in this longer presentation than usual for kunstler you'll discover that the collapse is in process and accelerating with political corruption at the vanguard;

Who knew that reality could become such a squishy thing in the USA? But such are the agonies of a collapsing society that it becomes ever harder to know what’s real, especially with factions in power intent on gaslighting, manipulating, obfuscating, and coercing the raw material of public opinion, which is: what has actually happened in the past and what is happening now.

When I wrote The Long Emergency, I expected we would be living through a period of confusion and disorder, but I didn’t know what it would feel like to go through it: a nauseating existential disorientation, like being seasick on dry land… like living in a German expressionist horror movie of the 1920s (and we know what that led to)… like being held prisoner inside Franz Kafka’s castle: an immersion in totalizing falsehood.

The collapse of authority is especially striking and disturbing now because ground zero for it is the US Department of Justice (DOJ), the very place that is charged with determining what is true and what is false, what is real and what is unreal, and especially what is okay, and what is not okay.

The collapse of authority at DOJ got sickening traction after the election of 2016, when FBI Director James Comey and his underlings, along with many high officials at its parent agency, DOJ, undertook a campaign to disable and expel the winner of that election, starting before his inauguration. The Russia Collusion operation was the epitome of falsehood concocted in bad faith, and the actions taken in it were never adjudicated — though an ectoplasm named John Durham is floating somewhere out in the national ether still delegated to make cases. Leaving all that hanging this long has been a grievous injury to the country’s identity as a place on this earth where fair play was supposed to be normal.

The Mueller Investigation was another insult to the public interest, devised to distract and cover up the all the previous seditious bad faith of Comey & Company, and the C-suite at DOJ — and, of course, the Special Counsel came up with absolutely nothing actionable, which was stunning considering the resources behind it, and the time spent. At a Senate hearing about it in 2018, Robert Mueller himself claimed to be unacquainted with key characters in his own investigation and key pieces of evidence. His performance was worse than not reassuring — he appeared to be lying or incompetent, or pretending to be incompetent, and since that moment he has gone-to-ground… untouchable............read more.......