Why They're Celebrating

The people celebrating the assassination are just random nobodies like Washington Post staffers, people teaching your children, university professors, aides to elected officials, medical professionals, and prominent talking heads.

— Sunny (@sunnyright) September 11, 2025

Via the UK Daily Mail:

Left-wing social media fanatics have celebrated influencer Charlie Kirk's murder - with some comparing him to Adolf Hitler and even suggesting he 'deserved' his fate.

. . . The killing of Donald Trump's ally is the latest example of political violence in the US spanning a range of political ideologies and affecting both major political parties.

I think the source of this is in the US educational system, and the celebrants will turn out to be students and alumni of elite universities, or at least wannabes. It always bothered me from my time as an undergraduate at one such that the subtext of the whole elite-school admissions rat race was to pound into the winners, those who got letters of admission, that they'd been selected via an intensely meritocratic, years-long process. We'll drop the issue that only a fairly small percentage of each entering class is actually selected based on grades, SATs, and extracurriculars, at least for now.

We're still left with the implcation that elite-school students are special, and they're better. Those students are going to want to believe this -- it feeds their natural adolescent narcissism. But one thing I began to notice after catching up with schoolmates over the years is that none of them outgrew this narcissism as they might have outgrown teen awkwardness or acne. When I ran into them as adults, they were uniformly superior, and not just superior, but superior to certain people, especially Republicans.

To display their superiority, they endorse what have beren called luxury beliefs:

In his excellent memoir, Troubled, the psychologist Rob Henderson recounts the alienating experiences he had as a mature student from a poor background at Yale University. One classmate told him that it was hopelessly outmoded for people who want to raise kids to prefer monogamy. Henderson, who spent much of his early childhood in the foster system, was taken aback. How, he wondered, thinking back to the chaos and heartbreak of his own childhood, could this girl fail to understand how important a stable family structure is to human flourishing? He pressed the classmate, who had grown up in an intact family, on her own life plans. Personally, she responded, she did plan to enter a monogamous marriage.

Henderson soon encountered political ideas that touched on different areas of social life but were, he felt, similarly performative. Students who hail from extremely safe neighborhoods argued that we should abolish the police. Classmates who loved to talk about how much they hate capitalism went on to stellar careers with J.P. Morgan or Goldman Sachs.

. . . Once upon a time, Henderson argues, the upper classes used to signal their status by purchasing expensive material goods. But as the kinds of goods that used to be reserved for members of the upper classes have become available to a much wider stratum of society, the affluent and highly educated have resorted to different status symbols to signal their superior standing. This is why luxury beliefs—jargon-heavy political slogans calling for positions that are widely unpopular among the general population—have substituted for luxury goods.

What I found as an elite-school undergraduate was that almost every course syllabus, almost all the readings, were premised on certain core assumptions: Darwinian theory was scientific truth, to the extent that "evolve" in any context meant "change in a desirable direction". Research on human motivations by figures ranging from Freud to B F Skinner disproved the validity of any religion-based assertions about sin or virtue. The idea of the God of the Old and New Testaments was an evolutionary artifact that to some extent has, but certainly will, atrophy as an element of human nature.

Social or sexual views that might derive from that set of assumptions may be argued within a fairly narrow range, but they definitely implied that notions of traditional sexual morality were at best unevolved. Certainly this element of luxury beliefs appealed most directly to narcissistic adolescents -- not only are you just hot to trot, but you're a crusader at the forefront of human progress! And here we get to the crux of the problem with Charlie Kirk:

Get married and have children. It's not only good and godly and will bring you joy and legacy, but it's a simple act of defiance against the oligarchs and the tyrants who would rather you die bitter, alone, and with nothing but robots by your side as you enter eternity. https://t.co/hLsfQ79xGO

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) May 2, 2024

He was going onto college campuses and arguing persuasively against luxury beliefs. This may not have been the assassin Tyler Robinson's specific motive -- the most recent reports suggest he held inchoate "antifascist" beliefs -- but I think it's a big reason the elites are celebrating his assassination.

The problem is that although Kirk represented retrograde Republican-style beliefs, his assassination comes at a time when those beliefs are resurgent, and in fact at a time when the elite universities that inculcate those beliefs are on the defensive. The received luxury beliefs on sexual morality that lie at the basis of the whole elite-university curriculum -- I suspect sophomores are still assigned Coming of Age in Samoa --implies that any loosening of traditional sexual paradigms is a step in the direction of progress. Charie Kirk stood against progress, and indeed human evolution itself.

These and similar luxury beliefs are doomed, and deep down, the people celebrating Kirk's assassination know this.

It Looks Like The FBI's Silence Is Deliberate

I was puzzled when, as of last night, all the FBI had released was satatements that they'd detained and released two persons of interest and were asking for support from the public. But heck, I'm just a guy who watches true crime on TV, and I know that's not how this works. This is 2025 on a college campus. I remember 20 years ago listening to students at my alma mater bellyache about having to swipe key cards to get in and out of their dorm buildings. Even then, I had to swipe key cards to get in and out of my hotel rooms, and in fact there was consensus that this was improved security.

Now, I'm sure it's at least ten times worse. Cameras are everywhere, lobbies, hallways, elevators, outside. And as best anyone can tell, this guy got onto a roof to make the shot. How did he get onto a roof? I doubt if just anyone goes up some stairs and out onto the roof of a multi-story college building. At least what we're being told this morning finally suggests law enforcement has been looking in the right places:

Law enforcement officials said Thursday they have recovered the rifle they believe was used to kill conservative political activist Charlie Kirk and found other key evidence as the manhunt for the shooter expands.

The “high powered, bolt-action rifle” was found in a wooded area where the gunman fled after shooting Kirk during an event at Utah Valley University in Orem on Wednesday, FBI special agent Robert Bohls said at a press conference.

Investigators have also collected a “footwear impression, a palm print and forearm imprints for analysis,” the agent, Bohls said.

As I suspected, the investigators were quickly able to get video of the perp's every move, start to finish. Utah DPS Commissioner Beau Mason said at this morning's press conference:

“Through all that work last night, we were able to make a few breakthroughs. We were able to track the movements of the shooter. Starting at 11:52 a.m., the subject arrived on campus, shortly away from campus. We had tracked his movements onto the campus, through the stairwells, up to the roof, across the roof to a shooting location,” he continued. “After the shooting, we were able to track his movements as he moved to the other side of the building, jumped off of the building and fled off of the campus and into a neighborhood. Our investigators have worked through those neighborhoods contacting anybody they can, with doorbell cameras, witnesses, and thoroughly work through those communities trying to identify any leads.”

People magazine reported a description from radio transmissions at the time of the shooting:

The person of interest who authorities believe killed Charlie Kirk was described in law enforcement dispatch audio as wearing all-black clothing and tactical gear, according to audio reviewed by PEOPLE.

The audio described a person in all-black — carrying a black long gun, wearing a black tactical helmet and mask, and possibly a tactical vest and jeans.

Other transmissions mentioned aviator-style glasses, a black bag, black long pants and longer hair.

Authorities immediately found someone who matched this description, but he turned out not to be involved:

Authorities said at a press conference that a person of interest was taken into custody, and that the person was wearing all-black.

So I'm not sure how seriously we can take this description, which actually sounds like something that could have been written by AI trying to limn Inspector Clouseau. The same applies to these remarks from Newsweek:

Former FBI Agent Stuart Kaplan said the shooter likely put a lot of preparation into the attack, telling Fox News' Jesse Watters: "This assassination, different to the attack [on Trump] back in Butler, Pennsylvania, was a very well planned, very well orchestrated plot that was put in motion days before.

"This individual had a plan of escape to elude detection of being out on a rooftop, and also being able to evade and elude law enforcement," added Kaplan. "This assassination of Charlie Kirk to me is indicative of a professional hit, and I'm not so sure we are quickly going to be able to apprehend this individual without some luck."

If I were a professional hit man, the last place I would want to remain anonymous would be a college campus, given the prevalence of cameras. As the investigators mentioned, the cameras tracked his every move, from the time of his arrival to his route to the rooftop, to his eacape to nearby woods. And frankly, who on earth would saunter onto a college campus carrying a black long gun, wearing a black tactical helmet and mask, a tactical vest, aviator glasses, and a black bag -- making him, if nothing else, incredibly easy to track with video? Not, I suspect, a pro. Here's what a professional hit looks like:

Just before 5:30 on a December evening in 1985, mob boss Paul Castellano stepped out of a limo in front of Sparks Steakhouse in midtown Manhattan and was shot to death. The four assassins who gunned him down were conspicuously dressed in trench coats and Russian fur hats. John Gotti, the man who arranged the hit, sat in a car nearby to make sure “Big Paul” was dead.

As someone pointed out on Reddit:

Exactly… multiple people saying they saw a guy dressed in a Cossack and Trenchcoat and then another saying, yeah I saw both of them too, and another saying , wait I saw 4, then another saying, no, I saw six. Confusion abounds.

The four guys in Russian hats and trenchcoats were never identified, which was the whole point. A single guy on a rooftop, no matter how he's dressed, is far too easy to trace. In fact, notwithsanding the former FBI agent, I would go as far as to say this was a disorganized killer along the line of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the Butler shooter, or maybe even Robin Westman, the Annunciation Church killer. According to the Wall Street Journal this morning,

Investigators found ammunition engraved with transgender and antifascist ideology inside the rifle, sources said. A Justice Department official said the investigation was still in its preliminary stages.

This, if true, would almost point to the killer being a Crooks-Westman wannabe. I can't imagine the Wall Street Journal would print this without careful confirmation. But I also think the FBI so far isn't telling all it knows, and of course, there's nothing untoward about that when the investigation is ongoing.

The Big Hoax: The Bureau Of Labor Statistics

🚨 UPDATE: Scott Bessent is DEMANDING the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a LOT to make up for their total inaction following a major jobs revision.

"If the Fed says they're data dependent and the data has been atrocious, then it seems like there are probably some makeup… pic.twitter.com/L7M80tGUQC

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 9, 2025

So far, only Byron York at the Washington Examiner grasps the importance of yesterday's revelation:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has revised the number of jobs it says were created in the year between April 2024 and March 2025. Until now, the official line was that the economy created 1.758 million jobs in that period. Now, the BLS says only 847,000 jobs were created, less than half what was originally thought. That is a stunning downward revision of 911,000 jobs.

The new numbers upended much of what everyone, regardless of political party, thought about the economy. Democrats maintained that President Joe Biden handed off a strong economy to President Donald Trump, who then weakened it. Republicans maintained that Biden handed off a weak economy to Trump, who then strengthened it. Now, it appears that from a jobs standpoint, the economy has been weaker than thought the whole time.

. . . Last year, there was another story like this one, in which we learned that from April 2023 to March 2024, the economy created 818,000 fewer jobs than the BLS had originally said, wiping out most of the economy’s gains. The number was finalized at about 600,000 jobs, fewer than originally estimated, but the gap between early reports and reality was huge.

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse commented,

[This] puts President Trump’s decision to fire the head of the BLS into context.

Legacy media portrays Trump as impulse-driven and narcissistic, but it's hard to avoid thinking his instincts in this area have been correct. Byron York concludes,

The great and the good rose to denounce Trump. That’s what they do. But now, with the latest huge revisions on top of the previous huge revisions, it seems reasonable to suggest that there is something terribly wrong with how the BLS counts the number of jobs created each month. That is not to say that Erika McEntarfer was trying to win the election for Kamala Harris, or that she was acting out of bald political bias. It is just to say that something is wrong.

. . . This is important because many people in many corners of the economy rely on the BLS data. Businesspeople base business decisions on it. Government officials base governmental decisions on it. Politicians base political decisions on it.

Or put a little differently, the Federal Reserve has been setting interest rates based on garbage data, and it looks like they'll be among the last people ever to acknowledge this. What interests me here is the similarity to the underlying issue in The Big Short: the discrepancies between reality and the accepted metrics -- in that case, the ratings of the bond agencies, in this case, employment statistics -- are noticeable, measurable, and at least to some, predictable.

In a statement posted to X, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the revision underscores that Trump “inherited a far worse economy than reported and he’s right to say the Fed is choking off growth with high rates.”

While the preliminary revision announced Tuesday was higher than economic experts anticipated, many expected a sizable write-down. The Fed also factors in an array of metrics when setting policy — most notably inflation numbers — and board members know to bake in some leeway to account for possible changes in BLS numbers. (Fed Gov. Christopher Waller, a potential candidate to replace Powell, said in a recent speech that he expected the annual revision to eliminate around 60,000 jobs per month from the 12-month average.)

The contrarian investors in The Big Short saw the opportunity to profit from the discrepancy between the AAA ratings for mortgate-backed securities and the actual risks posed by the credit ratings of the underlying borrowers.

I can only assume that someone can come up with some type of financial instrument that would allow an investor to arbitrage the discrepancy between BLS employment reports and reality. On the other hand, such discrepancies suggest that wise decisions can be made in areas other than just financial investment -- for instance, if as Byron York says above, government officials base governmental decisions on BLS data. Politicians base political decisions on BLS data.

Which government officials should we trust? Which politicians should we trust? After all, civic trust is a form of investment. As the contrarian Mark Baum said to his staff after interviewing an overoptimistic investment banker, "Short everything he's touched!" We're entitled to distrust every government official and politician on the wrong side of this spread. What we've been seeing over and over is that Trump's instincts have been correct.

The Big Hoax: Crime Statistics

The legacy media take on Trump's crime crackdown in DC was to say that crime was aready declining there. For instance, from CBS News:

Identifying the specific causes of changes in criminal activity is complex because it can be driven by many factors – and local police data was already showing that reported crimes were trending downward in Washington prior to the president's action.

Violent crime, for example, in the two weeks prior to Aug. 7, was down about 20% already from the same period in prior years, according to the MPD data.

But the assertion that DC crime had already been declining is actually very questionable:

Last month, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) informed Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Chief Pamela Smith, in a letter, that his committee is “investigating disturbing allegations that DC crime data is inaccurate and intentionally manipulated.”

Comer told Smith that a whistleblower “with direct knowledge of internal MPD operations and crime data discussions” told his committee that “crime statistics were allegedly manipulated on a widespread basis and at the direction of senior MPD officials.”

. . . MPD District 3 Commander Michael Pulliam, was reported last month to have been under investigation for allegedly manipulating crime statistics for his district, although Comer told Smith in his letter that, “Unfortunately, this practice does not appear to be isolated, nor is it a recent development.”

MPD data had shown violent crime decreases across all seven police districts, although D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said MPD leadership only found anomalies in data reporting in one district.

The whole aim of California's 2014 Proposition 47 was to define crime downward by reclassifying many felonies as misdemeanors:

Prop 47 identified six “petty” crimes—grand theft, larceny, personal drug use, forgery, and two types of check fraud—and reclassified them. It downgraded these crimes, including thefts with property values under $950 and illegal drug possession for personal use, from felonies to misdemeanors.

The conventional reaction has been to insist Prop 47 lowered crime rates:

Just-released statistics from the California Department of Justice show property crime rates reached their lowest levels ever reliably recorded in 2024 — before the anti-reform Proposition 36 ever took effect.

A decade of crime trends through 2024 refute the widespread alarm driven by viral videos, sensational news reports, anecdotes, and quips that 2014’s Proposition 47 reform increased property crimes. Property crime rates declined during much of the criminal justice reform era to reach record-low levels last year.

But according to the previous link,

Pre–Prop 47 discretion over charging felonies also provided the safeguard that people convicted of a felony are subject to closer supervision after release than those convicted of a misdemeanor. Individuals with a history of theft tend to pose more of a threat than those who commit theft once. But Prop 47 took away prosecutors’ ability to charge those repeat offenders with more serious felony crimes, instead treating all their crimes as misdemeanors, where the maximum sentence is 364 days in jail for some crimes, and only 180 days for theft.

Prop 47 was a significant shift in California’s approach to criminal justice, investing in the popular narrative that slashing incarceration while increasing spending on services would provide better outcomes for both defendants and public safety. Several previous studies, however, found that property crimes increased under Prop 47. One 2018 report found that Prop 47 may have contributed to a larceny theft increase of approximately 9% in California, compared with other states. Another study from that same year found a moderate increase in larceny and motor vehicle thefts. And a 2019 analysis found that property crime increased 5%–7%.

The study argues that reduced penalties shifted prosecutor decisions in how to charge defendants, and the increased likelihood that shoplifters wouldn't be prosecuted reduced merchants' willingness to report the crimes. Both of these factors would reduce overall crime statistics, but in places like DC, the impression of ordinary citizens has been that crime has become worse.

In addition, there have been pressures on police to fudge crime statistics downward for decades. For instance, in Atlanta,

Atlanta underreported crimes for years to help land the 1996 Olympics and pump up tourism, according to an audit commissioned by police and released Friday [2004].

Police in this relentlessly self-promoting city of the New South routinely altered or suppressed thousands of crime reports in a concerted effort “to improve Atlanta’s chances for selection,” the audit said, citing interviews with several officers.

“Crime incidents were downgraded, underreported and discarded,” the report said.

. . . Despite the distorted figures, Atlanta ranked No. 1 or No. 2 in violent crimes such as rape and murder in nine of the last 10 years, according to FBI crime data, which is compiled from reports submitted by police departments.

The same contradiction is reflected in the current debate. PBS fact checks Trump's claims about the DC crime rate:

Is Washington, D.C.’s homicide rate the highest of any city in the world? The chart Trump displayed showed the district’s 2023 homicide rate. But it did not have the highest homicide rate of cities around the world that year.

The Igarapé Institute, a Brazilian nonprofit organization, monitors homicide rates around the world. In its most recent data from 2023, 49 cities around the world had higher homicide rates than Washington, D.C.

Of those 49 cities, three are capital cities — Cape Town, South Africa; Kingston and St. Andrew, Jamaica; and Caracas, Venezuela. Trump specifically compared Washington, D.C.’s homicide rate with Bogotá, Colombia, and Mexico City. The district had a higher 2023 homicide rate than those two places.

. . . We rate Trump’s statement False.

The problem here is twofold. First, exactly where DC rates in a list of third-world hellholes with correspondingly high murder rates is a trivial question if it's on a top-50 list at all. Second, the ordinary populace has had a strong impression that whatever the crime rate, public spaces, parks, streeets, transit, front yards, sidewalks, are unsafe and unhealthy. To claim rhe rates surrounding these conditions are somehow decreasing is nothing but gaslighting.

What's been happening for several generations is fairly simple: the urban machines have found it to their advantage to privilege the criminal underclass, Marx's Lumpenproletariat. Their families don't want brothers, sons, or baby daddies in prison, so they'll vote for candidates -- judges, councilmembers, mayors, district attorneys -- who'll oppose cash bail and put offenders back on the street. Meanwhile, there's been an incentive to minimize crime statistics to conceal the actual effect of these policies. But this is nothing new.

It may be that the impact of well-publicized cases like those so recently in the news will begin to change overall publc attitudes. Certainly the sense that the Trump administration is actually doing something about the problems may have an effect as well.

The Big Hoax: Red-Pilling The Public Discourse

Yesterday I touched on the idea that's at the basis of The Big Short that a hoax can be perpetrated on the public -- and by this is meant the educated, informed, and prosperous classes -- via respected institutions and the media. But this isn't just paranoid thinking -- the mortgage-based securities hoax that led to the 2008 financial crisis was predictable and quantifiable, which is one of the chief themes of the film. Near the end, the contrarian Mark Baum makes the point that the fraud has been taking place "not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball". I noted yesterday that his omission of medicine must have been inadvertent.

What we're seeing in the era of Trump 47 is a systematic, at least notionally top-down effort to dismantle the comprehensive social hoax. For instance,

You could see just how much the Health and Human Services secretary is despised last week at a Senate committee hearing when Democrat after Democrat abused him with slurs like “charlatan” and demanded he resign. There is an orchestrated campaign to force him out that includes the overplayed political ploy of an “open letter from nine former CDC leaders” and another letter from 1,000 current and former HHS employees calling on him to step down.

But why would he resign? He’s only just getting started on Trump’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, which is popular with Americans of all stripes, especially Republicans, 73% of whom rated it favorably in the latest Insider Advantage poll.

It addresses public concern that transcends party lines about chronic disease, food safety and vaccine skepticism, the latter of which can be blamed on the lies we were told during the COVID-19 pandemic, not on RFK Jr.’s six months in office.

But it wasn't just Democrats:

Republican senators are sending clear signs of disapproval and unhappiness with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., making it plain to President Trump that they want the administration to address the chaos Kennedy has caused by trying to rewrite the nation’s vaccine policies.

GOP senators have stopped short of calling on Kennedy to resign and haven’t yet said they regret voting for him in February, but they want him to back off efforts to change vaccine policy recommendations without sound scientific backing as the administration faces a growing public backlash.

However, as Miranda Devine says at the first link, the public doesn't like vaccines. I can say from my own experience that in my routine trips to the doctor at Kaiser, he and the nurses have definitely backed off any pressure for me to get yet more COVID boosters -- I stopped, I think, after the fourth shot, when my booster card ran out of space anyhow. I firmly refused any more, and they've been polite about it. Every indication has been that my decision was prudent. Miranda Devine continues at the first link,

Democrats hate RFK Jr. because he’s an apostate who helped propel Trump to victory last year and because he calls out donations from Big Pharma. Some establishment Republicans don’t care for him either and fear he is undermining faith in vaccines.

But that faith was undermined by the real charlatans during the COVID-19 pandemic who lied that the mRNA so-called vaccine would stop transmission, must be administered to healthy children and had no downside.

The problem is that the hoaxers have hijacked formerly respected institutions. In The Big Short, it was the ratings agencies and the Federal Reserve. Remember that abolishing the Federal Reserve during almost all the last century was seem as an agenda item for only the farthest-fringe right wing. Now, we're getting a closer look at who's actually on the board via the Lisa Cook kerfuffle, and the idea of getting rid of it doesn't seem so extreme.

They've certainly hijacked the Centers for Disease Control.

The percentage of US adults reporting high confidence in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) fell from 82% in February 2020 to 56% in June 2022, along with decreasing trust in other US health institutions, according to a study yesterday in PLOS Global Public Health.

. . . The authors noted that respondents reporting high confidence in the CDC dropping from 82% in February 2020 to 68% in May 2020 to a low of 56% in June 2022—26 percentage points from its high point. The rate of those expressing high confidence then rebounded only slightly, to 60%, in October 2024.

Reported high confidence in the NIH, HHS, state health departments, and medical organizations followed a similar pattern, dropping by 25, 13, 16, and 26 percentage points, respectively, from the first (February 2020) through third (June 2022) survey.

So Secretary Kennedy fired the newly-named CDC head. That ought to be a dog-bites-man story if ever there was one.

Kennedy told senators on the Finance Committee that the CDC official, Susan Monarez, had lied about the circumstances that led to her firing, and said the CDC’s failings during the pandemic, and in combating chronic disease, meant more people at the agency needed to go.

“We are the sickest country in the world. That’s why we have to fire people at the CDC. They did not do their job,” Kennedy said. “I need to fire some of those people to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Another issue is the August 22 murder of Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown on a Charlotte, NC tram car. This wasn't covered until Elon Musk reposted about it on X yesterday:

Here’s a list of all the news networks who have NOT covered the Charlotte NC story:

- NYTimes
- CNN
- Washington Post
- MSNBC
- NPR
- USA Today
- Reuters
- Axios
- ABC News
- PBS

Every single one of them wrote stories on Daniel Penny...

…do you get it yet? pic.twitter.com/gr7MJx0NsX

— Matt Van Swol (@matt_vanswol) September 7, 2025

A video showing the murder of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on public transport in Charlotte, North Carolina, has sent shockwaves round the world. It has also reignited debate over the widening ideological gulf in news reporting. The video shows Zarutska sitting alone, scrolling her phone, while behind her Decarlos Williams, a 35-year-old black man with a long history of arrest and diagnosed schizophrenia, rises to his feet and swings a knife toward her unsuspecting neck.

. . . In addition to alleging a racialised disparity in propensity to criminal violence, the Right also claims that the progressive press seeks methodically to report cases so as to invert this disparity. That such violence is preponderantly and unjustly perpetrated by white people, especially police officers, against black Americans, was the animating claim that drove the Black Lives Matter protests and subsequent calls to “defund the police”. In a similar vein, there are dozens of New York Times articles on the Daniel Penny trial, while I could find none on the death of Austin Metcalf.

. . . Putting all this together, there is simply no obvious way to make her murder intelligible within American race politics in a way that does not serve Right-wing narratives. It thus appears that those outlets which most zealously oppose such narratives have either not registered it as having occurred, or opted not to report it.

In other words, we've been hoaxed, not just for a dozen years since the George Zimmerman and Michael Brown episodes, but since Rodney King and O J Simpson in the 1990s, that racial violence is overwhelmingly white-against-black. Trump has an instinct for these issues, and it's no coincidence that the top-down redpilling is taking place while he's been president.

🚨 BREAKING: President Trump is planning to look into the kiIIing of Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte

"Horrible... I'll know all about it by tomorrow morning."

After the Charlotte Mayor refused to condemn the attacker, the city may need federal intervention. pic.twitter.com/3vefQcnpXK

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) September 7, 2025

The Big Short In A New Perspective

Last night, my wife and I watched the 2015 film The Big Short after not seeing it for several years -- certainly not since Trump's return to the presidency. Not long into the film, my wife exclaimed, "This movie put Trump in the White House." If the film itself didn't directly do it -- certainly I don't remember hearing it brought up in either the 2016 or 2024 campaigns -- on watching it again, I think it characterizes a certain mindset that's grown over the past decade. Via Wikipedia,

Based on the 2010 book of the same name by Michael Lewis, it depicts how the 2008 financial crisis was triggered by the United States housing bubble.

. . . A critical and commercial success, the film grossed $133 million on a $50 million budget and received acclaim for the performances of the cast (particularly those of Bale and Carell), McKay's direction, editing, and the screenplay. The film won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in addition to nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Bale), and Best Film Editing.

The action in the film involves a small set of independent market actors who are variously eccentric, contrarian, and a little naive who eventually come to the conclusion that mortgage-backed securities have matastasized into an enormous hoax, which is being maintained by the Federal Reserve, big banks, and ratings agencies, with the connivance of the media. They anticipate that it will lead to a market crash in 2007, and they make risky trades anticipating this.

However, the institutions and the media are able to keep the ball rolling until mid-2008, which creates the suspense in the film, as the red-pilled players steadily lose the confidence of their investors. The final crash and demise of investment banks like Bear Stearns vindicate them, although they recognize that nothing has changed the basic system that created the problem. Mark Baum, one of the fictional contrarians, in a debate with Bruce (actually Bill) Miller, a real-life figure known for his bullish stance on mortgage backed securities, explains a basic premise of the film:

Mark Baum: We live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball... What bothers me isn't that fraud is not nice. Or that fraud is mean. For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once. Eventually you get caught, things go south. When the hell did we forget all that? I thought we were better than this, I really did.

[to his opponent, Bruce Miller] Mark Baum: And as fun as it is seeing pompous dumb Wall Streeters be wildly wrong, and you are *wrong*, sir. I just know that at the end of the day regular people are going to pay for all of this. Because they always, always do. That's my two cents. Thank you.

Deutsche Auditorium Host: Does our bull have a response?

Bruce Miller: Only that in the history of Wall Street, no investment bank has ever failed except when caught in criminal activities. So I stand by my Bear Stearns optimism.

As they speak, the stock run that will lead to Bear Sterns's demise begins, and the auditorium empties. But Mark Baum makes the real point, what probably put Trump in the White House: We live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball. Or for that matter, medicine. Sundance at Conservative Treehouse outlines the effect of the big medical fraud:

Corona Virus Disease of 2019 (CoV2), colloquially referred to as “COVID-19”, was a man-made influenza (flu) virus created in a laboratory in Wuhan China, using “gain of function” research grants from the United States government. The virus escaped the laboratory and became a pandemic influenza virus as it spread throughout the world.

The response to the release of the virus, the mitigation effort, was organized by global intelligence services and coordinated through western military cooperation. The military and intelligence services coordinated the mitigation efforts with various national health services, the compliance rules and subsequent restrictions upon Americans were a downstream consequence.

Everything within the mitigation process was fraught with governmental fear, widely ridiculous panic, over-the-top reactions and a level of political pressure never before seen in modern history. All of the rules and restrictions were genuinely crazy at the time events were happening, and in hindsight review none of the mitigation efforts made any sense whatsoever. Commonsense was thrown out the window as mass formation psychosis spread like wildfire with a hurricane.

If we begin to think about the COVID crisis of 2020-2023, the financial crisis of 2008 pales in comparison -- take just this one vignette:

March 29, 2021 Rochelle Walensky, Director of CDC, infamously declared on MSNBC:

"Vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick."

Emails obtained by FOIA from Jan 30, 2021 show that Walensky knew this was a lie at the time she said it.

1/12 pic.twitter.com/9rdmGuEHPM

— Kevin Bass PhD MS (@kevinnbass) September 5, 2025

But the book on which the film was made, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis, was published in March, 2010, less than two years after the 2008 crisis. As of now, we're well over two years past the worst of the COVID mandates, and we have yet to see equivalent examinations of this much bigger fraud. Think of the film that could be created about the COVID hoax.

In fact, this must certainly lie behind the astonishing congressional meltown from both parties over Secretary Kennedy's appearance last week. I'm not sure if a film equivalent to The Big Short on COVID can be made; it would come much too close to the basic fraud problem we currently have. Still, think of the careers that could be made by actors portraying Dr Fauci, Dr Birx, Dr Walensky, Donald Trump, Joe Biden. . .

So, What Is Trump Up To In Venezuela?

The YouTube embedded above is one of very few attempts I've found anywhere to parse out what Trump's objectives are now in Venezuela. In it, Preston Stewart is a West Point graduate and Afghan combat veteran who posts about veterans' affairs on TikTok and YouTube, as well as on various podcasts. In this episode, he interviews Juan Gonzalez, whom he identifies as a former National Security Council Senior Director for the Western Hemisphere and currently a resident fellow at the Georgetown Americas Institute.

Under the principle of "trust but verity". I note that Mr Stewart has inflated Mr Gonzalez's title from "Director", as it appears on this link, to "Senior Director". He omits that Gonzalez was also "Special Advisor to Vice President Joe Biden from 2013-2015, where he advised and represented the Vice President on all policy matters related to the Western Hemisphere". Gonzalez was also Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department in 2016.

However, apparently after Trump's 2016 election, he moved to the Penn Biden Centerr for Global Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which appears to have been a holding tank for Biden loyalists while Joe was out of office. But he doesn't seem to have returned to either the White House or the State Department following Biden's 2020 election. He is currently listed as a fellow at the Georgetown Americas Institute on its website.

One thing that puzzles me is Gonzalez speaks on the screen with what appears to be his desk behind him, but on the desktop and shelves are a few books, a fair amount of bric-a-brac, and a lot of family photos -- but there's neither a computer screen nor a keyboard in sight. Hey, this is 2025 -- if you work at any sort of professional job, you work with a computer. What does this guy actually do for a living, and why does he have so much time to schmooze with a YouTuber? In fact, if he actually worked on real issues connected with Venezuela and the drug trade, wouldn't he actually need high-level approval to speak publicly on sensitive material? Just wondering. I'm not impresssed with this interview overall, but it sent me looking for other answers.

I give him credit for being up front; he clearly worked for both Obama and Biden, and he says he disagrees with almost everything Trump is doing over Venezuela --- but revealingly, he basically says nothing Obama tried to do with Chavez or Maduro worked. And in the end, he has little productive to say, other than to minimize the role of cocaine smuggling in tbhe whole Venezuela question, which is nevertheless the issue Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth have all stressed in their public remarks. He also says that it's unrealistic to expect a Venezuelan military coup against Maduro, because all the generals are carefully screened fior loyalty.

But this brought me up against remarks by another well-placed policy commentator who's begun to appear on YouTube with some frequency, Sarah Paine, a professor at the US Naval War College. She frequently mentions the disadvantages of large standing armies, as she does in this interview: they generate coups, and they need to be paid. As she puts it, they "tended to influence political institutions in authoritarian directions". Indeed, she often makes the point that in China, the Peoples Liberation Army controls the economy to benefit itself.

But this brought me to another thought: I noted back in February that Trump's strategy to stop the grift machine is to turn off the money spigot. If NGOs are feeding mass migration via settlement programs, end the federal grants that finance the NGOs. If universities are treating foreign students as a cash cow, which in turn fosters anti-Semitism, end federal grants to universities, and cut off their foreign students.

So I immediately began to wonder if Trump saw the threat of military force against Venezuelan gofast boats as a way to turn off the money spigot, and I applied Sarah Paine's insights into military rule to the question: yes, the military is in charge, but the military wants to get paid. A few moments searching the web brought up some productive insights (this may give some context to why Juan Gonzalez doesn't have a keyboard or a screen on his desk). For instance:

Venezuela was historically among the wealthiest economies in South America, particularly from the 1950s to 1980s. During the 21st century, under the leadership of socialist populist Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan economy has collapsed, prompting millions of citizens to flee Venezuela. GDP has fallen by 80 percent in less than a decade. The economy is characterized by corruption, food shortages, unemployment, mismanagement of the oil sector, and since 2014, hyperinflation.

So, given Venezuela's economic collapse, how is the military getting paid? Remember, Sarah Paine's point is that the military controls the economy to advantage itself.

Venezuela has been a path to the United States for cocaine originating in Colombia, through Central America and Mexico and Caribbean countries such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. In the 2010s, Venezuela also gradually became a major producer of cocaine.

. . . In 2005 Venezuela severed ties with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), accusing its representatives of spying. Following the departure of the DEA from Venezuela and the expansion of DEA's partnership with Colombia in 2005, Venezuela became more attractive to drug traffickers.

. . . Since 2012, the United States government has stated that "generally permissive security forces and a corrupt political environment have made Venezuela one of the preferred routes of cocaine trafficking from South America". . . . According to the United States, "elements of the Venezuelan security forces have assisted these drug trafficking organizations".

In other words, the military is getting paid, either directly via transporting the drugs themselves, or via payoffs from the cartels, from the drug trade, since the legitimate Venezualan economy has collapsed.

Earlier this year, I noted that business-school studies of Trump's negotiating strategy point out that he carefully studies both his opponents' strong and weak points. The Venezuelans' weak points are first, that their economy is forced to rely on drug trafficking, but also, that the drug routes involve long stretches over international waters. As Secretary Rubio pointed out in his Mexico City news conference, conventional interdiction via sea-based resources amounts to little more than an overhead item for the traffickers.

On the other hand, tracking of gofast boats via electronic intelligence and drones, and immediate obliteraion of the boats via missiles, threaten something much closer to complete closure of the smuggling routes -- and if the gofast boats can't get through, this turns off the money spigot, and the military doesn't get paid.

What happens next is an open question, although in Wittgenstein's sense, the solution to the problem appears in the disappearance of the problem. Juan Gonzalez complains that only a third of US cocaine imports come via the Caribbean, but that's a third of US cocaine imports, a major dent -- and done via drones and missiles, a fairly cheap solution. Questions of coups, regime change, or boots on the ground are irrelevant. The increased US military resources are there simply to protect the drones and anti-boat missiles.

But it also serves as a template. Venezuela isn't the only country where the cartels control the state via the military. It's a template for strategy elsewhere: find a way for drones and missiles to stop the drug trade outside the borders, and other things will inevitably follow.