“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” - Samuel Johnson

By James Howard Kunstler - March 24, 2023

Of course, the newspaper USA Today chose transgender activist Leigh Finke for its Women of the Year award because in the USA of the here-and-now (today, for instance), boundaries are a thing of the past, and if a woman of the year happens to come with the “package” that signifies male-of-the-species, you’d better ignore that and go along with the gag — or prepare for the punishments that will come down until your morale improves.

The transgender movement has crystalized into the Party of Chaos’s favored instrument for enforcing its ethos of unreality on a population obdurately stuck on thinking in categories, on making hateful distinctions between things. Better to live in a protective miasma of undifferentiated sensation than a cruel state based on pattern recognition where one is incessantly prompted to understand how objects and life-forms around us differ, where things begin and end, and what all that means relative to your own ideally amorphous existence.

Mattias Desmet, Belgian author of the 2022 book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, proposed that a political faction subject to “mass formation psychosis” — the group hysteria that sets the scene for tyranny — would demand that the public swallow a cavalcade of increasingly absurd ideas in order to soften up their brains, so as to make it easier for leaders (influencers) to push them in any desired direction. I would propose that we have probably achieved peak brain-softening now in this land.

The only thing left to challenge is the distinction between being alive or dead, which is exactly what you would get in Zombieland, a place that the Party of Chaos (and its mentors in the World Economic Forum) long to take you to, where you will have nothing and be happy! And never think a hateful thought, or any thought not pre-cooked for you and served up by The Party like so much dim sum. Choose that or it’s the nothingness and bliss of the grave. It’s all the same to the Party leaders. Voila: the totalitarian nirvana!

Folks are beginning to grok how all this works now after a years-long epic mind-fuck by the increasingly malevolent permanent bureaucracy running a nation on the glide-path to destruction. Not a few people around America still-capable of independent thought are less than avid for liquidation. And certainly not willing to be absorbed into the amoeba-like blob of redundant, undifferentiated protoplasm that a totalized population must be in the end-state of political Wokery.

Now, in the spring of ’23, Woke is suddenly mutating into a general wake-up call. The animals are stirring from their long sleep of compliance as ruin stalks the land. The season of concentrating the mind is here. When it becomes a matter of sink-or-swim, people once again remember the difference between being dead or alive. The test is on.

Expect three evolving dynamics to stipulate our country’s zeitgeist in the stirring months to come. First, the collapse of our project for using Ukraine to destabilize Russia, an enterprise so feckless it could have only been conceived by the dead-of-brain. Our geniuses of foreign affairs screwed the pooch on this one. It’s almost too obvious that they never cared about the people of that sore-beset land. Notice, they do not even use the word “peace” in any of their confabulations about what’s going on there, because it is the opposite of what they seek, which is . . . chaos unending.

Thus, others will end the project for us — namely, our antagonist there, Russia — and the regime of “Joe Biden,” for the second time in its mortifying two years-plus of rule, will be left holding its limp, generative member in its collective hand, another humiliation for our over-reaching imperial soldiery — and the deluded empty suits commanding it. Will they be able to pretend this time, as they did in Afghanistan, 2021, that there’s nothing to see here, folks? Just a blizzard of press-releases declaring “mission accomplished” or some-such other craven bullshit? I don’t think so. The reaction may be enough to bum-rush “Joe Biden” and Company out of office. His grotesque family rackets (including the Ukraine grifts) will finally and magically come to the public’s attention, and that’ll be all she wrote for “JB”— except for the historians waking from their own long catatonic spells to record the disaster they will swear they couldn’t see coming.

Next, we will go through the tipping-point where a critical mass of the population — not just in America, but throughout Western Civ, and even beyond — realizes that they have been poisoned and injured by the mRNA “vaccines” they were so eager to line up for. It will produce a special sort of collective agony centered around a raging despair that leads with astonishing speed to prosecutions. The torpor and uncertainty of the past three years evaporates and the machinery of law actually starts cranking again, and in the right way — not as a mere instrument of coercion and intimidation, but to actually seek justice.

Third will be the transformation of a raging inflation into . . .

[SNIP]