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About the War on Populism

When people raise the question of “populism” in politics they are generally accusing the Other Guys of a crude appeal to emotion and bigotry.

The big question on the populist front has been the concern in the best circles about “populist nationalism.” The word “populist” is usually intended to communicate “rude and crude,” “Nationalism,” experts agree, is Literally Hitler.

Ruy Teixeira is discussing this in a post on “No Populism Without Cultural Populism.” Our Democratic friends are a bit upset about the cultural populism directed at them, on the immigration, gender, and DEI front when the real problem is those Billionaires of which you’ve heard tell that aren’t paying their fair share.

Teixeira links to Democratic candidate James Talarico, who’s running for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate from Texas against the divine Jasmine Crockett:

The culture wars are a smokescreen. They want us looking left and right at our neighbors instead of looking up at them. The biggest divide in our politics is not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom.

Yep, I get it.

The only minority destroying America is the billionaires. Trans people are 1% of the population. Muslims are 1% of the population. Undocumented people are 1% of the population. We are focused on the wrong 1%.

Yep. According to my Four Wars concept, the best domestic politics is “unite most of the country against a small minority for a witch-hunt.”

You see the point. Talarico is a Democrat; he can’t unite Democrats against Muslims or migrants or transgenders as the small minority. Because “The Groups.” The Group Industrial Complex will tan his hide if he doesn’t come out 110% for transgenders, migrants and Muslims.

So he goes for the Billionaires. Chaps like Andrew Carnegie who used cheap immigrant labor to make cheap steel, and then annihilated the workers in the infamous 1892 Homestead Strike.

Only, of course, inexpensive steel was real good for building steamships that could transport poor people from Europe to America.

Or monopolist Rockefeller, who saved the whales by developing the oil industry and making it possible for Hollywood Westerns to feature oil lamps in the homes of the Wild West.

Now we have the tech billionaires. And how did they make their money? By making information on the internet almost free. Not to mention invent and manufacture those gigantic wall TVs so sports fans can keep an eye on their favorite teams all weekend.

Yep, I get it. “There is no politics without an enemy.” So every politician has to gin up an enemy, and heroically lead our young men into battle against the Frightful Foe. Only, of course, it’s the young kids that get killed in the politicians’ war. It’s the politicians that stay safely behind the lines and get to parade as national heroes after the glorious victory.

If you are a “populist nationalist” politician you play the cultural populism card against transgenders and migrants and Muslims.

If you are a Democratic politician you play the economic populism card and demand that the Billionaires pay their fair share.

Got it.

| Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:39:41 GMT |

CIA Babes in Politics

Did you know that the Democrats are actively recruiting former CIA people as candidates? David Strom has the receipts.

The ideal candidate was a young-to-middle-aged female intelligence-type—think Elissa Slotkin or Abigail Spanberger—who could run as a moderate and work from the inside to undermine conservatives in general and Donald Trump in particular.

And don’t forget NPR CEO sweetie pie Katherine Maher, who was involved in some way with the color revolutions back in the day.

David Strom writes that this is all part of a plan:

The radical left is openly sharing their 2026 playbook:

→ Run as “moderates” with veteran optics and big progressive money

→ Win critical swing races

→ Immediately implement the hard-left agenda once in power

But you know what? I’m not all that exercised about it. Because I have this feeling that the girl CIA spies are just pen pushers: apparatchiks rather than nomenklatura.

What the Democrats desperately need is candidates to lead them out of the Swamp.

Hey, don’t get me wrong. The IC needs pen-pushers just like any bureaucracy. But I don’t see the Mahers and the Spanbergers getting the Dems out of their present mess.

I see the Democrats’ real problem as “The Groups,” the lefty activist groups that set the Dem agends and turn the money spigots. There is no Democrat with the independence and the fundraising pipeline that can push against “The Groups.”

So you have Democratic politicians in all the blue states and in Congress that just have to go with the radical agenda and crank up the spending for the government bureaucrats and the NGO Industrial Complex. “Nice little job you got here…”

And the Democrats in Congress don’t even have the cojones to stand up at President Trump’s suggestion and celebrate American citizens over illegal aliens.

Now, Let Me Be Clear — llike President Obama. I am not saying that the CIA operative babes are armed insurrectionists waiting with sleeper operatives in the Deep State waiting for the signal on their secret decoder rings. I am just saying that I suspect that CIA bureaucrats and the members of the USAID Industrial Complexx are much like most other bureaucrats. They do their jobs, but they really aren’t going to dig the Democrats out of the hole they have dug for themselves.

Of course, I could be wrong. Perhaps the Democrats will win the midterms, impeach President Trump and throw half the Republican Party in jail and let illegal aliens vote by mail forever.

Or not.

| Fri, 27 Feb 2026 01:22:13 GMT |

The Feminization of Revolution

Remember back in the day? If the natives got restless it was described as rioting in the streets.

But then the Narrative changed. Experts and political philosophers started to write about “demonstrations.” You can see that the point of the street action is now “a show of force” rather than actual violence in the streets.

I suspect that our lefty friends decided one day in a secret cabal in a fashionable café in Paris that rioting didn’t have quite the desired effect. Possibly because if the revolutionaries practice violence then that licenses the ruling class to practice violence. And we certainly don’t want the far-right armed insurrectionists to think that they have a license to counter-riot.

Also, of course, by The Sixties in the US, the demonstrators were not helpless victims of capitalism but the sons and factotums of the ruling class, and especially the obedient Narrative reciters in the mass media. So actual violence was not needed. Top level politicians could threaten violence if the demands of the demonstrators were not met. But the actors in the street did not have to.

OK, I checked with Google, and Google AI said that “protest” goes back to the 15th century, but:

its modern usage to describe public marches and rallies gained significant traction during the 1960s. Before this era, “demonstration” was the more common term, but the rise of activism—particularly regarding the Vietnam War and Civil Rights—shifted the terminology toward “protest” to emphasize active, and often disruptive, dissent.

You can see that “protest” is trying to communicate “rights” and “justice” while “demonstration” says that, if we want — and we might — we can tear the place down.

But now we don’t have “protests.” No indeed. Now we have “peaceful protests.” Not according to Google, who says that the idea of “nonviolent” or “peaceful” protests also came out of the Civil Rights Era.

But I don’t agree, and I realized what was going on a week ago when I read a piece which featured an accompanying photo full of twentysomething girl protesters.

And I thought: That’s what it’s all about! Revolution is not the good old riot like we get to see in living color in the movie of Les Miserables set in 1832. Revolution is now an upper-class thing, a girl thing.

“Women expect to be protected,” according to philosopher Christopher Chantrill. Therefore, most women — especially from the privileged educated classes — aren’t going to go out for a rumble like the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story or the students in Les Mis. No, women don’t have a culture of violence, “Women have a Culture of Complaint,” according to philosopher Christopher Chantrill.

So it makes complete sense that when women march in the street with their artistically hand-created protest signs, they are “complaining” and “protesting” rather than threatening the gang from the other side of town — even if the Other is nothing less that radical-right armed insurrectionists.

So, you might say, we have feminized Revolution, like everything else in our society, according to the prophecy of Georg Simmel who said at the turn of the 20th century that the effect of women coming out into the public square would be that they would transform it to suit “a more feminine sensibility.”

And “mostly peaceful protest?” That is a cunning term that helpfully suggests that a violent riot is not really violent. Just mostly peaceful, girls.

See? Now I have explained everything.

| Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:34:22 GMT |

One Thing about the Iran Decapitation Strikes

For some reason I have the idea that, back in the day, the rulers of the world had an informal agreement that war is war, but bombing the emperor’s palace is bad form. Old chap.

Of course, that does not apply to US domestic politics. Any leftie that wants to take a shot at President Trump — or any IC worthy that feels the need to take out President Kennedy — go right ahead. That’s Different.

But I am concerned that now that Trump and Netanyahu have taken out the entire top shelf of Iran’s ruling class, and I fear that the rules have changed.

Maybe it doesn’t matter, because the US is the Global Hegemon for the foreseeable future, and the US sets the rules, and anyway, there’s no way to put a missile into the men’s room at the White House. Yet.

But still, think about what the US (and/or Israel) has done. Bomb the palace where the top Iranian leaders were meeting in Tehran. Then bomb the building in Qom where the Assembly of Experts were meeting to select the next national leader.

Think about some future global hegemon bombing the White House when the President’s cabinet is meeting. Or think of bombing the US Capitol when Congress is checking the electors selected for the next presidential election.

I know. It is unthinkable. The White House and the Capitol are Holy Places where we Americans conduct our sacred rituals with much pomp and ceremony. And don’t get me started on the Washington Monument.

Of course, maybe the problem is that Iran has no right to play in the Global Hegemons League, and the US is teaching it a lesson to stay in the Regional Ideologues League where it belongs. Today the Hegemons League would be the US, Russia, and China. Tomorrow? You think maybe India, replacing Russia after its diminishment in the Ukraine War?

Anyway, I suspect that in bombing Iran that Trump & Co. have led the world into a New Era.

And we may look back with regret.

| Tue, 03 Mar 2026 23:10:24 GMT |

Critical Theory Update

Back in 2020 I wrote a Brief on Critical Theory. I said that it was a thread that started with Kant and his notion that we cannot know things-in-themselves but only appearances. Then there was Fichte that wrote that “All our thought is founded on our impulses,” meaning that conscious thought begins in the unconscious.

Hegel wrote about the “nightlike abyss” of the unconscious, and Schopenhauer called this unconscious drive “Will,” and Wagner wrote The Ring of the Nibelung to show that myth is a welling up of the unconscious out of the abyss to tell a story about how the world works and how it’s all about the girls, from the Rhine Maidens and the Valkyries to the heroine Brünnhilde.

Notice how Marx manipulates the unconscious to make a political point. Google Search:

Marx viewed the “unconscious” not as a psychological concept, but as a social and economic phenomenon where capitalist structures (”base”) shape consciousness (”superstructure”).

And, of course, the helpless workers have no idea how the bourgeoisie manipulate their unconscious. But the Marxists would take care of that.

Then came World War I and the workers unaccountably identified with their nations, not their class. So the Frankfurt School arose to construct a new critical theory based not on class but on all forms of repression: sexual and racial. To emancipate the world, the Frankfurt School proposed a

synthesis of the Marxist tradition, psychoanalysis, and empirical sociological research.

Frankfurt scholars-in-chief Horkheimer and Adorno felt that they should keep their distance from politics, and Jürgen Habermas in The Theory of Communicative Action proposed that humans should get together, all friendly like, to discuss their differences.

But Herbert Marcuse dove right in and encouraged the Sixties students to protest.

Marcuse saw agents of change that could supplement the quiescent working class and unite with third-world communist revolutionaries.

By the way, the code word for going beyond thinking to fundamental transformation is called “Praxis:”

the transformative union of reflection and action, where theoretical understanding of social injustices (like exploitation or oppression) drives practical, informed action to change the world.

But suppose your “theoretical understanding of social injustices” just does not align with the reality of “dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge”? What then?

Then you get to what we now actually call “Critical Theory.”

Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida… were reshaping academic discourse with critiques of knowledge, meaning, power, institutions, and social control with deconstructive approaches that further challenged assumptions about objectivity and truth.

Thus critical theory expands into

critical animal studies, critical criminology, dependency theory and imperialism studies, critical environmental justice, feminist theory and gender studies, critical historiography, intersectionality, critical legal studies, critical pedagogy, postcolonialism, critical race theory, queer theory, and critical terrorism studies.

And the critical theorists expand on

Marxism’s emphasis on analyzing how dominant groups and systems shape and control society through exploitation and oppression[.]

For some reason these devoted activists are blind to the fact that they are the agents of exploitation and oppression in today’s world.

In fact, I would argue that the critical theorists turn Kant’s original notion of our fundamental ignorance about things-in-themselves upside down. Instead of humbly wondering how the world works they are all determined that the world is nothing but hegemony and oppression all the way down and that their analysis is the truth that can inform a Praxis that can lead to a just and equal society.

Notice that the whole point of Kant is that we cannot know the truth-in-itself.

My critique of Critical Theory is a Real Simple collection of Four Laws.

Socialism cannot work, because prices. Prices are a social thing — dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge — and cannot be directed by government.

Administrative government cannot work because the “knowledge problem.” Society works through dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge that government and corporate administrators cannot grasp.

Regulation cannot work, because “regulatory capture.” Actors in the market have dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge that cannot be comprehended by government regulation.

Government programs cannot work, because every government program becomes institutional corruption.

Yes, dear lefties, there is injustice and domination and hegemony all over the place. But a single theory — or even a basket load of critical theory — of oppression just cannot comprehend the depth and complexity of human life and society. Because the way the world works is through dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge, and not through critical theory and Praxis.

Because how do you know that your critical theory is anything other than intellectual fantasy?

| Wed, 04 Mar 2026 23:42:50 GMT |

Let Us Analyze the War Situation

A little under five years ago I developed my Four Wars concept. As with all my ideas it is Real Simple.

International wars:

1. Unite the country against a small country for a quick win.

2. Unite the country against a big country for a world war.

Civil wars:

3. Unite half the country against the other half for a civil war

4. Unite most of the country against a small minority for a witch-hunt.

And that is all.

Let us analyze the Iran situation and the US domestic situation in the light of the Four Wars concept.

Iran Situation

About 50 years ago the Iranian people rose up against the US-sponsored Shah and kicked him out. They imported a modest mullah, Ayatollah Khomeini, from Paris, but he turned out to be a totalitarian religious thug.

But every regime need an enemy, especially if you are a religious totalitarian regime. So what did the new Iranian regime come up with? It declared war on a small neighboring nation, Israel. But because it didn’t have the power to actually defeat Israel in war it chose the lesser path, of sponsoring and financing terrorists in Syria, in Lebanon, in Gaza, and in Yemen, and making a fortune selling keffiyeh scarves to liberal women all across the West.

It all worked like a champ until the regime violated the famous Mr. Brooke — of Middlemarch — philosophy not to “go too far” and backed Hamas in Gaza to commit the October 7, 2023 atrocities against Israel. The result has been the current Iran War in which Israel, backed by the Global Hegemon Trump is busy reducing the Iranian regime to rubble and also uniting the Sunni Arabs against it.

Notice that Iran is now in the position of a small nation going to war against all the other nations in the region. This is not recommended in my Four Wars concept.

US Domestic Situation

Back in the day, political entities were straight hierarchical, from the feudal king down to the rural peasant, and everyone knew their place.

But when Gutenberg invented the printing press a new educated class arose and began to challenge the feudal hierarchy that had declined to provide them with an honorable place in the hierarchy unless they were priests or monks. The rising educated class pushed the idea of equality. It might be in the terms that the North American rebels developed:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.

Or it might be couched in the idea of blissful equality developed by Rousseau.

At any rate, by the mid-19th century experts had decided that the educated class ought to be the rulers. But how?

Naturally, they consulted my Four Wars concept and decided that the problem was the small bourgeoisie that was exploiting the vast majority of people in the industrial working class. Let the vast working class unite against the tiny bourgeoisie!

Although good in theory it didn’t work out in practice, maybe because in the immediate aftermath of Marx’s writings in the mid 19th century economic growth in western countries maxxed out. Here’s the US record from my usgovernmentspending.com.

Odd that it should be an S-curve, interrupted by a blip in the 1930s.

After World War I, in which the working class identified with their nations and not their class, the Frankfurt School in the 1920s invented critical theory and decided that the problem was much bigger than the exploitation of the working class.

Thus the educated class would be the champions of not just the working class against a now pretty substantial middle class, but a coalition of all oppressed peoples, from blacks to women to colonized peoples. Do you see how they adjusted the need of successful politics to make war upon a small minority by enlarging the community of oppressed peoples? Great idea, if it turned out to be a good idea that worked.

If you look at the various iterations of critical theory since jusst after World War II, you can see that it is always in search of a new majority of oppressed people that the educated class can lead to glorious victory with its “Praxis” and change the world.

Only, just like with the Iranian mullahs, the educated class has conjured up enemies who don’t like what the educated class is doing to them. That is the meaning of “populist nationalism” that the educated class spends all its spare time attacking as fascism and Literally Hitler. I saw a cool yard sign here in North Seattle:

I assume that the creator of that sign knows that “care for each other” means vast government programs funded by taxes on billionaires.

Back in the 2000s the educated class in the US knew that it was gathering together The Emerging Democratic Majority by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. But now it’s not so sure, because traditionally marginalized groups like the lower middle class and blacks and Hispanics are moving towards the Republican Party. That’s why experts agreed that we should flood the country with “undocumented migrants.”

But this means that, instead of uniting the vast majority of the country against a small privileged minority, the Democrats are uniting half the country against the other half. Not a good strategic idea because you never know who will win in a civil war.

Of course, the real problem is that there is very little that politics can do except execute one of the Four Wars. But the whole point of human society begins after the heroes have won the war and we can all get back to cooperating with each other. As I say, inspired by F.A. Hayek:

Society works through dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge that government and corporate administrators cannot grasp.

But politics is all about concentrating social action into fighting and winning a war — and then distributing the spoils to the supporters.

| Thu, 05 Mar 2026 22:49:47 GMT |

Suppose Your Women's Liberation Enslaved You

All the world knows that the liberation of women in the last century or so has transformed women from subordination under the patriarchy to a new liberated age.

But my go-to guy is Georg Simmel, who wrote over a century ago about the transformation of the lives of women occasioned by the modern era. And his take is a bit different.

According to Jerry Z. Muller in The Mind and the Market, Simmel noted that capitalism had opposite effects on middle-class and working-class women. With labor-saving devices and ready-made clothes reducing the need for labor in the household, middle-class women wanted to get out into the world and enter the man’s world of “property, higher education professional equality, and political participation.”

But the experience of working-class women, “driven out of the home and into the factory by economic need” decades before, was different. They wanted to get back into the home and “the possibility of devoting more time to their familial roles as wife and mother.”

Middle-class women wanted to get out of the house, working-class women to get back into it.

Isn’t that still the case, except now we are talking about educated-class women versus ordinary middle-class women?

And isn’t it odd that we don’t really hear in the public square from the women in the lower orders?

A similar narrative was developed by Charles Murray in his Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960 - 2010. My analysis of the book is that Murray tells us “that the top 25 percent, the cognitive elite, is doing fine… The middle 40 percent are doing so-so, but the folks in Fishtown are in real trouble; the women don’t marry and the men don’t work.”

Anyone asked the lower class in Fishtown (a poor white neighborhood in Philadelphia that is now gentrifying) what they think? Bueller? Anyone?

It is a characteristic of modern society that only the elite gets to decide.

• If the workers are being exploited then the educated class in government offices gets to decide how to save them.

• If the educated class decides on no-fault divorce, so guys or gals can call it off, when the mood takes them, then that’s the rules.

• If educated-class women want to spend their twenties establishing a career and various sexual relationships and aborting the occasional accident, then that’s the rules.

• If the educated class decides that what we need is mortgage subsidies that encourage people to put their last nickel into a home mortgage and increase prices out of the range of the lower middle-class, then that’s the rules.

• If the educated class decides to solve the racism of centuries with quotas that benefit higher-income minorities, then that’s the rules.

Now I happen to believe in Lord Byron’s poetical notion from Don Juan that:

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ‘
Tis woman’s whole existence.

Maybe it’s a bit over the top, but it is certainly my experience that women take “love” much more seriously than men. It’s not hard to see why. Women need protection, from unwelcome male attention, during pregnancy, while raising children. I believe that “love” in women is largely their instinctive devotion to the one that protects them. It is not hard to see that biology and society combine to provide for the protection of women and children.

So I believe that the cultural and religious norms relating to sex and marriage and children and the status of women are not in fact artifacts of the male patriarchy but something much deeper.

It may be that you, educated-class women, feel confined and imprisoned by traditional cultural tropes around sex and marriage and work and play, but maybe other women, lower in the class ranking than you, find protection from “the guard-rails,” but don’t have the means and the cultural power to articulate their needs.

Needless to say, more research is needed, and maybe it should be research not dominated by educated-class researchers.

Were women more enslaved by society in the days of yore? Or are they enslaved today by all the cross-currents of modern educated-class ideology?

You make the call.

| Fri, 06 Mar 2026 23:58:53 GMT |

Experiencing War on X

During the last week or so of Epic Fury and and Roaring Lion the effect of a de-censored X has become apparent to me.

As an ordinary X subscriber I get to receive the Narrative of all kinds of propaganda sources: US, Israeli, liberal influencers, Iran regime and opponents. And I gotta admit, it is pretty confusing. If I weren’t as smart as paint…

It makes me understand why all warring states need to impose censorship. And also why the narrative never ends. We are still hearing how World War II was the noblest and greatest war of all time and that the Nazis were the worst thing since Attila the Hun. Or maybe Genghis Khan.

And I get why the Bidenoids did a full court press on social media during World War COVID. It would never do for people to start questioning lockdowns and vaccinations. Not after our beloved leaders had told us that The Science required it. Because once you admit that, hey, maybe we don’t need to shut down the beaches in California, or maybe the lockdowns weren’t such a good idea, then people may start to doubt other aspects of the regime strategy and tactics.

It has become clear to me, especially in the last week, that a warring state absolutely needs to assure its army and its people that we are the good guys, the Other is evil, and everything is going well, our boys are heroes, and victory is assured. Otherwise…

And if you start to do your own investigation, you start to wonder whether it was a good idea for the Brits and the French to ally against Germany in the Entente Cordiale in 1904 and surround Germany from east and west in the Triple Entente with Russia in 1907. I get it: a united Germany, that had invented modern philosophy and modern chemistry and modern physics after centuries of being a disunited Holy Roman Empire, was a fearsome thing, the scariest thing since the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna in 1683. And don’t get me started on the Treaty of Versailles.

But it’s all too easy to second-guess the politicians a century later.

Meanwhile, what really is going on? Are the US and Israel really beheading the Iranian regime? Can the Iranian people really hope to put an end to their subjection without US troops on the ground? Will the IRGC keep popping off missiles forever?

Then there’s the big picture. Can a US president that once was a TV star really hope to end the Maduro regime in Venezuela, the Islamist regime in Iran and the Communist regime in Cuba? All in one year? Are you kidding? Where are the experts, the wise ones, the foreign policy analysts on all this?

And now President Trump is announcing a war on drug cartels with his Shield of the Americas. Really? If this is such a great idea, how come the experts didn’t figure it out decades ago?

Meanwhile President Trump had a press conference today where he announced “major strides” in Epic Fury and Datarepublican has a comprehensive data analysis of the state of the conflict so far.

To be continued…

| Mon, 09 Mar 2026 23:11:49 GMT |

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