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
Newest firstAll episodes
Darkness Dying
Feb 14, 2025Tap to summarizeThe exorcism of the USA just keeps revving up. You can tell by the number of revolutions-per-minute Elizabeth Warren’s head spins while she spews pea soup at the cameras. Who knew what a demon-infested slough USA Management Central was? And yes, I would like some insight as to how humble civil servants like Liz Warren accrue a $12-million fortune . . . and $30-million for Samantha Power (ex-USAID-chief) . . . and more than $150-million for Nancy Pelosi. Could it be as simple as just good stock-picking? (Is that how they spend their time?)You have reason to suspect that what goes on in Washington DC is the greatest racketeering operation ever run on God’s green earth. “A threat to our democracy!” the Party of Chaos spouted incessantly during the election campaign in re: Donald J. Trump. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” The Washington Post still declares on its name-plate. Yet, who exactly kept the lights off the past four years? Who scrambled the brains of the nation’s management and thinking classes? Who made mental illness aspirational?You begin to detect that by “our democracy” they actually meant “our everlasting grift.” And it didn’t die in darkness — it thrived, grew, and spread in the moist bureaucratic darkness like the Devil’s own slime mold. And now it is being revealed, to the astonished disgust of slightly more than half the nation that was not on-the-take. Turn over a log in the woods and you have the metaphor for “our democracy.” Countless hundred-footed things slither around under it, their feeding interrupted . . . 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 political left’s success springs from its dedication to organizing its member ranks and their activities. Organizing has been the key to their grand plan for arriving at Utopia. Except, sometime near the dawn of this century, with the torch of communism burning out, they realized that Utopia was a destination unlikely to be reached. Instead, they could turn their organizing talent to directing the money flow from their ever-expanding roster of world-saving NGOs into the bank accounts of their own member ranks.USAID was the poster-child for that, a flowering of mutually-referential dollar feedback loops providing six-figure “jobs” and non-stop cocktail partying for the elite surplus churned out of the left’s training academies, Harvard, Brown, Yale — with a whopping vig paid to congress-persons and senators who disbursed massive taxpayer funding for each newly-sprouted org dedicated to the uplift of the “marginalized and oppressed.”Of course, that was merely the feeding frenzy of the small fish on the surface. Deeper down, the money-flow was going to much more demonic enterprises: the color revolution gang in the CIA, State Department, and God knows what other surreptitious agencies. . . Antifa and BLM (the Democratic Party’s shock troops) . . . the news industry (now completely corrupted into a global mind-fucking operation) . . . Hollywood’s zeitgeist-shaping dream factory of girl-boss fantasies. . . book publishing (with its zillion-dollar “advances-on-royalties” to political celebrity authors, who could never possibly earn-out that windfall on book sales) . . . the school systems at every level . . . the medical-pharma matrix . . . the military procurement racket too vast to even quantify (and the probable cause of the Pentagon’s consistent audit failures) . . . and, we’ve learned recently, the care-and-feeding of twenty-million illegal aliens ushered into our country by the “Joe Biden” / Al Mayorkas travel agency.This colossal worm-farm lies exposed now with its slithering denizens drying up under the DOGE sunlamp. The response by the political left’s clown troop fronting for all these scams is the most pathetic performative cluster-B psychodrama ever enacted on the streets of our nation’s capital: Schumer, Maxine Waters, Ayanna Pressley, Liz Warren, and every other mewling loser in Wokedom singing that old union ditty Which Side Are You On for the cameras — as if they were reenacting the 1907 Monongah Mining Disaster. They are crying— as the old saying goes — all the way to the bank.The histrionics of the past three weeks are only the beginning, you understand, since USAID was just a mole-hill beside the mountain range of past turpitudes yet coming into view as Mr. Trump’s generals deploy in the battle-space. Yesterday — mirabile dictu! — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was sworn-in for Health and Human Services, to oversee the empire of fraud that public health became during the rogue reign of Tony Fauci and his cohorts. The flip-side of MAHA is Make Medicine Truthful Again. Everything about health-care in America slouches in disrepute and ignominy, from the doctors hostage to their private equity taskmasters to the faked drug trials at FDA to the deliberate data mismanagement at CDC to the grant-and-kickback game at NIH and NIAID, to the hellscape of medical insurance fraud, to the revolving door between pharma and government —RFK faces one of the most onerous tasks of filth-clearing since Hercules shoveled out the Augean stables. And then there’s the giant hairball of poisoned American food.The solitary figure who remains absent on the playing field is Kash Patel, and you can tell by the delaying tactics employed by the Party of Chaos that they (and their blob allies) dread the coming day that he gets confirmed to lead the FBI. That’s when the combined forces of avalanche, tsunami, earthquake, and fire send forth an exterminating spewage of long-suppressed information about the 1960s assassinations, RussiaGate, the Epstein matter, the Ukraine money-laundry, and any number of other unresolved treasonous scandals. It’s going to happen. And, if by some quirk of fate, Mr. Patel fails to get the votes, somebody else eventually will, somebody equally capable of fumigating that rat-hole. When that day comes, I’m sure Chuck Schumer will sing Kumbaya from the Capitol steps, expecting to make it all magically go away.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.co...
Transcribe →Warfare on Lawfare
Feb 10, 2025Tap to summarize“It is axiomatic that those who are beneficiaries of waste, fraud and unnecessary government spending will be the most threatened by the cuts that DOGE is making in these programs. These beneficiaries of waste and fraud are also extremely worried about the reputational, legal and potential criminal risk they will suffer by being exposed by DOGE” — Bill AckmanI’m so glad that The New York Times explained what Kendrick Lamar was up to in his Super Bowl half-time act because all I could make out was a grown man dressed-up like an eight-year-old hollering nursery rhymes in front of a flash-mob. Apparently, KL is engaged in a feud with another rapper named Drake, whom KL styles as a child molester. So, you see, the whole thing was just a bit of wholesome family entertainment. Thank The NY Times, for putting a grad-school spin on it:Speaking of metanarratives — and apart from the private vendettas on Planet Rap — a nice one is developing at center-stage of US political life: the Party of Chaos using federal judges to oppose the dismantling of their gigantic grift scaffold. In other words, more lawfare to obstruct any earnest effort to effectively reform the management of our country. So, last week, you get Judge Carl J. Nichols in the DC District arguing that the DOGE shutdown of USAID was unauthorized and potentially illegal, lacking congressional approval.Then, late Friday (when most citizens are checking out of the week’s struggles) Judge Paul Engelmayer out of the Southern District of New York blocked DOGE and other executive branch officials from accessing US Treasury records of expenditures. The injunction, comically, prevents Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent from seeing what his agency doles out money for — that is, from managing anything his department does. The suit that prompted the ruling was brought by nineteen states’ Attorneys General led by NY AG Letitia James. So, you see how this works.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.comYou must also imagine that the White House was prepared for these lawfare shenanigans, though they haven’t shown their hand in response so far. This is a constitutional quarrel, of course, since it concerns who has authority between the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary over agency spending and, in particular, who gets to audit it. The actual objective by the plaintiff in these cases (the Party of Chaos) is simply to delay any corrective action.The DOJ under Pam Bondi can designate the US Solicitor General to petition the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) for certiorari — to expedite the resolution of this constitutional issue as to whether Mr. Trump, as chief executive, and his bona fide appointees, can carry out executive functions. The arguments against that appear to be weak.It is the President’s duty to see that the laws are faithfully executed, meaning that the departments under him do their jobs correctly, which would give him inherent authority to audit and restructure agencies like USAID. Both judges Nichols and Engelmayer are arrogating executive and legislative functions on policy-making to themselves, triggering a separation-of-powers dispute that the SCOTUS must adjudicate promptly.What matters most in these cases is that SCOTUS has an opportunity to put up new guardrails against the hijacking of the federal courts for the purpose of lawfare — that is, for political dirty-fighting under color-of-law. The law is slow-moving, arcane, and incomprehensible to most non-lawyer citizens and that is why the Party of Chaos has misused it so liberally.In any event, DOGE is moving ahead on many other fronts and the next battleground looks like the US Department of Education, an agency which, since its creation in 1979, has only presided over an epic degeneration in the academic performance of young people. The agency has grown since 1979 to 4,400 employees overseeing a $238-billion budget. Otherwise, what it’s mainly accomplished is to enrich the various teachers’ unions and to raise the cost of college tuitions astronomically while degenerating the purpose and value of higher ed. The fifty states were arguably doing a better job on their own without any DOE on the scene.Meanwhile, it’s satisfying to see the security clearances revoked from Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Lisa Monaco, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Andrew Weissmann, Mark Zaid, and Norm Eisen. The reason: among other crimes, they all dabbled in election interference. And “Joe Biden” lost his, too, on account of being too feeble-minded to be trusted with classified information. Who knows what other legal co...
Transcribe →How It Worked
Feb 7, 2025Tap to summarizeIf you wondered since 2016 how come the blob and the Democratic Party were aligned so exquisitely in their operations to destroy populism (personified by Mr. Trump) and to permanently entrench single party power in America for all time to come, it’s because an endless font of taxpayer money was streamed into countless non-governmental orgs creating a shadow civil service of Democratic Party activists that melded seamlessly with the big policy-making agencies.The money was laundered through manifold layers of these orgs and their sub-orgs to pay for an ongoing “color revolution” in the USA — lawfare, election fraud, propaganda, censorship, career cancellation, medical fuckery, open borders, and other totalitarian ploys — while enriching political players at all those manifold layers from multi-millionaire congressmen and senators to thousands of NGO officials making six-figure salaries to street hustlers like Patrisse Cullors of Black Lives Matter and “anti-racism” racist Ibram X. Kendi and his $50-million Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University (recently axed) — and, of course, ultimately the former Potemkin president “Joe Biden” and his family.It was all this money that drove eight years of sponsored insanity. Mainly, it kept the hands of the Democratic Party firmly on the levers of power so that nothing could be done about the insults and injuries they were inflicting on our country. So, is it a mystery now that nobody was prosecuted for burning the cities in 2020, or for magically creating millions of extra “Joe Biden” votes out of nowhere that year, or setting up the kickback machine from Ukraine to Congress, or forcing millions to get a janky vaccine?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.comPam Bondi is going to be a busy girl. The DOGE has uncovered a government racketeering operation of which the USAID scandal is but one cog in a colossal engine of grift. What the public, including you readers, may not appreciate is how much planning went on over the past year to mount the DOGE effort, and how comprehensively the work of its many hundreds of computer techies (not just six whiz-kids) has laid bare the money-trails out of previously impenetrable government computers. Their algorithms have pierced the firewalls, revealing decades of fraud and deceit.Mr. Trump’s cabinet officers have started the job of dismantling the machine by getting rid of the employees who set it up and worked for it. By Thursday, Secretary of State Rubio fired all but 300 of the 10,000 people working for USAID. CIA Director Ratcliffe offered the agency’s entire workforce a “deferred resignation” option that will allow them to bail out and still collect their salaries until September. Look for straight-up firings to ensue. Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered the acting FBI director to terminate eight senior FBI officials and asked for a review of up to 5,000 involved in J-6 investigations (including, presumably, agents who engaged in abusive SWAT-team deployments).Many lawsuits have been mounted by blob-adjacent attorneys to make all this stop. But one big problem for them is that their gigantic legal fees — hundreds of dollars an hour on the meter multiplied by x-hundreds of lawyers— were previously paid by exactly those NGOs that are getting shut down now. So, perhaps you see exactly how those levers of power worked. The money will have to come from somewhere else, and I doubt that Silicon Valley billionaire blob-supporter Reid Hoffman wants to piss away the rest of his fortune on this.Some actual persons will have to be held accountable for all the mischief carried out in rogue agencies over many years. It has to start somewhere. I nominate Samantha Power as a first test case. She was in charge of USAID for nearly four years — until Jan 20, 2025 — including the duration of the Ukraine War. She was also personally very busy hands-on in arranging attempted color revolutions in Hungary (failed, against Viktor Orban), Georgia (failed), Mexico (failed), and Brazil (succeeded against Jair Bolsonaro). Ms. Power provided money from USAID-connected NGOs to foster instability in many more countries, including our country. It must have come as quite a shock to her that Kamala Harris did not win the 2024 election. USAID will not be paying for Ms.Power’s legal representation.Much more will come to shock the blobsters and their legions — though just now, as the reformation of government begins, it’s comforting just to think of all those dedicated seditionists, Wokesters, Marxians, and Jacobins unable to make their rent payments or buy groceries all of a sudden. The paychecks have stopped coming for thousands who wanted to turn American life upside-down and inside-out. This happened most colorfully at the fake-news outfit called Politico this week. Turned out they were a subsidiary of the blob. Who knew? (Everyone who was paying attention to the jive they published.) Management had to send out a memo that reporters and editors would not get paid this week, or maybe ever again. Boo hoo.It was also revealed this week that the Reuters News Agency, the Associated Press, The New York Times, the Wash-Po, and around 700-other news outfits altogether had been receiving financial support from USAID, the CIA, and other government entities. Now do you understand why the Democratic Party voters are so obdurately deluded and deranged?Besides the perfunctory lawsuits filed against DOGE and the agency chiefs, the response to all this corrective action has been surprisingly feeble. You might conclude that they couldn’t marshal the rioters this time because the money for rioters has been cut off. Instead, you saw a motley pack of political creeps — Jamie Raskin, Ayanna Pressley, Liz Warren, Chuck Schumer, Maxine Waters, Jasmine Crockett , Ilhan Omar —crying crocodile tears outside USAID HQ at 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. They looked like roaches after the exterminator’s visit.The reform of our gone-rogue government is barely underway, notwithstanding these mighty initial actions. Yet to come, you have the whole filthy underbelly of the public health agencies who brought you Covid-19. The terrified Democrats are holding back confirmation of Patel, Gabbard, and RFKJr, but even if they fail to get confirmed, the new administration will put capable figures in those jobs at FBI, ODNI, and HHS. The party of Chaos must know that they cannot stop the dismantling of their evil machine.Beyond these grifts lies the Okefenokee of treason, bribery, conspiracy, and sedition deriving from RussiaGate, the impeachment of 2019, and all the shenanigans emanating out of Ukraine since the Maidan Revolution in 2014. Turns out, it was all of a piece. The same cast of characters were involved in all these nefarious events. I believe we’ll see those “Joe Biden” preemptive pardons tested in the SCOTUS. You haven’t begun to hear about the cases that AG Bondi will have to consider in that giant hairball. It’s only her second day on the job. Have mercy.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...
Transcribe →KunstlerCast 418 — Peter Golden Explores the Inner Life of John F. Kennedy in a New Novel
Feb 7, 2025Tap to summarizePeter Golden is an award-winning journalist, novelist, and historian. His novels include Comeback Love, Wherever There Is Light, Nothing Is Forgotten , and Their Shadows Deep, just published, in which John F. Kennedy is a major character. During the course of his career, Mr. Golden has interviewed Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush; Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, George Shultz, and Lawrence Eagleburger; Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Shamir; and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. He lives with his wife near Albany, New York.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 →February 2025 | Eyesore
Feb 5, 2025Tap to summarizeConcerning President Donald Trump’s executive order requiring new federal buildings to show a preference for "classical architectural style" which includes Neoclassical, Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Beaux-Arts, and Art Deco, referencing the architectural traditions of Greek and Roman antiquity. . . Behold (above) the federal building and courthouse in Tuscaloosa, Alabama by HBRA Architects. And, no, it was not conceived when Andy Jackson was fighting the Battle of Emuckfaw against the “Red Stick” Creek Indians in 1814. Rather, it went up in 2012, a rare example of neoclassical design executed in our time. For the most part, though, the decades-long trend in American civic architecture has been for sui generis one-off, tortured-genius, para-metaphysical, high-tech, in-your-grille stunt buildings commissioned to shock and confound the middle class (Épater le bourgeois, as the French dubbed this maneuver). These generally horrified the public (as intended), as well as perplexing and confusing them, making their interaction with the building a form of punishment. Often it was difficult to even discern where the entrance of the building was, or where to go once you managed to get inside. For instance, the recent San Francisco Federal building by Tom Mayne of Morphosis Architects, below, designed in the style of a dashboard from an alien spacecraft:At its worst, you got the conjunction of malign form and evil function, as concretized in Washington’s J. Edgar Hoover Building, home office (mother ship) of the FBI, below:<a class="im...
Transcribe →Last Rites
Feb 3, 2025Tap to summarize“In private meetings and at public events, elected Democrats appear leaderless, rudderless and divided. They disagree over how often and how stridently to oppose Mr. Trump. They have no shared understanding of why they lost the election, never mind how they can win in the future.” — The New York TimesMaybe that’s because the four years of “Joe Biden” was little more than a vaudeville show in front of the curtain, distracting you from what was going on backstage — the world’s biggest political racketeering operation as conducted by a vast bureaucracy gone wild and mad: the blob in florid, mature efflorescence, doing its blob-thing to the max, looting and punking the nation. Now it is all being uncovered, disclosed, unmasked.Think of the Democratic Party as the entertainment arm of the overall operation. Its aim has basically been to induce you to doubt your sanity. You were asked to swallow one fabulous absurdity after another — lockdowns, vaccines that don’t prevent illness, mostly-peaceful arson, US soldiers in puppy masks, pronoun police, shoplifting-is-reparations, the wide-open border — an epic acting-out of manifold mental illness in living color. The climax was drag-queens in the primary schools, obese men in fright-wigs presenting nightmare varieties of Mom-as-monster, often with some exposure of their male junk as part of the act. Suburban mothers watched approvingly, insisting on video that this was all wholesome, edifying fun for the kiddies (while some of the more insane moms went even further at home, coaxing their little kids toward medical “transitioning”).Can you grok how insane all this was? So, if you were a Democratic Party strategist, perhaps the first thing you’d consider these days is to stop being insane. Second, at this particular juncture, you might consider apologizing to the people of this land for your heinous antics of recent years — like an alcoholic parent who has acted very badly against the family — and promise to make the effort to get your shit together. This is obviously the part that Democrats are struggling with now, and it explains why they pretend to be at such a loss to make course corrections. Of course, any further failure to come to grips with all this will lead to the death of the Democratic Party. Never in history has a political faction gone out in such pathetic ignominy.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.comYet it is not just this feckless party that needs to expiate its shame, it is also America’s thinking class as a whole, its “experts,” its managers, its educated elites, its doctors and lawyers, its curators of “news” and opinion, and most of the denizens of showbiz. For the moment, they are all cowering and shuddering before the juggernaut of Mr. Trump, who they so grievously underestimated.They know — they can see in plain view — that he is coming for them, and many might find themselves called to account in a rebalanced justice system. Many of them committed crimes against the nation and its citizens. The raft of lawyers fired out of the DC federal district this weekend for cause —namely, for conducting overtly malicious prosecutions under dubious predication — are an early sign. Ditto, the warning issued to Chuck Schumer concerning his 2020 incitement of violence against Supreme Court justices. Imagine, too, how many officials in the public health agencies need to answer for their roles in Covid-19 — the creation of it in their labs, the worthless vaccines, and the deadly treatment protocols they insisted on.Now, the fate of the blob itself is a thing somewhat apart from the fate of this evil vaudevillian Democratic Party fronting for it. A purge of the blob is pretty clearly underway. USAID was shot dead like a rabid dog over the weekend. The agency had gone completely rogue, serving (Mike Benz explains) as the pivot between every nefarious operation coming out of the CIA, the DOD, and the State Department’s many black box units. The billions of dollars laundered out of USAID went to support hundreds of NGOs, many of them dedicated to harming the life of this nation, such as the orgs that handed out money to illegal aliens and advice on evading detection in-country. And these many NGOs represented an employment racket for the “elite overproduction” of grads coming out of universities with useless degrees and Maoist political training. There was, of course, a giant revolving door between these NGOs and the activist ranks of the Democratic Party.The country need...
Transcribe →Six Ways From Sunday
Jan 31, 2025Tap to summarizeWas it the miasma of cognitive dissonance blackening the air-space over the DC swamp that caused the deadly collision of AA Flight 5342 and a Blackhawk Helicopter this week — an impenetrable fog arising from the fetid exhalations of so many hyperventilating swamp creatures brooding between the urges of fight-or-flight as Mr. Trump deploys his chosen pest-controllers across the Potomac Basin?Altogether, these many parasitical swamp creatures make up the greater DC blob, and the blob convulsing and fibrillating is what you witness in these committee hearings with Bobby, Tulsi, and Kash. For instance, fake “progressive” Bernie Sanders (D-VT) faced with the reveal that he leads his colleagues in pharma “contributions” (just under $2-million) . . . or fake Cherokee Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in a fugue state over the perceived threat of Mr. Kennedy to pharma profits . . . or presidential pardon recipient Adam Schiff (D-CA) lecturing Mr. Patel on ethical behavior. . . or Ms. Gabbard enduring the meltdown of Senate Intel Committee tool Michael Bennet (D-CO).Behind these histrionics by the big gators and peccaries of the collapsing Democratic Party is pure scintillating fear. They are afraid that all of their hoaxes and lies of recent years will be exposed in the months ahead. And they fear that such exposure might lead eventually to legal complications for them. All of that implies loss-of-power, the single element that demonically drives their careers.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 fact is they have already lost their grip on the levers of power and, for the moment, that is all that matters. They especially no longer control the Department of Justice, its subsidiary, the FBI, the many public health agencies under Health and Human Services, and the many-footed intel “community,” as it styles itself. These agencies are where the truth about our national affairs has been locked up. Now, the citizens will either see what’s there, or find out what has been deliberately destroyed — such as the internal agency email correspondence over RussiaGate, the Covid-19 operation (and the deadly vaxx campaign), the J-6 affair (and the pipe-bomb sideshow), the weird, documented irregularities of the 2020 election, the Ukraine War money-laundering shenanigans, the manifold janky DOJ prosecutions of Mr. Trump, and much more.Every day now since January 20, heads explode all over DC as the executive orders roll out and the insanity of whatever lurked behind “Joe Biden” gets systematically expunged from the order of things. And as this happens, the more plainly deranged the past four years looks. Did they really believe that men dressing-up as women would improve the US military? Or was it a traitorous effort to weaken and demoralize our armed forces? Was DEI a public ethics exercise or a massive jobs program for incompetents?In what way did “Joe Biden’s” Department of Homeland Security imagine that funneling known criminals, certified lunatics, and saboteurs across the border squared with their duty to protect and defend the country? And how did it happen that US taxpayers’ money got shelled out to fake “religious” NGOs in Mexico minting debit cards for border-jumpers, handing them wads of cash, cell phones, airplane tickets, fully-equipped backpacks, and apps for evading arrest? In effect these NGOs took over the exact job description of “coyote” formerly performed by the criminal cartels — leaving the cartels free for the more lucrative rackets of dealing fentanyl and trafficking women and children.The corruption in all this has been supernatural, and the fact that, until late 2024, seventy-million Democratic Party American voters thought this was all okay is extra-supernatural. What happened to their minds? The cliché of “Trump derangement” doesn’t really answer that. What it probably comes down to was the stunningly successful mind-fucking operation run by the blob (the CIA and the darker elements of the DOD in particular), in league with captured news media, to bend and distort the consensual perception of reality — all of which leads to the question: why?The two main answers to that seem to be 1) Some organized entity seeking to destroy the country for instance, the Chinese Communist Party, or the World Economic Forum, or 2) that the blob had evolved into such an overt criminal racketeering operation that it increasingly and desperately needed to keep covering its mighty ass. Thus, the Democratic Party became the blob’s enforcer and the news media became its propaganda arm. And the “thinking class” of America especially got ignominiously hosed by all that.There’s a pretty good chance that blob agents in the Senate will successfully block the confirmations of Bobby, Tulsi, and Kash. They are all superlative candidates for the particular jobs at HHS, ODNI, and the FBI. But know this: excellent as they are, there are a great many other worthy, dedicated, and stalwart warriors in this land who can take their places if necessary. The blob has already lost in the political battle-space. All they can manage at this point is some rearguard action.Coffee and a Mike Podcast with JHK, Dave Collum, and Mike Farris recorded Wednesday — The ERA of V-SHAPE RECOVERY IS OVERGallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 seasonFishermen at Factory Ruins, Clarks Mills, New YorkAnother rousing novella to amuse you in the drear wint...
Transcribe →Glug Glug. . . .
Jan 27, 2025Tap to summarizeThat’s the sound of a swamp being drained. And much fetid water is still backed up over the 68.3 square miles that comprise the District of Columbia. You might be just realizing that the “Joe Biden” regime was not a government at all, but rather, a colossal racketeering operation. And let’s be clear and precise: racketeering is making money dishonestly. Thus: the grubby Biden Family itself at the top of that putrid food-chain, and their smalltime harvesting of mere table-scraps. Where trillions got creamed off by the big gators, the Bidens risked all for a measly few million, like newts gorging on gnats in a drainage ditch.Are you so cynical— as the Marxians are in their so-called “critique” of capitalism — that you think all human transactions of making-and-doing are dishonest? That is yet another misreading of reality, which the recent years of nonstop official propaganda and gaslight have catastrophically aggravated to the degree that half of America can no longer think at all.Capitalism is not a political ideology despite the “ism” incorrectly attached to it, like the tail pinned on a donkey. Capitalism is simply the management of surplus wealth. The catch is, in a hyper-complex society, the management itself becomes complex to an extreme. And that can easily lead to mismanagement, which will deform and pervert the very mechanisms that superintend wealth, sometimes so badly that the wealth disappears altogether.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.comThese are the dynamics faced by the newborn Trump command. Both political parties, per se, have fallen into a dismal habit of racketeering in this sclerotic state-of-empire. But now Mr. Trump has seized control of the Republican apparatus, at least, and the Party’s entrenched ol’ crocs and pythons descry that under DJT the regular feeding frenzy is over. Hence: the hand-wringing over Pete Hegseth setting foot in the Pentagon, as he will sometime this dawning day. The dollars pounded down that rat-hole in this century could have funded start-ups of several empires, but instead the swag just landed in the index funds of countless board members parasitically lodged in a dark cosmos of G.I. procurement circle-jerks. A lot of that can and will be stopped. And the ones who just won’t quit are liable to be found out.Now, the Democratic Party faces more perplexing quandaries. It, too, is constructed as a gigantic grift machine. But if you subtract the employees of the multitudinous NGOs and non-profit orgs set up in recent years to receive government largess — which have spawned like smelts in the San Joaquin delta — you would eliminate much of the party’s rank-and-file. (The rest are apparently embedded in government itself and the teachers’ union.) A whole lot of activists would lose their platforms for activism in the process.These crypto-bureaucracies have become the places where the Democratic Party stashes the “elite over-production” of Woked-up Marxian semi-morons from America’s diploma mills — in which orgs they are lavishly paid to conduct the aforementioned propaganda and gaslighting operations that wrecked so many American minds. The funding spigot to many of those is getting shut down. It will result in an employment crunch for a large cohort of professional crybabies. They could possibly adapt to their new circumstances by ceasing to be crybabies, and finding other, more useful things to do. That would portend some very significant cultural shiftings, which might include the death of the Democratic Party as we’ve known it. Or, they could all just join Antifa (if they’re not already in it) and go make trouble in the streets.The first seven days of Mr. Trump have been sheer razzle-dazzle. He and the people around him have torn through the zeitgeist like front-end-loaders through a homeless encampment. He has yet to meet a crisis. Some of the obvious traps are avoidable. For instance: seeking further injury to Russia as a way of ending the stupid Ukraine war — started by us in 2014, thanks a lot Victoria Nuland & Company — since both the US and Russia are just about unconditionally desirous of stopping the damn thing as soon as possible. It’s had no benefit for anybody but the Raytheon war lobby and the Zelensky regime’s legion of grifters. Mr. Trump’s recent tough talk has been entirely for show, just a mass of rhetorical lube to un-stick the lingering “Joe Biden” stasis in that sad-sack corner of the world.If crisis awaits, it’s probably lurking in the financial realm, where the operations of debt have put nearly every country on Gawd’s Green Earth behind the eight-ball. There is just too much of it that everybody knows can’t possibly be paid back — or soon even serviced — and the grand managers of these matters are finally out of tricks for pretending things can go on. Nor, here in America, can Mr. Trump cut spending fast enough to rebalance accounts. And if he somehow could, government employment has become such a big piece of the total economy that we would land post-haste in a new great depression That predicament is yet-to-be faced, but hold your breath because it is hard upon us.Meanwhile, this is the week when the most hardcore of Mr. Trump’s cabinet warriors go ‘splainin’ before committees in the US Senate: Bobby Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Kash Patel. Prepare for some heat and light. And then, the deluge.Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 seasonFishermen at Factory Ruins, Clarks Mills, New YorkAnother rousing novella to amuse you in the drear winter twilight. It is the summer...
Transcribe →Gallery 16
Jan 26, 2025Tap to summarizeThese paintings of the landscape around Washington County, New York, were made in 2024. I hung out often around an island in the Hudson River between the river itself and the Champlain Canal, created originally in the 1820s to bypass the Falls of Northumberland a mile north of Schuylerville. The canal towpath has lately been connected to new walking trails which afforded many opportunities to get human figures in the scene. I often encountered fishermen there. I also haunted a particular stretch of the Battenkill River (tributary of the Hudson) in the hamlet of Shushan, New York, about ten miles east of the Hudson. It is popular with bathers and kayakers.Interested buyers can contact me at jhkunstler@mac.com for sizes and prices.Fisherman at Factory Ruins, Clark’s Mills, New YorkFisherman and Children, the old Canal, Springtime, Schuylerville, New YorkSpring on the Towpath, Schuylerville, New York<source type="image/webp" srcset="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_424,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progres...
Transcribe →The Great Sorting-Out Begins
Jan 24, 2025Tap to summarizeThis, as they say, is one of those weeks when decades happen. You realize that under the fiends fronted by “Joe Biden,” the US government became a demon-driven machine for wrecking lives, perverting the law, and demolishing all scaffolds of decent behavior. And now, it all has to be fixed, cleaned up, fumigated, rectified, rehabilitated.Scores of executive orders flew out of the Oval Office, rescinding four years of “Biden” regime lunacy in every direction: Censorship, dead. . . Gain of function research, killed. . . CBDCs banned. . . CBP-app for aiding illegal migrants, discontinued. . . border fortified. . . homicidal alien mutts deported. . . World Health Organization, no thanks. . . Paris Climate Accords, fuggeddabowdit. . . DEI, vacated through all of government. . . Green New Deal, scrapped. . . “pride” in mental illness, cancelled. . . Ukraine War, headed for the negotiating table. . . all in four days and so much more coming.The DEI flimflam is particularly illustrative of the hazards still lurking. The DC blob is desperate to hide its chaos agents by switching their job titles and shuffling them around to hidey-holes in obscure precincts of this-or-that bureaucracy. Being federal employees, of course, they all have searchable names and payroll accounts, so you may be sure they’ll be discovered wherever they’re hiding-out and placed, as ordered, on “administrative leave.” Since DEI was essentially a program to promote incompetence, these employees represent a monumental cargo of dead-weight. So, the next task will be finding a way under the civil service codes to cashier them for good. For instance, reclassifying their job status to render them fire-able.Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!his 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.comThis is sure to be a major friction-point for the so-called “resistance,” the huge cadre of “activist” Wokesters embedded in the agencies. Cue the army of Democratic Party lawyers who will be filing suits to prevent the chief executive from coherently managing the departments of the executive branch. But there’s a catch: this time, the White House will not be funneling scads of money directly to the NGOs that pay for these blob-adjacent lawyers, nor will they be able to redirect money out of the DOJ, FBI, and CIA for that purpose. The president may also find a way to interrupt the flow of money from foundations financed by malign freelancers such as George Soros and Linked-in founder and billionaire Reid Hoffman (who financed the E. Jean Carroll “rape” trial hoax and many more Democratic Party pranks ).Another friction point: release of the pardoned J-6 prisoners is being loudly opposed by DC District federal judges such as Tanya Chutkan and Amy Berman Jackson. They don’t enjoy any privilege or prerogative for voicing prejudicial opinions about vacated cases, nor for failing to comply with paperwork needed to discharge them. They can be impeached for that in the House of Representatives. Or, if they actively obstruct releases, the new-and-improved Department of Justice might consider 18 U.S.C. § 242 - Deprivation of rights under color of law.Meanwhile, goons at the DC jail detained pardoned prisoners unlawfully this week after years of the grossest mistreatment, including solitary confinement in basement “holes” without beds, blankets, or water, and direct physical assault that could be described as “torture.” All of this was countenanced by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, despite plentiful public reports of abuse over the past four years. That is, she knew all about it. This is an argument for finally rescinding Washington DC’s “home rule” status and placing the city and all its departments back under federal management.Last night, Mr. Trump signed an order to declassify government files relating to the murders of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. Of course, the intel agencies holding these files have had a half-century to expunge anything in the files that might reflect poorly on the intel agencies — such as, the long-trafficked rumor that the CIA was behind the killing of all three. Why would you expect to get anything like that? How could the remaining material be anything but a cover-your-ass file? Well, now we shall see. At some point in his first term, Mr. Trump allegedly saw what was in the files and demurred from his promise then to release them. Was it too shocking? Or was it the well-groomed nothingburger described above?That’s not to say that there’s any shortage of weird, tantalizing documentation around all those cases, inexplicable doings. . . sketchy characters like Oswald, Jack Ruby, Howa...
Transcribe →