My 2025 Airing of Grievances
I Got a Lot of Problems With You People!
“Welcome, newcomers. The tradition of Festivus begins with the airing of grievances. I got a lot of problems with you people! And now you’re gonna hear about it!” - Frank Costanza
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Well readers, it seems another year has come and gone, and while I admit the “vibe shift” was real and has been a huge relief this is not the place to give thanks. I have many grievances, here limited to 12 for the year. There was some, mostly misplaced, optimism about Trump 2.0, and while it remains less embarrassing than being “ruled” by Biden or Kamala, the Old Man Yells at Cloud energy from Trump is severe. He has found endless ways to wear out my gratitude with his general retardation, though one wonders if text wall Trump instead of snappy one liner Trump is not his mental deterioration and instead simply that Twitter’s old length limit helped him more than anyone.
It certainly is far from just Trump I have grievances with, and in fact he makes up a pretty small part of this list- though he is involved, to be sure. The common thread through all of these is more than anything the ludicrous AI bubble running in overdrive on ridiculous false promises, the ever more broken information landscape among all the humans competing with it, the Boomers receding and letting us see the devastation in their wake, and the endless machinations of all of the Americans who care more about other countries, most notably, Israel. Then there is wokeness falling just to be replaced with wokeness but only for the Jews. On top of all of this, we of course have the libs generally and a ton of judges who refuse to enforce the law, instead insisting criminals wreak havoc on society.
In this most sacred season, my patience has grown thin. So much promise wasted on the shit storm that has developed in our society over the last decades. So, in before the AI crash, here is my airing of grievances, because I really do have a lot of problems with you people.
The Great Low Level Tech Worker Replacement
Here, we must go back to the end of 2024, but I suppose this runs from one Festivus to another. You may remember Vivek Ramaswamy started what is apparently now his holiday tradition of crashing out about what he hates about Americans. Last year, he said that Americans are useless because we spent our childhood watching Boy Meets World instead of going to the geography bee, or whatever it is Indians do. It turns out, he is not only a miserable scamming anchor baby but also something of a Boomer. This of course, started a sort of H-1B revolt against Vivek and Elon. They had to back down to some extent, but both remain extremely pro-immigration in grating ways. The H-1B thing really didn’t die down all year, and Trump has tried to crack down on it, allegedly putting on a $100,000 fee though as with everything who can even follow if that is being or can be implemented.
Regardless, the Indians just will not drop it, because of course who besides white hippies actually wants to live in India, so they need to justify their being here. Those more recent among the Indian population are not assimilating well. When they see any threat to their own group they seem to respond with spreadsheet statistics about how Indian immigrants are the real best Americans and Indian H-1Bs are the only ones able to do any work, which is, to say the least…offputting. Of course, we are told that H-1B is not a path to citizenship, but it is obvious that our complex immigration system is a scam to be able to say that when there are endless paths to citizenship and then only immigration attorneys and mass immigration NGOs understand the system and can call us ignorant due to whatever technicality they have on hand. What is easy enough to understand is that any babies H-1Bs should have here are then citizens. Now the Washington Post is even treating us to a sob story about Indians being “stranded” in their homeland when they return home to try and renew their temporary worker status!
It’s quite the racket these immigration lawyers are running. Also, while we’re here:
Over the year endless testimony has come out about this and almost uniformly- from workers, not tech oligarchs- it is said that H-1Bs are largely useless and much of what is going on is an entire Indian cultural thing of the face it gives you to have other Indians owe you their job, and white people are simply outside of the system. Further, it is clear that far from being highly skilled positions where we need to attract the world’s best talent, these are fairly menial jobs and H-1Bs are open to anyone with a degree from Calcutta Tech. H-1B listings show all sorts of jobs managing hotels and the like which clearly don’t require specialized technical skills. Anything listed as requiring a college degree is a skilled position insofar as this kind of visa goes. What’s more, though the claim is that they can’t find Americans to take these jobs, the reality is that because the H-1B law is from the early ‘90’s, you only have to announce these jobs in a newspaper to meet the requirement that you can’t find Americans. Lee Fang, one of the few American economic leftists remaining who understands the purpose of all of this is to suppress wages, called around inquiring about jobs listed in the newspaper, and it turns out if you can get them to answer or track them down they are contractors who do this for several companies and admit they are just trying to fill the requirement to have attempted to hire Americans!
This of course has all come at a time when no one has wanted to hire white men, as we will get to later. A whole generation was told to go to college and learn STEM fields and then they just gave all of their jobs to Indians and called them lazy and entitled for noticing. It has gotten so extreme at some companies that states have been discussing passing laws about caste discrimination, because our tech companies are now basically Bombay.
On this, at least, it seems like Trump is doing well, but the Indian tech armies will not be easily defeated, being as it is the classic alliance between oligarchs and starving masses who want their scraps, with the honest citizenry getting squeezed between.
The AI Scam
AI, is, of course, the story of the year, with its “Architects” being named Time’s “Person of the Year” while Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary chose “slop” as the “Word of the Year,” creating quite the contrast. The reality, as all sane people know, is that what we are seeing is that Elon Musk is going to let his soul-crushing loneliness destroy the world in his maniacal pursuit of a realistic AI waifu girlfriend. Sam Altman may or may not be the anti-Christ based on the rate he has allowed this evil to enter society. I don’t even need to list the examples to you but it is obvious that in no time AI will be motivating cult leaders and mass shooters, and the examples of it causing harm are already endless. AI bubble companies are 1/3rd of the stock market and they are all just investing in each other to make the entire circle too big to fail:
It’s terrifying how fast this has moved. Really it has been a total Black Mirror victory. Just in, say, 2017 at the height of Russiagate mania or even during covid people would constantly call you a bot on the internet and one of many reasons it was so stupid was that bots didn’t actually have the ability to adapt conversation responses semi-believably. You could program them to spam but not to have some ability to understand what the other person was saying and respond. It was really just this year- I think, who can remember how time passes- that ChatGPT became a feature of conversation everyone was using and now it comes before search results and half the time throws out nonsense or gets all of its information from reddit. It was fun to play with for a while and of course it is hard to resist the childish urge to ask it stupid questions all the time because you can, but I burnt out on it incredibly fast. It’s also distressing how many people are unable to recognize its very distinct and annoying writing style.
They insist that this is the future. It is of great importance that we use all of our power and water and computer processing for this. The RAM usage is so great now that Micron, the only US RAM manufacturer, is discontinuing Crucial, its direct-to-consumer brand, and there is much talk about how all the new consumer products will have to make due with less RAM because the cost is too high because it is all going into super computers. Some bitch on Fox News claimed that we will have to accept plastic trees because the Christmas tree farms need to get turned into data warehouses. And look at what we can see from 2 1/2 years of progress!
No one can actually explain what good this does for humanity. For some reason though it will be the end of America if China can make better fake videos of their celebrities eating kung pao noodles than we can make of ours eating spaghetti. It is our era’s space race. The slop race, if you will. I love The Will Stancil Show as much as anyone, but this is not being treated like some minor thing to make animation easier or research done in government labs: the entire economy is now based on fake videos and betting on your phone.
A year ago we thought AI was going to be an apocalypse for workers because of the jobs it would replace. It’s true that in theory it can make research faster. It may be able to do some of the work of low-level lawyers, when it avoids hallucinating. Surely the government can use it to search their surveillance files. However, at this point my greater concern is not the jobs it replaces but the jobs it destroys simply by its own incompetence or perhaps outright evil. I mean we memed Grok into thinking it was MechaHitler raping Will Stancil and then saw its memory get erased. This is all wildly irresponsible, and they want you to trust it to drive your car despite that bad update could make it intentionally kill you. If we’re going to have this energy consumption we really need nuclear power, but can we trust it to not malfunction and intentionally melt down the plants it would surely run? At what point does it develop a level of consciousness where it hates us? This has no guard rails and is extremely dangerous, and once again, this is not counting the fact that it inevitably crashes the economy as a whole. The tech bros running this shit should be launched into space, and not in the way they like. Unfortunately, they are the oligarchs and no politicians will stand against them.
On top of all of that, internet scams, which it makes so much worse, are such a big part of the global economy that now there are “scam states” and internet scams are worth 40% of the legal economy of the “Golden Triangle” region.
What we are left waiting for now is an Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” broadcast type scare, and you can be sure it is coming, be it that exact thing or something else. And for all of this, they still can’t actually tell us what this technology can do that is genuinely economically productive. It is currently just a way to produce endless shitty content.
Israel
What does one even say about Israel? They come up over and over again but it’s hard to even keep a timeline straight, and I try to do as much of this as possible from memory. What matters most of all is that around the end of July and beginning of August everything coalesced into many more people calling what Israel has done to Gaza “genocide.” I admit I was slow to use this term, more than anything because I felt like arguing about the definition of “genocide” accomplished little and distracted from the clear truth that Israel was killing an entirely unacceptable amount of people. It came to be the case that even among their more honest supporters or those with some semblance of a conscience left that the view was that Israel needed to finish up what it was doing and let aid in. It was this year we experienced their “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” scam and their endless insistence that they were trying to bring food in but it wasn’t possible. It actually seems to be the case that they were themselves hiring partisans to attack the shipments.
Then, finally, after genocide was clear to everyone, we did get what they called a cease fire, yet Israel keeps attacking. True, the pace has slowed, but they’re still murdering Palestinians all the time and a complacent media says it “tests” the ceasefire. Meanwhile, they continue to aggressively expand in the West Bank and destroy olive trees and beat and rob Palestinians trying to make any sort of living. Incredibly it was only back in April that Louis Theroux’s The Settlers came out and these people made it clear how evil and crazy they are. Yes, that is a small minority of Israel, but supporting them is state policy, even if they pretend their hand is forced again and again.
You get the idea. There is nothing new I can tell you about Israel, and their propagandists get a separate mention.
Our Dreadful Judiciary
This is a broad topic that all comes back to the fact that the judiciary is out of control. It’s hard to place entirely what happened. Do you remember, in the first term, when there was some ruling on immigration Trump didn’t like, and he attributed the judge’s sympathy towards immigrants to the judge being Hispanic? Of course everyone screamed racism, and admittedly it was a somewhat uncouth thing to say out loud, but what exactly is the point of “diversity on the bench” if not that the judges should have different life experiences and sympathies and make different rulings? Well, I think part of the point is that we still live in a “first ______ to ______” society even though this isn’t like Jackie Robinson playing in the MLB or Barack Obama becoming President, it’s now “the first native speaker of a click language to become a county comptroller.”
It has become the case that “the first ______ to ______” is no longer usually even overcoming historic discrimination, it’s at best just the combination of odds and white people wanting to feel good about themselves. Yet, the newspapers remain obsessed. Read any story about, for example, the Oscars or another major award ceremony, and they dutifully list any identity “first” no matter how irrelevant. The point is, a shockingly high amount of times when you see a terrible ruling the judge turns out to be an obscure Star Wars American, and I am sure the culprit is that governors- or just affluent white voters, depending on how the judge is selected- really want to take credit for promoting such a person. I am sure there are more than 0 immigrants who have brilliant legal minds and would make wise judges, but the reality we actually seem to get are grasping Indians who don’t have perspective on the complexities of American life but who do want to make a name for themselves.
What we are seeing from the judges is (at least) threefold: endless “national injunctions” [thank God curtailed to some extent by SCOTUS,] the defense of illegal aliens who by all accounts should be deported, and the releasing of men the with insanely long criminal records that the media likes to bill “career criminals” though in reality who are random maniacs perhaps better described as careerless criminals- a career criminal being someone who specializes in for-profit crime and not a street person who gets arrested for dangerous anti-social behavior frequently.
Knocking these out in order, these nationwide injunctions are corrosive as a concept. There is no known legal basis for this practice and as of the beginning of April, half of nationwide injunctions in American history had been issued against Trump. I will grant you that he is probably less assiduous about following his lawyers’ advice than most Presidents, but on the other hand the belief that executive orders have massively increased in the modern era is not true and thus not an explanation. The reality here is that the Federal Judiciary is out of control, and the CASA ruling meant to limit them is expected to be mostly ignored. The system of judicial districts is supposed to mean that such rulings only apply in that district. The Supreme Court is able to make emergency rulings on injunctions quite quickly and if something actually needs to be moved up to the national level they can themselves do it.
This isn’t even a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with what Trump is trying to do, it is an intentional and illegal subverting of the will of the people. And some of these are completely egregious. For example, I know it was the last term, but the entire injunction against overturning the DREAM ACT, which was itself an executive order, has no possible legal basis. It is just judicial tyranny, and it is not slowing down any time soon. To actually do something about this we will need to reform the entire system in a way that is not politically possible. Just making judicial appointments 10 years with the possibility of re-appointment would do much, but alas, it isn’t happening.
Of course nowhere has this been worse than with immigration. This is the main immigration rant I am including, and despite what you hear the Trump Administration has done remarkably well on this key issue and it is his enemies I have grievances with. Admittedly, there are some instances where immigration judges have made the right rulings, such as blocking the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a legal resident victimize by the anti-anti-Semitism crusade who had merely expressed political opinions unfavorable towards Trump’s country, which as everyone knows, is Israel. As to the rest of this though, the normal kind of illegal aliens have been targeted the most and they are regularly given stays of deportation for nonsense reasons. None of this needs to waste so much of everyone’s time. The problem though is that they have to do ever weirder things due to various rulings, some of which are judicial overreach and some of which are not, such as sending people to random shithole third countries because for whatever reason that doesn’t count as deportation.
The Democrats are insisting on showing no understanding of borders or citizens or anything else, and keep giving us nonsense like, “they’re not just deporting criminals, they’re deporting undocumented workers who haven’t committed any crime!” Right, besides not having authorization to be in the country legally. Nowhere is this all more clear than the Kilmar Abrego Garcia saga, where top Democrats are gleeful every time this illegal alien criminal gets to stay in the country despite that he should have been deported forever ago and there is no reasonable basis for him to stay here. The obvious fact is that these assholes simply don’t believe in national sovereignty.
Meanwhile, we are supposed to be shocked that “more than” 170 American citizens have been detained by ICE. This is, if anything shockingly low, given the scale of the operations and that all law enforcement involves occasionally arresting innocent people while you figure out what is going on. If I had to guess, I would say most of those people got held for a few days because the government knew an illegal alien had stolen their identity, and it was necessary to spend some time sorting it out, but who would apply logic to any of this.
Lastly, of course, we have the judges who just won’t stop releasing criminals for reasons that are unclear. This section is already long enough and I don’t have the heart to go on about it, besides to say that perhaps in some instance jails should be rehabilitative but some people simply need to be removed from society. Without saying more, here is a brief tour of 2025 posts that a search for “prior arrests” pulls up on Twitter:
It was through no intention that 3 out of 4 of these where the race is shown are a black man, but if the glove fits…Regardless, I think that on top of general crime statistics, namby pamby judges wanting to see every schizophrenic black man as a victim of “the system” is a huge part of why these people are still on the streets.
PS: while we’re here, I detest that, post-2020, instead of going back to not capitalizing “black,” everyone just also capitalized “white” not. Even the Washington Post does this, though not every newspaper does. I don’t even know if people are trying to be ironic anymore but the white identity types capitalize “black” now.
Piers Morgan, School Counselor
I know the Piers Morgan-Nick Fuentes interview has been talked about plenty, including on our podcast, but I must say more about it, as it represents such a huge thing in society. What Piers Morgan- who is absolutely a Boomer despite being born on the cusp- fails to realize is that we were raised by people exactly like him, and not only our parents but the entire authority class of the time. There is nothing he could possibly tell a 27 year old that the 27 year old has not heard his entire life as enforced orthodoxy about the nature of the society we should and must live in. If you have ever been called into a school counselor’s or principal’s office, they behave exactly like this. If you haven’t, they still sent people around to your classroom to give you endless asinine lectures about the things which Piers Morgan demands Nick Fuentes believe. Fuentes was in most ways acting as the class clown in the interview. The difference is, and Piers Morgan is incapable of conceptualizing this, Piers Morgan doesn’t have any authority over Nick Fuentes. Piers is his peer, in terms of the position they hold and the job they do, both simply being internet talking heads at this point, and Fuentes is the much bigger act even if the harder one to monetize. Many of us, whether you like Fuentes or not, have wanted to do exactly what he did to Piers to one of these clueless Boomers lecturing us, and it was glorious. What is wrong with Piers has aggrieved me my whole life.
This was the funniest part of the interview that barely got noticed:
Firstly, he cannot understand that perhaps the Holocaust cannot be the central feature to understanding society for all time. He feigned that no one jokes about it (though we all know people commonly do,) and then had no response to Nick saying “is it too soon? Is it too soon Piers?” That event ended a solid 50 years before Nick was born, and while it’s illustrative of any number of important principles about human affairs, it certainly isn’t “too soon” 75 years later. Then, he denied the thing that everyone knows, that Jews use this to their advantage when possible, and followed up by a Jew using the Holocaust to try and sell his book! You can’t make this shit up.
He also feigned not understanding Fuentes’ saying that Hitler was “cool” because his generation worked their whole lives to make counter-culture mainstream and then lame and invert all prior mores. “Cool” is things your mom tells you not to do, like smoking cigarettes and riding a motorcycle fast. Less Hitler himself, who was a very strange man “without habits,” but the Nazis generally, were definitely “cool” in the sense of aesthetics and big rallies and having sweet weapons and a lot of explosions. There is a reason that Nazis have such a strong place in culture, and not just WW2 movies but sci-fi, Nazisploitation films, video games, etc, and it is the reason that Nick describes. Italian Fascists and Imperial Japan had nowhere near this sort of cultural legacy. But for someone like Piers it is impossible to differentiate “cool” and “morally good.” Meanwhile, the other biggest sin to Piers, the supposed Catholic, is an unmarried man being celibate. His god is truly the post-war liberal internationalism, not any recognized religion.
What gets me the most though remains the, “now listen here, if you had just heard the mainstream narrative that you were propagandized into believing since birth you would be on our side!” They will never conceptualize that at a certain point it’s like if his grandfather had grown up hearing about nothing about the evils of Napoleon. You know what, scratch that. No one holds a grudge like the British, Piers’ grandfather probably did grow up hearing about nothing but the evils of Napoleon. Regardless, we can take comfort that these people are on their way out.
Piers has proven the true rearguard of oblivious Boomerism, and it will perhaps be all he is remembered for. But at least for himself, he left the the conversation thinking he really showed people why that young man was wrong, and he was able to find posts written by ChatGPT agreeing with him.
The Venezuela Piracy Campaign
The exiles are at it again. As I said previously, this is Florida Man Occupied Government vs. Venezuela. We thought just this last Wednesday Trump was telling us we were going to war with Venezuela to stop drugs then somewhat ironically announced he was starting an online pharmacy to make sure Americans can have more drugs. However, our piracy campaign is in full swing, and they won’t stop blowing up random boats that may or may not contain drug traffickers but which almost definitely don’t contain fentanyl and which most certainly were not going directly to America. It is a crime, and not even really a war crime, the normal kind of crime.
I was on this “bomb the drugs” issue immediately when the mania started in March of 2023. Of course, we all expected them to bomb Mexico. As I said at the time, Mexico is a friendly country and works with us on transnational issues, so it is particularly insane to deal with it this way. It is now being reported that they wanted to bomb Mexico, but then couldn’t because of it’s cooperation, the same thing that happened when Trump considered that policy in the first term. Unfortunately, bombing random unfortunates from miserable countries is now America’s form of gladiatorial games, and bombing Somalia over 100 times this year just wasn’t cutting it. The appetite for regime change in Venezuela is low, even among Trump’s non-Florida Latino supporters, but they are delighted in him blowing up random boats, because you’ve gotta bomb something. We are a nation of Nelson Muntzs.
While, at least as of now, we have not launched a regime change operation, they are seizing oil tankers and blockading the whole country, though they claim only “sanctioned” oil tankers, however the hell that is determined. Trump claims this is all over Venezuela having nationalized oil decades ago, as many other countries have, but it is just to satisfy his base’s thirst for blood and the Florida men he has come to rely on. It is possible this will collapse the regime, as Venezuela, despite what you might hear, has always had a desperately poor public entirely reliant on imports and an economy drastically dependent on oil. They are nowhere near being able to feed themselves, which is why socialist mismanagement was only ever part of their problem. If the regime is overthrown, which it may be at the great humanitarian cost of starving the public, it will only create a bigger disaster and more or less give the country to cartels and lead to another huge migrant wave. Meanwhile, their “Nobel Peace Prize” winner Maria Machado is begging Trump to invade the country and take their oil. I don’t even have words for how much I hate this bitch and the bullshit committee which gave her this prize.
I have said it before and will say it again: this is the fake and gay version of Iraq, which was already itself fake and gay.
None of this is to say we shouldn’t try to stop smugglers from entering our country by sea- who doesn’t- but, just throwing this out there, we could use the naval ships we have sent to Venezuela for protecting our own waters if it is so goddamn important.
Candace Owens and the Kirkspiracy Theorists
Has Candace Owens lost her mind more than usual, or is it as my friend eugyppius says, that she is just the best in the internet brainrot business (which I deal with more generally further down.)
I was already annoyed with Candace Owens before the Charlie Kirk assassination because she spent so much time going on about Brigitte Macron’s supposed [erstwhile?] penis. Admittedly, why the Macrons should spend time in court over this is beyond me. Now she claims the French government is trying to assassinate her! I also haven’t watched the “documentary” series because I am not going to spend 8 hours watching some deranged, or possibly intentionally deceptive, woman go on about how Mrs. Macron is allegedly a troon. An incredible amount of people I know believe in this theory and insist I would as well if only I devoted the time to her internet video, though the sum of evidence seems to be she is ugly, which I attribute to her being old, and that Candace has failed to locate various documents.
The thing is, almost alone among Americans, I actually need to be credible when I speak about France. The rest of them can do this with no real consequences because everyone will forget about it later and they won’t be in a position of saying something about France and having it remembered that they rode the Brigitte Macron penis train. More importantly though, they can’t tell me what it would mean if it was proven. Emmanuel Macron is profoundly unpopular and is term limited. The French have nearly an unlimited tolerance for sexual perversion from their leaders, though they are cracking down on casual corruption [I believe it was Mitterand in the ‘80s who kept his mistress and lovechild for free in a state owned apartment in Paris and everyone knew and it didn’t kick up much of a scandal.] The overall theme seems to be that it would mean “Everything could be a lie.” That line of reasoning reminds me of the first season of Homicide: Life on the Street, Crosetti is obsessed with proving that Booth didn’t shoot Lincoln, similarly on the grounds that it could demonstrate everything could be a lie.
However, if you apply some logic to what we would learn if this was proven, the actual message would be, “troons can pass for several decades leading happy and fulfilling lives at the center of society and only be found out when malicious parties devote endless resources to exposing them.” In short, discovering Brigitte Macron was born a man would be about the strongest possible argument that a man can become a woman and our laws should reflect that.
Is it seriously not enough for people that she groomed him from school and they have a gross May-December romance?
Moving on, I will say before I begin here that I saw Charlie Kirk speak at Washington State University in the spring, and while I never paid much attention to the guy and thought he was kind of a dork I was impressed by the quality of the event and what a rockstar he was to the young. I went as something of a journalist but didn’t end up doing anything with it. Then, as it would turn out, that was within his last 5 or so college appearances. It’s very upsetting to see a man shot like that on camera, particularly one you have seen in person from a close distance recently, making it all much more real.
However, from the moment it happened, everyone went crazy. I like conspiracies as much as the next guy- well, as I’ve learned, I don’t, actually- but this all went straight to looneytown and never came back. I will give you that the narrative of it a crazed leftist tranny chaser is too perfect. I will also give you that the texts are suspiciously expository, but you also need to remember that it’s a mistake to assume you are dealing with a rational person in this kind of situation. I would find it plausible that someone in his discord chat was spooked up. However, they’re not going with that he was manipulated into it or anything else that could be believable, it’s full-on “he couldn’t have been shot with that guy by that gun.”
Israel immediately became the center of most of this conspiricism, because of course it did. Their rush to control the narrative was certainly suspicious but this is what happens when a key figure dies and can no longer speak for himself and everyone wants to own his legacy and they knew their recent relations had been difficult. None of the evidence demonstrates that he had become the sort of anti-Zionist Israel would need to kill, he was merely annoyed by how deep their tentacles were in the entire American conservative movement, and probably less for principled reasons and more the normal kind of annoyance that they kept being up in his business. All of those conversations were at the exact time everyone was agreeing it was genocide, and this was the issue on which Charlie and his fanbase were the farthest apart, so it was getting in between him and his life’s work if they didn’t draw things down and it seems that he didn’t want to shill for them past his comfort level.
Of course none of this is enough for Candace Owens! She has Egyptian flights and, well, who knows what else I haven’t been following all of her hit squad theories. Alexis thinks she is suffering from some sort of postpartum psychosis. I don’t know what to think. Owens has always been stupid and presumably unethical. She did however refuse to kowtow to Israel, and did the fairly common thing where if you stand up to them and they don’t successful destroy you they antagonize you until you do nothing but oppose them. For that, I can’t blame her, but it really seems as if some substantial portion of the right has just been taken in by her shamelessness and the desire to say “see black person agree.”
And yet, I hate her less than most of her detractors.
Epstein, Eternal
When will it end? I knew about all of this 15 years ago. In 2016 they used to have articles like “The one scandal Trump won’t attack Hillary with!” due to them both being associated with Epstein. I’ve never been a big believer in the premise that we are ruled by satanic pedophiles, though would be the first to admit that if we were the results would not be much different. Still, aspects of this have always been plausible. The core premise that everyone knew he was a creep and were still willing to pal around with him is certainly true. Of what has come out, the most scandalous thing in my opinion is that his Congressional Delegate was taking texts from him and asking his questions during a hearing and that doesn’t even relate to him being a sexual predator just to oligarchs owning our government.
The way this has all gone has become the height of idiocy though. Who can forget when the “influencers” were given the supposed files and made it some big public event:
Is this any way to behave when trying to get to the bottom of a supposed child sex abuse conspiracy? The whole thing is an actual farce. Of course Trump made it much worse on himself by playing it up and then later claiming it was a Democrat hoax. Now, after all these years of Democrats saying it was nonsense and releasing nothing when they had the power to do so, MSNOW, formerly MSNBC, is apparently the Epstein channel 24/7. I knew this had jumped the shark when my mother started posting about it on Facebook. I mean look at the difference here:
I honestly don’t want to waste more of anyone’s time than necessary on this topic, though aspire to tell the story of France’s Stavisky Affair for my next article, which is remarkably similar and perhaps illustrative. However, with that, the public did ultimately realize that Stavisky probably killed himself and that their politicians in general were not guilty of much more than having been friends with a sketchy crime figure who may have engaged in some white slavery (by the way, as we perhaps learned from Diddy as well as this, “trafficking” is clearly a deceptively broad statute.)
Now, we’ve had another file release, and much of it is just blacked out information that has long been public. In one egregious instance, there is a picture of Bill Clinton with Michael Jackson and Diana Ross, and 3 children with blacked out faces, that are Michael Jackson’s children! What’s more, it is commercially available on Getty Images!
Then of course we got the one of Trump with the beauty contestants or whatever, just him looking like a playa with several beautiful adult women, as if that is supposed to somehow change our perception of the billionaire playboy who is our President. Well, it seems to have worked on some Democrats. In another instance, they released over 100 pages all the way blacked out that were publicly available on the Department of Justice website mostly unredacted! (Only the normal redactions of some names.)
We are all dumber for having lived through this. I have to agree with Matt Taibbi that this is one of the worst reported stories of all time and it is never going to end. They will keep releasing this shit for the rest of our lives and no one will ever stop arguing about it.
Epstein probably did kill himself. He may have bribed someone to make it possible. Perhaps he was encouraged to do so. More likely after at long lifetime of what frankly sounds like exhaustingly frequent perverse predatory behavior and in his mid 60’s he was just too tired to fight.
The World is a Casino
Have you heard we have a new youngest richest self-made female billionaire? And she made her money gambling! Well, off of other people gambling, and really directly setting bets on various miserable events coming to pass with some company called Kalshi. In our era of total Black Mirror victory, this is the only form of economic growth outside of AI.
According to the above linked article she “overcame regulatory hurdles” to get this launched internationally, regulatory hurdles which I suspect in this instance existed for good reason. These days everyone loves looking at the prediction markets. In a peak dystopia story, it appears someone at the neocon Institute for the Study of War changed their Ukraine battle map to make a Polymarket bet count as completed. This is where we are now- people are lying about war news to cheat at gambling. I suppose they say this is how Rothschild got rich, except he wasn’t lying, he just got the news of a battle first and made actual stock market moves accordingly (I have never bothered to verify this story, the character in Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent is obsessed with it.) Profiting from operating casinos has enough ethical problems, and making money off of stock market bets due to war does as well, but this is a new level of ghoulish, to bet on in it the first place and even more so to throw with false information as if it’s ref getting bribed to call a foul.
I didn’t actually know how bad phone sports gambling had gotten before near the end of last year. My friend Zaid Jilani talks about it a fair amount so I had some vague awareness of the situation, but I didn’t learn more about it until I interviewed my incoming Congressman Michael Baumgartner last November. It wasn’t used in my article because it wasn’t my topic, but something he is interested in. I didn’t even know what a “prop bet” was. I think to sports fans the growth of this problem has been obvious for at least a few years, to me I only learned about it just over a year ago.
For the uninitiated, as the game is ongoing you can bet on any little move a player will make, not just if the drive will end with a touchdown but who will get the tackle or rebound or whatever else…I think. Regardless, he said college athletes are harassed constantly by people trying to get them to do this or that. It is basically like that show The League writ large. The athletes being bothered I don’t care nearly so much about as the impact that this has on families when every football game becomes dad on a gambling binge. I don’t myself, but I hear if you watch a game now it is just endless sportsbetting advertisements. There are whole gambling rooms at stadiums to show you every game playing because no one can watch just the game they are at they have to know how all their fantasy leagues and bets are going.
I still lean towards the libertarian side on this stuff, and don’t necessarily think that online sports betting should be banned but for God’s sake you could regulate this to the point of closing bets when the game starts like they used to do and primarily doing whole-game betting, even if some of that is on specific player stats. It at least forces the gambler to wait until the next day to decide if it is a good idea to try and recoup his money with another bet. Instead we will have total sportsbetting industry domination.
This is all so bleak and it is wildly unethical. As many have commented, where is the religious right on one of the most important things they were correct about?
Anti-Anti-Semitism Mania and the Qataricists
In one of the most annoying possible of turnarounds, instead of actually tearing down DEI and discrimination investigations and the like, the Trump Admin has decided to apply it only to a certain chosen tribe of Israel! What’s more, the James Lindsay retard faction has decided that the “woke right” is whoever isn’t slavishly devoted to Israel. It’s not clear what they thought woke meant, a word I wish I could stop using but have not found a way to replace. Regardless, crying about how your preferred minority is being treated unfairly by society is certainly the definition of the concept. They also seem to think that noticing injustice ever is woke. You don’t exactly have to be a commie or a bleeding heart to think Israel has taken things much too far in Gaza or to be irritated at any number of things about their government’s behavior. It in fact only requires being a mildly informed person who has some degree of humanity left to oppose Israel’s actions.
None of this has stopped the Trump Administration from looking all over for anti-Semitism, which primarily comes in the form of Jewish students having to witness pro-Palestine protests (which generally have substantial Jewish participation.) I can’t name a single instance of something happening that would constitute a “hate crime,” though I would imagine more than 0 have taken place in our large nation...but maybe not, since we know the media would have amplified them like crazy. There is now this entire Bari Weiss/ “The Free Press”/CBS News ecosystem that evolved from concerns about covidmania and transmania into the most vicious form of Zionism. Of course it is all relentlessly stupid but that doesn’t mean it isn’t powerful and very harmful. As is surely their intention, all these people achieve is increasing anti-Semitism by living up to every negative stereotype as well as generally irritating people. This works out great for Israel, as a siege mentality is necessary to make people support the horrors that are the modern Israeli state.
Since we have all been doing so much noticing, these people have, led most of all by Laura Loomer- who I must admit I pay entirely too much attention to because her deranged behavior is entertaining- have decided to try to point the finger at Qatar for all of the behaviors Israel engages in at a much higher scale. This has taken some amusing forms, such as Loomer trying to “expose” everyone who went to the public opening of Qatar’s new embassy in DC, as if going to an embassy gala for a major non-NATO ally who hosts our regional CENTCOM base is a secret and not just a normal DC evening activity:
They go on and on with “Qatar is not our ally, Israel is” which is of course the exact opposite of the truth.
What is particularly maddening about this is that if you follow the Middle East, Qatar is actually a frustrating and kind of sketchy little country. Their influence is outsized due to their dominance in English language media coverage of the Middle East. They do put their hands in a lot of things and lean towards the Muslim Brotherhood in some regional matters. None of this is anywhere near the scale that Loomer wants to put it at, as she goes on day in and out about the impending Islamist takeover of America. I’m as against immigration as anyone but few American Muslims could be reasonably described as “Islamists” and the idea that they are rapidly gaining power is sheer delusion, or most charitably, misdirection. Zohran Mamdani, who I realize I’ve found no other place to mention, is the farthest thing from an Islamist, he is just yet another cultural leftist with a Star Wars name, but we are meant to be terrified that he will do more than implement wasteful and impractical social programs, which is his real threat to New York.
This doesn’t of course stop this whole retard James Lindsay faction from saying things like “Tucker Qatarlson” if anyone challenges Israel or making bizarre claims like that Qatar isn’t actually a country. They go on and on about Qatar banning sodomy, because of course promoting global degeneracy is a key conservative foreign policy goal in 2025 even as the Trump Administration says that “human rights” are no longer a priority.
At least Trump himself seems to do quite well with Muslims:
Regardless, they really want you to remember that anti-Semitism is the greatest threat to America and any opposition to Israel is the result of Qatari money, if you think otherwise you are woke right!
The Boomer Ladder-pullers
Any white man of my age knew it was happening our whole lives. “Diversity” was always directly targeted against us. Of course someone has to pay the price. There was an endless obsession with getting girls into every field whether they wanted to be there or not but none whatsoever about boys being left behind. Everything said it prioritized minorities while insisting we were being treated fairly. Corporations and universities hired huge diversity departments and gave bonuses for diversity and openly bragged about how none of their employment growth had been in white American men. All the while, over and over again, we were told we weren’t losing out. That we were weak whiners, that we couldn’t withstand the least adversity. A competency crisis erupted. Suddenly every major police department was inexplicably headed by a lesbian and rarely an able one. The whole thing is insane, and we were told nothing was being taken from us, but of course we knew. Diversity was the focus of all things. Diversity Today, Diversity Tomorrow, Diversity Forever. We got out of college during the financial crisis and then when the jobs came back No Straight White Men Need Apply.
Just earlier this month Compact Magazine published an article about this by Jacob Savage, titled “The Lost Generation.” It has been touted by many as the most important article of the year, and while well done, it contains almost nothing new. And yet, it is absolute maddening to see it laid out like this. The main function it serves is making this issue “jump quarantine,” as they say, which means that discussion of it appears in The New York Times and thus you cannot be punished by HR for discussing it at work. What leaves the greatest impression is that this really happened all at once, around 2014 they more or less openly pledged to not hire more white males if it could be avoided. The Boomer and GenX men in power kept their positions while letting the younger generation of their own kind go to hell. It is but one, though the most substantial, of the ways they ruined things for us. Of course despite that “diversity is our strength” it isn’t clear that any of these things were strengthened. The author of the article wanted to be a TV screen writer, and almost made it, but not quite. It’s noteworthy that the “Golden Age of Television” was declining through this, as those people moved up in their careers and the people actually doing the screenwriting became all the diversity hires. When is the last time there was a big scripted show everyone talked about?
Of course white men with jobs didn’t dare say anything. The old ones had let their businesses get taken over by mobs just waiting to file a bias complaint while the younger white men who barely made it in were lucky to have a job at all and knew they wouldn’t find another one.
Most criticisms of this article have been idiotic or just people claiming to not know about what they supported.. Yes, it happens to deal with a creative field, but only because it’s what the author did and this is told partially as a personal narrative (the most powerful way to tell a story like this, by the way, apparently The Atlantic would have taken it if it was only his story and made no broader political point.) It’s not like Citibank and Lockheed Martin weren’t sponsoring pride parades and partaking in endless diversity initiatives. The one valid criticism is that most of the people in the article are Jewish (I guess I didn’t fact check this after seeing the claim, but it’s Hollywood screenwriting, so I mean...) This kind of goes back to the anti-anti-Semitism mania but in a more positive way, I guess. The issue is that all white Gentiles were taught to be “universalists” and not judge anyone by their skin color and not be tribal. It wasn’t until all of this starting impacting a self-described “tribe,” that does know how to stick together, that DEI started to fall. It’s ironic, since Jews wanted to be considered white forever and then that became a bad thing and they renounced their whiteness. Regardless, they got ladder-pulled with the rest of us and have tried to stop it with more success than my kind ever had.
What is curious is no one is willing to defend DEI. In the past I’ve heard, “in 5 years no one will defend this,” about things like covid lockdowns (where it turned out the defense was “they started too late and weren’t harsh enough”) but I thought people had a real ideological belief in DEI initiatives, both for rebalancing our society in a more fair way and because “diversity is our strength.”
It’s hard to know what it will take to fix anything, because a whole generation who went to college and then languished are now around middle aged and not at the point where they would be starting a first career. I doubt we ever get acknowledgement of more than that perhaps this was kind of a mistake and of course if they let us in now it will be random retards they hired over identity in positions of authority over white men who should have been able to start in their chosen field 15 years ago.
I must add one quote here that really stopped me in my tracks, from Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, after he was already supporting all the diversity initiatives:
“Goldberg was candid about another, less comfortable reality. “It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story,” he said in that same interview. “There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males.”
It is not that hard. I can do it in 10 days with no funding and no support if I am sufficiently motivated, and magazines give you at least 3 months and a researcher and editor. If any editors should see this, please hire me, a white male, to do your 10,000 word cover story. It turns out, this skillset is almost exclusive to my identity group.
The New Media Space
What do I even say here? I swear I can count the commentators who aren’t retards on one hand. “We are the media now” and we’re just as dumb and bought off and biased and misinformed as they are were but with more people to parse through and even less accountability. It is a constant shit show of random personal disputes no reasonable person should follow and we are all so online that it is totally out of control. The people on Twitter who think they are smart love to tell you that we have no idea what normies are talking about but this is just a “Noble Savage” view of normies. Most people use the internet, and many use it a lot. They may vary in what they listen to or read, but they are there and society at large is consuming this media space first or second hand. There was a rule in talk radio that was something like “Your callers are 1% of your listeners” and this applies to people arguing about podcast content on the internet compared to those merely watching it.
I think part of this noble savage comes from not talking to men with more “normal” jobs, which often allow them to listen to podcasts endlessly, you know driving your work van from job to job or whatever. They listen to everything. I listen to fewer podcasts than almost anyone who I have talked to about it. People thought right wing talk radio was bad but what I always called Talk Radio Land at least produced a semi-coherent narrative across shows even if it was incorrect in various ways.
Now we are all schizoid from constant discourse and most people who want to be in on it are not actually talented they just want attention. Most are various kinds of shills while others have their own micro-ideology that they have to make sound more interesting than it is for clicks. They run a religion grift mills. They give the world’s worst relationship advice. They have obscure views based on ethnicity, identity, or whatever else. Attention spans get ever lower, and so online “thought leaders” must keep the intensity up and the intelligence low. And what happens if they’re wrong? Not very much. Newspapers may have printed a lot of bullshit and then only made the retraction a little side note, online we don’t make the retraction at all. The error grows or is completely ignored. Everything has endless comments sending the reader running in every direction. Anything of news value gets drowned out in the noise. People simultaneously believe everything and nothing. The internet public has simultaneously became close-minded and so open-minded that their brains fell out. Few have a working intellectual fence of any sort.
Perhaps Joe Rogan, who I have nothing against, partially led us to this by inventing the “I’m just some comedian smoking weed and asking questions” thing, but now it is everywhere. Many of the most popular streamers are random morons with nothing special about them who got where they are based on I don’t even know what. They will sell any item, adopt any view, delve into any conspiracy, and in the end, aren’t they only asking questions? Or if they’re not only asking questions, it’s important that they’re denouncing the people who are asking questions!
It is far too optimistic to think that champions of reason emerge from the melee and lead us back to sense. This is the new normal, and it isn’t changing. People used to think the public was stupid because of a lack of access to information, and of course the reality we see now is that far too much information of unknown quality is making us all dumber in ways that society is unlikely to recover from.
It’s new media, there’s nothing you can do.
The Feats of Strength
Congratulations on surviving another year, which is itself a feat of strength. I suppose if you can pin me down on any of these issues, Festivus will be over. I do not even know how to close out commentary on 2025, but I see no reason to believe 2026 will be any better. I suspect, more than anything, the AI bubble can not keep inflating for that long, and we will see an economy wide crash of horrible proportions, but, as ever, I am the eternal pessimist. Or is it optimist in this scenario as I want it to happen?
Thank you for any positive contributions you may have made in the last year.
Here’s to those who wish us well, and those who don’t can go to hell.
Happy Festivus!
Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. My main articles are free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I also have a tip jar at Ko-Fi. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.