The Story Of Hollywood

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If you make any effort to consume popular films and television shows, you will notice that much of the content is now locked away on streaming services. You will also notice that many films go straight to a streaming service, or they have a short run in theaters then get sent to a service. Everyone in the film business now has a streaming service and they need content. Like a great, gaping maw that must be fed, the services are sucking up everything they can find.

The funny thing about this shift is that the services are turning out to be a massive money loser for the industry. On the one hand, streaming robs from the theaters, especially small local theaters, by removing cheap content they would use to attract daytime audiences in the summer.  On the other hand, the public has not embraced the streaming service concept as expected. Every service, except Netflix, is a money loser at the moment and none of those are close to getting in the black.

The prime example of the streaming problem is Disney Plus, which loses money every month despite having the massive Disney catalogue. It has the most subscribers and it does generate a lot of monthly revenue, but it also generates massive amounts of expense that swallows up that cash. Much of this is due to the many flops Disney has produced recently, but the concept seems to be the problem. That and the costs make pirating films much more attractive.

The streaming story is a good example of how culture is too complicated to model with a green visor and excel spreadsheet. The bean counters just assumed streaming would follow the model of the rental market, which followed the pattern they saw in the secondary theater market. Low budget films, mediocre films and even terrible films made additional money in the secondary theater market. When take-home rentals came along, these films often got a second life in this market.

It has not worked that way with streaming. A film like the live action Snow White, which was torn apart by internet critics, was a massive flop at the theaters, but then had no life in the streaming market. In the old days, it would get rentals from people curious about it or for get-togethers with friends to have a good time laughing at a bad film. That is not the dynamic with streaming. People will watch nothing rather than sit down to watch a bad movie or something unknown to them.

What streaming failed to account for is the social aspect of films. In the old days, going to the theater for many people was like going to church. It was a thing you did every weekend, not because of the content but because of the social aspect. The theater was where men took their dates and the choice of film or how they selected the film to see was part of the courtship. Friends went to the theater, even if the films on offer were unknown or not good, because it was part of the social event.

Today, the theater is, at best, a sterile place to just see a film. In most cases, it means wading through diversity and tolerating people screaming at the screen, or shooting at it, in order to see a film that will be streaming in a few weeks. The theater is also an expensive proposition now. While this still works for big blockbuster films with good reviews, it is a deal killer for everything else. The theater is no longer a community experience, but a transactional one.

A similar dynamic held the rental market together. People in the suburbs stopped at the rental place to shop for videos. Usually, it was with friends or family, as it would be part of the social experience. Young people with little money could rent some bad films, buy a pizza, and make an evening of it. At the rental place people often talked about the films, which could result in a low-budget film becoming a hit in the rental market as word of mouth boosted its appeal.

That social aspect is gone with streaming. It is a solitary thing for many people because of the atomization of society. No one deliberately watches a bad film on their own because the best way to enjoy that content is with friends. Mystery Science Theater 3000 became a hit because everyone could relate to it. At the same time, people are less likely to try something unknown because why waste your leisure time on a film that you have never heard of, that might be terrible?

Of course, the dynamics of the American film market is why the studios now look to foreign markets for profit. This means more films high on big flashy effects and low on sensible dialogue and plot. They went all in comic book films at the same time they went all in on streaming for the same reason. The flashy stuff on screen works for non-English speakers abroad, so maybe it will work on them at home. Maybe it will also rope in the valuable white audience as well

The reason Hollywood is in trouble, and they are in serious trouble, is they detached themselves from the social aspects of their industry. No other country was able to produce a movie industry like America, because America was a unique place that needed a popular culture to hold it together. In the 20th century, film, television and sports were what everyone had in common. Hollywood was part of the national social capital that defined “American” for people.

As we see everywhere, Hollywood looked at the social capital and wondered how they could turn it into quick cash. They were not alone and maybe not the driving force behind this phenomenon. Mass migration played a role. The desire to harvest American social capital was also behind mass migration. Hollywood, however, needs a shared culture to work and now that the national social capital has been just about consumed, Hollywood is just another commodity.

Wherever the current crisis takes us, it is likely that the story of Hollywood tracks the story of the crisis. An industry that was integral to the people who made it possible is suffering the same fate as the culture it helped destroy. You cannot have a common culture containing people from every part of the globe. At best, it is a somewhat peaceful marketplace where people retreat into their private culture to get away from the cacophony of alien voices in the public square.

Hollywood was always a product of the public square. For it to be Hollywood and not just a film production center, it needed that vibrant American public square created by the people who created America. The people who made Hollywood could not have done it anywhere else. Now that the public square is collapsing and the people who made it are marginalized, Hollywood is dying. The oxpecker finally found a way to kill the host and as the host dies, it dies with it.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Legume Revolution

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Note: Last night I was on a Twitter Space with Paul Kersey, Peter Brimelow, Harrison Smith, and Dan Lyman. The topic will be how best to remove the alien invaders.

Tonight, the two most moderate men on the internet, myself and Paul Ramsey, will be striking the reasonable tone on the Legume Revolution. You can watch on Twitter, YouTube or Rumble.

Since Trump arrived for a second turn at the wheel, everyone has been wondering when the Blob would make its move against him. The one thing we know about these people is they never take no for an answer. Every setback is met with a new round of schemes against their enemies. The relatively muted response to this point has had many people scratching their heads. The invader riots in Los Angeles that are spreading to other cities appear to be the long-awaited response.

At this point, it is clear that the Los Angeles riot is synthetic. The internet is full of images and videos showing professionally trained rioters. For example, whenever you see college aged white girls with whistles at one of these things, you know the army of not-for-profits has their people on the ground training protestors. The whistle is a common, low-tech item for professional protestors. It is often used to alert the lawyers stationed at the protest to come to the area.

There is also the fact that the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, was on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy. This is one of the main hubs of the Blob, primarily used to stage color revolutions around the world. When Bass was in Congress she was on a committee that had the job of overseeing NED, while she was also their most senior board member. Of course, the color revolution queen, Victoria Nuland, is currently a senior Blob person at NED.

It appears that the plan is to replay the Summer of Floyd, but this time with little brown guys as the fig leaf for the project. The George Floyd riots were also a manufactured crisis, organized by white activists. They caught fire and became a series of race riots, where blacks burned down their own neighborhoods, but the general operation was run out of Washington. This time they are trying get the migrants and brown activists worked up into a ghetto riot.

That is looking to be a problem for a number of reasons. One is the scenes of masked men waving Mexican flags while standing on burned out cars was obviously a repeat of the scenes of blacks standing on destroyed police cars. For some reason, the people involved think this is good politics. It is bad politics because it is bad optics. In this case, it highlights the fact that our rulers abetted an invasion. Seeing foreigners celebrate in American cities like this just hardens attitudes toward immigration.

The other problem they have, and it is clear from the videos, is that the immigrants are not willing to riot like blacks. Legal immigrants are in favor and tough measures against illegals and the illegals have no interest in making it easier to get grabbed by the police and put on a bus back home. That leaves the rioting to the twenty-something white losers the Blob relies on as foot soldiers. Now, the blacks are taking advantage of the opportunity and looting the sneaker stores.

Perhaps the biggest problem for the Blob this time is the world has wised up to the color revolution rackets. Lately, they keep failing because everyone understands that these things are not organic. The authorities focus on the support networks in the same way you would attack an army’s supply lines. That was what we saw in the Caucasian country of Georgia last year. The government thwarted the Blob by going after the foreign networks operating inside the country.

The Trump White House has learned the same lessons, which is why they went after USAID on day one. That has hampered the Blob’s ability to subvert, but the Blob has access to lots of resources besides USAID. It seems the White House anticipated this, as well, which is why they were ready for these legume riots. Note that they keep escalating whenever the Blob people make threats. The response to Los Angeles is the same escalatory dominance the Blob likes to employ.

So far, this strategy is paying off the White House. The public overwhelmingly supports a tough response to these actions. The public sees foreign men waving foreign flags in an American city, while fighting with the police. The public naturally expects the government to send in the army. The White House being ahead of the curve on this makes Trump look strong and decisive. The Blob people mewing about it look weak and dishonest, rather than self-righteous.

There is also a secondary issue here. The center of gravity on immigration has been quickly moving in the sensible direction as the public has become fed up with the invasion and more aware of the details. These riots and the Trump response has put the foot on the accelerator. Suddenly, the edgy position in normie politics is a total ban on all immigration, not just illegal immigration. Trump himself is starting to look like a squishy moderate on the immigration issue.

Of course, the thing looming over all of this is the change that occurred in the oligarch class over the last year. During the Summer of Floyd, they were happy to join in on the chaos, so they could feel like one of the folks. They were all waving the flags and chanting the chants. Things are different now and the main reason is they see in their own world the risk automation brings. The AI revolution that has captivated them has also made plain the problem of too many people.

When they think of AI, they imagined the acres of cubicles suddenly emptied out, replaced by robots in the server farm. Those coders, engineers and support people will need something to do soon. AI may turn out to be a fantasy, but it could also be a tragic turn for the oligarchs, if we suddenly have millions of unemployed smart people, wondering how they are going to pay their bills. The scenes they now see in Los Angeles could just as easily be in their neighborhood.

The Legume Revolution is just starting, so it is too soon to know how this thing will playout over the coming months. The conditions are clearly different from those leading to the Summer of Floyd. It is also clear that the Trump admin is better too. On the other hand, the Blob people are relentless. Like a drug-resistant virus, they must be completely eradicated to make sure they do not return. There is much to be done on that score, but this crisis could be a step in that direction.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Materialism’s End

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Note: Tonight at 8:45 PM EDT I will be on a Twitter Space with Paul Kersey, Peter Brimelow, Harrison Smith, Dan Lyman and Jared Taylor. The topic will be how best to remove the alien invaders.

There is a famous movie line that says, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” The line does not originate with the film but much earlier, most likely by Charles Baudelaire. In the 19th century, the line turns up a lot and was used to mean that people often stand by and do nothing when terrible things are happening because they fail to appreciate the great struggle with evil that must define life when one acknowledges the existence of it.

Something similar persists to this day with something we can pin on Karl Marx and others regarding the nature of human society. Marx argued that oppression and inequality were the result of economic relations. Therefore, if you want to get a society free of oppression, then you need to get the economic relations right. Later, libertarians took up the same claim but arrived at a different path to liberation. Ever since, the West has been sure that nothing exists other than economics.

The story of the last century or so in the West has been the spread of materialism as the defining feature of Western thought. Getting the economics right has been the center of all political debate. The left-right axis found new poles with socialism on the left and libertarianism on the right. One side sees equality as the equal distribution of goods, while the other side sees it as the equal distribution of liberty. Both assume that once the economics are right, paradise must naturally follow.

The reason for the “cultural revolution” of the last decade or so is that a portion of the left began to see the error in this view. In the middle of the last century, they embraced the claim that Marxism failed because people were incapable of transcending their cultural conditioning. Therefore, the inevitable progress toward egalitarianism can only happen when the cultural restraints are removed. That required taking control of the centers of cultural production.

This is why the leftists in this age are perfectly comfortable working for wealthy oligarchs or even being oligarchs. They deliberately entered corporate life as they saw corporations as a center of cultural production. Similarly, they entered and then took over the vast, sprawling networks of the administrative state and then the managerialism system that directs it. All the people and things the left supposedly hated were turned into tools to bring about the revolution.

Ironically, that project is foundering for the same reason that its predecessors persisted long after reality made clear that Marx was wrong. The public embrace of economics as the standard against which everything is measured meant that the cultural revolution would be measured against its practical utility. The escapist phrase, “go woke, go broke” was factually incorrect, but it had a kernel of truth. In a purely materialist age, culture takes a back seat to the price of eggs.

The corrosive power of materialism is clear in the ongoing destruction of college sports where “reform” is about getting the money right. The reason college athletics is a thing at all is tradition, but everyone involved is willing to throw tradition into the furnace if it helps fire the economics. Everyone is sure that all they need to do is get the economics of the sport right and everything will follow. No amount of evidence will convince them that some things are too important for the marketplace.

You see it with libertarian cranks over the immigration bill. The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” is in trouble because weirdos like Rand Paul are able to rally the clown horn gang to oppose it on money grounds. Rand Paul is literally making the argument that your society is only worth saving at the right price. It is a great example of the expression, “A man who puts a price on everything values nothing.” This is the life motto of all those who embrace materialism.

The people siding with Rand Paul are psychologically incapable of understanding why a people can survive bankruptcy but not demographic replacement. For them, the holy crusade is to get the economics right. Their version of the egalitarian paradise may be different than that of the Marxists, but it is just as powerful. For them, the imagined Hell is the long promised fiscal collapse, whatever that means. Staving that off is the purpose of their life, so they cannot be persuaded.

Therein lies the small bit of good news. There is a growing number of people who see that there are some things too important to subject to the marketplace. This is the dissident view, which is the old conservative view. It is the very heart of the left-right concept that has haunted the West for centuries. The left says the truth lies with the people, while the right says it lies outside the people. For today’s dissident, the truth stands in judgement of the marketplace, not the other way around.

All the evidence tells us that material prosperity, the key to the materialist worldview, is not the roots of a healthy society. Instead, it is one of its flowers. In the West, we have reached material prosperity, but all of the measures of happiness are in decline, with some in rapid decline. The demographic collapse that comes with material superabundance is not a problem to be managed, but a warning that the logical end of materialism is death. We used to know this.

Again, there are signs that this old knowledge is not dead and buried, but simply in hibernation and now starting to spring forth. You see it in the hostility to the libertarian cranks on social media. You see it in the jeering at socialist cranks. Safety first commentators like Matt Walsh and Charlie Kirk are now repeating dissident things that used to be disqualifying for them. Perhaps in the end, the last materialist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Temporarily Successful Paupers

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about bugmen, a post about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

A basic rule of complex systems is that within them, you get more of what is rewarded by the rules of the system and less of what is not rewarded. In the case of human systems, this manifests as status. High status people will possess many of the qualities favored by the rules, and low status people will have fewer of those things. The stars of a sport are those who are either great at some aspects of the sport or very good at a wide range of favored skills in the sport.

Culture is the word we use for the complex system of rules and properties that define the societies in which we live. Like all systems, culture rewards some things and not others and punishes some things and not others. Status in the culture is determined by the overall quantity of these things. Some qualities are disqualifying, as the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein learned. He was very good at making profitable films, a highly prized quality, but he had habits that were eventually disqualifying.

This basic rule of systems can help explain why the United States finds itself in a crisis that, on the surface, seems easy to solve. The finances of the American empire are not so dire that they cannot be remedied. Some sacrifice would be needed, but with sound leadership, the fiscal house could be set right quickly. The same is true of the foreign policy challenges. The demographic and cultural issues are more complex, but the answers are known. It is a question of execution.

The most vexing problem of the current crisis for most people is why nothing gets done to address the known issues when the solutions are fairly obvious. On the one hand, there is an industry that exists to explain why the politics of each issue is such that the right answer can never be considered. On the other hand, there is libertarianism and conservatism that offer escape from the reality of the problem. These are the people who start every sentence with “all we need to do is…”

The corruption and escapism surrounding the question of why the issues that plague the country are never addressed are not explanations. They are part of the set of things that are caused by the core issue. We have gotten a hint of this in the first months of Trump’s second attempt at the wheel. He simply did things, like void longstanding executive orders on affirmative action. Suddenly, a man with the will to act was acting on a problem of politics, and the problem stopped being a problem.

What the first months of the new Trump term show is that leaders can simply act, and their actions can change the rules of the system. The racial rackets are suddenly in crisis because one man signed his name on some paper. We are seeing the same thing with immigration, where the political center is now speeding so quickly in the direction of the patriotic position that people are struggling to keep pace. It is as if there is a revolution going on in elite opinion.

This returns us to the question of why the same thing has not been done with regard to the main issues of the current crisis. The reason is systemic. The system rewards certain types of men and not others. That means our elites are high in the qualities that are rewarded and low in the qualities that are needed to solve the problem. The fact that Trump is universally hated in Washington speaks to the fact that he is high in qualities that the political system abhors.

An example of how this works is Mark Cuban, the billionaire who used to own the Dallas Mavericks and now agitates people on social media. He is a billionaire and therefore a member of the elite. The difference between Mark Cuban and the people in the stands at an NBA game wearing a team jersey is only about money. In fact, Cuban was one of those people as the owner of the team. He was not just the owner. He was the number one superfan of the team.

John Steinbeck coined the phrase “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” to describe the attitude of the typical American. The American Dream says that through hard work and determination, you can become wealthy. There is also the sense that serendipity plays a role in getting rich. You increase your odds of getting that winning ticket to the upper classes if you work hard. In this regard, Mark Cuban is the manifestation of this concept, as he got rich through hard work and serendipity.

There is a flip side to this that is clear with Cuban. Our elites think of themselves as temporarily successful paupers. The same turn of fortune’s wheel that made them rich could easily make them poor again. This is why American elites are so desperate to imitate the ways of the lower classes. It is as if they feel they must be penitent in order to prevent the hand of fate from sending them down the economic ladder. This is why rich celebrities are so fond of playing the victim.

Of course, it is not merely dumb luck that explains success. Hard work and determination play a major role, but the main driver is the relative quality of those things rewarded by the culture. America is a materialist society that rewards those who are good at our peculiar form of economics. Mark Cuban got rich because he was able to fob off onto tech billionaires a company that turned out to be worthless, but at the time looked like a goldmine.

Elon Musk became the world’s richest man by flattering the political class that his businesses were holy crusades. If they invested public money in those enterprises, they would not only bring salvation to society but also be seen as virtuous. Without hundreds of billions in public money, Musk is just an eccentric weirdo. His love for Donald Trump now looks like opportunism. It was a chance to run the same game on the MAGA movement that he ran on the left for so long.

The recent public feud between Trump and Musk is useful in understanding something else about our elites. Musk feels like Trump used him, but he should not be shocked, as to be an elite means being a tool. Success in economic endeavors is never about higher values or transcendent beliefs. It is about making the mechanics of the economic system work in your favor. At every level, the people involved are nothing more than tools to be used by those above them.

This makes the people at the top the most successful tools in the system. They are the tools the system uses to exploit the rest of the tools. It is no wonder then that the political elites use the economic elites as tools for their success. Trump’s relationship with Musk shows that Trump has learned how to be good at politics by using members of the economic elite like Musk as tools in his new trade. In a society of tools, everyone is eventually used and then discarded, even the elite tools.

This brings us back to those vexing problems of the current crisis. The solution is clear, but the execution requires men with the will to do it. Such men are never mere tools of the system, but men with a sense of nobility. They are men who understand why old men plant fruit trees. They have a higher purpose than the mere collection of things, and they do not see themselves as temporarily successful paupers. Their nobility is independent of their utility.

The American system does not produce such men because it does not reward the qualities that such men must possess. In fact, having a higher purpose is disqualifying in most areas of life. The businessman who sees his company as part of the social fabric will be ruined by those who can think only in money. The politician who speaks of sacrifice will lose to one promising free money. Materialism demands that you live in the present, so you can never transcend the present.

It was not always so for America. It is the transformation that occurred in the twentieth century that resulted in a system that produces our current elites. It is the failure of those elites that will bring about the end of the system that created them. Perhaps what comes next will once again reflect the essential American character, but this assumes there will be enough of those essential Americans to make it possible. That is the great question at the heart of the current crisis.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Radio Derb June 06 2025

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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 03m16s Lunacy, Muslim-style
  • 10m07s Imaginative warfare
  • 15m12s Rumors of war
  • 22m29s Trump and Musk
  • 27m25s Valediction

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers. This is your conclusively genial host John Derbyshire with the D-Day edition of Radio Derb. I know of course that most of you listen to the show on Saturday, which will be the 7th; but Friday is when I sit down to record it, so “D-Day edition” is valid.

Calendrical matters are at the front of my mind this week as Tuesday, June 3rd, was my birthday, my 80th birthday. I didn’t broadcast that fact in advance, so I was pleasantly astonished at the number of emails I got wishing me a happy birthday. How did people know? A moment’s reflection reminded me that my birth date is there for all to see on my personal website. It’s also on Twitter, if you go looking; and it’s on my Wikipedia page in between the descriptions of me as a hate-filled far-right homophobic racist misogynist full of hate.

Even after remembering all that, I was still surprised by the number of emails that came in: surprised, and stirred. I offer my sincere, heartfelt thanks to all who emailed, most especially to those of you who told me you’ve been following me ever since such-and-such, with some of the such-and-suches going all the way back into the 20th century. Thank you, thank you!

And yes, I had a very happy birthday. It was a lovely June day. I did some garden work and some undemanding household chores. For dinner my wife and kids took me to an excellent Italian restaurant in the village here and let me make a complete pig of myself. Life is good; all the better with a loving family and friends far and near. Thank you, again thank you!

I shall have more calendrical observations later. First, a glance at the week’s news. It’ll only be a brief one; I’m still in a holiday mood.

Continue reading →

In Search of Antisemitism

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Fifty years ago, the word “antisemitism” did not often turn up in everyday discourse and when it did it lacked the punch of today. The person who thought poorly of Jews was like the guy who was into conspiracy theories. Only in the upper reaches of society was it a fearsome accusation. That changed and now it is the worst thing that can happen to someone with a professional career.

The funny thing about the term and the meaning behind it is that it now has a definition that only professional anti-antisemites can explain. Fifty years ago, an antisemite was someone who hated Jews. Today, it is complicated. The determination as to whether someone is an antisemite requires a team of experts who have not only studied the man’s life but have also been trained in anti-antisemitism.

Eric Hoffer noted that mass movements in America become a religion, a corporation, or a racket, but in reality, they often become all three. You see it here. For some, anti-antisemitism is a way of life, like a religion. For others, it has become a lucrative career that provides them with regular appearances on television. For most now, it is a racket that lets them earn more than their talents warrant.

Ironically, this is only possible because America has no history of antisemitism and never possessed a critical mass of people who were hostile to Jews. The great wave of immigration in the 19th century that brought Jews to America delivered Jewish people into a land that was largely indifferent to them. Like the rest of the migrants, they had a rough go of it at first, but otherwise they encountered no opposition.

This is what makes the present moment interesting. Just as America is becoming something like medieval Spain in terms of demographics, we are seeing the first flickers of hostility to Jews. They are at the forefront of the open borders policies that have wrecked American demographics, thus creating conditions for the sort of tribalism from which most stereotypes about Jews arose.

That is the show this week. It is mostly an exploration of the anti-antisemitism world in search of a definition for it. Sprinkled in is the usual commentary about the weird things one finds when he goes down this rabbit hole. Unlike the anti-racism rackets, the anti-antisemitism rackets are far more complicated and have a logic to them that explains both anti-antisemitism and antisemitism.

It also explains why it must always bee looking for or producing antisemites that paly the familiar role of Old Scratch. One the one hand, the industry is ready accuse anyone of being an antisemite. On the other hand, it does produce people who think they are in a great struggle with the Jews. Negative identities, which is anti-antisemitism, must always preserve that which it claims to oppose.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • Intro
  • Buckley
  • Defining Antisemitism
    • The American Government (Link)
    • Stockholm Declaration (Link)
    • Holocaust (Link)
    • More Holocaust (Link)
    • American Jewish Committee (Link)
    • ADL (Link)
    • Spelling (Link)
  • The Main Issues
  • America
  • Full Circle

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Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Signs In The BBB

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Note: Last night Paul and I talked about what it means to be a dissident and why the people we call the left believe the weird things they do. Watch here.

Most of the week has been talk about the “Big Beautiful Bill” that is winding its way through the gauntlet that is Congress. The hold up, as is always the case, is the Republicans are devoting their time to how best to use this opportunity to screw over their own voters. To be a Republican means looking for opportunities to remind your voters that the political system is hopeless. It is now looking like the Republican Senate will hand their president a major loss.

While many of the oligarchs have swung to the side of angels, the donor class in general remains locked into the old nation wrecking model where both parties are focused on undermining and destroying the majority population. The cultural atmosphere in Washington is radioactively hostile to the average American. The broad support for Trump and his policies is simply seen as proof that the people opposing Trump are the good guys in this long twilight struggle.

At some point, the effort will shift to peeling off some Democrats in the Senate to get the votes for the bill, which means giving even more away to the forces of darkness than was already in the bill. The end result will be something that has a few crumbs for the majority and mountains of stuff for the bad guys. The result of the “sausage maker” that is Congress will be a mighty turd sandwich with those few crumbs for the majority sprinkled on top like sesame seeds.

In fairness, some of those crumbs are good crumbs. There is $46 billion to build the wall Trump promised a decade ago. Given how incensed both parties were over this idea when it was proposed, this should be viewed as progress. There is a bunch of money in the bill to expand the forces and facilities needed to expel the invaders. The claim is that the additional resources will let the government expel up to one million invaders every year, not including the people nabbed at the border.

That is one of the many lies Washington has fed us over the years. They claimed that every year one to two million people were deported, when the number was actually around three hundred thousand. The additional million or so were people refused at the border for any reason. If Boobingo from Ghana did not have the right stamp on his passport and was rejected at the airport in Ghana, then that was counted in the deportation numbers.

There are tax cuts that actually favor people who work for a living. There is the “no tax on tips” change, which is a big deal. It also rolls back the reporting requirements from services like PayPal. Currently, if you get more than $600 through PayPal, you get a 1099 and then it is up to you to prove to the IRS that the money sent to you from a friend was not income. The “gig economy”, people who make money a few bucks at a time, will get serious tax relief.

One thing not mentioned in the media, because it requires a high school education to understand, is the planned rollback of energy regulations. The point of these changes is to allow the administration to kill off the Gaia nonsense in the energy sector to pave the way for new energy production. In one of his pressers, Trump casually mentioned the goal to add 400 GW from nuclear by 2050. That would mean quadrupling the amount of electric we get from nuclear power.

Along with the immigration measures in the bill, this is where you get a hint of what is vexing the oligarchs who are backing Trump. They look at AI and see the cubicle farms in their businesses being filled by robots instead of humans. That means they will need vastly more electricity than they currently have, and it means they need to find something to keep these unemployed people busy. The army of Indians stashed around the country will have to go back.

It is a bit ironic, in a way, as for decades people have argued that we do not need more people as automation is reducing the value of labor. Normal people in the regular world could see it, but the oligarchs did not see it. Instead, they saw the need for armies of Hindus to cheaply write code and administer the vast financial skimming models used by the financial sector. With AI, they can now see what automation means in their lives, so they are swinging around to the moral position.

Of course, the fact that even with oligarch support this bill is struggling speaks to the problems of the political system. The massive amounts of new spending and the failure to include the savings found by DOGE is a good reminder that the system cannot be reformed though the normal means. It will take a fiscal crisis and then emergency powers to fix the government’s finances. Most likely it will require a Robespierre to pave the way for genuine reform.

In the end, despite the Republican perfidy and conservative cuckery, the existence of this bill hints that some powerful people are serious about avoiding disaster. It is one of those tiny steps in the sane direction on some issues that will either be viewed as too little too late or the start of the great reordering. Of course, either way, there will be a great reordering no matter what. The question that hangs over all of this is whether it comes by the pen or by the sword.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Death Of Experts

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Note: Tonight at 8:00 EDT, Paul and I will be talking about what it means to be a dissident in this age. The show is on Twitter, YouTube and Rumble.

A strange thing developing in pseudo-intellectual circles is the defense of expertise, by which is meant the defense of credentialism. People long on credentials, but short on practical knowledge and experience, are demanding they get the respect they deserve as experts in their respective fields. Nathan Cofnas is the latest to get in on the issue by demanding we respect his authority as an expert. Dick Hanania has also used to the issue to get attention online.

It is not a new issue nor one exclusive to the sorts of people who seek attention online as “influencers.” Credentialism produces a class of people who have no practical knowledge, so they have no experience. The lack of experience means they have no tangible results to back up their claims to expertise. This produces a class of people who defend credentialed experts. The anti-Trump crank Tom Nichols is a good example of the type. He even wrote a book defending credentialed experts.

Credentialism itself is a sign the system has entered its denouement. It signals the capture of the system by people who are motivated by class consciousness rather than a genuine expertise in a specific field. The group of people devoted to genuine expertise are shouldered aside by those devoted to defending the privileges that come from claiming expertise. To solidify their hold, they create arbitrary barriers of entry into the domain of expertise, which are called credentials.

This is the flaw in Peter Turchin’s concept of elite overproduction, at least as far as it applies to the managerial state. It is not that there are too many elites for the available positions, but that the nature of elite degrades over time. The builders give way to maintainers who are then displaced at the top by people who are good at institutional politics, to the exclusion of practical knowledge. The definition of elite then changes from practical things to the abstractions we see within credentialism.

That aside, for those interested in seeing how the defense of credentialism manifests with the next generations, this video is a good start. Dave Greene, the man behind the YouTube channel The Distributist, debated Nathan Cofnas, the person who gained some notoriety attacking Kevin MacDonald a half dozen years ago. Cofnas is now trying to create a new career defending credentialism. Cofnas then defended his performance with former pornographer Luke Ford.

Without knowing it, at least as a front brain process, Cofnas is engaging in a group activity in his defense of credentialism. He is appealing to the people who may or may not allow him to remain in the expert class. He is not trying to convince the rubes to respect his authority. He is signaling to his betters that he is a reliable candidate for admission into the club. His thumbless way of doing it is his undoing, but it the behavior elicited by the selection mechanisms of credentialism.

A more nuanced example is this post on Zero Hedge about the plan circulating in the West to cut themselves off from cheap energy products. The origin of the post is the site OilPrice.com, which is a clearing house of postings about the energy markets. The author of the post is someone calling himself Cyril Widdershoven. That is not a fake internet name, but a real person. Here is his CV on LinkedIn. He is an anthropomorphized example of credentialism.

If you read the postings of Cyril Widdershoven at that site, what you see is that he is usually wrong in his predictions. His analysis in the case of the pending energy sanctions rests not on an understanding of oil markets but on an understanding of the prevailing opinions in the expert class. That is the key to his wrongness. He is always wrong in the same way everyone else in the expert class is wrong. In managerialism, being wrong along with everyone else is better than being right.

That is the thing about credentialism. It selects for people who preternaturally understand the prevailing attitudes within the group. It is why the range of opinions is so narrow in every field. Once any group hits a critical mass of people whose instinct is to be in the center of the group, the group is then defined by the fights to be as close to the center as possible. The expert class becomes a collapsing star. This is why our expert class now sounds like a chorus rather than a debate.

You see the problem in that video of Cofnas debating Greene. Cofnas cannot distinguish between error and a lie or understand why one is better than the other because for him they are not moral issues. Both are simply means to an end, much in the way a sociopath views the truth and a lie. In the case of credentialism, error and lying only matter insofar as they move you closer to the center. The practical impact is of no importance to the people inside the expert class.

Managerialism, of which the expert class is a part, rests on the social capital of the people over whom it rules. The accumulating errors of the expert class, which contributes to the dysfunction of the managerial system, is eroding the social capital of society and thus we see the collapsing trust in experts and the state. Counterintuitively this is seen as proof within the expert class that they are not just experts, but members of the elect, chosen to rule over the non-experts.

This explains the prevailing madness in our politics. The motivations inside the system are now divorced from practical necessity. The rooms where decisions are made are full of people with resumes littered with the word “consultant” or letters indicating admission to various subgroups in the expert class. Nowhere is there anyone who knows how anything works. The only thing they know for sure is that you should respect their authority as experts.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Blackrockistan

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Note: Tonight at 8:15 EDT, I will be on with Paul Kersey, Peter Brimelow and Harrison Smith from Infowars to talk about remigration. I may also announce, with a great flourish, that I am officially off the Trump Train. Tune in here.

A question that is never asked in official circles, or even much in unofficial ones, is why Western leaders seem so desperate for war? For the last three-plus years, they have been scheming to start a direct war with Russia. The rhetoric has been so crazed it suggests they have a death wish. It is not just Russia. They want war with China and Iran, which would mean a regional war in the Middle East. The one thing the West seems sure about is the need for a big war.

Of course, given the increasing separation between official narratives and reality, many are sure they are at war. The current Prime Minister of Britain is telling his party that the country is now at war and must mobilize the country. Emmanuel Macron has spent the last year flitting about the continent as if he is leading Europe in a war against Russia, despite the fact the official position of his government, and NATO, is they have no direct role in the Ukraine war.

There is a Little Rascals quality to Europe at the moment. None of these countries have an army capable of fighting beyond their borders and many could not defend themselves against a well-armed militia. Europe has relied on the American military for so long most have forgotten how to fight. Instead, like the old television program, they dress up like big boys and girls and put on a show. Watching the girl bosses of the EU make threats is as absurd as the old television show.

That does explain one reason for the rhetoric. To be a European head of state is to be powerless, other than the power to put on a show. France, for example, relies on the EU to control its economy, trade policy and immigration policy. NATO decides what France can do with its shrinking military capability. The typical American governor has more sovereign authority than the head of France. While not entirely ceremonial, this is the direction for the “leaders” of Europe.

If you are allowed to do only one thing after reaching the highest office in your country’s political system, that is the thing you will do, and with gusto. Keir Starmer, for example, understands that the Bank of England overthrew the Tory government and put Labour in charge of parliament with a minority of public support. Every EU leader knows the EU rigs elections and overthrows governments. Every European “leader” knows he is an actor hired to play a role, so they play the role.

That gets to who is doing the hiring. Starmer is in office because the Bank of England saw him as a suitably complaint puppet. Macron remains in power, despite losing the last election, because Blackrock wants him in power. Germany’s new puppet is in charge for the same reason. BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager controlling more than nine trillion dollars. That means it has real power, the power to pick who wins elections and who controls public policy.

Blackrock invested billions in Ukraine prior to the war, because it believed Ukraine would fall into the Western orbit, which would mean Blackrock would control trillions in natural resources. The reason the Republicans were suddenly desperate to get sixty billion in new money to Ukraine after the 2022 midterm victory was to get Blackrock and others some of their money out of Ukraine. The proxy war with Russia was sold to the bankers as an opportunity to loot Eurasia again.

Now that the war has turned against the West, the rhetoric has become shriller for political reasons, but also as a way to sell arms. Blackrock and other massive private asset holders have large stakes in companies like Raytheon, Lockheed, Rheinmetall and many other arms makers. Another reason the political class of Europe is carrying on as if Genghis Khan is about to cross the Dnieper is they think it builds popular support for rebuilding their militaries.

There is another element to this. The Western oligarchy is based on the assumption that the United States is the global bank and the global mint. It performs this dual role by controlling the global reserve currency, which is made possible by controlling the most important global assets. To this point, that was made possible by controlling oil via the petrodollar agreement with OPEC. If energy must be priced in dollars, the demand for dollars can never be challenged.

The technological revolution, which is largely responsible for creating this new oligarchical class, has also undermined this arrangement. There are now other things in great demand to meet the needs of technology. Simply skimming from the oil trade is no longer enough. America needs computing power and that means energy production, which means a massive increase in energy consumption, along with the consumption of other natural resources needed for big computing.

The trillions in natural resources underneath the Donbas were seen as a quick and easy answer to the Western hunger for natural resources. Of course, it was just the first domino in the eventual exploitation of the rest of Eurasia. The technological revolution has turned the West, particularly America, into a ravenous beast that must find new sources of food to maintain itself. Big Tech and Big Finance have created a vampire economy that is always looking for a new neck.

They say all wars are banker’s wars and this has been true since the spread of popular government in the 18th century. Once who controls the assets is divorced from how those assets are used, there is no longer any control over how those assets are used by the political system. We see that in the modern West. The people vote, politicians are picked to fill the offices, but policy is made by those who own the assets because the Golden Rule states, the men with the gold make the rules.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Asabiyyah

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the death of college athletics, a post about building a workbench, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

If you were to imagine the ideal human community, you would probably assume “ideal” meant peaceful and cooperative. There may be people who think the ideal society is one that it is something like a prison exercise yard, but most people think of the idyllic society as one in perfect harmony. Everyone cooperates with one another in order to overcome the natural challenges that come with human society. Disagreements are worked out through the free exchange of ideas and compromise.

Everyone understands that even on a small scale, such a thing is not possible, but it has always been a useful metric. We often measure society against this standard of what we conceive of as the ideal society. It is why every year there are studies posted listing the happiest countries or the least corrupt countries. These are ways to see how the country stacks up against that ideal. Happy people have less crime and corruption than people in quarrelsome, uncooperative societies.

This is not a Christian concept as many assume. People have noticed since the ancient times that societal health correlates with cooperation. Aristotle talked about the concept of philía, which roughly means friendship or affection. It is the glue that holds a people together, which is a requirement of the polis. It is the natural desire to cooperate with others, not just from personal interest, but for the sake of the polis. The “politics” of a society, therefore, arise from friendship and affection.

The 14th-century Arab historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun wrote about this thing he called asabiyyah, which is something like social cohesion or group solidarity. It is the natural desire to cooperate that arises from family and the tribe, which allows for the construction of increasingly complex social structures. The more asabiyyah a society possesses, the more it is able to accomplish. This, Khaldun noted, is also why complex societies inevitably collapse.

The thing that makes it possible for one people to dominate other people is that which eventually erodes their social cohesion. It is social cohesion that facilitates cooperation, which increases the prosperity of the society. That prosperity then brings expansion and the incorporation of new people, who begin to drain that social cohesion. The cost of acquiring new people is the loss of social cohesion. This then raises the cost of governing the society, which further erodes asabiyyah.

There are many famous theories as to why human societies rise and fall, but all must contend with this central truth of human society. It can only exist when people are able to trust and cooperate with those outside their kin group. The greater the distance from that kin group, the more it costs to maintain cooperation. The reason empires always fall is they end up including people so distant from one another that they are unable to form any sort of cooperative relationship.

Look around the West and you see two things. One is the cost of the state is spiraling upward as it becomes increasingly incompetent. An unsaid truth of many American cities is they lack a genuine police force. The police are just a state sponsored gang that keeps the less organized gangs in check in order to maintain some safe areas for the elite and the tourist areas. Parts of cities like Baltimore can no longer be included in the concept of “civilized society.”

European cities are struggling with the same issue, but for different reasons. Instead of an unassimilable population from an old economic model, they imported millions of people who are genetically distant from the native population. Many of these people are hostile to other people imported into Europe. This alone has eroded social cohesion, but the efforts to maintain order are also eroding social trust. Every man jailed for speech crimes is a loss of European asabiyyah.

This may explain the sudden lurch in elite opinion in the United States away from unlimited immigration to what may be open hostility to it. Every day the window on the issue seems to move from the long-held position of open borders to what is now called remigration, the return of migrants to their homelands. The State Department has announced it is opening an office of remigration to facilitate this. A year ago, uttering the word “remigration” in many places could get you jailed.

This change is elite driven, which is what matters. Instead of an elite responding to public opinion, it is the elite now trying to drive public opinion. When the CEO of JPMorgan Chase speaks dismissively about immigration, as he recently did on the left-wing cable channel CNBC, something big is happening in the clouds. Conventional wisdom among the elite on immigration has swung to the opposite side. There is a reason for it, and it is not a sense of shame.

This gets back to those old concepts about what makes society possible and how best to measure the prosperity of a society. Decades of mismanagement due to the needs of the American empire have drained the West of its asabiyyah. As a result, the cost of maintaining order in the West is reaching a danger zone. All one has to do is look at the budgets of Western governments and then look at the condition of society. In many places, no government at all would be an improvement.

Therefore, it should not be surprising that it is the money men who are the first to sense something is seriously wrong in the West. They may not understand the cultural issues, but they see the gap between the cost and the results. The world’s richest man was not tasked with finding trillions in waste by accident. With $19 Trillion in debt rolling over in the next year, the money men are right to be worried that they have drained the last drops of asabiyyah from the Western world.

While it is tempting to see this sudden realization as a positive, Ibn Khaldun was not optimistic about a society’s ability to rebuild its asabiyyah. This is a theme with all writers who examined societal decline. Once a society hits that inflection point, it no longer has the capacity to reform itself. Social cohesion is not something that can be rebuilt, not even through shared struggle, as it is something that naturally occurs. Once it is drained it is gone and the society it produced is gone with it.

Perhaps this is a necessity as the West finally escapes the age of ideology. The decline of the West will open the ground for new social cohesion to form organically among the European populations that remain in Western lands. The new, post-ideological societies, growing up in majority-minority lands, will place social cohesion and asabiyyah at the top of their social hierarchy. The new asabiyyah will grow out of the wreckage of the ideological society.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!