2024: The Year the Masks Came Off

Simplicius offers a cogent summary of the recently-concluded year.

2025 saw a remarkable and precipitous decline of the West into tyranny and illiberalism.

Given the bizarre coordinated nature of every Western nation’s mirrored crack downs on fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech, the total delegitimization of democracy and elections, the absolute spiteful disgust that our ruling elites have shown to the common man, the farmer, the blue collared laborer, the wage slave—given all these things, and how remarkably coordinated they have been across the governments of the West, 2025 has taught us that the entire Western order must necessarily be taking direction from a centralized node of governance somewhere. That somewhere may be in the backrooms of the WEF or Bilderberg or what have you, but the rule by fiat from above is now clearer than ever.

Quoting Mearsheimer, B writes: “Most horrifying though is the breakdown of humanitarian concepts the ‘west’ once claimed to hold high. Mearsheimer says it best when he decries the the moral bankruptcy of the West”:

Given the West’s presumed commitment to human rights and especially to preventing genocide, one would have expected countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany, to have stopped the Israeli genocide in its tracks.

Instead, the governments in those three countries, especially the United States, have supported Israel’s unimaginable behavior in Gaza at every turn. Indeed, those three countries are complicit in this genocide.

Moreover, almost all of the many human rights advocates in those countries, and in the West more generally, have stayed silent while Israel executed its genocide. The mainstream media has made hardly any effort to expose and challenge what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. Indeed some key outlets have staunchly supported Israel’s actions.

That’s right—2024 was the year of unvarnished genocide, and what’s more: it was the total white-washing of said genocide by the bought-and-paid-for corporate media.

More than anything else, I declare year 2024 as the death of mainstream media. Never before was their bias, their criminality and total hostility to truth more openly obvious, more flagrantly flaunted by them. Scandal after scandal marred the last few remnant crumbs of credibility that remained, from covering up Biden’s clear dementia, presidential incompetence, and family crimes, to covering for Israel’s genocide all year long, with ‘creative’ formatting and syntax tricks, as well as lack of any impartiality or ability to question the State Narrative. They have exposed themselves as nothing more than an antiquated soapbox of disinformation and narrative control. This year was truly the long-overdue—and much-earned—death of mainstream media as an institution.

Virtually everything of note, any newsworthy revelation or exposé, was broken on either Twitter, Substack, or associated ‘citizen journalist’ haven. People are tuning out more and more from corporate legacy programming in general, whether it’s MSM or Hollywood or even major sports—with recent headlines reporting NBA viewership down by 50%, for instance.

I proposed a couple articles ago how the world is now entering a period of strongman lawlessness due to the systemic breakdown of previous international institutions and guardrails which have held some semblance of ‘order’ across the globe. Now it’s becoming nearly passé to speak of, and actually carry out, illegal seizures of land, occupations, etc. From Israel’s demarche on Syrian territory, to Turkey’s brazen calls for revanchism, to Trump’s sudden and inexplicable rousts around the annexation of Greenland and Canada—the lack of international order, the lack of spine in ‘rule of law bastions’ has become nearly surreal.

The rule of law is observably dead in the USA and in Europe. The mainstream media narrative is observably fake and is not only run according to the ruling elite’s script, but is observably being played out by actors who are not even the individuals they pretend to be. The six Bidens and the three Trumps are only the most obvious indicators that all of the modern world is a stage.

Not even science can be relied upon anymore; in addition to the unreliability of modern peer-reviewed published studies, its very foundations, from evolution to physics, are being shown to be, not only erroneous, but manufactured and mathematically impossible.

2025 is going to be a difficult year, in many ways for many people around the world, but it also promises to be a year that offers genuine hope for Man to further free himself from the empire of lies that has been keeping him intellectually enslaved in a chain of comfortable falsehoods that date back to the increasingly misnamed Enlightenment. The entire basis for governance in the West is now known to be not only false, not merely illegitimate, but entirely artificial and manufactured, and as Simplicius notes, “the rule by fiat from above is now clearer than ever.”

This is something that, once seen, cannot be unseen, and everyone is seeing it now.

Happy New Year.

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The Devil Champions Foreign Invasion

I warned everyone not to go back to Twitter after it was acquired and rebranded by Elon Musk. It was just swapping King Log for King Stork, which is becoming increasingly obvious as Musk is now seeking to deplatform, demonetize, and suppress the reach of Americans who criticize the federally-approved foreign invasion that has disemployed millions of Americans and lowered their wages.

The online beef between Donald Trump’s Silicon Valley backers and the more traditionally conservative MAGA base has culminated in Elon Musk allegedly using X to censor his fellow Trump supporters.

Laura Loomer, Gavin Mario Wax, ConservativePAC, and Owen Shroyer all had their X verification badges removed Thursday night after criticizing Musk’s stances on labor and immigration earlier in the day.

“All of our influencers have now lost verification status, as well as our own page,” the Trump-supporting ConservativePAC wrote. “Our brand did nothing. We spoke out against HB1 visas and it appears that @elonmusk intentionally shut us down? Is this the new status quo from America’s ‘most free’ social media platform?”

No, it’s not “the new status quo”. It’s the same as it always was. I have had actual evidence proving that Musk is a liar for two years now. In order to prove my suspicions, in 2022 I asked X tech support to unsuspend my @voxday account which had been suspended since 2017. They promptly informed me that my account would never be reactivated, in direct contradiction to what Musk had been publicly proclaiming at the time.

The amusing thing is that the Clown World fraud – Elon Musk is most likely a midwit actor, he’s probably not even Mensa material – almost appears to believe that he actually is the character he is playing. His IQ is reportedly five whole points higher than my own, but I have never heard him say or seen him write one single thing that would require an IQ over 120. Does this angry and self-defensive tweet sound like anything I, or any other high-IQ individual, has ever written? Or does it sound more like bad 4chan copypasta?

The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B. Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.

An invader is willing to go to war to import more invaders in order to defend himself from the natives. How very new and different… America would be much better off if he and Ramaswampy would go back to their homelands and take SpaceX, Tesla, and every other fake, propped-up company they’ve financialized with them. What they represent isn’t economic strength, but what is known in the economic literature as “malinvestment”.

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At Least They’re Good for the Economy

Imagine how much worse the failing economies of the USA and Europe would be doing if it weren’t for the tens of millions of immigrants who have invaded their countries:

Data from the Department of Justice (DOJ) reportedly suggests that crimes committed by illegal immigrants cost U.S. taxpayers at least $166.5 billion and the severity of those crimes greatly exceeds that of typical American norms. The report was written by Dr. John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center and is based on data from the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ). In September, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) revealed in a letter to U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) that as of July 21, 2024, there are 662,566 illegal immigrants with criminal histories on the Non-Detained Docket (NDD), which means they are living freely in the U.S.

Of the 662,566 illegal immigrants, a total of 435,719 on the docket are documented to have criminal convictions in their home countries; that is 65 percent. Another 226,847 or 34 percent, have pending criminal charges.

FBI crime statistics show that in 2023 the rate of convicted killers in the NDD along is more than 13 times higher that of the rate of reported homicides when compared to American crimes. According to Dr. Lott’s research, out of the total crimes committed by the illegal immigrants on the docket, 14,944 are homicides; 20,061 are sexual assaults; 105,146 are assaults; 126,343 are traffic offenses; and 60,268 are burglaries, larcenies, or robberies. Lott’s report states that the financial cost of crimes committed by illegal immigrants on the NDD list is estimated at $166.5 billion, with the largest share of $153.8 billion coming from murder.

I suspect that the immigration-inspired pillaging of the USA is going to make for a very interesting chapter in the economic history of the decline and fall of the West. Especially since this estimated financial cost apparently doesn’t even include financial crimes of either the real estate or Nigerian Prince variety.

The idea that “immigration is good for the economy” is an even bigger and more obvious lie than “free trade is good for both economies involved” and “kidnapping Africans and transporting them by sea to pick cotton is good for the economy”.

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Cuba Joins BRICS

As a partner-state rather than a full member-state, however:

Cuba and Bolivia are expected to officially join BRICS as partner states on January 1, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov has said. In an interview with the Izvestia newspaper on Friday, Ryabkov confirmed that both countries had received invitations.

“We are confident that everything will work out in terms of their joining the group as partners,” the diplomat said.

The new ‘partner country’ status was approved at the BRICS summit in October, hosted by Russia in Kazan, and is intended to serve as an alternative to membership after more than 30 nations applied to join the organization.

I think the more noteworthy item is the absence of an invitation for Türkiye. One would have thought they would be a shoe-in, but perhaps the Turkish invasion of Syria was more than the BRICS members were willing to accept. I also find it curious that neither Malaysia nor Vietnam were accepted, but it might be that there will be a separate announcement concerning the new Asian member-states coming from China.

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A Timely Reminder on Tariffs

This is a repeat of a 2018 post that is itself a rehash from a paragraph of my 2009 book entitled The Return of the Great Depression. And contra Martin Armstrong and everyone else who is pontificating about how Trump’s proposed tariffs would “destroy the global economy”, it’s just not true, at least not on the historical comparison to which most of them are appealing.

Every single talking head who makes any reference whatsoever to Smoot-Hawley is a poser and a fraud who knows nothing about economics or economic history. This is basically a variant of the “Um, Ricardo?” pseudo-rebuttal to an argument for tariffs or other forms of protectionism. It is proof that the speaker has heard about the subject, but doesn’t actually know the subject at all.

The point is so trivial that I dealt with it in a single paragraph in The Return of the Great Depression ten 16 years ago and haven’t seen the need to mention it again since until now.

For many years, it was supposed that the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 played a major role in the economic contraction of the Great Depression. As more economists are gradually coming to realize, this was unlikely to have been the case for several reasons. First, the 15.5 percent annual decline in exports from 1929 to 1933 was less precipitous than the pre-tariff 18.3 percent decline from 1920 to 1922. Second, because the amount of imports also fell, the net effect of the $328 million reduction in the balance of trade on the economy amounted to only 0.3 percent of 1929 GDP. Third, the balance of trade turned negative and by 1940 had increased to nearly ten times the size of the 1929 positive balance while the economy was growing.

There was nowhere nearly enough international trade taking place at the time to cause or account for the Great Depression. Whoever originally came up with that idea didn’t know what they were talking about and didn’t understand economics. And neither does anyone who still takes the ridiculous idea seriously.

The reason the Great Depression happened was the same reason that the financial crisis of 2008 happened. Everyone was overleveraged and the total amount of money being borrowed collapsed. That is why an average of 1,287 banks failed every year from 1930 to 1933. The historical credit collapse had vastly more impact on the economy than a smaller annual decline in exports than had been experienced seven years before as a result of the Fordney–McCumber tariff act.

The only way Trump’s proposed tariffs can “collapse the global economy” is if the resulting shift in purchasing preferences toward domestic producers results in the collapse of overleveraged corporations and banks that will no longer be able to service their debts in countries that have a trade surplus with the USA. But that’s going to happen anyhow. What 100-percent tariffs really mean is that global producers will have a serious incentive to produce goods in the USA instead of manufacturing them elsewhere and shipping them into the USA; it would definitely alter the relevant math on leather book production, just to give one example.

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Occupied Britain

This level of “immigration” goes well beyond invasion and amounts to conquest and occupation:

The UK’s net immigration record has been smashed again with 906,000 now thought to have been added to the population in a single year. Huge revisions to official data show the extraordinary mark was hit in the year to June 2023 – and the figures remain at historically unprecedented levels.

Official data covering the 12 months to June this year show long-term immigration was 728,000 higher than those leaving the country. That is almost as high as the previous record. But the bar has been shifted upwards by the Office for National Statistics, with net migration for the year to June 2023 skyrocketing upwards by 166,000 from the initial estimate of 740,000.

A similar revision has been made for net migration in the year to December 2023, which was initially believed to be 685,000 and is now put at 866,000, an increase of 181,000.

The British population in 1939, on the eve of WWII, was 47,760,000. Great Britain has now been invaded as many foreigners in the last four years as the combined forces of Nazi Germany, Romania, Finland, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovakia used to invade the Soviet Union in 1941.

The UK is now in a similar state to the USA. Either mass repatriations will begin within the next ten years or the state will collapse into secessions and civil war. Russia has absolutely nothing to fear from either the USA or the UK, because it has no need to defeat either of them in war, it has only to damage sufficient economic infrastructure to begin the inevitable process of societal collapse that will prevent their militaries from engaging in foreign actions.

And between them, Russia, China, and Iran collectively possess enough economic power to inflict the necessary level of damage to Western infrastructure without ever directly attacking the USA or the UK. I don’t bother mentioning Western Europe, because, barring a complete economic surrender to Russia, the German economy is already doomed.

Lest you fail to draw the obvious conclusion, immigration is not “good for the economy”. To the contrary, over time it is considerably worse for the economy than losing a war is.

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Germany Suicides Even Harder

It’s very, very difficult to imagine what the NATO mouthpieces currently pretending to run Germany think they’re going to accomplish by threatening to suicide Germany even harder by throwing its young men and women on the same altar they’ve sacrificed the German economy:

Now Germany reveals plans to mobilise national defence and 800,000 NATO troops after Kremlin nuke threat – as US announces new weapon Kyiv can use to stop Russia after allowing long-range missile strikes.

Ukraine’s strike on an ammunition depot in Russia’s Bryansk region yesterday with US-supplied ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) meets these criteria, with Moscow saying that it marks a ‘new phase of the Western war’. ‘This is, of course, a signal that they want to escalate,’ Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said, while foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin said attempts by NATO countries to facilitate Ukrainian missile strikes deep inside Russia ‘would not go unpunished’.

In Eastern Ukraine, Russia’s forces are steadily grinding towards the logistics hub of Pokrovsk having taken large swathes of territory in the Donetsk region in recent months. Putin’s army took 185 square miles of Ukrainian territory in October, a record since the first weeks of the conflict in March 2022, according to an analysis of data provided by the real-time conflict tracker from the Institute for the Study of War.

Now, where are those “800,000 NATO troops” going to come from? Not Poland, the Scandinavian countries or the Baltics. They’re talking about US troops, mostly, but there is no way President Trump is going to send more US troops to Germany; he’s far more likely to withdraw all the troops that are already there.

Simplicius points out that the IMF, the World Bank, and the CIA have now all confirmed that Russia is decisively winning its war with NATO and its member states on economic terms as well as in the military context.

A couple months back, you may recall World Bank announced that as per their calculations, Russia had finally surpassed both Germany and Japan in GDP PPP. However, the official IMF and CIA figures still scoffed at this, with Russia trailing both countries on their counts. This allowed the popular narrative to be maintained that the World Bank figures were some kind of inaccurate fluke or anomaly.

Well, the IMF has just done their latest report and has officially concluded that Russia has blown past both Germany and Japan as of 2024, and is now the number four economy in the world. And not only that, but the IMF has Russia in the lead by an even larger margin than World Bank. On top of which, the CIA also updated their numbers and likewise reflects Russia at the number four position.

This means that the longer Germany persists in its futile denial of the need to stop supporting Ukraine and encourage it to surrender, the worse off the Germans and the other Europeans will be. Time, attrition, and economics are all on the side of the Russians, and more importantly, their allies in China, North Korea, and Iran.

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BRICS to Expand by 13

13 countries received the status of BRICS partner country at the 2024 BRICS summit. They are Turkey, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Algeria, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda and Vietnam. BRICS partner country status is a mandatory step before full membership.

The 13 new partner countries, at least 10 of which will become full BRICS members in a year or so, effectively add 840,276,082 people to the economic alliance, which alone is more than the USA, the UK, the EU, and Israel combined. Their coming addition will also make BRICS the global majority. The key additions are current NATO member Türkiye, Southeast Asian giant Indonesia, African giant Nigeria, and Asian military power Vietnam. Clown World has been desperate to keep both Türkiye and Vietnam on its side, but it now appears to have lost both.

At this point, it should be clear that Russia has comprehensively defeated Clown World, not only militarily and economically, but diplomatically as well. To paraphrase Rorshach, Clown World hasn’t locked Russia in solitary, but Clown World is locked in with itself.

Note to the Finnish, Swedish, and Swiss governments: You all chose poorly in selecting this particular moment in time to abandon your historic neutralities. Very, very poorly indeed. There isn’t a single BRICS nation, or even BRICS partner country, that is as small as any of you. Not only is the USA totally incapable of “protecting” you from Russia or any other military threat, but you’re actively doing harm to your ability to engage economically with more than half of the globe and counting.

You would do well to re-establish your neutrality, and do it fast.

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Please Don’t Go!

NATO is begging Türkiye to stay in NATO even if it joins BRICS:

Türkiye has the right to cooperate with the BRICS economic group without undermining its status as a NATO member, the secretary-general of the US-led military bloc, Mark Rutte, has said.

The NATO chief’s remarks came at a press conference in Estonia on Tuesday. He was asked by the Estonian Public Broadcaster whether Ankara’s desire to become a member of BRICS, which the outlet described as a “Russia-dominated organization,” should be a cause for concern.

Rutte stressed that Türkiye remains “a very important ally in the alliance” as it is “one of the best equipped military forces in NATO” and plays a “vital role in its part of the NATO geography.”

“Obviously within the alliance, being a democracy, 32 countries, there will always be debates on this and that,” the secretary-general admitted. However, he insisted that Ankara has “the sovereign right” to work towards a BRICS membership and cooperate with its members.

The real question is if BRICS will permit the Turks to join if they remain in NATO. And the jury is still out on that one.

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The Intellectual Limits of Thomas Sowell

I like Thomas Sowell and his work. It was a minor influence on my intellectual development in my youth. But he has always been limited in his willingness to depart from conservative orthodoxy, as evidenced by his unwillingness to accept the relevant aspects of human genetics as they relate to societal development, or the lack thereof.

Sowell is the leading conservative proponent of the cultural explanation. In regard to race differences in the US, his idea is that black Americans adopted a dysfunctional culture from white rednecks in the South. A different culture would have, and in the future could, set blacks (as well as southern whites) on a different path. While he mostly avoids ad hominem attacks against hereditarians, he portrays most of them as bumbling half-wits with a history of making baseless and contradictory claims.

I was recently interviewed for “The Genius of Thomas Sowell” podcast to talk about hereditarianism vs. culturalism, and the host, Alan Wolan, persuaded me that it would be worth spelling out my objections to Sowell in more detail. Here I respond, in turn, to Sowell’s arguments for the cultural theory of race differences and his critique of hereditarianism. I contend that hereditarianism remains by far the most plausible explanation for persistent gaps among groups living under comparable conditions, including American blacks and whites.

Some hereditarians believe that, even if Sowellism is false, it would be politically expedient to promote it as a means of countering leftist narratives about race and racism. I will explain why this is a mistake. Even if (counterfactually) we could convince large numbers of people to accept Sowell’s scientifically incorrect theory of race differences, this would not stop wokism.

While he is a generally admirable man, one unfortunate characteristic of Sowell is his refusal to follow the observable, and even undeniable, truth, at the cost of his personal preferences. Given his identity complications, it is not even remotely surprising that he would prove willing to sacrifice his intellectual integrity on the altars of both race and personal relations.

Sowell is without doubt an effective starting point for conservatives, but at some point, anyone who is geniunely devoted to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True will find they have to move beyond him if their intellectual journey is going to proceed.

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