You have entered the season of chaos. Better get used to it. The center quit holding a long time ago, and now even the margins are quivering. Buckle up and batten down. It will probably get rougher and weirder. Struggle is everywhere.

Will Iran reopen Hormuz or not? They really only have days to stop playing games with the rest of the world. It will soon be clear whether they can negotiate in good faith. It doesn’t look good. Their theology of jihad contains a permission structure for lying to their enemies to accomplish their aim: which is, to annihilate the hated infidels (that’s us).

That is the reason for this conflict, by the way. They have promised over and over again to destroy us. Why not believe them? The thousand pounds of enriched uranium is still stashed somewhere in the country. It has only one purpose, to be made into bombs, and they’re not allowed to keep it. The message is pretty simple, but they don’t seem to get it. There are probably big fissures between the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), the secular government of President Masoud Pezeshkian, and the regular army (the Artesh). Are they even able to communicate with each other? You and I don’t know, though Mr. Trump and his people might know.

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I doubt that Mr. Trump wanted to drop the hammer on Iran last Tuesday, as he vowed to do. But it might eventually be necessary to turn the lights off there if they don’t stop screwing around. Does Iran have an inexhaustible supply of missiles and drones, as some observers seem to believe? I doubt it. We blew up their factories. We have the option and the ability to track down whatever they’ve got left in storage and destroy it. One way or another, we are going to end Iran’s ability to be a problem for the rest of the world.

The American Left (the Democratic Party) would like nothing better than for Iran to thumb its nose at the rest of the world (at us especially), because the American Left has launched its own sort of Jihad. It has been waging war on the rest of us in America for ten years, and you can be sure that, as springtime blossoms over the land, they intend to ramp up the action.

Expect Act One on May Day. That is the day that the Left customarily celebrates socialism. It started off decades ago as a holiday for industrial workers. There are few enough of those left in the USA these days that they constitute less than a critical mass of all American workers. They have been replaced by grifters, fraudsters, and other parasites looking to get money-for-nothing from the rest of us without working at all. That is the Democratic Party’s raison d’être. They are now strictly a racketeering operation.

The Left will stage widespread demonstrations around the country on May Day. The several No Kings demos in cold weather were rehearsals for the spring and summer fun. You can expect the May Day action to turn into riots. Antifa is still very much at the Party’s beck and call for sparking that sort of thing. The idea behind it is to provoke the president into reacting forcefully to the Left’s riots so they can brand him “a tyrant.” If May Day is insufficient to accomplish that, wait until the extravaganzas around the Fourth of July when the USA ostensibly gets to celebrate our 250^th birthday as a republic.

Considering that the Republican majority in Congress was unwilling to pass an election reform bill, it is also a fairly sure thing that sometime between May Day and July Fourth the president will have to issue an executive order setting out requirements for a free and fair election: voter ID, citizens only, highly restricted and tightly regulated mail-in voting, no electronic ballot-counting machines, etc. That alone will inflame the Left, who cannot win elections without ballot fraud.

Of course, Norm Eisen, Marc Elias, Mary McCord, and the lawfare ninjas will file lawsuits to negate any executive order on election procedures, and their select federal judges will issue injunctions against it. Which will provoke Mr. Trump, in turn, to go full Abe Lincoln on them and declare an insurgency requiring extraordinary executive powers to overcome the Left’s ploys — just as Mr. Lincoln had to overcome the traitorous Confederates of his time. That will get Mr. Trump branded “a super-tyrant.”

From that point, we’re really in uncharted territory. But, it being the nation’s 250^th birthday and all, a great majority of US citizens may be in no mood by then for any further pranking and punking by the Left. They will be more than eager for trials, perhaps by military tribunals if the corrupt federal judiciary proves intractable.

This is the kind of thing we have to look forward to as 2026 keeps rolling out. But meanwhile, events might get even hotter over in Euroland. The joint is primed to blow. They’ve had enough jihad, too, and enough of the retarded political leadership that allowed it to be inflicted on the people of Europe. It’s already started. Ireland is about to go up in flames, a case of the government’s utter betrayal of the people. After Ireland, cue the United Kingdom. They’ve had enough of hostile Islam and Prime Minister Keir Starmer. It’s going to be a long, hot summer. They don’t call this the Fourth Turning for nothing.

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

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JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

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JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

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

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

This podcast is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals. For more than 50 years, McAlvany Precious Metals has helped investors learn about and own physical gold and silver as part of a long-term approach to wealth preservation.

To explore their market insights, educational resources, and see whether precious metals make sense for you, visit: mcalvany.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

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JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

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

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

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

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

The mysterious financial repo markets — which practically no one outside of banking understands (and even some banking insiders don’t) — are going wonky again like they did in September 2019, just before You-Know-What sucker-punched the world with lockdowns, stolen elections, and fake vaccines. Half of America still hasn’t got its head straight. . . and here we go again.

The private equity outfits, like giant BlackRock, are wobbling so hard that they had to “gate redemptions” — meaning, investors can’t pull their money out of funds going dark with dubious collateral. It’s exactly what sparks panics. Money can only stand so much unreality. The Rube Goldberg machine of finance — a scaffold of insane complexity designed to bamboozle the rubes — is threatening to fly apart. The world only needs so many pre-owned yachts.

Plus, there’s a war on, which has disrupted the regular flow of the world’s primary resource: oil. That’s the really-real side of the picture. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. You’ve got to wonder how much additional pounding the lunatic state of Iran can take. It’s not clear who is even in charge there. Iran’s supposed foreign minister, one Aras Araghchi, is suddenly offering to give up those 440 kilos of 60-percent enriched uranium that are at the heart of this quarrel. Sounds a little surrender-ish, though he made the offer with a certain defiant bluster. Let’s see where that goes. Maybe the war will be over sooner than you thought.

Watch and listen starting at 13:00-minute Mark

With all this in motion, things slip-sliding all over the place, the week ahead may be one in which nobody can think straight or get a straight answer. Here’s something to chew on: do you think Great Britain is our dear friend because we speak the same language? Great Britain has been allowing Iran’s ruling Revolutionary Guard to park its money in London for half a century while Lloyd’s offers jacked-up insurance rates to all those tankers faring through the Strait of Hormuz.

This dynamic has made world oil up to 15-percent more expensive since the 1970s, and Britain’s banks have been creaming off the premium all the while. Trillions. Mr. Trump is putting an end to that racket while he also terminates Iran’s ability to export Jihad thuggery throughout the Middle East. That’s the meaning behind the Abraham Accords and the new Board of Peace set up to figure out Gaza — and probably to replace the broken United Nations as a mediating force in the region’s long-running conflicts.

Mr. Trump is also sending a message to China: the US will have something to say about the flow of oil going there out of the Persian Gulf, which is to say most of China’s imported oil. (The US imports relatively little oil out of the Persian Gulf, two to three percent of total US oil consumption which is 20-million barrels a day.) This is pretty serious power politics, but notice that China has not started World War Three over it. Mr. Trump and Xi are still talking, and are scheduled to meet in Beijing in April. Meanwhile, Xi is having plenty of trouble of his own with twitchy PLA generals, a staggering deflationary export economy, and a lot of angry young people thrown out of work.

One thing our country will not get a straight answer on this week is the SAVE Act. Senate Majority Leader John Thune made noises over the weekend about staging a half-assed “debate” on the floor, a demi-filibuster. . . then holding a guaranteed-to-fail cloture vote. . . making it impossible to reach a place where the bill might be subject to a simple majority vote. The procedural bullshit at issue is surely a challenge for the general voting public to understand. The bottom line is that Majority Leader Thune is entirely in-charge of the filibuster process and could make it work to advantage the SAVE Act if he wanted to. He could call for a full, “standing” filibuster that would require the bill’s opponents to explain themselves — that is, to explain why they prefer election fraud.

So, for now, the Save Act will fail to pass. The public will register the failure, if not the twisted route that got it there, and they will be mighty pissed-off. The really interesting part is what happens after all this is acted out, especially Senator Thune’s comic attempt to explain why he did this. And especially if, in the weeks just ahead, the nation watches federal indictments rain down for election fraud in Georgia, Wisconsin, and other states where so many weird things happened right before our eyes in November, 2020, 2022, and 2024. Sometime after that, the SAVE Act will come up for a vote again, and with a vengeance!

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

Don’t lose your shit over mines in the Strait of Hormuz and the oil price shooting up. Iran has many thousands of mines. But something has to lay them out in the water. Iran has no more naval ships. They have small boats. The US can see everything moving on the surface, or sitting at docks. We are blowing them up methodically. The news outlets who want the US to fail in this operation (because: Trump) want you to think that we had no plan for dealing with this problem. That’s not so.

There are very few mines actually laid so far. Tankers are not going through the Strait of Hormuz because their captains are nervous. Their ships and their cargos are worth millions and the insurance costs millions. So, they’re waiting in place, hanging back. The US still has work to do destroying Iran’s shoreline defenses of missile and drone launch sites. Iran is firing all they’ve got left. Whenever they launch something, we see the geo-location on our satellites and radars. The mobile launchers are a little trickier because, obviously, they shoot and move. But they don’t always move fast enough, and there isn’t an endless supply of them.

The US Navy decommissioned its four Avenger-class minesweeper ships in the Persian Gulf in September, 2025, but replaced them with more agile Littoral Combat Ships (LCSs) capable of countering submarines and clearing mines. Two LCS ships — USS Santa Barbara and USS Canberra — quietly deployed in March 2025.

An LCS uses an Airborne Laser Mine Detection System and an Airborne Mine Neutralization System via helicopter. In the water, it uses mine-hunting sonar and the Unmanned Influence Sweep System — all operated from unmanned surface vessels. The unmanned sweep vehicle triggers magnetic, acoustic, or combination mines, with the LCS at a safe distance.

The LCS vessels are armed with an 11-cell SeaRAM launcher for point defense that fires Rolling Airframe Missiles — fast, radar-guided missiles designed to knock down incoming anti-ship missiles and drones at short range. They also carry Longbow Hellfire missiles with updated software and hardware specifically to counter drones. The Longbow Hellfire uses radar-guided technology enabling it to engage targets through battlefield clutter, with a range of up to eight kilometers — giving the LCS the ability to engage drones before they get close. The LCS ships will be accompanied by Arleigh Burke-class destroyers equipped with Aegis and full missile defense suites for protection against the full spectrum of Iranian threats.

The oil markets are extremely sensitive to any changes in the oil environment, and war induces the most extreme changes. Even outside of war, weird things happen. April 20, 2020, was the apex of Covid-19 paranoia when everyday life was shutting down all over Western Civ. The price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures — specifically the May 2020 contract, which was expiring the very next day — crashed to an historic low of negative $37.63 per barrel. That is, sellers were literally paying buyers to take oil off their hands. By the following day, April 21, prices had rebounded back into positive territory, though still at very depressed levels around $10–$15 per barrel.

The current situation with oil in the $100 range is not going to be a one-day event, but it won’t last forever, either, so do your deep-breathing exercises and calm down. Of course, in America right now, a seditious news media will take every opportunity to induce exquisite anxiety in the public-at-large to deflect from the order-of-battle that President DJT is carrying out to 1) improve America’s geopolitical position and relations, and 2) to defeat the forces both external and domestic that seek to wreck the country.

Which is why you might see that the next move in the order of battle will be against the wrecking crew in our own country, including the political figures behind the decade-long conspiracy to undermine the president, the administrative rogues running the “resistance” in government agencies, the Lawfare ninjas queering the justice system, and the big money that funds the hundreds of NGOs attempting to instigate a color revolution here. I have visions of perp walks and indictments coming in on the zephyrs of spring.

It looks just now like Majority Leader John Thune and his RINO herd will trample the SAVE Act (election reform) into failure. But consider that Mr. Trump’s FBI has had more than a month to analyze the Fulton County, Georgia, ballot evidence from the 2020 election (while only last week it seized the Maricopa County, AZ, records, and for all we know the agency also has 2020 ballot evidence from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada, too). So, prepare for the public to be shocked and amazed at what has been discovered, and expect to see a sharp attitude change among embarrassed US Senators who will be compelled to come on-board for election reform.

Somewhere in all that, you might expect Cuba to fall — a momentous event, actually, considering the cumulative mischief Cuba’s government has provoked all over the western hemisphere since 1958. We don’t even have to do anything to make it happen, just respond in the aftermath with emergency food and fuel relief, and perhaps some help averting the vengeful slaughter of the old Castro governing network. We don’t want a bloodbath there.

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

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

Don’t lose the plot. Embrace the suck. This is the world’s hard time, for now. The birth of anything can be a bloody horror. It can even look like death. Don’t be too afraid to see what comes on the other side of this awful spectacle.

So many Americans are rooting and wishing for the Iran war to turn out badly for Western Civ. And why? Because Trump. And why? Because at the same time he is ending Iran’s long-running nuclear blackmail game, he is terminating the rackets of the Democratic Party. The incipient changes in operational order create new categories of winners and losers.

Now you know why Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists run on the same track as America’s Woke-Jacobin-Marxists, including the pitifully deluded wine ladies of posh West LA, Grosse Point, Beacon Hill, Fairfax County, et cetera, whose brains have been hijacked by the cable news demon factory (and their sponsors). Chaos does everything possible to avoid meeting order.

And this is why passing the SAVE Act is as consequential as ridding the Middle East of its chief chaos agent. Do you realize how perfectly insane our country’s election procedure has become? The fraud is titanic and right in your face, and the remedy is so plain and simple. What possible excuse is there to thwart it? Non-citizens have no right to vote. Mail-in ballots are patently subject to chicanery. Vote tabulation machines are demonstrably hackable. 80-percent of Americans know this is the truth. How is there controversy over this?

How? Because among all the broken institutions in our country, Congress is the worst. The Congress of our time is demonstrating that we might not be worthy of governing ourselves. We are at a cycle-low for public rectitude. Anything goes and nothing matters as long as the campaign contributions keep rolling in. You see how this has been going.

But mark this: we are going to get election reform one way or another. It’s that urgent, and failure to accomplish it by legislation will warrant a national emergency. And when the election machinery has been fixed, we had better do something about the plague of corporate money that runs like poison through our politics because of the Supreme Court’s foolish decision in the 2010 Citizens United case. They decided (by a slim 5-4 majority) that limitless campaign contributions by corporations amounted to free speech under the Constitution.

I will tell you concisely why this was tragically fallacious. Free speech in our country is a God-given right of sovereign citizens. Corporations are not citizens. Corporations don’t have obligations, duties, and responsibilities to the public interest (a.k.a. the common good). Corporations explicitly, by law, have obligations, duties, and responsibilities solely to their share-holders. The interests of corporate share-holders and the nation’s public interest are manifestly oppositional. Perhaps now you can see why this was such a dreadful invitation to political chaos.

So, Mr. Trump, for all his flaws, attempts to bring order out of chaos at home and in global relations, and the agents of chaos mightily resent the shut-down of their precious chaos. With Iran, it has come to fighting fire with fire. It’s unlikely that most of the people in that country seek to become martyrs. The cult of martyrdom is strictly the business of the maniacs who seized power there in 1979, a reign of terror, extended by proxy around the whole Middle East and beyond.

Entwined with Iran’s oil business, and the energy security of many nations, the mullahs inflect the trade of this primary resource with their chaos. The world cannot cope with chaos in the oil trade. The collapsing regime of the mullahs wants to go out turning the entire world into a martyr. Just like the Democratic Party wants to martyr the founding principles of the USA to preserve its matrix of moneygrubbing and power-seeking. These are two forces that require the most severe discipline and Mr. Trump is acting to impose exactly that. It’s painful to witness, but it must happen if we want to continue the human project as a reality-based enterprise.

So, heed what is at stake in the events unspooling. This is a dark moment in a journey back to daylight. Have faith. As the old American hymn goes: Farther along we’ll know more about it; farther along we’ll understand why.

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

You probably wonder what the end of this war will look like. It won’t look like V-J Day in Times Square, 1945, with sailors kissing girls they met five seconds ago. Our country is way too divided and disturbed with politically-inflected mental illness for love to bloom in the streets like it did then. If you happen to catch the glum crew on CNN you will detect that they really want this operation to fail because, you know, Trump.

The war will be over when Iran loses the ability to spray missiles and drones all over the place — and notice how they are pouring it on the Emirate states, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and even Azerbaijan, for Gawdsake, turning would-be bystanders into pissed-off additional enemies they need like a hole in the head.

At some point they will run out of ordnance, or the will to roll them out of the supposed 10,000 bat caves their weapons are stashed in. Our side apparently has an uncanny knack for seeing the launchers creep into daylight and efficiently blowing them up. Creates a disincentive to even think about launching. Of course, Iran might have some spectacular last-ditch thingie they can unleash to horrify the world — perhaps a “dirty” bomb that uses the 460 kilos of 60-percent enriched uranium they bragged about at one of the last negotiation sessions before the war with Witkoff and Kushner. Standing by on that.

But, at some point a week or so hence, a stillness will fall upon the earth and sky above Iran, and that will be all she wrote for sheer havoc. Victory will not look much like anything. Just that stillness. The body politic in Iran is another matter. Expect awful turmoil. Iran’s command structure is shattered. Officials don’t dare pick a room in some building to meet in. The Internet is down and most communication with it. Nobody knows who is really in charge, and nobody may be in charge, not for quite a long time to come.

Let’s hope we have the patience to let the Iranians sort out their own governing structure, and that it will be made up of people who are not insane, not fanatics of the martyrdom cult that has ruled the place for fifty years. It’s probably not part of the US plan to slaughter the Revolutionary Guard, or Sepah, the chief apparatus of despotic control in the country. Or the Basij, (Sâzmân-e Basij-e Mostaz’afin, which means “Organization for the Mobilization of the Oppressed”), an auxiliary volunteer paramilitary militia that acts as the “morality police” and cracks down on dissent. Hundreds of thousands are employed by these groups.

You might imagine circumstances in which the members of those dastardly outfits decide to peel away from them, sensing a loss of legitimacy and danger in remaining on-board. Surely, a lot of Iranians will have blood in their eyes, looking for scores to settle, just as the people took revenge on members of the Shah’s secret police, the Savak, after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Even now with the bombs still falling in Tehran (perhaps even because of them), many ordinary Iranians are dancing in the streets. You must suppose there is massive opposition to the regime. But first, chaos.

Why would we feel any necessity to put “boots on the ground” in there? Why expose American troops to the factional fighting that is apt to break out, as it did in Iraq? Did we not learn the lessons of Fallujah? Wouldn’t it be enough that Iran just loses its ability to fire weapons at anyone? Loses its ability to mess with shipping in the Persian Gulf? And loses its ability to foment mischief in other countries, including any ideological influence it might still have, or any financial mojo for sponsoring terrorism? Can we not just stand by and let the Iranians figure out their own future?

Try imagining a peaceful Iran not bent on exporting Jihad (just like you might imagine a peaceful Ukraine, not making itself a problem for the rest of the world). Forgive the cliché, but Iran (a.k.a. Persia), is an old and durable culture, with a highly educated population, one of the world’s largest oil-and-gas reserves, and plenty of other resources. Iran could be somebody. It doesn’t have to be a bum with a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

As for our own country, too many people here are busy wolfing down the black pills with their Adderall and their Starbucks iced lavender cream chai. It’s actually possible that there is a satisfactory outcome to this Iran operation. Would that disappoint you — as it apparently disappoints the glum crew at CNN? As with Iran, it doesn’t pay to be insane, and something close to half of America is insane. That perturbation is mostly lodged in the American Left these days, the Democratic Party, devoted to a long list of ideas and propositions at odds with reality and locked into a strange willful hysteria that regards any kind of good faith as poison. That is exactly why we can’t have clean elections. How about fixing that?

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

Behold the Tour Montparnasse, 59-stories, 689-feet high, built in 1969-1973 during the presidency of Georges Pompidou (yes, he of the inglorious Pompidou Center across the River Seine). Note that there is nothing like it in the neighborhood. Curiously, the hidden hand behind its development belonged to American real estate poobah Wylie F. Tuttle, who enlisted a consortium of 17 French insurance companies and seven banks in the project to get Europe’s then tallest skyscraper built. Minister of Culture, André Malraux at first opposed the idea, then folded under pressure and approved a permit for the monstrosity. The joke goes that the view from the tower is the most beautiful in Paris because it’s the only spot from which the tower can’t be seen. It has also been called the box the Eiffel Tower came in.

Now, more than a half century later, the thing is getting a bit worn. The surrounding shopping mall district, spanning about 22-acres, was hemorrhaging tenants and had become the campground haunt of homeless migrants. Something had to be done! Starchitect Renzo Piano was hired to rescue it — though there was plenty of sentiment to raze the goshdarn thing altogether.

The tower itself is getting a $700-million “skin-job” — the monkeyshit brown original cladding changed-out for shiny mirrored glass, with an underskirt of hanging gardens on the lower ten floors in a nod to the still ongoing “green” mania. The surrounding shopping mall — a typically American-style urban blunder — is due to be replaced by a network of “typical Parisian streets” fronted by shops in the normal manner.

Hence, the tower supposedly gets a new lease on life, reviled as it may be as a freak. But then here we are on the threshold of Artificial Intelligence cutting its awesome swathe through the office workplace. After 2021, the Great Covid-19 Op savaged office occupancy in Europe just as it did in America, with so many employees working-from-home. All that vacancy played hell with commercial real estate. A-I is looking like the coup de grâce for the office skyscraper now, threatening to eliminate vast categories of corporate employment per se. Let’s face it: Europe is not doing a stellar job of anticipating what the actual future might bring. Anyway, nice try. (Below: the tower before and after its fix-up.)

Below: a close-up rendering of the “green” terrace to come. Note a couple of curious things: no fence or guard-rails at the edge. Hmmmm. . . . Also notice how thin the roof is. Do you really suppose it could support the growth of mature trees? I’d say, not a chance. What are they thinking?

Eyesore of the Month is sponsored by Sage Restoration.

You’ve got to think: if the US military can pinpoint one room in Teheran with a Grand Ayatollah and 39 other high officials in it, then the US military can figure out where Iran’s missiles are being launched from and put a stop to that, too. With no high command left, Iran’s missile batteries have been on their own since Saturday, desperately trying a kind of last-ditch “Samson option” to light up the whole region and bring the House of the Middle East down with Iran.

Firing on the Emirates, and Saudi Arabia especially, was maybe not such a hot idea. Saudi Arabian air defenses intercepted almost all the drones aimed at their giant Ras Tanura oil refinery. Falling debris started a small fire that was contained while the refinery shut down safely. Iran has reawakened the centuries-old rift between Shi’a and Sunni Islam and Saudi Arabia has been stockpiling war planes from the USA for fifty years without getting to use them much. I doubt they’ll pass up the chance.

Who does speak for Iran now? Just naming a successor to the Ayatollah Khamenei would put a target on his turban. Iran’s Intel Service building was blown up on Sunday, so that network must be dark. How is Iran’s government and its remaining military command communicating? And how would US and Israeli intel not be listening in on whatever chatter is out there?

The world fretfully expects Iran to try to close the Strait of Hormuz, but how does that happen with tanker traffic halted and most of Iran’s navy blown up and its naval command headquarters destroyed? Without the ships to do it, it’s unlikely that Iran will be laying out minefields in the Strait. Or that any tankers will be around to sink in the channel.

President Trump has declared a four-week window for Operation Epic Fury. Sounds a little too generous. With no command structure left and no viable communication, you might give the Islamic Republic one more week, maybe. It’s a tossup whether they run out of missiles and drones before all their launch-sites and stockpiles get bombed. Meanwhile, a US / Israeli info operation that hacked Iran’s state-run TV seeks to persuade Iranian army personnel and government bureaucrats to turn on what remains of the theocracy and think about forming a secular government. Why would they stick with the loser regime?

Of course, the Trump-deranged political opposition in America is ululating over this effort to put the world’s leading fomenter of terrorism out of business. The New York Times is especially glum, claiming, “The American public’s appetite for an attack on Iran was low before Trump and Israel took action.” Maybe the Jacobin-Democrats they cater to feel that way, since the party has been increasingly synchronizing with the forces of Jihad since the Oct 7, 2023, Hamas raid. After forty-seven years of ayatollahs, what part of “Death to America” don’t they understand?

Not a few prominent figures on the Right also deplored Operation Epic Fury. The increasingly rogue Trump-hater and Israel vilifier, Tucker Carlson, called the action “disgusting and evil.” MTG called it “unnecessary and is unacceptable.” Blackwater founder Erik Prince colored it as “not serving America’s interests and inconsistent with President Trump’s MAGA agenda.” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) framed his objection in Congress’s prerogative to declare war — though the War Powers Act of 1973 permits the president to conduct military operations for 60 days after notifying Congress of his intentions.

You can understand why people are nervous about this, with so many commentators predicting World War Three and Biblical Armageddon. The Fourth Turning narrative asserts that a major war is inevitable at this moment in history. Maybe so. But Ukraine has already happened and is on a glide path to its conclusion. And Operation Epic Fury does not have to turn out badly for all concerned, including Iran. Other more sanguine observers see a more peaceful and prosperous Middle East emerging from the smoke, a fulfillment of the Abraham Protocols, and the termination of Iran-sponsored proxy wars, terror programs, and medieval social despotism.

Epic Fury looks like a turning point for Western Civ more generally as regards tolerating Jihadi insolence — its declared intent to destroy all its “infidel” enemies, meaning you and me and the remaining indigenous population of Europe. The strife Iran managed to stir up all around the Middle East and beyond for decades was largely responsible for the mass migration into Europe and the dispersion of millions into the USA during “Joe Biden’s” open border years. Citizens are now rising to oppose Islam’s aggressive promotion of Sharia Law and demographic replacement in Texas and other states. Expect bolder resistance to all that now, here and in Europe, too.

However this thing goes, Iran will not acquire a nuclear arsenal, and this was, after all, the main issue. Anyway, the Iranians must be sick of the rule of the mullahs. Mr. Trump told them some weeks ago that “help is on the way.” He meant what he said, he didn’t chicken out, and now it’s up to the people of Iran to sort out how they enter the future, starting now.

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The zeitgeist is a rough beast, hard to ride as it slouches into the unknown. Our country is trying to hang on while a party of goblins vexes and needles the beast from behind, and you cannot make them stop. Sense-making gets to seem impossible.

We don’t have an explanation from Senate Majority Leader John Thune as to why he will not do what is within his power to do: pass election reform, known as the SAVE Act, by changing the filibuster procedure. At midweek Sen. Thune said Republicans were “not unified on pursuing a talking filibuster.” Understand that bringing back a real filibuster, with continuous speech in the well of the Senate, only requires the Majority Leader’s say-so, meaning Mr. Thune is prevaricating, concealing the truth.

Which might be that he does not want to pass election reform. It appears he wants to set up the midterm elections with the now-familiar kit of unverifiable mail-in ballots, millions of non-citizen motor-votes, and dragged-out vote-counting so that Democrats will seize control of the House (if not the Senate) in order to crank-up the impeachment machine again and finally get rid of President Trump. It does not look like anything else, certainly not any kind of cunning game.

What might change that would be an FBI analysis of the 2020 election year ballots, voter rolls, and vote tabulation tapes recently extracted from the Fulton County, Georgia, Elections Hub, leading to indictments. They’ve had this mass of material for a month. There was already plenty of preliminary evidence of fraud from earlier investigations — which is how come U.S. Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia found probable cause to approve a search warrant for the FBI. They must have an idea by now of what the evidence shows. It’s not that complicated.

There’s no fixed statutory timeline for a referral. The FBI can pass along the matter to the DOJ for prosecution whenever they determine the evidence is sufficient. Referrals are customarily secret, as they occur during ongoing investigations and involve sensitive, non-public information. DOJ policies emphasize confidentiality in pre-charging stages to protect investigations, potential witnesses, sources, and the integrity of any future prosecution. In general, the public learns of an FBI referral only indirectly — through later developments like indictments, or news media reporting via “sources.”

Criminal referrals on the Fulton County case might have already been made, and indictments might be forthcoming. That would have to prompt some kind of attitude adjustment for Senate Majority Leader Thune on behalf of election reform. It could happen at any time. It would at least put Senator Thune between a rock and a hard place. It’s well-understood that at least 80-percent of people polled want the SAVE Act passed.

There is no debating position that reasonably argues against it. You might have noticed that Mayor Mamdani of New York City called for volunteers to shovel snow in the latest blizzard, and that anyone who stepped-up was required to show two types of photo ID to work the job. Yet, Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), aligns with the party’s longstanding opposition to voter ID laws, including the SAVE Act. No need to go figure on that. It’s just arrant dishonesty.

The president emphasized clearly why the Democrats are against election reform in this week’s State of the Union speech: because the party can only win elections by cheating, by employing massive systematic fraud. He said it so that everybody tuned-in could hear it, and the Democrats just sat stone-faced on their side of the chamber — and that was only minutes after they refused to stand for the proposition that the government’s main job was to act in the interest of American citizens.

It’s unlikely that the president can alter election procedure himself, through executive order or by declaring some kind of national emergency. Any attempt would be instantly litigated and shut down by the judiciary. The Constitution assigns primary authority over the “times, places and manner” of elections to the states (with only Congress able to alter them by law). Either Senator Thune will do his duty or not. He must have some self-awareness that he risks going down as the greatest villain in our history, the man who wrecked the country. Does anything like personal honor still exist in this land?

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Lunacy proceeds from crime. In case you wonder why half the country has gone crazy, seek no further than Susan Rice’s stark warning to the other half of the country that is not crazy. Ms. Rice was Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor and then “Joe Biden’s” Domestic Policy Advisor. She did a podcast last week with Preet Bharaha, former US Attorney in the SDNY, now a private lawyer with the Beltway law firm WilmerHale. Her message to Trump supporters: We’re coming after you when we’re back in power. “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

It was an important signal and it got a lot of people’s attention. It telegraphed the fear running through the Lefty-left that their crimes against the country are being tallied, carefully catalogued, and presented to a grand jury in Florida. The crimes are bundled as a multifaceted conspiracy to overthrow the US government. Pretty serious. Sedition and Treason. Susan Rice knows what she (and others) did.

First, in the frantic days between Nov. 3, 2016 and January 20, 2017, Barack Obama’s White House cooked up the Russia collusion hoax with John Brennan’s CIA, James Comey’s FBI, and Loretta Lynch’s DOJ. Ms. Rice, who was in on it, notoriously wrote a CYA memo memorializing the meetings and planted it in her office desk to be easily discovered by the new Trump admin. The memo stated that “every aspect of this issue is handled by the intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book’.” Of course, that was exactly the opposite of what really happened. The mischief emanating from it has run for ten years, crime upon crime upon crime.

Secondly, and surely less-known to the American public, was Ms. Rice’s role as Domestic Policy Advisor under “Joe Biden.” Her actual job from 2021 to 2023 was to serve as a conduit for Barack Obama to run “Joe Biden’s” White House, along with Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken. During those years, the public rarely (if ever) saw Susan Rice. She avoided the news media and did not make public statements or appearances at White House events. The news media were happy to ignore her. They knew exactly what she was up to.

The prime concerns of this cabal were to protect the image (cover up the crimes) of Barack Obama and his associates, to cover up the criminal degeneracy of the Biden family, and to get the Democrat Party back in power by utterly destroying Donald Trump and the populist revolt he headed.

Everything done in “Joe Biden’s” name during those years was to guarantee his party’s return to power, especially the deluge of illegal aliens across the border to pad the census for congressional districts and provide millions of future voters indebted to the party for letting them in (and giving them tons of freebies when they got here. . . phones, housing, food, walking-around money).

Meanwhile, the Democrats erected an immense scaffold of NGOs to funnel taxpayer money into salaries for their corps of political activists — outfits such as Stacey Abrams’ empire of grift in Georgia, the national networks of Antifa and BLM street-fighters, and the matrix of Somali social service fraud in Minnesota and Maine. This created a huge parasitical patronage class, basically a national racketeering operation. Eventually all the NGO grift became an end in itself — the Democrats animating principle: grift for grift’s sake, power to just keep it all going and continue to cover up the crime behind it.

The vital component to all this was weapons-grade mind-fuckery to produce a fog of war that would keep the American public utterly bamboozled, unable to comprehend what was happening amid gales of hoaxes, ops, and scams. The Covid-19 caper was the doozy. We still don’t know definitively if the mRNA vaccine program was a deliberate depopulation project, but it kind of looked like it, while plenty of messaging from global institutions — from the Gates Foundation to the WEF to the UN — was pretty explicit about getting rid of useless eaters. On top of all that, throw in the trashing of Western Civ’s industrial economies with “green” trickery, adding another layer of anxiety onto a sore-beset citizenry.

Of course, despite their best efforts — and it was a mighty crusade of bad faith and ill will — the Democrats failed to vanquish Mr. Trump, a strange miracle itself suggesting some sort of divine intervention. The question now is, will Mr. Trump be able to vanquish them? It begins to look like he might, with plenty of help from the Democrats themselves, who have reached a pitch of madness rarely seen in human societies.

Their latest prank: a boycott of the State of the Union speech to Congress. So far, seven senators and nine congresspersons have promised to bail on the speech, led ostensibly by Senator Adam Schiff of California, a liar so prodigious and fertile that it can be truly said he never uttered an honest word including “yes,” “no,” and “maybe.” This faction will gather on the mall instead and hurl objurgations at the Capitol rotunda.

All that’s needed to finish them off, really, is passage of the SAVE Act so that voters will be required to prove their identity and citizenship, and absentee ballots will be restricted to the old rules about being too sick to get to the polling place, or else out of the country. Last week, staffers behind the walking mummy, Mitch McConnell, prevented the bill from reaching the Senate floor with some procedural rigmarole. Mr. Trump must call them out, and call out Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), too, for dragging his feet on whatever’s necessary to pass the SAVE Act. The country demands honest elections, and one way or another they’ll get them.

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

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JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)