A Lot Has Gone Terribly Wrong…
Authored by James Howard Kunstler,
Forecast 2026: In The Vortex Of The Whirl
“Whirl is King”
– Wm Shakespeare
2026 is the 250th anniversary of our country’s conception. A few years later when the Constitution was ratified, we became a republic — “if you can keep it,” Ben Franklin cracked to anxious citizens waiting outside the great hall in Philadelphia. Our country was predicated on the resolve of virtuous men operating under the rule of law. We are lately under an astounding siege of villains without principle seeking to wreck the republic.
Washington’s Army at Valley Forge.
The big question facing the USA is whether our political life can become even more deranged than it has been in the past ten years, or can we possibly sober up.
How is it we’re still arguing about men in women’s locker rooms?
The self-evident has gone missing. A lot has gone very wrong.
The Woke-Jacobin war against our country continues, led by a Democratic Party made even more vicious, depraved, and insane by the 2024 election victory of Mr. Trump, who was left a broken polity after the four-year tableau vivant of “Joe Biden.”
Can our nation recover its balance, its sense of purpose, its traction in history? Can we reconstruct a coherent common culture that will afford us some means to carry on as an upright people?
I will try to answer without wasting pixels.
“Times are difficult globally; awakening is no longer a luxury or an ideal. It’s becoming critical. We don’t need to add more depression, more discouragement, or more anger to what’s already here. It’s becoming essential that we learn how to relate sanely with difficult times. The earth seems to be beseeching us to connect with joy and discover our innermost essence. This is the best way that we can benefit others.”
– Pema Chodron
Hijacking the Law
Nothing is more urgent than cleaning up the machinery of our elections. It is overloaded now with deliberately devious complexities that invite fraud. We must put an end to mail-in ballots with the sole exception of traditional absentee ballots for citizens out of the country on election day, with proof. We must eliminate all electronic interfaces between the vote and the tally, including all ballot-counting hardware, and return to paper ballots tallied by human beings. We must require voter ID, proof of citizenship, and proof of local voting-district residence. Automatic motor-voter registration must end. Ballots must be cast on election day only (absentee ballots must be received by election day) and the results reported out in twenty-four hours.
It would be tiresome to rehearse exactly how our elections became rigged and degraded by orchestrated fraud. . . the mischief around the Covid-19 caper. . . the sinister techno-narcissism of machine automation. . . the marshaling of non-citizens against citizens. . . the abuse of office and authority. . . . But, understand that an industry has evolved to take full advantage of that. It’s personified by the Democratic Party-allied lawyer Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket, who played a significant role in the legal expansion of mail-in voting that led up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The Democracy Docket org is funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, associated NGOs (the Hopewell Fund, the North Fund) used as pass-throughs for the Arabella Fund, the MacArthur Foundation, and the David Rockefeller Fund. In 2021, Marc Elias founded the Elias Law Group after leaving Perkins Coie, the Washington DC power firm that played a significant role in the RussiaGate crimes centered around Hillary Clinton’s Steele Dossier.
At Perkins Coie, in advance of the 2020 election, Elias was extensively involved in challenging, litigating, influencing, and re-engineering state election laws and advised on “dark money” strategies for Democratic voter “outreach” (that is, ballot-harvesting). It was all meticulously gamed-out beforehand by an NGO called the Transition Integrity Project founded by Rosa Brooks of the Georgetown University Law Center. The objective: to maximize opportunities for improper balloting. After the 2020 election, Marc Elias defended the suspicious results from counties in swing states against Trump campaign lawsuits (winning 64 of 65 cases on specious grounds). The last thing Marc Elias has been interested in is election integrity. His focus is strictly on winning elections for the Democratic Party by any means necessary. The war cry about “defending democracy” is the exact opposite of what the lawfare ninjas actually do.
Through 2025, Congress has entertained election reform bills, most recently, the SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility), which has languished on the House side for months awaiting deliberation in the Senate. Prediction: Mr. Trump will turn up the heat on Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to expedite passage of election reform. This partly depends on the dark business now occurring in Venezuela, which is the suspected hub of a global election rigging apparatus engineered around Dominion / Smartmatic technology. Prediction: Marc Elias will be indicted for activities related to election fraud.
Norm Eisen is the point man for Democratic party Lawfare, which is warfare against the citizens of the USA by means of the courts. Eisen is affiliated with the Brookings Institution and the States United Democracy Center, which is supported by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and activist orgs associated with Arabella Advisors, a hub fueled by dark money. He was an active participant in the Transition Integrity Project of 2020. Norm Eisen’s general mission for years is to drain the resources of the Democratic Party’s political opponents in frivolous lawsuits — working in partnership with Democratic activist judges — and to overburden the federal court dockets to paralyze the working-out of our nation’s disputes.
Eisen was counsel to Jerrold Nadler’s 2019 House impeachment committee and was involved in the machinations of then-Rep. Adam Schiff with CIA-agent “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella, Intel IG Michael Atkinson, and NSC staffer Lt. Col Alexander Vindman, who cooked up the Ukraine phone call scheme to impeach Mr. Trump. After “Joe Biden’s” fake election, Eisen was deeply involved in choreographing the scope and format of the House Jan-6 hearings for which the Republican minority was not allowed to choose its own committee members. The committee proceedings were arranged as a prestige docudrama TV show, under the direction of former ABC network president, James Goldstein, hired, in effect, as the producer of a show. The committee destroyed its entire evidence cache after it issued its final report. That’s how much confidence they had in their methods and findings.
After that exploit, Eisen acted as a facilitator and strategist for “Joe Biden’s” DOJ in the 2024 Jack Smith Special Counsel prosecutions of Donald Trump, and acted as a go-between for the DOJ in the various New York State cases against Trump and the Fulton County, GA, case brought by DA Fani Willis. All of these actions amounted to election interference — a concerted conspiracy to eliminate Mr. Trump by putting him in prison by way of specious, malicious prosecutions — and, one way or another, they all failed to accomplish their goal. Norm Eisen and Marc Elias, along with their lawfare cohorts Mary McCord, Andrew Weissmann, and Ben Wittes should be subject to prosecution under federal criminal statutes for their wide-ranging activities, including: 18 U.S.C. § 241 (Conspiracy Against Rights); 18 U.S.C. § 1001 (False Statements); 18 U.S.C. § 594 (Intimidation of Voters).
The next big hairball is the politicized judiciary, federal judges who consistently interfere in executive actions (the President), a clash between Article II and Article III of the Constitution. It amounts to Democratic Party-designated plaintiffs getting injunctions and restraining orders through partisan judges against policies issued by the White House around deportation of illegal immigrants, firings of federal employees, funding freezes, the termination of “birthright citizenship,” and more. The funding freeze and firing cases were aimed at keeping taxpayer dollars flowing out federal agencies to Democratic Party NGOs and for keeping the so-called “resistance” operators in positions of influence within government agencies at their desks and on the payroll. Many of the NGOs promote activities aimed at dismantling the government and fomenting racial animus. Taxpayers should not have to underwrite that. The president must be allowed to fire employees of the executive branch engaged in slow-motion sedition.
These court rulings are choreographed by Norm Eisen’s lawfare operation which has enough money from the aforementioned NGOs and billionaire-funded foundations to bring endless lawsuits in order to gum up the works of governance. The remedy for all this is knotty. The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has reversed many lower court rulings, but these are provisional actions, pending the SCOTUS entertaining any particular case decisively in regular session. The myriad cases end up jamming the SCOTUS docket. The net effect is to slow down policy that President Trump was elected to pursue.
Federal judges can otherwise be removed only via impeachment by the US Senate, which is a practical impossibility at this time since it requires 60 out of 100 votes and the Republicans hold a mere 53 seat majority out of 100. Perhaps the best remedy is to prosecute the lawfare ninjas who are ginning up all those court cases. Their activities can be framed as a conspiracy against rights (18 U.S.C. § 241). Against whose rights? Against the rights of the people of the US to an executive that is able to discharge its Constitutional duties — to provide for the public safety, to enforce the law, and to carry out foreign policy. Norm Eisen, Marty McCord, and Andrew Weissmann might also be subject to a charge of seditious conspiracy (18 U.S.C. § 2384), as when two or more persons conspire to “levy war against the United States. And it is warfare using the mechanisms of the law. Norm Eisen is behaving like a spike protein in the nation’s bloodstream, turning the nation’s immune system, the rule of law, against the nation. Prediction: Norm Eisen and cohorts will be hiring criminal defense lawyers in 2026.
Hijacking the Truth
“. . . the dirty little secret is that the same people pretending to be fighting fascism are the fascists.”
– Sasha Stone
The American people have been increasingly subjected to a contrived permission structure that has normalized lying and deceit about everything and anything, leaving every major institution in the land damaged or wrecked. Lying has become the default position of many in authority, and no one has been held accountable for it.
Medicine is wrecked due to the dishonest behavior of doctors colluding with the pharmaceutical industry and officials of the Health and Human Services agencies on the Covid-19 op — mandates, lockdowns, lying about efficacy and harms, hiding true remedies, cover-up of the origins of Covid — as well as the medical establishment’s regular ongoing “health care” racketeering operations in concert with insurance companies, hospital conglomerates, and other players. The cruelty and incompetence of these medical rackets is one thing, but the moral failure is spectacular. Medicine has forsaken the Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm.
The many agencies under US HHS, plus the university labs, the medical journals, the state medical boards, and the mainstream media’s health reporters are all implicated in these ongoing misdeeds. Until late in 2025, HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy, Jr., was sore beset by “resistance” at the FDA, CDC, NIH, and everything else under the giant agency’s umbrella. In December, 2025, things are changing. The CDC’s ACIP vaccine advisory committee stopped recommending Hepatitis B vaccines for newborns. Then the CDC officially acknowledged that COVID-19 vaccines have caused injuries in adults, previously stonewalled. These might be signs that Mr. Kennedy is finally getting a grip on his sprawling agencies. Prediction: in 2026, expect criminal referrals against former senior management at CDC, FDA, and NIH for a range of crimes in the Covid-19 operation.
In the larger picture, the whole scaffold of health care is in the process of imploding. Predictions: In 2026, doctors will increasingly bail out of big corporate practices and go freelance on a cash payment basis, leaving behind the corrupt and onerous insurance racket. Hospitals will shutter. Giant medical insurance conglomerates will go out of business. Millions will be left without coverage. Medicine will be forced to begin reorganizing on an emergent, provisional basis. The net effect will be doctors who make less money but control their own medical practices and much more limited access to specialty medicine for the general public, including now-common surgeries like joint replacement and cancer therapies. It will be most difficult for doctors to regain their authority and the esteem of their patients. Alt medical practitioners of every sort will multiply, many on the down-low evading regulation, as sick citizens desperately seek relief from illness while they navigate around the ruins of the old standard medicine. Quackery will flourish and it will be difficult for ordinary people to discern which health care services are of value and which are scams.
Higher education is obviously ill. It bargained away its legitimacy by participating in the college loan racket with the equally deleterious overlay of pervasive DEI racketeering (and inevitable lowering of standards). That opened the door for grievance-oriented Marxists, and race-and-gender hustlers to take the curricula hostage — wholesale intellectual racketeering. That, in turn, led to the abolition of truth-telling for the purpose of advancing agendas. Reality on campus became purely transactional and contingent. Free speech was suppressed. All of this was supported by pusillanimous college deans and cowardly university presidents and now they are paying the price. Too many young Americans do not believe that a college degree has value, especially at the price of six-figures in debt.
Most colleges and universities are not backstopped by big endowments like the big Ivy League schools and a lot of them will be going out of business in 2026. Graduate schools and PhD programs will be especially hard hit. It’s not clear what role artificial intelligence (AI) will play in paring down the numbers of candidates for certified expertise, but it’s not looking good. Any earnest young person can already find an adequate education post-secondary education on the internet, for instance the Khan Academy, a long-running, pre-AI, free website of courses from the rudimentary to the advanced.
The arts and the cultural media (including news media) have been disgracing themselves frantically for years. Film production in Los Angeles dropped 63-percent in 2024 extending into 2025. The feature film is being replaced by short-format Instagram and Tiktok videos. The multiplex cinemas are empty. The theatrical exhibition of movies is on its deathbed. They can’t compete with giant flat-screens in the comfort of your home where microwaved popcorn is only a buck a bowl (compared to $32 at the cineplex.)
Management of the Hollywood studios was taken hostage by race-and-gender hustlers, with permission structures engineered by financial reliance on Chinese (CCP-affiliated) investors and distributors. The result was Woke cinema, girl-boss movies, DEI-oriented storytelling, and one flop after another. The replication of streaming channels has only invoked Gresham’s Law in culture: bad content drives out good content.
The next development, moving very rapidly now, is AI applied to cinema, which implies the end of the acting profession at least, and perhaps screenwriting, too. The end product is liable to be something more like an hallucination than a story told in the language of dramaturgy, following the logic of authentic human behavior. I’d expect even more corrosive effects of Gresham’s Law in the new AI regime as genuine human creativity becomes ever more mediated and abstracted from the end product. You must also wonder about the long-term prospects of the Internet as we know it. The sheer stress on the electric grid from the demands of AI suggests problems with reliable electric service in the years ahead. The whole thing begins to look like a self-limiting problem. Ten years from now, we might be back to entertaining ourselves with puppet shows.
News as we knew it for much of the past 200 years is also gone missing. The remnants exist on cable channels and internet sites as a commerce in gossip, rumor, and opinion. The legacy TV news channels no longer employ reporters in the field. Even under Bari Weiss’s new management, CBS’s 60-Minutes still broadcasts rafts of mendacious propaganda each week. “X,” formerly Twitter, is a colossal grape-vine, and is now touting itself as the world’s leading news source, though it still engages in surreptitious censorship. These days, you must be your own gatekeeper (managing editor), combing through bales of crap to find the scattered gems of real news.
The authoritative, trustworthy editors of yore are no more. Hardly anyone in the public arena speaks with authority, and reputations are easily assassinated by interested parties with agendas. The newspapers have made themselves pathetic jokes — The New York Times with its Pulitzer Prize for lying about RussiaGate and routine spin services for the corrupt Democratic Party. . . The Washington Post acting as publicist for nefarious cabals in and around the intel blob. Local newspapers lie dead everywhere, and hardly anyone knows what is going on in their own towns. The people are horrifically misinformed and uninformed. Don’t expect AI to make the situation any better.
The years ahead may therefore be a nadir of public confusion, delusion, and generalized ignorance in societies whose complexity cannot survive such derangements. What was not so many decades ago a high trust society based on a coherent common culture and broadly agreed-upon values seems to be devolving into babel and anarchy leading eventually to a generalized social collapse. Out of that, a new consensus about reality will emergently and eventually self-organize, but it’s imp