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LOSING THE MANDATE OF HEAVEN Let’s be real: US political leaders since the Gulf War are perhaps the worst leaders in the history of the world. In 1991, they inherited a hyperpower that wins everywhere without fighting. But by 2021 they produced a declining power that fights everywhere without winning. It’s thirty years of unmitigated domestic and international failure, from San Francisco to Syria, from financial crisis to coronavirus. With every inherited advantage, US leaders nevertheless produced historical collapses in life expectancy[1] and manufacturing capacity[2], in patriotic loyalty and involvement in community[3]. They also delivered concomitant rises in drug overdoses[4], out-of-wedlock births[5], and homeless encampments[6]. And no, they have no historical, philosophical, or literary depth. The historical analogies begin and end with 1939. The philosophy is little more than constant accusations of racism. And the reading level of US presidential speeches has measurably[7] dropped like a rock, to idiocratically elementary levels. The only thing the establishment *has* delivered on is their own bottom line. Think about Pelosi’s stocks[8], BLM’s mansions[9], Obama’s book deals, and 10% for the big guy. The corruption is now flagrant and public. As others have observed, we’re in the looting-the-treasury phase of imperial collapse, as the national debt soars past $33T with literally no limit in sight. STUPID, OR EVIL? And that's what leads to the "conspiracy theories." Are US leaders stupid, or evil? Did they unintentionally ruin what was once the greatest country on earth, or was it intentional and done for their own gain? The conspiracy theories are a way for mere proles to make sense of the senseless. They aren't all wrong, mind you — WMD was fake, the AAA mortgage-backed securities were fake, Russiagate was fake, and so on. Evil was involved in intentionally faking these stories. But ultimately, thinking of US leadership as evil gives them too much credit. It's just hard to remain global #1. The nature of entropy means there are countless ways for the world order to shatter, and only a few ways to keep it intact. Maybe George Washington could find one of those ways, but we have Joe Biden. And that's why DC is losing the Mandate of Heaven[10]. [1]: scpr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4… [2]: thedrive.com/the-war-zone/al… [3]: archive.ph/d8eAk [4]: nida.nih.gov/research-topics… [5]: childtrends.org/publications… [6]: archive.ph/kWktp [7]: flowingdata.com/2013/02/12/s… [8]: dailydot.com/debug/nancy-pel… [9]: nypost.com/2022/05/09/blms-p… [10]: worldhistory.org/Mandate_of_…

This kind of thing has happened before. People once spoke of Europe and Christendom, before they referred to America and the West. That shift of the global center to America was a territorial shift, but it was also an ethnic, religious, political, and technological shift. As focus gradually moved from God to the State, the religious conception of “Christendom” declined and the quasi-geographical idea of “the West” gained traction as a way to delineate the borders of a community. Today, the global center of mass has moved again. Just as it moved from the Old World to the New World, it’s moved from the physical America to the international Internet. Of course, the Internet is the child of America, just as America was the child of the UK. But it’s becoming something different. A successor that exceeds its worthy progenitor.