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First, Quit Pretending
Kuntsler.com ^ | 9/28/2026 | James Howard Kuntsler

Posted on 09/29/2026 10:30:01 PM PDT by MacNaughton

“The Republican party has plenty of things wrong with it, but the other side is so crazy they’re celebrating our assassinations and sharia law.” —DC_Draino on X (Rogan O’Handley)

The leaves turn and the season quickens and, in a few weeks, comes an election more dreaded than all the slavering blood beasts of Halloween. Do you suppose, as I do, that America is tired of being insane? The pathetic part of this national nervous breakdown is how unnecessary it actually is. Our national problems are not that difficult to understand and correct. Here’s an inventory of them:

Making a living 1. So many blunders, starting with off-shoring our factories. So few well-paying working-class jobs. Some of the former working-class are now working three part-time gigs and still not making a living. Quite a few are just at home, on “disability,” smoking drugs, flirting with suicide on fentanyl, eating too much crap snack food, getting tattoos. We’ve quit pretending that’s all right.

Mr. Trump proposes to change that and is re-shoring industry. It takes time to build it, get it running. Meanwhile nobody can find a plumber, an electrician, because of the bad political decision to send everyone to college, including kids not really able to finish high school. Result: “elite overproduction.” Translation: too many college graduates, with the situation made worse by bogus fields-of-study that were concocted to keep students busy without preparing them for the real world. Hence, they are “elite” only by certification, not superior knowledge or skills. Young people need to learn real skills. Mr. Trump issued EO 14278 (April 2025) “Preparing Americans for High-Paying Skilled Trade Jobs of the Future.” Pell grants for short-term vocational training. Grants for apprenticeship positions.

Making a living 2. Rewrite the immigration law. We don’t need 1-million-plus newcomers each year. How about none for a while? Give American citizens priority for any and all jobs. Keep the border closed and deport all illegal immigrants. They have no “right” to be here. We don’t need “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore” (Emma Lazarus, 1883). It’s not 1883 anymore. Quit pretending we have to be “the beacon of the world.” Let them make themselves free in their own lands.

Making a living 3. America needs household servants and poor people need work. The current work-around for the well-off is to hire illegal aliens for this kind of work. It allows them to believe that putting poor Americans on the dole (out of “empathy”) and allowing them to be useless is “progressive.” (That’s insane.) There’s plenty to do, even for people of limited ability. Make menial labor okay again. These days, many people of means live in chaotic households where nothing is taken care of. It reflects their chaotic lives. (No wonder wealthy liberals are crazy.) Get poor people off welfare and off making babies they can’t take care of. Give them a place to live in your 5,000 square-foot McMansion and a paycheck.

Nothing Works. Because we automated too many transactions. Spent $XX-Billions and fifty years computerizing the US Telephone system to improve communication. Result: it’s impossible to get a real human being on the phone. How is that an improvement? How is it better for Americans to get fucked around on “phone trees” for hours every week? Too many “help desks” located in foreign lands that employ people who barely speak English. Quit pretending that’s okay. Start by requiring doctors’ offices and hospitals to provide humans to the answer their phones.

The Horror That Is Medicine. Get this: the situation is too dire to fix at-scale. The complexity and opportunities for racketeering are now too vast. Since failure is already well underway, and trust in doctors is broken, allow medicine to reorganize at the local clinic scale on a pay-for-service basis. Streamline medical education and the entry positions to practice. Government should not take over medicine, but can subsidize medical education. It would comprise a tiny percentage of the annual budget. Accept that there’s a lot doctors will have to learn on-the-job. Forbid insurance companies from owning hospitals, clinics, and doctor practices. To restore trust, quit pretending that Covid-19 was anything but a nefarious exercise and prosecute the large number of pharma executives, hospital admins, doctors, bureaucrats, who enabled it to happen. Make personal responsibility for your body great again. Let RFKjr do his job.

Scam Education. It’s failing at-scale as medicine is. Kids are allowed to “graduate” from high school not knowing how to read or do basic arithmetic. How did that become okay? Answer: the teachers’ unions are corrupt and degenerate, dedicated to Marxist social disruption and maximizing their pensions. Manipulating kids into fake sexual crises is a criminal enterprise. Centralizing K-12 schools into gigantic buildings was as much a mistake as off-shoring industry. School’s primary mission should be to produce basically literate citizens in the language of the USA, which is English. If you can’t speak and read English, you’re unlikely to learn anything else and unlikely to thrive in this society.

Black / White race conflict. Failing to teach black ghetto kids to speak English correctly stigmatizes them for life. Quit pretending you can compensate for that with grievance politics. It’s only made race relations worse and driven whites and blacks into separate cultures that can barely communicate with each other. That is opposite of the direction America was going in two generations ago. How did it reverse? I will tell you: By the 1980s, liberal shame over the Civil Rights movement’s failure to produce perfect social “equity” inspired the “solution” of “multiculturalism,” which said, let’s just have different standards of language, manners, and behavior for different ethnic groups (and everybody will get along). It was a shuck and jive. To be a coherent nation requires a common culture, the same standards for all citizens. That was America’s strength when we were strong, not our “diversity.”

The Law. The Woke judiciary is punking America thanks largely to appointments made by Barack Obama and “Joe Biden.” It’s extremely difficult to get rid of political “activist” judges with lifetime appointments. Or to wait for the SCOTUS to reverse their multitudinous noxious rulings. But it’s less difficult to put out-of-business the small cadre of lawfare ninjas who bring all the lawsuits that their chosen activist judges rule on — namely, Norm Eisen, Marc Elias and their many associates. They have engaged in manifold seditions from RussiaGate to the Mar-a-Lago raid and are liable for prosecution for the roles they played. Eisen and Elias run numerous NGOs that assist their shenanigans. The funding streams to them can be turned off, especially if any of the money comes from foreign entities, such as Arabella Advisors (and its pass-through orgs) or from foreign nationals like Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss and Shanghai-based Neville Roy Singham (currently under investigation by a New York federal grand jury). George Soros’s many Open Society affiliated NGOs have been busy for years pumping money into state attorney general and many county district attorney elections. In a 5–4 ruling on the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment bars the government from limiting independent spending on political speech by corporations, unions, and other associations. A later D.C. Circuit decision, SpeechNow.org v. FEC, led to the creation of “Super PACs” (political action committees) that can spend unlimited sums on activism as long as they do not give money directly to candidates or coordinate with them. Years later, there is a growing consensus that these decisions led to tremendous mischief in politics and the administration of law. They can be revisited.

Fraud and Grift. Artificial Intelligence (or “Super Intelligence,” if you like) is already pretty good. Good enough to trace money flows from the US Treasury through states such as Minnesota, New York, Illinois, and California, and further down the line into local orgs like the now-infamous Minneapolis “Learing” Center and the Feeding Our Future scam. AI can go over their books super-efficiently, too. Veep JD Vance is probably already using AI on his Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent estimated aggregate fraud in annual government spending at around half a trillion dollars a year.

Free and Fair Elections. It’s astounding that there’s any disagreement over the provisions in the SAVE ACT: only citizens can vote. . . ID required. . . One-day only election with results next day at the latest. . . Mail-in voting only for military, voters too ill to go to the polls, and persons out-of-the-country for a good reason. It’s a sign of epic dysfunction that we go into the midterms having failed to move this bill through a Republican-controlled Senate.

This is just a casual survey of a few things in our national life that need repair. You have to ask: who is behind all the pretending. What stands in the way of getting any of this done? I think you know.


TOPICS: Education; Health/Medicine; Society
KEYWORDS: education; immigration; law; medicine

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1 posted on 09/29/2026 10:30:01 PM PDT by MacNaughton
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To: little jeremiah; MtnClimber

PING


2 posted on 09/29/2026 10:33:19 PM PDT by MacNaughton
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To: MacNaughton

How is it better for Americans to get farked around on “phone trees” for hours every week.”
.
My doctors’ hospital offices are three miles away. It’s faster, more convenient, to drive there than to while-away the minutes navigating their “phone trees”.

Or to get text messages, answering and getting, “No Messages”.


3 posted on 09/29/2026 11:41:48 PM PDT by Does so (Book:"The Party of Death"...Dem☭¢rats ™ ® © ≣ ½⅓⅔¼¾ ⅛⅜⅝⅞ ⅓ ⅕ ⅖ ⅗ ⅘ ⅙ ⅚)
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To: MacNaughton

Amazing post. With memes.

Thanks Mac.


4 posted on 09/29/2026 11:56:17 PM PDT by KitJ (Shall not be infringed...)
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To: MacNaughton
> ...in a few weeks, comes an election more dreaded than all the slavering blood beasts of Halloween.

Well put. I fear we are screwed if as I expect the Congress goes Dem. The next two years are going to be hell, and if 2028 brings a Dem administration, we can just kiss our collective azz goodbye.

> Do you suppose, as I do, that America is tired of being insane?

I wish. No, I think the crazies have just begun to get rolling. We have some terrible times ahead before it straightens out.

I'm not worried, I'm 75, and I might live to see it get straightened out if I'm lucky and they don't line me up against the wall in the interim.

5 posted on 09/30/2026 12:13:17 AM PDT by dayglored (This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it. Psalms 118:24)
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To: MacNaughton
It’s a sign of epic dysfunction that we go into the midterms having failed to move this bill [the SAVE ACT] through a Republican-controlled Senate.

It's a sign of a political dysfunction that runs so deep that it may well lead to the slow-motion suicide of a once great American political party.

6 posted on 09/30/2026 12:31:13 AM PDT by henbane (✧ 𝕁𝔸ℕ𝕌𝔸ℝ𝕐 𝟚𝟘 𝟚𝟘𝟚𝟝--𝕄𝔸𝔾𝔸 𝕄𝔸𝔾ℕ𝕀𝔽𝕀ℂ𝕌𝕊 ✧)
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To: MacNaughton

We live in a dystopia. In large part, because politicians keep promising to build a utopia.


7 posted on 09/30/2026 1:59:44 AM PDT by ClearCase_guy (Some people want to control their own life, others want to control the lives of others. )
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To: MacNaughton

Great post.


8 posted on 09/30/2026 2:33:26 AM PDT by MeneMeneTekelUpharsin (Freedom is the freedom to discipline yourself so others don't have to do it for you.)
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To: MacNaughton

Making a living 1: “We’ve quit pretending that’s all right.”

I don’t think we do think its all right. I think lefties think its all right. Remember when Nazi Pelousey went on and on about how young people shouldn’t have to work if they didn’t want to? That gov’t. should fund their fantasies of being artists and layabouts? I do. “Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.”


9 posted on 09/30/2026 2:34:51 AM PDT by Adder ("A pack of jackasses led by a lion is superior to a pack of lions led by a jackass.” GW.)
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To: MacNaughton

Demonicrats need to be recognized for what they are - lying, perverted, murdering traitors to the United States of America.


10 posted on 09/30/2026 4:46:01 AM PDT by Carl Vehse
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To: MacNaughton

btt


11 posted on 09/30/2026 4:51:50 AM PDT by Theophilus (I'm all out of attention to this matter...)
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To: MacNaughton
To restore trust, quit pretending that Covid-19 was anything but a nefarious exercise and prosecute the large number of pharma executives, hospital admins, doctors, bureaucrats, who enabled it to happen. Make personal responsibility for your body great again. Let RFKjr do his job.

There isn't a pipe big enough to spark up this dream.

12 posted on 09/30/2026 6:09:31 AM PDT by Sicon ("All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." - G. Orwell)
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To: MacNaughton

Howabout zero immigration for 10 years.


13 posted on 09/30/2026 8:48:33 AM PDT by kaktuskid
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To: MacNaughton

And, any part of this will be used by the fat arsed losers who sit on their couches and refuse to vote — “’cause XXX has a single policy I don’t like.”

No wonder BFranklin was so dubious about holding onto a democracy.


14 posted on 09/30/2026 8:49:03 AM PDT by bobbo666
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