Envy needs an ideology

 

Handre

@Handre

Envy needs an ideology, and socialism has always been happy to provide one. Mises wrote a whole book about this in 1956, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, and the diagnosis holds up: people who resent the outcomes of voluntary exchange will always search for a doctrine that transforms their resentment into virtue. The woke left found theirs. Notice what wokeism and socialism share at the root. Both start from the premise that unequal outcomes prove injustice. You earned more than your neighbor? Exploitation. One group outperforms another in median income? Systemic oppression. Neither doctrine ever asks whether people made different choices, took different risks, or produced different value for others. Asking that question would ruin everything, because the entire project depends on assigning blame rather than understanding prices, profit, and loss. Once you accept that unequal outcomes equal injustice, you need a corrector. Someone powerful. Someone with the authority to override contracts, seize property, and redistribute according to a moral hierarchy the planners themselves define. That job description has exactly one applicant: the state. This is why the woke activist and the socialist always arrive at the same policy desk, demanding rent control in New York, wealth taxes in Sacramento, hiring quotas in every HR department from Seattle to Brussels. Marcuse and the Frankfurt School figured out decades ago that the Western worker refused to play his assigned role as revolutionary. He got rich instead. Capitalism handed him a car, a house, and air conditioning, and he stopped listening to men promising utopia through expropriation. The revolutionaries needed a new client base. Class became identity, but the machinery stayed identical: oppressor and oppressed, guilt and grievance, revolution and rule. The love affair with socialism, then, follows logically. Wokeism supplies the moral demand for coercion; socialism supplies the economic apparatus of coercion. Neither can survive in a world of private property and voluntary exchange, because in that world you rise by serving customers, not by capturing committees. Venezuela ran this experiment from 1999 onward. The grocery shelves reported the results.

Immigrants come to America to flee capitalism

NYC DSA co-chair

RedWave Press

@RedWavePress

·

Jul 18

Fox News’ Martha MacCallum: “Your family came here from Peru really in the middle of the heat of the Shining Path. They were Maoist communist guerrillas in Peru. So why did your family come to America?” New York City DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo: “The economic situation in South America and Peru was in a really bad place… much of what we could say was responsible for that actually was the imposition of capitalism and American imperialism. In many cases, it is actually what brings immigrants to the U.S. coming out of Latin America.” Martha MacCallum: “They come here because they don’t like the imposition of American imperialism in the country that they’re in.” Gustavo Gordillo: “Yes…” Martha MacCallum: “That doesn’t make much sense.”

Food inflation

 

A 28 Item Grocery Order From Target That Cost $64.50 In 2020 Is Now $158.30 In 2026

July 16, 2026 by Michael

https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/a-28-item-grocery-order-from-target-that-cost-64-50-in-2020-is-now-158-30-in-2026/

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The cost of living has become absolutely suffocating for millions of Americans. For years, the bureaucrats in Washington have been feeding us numbers that show that the rate of inflation is low, but it is obvious to everyone that what they are telling us is simply not true. Many of the items that I regularly purchase at the grocery store have more than doubled in price over the past decade. Some have more than tripled in price. When I get to the register to check out, I feel like asking the cashier which organ I should donate to pay for my groceries.

We have reached a stage where grocery prices are causing extreme financial stress for families all over America. One man recently caused quite a stir on social media when he revealed that a grocery order from Target that cost $64.50 in 2020 is now $158.30 in 2026…

This post has already been viewed a million times.

The reason why it is so popular is because it instantly resonates with people.

Everyone knows that grocery prices have risen to absurd levels, and yet the statisticians in Washington keep assuring us that everything is fine.

I don’t believe them.

Do you?

The Washington Post just conducted a poll that found that 66 percent of Americans consider the cost of groceries to be unaffordable.

That figure has risen by 21 percent just since February…

Americans are feeling worse about the price of groceries than they were before the war with Iran began, a Washington Post-Ipsos poll finds.

About two-thirds, or 66 percent, of Americans say they would describe the cost of groceries as unaffordable, up sharply from the 45 percent who said the same thing in February before the conflict started.

Partisanship continues to play a big role in perceptions, with half of Republicans saying groceries are affordable in the latest poll, compared with about one-quarter of independents and Democrats.

Housing is even worse.

The median price of an existing home in the United States has now surpassed the $440,000 mark…

With a landmark housing affordability bill in political limbo, U.S. home prices have hit an all-time high.

The median price of existing homes in June was $440,660, up 1.8% from $432,700 a year ago, according to new data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Home prices have risen for 36 straight months.

“Housing affordability remains low under slowing wage growth and stronger home price growth,” Ershang Liang, an economist with PNC Economics Research, said in a report.

Who can afford to pay that much for a house?

Rental prices have also gone through the roof.

If you can believe it, the average rent on a one bedroom apartment in Manhattan is now a whopping $5,408 a month…

The city’s housing crisis has hit “DefCon 1” — with average rents for a one-bedroom in Manhattan hitting an all-time high of nearly $5,500 last month, and Brooklyn following suit, according to new data and critics.

“We need bold action. This is a crisis,’’ New York City Comptroller Mark Levine posted on X over the weekend, along with a link to the latest figures from the inhabit blog by real-estate giant Corcoran Group.

The dismal June stats reveal that renters paid an average of $5,408 for a one-bedroom in Manhattan, with studio prices not far behind at $4,014.

It isn’t a mystery why most Americans are struggling in this sort of an environment.

Many are turning to debt in a desperate attempt to make ends meet…

Many American families are struggling to make ends meet on their incomes alone and have resorted to credit cards, payday loans, and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) options for groceries, according to nonprofit research center Urban Institute.

The findings are based on a survey of 18-to 64-year-old working-age adults conducted in December 2025. About 8.7 percent of adults said they used a credit card for groceries and were unable to make the minimum payment, up from 7.1 percent in 2023, the Urban Institute said in a July 13 report. This suggests “worsening financial distress” among families.

Almost one in 10 used BNPL to pay for groceries, out of which more than a third missed a timely repayment last year.

Unfortunately, when you keep piling up debt a day of reckoning eventually arrives.

Coming into this year, alarmingly large numbers of Americans were getting behind on their credit cards…

And the number of foreclosures in the U.S. is way above the highly elevated pace that we witnessed last year…

Foreclosures across the U.S. ballooned in the first half of the year, a sign of the increasing financial strain facing the nation’s homeowners.

Foreclosure filings reached nearly 228,000 from January to June, up 21% from a year ago and 28% from two years ago, according to data released Thursday from real estate data company ATTOM.

Rising foreclosure rates indicate that more homeowners are in financial distress, Rob Barber, CEO of ATTOM, said in a statement. Homes go into foreclosure when the owner falls behind on mortgage payments, often due to extenuating life circumstances such as a job loss. ATTOM defines foreclosures as default notices, scheduled auctions or bank repossessions.

This reminds me so much of the conditions that we experienced just before the financial crisis of 2008.

Unfortunately, the cost of living is only going to go higher.

The cost of energy directly affects the cost of everything else, and it appears that the Strait of Hormuz is going to be closed for an extended period of time.

The average price of a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. has nearly reached four dollars again, and the average price of a gallon of diesel has already risen above the five dollar mark…

US gas prices have rocketed higher during the on-again, off-again war with Iran.

After a brief respite, the average price for gas has surged 15 cents in a week to $3.94 a gallon and appears headed north of $4 again. Diesel, which shows up in customers’ shipping costs, topped $5 a gallon again Thursday for the first time in 3 weeks, according to AAA.

It serves as a painful reminder of how the military conflict in the Persian Gulf has a direct effect on your wallet.

Of even greater importance is what the closure of the Strait of Hormuz means for the global fertilizer market.

As Mike Adams has pointed out, without sufficient quantities of nitrogen fertilizer we won’t even come close to producing enough food for everyone…

Admittedly, I have failed to explain the stakes clearly enough. For months, I have written about fertilizer supply chains, the Haber-Bosch process, and the vulnerability of the Strait of Hormuz. But the gravity of this crisis has not sunk in for most people. Let me put it as plainly as I can: The global population of more than 8 billion people depends on a fragile web of natural gas, oil, and downstream chemistry that took 60+ years to build on this planet. If we lose 25 percent of these critical substances, we lose 25 percent of the population. That is 2 billion people. Here is why that math is inescapable.

As I documented in my article “The Haber-Bosch House of Cards,” the single chemical reaction that fixes nitrogen from the air into fertilizer is responsible for feeding roughly half of humanity [1]. That process requires vast quantities of natural gas. The Persian Gulf region, especially Qatar and Iran, supplies much of that gas. When the Trump administration launched its war on Iran in February 2026 and the Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed, the global fertilizer supply chain began to collapse. This is not a prediction of future famine. The famine is already baked in. But it could still get a whole lot worse depending on how things go from here.

We could be facing multiple years when global food production is at depressed levels.

That means that food prices will go even higher in wealthy countries, and in poor countries there will be shortages.

Famine is one of the major trends that I am tracking, and what we are already witnessing in some parts of Africa is absolutely heartbreaking.

There is no magic button that we can press that is going to make these problems go away.

A crisis of historic proportions is now upon us, and we are still only in the very early stages of it.

tyrannized by delusions

 

"Here's why talking politics with the modern left feels like banging your head against a wall."

Anyone who has ever tried knows the feeling. You present facts, evidence, or plain common sense, and what comes back is a wave of emotional outrage.

The worst part is that it's no longer possible to live a normal life without running into politics.

Schools, workplaces, museums, sports, entertainment, universities, every corner of life has been swallowed by ideology.

We live in a society held hostage by people who insist their fantasies outrank reality.

And the reason is simple. We are being tyrannized by delusions.

Most people debate from reality outward but the modern left debates from utopia inward. This inversion comes straight from the Frankfurt school, an intellectual factory that produced nearly every strand of woke dogma now embedded in academia and public sector.

Their central idea was the utopian horizon.

Imagine a world without hierarchy or domination, then condemn the real world for failing to match fantasy.

Once you understand this, the entire ideological landscape snaps into focus.

They argued that family reproduces hierarchies and must be reimagined. Schools should radicalize children against power structures instead of educating them.

Culture manufactures consent, therefore culture must be engineered.

Even language encodes power and must be bent to social justice aims.

In this worldview, every institution is guilty unless proven innocent. And innocence is impossible because the benchmark is utopian perfection.

So critical theory always finds oppression. If a system works it's stabilizing power. If a system fails that's also power at work.

If people consent they are duped by power. If they dissent, the system shapes their frustration.

It's a closed loop.

You're not debating ideas.

You're debating someone who believes the real world is illegitimate by default.

Modern offshoots such as critical race theory, gender theory, decolonization studies and feminism all use the same engine.

Imagine a utopian world, identify gaps between their imagination and the real world, declare those gaps as oppression, then demand society must be remade.

This is why discussion politics with the modern left feels like arguing with someone who is hallucinating.

They construct a perfect world in their mind, one without conflict, cost, tradeoffs, or human nature. Then label anything that falls short as bigotry, privilege, or violence.

The obsession with race, LGBTQ politics, feminism, and decolonization is not random.

It's the metric they use to measure how far reality deviates from the dream.

You're not arguing with people who misread the world. You're arguing with people who believe the real world is wrong for existing.

https://x.com/liam_out_loud/status/2078590227841536272?s=20

https://x.com/liam_out_loud/status/2078590227841536272?s=20

Alinsky rules:

mass indoctrination in the west

 

Elon Musk reposted

Wall Street Apes

@WallStreetApes

Every person living in a western nation needs to listen to every word of this Katherine Berbalsingh went to the University of Oxford and is Headmaster at Michaela Community School in London, UK She PERFECTLY explains the mass indoctrination into the narrative of oppressor and oppressed, and of hating White People I will write only some of this out because it’s very important, however you should listen to it so you can hear the passion: “The culture shift comes from what children learn at school and online. Ask any young person what history they learned at school, and they’ll tell you, Hitler. Ask them what else? Slavery. Ask them what else? American civil rights. In fact, what little they know of history will be all about Black and brown people fighting for equality against the white man, women fighting men for the vote, gay and trans people fighting for various rights. Our young people have been taught that history is simply one long story about various groups struggling under the oppressive dead white man. — History is taught through an oppressor lens. The triangular slave trade, white men held the power. What about Britain ending the slave trade? More than a quick mention, if at all? Mm, no. What of the Arab slave trade that lasted 3 times as long as the triangular slave trade? Mm, no. Okay, so GCSE history in Britain is often taught as migration through time, so the idea that Britain has always been a land of immigrants is embedded in our children’s heads. Most schools would prefer to concentrate learning about the tiny number of Black people who existed in Tudor England over a thorough analysis of England’s break from Rome. — Not to mention weeks on King Mansa Musa of Mali because he was a Black Muslim. His bearing on British institutions, laws, and faith is nonexistent. And the fact that he is said to have been the richest man in history, thanks in part to his massive slave-owning society, is a detail somehow that teachers rarely ever teach. But it isn’t just our schools. It’s our general culture too. Take your kids to a museum or an art gallery in any Western country, and you’ll find the same narrative. As an example, when learning about aviation in London’s Science Museum and the extraordinary feat that is man making massive machines move in the sky, a write-up on the wall explains that women and Black people were historically barred from aviation schools and the military. Similarly, James Watt, the man who invented the steam engine and is considered the founder of the Industrial Revolution, has a write-up on the wall explaining that his early career involved slave trafficking, with a bonus analysis of the whole of Britain’s complicity in the slave trade. They flatten the entire human story and all of its complexities into the narrative of oppressor and oppressed, leaving young people unable to see the world in any other terms.” We have to end the mass indoctrination