The Matrix Abides

"[S]omebody once observed that so much of leftism is pretending not to understand things that everyone understands." — Kurt Schlichter on "X"

Jolly Antifas on Parade

I misinformed readers in an earlier edition of this Oct 13 blog about the number of captured women and children hostages from the Oct 7, 2023 raid into southern Israel that kicked off the Gaza War. (Pre-dawn composition has its drawbacks.) Revision herewith:

On Oct 20, 2023, brokered by the Red Cross, 20 women, children, and elderly persons were released (13 Israeli, 4 Thai nationals. In Nov, 2023, Hamas released 105 hostages (81 Israelis, 24 foreigners, including Thais and Filipinos) in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners, a deal brokered by Qatar. 4 elderly Israeli hostages were exchanged for 10 Palestinian prisoners in August, 2024. Between January and June of 2025, 15 hostages were released, mostly a mix of foreign nationals and dual citizens. 83 hostages died in or en route to captivity, at least 6 of them children. Of the 20 released today, all men, two were IDF soldiers.

World opinion has not processed this event in the heat of this moment, with the Gaza War ostensibly resolved. Soon, the captives’ stories will be told in full. Of course, world opinion is not what it used to be even a few years ago. These days, it oscillates around the poles of sane / insane. The Lefty-Woke wine-ladies of the Boston suburbs and their nose-ring Ivy League daughters must have the blues today over the implicit surrender of their heroes, Hamas. The keffiyeh is headed out as a fashion accessory. Who will be their next pet oppressed minority? (The Eskimos? The New York Times will put out a whole cooking section on blubber.) Note to the men (so-called) in their orbits: the gals will be loading up on Paxil and Klonopin, on top of all that Chardonnay. Consider hiding the car keys.

Meanwhile, over at Conflict Central, the action shifts to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, today for a “peace summit” among the various parties involved in a war settlement, many of them Arab nations of the region, plus key Euroland players. Somebody will have to police the joint, probably some combo of Gulf State soldiers and American troops. The UK, France, and Germany will have to content themselves with pretending to participate, as they have their hands full just now pretending to ignite a war with Russia. Turkey could be in the mix, too, though the odor of pre-1918 Ottoman subjugation lingers on in that corner of the world. Don’t expect a whole lot to be sorted out quickly.

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Donald Trump will take a few brief victory laps and, by Tuesday, all that nasty business might be behind him, at least for a while. . . maybe. Mr. Trump has a whole lot of fish to fry back here. He is fixing to disassemble the entire armature of Democratic Party sedition by wrecking the armature of NGOs that feed it — and you should not be surprised to learn that billions of the dollars sloshing through that colossal money-laundry originate in US government tax receipts.

For instance, the diligent “X” account known as “DataRepublican (small r)” reports that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) with gross receipts of $363,001,576 received $362,047,237 from taxpayers, mainly through the State Department (including pre-Trump 2.0 USAID). The org, initially founded by Reagan Republicans, is now controlled by Democrats and their Neocon cronies bent on “nation-building” and color revolutions. Wherever there is turmoil in the world — Ukraine, Sudan, Pakistan, Myanmar — the NED has a piece of the action.

Stanford University, with an endowment of $23,780, 883,880, received $1,518,836,616 in taxpayer funds (those are billions), used to sponsor its Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), which spun off the Election Integrity Project (EIP) and the Virality Project. The former was dedicated, under “Joe Biden,” to assist Christopher Wray’s FBI and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, in censoring social media on matters such as the Hunter Biden Laptop .

The Election Integrity Project ran a parallel op under “Joe Biden” tracing 2020 election “disinformation” — i.e., anybody who reported ballot fraud — and the EIP worked to censor such content across platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube with help from Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Global Engagement Center (GEC). The Virality Project likewise dedicated itself to Covid-19 speech suppression. A lot of this money was funneled through subsidiary NGOs such as the National Science Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Omidyar network (the eBay fortune).

You see what I mean by armature? (And that was a mere schematic sketch of a small part of it.) This is a vast edifice of funny-money. The Democratic Party had captured all of it, and has been using it largely to maintain its power, which is to say, to keep the colossal money-laundry operating, because the salaries of all the people employed in these supposedly beneficent endeavors support a huge managerial cohort of officers who circulate in and out of government and comprise much of what’s called the “Swamp,” the “blob” or the “Deep State.”

This matrix is the same source of funding for Antifa and other Lefty-Woke outfits seeking to sow chaos through our country. The next big event on the agenda is another national “No Kings” protest, scheduled for Saturday, October 18, in over 2,000 US towns and cities. It’s organized by the umbrella NGO, Indivisible, with cash from George and Alex Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the Berger Action Fund (the philanthropic vehicle of Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss), the Tides Foundation, and the Act Blue donation platform (currently under DOJ investigation for campaign contribution fraud). These outfits supply placards, transportation, and protesters’ stipends for what amounts to an “astroturf” (fake grassroots) spectacle.

Things should heat up and get spicy this week as that great day approaches. Antifa is not done trolling the ICE buildings in Portland, Chicago, and the Boston field office in Burlington, Mass. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton will likely get indicted in the days ahead for possessing classified documents he was not entitled to keep (boo hoo). And don’t be surprised if tremors rock the financial markets. Gold (nearing $4100) and silver (nearing $50) are sending ominous signals.

Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season

Fishermen at the Falls of Northumberland on the Hudson River

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JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

“I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality.”
—James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand