The Shadow of the Shadow “As shocking as it may sound, the institution of the State itself is the real enemy. It’s time to carefully analyze your relation to it.” — Doug Casey JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER

  You have to wonder: has there ever been a country that marched off to war with no head-of-state at the top of its war machine? It’s exactly that bad in our country, with a broken animatronic Halloween scarecrow popping in-and-out of the White House to yell incoherently at election campaign events for a putative successor too scared of the predicament she’s in to think straight. Really, no one is in charge — and if any of the leading actors on the scene really were, the situation could easily get worse.
  Hence, the brainless wish roiling through the NSC, State Department, and the various shadow councils of the intel emeriti to lob long-range missiles into Russia, apparently heedless of any consequences. America, you are a headless horseman riding blindly into chaos.
  In fact, the entire Democratic Party and its Deep State intel blob partners have melted down into a desperate mob of political criminals frantic to evade accounting for their acts. So then, setting the world on fire is all they have left, a fitting act of revenge for a faction thwarted in its mad drive to merely wreck the United States for the sake of “social justice” and “equity.”
 The Democrats of 2024 made exactly the same mistake that their predecessors, the Jacobins, made in France back in 1794: they just couldn’t tell when they’d gone too far with their insults against the public interest and common decency. Their insults derived from the age-old human impulse to demolish society due to life being unfair, later codified in Marxian doctrine, and then made into a play-book by Saul Alinisky (with annotations by Antonio Gramsci, Richard Cloward, and Frances Fox Piven).

Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or here on Substack Upgrade to paid This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit:Kunstler.com/vaulted As the French Revolution ground on and on, by 1793 the Jacobins gained control of the Committee of Public Safety which actually carried out policy, while endless quarrels occupied the National Convention — the then-current legislative body. The Jacobins’ policy was insane, just as the policy of open borders, lawfare, war, censorship, pharma-terrorism, climate hustles, and drag queens in the schools is insane under our modern Jacobins, the Democrats. (Notice the Democrats’ constant invoking of “safety” and “safe spaces” as a similar rhetorical device for justifying their deeds and cowing the public.) The Committee of Public Safety sought to remake French society by turning its cultural norms upside-down and by killing as many of its political opponents as possible. Thus, the Reign of Terror when, for a whole year, heads rolled and rolled off the guillotine in the Place de Concorde, usually without benefit of a trial. The ghoulish extravaganza of gore and death grossed-out those in the country who had not lost their minds. One night in July 1794, as the Jacobin boss, Robespierre, took to the rostrum in the Convention for the umpteenth time to denounce his enemies and announce new death sentences, members in the chamber commenced throwing food at him. That was the turning point, and it turned so hard and fast that France was amazed. Within forty-eight hours, Robespierre and many of his cohorts got beheaded under the “national razor,” and that was the end of Jacobinism and all its insane measures to wreck what was left of society after five years of revolution. Our Democratic Party Jacobins have been harder to defeat because government these days is vastly larger and more complex, and the equivalent of the Committee of Public Safety is now a huge network of cadres toiling in scores of federal agencies and associated NGOs financed by those agencies (or by their billionaire henchmen such as George Soros, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Reid Hoffman). Insane as they are, many public officials understand their culpability for the treasons and insults of recent years. They live in fear of prosecution and, short of that, of losing their cushy sinecures in the colossal bureaucracy that is bankrupting us. There are many in our country today who are also not insane, just as in France circa 1794. This is actually the chief appeal of Mr. Trump, though he often expresses it clumsily, coming, as he does, from the rough and exacting world of property development, which is full of rough people in rough building trades using rough language. Secondarily, Mr. Trump represents leadership — the sheer idea that an actual person should be an executive-in-charge of a national polity — and it appears that a majority of the people in this land are finally sick of a faceless blob ruling madly from the shadows. Thirdly, Mr. Trump has become a national father figure, a titanic offense to a party run by women with daddy issues and to their Marxist allies dogmatically bent on destroying the family (along with every other institution). As it happens, countries need fathers, both actual and symbolic. What a surprise! In the mad effort to evade judgment for their acts, the Democrats and their blob cadres are either trying to kill Mr. Trump directly, or are looking the other way while other nefarious parties attempt the wicked business. So far, no cigar. Who knows what they’ll try next: a surface-to-air missile at his airplane. . .a directed-energy weapon. . . a poisoned cheeseburger. . .? The candidate himself seems a little tinged these days with the same aura of dauntless resignation that was seen in Martin Luther King and the first Bobby Kennedy in 1968 — who both went about their business trying to rescue our country from war and wickedness despite the threats against them. Many upright, intelligent, bold figures stand with and behind Mr. Trump this time, people capable and willing to pick up the flag in the event it becomes necessary. Do not fear. Meanwhile, you have to also wonder: what on earth possessed the Democrats to maneuver Kamala Harris into this race? Everyone in the party and the blob must know she doesn’t have an agile mind — beyond some ability for reciting parboiled slogans — nor much acquaintance with the workings of the world besides her dwindled wiles in political amour, and that she may actually have a drinking problem. She is left, finally with no one to cheerlead for her but the harpies on The View and the degenerates on CNN and The New York Times who all know the score but are too invested in years of their own mendacity to even attempt to come clean. Chatter arises that the awaited “October surprise” will involve “Joe Biden” resigning from office to make way for Kamala to become the First Woman President just before election day, affording her, supposedly, a magisterial prestige in the final leg of the race. Don’t bet on that. When he resigns, “JB” loses his power of the pardon. If he exercises it on the eve of resignation and lets son Hunter, brothers James, Frank, and other family members (including himself) off the hook for their global money-grubbing exploits, it will only besmirch Ms. Harris by association. He has to hang in office until after Nov 6, no matter how the election turns, and then he can pardon what left of his brains out. Before we even get to that point, all you have to worry about are unaccountable government factotums doing something over in Russia that will make Mr. Putin want to turn the USA into an ashtray.