TimeGhost History
Published 6 Feb 2025Join SPARTACUS and INDY on the War2War 1945 Newscast as we explore a world tumbling from war to war. European colonies face fresh conflicts and groundbreaking polymer innovations spark industrial revolutions. All the while Nazi war criminals are brought to justice at the Nuremberg Trials.
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February 7, 2025
Justice for WW2?! – W2W News 1945
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QotD: The Chump Ratio
P.T. Barnum gets a lot of quotes about gullibility attributed to him, because, well, he’d know, wouldn’t he? There’s a sucker born every minute, you’ll never go broke overestimating the public’s stupidity, and so on. One I particularly like is: One in Five.
That’s what you might call the Chump Ratio. In any given crowd, Barnum (or whomever) said, one person in five is a born chump. He’s ready, willing, and able to believe anything you put in front of him, and so long as it’s not skull-fornicatingly obvious fakery — an extremely low bar, as you might imagine — he’s all in. The best part is, chumps don’t know they’re chumps, and they never, ever wise up (poker players have a similar adage: “After a half hour at the table, if you can’t spot the sucker, then you’re the sucker”; it has the same impact on behavior, namely: none whatsoever). You don’t have to do anything to sell the chumps; they’re practically begging you to take their money.
Barnum didn’t say much about these guys, but there’s another ratio that applies to a given crowd, also about one in five: The born skeptic, the killjoy, call them what you will. This is the guy completely unaffected by the lights, the music, the smells of popcorn and cotton candy, the children’s laughter … all he can see at the carny is the tattooed meth head who put everything together overnight with an Allen wrench. He might well show up at your carny — the wife and kids wanted to go — but you’ll never make a dime off him. No show in the world is ever going to sell him, so you don’t need to worry about him.
It’s those other three guys in any given crowd that make you some serious money … or bring the whole thing crashing down on your head. They’re who the show is really for.
It’s pretty easy to sell these folks. After all, they want to be sold. They’re at the carnival, aren’t they? And yet, it’s also pretty easy to screw it up. They’re willing to suspend disbelief — they want to — but the line between “necessary suspension of disbelief” and “an insult to one’s intelligence” is thinner than you think, and lethally easy to cross.
Severian, “Carny World”, Founding Questions, 2021-09-24.
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February 6, 2025
Trump tariff diary, day 5
The attention shifted away from the BOM kicking the Little Potato around as BOM floated the idea of annexing the Gaza Strip (as Eastern New Jersey?) on social media. There goes at least 24 hours of media hysteria …
Justin Trudeau’s vision of Canada
As I’ve pointed out a few times, the situation didn’t blow up out of nowhere (we’re back to the Trump tariffs, not the Gaza Strip), as Trump had given ample warning that this was an important issue for him. However, as Roxanne Halverson points out, Trudeau’s government paid it not the slightest bit of attention until Trump forced them:
This means Ontario Premier Doug Ford who threatened to cancel a $100 million dollar Starlink contract with Elon Musk to provide high-speed internet to northern and rural Ontario communities because of Musk’s strong ties to Trump. And perhaps BC Premier David Eby shouldn’t have threatened to take alcohol products from “red states” in the US off the shelves of BC liquor stores. And perhaps Team Trudeau shouldn’t been trying to play the mouse that roared by threatening to slap retaliatory tariffs on American products coming into Canada, given that it means Canadians will pay more for products like fruits and vegetables that we simply can’t get here in the winter. And that goes for all the provincial premiers, with the exception of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.
And for all Canadians — particularly those who voted for Trudeau — who are so angry at Trump that they are blowing up the internet with memes, threatening never to vacation in the States, and booing the singing of the American anthem at hockey games — grow up and smarten up and rethink who your anger should be directed at.
Everyone needs to recognize the fact that Trump made it pretty clear about the tariffs when he was campaigning for the US presidency, after he won the presidency — but had yet been officially sworn in — and as soon as he entered the Oval Office. And yet everyone seemed so shocked when he did it — including Prime Minister Trudeau.
Trump also made it pretty clear what he was after — fix Canada’s porous border and fix the drug trafficking problem — and the fentanyl problem in particular. And thanks to the dithering of the Trudeau government — vacillating between “negotiating and diplomacy” and talking “tough”, as well as using the issue as a campaign tool, this is what it came to. Because, it would seem, Trump didn’t think his request was being taken seriously so he made it serious. One thing Trump recognizes is weakness, and it is something he is willing to take advantage of it. And in Canada he saw weakness — weak leadership and an weak economy. Another thing Trump is very good at, and that is rattling people and he did that in spades on Saturday — and by Sunday he got results.
For all the Canadians who are mad at Trump for starting these tariff wars, particularly those who voted for Trudeau. Remember this … if Canada had a strong economy that hadn’t been driven into the ground by ten years of Liberal economic, monetary, social engineering and “green” policies we wouldn’t be so vulnerable to Trump’s tariffs.
Trump didn’t halt the building of pipelines that could have taken our oil products to both eastern and western coasts to be shipped to markets overseas. This would have expanded markets for Canadian oil, meaning we wouldn’t be selling sell the bulk of it to the Americans at bargain prices. It wasn’t Trump who drove billions, if not trillions of dollars in investments out of the country by overtaxing businesses with ever increasing carbon taxes and various other in sundry operating costs, or stifling business growth with endless crippling green energy policies and regulations, or extinguishing any chance of expanding our natural gas production to sell to overseas markets by claiming “no business case” for it.
The business investment picture in Canada shows a clear decline dating almost exactly to the start of Trudeau’s time in office:
The Canadian government’s (and several provincial governments’) hostility to economic development and infrastructure expansion is clearly illustrated, I think.
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QotD: Wokeness as substitute religion
And of course so much of the theorizing behind woke ideas is based on entirely unsubstantiated, faith-based positions. They believe in unconscious bias, and institutional power structures — things that you can’t quantify or put your finger on that just sort of exist in the ether like spirits. And to ask them to prove any of these positions is to simply get the response that well, they do exist because we know they do. Which is what a religious zealot would say.
So I think that certainly the best way to understand the social justice movement is to see it as a cult. Because then it all makes sense, and it also makes sense why they’re able to behave so barbarically toward those who don’t subscribe to their belief system. Because the hallmark of many religions is tolerance to a degree. And then where things start going wrong, where witches start getting burned at the stake and heretics start getting executed is where that tolerance runs out. And I think that’s what happened here: the social justice movement is a fundamentally intolerant movement. And fundamentally illiberal. There’s nothing liberal about it.
Andrew Doyle, talking to Spencer Klavan, “Titania McGrath and the Politics of Wokeness: An Interview with Andrew Doyle”, The American Mind, 2020-01-30.
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February 5, 2025
Trump tariff diary, day 4
The Big Orange Meanie and the Little Potato had a phone call, after which the BOM announced a 30-day delay to the imposition of tariffs. In Canada, all of “peoplekind” were relieved to hear that they won’t have to give up their American-made binkies quite yet. Some appropriate snark from The Free Press:
It was actually a phone call between the BOM and the Little Potato, but we can imagine this is what it would have looked like in person.
Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum Speedy Gonzales’d her way to a deal with Trump yesterday, promising to deploy 10,000 Mexican troops to the border to stop the flow of illegal immigrants and drugs. In return, Trump agreed to pause his 25 percent tariff on goods coming from south of the border. Soon after, he struck a seemingly identical deal with Justin Trudeau, who said he’d appoint a “fentanyl czar” and promised to send 10,000 Canadian troops to the northern border. Who knew they even had that many?! Tariffs will still be levied against Chinese goods starting today, but Trump says he plans to talk with President Xi Jinping as soon as this week.
The FP isn’t wrong … the Canadian Army doesn’t have 10,000 spare troops just hanging around their barracks who could be sent to the border, so it’s much more likely to be a combination of Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) agents, RCMP officers, provincial police (if the respective provinces are willing), and whatever the army can spare. (Trudeau refers only to “nearly 10,000 frontline personnel”, not “troops” as a lot of US reports state … that seems a lot more achievable.)
You may be wondering how the US President has such disruptive and antagonistic tools at his disposal. It’s yet another hangover from the Carter years, as Congress delegated these powers to the president in 1977:
Donald Trump as Napoleon the 47th.
Image generated by Grok.
The emerging on-off-on-off trade war between Canada and the United States has everyone asking “How should we fight?” — understandably enough — but we should not move too quickly beyond the question “How is this literal nonsense at all possible?” How did the U.S. Congress’s clearly specified constitutional power to regulate the country’s commerce with foreign nations fall into naked and unapologetic decrepitude? Why is every new American president now a Napoleon, and why isn’t this at all a political issue in the U.S.?
The American Constitution, it seems, has no political party apart from a handful of cranky, tireless libertarians like Gene Healy, Clyde W. Crews or Ilya Somin, who has a new article spitballing possible litigation approaches for Americans who lie in the path of the tariffs now being wishcasted into existence by Napoleon the 47th. Somin explains that President Donald Trump is using an openly contrived “national emergency” to invoke powers delegated to the White House by Congress in 1977, powers that are to be invoked only in the face of “unusual and extraordinary threats” to the Republic.
Since the president apparently has plenary power to define an emergency, and to do so without offering anything resembling a rational explanation, this act of Congress now appears to be less of a delegation and more of a surrender — a total abandonment of constitutional principle and the classical separation of powers. I pause to observe that the cheeks every Canadian should redden with slight shame at the spectacle of frivolous recourse to the law of emergencies causing obvious and sickening injury to the rule of law in the U.S. (Oh, no, that could never happen here!)
February 4, 2025
Trump tariff diary, days 2 and 3
Posted to social media yesterday:
To celebrate Groundhog Day, Governor Trudeau wore commemorative Groundhog-themed socks. Governor Trudeau’s announced counter-tariffs seem to have made no difference to the Big Orange Meany, so the Great State of Canada proceeds with plans to annex Guam and American Samoa. China has indicated interest in purchasing Vancouver Island or leasing the naval base in Esquimault. The National Post‘s Tristin Hopper suggested “Spend 10 years relentlessly kneecapping the Canadian economy for no reason to show Trump we’re not scared of him”, but we’ve already done that.
Today’s tariff diary entry was going to be:
Reports indicate that the Mexican government is folding to Trumpian pressure. Governor Trudeau insists he won’t budge, regardless of the economic damage to Canadian consumers … what a hero! A few of us may lose our jobs, our businesses, and our economic futures, but he’s willing to take that risk. Update: Trudeau folded like the cheap suit he so resembles. Tariff war on hold for 30 days as Trudeau looks for a way to sign the terms of surrender without any blame attaching to him or his party … he’ll probably blame the provincial governments and the federal NDP (who’ll still support him in Parliament, regardless).
… But the “pause” in tariff enforcement may be enough to let Trudeau and the Liberals — with the active connivance of the bought-and-paid-for Canadian legacy media propagandists — portray this as a great national victory and attempt to turn it into votes for Liberal candidates in the next federal election. I’d love to be proven too cynical here, but the Liberal track record isn’t good.
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February 2, 2025
Captain Trumpmerica versus the Post-national Maple Protectionists
Donald Trump has made picking fights with the corrupt oligarchs of Mexico and Canada a key part of his appeal to American voters. Canada used to be a proud nation, but after years of deliberate mismanagement and stubborn opposition to innovation and growth, we’ve become — as Justin Trudeau so smugly put it — the first “post-national state” that has “no core identity [and] no mainstream”, because we’re a plaything for the WEF and other transnational organizations. Elizabeth Nickson calls us a “failed state” and that swapping in globalist WEF’er Mark Carney for globalist WEF’er Justin Trudeau will make no positive difference:
25% tariffs will ruin us. The tariffs mean one million small businesses — all which sell to the U.S. — will contract and many will close their doors. And then Trump, as he promised the unions, will pull “our” auto industry. Then we’re done.
Who is to blame for this?
The following is going to be crude because Canada is so boring (that’s deliberate) that no one cares. There are a thousand ultra-complex rationales on why Canada is failing and all they do is obfuscate. I’m not pulling punches, softening rhetoric — it is bad. It is urgent. This is the death of something that 75 years ago was shining, sunlit, exciting. That country? That country was killed by the Laurentian elite, weak, cosplaying Marxism to stay in power, themselves outwitted by investment bankers who plan to steal everything not nailed down. In so doing new elements were forcibly injected into the population: envy, resentment of the successful, sloth, the refusal to grow up, be strong and independent. We effectively sit on top of the U.S., seething with envy, in wet diapers.
We are a broken country. Everyone who understands the world knows this. The only people who don’t are deluded Canadian socialists, which is to say our entire elite and all our “knowledge class”. Dissent is ignored. Or jailed.
Central banker Mark Carney, WEFer paramount, is being parachuted into the Liberal party in order to sell us off to the investment banks who will harvest us for our resources. Our people? Future serfs in Special Enterprise Zones. We already have the regulation in place. No taxes, no worker rights, no enviro controls, no self-determination, no agency, no freedom. Time frame? Ten years, twenty at the outside. The inevitable end of hard-core socialism.
That is what Carney did to Canada in the ‘08 crisis, a crisis entirely created by larcenous government and investment bankers: he loaded us up with so much debt that the moment the economy turned, the working class — and Canada is now 75% working class — paid for it through interest rates so high they crippled and broke every middle class family with a mortgage. Then, he moved to England and did it to the English. His name there? Mark Carnage. During the ’08 crisis, he in Canada and the UK and Obama in the US transferred trillions in public wealth to the investment banks to keep them going after the worst crisis since ’29. A crisis they caused. That was the people’s money, not theirs.
However, as Peter Menzies points out, our Laurentian Elite are still 100% protecting us from the baleful influence of American culture … well, the commercial bits anyway:
Next Sunday, the federal agency responsible for the flourishing of national culture and identity will be swamped with complaints. The grumbling will emanate from Canadians enraged they can’t get more American culture. Yes, America may be in the process of humiliating Canada as its lamest of lame duck leaders, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, waddles into the sunset. And, for sure, most of us are mortified that U.S. President Donald Trump has chosen to make an example of us as he launches his mission to bring the globe to heel and Make America Great Again.
But the bitching directed in the days to come at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications (CRTC) headquarters in Gatineau will originate from Canadians angry they can’t watch American Super Bowl TV ads along with the game. A perennial contender to be the most watched TV event in Canada, the Super Bowl also has traditionally been the most controversial event on the CRTC’s calendar.
The USA can slap us silly with tariffs. It can send hundreds of thousands of us into unemployment and despair. It can mock our disinterest in maintaining the essentials of nationhood and drive us into unsustainable debt. Trump can brutalize our national esteem and taunt us for our cavalier attitudes towards the defence of our sovereignty. And he can lick his big beautiful lips while pondering our potential as the 51st state.
But what will really light us up Feb. 9 will be being unable to watch Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal reinvent their famous restaurant scene from When Harry Met Sally or Michelob Ultra’s production starring Willem Dafoe and Catherine O’Hara as a couple of pickleball hustlers. Or Matthew McConaughey channeling legendary Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka for Uber Eats. And the Clydesdales. Everyone loves those Budweiser Clydesdales, particularly the cute little foal making a debut.
It doesn’t matter that the ads cost $7 million U.S. (which will convert into heaven only knows how many bazillion loonies in the months ahead) for a 30-second spot. Or that for more than a decade many of the commercials have been available on YouTube. Canadians don’t want to watch a Super Bowl adorned with Government of Ontario and Maple Leaf Foods ads. They want to watch the game like real Americans and relish the full, unfettered American experience.
At the National Post, a sad recounting of just how badly we’ve been let down by our politicians — and not just recently … this is a decades-long list of conscious self-harm for short-term domestic political advantage:
Bold counter-attacks against the U.S. can’t work, because all the ideas Canada could have put into action to make such a response viable are collecting dust on the cellar shelf. Drop interprovincial trade barriers that amount to a $200-billion penalty on the national economy every year? That only became a serious conversation in the last month. It should have been a serious conversation 10 years ago, if not more.
End supply management? Out of the question — think of the Quebec votes such a move would cost. The Big Milk lobby is a strong one.
How about resource development? Because Canada is ultimately a resource-exporting economy? No; we’ve been cancelling energy projects at the slightest objection and building more legislation to stand in their way. Industries like mining and fishing, already mired in growth-choking regulations, are increasingly refashioned by governments into welfare and “reconciliation” initiatives, repelling private investment that would have brought prosperity to the country as a whole.
Diversify away from the Americans? We’ve only done the opposite: since 2017, Canadian trade has become more focused on the U.S.
Canada should be a prosperous, growth-oriented economy, but instead, its government — and the people who continuously vote for economy-stagnating policy — settle for subsistence and redistribution of a shrinking pie of wealth. Their choices for the past decade have left us without enough fat to get through a cold trade winter.
Prompt retaliatory counter-tariffs are hence unwise. Such a move would put Canadians in the path of two separate blows, one from the front, the other from the back. And while immediate counter-tariffs could affect Americans whose support the president depends on — as was the case in the 1930s, when Canadian counter-tariffs prolonged the American Great Depression (while inflicting domestic pain) — those Americans have much bigger economic fat stores. In a trade war of attrition, expect Canada to lose.
That leaves us, unfortunately, with the less-glamourous immediate option: play this by the book. The United States-Canada-Mexico free trade agreement, which will be violated by any across-the-board tariff Trump applies, needs to be challenged with the mechanisms agreed upon by party states. During the process, Canada must remind Trump that it’s just following the agreement that he made.
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January 31, 2025
“… and 10% for the Big Guy”
In the New English Review, Bruce Bawer reviews Miranda Devine’s new book, The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America:
Even now, roughly half of Americans seem to believe that all the attention that’s been paid to Hunter Biden and his laptop has to do with his love of prostitutes and drugs rather than with high crimes and misdemeanors committed by him on behalf of his dad and other members of the clan. Even now, many Americans seem to be blithely unaware of the mountains of evidence showing that Hunter has long been fleecing foreign firms on Daddy’s behalf. For some reason those clueless Americans, even if capable of accepting that Hunter was up to no good, simply can’t believe that his pop – good old Lunchpail Joe – has ever been guilty of anything. (These same people, of course, are convinced that Donald Trump is the most corrupt politician ever to come down the pike.)
This blindness to facts – or stubborn refusal to pay attention to them – is immensely frustrating. And it must be especially frustrating for Miranda Devine, the Australian-American New York Post journalist who, in Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide (2021), detailed the contents (by turns sordid and criminal) of Hunter’s celebrated computer, the story of which her newspaper broke 20 days before the 2020 presidential election, and who in her new book, The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America, focuses on the cover-up.
To say that Devine tells her story in impressive detail would be an understatement. Like War and Peace, The Big Guy opens with a long list of the main players, just in case you lose track of who’s who. And you will. Reading this book isn’t just like reading War and Peace – it’s like reading War and Peace at the same time as One Hundred Years of Solitude. You have to remember a slew of foreign-sounding names, many of which sound very much alike, all the while following an exceedingly labyrinthine narrative.
To be sure, this tale also involves plenty of Americans, some of them public officials who, when they scented the heady whiff of corruption in the Biden circle, actually did their jobs by digging into the facts and gathering evidence. Others, alas, are people who also held positions of authority but who did their damnedest to put up “roadblocks” or “obstructions” or “delays” or “logjams” – to use some of the many synonyms that Devine uses to describe efforts to keep the public in the dark.
And boy, was there a lot to cover up. Among the expenses that Hunter tried to write off on his taxes – not that he was quick to pay them, mind you – were disbursements to prostitutes and drug dealers and memberships in sex clubs. During one “crack and hooker bender” in 2018, he spent $8,000 on a single sex worker, $140,000 on a stay in Las Vegas, and $34,000 on a sojourn at the Chateau Marmont in L.A. The Chateau Marmont is legendary for playing host to celebrities on drug binges, but Hunter caused so much damage to his room that he was banned from the place thereafter, which even he suspected was a first.
Part of the reason why Hunter was able to go through a small fortune so quickly was that he had a “sugar daddy” by the name of Kevin Morris, who for reasons that still remain a mystery chose to give him millions of dollars over the years to save him from financial crises (such as the ones posed by the relatively modest monetary demands of Hunter’s baby mama in Arkansas). A 2019 book contract with Simon & Schuster also netted Hunter a $750,000 advance, even though the book (surprise!) ended up selling so few copies that it made back only a tiny fraction of that sum. Then there were his paintings, which brought in at least $1.5 million. People laughed when Hunter first revealed his artworks to the world in 2020, but I didn’t: they’re no worse than a hell of a lot of contemporary art – and, after all, the art market these days is as much about laundering money than it is about aesthetics.
But Hunter’s main sources of mazuma were foreign companies. One of them was Barisma in Ukraine. Another, in Russia, was run by a man named Zlochevsky who said that Hunter, whom Joe Biden had called the smartest man he knew, was in fact stupider than Zlochevsky’s dog. A third was the Chinese energy company CEFC, a leading promoter of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. CEFC put Hunter on its board – and paid him millions – in exchange for his promise to use his father’s name to “open … doors around the world” for the firm.
Collecting loot from all these sources and funneling some of it to family members involved a complex network of bank accounts and shell companies that was designed to make the moolah tough to trace. To illustrate the process, Devine follows the path of a single $5 million payment by a CEFC affiliate to one of Hunter’s firms, HWIII. Over time, Hunter transferred most of that $5 million to another firm of his, Owasco; in addition, he wired some of it to his uncle Jim’s company, after which Jim’s wife, Sara, withdrew a fraction of that sum and deposited it in the couple’s personal account and dispatched a $40,000 check to Joe Biden.
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QotD: “Did you know the government faked the moon landings?”
Today I am compelled to much more sympathy with people who have come to believe that. It’s still objectively stupid, but I understand how they got there. It’s an interaction between a low-trust, polluted information environment and the cheater-detection module wired into human brains.
If you pose people a logic problem phrased in two different ways, one of which is “spot the cheater” and one of which is not, they’ll do substantially better on the first version. We are social animals who survived by forming trust networks, and for millions of years spotting the cheater was a life or death matter.
Now put yourself in the shoes of a person of average intelligence — not very good at following complex arguments or extracting generative patterns from large masses of evidence. This person has gradually become aware over the last quarter century that public information sources are saturated with lies. The media is corrupt and partisan, corporations deceive to boost their profits, education is ideologically captured, and governments constantly peddle vast falsehoods to gain compliance.
In this environment, and given the capacity limitations of the average human, the cheater-detection module goes into overdrive. The least bad strategy is to try to spot the worst liars and then believe the opposite of everything they say.
“The moon landings were faked” has to be understood as a symptom not of individual insanity, but of governing institutions and elite classes who have repeatedly burned up their long-term credibility for short-term gains.
This trend had been building for a long time, but undoubtedly culminated with the series of colossal lies, blunders, and “we’ve always been at war with Eastasia” reversals around COVID.
I wish I knew a way back from this. I’m not sure anything less than the abolition of secrecy could do it.
ESR, Twitter, 2024-10-27.
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January 30, 2025
The MAGA movement as “America’s Thermidorian Reaction”
Fortissax lays out the case for Canada remaining separate from the United States, in what he says is the longest single article he’s written. It is indeed a long piece, from which I’ve selected a small portion that helps identify the US MAGA movement as something other than just pro-Trump activism:
“Canada’s national identity is rooted in Order, as expressed in its national motto, Peace, Order, and Good Government, conceived by Sir John A. Macdonald. This stands in contrast to the United States, whose core value is Liberty, reflecting its liberal and individualist foundations in the pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The MAGA movement, as explored in my colleague and fellow Canadian Endeavour’s article, can be understood not as a counter-revolutionary or genuinely reactionary force, but as America’s Thermidorian Reaction — a movement within the post-WWII liberal order to purge its own radical excesses. Endeavour draws parallels to the French Revolution, where the Thermidorian Reaction was not a restoration of the monarchy but a moderation of the Reign of Terror’s extremism, and to the Soviet Union’s Destalinization, which sought to distance the regime from Stalin’s radical policies without abandoning communism.
Similarly, MAGA does not aim to dismantle the liberal framework established during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, marked by the Civil Rights Act and Hart-Celler Act, but instead seeks to address the instability caused by the radicalization of this framework during the “Great Awokening” of the 2010s. Its faith in “colourblind meritocracy” is rock solid. Just as the Thermidorians and Khrushchev’s regime sought to preserve their respective systems by eliminating destabilizing elements, MAGA represents an attempt to recalibrate the liberal order by challenging excessive ideological commitments like open borders, identity politics, and globalist policies.
While MAGA appeals to traditionalist sentiments, it ultimately operates within the boundaries of the same liberal system it critiques, lacking the philosophical depth to present a true alternative. Trump’s 2016 campaign was fueled by widespread dissatisfaction with the establishment and a sense of cultural alienation among, working-class European-Americans. As an outsider candidate, Trump faced opposition from both political parties and the media but managed to channel populist anger into an unexpected victory. However, his presidency revealed that he posed less of a threat to the system than many anticipated. Trump’s administration implemented some reforms but fell short of disrupting the liberal order, leading many elites to reframe him as a tolerable alternative to the increasing instability caused by radical left-wing movements. The 2024 campaign differs significantly from Trump’s earlier runs because he has garnered support from influential elite factions. Figures in Big Tech, such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and segments of the Zionist lobby, see Trump as a tool to stabilize the system without fundamentally altering it. While Trump continues to appeal to his populist base, his elite backers are likely to exert more influence over his presidency than grassroots supporters.
The Four Agendas of America’s Elite
Endeavour outlines four major agendas driving the U.S. political landscape, which often overlap but also compete for dominance:
- The Anti-White Agenda (Wokeism)
This agenda promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as core principles, advocating for identity politics, demographic transformation, and the demonization of traditional Western cultural norms. Organizations like the NAACP, SPLC, and Open Society Foundations champion this cause.
- Managerialism
Focused on centralized control, managerialism, coined by James Burnham, expands bureaucratic oversight in both public and private sectors. The COVID-19 pandemic epitomized managerial overreach, as policies enforced compliance on an unprecedented scale. Key proponents include BlackRock, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
- The Zionist Lobby
Primarily concerned with ensuring unwavering U.S. support for Israel, the Zionist agenda overlaps with wokeism in promoting leftist social causes but diverges when these causes conflict with Israeli interests. Organizations like AIPAC and the ADL straddle this divide.
- Big Tech
Initially aligned with wokeism, Big Tech has begun to push back against its most radical elements due to its impact on innovation and competence. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X) symbolizes this shift, as does growing discontent with DEI mandates within the tech sector.
While these agendas are not inherently unified, they collectively uphold the liberal framework established in the 1960s, even as they compete for dominance within it. I’ve defined these forces in the past as left-liberalism vs right-liberalism, which I covered here: MAGA & Wokism
Parallels to Historical Thermidorian Reactions
MAGA’s role is likened to historical Thermidorian Reactions, where moderates sought to rein in revolutionary excesses to stabilize their regimes. For example:
- The Thermidorians ended Robespierre’s radical Reign of Terror, easing persecution and executions while maintaining the republic.
- Khrushchev’s Destalinization moderated Stalin’s authoritarian rule but preserved the communist system.
Similarly, MAGA seeks to temper the radicalism of woke managerialism without challenging the core tenets of the liberal order. The “Great Awokening,” characterized by intensified DEI policies, identity politics, and cancel culture, parallels the Reign of Terror and Stalinist purges in its ideological zeal. Trump’s 2024 campaign represents an attempt to dial back these excesses and restore a degree of moderation.
Challenges Facing the Thermidorians
Despite its goals, MAGA faces significant hurdles in moderating the system:
- Demographic Shifts: The growing influence of progressive, non-white voting blocs entrenches leftist policies.
- Institutional Entrenchment: Managerial bureaucracies are staffed with ideologues deeply committed to woke principles, making reform difficult.
- Superficial Reforms: Even if MAGA eases censorship and curbs DEI mandates, it is unlikely to reverse structural changes such as demographic transformation or the Civil Rights Act.
Endeavour contends that MAGA’s moderation of woke managerialism may improve short-term conditions but will not address deeper contradictions in the liberal order. For example:
- The Zionist lobby’s support for both Israeli ethno-nationalism and woke policies in the U.S. creates unsustainable contradictions.
- Universalist egalitarianism remains fundamentally flawed, and attempts to reform it, like Gorbachev’s Perestroika in the USSR, may inadvertently accelerate systemic collapse.
While MAGA may temporarily stabilize the United States, it will not fundamentally alter the trajectory set in motion during the cultural revolution of the 1960s. The deeper issues of demographic change, cultural alienation, and institutional decay remain unresolved. Trump’s vision—and likely that of most within the MAGA movement—is rooted in nostalgia for the 1980s and 1990s, a romanticized era cherished by many baby boomers. This idealized vision imagines a time when race was purportedly invisible, the black middle class thrived, and patriotism unified Americans across racial lines. This narrative conveniently ignores the darker realities of that period, including the L.A. race riots and the rise of militant groups like the Black Panther Party. At the same time, this Thermidorian Reaction is being leveraged to solidify control over America’s imperial vassals, with the Anglosphere serving as its primary appendages and European nation-states as key dependencies. Populist movements across Europe echo rhetoric nearly identical to that of MAGA, with many receiving direct or indirect support from individuals and entities affiliated with the movement. Figures like Elon Musk have actively amplified some of these efforts, like promoting the Alternative für Deutschland party and bolstering independent actors aligned with MAGA’s agenda, thereby expanding its influence across the Western world. Not ideal, but a means to an end for sure.
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QotD: Michael Moore
But most folks are nicer than that.
And so you can’t help noticing that, for a champion of the little guy, he goes to an awful lot of time and effort to make the little guy look like a chump. Moore has no interest in digging deep into his subjects when all the fun’s to be had on the surface of American life — the squeaky receptionists, the bored security guards, the bland PR women, the squaresville company guy in the suit, the State Police trooper with the infelicitous phrasing, the bozo in the pool hall … His vision of America as a wasteland of gun kooks, conspiracy theorists and perky brain-fried mall clerks will doubtless have them rolling in the aisles in Paris this weekend. In my corner of New Hampshire, there were only four other moviegoers in the theater. But Moore, a great favorite with the BBC, now does his shtick with an eye to the non-American market.
Mark Steyn, “Bowling for Columbine”, Steyn Online, 2002-11-30.
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January 29, 2025
German democracy in its death throes as extremely extreme extreme right gets an anti-immigration bill up for a vote
The situation in Germany appears critical, as the extreme right Christian Democrats (CDU) seem to be moving closer to working with the extremely extreme extreme right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) to pass an anti-immigration bill:
Despite everything, the cordon sanitaire against the Evil Hitler Nazi Fascist party known as Alternative für Deutschland really appears to be crumbling. CDU Chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz has set in motion a chain of events he can no longer control. This coming Friday, there is every chance that anti-migration legislation will pass the Bundestag and become law with the help of AfD votes – an eventuality that was unimaginable even seven days ago.
As I reported in my prior post, Merz said last week that he was open to passing anti-migration bills with AfD support. His statement was remarkable, because it violated the most important tabu in German politics, namely that against achieving any outcomes with votes from the AfD. This tabu excludes the political voice of opposition voters and insulates the traditional party system from political change.
Almost from the beginning, there was messaging confusion from within the CDU about Merz’s statement. The reversals, re-reversals, doublings down, and contradictions that have flowed from Merz and his party over the weekend are highly significant. They suggest a panicked CDU leadership that is in disarray, eager to stem the tide of defections to the AfD and desperate to weaken the negotiating positions of the leftist SPD and Green parties. The cordon sanitaire is a wedge driven straight through the right that allows an ever more unpopular left to punch far above their weight and maintain their vice-grip on German migration policy. It was intended to wall out the AfD, but as the AfD has grown stronger, it has only walled in the CDU. Remarkably, the CDU seem to have finally figured this out.
Merz responded to the growing cries of outrage from the left at first predictably – by backtracking. He insisted he wanted not the AfD but the “political middle” to support his anti-migration legislation. In a strange statement on Saturday, he announced that “We have sent the SPD, the Greens and the FDP all the texts that we want to pass next week” so that “We can … agree on how we will vote next week.” He added bizarrely that “The AfD is not receiving these texts.” These “texts” leaked almost immediately; they turned out to be resolutions calling on the Green and SPD government to tighten border security and increase deportations.
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January 28, 2025
AI, the iPhone, and other tech whizzery are not the most important inventions ever
Freddie deBoer reacts to so, so many technically illiterate hot takes about this or that latest bit of techno-woo bling being given accolades as “the most important invention”:
Years ago, I think in 2010, Business Insider invested a great deal of hype and hoopla into a list they developed of the one hundred most important inventions of all time. I have tried and tried to find a link, including via the Internet Archive, but no dice; I’ll chalk it up to linkrot, the endless deterioration of the web over time, Business Insider‘s paywall, and their convoluted publishing history. You’ll have to take my word for it that, in a list that was released with great fanfare, they rated the iPhone as the most important invention of all time. Not antibiotics, the plow, or alternating current, not anesthesia or the lightbulb, but the iPhone, which took a bunch of things that already existed (cellular telephone service, email on the go, a touchscreen) and put them in one remarkably profitable package. The Business Insider list isn’t alone in putting the iPhone so high on ranked lists of human achievement. There’s plenty you can find, including a British survey that put the iPhone at number eight, ahead of the internal combustion engine, or this New York Times podcast which puts the iPhone at number three, although the list seems to be partially tongue in cheek. There’s a lot you could ask about such a choice, including epistemological questions inherent to putting a cellphone above the electricity-generating technologies that power it. But my visceral response to this kind of thinking — and even aside from ordinal lists of importance, the smartphone-supremacy attitude is very common — is to say, wow, these people must really enjoy shitting in the yard.
Plumbing — bringing fresh water from one place to another and disposing of human waste via engineering — goes back to antiquity, and you occasionally find claims of affordances like flush toilets in ancient times. Today, modern people in most developed parts of the world have constant access to free-running clean water and toilets that can remove physical waste to a secure processing facility or holding unit, with heated water on demand a very nice extra. That’s largely a 20th-century and forward phenomenon. There were pretty sophisticated sewer systems in Victorian London, the White House got running water in the Jackson administration, and as usual major metropolitan areas in rich countries were ahead of the game generally. But it wasn’t until the 1920s or so that indoor plumbing became a true mass phenomenon, again only in wealthy countries, and it was perfectly common for a soldier coming home from World War II in 1945 to be coming home to a house with a well and an outhouse. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a majority of American homes had indoor plumbing, which means that the beginning of the Space Age overlapped with a period where most Americans couldn’t wash their hands whenever they wanted to. And, as cool as NASA and launching satellites and orbiting the Earth and traveling to the Moon are, their practical impacts on human life pale in comparison to modern plumbing.
So when I read people putting the iPhone as the pinnacle of human ingenuity, I have to imagine that they’re big fans of shitting in their yard. Because if faced with a choice, they’ve indicated that they’d choose their smartphone over their toilet! And that’s quite a choice. It might be worth doing a little reality check in that regard by spending a month without one and then a month without the other. So you see how life feels without your smart phone for 30 days, and then you see what it’s like to not be able to access indoor plumbing for 30 days. You have to piss and shit outside. You have to walk to a well, if you can find one, to get (hopefully clean) water, and then you have to heat it up on your stove if you want it hot. You can’t shower, and taking a bath would be a remarkably laborious process that still left you with tepid water. And this isn’t just a question of comfort but a question of essential hygiene, by which I mean medically-relevant hygine — cholera, typhoid, gastrointestinal worms, scarlet fever, hepatitis, and many more diseases were massively harder to avoid before mass indoor plumbing. I don’t know you, personally, but I feel considerable confidence in suggesting that your desire to avoid those diseases is greater than your attachment to Instagram.
That’s the shitting in the yard test, or the indoor plumbing test, for those who prefer to avoid vulgarity. The test requires you to compare the hype about a particular tech product up against the actual brick-and-mortar changes wrought in the great period of human advancement that began sometime in the late 19th century and ended sometime in the late 20th; the modern flush toilet is just a particularly relevant example. Is Zoom really a bigger part of your life than food refrigeration, a technology that has saved untold millions of lives over the decades by dramatically reducing deaths from foodborne illness? Is cloud storage really a bigger deal than infant vaccines, which save six lives a minute? Does Android Auto really rate when compared to the airbag? You can call these questions obtuse, and some do, but they are natural and necessary things to think about in an era of obsession with artificial intelligence. (By which people mean LLM/neural net-based artificial intelligence, which is a whole other thing.) When you say that AI is the most important invention in human history, you’re making some really, really powerful claims. And yes, you have to then justify saying that AI is more important than, for example, the transistor, self-negating claims that deny the importance of technologies that make large language models possible. But you also have to justify saying that AI is more important than, like, the bowl. By which I mean, bowls. To put food in. To eat out of. Try and spend the rest of your life without ever using another food container and get back to me about whether ChatGPT is more important. Food containers are inventions!
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“Like Sulla, [Trump]’s been taking names, and he has a list”
So-called “Sulla” (probably from the time of Augustus) after a portrait of an important Roman from the 2nd century BC.
From the Glyptothek collection via Wikimedia Commons.
The comparison of Trump to the man who prefigured Julius Caesar in the final years of the Roman Republic is, we should all passionately hope, more rhetorical than realistic. Sulla came to power in Rome after being, in his view, illegally removed from his rightful position, and he came wading through the blood of his enemies. He then created a brand new position for himself, using the old and disused title of “dictator”, but piling on far more power than any earlier dictator had held (the irregular election was held in hearing distance of where Sulla’s army was busy executing many of his captured enemies). He used his power to reconfigure and codify the rules by which the Republic was run, to “restore the Republic” to what he imagined was a purer, better nation. He set a precedent that would be followed a generation later by Julius Caesar and the end of the Republic was clearly in sight.
Trump has come again to power, from which he believes he was illegally removed, although he has not been wading through the blood of his enemies. He has been using the powers of his position very actively, but thus far seems to be staying within the bounds of the Constitution (mostly). On his Substack, Glenn Reynolds says that the second Trump presidency will be much worse for his political opponents than if he’d won his second term in 2020, and I think that’s the right analysis:
Well, if you follow me here, you probably don’t need to be told how fast Trump is moving. But I have a few other thoughts here that didn’t fit the column. The main point is that the Democrats’ over-the-top rule-breaking, norm-busting attacks on Trump have backfired bigly. I like to use the Tolkien quote, “oft evil will shall evil mar”, and that happened here for sure.
A second consecutive Trump term would have been better, from my perspective, than Biden’s sham administration, obviously. But it certainly would have been better for the Democrats than this second non-consecutive term. Trump spent the past four years not only planning his comeback, but planning what he would do after his comeback.
In his first term he was too busy running to plan, and he was naïve about how Washington and the federal government – and the Republican Party – actually work. Not so much anymore. I’ve seen people – to continue the Tolkien reference – compare him to Gandalf the White coming back after battling the Balrog, and that’s not a bad analogy.
Then there’s this one, which pretty much sums up what I’m saying here. Like Sulla, he’s been taking names, and he has a list.
And there’s this:
It really is. Trump could get carried away with this stuff at some point, but at present he seems to be settling all family business in a very measured way. Where the opening months of the first Trump Administration were confused – Omarosa in the White House? – this time around he’s realized that personnel is policy, and he’s clearly done a lot of thinking about who his personnel will be. And it’s no coincidence that he’s put a lot of people who were victims of various government agencies in charge of those same agencies. Not much danger of them going native, I think.
A second consecutive Trump term would have delayed the advance of the left/Democrat agenda, and pushed it back in some minor ways, but would probably have ultimately been no more than a bump in the road for that agenda. This Trump term will likely burn it down.
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What Britain desperately needs is common-sense pointy stick controls
Britain’s gun laws make Canada look like the wild west, yet the government still wants far greater control over objects that can be used as weapons. The conviction of the Southport murderer, who used a knife obtained through Amazon, seems to have given the British government under Kurt Stürmer Keir Starmer an excuse to crack down even further on any kind of device with a sharpened blade rather than the criminals who wield them:
Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana.
Photo released by Merseyside Police.
“Time and again, as a child, the Southport murderer carried knives. Time and again, he showed clear intent to use them,” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer wrote in a piece for The Sun about Axel Rudakubana, who admitted murdering three girls and injuring others at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last year. “And yet tragically, he was still able to order the murder weapon off of the internet without any checks or barriers. A two-click killer. This cannot continue. The technology is there to set up age-verification checks, even for kitchen knives ordered online.”
What Starmer mentioned but glossed over is that Rudakubana was three times referred to a program intended to divert people from radicalization and terrorism before authorities lost interest in him. At the time of his arrest, he had a copy of an Al Qaeda training manual, which led him to being charged and sentenced for terrorism. He also possessed the deadly poison ricin that he’d manufactured himself in sufficient quantity to conduct a mass attack.
Rudakubana was a human bomb waiting to go off. But Starmer focused not on officials’ failure to pay attention, but on knives — edged tools that are among humans’ earliest and most important creations.
“Online retailers will be required to ask for two types of ID from anyone seeking to buy a knife under plans being considered by ministers to combat under-age sales after the Southport murders,” reports Charles Hymas of The Telegraph. “Buyers would have to submit an ID document to an online retailer and then record a live video or selfie to prove their age.”
It’s difficult to see how an ID check is going to stand between those planning mayhem and tools first crafted 2.6 million years ago in their most primitive form and still used by people every day. My dentist forges knives in his backyard for fun. One of my nephews turns files into knives on a grinding wheel. Scraping an appropriate material against a stone will give you an edge and a point. ID checks don’t seem like a barrier to people with bad intentions and the ability to make ricin in their bedrooms.
A Case History in Ridiculously Restrictive Policies
This is why the U.K. strikes many Americans as the reductio ad absurdum of policies that demonize objects rather than targeting bad actors. Opponents of authoritarian laws ask: What will the authorities do once they’ve made firearms difficult to legally acquire, and crime continues? Will they ban knives?
The answer from the U.K., which already has restrictive gun laws, is yes, they will ban knives — or at least impose access and carry restrictions and consider forbidding blades to have points. The result has been a black market in smuggled and illicitly manufactured firearms that will inevitably extend to knives. Harmless people are now arrested for having Swiss Army knives in car glove compartment or for possessing locking knives on the way home from jobs that require them. And the country’s crime problems continue to grow.
That’s bad enough, but U.K. authorities, like those elsewhere, also prefer to surveil the entire population to detect anything they could call a danger to public order, rather than focusing on specific individuals harming others.
“There are now said to be over 5.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK,” according to Politics.co.uk. “Surveillance footage forms a key component of UK crime prevention strategy,” but “the proliferation of CCTV in public places has fueled unease about the erosion of civil liberties and individual human rights, raising concerns of an Orwellian ‘big brother’ culture.”
The British government also monitors online activity to an extent that Edward Snowden deemed it “the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy.”
That surveillance turns up comments, jokes, and rants authorities just don’t like. “Think before you post,” the government warns people. “Content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful – it can be illegal.” But the authorities enforce a broad definition of unacceptable material. People have been arrested for dressing as terrorists for Halloween, for making intemperate online remarks, and for just getting things wrong when posting on the internet (they’ll need a big paddy wagon for that one).
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