Podcast
Clusterfuck Nation
Hosted by James Howard Kunstler · EN
James Howard Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation blog is updated Mondays and Fridays. The KunstlerCast podcast and Eyesore of the Month are monthly features. Read & comment here.
21episodes
Episodes
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The Glow of the Gaslight
Mar 10, 2025Tap to summarizeCBS 60-Minutes’ Gaslighter-in-Chief Scott Pelley was at it again Sunday night trying to put over the story that Donald Trump had unfairly cashiered a broad swathe of federal agency Inspectors General — whose job it is to investigate crime, mischief, and administrative malfeasance. In the spotlight sat one Hampton Dellinger, Special Counsel to the independent Office of Special Counsel, who just resigned after a court battle over his firing weeks ago.Do you have any idea what a laugh riot that is? Dellinger’s job was to protect whistleblowers and enforce the Hatch Act (against public employees engaging in partisan political activities). Would you say he did a great job protecting FBI whistleblowers who testified before Congress last year — say, FBI agents Marcus Allen, Garret O’Boyle, and Steve Friend? They were suspended without pay, not allowed to seek other employment, lost homes, were financially wrecked, and hung out to dry by then-FBI boss Christopher Wray. Was Hampton Dellinger heard to make a peep about that? (Nope.) So much for protecting whistleblowers.You can state categorically that thousands of federal employees have been engaged in what they call “the Resistance” since the first Trump administration. They openly advertise themselves as the Resistance. The Resistance is simply and purely Democratic Party activism. How is that not a violation of the Hatch Act? Hampton Dellinger did not notice any of it. Maybe that’s why he got fired, ya think?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.comAbout those many Inspectors General fired from the various agencies. . . considering what is now known about the fantastic racketeering operations run during the Biden years — e.g., the USAID money laundry, the gazillion dollars flushed through the EPA to grifters such as Stacey Abrams under the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate change provisions, the vast royalties paid to NIH employees by Pharma companies for aiding in their product development — do you think the Inspectors General have done a bang-up job of protecting the US public against waste, fraud, and crime? (Maybe not so much, ya think.)Of all the IGs, Michael Horowitz of the DOJ has been in place since 2012 and mysteriously remains on the job. He was on-the-scene through the entirety of RussiaGate, including the Crossfire Hurricane flimflam, the immense mischief perpetrated in the FISA Court, the whole run of the deceitful Mueller Special Counsel op, the 2020 election fraud, the FBI-sponsored J-6 riot (and the DNC / RNC pipe bomb caper), the Hunter Biden laptop shenanigans (and Biden Family bribery scheme), the feckless Durham investigation (on the origin of RussiaGate), and the matrix of lawfare cases launched by Merrick Garland against Mr. Trump in the 2024 election year. Seems like Mr. Horowitz missed a few things. How would you rate his Inspector General-ship? And why is he still in that office?By now, you might have grokked that there is another side to the story presented by Scott Pelley, whose mission is to get the deranged half of the American public to go boo-hoo over ersatz threats to Our Democracy. Which might lead you to ask: how and why, exactly, is CBS so deeply invested in protecting the Administrative State (let’s call it) from allegations of corruption? Answer: CBS is the servant of the US Intel Community and its blob tentacles. They are captured. They do as they are told for their masters.As it happens, Mr. Trump launched a $20-billion lawsuit against CBS last October for fiddling with the interview that candidate Kamala Harris did on 60-Minutes in such a way that it presented a false record of her answers in order to boost her floundering election campaign. So, let’s suppose we have been seeing CBS play a game of hardball against Mr. Trump, consistently painting the once-again president as a villain in case presiding U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk in the Northern District of Texas happens to have nothing better to do on Sunday evenings than watch 60-Minutes, out of sheer habit, like so many Americans.Notice that you haven’t heard a whole lot for two weeks from AG Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel. They have had their hands full attempting to clean up big messes in the Southern District of NY’s DOJ office and its companion, the Manhattan FBI office, where many lawyers and agents have been fired in recent days. Among other things, the FBI office in New York supposedly sat on reams of evidence in the Jeffrey Epstein case. Much flappery has been made over that. But, considering Mr. Epstein’s service to the Intel blob, and its political servants especially, is it really plausible that any truly significant evidence remains?The FBI raided Epstein”s Manhattan townhouse in July, 2019. They found CDs and hard drives galore and lots of photos of underage girls. None of the videos ever managed to leak out. Do you find that suspicious, considering how sensationally incriminating they would have been? Would you guess that is because they were destroyed? Personally, I wouldn’t expect much now.But I do expect Ms. Bondi and Mr. Patel to develop a great many cases out of the aforesaid far-ranging corruption — overlooked by all those Inspectors General — that occurred throughout government at least since 2016, and probably involving a whole lot of well-know names, including Presidents Obama and Biden. It takes a lot of time and care to construct cases worth bringing to grand juries. Also consider that Dan Bongino will not take up his duties as FBI Deputy Director until March 15. As it happens, Mr. Bongino wrote several books about RussiaGate and its spin-offs. He will have a pretty good idea of exactly where to look and who to talk to, and he will be in-charge of making that happen. Be patient.Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 seasonFishermen at the Factory Ruins, Clarks Mills, New York<img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1beaf5a8-5299-4e1a-9d27-83dc6f262a10_500x505.heic" width="500" height="505" data-attrs="{"src":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/1beaf5a8-5299-4e1a-9d27-83dc6f262a10_500x505.heic","srcNoWatermark":null,"fullscreen":null,"imageSize":null,"height":505,"width":500,"resizeWidth":null,"bytes":61981,"alt":null,"title":null,"type":"image/heic","href":"https://www.kunstler.com/p/gallery-16","belowTheFold":true,"topImage":false,"internalRedirect":"https://www.kunstler.com/i/158765382?img=https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1beaf5a8-5299-4e1a-9d27-83dc6f262a10_500x505.heic","isProcessing":false}" class="sizing-normal" alt="" srcset="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_424,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1beaf5a8-5299-4e1a-9d27-83dc6f262a10_500x505.heic 424w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_848,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1beaf5a8-5299-4e1a-9d27-83dc6f262a10_500x505.heic 848w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:stee...
Transcribe →March 2025 | Eyesore
Mar 9, 2025Tap to summarizeBehold the decorative cornice of this humdinger from Dennison, Texas, corner of Rusk and W. Chestnut.. Known locally as the “Penis Building,” the motif supposedly emerged from a dispute between the developer and the city’s building code department, which repeatedly refused him a permit because his proposed building “lacked suitable ornamentation.” Moral of the story: Bureaucrats, be careful of what you wish for. History note from Jim Owen, realtor, who nominated this charmer:Denison in the late 1800’s was a thriving railroad town until the town pissed off the railroad, who wanted to expand their presence, thus, they moved to Houston. During that time, prostitution was the main business in the very blocks where the Penis Building was located, perhaps that’s why the builder chose that ornament. In fact the town was in dire financial straits and saved the coffers by charging the prostitutes a license fee. The building appears to have been severely modified since its heyday. Weep for history! The same address today:<div class="subscription-widget show-...
Transcribe →KunstlerCast 420 — Tom Luongo of Gold, Goats and Guns, Talkin' Europe, Russia, and America in a Dangerous Year
Mar 8, 2025Tap to summarizeTom Luongo is a Former Research Chemist, Amateur Dairy Goat Farmer, Anarcho-Libertarian and Obstreperous Austrian Economist who blogs and podcasts at Gold, Goats and, Guns. His work can also be found on sites like Zerohedge, Lewrockwell.com, Bitcoin Magazine and Newsmax Media. His work focuses on the attempt to connect the false narratives of geopolitics to viable long-term investment theses. He built the house that he lives in and loves hockey, his family, the art of drumming, board games of all kinds, a logically consistent argument, and the beauty of spontaneous order…. not necessarily in that order.The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry UngerThis podcast is sponsored by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. 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
Transcribe →Dems and Blob Together
Mar 7, 2025Tap to summarizeIf the Jacobins of Paris, 1794, had not been bum-rushed to the “national razor,” perhaps they would have acted-out as clownishly in defeat as America’s Democratic Party does right now after their election debacle of 2024. Imagine Robespierre in Harlequin drag riding backwards on a goat over the Pont Neuf to do handsprings and a juggling act in the Parvis de Notre-Dame. Alas, foiled by the guillotine. . . .Now imagine Rep. Al Green (9th Texas Dist) shaking his cane and hollering curses at the rostrum in Tuesday night’s joint session of Congress. Two days later, he carried on again in the well of Congress as Speaker Johnson read out his bill of censure and a motley mob of Mr. Green’s fellow Dems gathered ‘round to sing We Shall Overcome — the once stately Civil Rights movement reduced to abject farce. Such things are really happening.The Dems’ game has been revealed. The revenue stream for their national wrecking operations is suddenly cut off and it’s game-over. Everybody can see how this worked now. You funnel vast amounts of US taxpayer dollars into Non-Governmental Organizations, NGOs, spin off more NGOs below them, and add extra layers of subsidiary NGOs, and all of them pay their staffs of Dem Party foot-soldiers for do-nothing jobs — leaving plenty of time for riots and real-estate investing — a splendid racket that worked for years to support the insane antics of the Woke-Jacobin revolution. (And you paid for it.)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.comThe catch is: an org that gets government money is hardly non-governmental. Wouldn’t you think there’s some law against that? Thus, Exhibit A: in September 2022, Dem luminary John Podesta was put in-charge of a $369-billion fund out of “Joe Biden’s” so-called Inflation Reduction Act, tagged for climate change action. Conceptualize further: that’s three-hundred-sixty-nine-thousand-million dollars (!), a lot of millions, disbursed among tens of thousands of NGOs and their contractors. It boggles the mind that the government could even manage to cream-off such a fortune out of our nation’s alleged aggregate productivity.It was, in reality, money conjured out of thin air: debt. Before long, you are going to find out where it all went, and the picture will not be a pretty one: Into the NGO laundromat and straight out to Democratic Party members’ bank accounts, one of the greatest grifts in our history. Of course, your grandchildren are on the hook for all the debt behind it. Do you think our DC Federal District judges would serve better presiding over these matters than spending years hunting down J-6 “paraders”?Without that bonanza of conjured money for laying trips on the rest of us, the Democratic Party has nothing, not a single credible idea, not any plausible leadership, really no reason to exist. It has been for years nothing more than a gigantic grift engine extracting the remaining wealth out of our republic. So, what you are seeing acted out on the DC streets and the well of Congress and on the angst-filled cable news networks is the kind of ghost-dance that attends the death of a great political machine. Buh-bye. . . .The symbiote of that parasitical organism is the “blob” of war profiteers, pharma profiteers, seditionists, traitors, lunatic ideologues and assorted criminals lodged in the DC bureaucracy and Congress. For instance, former CIA Director John Brennan (appointed by Barack Obama), a veritable US Communist Party activist in his youth and all the above in age. After 2020, Mr. Brennan might have thought all he had to do was kick back in a comfortable retirement, make a little extra “walking-around money” doing hits on MSNBC, and enjoying the esteem of his former colleagues as a legendary blob poobah. Likewise, Mr. Podesta, former White House Chief of Staff, Chair of the Hillary Clinton 2016 election campaign, and many other distinguished perches. Likewise, Senator Mark Warner, RussiaGate promoter as Vice-Chairman of the Senate Intel Committee; and likewise, Senator Adam Schiff, chief engineer of Trump Impeachment No. 1; and likewise, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, rumored to have enabled the J-6 riot by denying National Guard reinforcements for the Capitol Police; and likewise, former AG Merrick Garland, the Torquemada of lawfare, and likewise, FBI Director Christopher Wray for concealing the far-ranging criminality of his Bureau in a long list of hoaxes and ops against the public, and likewise, Gina Haspel, who ran the CIA through the high times of RussiaGate hoaxdom; and likewise, “Biden,” Blinken, and Sullivan in Ukraine and the fate of $300-billion-plus in purloined aid — all these people just a small sample of the depraved officials who operated with such gross impunity against the citizens of this land, soon to collide with the wheels of justice.The Democratic Party is no longer in a position to defend them, and conversely the blob actors are in no position anymore to protect their allies in the Dem Party. It is a mutual aid society suddenly turned into a suicide pact. The real action hasn’t quite commenced yet as a new officialdom warily finds its place — Bondi, Patel, Kennedy, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Musk — to address a complex agenda of reform for that matrix of appalling agency corruption. We await a flood-tide of greatly disturbing revelation and concrete actionable allegation.Between all that and the cascade of truth finally emerging about Covid-19 and its dastardly vaccine program, America’s elite managerial class — Dems and blob together — find themselves like Pharaoh’s Army of old, trapped by an onrushing flood of destruction. All they have left is making faces and screeching like ghouls.Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 seasonThe Beach at Moreau Lake, Saratoga County, New York<img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F690ef7e5-3312-4b74-8a42-d5ce08249972_2583x2561.heic" width="1456" height="1444" data-attrs="{"src":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/690ef7e5-3312-4b74-8a42-d5ce08249972_2583x2561.heic","srcNoWatermark":null,"fullscreen":null,"imageSize":null,"height":1444,"width":1456,"resizeWidth":null,"bytes":1579641,"alt":"","title":"","type":"image/heic","href":"https://www.kunstler.com/p/gallery-16","belowTheFold":true,"topImage":false,"internalRedirect":null,"isProcessing":false}" class="sizing-normal" alt="" title="" srcset="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_424,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F690ef7e5-3312-4b74-8a42-d5ce08249972_2583x2561.heic 424w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_848,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F690ef7e5-3312-4b74-8a42-d5ce08249972_2583x2561.heic 848w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F690ef7e5-33...
Transcribe →Attitude Adjustment
Mar 3, 2025Tap to summarizeSee if you can get this straight: So, Keir Starmer says: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland wants to “put boots on the ground and planes in the air” in Ukraine so as to lead a “coalition of the willing” (NATO) against Russia. Sounds a little like the British PM is holding seances at No. Ten Downing Street to channel the spirits of bygone European leaders who launched doomed bear hunts into the vast and mysterious Eurasian east. (Who comes to mind?)Why is Europe so avid for war? After eighty-odd years of serving as the world’s tourism theme park, languishing in their cafes, maybe they forgot what war is like. The New York Times reports: Ursula von der Leyen said the European Union would fortify Ukraine with economic and military aid, aiming to turn it into “a steel porcupine that is indigestible for potential invaders.” This requires you to fall for the fake idea that Russia seeks to invade western Europe. Notice how much the EU acts like America’s Democratic Party — projecting its own hostile fantasies on its adversaries.Also, like our Democratic Party, Europe is sinking into oblivion. The animating ethos of the ruling parties in Germany and France is to punish their own citizens with censorship, tyranny, and sponsoring an alien invasion that aims to demolish European culture. Their economic wizards are taking the continent medieval, to a global backwater of defeated peasants eating bugs. I will boldly predict that the likes of Starmer, von der Leyen, and Friedrich Merz will be swept out of power by angry mobs before next Christmas.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.comIn the meantime, Europe has made itself preposterous. Europe does not have the mojo to do a darned thing about Ukraine or Russia. The British army has 74,296 active-duty troops, comparable to Algeria. The UK’s North Sea oil production has declined by approximately 73-percent since 2000. Germany produces around 23,000 barrels-a-day, enough to meet two percent of its domestic oil demand. Anyway, exactly a year ago, Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared, “There will be no ground troops, no soldiers on Ukrainian soil sent there by European countries or NATO states.” So, who’s kidding whom?Circumstances are driving the USA and Russia into an alliance of necessity. The immediate goal is to stop the insane war provoked by previous non-Trump administrations (and the EU) going back to George W. Bush, that repeatedly promoted “color revolutions” (regime change) in Ukraine so as to drag it into NATO — putting a hostile forward base on Russia’s “front porch.” The idea all along among the most fervidly delusional neocons has been to bust-up Russia in order to seize its oil and mineral assets.That project never panned out because after a decade of post-Soviet chaos, Mr. Putin put his country back in order, turned it into what used to be the definition of a normal European nation and — too ironically even for Russian literature — made it a bastion for defending Western Civ while the other nations of Europe launched their campaign of collective suicide. History is ever a trickster and the zeitgeist is its consigliere.Mr. Trump and his wingmen apparently recognize the obvious: that Ukraine is exactly what its name signifies in its Slavic root, Украина" (Ukraina): frontier, borderland, periphery, outskirts. Ukraine is on the edge of Russia. Most of all, it is geopolitically within Russia’s sphere-of-influence in the same way that Mexico is in ours, with similar implications for national defense as laid out explicitly in our Monroe Doctrine. Because Ukraine is mostly a flat plain, it has served historically as the doormat for invasions into Russia, so you may see why Russia was not comfortable with the prospect of NATO perched there, especially in a new age of drones and missiles.As Europe now flounders impotently and wrecks itself, America and Russia are motivated to avoid being snookered into an unnecessary world war over Ukraine. Mr. Zelenskyy is but an anachronistic artifact of the color revolutions that finally sputtered out with “Joe Biden,” who was himself in the vanguard of a colossal money-grubbing operation in that sad-sack country. While much is already known about how that worked, a whole lot more is waiting to be revealed, including the degree of actual treason it entailed. People around “Joe Biden” will be going to jail over this, or worse.I’d also venture to predict that W. Zelenskyy will before much longer get removed from his position by his own generals. Ukraine will return to its long-standing status as a borderland that poses no danger to the rest of the world. America and Russia will be poised to defend what remains of Western Civ from ambitious China. And Gawd help Europe if its insane national leaders revert to fighting among each other as they did for two thousand years before 1945, making a slaughterhouse of the region again.Mr. Trump is correct to avoid getting dragged into that. We have enough on our own agenda for repairing the damage done to ourselves the past thirty years. The good news is that we’re beginning to get that done.Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 seasonThe Beach at Moreau Lake, Saratoga County, New York<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Ancients-Fortitude-Triumph-Greenaway/dp/1723868108/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1GPIFJ2BPYIUA&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.lO4v2Wh-4Gpp9qdc4Wcb9agDmUf49-wjWdcirLUESyfGjHj071QN20LucGBJIEps.dND86uY7KfCvVKjfWps5lfkHZjFK...
Transcribe →The Dog Probably Ate It
Feb 28, 2025Tap to summarizeTurns out new Attorney General Pam Bondi was a little off the mark earlier this week when she said the Jeffrey Epstein files were sitting on her desk. Actually, it was a six-hundred-pound tar-smeared hairball with a gift tag that read: “To Pamela Jo from her Friends in Blobville, good luck untangling this!” Well, she did tell Fox News host Jesse Waters that the thing sitting on her desk was “disgusting.”As promised, those Epstein files were released on Thursday — a measly two-hundred pages — to much chagrin and embarrassment for all, since the material turned out to be the same old lists and flight logs that every blogger and his uncle has already put out on the Web for years — say, what . . .?But then the plot thickened later in the day when AG Bondi said a whistleblower informed her that the New York office of the FBI and their counterparts in the Southern District of NY (Manhattan) DOJ offices were hiding “thousands and thousands” of pages evidence and other stuff (videos? photos?) they had been sitting on for years.AG Bondi quickly fired off a letter to brand-new FBI Director Kash Patel demanding that the New York FBI office deliver all that stuff to Washington by eight o’clock in the morning today (Friday). If you were Mr. Patel, rather than waiting until morning, wouldn’t you just take a twilight ride up the Jersey Turnpike from Blobville to the Big Apple with an FBI swat team and bust into both the FBI and DOJ offices there. . . and maybe frog-march a few federal employees onto the street like so many grannies caught praying in front of an abortion mill?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.comOf course, I am writing this a few hours before the Friday morning deadline. So, for now there are only the ancillary considerations in this fast-developing denouement to the longest and slowest-running case of trans-national fuckery in world history. Some little details do stick in one’s craw. For example, Maurene (spelled that way) Comey, daughter of fired FBI director James Comey has been a lead US attorney out of the SDNY in the case against Ghislaine Maxwell and the more recent case against Sean (“Diddy”) Combs — both cases revolving around grand-scale sexual depravity among world-class celebrities. Note, too, that the SDNY was the origin point of more recent janky cases brought against Mr. Trump in the 2024 runup to the election.And, as independent investigator Mike Benz points out, Bill Barr was USAG in 2019 when Jeffrey Epstein was finally busted, stuffed into the Manhattan federal lockup, and promptly (shall we say, conveniently) turned up dead a few days later (putting aside the known irregularities involving the disposal of his body and the pathology reports about the cause-of-death). Did you notice that no one was ever disciplined for that? Not the two guards on the floor that night who claimed they fell asleep. Not the warden of the jail who failed to check whether the security cameras were working (they weren’t) on his most important prisoner’s cell?Nor did Bill Barr ever answer for that, or for some other capers — such as sitting on Hunter Biden’s laptop in the fall of 2019 when Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee held preliminary hearings to consider impeaching President Donald Trump over his inquiring phone call to V. Zelenskyy in Ukraine. The laptop, you surely know, was stuffed with deal memos and emails about the Biden family’s ex-officio financial shenanigans in Ukraine that surely would have amounted to exculpatory evidence and was withheld from Mr. Trump’s lawyers through the entire psychodrama of the impeachment and trial in the Senate.Then there is the peculiar history of Bill Barr’s dad, Donald Barr, present at the founding of the CIA (as an OSS officer in WWII), who groomed young Jeffrey Epstein into a job teaching math New York’s Dalton prep school in 1974 on the basis of fake college credentials (Stanford). Epstein was soon transformed into a Wall Street go-getter and most probably an agent for Mossad, Israeli intel. Epstein’s rise in high finance and international spookery led him to crypto-British media mogul and Mossad agent Robert Maxwell and Maxwell’s sex-crazed daughter Ghislaine. . . and the Epstein underage sex operation proceeded from there.Coincidentally, Donald Barr’s son, Bill Barr’s rise in Blobville neatly parallel’s Epstein’s rise. Barr signed on with the CIA in 1973, worked as an “analyst,” quit to go to law school in 1977, landed in the Reagan White House, than the Bush One White House where he performed clean-up operations on the lingering Iran-Contra mess, eventually becoming US Attorney General in 1991. Between 1994 and 2019, he racked up a personal fortune in blob-centric law, becoming Attorney General a second time in 2019, under Mr. Trump, whom he sedulously stabbed in the back, butt, and liver during his tenure.Now, it is well-known that Donald Trump consorted with Jeffrey Epstein at various points in his life. Mr. Trump, in his role as New York real estate mogul, was but another celebrity butterfly in Epstein’s vast collection. He admits flying on the notorious Epstein airplane, though, he has said only to catch a ride somewhere. Mr. Trump later clashed with Epstein, as far, even, as blackballing him from the Mar-a-Lago club. (Epstein’s role as a high-toned pimp was becoming known in the early 2000s, though his legal culpability was neatly minimized by Barack Obama’s DOJ.)In light of all this, it appears that Mr. Trump has no reservations these days about disclosing whatever lurks in the blob files about these skeezy matters. Of course, it is a little hard to believe that blob agents did not dispose of the evidence well in advance of January 20. Other whistleblowers say that FBI agents have been “working night and day” to destroy files on “stand-alone” FBI servers in the days preceding Kash Patel’s arrival on the premises.As I wind up today’s post at 8:02 in the morning, something new should have landed on Pam Bondi’s desk in place of that six-hundred-pound hairball. Not a whisper of news yet. No perp-walks out of SDNY or the New York FBI office. And, of course, The New York Times, barely a mention on yesterday’s Epstein doings. There’s a long work-day ahead. Stand by.Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 seasonThe Beach at Moreau Lake, Saratoga County, New York<img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F690ef7e5-3312-4b74-8a42-d5ce08249972_2583x2561.heic" width="1456" height="1444" data-attrs="{"src":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/690ef7e5-3312-4b74-8a42-d5ce08249972_2583x2561.heic","srcNoWatermark":null,"fullscreen":null,"imageSize":null,"height":1444,"width":1456,"resizeWidth":null,"bytes":1579641,"alt":"","title":"","type":"image/heic","href":"https://www.kunstler.com/p/gallery-16","belowTheFold":true,"topImage":false,"internalRedirect":null,"isProcessing":false}" class="sizing-normal" alt="" title="" srcset="https://substackcdn....
Transcribe →KunstlerCast 419 — Celia Farber on Covid Sorcery, the AIDS Fiasco, and Science Gone Wrong
Feb 26, 2025Tap to summarizeJournalist and blogger Celia Farber started out covering the AIDS crisis in the 1980s as a staff writer for Spin Magazine. She went freelance in 1997 writing for Esquire, Harper's, Rolling Stone, Salon, Observer, and more. Her 2006 article in Harpers exposing the activities of Anthony Fauci at US NIAID was followed by a “career-ending” coordinated attack on her from the medical research establishment. She started her blog, The Truth Barrier, in 2009. It was attacked and taken down in 2020, and she has since relocated it to the Substack platform. Her books are Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS (2023) and Sacrifice: How the Deadliest Vaccine in History Targeted the Most Vulnerable, With Dr. James Thorp (2025). She served as AIDS historian and researcher for Robert Kennedy, Jr., on his book, The Real Anthony Fauci.The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry UngerThis podcast is sponsored by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. 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
Transcribe →No Way Out
Feb 24, 2025Tap to summarizeCBS’s 60-Minutes show was at it again Sunday night in the most prime primetime weekend news slot on the old broadcast spectrum — Sunday at 7:00, the power-hour of national mind-fuckery — with blob PR-agent Scott Pelley singing the blues over the systematic disassembly of the rogue bureaucracy. Trouble is, fewer and fewer minds are susceptible to the argument that the blob exists to “save our democracy.”You’re supposed to go boo-hoo because the Department of Justice is under new management. Now get this: since 2015 the Department of Justice and its step-child, the FBI, have devoted their vast and savage powers to manifold acts of sedition, treason, malicious political prosecution, obstruction of justice, suborning perjuries, and countless other abuses of law in an ever-widening gyre of ass-covering operations as year-by-year their crimes multiplied.RussiaGate was initially a cover-up op for the Clintons’ many acts of mischief and moneygrubbing when Hillary ran for President, just as the Mueller Special Counsel Investigation was a cover-up for the crimes committed by the DOJ and FBI after Hillary lost to Mr. Trump, just as Impeachment #1 was a cover-up for the Ukraine money laundry and its role in RussiaGate, and Impeachment #2 was a coverup for the 2020 election ballot hijinks that got rid of Mr. Trump, and just as the Mar-a-Lago raid was a cover-up to retrieve evidence of all-the-above that Mr. Trump had archived, and just as the flurry of Trump prosecutions in 2024 was the final (and amazingly inept) effort to put the Golden Golem of Greatness out-of-business forever.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.comBut somehow, perhaps an act of Providence, he prevailed over all that adversity, like some paladin out of the ancient myths, and is suddenly back in charge — to the abject horror of all those lawyers and spooks behind the aforesaid ops, now nervously awaiting subpoenas in their Beltway McMansions. You will learn shortly that there is a difference between “justice” based on fraud and fakery and justice served by way of fact-patterns and evidence.And so late Sunday evening after the 60-Minutes pity party, came the pretty astounding news that former Secret Service agent and now podcaster Dan Bongino is appointed Deputy Director of the FBI. Astounding because Mr. Bongino has documented the worst blob crimes of recent years in a series of books that comprehensively presents the entire tapestry of lawlessness in microscopic detail. He knows the whole sordid, epic story, all the names, and all the money trails in every obscure corner of the worst aggregate matrix of scandals in US history. Believe me when I tell you, this is like a death sentence for the blob.For instance, Mr. Bongino is acutely aware of what went down on J-6, 2021, when a supposed pipe-bomb was “found” at the DNC headquarters, the part it was supposed to play in the larger J-6 op to rid Washington of Mr. Trump, and the lying confabulations of former FBI Director Christopher Wray afterward. Now he is in a position to compel current and former FBI officials to answer questions about that, and much more, from the Crossfire Hurricane scam to the shenanigans in Judge Juan Merchan’s court last summer.Those investigations will require a whole dedicated division of new FBI agents while Kash Patel attends to the latest grifts uncovered by the DOGE, the threats against public order and safety posed by countless military-aged illegal aliens ushered into the country by “Joe Biden” and Alejandro Mayorkas, the turpitudes of former AG Merrick Garland, and the crimes committed by officials in the CDC, FDA, and other public health agencies around Covid-19, and lingering monstrosities such as the Jeffrey Epstein capers, the huge fortunes mysteriously amassed by US senators and congressmen, the 1960s assassinations of the Kennedys and MLK, the censorship operations conducted by the combined FBI / CIA, State Department, and dark offices of the Pentagon, the theft of US largess given over to Ukraine, and the infiltration of American institutions by China.The Trump admin knows that it will have to strike hard and fast in all these matters and more. Cases will have to be prepared briskly and removed to federal courts outside the blob-controlled DC district. A great many political figures will have to be taken out of circulation. It will be helpful to finally understand the bizarre capture of the old legacy news media so, for instance, it becomes clear why an outfit such as CBS’s 60-Minutes ended up on the dark side, committed to burying the truth and distorting reality at every opportunity.The Democratic Party was the political enabling partner in all this sedition and treason and it is hard to see how it comes out of this alive. Expect to see a lemming stampede of resignations out of Congress and the Senate. And some of them, like Sen. Adam Schiff, and Rep. Eric Swalwell could end up in prison. You saw the fear in their public antics the past two weeks as the cabinet confirmations mounted. They know what’s coming. They are desperate, but the power they once wielded is now in other hands. There’s no way out.On a bright note, it was heartwarming to see that Joy Reid got “axed” from her primetime perch at MSNBC over the weekend. (Nobody axed me, but I approve!) She’ll be doing a must-watch farewell show this coming week. Don’t miss it!<div class="pencraft pc-reset icon...
Transcribe →Funny Money
Feb 21, 2025Tap to summarizeYou’ve got to wonder how the Party of Chaos thought they would get away with the Stacey Abrams grift-of-grifts. In case you forgot, Stacey Abrams ran for governor of Georgia twice, lost, and claimed she was “real governor” for years after. In the meantime, she parlayed her celebrity persona to a $3.17-million net worth by 2022, doing nothing but running for office. She claimed it derived from giving speeches, publishing romance novels, and “wise investments.”That was then, and this is now. Stacey popped up again this week in what looks like a textbook case of political scamming, uncovered by The DOGE team of forensic financial investigators. As “Joe Biden” racked up Democratic presidential primary wins in 2024, the shadowy claque behind him allocated $27-billion to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from the huge Inflation Reduction Act, ostensibly for “climate change action.” The money was stashed at Citibank, where it became a hidden slush-fund to keep payoffs flowing to party favorites no matter who won the 2024 election. An EPA “special advisor on climate action,” one Brent Efron, told a Project Veritas investigative reporter that “President Biden” was “throwing gold bars off the Titanic”.The key to understanding how the Democratic Party works is how it uses federal grants to redistribute taxpayer money into jobs programs for its rank-and-file. As seen in the recent USAID scandal, the action revolves around the creation of countless NGOs (non-governmental orgs). They are easily created, poorly supervised, and assembled into large networks of self-serving, inter-dependent organisms whose main mission is paying staffers — and secondarily pretending to do good works, as suggested by a given group’s name is. These staffers make up the matrix of Democratic Party activists, well-paid foot-soldiers in do-nothing jobs who can be called upon to cheer-lead for the party, organize street protests and, most critically, harvest ballots when the time comes.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.comStacey Abrams became a kind of field marshal for setting up NGOs around her campaigns for office and then later turned them into money laundromats for the trillions of dollars fire-hosed out of the US Treasury during the Covid-19-darkened “Biden” years. Here are some of Stacy’s NGOs:· The New Georgia Project and its affiliated NGP Action Fund — set up for her 2018 run for governor. It was eventually fined $300,000 for failing to disclose millions in contributions, failing to register properly, and sixteen violations of campaign laws. Its main purpose was providing jobs for an army of activists. One question that might have been asked: how many of Stacey Abrams’ books were purchased by The New Georgia Project, juicing her royalties?· The Southern Economic Advancement Project, founded in 2019 to “promote equity” in twelve southern states, paid Stacey a $700,000 annual salary.· The Fair Fight Action group raised nearly $62 million in dark pool donations by 2022, with 96-percent from 252 large, unidentified donors.· The Fair Count Project was created to lobby for counting illegal aliens in the 2020 US Census, in order to pad state congressional districts.· The Third Sector Development group, created as an “incubator” for other groups (including the New Georgia Project).· The Fair Fight 2020 group, created to “train voter protection teams” in twenty “battleground states.” That is, ballot harvesting.Out of the $27-billion from “Joe Biden’s” Inflation Reduction Act sent to EPA in 2024, $2-billion from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) ended up in the Stacey-associated Rewiring America org and its offshoot the Power Forward Communities org. Stacey was listed as “senior counsel” to Rewiring America, which also happened to “partner” with her prior NGOs Fair Count and Southern Economic Advancement Project.What you might surmise from all this is that “Joe Biden’s” green energy agenda was used as a green smokescreen for a giant patronage racketeering operation. The billions allocated would go ostensibly to innumerable corporations set up to carry-out “green” good deeds, most of which would never actually happen, but would, along the way, pad thousands upon thousands of bank accounts for favored contractors.Stacey’s Power Forward Communities NGO was incorporated in the state of Delaware where loose corporate governance requires such orgs to pay out only five percent of the org’s funds to its stated mission recipients each year. The rest of the $2-billion not allocated to staff salaries can be socked away in safe investments garnering, say, $50-million-a-year in returns, which can be rolled back into the org and used for spinning out new NGOs with more paid staff positions. . .grift upon grift. . . . That is what patronage is, and that, by the way, is how it became such an urgent national issue over a hundred years ago when it was openly known as the “spoils system” in electoral politics — to the victor go the spoils— which was resolved by the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. Alas, in our time patronage (that is, corruption) has reinvented itself as the blob, the runaway system that almost sank the country.Do you see how all this works now? The ever-expanding matrix of NGOs creates an army of useful idiots working hand-in-hand with an ever-expanding rogue bureaucracy that has become effectively a fourth branch of government accountable to nobody. This is how your tax dollars disappear down a rat-hole and why the US government is insolvent.The difference now is that the Democratic Party no longer has its hands on the levers of power. Different managers are in place at the critical agencies, most particularly Pam Bondi at DOJ, Kash Patel at the FBI, Russell Vought at OMB, Lee Zeldin at EPA, and Elon Musk in the DOGE. In the past, nothing was done about these shenanigans. This time is different. The Democratic Party will lose its principal means for staying alive. That’s why senators like Chuck Schumer, Chris Coons, and Adam Schiff are out mewling and hollering in the streets. Meanwhile, the blob is getting methodically disassembled, one bureaucratic office at a time. Before much longer we are going to be a different country, and most probably a better one.Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 seasonThe Beach at Moreau Lake, Saratoga County, New York<img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F690ef7e5-3312-4b74-8a42-d5ce08249972_2583x2561.heic" width="1456" height="1444" data-attrs="{"src":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/690ef7e5-3312-4b74-8a42-d5ce08249972_2583x2561.heic","srcNoWatermark":null,"fullscreen":null,"imageSize":null,"height":1444,"width":1456,"resizeWidth":null,"bytes":1579641,"alt":"","title":"","type":"image/heic","href":"https://www.kunstler.com/p/gallery-16","belowTheFold":true,"topImage":false,"internalRe...
Transcribe →Krakatoa Blows
Feb 17, 2025Tap to summarizeYou’ve got to wonder who at CBS-News thinks it’s a good idea to quadruple down on mendacious grandstanding when the network faces a $20-billion lawsuit from Donald Trump — for assisting Kamala Harris’s campaign (aka election interference) — while the FCC under new Commissioner Brendan Carr questions the network’s license to operate on the grounds of “news distortion” and violation of the broadcast news fairness doctrine.So, on Sunday night February 16, CBS’s flagship news show, 60-Minutes, pitched a doubleheader of knowingly faked-up feature pieces intended to scramble American minds to benefit the Party of Chaos and its manager, the US Intel Blob. The first piece was a sob-story on how sad and unjust DOGE’s deconstruction of the USAID money-laundering operation is. Yeah, boo-hoo. They interviewed several part-timers and consultants pretending to be long-term employees of the outfit. Complete horse-shit, and they knew it. What really matters is that a whole lot of bureaucrat grifters (and politicians) won’t get paid anymore. . . and the Blob won’t be able to soften-up faraway nations for plunder with its color revolutions and other hijinks.The second piece was a ringing endorsement of Germany’s current censorship campaign, arresting ordinary citizens for mean tweets. Their camera crew followed the German Gedankenpolizei entering apartments and seizing cell phones. The viewing audience was asked to shed tears for German Green Party politician, Renate Künast, who got dissed on “X” (“misogynist comments” and insults) — the same week that an Islamic immigrant maniac drove a car into a Munich crowd on-purpose, injuring 39 people, including two dead (one, a child). No mention of that incident on 60-Minutes, or, more generally, that illegal immigration is the big taboo subject behind all the censorship.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.comCBS actually preceded that gaslighting job with a bit of Sunday morning constructed Orwellian fake syllogistic idiocy by Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, who said that free speech caused the Holocaust against the Jews. Her reasoning: free speech allowed the Nazis to gain power, therefore. . . Auschwitz . . . therefore, free speech is bad. Guest, Sec’y of State Marco Rubio, told her that he could not associate himself with her thesis. In fact, once in power, the Nazis totally controlled speech and news and did not permit other political parties to even exist. All of this, you understand, is just deliberate Gramscian distortion-and-perversion of language — black is white, up is down — to defeat any attempt at coherent public debate today.The conclusion you might draw from all this is that CBS is terrified of free speech, and is trying desperately to hide the Blob’s long-running criminal racketeering activity — which they have aided and abetted for years and deserve to lose their license over, plus pay billions in penalties, and go out of business — a rather existential predicament.Reality distortion is no longer working so well with Mr. Trump in the White House. Here is what’s behind the USAID brouhaha and why it matters. By 2016, the Blob had become a fullblown, independent, parasitical organism on US governance. It had several purposes: 1) to keep itself in perpetual power by paying off its voting blocs of “the poor and marginalized,” 2) to pay its corps of bureaucrat managers (of the “poor and marginalized”) handsome salaries to win their everlasting allegiance, and 3) to pay-off elected officials to keep voting the money flows for all that. All this created a massive class of Democratic Party activists dedicated to overthrowing the republic so as to usher-in their social equity nirvana. And all that was sheer hubris. More recently, nemesis arrived on the scene and all this institutional Blob power had to be diverted to a massive ass-covering operation, now in full, florid failure. And, worst of all for the Blobists, evidence of actual crime is accruing at a frightful, fast pace.With the confirmation of Kash Patel later this week, Mr. Trump’s agency team will be complete. What follows will be a Krakatoa of revelation, drastically altering the climate of US politics for years to come. You should learn exactly how many FBI and CIA agents were moiling and roiling in the J-6 mob. You’ll find out what the J-6 DNC pipe bomb caper was all about. You’ll find out why RussiaGate was never properly investigated or adjudicated. . . how the Adam Schiff / Alexander Vindman / Eric Ciaramella impeachment op worked. . . how the Clinton Foundation made a zillion dollars . . . where all the money went that got poured into Ukraine. . . and much much more.You will also soon start getting some actually reliable information out of CDC, FDA, NIH, and other public health agencies. Do you suppose that Tony Fauci is the only person who must answer for Covid-19? I expect many of the following persons who were high-ranking officials — nearly all of them completely obscure to the public — to be asked under oath what they thought they were doing:Robert R. Redfield, M.D. — Director of the CDCH. Clifford Lane, M.D. — Deputy Director for Clinical Research and Special Projects, Clinical Director, NIAIDSarah W. Read, M.D., M.H.S. — NIAID Principal Deputy DirectorJill R. Harper, Ph.D. — NIAID Deputy Director, Science ManagementCarl W. Dieffenbach, Ph.D. — NIH Director, Division of AIDSDaniel Rotrosen, M.D. — NIAID Director, Division of Allergy, Immunology, and TransplantationEmily Erbelding, M.D., M.P.H. — NIAID Director, Division of Microbiology and Infectious DiseasesAnne Schuchat, M.D. — Principal Deputy Director, CDCSherri A. Berger, Ph.D. — Chief Operating Officer, CDCDebra Houry, M.D., M.P.H. — Acting Director, CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and ControlNancy Messonnier, M.D. — Director, CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory DiseasesFrancis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. — Director, NIHJohn Jernigan, M.D., M.S. — Director, Division of Healthcare Quality PromotionRuth A. Etzel, M.D., Ph.D. —Director, National Center for Environmental Health/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR)Dana Meaney-Delman, M.D. — FDA Acting Director, Office of Public Health Preparedness and ResponseLawrence A. Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D. — Principal Deputy Director, NIHJoshua A. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D. — Director, National Institute of Mental HealthWalter J. Koroshetz, M.D. — Director, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and StrokeGary H. Gibbons, M.D. — Director, National Heart, Lung, and Blood InstituteRichard J. Hodes, M.D. — Director, National Institute on AgingShannon N. Zenk, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.N. — Director, National Institute of Nursing ResearchI’m sure many more names can be added to the list. They must have known, and found out early on, that Covid-19 was created with US Government grants (possibly through DARPA), that the mRNA vaccines were ineffective and harmful, that the lockdowns were shuck and jive, and that public health officials were paid a lot of money in royalties while all this was going on. If they haven’t shredded or deleted the info — and it’s still possible that Tulsi Gabbard can find it, anyway — the gaslight will finally get turned off and the sunlight will shine in. You know this is going to happen.Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 seasonThe Beach at Moreau Lake, Saratoga County, New York<source type="image/webp" srcset="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_424,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F690ef7e5-3312-4b74-8a42-d...
Transcribe →