March 25, 2023 | People We Should Know: James Howard Kunstler

There are a lot of writers in this — let’s call it the “rational” — space, where limited government, individual freedom, and sound money are considered basic common sense. Stylistically, most of us fall into the journalist category, which is to say we convey what we hope is useful information as clearly and accessibly as possible.

Then there’s James Howard Kunstler, who covers this familiar ground in a style that’s somewhere between polemic and performance art. He posts on a site called “Clusterfuck Nation” and, as that name implies, couldn’t care less about who he pisses off as long as he also informs and entertains.

Whenever I come across a link to his work (usually on Automatic Earth or 321gold), I stop what I’m doing and dig in. Here’s an excerpt from his latest:

The Season is Here

Now, in the spring of ’23, Woke is suddenly mutating into a general wake-up call. The animals are stirring from their long sleep of compliance as ruin stalks the land. The season of concentrating the mind is here. When it becomes a matter of sink-or-swim, people once again remember the difference between being dead or alive. The test is on.

Expect three evolving dynamics to define our country’s zeitgeist in the stirring months to come. First, the collapse of our lunatic project for using Ukraine to destabilize Russia, an enterprise so feckless it could have only been conceived by the dead-of-brain. Our geniuses of foreign affairs screwed the pooch on this one. It’s almost too obvious that they never cared about the people of that sore-beset land. Notice, they do not even use the word “peace” in any of their confabulations about what’s going on there, because it is the opposite of what they seek, which is…chaos unending.

Thus, others will end this vainglorious project for us — namely, our antagonist there, Russia — and the regime of “Joe Biden,” for the second time in its mortifying two years-plus of rule, will be left holding its limp, generative member in its collective hand, another humiliation for our over-reaching imperial soldiery — and the deluded empty suits commanding it. Will they be able to pretend this time, as they did in Afghanistan, 2021, that there’s nothing to see here, folks? Just a blizzard of press-releases declaring “mission accomplished” or some-such other craven bullshit? I don’t think so. The reaction may be enough to bum-rush “Joe Biden” and Company out of office. His grotesque family rackets (including the Ukraine grifts) will finally and magically come to the public’s attention, and that’ll be all she wrote for “JB”— except for the historians waking from their own long catatonic spells to record the disaster they will swear they couldn’t see coming.

Next, we will go through the tipping-point where a critical mass of the population — not just in America, but throughout Western Civ, and even beyond — realizes that they have been poisoned and injured by the mRNA “vaccines” they were so eager to line up for. It will produce a special sort of collective agony centered around a raging despair that leads with astonishing speed to prosecutions. The torpor and uncertainty of the past three years evaporate and the machinery of law actually starts cranking again, and in the right way — not as a mere instrument of coercion and intimidation, but to actually seek justice.

Third will be the transformation of a raging inflation into a ruinous debt deflation that leaves Americans, one way or another, with no money. At the same time, the people will wake to the wrecking of their energy and food supply. A line will appear drawn in the ground from sea to shining sea, as by a cosmic power, and everybody… the formerly Woke, the unvaxxed, the penitent and unrepentant, the middle and lower orders especially, who suffer most harshly… will find themselves all on one side of that line in opposition to the wicked who have brought a hard rain upon them. And there you will finally see the beginning of your long-promised hope and change. No need even to wait for it. At long last, it’s upon us.

Kunstler’s many books have evocative titles like The Long Emergency and World Made By Hand. Find them here.

His podcast archives are here.

His Twitter feed is here.

John Rubino March 25th, 2023

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