"It was a coup, and I'm using that term literally ... One egregious felony after another." - Stephen Miller

By James Howard Kunstler - August 4, 2025

America is tired of being driven insane, of having absurdities crammed into our collective consciousness. Reality is an agreement about what is going on in the world. That act of faith requires such an agreement be based on what is demonstrably true. Without it, society dissolves into chaos and failure.

The RussiaGate psychodrama is about an agreement based on lies. It started with Hillary Clinton’s desperate ploy to save her foundering 2016 election campaign. Her emails somehow got sent to Wikileaks, a radical news org dedicated to revealing government secrets, implicating misconduct. It was easy to declare the Russians did it, by hacking — when it was much more likely, in fact, proven by a forensic audit, that a Clinton campaign insider downloaded the info on a thumb drive, perhaps one Seth Rich, found murdered on a DC sidewalk soon thereafter.

Every lie after that met the kind of skepticism among the public that generates heat, controversy, scandal, and fire. Hillary managed to enlist President Barack Obama and his executive agencies into her project, and the party apparatus with it, because the Clinton Victory Fund had paid the DNC’s debts and took over its management. Soon, the Russia collusion project grew into a gigantic scaffold of flaming lies. The big newspapers and the TV news networks bought the story, and came along for the ride. They were all sure Hillary would win the 2016 election. All the heat and fire would get flushed away. The polls all said so. The agencies and the parties would pick up and go on as before, run the show, make careers, get wealthy, be important!

They miscalculated. They lost. But they decided to keep building the scaffold of lies in order to protect themselves from the danger it represented — because they lived in that scaffold, it was the party’s house. And the scaffold of lies needed massive fortification. The house that the party lived in had to be protected at all costs, or they would all be cast out, homeless, a whole party on street, lost, broke, ruined, dying, like the pitiful tweakers bent over out on Kensington Avenue in Philly, in every Democrat-run city, really.

And so, they undermined the winner of the election at every turn, worked furiously to drive him from office, made a plague happen, subverted the 2020 election, and spent four years under a fake president jamming absurdities into the public arena, turning it into a freak show, one drag-queen story hour after another, from seas to shining sea. All to defeat the return of a public consensus about reality based on what is demonstrably true — starting with the fact that there are men and there are women, and that the primary interaction between them keeps society going by producing offspring.

This enormous, drawn-out insurrection, composed of serial felony crimes, amounts to the greatest insult against the republic — the res publica, in Latin, the public thing — in the nation’s history. And now it is coming apart as an overwhelming majority of citizens, including now many Democrats, can’t avoid discovering what has happened in the country. Because lies are weak and the truth is sturdy and eventually truth prevails, even after an arduous struggle.

The old news media complex, the networks and the papers, are not reporting the recent disclosures by the Directors of the CIA, the FBI, and National Intel. What will it take to get their attention? Arrests and perp-walks of formerly important officials? And then, do they acknowledge and atone for their disgraceful participation in the events? Or pretend they couldn’t figure any of it out for years and years? Poor us, we didn’t know! Suddenly, it looks like many of these “legacy” news outfits are going out-of-business. They’re throwing their performers over the side like sinking ships casting off so much useless ballast.

You knew this was coming, right? Now, here you are: the hour that consequence finally returns from its wanderings in a wilderness of institutional failure. There’s no evading it anymore. The scaffold of lies has collapsed, and trying to add additional lies will amount to throwing a few twigs on a heap of smoldering wreckage.

The institutions themselves are . . .

[SNIP]