Clusterfuck Nation

The polycrisis of 2026 whirls like a demon-infested storm overcoming this human project of ours like a medieval panorama of the world’s end. Everything is fraught, tilting toward hazard, menace, ruin. Even under a summer sun, the mind sees only darkness everywhere it looks. Apocalypse now, it seems like. You almost can’t blame the doomers, the black pill-ers, lost in their transports of dread. But I tell you, we will get through this.

Is it a surprise that the IRGC has a death wish for its host, Iran? They’ve been advertising it loudly for half a century, yearning for martyrdom, the bliss of paradise, marriage to multiple perfumed virgins, all the pomegranates you could ever want, and perpetual dreamtime beside a gently burbling fountain in the palace of eternity. Trouble is, to get there you must have your head blown off.

That’s exactly what the IRGC is asking for, though the millions of ordinary Iranians probably have their doubts about the ask. They are hostages of the IRGC regime, which refuses to just stop being a problem for the world. Mr. Trump’s proffer for Iran still abides: become a normal nation, sovereign and all, only without atom bombs. Let ships sail through Hormuz unmolested. Sell your oil, make some money, trade with the other fellas across the Persian Gulf, have a nice civilized life with all the refinements of age-old Persian culture, even with its Islamic overlay. Be happy!

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The USA does not seek to occupy Iran, steal its resources, subjugate its people, force them to buy Minnie Mouse plush toys, play baseball, eat Jimmy Dean sausage for breakfast, strum banjoes, or wear cowboy hats. Just stop projecting violence and discord all over the Middle East.

You can’t make us, the IRGC says. Yes, we will, the USA replies. And so it goes. Next up: bridges and power plants. Plus, every ship you damage, we’ll deduct the cost of repair from your frozen assets held in our banks. This is where things stand after the thirteenth night of strategic bombing against the IRGC’s launch sites, drone factories, missile storage caverns, and shoreline military installations. Iran prepared assiduously for this death-scene for decades, building hidey-holes here, there, and everywhere. But every time they launch something now, our satellites mark the coordinates, and boom, now there’s one less hidey-hole.

Iran’s currency, the rial, has an exchange rate against the US dollar of about 1,900,000 to one dollar. There is hardly a functioning economy left. The people are flat broke. Everyday life must be hell now. Could be the IRGC was getting tons of munitions and material for free from China, but days ago we blew up the railroad bridge at Aq Tekeh-Khan that was China’s main connection to Iran, so that’s over with.

You must doubt that Russia is capable of sending arms to Iran at this point. Russia needs every drone and missile it can fabricate now that Ukraine is sending drones clear into Moscow and St. Petersburg on a regular basis. Of course, that war is being stoked by NATO, which perforce includes the USA. A bill (H.R. 2913 — the Ukraine Support Act) that would furnish $1.3-1.8 billion in direct security, military, and reconstruction assistance for Ukraine plus $8 billion in loans was passed by the House in June, but languishes in the Senate. President Trump has threatened to veto it, as running counter to the administration’s preference for negotiations with Russia to end the Ukraine War rather than extend it.

These two conflicts must seem intractable for now, but the mojo driving them has clear and present limits. If the USA does not underwrite Ukraine’s war effort, then that leaves the EU nations, who are increasingly broke, and for all their idle talk are really incapable of mounting a major arms production campaign. The UK especially is skating on thin ice these days as Mr. Trump methodically cancels its long-running command and control of global finance through the City of London (as its “Wall Street” is called). In fact, it looks as if the floundering UK — with dopey Andy Burnham rolling in as Britain’s seventh Prime Minister in a decade — has passed the ball of globalist leadership to its forward striker (and all-purpose fixer) Mark Carney the Prime Minister of Canada.

Carney, who was previously chief of the Bank of England, has played a series of losing games against President Trump the past year, while Mr. Carney is busy wrecking the Canadian economy for the sake of the globalist “green” flimflam, a sustained high volume of third world immigration, and outlandish DEI activism that includes giving vast tracts of real estate back to Canada’s First Nations people, their Indians. Carney has also very actively played footsie with the CCP to a degree that is seriously pissing off Mr. Trump. Among all the other shocks and surprises upcoming, you might imagine him having to send the 82nd Airborne up to Ottawa to inform PM Carney that there will be no globalist seat of operations in North America.

Yes, things are getting that strange. And then, continuing the clean-up operation south of our border, there is Cuba to straighten out. Cuba is obviously next. Our patience with that failing state’s communist export project is particularly thin, now that the Democratic Party here is entertaining Marxist-Leninist dreams of glory.

On top of all that, we have serious concerns with the financial markets and the widening income inequality that drives the younger generations’ yen for “socialism” (free rent, free medicine, free stuff). Financialization concentrates and compounds wealth while the salary-mule class stagnates, suffers, goes broke, and nurses its grievances. We’re pushing into the season of financial train wrecks. AI has cornered all the free capital in the land — for something that appears to be an existential menace as much as any potential economic benefit — and it is wildly perverting the equity market. The bond market groans under the debt burden and the impossibility of fiscal prudence. Capitalism that can’t self-correct invites financial and political violence.

It’s probably a greater threat to us than the faraway wars, bad as they are. Mr. Trump, Secretary Bessent, and others in charge surely know this — that the American ownership class has become tiny, and that the cure for that is getting the vast dis-owned, forsaken middle-class back into businesses that they will own, in an economy based on production of real goods, not on playing games with money. There is so much to be done and we can get it done if we screw our heads back on.

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

You ask: Why did Achilles drag Hector around the city of Troy three times?

Answer: He was just that pissed.

So it goes with President DJ Trump and the intransigent jihadi maniacs running Iran down a rat hole. Mr. T is just that pissed, too. “War is Hell,” the savvy Union general WT Sherman observed after he torched Atlanta, setting a precedent for moral clarity in the service of tactical fortitude. And thus, a century-and-a-half later, this is Iran’s hard time. Iran can make it stop at any time by. . . stopping. But the catch is, they really have to stop it, no more head fakes, ruses, jukes, dodges, and ploys. Just stop it.

Don’t doubt that they will have to stop it. We are going to make them stop. In the meantime, there is plenty else to concern those of us who care about our country, and Western Civ more generally, on the home front. Here comes the Insane Clown Posse of the Democratic Socialists. Their platform: abolish the police; no more jail for criminals; open borders; amnesty for all border-jumpers; abolish the Senate; Abolish the electoral college (House of Representatives to elect the president); defund the War Department; voting rights for all non-citizens; “wealth” taxes; free housing, food, medical care for all; green new deal laws; free Palestine (which is more important than any place else on Earth)!

Oh, and they are quite out-front about merely using the Democratic Party as a means to acquire power. Yeah, you noticed that already? Nobody actually had to read the quiet part out-loud. (Well, it wasn’t all that quiet.) Question is: how is all this going to work in practice (or in the praxis, as the Gramscian Marxists like to say — because it sounds like some occult power), as they roll over every institution in the land.

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This blog is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals, helping investors learn about and own physical gold & silver as part of a proven, long-term wealth preservation strategy. To explore their market insights, educational resources, visit: mcalvany.com

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are our own jihadistas. They aim to make their program work by jamming it down America’s throat, starting with the throats of the plain old Democratic Party, the party of FDR, JFK, and HRC, currently fronted by Hakeem Jeffries (the House) and Chuck Schumer (the soon-to-be-abolished Senate). These two appear to be totally buffaloed by the DSA’s Insane Clown Posse. It’s their own Frankenstein monster, stitched together in their laboratory from the tatters of the 20th century. And like in the original by Mary Shelley, this monster is fixing to abolish its maker. Hakeem and Chuck are just standing by like a couple of credulous clucks waiting to see how things develop as the calendar marches implacably toward the catastrophic midterm election.

Last week’s Maine Senate primary debate was instructive. A more pitiful conclave of political losers had not been observed on continental US soil since Millard Fillmore led the Know-Nothing party into oblivion in 1856. (And, of course, five years later the American Civil War ignited.) Remember the old maxim: “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” Well, Gawd help us, then. See for yourself (click image):

The fellow on the right pretending to be a woman is one Ashley Webb (formerly James Charles Webb) who cited “her” reasons for joining the race as: running for office before (unsuccessfully), being a songwriter, writing books, and being an “angry citizen” who would be an “angry senator.” Perfect! You might ask: why wasn’t Punch the Monkey onstage with the rest of this bunch?

Here is your very picture of Progressivism, the larval form of DSA — and, as you read this, there are Progressive larvae yet metamorphosing into full-blown DSAs all over these fifty states. Mamdani in New York. . . Brandon Johnson in Chicago. . . Katie Wilson in Seattle. . . Michelle Wu in Boston. . . Karen Bass in LA, etc. And here come DSAs Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander, taking House seats in New York and Melat Kiros out in Colorado (yes, the lady who likes to wipe her hands on the US flag) who are expected to join The Squad (AOC, Jayapal, Pressley, Tlaib) next January. Plus, over on the soon-to-be-abolished Senate side, one Dr. Abdul El-Sayed running in Michigan. They all promise to keep the punishment coming until American morale improves!

Looming over this Insane Clown Posse of — oh, let’s just say it — feckless communists, is the ancient visage of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Eyes of Dr. TJ Eckleburg — the old war-horse’s long-cherished dreams finally coming true. Remember, in 1988 Bernie took his new wife on a honeymoon to the Soviet Union? Like. . . to witness how well that system was working. . . exactly three years before it collapsed. You can say the Democratic Socialists of America have got exactly the avatar they deserve.

The question is: will the DSA drag the Democratic Party into oblivion? Most assuredly they will. We are going to get election reform one way or another this year. There will be no more mail-in ballot harvesting or voting by non-citizens or vote tabulation machines. It might be that a substantial demographic in our country is insane, say, generously, maybe forty percent. But a firm majority of Americans are not insane and they are going to put a stop to this communist insurrection just as President DJ Trump — who is really pissed — will put an end to the forty-seven-year Iranian jihad. What a week it has been!!! More thrills and chills ahead, you can be sure.

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

Strange to relate, in last night’s speech to the nation on election chicanery, President Trump managed to both overwhelm and underwhelm public expectation. He touched on voting machine shenanigans, registration skullduggery, cyber-fuckery, labor union toolery, ballot fraud, and especially China meddling.

Internal CIA / FBI docs at the time said that China’s policy around the 2020 US election was to “leverage all domestic and foreign elements” opposed to the President to prevent his re-election. The Intel bunch never sent that memo to the White House. They were too busy pushing fake Russia meddling, fake impeachment, and a fake Covid-19 pandemic. Then they declared that the 2020 was “the most secure election in history.”

As of yesterday, the President de-classified many thousands of Intel agency documents for the public (and news media) to peruse. And naturally, the major cable news networks (except Fox) declined to broadcast the speech. As of Friday morning, The New York Times leads the offensive to disparage the actual news.

He’s Obsessed, that Trump! The actual news: China hacked over 220-million voter registrations, plus social security files; manufactured and shipped tens of thousands of fake US driver’s licenses to be used in motor-voter states; and paid favored US journalists to write negative articles about Mr. Trump. The Department of Homeland Security reported 278,000 non-citizens were registered to vote in federal elections. But that number was compiled only from states that complied with DOJ demands for voter rolls. California, New York, and Illinois and many other states refused, so the number is probably more than double the DHS figure.

Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!

This blog is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals, helping investors learn about and own physical gold & silver as part of a proven, long-term wealth preservation strategy. To explore their market insights, educational resources, visit: mcalvany.com

The big take-away was that US Intel agencies withheld all this intel from the President of the US, Mr. Trump, in the lead-up to the 2020 vote. Yes, there really is a Deep State, as seen starkly in a now-declassified memo from the then-chief of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, one Nikki Floris, who wrote “I’m basically running a shadow government at this point” by hiding information from POTUS. Ms. Floris is now employed as Microsoft’s Director of Insider Risk (former Deputy Attorney General under “Joe Biden,” Lisa Monaco, is President of Microsoft Global Affairs.)

According to the NY Post’s Miranda Devine, in August 2020, Nikki Floris also tried to hoodwink Senators Chuck Grassley and Rob Johnson, telling them the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian op — a gag later ratified by fifty-one former intel officers (including five former CIA Directors) who signed the notorious October letter to the news media. All of this activity, Mr. Trump averred, amounted to a cover-up of a conspiracy by members of the permanent bureaucracy to overthrow the government. And that is exactly why more than one federal grand jury is convened in Fort Pierce, Florida, right now, to sort out who, exactly, is going to account for these rather grave crimes. The new document release is apt to accelerate the work of US Attorneys there, since declassification is the biggest routine holdup in the process.

On the “underwhelming” side of the president’s speech, there was little mention of the swing-state ballot fraud enabled and conducted by local election officials in Fulton County, Georgia, Maricopa County, Arizona, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Antrim County, Michigan, Mesa County, Colorado, and Philadelphia, PA. But you know that the FBI raided Fulton County election headquarters months ago and seized around 700 boxes of evidence, and then reassigned 260 FBI agents to examine all the material. All that might still be to-come.

Then there is the question of the millions of dollars that Hunter Biden winkled out of China over the years before the 2020 election — records of which were stuffed in his infamous laptop, along with photos and video of his sexual exploits there — and whether Hunter’s father, Joe, was a blackmail captive of China leading up to that election. Stay tuned on that.

Altogether, Mr. Trump’s speech and document drops are obviously an effort to move election reform, the Save America Act, through Congress, where it has languished in a procedural miasma for months due to one man: Senate Majority Leader John Thune. The President’s emphasis last night on China’s election meddling is purposeful in ways not broadly apprehended, but I will tell you:

If Congress does not find a way to vote that bill out to Mr. Trump’s desk before they recess for the rest of the summer in late July, Mr. Trump will invoke an executive order under the National Emergencies Act (NEA) — Public Law 94-412; codified at 50 U.S.C. §§ 1601–1651 — requiring the fifty states to employ all the same provisions that are in the SAVE America Act for the 2026 midterm elections. Under the NEA, the federal courts cannot be used to fight or strike down the executive order; it can only be stopped by a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate.

If that is the course that this takes, you can expect Antifa and the Democratic-Socialist foot-soldiers to take to the streets this fall in a violently-amplified episode of “No Kings” demonstrations — because fair and honest elections with citizens-only voting will mean the end of the Democratic Party, and they know it. Last night’s move by President Trump is only the opening bid of a quickening game against the Deep State, and their partners-in-sedition. The game is gonna get rough now.

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

Eric Metaxas is the author of seven New York Times Bestsellers, including his newest: Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World. His earlier books include Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy and Martin Luther, as well as thirty children’s books. His works have been translated into 25 languages. Eric is the host of Socrates in the City and the Eric Metaxas Show (on Apple Podcasts), where he has interviewed Dick Cavett, Ron Howard, George Foreman, Mel Gibson, Morgan Freeman, and many others. His humor has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

This podcast is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals. For more than 50 years, McAlvany Precious Metals has helped investors learn about and own physical gold and silver as part of a long-term approach to wealth preservation.

To explore their market insights, educational resources, and see whether precious metals make sense for you, visit: mcalvany.com.

Where do the enemies of our country — including the ones inside our country — get the idea that Iran is winning this war? They wish it into existence. The wishing is necessary to put across the talking points that President Trump and his advisors don’t have a plan, don’t know what they are doing, that the USA is persecuting and oppressing Iran for no good reason.

We pounded Iran over the weekend for a very good reason: Iran needs to learn the hard way that there are consequences for breaking agreements. For instance, at around 7:15p.m. local time, Iran fired a projectile at the Cyprus-flagged container ship GFS Galaxy, managed by Dubai-based Global Feeder Shipping, in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran claimed it was “a warning shot,” but it was a direct hit on the ship’s engine room, disabling the vessel. The crew had to abandon ship in lifeboats — and were soon rescued by a combination of other commercial ships and Omani navy vessels. One crew member went missing.

Hours after the attack, Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz closed. And soon after that, President Trump asserted that the Strait was open to commercial traffic, with US forces positioned to ensure freedom of navigation, contradicting Iran’s announcement of closure “until further notice.”

Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!

This blog is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals, helping investors learn about and own physical gold & silver as part of a proven, long-term wealth preservation strategy. To explore their market insights, educational resources, visit: mcalvany.com

It’s not the President and his advisors who are confused, it’s the situation, and for a good reason: Iran’s leadership is confused. It’s as if Mr. Trump has to stand between Abbott & Costello doing their Who’s on First routine. All the while the IRGC fulminates and fires what remains of its ordnance at ships and other countries in the region, Iran’s putative civilian leadership, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Foreign Minister Seyyed Abbas Araghchi, and Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi, are talking desperately on the phone to mediators in Qatar and Pakistan about how to implement “technical issues” in the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).

All of this indicates that Iran’s leadership is badly split between its civil government and the IRGC (Revolutionary Guard) forces that operate as a competing Mafia-style command structure with an attached military of its own, separate from Iran’s regular army. The major discord between the two entities is that the civil government would apparently like the conflict with America to resolve in a way that will allow their country to salvage its economy and return to normal relations with the rest of the world, while the IRGC remains obdurately bent on jihad, no matter what it means for their country and its people.

The problem with jihad is that it must be waged against all infidels, meaning the people of Western Civ — a major part of the rest of the world — and now even many states around the Persian Gulf region who have joined President Trump’s Board of Peace — Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan — that might qualify as targets of jihad, too. Why? Because Israel was one of the initial signatories, making the Board of Peace a creature of The Great Satan (the USA) and Little Satan (Israel).

Of course, a key precept in jihad is taqiyya, which prescribes lying and deception in the service of jihad, which further suggests that, for the jihadist IRGC, there can be no real understanding in the Memorandum of Understanding that Iran’s civil government signed. Taqiyya requires the IRGC to lie, which it has demonstrated it is determined to do. . . like, firing missiles at commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz after it promised not to. How can such conduct possibly produce mutual understanding?

And so, if you picture the negotiations as a carrot-and-stick type process, you see that Iran’s IRGC is oblivious to carrots. Only the stick might avail, and Mr. Trump is obliging them with it. By the way, rumors circulated the past twenty-four hours that the IRGC’s newest commander, Ahmad Vahidi, was killed in his bunker by an American bomb over the weekend. True? Dunno. We’ll probably learn soon enough. Vahidi became the IRGC Commander in March of this year after his predecessor, Mohammad Pakpour, was successfully blown up. Who’s available to step-up into the job now? I guess we’ll find that out soon enough, too.

Speaking of targets, we also learned that President Trump was targeted for assassination by Iran (surprise surprise) upon leaving last week’s NATO confab in Turkey — Israeli intel informed him — necessitating that switcheroo between the new Air Force One gifted by Qatar, and the good old baby-blue Air Force One just recently retired from service going all the way back to Bush One. The old plane had better defensive weaponry aboard, our officials explained.

If I were president of our country, at this point in the quarrel with Iran, I’d consider just dropping Graham Platner over Tehran. And if that fails to get their minds right, follow-up with Rosie O’Donnell and Ana Navarro.

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

The scene: February of 2027, a federal courtroom in Fort Pierce (St. Lucie County), Florida, the third day of trial in the RussiaGate matter. Defendants seated on the right (from the judge’s vantage) are so numerous they require two tables, including John Brennan, James Comey, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, Strzok & Page, Bruce Ohr, Lisa Monaco, Mary McCord, Christopher Wray, Marc Elias, and seven other former federal officials.

Former President Barack Obama and former Sec’y of State Hillary Clinton, named as “unindicted co-conspirators,” are not present in the courtroom for the sake of decorum. Former MI6 agent, the slippery Christopher Steele, purveyor of the infamous “dossier,” is on-the-lam, whereabouts unknown. The charges against the bunch are Seditious Conspiracy (18 U.S. Code § 2384), Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice (18 U.S.C. §§ 1503, 1512, 1519), Conspiracy Against Rights / Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law (18 U.S.C. §§ 241, 242), Perjury (18 U.S.C. § 1621), Concealment (18 U.S.C. § 1001).

At 10:00 a.m., a “surprise” witness is ushered into the room. Gasps erupt from all angles. The witness is immediately identified by his snow-white hair and beard. Everybody sees it is Julian Assange. He is a surprise witness for security reasons. He has been flown from Sydney to New Delhi to Frankfurt, and finally to Miami in a US government airplane, the lone passenger.

Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!

This blog is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals, helping investors learn about and own physical gold & silver as part of a proven, long-term wealth preservation strategy. To explore their market insights, educational resources, visit: mcalvany.com

Recall: in June 2024, Assange reached a plea deal with the US DOJ: guilty on one count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defense information. He was sentenced to sixty-two months (time served), crediting the approximately five years he had already spent in Britain’s Belmarsh prison while fighting extradition — but not counting the six years and ten months he was holed-up before that in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. There was no additional jail time, supervision, or financial penalty.

Assange is sworn and seated, led through preliminary questions as to his identity, place of residence, his former occupation running the news service known as Wikileaks, blah blah. The prosecuting federal attorney will now turn to the subject of one Seth Rich — remember him? The twenty-seven-year-old was working for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2016 as Voter Expansion Data Director. At 4:00 a.m. July 10, 2016, Rich was found dead, shot twice in the back, on Flagler Place NW, in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., in what police called “a botched robbery.”

Rather bizarrely from a police procedural standpoint, Rich’s wallet, stuffed with money, his watch, and his cell phone remained on his person. Only his laptop was taken in the “robbery.” It has been a “cold,” unsolved case all these years.

Sometime before the murder, as early as Spring 2016, well before the Democratic party’s nominating convention, Assange’s Wikileaks received a large packet of information containing as many as 58,000 emails hacked out of the account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. The emails detailed many curious machinations inside the DNC that year, including sketchy efforts underway to derail Clinton’s rival, Bernie Sanders, excerpts from Clinton’s paid private Wall Street speeches (e.g., to Goldman Sachs), references to Clinton’s health problems, her private email server issue, various Clinton foundation dealings, and a lot of strange chatter about “pizza” and other mundane food items that would eventually spawn the “PizzaGate” story alluding to alleged child sex cult activities centered around John Podesta and his brother Tony.

It was quite a juicy load. But Wikileaks sat on it until just before the election. That spring and summer, Hillary was already laboring under the scandal about the private email server she had set up in her suburban Chappaqua, NY, home. She had apparently used it casually when she ran the State Department to conduct official government business, including classified information, instead of her official government email address. That itself was against the law, apart from what else the content of the Podesta email trove revealed. The FBI had been working the server case that spring, and just weeks before the convention, FBI Director Jim Comey made a big public show of exonerating Hillary, declaring incorrectly that he declined to prosecute — since it is not the FBI’s job to prosecute, only investigate, and for the DOJ to actually decide whether to prosecute. But he did add for the record that her doings had been “extremely careless.”

Anyway, Comey’s blunder became a low-grade scandal unto itself, colored by the suspicious meeting a month earlier between Bill Clinton and then Attorney General Loretta Lynch in her official airplane parked on the tarmac of the Phoenix airport. Both claimed they just talked about their grandchildren. Hence, Comey letting Hillary off the hook in July had the odor of a set-up. She was duly nominated July 26, 2016.

In October, 2016, Wikileaks began dribbling out the hacked Podesta emails they had obtained earlier that year, just in time for the election. To complicate things, the FBI and the New York City police were just then investigating former Rep. Anthony Weiner, husband of Clinton’s closest aide Huma Abedin, for sending sexually explicit messages to a minor. In the course of things, they obtained Weiner’s laptop, which was stuffed with 140,000 additional emails between Ms. Abedin and Hillary. Yikes!

On October 28, 2016 (eleven days before the election), Comey sent a letter to Congress notifying them that the FBI was reviewing these newly discovered emails to determine if they contained classified information (they did), in effect re-opening Hillary’s private server case. Comey later testified he felt obligated to inform Congress to avoid accusations of a cover-up close to the election. He called it a “no-win situation.” On November 6, 2016 (two days before Election Day), Comey announced the review found no new evidence warranting charges, reaffirming the July conclusion.

All of this intrigue revolved around the question of who, exactly, hacked those DNC emails. In June 2016, a cyber-security outfit called CrowdStrike, run by former FBI agent Shawn Henry, identified two Russian intelligence-linked groups — Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear — as responsible for the DNC hack. By that time, the Steele Dossier was already circulating between the CIA, the FBI, and the White House. The Russia collusion story (the RussiaGate hoax) was busy being born. Russia Russia Russia !!! It was all the people of the USA heard the whole four years of the first Trump term.

Which brings us forward to the courtroom scene, February, 2027, Julian Assange in the witness chair. The young lead federal prosecutor (one of several) in the room, finishes his preliminary questions and asks Assange: “Are you willing to tell the court now, who exactly was your source for the DNC emails?” Assange has kept it secret for all these years. But he had been very badly abused by some of the very US government officials who are sitting at the two defendant’s tables, and he is rather sore about all the years he had to hide out in the Ecuadorean embassy in London before the Americans induced the British authorities to stuff him in Belmarsh prison for another five.

“Yes,” he says placidly. “It was a young man named Seth Rich. He copied it onto a thumb-drive directly from the DNC.”

And that is how all the bullshit about RussiaGate finally dissolves into a rancid cloud of sedition for the folks slumped in their seats on the defendants’ side of the courtroom.

Shout out to the valiant podcaster Mel K for pointing us in the right direction on this one.

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

Lurching into high summer, we take a break from the monumental grandiosity of High Architecture and focus on a small, but not unimportant, matter of civic design that applies especially to the American small town. What’s wrong with the picture above? I will tell you.

The everyday built environment is not just a collection or succession of things sitting on the terrain. It consists of relationships between them. A window is not a mere hole in the wall of a building, it is a relationship between the inside of the building and the outside. It is a transition between the two.

Likewise, a fence is a device of transition. It informs the citizen-at-large that the public realm of street meets and transitions into the private realm of the front yard, and ultimately the house. There are better and worse ways of doing this. A stockade fence is one of the worse ways because it is brutal and crass, like sticking your hand in the face of someone trying to speak to you.

Ideally, in the small town setting, you would want gentle transitions between public space and the private realm. And also, ideally, the private realm would show some generosity toward the street. It would share something of itself to the public, something worth sharing. All of which explains why the best fences in residential neighborhoods are semi-transparent.

You can see through (and over) this fence. The property owner shows some generosity to the people on the street. You are allowed to see the house, and if the house contains some design grace notes, so much the better. The one above is rather austere. Its chief virtue is its clean, classic proportioning. But you are allowed to look through and over the pickets to see it. Don’t you like to see the houses along the street as you pass by? Of course you do.

Now, I will tell you why you see so many stockade fences in American towns: the automobile creates chaos in the street, even in a small town residential street, low-grade chaos. Even that much dissonance in your environment prompts self-defense. The house (the home-owner, that is) does not feel generous toward the street. He doesn’t want to share anything with the street and these menacing things moving in it. He wants to block it out, pretend that it’s not there. It’s a simple as that.

Bottom line: the people who manage your town and write the design codes must be careful to code the residential streets in favor of fences you can see through, and code against stockades and high walls, except under special circumstances. The outcome, I promise you, will be better looking towns. . . places you will enjoy walking around. Now, onto summer and all its pleasures!

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Now that the grand 250th USA birthday party is over — the speeches, the shrieking warplanes, the dazzling fireworks, the speeches and strawberry shortcake — there is only one way this thing can go. What thing? The war for the soul of the nation. Some mysterious somebody is behind the surging “Democratic-Socialist” craze. Somebody is paying for it. It’s a last-ditch drive to marshal the disaffected, under-employed young voters, choking on their college loans, deranged by anomie, and get them marching in solidarity with X-million illegal aliens to act-out an election jihad so as to squeeze out House and Senate majorities and, ultimately, wreck the nation.

That mysterious background “somebody” is not so mysterious. It just doesn’t self-identify under a banner, but you can easily tell who they are: the slippery closet-Marxist Barack Obama and, behind him, the American Deep State nomenklatura desperate to stay out of prison, along with the unelected EU Commission led by the grandmotherly sadist Ursula von der Leyen (plus the banksters behind her). Some call them “globalists.” They are a loose coalition of convenience against the populist threat of Mr. Trump in America and similar populist movements in Europe: AfD in Germany, the two parties of Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe in the UK, and LePen’s National Rally in France.

The EU, with its front-men Macron, Merz, and whoever will replace Starmer this month, is currently preoccupied with its stupid effort to provoke Russia into a wider war, using their proxy, Ukraine. Mr. Putin, still advancing through the Donbas, refuses to get drawn-in deeper with the EU despite the drone and missile sorties lately banging-up his oil depots. Mr. Putin is actually a defender of Western Civ — yes, ironic, isn’t it, considering what his country escaped out of in 1991 — but it’s so. Russia has become our natural ally in this struggle as the EU goes all werewolf on both Russia and us. File under strange-but-true.

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Contrary to Deep State propaganda, and the IRGC’s bullshit, Mr. Trump has the Iran situation in-hand. We have bigly reduced Iran’s capacity to make trouble in the world and our satellites watch everything they do now, so there will be no Iranian military re-build, no matter how the MOU talks go. They still do have the option of dropping their jihad fixation and acting like a normal nation, but we’ll just have to stand by on that.

What has to happen now in the USA is a summer of accountability. Perp walks. Indictments. Preparation for trials. Many of you are discouraged about this, I know, but please put those black pills back in the medicine chest. Accountability is coming. The mills of the law grind slowly, and it’s especially difficult since the Deep State has corrupted select precincts of the law, such as the US District Court for the District of Columbia, where rogue judges Boasberg, Chutkan, Sullivan, Howell, Meta, Reyes, Cooper, et al., have made an industry of paralyzing Mr. Trump’s executive branch.

Nevertheless, accountability might also be coming for Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the dodgy majority opinion on the SCOTUS’s June 30 “Birth Citizenship” decision (Trump v. Barbara), an epic fail for Justice Roberts (joined by Amy Coney Barrett and the three DEI gals). The 14th Amendment was written to mitigate the disruptions of the Civil War. Section One is clearly aimed at defining the full citizenship of former slaves, and that’s all, not the offspring of casual visitors and border-jumpers. There was considerable clarifying debate on the record about all that in June, 1866, with skeletons still being cleared off the battlefields. The 2026 decision looks like a debacle for reasons also obvious.

What motivated Mr. Roberts to do such a harm? Perhaps he’s just an idiot, but there’s more lurking there. It’s widely known that the Chief Justice made at least one week-long visit to Norm Eisen, after Eisen had been appointed Ambassador to Prague (2011) by his law school classmate, President Barack Obama. In these final years of Obama-in-office, Norm Eisen was busy plotting so-called Color Revolution in Europe, which climaxed in the 2014 Maidan operation in Ukraine. The purpose was to make Ukraine a proxy to weaken Russia, and would come to entail massive money-laundering and the setting up of bio-weapons labs there. This was also the period when then-Veep Joe Biden was given the “Urkaine Portfolio” and was busiest with his own grifting enterprise, through son Hunter.

Norm Eisen went on to become the chief lawfare ninja coordinating against the Trump administration with his field captains: Marc Elias, Mary McCord, Andrew Weissmann, and others. All have been involved in suspiciously seditious activities through both Trump terms. What was the Chief Justice confabbing about with Norm Eisen in Prague then? About vagaries of US / EU legal cooperation? Or were they deliberating on tactics for dealing with Barack Obama’s as-then-undeclared successor? Or possibly on bringing color revolution to the US, if Barack Obama’s posterity declared it necessary?

Consider the strange situation that one Sheldon Snook was appointed Special Assistant to Roberts in 2014. Snook is married to lawfare ninja Mary McCord, who served as Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division, DOJ (2014–2016) and Assistant Attorney General for National Security, DOJ (2016–2017). She was involved in the initiation of the RussiaGate operation and in 2019 was appointed Special Counsel to Jerrold Nadler’s House Judiciary Committee during the 2019 impeachment inquiry into President Trump — the impeachment that was all about Ukraine. . . and what might have been going on there under Obama, especially Joe Biden shenanigans.

Consider, too, that a scandal has just emerged involving CJ Roberts’s wife, Jane, and the enormous commissions she received working at the DC law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, and then the legal recruiting outfit Major, Lindsey & Africa (through 2019), and then another legal recruiting firm, Macrae, for placing eminent attorneys into law firms with active Supreme Court case practices. Her income from all this recruiting surpassed $10-million. CJ Roberts did not recuse himself from the cases involving these relationships. This is a still-developing story. . . .

And, of course, an investigation of California Governor Gavin Newsom begun, irony-of-ironies, by the Biden DOJ, has just blossomed into a florid scandal involving shell companies set up by Gov. Newsom’s busy wife, Jennifer, through which millions of dollars were laundered under various fake social and health service initiatives. Newsom appointee Alexis Podesta “wore a wire” during the period and is cooperating in the case. Buh-bye presidential hopes, Guv, and don’t let the cell door whack your ass on the way in.

These are just a few possible appetizers. The main course is coming up.

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

Who are all these Democratic Socialists of America, anyway?

“We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” one of their spoxes declared on Instagram in 2024.

Hmmmm . . . . I wonder if you can be a little more specific. Like, including democracy and socialism, two western civ constructs? Kind of looks like a baby / bathwater situation, followed by burning down the house where the baby lived. Do we get a chance to debate this proposition in the midterm election?

Likewise, a St. Paul, Minnesota, school board member, one Chauntyll Allen offered the following policy recommendation on the We Love Our Dog Park Facebook page:

A bad moon is rising on our nation’s 250th birthday. The country is in a rancid mood. You begin to see what happens when political ideas are carried to their last limits. Question is: does all this add up to a winning party platform? You must suppose that higher-ups in the Democratic Party are asking themselves the question now. What do Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer think when they see these Angels of Death on the march (or in flight) over the midterm battlefield?

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Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez, and Melat Kiros are going to Congress to link arms with “The Squad” — AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley — and they will bring their cargo of DSA policy ideas with them: racial, gender, and social justice; abolish ICE (no more deporting anybody); defund the police; end incarceration (no more jails); free housing and medical care; green this-n-that; government ownership of business; abolish the Senate and the electoral college; pack the SCOTUS. . . .

The platform apparently has a lot of appeal to a certain demographic — which, I suspect, includes the many young recent graduates of the diploma mills who are pissed-off that Mr. Trump & Company are methodically shutting down the NGOs that were supposed to furnish these young race-and-gender studies majors with cushy, six-figure jobs doing “activism.” Alas, that pathway is increasingly blocked and the country only needs so many baristas. What to do then? Take it to the limit! Be communists. . . with all that entails. What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine, too.

This new gen of Democratic Socialists is arguably worse than the Confederates of 1861. Those Rebs only wanted to secede from USA and go their own way in one corner of the land. They didn’t want to piss on Johann Sebastian Bach, Leonardo DaVinci, Jane Austen, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson as they walked out. The Democratic Socialists of our day are fully aligned with their avatars: Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot, who operated human meat-grinders at scale to tamp down the opposition. Not a great look to align with the great mass-murderers of history.

It must be agony for Schumer and Jeffries. Eradicate Western Civ. . . ? Piss on white people’s corpses. . . ? Are they really going to get behind that? No-o-o-o-o. But they will try to wriggle around this steaming pile for some weeks to come until it is obvious that the Democratic Party has blown itself up, hoisted itself on that old petard. It may be too late for the party’s old guard. No matter how many rain-dances Elizabeth Warren does, nothing will put out this dumpster fire.

Another question for the months ahead: can that party control its increasingly maniacal street warriors, the Antifas, the Pink Pistols, the Transgender Armed Defense forces, and whatever remains of BLM. There is still a lot of money in circulation for public demonstrations and disruptions from George Soros and other sponsors. And apart from that are the forces of jihad, with their own foreign patrons. Gawd knows how many jihadis came into the country during “Joe Biden’s” orchestrated alien invasion. Not just a few, you can be sure.

By the way, can somebody at the Office of Management and Budget do an audit of the $370-billion that “Joe Biden” handed over to John Podesta in the fall of 2024 to administer “climate-related provisions” of the Inflation Reduction Act, and figure out how much of it bounced right back into Democratic Party-adjacent NGOs and down to party capos like Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Brandon Johnson in Chicago, and Karen Bass in LA?

Meanwhile, the big celebration of America’s 250th is only hours away. There will be a lot of bangs and flashes the next couple of days. Let’s hope they are not really big ones. Stay alert and safe out there. And happy 250th birthday to you, America — if you can keep yourself.

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

Mel K is an investigative writer, host, and producer. Her new book, Infiltration Instead of Invasion: America Betrayed 1944–1954, examines how intelligence networks, financial institutions, and supranational structures reshaped American sovereignty in the decade after World War II. Mel was a producer and screenwriter in Hollywood until she was cancelled by the Woke Rebellion. She reinvented her self as a podcaster and is now host of The Mel K Show, where she has been killin’ it with her commentary on the American political traumas and psychodramas of the day. She also happens to be the producer of Roaseanne Barr is America, which streams on Apple TV and other venues.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

This podcast is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals. For more than 50 years, McAlvany Precious Metals has helped investors learn about and own physical gold and silver as part of a long-term approach to wealth preservation.

To explore their market insights, educational resources, and see whether precious metals make sense for you, visit: mcalvany.com.