UnHerd.

You would be hard pressed to find a bar in Washington D.C. where you’d find a group of people as ideologically diverse as Donald Trump’s cabinet. He’s got Tea Party veterans mingling with a Kennedy, a Teamsters ally, George Soros’s “protege”, and the former vice-chair of the Democratic Party.

And, yet, on the surface at least, D.C. is uncharacteristically calm. Some anti-abortion groups are agitating about Trump’s decision to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr to head up the Department of Health and Human Services, but on the Right, nothing inside the conservative movement resembles a “freak out” at all right now.

“It’s the end of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” says one insider, reflecting on the feverish resistance movement that sprang into action after the President-elect’s 2016 win, creating an arms race for anti-Trump donor cash and media attention. While there’s some “grumbling” about Kennedy and Trump’s pro-union pick for Labor Secretary, nobody wants to “step on the vibes”, one senior activist tells me.

TDS is still going strong in the Narrative Media, as I document here daily.

Read it.

with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. The First was in Hanoi, followed by a highly ‘controversial’ meeting at the Korean border, which was the first time in history that a sitting American president had stepped foot into the North Korean side of the border.

There was talk at the time of the two leaders falling “in love”—however, the past couple years of Biden’s Pentagon parking a nuclear submarine at a South Korean port has done much to undo these good will displays. Washington has requested that Pyongyang abandon its nuclear weapons development, while Kim has demanded nothing less than full sanctions relief.

What will the policy be under the second Trump White House?

It worked last time.

ZMan:

Tradition, like most of what makes up the organic set of relations and habits of mind we call culture is not quantifiable. Most people cannot tell you why they like that the Detroit Lions host a game every Thanksgiving. You may not care about the NFL, or the teams involved, but it is probably part of your Thanksgiving memories. The value of intangible things like tradition make sense only to the people who have them.

The Conversation, a Voice of the Crust.

Every November, numerous articles recount the arrival of 17th-century English Pilgrims and Puritans and their quest for religious freedom. Stories are told about the founding of Massachusetts Bay Colony and the celebration of the first Thanksgiving feast.

In the popular mind, the two groups are synonymous. In the story of the quintessential American holiday, they have become inseparable protagonists in the story of the origins.

But as a scholar of both English and American history, I know there are significant differences between the two groups. Nowhere is this more telling than in their respective religious beliefs and treatment of Native Americans.

As you might expect, ‘treatment of Native Americans’ is far more important than ‘their respective religious beliefs’.

The American Mind.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s crushing victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, social media has been flooded with videos of apartment- or vehicle-bound neurotics screaming, banging pots and pans in sheer disbelief, packing their belongings, or generally convulsing as if Kristallnacht were upon us. The American public has been introduced to the 4B movement, in which liberal women appropriate a South Korean sex strike because justice.

To be sure, social media is at best a caricature of real life. Only the most dramatic individuals will shave their heads for “reproductive rights” (read: for likes), but most people do not express themselves in quite such a hyperbolic register. That said, in this case the memes are imitating real life. Not every ex-Kamala voter is experiencing a full-scale breakdown. But judging based on my own clinical observations as a practicing therapist, I think it may well be true that a significant number of young American leftists are going through a collective mental health crisis.

I speak from some experience, having spent multiple hours per day over the past few weeks hearing from clients about the damage inflicted upon their psyches “by the Trump win.” This is their account of things. My own opinion, however, is that someone has subjected these kids to psychic trauma. But it wasn’t Donald Trump.

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The world’s thinnest spaghetti, about 200 times thinner than a human hair, has been created by a UCL-led research team. The spaghetti is not intended to be a new food but was created because of the wide-ranging uses that extremely thin strands of material, called nanofibers, have in medicine and industry.

Nanofibers made of starch—produced by most green plants to store excess glucose—are especially promising and could be used in bandages to aid wound healing (as the nanofiber mats are highly porous, allowing water and moisture in but keeping bacteria out), as scaffolding for bone regeneration and for drug delivery. However, they rely on starch being extracted from plant cells and purified, a process requiring much energy and water.

A more environmentally friendly method, the researchers say, is to create nanofibers directly from a starch-rich ingredient like flour, which is the basis for pasta.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees.

Been there.

Read it.

In the annals of agrarian history, one particular movement has left a profound impact on the collective imagination of food sovereignty advocates. The Diggers in 17th century England were led by the visionary Gerrard Winstanley. This radical group emerged during a period of intense social and political upheaval, offering a revolutionary perspective on land ownership and food production that continues to resonate with modern struggles for (food) justice.

The Diggers, also known as the True Levellers, arose in 1649, a time when England was reeling from the aftermath of civil war. Winstanley and his followers dared to imagine a different world. The group challenged the very foundations of the emerging capitalist system and the enclosure movement that was rapidly privatising previously common lands. But Winstanley’s vision was not merely theoretical.

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From the outside, Bugatti’s new 1,800 hp Tourbillon looks much the same as the outgoing Chiron. Longer, sure, with a more pronounced nose and aggressive fender flares, but not substantially different. Look closer at the suspension, though, and you’ll notice something radical: The control arms and linkages, rather than appearing like typical automotive parts, have a distinctly organic shape—like the skeletal structure of some otherworldly creature built for speed. These key components in the $4 million model were created using bleeding-edge additive manufacturing, more commonly known as 3-D printing.

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As COP29 wrapped up in Baku, it left behind a trail of broken promises, hollow platitudes, and a $300 billion-per-year climate finance pledge that’s already being treated like Monopoly money. For the attendees, this summit was supposed to be a turning point—a global kumbaya to double down on the Paris Agreement and guilt developed nations into more climate cash giveaways. Instead, they woke up to a rude reality: President Donald J. Trump is back, and he’s armed with a cabinet determined to shred the green bureaucratic utopia faster than Greta Thunberg can say, “How dare you?”

The $300 billion package to “help” developing nations has been hailed as a win—if you define a win as forcing Western taxpayers to underwrite wind farms in nations where electricity is still considered a luxury. Naturally, the recipients aren’t satisfied. They’re already calling it “woefully insufficient,” which roughly translates to, “Nice start—now double it, and maybe we’ll stop complaining.”

But the real story isn’t the faux climate unity in Baku; it’s the cataclysmic shift coming out of Washington, D.C. With Trump’s return, the U.S. is poised to leave the Paris Agreement (again), freeze out the global climate aristocracy, and make American energy great again.

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Think back to that basic biology class you took in high school. You probably learned about organelles, those little “organs” inside cells that form compartments with individual functions. For example, mitochondria produce energy, lysosomes recycle waste and the nucleus stores DNA. Although each organelle has a different function, they are similar in that every one is wrapped up in a membrane.

Membrane-bound organelles were the textbook standard of how scientists thought cells were organized until they realized in the mid-2000s that some organelles don’t need to be wrapped in a membrane. Since then, researchers have discovered many additional membraneless organelles that have significantly changed how biologists think about the chemistry and origins of life.

I was introduced to membraneless organelles, formally called biomolecular condensates, a couple years ago when students in my lab observed some unusual blobs in a cell nucleus. Unbeknownst to me, we had actually been studying biomolecular condensates for years. What I finally saw in those blobs opened my eyes to a whole new world of cell biology.

Explorer Scout: “What use is calculus? I’ve never seen the need for it.”

My brother, the Explorer Post adviser and Dungeon Master: “You’re going from a five-foot wide corridor to a ten-foot-wide corridor. How long a spear can you get around that corner?”

Explorer Scout: “I have no clue.”

My brother: “Come, my child, while I explain to you the uses of maxima and minima….”

The Foundry.

President-elect Donald Trump’s win two weeks ago in Pennsylvania was always right in front of you if you were objectively listening to the concerns of the people and the data showing the most important, but misread trend of all: The Republican Party had now become the party of work.

In interview after interview, waitresses, welders, rank-and-file union members, plumbers, HVAC small-business owners, hairdressers, and barbers would tell national news reporters, including me, that they were voting for Trump.

No matter how often these voters said this, it often was dismissed as an outlier. Or it was placed in a silo of race, meaning it was only the white working class. The blindness among reporters and Democrats was that they thought it was only white middle-class voters behaving that way, missing that working-class voters of all races were voting shoulder to shoulder.

I’m more interested in seeing an Amazon truck (or the FedEx guy) than any of my neighbors.

Read it.

The second weekend following the election that rocked the world had football players in the end zone doing the now-famous Trump Dance. The UFC event that put together the fabulous five of the MAGA/MAHA/DOGE team culminated with the winning fighter giving his prize belt to Trump himself.

…

You know all these stories because there has been a sudden and remarkable shift in American politics. The pronouns are disappearing from bios, major influencers are hiding, pollsters are resigning, and a different ethos is obvious in every town center in America, even in blue states. It’s as if a curtain has been lifted or a big weight has been pulled off the chest of the body politic.

Read it.

Will Trump and his new cadre of appointees succeed in ending the wars, closing the border, slashing bureaucracy, and ridding our food/medicine of poison? Or will he get rolled by the Deep State again?

Revolver News founder Darren Beattie and Grayzone Editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal dove deep into Trump’s cabinet in last night’s debate, hosted by friend of ZeroHedge Adam Taggart (who was kind enough to fill in for Judge Napolitano due to a last minute issue — please subscribe to Taggart’s YouTube channel to thank him).

Read it.

At least 42 companies in the Fortune 100 pay for employees to travel for an abortion in states where it isn’t available, according to a new report from the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Forty-two companies is likely an undercount because coverage for abortion travel is becoming standard in many health care plans for procedures not available nearby, according to the EPPC report from Alexandra Desanctis and Nathaniel Blake.

Two other corporations suggest they also provide abortion travel coverage.

Most of the companies that publicly affirmed coverage for abortion-related travel don’t provide public information on their child-care benefits.

Obviously, paying for abortions is cheaper than paying for child-care.

The American Mind.

Democratic candidates in 2016, attacks from legacy left-wing institutions on Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, among others, have had an effect—but not one those institutions intended. Tech CEOs, it turns out, are moving sharply to the Right. Musk openly campaigned for Donald Trump, and Zuckerberg is supposedly penitent for his submission to the Biden Administration’s demands during COVID. Venture capital, the engine behind the tech industry’s dynamism, is moving rightward as a whole as well.

UnHerd.

Today the cultural gap in America is not a function of geography but of education. A certain level of education — basically a bachelor’s degree — is now required to advance significantly in society. We may forget in our little university and urban cocoons but only a little more than a third of adult Americans have such a degree. When I looked up the percent of Manhattanites with a university degree, which I assumed to be a little less than 50%, I discovered that it has risen to nearly 70%. It is only 23% in the Bronx. I had no idea.

I’m surprised it’s that high in the Bronx. I’d have guessed 10%, maybe.

And the consequences of this gap are not just economic. University does not only provide training for entering lucrative professions, it also socialises students into new styles of living, as Tocqueville called it, that are vastly different from those of the less educated. Graduates come out of the university with different ideas about how to comport themselves in public and at work, what to eat, how to entertain themselves, how many children to have and how to raise them, how to manage money, and how to take care of their health. Even the typical bodies of our cultural classes are notably different today.

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The once and future president, Donald Trump, has already begun the gargantuan task of selecting staff for his incoming administration, but he should also keep an eye out for specific woke bureaucrats to fire as soon as he enters office on Jan. 20, 2025.

Trump didn’t just win the Electoral College on Nov. 5; he won the popular vote. He has a clear mandate to take charge of the federal government and root out the woke elites who pull the strings in Washington, D.C.

My research for my forthcoming book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” highlights four key bureaucrats to whom Trump will likely deliver his iconic line from “The Apprentice”: “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Read it.

Depending on who you listen to, talk to, or follow, in its first full week, the Trump team is either playing an incredible game of 3D Chess, or is playing the equivalent of 52-Card Pickup with the nation.

Read it.

In the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, Portion 72, Verse 1, it says that if someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first. And this has always been the guiding philosophy of Israel’s armed forces and its intelligence community, particularly the Mossad, which has resorted to targeted assassinations to thwart what they perceive to be threats to the state of Israel.

Damned straight.

Read it.

After the majority of Americans voted for the economy over abortion, furious feminists have announced that they will no longer date, marry or have children.

Call it slow motion misery and mass suicide.

In the past, Americans protested by refusing to pay taxes, now leftists are protesting by refusing to have children because of their frustrated eagerness to kill those same children in the womb.

What began as a last minute election gimmick by the Kamala campaign, which decided that its best strategy for winning the election was dividing us by sex, is now poisoning our culture, and further ruining relationships between men and women. And the media is spreading the poison.

From an evolutionary perspective, this is a win. The worst elements of our modern political culture are voluntarily removing themselves from the gene pool. We ought to encourage them to do so.

Read it.

Some writers are unjustly known for one book, no matter how many excellent works they may have written. Such has been the case—in the Anglosphere at least—for the prolific French novelist, travel writer, and explorer Jean Raspail (1925-2020) who had a fifty-year literary career, producing about forty books. That said, five of Raspail’s books have been translated into English over the past sixty years, which is probably a better average than most contemporary French writers.

The one book for which Raspail is known is, of course, his 1973 dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, which first appeared in English in 1975 and which has become a kind of ideological sounding board (an appreciation by Robin Harris of Camp of the Saints and Raspail appeared in the Winter 2024 print edition of The European Conservative). There is talk of a new edition of this novel, featuring a fresh English translation, appearing in the near future. Usually falsely derided as a racist work, Saints great fault today seems to be that it was eerily prescient, not only that mass, uncontrolled migration would come to the West from the Global South—not much of a prediction there—but that the powers that be in the West would either welcome this invasion or that they would prove to be morally, technically, and politically incapable of stopping this from happening. Nevertheless, Raspail’s most notorious book is but a small part of his legacy.

Steve Graham.

RFK Jr. is about to become the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, a department which sounds leftist when you say its name. What conservative would use the phrase “human services”? It’s idiotic. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s too broad. I’m a human. When I hire someone to look at my AC system, it must be a human service. But HHS doesn’t send out air conditioner repairmen.

We had better department names when we had fewer departments. The Department of Defense was the Department of War. No apologies. Truthful. Trumpish.

…

Okay, okay. We do need someone to keep really awful drugs off the market. I mean, if we didn’t have a government agency doing that, some company might put out untested vaccines that cause blood clots and myocarditis, leading to an epidemic of excess deaths among young people, which the government’s unofficial department, the MSM, would have to tell us did not exist.

All right. All right. We do need the FDA. I think. Even though it keeps Americans from receiving excellent medications used everywhere else in the world. Look up Rowachol. I got COVID recently, and the pharmacist in Rome gave me two well-regarded drugs, neither of which had I ever heard of. Thanks to the FDA.

The Guadian.

Oh noes!

hen we walked into school on the morning of 6 November, we exchanged quick glances with the other girls in our social circle – looks filled with uncertainty and dread about the future. Because we are applying to colleges all around the country and about to leave our homes in the Hudson Valley, political issues suddenly have begun to feel a lot more personal.

Access to abortion and contraception, protection of the environment, and the growing hate and violence toward marginalized groups all have the potential to greatly impact our lives. We had only brief conversations about why Trump’s victory felt so defeating, but our shared disappointment stuck with us as we walked to our first period classes.

But as we sat down at our desks, we noticed a very different attitude among our male peers. Subtle high-fives were exchanged and remarks about the impending success of the next four years were whispered around. It didn’t make much sense. We live in a mostly liberal town in the Hudson Valley where Harris-Walz signs were posted outside of most of our friends’ houses. This is not to say that families with dissenting opinions don’t live in our town. But the boys that were the most vocal in their enthusiasm about the election results have progressive parents just like ours.

By an anonymous female from a female-centric point of view, as everything is nowadays.

Funny–he doesn’t look like Kamala Harris….

The Foundry.

Conservatives know that when the American Left wants us to “have a conversation” about an issue, it means they get to talk incessantly until we agree with them.

To progressives, there is one, approved view on a given issue and all others are atavistic throwbacks to an era before “progress.”

Observe that humans (and all mammals) come in two sexes, and you are a “transphobe.”

Suggest it is unfair for males to compete against females in sports and unsafe for men to share prison cells with women, and it is “hate speech.”

Declare that America is about equal opportunity, not equal outcomes, and uphold merit over race- and sex-based discrimination, and you are racist and misogynistic.

Argue against mass illegal immigration, and you are xenophobic at best, racist at worst.

The American Mind.

One of the worst decisions in Supreme Court history might finally be overturned.

Filed in January 2024, John Ream v. U.S. Department of the Treasury could cast aside Wickard v. Filburn (1942) could put an end to the Court’s rampant abuse of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause to justify whatever Congress wants to do.

The plaintiff is asking for declaratory and injunctive relief to overturn the current federal ban on distilling alcoholic beverages at home for personal and family consumption. Mr. Ream wants to produce rye and bourbon and has no plans to sell or offer it to the public. He believes that this prohibition exceeds the powers of Congress under both Article I and the 10th Amendment.

Although current statutes expressly authorize the home production of both beer and wine, 26 U.S.C.§ 5601(a)(6) prohibits home distilling of whiskey. Interestingly enough, 26 U.S.C. § 5181 allows for personal production of ethanol to produce fuel for farm use—and the same distilling process can also be used to produce whiskey.

The complaint in John Ream correctly notes, “If Congress can prohibit home distilling, it can prohibit home bread baking, sewing, vegetable gardening, and practically anything else.” How did Congress get the authority to regulate virtually anything under the auspices of commerce?

James Lileks: “Maybe it’s just me, but the older I get, the less I need to know everything now about everything.”

John C. Wright.

Modern society faces seven mountains of madness, that is, seven institutional strongholds, captured by the enemy, that command the culture and war against it:

The Press and Hollywood
Washington and Wall Street
Academia, The Chattering Class, The Church

While the Church is not entirely captured, the number of priestesses, pro-abortion, pro-sodomite and pro-contraception denominations, bishops, and orders who have fallen away from Christian teaching is severe and severely scandalous.

With the election of Trump, the centermost of the mountains of madness, the stronghold of politics, takes are sharp and shocking blow.

I’m with you, brother.

Rollo Tomassi: “Democrats don’t see men as having problems, they see men as being problems. Men responded to that and voted Republican.”

ZMan lays it out.

Trump has made it clear that he wants to use tariffs to redirect investment into the domestic economy. Another name turning up as a possible addition to the Trump team is Robert Lighthizer, who is both a China hawk and the architect of Trump’s trade policy in his first term. It is important to note that the changes Trump ushered in were not rolled back under Biden. Taken together, it is a clear sign that Trump 2.0 will be much more hawkish on the trade front.

Those familiar with the regulatory world remember the wild ride it was in Trump’s first term as they went on a deregulation spree. Expect Trump 2.0 to be even more aggressive, especially on the environmental front. His nominee for the EPA is Lee Zeldin, who the Gaia worshipers detest. Trump made it clear with the announcement that his job will be to clear the dense thicket of environmental regulations that make it hard to put a shovel in the ground for any reason.

Trump 2.0 will be helped by the courts in this regard. This year the Supreme Court ended what had been termed the Chevron deference. This was the rule that said the courts should defer to the regulatory agencies whenever there was ambiguity in the laws passed by Congress. Of course, this meant that everything passed by Congress was as vague as possible, to give total control to the agencies. This has been turned on its head by the courts.

“Chevron deference” was a great wart on the American legal system. We are well rid of it.

The American Mind.

On a long drive the day after Trump’s victory, after absolutely no sleep, deeply hungover, I turned to liberal radio as a much-needed painkiller. First I tried NPR, but even their coping and seething was too appalling to bear. So I sought out another source: Pod Save America, the famous podcast hosted by three famous former Obama staffers known for being Very Good Boys.

What struck me is how closely the hosts—Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer, and Tommy Vietor—conform to a single archetype: that of the effeminate, white, male valedictorian-cum-Brooklyn striver under whose boot we’ve all been stuck for two decades. They are each one a variation on this platonic form, their speech patterns recognizable by the vocal fry that communicates, “I’m safe” while a certain scruffy growl from time to time adds, “but I’m still a guy.”

Members of this class are defined by a very specific perspective. I’ve noticed it ever since first encountering the species in New York in 2007. This perspective accounts for the major difference between what middle-class people teach their kids and what elites teach their kids—what state schools teach their students versus what the Ivys do. You can hear it vividly throughout the episode.

…

Yet the solution they come up with is that they need more of a “narrative approach” to “storyelling,” so they can…continue to manipulate people into voting for them. At no point do they address what they actually believe. At no point do they consider that perhaps their beliefs are simply wrong, or perhaps insane, or perhaps completely radical. At no point do they wonder whether the problem might be, not that Democrats aren’t perceived as the party of working people anymore, but that they actually aren’t.

Quillette.

Mind viruses seem to be all the rage these days. In his 2020 bestseller Parasitic Mind, evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad identifies “the tyranny of political correctness” and other “infectious ideas” that are harming our societies. A year later, from a different ideological angle, the philosopher Andy Norman published Mental Immunity, a guide to boosting your mental immune system against infectious “mind parasites.” And in his popular science book Foolproof (2022), psychologist Sander Van der Linden advocates “mental inoculation” against misinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories. In various ways, each of these books suggests that beliefs act like infectious parasites spreading from one brain to the next.

Read it.

The physical world is an intricate dance between matter, information, and energy. Recognizing that mitochondria are alive will open new horizons into how we learn about, and build with, biology.

The cells within our body are the remnants of an ancient alliance.

In a 1967 paper called “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells,” American evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis proposed an idea that, upon first hearing, seems ludicrous. Her paper, in fact, was rejected by 12 different journals before it was published.

Margulis argued that one-and-a-half billion years ago, a primitive eukaryotic cell engulfed an oxygen-utilizing bacterium. But rather than digesting this bacterium — or conversely, the bacterium destroying its newfound host — the two cells gradually entered into an endosymbiotic relationship; the host provided nutrients and protection to the bacterium, and the bacterium supplied energy to the host. Margulis argued that this endosymbiosis event was a seminal “innovation engine” for biological systems, ultimately leading to the modern mitochondrion and chloroplast.

ZMan:

Watching the jubilation from the Trump fans online, I am amazed how they seem to have forgotten what happened in his first term. His party, the other party, permanent Washington, the judiciary and the intelligence community worked to thwart him. It is only reasonable to assume they will do the same this time, maybe without the theatrics. Trump is wiser now and he has some support from the economic elites, but he still faces the orc army of managerialism.

That does not mean it is hopeless. It just means expectations need to be tempered. The most we can expect from Trump is for him to move the ball down the field, so that Vance can start from better field position if he wins in 2028. In fact, one of the top priorities of this term should be to set up Vance to take the baton from Trump and continue the fight. Every mortgage payment in Washington depends on Trump failing, so no one should expect a glorious revolution.

Read it.

So, well, now that’s over, let’s look at the 2028 presidential race.

If you are polite, you just swore in your head – if you’re normal, you did it out loud.

But sometimes we like to torture our readers, so let’s look ahead four years, shall we?