“All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction…”
— George Washington, Farewell Address
August 6, 2025 — America is tired of being driven insane, of having absurdities crammed into our collective consciousness.
Reality is an agreement about what is going on in the world. That act of faith requires such an agreement be based on what is demonstrably true. Without it, society dissolves into chaos and failure.
The RussiaGate psychodrama is about an agreement based on lies. It started with Hillary Clinton’s desperate ploy to save her foundering 2016 election campaign.
Her emails somehow got sent to Wikileaks, a radical news org dedicated to revealing government secrets, implicating misconduct. It was easy to declare the Russians did it, by hacking — when it was much more likely, in fact, proven by a forensic audit, that a Clinton campaign insider downloaded the info on a thumb drive, perhaps one Seth Rich, found murdered on a DC sidewalk soon thereafter.
Every lie after that met the kind of skepticism among the public that generates heat, controversy, scandal, and fire. Hillary managed to enlist President Barack Obama and his executive agencies into her project, and the party apparatus with it, because the Clinton Victory Fund had paid the DNC’s debts and took over its management.
Soon, the Russia collusion project grew into a gigantic scaffold of flaming lies. The big newspapers and the TV news networks bought the story, and came along for the ride. They were all sure Hillary would win the 2016 election. All the heat and fire would get flushed away. The polls all said so. The agencies and the parties would pick up and go on as before, run the show, make careers, get wealthy, be important!
They miscalculated. They lost. But they decided to keep building the scaffold of lies in order to protect themselves from the danger it represented — because they lived in that scaffold, it was the party’s house. And the scaffold of lies needed massive fortification. The house that the party lived in had to be protected at all costs, or they would all be cast out, homeless, a whole party on street, lost, broke, ruined, dying, like the pitiful tweakers bent over out on Kensington Avenue in Philly, in every Democrat-run city, really.
And so, they undermined the winner of the election at every turn, worked furiously to drive him from office, made a plague happen, subverted the 2020 election, and spent four years under a fake president jamming absurdities into the public arena, turning it into a freak show, one drag-queen story hour after another, from sea to shining sea. All to defeat the return of a public consensus about reality based on what is demonstrably true — starting with the fact that there are men and there are women, and that the primary interaction between them keeps society going by producing offspring.
This enormous, drawn-out insurrection, composed of serial felony crimes, amounts to the greatest insult against the republic — the res publica, in Latin, the public thing — in the nation’s history. And now it is coming apart as an overwhelming majority of citizens, including now many Democrats, can’t avoid discovering what has happened in the country. Because lies are weak and the truth is sturdy and eventually truth prevails, even after an arduous struggle.
The old news media complex, the networks and the papers, are not reporting the recent disclosures by the Directors of the CIA, the FBI, and National Intel. What will it take to get their attention? Arrests and perp-walks of formerly important officials? And then, do they acknowledge and atone for their disgraceful participation in the events? Or pretend they couldn’t figure any of it out for years and years? Poor us, we didn’t know! Suddenly, it looks like many of these “legacy” news outfits are going out-of-business. They’re throwing their performers over the side like sinking ships casting off so much useless ballast.
You knew this was coming, right? Now, here you are: the hour that consequence finally returns from its wanderings in a wilderness of institutional failure. There’s no evading it anymore. The scaffold of lies has collapsed, and trying to add additional lies will amount to throwing a few twigs on a heap of smoldering wreckage.
The institutions themselves are under new management, and they show every sign of returning to regular operation, doing what they were designed to do in the first place: deliver a truthful account of what has happened and determine a just consequence for the people who made it happen. It’s going to happen, and then we can rebuild a coherent public consensus about what is really real, who we really are, and where we go from here.
Regards,
James Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler & Grey Swan Investment Fraternity
P.S. from Addison: “Keeping track [since Trump’s reentry into the Oval Office] is like a worker accident counter on a factory floor,” our colleague Pete Coyne quipped this morning. “It’s been X Days since the last crazy Trump wrinkle.”
That was before noon.
By the afternoon, the media had shifted from Epstein file speculation to breathless coverage of Democratic legislators absconding from the Texas Capitol — again.
Apparently, if you believe them, democracy dies in darkness… or on the steps of a statehouse in cowboy boots.
What the Texans will do next is unclear. But the national press corps has declared it an existential crisis for the republic. (The same republic that barely blinked when Maryland’s congressional map was gerrymandered into a Salvador Dalí fever dream back in 2020 — every GOP vote twisted into a single district like a political cul-de-sac.)
Meanwhile, Trump’s first year back in office reads like an absurdist stage play — with a body count.
Tesla showrooms firebombed by climate radicals and aging Federal employees alike. Protesters playing real-life Frogger in the financial district.
And somehow, we’re still unpacking classified memos proving “Russiagate” had more fabrication than a Restoration Hardware showroom.
Our wandering correspondent Joel Bowman recently wrote while visiting New York City days after a gunman murdered, among other people, a high-level executive at BlackRock:
Monday’s Midtown shooting happened just two blocks from Mr. Trump’s hypothetical “crime,” and just a few blocks from his own iconic building. There are those who believe he has divided the nation, perhaps beyond repair.
Trump’s detractors, said by the faithful to suffer from “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” think of him as a fascist… a Nazi… a Hitler incarnate. And they’re not afraid to say so, vociferously, stoking exactly the kind of firebrand rhetoric they accuse him of trafficking in.
And, not unlike mental patients, many of them exhibit bizarre, antisocial behavior. They are the blue-haired “libtards” we all see online, sitting in their cars by themselves in Walmart parking lots, screaming into their phones about being “misgendered,” forever perceiving themselves the victim of one imagined micro-aggression after another.
They wear blue “safety” bands to signal to each other that they’re not part of the “MAGA crowd,” and therefore safe to approach and engage in public. They cry when unfunny comedians lose their jobs, think the world is going to end in three years if they don’t recycle their copies of The Atlantic, and still keep an emergency KN95 mask in the glove compartment, just in case someone in a Tesla gets too close at the next traffic light.
Then there are the man’s die hard followers, whom Trump himself says would never desert him, not even if he shot someone out front of the St. Regis Hotel on a Monday afternoon. Like their opposite numbers, these folks might be said to suffer from another form of TDS, “Trump Devotion Syndrome,” where critical thinking, nuance and independence of mind are considered bugs, not features.
But for all his brashness and bombast, has Mr. Trump really divided the nation… or merely exploited, and perhaps deepened, pre-existing divisions? Stated another way, is Mr. Trump the cause of the palpable polarization in this country… or rather a symptom of an already divided culture?
On New Year’s Eve 2024, we named “rising political violence” as Grey Swan #1 in our 2025 forecast. How quaint that now feels. And embarrassing. Feels a little like predicting wet sidewalks after a thunderstorm. This one isn’t grey anymore. It’s white, feathered, and honking.
And while the headlines blare about tax cuts, Musk’s stint at the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) resulted in no actual reductions — just better branding. We got crypto jokes instead of spending cuts.
We don’t particularly care for the term “uniparty” — it lets everyone off the hook. But it’s hard to ignore the bipartisan consensus on one thing: spend more, pretend less.
Markets are already dancing like it’s 1999 — only this time the DJ is promising rate cuts before the next bubble pops. The punch bowl hasn’t even been spiked yet. But everyone’s drunk.
Events have brought us to this point. Today, we’re doubling down on the forecast: Grey Swan #1 for 2025 is no longer just political violence, but the moment it sparks a rout in tech stocks.
It fits the bill — a foreseeable event that’s treated like fantasy until it’s front-page reality. Then, the same people who ignored it will act shocked that it had happened at all.
As ever, we’re not interested in screaming into the social void. Or to somehow give “our side” the upper hand, whoever that might be. But we do want to remind you: the circus on Capitol Hill and in political strategy sessions around the nation have real consequences for Wall Street.
Ignore them at your peril.
P.P.S. If you’re a paid-up Grey Swan Investment Fraternity member, mark your calendar. You can catch us with Mark Jeftovic on Grey Swan Live! tomorrow – Thursday, August 7 at 11 a.m.
We’re going to take a deep dive into some intriguing research Mark has been highlighting on behalf of the fraternity. We’ll look at what technologists call “The Quickening,” or the rabid pace at which AI is becoming superintelligent, and the real-world impact that massive AI investment is having on historical patterns in the stock market.
We’ll assess today’s market in the context of what Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises called the “crack-up boom” – the final phase of inflation-induced speculation and how to trade “the most terrifying bull market in history” without losing your shirt.
Going to be a good one. Please join us.
Your thoughts? Please send them here: addison@greyswanfraternity.com
