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The Fourth of July
https://www.kunstler.com ^ | Jul7 04, 2025 | James Howard Kunstler

Posted on 07/04/2025 5:59:05 PM PDT by little jeremiah

"I can negotiate with a man who wants to make money. I can't negotiate with a communist who wants to kill me." — Josh Lippincott on "X"

O, Norman Rockwell, where are you when we really need you? Forgive us, Emma Lazarus, our second thoughts about those huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . . the wretched refuse of your teeming shore(s). That was then and this is now. O, beautiful for spacious skies (but, why so many contrails criss-crossing overhead from the New York Island to the gulf stream waters?). O, land of tattooed grandmas, hostages of the tiny screens, the sexually confounded, the illiterate and innumerate, the lawless and the feckless, brainwashed youth marinated in Marx, the deranged, befuddled, the bought-off, the bug-eyed and bewildered, the lame, the halt, the addicts, grifters, hustlers, porn-stars, drugstore cowboys, alpha dogs, beta boys, shrieking Karens, and sundry victims of future-shock — whither, this hallowed experiment in nationhood?

Wouldn’t you like to know? In the meantime, husk that corn and flip them burgers! Turn them wieners! Mash your guacamole, pop another frostie, pass the Jack, lock-and-load, and mind those hovering drones! It is the 249th birthday of what remains of our country! Respect and thanks, ye ancestors!

At least, there is Mr. Trump in command now, not Norman Bates’s mother (or whatever decrepitating thing pretended to rule from the White House those previous four years of anarchy and agony). Daddy’s in da house — finally! — and things are being put in order against all odds. Yeah, you’re gonna clean up your damn room, or else! For many, this is a yuge relief. The rest of you, with your “No Kings” fake revolution, your Antifa monkey business, your mean girl psychodramas, your trans psychosis, your childless despair, your occult Gramscian schemes of destruction — please report back to the margins, where you belong.

The struggle to get normal again is epic and harsh. And, of course, many will deny that there ever was such a state of being, of minding your business in the purest sense of the phrase, acting like responsible, self-respecting, autonomous adults. In the immortal words of Aimee Mann, better wise-up. Childhood ends; something else begins. Take yourself seriously for a change, but keep your heart light, ready for the jokes that travail always presents. After all, nothing is funnier than unhappiness.

To get back to normal, to shed the burden of absurdities we’ve been heaped with, requires an accounting. You know this. Matter of fact, the absence of such an accounting has been bugging you no end. A whole lot of pain and suffering was inflicted across this land in recent years and barely a soul has had to do any ‘splainin’. It rankles badly. When, if ever, will these vicious, seditionist goons who turned the nation inside-out and upside-down be compelled to sit at the defendant’s table in a court of law?

I have a theory. The right dawgs, you well-know, have been in position for months. They understand the conspiracy hatched ten years ago through-and-through. Mr. Patel, remember, ran Chairman Devon Nunes’ investigation of the nascent RussiaRussiaRussia hoax in 2017 as senior counsel for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and helped draft the “Nunes Letter,” much abused by the perfidious news media, that laid out the plot by Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Obama & Company to smother Donald Trump’s newborn presidency in its crib.

Through some alchemy of mass political psychosis, that conspiracy has rolled on for a whole decade, one malice-driven prank after another. It continues to this day, an evermore rearguard action conducted by Deep State rogues and their public mouthpiece, Norm Eisen of Lawfare, Inc. Dan Bongino, now at Mr. Patel’s right-hand, chronicled that long march of treason in several books while he conducted daily podcast discourses on the workings of it all. “Remember the names,” he always said. Danny Boombatz remembers the names.

Normality, with all its own problems and hazards, demands that accounting for crimes and insults against the people of this sore-beset Republic. That fateful accounting is the one element missing in all of Mr. Trump’s implacable “winning” of the past five months. Those remembered names fester like an abscessed wound in America’s body politic. That wound must be cleaned, irrigated, debrided, and dressed in judicial process that restores the probity and honor of our much-abused law.

My theory is that a whole lot of other matters had to be cleared out of the way first. And now, that is pretty much where we’re at. Mr. Ratcliffe, formerly Director of National Intelligence (in Trump One) and now Director of the CIA, also knows all the names. He’s been as quiet as a tick on a wild hog lo these many months, but on Wednesday he issued quite a squawk, in the public arena of X, no less, along with a report by trusted agency colleagues titled (nontoxically) Tradecraft Review 2016 ICA on Election Interference 062625.

This fateful report, which lays out the originating crime, should commence the more general institutional accounting so overdue. It’s coming. Cases are being laid and made quietly in the background. Cases will be brought. The insults will be redressed. Derangement will slip away like that quicksilver mirage on a desert highway. The inordinate division of recent years will go with it. We will allow ourselves to be a people again, one nation under God, as the old chestnut goes. Next year, on our country’s 250th birthday, there will be a special reason to celebrate. For now, patience and fortitude.


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: corruption; jhk; kunstler; ratcliff; trusttheplan
Patience and Fortitude - good words.
1 posted on 07/04/2025 5:59:05 PM PDT by little jeremiah
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To: MtnClimber; Carriage Hill; GOPJ; Mama Shawna; notdownwidems; The FIGHTIN Illini; JZelle; ...

Kunstler time


2 posted on 07/04/2025 6:01:37 PM PDT by little jeremiah (SCARE: Social Chaos And Response Emergency)
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To: little jeremiah

Howard K. Smith on the definition of a communist:
“ What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable.”


3 posted on 07/04/2025 6:02:58 PM PDT by Fungi
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To: little jeremiah

We get to celebrate several rat-free—finally!—holidays in 2025.
This is special.


4 posted on 07/04/2025 6:12:20 PM PDT by tumblindice (America's founding fathers: all armed conservatives)
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To: little jeremiah

“I think fireworks should be legal on the 4th of July.”

— George Carlin


5 posted on 07/04/2025 6:16:23 PM PDT by Bon of Babble (You Say You Want a Revolutioan?)
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To: little jeremiah

Please, God, make it so.


6 posted on 07/04/2025 6:29:38 PM PDT by laplata (They want each crisis to take the greatest toll possible.)
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To: laplata

Indeed.


7 posted on 07/04/2025 6:49:15 PM PDT by GaltAdonis
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To: little jeremiah; foldspace
Happy 4th 😊


graphic by foldspace

8 posted on 07/04/2025 6:53:58 PM PDT by Aquamarine (“Be excited about the future of our country. Be excited.” - Donald Trump)
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To: little jeremiah

“ In the immortal words of Aimee Mann”

N couldn’t figure out why this “essay” is like a kindergarten fingerprint.

Then I saw who this guy cites and thinks about.

Hyped mediocrity.


9 posted on 07/04/2025 7:01:02 PM PDT by ifinnegan (Democrats kill babies and harvest their organs to sell)
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To: Aquamarine

Caption: Such a showoff, Donald. Why not use the Auto-Quill we all use?

Trump: I want this signature large enough that Elon Musk can read it without increasing the font on his X device.


10 posted on 07/04/2025 7:10:57 PM PDT by frank ballenger (There's a battle outside and it's raging. It'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls. )
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To: frank ballenger

That’s hilarious 😂


11 posted on 07/04/2025 7:13:23 PM PDT by Aquamarine (“Be excited about the future of our country. Be excited.” - Donald Trump)
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To: Aquamarine

My humble thanks.


12 posted on 07/04/2025 7:21:43 PM PDT by frank ballenger (There's a battle outside and it's raging. It'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls. )
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To: little jeremiah

Start with Comey’s signature on the FISA form on penalty of perjury.


13 posted on 07/04/2025 8:20:24 PM PDT by Carry_Okie (The tree of liberty needs a rope.)
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To: Aquamarine

Thanks for the image!


14 posted on 07/04/2025 9:03:07 PM PDT by little jeremiah (SCARE: Social Chaos And Response Emergency)
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To: little jeremiah

Pity that only you and I read this fabulous column.


15 posted on 07/05/2025 11:46:07 AM PDT by Jacquerie (ArticleVBlog.com)
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To: Jacquerie

Oh, no...LOTS of us read Kunstler every Monday and Friday. A MASTER wordsmith.


16 posted on 07/05/2025 11:49:37 AM PDT by who knows what evil? (Hospitals are the most dangerous place on Earth! Dr. David Williams)
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To: Jacquerie

Seems a fair amount of people read it. I post whenever I get it, unless someone else gets to posting first.


17 posted on 07/05/2025 6:33:53 PM PDT by little jeremiah (SCARE: Social Chaos And Response Emergency)
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