Murdockinations

"The Man I Warned You About": What William F. Buckley Would Make of Trump and His MaGA Republican Party

2026-06-08T06:00:00.000-07:00

I was a fan of William F. Buckley, Jr. decades ago. And of Gore Vidal. The opposites of the Right and Left political thinking in their day, respectively. I still watch Buckley's Firing Line, now in the competent hands of Margaret Hoover. I came across the documentary Best of Enemies - Buckley vs Vidal (2015) on Netflix, that I highly recommend, and it got me thinking. It was about their 10-night ABC network airing during the Republican Convention in 1968 in Miami, Florida which I would love to get a chance to view...all 10 episodes. Even though each segment was only 15 minutes druing each night's 90-minute news show.

What would Buckley make of Pres. #47 Donald J Trump today? Not much I thought. So who is Buckley?

William F. Buckley Jr. was the most influential intellectual architect of modern American conservatism. He founded National Review in 1955 as the movement's flagship journal, hosted Firing Line for 33 years as the longest-running public affairs show in television history, and was widely regarded as the most skilled conservative debater of his generation. Erudite, witty, and relentlessly disciplined, he believed conservatism had to be intellectually serious to be politically durable. He was not a populist. He was the man who defined what the American right was supposed to be.

One of his most consequential acts was purging the John Birch Society from the conservative movement in the early 1960s, on the grounds that conspiratorial, anti-intellectual populism would destroy conservatism's credibility and marginalize it from mainstream American life. That decision shaped the Republican Party's intellectual identity for decades.

What He Actually Said About Trump

Around 2000, when Trump briefly pursued the Reform Party nomination, William F. Buckley wrote critically about him, in National Review, characterizing him as a demagogue whose essential appeal was flattering crowds while offering no substantive ideology beyond self-promotion. He identified Trump's narcissism as the core of his political identity. This was not a passing dismissal. Buckley chose his words with precision, and he used them deliberately.

It was in part reprinted in 2016, again in the National Review.

On MaGA and Populism

The Birch Society purge is the key lens here. MaGA, with its election denialism, conspiracy adjacency, contempt for institutional expertise, and grievance-driven mass politics, would look to Buckley like the Birchers' revenge. He spent decades trying to prevent exactly this kind of movement from capturing the Republican Party. Watching it succeed would have been, for him, a historic failure of conservative nerve.

On Institutions

Buckley was a deeply institutional man. Yale, the CIA, the Church, the Senate, the press. He believed civilization was built on inherited structures that required active defense against both left-wing leveling and right-wing wrecking. Trump's sustained assault on the Justice Department, the electoral system, NATO, and the independent press would not read to Buckley as disruption or strength. It would read as vandalism.

On Trade and Foreign Policy

Buckley was a free trader and a Cold War internationalist who saw the liberal international order as a necessary defense against totalitarianism. Tariff nationalism, America First isolationism, and hostility to alliances would be nearly incomprehensible to him as conservative positions. He would see them as strategic recklessness dressed up as patriotism.

On Style

This matters more than people credit. Buckley believed conservatism should project civilizational confidence, wit, and seriousness. He cared about what the movement looked like to educated people. Trump's rally aesthetic, the vulgarity, the grievance saturation, the contempt for precision and argument, would strike Buckley as not just politically wrong but as an embarrassment to everything he built.

Where It Gets Complicated

Buckley had his own contradictions. His civil rights record was late and troubled. He had an aristocratic streak that could shade into romanticizing hierarchy. And his loathing of the left was bone-deep, which might have made a clean break from the Republican Party psychologically difficult even as he watched it transform into something he didn't recognize.

His most likely posture would have been to call for a conservative reformation from within, probably to diminishing audiences, probably futilely.

The Bottom Line

Buckley would almost certainly argue that MaGA is not conservatism at all. It is a personality cult that has occupied conservatism's institutional infrastructure while gutting its intellectual content. He would place himself, however uncomfortably, alongside people like George Will and David Frum who chose principle over party. And he would reserve his sharpest contempt not for Trump, whom he had already diagnosed clearly in 2000, but for the conservative intellectuals and Republican officials who knew better and said nothing.

The movement he built was taken over by the kind of man he spent his career warning about.

He saw it coming a quarter century ago.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of Claude AI

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

Birthday, Vancouver, BC - Summer 1981...and Cheech and Chong

2026-06-06T06:00:00.000-07:00

OK so, with my birthday coming up (this was 1981), my girlfriend, let's call her, "M" and I, decided to go to Vancouver.

I was driving, so my car, but which one? The '75 Camaro RS? The one after that? I'm thinking it must have been the Camaro? Anyway...irrelevant, really.

Shanghai Junk Cabaret in Vancouver’s Chinatown History. Nude psychedelic dancer ‘Sandi’ at the Shanghai Junk cabaret in Chinatown, 442 Main Street, on Feb. 18, 1967. Club owner Stan Chong is at left, looking up, and Tommy Chong smiles on the right. Photo : Ray Allan.

so before graduating college in 1984, had to be before Bellingham as we'd have been broke, so that means likely 1980 or so she went to Wazzu (WSU, Washington State University) for year 1980-81, we then moved in together for 1981-82, 82-84 in Bellingham. We drove up to Vancouver as I'd been going there all my life. Well, Victoria anyway, but then from high school on ...fully Vancouver.

We got to Vancouver and must have had a reservation as we must have had a destination. We got our room key and headed to our room. Part of the idea was to luxuriate, take it easy, play in our room, order room service. For whatever reason, I pulled back the cover on the bed a bit, sat down, picked up the phone to order food and....dead phone.

We wanted food. so we had to go downstairs to the front desk. I told the clerk the situation and asked for another room as we had planned on using room service, as part of the reason for the weekend, but the phone was dead. It seemed a simple request. What hotel would refuse you a working phone to spend more money?

She started to say something, then stopped, thought and asked, "Did you pull the covers down on the bed?"

What an odd question. I gave her a weird look and said, "Yeah, I pulled the covers back a little but I can put them back." She said, "Well then, I can't give you another room. I'm sorry." Then the killer phrase all middle management loves to use as a weapon: "It's policy." She smiled. It was a petty, satiating smile. The kind used by those who know they have power over you and there was nothing you could do about it.

I was stunned. I could feel the heat rising. I was not happy and becoming less so with every moment. So the customer is never right, here?

Thinking of my mother, as annoying as she could be with her "squeaky wheel always gets the grease" and, "I learned that from my dad," nonsense. Yeah sure, but she often took that too far and too often. She often sent back food at a restaurant to the humiliation of my older sister and I who once said, when we were talking about this, that she had dined around the world with actual rich people, and while mom seemed to think that's how rich people act, the ones she knew would be humiliated to make such a fuss.

So I said, "I would like to talk to your manager."

That surprised the woman. But then smiled: "I am the manager." She enjoyed the look on my face as the blood drained. I could see this was hopeless. My birthday was not starting off well. I'd been through a lot over the past year, separated from the Service, out of the USAF, divorced, trouble getting a decent job (had a few miserable ones), and I needed this celebration of...anything.

I just needed a break. And this wasn't going to be it.

So, surrendering, I asked where we could get a drink. Adding salt into the wound, she said, "Well, it's Sunday, so you can't." I was stunned, I mean, what? It's my birthday and I can't even get a drink?

She said, "Well you can, but you'd have to order food first. I said fine we're hungry anyway and asked where the nearest restaurant was.

Finally she was useful and told us there was one a couple of blocks down the street. It was nice out being August 30th, so we headed out. I have no doubt I was complaining as we walked down the street, trying to process it all and being assuaged by the thought of dinner and drinks.

After about a half a block we noticed two attractive, nicely dressed... apparently sex workers on our right, waiting for something. Someone like me apparently.

One of them saw us, focusing directly on me, and walked over. She was quite attractive, So much so, I don't even remember the other one's looks. She was pleasant, happy as she propositioned me. My girlfriend wrapped her arms around my right arm, hugging it.

We didn't stop and kept on walking, but now the woman was walking with us. I said, "Thanks, but as you can see, I have a girlfriend." She took that as an invite, or a challenge and slipped her hands around my left arm, smiling, and being very friendly.

So I'm now walking down the street with two good looking women, one on each arm. My birthday was getting better, but also, worse. While this was fun, it was either fear invoking, or relationship concerning.

I never considered paying for the woman, but it was a moment I realized I could have fun with. I had an urge to tease my girlfriend a bit. So, when the woman said, "I don't mind a party." Meaning she'd be happy to join my girlfriend with me (what kind of customers was she used to?)...I smiled and looked at my girlfriend and said, "Well, it IS my birthday."

The woman picked up on that immediately. M said, "Yeah, in your dreams," and we just kept walking. I was polite and thanked the woman but turned her down. she realized it was a losing battle by this point, but she had given it a valiant try. So she detached and said, "Well, if you change your minds, I'll be around." She wasn't, when we made our return trip back to the hotel after dinner, I couldn't help but notice she wasn't around.

We continued on and had our dinner and some things to drink (I think two were allowed on a Sunday, "what a strange law" we thought), then headed back to our hotel room, and our stupid broken telephone (is that even legal?). We had our own private party and satiated our attraction for each other, eventually falling asleep in one another's arms. This was the best part of that weekend. Although possibly not the most interesting part.

The next day we hung out around town, walking through Gastown, headed over to Stanley Park where I showed her and told her the story about the time I was there when I was18 with a friend. I'm in my mid 20s at this point, and my girlfriend was about 19. We'd met at Tacoma Community College as lab partners in Physics/Chemistry, where we both had taken a single summer quarter.

OK. So this now heads into another story entirely and the point of telling all this. We'll skip that story about when I was 18 for another time. It involves Gastown, the Gastown Pub, the Gastown Inn, and a mass amount of High School students swarming over a hill from the parking lot, down to the beach at 3rd Beach, Stanley Park.

At the end of day we decided a bit late, to head out of town and home to Tacoma. Not realizing it was rush hour until we were in the middle of it trying to get across the Lions Gate Bridge (Hwy 99).

When I came across Chinatown I said I had to drive through there. That was a bust as there wasn't much to see and I quickly got lost. I finally found my way out of it and just wanted to get out of town and on the freeway home.

We drove around avoiding traffic until we realized, there was one bridge out of town and it was jammed. Realizing we we're stuck for a while, I said maybe we should just stop someplace, anyplace, to get out of the traffic and maybe get something to eat. We could head out once traffic died down.

So we stopped at the first place that looked promising. There wasn't much which confused us. But we found what looked like a bar...maybe. I parked and we weren't even sure it was open. But we opened the front door and stepped inside. No one was around. On the left it seemed like a restaurant or something, but was dark. There were stairs straight ahead that seemed to just go on, but we heard music filtering down from there.

So, we started climbing.

We get to the top and look around, my gf frowned at the two old men, the only patrons. But the attractive, completely naked, tiny Asian woman dancing on the small stage, seemed somewhat reassuring to her. Or not.

We went straight on in, found a table on the left, near the back along the wall, where the walkway continued further back, to restrooms and the kitchen, which I think was on right, with rest rooms on the left.

We ordered a sandwich and a beer each. We sat there waiting, watching the dancer. Then she said, "She's good." The dancer. I agreed. Then she said, "I have to go to the rest room." She headed into the back

I sat there watching the dancer, observing the old businessmen being served. The dancer finished as another was passing by her onto the stage. They shared a few words. The new dancer was not quite as cute, but she got on stage, and dancing starts again. The other woman walked through the room, watched closely by the men at tables and she disappeared into the back.

Eventually the food arrived. I'm watching the new dancer, sipping a beer. There wasn't much else to do. I realized that it's been more that 15 minutes since my girlfriend left. She never took that long. I started wondering if I should be worried. Once that occurred to me I started a run down of reasons I should or shouldn't worry. The reasons to worry outpaced the reasons not to.

I knew about organized crime in Vancouver. We were after all, in another country, even if it was typically (as I knew it) Canada. I got up and walked to the back. I saw the rest rooms, but I wasn't going to go into the women's rest room.

Or should I? Am I being a bad boyfriend in not going in? Am I a perv if I do? What the hell, why was I in the situation? What an odd weekend. I had to admit to myself, I always had fun, or odd, or entertaining times in Vancouver. But this was a first.

At what point should I tear the place apart? Or start yelling? I noticed there was a back door. Could she have gone out back? Why? Had she been kidnapped and taken out that door? At this point, I'm trying not to freak out. Everything seemed normal, nothing "felt weird." I'm pretty good at feeling something like that. I didn't here. It all felt normal, but was I being delusional? I mean, I didn't know that place, what's normal there?

I went back and sat down, confused. I watched everything like a hawk. Trying to decide. Should I go into the women's rest room? I decided I needed to. But when? This was all happening in a short span of time. My mind was racing a bit. Should I have gone in already? I was pretty sure, yes. But if I went in there and she's there, she's going to give me a hard time like, forever. Maybe. Or would it cause a ruckus with the staff, some guy going into the women's restroom. Was I overthinking things? Sigh... Why was this happening?

While I'm sitting there trying to make myself go into the women's rest room, M walks up and sits down like nothing was out of the ordinary.

"Oh good, food's here. I'm hungry." I look at her like she's nuts. She takes a sip of beer and notices the odd look on my face. "WHAT?"

"What? Do you know how long you've been gone? I've been freaking out wondering what happened to you. I don't know this place, or if someone kidnapped you. Or what. What took so long? Is everything OK?" An odd grin crossed her face, one of...embarrassment? What happened?

"I'm so sorry, really, I just lost track of time." I'm observing her now. Something's off. She has a familiar look on her face. Like she's...

"Are you stoned?"

She smiled. "Uh, yeah." She started to explain. "I went to the restroom. When I was done I came out of the stall and that dancer was in there by the sinks. Still completely naked. I washed my hands and we started talking. She was nice. Funny. Then this guy just, walks in."

Here. I'm not pleased.

"She knew him. He had a joint and asked if we wanted to smoke it. I mean, I said...yes."

Now I'm trying not to be pissed, mostly because I'm freaking out about IF I should go into the women's rest room and apparently, it's normal for a guy to do that? Not to mention, I missed out on getting stoned, hanging with a cute (naked) dancer. With my girlfriend, in a situation where it was all apparently normal and OK?

"Good grief. I can't believe I was out here trying to not lose it, worried something horrible may have happened to you...all while you're just getting stoned? Not to mention, I mean, I didn't get to get stoned either."

"Well, I'm sorry, but it just happened and it would have been weird to say, 'can I go get my boyfriend so he can get stoned too'?" Really, I did get her point. It was all just an odd situation, and I got caught up in it on the wrong end of things. It sucked for me, but I didn't want to deny her doing what I would have done too.

As we'd been talking, I could see she was realizing the situation as our conversation was evolving, and she hadn't considered the other side of how this might all have appeared to me, waiting for her in a strange place. As it turned out, the place didn't seem that strange at all but rather a nice venue. At least in that situation.

She had found a cute, naked woman in the bathroom, a guy walks in, offers them a joint to get high on, and they're just talking ... having fun. Well, more power to her. But my end in the situation, sucked.

"Look, it's not like you did anything wrong, but, damn, I was worried and trying to decide if I needed to start yelling your name and go into the women's restroom which, come on, could easily go wrong. I mean, we don't know this place, they don't know me, what if they said they never saw any woman? You're just, gone? Kind of a horror show." Yes, I have a good imagination. She knows that.

I can see this is all dawning on her and she's flustered. And feeling bad. What can I say, why blow her calm and her high. So, I brushed it off. I was glad she had some fun, at one of us had. This was a very odd birthday overall. We drank the beers down, paid, took the sandwiches with us and headed out. Rush hour was over. The rest of the ride home south was uneventful.

But it was not a birthday I ever could forget. Overall, it wasn't horrible. Just...it wasn't even in the ballpark of a weekend that either of us had anticipated.

Still, it was a story I told for years. And that made it all worth, something. Weird hotel. Propositioned by a very good-looking sex worker on my 24th birthday. Lost in Chinatown, accidental visit to a nude dance club, M getting stoned in the bathroom with a naked dancer and some guy, while I sat outside quietly losing my mind over sandwiches.

It was enough of a story. It didn’t need anything else. Certainly no embellishments.

Then recently I went down a rabbit hole about Tommy Chong’s and Cheech Marin's early years when they met, in Vancouver, and I found out something that reframed this entire story.

Before he was half of Cheech and Chong, before Up in Smoke, before any of it, Tommy Chong was running clubs in Vancouver. One of them was the Shanghai Junk -- a topless club in Chinatown, at Pender and Main, operated with his brother Stan.

When Tommy took over, he didn’t have the heart to fire the dancers. So instead, he built an improv comedy troupe around them, called City Works, and created what he described as the first topless improvisational theatre in Canada. This was about 1969.

Where were we? Upstairs. Small tables. Chinatown. A stage with a naked dancer.

Here’s a 2014 article about it: Chinatown: Topless joint sparked stoner comedy genre.

What is it with my connection to topless joints? (See, The Teenage Bodyguard screenplay). I’ve only been to two, neither of which were my idea, one in Tacoma (topless only) to find a friend whose birthday it was with a group of our friends, and that time in Portland (fully nude venues) with coworkers.

OK three, including the one in this story. But hey, I was with my girlfriend and when we walked in, we had NO idea it was anything but a bar.

A young guy named Cheech Marin, who had come to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft, walked into that room and joined City Works. The two of them came out one night to warm up the crowd, got laughs, never gave the stage back, and eventually drove to Los Angeles to become one of the most successful comedy acts of their generation.

If you don’t know Cheech and Chong, here’s the short version. Richard “Cheech” Marin and Tommy Chong became one of the most successful comedy acts in North American history through the 1970s and into the ‘80s -- albums, tours, and a string of films starting with the 1978 cult classic Up in Smoke that defined a generation’s sense of humor and became shorthand for a whole cultural moment.

They were enormous.

If you were alive and paying any attention in that era you knew who they were. What most people didn’t know was where they started -- which was a topless improv club in Vancouver’s Chinatown, in a room above a street corner, at a small stage, with a naked dancer and a handful of tables.

The geography of where we parked that night -- right side of the street, facing toward bridge out of town, on the edge of Chinatown -- all lines up with Pender and Main.

I stopped there to kill time on my birthday weekend on the way out of town. I had a beer and a sandwich and worried about my girlfriend and watched a naked woman dance on a small stage. there was just over ten years between these things when Cheech and Chong were there.

I had no idea until now, decades later, after watching their latest film, Cheech and Chong's Last Movie, a compendium of their history, that we may have been sitting in the room where Cheech and Chong history happened.

I was a big fan of theirs from day one. If you ever were, great movie to watch about them.

I stopped there to kill time on my birthday weekend on the way out of town. I had a beer and a sandwich and worried about my girlfriend and watched a naked woman dance on a small stage.

Look, does it really matter if it was that venue or not? Because whether we were there, or a mere block or so from it, either way? This was a pretty pleasant exercise in memory and nostalgia.

I had no idea back in that bar that we might have been sitting in the room where Cheech and Chong history happened. Or down the block from it. But regardless?

The Canadian beers were good. The sandwiches were fine. The naked dancers were, well?

Let's just say...what a weekend.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Trump's Project 2025 - As Seen If From Another Country

2026-06-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

Intelligence Assessment — Internal Use Only

Origin: Domestic Policy Intelligence Unit Classification: For Discussion Purposes Subject: Heritage Foundation — "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise" (2023)

Assessment frame: If an allied democratic government produced an analogous 900-page transition document, how would U.S. intelligence evaluate it?

Executive summary

The document constitutes a comprehensive pre-transition governance blueprint authored by a well-resourced private foundation with longstanding ties to the relevant political movement. Comparable products from allied democracies are not unusual; the scope, specificity, and institutional placement strategies contained here are, however, exceptional and warrant close analysis.

Key findings

High concern Subordination of the civil service. The document calls for replacing career professionals across agencies with political loyalists, explicitly framing the independent bureaucracy as an obstacle. No allied democracy has proposed a comparable wholesale political conversion of its professional civil service. Assessed risk: significant erosion of institutional memory, independent oversight, and policy continuity.

High concern Concentration of executive authority. Structural proposals centralize power within the Executive Office of the President at the expense of independent agencies, inspectors general, and congressional oversight mechanisms. This pattern, if enacted by an ally, would prompt reassessment of that government's democratic governance indicators.

Moderate concern DOJ and law enforcement posture. The document proposes subordinating federal law enforcement to direct White House control, reducing the institutional separation that protects prosecutorial independence. Comparable arrangements in allied nations are treated as governance vulnerabilities in our own country assessments.

Moderate concern Intelligence and national security realignment. Proposals affecting the intelligence community's chain of command and the NSC structure suggest a preference for politically accountable leadership over professional judgment. If observed in an ally, this would be flagged as a potential single-point-of-failure in crisis decision-making.

Moderate concern Media and information environment. Sections on federal communications agencies and public broadcasting suggest an interest in reshaping the domestic information environment. Not unprecedented in democracies under stress, but correlates with democratic backsliding patterns in our regional analysis models.

Within norms Policy content. The ideological policy positions — on regulation, taxation, social programs, foreign policy posture — fall within the range of legitimate conservative governance observed in allied democratic states. Disagreement with these positions does not constitute a governance risk in itself.

Overall assessmentWere this document produced by an allied democratic government, the intelligence community would flag it as a significant governance-stress indicator — not primarily due to its policy content, but due to its institutional architecture proposals. The combination of civil service conversion, executive consolidation, and reduction of independent oversight bodies maps closely onto patterns observed in the early-stage democratic erosion of Hungary (2010–12), Turkey (2013–15), and Israel (2023). The document is notable for its candor — it names the mechanisms explicitly rather than implementing them incrementally, which is atypical of comparable transition-planning documents from stable democracies. The degree to which these proposals are enacted versus used as negotiating positions will be the operative variable for ongoing assessment.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of Claude AI

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The Addiction of Ignorance, and the Revolution We Should Have Seen Coming

2026-05-29T06:00:00.000-07:00

I have definitely written about this before. Many times.

America has a drug problem nobody wants to talk about honestly. Not fentanyl. Not alcohol. Ignorance. Specifically, the cultivated, deliberate, chosen variety. Selective ignorance. And like any addiction, the longer it goes untreated, the more it takes from you, and the more dangerous the addict becomes to everyone around them.

What makes it an addiction rather than a simple deficit is the active, continuous work required to maintain it. Psychologists call it motivated reasoning: the cognitive process by which people do not reason toward truth but toward conclusions they have already decided they want. This is not passive.

People running motivated reasoning are working hard, filtering incoming information, discarding what contradicts the preferred conclusion, amplifying what confirms it. The ignorance in America's current crisis is not a shortage of available information.

We live in the most information-saturated society in human history. This is a shortage of willingness to receive information that costs something. That is a crucial distinction, and it changes everything about how we diagnose what is happening to us.

We did not stumble into this. We chose it, repeatedly, at every turn where knowing something inconvenient would have cost us comfort, privilege, or the warm bath of tribal belonging. We chose it in churches, in school board meetings, in voting booths, and on social media feeds algorithmically tuned to feed us exactly what we already believed. The addiction metastasized in plain sight.

And it is worth understanding why the social cost of knowing is so high. Social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner established decades ago that human identity is inseparable from group membership. We do not just belong to groups. We are our groups.

When the group's shared worldview requires the rejection of expertise, accepting expertise becomes an act of betrayal. You do not just change your mind. You lose your people. In communities where the group is the whole of a person's identity and social world, that cost is existential. Ignorance becomes the price of admission, and people pay it willingly, even gratefully, because what they are buying is belonging.

There is a phenomenological dimension here that goes deeper still. Willful unknowing is not a passive state. It is an active, lived experience requiring continuous maintenance. On some level, the person who chooses not to know is aware of the choice. Reality keeps pressing in, and the relief of not engaging it has to be re-administered, reinforced, re-confirmed by the group. That is the addiction structure exactly. The substance is not a chemical. It is the relief of a world simplified to the point where you and your tribe are right, and everyone with credentials and data and uncomfortable questions is the enemy.

I was in high school in the early 1970s when my teacher (I've previously written about my high school Civics and World Problems teacher, the amazing Mrs. Wotton) walked us through what Mao Zedong had done to China with his Cultural Revolution. We sat there, American teenagers, shaking our heads at how stupid those people must be.

How could an entire society follow a megalomaniac into the deliberate destruction of its own intellectual class? How do you purge universities, persecute doctors, imprison professors, and silence scientists, and have a population that either cheers or says nothing?

We were very smug about that. Very confident it could never happen here.

What we did not understand then, and what the psychology makes clear now, is that Mao's Red Guards were not simply destroying expertise. They were building community through that destruction. The shared rejection of the intellectual class was a bonding ritual.

The public humiliations, the struggle sessions, the denunciations: all of it created solidarity among participants. You proved your belonging by performing your contempt for knowledge. The crowd that cheers when a professor is fired, when a doctor is silenced, when a library is purged, is not just expressing hatred. It is renewing its membership in the tribe.

Here we are.

Donald Trump did not invent American ignorance. He weaponized it. He handed it a flag, a cross, and a grievance, and told it that everything it didn't understand was the enemy. White Christian nationalism became the operating ideology of a federal government. Not a fringe. Not a protest movement. The government.

The psychological engine underneath that movement has a clinical name: Terror Management Theory, developed from Ernest Becker's foundational work and extended by Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon. When people feel their mortality, their significance, or their cosmological worldview under threat, they do not open up. They contract. They cling harder to the group identity that gives them meaning and to the enemies that justify their fear.

White Christian nationalism offers exactly the right package for that psychological state: a cosmology, a tribe, a hierarchy, a villain, and a promise of eternal significance to people who feel they have been made small. Trump did not build that. He found tens of millions of people already running that psychological program and gave them permission to act on it.

Agencies gutted. Scientists fired or sidelined. Educators targeted. Health agencies hollowed out in the middle of a century that has already demonstrated what happens when you let preventable diseases find an opening.

And it is worth knowing that much of this ignorance is not organic. It is manufactured.

Historian Robert Proctor developed the field of agnotology, the formal study of culturally induced ignorance and doubt, after studying how the tobacco industry spent decades deliberately producing uncertainty about the link between smoking and cancer.

They did not need people to believe cigarettes were safe. They only needed people to believe the science was unsettled. The same machinery runs today on climate research, vaccine safety, election integrity, and pandemic response. Engineered doubt is not a side effect of the information age. It is a product, developed, funded, and distributed with precision.

We are watching infectious disease rates climb back toward numbers we were told we'd never see again, because a meaningful portion of the population has decided that the people who study disease are the enemy, and the people who spread misinformation about it are the heroes.

We are watching professors lose positions. Researchers lose funding. Federal employees purged for the content of their emails and their perceived politics. Libraries challenged. Curricula sanitized.

And we haven't even gotten to the imprisonments and murders...yet.

I say yet with full awareness of what I'm saying. Because if you had described the current state of American governance to me in 1973 in that high school classroom, I would have told you it sounded exactly like what we were being warned about.

Except we were being warned about them.

The Soviets.

The Chinese. Cautionary tales on the other side of the world.

The cautionary tale was always us, waiting to happen.

Ignorance is comfortable. Too comfortable. Selective ignorance is ecstatic.

You get to keep your prejudices, discard inconvenient facts, belong to a community of the like-minded, and feel righteous about all of it.

The MaGA movement did not recruit stupid people. It recruited comfortable ones.

It recruited people who found the drug of chosen ignorance, of selective ignorance, more appealing than the cost of knowing things that challenged their worldview.

Fascism does not need jackboots on day one.

It needs an addicted population that has practiced, for decades, the discipline of not knowing what it does not want to know. That population is ready-made for whoever arrives with the right story.

It would seem we learned nothing from what we studied. Or we have simply...purposefully...forgotten it.

Worse, we were too arrogant to think we needed to remember it.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Purpleism opposes all human irritants. Trump has consumed that space so completely everything now runs through him.
That distortion of daily life is itself a Purpleism issue.
Exhausting.
Malignant Narcissism does that

Compiled with aid of Claude AI

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The Militias We Stopped Talking About

2026-05-25T06:00:00.000-07:00

Wishing you and yours a very pleasant Memorial Day!

I hope we're approaching a time when we can celebrate it without the disdain, frustration, embarrassment, and outright abuse our own government has been inflicting on its citizens. We've earned more than this. We've also let our greatness lull us into a false sense of safety, and some are more than happy to fill that void.

It will get better. We will come out of this stronger. And wiser.

A few years ago, illegal paramilitary militias were widely described by federal law enforcement as one of the most serious domestic security threats in the United States. The FBI repeatedly warned about anti-government extremist groups, armed militias, and politically motivated violence. News stories were common. Congressional hearings were held. Arrests made headlines.

Then something curious happened.

We stopped hearing about them.

That silence does not mean the militias disappeared. It means the story changed.

Today I saw a news piece: "War widens as Israeli and US planes pound Iran and Tehran and its proxies hit back"

Iran is attacked by a foreign enemy. Militias respond in defense of their homeland. That is how militias are supposed to function historically.

In the United States, too many private militias have turned inward, seeing their own government as the enemy. Instead of national defense, they reflect a toxic subculture of anti-government extremism.

A militia that prepares to fight its own country is not a defense force. It is something else entirely.

The Quiet Threat

By 2024 and 2025, federal assessments still categorized militia-style extremists under the broader heading of domestic violent extremism, a category that includes anti-government groups and individuals who believe violence against the state is justified.

Security experts continued to warn that domestic extremism posed a greater day-to-day risk than foreign terrorism.

But public attention faded.

Large groups stopped marching as openly. Fewer armed demonstrations made national headlines. The big militia names that dominated the news after January 6 became less visible.

It looked like the problem had gone away.

It hadn't.

From Organizations to Individuals

One major change is structural.

Earlier militia movements often organized in visible groups with leadership hierarchies, training events, and public messaging. Today, the movement is more fragmented.

Instead of large organizations, analysts increasingly describe:

Small independent cells
Loosely affiliated networks
Individuals radicalized online
Informal local groups

This makes the threat harder to track and easier to overlook.

When there is no central organization, there is nothing obvious for the public to notice.

But decentralized movements can be more unpredictable than organized ones.

Less Attention Does Not Mean Less Risk

Another reason militias faded from the headlines is that government priorities appear to have shifted.

Some federal programs that monitored domestic extremism have been reduced or reorganized. Staffing and resources directed at domestic terrorism investigations have reportedly declined.

This does not necessarily mean the threat is gone.

It means fewer public briefings, fewer press releases, and fewer visible investigations.

In other words, less noise does not equal less danger.

Anti-Government Extremism Remains

The core ideology that drives militia movements has not disappeared.

Militia movements historically form around a belief that the federal government is illegitimate or tyrannical. That worldview still exists and in some cases has spread more widely than before.

Ironically, the less visible militias become, the more their ideas may blend into broader political culture.

Formal organizations may shrink while the mindset survives.

History suggests this pattern is common. Extremist movements often become less visible before they reappear in new forms.

Private militias made sense in the 18th century, when the United States had no real standing army.

They became obsolete once America developed a professional military and especially after the National Guard was created as the official organized militia.

Today the United States already has what the Constitution envisioned: a trained militia under civilian control.

Private militias are not a necessity. They are a leftover idea from a country that no longer exists.

To make it painfully clear to these groups and to Americans at large:

Once the National Guard became the constitutional militia, private militias became unconstitutional. Illegal.

The Constitution authorizes militias under government authority, not private armies acting on their own. This is reflected in the Second Amendment itself:

"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

For most of American history, the Second Amendment was understood as supporting a well regulated militia under public authority, not independent armed groups. Courts, historians, and legal scholars generally treated it as a civic responsibility tied to national defense.

That interpretation began to change in the late twentieth century. Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s, political movements and gun-rights organizations promoted a new interpretation that emphasized an individual right to bear arms independent of militia service. This shift was partly a reaction to social unrest, distrust of government after Vietnam and Watergate, and fears of federal overreach.

Advocacy groups funded research, legal arguments, and public campaigns to promote this view. Over time, the new interpretation moved from political activism into legal theory and eventually into court decisions.

The result was a major historical shift: the Second Amendment increasingly came to be understood as an individual right rather than primarily a framework for a regulated militia.

But the Constitution still provides for militias under government authority. It does not authorize private armies acting on their own initiative.

Then the NRA under Wayne LaPierre lost its damned mind. What happened to him and the NRA?

When people say “the NRA under Wayne LaPierre lost its damned mind,” they’re usually talking about two different things that happened at the same time:

A political and ideological shift
A leadership and corruption collapse

Both are real — and together they explain what happened.

A New York jury found LaPierre liable for financial mismanagement and misuse of millions of dollars, ordering him to repay large sums. For wealth and power, he weaponized the NRA using and abusing the 2nd Amendment.

He resigned in 2024 shortly before the trial began.

A court later banned him from NRA leadership for ten years.

This is going on in our government today with toxic conservatism running amuck.

It is the same pattern that can be seen again today under POTUS 47, Donald Trump...a convicted felon, long associated with criminal investigations, and an increasingly autocratic political figure. He has also been found liable in court for sexual abuse, and further revelations may yet emerge regarding his associations and the Epstein investigations.

We are seeing the presidency used in ways that test constitutional limits, while a Republican-controlled Congress largely falls in line with his agenda rather than acting as an independent check on executive power.

The result is a level of corruption and concentration of power unprecedented in modern American history.

The Real Question

The real question is not whether militias exist.

They do.

The real question is whether we are paying attention.

Only a few years ago, illegal paramilitary groups were described as one of the leading domestic threats facing the United States.

Today, they receive far less attention.

But quiet movements do not necessarily mean peaceful ones.

Sometimes it just means they are preparing.

Something Worth Watching

Illegal militias occupy a strange space in American law and culture. Many states prohibit private paramilitary activity, yet armed groups continue to organize in gray areas of legality.

They do not disappear simply because the news cycle moves on.

If anything, history suggests that movements ignored too long tend to return in unexpected ways.

The militias we stopped talking about may still be there.

And that may be exactly the point.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of Claude AI

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

New Worlds, Unknown Histories -- What Is Anchor Field's Expanding Vision?

2026-05-24T09:39:28.135-07:00

I want to share something that has quietly been one of the most ambitious creative projects I've had the privilege of watching take shape.

It's called Anchor Field -- and it's a museum to the imagination of someone close to my heart, who has decided it's time to stop keeping his work to himself.

AnchorField.org is a living creative archive unlike anything I've come across.

At its heart, it's the work of one person with a genuinely rare combination of gifts:

WorldBuilder
Philosopher
Storyteller
Visual Artist
Musician
Lyricist

-- all rolled into one.

The site spans original science fiction and fantasy universes with fully developed alien species, histories, cultures, and timelines. Philosophical and theological essays explored through AI-powered podcast discussions featuring multiple distinct voices. Original artwork expanded through AI tools. RPG campaign journals written as literary prose.

And even an original theoretical physics framework.

What makes Anchor Field stand out in an era saturated with AI-generated content is the intentionality and transparency behind how AI is used here. Every idea, every world, every argument originates from the creator.

AI serves as the brush, never the painter.

That distinction is spelled out plainly on the site -- and you can feel it in every corner of the work.

This is a human imagination that simply refuses to stay small.

There are even recordings of his own piano and guitar on the site -- a reminder that the artist was always there, long before the brushes.

The site is still growing, which is part of what makes it exciting. If you love speculative fiction, deep ideas, music, art, or creative experimentation at the edge of what's possible right now -- Anchor Field is worth your time.

Go. Explore:

https://anchorfield.org

Shooting in a Ghost: Lincoln High's Rifle Team and the Old Aquarium at Point Defiance

2026-05-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

I had been in that building before.

As a kid, I'd gone to the old Point Defiance Aquarium on the waterfront more than once, the one down near the water, below the bluffs. I remember the fish, the glass, the particular quiet of that kind of place. Puget Sound creatures behind thick panes, and kids pressing their faces in to get closer. There was a small amusement park next to it. I remember that fondly, too.

1970-71 Lincoln High School Rifle Team Yearbook page - Tacoma, WA. Some members missing.

In the fall of 1970, as a Lincoln High sophomore, I was driven to Point Defiance for my first rifle team practice. We pulled up above the boat house and I knew this building. It was the aquarium. But no, someone said, it's not.

We walked into what was by then just one long bare room with targets at the far end. Nothing on the walls. No tanks, no glass, no trace of what it had been. Just wood and distance and the smell of a place that had been repurposed and forgotten. No trace of what it had been. I stood there a little stunned. Things change.

Photo at least a few years before I was visiting in 1960 or shooting there in the early 1970s.

Point Defiance Park was established in 1888 when President Grover Cleveland authorized the federal military reserve to be used as a public park. As early as 1895, the Park Board leased space for a boat stand, restaurant and float at Point Defiance Park to J. Olson for $5 a month. The first permanent boathouse was built in 1903 by Edwin Ferris. Ferris agreed to pay for the construction of the boathouse if he could run it for ten years, at which time he would turn the building over to the Park Board for their use. Ferris’s beautiful octagonal boathouse/pavilion was an immediate success. - Parks Tacoma

The aquarium existed only in my memory now, not in the room itself, now turned into a firing range. We were going to be shooting in a ghost held only in my mind. I seemed to be the only one on the team who knew what it had once been. A journey into the deep of Puget Sound. Apparently, the aquarium burned down in 1974 and the boathouse ten years later in 1984.

I'd be curious who owned the building as Tacoma had a series of criminal arsons back in those days. I wrote about some of it in my award-winning screenplay, The Teenage Bodyguard, set in 1974. It details an attempted arson at the Top of the Ocean restaurant along the waterfront on Ruston Way, a few miles southeast of there. A local crime family had burned down or tried to burn down more than a few buildings in those days for fun and profit.

Lincoln's rifle team was not a glamour operation. We shot .22 caliber rifles donated by the Army — heavy, worn, some broken. The 1972 yearbook records them diplomatically as "worn out or broken." I struggled with the bulk and weight of those old surplus rifles from the start, and never quite made peace with the aperture sights either. I was not, I'll tell you honestly, a natural range shooter. Equipment that fits you matters, and nothing about those rifles fit me particularly well.

Our coach was Mr. Williams, ex-Army turned teacher, a genuinely humane man with great stories and a clear understanding of what his kids were working with and working against. When I complained about the rifles he didn't apologize for them. He just said: it's what you have, be proud and make the best of it. That was Mr. Williams. He knew something about making do.

Forty rounds counted toward your score, ten points each, four hundred possible. Hit three hundred sixty or better and you earned a varsity letter. Any member could earn one regardless of sex, which in 1971 wasn't nothing — we had girls on the team and they belonged there.

Every Monday afternoon the old aquarium became a gathering point for Tacoma's high school rifle league. Stadium, Curtis, Wilson, Mount Tahoma, and Lincoln all competed there, five city schools converging on one repurposed waterfront building with their rifles and whatever else they could get their hands on. One team, a school who was financially better off, had match competition pieces and won quite a bit more often. It was hard not to notice that fact.

We were the only school though with Army surplus rifles and our coach told me, "It's what we have, don't worry about those other schools, be proud of them, and shoot well." It was a real league, with real competition, and virtually none of it exists in any archive anywhere. The yearbooks are almost the only evidence it happened at all.

It is worth noting that today the idea of a Tacoma public high school rifle league — five city schools competing weekly, kids bused to a park facility with Army surplus weapons, earning varsity letters for marksmanship — would be unthinkable.

Not because the kids were dangerous, they weren't, we weren't, or because the sport wasn't legitimate, it was. Simply because the world changed. Hunter's safety courses still exist, and competitive shooting still exists, but the casual integration of rifle sport into public high school athletics, the same way you'd letter in swimming or track, belongs to a specific window of American life that closed quietly sometime after we did.

I've mentioned that from time to time in recent years when in a group and the topic came up and I have gotten horrified looks or comments like, 'Well, that wasn't a good idea." But WWII wasn't that far away back then. Certainly not for those who taught us.

I had a 20 gauge single shot shotgun and a British .303 bolt action WWII surplus rifle on a rifle rack in my bedroom in junior high. My older brother's as he traveled America on his motorcycle in the late 1960s. Yes, I had ammo.

The .303 British bolt action on that rack had been my older brother's, given to him at fifteen. Later, when I was fifteen, he passed it to me — he didn't have a son and didn't know yet that he would. It was a serious weapon. The British used that caliber to hunt elephants in Africa. It was not a toy, and we never treated it as one.

I eventually gave it to my own son when he turned fifteen. I did keep the bolt however, until he moved out and was legally old enough to own it. My brother died this year. I think about that rifle and what it carried with it — not just the weight of the thing, but the line of it, three generations each receiving it at the same age, each understanding what it meant to be trusted with something that demanded respect.

Mr. Williams was ex-Army. Mr. Eakes ran hunter's safety courses. For them, teaching young people to handle weapons carefully and compete honorably was simply good citizenship. None of us considered harming anyone, and none of us did. The newspapers from that era are proof enough of that. Compare those to the newspapers today and draw your own conclusions.

The best shooters on our team were the Hondle brother twins and the Eakes brothers. I already knew all of them from a private junior high rifle team coached by the Eakes boys' father, Mr. Eakes. They were older than me and they were crack shots, the lot of them — but the Hondles carried it differently than the Eakes did. The Eakes brothers were good but weren't on the high school team. They'd had enough of it with their dad, growing up, helping him as I had, teach hunter's safety courses a year or two previous.

The Hondles knew they were good. When you're a younger kid wearing a T badge around guys like that, you feel it without anyone having to say a word.

The T badge was my first year. Gold shield, black border, a T for Tyro — meaning beginner, meaning novice, meaning you're not there yet. In competitive shooting it's a legitimate classification for a first-year competitor. In that company it felt like wearing my inexperience as an announcement. Nobody said anything about it. That was almost worse.

My senior year I was working nights at the Auto-View Drive-In, where my stepfather was assistant manager for his night job. I missed matches. I showed up when I could, which was not always, and I watched my entire high school social life happen on the other side of the snack bar counter — friends and classmates coming in on weekend nights while I was working, every holiday, every Friday. I knew I was missing things that don't come back.

Mr. Williams saw the whole picture. At the end of my senior year he gave me a full varsity letter — a gold L, the real thing. I always figured it was for being on the team three years and holding down a night job through high school, both of which he understood and respected. He was that kind of man.

I never got the letterman's jacket. My parents couldn't afford it and neither could I on snack bar wages. So the letter sat. I still have the T badge somewhere. I'm not sure I was ever as dismissive of it as I felt at the time.

One of the faces in the 1973 team photo is my best friend Dave Henderson. Dave wanted to be on the team. So, I told him to get over for that day. He never fired a round that season. But he is in the Lincoln yearbook as a rifleman, which still makes me smile fifty plus years later.

The whole waterfront Pavilion complex at Point Defiance burned in 1984. The old aquarium building went with it — the shooting range, the ghost, all of it. Three lives for one building: aquarium, rifle range, ash. Almost none of it is documented anywhere. The yearbook pages are about the only hard evidence the league and that range existed at all.

I earned a letter in that building, for a jacket I never owned, shooting rifles I never fit, in a room I'd first entered as a child looking at fish.

I think about that sometimes.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of Claude AI

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

Remember Trump's famous favorite Bible quote? No? Come on! Really?

2026-05-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

Remember Trump's famous favorite Bible quote?

He's got one, right?

So if he does have one, based upon his actions as president, or his decades as a miserable example of a "businessman" over his lifetime, WHAT IS IT?

What might, say...three of his favorite quotes be?

The famous moment: Trump was asked his favorite Bible verse in 2015 and couldn't name one. He later cited "an eye for an eye" as his philosophy -- which is real (Leviticus/Exodus), but notably Jesus specifically repudiates it in Matthew 5:38-39. So his "favorite" is the verse Christ overruled.

Three that actually fit his record:

1. Proverbs 21:6 "A fortune made by a lying tongue is a fleeting vapor and a deadly snare." -- Six bankruptcies, Trump University fraud settlement, inflated asset valuations. The vapor part aged well.

2. Matthew 6:5 "When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others." -- The Lafayette Square Bible photo op, holding it upside down. Scripture as prop.

3. 1 Timothy 6:10 "The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." -- Covers pretty much the entire career arc and the current presidency-as-profit-center Raskin was describing above.

The brutal irony is that "eye for an eye" being his self-chosen verse is actually the most honest thing he's ever said about himself.

Trump's politics are pure Old Testament retribution politics with zero New Testament grace anywhere in sight.

Trump really seems to be an Old Testament guy, though.

Old Testament Trump?

The OT God is frequently wrathful, vengeful, tribal, transactional, and rewards loyalty above almost everything else.

So? Trump IS like the Old Testament, immature, vindictive, jealous "God"?

Punishment is swift and disproportionate. Enemies are smited.

The chosen people are exceptional by definition.

Outsiders are threats. Sounds kind of like a five-year-old.

But it maps almost perfectly onto Trump's operating psychology.

The transactional covenant thing is key.

OT theology is largely "obey and prosper, disobey and suffer."

Trump runs the same deal -- loyalty is rewarded, disloyalty is destroyed.

It's less a moral framework than a power framework with religious language draped over it.

What Trump actively rejects from the New Testament:

Forgiveness of enemies (he never forgives, or apologizes, doubling down, always)
Humility ("blessed are the meek" -- not a Trump value)
Turning the other cheek (see: "eye for an eye")
Care for the poor and stranger (see: every immigration and social policy)
The rich man and the needle's eye passage -- genuinely inconvenient for him

The dark irony is that evangelical Christians, who are supposed to be defined by the New Testament and Christ's teachings, have attached themselves to perhaps the most purely Old Testament political figure in American history.

See, white Christian Nationalism. Or the American Taliban.

Allow me... And there it is. The through line.

Why the OT fits WCN perfectly:

White Christian Nationalism isn't really Christianity in any theological sense. It's a tribal identity system that uses Christian iconography as its flag. The Old Testament gives them what they actually want:

A chosen people narrative
A promised land (America as covenant nation)
Divine sanction for conquest and dominance
Clear in-group/out-group boundaries
A wrathful God who punishes enemies
Tribal law over universal grace

The New Testament is genuinely problematic for them because Christ was a Middle Eastern Jew who preached radical inclusion, care for immigrants and outcasts, rejection of wealth and power, and forgiveness of enemies. That's essentially the opposite of the WCN political program.

So they quietly sideline Jesus as a theological figure while keeping the cross as a political symbol. The cross at January 6th wasn't about the Sermon on the Mount.

Trump as OT figure works for them because he's Cyrus -- the flawed pagan king God uses as an instrument anyway. That's literally the theological framework many WCN pastors use. It's clever because it immunizes him against any moral critique.

The deepest irony: They've built a political religion around the parts of the Bible their own Christ specifically came to supersede.

That's not Christianity. That's nationalism wearing Christianity's coat.

While we're on the topic of Trump's nonsense...

The Trump "Weave" Nonsense Unravels: A Decade of Cognitive Decline in Donald Trump's Public Speech

1980s — Coherent, even articulate in interviews; sentences complete, vocabulary precise, stays on topic. Fundamental life view pretty messed up, however. Still capable of hiding that.
1990s — Still functional but shallower; the braggadocio is increasing, substance thinning.
2011 — Filler words measurably increasing in recorded interviews; vague placeholder language creeping in.
2015 — Campaign launch; rambling style rewarded by crowds, masking deterioration with performative energy.
2016 — Tangentiality accelerating but mistaken for authenticity; wins the presidency.
2017 — First STAT linguistic analysis finds his speaking style has already worsened significantly since the 1980s.
2018 — Still capable of structured prepared remarks but unscripted responses increasingly fragmented.
2019 — Repetition of key phrases intensifying; same anecdotes recycled regardless of context.
2020 — Post-election loss triggers emotional constriction; all-or-nothing vocabulary spikes.
2021 — Negative emotional language dominates; "never," "always," "completely" becoming verbal tics.
2022 — Word retrieval errors becoming regular; confabulation harder to distinguish from deliberate lying.
2023 — Haley/Pelosi confusion; uncorrected errors normalizing; digressions no longer return to a point.
2024 — Abrupt unframed topic shifts more than double; changes exceed what stylistic continuity can explain.
2025 — Retrieval failures, disorganized sequencing, errors go uncorrected in real time; the compensating mechanisms are visibly breaking down.
2026 — Currently in office, 79 years old, mentally older, and the public record of any given week supplies fresh examples without having to look hard.

The baseline has shifted to where the episodes are no longer remarkable enough to dominate any news cycle.

By the way?

That normalization may be the most telling data point of all.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of Claude AI

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The Kid Who Was Ready

2026-05-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

Some people are shaped by a single defining moment. Others are shaped by a decade of unlikely preparation, each experience stacking quietly on the last until one day something extraordinary happens and they discover they were ready for it all along.

"Gordie" was that kind of kid.

He was born into an east coast family -- his mother a Brooklyn girl -- and spent his early years moving. There was a stretch in Spain that seemed like it might become permanent, until it wasn't. Family tensions built to an explosive final confrontation, and his grandfather threw his father out of the country.

The now family of three moved to Philadelphia, back near relatives, trying to find solid ground. Eventually his mother remarried and the new configuration -- mother, stepfather, Gordie, his sister, and a new little brother -- who made their way back, across the country to Tacoma, Washington, to where the oldest brother, from another father, lived with his dad.

They moved around a lot before finally settling. Home, when it existed, was complicated -- a difficult stepfather, a mother doing her best, a household held together by obligation more than ease. That arrangement lasted until he graduated high school and eventually went into the Air Force. But long before that, home was somewhere to leave.

So he left it, early and often, and in doing so stumbled into one of the most unusual informal educations a young American could receive in that era. Asking his mother decades later why she allowed him to always be taking lessons of some sort of another, she smiled and said, "I knew I had to tire you out every day, so you'd go to sleep at night. You were like that since birth. Always wanting to see the next new thing."

His sensei Steve Armstrong, ran one of the Pacific Northwest's premier karate dojos...in a style called, Isshinryu.

Sensei Armstrong ran one of the Pacific Northwest's premier karate dojos, a Marine veteran who had studied directly under the founder of Isshin-Ryu on Okinawa, eventually becoming his number two student. This wasn't a strip mall operation.

This was the real thing, brought back from postwar Japan by men who understood it as a discipline and a philosophy, not a hobby. Gordie trained there from age twelve, rode the city bus in his gi, competed in tournaments alongside future legends of American martial arts, at least one who made the cover of Black Belt magazine, and on one occasion performed kata in a boxing ring at a main event in front of a packed international tournament arena.

He joined the Civil Air Patrol, eventually rising to cadet flight commander. He trained in search and rescue. He earned a ham radio license, a radio telegraph license. He learned first responder first aid. He went on mountain missions, rappelled cliff faces, and on one search and rescue operation found a downed aircraft and its frozen passengers -- an experience that stayed with him. He spent only a single year in a Catholic school in eighth grade where the class was taught Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics and he graduated that reading at ten thousand words per minute. With a tested eighty percent level of comprehension.

He shot competitively, three years on the high school rifle team, earning his varsity letter. He got his SCUBA license in tenth grade. He went skydiving the morning after a birthday party, badly hungover, with his best friend and his older brother. On his second jump alone without his friends, he experienced a parachute malfunction at three thousand feet, fixed it himself rather than deploy his reserve -- because he didn't have the two dollars and fifty cents to pay for the repack, and landed hard, but safe.

He managed the snack bar at a drive-in theater through high school. Once graduated, he got a job downtown Tacoma and was paying his own rent from the age of seventeen, driving himself to work in his 1967 red Camaro convertible.

By that age, Gordie had accumulated a set of capabilities that no institution had deliberately assembled in him. They had simply accrued, experience by experience, in the life of a kid who preferred being useful to being comfortable.

None of it was preparation for what happened in May of 1974. And all of it was.

A phone call from a friend. A woman who needed a ride. A newspaper clipping about a murder. A question that would have sent most teenagers running:

Do you have a gun?

Unbelievably, as it happened -- he did. A Ruger Blackhawk 357cal. magnum.

Would you stay with me for the week -- until I can get out of town?

What followed was one week in the life of a seventeen-year-old who found himself between a witness to an organized crime murder and the mafia crime family who wanted her silenced, in a city where the Sheriff, and others, were on the payroll and the police couldn't be trusted.

A mafia crime ring so pervasive and insidious -- its reach extending into local, county, and perhaps even state government -- that when the federal government finally moved in, aided by the very Sheriff's office deputies who had refused to be bought, the trial had to be moved to California.

The case gathered newspaper headlines across the entire country for months. The corruption ran so deep that Pierce County voters eventually approved a new county charter abolishing the governmental structure that had made it all possible.

He wasn't a hero. He was just ready.

And nobody knew about his story -- for decades.

Until now --

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of Claude AI

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The Teacher Who Told Me the Truth and the System That Proves She Was Right - Gerrymandering

2026-05-18T06:00:00.000-07:00

There is a specific kind of shock that isn't loud. It doesn't announce itself. It moves through you quietly, like something cold dropping through water, and by the time you know it has happened, your understanding of the world has already shifted and will never quite shift back. I have felt that shock twice in my life before the age of eighteen, and both times it was a classroom that delivered it.

The first time I was seven years old, sitting at a wooden desk in a second-grade classroom approximately half a mile from McChord MAC (Military Airlift Command) Air Force Base in Parkland, a suburb south of Tacoma, Washington, being told that the desk itself would protect me from a nuclear bomb.

Think, 1950s "Duck and Cover" nonsense.

The second time I was seventeen, spring 1973, sitting in civics class taught by one of the finest teachers I would ever encounter, being told that the political party that wins an election gets to redraw the voting map to help itself win the next one.

Both times, the institution I was sitting inside told me something that was factually untenable. Both times, the adult at the front of the room had no real counter-argument. And both times, I walked out of that room carrying something I had not brought in: the knowledge that the systems I had been raised to trust were capable of something worse than corruption. They were capable of requiring everyone to look directly at the corruption and agree to call it normal.

I want to tell you about Eleanor Wotton. Because she is the reason I am thinking about all of this today.

Mrs. Wotton taught social studies, civics, and world problems at Lincoln High School in Tacoma. I had her for world problems in the first half of the 1972-73 school year and for civics in the second half. She was energetic in the way that only genuinely smart and curious people are, not performed enthusiasm, not the theatrical brightness some teachers deploy to keep rooms from going catatonic, but the real thing: a woman who found the world actually interesting and could not entirely conceal her impatience when she suspected you might too.

She was also not an ordinary social studies teacher in her background.

Somewhere in the years before I knew her, likely the late 1960s, she had worked in some capacity with Chiang Kai-shek, likely in Taiwan where he had lived already for two decades. Chiang, who had lost the Chinese Civil War to Mao Zedong in 1949 and retreated to Taiwan with the remnants of his Nationalist government, was by then presiding over the Republic of China from Taipei while the mainland burned under the Cultural Revolution.

Mao, that regretful bloated monument to self-worship, had by the mid-1960s decided he was less a leader than a cosmological force, enshrining his own thoughts in "Mao's Little Red Book" and distributing it to a nation he was simultaneously destroying, purging intellectuals, crushing dissent, setting China back a generation in the name of raising up "The People."

The people, as usual in such arrangements, being the last to benefit and the first to suffer. Sound familiar?

It has the distinct smell of something we recognize today. The cult of singular infallibility. The little book replaced by a social media feed. The intellectuals replaced by scientists, journalists, judges. The enemies of the people rebranded but performing the same function. Mao thought he was a god.

Trumpism doesn't bother with the theology. It just acts like one.

Not at a remove, not through some academic intermediary, but directly, as part of a commission or advisory group, developing curriculum and programming around world politics and international civics. I did not know this when I sat in her Civics class. I pieced some of it together later from things she said and from what happened the spring of 1973.

My girlfriend at the time and I bought her a poster as an end-of-year gift. It was a photograph of Chiang Kai-shek, smiling broadly, giving what appeared to be the peace sign (likely he intended as a "V" for victory, novelty popularized by some company in a poster). That same two-fingered V that our generation had made the universal emblem of the antiwar movement. For us it was a little irreverent, a little funny, a little affectionate. We found it somewhere, maybe at the Tacoma Mall and thought she would get a kick out of it. We did not fully understand what we were handing her. But she loved it. She was very proud of her work with him and the group that had brought them together. She said that group had developed a game to help teach issues of relevant issues to enhance the world's understanding of our all living in the world together.

A useful point of reference, though not necessarily the model for what Wotton and her commission developed: Risk, the global strategy board game that became a fixture in American households, was invented in 1957 by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse, better known for the classic short film The Red Balloon.

Originally titled La Conquête du Monde, The Conquest of the World, it was designed to distill the mechanics of global conflict into something a family could play at a kitchen table, strategic enough to reward thinking, simple enough to hinge on a dice roll. What Lamorisse understood, and what made Risk endure, was that the abstraction of world power into game mechanics didn't trivialize geopolitics.

It made geopolitics legible. A teacher developing curriculum around world politics in the late 1960s, working within the orbit of a government-in-exile watching the mainland convulse under the Cultural Revolution, would have had every reason to think along similar lines: if you want students to understand how nations compete, how alliances form and fracture, how territory translates to power, make them play it out. The game is the lesson.

Other games of the era explored similar terrain: the board game Diplomacy, created in 1954 by Allan Calhamer and famously played by President Kennedy, replaced dice with negotiation and alliance-making to simulate the mechanics of great power competition; and Harold Guetzkow's Inter-Nation Simulation, developed at Northwestern University and published as a classroom kit in 1966, placed students directly in the roles of decision-makers for fictional nations navigating the full architecture of geopolitical conflict. Neither are what Wotton helped develop, but both speak to the moment: the late 1960s belief that if you wanted students to understand how the world actually worked, you made them play it out.

The following year, when I went back to visit her at Lincoln in her classroom, she proudly opened her closet door. There on the inside of the door was Chiang's smiling face, gesturing, right where she would see it every single time she reached for anything in that closet. She was proud of it in a way that was not small.

She had kept her poster, privately, not as classroom decoration but as something personal. That image, for her, was not a joke. It was layered. It was the man she had worked with, refracted through the exact cultural moment her students were living inside. Two teenagers who had handed her something that connected those two worlds without knowing it, and she had understood that immediately and treasured it.

That tells you who she was.

I had a somewhat troubled school life in my K-12 years, where high school was better but still problematic. I had noticed three teachers I considered our brightest and many did. It was those three who saw me differently and took their time to guide me in ways few other had ever done. Mrs. Van Arnum in 6th grade at Horace Mann Elementary school comes to mind. Mr. Selfors in Mechanical Drawing in 9th grade at Stewart Junior High, was another.

The Watergate hearings had been unfolding across the months of our Civics class, and Mrs. Wotton could barely contain herself. She told us we were living through a genuinely historic moment in American civic life, that the mechanisms of democratic accountability were operating in real time, teachable time, visibly, on television, and that we would be watching.

So we watched, in class, on a television she brought in. She folded it into our civics curriculum. This is how it works. This is what the system does when it tries to correct itself. Pay attention.

She was right about that. The hearings were extraordinary. And the belief she was modeling for us, that the system could and would self-correct when sufficiently pressed, was not naive. It was historically grounded.

Nixon eventually resigned. The process worked, in its grinding, painful, imperfect way.

But there was something else in her curriculum that worked differently on me. Something that did not resolve.

The Gerrymandering lesson arrived the way the best lessons do: not as a lecture but as a fact dropped into the room that I could not leave alone.

Mrs. Wotton explained the mechanics of it. The party in power after a census gets to redraw the congressional and state legislative districts. They can configure those districts to concentrate opposing voters into as few districts as possible, or to spread them across many districts so they never constitute a majority in any of them. The result is a map that looks like a democracy and functions like a lock.

I remember absorbing this. I remember the specific quality of the silence in my own head as the implications assembled themselves. I'm seventeen. Not particularly interested in caring about anything. And yet something in me will not let this go.

I raised my hand and said, "So wait. The party that wins gets to redraw the map to make it easier for themselves to win again?"

She said, "Yes, that's essentially correct."

I said, "But that's ridiculous. How's that a balanced democracy? That's...cheating."

She did not argue. She said it has always been that way.

I said it shouldn't be. That should be ended...right now.

She looked at me for a moment with an expression I have never entirely stopped thinking about. It was not the expression of a teacher who has heard a student say something incorrect. It was something closer to the expression of someone who has just heard something they already knew spoken out loud by someone who had no reason to protect themselves from it.

She agreed with me. She said it was a fair point. And then, gently, with the practiced accommodation of someone who has made a long peace with maddening facts, she moved us on.

I sat there stunned, trying to catch up, to move along with the class.

No one else in the room seemed particularly troubled. My girlfriend, who was smart, either got it in the moment or we worked through it together later. Because I couldn't let it go. The other kids heard it, processed it, and filed it somewhere in the category of things that are unfortunate but are just...there. Mrs. Wotton's acknowledgment that it had always been this way was enough permission to let it rest.

For me it was not enough.

I spent the rest of that class period only partially present, my seventeen-year-old brain turning the thing over and over. The winning party redraws the map. The winning party redraws the map. I kept expecting to find the angle at which this became acceptable, the principle I was missing that explained why this was actually fine, and I could not find it. Because it isn't there. The logic is exactly as stupid as it looks to a seventeen-year-old who doesn't know enough yet to have learned to look away.

This mental explosion had happened before. The nuclear bomb drill was ten years earlier, 1962, second grade, I was seven

The night before, my family had watched a television program about how nuclear weapons work. How the blast expands, sideways. How the heat travels. How the pressure wave moves outward at speeds no shelter of wood or brick or flesh could meaningfully interrupt within the relevant radius.

Ironically the next morning, we had a bomb drill. The teacher told us: OK kids, alarm goes off, now carefully and quickly, get under your desks.

I got under my desk. And then, when she asked if there were questions, as we reseated ourselves, I said I had one.

We went back and forth. I said, this won't protect us. She asked why? She explained that the desk was protective to things falling from the ceiling. I said, but the bomb blast goes sideways and that's part of its destructive power. I explained that, as clearly as a seven-year-old can explain physics. We were also half a mile from McChord AFB. That the desk was made of wood. These facts did not coexist in any meaningful way with her premise. I explained what I had watched the night before, on TV. The definitive source back then.

Obviously flustered, she finally said, at a loss for words: "You're scaring the other children."

Ever noticed how close the word "scaring", "to scare", is...to "scarring", "to scar?"

I looked around. She was right.

Some of the kids, mostly girls, but some guys, had frightened faces. Others just seemed confused. So I stopped. I dropped it. I was frustrated. Something was wrong about all this. Not because she had answered me. Because I chose, at seven years old, to absorb the cost of the truth rather than make the other children pay it.

Our teacher was responsible for giving us incorrect information. I didn't think she knew the truth either, only realizing it when I stated it out loud, plainly, clearly. Then she had turned it onto me, I was now the one causing issues, scaring children. Scarring them, perhaps. But mostly I realized as I looked around the class, no, they weren't absorbing what I was trying to say, just...a few.

I walked out of that room that day knowing something I had not known when I walked in. The institution required participation in a fiction. This was something that decades later would become a joke and a shock to the nation when old videos of the rather ridiculous duck-and-cover public service announcements were rediscovered.

The adult in the room that day had no counter-argument.

The system, whatever system this was, the school, the teachers, the government behind the duck-and-cover program, had decided that the fiction was preferable to the truth, their only fast recourse, and expected everyone to cooperate.

I was seven. I did not have the vocabulary for what I was understanding. But the understanding was real and it was accurate and it has never left me.

Mrs. Wotton was one of three teachers in my entire K-12 education who saw me as something other than a problem. The others were my English teacher and my individualized reading teacher. Generally considered at our high school to be our three smartest teachers, our of however many teachers across my formative twelve years of school? Well, there were a few others over the years, but not many.

What I had in common with them, I think, was that I was not bored in their rooms. Not because the material was always easy or always thrilling, but because they were genuinely engaged with ideas, excited about them. And when you are genuinely engaged with ideas you are better at recognizing when someone else is, even when that someone else is wearing the mask of a disinterested seventeen-year-old who acts like he doesn't care.

The symmetry is not coincidental. The students those teachers noticed were the students noticing them. Mrs. Wotton did not miss the gerrymandering moment. She knew exactly what had happened in that exchange. She carried it, I believe, alongside the Chiang Kai-shek poster on the inside of her closet door, as something that had connected, that had meant something, in the way teaching rarely gets to mean something that visibly.

Now it is 2026, and I am listening to NPR, and there is a movement of people trying to do what I said should be done in 1973.

Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick and Tom Suozzi on rising issue of gerrymandering

Nonpartisan redistricting commissions. Independent bodies, structurally removed from the party in power, using neutral geographic and demographic criteria to draw district maps. Not perfect. Nothing in politics is perfect. But meaningfully, structurally different from allowing the winners to design the game board for the next round.

It is working, in the states where it has been implemented. California, Michigan, Colorado, Arizona have all moved in this direction to varying degrees and with varying results, but the underlying principle is sound and the data supports it.

This, is not a healthy drawn district map. That red tri-formed district on the left, is toxic. Disingenuous. What this does is aid one party over another. What that does is make our country into exactly what we are seeing today. Gridlock. Partisan. Toxic.

A healthier looking map might be this:

Maps drawn without partisan intent produce legislatures that more closely represent the actual distribution of political opinion in the population. This is what democracy is supposed to do.

This, "Win at any or all costs regardless who it harms as long as it's not us" mentality has got to STOP!

The resistance to fixing this is ferocious, particularly from the MaGA Republican movement, which has perfected toxic politics, toxic capitalism, toxic gerrymandering into an instrument of what amounts to minority rule into a kind of "American apartheid": legislatures that vote against policies the majority of constituents support, because the maps were drawn to make the majority structurally irrelevant.

This is not a side effect. It is the point. It is the feedback loop I identified at seventeen made into a governing philosophy. Win the election, redraw the map, entrench the win, use the entrenchment to win again, use the second win to redraw the map again.

Mrs. Wotton told me it had always been that way. That, was stunning to me. Shocking.

She was right. Both parties have used it when they had the chance. But what we are watching now is something quantitatively different, gerrymandering deployed at a scale and with a precision, aided by computational modeling, that the architects of the practice in previous decades could not have imagined.

THIS IS PARAMOUNT: technology has made the cheating more efficient without making it any less what it is.

What I said in her class remains what I believe: it should be ended. It is not a moot point. It is one of the central structural pathologies of American democracy, and the fact that it has always been that way is not an argument for its continuation. It is an argument for its urgency.

I think about Mrs. Wotton and the closet door. I think about the Generalissimo's smiling face and his fingers held in a V that meant victory to him and peace to us and something private and layered and irreplaceable to her.

I think about a woman who had worked at the highest levels of international political life and then came back and taught seventeen-year-olds in Tacoma about how the world actually works, with enough honesty to confirm that yes, the cheating is built in, and enough humanity to agree when a student said it should not be.

She was proud of her work with Chiang. She was proud of the poster. And I believe she was proud of the moment in that classroom, the kid who looked at gerrymandering and refused to normalize it.

I was stunned into a kind of cognitive shock that day that I have never entirely recovered from. I don't want to recover from it. The shock is correct.

It's a kind of schema rupture, the specific cognitive shock that occurs when a foundational belief you didn't know you held gets suddenly invalidated. Clinical terms referring to it you might know: cognitive dissonance, disequilibrium, or what trauma theorists call a rupture of the assumptive world.

I didn't know I believed democracy was inherently self-correcting until the moment I discovered it wasn't, and the desk went quiet around me while my seventeen-year-old brain tried to process what had just been said.

We're seeing this play out today with Donald Trump as twice our worst president in history. What he has proven true in his ignorant bull in a China shop orientation, or failed CEO running a nation foolishness is that he is showing us where our democracy has been running pretty well from the beginning so we have not bothered in recent times to take the time and effort to fix what needed to be trimmed or enhanced.

We have allowed the presidency to become exactly what our Founders feared: a demagogue lacking ethics or knowledge, empathy or historical perspective outside legacy, who would bypass institutions, concentrate power in the executive, and convince the people that he alone could fix it.

The system is as stupid as it looks to someone innocently, objectively seeing it clearly for the first time. The only difference between seventeen and now is that I have fifty more years of watching it compound.

Eleanor Wotton would, I think, not be surprised by any of it.

She would probably just say: it has always been that way.

And I would still say: it shouldn't be.

To that today maybe she would say, then we need to change it.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of Claude AI

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The Defense Cannot Rest: HOW Are There Still Trump Supporters?

2026-05-15T06:00:00.000-07:00

Years defending that man. To parents, kids, friends, lovers, his enemies -- to themselves in the mirror at 3am. They would have gone to their grave calling him a good person. A great leader. Then they saw what he did to... who? Who or what does it take for MaGA to abandon someone who was always quite obviously beset with a history of abuse, lies, bigotry -- but denied reality the entire world sees, until today?

Republican Party Venn Party Poster

How can they now be devoted to him the way they once were, like those of a doomsday cult?

The defense cannot. The grave did not -- for 200,000 Americans dead of Covid from his purposeful mismanagement, for reasons only of his supremacy and power. According to POTUS45 Trump's own former Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly.

Yes, I had at first post-covid, claimed 200,000 American citizens dead due to Trump's incompetence and divisiveness, but then I started saying 100,000 citizens to err on the side of caution. But THEN I had to agree with the expert, Trump's own former White House employee (who lets face it, KNOWS), when I heard saw and him on the news one day SAY it was 200,000 dead due to those reasons I had long suspected Trump of doing. Apparently, he did kills those people due to incompetence and gamesmanship releated to power acquistion, malignant narcissim, manipulating his political cult, and let's say...ignorance (seem I'm being nice again, because it's actually stupidity, in the form of selective ignorance, a MaGA trait exercised to the point of utter insanity).

So? How in the world are there still any Trump supporters?

It is one of the genuinely haunting political psychology questions of our era, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a dismissive one -- even if the conclusion is damning.

It Was Never Really About Him

Trump is a vessel. What his supporters are loyal to is an identity, a grievance framework, and a tribal in-group that preceded him and will frighteningly outlast him. Abandoning Trump means abandoning themselves as they have defined themselves for a decade.

That is a psychological cost most humans cannot pay.

Sunk Cost as Identity

The more someone has publicly defended a belief -- sacrificed relationships over it, staked their self-concept on it, shouted it at family dinners -- the more evidence against it feels like a personal attack. The 200,000 Covid deaths are a clean example. For a loyal supporter, accepting that number as negligent homicide means accepting that they cheered for negligent homicide. The mind does not go there easily. It goes almost anywhere else first.

Reality Was Always Negotiable

The lies were never disqualifying because the supporters were never operating on a factual framework to begin with. They were operating on a narrative framework -- us vs. them, real Americans vs. coastal elites, forgotten people vs. the system. Facts don't penetrate narrative loyalty. They bounce off it. This isn't a character flaw unique to MaGA voters. It is a feature of human cognition that propagandists have exploited since before the printing press. What is unique here is the scale and the deliberateness of the engineering.

We do not need to outlaw MaGA, we cannot do that. We need to educate that mindset into nonexistence. We need to mental healthcare it away. We need civics taught in high school again. We need to fund our teachers and schools. We need to shut down extremmism and toxic beliefs such as have filled the conservative channels of pollitical discourse.

The Doomsday Cult Comparison Is Precise, Not Metaphorical

Leon Festinger's landmark study When Prophecy Fails (1956) documented exactly this: when a UFO cult's predicted apocalypse didn't happen, most members didn't leave. They doubled down and recruited harder. Disconfirmation of a deeply held belief -- when your social world is built around that belief -- produces stronger commitment, not weaker.

The mechanism is cognitive dissonance reduction.

The mind finds it easier to rewrite reality than to rebuild an identity from the ground up. There is no bottom. There is no revelation sufficient to break the bond, because each revelation is processed through the very framework the revelation should be dismantling.

Abuse Dynamics Apply Literally

The intermittent reinforcement model -- the abuser who alternates punishment with reward, contempt with flattery -- creates stronger psychological bonding than consistent positive treatment. Trauma bonding is not a metaphor here.

Many supporters describe their relationship to Trump in emotional terms indistinguishable from descriptions of abusive relationships.

The cruelty excites them.
The vulnerability he occasionally performs disarms them.
The shared enemies unify them.
This is a known psychological loop.

And it is extraordinarily difficult to exit from the inside.

The Media Ecosystem Is a Closed Loop

A supporter who received every piece of information through Fox, OAN, Newsmax, and algorithmically curated social media never encountered the same reality as someone outside it. The 200,000 Covid deaths were presented, in that ecosystem, as a deep state hoax, a Democratic exaggeration, or an unavoidable fate that Trump heroically mitigated.

You cannot defect from a belief you were never fully allowed to encounter. The question "how can they still support him?" assumes they have access to the same informational reality from which the question is asked. Many of them do not. They are downstream of a deliberate architecture.

What Would It Take

Festinger's answer -- and the historical answer -- is personal, embodied, undeniable loss. Not statistics. Not journalism. Not moral argument. Something that happens to them, in their lives, that cannot be explained away. A family member killed by a policy. A personal financial ruin directly traceable to a decision, to a face, to a name.

And even then -- the cult framework has an answer ready: betrayal by the people around the leader, not the leader himself. The leader is always the last refuge.

The grave already took 200,000 who weren't even Trump's enemies. They included those, to be sure but also his supporters, those who loved him. But it did not move that needle for him, or for them. That tells you something profound and terrible about the limits of shared reality as a democratic foundation.

The Real Conclusion

What we're witnessing isn't stupidity. Well somewhat, in selective ignorance being about as stupid a mindset as one can adhere to.

But dismissing it all as stupidity is, in fact, one of the reasons it has proven so durable -- the contempt from outside the tribe confirms everything the tribe believes about outsiders. What we're witnessing is the logical endpoint of a decades-long project to make tribal identity more real than empirical truth.

Trump didn't build that architecture. He just moved in, redecorated in gold, not in a cohsive intelligent fashion but in a slap it on and call it art fashion, and then declared himself its permanent resident.

The defense cannot rest because for millions of people, the moment the defense rests, they have to look at what they spent a decade defending.

And sadly, most of them would rather not.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of Claude AI

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi.

Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The Last Witness: A True Crime Story Hollywood Hasn't Made Yet

2026-05-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

While this movie has yet to be made, one screenplay coverage reviewer asked the obvious question. "Why hasn't this been on a screen somewhere, yet?"

In 1974, a 17-year-old girl was running from the Carbone crime family in Tacoma, Washington. She had witnessed something she refused to admit even to herself. Everyone around her who knew too much was turning up dead, overdosed, or face-down in Spanaway Lake. She needed one week, a place to sleep, and someone who wouldn't sell her out.

She chose a 17-year-old kid she had known for less than an hour.

That kid is still alive. Most of the other major players in this story are not.

As for the screenplay with over a dozen international awards, new coverage (that is a professional level review of a screenplay) from The Black List indicates it could easily be a $30-50 million prestige studio production.

I'd long thought maybe a $3-5 million indie production. Though UK producer/director Danny Baker told me this past winter it could easily be an FX type prestige series. So, I drew up a treatment for that and...he loved it. But he's busy on other projects at this time and as usual, getting the money or studio on board is the issue at hand.

The Black List coverage from May 2026:

There is a compelling 1970s coming-of-age action thriller here, and it's clear the writer has strong instincts for period detail, character-forward storytelling, and cinematically rich set piece design that compete with many professionals working today. Their ability to ground larger-than-life action within a relatable, empathetic teenage POV is especially exciting, and they should feel proud of the work thus far. Even so, there are notable areas that may benefit from significant rewrites.

As they consider this development, they may find inspiration in similar voices such as Elijah Bynum or Scott Frank. In terms of selling this, the period setting and ambitious set pieces likely push the budget into the $30-50M range, putting it best with traditional studios or streamers like Netflix or Apple, both of which have appetite for prestige action drama. As these buyers are highly talent-driven, a strong next step may be to refine the draft and tee up a producer who can help bring in a marketable filmmaker and cast.

It's a story and screenplay that has had the interest of a UK producer some years ago, a well-known Hollywood producer, 3 directors and now a new UK working film industry professional. And yet, it's still unproduced. Such is the filmmaking business. But I'm not giving up. What is stopping it from being produced? It takes the right people, the right vision. And to date, everyone seems to love it but has their own vision.

I have mine. The right vision for it. And mine will win out. Or it won't.

That vision is that this is not a coming-of-age story, though there are elements of that. It is not a "teen romp". This is not your average teen. His motivations were not a normal teen's. He was also no super teen, either. He simply had an unusual degree of training in all the right things required for this kind of a situation.

The fact that he came together with this woman, at that time in that situation, is truly remarkable. Story worthy. Movie worthy. Series worthy. And it really happened.

I just hope I can get it produced before the protagonist, who is likely the only remaining participant from this story still alive, gets to see it on screen.

Before he's no longer here.

What's important here is, we still have someone who was there, who saw it all, who was central to the entire bizarre story in a situation that eventually went viral as it involved the city, county, and state levels of government, and so acquired national attention. It was in the newspapers for months on end. That would be the trial of the crime family, that had to be moved from Tacoma to California to protect the trail from being corrupted.

Yet now, no one knows about all this.

The Enterprise

Pierce County in the early 1970s was, in the words of former Tacoma Mayor Bill Barma, wide open. Joint Base Lewis-McChord, then split between Fort Lewis and McCord Field, filled the county with young military men and the kind of cash economy that organized crime has always known how to exploit. John Joseph Carbone knew exactly what he had.

His operation ran topless bars, card rooms, prostitution, and heroin across a network of tavern fronts throughout the county. When competition appeared, it was firebombed, sometimes with employees still inside. When witnesses emerged, they disappeared. A dancer subpoenaed before a grand jury was found dead of an apparent overdose. A bouncer who had been called to testify told his family he needed to get out. He reappeared face-down in Spanaway Lake.

When liquor control agent Mel Journey started making connections that other investigators weren't making, two gunmen approached him in his driveway and shot him four times in the chest while his family watched from the window. He survived on multiple blood transfusions, contracting Hepatitis C in the process. The enterprise kept operating.

The reason it kept operating was Pierce County Sheriff George Janovic, who accepted payments from Carbone's intermediaries, tipped off Carbone's operations before raids, and directed deputies to harass competing nightclub owners. Mayor Barma recalled Janovic being consumed not with the crime wave rocking his county but with building a campaign war chest large enough to discourage a rival from running against him. Barma attended one of Janovic's fundraisers. Carbone was there.

By November 1978, after a 13-month FBI and ATF undercover operation, 15 people were arrested including the sheriff. Carbone was convicted on 14 counts including racketeering and sentenced to a hundred years. He served 15. Janovic got 12 years, served 6. The trial had to be moved to San Francisco because there was no impartial jury to be found in Pierce County.

This is documented history. Court records. Sentences. Federal convictions.

And sitting in the middle of it, for one week in 1974, was a girl named Sara.

The Witness

In June 2020, the true crime podcast Scene of the Crime, hosted by former KIRO Radio reporters Carolyn Ossorio and Kim Shepard, devoted an episode to the Carbone enterprise. The episode, titled "Enterprise," featured Bill Barma and drew on documented records of the FBI investigation and the Janovic conviction.

It also featured an interview with the man who protected Sara that week in 1974.

He described a frenzied call from a friend, a nervous woman in her late twenties who climbed into his car and handed him a News Tribune article about the murder of a bouncer named Danny at the Tiki nightclub in Lakewood. She told him she hadn't seen it. He believed she had. She asked if he had a gun. She asked if he would stay with her for a week until she could get out of town.

He said yes.

What the podcast captured is the shape of the story. What it couldn't fully convey is the character of the man who said yes, or why Sara chose him specifically, or what happened to her after she left. Those answers are in the screenplay.

Carolyn Ossorio has since gone on to produce The Shadow Girls, a deeply reported podcast on the Green River Killer's victims, now continuing under the title Criminal Mischief. She's worth following. The Carbone episode remains one of the best documented accounts of the enterprise available in audio form.

The Screenplay

The Teenage Bodyguard is a feature screenplay based on these documented events. It opens with Danny McCormick's murder. It carries the historical record through title cards and court documentation. It traces Sara's flight through the Carbone network's reach, the Seattle connection through the Colacurcio organization, and the week one young man spent keeping her alive on instinct, karate, a Civil Air Patrol background, and a .357 he knew how to use.

The screenplay has won 17 international film and screenplay contests across three continents, including:

Best Feature Script, Bab Al Bahrain International Film Festival (Bahrain, 2024); Best Drama Screenplay, Best Hollywood Day Short FF (Winter 2025); Outstanding Achievement Award, Brandenburg International Film Festival (Germany, 2023); Best Screenplay, David Film Festival (Istanbul, 2023); Best Feature Script/Screenplay, Great Oman Independent Film Festival (Oman, 2024); Gold Award Feature Script, Hollywood Gold Awards (USA, 2024); Best Crime Screenplay, International Film & Script Festival-Lotus (Greece, 2023); Best Feature Screenwriting, Medusa Film Festival (USA, 2023); Best Original Screenplay, New Cinema Festival (Buenos Aires, 2024); Best Feature Script, New York Movie Awards (USA, 2024); Best Feature Screenplay Honorable Mention, New York Screenwriting Awards (Summer 2023); Best Screenplay, Tibriz Cinema Awards (Iran, 2023); Best Unproduced Drama Screenplay, US Motion Picture Alliance (USA, 2023); Best Screenplay, Washington Film Awards (December 2023); Feature Script Outstanding Achievement, World Film Carnival (Singapore, 2023); Best Feature Script, Bab Al Bahrain (2024). And a variety of Official Selections.

A separate rewrite with input from producer Robert Mitas, who has long worked with actor/producer Michael Douglas, added three additional recognitions to the story. It is a shorter, tighter screenplay, but it's not the same story and not as true to what happened as the longer, original version that has been worked on with help from Robert, as well as screenplay consultants like Jen Grisanti.

Why not a Book?

Maybe. A screenplay is the compressed form. It does what screenplays do: it moves. But the story underneath it is larger than any two-hour film. As Danny Baker said, it could easily be a prestige series in the FX, Netflix, or HBO formats.

The documented Carbone enterprise. The FBI operation. The Janovic conviction. The Seattle connection. The young man who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, trained in martial arts since childhood, earned his letter in riflery three years running, flew search and rescue missions with Civil Air Patrol, and walked into a week that no one in his life knew about for the next fifty years.

And Sara. Who she was. Where she went. What the Carbone network's reach actually meant for a woman trying to disappear in 1974.

That's a book. Narrative nonfiction true crime with the court records to back it up, a living primary source who has never told the full story, and an ending that the screenplay only hints at.

The story is documented. The witness is available. The work is already begun.

The Teenage Bodyguard screenplay is represented by its screenwriter, JZ Murdock. Robert Mitas and a UK producer/director, are available when this project begins to move forward.

Inquiries welcome.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of Claude AI

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

Special Edition: Russia Is Eating Itself: The Slow Collapse of Putin's War State

2026-05-10T12:00:00.000-07:00

Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 with the apparent expectation that it would be quick, decisive, and largely invisible to the Russian public.

More than four years later, it has been none of those things.

Donald Trump, is not far outside of this club.

What has emerged instead is a portrait of a regime slowly consuming itself: generals killed by car bombs in Moscow suburbs, a president hiding in bunkers along the Black Sea coast while state media runs pre-recorded footage to maintain the illusion of normalcy, and a security apparatus so fractured its chiefs are openly blaming each other in Kremlin meetings. The numbers below tell part of the story. The rest is told by the silence of Russian elites who have quietly stopped saying "we" when they talk about the war, and started saying "his."

MILITARY CASUALTIES

CSIS estimates Russian forces suffered nearly 1.2 million battlefield casualties, including killed, wounded, and missing, between February 2022 and December 2025, with roughly 415,000 in 2025 alone, at an average of nearly 35,000 per month. To put that in historical context, Russia has suffered roughly five times as many fatalities in Ukraine as in all Russian and Soviet wars combined between the end of World War II and the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022. Center for Strategic and International StudiesCenter for Strategic and International Studies

Russia's rate of advance since January 2024 has averaged between 15 and 70 meters per day in its most prominent offensives, slower than almost any major offensive campaign in any war in the last century. Center for Strategic and International Studies

GENERALS KILLED

The deaths of 15 Russian generals have been officially confirmed. In December 2024, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, head of the Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Protection Troops, was killed by a bomb in Moscow. In April 2025, Lieutenant General Yaroslav Moskalik, a senior officer in the General Staff's Main Operational Directorate, was killed by a car bomb in a Moscow suburb. In December 2025, Lieutenant General Fanil Sarvarov, head of the Operational Training Directorate of the Russian General Staff, was killed in Moscow by another car bomb. In July 2025, a strike on the headquarters of the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade killed at least six officers, including the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy. Zona Media

PUTIN IN BUNKERS / HEIGHTENED SECURITY

The Kremlin has dramatically increased personal security around Putin, installing surveillance systems in the homes of close staffers, prompted by a wave of assassinations of top Russian military figures and fears of a coup. Cooks, bodyguards and photographers who work with the president are banned from traveling on public transport. Visitors to the Kremlin must be screened twice, and those working close to Putin can only use phones without internet access. CNN

Putin and his family have stopped visiting their residences in the Moscow region and in northwestern Valdai. He is now spending extended periods in bunkers, including in the Krasnodar area in southern Russia, while state media uses pre-recorded footage to project normality. i24NEWS

He has not visited a military facility in 2026 so far, despite regular trips in 2025. CNN

Intelligence reports indicate Putin fears not so much Ukrainian attacks as a conspiracy by Russian political elites. Sergei Shoigu, the former Defense Minister and current Security Council Secretary, is specifically associated with the risk of a coup attempt. UNN

At the Kremlin's May 9 Victory Day parade this year, no members of the State Duma were invited to Red Square, reportedly to reduce the number of people in close proximity to Putin. The Federal Protective Service has been given broad powers over information policy, personally approving any media appearances involving the president. Surveillance tools once used for criminal investigations have been redirected to monitor government officials. Militarnyi

INTERNAL SECURITY AGENCY CONFLICT

After the assassination of Sarvarov in December 2025, tensions between security agencies exploded during a meeting where Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov sharply criticized the FSB for failing to detect assassination plots. FSB Director Bortnikov responded by criticizing the Defense Ministry for lacking its own protection unit. Head of the National Guard Zolotov refused to allocate his agency's resources to protect Defense Ministry officers. Militarnyi

A former Kremlin insider noted that "a very big battle for power is going on" and that "the FSB and the administration are very much in conflict." HotAir

THE ECONOMIST: PUTIN LOSING HIS GRIP

An anonymous former senior Russian government official writing in The Economist described how senior officials, regional governors and businessmen have stopped using the first-person plural when talking about state actions. As recently as last spring, everything was "we" and "ours." Now they describe what is happening as "his" story, not "ours." His decisions are described as "strange." Even stranger, the author notes, is the fact that he decides anything at all. Substack

The author frames it as a political "zugzwang," the chess term for a position where every available move worsens your situation. He identifies four converging factors: the rising cost of a war designed to be invisible to most Russians; a new demand for rules among elites cut off from London courts and offshore vehicles; roughly 5 trillion rubles in private assets confiscated over three years, the largest redistribution of property since the 1990s privatizations; and a geopolitical climate that is eroding the specific asymmetries Russia historically exploited. Hvylya

The future, he writes, is no longer discussed as something Putin will decide, but as something that will unfold independently of him, and possibly already without him. Substack

ECONOMIC DETERIORATION

Russia's GDP contracted 1.8% in the first two months of 2026. Putin acknowledged the issue in a government meeting on economic affairs in mid-April. HotAir

Russia's economy shrank 0.3% between January and March 2026, the first contraction since early 2023. The public deficit ballooned to $60 billion in the same period, exceeding the full-year target. Inflation remains stuck near 6% under an interest rate of 14.5%. Euronews

Oil and gas revenues in 2025 came in at 8.7 trillion rubles, well below the planned 10.9 trillion. To compensate, the government has raised VAT from 20% to 22% starting January 2026, and utility bills are projected to jump another 13% in 2026, the highest increase since the war began. The Moscow Times

When ordinary Russians were asked in BBC interviews what they hoped for in 2026, a striking number answered with a single word: peace. Several said they no longer plan their lives months or years ahead. One summed up the mood: "Five years? If I look ahead 10 days, it's good." EUvsDisinfo

An anonymous former senior Russian official, writing recently in The Economist, reached for a chess metaphor to describe where Putin now stands: zugzwang, the position where every available move only worsens your situation. The war was supposed to preserve his power. Instead it has become the engine of its erosion. What comes next, no one inside Russia appears to know, including the people closest to him. That uncertainty, more than any battlefield statistic, may be the most significant development of the entire conflict.

I wish us all well...

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of Claude AI

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The Costs of Allowing Selective Ignorance Rule in the White House

2026-05-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

Donald Trump. "Stable Geeenuiuuussss..."

Remember when people were asking if you really want the guy who used to stand by the keg at a kegger be our Commander in Chief?

George W. Bush. The guy you'd want to have a beer with -- which was literally the media narrative sold as a virtue in 2000 and 2004. Folksy, inarticulate, legacy admission to Yale, disappeared from his flying a fighter jet to help on his dad's campaign, dodging his own military service (then dressed up in a flight suit as president to play soldier for a war in the wrong country that he started). Ran three businesses into the ground before his dad's friends handed him a baseball team and then a presidency.

And the keg analogy holds. You don't want the keg guy running the nuclear codes.

When Obama was elected I said, "Well, the Republicans can't go any lower than George W. Bush -- and I voted for his father."

Boy, was I wrong. Bush as president is not almost quaint, a country gentleman even, much as he might wish to be perceived.

It was catastrophically wrong. Because with Donald Trump, the bar didn't just get lowered -- it disappeared. In his first term he had to step over it. Now, in his second, you need a metal detector to even, hopefully, find it beneath the surface.

Which, to be honest, was always exactly what Trump wanted. Not the presidency as public service. The presidency as Al Capone-level immunity -- power without accountability, authority without consequence, the office as a personal get-out-of-jail card. Permanently.

Now, about that "sea/see" incident just happened this week.

While giving a speech, Trump said "by sea, by ocean, by water" and then explained: "A lot of people say, 'What do you mean by sea? Is it see? Like vision?' No, it's sea, SEA."

As Raw Story noted, when Trump says "a lot of people" or "many people" think something, it typically means he used to think it and got corrected. In other words, he was projecting his own former confusion onto a hypothetical crowd.

There's others like that. MANY, many others:

800 percent off

Windmills cause cancer

Hannibal Lecter is real

ID to buy cereal

Napoleon was short, that's why

Inject bleach

Tim Apple

The oranges of the investigation

Frederick Douglass is doing great work

I invented "priming the pump"

Rake the forests

Covfefe

Revolutionary War airports

Look. This is just a dumb man trying to sound smart, pure and simple.

He also has a habit of saying people call it, or it's what is called and then says something stupid

Claude responded: Yes -- the classic "some people call it" setup where he's clearly the only person who calls it that.

Or his classic "some people call it" setup where he's clearly the only person who calls it that.

Some people call it the snake" -- reading a poem about immigration as though it were his own insight
"People call it the super drug" -- about hydroxychloroquine
"They call it the Chinese virus, some people call it that"-- he called it that
"People call it the deep state, I call it the radical left"
"Some people call it a revolution, I call it common sense"
"They call it the green new disaster"
"People call it the laptop from hell"
"Some people call it the fake news, I call it the corrupt media"
"They call it the big beautiful wall"
"People call it the death tax, I call it unfair"
"Some people call it the swamp"
"They call it the Gulf of Mexico, I call it the Gulf of America -- and it's a much better name"

That last one is the purest example -- he renamed a body of water and then complimented himself on the rename. The "people call it" construction is doing a specific job every time: it creates the illusion of consensus around something he alone believes, or distance from something he very much said himself.

The underlying claim is also nonsense.

Trump said "drugs entering our country by sea are down 97 percent" at a January 29 White House briefing, but experts called the assertion ridiculous, invented, or involving disingenuous numbers meant to deceive.

"It wouldn't be the first time this administration just made up something out of whole cloth," said Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. And notably, a 97 percent reduction in cocaine flow would mean cocaine was now extraordinarily rare in the United States. It isn't. And the Trump numbers keeps shifting -- he's said 94%, 96%, 97%, and 98.2% at various points.

what do you call the "sea/see" thing academically or psychologically?

Several overlapping concepts apply here:

Projection of ignorance -- The classic "a lot of people are saying" construction is what linguists sometimes call a distancing hedge. He's attributing his own confusion to an unnamed crowd so he can explain it without owning the original ignorance. It's face-saving through deflection.

Illusory superiority / Dunning-Kruger effect -- The irony is that he's spelling out S-E-A to sound authoritative and clarifying, when the very fact that he felt the need to do so reveals the confusion was his own. Someone who never confused the two homophones would never think to clarify them publicly. The performance of intelligence actually advertises the deficit.

Compensatory verbosity -- A well-documented pattern in his speech: when uncertain, he doesn't go quiet, he adds words, repetitions, and elaborations ("by sea, by ocean, by the water, you know") as though volume substitutes for precision.

Confabulation -- This is the clinical-adjacent term. Confabulation isn't exactly lying; it's the brain filling gaps with plausible-sounding material, often without awareness that the gap exists. Trump regularly produces figures (97%, 25,000 lives per boat) that have no factual anchor but feel convincing to him and his audience in the moment.

Is it stupid? Childish? Or performed?

Probably all three operating simultaneously at different layers. The confusion itself may be genuine -- this is a man with a demonstrably limited reading life who processes the world aurally. Homophones trip up people who don't encounter words primarily in print. The performance of explaining it is where the compensatory behavior kicks in -- an attempt to reframe the gaffe as expertise. And the political tribalism around it means his base hears "he's so relatable, he explains things plainly" while everyone else hears "he didn't know what 'by sea' meant."

None of that amounts to clinical proof of cognitive decline. Trump's allies argue that his tangents, riffs and verbal detours are part of a long-established political style. What is clear is that in 2026 every stray Trump sentence is being dissected for signs of either cunning or collapse.

The honest answer: the line between "he's performing folksy" and "he genuinely didn't know" blurred a long time ago. At this point they may be the same thing.

The academic frameworks are useful for dissecting the mechanics, but they can also inadvertently dignify what is, at its core, exactly what you said -- a man of limited intellectual depth who has spent 80 years developing workarounds to avoid being exposed. The spelling out of S-E-A isn't a cognitive symptom or a rhetorical strategy. It's what a guy who didn't read much and got confused by a homophone does when he's standing at a podium and the words just come out.

What makes it politically durable is the audience. His base doesn't hear inadequacy -- they hear a plain-spoken man cutting through complexity. That's the one genuinely shrewd thing about it, though I'd argue even that isn't calculated so much as accidentally discovered over decades of bluster. He found out early that confidently wrong lands better than quietly uncertain in certain rooms, and he never had reason to update that.

The tragedy -- and it is one -- is that the office requires the opposite. Precision, intellectual humility, comfort with ambiguity. Every "by sea, S-E-A" moment is a small but real reminder that the gap between the demands of the job and the man filling it is about as wide as it gets.

I so look forward to intelligence returning to America with leaders of knowledge, education, wisdom, accuracy, precision of speech and, democracy.

The return of intelligence, knowledge, education, wisdom, and precision of speech to American leadership -- and with it, democracy itself -- cannot come soon enough.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of Claude AI

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The Autocrat's Playbook: Trump - From Immigrants to Iran

2026-05-04T12:00:00.000-07:00

A documented record of who Donald Trump has attacked, in what order, and what it means

Verblendung (German): the state of willful blindness in which a person or a people becomes so captivated by a figure or ideology that they lose the capacity to see what is plainly in front of them. Not mere ignorance. Not deception imposed from outside. The kind of blindness you choose, and then forget you chose.

There is a question worth asking plainly: when you line up everyone Donald Trump has attacked since his first term in office, what do you see? Not what his supporters say you see, and not what his critics fear you see. Just the list, in order, with the facts.

What you see is a pattern. And patterns, unlike individual events, tell you something true about intent.

First Term (POTUS 45, 2017 to 2021): Establishing the Template

The first term was about identifying who could be attacked without serious political cost. Trump started with groups that lacked political power, were easy to demonize, and whose suffering would be invisible to his base.

Muslims came first, via travel bans targeting majority-Muslim nations. Then asylum seekers and migrants, through the family separation policy, zero tolerance prosecutions, and children held in detention facilities that a federal court later described as barbaric. Then Mexico, threatened with tariffs and accused of sending rapists and criminals. Then NATO allies, threatened with abandonment unless they paid more. Then Iran, from which Trump unilaterally withdrew the nuclear deal in 2018 before ordering the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Then China, via a trade war. Then the press itself, declared the enemy of the people.

The template was simple: pick a target, remove their legal protections, and see what happens. Nothing serious happened. So he came back.

Year One of POTUS 47: The Targets Expand Inward

Undocumented Immigrants

On his first day back in office, January 20, 2025, Trump signed executive orders expanding expedited removal nationwide, suspending refugee resettlement, and instructing agencies to detain people to the fullest extent possible. ICE was given permission to raid schools, hospitals, and places of worship. Agents in unmarked vehicles, wearing plainclothes and face coverings, began conducting door-to-door enforcement in immigrant neighborhoods based on what internal documents described as apparent race.

Legal Immigrants and Asylum Seekers

The administration then retroactively made over a million people illegal, including those who had used official government programs like CBP One appointments and Temporary Protected Status. People who had done everything the right way were reclassified as undocumented overnight. In May 2025, with Supreme Court permission, the administration revoked the protected status of 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants in what advocates described as the largest single action stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status in modern U.S. history.

International Students and Foreign Nationals with Political Views

The administration revoked the visas of hundreds, possibly thousands, of international students across dozens of states. Many were arrested, detained, and deported or threatened with deportation not for any crime but because of their political speech, particularly support for Palestinian rights. The First Amendment was treated as a privilege that expired at the border.

U.S. Citizens

This is where the pattern became impossible to dismiss as immigration enforcement. By October 2025, ProPublica had confirmed at least 170 American citizens detained by ICE. The detainees included elected officials, disabled adults, children receiving cancer treatment, Puerto Ricans, and Indigenous people. The deportation of U.S. citizens from the United States is illegal. It happened anyway.

The administration announced plans to strip citizenship from 100 to 200 naturalized Americans per month. The DOJ directed prosecutors to pursue denaturalization cases. An executive order attempted to revoke birthright citizenship from U.S.-born children of immigrants, a right enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment.

Elected Officials and Protesters

Protesting near an ICE operation became grounds for arrest. Accompanying an immigrant to a scheduled court hearing and asking officers to produce a warrant became grounds for arrest. Asking the Secretary of Homeland Security a question became grounds for arrest. These things happened to members of Congress. The message to everyone less powerful was obvious.

The Foreign Wars: Seven Countries and Counting

While the domestic crackdown accelerated, the military campaign abroad expanded at a pace that broke all modern records. Data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project documented 622 air and drone strikes across seven countries in 2025 alone.

Somalia (February 2025 onward)

The U.S. conducted more strikes in Somalia in 2025 than under the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations combined. Both al-Shabaab and ISIS-Somalia remained intact and active by year's end, with al-Shabaab gaining ground and advancing toward the capital.

Yemen and the Houthis (March to May 2025)

Under Operation Rough Rider, Trump ordered more than 1,100 strikes on Houthi positions, spending over a billion dollars in a matter of weeks. Human Rights Watch documented a strike on the Ras Isa port in April that killed more than 80 civilians and called for a war crimes investigation. A ceasefire brokered by Oman ended the campaign in May. By July, the Houthis had resumed attacks on shipping.

Iraq (March 2025)

A U.S. strike in al-Anbar province killed Abdallah Malli Muslih al-Rifai, identified as a senior ISIS commander, in coordination with Iraqi and Kurdish authorities.

Syria (December 2025)

Following an ISIS attack in Palmyra that killed two U.S. soldiers and a translator, the U.S. struck 70 ISIS positions across Syria on December 19. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it a declaration of vengeance.

Nigeria (December 25, 2025)

On Christmas Day, Trump ordered what he called powerful and deadly strikes on alleged ISIS affiliates in northwestern Nigeria's Sokoto State, framed explicitly as protecting Christians. Nigerian officials disputed the characterization. Terrorism experts questioned whether ISIS even operated in the targeted region. Hegseth marked the occasion with: Merry Christmas. More to come.

Latin America and the Caribbean: The Boat Strikes (September 2025 onward)

Beginning in September 2025, the U.S. carried out at least 45 strikes on vessels alleged to be drug trafficking boats in Latin American and Caribbean waters. Monitoring group Airwars documented 151 people killed. The United Nations rejected the legal basis for the strikes, calling them unlawful extrajudicial killings. The Trump administration described drug trafficking as a form of armed attack on the United States.

Venezuela (January 3, 2026)

U.S. Special Forces raided Caracas overnight and abducted President Nicolas Maduro in an operation called Operation Absolute Resolve. At least one U.S. missile struck an apartment building in the port city of Catia La Mar, killing an 80-year-old woman as she slept. Trump described the attack as successful and perfectly executed. Legal experts and lawmakers from both parties called the operation illegal under U.S. and international law. Trump invoked what he called the Donroe Doctrine, a rebranding of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, and declared that American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.

Iran (June 2025 and February 2026)

In June 2025, the U.S. struck Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan during active diplomatic negotiations. In late February 2026, joint U.S.-Israeli strikes were launched in what Trump described as major combat operations aimed at regime change in Tehran. The Iranian Red Crescent documented at least 201 killed in the initial wave. Iran launched a counterattack on the U.S. Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. Trump has already threatened to strike again.

The Countries Threatened But Not Yet Struck

Greenland and Denmark were threatened with military annexation. Denmark's prime minister warned that a U.S. attack on a NATO ally would collapse the entire alliance. Mexico has been threatened repeatedly over cartel activity, with reports that drone strikes inside Mexican territory were seriously considered. Cuba and Colombia were targeted with threats after the Venezuela raid. The list is not shrinking.

The Conclusion the Record Demands

He is not fighting enemies. He is manufacturing them.

Every escalation follows the same logic: identify a target that a portion of the public will not defend, attack them, normalize that attack, then expand the definition of who qualifies as the enemy. Undocumented immigrants became legal immigrants became visa holders became naturalized citizens became U.S.-born citizens became elected officials became protesters became anyone who asked a question. Abroad, terrorist groups became sovereign nations became a NATO ally in Greenland.

The violence is the point, not the means. A leader genuinely focused on security, drug trafficking, or nuclear threats would use diplomacy, law enforcement, and coalition building. Instead, each solution maximizes spectacle, cruelty, and personal political benefit. Deporting children receiving cancer treatment. Bombing a sleeping 80-year-old woman. Striking Iran during active diplomatic negotiations. These are not policy failures. They are features.

He has successfully inverted the law. Following the law now gets you arrested. Breaking it is called strength.

The domestic and foreign violence are the same project: a unified assertion that the executive branch may use lethal force against anyone it designates an enemy, with no court, no Congress, and no international body having the authority to stop it.

The word autocrat is accurate. But what the documented record describes is what historians call the consolidation phase. The dismantling of courts, oversight, civil rights protections, press freedom, and citizenship itself. The use of military force against civilians at home and abroad. The imprisonment of political opponents. The targeting of allies. This is not where authoritarianism peaks. This is where it accelerates.

The fact that large portions of the American public oppose these actions is, in this framework, not a constraint. It is the next problem to be solved.

Consolidation does not stop on its own. It stops when institutions, allies, or the public make the cost of continuing higher than the benefit. That is where history currently sits.

Sources: Al Jazeera, Council on Foreign Relations, Vera Institute of Justice, American Immigration Council, ACLU, ProPublica, Airwars, Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, Wikipedia

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of Claude AI

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

Two Moments That Changed How I See Authority

2026-05-04T06:00:00.001-07:00

There are experiences that don't announce themselves as formative while they're happening. You don't feel the ground shift. You just notice, months or years later, that you are standing somewhere different than you were before -- and you trace it back.

Two things happened to me in the late 1970s at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington that I have written about separately over the years. A book I couldn't finish. A church I couldn't get out of fast enough. I've been thinking lately that they belong together, because they were teaching me the same lesson from opposite directions.

The Book

Picture the young man who would read that memoir.

I was a parachute rigger in the Strategic Air Command, working with B-52 bombers at a nuclear alert base in Spokane, WA. Fairchild AFB. I had a secret security clearance. I also had the longest hair on the base -- kept in something approaching regulation shape by a daily application of Dippity-Do hair gel, worn under my service cap until I got home and showered, mostly to wash off the JP-4 jet exhaust from packing drag chutes all day, partly to get my hair back to something resembling human. That annoyed my friends to no end as they had gotten $50 ticket for hair out of regs and had to -- and this really annoyed them -- pay for the haircut.

To put this in perspective, I got awards for my work in the survival equipment shop, the parachute shop, which came with a three-day pass (not attached to the weekend -- WHY?), I received a Good Conduct medal. I wasn't a rabble rouser, but I questioned authority. At least internally. I got away with a lot. How? I read the manual. Literally. I knew what I could get away with and how far to go. When questioned, I'd state the regs and, I was always right (or I wouldn't do whatever it was).

Think, when higher ups give you grief, and you say, "Fine, I'm packing these chutes 100% by the T.O." Technical Manual, which they knew would take forever. I wasn't a wise guy. I had a sense of humor, I was likeable. I made other people look good. I played the game. I think when I got out of the service, it broke our Shop Sergeant's heart, seriously. He told me he saw me as a son. I miss the guy. But I wasn't staying in. I got out and went to college.

When I turned twenty-one I bought my first legal handgun -- a Walther PPK/S .380, from a department store in Spokane. Great firearm. I'd had a .357 Magnum since I was eighteen, acquired from a friend in circumstances that were not exactly textbook legal (see The Teenage Bodyguard, an award winning screenplay). But the Walther was mine -- properly. The older gentleman in a suit looked at me across the store counter at -- a young guy, hair tool long for regs -- and said he didn't believe I was actually in the service. I showed him my USAF ID with security clearance. He said, "Okay, I believe you. But, how--? He spent a moment marveling at the hair while he completed the paperwork.

That was who picked up Westmoreland's book. Not a naive kid. Not a credentialed analyst. A young man who read the newspaper, watched the evening news, carried a concealed weapon legally, worked with nuclear weapons delivery systems, and had been listening for years to his older brother's friends -- seven years his senior -- who had come back from Vietnam with stories that often bore little resemblance to official accounts.

Not My Lai level atrocities, but close enough to the edges of things to make a person skeptical. The Pentagon Papers had been public for several years by then. I hadn't read them cover to cover, but I had absorbed what they meant: that military leadership had been systematically misrepresenting the war to the American public while privately knowing better.

So, when I picked up General William Westmoreland's memoir when it came out, A Soldier Reports (Doubleday, 1976), I came to it with genuine respect. He was the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968. Whatever you thought of the war, the man had carried an enormous burden. I gave him every benefit of the doubt a young reader could give.

I signed up Vietnam era service. Delayed enlistment until there was a job opening for Law Enforcement. September 1975. That summer the war ended. I got all the war benefits on the G.I. Bill but they eventually recategorized me, Post Vietnam Era.

So I got into Westmorland's book. And for a while, it worked. He wrote with authority and precision. He knew things I didn't. He was, by any measure, a subject matter expert.

But somewhere somewhere around the midway point, something shifted. The book began to construct a world I didn't recognize.

Westmoreland's argument, laid out with great confidence and considerable detail, was essentially this: the military had a sound strategy; the war was winnable; what went wrong was the failure of civilian leadership, the interference of politicians, the distortions of the press, and the damage done by the antiwar movement.

The military, he contended, had been betrayed from within and from without. Victory had been stolen.

I remember the feeling of reading that and thinking: but I was there for this. Not in Vietnam -- but alive, paying attention, reading the news, talking to guys who just came back from there, mostly -- messed up guys. I knew about the body count metrics that Westmoreland had built his entire strategy around, already widely exposed as manipulated and strategically meaningless. I knew that the same Pentagon Papers documenting civilian failures also documented military leadership providing falsely optimistic assessments to Washington while privately knowing the picture was far darker. I knew what those B-52s I worked with had been doing over North Vietnam and Cambodia. I knew the guys who had worked on them other there. I worked with them every day.

Westmoreland wasn't lying in the way a con artist lies. I don't think he was cynical. I think he genuinely believed his version. That was almost scarier. He had taken the enormous complexity of a failed war -- a war with deep strategic contradictions, moral catastrophes, and institutional failures at every level -- and recast it as a story in which he and the military were the heroes, and everyone else was the villain. He hadn't written history.

He had written mythology, dressed in the uniform of history.

I didn't have a word for it then. I do now. It's the stab-in-the-back thesis -- the same narrative structure that German militarists used after World War I, blaming civilian betrayal for military defeat, which fed directly into the conditions that produced Nazism. Applied to Vietnam, it became the founding myth of a certain kind of American right-wing grievance politics that is still very much with us.

What I knew, in my bones, before I had any of that language, was simpler: this doesn't add up, and he's asking me to forget what I already know in order to accept it. I wondered about the leadership above me at the time in the service, who were the same guys who were in Vietnam.

I put the book down.

That was when I discovered a theory. Conspiracy theory. Now when you have a theory of a group doing something unknown openly, and they are doing something bad, it may well be a conspiracy. They happen. Usually, they are uncovered for a variety of reason. One I noticed in the military. It doesn't run perfect, except through a lot of effort and determination. That's doing good things. If those were bad things? Different animal altogether.

THAT'S what the conspiracy theorists of today don't seem to comprehend.

I started studying not the conspiracy itself, but the nature of conspiracy thinking. Rather than diving into Westmoreland's specific claims and trying to refute them one by one -- which is the rabbit hole -- I started asking: how does this kind of argument work? What are the structural features that tell you something has gone from analysis to mythology? My older brother, encountering the same kind of thing, tended to defer to the expert. I went the other direction. Trust but verify. I became interested in the architecture of false certainty.

Also, it explains a lot about how I think. How I later ended up at university getting a psychology degree as what my department advisor professor had said (and I questioned him on this, but he thought about it and said that, yes, he was sure), I was one of the top psychology undergrads at any university in the nation. Damn. I mean, cool.

Anyway, that mental divergence has shaped everything I've written about politics since.

The Church

About a year or two after I set down Westmoreland's book, I was at the base gym as my friend in the shop with me and I did daily. One day racquetball. Next day, weightroom. We'd gotten friendly with the equipment room attendant over borrowing equipment from the gym (don't remember now, what?) -- the usual slow accumulation of gym friendship, guy talk, nothing remarkable. We made one another laugh. He seemed, cool. Normal. Mostly was.

Then one day he asked if I wanted to come to his church. He said I could bring my wife. My friend could come too (he begged off immediately). He also said later, I could bring my gun.

That last part was odd enough that I decided to actually bring it, obviously to carry concealed -- the Walther PPK/S -- which I was legally entitled to do. Something about the invitation had put me on alert without quite articulating why. Go to church -- with a gun. Not the old Slovak Catholic church I had grown up going to, had been head altar boy at.

He picked us up at my house and drove us out of Spokane on a Sunday morning, his wife with him, my wife and me in the back of his, what passed back then for an SUV. We crossed the state line into Idaho. I got nervous and asked about it. He said not to worry -- no concealed carry permit required in Idaho, and where we were going it wouldn't be an issue. Crossing the state line was only peripherally on my mind, why were we leaving the STATE?

But still. I held a secret security clearance. I worked with nuclear weapons delivery systems. I was crossing a state line carrying a weapon, heading to an unknown location. The math on that was not comfortable. Being in the service changes things legally for a military person. Breaking any law with a secret clearance is worse, with nuclear weapons clearance, much worse. he didn't have that. It never occurred to me about that disparity, honestly, until right now -- as I write this.

The compound was in the hills of Idaho. Locked gate. He had to call on a phone out of a box by the gate. Someone came down, unlocked the gate, let us drive and, locked the gate, and followed us up. We saw a traditional church with a steeple. A well in the center of the property. Several men in grey uniforms designed to look just different enough from Nazi uniforms that you technically couldn't call them Nazi uniforms -- except for the salute, which was identical. When I noted the resemblance, they were offended. "We're not Nazis!" (no, neo-Nazis, maybe)

The name of the organization was the Church of Our American Christian Heritage. I'll never forget it. I have since learned to treat any church name containing the words "American" or "Heritage" as a yellow flag. A church that has all the answers is another. I'm reminded of the last episode of The Boys, on Amazon Prime, where head sociopathic superhero Homelander has gone off the deep end and started the "Democratic Church of America." With Homelander himself as head, not as leader, literally as -- God.

But I digress...

Their national leader had come up from Georgia specifically to speak that Sunday. He didn't know my wife and I were there as complete outsiders. Newbies. He didn't filter himself. He let loose -- a full accounting of their beliefs, their grievances, their vision of a purified nation, their contempt for nonwhites, their specific disgust at Vancouver, B.C., which apparently represented for him a kind of living offense against nature and civilization. The old ladies of the congregation were the most virulent true believers in the room.

Let me be clear about Vancouver, British Columbie, Canada. I've been there and Victoria, on Vancouver Island since I was a kid, with my family. I love it there. Love Canada, like a cousin, or a brother even. I was OFFENDED, right off.

My wife spent the entire service sitting close to me, gripping my sleeve hard enough to nearly tear it from the shoulder, occasionally leaning close to whisper urgently: Get us out of here.

I heard my sleeve rip twice by the shoulder seam. Once in church, once as we were headed out of church.

The older woman in the back surrounded us and oh my God, I'd never met old people, anyone that racist. The national leader came up and introduced himself. Big smile. He apologized for cutting loose like that. He was just told we were new.

I smiled and shook his hand and said, "No, I'm glad you did. Good to hear exactly what you believe." I braced myself for his reading my meaning, if not sarcasm. I mean, I was being honest. The next second was interminable. Then he broke into a huge smile (it worked). He had decided he liked us a LOT.

We got out as soon as we could. Services were over. We all made out goodbyes, and my "friend" drove us home. We made small talk along the way, did all we could to keep him and his wife at ease -- he talked about getting together again. He dropped us at home and drove off smiling and waving.

The next day I considered reporting him and his group to the base authorities. They needed to know about this. I told my racquetball friend in the shop that day. He said he'd drop by after work at my house.

When he stopped by that afternoon, he had thought about it. He got me alone and talked to me about what he had come up with. He did his best to talk me out of telling anyone on base anything. I wasn't having it.

Until. He pointed something out, reasonably and chillingly. "They picked you guys up here yesterday morning?" "Yes." "They dropped you off -- here." "Yes." "So Those people know exactly where you both live. And when your wife would be home alone?" "Uh, yeah..."

I never went back to that window at the gym to get equipment. Neither did he. From then on, we brought our own. We never spoke to him again. Not long after, we noticed he wasn't around the gym anymore and we wondered about that, for a very long time.

What They Had In Common

It was a general construction of an alternate history -- of a war. They were a quasi-military white nationalist congregation in the Idaho hills. On the surface, very different things.

But the underlying structure was identical.

Both were communities of people who had taken real grievances -- about the war, about social change, about lost certainty -- and converted them into a sealed explanatory system that could not be falsified. In both cases, the complexity of the actual world had been replaced by a story with clear heroes and villains. In both cases, outside information was not evidence to be weighed -- it was enemy propaganda to be rejected. In both cases, belonging to the group meant accepting the story, and the story protected the group from reality.

The difference was one of degree, not of kind.

Westmoreland's version was respectable, credentialed, published by Doubleday, reviewed in major newspapers. The Idaho congregation's version came with grey uniforms and a compound with a well and a sheriff who wouldn't come onto the property. They passed newsletters about their grievances; there was no internet back then to help a subculture such as they were explode upon the American psyche.

But they were running the same cognitive operating system. Wounded certainty, calcified into mythology, defended against all comers.

I didn't know then that I was watching the seedbed of what would eventually become the American political landscape of the 2010s and 2020s. The stab-in-the-back Vietnam narrative fed directly into a politics of grievance and betrayal that never fully went away. The Christian nationalist militia movements of the inland Northwest were not anomalies -- they were early iterations of something that would eventually find mainstream political expression.

I didn't know at the time about the confederates who after the Civil War had migrated up to the Pacific Northwest and made a new home free of the government for the most part in the east of Oregan, the east of Washington state, and in Idaho. Especially in the back hills, the back roads, the roads less travelled certainly by government officials.

My late older right wing MaGA brother now gone about a month (miss ya big guy, sad as our interactions were this last decade of the Trump infection), had moved years ago to Home, across Puget Sound via the Narrows Bridge, the other side of Highway 16 from Gig Harbor. It's a community on the Key Peninsula and borders the waters of Carr Inlet, an extension of Puget Sound.

He had told me that those citizens who had enough of the "bullshit of Tacoma government" had moved there and called it "Home" because it wasn't Tacoma, it was, home.

What protected me about this kind of mind worm dynamic, I think, was not superior intelligence or education -- I was a young enlisted man without a college degree, smelling of JP-4 jet fuel exhaust by mid-morning after packing B-52 drag chutes, with my longish hair shellacked under my service cap, "white walls" of shaved skin surrounding my ears to put on a good show for the annoying "lifers", but not so much the "career enlisted" (who we differentiated, as they were just trying to get through to retire one day but not thoroughly "ate up" like some old codgers were).

What protected me was a combination of things: a grandmother who taught me that books demanded honesty, and to finish one when you started it; an older brother's friends who told me what Vietnam actually looked like from the ground; a willingness to trust my own perception when it told me something didn't add up; and the crucial decision to study the form of bad thinking rather than just the content of any specific claim.

You cannot fact-check your way out of a mythology. The mythology has already inoculated its believers against facts.

What you can do is recognize the architecture -- the sealed system, the designated enemy, the unfalsifiable narrative, the group that has all the answers -- and decline to enter.

I learned that from a book I couldn't finish and a church I couldn't leave fast enough.

Both were trying to sell me a story in exchange for my grip on reality.

I kept the grip.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

JZ Murdock is a filmmaker and author based in Bremerton, Washington. His novel Death of Heaven was honored with the New York City Big Book Award for Horror. His film Pvt. Ravel's Bolero has been lauded worldwide with many international festival awards. The film companion book is forthcoming.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi.

Level 1 Rights, Level 100 Weapons

2026-04-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

One of the strangest features of the modern gun debate is that we often speak about the Second Amendment as if technology has not changed. It has — radically, irrevocably, and in ways no legislator of 1791 could have anticipated or intended.

The Baseline Was a Level 1 Weapon

When the amendment was ratified, the typical firearm available to a citizen was a flintlock musket or pistol. These weapons shared a very specific profile of limitation:

One shot before reloading — often a 15 to 30 second process
Significant inaccuracy beyond short distances
Black-powder reliability failures in wet or cold conditions
No rapid-fire capability of any kind

If we assign that technology an arbitrary power level of 1, we can at least begin to reason about what has changed since.

Illustrative Power Scale — Civilian Firearms by Era

1791 Flintlock Musket1×

Early Repeating Rifle (1860s)~10×

Modern Semiautomatic Rifle~50×

Anti-Materiel / High-Capacity Systems~100×

* Scale is conceptual and illustrative — not a formal ballistic or legal standard. Intended to frame the scope of technological change.

The Firecracker Analogy

Consider a simpler thought experiment. Imagine the founders had written a law regulating firecrackers. At the time, the most powerful explosive available to the average citizen was roughly equivalent to a small consumer firecracker.

Now imagine someone arguing today that the same law must automatically govern:

M-80s
Military fragmentation grenades
Commercial sticks of dynamite

The reaction would be immediate: the original law was written with a specific technological scale in mind. No rational legislature writes a rule for firecrackers and assumes it must cover dynamite by the same logic.

"The question is not whether the Second Amendment exists. The question is how a constitutional principle written for one technological era should apply to another."

The Founders Were Practical Legislators

The founders were not technological mystics composing abstract principles for a timeless void. They were practical people writing law for a world they understood — and that world already contained meaningful distinctions in destructive scale.

Early American law already regulated:

Gunpowder storage — limits on quantity and location
Cannons — treated differently than personal arms
Militia equipment — specific requirements for service weapons
Weapons in public spaces — locality-based restrictions

Even within the technology of 1791, the founders distinguished between weapons based on scale and danger. There is no principled reason to assume they intended the exact opposite for all future generations.

✦ ✦ ✦

The Constitutional Question Reframed

The Debate We're Having

Guns vs. no guns. Rights vs. regulation. The amendment as a fixed rule written for all future technology.

This framing produces an impasse.

The Debate Worth Having

What level of destructive capability did the founders intend citizens to possess?

If the baseline was Level 1, what principles govern Levels 10, 50, or 100?

Rights are not abolished by technological change — but their application evolves. The First Amendment governs the internet. The Fourth Amendment has been extended to digital privacy and electronic surveillance. Courts reason about changed circumstances constantly.

The Second Amendment need not be treated as uniquely frozen in 1791 amber while every other constitutional principle adapts to the world as it actually exists.

Thought Experiment

Suppose the founders could step into the present. They observe rifles capable of dozens of shots in seconds. Weapons designed to penetrate vehicle armor. Suppressors engineered specifically to reduce detection and response time.

Would they say: "Yes, that is precisely what we intended."

Or would they ask a more practical question: What level of power did we actually mean citizens to have?

The honest answer is almost certainly the second. They were not ideologues. They were engineers of governance.

The Conclusion the Scale Forces

Ignoring technological change produces a legal absurdity: treating radically different tools as if they occupy the same category simply because both involve a projectile and a trigger. By that logic, a firecracker and a stick of dynamite are the same object.

The debate over the Second Amendment is not, at its root, about whether Americans have a right to bear arms. Most people across the political spectrum accept that right in some form.

The real debate — the one worth having — is about technological scale. The founders wrote law for a Level 1 world. Two centuries of invention have produced weapons that may be 10, 50, or 100 times more capable by any meaningful measure.

At some point on that scale, the question stops being about the amendment itself and starts being about what it was always actually about: what degree of lethal power a free society chooses to place in private hands, and by whose judgment that line is drawn.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of Claude AI

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

Confusing a Noun With a Nation: The Tartaria Conspiracy and What a Real Historical Debate Looks Like

2026-04-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

Over the last twenty years, something has shifted in the way people relate to history, institutions, and information itself. The internet democratized access to knowledge in ways that are genuinely remarkable, but it also democratized the production and distribution of misinformation at a scale no one was fully prepared for. Social media algorithms reward engagement over accuracy. Short form video is perfectly engineered for the "look at this shocking thing they don't want you to know" format. And a generation of people who have every reason to distrust institutions, governments, and official narratives have sometimes allowed that healthy skepticism to curdle into something less discerning.

The result is a certain kind of content now making the rounds, and if you spend any time on Substack, TikTok, or YouTube you have probably seen it. It follows a recognizable pattern. An earnest, emotionally burdened narrator describes their lonely journey into forbidden archives. Old documents are cited with great drama. A shadowy network, usually the Freemasons, is implicated in the suppression of some vast, lost civilization. A donation button appears at the bottom.

In full transparency, I am a Freemason and former Senior Warden of my lodge, though I have stepped back from active participation in recent years. Make of that what you will.

Why This Matters Before We Even Begin

Conspiracy theories have always existed. But they used to be contained, passed around in photocopied newsletters or late night radio. Now they have Substack pages, TikTok channels, and monetization strategies. They are packaged with emotional sophistication, genuine archival images, and a narrative structure designed to make the reader feel like a courageous truth-seeker rather than a consumer of a product.

I am not writing this to mock anyone. I am writing this because critical thinking is a skill, and like any skill it atrophies without practice and improves with use. When I encountered the following article recently, I felt compelled to respond not just to the author, but publicly, because the methodology it employs is worth examining carefully. Not the conclusions alone, but the method. Because the same method gets applied to topics far more consequential than old maps.

This is what that looks like, and this is how to think through it.

The Article That Started It

I will not quote the article I encountered, here, nor will I name its author. I have no interest in making anyone a target. What I do have an interest in is the method, because we need critical thinkers posting publicly. We just need those critical thinkers to think critically and appropriately. That is the only fair way to do this.

My First Response

I posted the following comment:

The emotional framing here is doing a lot of heavy lifting for very thin evidence. Every document cited is real, but none of them say what the author claims.

"Tartaria" was a standard European geographic label for Central Asian and Mongolic peoples for several centuries. It appears on old maps and in old books for the same reason "Christendom" does: it was the vocabulary of the era, not proof of an erased superpower. The 1865 Freemasons' Magazine reference to overthrowing "the Tartars" describes anti-Qing sentiment in China. The Manchu Qing dynasty literally were the Tartars in question, and their history is extensively documented and widely taught. The "General History of China" passages about Tartarian kings and dual-language seals describe the Qing conquest of China in 1644, one of the most well-documented political transitions in Asian history. The theater production was a popular adventure romance using exotic settings, the same way Hollywood westerns use "the frontier." None of this is hidden. All of it is in open, searchable archives.

The rhetorical trick throughout is: word appears in old document, therefore civilization was erased. That's a non-sequitur wrapped in grief-lit prose designed to make you feel like a courageous truth-seeker. Notice it ends with a donation button.

Actual suppressed history exists and deserves serious investigation. This isn't it.

His Response: Find Me a Book

The author replied:

"If you say so… In future friend, if you want to discredit or prove me wrong, then do that. All you've voiced is your opinion, without any evidence; so why don't you find me a book, published before the 19th century that corroborates your claim. You won't find one, because I've looked… but I challenge you to prove me wrong. I would love you to prove me wrong… So yes, find me that book!"

This is a recognizable debate move worth naming clearly. He dismissed the entire substance of my response as "just opinion," then issued a challenge that shifted the burden of proof onto me while ignoring that I had been addressing his own cited sources. He also moved the goalposts: we were discussing specific documents he had cited. Now I needed to produce different documents entirely.

Still, the challenge was fair enough to meet directly. I replied:

I want to be clear that I had no intention of being dismissive or abrasive, and if it came across that way I apologize. That genuinely wasn't my goal.

I also want to address your challenge fairly, because it deserves a direct answer rather than a dodge. Jean-Baptiste Du Halde's Description of the Empire of China, published in 1735, covers the Manchu Qing dynasty in exhaustive detail, the very people your sources call "Tartars," as a historically continuous, well-documented civilization whose conquest of China in 1644 left an enormous paper trail across both European and Chinese scholarship alike. That's well before the 19th century.

As for the claim that my response was opinion without evidence: I addressed your own cited documents in their historical context. The General History of China and the Freemasons' Magazine passages you highlighted describe the Qing conquest and administration, events that mainstream history has never erased or hidden. Engaging directly with your sources isn't opinion, it's the most honest form of response I could offer.

I'll leave it there. No hard feelings either way.

His Response

He came back with something more substantive. He had pulled up Du Halde's General History of China on archive.org and run two word searches: one for "Tartar," which returned 20 results, and one for "Qing," which returned 0.

His argument, reproduced in full:

"Brother I'm of the opinion that if they meant Qing, they'd have written Qing… And Jean Baptiste Du Halde describes the Tartars in detail? Have you read the book you quote because I have friend… Have you any pages to back up your claim that he called them Qing? From his own period works please. I'm sorry to be blunt brother but we have to be honest; it says Tartars and not Qing, if it meant Qing, it would say that and not Tartars. We need to get past 'it says Tartars but they didn't mean that' because how do you know? It seems more illogical to assume thousands of authors, travellers, geographers, historians all got it wrong, and us, in the modern era are the only people to get history right. It's bonkers really…"

This is actually the strongest version of the argument and it deserves a serious answer.

What the Search Result Actually Proves

Here is what his own search demonstrates, and why it confirms the mainstream historical account rather than undermining it.

"Qing" was the dynastic name, the political designation for the state and imperial house. "Tartar" and "Manchu" were the ethnic labels European writers consistently used for that same ruling class throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Du Halde using "Tartar" in abundance and "Qing" rarely is exactly what any historian would expect from a Jesuit scholar writing for a European audience in 1735.

Consider a parallel: a European writer of the same period describing England might write extensively about "the English" and "the Protestant crown" without once using the term "House of Hanover." That doesn't mean the House of Hanover didn't exist or was erased. It means the writer used ethnic and cultural descriptors rather than dynastic nomenclature, which was standard practice of the era.

The Manchu ruling class renamed themselves from Jurchen to Manchu in 1635. To European writers, "Tartar" remained the established catch-all for the peoples of Central and Northern Asia, connecting readers to the existing European conceptual framework built around the legacy of Genghis Khan. "Manchu" was the more technically precise term that Jesuit missionaries in Beijing were beginning to learn through direct contact. "Qing" was the dynastic name for official state and political contexts. All three referred to the same people from different angles: one ethnic and general, one ethnic and specific, one political and dynastic.

If anything, a manuscript from 1735 using "Qing" as its primary descriptor for the people rather than the state would raise authenticity questions among historians, not settle them. It simply would not match the established vocabulary of the Jesuit missions of that period.

I've run into similar terminological confusion myself in reading history going back two thousand years, and my son, an independent researcher who works at the intersection of philosophy, physics, and historical inquiry, has encountered it going even further back, into the Sumerians, the Ubaid culture that preceded them, and as far back as Göbekli Tepe, circa 9500 BCE. I've helped him with some of that work. Terminology, labeling, and what names meant to the people using them versus what they mean to us now is a consistent challenge across all of recorded history. It is not evidence of erasure. It is the nature of language across time.

My final reply in the thread:

That search result actually confirms the point rather than countering it. "Qing" was the dynastic name, the political designation for the state and imperial house. "Tartar" was the ethnic label European writers consistently used for that same ruling class throughout the period. Right? Du Halde using "Tartar" in abundance and "Qing" rarely is exactly what any historian would expect from a Jesuit scholar writing for a European audience in 1735. I've run into similar issues and confusion in reading history going back 2000 years or so, and my son is an independent researcher who works even further back than that, into the Sumerians and the Ubaid culture that preceded them, going as far back as Göbekli Tepe around 9500 BCE. I've helped him with some of that work. Terminology, labeling, and what names meant to the people using them versus what they mean to us now is a consistent challenge across all of it. If anything, a manuscript from that era using "Qing" as its primary descriptor would raise authenticity questions, not settle them. The terminology differed by context, not by the people being described. Which brings us back to where we started: nothing was erased. The history is extensive, consistent, and hiding in plain sight under the vocabulary of its own era. What looks like a hidden secret on an old map is really just an old dictionary. "Tartar" is the ethnic label, "Qing" is the political name, one describes a people, the other a government. The conspiracy theory survives entirely by confusing a noun with a nation. But it does make for fun. For some. Not so much for others.

What This Exchange Illustrates

I want to be clear about something before closing. The author of the original piece is not stupid, and his readers are not stupid. The emotional architecture of this kind of content is sophisticated, and it targets something real: a genuine hunger to understand history more fully, a healthy skepticism toward official narratives, and a desire to feel like a participant in something meaningful.

Those instincts are not wrong. History is genuinely full of erasures, suppressions, and inconvenient truths that took decades or centuries to surface. The history of colonized peoples, of women, of the working class: these are all areas where the official record was curated by people with power and interests. Skepticism is healthy. It is the foundation of good historical inquiry.

The problem with the Tartaria theory is not that it asks questions. It is that it mistakes vocabulary for evidence. It sees the word "Tartar" on an old map and leaps to a coordinated global conspiracy rather than the far simpler and demonstrably accurate explanation: that this was the word people used at the time for a real and well-documented group of people whose history is sitting in plain sight in any decent library.

The rhetorical method employed in the original article is also worth examining on its own terms, independent of Tartaria specifically, because it appears across many conspiracy theories of the past two decades:

The burden of feeling. The opening section is not an argument. It is an emotional landscape designed to establish the narrator as a suffering truth-seeker. Once you have sympathy for the narrator, you are more likely to accept their conclusions.

The appeal to real documents. Every source cited is real. This is important. It is far more persuasive than fabricated sources, and it creates the impression of rigorous research. But citing a real document is not the same as reading it correctly.

The non-sequitur as argument. The central logical move throughout is: this word appears in an old document, therefore a civilization was erased. That is not a conclusion that follows from the evidence. It is an assumption smuggled in as a conclusion.

The goalpost shift. When challenged directly on specific documents, the response was to demand a different document entirely, then frame the inability to instantly produce it as proof of the original claim.

The monetization layer. The piece ends with a donation request. This does not make the author dishonest, but it is worth noting that the emotional investment the reader has been encouraged to feel is also financially useful to the author.

None of this means the author is acting in bad faith. It is entirely possible to believe deeply in something and still employ these methods without recognizing them as methods at all. But recognizing these patterns is essential to navigating the information environment we now live in.

The Qing dynasty ruled China from 1644 to 1912. Their history is one of the most extensively documented in human civilization. Nothing was erased. The record is enormous, consistent, and hiding in plain sight under the vocabulary of its own era.

That is not a conspiracy. That is just history being history.

And as I said in the thread: it does make for fun. For some. Not so much for others.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of Claude AI

Massive Apologies. I just realized this link above in previous

blog articles had a broken link in it. That has been rectified.

Also, that I have changed from ChatGPT to Claude.

I use ChatGPT (at times also, Copilot)

more like a glorified Google search.

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The Code He Runs On: Understanding Donald Trump in April 2026

2026-04-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

Start with a thought experiment. Imagine a person who operates by a fixed internal code -- not a moral one, but a functional one. Every decision runs through the same processor.

The code looks roughly like this:

I must dominate, not relate. Image overrides reality. I am entitled to special treatment. Criticism is an attack. Empathy is optional and strategic. Loyalty is one-way. Power is proof of worth. Ends justify the means. I don't lose -- I reinterpret. People are interchangeable.

That's the behavioral profile of what psychologists call a malignant narcissist. It's not a partisan label. It's a clinical pattern -- a way of organizing the world that prioritizes the self above every other variable, including truth, law, or the welfare of others. The person running that code isn't confused or hypocritical. They're consistent. You just have to understand what they're actually optimizing for.

Now apply it to the 47th President of the United States.

Trump said he posted it. He's a doctor in the image.

Apparently, Iran has been busy countering Trump memes.

To sum up, he's only either a malignant narcissist, or senile. Choose.

What the Record Actually Shows

Here's where a certain kind of media caution becomes its own form of distortion. ChatGPT, to use a recent example, will walk you through Trump's behavioral pattern with reasonable accuracy and then suddenly slam on the brakes at the conclusion -- retreating into "both sides interpret this differently" language at precisely the moment when the evidence stops being ambiguous.

That's not analysis. That's liability management dressed as objectivity.

So let's be direct about what the documented record shows.

The image building up to Trump seeing himself as Christ.

Trump's response to criticism is not occasional sensitivity. It is a defining, repeatable feature. Journalists, judges, generals, members of his own cabinet, governors of his own party -- the pattern is identical every time. Public attack, personalized targeting, escalation. The specifics change. The structure never does.

His emphasis on image over reality is not spin. It is the operating system. Crowd sizes. Ratings. Poll numbers. The 2020 election. In each case, observable reality became negotiable when it conflicted with the preferred narrative. This isn't political calculation -- politicians calculate. This is something more compulsive, more reflexive.

The loyalty architecture is one-way by design and always has been. High turnover among senior officials, invariably followed by public denunciation of people who were recently described as exceptional. The pattern holds across both terms, across decades of business relationships, across every context. Loyalty flows toward him. Reciprocity is not part of the structure.

And the ends-justify-the-means operating principle has moved from rhetorical style into direct institutional action. The Justice Department staffed with personal loyalists. Inspector general offices dismantled. Court orders defied. The removal of DOJ employees who had built cases against Trump, replaced with political appointees, is a concrete example of the executive branch being restructured to serve personal protection rather than institutional function. Democratic Erosion

April 2026: The Trajectory Isn't Ambiguous

The question isn't whether these traits exist. The question in April 2026 is what happens when a person running this code holds unchecked executive power and perceives that power as beginning to slip.

The answer, consistent with the behavioral pattern, is escalation.

A survey of more than 500 political scientists found the vast majority believe the United States is moving swiftly from liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism. After Trump's election in November 2024, scholars rated American democracy at 67 on a scale from zero to 100. Within weeks of the second term beginning, that figure dropped to 55 -- the largest single drop since tracking began in 2017. NPR

Steven Levitsky, co-author of "How Democracies Die" and one of the world's leading scholars on democratic collapse, assessed the first months of Trump's second administration as "the most aggressively and openly authoritarian case of democratic backsliding" he had ever seen. World Centric

These are not cable news opinions. These are researchers who have spent careers studying how democracies fail, applying their frameworks to current events and reaching conclusions they find alarming.

Political scientist Daniel Stockemer, writing in the journal Politics and Policy, described Trump's attacks on law firms, universities, and immigrants as a "more incremental form of democratic erosion" that tracks a six-step theory of autocratization drawn from comparative research -- including Venezuela's collapse under Chavez. Scientific American The United States, by his assessment, has already cleared the first three steps.

A detailed analysis from Just Security documented how the Trump administration's pattern of actions -- spreading false election narratives, installing loyalists who act on those narratives, rewriting rules and weaponizing the executive branch -- mirrors election-takeover strategies observed in countries that underwent democratic backsliding, replicated here step by step rather than in a single dramatic move. Just Security

Why "Competitive Authoritarian" Is the Right Frame -- and Why It Doesn't Make It Less Serious

The precise term from democratic erosion research is "competitive authoritarian" -- a system where elections still occur but the playing field has been systematically tilted before a vote is cast. The person running the code doesn't need to cancel elections to win them. They need to control who counts, who certifies, who gets prosecuted, and who gets scared into silence.

As political scientists Levitsky and Way write, in competitive authoritarian regimes elections are held, but the authoritarian uses power gained democratically to break democratic norms, undermine democratic institutions, and tilt the playing field in their own favor. The Conversation

What the malignant narcissist code adds to that political science framework is a psychological dimension that explains the acceleration. Most political actors, even opportunistic ones, have some internal governor -- some sense of how far is too far, some awareness of how they appear to history. The person running the narcissist code doesn't have that governor. Image matters more than reality, which means the appearance of legitimacy matters -- but only as a tool. The moment an institution stops serving the self, the institution becomes the enemy.

Harvard's Steven Levitsky put it plainly: "We've slid into some form of authoritarianism. It is relatively mild compared to some others. It is certainly reversible -- but we are no longer living in a liberal democracy." NPR

Note the word "reversible." That's the honest version of hope available right now. Not "it's fine" and not "it's over." It's: the machinery of democratic recovery still exists, but the window for using it is not indefinite.

The Devolving Part

What does "devolving as a leader" look like when the leader in question is running the malignant narcissist code?

It looks like this: as external resistance increases -- courts pushing back, allies breaking ranks, poll numbers moving, the war grinding -- the code doesn't adapt. It escalates. The targets multiply. The attacks get more personal and less calibrated. The gap between the internal narrative ("I'm winning, I'm always winning") and observable reality grows wider. The machinery required to maintain that gap gets more expensive and more aggressive.

Levitsky has noted an early sign of authoritarian regime fragility: "Republicans, for the first time in several years, are beginning to say no to Trump and to stand up to Trump. This is how authoritarian regimes die -- they die because they split; they fragment internally." Harvard Kennedy School

That's the devolution in real time. Not a sudden collapse, but an increasingly strained effort to hold a narrative together against a reality that keeps asserting itself. The code doesn't have a module for graceful retreat. It only has escalation, reinterpretation, and the identification of new enemies.

The Bottom Line

ChatGPT will tell you the evidence is ambiguous and that both sides interpret these behaviors differently. That framing is itself a choice -- one that treats false balance as neutrality and calls it rigor.

The behavioral record is not ambiguous. The scholarly consensus on what that record represents is not ambiguous. The trajectory into spring 2026 is not ambiguous.

What you're watching is a person running a fixed internal code -- one that cannot process accountability, cannot accept loss, cannot tolerate any power that doesn't serve the self -- operating at the apex of the most powerful executive office in the world, with the institutional brakes progressively loosened.

The code was always the same. The difference now is how much runway it has.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Corporate Thought: The Ideology That Ate Everything

2026-04-13T06:00:00.000-07:00

Here’s a clean, publish-ready blog you can drop straight onto your site or Substack. It’s written as an essay, not a rant—meant to name the thing clearly and leave readers unsettled rather than shouted at.

Corporate Thought: The Ideology That Ate Everything

Decades ago, I started using a phrase that felt obvious but slightly out of step with the language of the time: corporate thought.

I didn’t mean “corporations are bad.” I meant something more insidious: a mode of thinking—a way of processing reality—that treats human systems as if they were balance sheets, people as if they were assets, and morality as if it were a liability.

Back then, it mostly lived where you’d expect: boardrooms, management culture, shareholder reports. Today, it’s everywhere.

Schools.
Government.
Religion.
Media.
Politics.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

What Corporate Thought Is (and Isn’t)

Corporate thought is not capitalism. Capitalism can coexist with ethics, creativity, and human judgment.

Corporate thought is capitalism stripped of conscience and inflated into a worldview.

Its traits are consistent:

Outcomes matter only if they reinforce power
Process matters more than purpose
Compliance matters more than competence
Punishment matters more than effectiveness
Winning matters more than legitimacy

It is obsessed with control, not results—though it will insist those are the same thing.

The Ritual Over the Result

A perfect illustration appears in Breaking Bad.

In the show, a subordinate is told to eliminate a rival. The actual objective is simple: remove leverage, maintain control, keep the operation stable.

But corporate thought doesn’t care about the objective. It cares about the ritual.

If the ritual isn’t performed exactly as demanded—even if the result is better—the subordinate must be punished. Not because the system is safer, but because hierarchy must be enforced.

This is the same logic that fires competent employees for breaking arbitrary rules, that fails students for questioning bad curricula, that destroys institutions while insisting it is “maintaining standards.”

Corporate thought would rather waste value than tolerate autonomy.

How It Spread

Corporate thought escaped the corporate world because it offered something seductive:

Simplicity in complex systems
Authority without accountability
Metrics without meaning
Certainty without wisdom

Once normalized, it colonized everything.

Education stopped being about learning and became about outputs.
Government stopped being about service and became about enforcement.
Religion stopped being about humility and became about identity policing.

Everywhere it went, it replaced judgment with procedure and humanity with compliance.

Why It Thrives in Politics Today

Corporate thought thrives where fear is useful.

It teaches people that cruelty is efficiency, that flexibility is weakness, and that any deviation from prescribed behavior is a threat. It reframes domination as “strength” and empathy as “softness.”

This is why contradiction no longer disqualifies leaders who operate under this mindset. Truth isn’t the metric. Loyalty is.

Failure doesn’t matter. Harm doesn’t matter. Only control matters.

Once a political movement adopts corporate thought, it stops governing and starts managing populations.

The Core Lie

The deepest lie of corporate thought is that it is rational.

It isn’t.

It is emotional, brittle, and afraid of losing dominance. It cannot adapt because adaptation implies shared agency. It cannot compromise because compromise implies equality. It cannot learn because learning requires humility.

It is not strength.
It is insecurity given institutional power.

Why Naming It Matters

When something feels omnipresent and unnamed, it feels inevitable.

That’s why I still use the term corporate thought.

Because once you name it, you can challenge it—not with slogans, but with clarity.

Corporate thought is not realism.
It is not order.
It is not efficiency.

It is a pathology that mistakes control for intelligence and obedience for success.

And the more spaces it invades, the more urgently we need to remember something simple:

Human systems are not spreadsheets.
People are not assets.
And any ideology that requires wasting lives to preserve hierarchy is already broken.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

When Moral Authority Dissolves

2026-04-06T12:00:00.000-07:00

Look at Trump's recent Iran post! THIS, was presidential?

Just really look at it:

"Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"

A sitting president threatening to destroy civilian infrastructure -- power plants, bridges -- in a sovereign nation, signing off with an Islamic devotional phrase as mockery or punchline, apparently unable to distinguish between the two. This is what moral collapse looks like when it goes fully public. Eighty words. No filter. No advisor willing or able to stop it. No institution with the standing to say: this is wrong.

How sad is it that to find moral leadership today -- in government, in the military, in corporate life -- one has to turn to religion? And how much sadder still when religion itself has been so thoroughly weaponized that even that refuge is compromised?

This administration did not invent the hollowing out of American institutions. But it has accelerated it past any previous threshold. What we are watching is kakistocracy -- rule by the least competent and least principled -- fused with plutocracy, the whole apparatus running on the fuel of toxic capitalism, where every decision, including war, is ultimately a business calculation dressed in apocalyptic costume. Throw in the technocrats who believe systems can be optimized without ethics, and you have the full picture: power without wisdom, force without conscience, religion without faith.

The Strait of Hormuz is about oil and shipping and global capital flows. The moral framing of this conflict -- whatever scraps of it exist -- is performance. The actual drivers are leverage and money and the interests of people who will not be anywhere near the explosions. "Praise be to Allah" is not diplomacy, not faith, not even coherent provocation. It is a man coming apart in public, with the launch codes nearby. That is the situation stated plainly.

And the institutions that should be able to say stop? Congress has abdicated. The cabinet is captured. The Joint Chiefs are navigating a minefield of loyalty tests. The press is managing access. So moral authority, when it surfaces at all, comes from the margins -- retired generals writing open letters, some clergy, some academics, the occasional senator willing to lose a primary over it. People drawing on frameworks that predate this administration and will, one hopes, outlast it.

The military's written code is largely secular -- the UCMJ, the officer's oath. But its moral culture runs deeper than its paperwork. When officers push back, they speak in language that sounds almost devotional: duty, honor, oath, service. It is not religion exactly, but it is the same impulse -- an appeal to something that transcends the moment and the man currently occupying the office.

That is what we are left searching for. Not a pastor, not a general, not a party. Something that holds when everything built to hold it has been deliberately dismantled.

The darker question underneath all of this: what does it say about secular democratic institutions that they have become so hollowed out that pre-Enlightenment frameworks are now doing more ethical heavy lifting than the entire apparatus of the American government?

"Praise be to Allah."

Trump thought that was funny. Or threatening. Or both. He cannot tell the difference anymore. Neither, it seems, can the people around him.

Watch out for what this petty little autocrat pulls next on Tuesday.

We can make America great again...just not with this mob boss style leadership.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Regarding Intent and the Language of Film

2026-04-06T06:00:00.000-07:00

There's a shot opening a scene in Better Call Saul—something natural is suspended improbably outside a suburban home from a tree, or the house roof edge, by what appears to be a single spider thread—and that raises a familiar question:

Was this intentional symbolism, or was it simply there?

Bedford Falls, the "idyllic" town of It's A Wonderful Life - Frank Capra

Did Vince Gilligan and his team design it as metaphor—fragility, entrapment, inevitability—or did the crew arrive, notice it, and say “That’s interesting. Roll camera.”

This distinction matters less than people think—and more than they realize.

Intent vs. Inclusion

In production reality, not everything is designed. Weather intrudes. Light shifts. Props misbehave. Nature does what nature does. Crews are pragmatic.

The key question is not “Was this planned?”
It is:

Once noticed, was it used?

Film language is not authored solely at the script level. It emerges from selection. The camera does not merely record; it chooses. And once something is chosen—framed, lit, held—it enters the grammar of the film whether or not it was storyboarded months earlier.

A happy accident does not remain an accident once it survives editorial judgment.

The Fallacy of Over-Reading (and Why It Persists)

Audiences—and critics—love intentionality. We want symbols to be deliberate because it reassures us that meaning is controlled.

But cinema history is full of examples where meaning was retroactively assigned to what were, frankly, accidents.

It's a Wonderful Life is a classic case. For decades, viewers and critics have decoded moments—lighting glitches, performance tics, background actions—as deeply symbolic or thematic, when production records show they were unplanned, sometimes even technical mistakes.

Yet here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Once the film is locked and released, the accident no longer belongs to production—it belongs to interpretation.

Meaning is not revoked because it wasn’t intended.

The Filmmaker’s Real Skill: Assimilation

This is where your contention lands squarely on solid ground:

A filmmaker uses all he can.

The question on set is rarely “Should we stop and reset?”
It’s “Does this serve the moment?”

If the answer is yes, then assimilation—not correction—is the mark of craft.

This is not sloppiness. It is responsiveness.

Cinema is not architecture; it is closer to navigation.

Auteur Theory, Properly Understood

If we invoke auteur theory, we should do so carefully.

François Truffaut argued that the director’s authorship is visible not in total control, but in consistent judgment. Taste. Selection. Recurrence.

Likewise, in the Alfred Hitchcock sense of authorship, control mattered—but even Hitchcock was pragmatic. He used what worked. He did not discard a compelling image because fate placed it there instead of the storyboard.

Auteurism is not about omniscience.
It’s about what survives the cut.

If the spider-thread image remains, it is because it passed through multiple filters:

the director’s eye
the editor’s rhythm
the showrunner’s sense of tone
the network’s acceptance

At that point, arguing whether it was “meant” is almost irrelevant.

The Final, Unavoidable Truth

Once a film is released:

Everything in the frame becomes part of the language of that film.

Not the language of intention.
The language of cinema.

Interpretation is not invalidated by accident. Meaning does not require permission from the filmmaker’s original plan.

Cinema is a composed art—but it is also an adaptive one.

And the most honest filmmakers know when to stop fighting reality and let reality speak in their voice.

That, arguably, is authorship.

But, what are some of those situations that made it into film lore?

The streetlight / sign bulb in It’s a Wonderful Life

It's a Wonderful Life is one of the most frequently referenced cases in film studies where an accident became part of the film’s language.

What happened

During the scene where George Bailey runs through Bedford Falls after realizing his life mattered, a street sign or light fixture malfunctions—its bulb pops or goes dark at a key emotional moment.

For decades, viewers and critics interpreted this as symbolic punctuation:

the darkness before renewal
the town “waking up”
the world responding to George’s emotional state

The reality

By production accounts, it was not scripted. It was a technical hiccup—an electrical failure or bulb issue on set.

Frank Capra did not stop the scene. He kept rolling.

And that decision is the whole point of your argument.

Once Capra accepted it—once it stayed in the cut—it ceased to be an accident and became cinematic language.

Other famous “happy accidents” that became film grammar

These are often taught alongside It’s a Wonderful Life in film schools because they reinforce the same principle you’re articulating.

Casablanca – the foggy airport

Casablanca

The heavy fog in the final scene wasn’t symbolic design. It was used to:

hide the fact that the plane was a miniature
mask a limited set

Yet audiences read it as:

moral ambiguity
emotional uncertainty
the liminal space between love and duty

Accident → necessity → meaning.

Jaws – the shark that didn’t work

Jaws

The mechanical shark failed constantly. Spielberg was forced to not show it.

That limitation—purely technical—created:

suspense
dread
restraint

What began as malfunction became the defining language of the film.

Apocalypse Now – real chaos on set

Apocalypse Now

Weather, illness, breakdowns, even real military hardware drifting into shots—all unintended.

Francis Ford Coppola absorbed reality instead of controlling it, and the film’s instability became its thematic spine.

There's another side to this.

Problems on set that become part of the film. That may even alter the script. I had things happen on set while filming a production that greatly altered the film. The interesting thing about it is, 1) I'm very good at turning mistakes into wins on set with little time to think about it, and, 2) doing it in a way that enhances the film rather than detracts from it.

Any creative and skilled director can see that you take disasters and make them successes for the film. When they happen on set, your heart stops, fear may even crawl over you, but only for a moment until you realize that you have to act. People are waiting on you to complete the shot or the scene. And so... you ACT.

Once you realize your set has been derailed and you have to do something to alter the preplanned course, you calm down. As you search for an answer, you start to see solutions. Then how those solutions pan out for the rest of the film, or what you've previously shot. Once you see a potential path to take, then? It kind of gets exciting.

I've seen actors on set see the disaster, and the moment became rather glum. Disappointment on faces, considerations of their character's path, the rest of the day's shoot, when the shooting for the day may end.

As director you cannot let on that you are indeed, panicked. But once you have a path to follow, you start to get energized and you let that show. The crew and actors see that and they become energized. When you explain what to do, you can see them either get worried or see the possibilities you see. If they are creative and good at their jobs, they will see what you're saying (sooner or later).

You want your actors and crew to leave for the day energized, ready for tomorrow.

But the thing is? Those changes, those fixed, are now part of the film's direction, its statement, and becomes a part of film lore. No matter how small a production it may be.

Cinema is not weakened by accident.
It is defined by what the filmmaker allows to survive the accident.

Auteurship is not omnipotence. It is judgment—especially when reality intrudes. Discredited or not, that distinction still holds.

Other famous “happy accidents” that became film grammar

These are often taught alongside It’s a Wonderful Life in film schools because they reinforce the same principle you’re articulating.

Casablanca – the foggy airport

Casablanca

The heavy fog in the final scene wasn’t symbolic design. It was used to:

hide the fact that the plane was a miniature
mask a limited set

Yet audiences read it as:

moral ambiguity
emotional uncertainty
the liminal space between love and duty

Accident → necessity → meaning.

Jaws – the shark that didn’t work

Jaws

The mechanical shark failed constantly. Spielberg was forced to not show it.

That limitation—purely technical—created:

suspense
dread
restraint

What began as malfunction became the defining language of the film.

Apocalypse Now – real chaos on set

Apocalypse Now

Weather, illness, breakdowns, even real military hardware drifting into shots—all unintended.

Francis Ford Coppola absorbed reality instead of controlling it, and the film’s instability became its thematic spine.

Why It’s a Wonderful Life is the best example for your essay

Because it defeats the common audience assumption that:

“Meaning only exists if it was planned.”

Your contention is stronger:

Meaning exists because the filmmaker chose not to reject what reality offered.

Capra didn’t reshoot.
He didn’t “fix” it.
He used it—even if only by allowing it to remain.

That is authorship by assimilation, not domination.

And that...is the world and the language of film.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Tonight's Advance Copy of 1st Fool "Pres." Trump's April's Fool's Address.

2026-04-01T07:30:00.000-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 1, 2026 · murdockinations.com

TONIGHT'S IRAN ADDRESS,
Pre-Annotated

He hasn't given it yet. We already know what he'll say.
A public service for a nation that deserves better.

By JZ Murdock · April Fools Edition

HOW TO READ THIS Each passage from Trump's March 11 Iran briefing is followed by the rhetorical tactic in use — because tonight's speech will run the same playbook. The speech changes. The moves never do.

REALITY MANUFACTURE NUMERICAL HALLUCINATION VICTORY LAP (PRE-EMPTIVE) THREAT INFLATION SELF-CONGRATULATION LOOP BLAME DISPLACEMENT CONVENIENT IGNORANCE VAGUENESS AS STRATEGY TIMELINE SHAPESHIFTING THE COMPLIMENT PIVOT

Opening Salvo

"Over the past nine days, we've carried out some of the most powerful and complex military strikes and maneuvers the world has ever seen... Every place we've gone, we've had tremendous success."

VICTORY LAP (PRE-EMPTIVE)

The war isn't over. The Strait is still closed. Fuel prices are at a five-year high. But we've already won — tremendously, historically, possibly cosmically. Tonight's version will update the adjectives and keep the structure identical.

The Numbers

"Most of Iran's naval power has been sunk. It's in the bottom of the sea. It's almost 50 ships. I was just notified it's 51 ships. I didn't know they had that many..."

NUMERICAL HALLUCINATION

The number changes mid-sentence, live, in real time — and this is presented as charming spontaneity rather than a man making up figures on the fly. Tonight expect a new, rounder, more impressive number. Possibly ships that didn't previously exist in any naval registry.

The Scorecard

"We've struck over 5,000 targets to date... resulting in a 90% decline in various things, but in particular, Iranian missile launchers and 83% drop in drone launchers."

NUMERICAL HALLUCINATION

"Various things" is doing the hardest work of any phrase in this briefing. The numbers are precise — 90%, 83% — but what they measure is left comfortably undefined. Tonight's version will have new percentages, similarly unverifiable, similarly confident.

"We could take them all out in one day." — A man who has been saying this for several days.

The Timeline Promise

"We're ahead of our initial timeline by a lot. I would say that we probably would not have thought after a month we'd be here..."

TIMELINE SHAPESHIFTING

The initial timeline for this war was "four days." Then three weeks. Then "very soon." Tonight: "two to three weeks," which is what he said yesterday, and the week before. The timeline is not a schedule. It is a weather vane that always points toward optimism.

The Technology Digression

"The laser technology that we have now is incredible. It's coming out pretty soon, where literally, lasers will do the work of... the patriots are doing."

VAGUENESS AS STRATEGY

"Pretty soon" is the temporal equivalent of "various things." The laser exists. It is coming. It will be incredible. No further details are available or necessary. Tonight's speech will contain at least one technology that is "incredible" and arriving "pretty soon."

The Nuclear Certainty

"They would have had a nuclear weapon within two weeks to four weeks. And they would have used it long before this press conference. And we might've had a much different press conference if we had a press conference at all."

REALITY MANUFACTURE

A nuclear weapon that was two-to-four weeks away — always, perpetually, regardless of when you're measuring — that would have definitely been used, against a press conference specifically. Tonight's existential threat will arrive on a similarly convenient schedule.

The Neighbors Pivot

"They attacked their neighbors, and their neighbors were largely neutral... and it had the reverse effect. The neighbors came onto our side."

SELF-CONGRATULATION LOOP

Iran's strategic blunder is being credited, indirectly, to Trump's presence in the room. The neighbors didn't join because Iran made a catastrophic miscalculation. They joined because Trump was there. Causality bends in his direction. It always does.

The Escalade Clause

"I will not allow a terrorist regime to hold the world hostage... if Iran does anything to do that, they'll get hit at a much, much harder level... They better not play that game."

THREAT INFLATION

There are already threats on the table — power plants, desalination facilities, civilian infrastructure. The threat that exists above those threats is not described. It is felt. Tonight's escalation threat will be larger, vaguer, and more certain to never be named directly.

The School Bombing Question

"I think it's something that I was told is under investigation, but Tomahawks are used by others, as you know. Numerous other nations have Tomahawks."

CONVENIENT IGNORANCE

The president of the United States, commander of the military that fired the missile, does not know whether his missile destroyed a girls' school — but helpfully notes that other people also own missiles. Iran, specifically. Just so you know. Could've been them. Being investigated. Moving on.

The Putin Call

"I had a very good call with President Putin... he wants to be helpful. I said, 'You could be more helpful by getting the Ukraine-Russia war over with.' But we had a very good talk and he wants to be very constructive."

THE COMPLIMENT PIVOT

Putin wants to be helpful. Trump told him how to be more helpful. Putin listened. The constructiveness is bipartisan. Tonight, if Putin comes up, he will want things that are good and be told things that are helpful, and the call will have gone very well.

The Sleeper Cell Question

"The biggest problem we have is the Democrat shutdown. We know a lot about them, but the shutdown doesn't allow us to do what we have to do."

BLAME DISPLACEMENT

A reporter asked about Iranian sleeper cells inside the United States. The answer is: Democrats. Iran has sleeper cells, we're tracking them, but what's really dangerous here is Chuck Schumer. Tonight, anything that isn't going well will also turn out to be the Democrat shutdown's fault.

The Families at Dover

"I was at Dover yesterday. I met the parents... every single one, 'Finish the job, sir. Please finish the job.' And I'll leave you at that."

REALITY MANUFACTURE

Every single grieving parent — without variation, without exception — delivered the same sentence, verbatim, in support of continued military operations. This is presented not as policy, but as the unanimous voice of American grief. Tonight it will be invoked again, with the same unanimity.

"We wiped them out in the first two days."
— March 11. The war is still ongoing. April 1.

murdockinations.com · JZ Murdock · April 1, 2026

Political satire and commentary. Speech excerpts are from the public record. Annotations are the author's.

When Jousting Was War: Death, Prohibition, and the Birth of Sport

2026-03-30T06:00:00.000-07:00

Jousting did not begin as a sport. It began as training for killing men on horseback.

This came up recently when I was watching the new Game of Thrones prequel, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. I wasn't sure how I'd like it the first couple of episodes but I am really liking it. Now the creators/showrunners are saying they are hoping and planning for up to 15 seasons of it. It is stripped down, deconstructed, entertaining, and interesting. But it got me to thinking about, jousting.

From Medieval Warfare History

Origins: ca. 11th–12th Century

By around 1100 AD, what we now call “jousting” emerged from battlefield cavalry tactics. Knights trained to strike an opponent at speed with a lance—often in chaotic tournament melees involving dozens or hundreds of armored riders. These were not ceremonial events. They were violent rehearsals for war.

Deaths were common.

Broken necks, crushed chests, pierced visors, trampled bodies—tournaments killed not only knights, but bystanders and squires as well. Armor was evolving, but protection lagged behind the increasing power of couched lances and trained warhorses.

Church Opposition: Tournaments as Mortal Sin

The bloodshed alarmed the Church.

In 1139, the Pope Innocent II—through the Second Lateran Council—condemned tournaments outright, denying Christian burial to knights killed in them. The Church’s reasoning was blunt: tournaments promoted pride, greed, and pointless death outside holy war.

This ban was reiterated by later popes for nearly two centuries, though enforcement was inconsistent. The nobility loved tournaments too much to abandon them entirely.

From Battle to Contest

By the 13th–14th centuries, something changed.

Tournaments gradually shifted from group melees to formalized jousts: one knight against another, controlled lists, marshals, spectators. The goal was no longer battlefield dominance—but skill, honor, and spectacle.

This transition coincided with:

Better armor (full plate by the 1400s)
Codified rules
Purpose-built equipment

The Lance Evolves

Early lances were solid ash or oak—the same weapons used in war.

Later, tournament lances were deliberately modified:

Hollowed shafts to shatter on impact
Coronel tips (blunt, multi-pronged heads)
Breakability designed to absorb force and reduce fatal penetration

This didn’t make jousting safe—but it made it less lethal.

Scoring, Not Slaughter

As jousting became sport, point systems emerged—but here legend often exaggerates.

Common scoring included:

Striking the opponent’s shield or torso
Breaking a lance cleanly
Unhorsing an opponent

While later writers sometimes cite grim tallies like “three points for death”, there is no consistent historical ruleset awarding points for killing an opponent. Death still happened—but by the late medieval period it was increasingly viewed as failure, not victory.

By then, a knight who killed another in a tournament could face punishment, disgrace, or legal consequences.

What Jousting Became

By the 15th–16th centuries, jousting was no longer a rehearsal for war. It was:

Pageantry
Political theater
Noble branding
Controlled violence within strict ritual bounds

Armor became so specialized that it was useless on the battlefield. Jousting had fully separated from war.

Why This Matters

Jousting is a rare historical example of a culture deliberately domesticating violence—turning lethal training into regulated competition.

It didn’t happen overnight.
It took centuries, Church pressure, evolving ethics, and a recognition that skill need not require death.

That arc—from chaos to control—is the real story.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

The Pipeline to Moscow

2026-03-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

War in Iran. Other issues leading up to it. So, where are we exactly? Let's review...shall we?

An administration that systematically dismantled every alternative to fossil fuel dependency, started a war that made that dependency a crisis, then used the crisis to reward the foreign government that benefits most from America never leaving the 20th century energy system.

Russia?

Yes.

What does this timeline tell us?

It tells us that what looks like a series of independent domestic energy policy decisions produced, with remarkable consistency, a single strategic outcome: the United States entered a major Middle East war with no renewable energy buffer, exhausted its emergency petroleum reserve, and was forced to ease sanctions on Russia at the exact moment those sanctions were beginning to work.

Every individual action had a defensible policy framing. "Energy dominance." "Grid reliability." "Reducing regulatory burden." "Stopgap measure." None of those framings are obviously false in isolation. That's what makes the sequence striking -- you don't need any single action to be indefensible. You just need all of them to point the same direction, which they do, without exception, over 13 months.

A few specific things stand out:

The vocabulary erasure in February is underrated. Banning the words internally at the energy efficiency office isn't a policy -- it's a suppression of the institutional capacity to think in those terms. You can't build what you can't name.

The April coal EO and the May legislative demolition of IRA tax credits happened before the Iran war was even on the horizon as an imminent event. Those decisions locked in the vulnerability. By the time February 28 arrived, there was nothing to fall back on that wasn't tied to global oil markets.

The Russia piece is the one that doesn't have a clean innocent explanation. By March 2026 the administration had spent a year arguing that sanctions on Russia were a priority. Those sanctions were measurably working -- oil revenue down from 45% to 20% of the federal budget.

Then one phone call with Putin and a war-driven price spike, and the sanctions are partially unwound within a week. Zelenskyy noticed. The Europeans noticed. The argument that it was purely reactive to the Hormuz closure runs into the fact that Europe faced the same crisis and refused to do the same thing.

What the timeline tells you overall is that the framing of "energy dominance" was always about which energy sources dominate -- not about American independence from volatile global markets. The one energy sector that actually insulates Americans from Middle East oil shocks -- domestic renewables, priced locally, not subject to Hormuz -- was the one systematically eliminated. That's not an accident of priorities. That's a choice with a direction.

Whether it's corruption, ideology, or just the logical endpoint of who funds what in American politics is a separate question. The timeline doesn't answer that. But it does make the innocent explanation -- that these were just a series of unrelated domestic policy preferences that happened to converge on this outcome -- very hard to sustain.

Summarizing what this describes for an administration that follows this timeline, what supports these actions as a desired endpoint?

The desired endpoint, if you follow the logic of every action rather than the stated rationale, is this:

An America permanently dependent on fossil fuels, with the institutional, legal, and financial capacity to transition away from them dismantled at every level -- regulatory, legislative, scientific, and linguistic -- while the industries that benefit from that dependence are subsidized, protected, and politically entrenched for a generation.

What supports these actions is a coalition of interests that all converge on the same outcome, even if they don't share identical motives:

The fossil fuel industry gets the obvious thing -- market protection from a cheaper competitor that was beginning to outprice them without subsidies. Solar and wind were winning on economics alone by 2024. That had to be stopped by policy because it couldn't be stopped by the market.

The petrostate adjacency -- and this is where Russia becomes impossible to ignore -- is that high oil prices and a weakened energy transition benefit Moscow structurally. Not just in the short term of the Iran war windfall. A US that stays oil-dependent stays exposed to exactly the kind of leverage Russia and Gulf states have always held. An America running on domestic solar and wind is geopolitically emancipated in a way that a Russia or a Saudi Arabia cannot afford.

The ideological component is real but secondary. The climate denial framework -- calling the Endangerment Finding into question, erasing the vocabulary, dismissing the science -- isn't just belief. It's institutional capture. If you eliminate the legal basis for federal climate action and the professional class trained to execute it, the next administration that wants to reverse course finds an empty building. That's not policy disagreement. That's succession planning for a permanent outcome.

The political economy underneath all of it is Citizens United and what it enabled -- the fossil fuel donor class having essentially unmediated access to both legislative and executive decision-making. You don't need a conspiracy when the incentive structure produces the behavior automatically.

So what this administration describes, taken as a coherent whole rather than a series of discrete decisions, is a government that has been captured by the industries most threatened by the energy transition, executing a systematic rollback of every mechanism that transition depended on, while a war they started handed the greatest near-term benefit to the foreign government that has the most to lose if that transition ever completes.

The endpoint isn't energy dominance. The endpoint is energy lock-in. A country that cannot structurally leave the 20th century energy system regardless of what a future administration wants to do, because the financial incentives, the legal framework, the scientific infrastructure, and the institutional vocabulary to do otherwise have all been removed.

That's what the timeline describes. Whether it was designed that way or simply fell that way because of who was in the room making the decisions -- that's the question historians will spend a long time on. But the outcome is the same either way.

So, in a sentence...

Russia?

Yes.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of Claude