Clusterfuck Nation

A punishing heat-dome creeps over the eastern half of the country just in time for the gala Fourth of July week. The days are brutal, but anything and everything crawls out of the woodwork when that blazing sun goes down and the moon comes out. Everyone’s on edge, but the edge of what? I will tell you.

First, could there be a richer (or more obvious) target for bloody mischief than this year’s national holiday, the 250th birthday of a nation that millions lucky enough to live here have been trained-up to hate on? Even the sons and daughters (including pretend “daughters”) of millionaires have gone mad-dog on America, the poster-boy being Marxist-jihadi New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Left’s new avatar-general.

Since no one is more hated than the, ahem, Celebrator-in-Chief, you might want to steer clear of conspicuous public celebrations this week. Antifa and even worse gangs are out there right now, making plans and laying traps. Maybe not so much in places like Texas, where eight Antifas were just sentenced collectively to 450 years in the slammer for shooting up the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado. . . but here in the Empire State and other Blue-ish jurisdictions, all bets are off. Be careful ‘out there’ among the smokin’ ribs, the fireworks shows, and big music venues.

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You can see how this summer, and the nauseating slide down to the midterm elections, are shaping up. The party of “Our Democracy” is desperate to an extreme now, all disfigured by a communist leprosy eating away at its public face (and a cancer of fraud metastasizing through its innards). It has become such an obvious monster, raging with its hair lit-up, that anyone with half a functioning brain is shying away, stealing off into the gloaming. The party has nothing left but chaos and, in the weeks ahead, anything that might be disrupted probably will be.

The objective is to create so much havoc and distress throughout the country — especially the big cities — that Mr. Trump will have to invoke the Insurrection Act, and by doing so, the Lefty-left hope to create conditions so adverse that an orderly Election Day cannot happen. The Insurrection Act would be the Left’s cue to declare Mr. Trump the very “king” whose coronation they have busily rehearsed all year, and then, voila, you get a new French-style American Revolution 2.0, complete with guillotine and transgender Jacobins turning the country upside-down.

You might consider the theory that the nation actually needs to suffer a genuine nightmare to wake up from. The Revolution 1.0 we celebrate this week was, after all, a nightmarish struggle rife with hardship and loss. Nine signers of the Declaration of Independence died from war-related tribulations. Five were imprisoned and tortured. Twelve had homes ransacked and burned. And then, of course, the military action itself, including travails such as the winter at Valley Forge, the disastrous New York Campaign, and the never-ending logistics crisis, no food, no clothing, no munitions.

In the present summer of travail we face, you can expect at least some major wake-up calls issued by the bloc in the country that has not gone insane — which happens to include many in Mr. Trump’s executive branch. I’m serenely confident that real evidence of 2020 election fraud will finally emerge, coincidental with indictments. Do you think that the Fulton County, GA, election records were seized last winter for no reason? Say goodbye to that old “baseless” talking point.

There are, of course, a whole lot of other seditious and treasonous Beltway villains nervously awaiting administration of the law. You know their names. It appears that the new supervising US Attorney in the Southern District of Florida, Joseph DiGenova, is reorganizing the so-called “grand conspiracy” case against this large cadre of coupsters into a folio of discrete cases — RussiaGate, Fake Impeachment #1, the Mar-a-Lago raid, etc. — to make them more manageable and move them more speedily forward. Don’t be surprised if one or more of these cases happens to drop before the midterms. (Democratic Party true-blue loyalists could be surprised, even shocked to their socks, since these indictments will refute everything that has become essential to their identities as the good and righteous people of this land.)

Just one more item for now in the wake-up folder, coming a little out of left-field: things are looking eerie in the region of the San Andreas fault that runs through California, and perhaps the Seattle fault as well. The earth’s geology even seems to be manifesting a degree of chaos. It’s been shaky along the Pacific Rim “Ring of Fire” for many months. Significant earthquakes have struck Japan (7.4 offshore Honshu/Miyako area), Indonesia (7.4 near Bitung), the Philippines, Tonga, Vanuatu, Chile, Papua New Guinea. The Venezuela “doublet” (June 24, Mag 7.2) occurred in a separate tectonic zone, but all zones are essentially connected by the movements of magma deep in the earth, solar activity (flares, etc), gravitational tidal forces, and so on.

On June 24, a Mag 5.6 shook Redwood Valley, in Mendocino California, a Mag 5.8 near Pistol River, Oregon, and a Mag 5.1 struck 40 miles west of Petrolia in Humboldt County, CA. The east side of the Pacific rim (America’s West Coast) has been unusually quiet for some years now. Be alert. Things seem to be livening-up. Just sayin’.

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

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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!)

Okay, convince me that gay-Islamic-race-communism is a “progressive” political program America is going to buy like corn flakes. The Lefty-left wants to think so, as it lurches from one peak of mental illness to an even greater one in the 130 days to the midterms. Look how successful they’ve been with open borders, defunding the police, men in the girl’s swim lane, no cash bail, sex-change surgery for kids, free-for-all elections, hatin’ on white people, and open Medicare fraud. The new re-branding strategy as “Democratic Socialism” only tells you that reality has ceased to interest them.

No, winning electoral districts stuffed with illegal aliens in bright blue cities with tiny overall voter turnouts won’t sweep the nation like love. More likely it’s a harbinger of the party’s approaching death, like the Whigs going down the drain in 1852, gurgle-gurgle. Advocating to destroy American society is a poor sales pitch. The party’s old-line leadership frantically seeks some way to neutralize the rising influence of Zohran Mamdani and his disciples, but so far nothing works. An odor of desperation fills the air.

One thing you can say about the gay-Islamic-race-communists is that they are well-organized, which is understandable since their political program resembles an ant farm, a dis-individuated collective with insectile characteristics, workers and soldiers toiling in mindless solidarity to occupy more electoral territory so as to vanquish their “oppressors,” Trump and the big feet of his capitalist minions.

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Meanwhile, though, the money flows dry up as the old Big Donor Dawgs freak-out at the prospect of having their fortunes confiscated, eaten by this advancing ant-swarm, while Scott Bessent and Todd Blanche work to disassemble the giant, hive-like matrix of NGOs that, for years, laundered US taxpayer dollars through the Democratic Party’s patronage system. In New York City, Philly, LA, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, Portland, the NGOs furnished comfortable salaries for young activists churned out remorselessly by Higher Ed, but all that’s starting to look like a bygone Shangri-la, a lost world.

“Many Democratic primary voters, however, are in no mood for defensiveness. As they see it, they’ve been failed by a cautious, compromising establishment, and they’re going to overthrow it.” —Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times

Of course, the loss of those cushy jobs and perqs has pitched that young demographic into a yet greater rage, prompting them to wreak vengeance and havoc on the system that took their “entitlements” away. Activists want to do activism, which is not necessarily the same as working for a living. It’s working for an ideal, a cause — to abolish the very society based on working for a living and replace it with a parent-like, hovering, all-powerful government that provides your every need by “seizing the means of production.”

The trouble is, this has been tried before, many times in the previous century, and the track-record is discouraging, exhibit-A being the old Soviet Union, the experiment that failed. Why? Because after seizing the means of production, the state bureaucracy lacks the skills, the spirit, and the creative juice to produce much of anything, and especially to do it well. All it can actually contribute to the process is its intrinsic bureaucratic entropy and, to put it ultra-simply, entropy is just not a force for good in this world.

The Republican Party is laboring through its own parallel, but rather different sort of crack-up, a breach based more on pure enmity to President Trump’s personality than necessarily to ideas or policy. The Right still uniformly subscribes to personal liberty and economic enterprise, but factions on the right have a long-running investment in the Deep State apparatus and its protection against Mr. Trump’s impending prosecution of the so-called “grand conspiracy” (the ongoing seditious coup), as well as his dismantling of the money-flow architecture that keeps Beltway types rolling in dough. Former AG Bill Barr is exhibit-A for that faction, as when he concealed the FBI’s possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop through Trump Impeachment No. 1, when he refused to investigate ballot fraud after the 2020 election, and when he managed to let Jeffrey Epstein off himself in the Manhattan federal lockup.

Then there is Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the emptiest suit to ever occupy that job, who refuses to explain his aversion to common-sense election reform or his failure to allow confirmation of the president’s nominees to important federal posts. He is so committed to doing nothing that he makes “Joe Biden” look like a prodigy of action. They say Sen. Thune represents the old-school “country club” Republicans, but he looks too dim to even tote up an 18-hole golf card.

There are also Tucker, and Candace, and Nick Fuentes, and MTG, and other pouting and shouting former MAGA superstars throwing down against the president and his program. Tucker has exposed facets of his personality that seem every bit as cuckoo as the beliefs of the Democratic Party — his Bible literalism, his romance with space aliens, and especially his vehement antipathy for the Jews. It has all become rather unappetizing, though rumors swirl of Tucker seeking to build a whole new party to replace the GOP and MAGA. As Homey de Clown might put it: I don’t think so. . . .

Candace Owens, of course, seems clinically insane, with her year-long program of intense defamation and vilification of Charlie Kirk’s widow, as well as her fleering Jew hatred. MTG just looks like a sore loser, and Nick Fuentes. . . ? He’s like something that crawled out of the kitchen baseboards after the lights went out. I doubt that any of them will succeed in destroying MAGA, but they’re making the movement uncomfortable. Let’s face it: they’re embarrassing.

On the other hand, the Party of Algae and “Our Democracy” is incapable of being embarrassed, and that has been obvious for a long time based on the absurdities they attempt to foist upon our country. The Iran War seems to be fading in the rear-view mirror now, despite all their yelling about how we lost it. Oil is hovering just below $70-a-barrel as I write. Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are reduced to a pitiful vaudeville act in the face of Mamdani-ism. Bernie Sanders is lost in a rain-dance for Utopia. And James Carville is on-track for a three-week vacation in the Rubber Room. Don’t bother praying for them. Just wait for gurgle.

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!)

Susan Kokinda has been politically active since 1968, when she was part of the Robert Kennedy presidential campaign in Oregon and California. She pivoted politically after that, and in the 1970’s and 1980’s was active in Washington, DC, defending Richard Nixon during Watergate, covering the White House during the Carter Administration, and working with Congress in support of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. With President Trump’s 2016 victory, she knew it was time to return to Michigan. Since then, she has been organizing throughout the state, educating and building support for President Trump’s commitment to make the U.S. a manufacturing superpower and to make the Republican Party the party of workers and producers. In March 2025, she was elected Coalitions Vice Chair of the Michigan Republican Party.

She broadcasts on the Promethean Update YouTube channel and regularly reaches over 300,000 views. Her theme, along with her co-host Barbara Boyd, is that the real battle in the world is between the opposing principles of the American System and the British System, which represent two different images of man and society.

She has been interviewed by OAN, Real America’s Voice, Stephen Gardner, and numerous podcasters.

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.

That squawking you hear is Iran getting dragged kicking and screaming out of its jihad delirium into something that might look like reality-based relations with the rest of the world. They have to loudly declare that it’s not happening, even as it’s happening, to gaslight their own home folks, who might be getting a little sick of economic free-fall — and probably sick of the IRGC regime itself. And, of course, they know that the Lefty-left half of the USA is rooting for this whole business to fail so they can get their mitts back on the levers of power to avoid prison.

Things are at a pretty pass, all righty. The sticking point of the moment is Lebanon. Everybody is twanging on Israel to quit fighting Hezbollah. Okay, but does Hezbollah not have some obligation to quit its provocations? And is Iran, which controls Hezbollah, not responsibile to make Hezbollah stop?

Notice, you don’t hear any of the kibitzers calling for that. That’s because getting Hezbollah to poke Israel in the eye with a sharp stick is Iran’s favored device for dragging out negotiations which, they apparently hope, will put POTUS in fear of the looming midterm election. But time is running out on their playing for time. What they’re actually playing is pretend — pretending to be living large and in-charge. They’ve got nothing else, really. They’ve driven their country into a ditch.

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 US is in a straight-up good-cop / bad-cop mode. VP Vance, on-the-ground in Switzerland, presents the very picture of a smooth, cool, rational figure where it counts: face-to-face with Iranian leaders, after all these years. He calmly tells the world news media that “encouraging progress” has been made the first day toward a ceasefire in poor, sore-beset Lebanon. As of Monday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi concurred on “X.”

Meanwhile, President Trump was going mad-dog on social media. Of his relations with irksome Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu, POTUS said, “It’s good, but we have to keep him a little bit sane.” He added, “Iran must stop their highly-paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble. If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again. . . bomb the shit out of them.” He advised the Iranian negotiators that they “won’t even make if back” to their country if they keep playing games, and declared that the US will take over the Strait of Hormuz, if necessary. A bit harsh, admittedly. Any trouble parsing it out?

Ghastly as all that might sound, the American negotiating position offers as much carrot as stick. Patrick Wood laid it out nicely in this Substack post. It’s about rearranging the economic “architecture” of the region and, by extension, the rest of the world, which requires a stable, reliable, not-insane Iran and a peaceful Persian Gulf to sustain advanced civilization. The Abraham Accords are designed to induce all the players in the Middle East to act as sovereign nations conscious of, and seeking, their economic best interests — not blocs acting-out large-scale gang warfare based on age-old revenge scenarios. We are simply asking Iran to accept re-integration into real world of transactional nations by joining in the Abraham Accords.

It’s to no one’s benefit for Iran to become a failed state, and that’s what Iran’s leadership is flirting with as they bluster and thwart the peace process. Don’t forget, their clock is ticking, too, maybe even louder than America’s midterm election clock. There’s evidence that the over-full storage capacity for their oil has already caused damage to their oil wells — because shutting down wells degrades the geology of the underlying oil-bearing rock. Inflation has gone wild inside the country, estimated around 70-percent. Iran’s aquifers have lost 90-percent of their water volume as a years-long draught drags on. Iran has to import around 30-percent of its food. Do you suppose these conditions might make everyday life pretty uncomfortable for the Iranian people?

As of Monday morning, VP Vance reported that talks have moved on to the nuclear material question: Iran agreed to offer access to nuclear inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. watchdog. They likewise agreed to establish “coordinating mechanisms” aimed at clearing remaining mines from the Strait of Hormuz and solidifying the ceasefire in Lebanon. That looks like actual progress. This was never going to be easy. Expect more bumps on the road. Iran was so far-gone and for such a long time. Show a little patience.

Also, meanwhile, some real fabulous news as Keir Starmer has opted to vacate 10 Downing Street. Good career move! He’s nearly wrecked what’s left of his country. Nobody knows yet who the Labour Party might shove in to replace him, but it’s sure to be another short-timer because the party itself is burnt toast, based on its overwhelming loss in recent local council elections.

Starmer was in office for just over two years. His predecessor Rishi Sunak also lasted less than two years and, before him, PM Liz Truss (remember her?) was gone after 50 days. Procedural rigmarole might drag out the process to replace Starmer until September, when Parliament returns from its summer recess. “Old Blighty,” as the natives sometimes call the UK, is an exceedingly troubled place. With Starmer lingering in office as the lamest of lame ducks, it’s going to be a long summer, and possibly a hot one.

Equally worrisome, at this fraught moment, are the EU’s efforts to start World War Three with Russia. The EU was behind the massive drone attacks against Moscow last week. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, announced plans for “massive group strikes” on Ukrainian targets on a regular basis. Getting spicey over there. All of this is a smokescreen to conceal the political death throes of virtually all the EU member-nation’s leaders — the feckless Merz in Germany, the wobbling Macron in France, the commie PM Pedro Sánchez in Spain, and Giorgia Meloni in Italy, who double-crossed her voters on ending illegal immigration. Europe’s got nothing. . . but trouble ahead.

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!)

Consider that the many persons and parties yelling that “Iran won the war” have exceedingly cynical interests in painting President Donald Trump as a loser. His American enemies, lodged mainly in the party of “Our Democracy,” are not just striving to get back into power, but to stay out of prison, and perhaps off the gibbet, if treason ends up on the docket. (See: Gabbard Releases Documents on Fauci’s Alleged Role in Wuhan Lab Research Linked to COVID.)

The president’s globalist foes, lodged in the EU and London, resent his unwillingness to join their scheme for a big war against Russia — and are aggrieved about much else in matters of trade, international banking, and energy resources. The ink was hardly dry on the US / Iran Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) when NATO arrantly assisted its proxy, Ukraine, in an audacious drone attack on Moscow. Brussels also stealthily opened “accession talks” for Ukraine and Moldova to enter the EU. More bear-poking. . . .

Just what is the MOU? It’s not a peace settlement. It’s a sixty-day window to negotiate a settlement within clearly laid-out, agreed-upon parameters. You might suppose there’s a fair chance Iran is just jerking the US around. But then, Mr. Trump noted, “. . . if they don’t behave, we’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head, okay? ‘Cause they’ve misbehaved for 47 years.”

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Admittedly, an indelicate remark, yet with unmistakable intent: Jerk us around at your peril. Of course, Mr. Trump has also stated clearly that he would rue having to punish the ordinary Iranian people for the misdeeds of the IRGC maniacs who hold them captive. But also note that we have exquisite satellite intel on all their remaining missile and drone installation. Check out this stunningly detailed document: Atlas of Iran’s Missile Cities (thanks to Jim Shea, who sent it around). We know where everything is. Beyond those targets, if necessary, and alas, there are the bridges and power plants, which would surely cause the Iranian people to suffer. FAFO.

In short, the IRGC leadership have sixty days to get their minds right. On the positive side, the MOU offers them some powerful inducements to play nice in the way of economic assistance, a doorway to normal relations with the rest of the world, a chance to thrive. The question is whether any of that can overcome the IRGC’s apocalyptic “Twelfth Imam” death- wish jihad ideology — which requires the annihilation of Israel.

The MOU requires a ceasefire in Lebanon, where Israel and Hezbollah have faced-off for decades. Mr. Trump is very put-out with Prime Minister Netanyahu for continuing to return fire “disproportionately” on Hezbollah’s provocations. This has led to great consternation and antipathy in the US, which is already marinated in anti-Israel rancor. You might ask, though: if America is obliged to rein-in Israel, is Hezbollah’s long-time sponsor, Iran, not equally obliged to curb Hezbollah’s antics? And you might also ask: if Iran’s money to Hezbollah has been cut off, who is still funding them? Possibly the EU or London? (Just sayin’.)

Mr. Trump’s surprising work-around for that was to suggest that the Syrians go into Lebanon and mop up the floor with Hezbollah. Interesting. Get an Islamic Middle Eastern country to help clean up that mess? Mr. Trump commended Syria’s leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, saying, “He’s done an amazing job of pulling it together. . . . I suggested to Israel to let Syria take care of Hezbollah, because to be honest with you, I think they’d do a better job of doing it . . . . If Israel can’t do the job without killing everyone else, he’ll do the job. Syria will do the job.”

Wild as that sounds, it’s of a piece with the way that Mr. Trump managed to marshal the help of all those Persian Gulf nations in the Iran op so as to end the nuclear threat, and the constant chaos in the region. Who would have imagined that a year ago? Everybody in the region is on the same page now. They want Iran to quit waging jihad. They want to sell oil and natgas and live the good life. We’ll know soon enough how serious Iran is.

The Strait of Hormuz is open for the moment, maybe for all sixty-days of the MOU. Iran’s various media outlets keep saying they intend to operate a tollbooth there eventually. That’s obviously a deal-breaker. It only demonstrates how delusional and untrustworthy they are. The sixty days ahead will be like one of those projects in your college psych lab where you run rats in a Skinner Box. The rat touches one bar, he gets an electric shock. He touches the other bar, he gets a little rat treat. After a while, he learns.

Oh, as I finish up here, it’s just been reported that Ukraine fired off another volley of drones into Moscow overnight and this morning. Russian air defenses claimed to have intercepted hundreds of them, but many damaging strikes landed. One of the targets, an oil refinery hit earlier this week, was hit again. Is it conceivable that “hazelnuts” (Oreshniks) might soon be raining down over Kiev?

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 must be thinking that reality is pushing its luck with the president bringing this Iran business — a war, actually, let’s face it — to a favorable conclusion around dinner time Sunday evening (yawn) and then Mr. DJT sliding directly into his seat on the White House lawn to enjoy the special 80th birthday edition of Testosterone Gone Wild, that is, a full card of tattoo-bedizend savages beating the crap out of each other UFC style, like it was a Hooters parking lot on wife-swap night. . . why, it just doesn’t get more surreal than that.

Imagine what Victoria Nuland, Robert Reich, George Stephanopoulos, Elizabeth Warren, and other good folks of that ilk must be thinking. The. . . (Sputter sputter) indelicacy of it all! A freaking peace deal, and now this low-rent spectacle of ultra-violence! Like their whole world had turned out to be the meanest, lowest, most sordid backwater of the Marvel Comics universe where no one has ever heard of Chardonnay. The ape-men slugging, kicking, gouging, and head-butting each other half to death is one thing. . . but to let slip the opportunity to continue the Iran War with its downstream emoluments for another nineteen years. . . well, now that is an affront to all that is holy in the sub-basements of Foggy Bottom and the broom closets of Langley. As you read this on Monday morning the cries for impeachment will be ringing across the District of Columbia like calls to prayer in Mamdani’s Caliphate on the Hudson.

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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

Surely, you’ll get more details on the Iran deal as Monday spins out, but the terms look not bad at all for Western Civ in the news media’s early shorthand reports: Teheran pledges no nukes, ever, no how, no way. They will allow their cache of super-enriched uranium to be destroyed. The Strait of Hormuz will reopen promptly, free to international shipping, no tolls, no piratical monkey-business. No more Iran funding terrorist proxy groups. That means you Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and sundry cadres of jihadi maniacs ‘out there’ in the world’s hotspots.

Speaking of which, Mr. Netanyahu felt the president’s wrath earlier on Sunday (once again) when he replied to a Hezbollah rocket salvo out of Lebanon with air strikes. But, hey, everybody knows that Israel always and ever answers every attack against it no matter what, because Never Again. Even Mr. Trump knows that, so the whole flap was a sort of mummery. Obviously, Hezbollah must be anxious to wreck the peace deal, since without Iran’s ongoing largess they will not know where their next meal is coming from, not to mention their next shipment of missiles. If Iran actually complies with the deal, Hezbollah can have no more support. There may soon be no more Hezbollah. (Boo-hoo.)

Which raises the next obvious concern, namely, Iran is not known for keeping its word with The Great Satan (us). There is every reason to believe that the vaunted deal is just another sorry episode of them stringing the USA along, playing us. But Mr. Trump has made it clear he reserves the option to rev up the bombers and “do a number on” the Islamic Republic if they pull a fast one on this.

For its part, Iran is crowing in its own state-controlled press that it has won the war. Iran can say whatever it wants to — world opinion will probably not be fooled — if it makes the people running the joint feel good about themselves losing a war. It’ll be Iran’s actions that matter. There’s a chance, perhaps a low-percentage chance, but a chance nonetheless, that Iran has been persuaded to stop being insane.

They do have an opportunity to put jihad aside, sell oil and pistachios to the world, and try being a normal nation for a change. It’s asking a lot, I’m sure, but there’s a lot in it for them. If they actually showed a serious attitude adjustment, you can bet that Mr. Trump would offer help setting up bigly capital investments there, enabling new trade relations, and easing them back into a world of non-insane, sovereign polities with reality-based interests. He already invited them to join the Abraham Accords, to establish full diplomatic relations with the other signers, embassies, direct flights, trade, tourism, and security cooperation.

So, let’s stand by and see if the Memorandum of Understanding gets signed later this week. The president is winging to Geneva for the G-7 as I write. The other parties to the deal are on their way there, too. The face to face meet-up between the American President and whoever Iran sends to the ceremony will be more thrillingly momentous than any pairing of UFC cage fighters on the White House lawn.

In fact, I’m awfully glad that over-the-top extravaganza is done with. The triumphalism is disconcerting. We still have a very serious cold civil war to deal with here in the Homeyland, and a national mental health crisis that turns US daily life into a real time horror movie from sea to shining sea. The party of “our democracy” still works avidly to overthrow the republic, and extravagant sports entertainments will not avail to make that stop. We need perp walks and trials. . .sober business. . .a cold reckoning with our own monsters.

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’ll just have to stand by on whether this war with Iran is over or not, since the Shia true believers’ practice of Taqiyya is a permission structure for lying to infidels (us) when necessary — like, to advance global chaos that will bring the return of the Hidden Imam (Mahdi) to fill the world with justice, and establish Islamic rule. (Got that?) One might wonder, of course, whether the majority of Iran’s people have had enough of the true believers in charge and their true belief in apocalypse.

President Trump’s promise to bring exactly that down on them seems to have had a clarifying effect. The option remains open to “bomb the shit out of them,” as he put it, while keeping their economy in a Macumba Death grip choke-hold. In preliminary strikes Thursday, the US Military might have demonstrated an ability to go after whatever they have left of missile and drone launch sites. In any case, skeptics abound. . . but, admit it, an actual peace agreement would be quite a coup.

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It would be distasteful most of all to the mass formation lunatics of America’s Lefty-left “Resistance.” Anything that advances our country’s actual interests is hateful to them. In fact, when you think of it, the Lefty-left is in thrall to the same sort of world-ending chaos as the mullahs and their IRGC henchmen. The mullahs have their vision of the post-apocalyptic Islamic utopia and the Lefty-left has its dream of a post-revolutionary socialist nirvana where everyone is equal (except those who are more equal — and get to boss around the rest of us.)

Yeah, it’s an old story here in Western Civ, this recurring drive to level the existing social hierarchy so as to abolish the tendency of some people to do better in life than others. It never works out. It always leads to mass slaughter of some kind. It always ends in rueful disappointment and a return to the free-for-all that is the human project. The outstanding question might be: why do so many in the West continue to believe it?

The current uprising comes out of the strange conversion of Liberalism to Lefty-left Democratic-Socialist Progressivism. Remember, liberalism was pure live-and-let-live, with an emphasis on minimal government intrusion in our affairs, especially economic affairs. The Liberals of Boomerdom — the campus nirvanas of the 1960s — were contemptuous of government generally, but especially the FBI and the CIA. And, of course, the hippie vanguard was socially and culturally all about the freedom to do your own thing. Freedom of speech was a leading concern.

The Lefty-left, as it evolved under Barack Obama and “Joe Biden,” was about rigid intolerance for opposing ideas and maximal government involvement in your life, especially economic and sexual — making a pass at a girl became subject to litigation. The FBI was loosed on dissenters from Lefty-left policies. Juridical sadism became systematized as Lawfare. The Lefty-left constructed a huge censorship apparatus; no more freedom of speech. They used law and regulation to attempt social leveling; no more discipline in school for black kids because . . . racism! Discriminate against Whitey for jobs. . . anti-racism! Election fraud = “our democracy.” You see how all that went?

Turns out, they wanted to use the government to overthrow the government! And the social order it rode in on! Hence, the ten-year-long crusade to destroy one Donald Trump, the peculiar “Gray Champion” of our Fourth Turning, who turned out to be a staunch counter-revolutionary, that is, an opponent of this new Democratic-Socialist Progressive (wannabe-communist) corps of chaos agents.

One schematic way of understanding this dynamic is Peter Turchin’s theory of Elite Overproduction. By the early 2000s, with anybody and everybody going to college, there were not enough job positions in the real productive economy for this spewage of college degree-holding entrees to the Professional / Managerial Class. By this time, coincidentally, the colleges they were graduating from were infested by three generations of Marxist professors — i.e., adults enjoying cozy institutional security, with no experience in the real world, free to indulge in Marxian revenge fantasies and make them the basis of their teaching.

It was the perfect setup for the emergence of a matrix of NGOs and political activist orgs that could employ all these college graduates which the real economy had no place for. And the new hires were pre-programmed in the ideology of grievance, tinged with racial and sexual animus in addition to economic complaint.

So, voila! — America (and Western Civ generally) became infested with these pernicious Lefty-left operations, which became symbionts of the government themselves, many of the orgs dependent on government (USAID) to fund their activities and pay the management. They got scads of additional money from wealthy freelance chaos maestros like George Soros, Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, Reid Hoffman, Neville Roy Singham and others.

Mr. Trump is dismantling that matrix and the funding flows associated with it, at the same time that he attempts to reconstruct an economy based on the production of real goods. As it happens, that matrix of orgs amounts to the consolidated racketeering operation of the Democratic Party, and the party is going garishly insane at the prospect of losing its means to power.

The Lefty-left now is the Democratic Party. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what we used to call Liberalism. It’s a party of envy-driven, sadistic fanatics. And it is no accident that such a mind-set leads them to construct a permission structure for lying about everything they do. It’s all there in their primary manuals-of-operation: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, and Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation.

In this way, they are just like the Shia mullahs of Iran who are privileged to lie to infidels who threaten their lust for apocalypse. Mr. Trump doesn’t trust the insane mullahs and their IRGC wing-men, and he certainly shouldn’t trust the apparatchiks of the Democratic Party. Each, in its own way, represents a kind of performative adolescent rebellion, and both them require a kind of resolute parental response: Daddy is in da house . . . and you’d better behave. Believe this: after Iran, the Democratic Party is next. The hammer of law will be coming down.

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!)

Richard Lyon is an electrical engineer, petroleum engineer, and energy economist. He spent more than twenty-five years in the oil and gas industry in senior operational management roles in the UK, Norway, Azerbaijan, Congo, and Cameroon. He writes about the gap between energy policy and physical reality at his Substack, State of Britain (richardlyon.substack.com). His book, The Energy Trap: Why the Renewable Energy Transition Can't Work — And What Can, will be published by Swift Press this coming September, 2026, available in the US through Amazon.

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

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Whaddaya know? Looks like the charismatic Nithya Raman has overtaken maverick candidate Spencer Pratt in the Los Angeles mayoral “jungle” primary because. . . jungle reasons. That is, the denizens of LA’s vast homeless encampments — once known as “hobo jungles” — apparently voted overwhelmingly by mail for the Harvard-credentialed champion of street-junkies in the Silver Lake, Echo Park, Los Feliz, Atwater, and Hollywood neighborhoods (SELAH) she represents on the LA City Council.

So, it will be a November runoff between the super-duper “progressive” incumbent Karen Bass, and merely super-progressive Ms. Raman. Better reserve your U-Haul trailer ASAP, as the City of Angels completes its transformation to the City of Zombies. And no complaining, please. This is what you voted for.

By the way, what does “progressive” actually mean these days? Progress towards. . . what? The culminating disintegration of a civil polity? The concerted failure to govern a large, urban organism? Unconditional surrender to the forces of entropy? One might suspect a soupçon of racial animus in the mix, too, something of a middle-finger to this thing called white supremacy we hear so much about. It must be rooted out at all costs, including the cost of a place that a productive population once loved — the very people renting all those U-Hauls, dispersing out into the USA gloaming.

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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

Of course, this “progressive” Democratic Party has transformed itself in a decade or so into an out-and-out racketeering operation, that is, to a criminal enterprise dedicated to the misappropriation of taxpayer money among its rank and file, many of whom are not citizens. The model is not unlike more primitive early versions, such as Boss Tweed’s ring in 19th century New York, or the gang under mayor James Curley, the “Rascal King” of Boston. The system was known as “patronage.” Voters were the party’s patrons, and the patrons were on the payroll. Some had actual party jobs. Some just got free stuff in exchange for their votes. They called it a “machine” because its operations became automatic, self-fulfilling.

There was one big difference, though: these earlier Democratic Party grifters, for all their moneygrubbing shenanigans, were American patriots. They celebrated a country so ostentatiously “free,” so fervently dedicated to upward mobility, that it made room for their garish political corruption. The Democratic machine of Los Angeles today is quite the opposite: It’s a faction that loathes and detests the American system and seeks sedulously to destroy it, even while grabbing as much loot as it can in the process.

Mayor Karen Bass was trained for that mission in Cuba. Beginning at age 19, in 1973, Ms. Bass made eight trips there with the Venceremos Brigade (founded in 1969 by the Lefty-left SDS) to “show solidarity with the Cuban revolution,” which, you might remember, was a straight-up communist revolution. One might infer, then, that Mayor Bass is a straight-up communist, with ambitions to destroy the capitalist city of Los Angeles, so as to replace it with a communist utopia — where all production (if there is any) is owned and controlled by the government, which then dispenses the fruits-of-production to the people, according to their needs, as officers of the government see fit.

In such a system, history shows, the people enjoy no ability to make decisions for themselves about what sort of work to pursue for their own improvement and well-being — what we call economic liberty. That’s all left to the political office-holders, the kommisars, the decision-makers, who tell everybody else what to do (because, you see, they know better). It has not worked too well in practice, as the collapse of Soviet Russia demonstrated, and the imminent collapse now of Cuba will validate.

This is also exactly what you see in the aftermath of the Los Angeles fires of 2025. There was the fiasco of the fire itself in which everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, in the way of prevention and mitigation. The incompetence of Los Angeles city officials was so total — from the mayor’s absence in Africa, the fire chief’s cluelessness, the empty reservoirs, the broken fire hydrants, etc. — that Pacific Palisades and Altadena across town got completely destroyed. In the eighteen months since, the city’s bureaucracy (with “help” from the state) has made sure that next-to-nothing can be rebuilt. Since a large number of people employed in the movie industry lived in these places, and were left financially ruined, Karen Bass’s government has also neatly helped destroy the city’s signature business. . . a home run for communists!

Marxian economic theory is appealing to those who hate and oppose the natural fact that not all outcomes in human life are equal, who resent with red-hot passion the human tendency to social hierarchy, and work fanatically to defeat it. They never do, of course. In communist revolutions hierarchy always reorganizes itself — only within the party structure itself, while all extra-party human effort is outlawed. In California, as in the other “blue” states and cities, Democratic Party leaders perch in the upper branches of the social hierarchy while they cream-off all available revenue streams.

If you suspect there’s something shady about the California election system, you might be onto something. President Trump thinks this is the case, and said so pretty forcefully on Sunday in his confab with the argumentative Kirsten Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press show. “There’s no evidence!” Ms. Welker repeated strenuously, of voting irregularity, either in this month’s California jungle primary, or in the 2020 national election. You think? I guess we’ll see about that.

Remember: former president Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela — home of the Smartmatic vote tabulation system — has been in US custody for months. Do you suppose he might be trying to cut a deal for himself to avoid a very long prison sentence by disclosing what he knows about Smartmatic? Do you suppose that Mr. Trump might know something about these ongoing negotiations? Do you wonder if any of that has occurred to Kirsten Welker of Meet the Press?

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!)

Behold, The Cooper Union main academic building (41 Cooper Square, New York City) designed by Thom Mayne of Morphosis, a frequent Eyesore of the Month winner. Cooper Union, was founded in 1859 by industrialist Peter Cooper as a tuition-free college emphasizing art, architecture, and engineering, basically, a polytechicnic. The new building, completed in 2009 at a cost of about $175-million, nearly bankrupted the school — its endowment tanked in that year’s Great Financial Crash due to investments in sketchy hedge funds. By 2012, the hallowed institution had to start charging tuition.

You can assume that the architect felt compelled to express the spirit of the age the building was conceived in, and that seems to come down to a romance with the latest high-tech materials arranged in a way that defies our neurologically-derived expectations about how buildings work. The latest hocus-pocus includes LEED certification for “environmental” fabulosity. Thus: the perforated stainless steel cladding for temperature control (fail).

As you can see in contrast from the 19th century building next door, no one has to guess what the elements of its facade do. The windows are not half-hidden or disguised. The decorative elements, pediments, pilasters, all emphasize the tectonic quality of something that reaches into the sky under the rules of gravity. Not so much the Cooper Union building, with its mystifying slashes and those bizarre tilted columns along the ground floor. And then there’s this:

What is that fragment of a darker building peeking out of the steel skin at the corner? Is that the actual building hidden inside the box it came in? Someone, please, let it out!

Grace note: Cooper Union has partially recovered its financial equilibrium due to its luck at owning the land underneath the Chrysler Building uptown on 42nd street, on which it receives annual rent.

Thanks to Len Austin for the nomination.

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