The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Gift of the Antagonist A Mirror for Self Reflection Kalihi Valley Druid Working class jobs come with their downsides. One of them is that I am regularly surrounded by knuckleheads. Even worse are people like myself who have moderate intelligence and figured out that we get a way better deal collecting blood blisters and trading dirty jokes than the "more successful" office-bound flora. That means there's no shortage of underachievers who consider themselves smarter than everyone else and imagine they will leave us all behind someday once they get around to doing some really amazing accomplishment that's going to bring them fame and fortune. Month after month passes without appreciable results, and gradually the walls of age close in as their grandiose dreams dry up and reality sets in. They get a lot easier to deal with once they hit their first Saturn Return and learn some humility, but until then they have plenty of energy in their 20's and 30's and we...

  The Century of the Other John Michael Greer As a rule, no American election means as much as the shouting immediately afterward might lead you to think. Every four years, with a regularity that clockwork rarely matches, the supporters of the winning party pile all their daydreams of Utopia onto their candidate, while the partisans of the losing side howl that this time the jackboots and armbands will show up for certain. Then the new president is inaugurated, and something close to business as usual resumes. These have been getting plenty of use since November 5. This time, granted, the yelling is unusually loud. Some of that is an unintended byproduct of the losing side’s demonizing rhetoric during the last weeks of the campaign. Having convinced themselves (if no one else) that Donald Trump is literally Hitler, many Democrats are quaking in their shoes, sure that he must now act out the role they assigned him and throw them all into camps. Those camps have featured so relentles...

  Civil War II, Without Guns or Bayonets A House divided against itself Donald Jeffries The response to Donald Trump’s election continues to seethe and even explode, in all the big cities. In the upscale, lily-White gated communities. In the breakrooms of every public school. Behind the walls of Hollywood mansions. But most of all, on TikTok and Instagram, revealing America 2.0’s shocking level of insanity. In my last Substack, I blasted Trump for being Trumpenstein, as his initial cabinet choices were mirror images of the establishment disasters that he populated his first administration with. Marco Rubio for Secretary of State? But Trump must have been reading my Substack. Despite intimations that perhaps the Giant Orange Man is functionally illiterate, if he were to read something, what better than my humble offerings here? Trump’s picks of Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, and RFK, Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services, were met with the kind of reaction you’d expect fr...

  Donald Trump’s Middle Finger Patrick Lawrence Bird in the Hand – by Mr. Fish Donald J. Trump’s second four years in the White House are shaping up to be more fun than a barrel of monkeys, as the old saying goes. I have it from several sources, who cannot be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, as the old saying at The New York Times goes, that Trump’s cabinet nominees already resemble a barrel of monkeys. And my sources have been “verified by The New York Times,” I will have you know. Let’s leave all those liberal authoritarians, still smarting from their failure to sell Americans a bottle of snake oil labeled “Joy and Good Vibes,” to their predictable freakout as Team Trump runs onto the field. It is fun to watch, but you don’t want to partake of it. Remember, empire was not on the ballot Nov. 5: There was no voting against it and there never will be so long as America runs one. Trump and his people are simply going to run the imperium differently—more crudely, m...