“If cocaine is so prevalent in the West Wing that there is somehow ‘extra’ cocaine just laying around, when is the White House going to start drug testing its employees.” - Margot Cleveland

By James Howard Kunstler - July 7, 2023

Consider for a moment, and be grateful for, how perfect “Joe Biden” is as president of this foundering republic. He and his family project the rectified essence of every depravity now driving the life of our nation to some murky bottom, where it may be forced to assess its sorry state, repent, and perhaps recover (or just give up and die). There he stands, without ambiguity or conscience: “Joe Biden,” the personification of a failed state.

As a criminal enterprise, for instance, the Biden family influence-peddling operation among foreign powers reflects exactly the racketeering character of corporate America today — which is to say, making money dishonestly, and often for doing nothing. In America’s biggest industry, finance, this is absolutely the case. You may have forgotten what finance is, and what it’s supposed to do: namely, to lend money for activities intended to produce things of value, useful things that people need and want, sometimes even public works that benefit everyone in society.

American Finance now is in the business of receiving free money (loans at minimal interest) from government-chartered central banks (issuing “credit” from nothing), that banks, hedge funds, private equity outfits, and sundry freebooters can roll into instruments such as interest-yielding bonds (loans back to government) and derivatives (algorithmic bets derived, abstracted from, and tuned to market movements) magically multiplying money that finally produces nothing of value — though it may translate into yacht purchases, alimony payments, luxury suites at ballparks, private Caribbean islands, and traffic in humans for use as sex toys.

The Biden business model also applies nicely to medicine and higher education, two endeavors saturated in prestige and pomp, like the doings in the White House, but which, similarly to that hotbed of policy and action, produce shocking amounts of unnecessary death (est. 251,000 a year from iatrogenic treatment errors), in the case of medicine, and the production of specious and harmful Big Ideas in the case of higher ed — while both endeavors expand like turbo-tumors within the dying body of an expiring manufacturing economy.

As in the Biden model, dishonesty is now the keystone in both “Meds” and “Eds.” Our public health officialdom hasn’t stopped lying about the Covid-19 episode since it began, and in every aspect from the origin of the disease (if that’s even what it was), to the deaths statistically attributed to it, to everything about the “vaccines” cooked up to stop it. In turn, those officials coerced America’s doctors into withholding the best treatments (ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine) while applying deadly protocols (remdesivir plus intubation) guaranteed to kill hospital patients — which the government then rewarded with gargantuan bonus payments.

Higher ed has now turned its energies from learning to political activism, meaning the performance of morality preening stunts for acquiring status under the pretense of addressing social problems that boil down to bad behavioral choices and mental illness. Higher ed is now in the business of generating more of both those things in the form of manufactured racial antagonism and sexual torment (in partnership with the medical establishment). All fields of study in college are now racialized and genderized, and all at the expense of organized knowledge, which gets burdened with fatuous theory and spurious crypto-religious missions. The price of admission to this carnival of fakery multiplies at a faster rate than the generalized annual dollar inflation, abetted by federal loan guarantees that “Joe Biden,” in his munificence, seeks to abridge with a jubilee for student debt.

Of course, it’s the fantastic psychodrama within the Biden family that presents the most arresting model for America. “Joe Biden” tells us over and over that he loves his son, who he calls “the smartest man I know.” A father’s love is a wonderful thing, for sure. And yet, is there anything that Hunter Biden has not done to destroy “the Big Guy,” short of, say, driving a number nine knitting needle ear-to-ear through the old man’s skull?

Look at what Hunter has loosed on his loving dad: a photo archive of amateur pornography (including sex acts with children), drug crime, and bribery deal memos so vast and clear-cut that a first-year law student could write them up into a federal criminal case and / or a bill of impeachment. Hunter went and got a pole-dancer pregnant and lately tried to weasel out of paying to support the daughter he refused to acknowledge until DNA testing pinned it on him. He only just wriggled out of tax evasion and handgun charges due to his father enlisting the US DOJ as a private protection service, thus befouling the agency and destroying the public’s trust in it. Now Hunter’s suspected of leaving a bag of cocaine in a West Wing cubby, where White House security was sure to find it.

What we’re witnessing is . . .

[SNIP]