik. But that would be quite odd — welcoming a defending force inside the only military facility of the nation who supposedly wants to take control of the island.
Now here’s the rub. MAYBE psychopaths have realized the ludicrousness of all the actual numbers, and are constructing that mental model that will get people to hate Trump even more (a TDS viral accelerator, as it were.). But maybe not. Maybe it’s actually just a great angle for a relational disruption and chaos strategy across the board, for a non-event that is really a non-event. No one’s asking what a takeover of Greenland by the US military would do on anything but paper — which is actually the critical aspect of it. Declaration of Greenland being a US protectorate would be critical in telling Russia and China that weird stuff is not going to be tolerated. And it also likely will put other threats to bed preemptively.
Like China and Russia drilling for oil! Or mining for rare earth minerals. That must be the real reason for Trump’s obsession! And with Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), Greenland is really going to be green Real Soon Now.
And now we can see the exploitation of innumeracy once again. If you go out, once again, and ask folks how long it’s going to take to melt all the ice on Greenland, you’ll hear answers like ’20 years’. Or ’50 years’. Because we’re approaching the point of Global Boiling!
But once you jump off the Great Dichotomy — that the planet is going to become uninhabitable in 50 years — the numbers really don’t add up. Our own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says 1000-10,000 years to melt all of Greenland’s ice. Big error bars (not that this matters) but basically we don’t know. And I could say a whole bunch of math-y stuff how all this is based on some linear model, and so on. Blah, blah, blah.
“But it doesn’t matter!” screams the psychopathic contingent. “Over 100 GIGATONS of ice a year melt off of Greenland!” Whenever you hear gigatons, you better be scared. No mention of the context for any of this — Greenland ice volume (note wikipedia measures volume, but loss rates are in mass, to confuse people)
2.9 million cubic kilometers = 2.9 x 10^15 cubic meters = 2.9 x 10^18 kg (more or less). And reality is lost in the fact that 100 GT is really not very much at all.
And no one has any interest in popping down a level to what it would take to actually mine sites in Greenland. Greenland has 1 mine for anorthosite — a material that can be used for high temp construction material, and also a potential for titanium. Mining someplace like Greenland is hellishly hard — you gotta really want what’s under the ground — and the odds of it being accessible without a ton of ice on it is just not realistic at all. I’ve worked with a company in Labrador with my students. It was just a fun thought exercise on what do you do with all that snow you’ve got to deal with.
But psychopaths are not going to have a problem exploiting any of the ignorance around actually producing results from mining. Nor do they need to know the veracity of any potential claims. When your goal is chaos, that’s what you gear your training data for.
Does that mean there are no psychopaths with a conscious plan of manipulation on any of the basics of Greenland? Of course not. There might be a couple of smarties out there who have figured out what the public doesn’t know. But the minute the gigaton numbers come marching out, you don’t really need much. The psychopathic LLM kicks into overdrive, looks for hot spots (war! money! monomaniacal Trump!) and rapidly creates contemporaneous messages to support the bullshit. Chaos is the point, after all. There will be no epiphanies after the chaos campaign falls apart. It will just be on to the next point that might work.
And no one’s talking about how an ounce of prevention might be worth a pound of cure. That’s the whole metacognition thing — knowing what you don’t know. We’re just downstream of yanking Maduro out of Venezuela because of decades of neglect about dealing with a regime that allowed Hezbollah to produce long-range drones in our backyard, give a controlling interest in oil to China, and participate in poisoning our citizens with fentanyl and cocaine. Maybe a little preemptive, judicious action in another hot spot of potential global contention against real adversaries – what X mutual, @vtchakarova Velina Tchakarova calls the DragonBear (Russia and China together) might not be so stupid. In fact, it might be really smart.
But the psychopaths come out, with their magic blanket of fear. And here we are.
If there’s a remedy for any of this, just remember. The math isn’t complicated. But you gotta get your thought process to slow down, and say “huh” a lot. That dissipates that innumeracy cloud faster than any statistics class. Repeat after me: “that don’t make NO sense!”
P.S. I wrote another piece on innumeracy and COVID here. It’s quite good. COVID was driven by psychopathic manipulation of innumeracy. And it ain’t gonna get fixed just by taking another statistics course. I did go out and do a casual ‘man on the street’ sampling on what people believed the death rate from COVID was — most people said ~ 10%. Actual rate, just for your edification, was ~.05%. Typical respiratory winter numbers.
H/T to pal Joe Biello, who I work on climate issues with. Thanks, Joe!
Tool Cabinet, 2026. In case you’re wondering, I use ~ 5 of these for 95% of my woodworking.
I am writing this on Sunday, January 4, functionally the day after US Delta Force troops seized the head of the Venezuelan government, Nicholas Maduro, from the Presidential Palace in Caracas. To call it audacious would be an understatement. A coordinated force, launched primarily from an offshore fleet, mobilized helicopters, a slew of different aircraft types, including a B1-B!, and successfully evaded detection by Chinese radar long enough to destroy the entire Chinese armament Venezuela had imported. It is unclear, at least to me, the extent that the Iranians had constructed drone factories inside Venezuela, but I suspect these were hit as well. Talk about a bad investment.
If you had to pick a scenario to illustrate the complexity crisis in memetics, you couldn’t pick a more profound example. The Left immediately condemned snatching Maduro, a mass murderer by anyone’s yardstick, under the worn-out aegis of colonialism, while Venezuelans themselves were dancing in the street. Immediately, the anti-colonial propaganda machine spun up the usual condemnations of the invasion, saying it was oil for Trump’s buddies as the primary reason for the war — a claim they have been pre-bunking for a while, in an attempt to discredit the sinking of drug running boats and submersibles out of the Venezuelan ports as being in the interest of the United States. As their lede goes, there can be no legitimate external or internal action to preserve the United States — as the most hegemonic, evil state in history, we’ve gotta go down.
Fortunately, not everyone in the current government agrees with them. The information flows in the country, increasingly complicated, and not supportable by the sophistication of the previous bureaucracy, was going to simplify and decentralize. Those are the memetic physics, and you cannot run from that. But the how of that transition matters a great deal to those of us that live here. MAGA has attempted to be turned into a slur by the Democrats — but for those of us that live here, and are not planning on exiting to a Riviera, Mexican, French or otherwise, has widespread support as a guiding principle. That doesn’t mean that the lumpenproletariat has any clue what actions this actually entails, other than not giving away a ton of foreign aid to other countries. But certainly, allowing Russia and China to build up a military force on the other side of the Gulf of America isn’t such a hot idea. That is definitely not in the national interest.
And so a realignment of the Venezuela junta, that spent a good hunk of time publicly declaring its hatred for America, was really inevitable. Those in power, and in the know, who do NOT want to leverage collapse to add to their personal family fortunes, were sooner or later going to be all in. It’s one thing to have a socialist/communist government in our hemisphere down at the tail of South America. It’s quite another to have one on your doorstep.
What’s amazing is that Venezuela, as a failed narco-state, is such an obvious one. Here’s a hint how you can tell. Any failed state will be accompanied by refugee outflows of the middle and upper classes before the peasantry starts hoofing it for the border. If you can get out, you get out. I got a window into that last year when I visited Costa Rica. Conversations with locals indicated that Venezuelan teachers, doctors and whatnot were showing up quite a while ago. What WAS interesting was that in places like El Salvador, who experienced their mass migration before President Nayeb Bukele took office, the Venezuelans merely showed up into empty slots that were waiting for them. So maybe, just maybe, the signal that should have been heeded was lost on the rest of the world — the bourgeoisie simply were too busy re-settling in their new environs.
But any country hemorrhaging its people is a failed state. People don’t leave until they have to. The semi-official number of people fleeing is in the neighborhood of 8 million, out of a country of approximately 28 million. That’s gotta be up there with Cambodia at the end of the US Vietnam period.
It should be said that any narco-state does not have the interests of the U.S. at heart. The drug war has metastasized into a full-on tool of internal destruction inside the U.S. Once again, numbers are hard to come by (amazingly). But at least 1/2 million Americans have died in the last ten years. What is even more tragic is the number of children — I deep-dove this figure and came up with about 5000 in the last ten years. That means 500 kids/year are dying from fentanyl poisoning. Because drug overdose is often self-administered, the old mental models get spun up in varying ways about the responsibility for the deaths. But kids are kids — and even if they’re 17, they mostly get a break regarding total accountability for their actions.
Why are we so stuck in the current situation? We’ve got the mass death at our door. But we simply cannot change our mental models on what non-kinetic warfare really looks like. In a best case scenario, we should sort allies from adversaries on whether they are cracking down on production of fentanyl and associated chemicals inside their borders. Yet the fentanyl still streams from China, as well as Venezuela, and especially Mexico. If you cannot control production of chemicals inside your own country, if you’re not registered as a failed state, you’re damn close. Or if not a failed state, a true adversary.
And at a minimum, those states and their justifications are the last thing we should be listening to. It’s a war, folks, like it or not. You pay attention to your adversaries. But you don’t suck up their propaganda.
Understanding the Venezuela crisis also requires shattering of old models of how we perceive how we operate in our own hemisphere. Whether we exercised the Monroe Doctrine or not, we believed it to be true. But that’s not what has been happening Everyone from non-state actors like Hezbollah, to the usual suspects of Russia and China, have been operating in Venezuela. And their actions are profoundly not in our interests. But the American public can’t even conceive that Lebanese terrorists could be running around in our literal backyard. It never comes up in any discussions I read. And the fact that it took Trump drawing that hard line against them is more a sign of past managerial neglect towards the American empire than anything else. Once you get your government filled with enough globalists and collapse advocates, this kind of thing was inevitable. We are the world. Indeed.
And the connections between Iran and Venezuela are indisputable. Iranian drones were being manufactured in Venezuela. Do people really think that they were going to be used against Trinidad? But it’s all so fantastic, and requires a knowledge of geography elusive to the modern American, we end up back with the notion that it’s another war for oil. Look folks, oil is fungible — and what that means is that oil from Texas looks like oil from Venezuela like oil from Saudi Arabia, once you mess around a little with the chemistry and sulfur content. The per-barrel price is the only thing that dictates who gets it. But who gets the money FROM it does change. And that’s the North Star of how to understand any oil-related crisis.
What’s more interesting is tracking the stuff that is scarce. This piece by Tracy ShuChart (on Substack) is a must-read for all Illuminati wannabes. Venezuela turns out to be a much bigger play than oil. And as China attempts to use its various rare earth surpluses as a political tool to bring the US to heel — not too much, because if we stop buying their junk, their own middle class will revolt — Venezuela shows up there, conveniently, as a potential proxy supplier. If we had a news media that had some sense (we don’t — they are mostly composed of traitorous, whining fools) these folks would be getting out a global map and the red yarn to tie together the network China is using to corner the market on all the stuff, like tantalum and coltan, that makes all our new spooky devices actually work. So if you were China, why wouldn’t you reach out to an ally with no scruples, who could in combo form, kill off your adversary’s children with fentanyl, while destroying their supply chain for all their high tech? And why wouldn’t you help that same partner stock up on suicide bombers, still smarting from all the US action in the Middle East? It’s one helluva play — but if it went off, the chaos generated would be spectacular.
And the United States Lefty corps will be there to pre-bunk everything, and keep us in a state of paralytic senescence. We deserved it after all. Black Lives Mattered — until they became inconvenient as well.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s that any functional state needs a national interest. And that national interest needs to be grounded and real. And the US is allowed to have one.It gets back to the whole Collapse Narrative thing I’ve been writing about. The short form for the cheap seats in the back — you can always tell a Collapse Narrative by its lack of anything other than babbling moral principles. It’s not that principles don’t matter. But if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
One of the most preposterous Collapse Narratives is that by snatching Maduro, somehow China and Russia are emboldened in their own personal territorial quests. “If they did that, we can do what WE want.” So far, Russia and China have proved to be far more rational, self-interested actors than that. They ain’t out there for world peace, folks. And any nation that would help create the chemicals for fentanyl production is no real friend of ours. When they see us grab Maduro, they know the marble game is for keeps. And only seditious traitors like Mark Kelley, the Senator from Arizona, are going to try to spin it differently. China and Russia aren’t going to feel like the door is more open for their own territorial adventurism. They’re going to know that if we say something is important to us, we mean it. That’s the way functional hegemons work. And ALL nation-states are their own little hedgehogs. Don’t fool yourself.
None of this means that the runway to a bright future for Venezuela is free and clear. Left in place are the various junta members that helped Maduro do the bad stuff he did. But they are a bunch of rats — that’s what happens to your soul when you justify killing your own people. Trump has announced that we’re going to run Venezuela (Marco Rubio must be rubbing his brow), and I’m sure part of that message was that he was gonna kill them if they didn’t do what he asked them to do. Sometimes, the way you approach societal evolution is to have your leadership order it. And then hope that it takes. To a far lesser degree, it’s what I do in my own classes in design.
But success in Venezuela is going to be hinged on one thing — remigration of its professional class. Our job has to be giving Venezuelans enough hope for a new society that those people will come back. Because societies fundamentally run on information and information complexity. But in order to have information complexity, you’ve got to first have information.
I’m saying a prayer for Venezuela. And crossing my fingers as well. We could use a little luck about now.
And don’t forget — sometimes you go the Great Game. But sometimes, the Great Game comes to you.
Why won’t the Left in the United States support the current citizen’s revolution in Iran? If we want to understand why, we have to realize that all these actions occur in The Matrix, as well as on the top level.
A brief update. Approximately a week ago, across Iran, massive public demonstrations have been held against the mullahs and the Islamic Republic. The deeper history locates the start in Iran’s Kurdistan, in the town of Saqqez, centered on the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, after detention by Iran’s morality police in Tehran in 2022. The protests have bubbled along for awhile, but exploded last week across Iran. Though the collapsing economy certainly primed the pump, the treatment of women by the Islamic Republic’s mullahs have driven the moral compass on efforts to overthrow the current regime.
As I’ve written in this piece, Iran is not a ‘downstream tribal’ nation like Saudi Arabia. The population is split into multiple cultural and memetic groups, which range from tribal peasants to modern-day Performance-based liberals. Iran has some of the trappings of a Performance-based Communitarian society, in that its defense programs are likely the most advanced of any Third-World-esque outlaw nation. You don’t invent nuclear weapons nor sophisticated drones without the ability to have advanced social organization. And advanced social organization requires people to possess their own minds — agency.
In the wake of the bombings of the nuclear weapon Fordow and Natanz sites, less reported were other casualties of Israel’s and Iran’s 12 Day War (June 13-June 25, 2025) and Israel’s destruction of key centers of the Islamic Republic’s military ‘civilian suppression’ units. The Thar Allah Corps, Delman Corps, Special Unit in Khavoran, and the Imam Hassan Alborz Corps were four firebases stationed around Tehran to attack the local populace in the case of unrest and uprising. Because of their consolidation during the war — all members reporting in — Israel launched major attacks and basically killed the mullahs’ population suppression shock troops, creating prime conditions for a revolution. As this is being written, the mullahs are attempting to import Arab jihadis from Iraq and Syria to fill in these roles. It is not clear whether they will succeed (I expect Israeli intervention in any kind of mass airlift) but my guess is they will not.
It is important to understand, at least a little, why Islamic regimes are inherently anachronistic and incapable of long-term persistence. Iran long ago left being a Tribal v-Meme society (look at the long history of empires in its cultural record) and was, during the latter part of the 20th century, moving into the meme set of a Legalistic/Performance-based democracy. But this evolutionary progression simply got too far ahead of its leadership — Reza Shah was historically an autocrat and elite, and armed with Savak, a feared secret police, as well as a large peasant caste that was mired back in the Middle Ages. The result was that the regime collapsed, with some help, as well as disinterest from Western forces, and the mullahs took over. Organization and social evolution will always carry the day.
The problem with the level of psychosocial development of any hard core Islamic republic is that Islam, in its core beliefs, is stuck in Tribal/Authoritarian hegemony. Mental models are unchanged literally across centuries. And that means they’re primed to be taken over by psychopaths — which is what happened. Ceilinged out in complicated legalism, the individual has no agency in the face of the mullahs. And there is no allowance for individuals to develop in empathy past what the mullahs will allow. And Islam is very clear about maintaining second-class citizenry for those that don’t fall under the mullahs’ aegis. Don’t believe? Read about Jizya here — the dominant Somali mindset in the current set of fraud scandals in Minnesota.
All this might last for a long time in a pre-modern world (and did.). But influences from the outside are irresistible in the world of the Internet. When the signs of 21st century prosperity are only a click away, and one also gains the ability to broadcast your own plight to that world outside the mullah’s hegemony, regardless what happens with this revolt, the mullahs are living on borrowed time. Ask not who the Death of Geography comes for.
That doesn’t mean that blood will not be spilled. The various military organs of the Islamic State may be more than decimated — but they are not completely gone. And they have far more guns than the urban populations they are up against. A key noted element is whether the Army will refuse to shoot their own civilians, and turn toward the monarchists. We’ll see. I think the Army will turn — because the regime is driving the economy into the ground, and in the end, armies run on money.
So why, then, does the Left seem at best indifferent towards the mass protests in Iran? There is no memetic resonance between the conformance-demanding Left and the desire by the urban Iranian populace for more agency. In fact, it’s anathema. The Sophisticated Left — the Left that has some background knowledge on global affairs — keeps attempting to stand up organizations and agencies similar to what the mullahs have already created. Disinformation policing, messaging rigidity, moral condemnation of non-believers, and funding of special castes are the core of Leftist philosophy. All that’s left to differentiate is a call to prayer five times a day. The v-Meme matching between the punitive legalism and endless categorization of most of the Left in the Western world, and the destructive prescriptions of the mullahs meta-matches. Sure — they disagree on the top level (e.g. ‘treatment’ for homosexuality in Iran involves real conversion therapy — castration, though on second thought, maybe they’re not that physically far apart) but these are minor details. The deep structure of knowledge lines up, regarding who gets to dictate what people think, and who must be punished if their thought just doesn’t line up with the orthodoxy.
The last thing the Left wants to do is amplify the message of more agency. Much has been made about how various young people in the U.S. flocked to the Palestinian protests, and the assumption made was that those young people must have deeply understood the issue. Give me a break. The Palestinian protests were a social relief valve for young people deprived of 3 years of their social development by COVID restrictions. Protest movements were always a great way to get laid, and if you think no one was having sex in those tent cities, you don’t spend much time around post-adolescent adults.
For those that actually know what’s going on, the messages out of Iran are even more powerful against the Left. Iranians as a whole are exhausted with their government’s endless military adventurism across Iraq, Syria and Palestine. They’re the ones under Israel’s bombs, and what the urban class wants is NOT hyperinflation (the Rial, the Iranian currency has undergone something like 1000x inflation in the last 20 years) but some return to a modest prosperity that those of their educational caste have grown to expect. Iranians are very good at secret societies — this comes from literal 1000s of years of dealing with invaders. But by current global world trade standards, no one economy can exist today without trading with its neighbors. This notwithstanding the modest stream of supplies passing through Dubai, and on its way to Bandar al Abbas on the other side of the Persian Gulf.
And as I wrote in this piece, memetically the Left is profoundly wed to collapse. This made them natural allies with Hamas and their suicidal attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. But the current zeitgeist of the Iranian resistance is far more akin to MAGA — more of a ‘Make Iran Great Again’ mindset. People are literally yelling in the street they don’t care about Israel OR Palestine.
The current figurehead of the Iranian resistance is Shah Reza Pahlavi II — who before he was exiled in 1979, used to fly an F-14 in the Iranian Air Force. Information is sparse on him, honestly. I have a bias against any Pahlavi– they have a notorious reputation in my own family toward killing my family members. But I’m going to hold out hope that if the Revolution is successful, that we will see a receding monarchy after order is established. I’m pretty sundered from the remainder of my relatives in Iran, but I can tell you that all the engineering scholars in the US have no desire to go back. And they are not going to get caught in a group of immigrants condemning America. They know what’s at stake.
This is an ever-evolving situation. I’m going to pray for the Iranian people. No one in the world has a corps of first-class Immiserators like the IRCG and the Islamic regime, and the Iranian people have suffered enough. They serve as a cautionary note if we let our own AWFULs get out of control. And I’d argue that it is the Iranian people’s time. They deserve to be free.
But as we know all too well, deserve’s got nothing to do with it.
Son Conor wrapping up his first ultra-marathon — the 50 mile Bryce Canyon Ultra.
One of the more pathologically interesting facets of institutional evolution is how institutions who are behind, stay behind. Business analysts toss around the word ‘culture’ constantly. But what is Laggard culture? And how, if we inherit such an institution, do we do a meaningful turn-around?
In order to understand where to start, you have to understand what are the primary characteristics of a Laggard organization. A Laggard organization is one that consistently falls behind its peers, and seemingly is inured to meaningful change that would alter its status-based relationships with its peers. What this means that, especially in its upper-level administrative ranks, decisions are only made after other, more intellectually progressive orgs. have moved on from past historical patterns that may have provided success. It’s only when those other leaders have established a pattern of accomplishment that laggard organizations will then move in behind the leaders and adopt the ostensibly new successful patterns of operation.
There is no better place to observe this pattern of behavior than in academic institutions in the new milieu established by Donald Trump. With a series of Executive Orders, the Trump administration established, under no uncertain terms that the vast Diversity, Equity and Inclusion apparatuses built up to enshrine Woke Doctrine across all aspects of university life was to be dismantled, or lose all federal funding. This was actually affirmed, pre-Trump 2, by the Supreme Court in 2023, with the case Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard.
But the universities “fought back” — some kind of idiot euphemism that they weren’t going to dismantle their various DEI kingdoms, and “somehow” the public was going to rise up to defend the various machinations the universities had developed in the name of the various terms over the years. Academics screamed “academic freedom!” as well. But academic freedom, for the unwashed, means the ability to pursue intellectual paths inside the university, as long as it was a.) scholarly, and b.) somewhat defensible as far as being related to one’s focus of the home department, or related to a collaborative effort across the university, in pursuit of knowledge. Being one of the few that has actually exercised academic freedom (this blog is just the latest instantiation) I can tell you that most academics never come up against any boundaries where one would need to play that card.
At any rate, many of the leading universities soon settled with the feds (Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Virginia) seeing the handwriting on the wall really NOT that early, but enough to be in front of a pack of very slow donkeys. Many of the others reacted almost immediately with shock — basically changing title names to conform with federal grant applications. But they mostly regrouped, except now those same bureaucracies were doing even less than they were doing before the EOs. If you do some comparison of before/after org charts in most universities, you’ll see all the usual suspects.
This is actually a key identifying element of Laggard institutions — the obvious inability to change in the face of larger societal forces, while turning the entire apparatus of sophistication present in the organization into justifying the status quo. Inevitably, it’s wrapped in some kind of Communitarian v-Meme banner (“we CARE about our people.”). But the reality is it is a deeply tribal response that more maps to the Tribal/Authoritarian v-Meme structures most universities operate under.
What does this mean in terms of information flow and memetics? Laggard institutions exist, with both their members and their chieftains, in a closed information ecosystem. The minute that an institution enters that state, it becomes very difficult to even get leadership to develop larger-scale consequential thinking. Prior change, often due to arbitrary whims of fashion, could easily be managed as long as that information did not provide disruption for the dominant org. chart. And once some paradigmatic comet outside streaked across the sky, while it may have startled at least some of the denizens, everyone immediately put their heads back down and started chomping away. Dinosaurs have to eat.
The other problem with closed information structures, especially when manifested at the Tribal/Authoritarian v-Meme level, is that there is little information exchanged in terms of rational argument, or predictive models. Information discussed is primarily represented as long time myths. And those long-time myths are very prone to institutional parthenogenesis — the analogous process to where bacteria, unable to find other bacteria with which to conjugate, start self-replicating off their original pattern. This would be fine if the old Second Law of Thermodynamics — the tendency of entropy to create increased disorder — wasn’t in play. But trust me — there’s no better place to witness this than in anyone’s faculty meeting. Inevitably, the same memetic restructuring will be brought up again to be debated — again. And instead of new data (or any data) adding to most of the decision making, there will be some tweaking of dominant myths, which further reinforces the notion that fundamental change is not necessary.
If one considers the various developmental stages of universities, much as one might human societies, it’s easy to see that while ALL universities are slow donkeys, at least some have ingratiated outreach and faculty borrowing and lending to modestly prevent the natural tendencies of the social structures they all functionally operate under. For example, MIT doesn’t feel constrained to always follow the pack, and while they are still in thrall to many of the vicissitudes of the entire academic structure, if they want to try something different, there’s no one in the wings saying “well, XXX university hasn’t done that yet.” As part of their fundamental ethos, they’re SUPPOSED to try new things.
That’s not true for any laggard institution. In these, the dominant information transfer always has to be mirroring of whom the institution perceives is in front of it. And while the superficial take is indeed problematic, what’s even worse is that decay in consequential thinking that also happens in the context of the thinking of their leadership. In the case of universities, any change often takes something like 3-4 years to be implemented. Once even a relevant curriculum change might be proposed inside a department, the timescales mean that it won’t end up as a permanent change, an incorporation into the official university catalog for at least two years. Extremely problematic in a world where the major news cycle churns weekly.
All laggard institutions, and universities, with no exception, were hit memetically very hard during COVID. If one believes the memetic principles laid out in this blog, aggregate collective intelligence is very dependent not just on social structure of a given institution, but the frequency and velocity of relational transactions between agents in that system. And there’s no question — high trust societies and businesses maintain their ability to have high information coherence through face-to-face interactions. By sending everyone home to “work from home”, especially with laggard institutions, a new, low baseline of performance was established. Most people simply do not possess the discipline to “work from home.” They require both the encouragement as well as the policing that comes from co-location with other humans. Being who I am and having the ability to talk across Pacific Northwest industry with my former students, my guess is that north of 60-70% of people really are incapable of the self-motivation necessary to do so.
The problem was exacerbated in Laggard institutions because there was a memetic sorting mechanism that also occurred. Those who were actually able to maintain a reasonable work output during the isolation proved that their job talents were NOT tied to geography. And progressive institutions further up on the developmental scale could then scoop up these performers and add them to their staff. They didn’t have to move, and they would get paid more money.
That further separated workforces in Laggard institutions to people who were now testing the bottom of the work output pile. People actively were finding out how little they had to do to keep their job. And with the inherent social fragmentation imposed when entire institutions went home, there were no lateral feedbacks in the social structure. There was no one beating the drum on the slave ship, and worse — you were locked into the oars with no one. Many just quit rowing. Or rather, rediscovered gardening – and I’m not talking figuratively.
And to add even more difficulty to the problem, laggard institutions tend to index their performance relative to “close” peers. The dominant myth assumes stasis of position. And if you’re second rate, that’s where you’re going to stay. And then that turns into a major status myth that impedes any improvement in performance. “Well, we’re just not that good” turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Not surprisingly, especially when there are umbrella excuses like COVID lockdowns, any break from low performance, and return to a high performance mindset, is not greeted well by the broader members of the parthenogenic community. Now moral rackets come into play (“she has Long COVID, and you’re making her look bad!”) as well as negative targeting of higher performance individuals. There’s a natural regression downward in all institutions, from Performance-based Communities, back down into complicated Tribalism. High performing institutions, not surprisingly, attempt to have some mechanisms for rewarding innovation. Moderately performing institutions end up having praise mechanisms for the hierarchy itself, which inevitably involves praise for the non-involved. You can’t disrupt the narcissistic supply a normal hierarchy typically has for ranked actors.
But Laggard institutions are the worst of all, in that any activity outside the memetic box the institution has drawn for a given department becomes a threat to the institution itself. This is enshrined in the famous, but apocryphal “Five Monkeys and a banana” story, where a reward (a banana) is hung on a string below a ladder, and one of the monkeys attempts to get the banana, while the others are sprayed with ice cold water by the supervising researcher. Needless to say, it doesn’t take too many rounds of the experiment for all the monkeys to either a.) figure out such behavior is going to result in punishment, or b.) they better do whatever the other monkeys are doing or they’re gonna get the living daylights beat out of them as well.
The key takeaway is that once a given performance level is lowered and found permissible, and is coupled with absence from larger social forcing (as in work-from-home situations) one sinks into a very deep well that is difficult to recover. Even a visionary leader is going to have a difficult time fixing such an organization, primarily because the circumstances that caused them to assume a visionary perspective in the first place probably didn’t involve layoffs or lots of coercive Survival v-Meme thinking. The integration of an entirely different v-Meme set (“we take care of our people, no matter what!”) based along Tribal values makes it almost impossible. The moral racket turns into the Perfect Racket.
But the problem with being a Laggard organization is that you’re still the last zebra in the herd. And while herds offer substantial protection, when the going gets tough and the lion finally shows up, he’s not going to pick off the one in the front.
I shouldn’t have to state this, but Laggard institutions thrive on “work from home” or “remote work.” End it.
What can be done?
The key to fixing Laggard organizations is to realize where they are in the information space. Typically, they are grounded only weakly to organizations around them, and often not grounded to any reality at all. While all organizations operate in some public context, that does not mean that the appropriate signals actively being generated trigger any behavior modification — especially if people at the top of the organization don’t see anything like reduction in pay, or a lack of raises. One of the classic lines in Laggard organizations in decline is “we’re just not getting our message out,” or “they simply don’t understand our situation.” This is classic low empathy drumbeating — focus on one’s own victimhood, instead of doing any kind of real reflection on how the circumstances causing pain arose in the first place. And forget that connection and processing the views of the larger community. Those Deplorables have no right to judge us. They are deplorable, after all.
There are a couple of primary strategies, though, that can be executed. First and foremost is to make hard targets matter. If someone says they are going to increase enrollment by 50%, then NOT hitting enrollment should result in some physical penalty that is not just passed down the authority structure chain, but hits at the top level. Gaslighting is heavily rewarded in Laggard institutions, and rarely felt by those at the top. Readjustment strategies for targets can rapidly eliminate inflated estimates, without catastrophic measures like “if you don’t hit your target, you’re fired.” Cross-institutional transparency helps as well. Make it clear that failures will be publicized.
One of the most effective strategies for leadership for moving Laggard institutions off the dime once they’ve been told they have to move is to force yet another numbers-oriented version of “what are the deliberate, measurable steps you intend to take in order to do that?” The goal is to ground every piece of the process in reality, so that people cannot wiggle off the hook.
Since Laggard institutions work primarily on mirroring as a learning tool, setting up opportunities to visit known institutional leaders can also help. When someone is also actually doing something difficult, the excuses can vanish. Leadership has to also prepare for the inevitable “we could never do that here!” line of reasoning. Demanding some numerical number of changes after an aggregate set of visits would be a way to ground that process.
Finally, leaders in Laggard institutions must realize that they must lead from the front, with example. This is not easy in a large organization — but can be very meaningful. Volunteering budget reallocations and some number of experiments at the top sends a loud message to the rank and file that there will be no business as usual around here. Remember that mirroring matters. You are not going to evolve people to be data-driven, consequence estimators overnight.
And never forget it is authentic relationships that drive internal growth. When people are connected to other people in real ways, larger loci of responsibilities follow. The number of solutions to be generated for any problem will always be related to the interconnectedness of the social topology of your organization. That one is just the law — because it’s in the memetics.
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.
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.
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.
One of the most insane parts of the last six or so years has been the rise of the trans movement — to the point where it’s moved off the pages of various freak show publications, to a place of prominence where, at least if you live in anything resembling a college town, you’re confronted with it with some degree of regularity. Whether it’s lining up your pronouns in your e-mail address, or making sure you tell some ugly, middle-aged individual they are something they’re not, you’d better be on point in the gaslighting game of the decade.
And it’s highly relationally disruptive and devolutionary. Instead of YOU (yourself) assessing the most basic aspect of a person’s make-up — their gender — you’re supposed to believe whatever they say that comes out of their mouth. You’re supposed to suspend belief. And until Donald Trump came along, you could be fired, persecuted, or potentially slapped with penalties for not indulging someone’s often auto-erotic fantasy.
I really think that most people knew all this would end, sometime. But note to my community. It hasn’t, and it’s not going to end anytime soon. The respective cat is out of the bag.
The research on what’s actually happening with trans people’s brains is somewhere between mediocre to awful. Others have covered that, and I wrote a piece on trans demographics here. There are some key things to note. Not all trans people are afflicted in the same way. It is a mental illness, and these things reside on a multi-axis range of factors. But a significant percentage of them have what are called Axis II/Cluster B personality disorders.
Axis II/Cluster B disorders are major dynamic change units in societies, and have been, literally since the beginning of time. These are things like psychopathy, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, and some version of schizoid and paranoid personality disorders. Out of the center around Axis II/Cluster B are the lesser known ones that often create massive damage. My own mother had a Cluster C Avoidant personality disorder, and the chaos that this created in both my younger life, as well as my maternal search image in how I’ve dealt with women has created all sorts of forks in the road. But it’s also given me insight, unobtainable by any other means.
And what is the main insight? A key, neglected aspect of personality disorders is that they all fall under the umbrella of relational disruption. There are laundry lists of symptoms/characteristics, generated by various psychological researchers over the years. But I’ve found most of the lists inconclusive (there are obviously better/worse ones) likely dependent on whether the researchers themselves had a personality disorder, and were attempting either to discover truth, or hide their tracks. But you, as an individual, know when you’re dealing with one. It’s very similar to a piece of dark matter passing through your orbit. You can’t see it. But you feel the tug. And that’s EXACTLY why there’s so much pressure from the trans community to take away your agency. It’s not just the make-up they’re trying to hide. It’s the chronic relational disruption.
But back on target. The purpose of this piece is not to dig independently into individual personality disorders. Rather, it’s to understand how they act in the context of human social networks and systems.
A couple of years ago, I put some serious time into thinking about how system boundaries in human systems affect how we perceive cause-and-effect of various actions, and lessons from human activities. I centered this around the famous monkey grape/cucumber experiment run by Frans de Waal. In the experiment, there were two side-by-side monkeys, and a researcher would alternately (dependent on the monkey) give a grape reward for retrieving a rock, or a cucumber reward. The key was the two monkeys were able to see each other. And because of that, it didn’t take long for the monkey only getting a cucumber for a rock to get pissed when he saw the other monkey getting a grape for the same action. Everyone laughs at the video, posted below. But it’s actually much darker than that.
The natural tendency of the human brain is to draw a system boundary around the two cages, and leave it at that. But I started realizing this led to a very defective conclusion. What happened if you drew the system boundary around the researcher as well? Or included the cages or open space the monkeys would be returned to in the back? Would the monkey that got shorted beat the hell out of the other monkey? You can read this here to construct your own thoughts. Short version — lots of stuff we do to animals in labs is positively psychopathic.
A couple of years later (that piece was written in 2016) I turned my thoughts to the larger question — what happens when you have psychopaths in systems of HUMANS? This is a harder question, because now one must ask very carefully what the effects are going to be, and whether to consider both temporal and spatial effects. Further, it’s easy to decide that psychopaths (I’m going to use this as my generic term for Axis II/Cluster B/C individuals) are some defect in brain function — poor attachment, brain injury, sexual abuse, cultural environment, etc. All of which may be true. And maybe, in an organ as complex as the human brain, some error rate is inevitable. But that still does not explain their evolutionary persistence. Psychopaths are characters in literature down through the ages. If they really were a deep liability, or rather, a bug, as opposed to a feature, then societies without them would always prevail. And the ones that had any would collapse.
But that’s not the story of human history. I had to face up to the very hard, and disturbing fact that psychopathy is likely a feature of large-scale human systems. Not a bug.
I am a fan of Spiral Dynamics, Clare Grave’s masterwork, and am no believer in cultural relativism. I think the current post-modern anti-colonial rhetoric is actually gaslighting of entire disciplines — sociology, anthropology, as well as psychology. To gainsay the evidence of more or less successful societies is to deny the evidence in front of us. Short version — some people live in upwardly developing prosperity, while others live in squalor and violence. But figuring out exactly why is difficult.
But then I realized. It IS actually possible to draw a system boundary around Tribal societies relatively easily. Once you get above this, it gets more and more complicated. So I looked into Tribal societies.
There is some research on that is good, or at least a little rational. There is also a lot that is total garbage, full of romanticism and nonsense, generated by people who would never last a week in a real one. Some of the backlash is due to guilt over, across the world, our functional genocide of most tribal societies. That is a fact. But in the process of what the civilized world did to these people, we also lost our way in understanding the core of how many of these function. One of the many books I’ve read on how tribal societies function is Guns, Germs and Steel,by Jared Diamond. Diamond has the personality (and probably the research staff) to write long books. Trust me — you have to be neurodivergent to punch out a 1000 page tome. Why that is true will have to wait for another time.
The one thing that Diamond did document, however, is how intrinsically violent tribal life was, and is. People at the tribal stage of development kill each other ALL THE TIME. Murder rates run at 10x-100x of civilized societies. From ChatGPT – but this matches what I remember well.
“In The World Until Yesterday (2012), Jared Diamond draws on anthropological field data—especially studies by Lawrence Keeley, Napoleon Chagnon, and others—to estimate that traditional tribal societies experienced homicide rates far higher than those of modern state societies.
He summarizes the comparison roughly as follows:
Tribal / traditional societies: on the order of 500–1,000 homicides per million people per year.
This comes from archaeological and ethnographic data for small-scale societies such as New Guinea highlanders, Amazonian Yanomamö, and various pre-state groups.
It equates to about 0.05–0.1% of the population killed each year, or over a lifetime the chance of dying by homicide can reach 10–30% in some groups.
Modern state societies: typically around 1–10 homicides per million per year in peaceful contemporary nations (roughly 0.001% per year).
Diamond uses these figures to argue that, per capita, the murder rate in many tribal societies is roughly 10 to 100 times higher than in modern nation-states.
These numbers are not meant as a precise single statistic—Diamond stresses that rates vary widely between tribes and through time—but his central estimate is that the risk of violent death in pre-state tribal societies was about an order of magnitude (or more) greater than in modern societies.”
More reading led to another interesting insight. Lots of tribal “coming of age” rituals involved sexual abuse. It’s pretty well established that child abuse is a problem across Native reservations, even in the US. But what was more interesting (pathologically) was this was once again, not a bug, but a feature of the vast majority of tribal societies. And it obviously happened to girls as well as boys. After some ritual deflowering, there was almost always what I would call a “re-integration” ceremony, where the particular gender would be declared a man, or woman in the tribe. I can’t bring myself to read such publications as Margaret Mead, but there’s lots of stuff in her research romanticizing this.
The other thread I managed to weave into this line of psychosocial development is this: “what happens to individuals who are sexually abused, especially en masse?” The only person I found who had done research on this was Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, England. His work showed a probabilistic spread — most kids rebounded. But some did not, and went on to display deeper pathologies.
But getting back to system boundaries. What happens when we draw that system boundary in both time and space? What is the long continuum over the years in human society that we see, at least at the Tribal v-Meme level? Institutionalized sexual abuse creates key actors in those same societies, that go on to assume roles that, like it or not, are part of that tribe’s persistence. Their warrior societies are stacked with crazy-ass psychopaths. The ones that most of the time, sit in the warrior lodge — because the rest of the tribe knows they are some crazy-ass MFs. But at the right time, when the tribe is threatened by another tribe over the hill, or mountain, the warrior lodge doors get opened, and they pour out. If there are not enough of them, then the tribe CEASES TO EXIST.
What role do women serve in tribal societies? Sadly, by our civilizational standards, women, from a genetic perspective, exist to have an affiliation to being traded to other tribes, during some period of potlatch or some occasion. This is just historical record, folks. And what women would have the affiliation to get down to business with whomever they met? Once again, relationally disruptive women. You can look up your own stories about the libertine nature of various tribal ceremonies. But once again — it’s not a bug. It’s a feature. Without a particular level of genetic mixing, tribes would falter and CEASE TO EXIST.
Don’t shoot me. I’m only the piano player.
So what happens when you’re dealing with a large cadre of people in the middle of a memetic collapse, as the Democrats most clearly are? You end up with what I call the Great Simplification. There aren’t any new ideas to grab onto. So you hang onto your past winners. The problem, though, is this shifts your organization or group back into the Tribal v-Meme space. Anyone that thinks that tribes have more developed information spaces than modern societies, I can’t help you. And that means you’re also looking at downstream seizing of historical mental models (this is a great piece — short version, takes a complex society to create a nuclear bomb, but only a terrorist with a piece of wire to use it.)
But the models you pick will be the ones that your Neo-Tribe has an affinity for. And those affinities, like it or not, arise from The Matrix.
There’s a top-level thought going around right now in the form of emancipation population theory. What’s happened is that in our society, we’ve basically liberated everyone, and now the only ones left are the criminally insane (DeCarlos Brown murdering Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte, NC) or the larger trans movement, which is now starting to produce a statistically significant number of assassins (Tyler Robinson killing Charlie Kirk) all hopped up on hormones and fantasies of self-castration. On the surface, it’s compelling. But both these potential groups hold extreme damage to the public reputation of the Democrats.
And in the age of social media, we get to watch, within the span of six weeks, two actual snuff films. Over and over. You cannot deny either the murder of Iryna nor Charlie Kirk being shot in the throat. For any human without isolating levels of Tribal v-Meme affiliation, simply put — that dog won’t hunt. You would not want to affiliate yourself with a group that advocated for crazy people slitting throats in public, or defend a textbook assassination. No contemporary organization could hold up under those circumstances.
Yet endless pronouncements by a variety of celebrities and D politicians do just that. So something else is going on in the deep subconscious of the Democratic party.
And that thing is a complicated stack. But in the current moment, the question that Ds ask me is this: “Why can’t you drop the trans thing? There just aren’t that many of them.” To which I reply “Why can’t YOU drop the trans thing?”
And the neo-Tribal answer is “we will never betray our psychopathic warrior caste. We’re gonna need them to kill people, whether we’re publicly endorsing this or not. Or we’re going to cease to exist.” Now tag on some modified form that allows for the DeCarlos Browns of the world, whose own MOTHER was pleading for help in dealing with her schizoid/psychopathic son. But the systems set up, profoundly Democratic in essence, refused. Especially in a time of perceived threat, they need those people.
Obviously USAID (which various D actors/operatives have consistently defended) has known about the importance of maintaining a cohort of psychopathic warriors for a while. They’ve funded them in Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. And a bunch of other unstable countries. All masked, of course, as health-related. But when you look at the history of revolution and warfare in these places, you really have to be fooling yourself to see this as benevolent.
From ChatGPT
Here’s the updated master list of documented trans-rights/LGBTQI+ groups or initiatives supported by USAID, now including Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. (It highlights direct grantees or well-documented local partners; many broader USAID health projects also sub-grant to numerous smaller community-based organizations.)
Group / Initiative (lead org)
Country
What USAID funded / supported
Blue Diamond Society (BDS)
Nepal
Partnered with USAID on inclusive disaster-risk and health programs; also received HIV‐program support under PEPFAR and was affected by the 2025 funding freeze.
Parichaya Samaj
Nepal
Community center providing HIV prevention and counselling; supported by USAID-backed HIV programs until the 2025 pause.
LINKAGES (FHI 360) – MSM & transgender community partners
Nepal
USAID/PEPFAR project providing HIV services and community-led monitoring through local trans/ MSM CBOs in 19 districts.
LINKAGES (FHI 360) – trans partners
Kenya
USAID/PEPFAR project supporting trans-competent services and advocacy recommendations for Kenya’s national AIDS strategy.
USAID-funded network of transgender health clinics (Hyderabad, Kalyan, Pune) providing gender-affirming care, mental-health and HIV/STI services.
Humsafar Trust (collaborations)
India
Long-running partner on HIV services for MSM and transgender communities; noted as affected by the 2025 funding pause.
Africa Queer Network
Uganda
Kampala-based NGO that reported receiving a USAID stop-work order during the 2025 pause; previously funded for HIV programs serving LGBTQ—including trans people.
SUSTAIN program (with local partners)
Uganda
USAID-funded “Strengthening Uganda’s Systems for Treating AIDS Nationally,” which highlighted key populations including transgender people in HIV treatment and testing.
LGBT Global Development Partnership (via Astraea, Victory Institute, etc.)
Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, Colombia
USAID partnership that provided small grants and capacity-building to local LGBT groups—including trans-led CBOs—through Astraea’s grant network.
Bandhu Social Welfare Society (Bandhu)
Bangladesh
Implementer of USAID’s SHOMOTA (Equality) Activity (2022–2027) to advance rights and services for gender-diverse people.
Sompriti Samaj
Bangladesh
Co-partner with Bandhu in the SHOMOTA project supporting gender-diverse communities.
Transgender Network Sri Lanka (TNSL)
Sri Lanka
National trans-rights NGO receiving USAID support, including through the LINKAGES HIV program (2017–2019) for trans-inclusive services.
Overall pattern: USAID’s support for trans rights has typically flowed through health-focused programs (PEPFAR, HIV prevention/treatment) and the LGBT Global Development Partnership, which channel funds to local trans-led or trans-serving community-based organizations across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
You might think this is a play from a new playbook. But it’s not. I remember reading about the late ’90s civil war in Sierra Leone. The rebels set up a variety of checkpoints throughout the country. And who staffed them? 16-year-old boys, with AK-47s, dressed in negligees. Called Kamajors, they believed the dresses gave them spiritual protection. What IS interesting, as I investigated this (I remember the pictures from the Granta book I had) is that ChatGPT was very intent on painting the Kamajors as some kind of noble warrior cult defending innocents, than the berserker cult they were actually. Though, TBF, ChatGPT admitted these people did commit war crimes.
So here we are — stuck with a former major party, in the process of social devolution, captured by its own sexually abused and abusive psychopathic members, with no ideas on how to make a better world. And desperately reaching for its own warrior caste that used to be discreetly backed by the US government itself.
They just can’t quit them. And we as a nation better wake up to the deep roots of this. I live deeply entrenched in a community with a lot of their supporters. They are also old, and I suspect dementia, or some low level Alzheimer’s disease is also a problem. But I’ll tell you — they have absolutely no problem serving up fresh hell on the opposition. Or attacking me. And it is true that where I live is a microcosm. But microcosms are useful for understanding larger dynamics.
Civil societies are great things. They preserve far more human life than tribal societies, and provide lifestyles and benefits unimaginable even 100 years ago. But they are inherently fragile as well. And the path back down to the level where circumstance naturally puts the psychopaths back in the warrior hut is gruesome. I wrote this because I finally decided it mattered enough to get this model out there. The challenge is to get enough people to realize that a lot of what is going on with these people is not conscious — but it is actionable. Centering a societally devolutionary group’s (The Democratic Party) psychopathic warrior caste as those creating the diktats of the future is only going to result in societal chaos and destruction. Don’t fool yourself.
It's About Empathy - Connection Ties Us Together 