The same motive power that propelled Donald Trump’s electoral victories in 2016 and 2024 propelled his disastrous midterm repudiation—fear and loathing of government. There is no unconditional love in politics. Trump was elected to upend the ruling caste, which, among his supporters, is even more despised than the government. He didn’t do it, and has repeatedly demonstrated that he’s just another paid-up member. Many of his former supporters either protest-voted for the Democrats or stayed home.
The Epstein case continues to rankle because it so clearly involves prominent members of that caste. Here was an opportunity to not just disgrace some of them, but perhaps send them to prison. At the heart of it lies one crime that most Americans still find repellent—nonconsensual sex with underage victims. Trump repeatedly vowed to get to the bottom of it, then reversed himself and dismissed the whole matter. That not only enraged people, particularly his supporters, it also fueled suspicion that his involvement with Epstein’s depravity was far greater than he had admitted.
Wars have been the health of the ruling caste, and Trump broke his promise not to involve the U.S. military in any new ones, particularly in the Middle East. Trump partisans tend to forget that it was Trump who first got the U.S. involved in the Ukraine-Russia war, sending arms to Ukraine during his first term (a step Obama wouldn’t take), even before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. That’s been swept under the rug, but the disastrous U.S. and Israeli kinetic war against Iran can’t be. Nor can its disastrous economic effects.
What also can’t be hidden is that the war was launched at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Jewish lobby. They have an extraordinarily powerful and unhealthy influence on Trump. We’ll probably never find out how much of it boils down to natural affinity on the one hand, and bribes, blackmail, and bullets—the specter of assassination—on the other. Whatever the case, Trump’s subservience clearly fueled voter disgust.
The epic backlash against Israel began with Israel’s effort to eradicate the Palestinians. Even stepped up hasbara and massive campaign spending in both the primaries and midterm elections has done nothing to turn the swelling tide. Ominously for Israel and the Jewish lobby, their influence is waning most markedly among the younger generations of Americans. Just to close an ugly circle, there is also widespread suspicion that Epstein’s detestable honeypots were a Mossad operation, perhaps in conjunction with American intelligence.
There is no unconditional love in equity markets, either, and it looks like their long love affair with the AI industry is coming to an end. They are finally noticing their amour’s circular financing, huge debt loads, Chinese competition, immense demand for power and water, rising political opposition, and highly speculative revenue and profit projections. Those should be enough to end the AI mania, and probably bring down the rest of the market as well.
Still to come is general recognition of the flawed premises underlying the mania. Artificial intelligence (or super intelligence for the remaining Trumpists out there), is a misnomer. Human intelligence (HI) rests on curiosity and asking questions. Those are individual, not consensus phenomena.
At root, the problem is that although AI can answer a seemingly infinite number of questions, it can’t ask a single one. It can be programmed to spot and attempt to resolve conflicts within data, but it doesn’t autonomously ask questions. From birth, the human mind is an autonomous question generator; it’s how we learn. That’s not confined to our species. Anyone who’s ever watched puppies or kittens can see that they have something akin to human curiosity. They explore their environments and are interested in anything new (if they’re not afraid of it). Curiosity and questions are the foundation of learning and intelligence. Reading even a page of something interesting or provocative will generate questions. Generative AI “reads” trillions of pages without an iota of curiosity. No one who either hails or warns of AI surpassing HI has explained how it will do so while bypassing the foundation of HI.
***
AI output essentially represents consensus “knowledge” as measured by AI’s data surveying and statistical capabilities. What is defined as consensus may be an average weighted by the credentials and output of the various propagators of the data. It may, when it’s spitting out “answers,” note that the data conflicts and list alternative interpretations. However, aside from the fact that consensus, even weighted average consensus, is often wrong, there is a graver danger. Consensus wisdom is frequently the sworn enemy of innovation. Consensus-based AI may, on balance, retard more than it promotes innovation.
“AI is a Crock,” Robert Gore, SLL, 12/13/25
Innovation is rarely, if ever, imposed from the top. AI is the ultimate from-the-top “innovation.” It has governments, huge corporations, and trillions of dollars of capital behind it, pushing it for all they’re worth. What it doesn’t have is much of a use case for ordinary people. It’s nice to be able to ask a computer a question and get a seemingly plausible answer. AI can save a little time and impart some organization to mundane tasks like scheduling and record keeping. However, as it is gets incorporated into almost everything, it can also be downright intrusive and annoying.
What remains to be seen is whether AI can perform tasks for which ordinary people and businesses will fork over enough money to cover its huge costs of production and capital. Especially because so much of what it’s doing now is available for free, if not from U.S. AI purveyors, then from Chinese ones. In business applications, the price of tokens—the cost of AI usage—has dropped precipitously. There’s still no hard evidence that even reduced cost AI pays for itself in productivity gains. AI may well share the disappointing (to their promoters) uptake of other “great,” officially promoted technologies: solar and wind power, electric vehicles, and mRNA vaccines.
Most of the hyperbole of what is supposedly to come are a diversion. The real goal of AI has already been achieved—to enable the surveillance state, which is why it’s being pushed so hard from the top.
And like climate change and COVID, AI has the totalitarians and would-be totalitarians drooling. Collecting, assimilating, and manipulating data is the technological foundation of a surveillance state. That’s all the technototalitarians (See “Technototalitarianism,” Parts One, Two and Three) require of AI—all-encompassing data that can be sorted by every available metric, including ones for which citizens might pose a threat, rhetorically or otherwise, to the government. Some of them must know AI will never get close to HI, but that’s a useful claim, a selling point, to attract massive amounts of capital from Wall Street and support from the technototalitarian Trump administration.
There is no unconditional love in bond markets, either. Not only is the debt supporting AI faltering, so too is the big kahuna—sovereign debt. If equity markets crash, government bonds, particularly U.S. government bonds, may well catch a flight-to-quality bid and rally (interest rates would fall). However, quality isn’t what it used to be. The U.S., most European, and Japanese governments are in debt up to their eyeballs. While buying their bonds as a short-term trade may work out, as a long-term investment, they are a guaranteed loser. Those governments cannot support their debt loads, especially when unfunded liabilities for pensions and medical care are included. That much of the world seems to be headed towards World War Three, which would undoubtedly be a costly fiasco, greatly magnifies the problem.
Governments and their central banks have two choices: implicit repudiation of their debt via devaluation of their fiat currencies, or explicit repudiation. They’re already trying the former, but it’s a good bet bond markets won’t let them get away with it. Devaluation to zero produces interest rates to infinity. Governments are already feeling the squeeze of interest rates which are no longer zero, but are still in historically unexceptional single digits. Double-digit rates would force explicit repudiation and probably topple governments.
France is the preview of coming attractions. Its government spends more than half the gross domestic product on expensive welfare and warfare states. The national debt exceeds 119 percent of the GDP, and debt service is the largest item in the national budget. The government involves itself heavily in the sputtering economy (there is cause and effect between the two). The bond market has been marking up the interest rates on its debt, not just in absolute terms but relative to other nations’ debt.
As France joins the rest of European NATO in costly preparations for a war with Russia that Russia doesn’t want, the country has been engulfed in riots. Rioters employ the usual means—violence and destruction—have the usual ends—more this, that, and the other thing, paid for by someone else—and are covered by the usual media obfuscation about the identities of the rioters and their string pullers.
The French government and its would-be destroyers face the same problem—there’s not only no money, but the future has essentially been spent as well. On present course, debt service will consume an ever larger share of production until the inevitable debt repudiation and economic collapse. The same problem confronts most of the developed world’s governments—including the U.S.’s—and their would-be destroyers. The French are merely the first in line.
The world can’t pay for the huge, centralized governments it already has. It certainly won’t be able to pay for still more government if the destroyers have their way. Replacing myriad governments with one big government —the globalist dream—will produce an expensive, unproductive, ultimately unsupportable slave state. Its rulers will be almost as miserable as their subjugated subjects. From the delusional demands of the rioters, looters, and arsonists to the fever dreams of the globalists, the end result is the same—chaos, not utopian order.
That these outcomes are, in light of history and logic, glaringly obvious only highlights another obvious truth. The means of both the globalists and their stooges—violence and destruction—are their true end. A cautionary note for the globalists: violence is always a race to the bottom. The stooges, once unleashed, will engage in depraved torture and murder their putative masters can’t control, and eventually that depravity will be trained on them. The only “order” that emerges from this chaos will be the order of demented savages—torture chambers and firing squads—not the advertised utopia of the “enlightened” totalitarians.
Government is obviously the cause and is just as obviously not the solution to the problems confronting the world’s welfare-warfare states. Plenty of people recognize this truism. In the U.S., it has been the impetus for MAGA. Fear and loathing of government and rulers is not only here to stay—regardless of what happens to Trump—they will continue to grow as governments’ failures mount.
Which will be—other than the fact that the U.S. government is already bankrupt—the biggest problem for the Democrats, the party of government, and their always-on-call stooges. Constrained by reality, the ultimate constraint, the blue team will be unable to deliver on their promises to further expand the welfare state. Indeed, ever-rising debt will render both the current welfare state and the warfare state—the red team favorite—unaffordable. It will also crowd out funding for productive investment, destroy savings, further devalue the dollar against “Real Money” (gold and silver), and crash the economy and financial markets. In some future election, perpetually disappointed voters will wash away the blue team with a red tsunami.
And so it will go, back and forth, until the general realization dawns that no matter who’s elected, a government that’s flat broke, fundamentally broken, riddled with corruption, and obsolete can’t be fixed at the ballot box. At which point, bullets replace ballots. Uncontrollable violence and mayhem will be the order of the day.
Historians may look back on the 2026 midterms as the end of the beginning of the end of the centralization and control exercised by governments in the centuries-long epoch of government. The mounting chaos, confusion, and deterioration since the apotheosis of that epoch—the U.S. government’s post-World War II dominance—is just a foretaste of what’s to come and will last longer than any of us.
Buckle up.
