What Has America Lost? What Remains Worth Preserving?

 

An abiding mystery of this lunatic Fourth Turning is how it came to be that the supposed intellectual elite of America was the class that so shamelessly lost its collective mind, got behind ideas that ranged from absurd to disgraceful — “Defund the Police,” “boys in the girl’s locker room,” “voter ID is unfair,” “dismantle capitalism,” “no one is illegal,” “mostly peaceful riots,” “Covid vaccine mandates” “CIA-run censorship,” — and finally decided to march under the banner of communism, history’s most floridly ruinous political program.

The answer is that intellectuals are in the employ of the racketeering operation that is the Washington’s permanent bureaucracy married to the Democratic Party’s laundering of taxpayer dollars into all the parasitical enterprises that this combine feeds. And the more the money-flows get cut, the more the intellectuals fear losing their fat salaries and their status. In desperation, they are now trying to just burn the USA house down.

At least you don’t hear “Slava Ukraini,” anymore, since it’s so far beyond obvious that the EU has been using that sad-sack place as a launching pad for World War III, and evidently even “progressives” have decided that’s not such a hot idea. (The EU’s elites might even be crazier than America’s.)

History, I remind you, is a trickster. It’s also a cardinal irony of the times that this Fourth Turning’s “Gray Champion” role fell to one Donald Trump. He is at once cartoonish in speech, appearance, and predilections while being stunningly effective, indefatigable, and intrepid in his job as president. His mere presence on the scene drives his opponents to fugues of rancor. Their failure to eliminate him by either bullets or the most fantastically fallacious lawfare has led their favored political party to a frank break with reality, possibly close to suicide.

There was a silver lining to the ludicrous election shenanigans of 2020 that stuffed “Joe Biden” in the White House and marooned Mr. Trump out in the political wilderness. After being naively buffaloed by his Deep State enemies in Term No. 1, he got a great opportunity to stand back and see exactly how they operated with their hands on the levers of power, and then to map out the money-driven matrix of nefarious orgs that nourished these enemies. And even while getting dragged through the courts in one bogus case after another, and dodging bullets, Mr. Trump was able to lay coherent big plans to defeat these enemies.

Reality becomes ever harder to discern for a creature (the human being) who depends on a consensus about what’s real as driven by language, the engine of agreement. When you wreck language, you make agreement impossible, and reality turns to a gray ooze. The Lefty-leftists changed-up language like crazy until every word, every idea attached to every word, became the opposite of what everyone thought it was. The strategy backfired badly, because it was the Lefties who thereby destroyed their own reality, making themselves crazy as well as ridiculous. Imagine a Supreme Court nominee, a female, as it happens, who claims under oath that she can’t define what a woman is.

The Lefties who fell for this were trained up exquisitely by their own Leftie mentors in the universities, who were all in on Saul Alinsky’s depraved Bible of political dirty-fighting, Rules for Radicals, the number-one rule being: accuse your opponents of doing whatever you are doing. It helped their cause a lot that women were overtaking men demographically in higher ed and in the management jobs they segued into after college. omen, being smaller and not as physically strong as men, are more inclined to dirty fighting. That has been the sad recent history of the Democratic Party, and now it’s floundering in a netherworld of mental illness.

It was in the nature of conservatives to resist all the attempts at the language changes foisted on the country. They generally did not believe that men could become women by wishing it, or that the “diversity” provided by 20-million illegal immigrants was “our strength,” or that mothers had to be called “birthing people.” Their consensus about reality was not fractured.

The once-powerful elite can’t stand not having power. They still have plenty of money, but they probably want to keep what’s left of it, and now that all the laundering of taxpayer money through NGOs is ending, it will be ever harder to finance their power-grabbing with other people’s money. The midterms are more of a challenge for them than their official information channels let on, and the Woke slop on the Internet isn’t helping much either.

Apart from some traumatic “October surprise,” I now think it’s unlikely that the president will invoke a national security executive order to require anything like uniform voter ID across the country. Instead, it looks like several executive agencies will monitor activities at and around the polling places. Sec’y MarkWayne Mullins of the Department of Homeland Security stated that ICE agents could be present at polls. Lawsuits have been filed seeking to block that. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon declared that the DOJ intends to send 1000 lawyers and trained legal staff to select districts. The DOJ has also warned state and county election officials that fooling around with ballots will trigger a hard finding out this time.

If there’s trouble this year, it’s more likely to happen after the election, when Democrats refuse to accept the results. Lawfare ninjas Marc Elias and Norm Eisen will swing into overdrive attempting to paralyze the nation in post-election lawsuits. As for riots, the NGOs know that the FBI is watching their remaining money flows to outfits such as Antifa, or whatever remains of Black Lives Matter, or MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán), or groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, etc. Billionaires like Neville Roy Singham, are reportedly getting the heebie-jeebies. Soros will fork over around $30-million in cash to candidates, but I doubt he’ll sponsor any street-fighting. He and his successor son, Alex, are already skating on thin ice.

Anyway, the intellectual elite have thoroughly disgraced themselves. The still-unfolding Covid-19 aftermath sets off a slow-motion train-wreck of disgraced experts, one after another. The spectacle of Dr. Fauci taking the 5th last month is not the end of that business. Almost certainly there will not be any indictments of the many Deep State traitors before November 3 — the president does not aim to be accused of election interference. But after the midterms, the deluge.

* * *

You know the midterm election is a struggle session testing whether our country wants to be sane or insane. Of course, this raises the question: what’s so great about being insane? If nothing else, it implies a lot of bad decision-making, leading to all manner of sorrow and woe in life. So, why would so many opt to be crazy?

The answer is probably that they were snookered into it, fooled, tricked, rooked, spoofed, flim-flammed, bamboozled, enticed into a range of thought and emotion counter to their self-interest and well-being. Isn’t this exactly what you see in the social phenomenon of “transing” pubescent children? To induce them to go along with a malevolent program for turning them into something they are not.

A whole apparatus was constructed to carry out “gender-affirming care.” Notice how positive the language is. It’s “care,” administered by adults, not a few of them physicians and clinical psychologists, who affect to care. And it “affirms,” that is, it validates, it turns supposition into fact (that is not so). The adults happen to be in authority over children. They are presumed to be trustworthy.

But they are not trustworthy. They persuade children confused by puberty to be mutilated with surgery and hormones in order to put on a performance for the adults. The performance is called “No Boundaries.” It does not really affirm a child’s gender by pretending to change it. It affirms the mental illness of the untrustworthy adults. They have developed a defect of cognition that disrupts their perception of reality. They don’t know where things begin and end.

Where did this come from? You won’t like this. It came from women taking over the leadership of our institutions, especially education. In the two centuries that public education has existed, there were always a lot of women teachers. But they were superintended by men with a sense of boundaries, who enforced the distinction between thought and feeling, between sense and nonsense. Now you see what has happened with men removed from that picture. Thought and sense have been deleted.

Women are primarily driven by the wish for communion and for care (of children and households). If they don’t find mates, don’t form households, and don’t have children, their drives can be hijacked. Likewise, if their households are broken by divorce and their children are damaged by it. It’s been increasingly difficult for men and women to form households and successfully raise children, or to keep a household from breaking under the social and economic pressures of our time.

Politics is another set of institutions increasingly dominated by women in leadership roles. They convert all the social discontents of childlessness and broken households into laws, rules, and policies which, not surprisingly, demonstrate a failed sense of boundaries and a contorted drive for communion and care. That’s how the Democratic Party — increasingly run by-and-for women — was bamboozled into throwing the border wide open under “Joe Biden,” and why they have become hysterical over the nurturing of those millions of illegal migrants now here. The drive to care has transformed into a mad, grandiose wish to save the world.

The nation’s borders are strict boundaries. The Democratic Party programmatically denounces the existence of national boundaries — viz, the “Squad” in Congress, et al. “No one is illegal.” That open border was profoundly destructive and costly for the nation. Donald Trump declared that national boundaries matter and closed the border effectively. This not only made him an arch-villain to many of the women in America with boundary problems, but it also gave them a big opportunity to exercise their drive for communion by ginning up public get-togethers such as the anti-ICE riots of last winter and the “No Kings” marches of the spring.

Mr. Trump, with his repertoire of distinctive male mannerisms, setting of boundaries, and bent for decisive action, propels these world-saving, deeply-caring, communion-seeking political women into raptures of rage and animosity. It might be instructive to remind you that, back in the history of this land, among the native-American Iroquois (a most civilized people), it was the women who were assigned the primary task of torturing their enemies to death. (Read about the ordeals of Father Isaac Jogues in Francis Parkman’s The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century.) More recently, one Lindsay Clancy of Duxbury, Mass., demonstrated how savagely awry female boundary failure can go.

This pathocracy of women in the Democratic Party accounts for the seemingly insane turn to communism. But, it’s communion-and-care all of a piece — the most extreme form of crazy ideological solidarity, plus the promise of free stuff for everybody (care!) with no boundaries. Meanwhile, over in Mr. Trump’s camp, you have an emphatically male-dominated hierarchy with the MAGA women’s drives for communion-and-care directed, as much as possible these days, back into the household and the nursery. Throw in FAFO as the baseline attitude and there’s authority you can trust.

* * *

Our national problems are not that difficult to understand and correct. Here’s an inventory of them:

Making a living 1. So many blunders, starting with off-shoring our factories. So few well-paying working-class jobs. Some of the former working-class are now working three part-time gigs and still not making a living. Quite a few are just at home, on “disability,” smoking drugs, flirting with suicide on fentanyl, eating too much crap snack food, getting tattoos. We’ve quit pretending that’s all right.

Mr. Trump proposes to change that and is re-shoring industry. It takes time to build it, get it running. Meanwhile nobody can find a plumber, an electrician, because of the bad political decision to send everyone to college, including kids not really able to finish high school. Result: “elite overproduction” Translation: too many college graduates, with the situation made worse by bogus fields-of-study that were concocted to keep students busy without preparing them for the real world. Hence, they are “elite” only by certification, not superior knowledge or skills. Young people need to learn real skills. Mr. Trump issued EO 145278 (April 2025) “Preparing Americans for High-Paying Skilled Trade Jobs of the Future.” Pell grants for short-term vocational training. Grants for apprenticeship positions.

Making a living 2. Rewrite the immigration law. We don’t need 1-million-plus newcomers each year. How about none for a while? Give American citizens priority for any and all jobs. Keep the border closed and deport all illegal immigrants. They have no “right” to be here. We don’t need “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore” (Emma Lazarus, 1883). It’s not 1883 anymore. Quit pretending we have to be “the beacon of the world.” Let them make themselves free in their own lands.

Making a living 3. America needs household servants and poor people need work. The current work-around for the well-off is to hire illegal aliens for this kind of work. It allows them to believe that putting poor Americans on the dole (out of “empathy”) and allowing them to be useless is “progressive.” (That’s insane.) There’s plenty to do, even for people of limited ability. Make menial labor okay again. These days, many people of means live in chaotic households where nothing is taken care of. It reflects their chaotic lives. (No wonder wealthy liberals are crazy.) Get poor people off welfare and off making babies they can’t take care of. Give them a place to live in your 5,000 square-foot McMansion and a paycheck.

Nothing Works. Because we automated too many transactions. Spent $XX-Billions and fifty years computerizing the US Telephone system to improve communication. Result: it’s impossible to get a real human being on the phone. How is that an improvement? How is it better for Americans to get jerked around on “phone trees” for hours every week? Too many “help desks” located in foreign lands that employ people who barely speak English. Quit pretending that’s okay. Start by requiring doctors’ offices and hospitals to provide humans to the answer their phones.

The Horror That Is Medicine. Get this: the situation is too dire to fix at-scale. The complexity and opportunities for racketeering are now too vast. Since failure is already well underway, and trust in doctors is broken, allow medicine to reorganize at the local clinic scale on a pay-for-service basis. Streamline medical education and the entry positions to practice. Government should not take over medicine, but can subsidize medical education. It would comprise a tiny percentage of the annual budget. Accept that there’s a lot doctors will have to learn on-the-job. Forbid insurance companies from owning hospitals, clinics, and doctor practices. To restore trust, quit pretending that Covid-19 was anything but a nefarious exercise and prosecute the large number of pharma executives, hospital admins, doctors, bureaucrats, who enabled it to happen. Make personal responsibility for your body great again. Let RFKjr do his job.

Scam Education. It’s failing at-scale as medicine is. Kids are allowed to “graduate” from high school not knowing how to read or do basic arithmetic. How did that become okay? Answer: the teachers’ unions are corrupt and degenerate, dedicated to Marxist social disruption and maximizing their pensions. Manipulating kids into fake sexual crises is a criminal enterprise. Centralizing K-12 schools into gigantic buildings was as much a mistake as off-shoring industry. School’s primary mission should be to produce basically literate citizens in the language of the USA, which is English. If you can’t speak and read English, you’re unlikely to learn anything else and unlikely to thrive in this society.

Black / White race conflict. Failing to teach black ghetto kids to speak English correctly stigmatizes them for life. Quit pretending you can compensate for that with grievance politics. It’s only made race relations worse and driven whites and blacks into separate cultures that can barely communicate with each other. That is opposite of the direction America was going in two generations ago. How did it reverse? I will tell you: By the 1980s, liberal shame over the Civil Rights movement’s failure to produce perfect social “equity” inspired the “solution” of “multiculturalism,” which said, let’s just have different standards of language, manners, and behavior for different ethnic groups (and everybody will get along). It was a shuck and jive. To be a coherent nation requires a common culture, the same standards for all citizens. That was America’s strength when we were strong, not our “diversity.”

The Law. The Woke judiciary is punking America thanks largely to appointments made by Barack Obama and “Joe Biden.” It’s extremely difficult to get rid of political “activist” judges with lifetime appointments. Or to wait for the SCOTUS to reverse their multitudinous noxious rulings. But it’s less difficult to put out-of-business the small cadre of lawfare ninjas who bring all the lawsuits that their chosen activist judges rule on — namely, Norm Eisen, Marc Elias and their many associates. They have engaged in manifold seditions from RussiaGate to the Mar-a-Lago raid and are liable for prosecution for the roles they played. Eisen and Elias run numerous NGOs that assist their shenanigans. The funding streams to them can be turned off, especially if any of the money comes from foreign entities, such as Arabella Advisors (and its pass-through orgs) or from foreign nationals like Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss and Shanghai-based Neville Roy Singham (currently under investigation by a New York federal grand jury). George Soros’s many Open Society affiliated NGOs have been busy for years pumping money into state attorney general and many county district attorney elections. In a 5–4 ruling on the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment bars the government from limiting independent spending on political speech by corporations, unions, and other associations. A later D.C. Circuit decision, SpeechNow.org v. FEC, led to the creation of “Super PACs” (political action committees) that can spend unlimited sums on activism as long as they do not give money directly to candidates or coordinate with them. Years later, there is a growing consensus that these decisions led to tremendous mischief in politics and the administration of law. They can be revisited.

Fraud and Grift. Artificial Intelligence (or “Super Intelligence,” if you like) is already pretty good. Good enough to trace money flows from the US Treasury through states such as Minnesota, New York, Illinois, and California, and further down the line into local orgs like the now-infamous Minneapolis “Learing” Center and the Feeding Our Future scam. AI can go over their books super-efficiently, too. Veep JD Vance is probably already using AI on his Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent estimated aggregate fraud in annual government spending at around half a trillion dollars a year.

Free and Fair Elections. It’s astounding that there’s any disagreement over the provisions in the SAVE ACT: only citizens can vote. . . ID required. . . One-day only election with results next day at the latest. . . Mail-in voting only for military, voters too ill to go to the polls, and persons out-of-the-country for a good reason. It’s a sign of epic dysfunction that we go into the midterms having failed to move this bill through a Republican-controlled Senate.

This is just a casual survey of a few things in our national life that need repair. You have to ask: who is behind all the pretending. What stands in the way of getting any of this done? I think you know.

by James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com on September 18, 24, and 28, 2026