Wednesday, April 8, 2026

Is Merz Green Europe's Last Line of Defense


The word “crisis” comes from Ancient Greek and can also be translated as “turning point.” Whoever seeks to break the fossilized energy policy and force a turnaround in Germany must first overcome Friedrich Merz’s regime.

If the European Union has been waiting for a favorable moment to save face and quietly escape the energy-policy fiasco, that moment has probably arrived. On Thursday, the European Parliament formed a broad coalition of the Union-backed EPP faction with the national conservatives. The goal: initiate a migration turnaround, prevent citizen chat controls, and soften the grotesque Supply Chain Act.

Among the national-conservative parties in the EU Parliament is also the AfD faction, showing that the firewall against this party is a German phenomenon -- a product of hysterical left-green media makers and bloated politicians of the firewall cartel, who fear competition for their privileges.

Never has the opportunity been more favorable to leave the paralyzing logic of the firewall behind once and for all and to form national-civic coalitions than today.

Time is pressing. Germans face a wave of inflation already visible at gas stations and in heating costs. Citizens are approaching a defining initiation moment of truth. Since the beginning of the Iran crisis, fuel prices in Germany have risen by up to 25 percent on average. Gas prices rose another 20 percent in the same period. Going back to 2005, electricity prices in Germany rose a staggering 70 percent -- an undeniable proof of the catastrophic failure of the Energiewende.

What the green central planners have left behind can hardly be called energy-market design in the proper sense. On the ruins of a once well-oiled, highly complex structure and the blown-up cooling towers of nuclear plants, a system with built-in fragility has arisen. In a crisis, there are neither sufficient reserves nor systemic resilience against blackouts and the looming economic super-disaster. Above it all hangs the Damocles sword of potential crises that could erupt anywhere in the world at any time and directly hit Germany.

Hormuz reveals the extent of this fragility and exposes the unbelievable hypocrisy behind the green transformation. The story of sun and wind bringing free energy was from the start a bitter fairy tale for anyone not drunk on Trittin, Habeck, and Merkel’s chatter. A mood is brewing, ranging from deep anger to utter contempt for the cultlike transformation ideology.

It is no longer hideable: “green transformation” is a code word for establishing a vulgar, aggressive extraction mechanism fueled by climate apocalypse fears and moralizing degrowth ideology.

A turn toward modern forms of nuclear energy and the development of Germany’s own enormous gas reserves must now be undertaken -- never has public willingness to accept fracking been greater, as the economic crisis sinks into general awareness. Reasonable policy would return to the negotiating table with Russia to urgently discuss resuming gas deliveries. Belgium’s Prime Minister Bart de Wever also called for this. He is far from alone in this view. Hungary, Slovakia, and Italy are forming a real opposition that Brussels will have to reckon with.

But for now, paralysis dominates in the face of economic fallout.

It is painfully clear: Friedrich Merz and his economic minister Katherina Reiche have so far not grasped the extent of the crisis. They rely on the continuity of the green transformation and do not understand that this very construct is both the cause and the end point of the crisis. The bridge that they could now cross together with the AfD has so far been ignored. Reiche did discuss the strategic errors of German energy policy surprisingly openly last week. A possible extension of coal use is suddenly back on the table. But largely, the course remains. Together with Environment Minister Carsten Schneider, Reiche helped secure existing climate policy. Another eight billion euros will be pumped into the green patronage economy. The CO2 market and the ban on combustion engines are held fast.

Beneath it all, green hippie politics shines through like a monolith, blocking any reform effort. Strategic thinking is now needed, beginning with an honest stocktaking to make citizens aware of the true weight of political errors over the past decades. Everyone must understand: there is no simple solution. Politically induced artificial scarcity in the energy sector cannot be erased by chancellor decree.

Or will we possibly start a course correction and dare a 180-degree turn in energy policy? Ideology must give way to reason, green bubble politics to economic prudence, state interventionism to real market design. These are the pillars of the bridge that would then need strengthening and expansion.

But Friedrich Merz is not the Pontifex Maximus we need. He resists all criticism of Brussels’ transformation policies, defends the CO2 certificate trade to the bitter end, and is now preparing, together with his socialist SPD allies, a massive tax hit on the middle class. This man, along with the Union’s leadership team, stands in the way of the future. Merz is the antagonist of the national-conservative turnaround, one of many executors of green hippie politics.

Future national-conservative or national-liberal governments will waste no time fully exposing fiscal fraud, deception, and ideological madness -- such as the climate complex. Restoring balance to Germany’s budget, halting Ukraine aid, ending transfers to the green complex, Brussels, and NGOs worldwide will be easy. Necessary social-state reforms, including programs to return illegal migrants, will follow.

As the crisis deepens in the coming years, patriots will gain massive support. This includes libertarians and European cultural patriots, who express their passion for homeland, their will to repair past economic damage, and their desire to preserve Europe’s cultural diversity authentically.

The willingness of people to embrace a reform course, when recognized as contributors to society again, will be overwhelming. Politicians like Katherina Reiche will regret not being part of this turnaround. No bridge will be built for today’s fence-sitters and opportunistic turncoats into future political responsibility.


Podcast thread for April 8

 


go outside and enjoy the weather

Democrats Are Clear and Present Danger to the Nation


The United States must be growing and prosperous at home and strong and secure in the face of the many security threats facing us abroad.

The former can only be achieved with free markets and limited government domestically and the latter through a robust defense budget.

On both fronts, Democrats would take the country in the exact opposite direction needed.

Voters seem to understand this. RealClearPolitics reports Democratic Party favorability at -20.0 unfavorable and Republicans at -15.4 unfavorable.

Nevertheless, in polling on the overall congressional election for 2026, RealClearPolitics shows Democrats up +6.0.

Two things may explain this disconnect.

One, although voters show generically more favorability to Republicans, Republicans are still underwater in overall favorability.

Second, when voters are overall not happy with how things are going, they vote against the party in power.

Per the RealClearPolitics consensus, only 34.3% feel the country is going in the right direction.

Regarding the climate that will define the upcoming election season, one big variable will be the outcome in the current hostilities in Iran.

My prediction is that President Donald Trump and the Republican Party will emerge the clear big winner here.

Those who have opposed this war will be inducted into the national hall of shame. And here we are talking overwhelmingly about Democrat leadership.

The readiness of Trump to identify the clear and present danger to our country of the maniacal regime in Iran, both regarding their acquisition of nuclear weapons and development of a massive arsenal of long-range ballistic missiles, will secure Trump's place in history as a great leader.

American action in Iran has also brought forth with clarity where the rest of the world stands.

We now better understand the lack of principles of our so-called European allies and the squishiness of NATO. We now better understand the evil and threat lurking in Russia, China and North Korea.

And particularly interesting is the potential realignment that will emerge in the Persian Gulf, as suddenly the Arab nations in the Gulf have found themselves attacked by the Iranian maniacs. We may see a great solidifying of U.S. relations with those oil-rich Gulf nations, and we may see an historic solidifying of their relationship with Israel.

It all has made the security picture even clearer to Trump, who is requesting in the 2027 budget a 50% increase in defense spending, from around $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.

The current war has made abundantly clear the inadequacy of our defense spending, now hovering at an historic low of 3% of GDP. We live in a dangerous world. The motto "peace through strength" has never been clearer.

But how do we add $500 billion to our defense budget when we are running multitrillion dollar deficits at home and we're carrying national debt greater than 100% of GDP?

There is one answer. We must step up finally and revamp and reform the massive waste in our federal spending -- now approaching 25% of our GDP.

The GAO reported last year that the federal government loses $233 to $521 billion in fraud. It also reported improper federal payments since 2003 totaling at least $2.8 trillion.

In 2024 alone, GAO notes improper payments in Medicare, Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps) of $95.5 billion.

When Republicans moved to reform Medicaid in the One Big Beautiful Bill, Democrats went crazy and took us to a government shutdown.

Democrats are out front complaining about the spike in gasoline prices.

The best way to manage gasoline prices is increased supplies of oil and gas. Democrats are forever obstacles to this, making discredited claims about climate. Recently Microsoft founder Bill Gates, once a climate change enthusiast, has now repudiated "the doomsday view" of climate change, saying it "is wrong."

We may well see in the midterms that voters indeed see Democrats as the clear and present danger to the nation.


Let’s Get Naughty about NATO

Let’s Get Naughty about NATO

The glorious leaders and the elite minions that lead us, from Left, Right, and in-between, are barely competent.

Autism article image

Christopher Chantrill for American Thinker 

Everybody is talking about NATO this week, so I will too. But I warn my liberal readers: you won’t like it.

Let me be clear. All my life I have dutifully followed the narrative on NATO. Until I read a couple of books. The first is Never Again: Britain 1945-1951 by Peter Hennessy, about how the Labour Party government’s socialist “Planning” agenda totally failed. The other book is Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy, about how the “balance of power” is best. The two books powered a couple of my blog posts, and a NATO timeline:

  • On February 22, 1946, George Kennan sent his Long Telegram from Moscow “advising that the U.S. abandon cooperation for a policy of firm, long-term containment” of the Soviet Union.
  • On June 20, 1948, the West Germans replaced the inflationary Reichsmark with the Deutschmark and began their Wirtschaftwunder.
  • On June 24, 1948, the Soviets began their Berlin Blockade.
  • On June 28, 1948, the western allies began the Berlin Airlift.
  • On July 2, 1948, seven-power negotiations began for NATO.
  • On November 2, 1948, Harry Truman won reelectionas President of the United States.
  • On January 20, 1949, at his inauguration, President Truman announced a North Atlantic security plan.
  • On April 4, 1949, the NATO Treaty was signed in Washington, D.C.
  • On May 12, 1949, the Soviets ended the Berlin Blockade.
  • On March 2, 1952, Stalin sent a “Peace Note” proposing reunification of a neutral Germany.
  • In January-February 1954, the Soviet Union asked to join NATO.
  • On May 9, 1955, West Germany got to join NATO.
  • On May 14, 1955, the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern European countries created the Warsaw Pact.
  • On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall was reopened.
  • On October 3, 1990, East Germany was dissolved and Germany was unified.

Stop right there and go back and read through the list again. I bet you only knew about a third of the events in the list.

Now tell me what the U.S. leaders thought they were doing. Really, they weren’t thinking. They were just reciting Kennan’s Long Telegram.

Let’s get all Trumpy. After winning two world wars, the U.S. became a global hegemon “like you’ve never seen it.” In World War II we basically paid the Brits’ bills with Lend-Lease, and a good part of the Soviets’ bills as well. Then after the war we kept war-torn Europe alive with enormous financial assistance. The Brits kept having “sterling crises” while implementing their stupid socialist Planning and we’d come and bail them out.

In 1948, after two years of inflation and price controls during Allied occupation, Ludwig Erhard and Wilhelm RΓΆpke implemented Austrian economics and the German economy zoomed into the Wirtschaftwunder stratosphere with two years of 15% growth and a decade of 7%-8% growth. The Soviets immediately began their Berlin Blockade. The U.S. response was to create a military alliance against the Soviets, formalized after Harry Truman was safely reelected President.

But then, in 1952, Stalin published his “Peace Note” that proposed the unification of Germany as a neutral power. The West rejected his offer, so in 1955 the Soviets created their own alliance, the Warsaw Pact, and that was that, until the Soviet Union broke up.

Look, I think that Stalin was the baddest baddie in world history, excepting only Mao Zedong. But think about Stalin’s situation at the end of World War II. For sure, his soldiers bore the brunt of Hitler’s advance up to the gates of Moscow, but later his soldiers got to rape every German woman east of the Elbe. Meanwhile the U.S. executed a 27-front war -- or close to it -- rolling up the Germans in North Africa, Italy, and then western Europe. After the Battle of Midway the U.S. had the Japanese on the run, and then blew them up with a couple of newly minted A-bombs.

Just think what it was like to be the Russian dictator after watching a world-conquering performance like that. As Trump says: “there’s never been anything like it” in world history. Thank goodness Stalin had all those Soviet spies keeping an eye on things in Washington, so he had half a clue what was coming next.

I’ll bet you a nickel that, in 1948, Stalin was really scared that the U.S., one day soon, would decide to roll up eastern Europe and put paid to Stalin and communism and reveal the Soviet Union for what it was: a Potemkin village.

Life is rough for dictators. A couple of days after Stalin’s death, Lavrentiy Beria -- the guy Stalin relied on to go after the saboteurs and wreckers -- released all the doctors accused in the Doctor’s Plot.

Look, I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. I just think that the glorious leaders and the elite minions that lead us, from Left, Right, and in-between, are barely competent. Maybe.

Let’s just say that NATO was a good idea at the time and leave it at that.

Image: Nicolas Raymond


🎭 π–πŸ‘π π““π“π“˜π“›π“¨ 𝓗𝓾𝓢𝓸𝓻, π“œπ“Ύπ“Όπ“²π“¬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, π“žπ“Ÿπ“”π“ 𝓣𝓗𝓑𝓔𝓐𝓓

 

Welcome to 

The π–πŸ‘π π““π“π“˜π“›π“¨ 𝓗𝓾𝓢𝓸𝓻, π“œπ“Ύπ“Όπ“²π“¬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, π“žπ“Ÿπ“”π“ 𝓣𝓗𝓑𝓔𝓐𝓓 

Here’s a place to share cartoons, jokes, music, art, nature, 
man-made wonders, and whatever else you can think of. 

No politics or divisive posts on this thread. 

This feature will appear every day at 1pm mountain time. 


Unraveling The Far-Left Group Seeking To Derail Future Republican SCOTUS Nominees


The far-left group Demand Justice is developing plans to derail future Republican Supreme Court nominees for when a vacancy arises.



The U.S. Supreme Court’s consideration of so-called “birthright citizenship” last week has rightly drawn many eyeballs to a high-profile subject involving the rule of law and judiciary. And while the issue is certainly important, there’s another newsworthy story related to the high court that isn’t receiving the attention it deserves.

The New York Times published a seemingly under-the-radar piece on Friday titled, “Liberal Group Warns That Trump Could Have Two More Supreme Court Picks.” Authored by Times reporter Reid Epstein, the article disclosed plans by a far-left organization to disrupt potential Supreme Court nominations should they arise during President Trump’s second term.

While speaking with the left-wing outlet, Demand Justice President Josh Orton revealed that his group is “preparing a multimillion-dollar effort to oppose potential Trump Supreme Court appointees before they happen — with a warning that Mr. Trump could be replacing two justices this year,” as described by the Times. This project seeks “to tie all Republicans running for office this year to a potential Trump Supreme Court selection” and “frame a Supreme Court nomination fight less on traditional Democratic issues and more about a nominee having greater loyalty to Mr. Trump than to the country.”

Orton noted ongoing speculation about whether Justices Clarence Thomas, 77, and/or Samuel Alito, 76, will retire at the end of the court’s 2025-2026 term. In doing so, he notably bemoaned the left’s “fundamental miscalculation about power” when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg declined to step down when Barack Obama was president. That fatal decision and Ginsburg’s 2020 death allowed Trump to replace one of the court’s leftists with Amy Coney Barrett, a move that further shifted the court in an originalist direction.

According to Orton, Demand Justice’s game plan will cost $3 million and an additional $15 million should a vacancy arise ahead of the 2026 midterms. The group is working on the project alongside Indivisible, a far-left organization reportedly involved in organizing “No Kings” and anti-ICE demonstrations since Trump’s return to office.

Where Demand Justice is getting its millions of dollars to run this campaign is not disclosed in the article. Nor is it clear whether Epstein even bothered asking Orton about it.

What is evident, however, is that this is not the first time Demand Justice has sought to undermine Trump, his judicial selections, and the Supreme Court. While the Times was seemingly more than willing to spotlight the organization’s partisan plans for future SCOTUS nominations, it declined to delve into Demand Justice’s sordid history and how it’s served as a left-wing political weapon for years.

Origins and Leadership

According to the Capital Research Center’s InfluenceWatch database, Demand Justice was born in early 2018 as a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund to advocate on behalf of left-wing judicial nominees and oppose conservative ones. The Sixteen Thirty Fund — which regularly injects its money into U.S. elections — is a left-wing advocacy group that operates within the recently re-acquisitioned Arabella Advisors dark-money network. The group has come under fire in recent years for accepting millions of dollars from Swiss national Hansjorg Wyss via his Berger Action Fund.

Within its first year of operations, Demand Justice waged an ad campaign against Trump’s prospective nominees to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy — more specifically, then-Judges Brett Kavanaugh and Barrett. The left-wing judicial group would go on to increase its aggressive tactics upon Kavanaugh’s nomination by orchestrating protestor-led disruptions to Kavanaugh’s Senate hearings and launching a smear website aimed at tanking his nomination.

The group would go on to produce ads opposing Barrett’s and supporting Ketanji Brown Jackson’s respective SCOTUS nominations.

According to InfluenceWatch, Demand Justice became its own nonprofit in mid-2021, but nonetheless “received $1,982,613 from its former fiscal sponsor, Sixteen Thirty Fund” that year. The group also reportedly “received more than $2.5 million from the Open Society Policy Center, a 501(c)(4) lobbying group founded by George Soros, for general support” from April-June 2018.

This financial support from the left’s dark money war chest is unsurprising when further examining the organization’s leadership.

Demand Justice was co-founded by Obama White House official Christopher Kang and Brian Fallon, who served as press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Fallon would serve as the group’s executive director until 2023, at which point he stepped down from the position to become then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ senior communications official as part of Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign, a role he would maintain on Harris’ campaign.

The leftist organization would continue its entanglement with Democrat Party politics with its 2025 appointment of Orton as president. The Demand Justice chief notably served as a senior adviser to Harris in the Biden White House. He also previously worked as policy director and senior adviser to Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, an adviser to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and the “top judicial strategist” for the pro-abortion NARAL Pro-Choice America (now known as “Reproductive Justice for All“).

Court Packing and Other Left-Wing Advocacy

While opposing Trump’s judicial picks became a feature of Demand Justice during the president’s first term, the group notably boasted support for a policy that it touted much more prominently once Joe Biden became president. Namely, efforts to pack the Supreme Court.

The Capital Research Center (CRC) traced Demand Justice’s support for the extreme policy back to 2019 but noted how the group again promoted the idea “following the Democratic Party’s victories in the 2020 general election.” The group later ratcheted up its support for court packing in spring 2021, when it backed a bill introduced by congressional Democrats to add seats to the Supreme Court.

Demand Justice would go on to shell out $1.5 million on a program aimed at getting the Democrat proposal passed. The organization notably dialed down its infatuation with court packing following Trump’s return to office, as CRC’s Parker Thayer previously observed.

Supporting Democrat-led court-packing efforts is only part of Demand Justice’s bid to try and cripple the Supreme Court, however.

The group notably signed onto a 2024 letter from numerous leftist organizations to then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill., requesting that Alito recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The demand came in response to a media-concocted “scandal” about noncontroversial flags flown by Alito’s wife at their residence, which leftists tried to tie to “Stop the Steal” protestors.

Demand Justice subsequently announced plans later that year to launch a $10 million campaign to effectively undermine the court and future Republican judicial nominees.

Demand Justice has since re-focused much of its efforts to opposing Trump’s judicial picks since his return to the White House, according to InfluenceWatch. The organization also spawned an initiative to track what it claims to be are attempts by Trump and his allies to take “a sledgehammer to the rule of law and the balance of powers in our government.”

“The tracker’s release was accompanied by a targeted print and digital advertising campaign in the Washington Post, highlighting polling data from 2026 Senate battleground states,” the InfluenceWatch report reads. “The polling indicated cross-partisan concern regarding judicial integrity and political influence over the courts. [Demand Justice] stated that it intends to use both the tracker and polling data to apply pressure on lawmakers, regardless of party affiliation, during upcoming Senate confirmation votes.”

Closing Thoughts

If this look at Demand Justice and its destructive antics shows anything, it’s that the left will not hesitate to expend every resource necessary to accomplish its goals. And if that means throwing all that they have (including the kitchen sink) at a nominee to destroy his life and prevent him from ascending to the Supreme Court, then so be it.

The right would be wise to take heed of what groups like Demand Justice are doing and prepare accordingly. While conservatives were successful in overcoming the left’s campaigns to defeat Thomas and Kavanaugh’s SCOTUS nominations, it’s not guaranteed this will always be the case. Just look at what happened to Robert Bork.

While it’s currently unknown whether Thomas and/or Alito plan to retire any time soon, the Trump administration and its allies shouldn’t wait. They need to begin developing a plan of action on how best to confront what will likely be a vicious Democrat smear campaign.


There’s A New Name For Those Pierced, Weird-Looking Internet Addicts You Keep Seeing


The trends that were once confined to Discord servers and convention floors have now gone mainstream.



I've noticed a new trend among my students. While most trends used to stem from a pop icon on TV, film, or music, this new trend is an incoherent smorgasbord of various influences online: influencers on TikTok or Instagram, fashion crazes from past generations or other countries, and above all, Japanese manga and anime.

What would have easily marked a person as a social outcast when I was a student in the ’90s is now cool (or “tough” as the kids say). Instead of being bullied and shamed, sexually ambiguous introverts who style themselves as magical pirates from the manga One Piece, boast about their neurodivergence, and base their whole worldview on Nintendo products now represent the social avant-garde. By contrast, the conventional social set who play sports, host parties, and show charisma are dwindling into a negligible minority.

In a recent viral essay by Robert Mariani in The New Atlantis, this unexpected inversion of social dynamics, this “great weirding of America,” finally has a name: dinergoth.

According to Mariani, the emergence of dinergoth core is “what you get when economic mobility dies, suburbs become psychic deserts, and Discord becomes more real than your cul-de-sac.” In addition to the new trendsetters at high school, dinergoths can be found among older adults as well: “The dinergoth core is the pierced-up, gender-fluid Amazon warehouse worker who streams on Twitch, writes fanfiction, wears a furry tail to raves, runs an OnlyFans, and dreams of voice acting while working nights at the fulfillment center.”

Perhaps the most popular example of dinergoth right now is the Olympic champion figure skater Alyssa Liu — fittingly, she hopes to become a professional piercer after retiring from skating.

As with any other alternative lifestyle, dinergoth works as a spectrum. On one extreme is the ex-girlfriend Mariani describes in his essay who often dressed an anime character, identified as “nonbinary,” was open about her trauma and mental disorders, and sexually adventurous. On the other extreme are the normal adults (“normies”), like Mariani himself, who might not outwardly adopt the dinergoth lifestyle but sympathize with it and catch the references.

While older generations can live blissfully unaware of this “mass-cultural wave,” the younger generations (from X on down) have no choice but to confront it. Should we welcome this change before them and accommodate these unique individuals, or should we push back against this trend and try to stop it? It should be obvious by now that we should discourage and destroy dinergothdam by any means necessary before it spreads to the next generation.

For his part, Mariani nevertheless favors the former approach, framing it as the inevitable outcome of today’s economic and cultural “stagnation and the breakdown of barriers.” In an interview with the writer Dudley Newright, he repeated this Marxist materialist interpretation of culture being a direct consequence of economic conditions. Conveniently, this viewpoint bypasses any moral questions about dinergoth culture and implicitly approves its subversion of traditional social hierarchies.

However, this logic has it precisely backwards. Material circumstances are the product of culture, which itself is framed and informed by a preexisting moral code. It would therefore be far more appropriate to oppose the rise of dinergoths, seeing that it potentially destroys what is good in a community. No matter what form it takes, it is dumb, decadent, and dangerous.

This is mainly because dinergoth core lacks an actual core. There is no philosophy or set of values that define what constitutes dinergoth; rather, it is based on mimicking media content whose messaging is artificially predetermined by an algorithm. The typical dinergoth will cultivate a furry fetish, watch and quote the anime Demon Slayer, deface his body with a plethora of piercings and tattoos, and self-diagnose himself with adult ADHD all because his feed on TikTok effectively brainwashes him into doing so. He learns not to think twice about whether these choices actually correspond with reality, benefit him practically, or even make him happier. He simply assumes these affected poses, acts on his conditioning, and becomes an unattractive freak with no judgment, purpose, or basic awareness.

Put another way, the dinergoth phenomenon is a manifestation of today’s nihilistic escapism. Instead of developing important skills, forming meaningful relationships, and striving toward something greater, dinergoths play make-believe and relish the personal shortcomings that prevent them from living the good life. After all, they have based their way of life on the assumption that success is impossible and have subordinated physical reality to virtual reality.

Predictably, this usually makes dinergoths unhappy, undesirable losers. They are hollowed-out people who save face by blaming an unfair system for making them the way they are. They never grow out of their immaturity because that would force them to take ownership for their failures. For the sake of their short-term “mental health,” dinergoths need to believe that their choices are all a natural outgrowth of their true self, not online propaganda.

To be clear, criticizing dinergoth core does not necessarily mean criticizing all its influences. I personally believe that anime and manga are rich forms of entertainment, filled with great stories, deep characters, imaginative settings, and beautiful artwork. Like anything else, it has its share of superficial slop, but it also has veritable classics that elevate and inspire audiences. The same applies to most of the music, and general sensibilities that are seen among dinergoths.

Problems arise when these influences are twisted into unhealthy obsessions that detract from a person’s humanity. Because dinergoths spend relatively little of their time in the real world, they have no moderation or discernment for the media they consume. They experience slop and quality content with equal indifference, draw the wrong conclusions from the stories they follow, and take on the ugliest and most off-putting aspects of the characters they emulate. What they are watching and listening to is not the problem. How they are watching and listening is.

Fortunately, for all these reasons, the dinergoth trend will likely fade just like every other trend that appeals to insecure people. Sure, it is currently having a moment, and its ubiquity says something important about today’s culture (or lack thereof), but in time, it will become as passΓ© as the old diners and melodramatic goth kids from which it draws its name. The youths already have enough to worry about. They don’t need to add becoming an insufferable dinergoth to the list.


Price Inflation and the Price of Oil

Price Inflation and the Price of Oil

The yearly growth rate of the consumer price index (CPI) closed at 2.4 percent in February against a similar figure in January. In February 2025, the yearly growth rate stood at 2.8 percent. Note that, in June 2022, the yearly growth rate was 9.1 percent.

Most analysts are of the view that the sharp increase in the price of oil to around $95 per barrel (from around $64 at the end of February) is likely to lift the rate of inflation as depicted by the yearly growth rate in the CPI.

A very good visual correlation between the yearly percentage change in the consumer price index (CPI) and the yearly percentage change in the price of oil seems to provide support to the common idea that future changes in price inflation in the US are likely to be set by the yearly growth rate in the price of oil (see chart).

But, is it valid to suggest that the price of oil could be a key determinant of the prices of goods and services? Producers of goods and services set asking prices. It is also true that producers, while setting prices take into account various production costs, including the cost of energy. Whether the asking price offered by producers will be realized in the market place hinges on consumers’ acceptance or rejection of the asking price. Consumers dictate whether the price set by producers is “right.” On this Mises wrote,

The consumers patronize those shops in which they can buy what they want at the cheapest price. Their buying and their abstention from buying decides who should own and run the plants and the farms. They determine precisely what should be produced, in what quality, and in what quantities.

If consumers don’t have the money or do not value the goods at the prices asked by producers, then the prices asked will not be realized.

What is a price? It is the rate of exchange between goods established in a transaction. The price—or the rate of exchange of one good in terms of another—is the amount of the other good divided by the amount of the first good.

In a monetary economy, prices are usually the amount of money exchanged for other goods and services. A price is the sum of money paid for a unit of a good. If the stock of money rises while all other things remain intact obviously this must lead to more money being spent on the unchanged stock of goods—an uneven increase in prices of goods.

If the price of oil goes up, and if people continue to use the same amount of oil as before, then this means that people would now be forced to allocate more money for oil. If people’s money stock remains unchanged, then this means that less money is available for other goods and services, all other things being equal.

The overall money spent on goods does not necessarily change, only the composition of spending has altered here, with more on oil and less on other goods. Hence, the prices of goods or money per unit of goods remains unchanged. From this we can infer that the rate of increase in the prices of goods and services in general will be constrained by the growth rate of money supply, all other things being equal, and not by the growth rate of the price of oil. It is not possible for increases in the price of oil to set in motion a general increase in the prices of goods and services without corresponding support from money supply. Furthermore, the reliance on correlations to establish causality is likely to produce misleading results. All that correlation does is to describe, it doesn’t explain.

After rising to 79 percent in February 2021, the yearly growth rate of US money supply AMS followed a visible downtrend until mid-2023, before strengthening until mid-2024 before a renewed softening emerged. Given the long time lag from changes in money supply and its effect on the momentum of the CPI, the yearly growth rate in the CPI is likely to be strongly influenced by the lagged momentum of the AMS in the months ahead, which suggests may remain elevated in the short term before a softening emerges towards the end of the year. Note that changes in money supply do not affect prices instantly. When money is injected, it moves from one market to another market.

Notwithstanding the popular thinking that, by itself, an increase in the price of oil cannot cause general increase in the prices of goods and services, misleadingly labeled “inflation.” Without the increase in the growth rate of money supply, which is what inflation really is, no general increase in prices will occur.

Russia Hoaxer And CCP Patsy Eric Swalwell Accused Of Sexual Harassment, Misusing Funds


The Russia collusion hoaxer congressman and Dem candidate for California governor is accused of inappropriate sexual conduct with interns.



The office of Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., offers internships “for college students to gain valuable work experience … [and] absorb the many functions of a Congressional office.” If the growing harassment allegations against the leftist lawmaker and leading Democrat candidate for California governor are true, Congress may want to put the kibosh on Swalwell’s tutelage program for young women. 

It seems the accomplice media has been too busy falling all over themselves in their absurd attempt to make Swalwell a martyr of President Donald Trump’s “weaponization of law enforcement” to pay much attention to the women coming forward accusing the swamp rat of inappropriate sexual conduct. 

Swalwell’s flacks are furiously trying to explain away why the smarmy Democrat’s campaign spent north of $300,000 on “private attorneys who specialize in white-collar criminal defense and employment law.” They told KCRA 3 in Sacramento the payments were for legal guidance to fend off Trump’s “retaliatory investigations” into Swalwell that have “put his family and staff at risk.” After all, If you can’t trust a morally corrupt congressman who fervently peddled the Russia collusion hoax, who can you trust?

‘Pattern of Manipulation and Abuse of Power’

Cheyenne Hunt, a Democrat who in 2024 ran unsuccessfully for California’s 45th Congressional District seat, posted on her social media sites that she has been “working with a number of women who are in the process of coming forward and sharing their stories of sexual harassment and even alleged abuse at the hands of Eric Swalwell.” Hunt, who serves as executive director of the liberal organization Gen-Z for Change, claims a “major news outlet” is preparing to publish a story on the allegations.  

“So let me be as clear and transparent about that as I safely can be,” she said in a video posted to her Facebook page. “I am personally working with a group of women who want to come forward and share their stories. I am also aware of a much larger group that is also in this process that I am not personally working with.”

Hunt says the group has pro bono legal representation to protect the victims’ “legal and physical safety” as they share their experiences about Swalwell, adding that a number of women have come forward since a previous post last month. In that post she accused Swalwell of having a “predatory history toward women.” 

“I got deeply involved because, like I said in my first video, I had heard these rumors for years, going back to the time I was working on the hill,” said Hunt, who previously served as a law clerk for Sen. Amy Klobuchar, assisting the Minnesota Democrat in her position as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“Then, once I started digging into it and I found that there were a number of other women whose stories match the same pattern of manipulation and abuse of power I knew that I couldn’t stay silent because these women needed to know that if they came forward, there was a group of people that would have their back.” 

The Federalist reached out to Swalwell’s office, by email and phone Monday afternoon. Representatives have not returned those requests for comment. A female staff member who directed questions to the the congressman’s communications director said she could not speak on behalf of the office but that her “experiences here have been nothing but good ones.” 

Others, not so much, according to Hunt and other sources. 

‘Many of His Interns’

In her first post late last month, Hunt cited a text from a woman who claimed Swalwell harassed her when she was a 19-year-old working in the congressman’s office. 

“You know Eric Swalwell has slept with many of his interns and makes them all sign NDAs so they don’t speak up, right? And when I was 19 he tried hitting on me and sliding into my DMs and I have so many other friends that have similar experiences with him,” the text states. 

Hunt said she understands why people want names of Swalwell’s accusers and proof to back up the claims. She said many have remained silent for so long because they thought they were alone and that coming forward would ruin their careers in politics. 

“As someone who has worked in politics, I can’t disagree with that assessment. It appears that others may have stayed silent because of the belief that non-disclosure agreements required them to keep this secret,” the Democrat influencer said. “While it is true that most NDAs would be unenforceable under these circumstances, most people don’t know that and the idea of challenging a powerful sitting congressman in court is not something most people want to do.”

Covered in Sleaze

The allegations come at a particularly bad time for Swalwell, a far-left member of Congress who has spent the better part of the past decade whipping up the flames of Trump Derangement Syndrome. In the most recent polls, Swalwell is leading a crowded field of leftists in California’s race to replace sleazy Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has White House dreams dancing in his low SAT-scoring head. 

Swalwell himself is covered in sleaze. From his cozy relationship with an Chinese spy while a member of the House Intelligence Committee to his suspect California residency and his reported use of political funds for personal expenses, the Democrat has assembled quite a record as a D.C. swamp creature. 

As American Enterprise Institute’s Marc Thiessen wrote in 2020, there was a “certain poetic justice” about his relationship with Chinese intelligence plant Christine Fang ( aka “Fang Fang”). Swalwell, as The Federalist has extensively reported, was one of the main drivers of the debunked Democrat narrative that Trump and his campaign colluded with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 presidential election. 

Thiessen wrote at the time: 

So, it is a bit ironic to learn that the congressman who claimed Trump was an agent of a hostile foreign power himself had a relationship with an alleged agent of a hostile foreign power. 

Fang began cultivating Swalwell when he was a member of the Dublin, Calif., city council, as part of a Chinese intelligence operation to get close to rising political stars. After he was elected to Congress in 2012, she became a bundler raising money for his reelection campaign. She chose her target well. Swalwell became a member of the House Intelligence Committee and lead Democrat on the subcommittee with oversight over the CIA.

And here’s an interesting tidbit, Fang, according to Axios, “facilitated the potential assignment of interns into Swalwell’s offices” and “in at least one case, an intern recommended by Fang was placed into Swalwell’s D.C. office.” 

‘The Truth is an Absolute Defense’

The congressman is up in arms over reports that the FBI is mulling releasing files from the Fang Fang affair, some three years after the House Ethics Committee closed its probe with — surprise, surprise — no further action. Swalwell’s representatives have sent a cease and desist notice to the FBI, insisting that release of the records would be an assault on the congressman’s right to privacy and further underscore the Trump Justice Department’s weaponization against political enemies. In other words, what the Biden DOJ did to Trump and other political enemies. 

“It’s just absurd and probably the worst abuse that we’ve seen since the J. Edgar Hoover days,” Swalwell said during a recent interview on CNN.

“We expect more will come, other nonsense from the administration. But we don’t trust them one bit. And it’s also absurd, just absolutely absurd, as somebody who was on the Intelligence Committee, oversaw the CIA for eight years, that they’re so out to interfere in the California gubernatorial race, where we’re leading.”

It also feels like a case of the California scumbag doth protest too much. The question should be, “What’s Swalwell got to hide?”

But Swalwell may have bigger fish to fry. 

According to KCRA 3, which first reported the story, campaign finance records show that between 2016 and 2023, the Democrat’s congressional campaign made 44 payments to Bay Area-based law firm Coblentz Patch Duffy & Bass LLC totaling $305,118.

Micah Beasley, Swalwell’s gubernatorial campaign spokesman, suggested that the legal services were provided to protect Swalwell from Trump. 

“Legal guidance for congressional offices and staff has become increasingly critical in this environment as Trump continues his pattern of weaponizing federal law enforcement to go after his critics. It would be irresponsible not to seek experienced legal counsel,” Beasley told KCRA. 

But why exactly would Swalwell turn to “private attorneys who specialize in white-collar criminal defense and employment law” to assist with alleged Trump vendettas? 

Hunt says she is not blind to the fact that the sexual harassment allegations will have an impact on the governor’s race, and as an attorney she knows what making claims without evidence could mean to her personally and professionally. 

“That being said, Swalwell follows me and I know that his team is aware of my videos and the videos that other creators have made on this topic. To the best of my knowledge, none of us has been served with legal paperwork or sent a cease and desist,” the liberal activist said. “They can’t because the truth is an absolute defense.”