Clusterfuck Nation

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James Howard Kunstler: All of a sudden, after many years as a sideshow on the investment scene, gold and silver are in the center ring. What sort of structural changes in politics and economy account for this?

David McAlvany: The structural aspects are global in nature. The post-Bretton Woods dollar-centric monetary system has fallen out of favor. A gradual shift by reserve managers in the central bank community, and with our trade partners, settling invoices in currencies other than US dollars has begun. We now have domestic economic policies that further reduce the imperial stature of the dollar with the aim of building back our manufacturing base and onshoring jobs. These policies require a measured devaluation which will naturally accelerate the de-dollarization drive desired by our trade partners. As both the dollar and treasury bond markets come under pressure (treasury supply growth is already running into a demand problem), gold and silver are natural beneficiaries of capital reallocation. Reserve managers across the globe have shifted emphasis to gold as a unique asset within the financial markets which can be held off-grid and controlled locally, which is a fresh response and priority given aggressive US State and Treasury Department policies in recent years.

JHK: What is it in the nature of gold and silver that makes them distinct from other things we regard as money, say, currencies, securities, Certificates of Deposit, ETFs, et cetera?

DM: Precious metals are hard to find and costly to produce. In a sense they have intrinsic value due to their scarcity and high cost of production. As a currency, the oldest reliable form throughout history, they have been an economic stabilizer (forcing an equalization in trade balances) and due to finite above-ground supplies limit the expansion of debt. They are without peer as a reliable liquid repository of savings and wealth. Compared to securities, ETFs or CDs, precious metals alone have no counterparty risk. They are not dependent on human or systemic reliability.

JHK: We hear warnings about investing in the paper gold and silver markets. Are there any safe ways of investing in gold and silver besides holding actual coins and bars in your own possession?

DM: Yes, there are ways, but many of them introduce counterparty risk into the equation. ETFs are an example of that. They are great trading vehicles for the metals but ultimately lack many of the basic qualities physical gold and silver have, which are important distinctives in the context of economic or financial crisis. With ETFs you give up control for convenience. Our Vaulted program is a way to gain the convenience of a digital platform which facilitates the ownership of physical metals, both allocated and deliverable, better balancing aspects of control with a digital interface for convenience. Metals are stored with HSBC in London and with the Royal Canadian Mint until you request delivery.

JHK: Many are aware of the gold confiscation of 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102 and Americans were commanded to hand in their gold for dollars. The memory of that makes people nervous about owning the metals. In your opinion, is that likely to happen again?

DM: Desperate governments do desperate things. Confiscation can never be ruled out. However, when you look at the 1933 “Trading with the Enemy Act,” the ultimate purpose was to gain control of the money supply and allow for inflating away of debts from the 1920s. The ability to inflate away debt already exists today, with fiat currency. So, I would suggest the greater risk of confiscation is increased taxation, which some would argue is another form of confiscation. It’s worth noting that most Americans did not turn in their gold in 1933, which speaks to an admirable insubordination to authoritative overreach.

JHK: A lot of moves are being made lately at the heights of the global banking system that suggest gold and silver will be playing a larger role in the world of money going forward. Can you describe some of these moves and what they possibly mean for us?

DM: As de-dollarization accelerates globally, demand for gold as a reserve asset and as a trusted tool in trade settlement will increase. With greater concerns around fiscal viability in developed economies, asset allocators will continue seeking new diversification tools and precious metals are increasingly attractive.

Already we see many BRIC countries embracing net trade settlement in gold. When coupled with central bank reserve purchases, this is essentially a non-official re-monetization of the metal.

From the private sector we see more investors creating their own reserve framework with precious metals. When a currency or currency management team begins to lose the confidence of regular folk, the metals become an attractive “bankable” asset… Bottom line, the metals bull is well into the fourth or fifth inning, with a good bit of game left to play.

JHK: How do the qualities of gold and silver compare to Bitcoin and other digital novelties that are now out there in the arena?

DM: Although most digital currencies are limited in quantity and are therefore said to compete with gold in terms of scarcity, there is the unbound side of the crypto universe creating the next version—out of nothing. There are between 10,000 and 11,000 active crypto currencies today with multiples of that already come and gone. The most conservative estimates are that 50% of cryptos have already gone extinct. So how limited are cryptos truly?

In truth, Gold will never have the novelty factor of a “fart coin,” a “dogecoin,” or “Coinye” as in Kanye West. . . . Gold is old and depending on where you store it, may even be musty. . . . but it is the basic elemental qualities of gold and silver that make it so vital and not merely novel. Gold doesn’t need sizzle to sell it or justify its presence in a portfolio.

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* This post was sent via email to free substack subscribers of James Howard Kunstler. Some Patreon suppoters may receive this email.

Note: you are living through the FAFO of all FAFOs just now. The USA is brooking no more aspersions from whomever is still left alive to speak for the jihad posse in Iran. These are the terms: open the strait, layoff the other Gulf states, surrender those thousand pounds of enriched uranium. You can still go forward in time as a developed nation, enjoy the modern Persian life. Or, you can go backward in time to the twelfth century without electric service, bridges, and other conveniences. Your choice.

Over the weekend, further demonstration of what we can do. Such as, against all odds and expectations, rescue an American airman stuck under fire in the middle of Iranian mountain nowhere and do it with no casualties. The Lefty-lefties were so disappointed! No body-bags to celebrate. No Trump failure to trumpet. They were praying out loud Sunday to the Easter Bunny for war crimes they can do a hate-dance over. They insist the USA must be defeated in Iran so that Chuck Schumer and Hakim Jeffries can win the mid-terms. . . so they can destroy Trump in Congress. (Uh, okay, and then what?)

Meanwhile, another couple of dozen Iranian military higher-ups got kinetically removed from operations Saturday. Good luck with your military command structure over there. Got carrier pigeons? But, as far as is known, President Masoud Pezeshkian is still above ground, along with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, with whom US negotiators have at least been messaging, if not talking directly.

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Trouble is, their civilian government has no authority over the Revolutionary Guard (the IRGC), which controls all the missiles and drones, the proxy Quds forces outside Iran, and what’s left of the Basij secret police for terrorizing Iran’s people. Remember, it was the Revolutionary Guard who started this jihad long ago in 1979 when they seized the US embassy in Teheran and held 52 Americans hostages for more than a year.

The ultimatum to roll over Iran’s vital infrastructure on Tuesday is a forcing function to clarify who exactly can speak for the Iranian nation if they sincerely want the punishment to stop. It is unlikely to be anyone atop the IRGC, which is the rectified essence of the Islamic death cult. It lives for death! Death to America. . . death to ourselves for that ticket to paradise where the seventy-two virgins beckon. . . death to the global economy, if Allah requires it! Lovely, lovely death!

What part of that does Western Civ not understand? Jihad rolls across Europe without opposition. Nightclub massacres, trucks smashing through bodies in the Christmas markets, rape gangs, beheadings of teachers and Christian priests in broad daylight — none of that was enough to bestir the prime ministers and presidents of Euroland to consider expelling the uninvited hordes. New York City, the bastion of Lefty-left masochism, now lives under the sway of Mamdani’s soft jihad, the Islamic call-to-prayer rings through the neighborhoods twenty-five years after 9-11. The Jews of the Upper West Side voted for it. Compassion for the oppressed, as always. . . at one’s own expense.

The US President will have none of that, of course. So, he put it in the starkest form possible, with a touch of manic glee to annoy his homeland enemies. Developments since then? An Israeli air strike overnight took out Majid Khademi, the IRGC Intel chief. Who’s next? Step right up. Foreign Minister Araghchi hastily proposed a forty-five-day ceasefire through Egyptian-Turkish-Pakistani mediators. I doubt that our side wants to give them forty-five days to re-shuffle their remaining assets around. Mr. Trump is not bluffing about those bridges and power plants. Russia and China are not riding to the rescue. And Europe is still off in its corner, pearl-clutching and sniveling while its economies sputter.

Epic Fury leads to epic change on the global landscape. The old arrangements are over, especially the sponsored export of jihadi terror. The Hormuz crisis is the actualization of the global resource scramble underway. The winners and losers are sorting themselves out now, and Mr. Trump seeks to make sure that America is on the winners’ side. So, you must ask: why does the American Left, as personified in the Democratic Party, so desperately want our country to lose?

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

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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!)

Behold: the proposed Donald J. Trump Presidential Library coming in for a landing on Biscayne Boulevard, Miami a few years hence. It is already catching a lot of TDS flak, and deservedly so, for its gilded grandiosity — including a gigantic golden statue of “47” himself inside somewhere, and the gold “Trump” brand logo plastered on the 47th floor. Mr. Trump has always been a comedian, and this monument is, at least partly, a bit of trollery against his millions of hate-inflamed detractors, a 47-story middle finger (with a smile). All of that is too self-evident to belabor.

Don’t expect this library to house many books, either. Rather, the building is a combo temple / museum, filled with artifacts and objects of worship, like the jumbo jet (of various Air Force Ones) to be installed in the ground floor entrance.

The more curious aspect of this project is its manifestation as a skyscraper. Such megastructures are just now going obsolete all over the world, and the world is stuck with them. Working from home, or the corner cafe, or just about anywhere, killed the need for organizing office work in this manner, and artificial intelligence is apt to sweep away countless middle-management, information handling jobs in any case. Another skyscraper is just not what the world needs these days.

So, you’d also have to ask: aside from exhibit halls, study rooms, and auditoriums, what the heck else is expected to occupy the many other floors of the building? Document storage makes more sense in low-slung structures (filing cabinets are heavy) or underground, with elaborate climate-control. Is the plan to offer some upper floor market rental space to companies who might want to locate at a “prestige address?” But, we’ve already established that the traditional office milieu is on its way out.

The answer probably is that building skyscrapers is just what DJT did in life, besides being president of the USA twice. It’s what he knows how to do, and this scheme reflects on the triumphs of his prior career in real estate development. Really, it’s just another Trump Tower, perhaps, ultimately, another Trump hotel for folks who want to bask in the glow of the Golden Golem of Greatness and his legendary doings. The final joke is that it’s being financed with the awards from the various lawsuits Mr. T has won against the old legacy media giants who defamed him over years. For all that, we say GO, MAGA. . . !

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Why do the news anchor ladies of CNN, Erin Burnett, Kate Bolduan, always look so depressed on the air? They never smile. Their faces always register something between grave concern and hysteria. Is it the network’s cratered ratings? The pending hostile takeover by Paramount / Skydance (led by conservative David Ellison)? Too much botox, zombifying the small facial muscles? Or is it self-loathing from being compelled to slant everything they report on in the direction of a lie?

There does seem to be some hidden hand in Narrative Central issuing prescribed story-lines to the networks, and that hand seems to be tinged with malice for anything and anyone seeking to rescue our country from chaos, penury, psychosis, and jihad. It looks like the hidden hand wants the country to go down in flames, and will resort to any means necessary to get it done. The template for that is so-called “color revolution,” which is a hyper-accelerated version of “Red Rudi” Dutschke’s “march through the institutions” to “capture the transmitters of culture” so as to produce a communist utopia, as cribbed from the writings of Antonio Gramsci, (1891 – 1937) founder of the Italian communist party.

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The fascist Mussolini tossed Gramsci in jail where he scribbled three thousand pages of his Prison Notebooks, in which he laid out his strategy for destroying civil society, later adapted by the Americans Saul Alinsky (1909-1972) in his Rules for Radicals and Gene Sharp (1928-2018), who penned several concise manuals of strategic mechanics for dismantling targeted governments.

These are the mentors of chief Lawfare ninja Norm Eisen, who has made a specialty of marching through the institution of American law in order to advance the agenda of the Democratic Party allied with cohorts of the permanent Washington bureaucracy (or Deep State) to fend off any challenge to the corruption and racketeering embedded in those two symbionts.

The challenge obviously presents in the form of Donald Trump, the once and current president battling an increasingly rabid set of opponents. Norm Eisen has been deeply involved in every attempt to undermine and disable Mr. Trump since 2016. He wrote briefs for the Mueller Special Counsel operation; he acted as prosecutor in Trump’s impeachment # 1 (prompted by CIA agent and so-called “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella, as facilitated by then Rep. Adam Schiff); he assisted ex parte in the House Jan 6 Committee proceedings; he prepared legal arguments for the Fani Willis prosecution of Mr. Trump and 18 co-defendants; and he helped construct the legal framework for Special Counsel Jack Smith’s cases against Mr. Trump. In short, Norm Eisen spent the past decade laboring to brand Donald Trump as a criminal and shove him out of the political arena. His efforts failed.

Norm Eisen founded or is associated with several swamp NGOs active in Trump-hunting operations, including Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the States United Democracy Center, the Democracy Defenders Fund, Democracy Defenders Action — all posing as anti-autocracy operations. Eisen and his orgs have filed hundreds of lawsuits against the Trump administration to obstruct any initiative the President advances to stop Democratic Party sanctioned grift, deport illegal aliens ushered in during the “Joe Biden” years, and especially to derail investigations of election fraud. These orgs are well-funded by George Soros’s Open Society NGO and its spinoffs, Arabella Advisors (rebranded as Sunflower Services), the Tides Foundation, that is, the usual suspects.

In the face of all that, plus a dysfunctional Congress and a hostile federal judiciary, the President has struggled to find work-arounds for every piece of the agenda he was elected to carry out. What can be done about it? Even if evidence was produced to show that Norm Eisen acted improperly in the cases brought against the President, it is unlikely that a case brought against Norm Eisen would get any traction in a DC district federal court. He is a longstanding friend of James “Jeb” Boasberg, Chief Judge of the DC District. Norm Eisen was in the same 1991 class at Harvard Law School as Barack Obama, an architect of the Left’s movement to destroy the Republic. *

* Correction: in the early edition I mistakenly stated that James Boasberg was also in that Harvard Law School gang. He was not. He attended Yale Law School

All of this suggests that if Mr. Trump needs to accomplish something critical, such as basic reform of our election procedures, and if any of his executive orders are thwarted by Norm Eisen-backed lawsuits for judicial nullification of executive powers, Mr. Trump will have to declare some kind of extraordinary national emergency. That will be the red-line that Norm Eisen has been seeking for ten years: his chance to brand Mr. Trump as a “tyrant” and commence a new impeachment effort, in theory coinciding with the seating of a Democratic Party majority in both houses of Congress.

This is quite a battle shaping up. Norm Eisen has been adroit to a fault in all his nefarious endeavors. But then, Mr. Trump has performed as a veritable Scarlet Pimpernel of American politics, ruthless, resourceful, self-consciously comical, and genuinely motivated to save the USA from a cabal of prodigious villains. He is in it to win it. His crowning achievement might be getting the morose ladies of CNN to finally crack a smile.

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!)

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. A New York Times bestselling author, she has written extensively on policing, criminal justice, race relations, higher education, and the pursuit of merit in American institutions. Her influential books include The War on Cops and When Race Trumps Merit.

A non-practicing lawyer with a J.D. from Stanford, she holds a B.A. in English from Yale (summa cum laude) and an M.A. from Cambridge University. Mac Donald is a frequent commentator on Fox News and other outlets, known for her data-driven, fearless analysis of cultural and policy issues.

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.

Went to the No Kings assemblies in my town and the next nearby town on Saturday. Mental illness as far as the eye could see. Old folks, too, as far as the eye could see, predominately of the female persuasion: the devouring grandmothers. The Democratic Party has marshalled mental illness as its premier campaign strategy, and lately it is winning bigly around the country as mental illness becomes the go-to cope option for the ragged remnants of Boomerdom.

They believe things that are patently insane, for instance, the latest proposal by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) that illegal immigrants deserve reparations on account of being “traumatized” by U.S. immigration enforcement actions. If it feels like the Democratic Party is at war with our country you are not hallucinating. It is every bit as much a jihad as the Death to America crowd in Iran has explicitly pushed since 1979.

The president gets no help whatsoever from his own party, as you see in the disgraceful hijinks around the urgent issue of election reform. You know exactly how the election playbook was written: let x-million foreigners into the country illegally, give them (illegally) social security numbers, driver’s licenses, automatic voter registrations, addresses, mail-in ballots. . . and voila! They don’t even have to mail-in their own mail-in ballots. Lawfare ninja Marc Elias will arrange ballot pick-up service. And the cherry on top is that the census must count all the illegal aliens to add new congressional districts for extra seats in Congress.

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

So, in the face of that, Republican Majority Leader John Thune could not muster enough votes to save the SAVE Act. Or so he said. Looks more like lack a’wanna. Eerie lack a’wanna. On their tours of cable news, the hapless Republican senators, when asked, would not name their colleagues leaning against the SAVE Act. But you know who they are. Mitch McConnell, Murkowski, Tillis, Collins, Capito.

Leader Thune could not even manage to get Homeland Security funded with the prospect of Iranian sleeper cells awakening around the country. He just threw in the towel at three o’clock in the morning on Friday, and sent the whole crew home to meet the Easter Bunny. Chuck Schumer did an end-zone dance. The brokenness of our politics could not be more in your face. As things shape up this grueling springtime, Mr. Trump might have to go Abe Lincoln on these folks. That is, declare some sort of national emergency to save the election and the country.

Of course, the nation is more than a little distracted just now with doings in Iran. The No Kings folk are unabashedly rooting for everything to go wrong there, and not a few conservatives in the public arena are straining to conjure an Iranian victory in their black-pilled deliriums. Many claim they “have no idea” what we are doing there — can it be that hard? — or else they are rabidly exercised over our alliance with Israel in the operation. You know how that goes. Cue Tucker. He’ll explain.

The truth is we are pounding these savage Shia clerics and their Revolutionary Guard myrmidons to the garden of eternal bliss where the seventy-two virgins wait. Whatever remains of Iran’s legit government is bargaining under cover for an off-ramp now. Pakistan mediates. The parties sit in different rooms and pass notes through the mediators in a third room. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi pretends that he will not negotiate with Mr. Trump’s envoys, Witkoff and Kushner, both Jews, the horror! But that’s sheer fakery.

To avoid humiliation in the process, Iran is still lobbing missiles and drones around the Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Israel, and they will probably keep doing that until the very moment of capitulation. Anyway, in less than a week, Mr. Trump turns the lights off all over Iran, and then they are back in the twelfth century. . . no command communication, no juice for anything, no money, no food, no water, no nothing . . . and a population getting dangerously desperate to make it all go away. . . to return to some dim memory of what normal life once was in an Iran not ruled by psychotic death cultists.

Everybody else is greatly alarmed by the disruption of Persian Gulf oil supplies through Hormuz. Global finance was already pretty shaky before the hot war commenced, and the economic tail of that dog was not wagging happily. In America, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Apollo Global, and Blue Owl Capital had recently “gated” redemptions — meaning investors can’t get all or part of their money out of plays that are folding on collateral rot. This private equity fiasco has significant contagion potential. The sudden oil shock makes everything feel a hundred times worse, and pain is already felt, especially in the far east and Australia / New Zealand.

But consider that the Hormuz “blockade” is also a bit of last-ditch capitulation bravado. It could be a shorter crisis than the alarmists imagine. We see everything that Iran has got from high in the sky, whatever attack boats remain. . . the thermal signatures of rockets going off. . . the bays where the drones emerge. Mr. Trump might order troops in to stabilize ports and more than one island. Or perhaps not. I doubt we’ll know until after Iranian lights go out. If the kinetics conclude, what remains is re-starting the maritime insurance apparatus with or without Lloyd’s of London. Then, tankers start moving again.

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!)

Tensions rise as the green fuse drives the flowers of springtime (and thank you, Dylan Thomas, for the loan.) Too many things are out of whack. Some are actually breaking. A physics of events is at work that will bring our affairs back to true, but expect it to be painful. Okay, you’ve been warned.

Asia, especially, suffers bigly with the Persian Gulf shut-down. For decades these countries took the oil flows for granted without having to do anything. No thoughts of maritime security. No cares for the chaos Iran sowed across the region (and beyond). Leave the tanker insurance to London. Now, they are rationing the diesel, gasoline, natgas, and aviation fuel. For the moment they are just stunned. Soon, they’ll be hollering, stomping, jumping up and down crying woo-woo-woo.

Europe, for years, has garishly, and in plain sight, planned its own journey to a de-industrialized neo-medieval Palookaville. The poster-child, Germany, destroyed its energy prospects with lunatic glee, in thrall to retarded climate change politics, while the European Union turned into a devouring mother, stole her children’s sovereign agency, and herded them into a Klaus Schwab death camp. No more atomic energy for you! No more cheap gas from Russia. No more heat in wintertime. Jihad for entertainment. The lights are going out and it might be too late to make other arrangements.

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

This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com.

Don’t think for a moment that Iran was not a threat to the world, and especially to The Great Satan, as they styled us. The Persians have been hostage to a cult for half a century, and all cults are crazy. This one, the reign of the Shia ayatollahs, was apocalyptic in the pure sense of the word. They prayed and labored avidly for the destruction of others and relished their own martyrdom. The craziest part was thinking that the USA under Donald Trump might possibly roll over for them.

Quit swallowing those black pills, everybody. Iran is not some super-monster out of the Marvel Comics movies. Iran doesn’t have the mojo to shut down the Strait of Hormuz indefinitely. It will run out of missiles, drones, torpedoes, mines, launch sites, and a command structure for deploying any of that. It has converted the other neutral Gulf states into raging enemies eager to help the US — and by extension, most ironically, Israel, too. This rearrangement of interests in the Middle East would have been unthinkable a mere month ago.

We have way more to worry about here in America with our own apocalyptic coteries and claques. And our broken institutions. Is it not obvious that the Democratic Party exists now solely to punish half of the country that would prefer to not wreck our republic? The Democratic Party has no other program. It’s just another death cult. That’s why you were made to wait four and half hours in some far-off precinct of the airport for a flight that you were guaranteed to miss. Well, at least that’s over for now, since the Senate passed a spending bill at two o’clock in the morning today and DHS will be up-and-running again — while Congress takes two weeks off for Easter.

Now consider those figures and factions in the Republican Party who won’t lift a finger to allow election reform. Thune, McConnell (what little is left of him), Murkowski, Tillis, maybe Collins. What possible calculus judders their brains? They are about to be drowned in a tsunami of revelation about organized ballot fraud in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. How will they explain that? Maybe “election denial” wasn’t a thing all along. Thune’s game is plain stupid. He’s engineering his own downfall as majority leader as he attempts to usher the SAVE Act into a ditch. Our election procedures are patently insane, and only the insane fail to notice. So, failing to notice is an option, at least.

Tomorrow, Saturday, brings another Neville Roy Singham production of “No Kings” demos across the nation, a field-day for the senile. They want to abolish ICE. They want illegal aliens to stay here and they want them in the voting booth. Go out and ask them why that’s a good idea.

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!)

It’s not only darkest before the dawn, but the groupthink is murkiest, and the light at the end of the tunnel might be an explosion up your wazoo. Iran’s increasingly headless Revolutionary Guard (the IRGC) whirls in its gyre of martyrdom as the last traps are sprung under it. Tell the wide-eyed houris of paradise to primp for a fresh harvest of true believers.

Looks like Mr. Trump is not chickening-out, as his detractors like to insist. Looks like somebody is already turning off the juice around Tehran, likely the Israeils. It will be very hard soon enough for the headless IRGC to tell its body of psycho-killers what to do. Individual units are probably on their own now, anyway, wondering what the other units might be doing. . . might be thinking, while also, about now, the sore-beset, long-suffering, good-and-goshdarn pissed off, ordinary Persians will discover that nobody’s in charge, and maybe, at long last, it’s their turn to act, as the lights flicker out.

On the ground, in the apartments, the cafes, the offices, the grand bazaars of Tehran, Isfahan, Tabriz, and Shiraz life has already gotten super-impossible. Whatever’s left of the government just issued banknotes in the denomination of ten million rials, worth seven US dollars. Everybody there has plenty of money. Everyone is a millionaire, but they won’t be swanning around Fereshteh Street in top hats and monocles, shopping for Hermès, Louis Vuitton, and Rolex.

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

This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com.

In actuality, nothing can function normally anymore when the currency is absolutely worthless, including the regular distribution of food and fuel, and you know from history that revolution is always only nine missing meals away. Something will have to give.

The American news media, especially The New York Times, remains implacably peevish over Operation Epic Fury. The news media remains locked in its own epic fury at Mr. Trump running the executive branch, because, uh, why? The tweets! The mystifying hair-do! The gold filigree plastered around the Oval Office! Ucchhh. . . ! It drives them batshit. They want the Iran op to fail because then Mr. Trump will fail. . . and then. . .? And then. . . ? You detect that maybe they haven’t thought that through exactly.

Perhaps the news media believe it’s unfair to deprive the Islamic State of a nuclear bomb and its arsenal of missiles and drones. (It can’t be that the news media are anti-war because they continue to be one hundred percent behind the Ukraine war. They don’t want that to end anytime soon because, uh, well, Russia!) In reality, the news media abhors decisive action and especially any change in the geopolitical status quo, and super-especially one that inch-by-inch reveals that the USA has interests that actually intersect with the interests of post-soviet Russia.

Like preserving Western Civ. Unlike the poufs, cucks, and bozos running Euroland who are busy throwing two thousand years of history under the wheels of Jihad, and racing with eyes-wide-shut into a neo-medieval future without heat, lights, industry, art, or square meals. Europe — Great Britain in particular — yearns for an epoch-ending spasm of war against Russia because. . .uh. . . because Putin (like, because Trump). You understand they are completely incapable of prosecuting such a war, since they lack armies, navies, and sufficient weapons, but they can’t stop nattering about it.

The US news media can’t accept the possibility that the US Military is proceeding systematically and by clear stages to disarm the IRGC crazies. What has the IRGC got left? Apparently, they have missile launchers embedded in urban neighborhoods, the old human shield routine, same as Hamas and Hezbollah. And spidey-hole missile silos in the desert, supposedly hard to detect beneath the shifting sands. Not to mention the “underground cities” as much as 500 meters deep where missiles and drones are made and stored. They are core parts of Iran’s military architecture. We know where most of them are. Let’s see how they work if the electricity goes out across Iran. Do they all have backup generators and diesel fuel to keep the generators running more than a few days?

President Trump issued an ultimatum over the weekend: Fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping without threats, or the US would “hit and obliterate” Iran’s various power plants, “starting with the biggest one first.” As that occurs, expect breakdown in the Iranian ranks. Not every IRGC technician wants to be entombed down there in the underground gloaming. And what percentage of those defections will it take to wreck what little is left of the IRGC command structure? And what of Iran’s regular army, the Artesh. Let’s suppose there are some high-ranking officers among them, colonels, maybe a few generals, who are disenchanted with the IRGC and increasingly eager to see their country turn the page on forty-seven years of utter insanity.

Minutes before posting this blog, the White House announced that the US and Iran were negotiating “a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East” and that the president would postpone his deadline for attacking Iranian power plants by five days. The diplomatic back-channels must be on fire now. Might this whole thing almost be over?

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!)

Let’s pause for a moment amid all the excitement to address an abiding mystery of these times: why does the news media seem to be rooting for American failure in the Iran operation? Or more generally, how did the media become handmaiden to the Lefty-left and all its ancillaries? How were they lured into their Cloward-Piven bunker of crypto-Marxian “resistance”?

It’s unlikely that the network executives, news producers, and editors are communists outright. That would take you into a simpleminded John Birch Society fantasyland. Or did they just read too much Antonio Gramsci on campus back in the day? If they’re merely whores pandering to an audience, it’s a dwindling one as the Woke mass formation dissolves and the insanity of its agenda stands naked. (Why not pander to the growing demographic that yearns for a restoration of normality?)

Is the news controlled by the so-called Deep State? Do cadres in the CIA send headlines to the Washington Post newsroom? Many think so. I don’t pretend to know one way or the other. The problem with lying, of course, is that you have to keep lying to protect your previous lies. Does the rise of alt-news across the Internet provoke them to lie harder in the face of better narratives? Or is it just plain old group-think, fear of stepping out-of-synch with tribal certainties and shibboleths? Which is to say, are they merely cowards and cads?

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Do they really believe in the totalizing bad faith of the Democratic Party in its naked racketeering and power-seeking? That’s a sinking ship — the party that is now battling to obstruct simple straightforward election reform in the US Senate. Here’s a headline from today’s New York Times:

What will The New York Times do when bona fide, convincing evidence from material seized in recent FBI raids in Georgia and Arizona shows that recent elections were arrantly and knowingly rigged? It’s going to happen, you know. And if the procedural delays in the Senate drag out for weeks over the SAVE Act, the truth is likely to emerge while the bill is still in process, and will slam the whole country in the face, like thirty inches of re-bar. Will the newspaper print an apology to its readers?

We’re in a season of whacking great change in global and national affairs. “Epic Fury” in Iran will neutralize a regime dedicated to terrorizing the region and reorder the world’s energy flows to the disadvantage of America’s adversaries. China will lose its deep discount on imported Iranian oil just as in Venezuela a month ago. It already lost control of the Panama Canal as well. All its inroads around the western hemisphere have been nullified in this first year of Trump 2.0. China has to play nicer with America now.

The crisis has demonstrated that the US can’t depend on its NATO allies — who either refused to send ships to assist, or dawdled over it — which can allow the US to step away from the enormous expense that NATO imposes on us, and also from the tarbaby known as Ukraine. The truth is, we are ideologically more aligned with post-Soviet Russia than we are with France, Germany, and the UK under their current regimes. Ironically, the Russians, with Hungary, Poland, and the Czechs, are the last earnest defenders of Western Civ. Europe has apparently elected to go medieval, anyway. They like to pretend that they can maintain a high standard of living without oil or natgas, a formula so obdurately stupid that only the most awful hardship might avail to change their policies.

This month, the US leaped to create a maritime insurance alternative to Lloyd’s of London, meaning the UK banks can no longer impose a 20-percent cost premium on Persian Gulf oil, which thunders through the global system and affects everyone. We’ve already stepped away from the UN-backed international Net Zero carbon pricing scam on tanker and container ships. The economics of oil are going through a quick and decisive readjustment. With an end to Iran’s threats to world peace, the US can eventually leave policing of the Persian Gulf to the nations that depend on its oil (we do not).

Meanwhile, the US will continue pounding Iran until it can’t launch so much as a distress flare. They will have no nukes, no navy or air force, no more missiles and drones and payloads, and no ability to manufacture any more of them. And if they try, we will blow them up again. That’s real politics, not performative diplomatic jive. Sooner or later, the Revolutionary Guard regime will disintegrate and someone else will have to step up. The Iranian people deserve a chance to live in the sunlight after what they’ve been through for a half century. But it’s really up to them to make it happen. It’s pretty obvious that the American President and his people understand that.

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!)

Dr. Shane Simonsen is an Australian experimental farmer, author, podcaster, and thinker based in the subtropical Sunshine Coast hinterland of Queensland (on around 40 acres among the Glasshouse Mountains). He holds a PhD in biochemistry and previously worked in academia and as a teacher before leaving in his late 20s — disillusioned by institutional structures, the global financial crisis, and concerns over peak oil— to pursue independent work in biology, ecology, and sustainable systems. For the last decade he obsessively developed hardy staple crops for his little mountain village. Australia is uniquely vulnerable to energy system disruptions and totally unprepared for post-industrial agriculture.

Shane blogs weekly at Recombination Nation. His podcast of the same name interviews amateur plant breeders, geopolitical experts and culture innovators.

His non-fiction book Taming the Apocalypse explores a post-industrial future built purely on biological technology

He also wrote a novel under the nom-de-plume Haldane P. Doyle, Our Vitreous Womb, imagining a biotechnological civilization in the distant future.

This podcast is sponsored by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold and silver. Vaulted is backed by McAlvany Financial Group, which owns ICA, one of the largest and longest continuously operating full-service gold brokerage firms in the United States. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com/JHK