Welcome to the Reality Taboo, where no topic is off limits. It's February 21st, 2026. It's useful to define terms, and a la Mike Huckabee talking about the importance of... defining terms ahead of answering or obfuscating an answer to Tucker Carlson's question about what the definition of Christian Zionism is, I'm going to address a question Jeff asked in absentia about what we mean by the term managerial state. Uncle Ted
Kaczynski called it the system. One of the tragedies of Ted Kaczynski is that, of course, he is a murderer, but a sympathetic one in some ways, in that he used those mail bombs as a way of drawing attention to something he felt he could in no other way draw attention to. And in that regard, he was just a few years too early because
his actions came on the eve. Of the internet revolution that would have facilitated Ted getting the ideas that he had out to the country, out to the entire world, that technology came on the scene during the latter part of Kaczynski's terrorist campaign in the late 80s and early 90s. But had he come a decade later, then he would have been able to participate in the Gen X dream of the internet as being something where
ideas could be exchanged freely and openly. The dream that was still motivating Jack Dorsey when he famously called Twitter the free speech wing of the free speech movement. In any case, what Kaczynski called the system maps well onto the idea of the managerial state or what... Thomas Saas called the therapeutic state. Tom Woods calls the blob. Curtis Yarvin called the cathedral. And parenthetically, yes, Yarvin is Jewish. He could have called it the synagogue, but chose
instead to call it the cathedral. Though in fairness to him, the idea of a cathedral as having an elaborate, inspiring, and somewhat intimidating edifice is part of what allows the... cathedral to do what it does that allows the managerial state to do what it does is that it is draped in ornate Fixings, whether they be physical or rhetorical in the sense that they self -justify themselves as democratic or whether it be by
way of credentialism. These are studies and pronouncements made by the expert class who has gone through the academic institutions. Paul Gottfried and Sam Francis called it the managerial state. That's probably the phrase used most frequently here, although it's not my personal favorite. James Wilson called it the bureaucratic state. Jack Donovan, riffing from the never -ending story book and movie from the 80s, called it the nothing, the great nothing. The King James Bible called
it the powers that be. And my personal favorite comes from Hartiste, who called it globo homo. It's my favorite because it's that trademark trenchant innuendo and double meaning that Hartiste became so famous for because, of course, globo homo evokes the all -purpose slur of homo that was common in childhood parlance a generation
ago. But more significantly, it comes from the Greek... prefix homos which means same and it is similar to the great nothing the process of vacuuming up all of the variety of expressions of human action through culture and politics and religion and turning them into a globally homogenized enlightened hedonism devoid of anything more than the immediate avoidance of discomfort and the continual stream of pleasure. That is fed to the masses. This is Aldous Huxley's idea
of Soma in Brave New World. It's fed to the masses so that the elite institutions, the members, the ruling class that controls through a sort of committee. what the system or the managerial states, bureaucratic states, globo -homo does, the decisions that it makes. As to those decisions, whatever term is used, what it is getting at is the confluence of institutional forces that seem culturally and politically totally impervious to challenge, whether it be financial or political
or cultural. No matter how much these institutions seem to fail objectively, think of the Iraq War or the response to covid the financial crash of 2008 or the migrant invasion of europe no matter how often and continuously the managerial state fails by any sort of objective metric well other than the objective metric of sustaining their own ability to continue to control and direct events other than that metric they seem to continuously fail on all fronts and yet undeterred,
roll on like a juggernaut. And one of the things that unites all of these critics, Kaczynski, Saas, Wood, Jarvin, Gottfried, Francis, Wilson, Donovan, the Bible, Hartiste, and so many others offering critiques, whether they be of the neo -reactionary variety as these are, or from other angles, no matter what the critiques are, they all are quite uniformly impotent when it comes to... having any impact, any effect on how that system operates. This is going to be a bit of
a potpourri recording. That is a good enough segue into one thing that might potentially disrupt Globo Homo's vice grip on everything, and that is artificial intelligence. This week, C -Dance 2 .0 has been made available to the public and... If you haven't seen what CDance is capable of, I encourage doing so. There's a link in the show notes that provides a menagerie of different things that CDance has been able to do just in the first week of being open to the internet
using public. And it has blasted through the uncanny valley that has characterized AI. video productions over the last couple of years where it is really the untrained eye can detect almost immediately that what is being presented is not
live action. It's comparable to CGI and in a lot of cases, quite bad CGI, especially on particular aspects like human movements, mouth movements, and the coordination between sound and the movement of lips, hands, walking, a lot of the subtle things that have to do with human movement in particular, that up until Seedance were clearly not real humans operating in real space, but that is gone with Seedance 2. It looks and sounds just like actors and actresses you'd be familiar
with. There are a series of AI -generated scenes riffing off of... Breaking Bad that look like they could have come directly from a cut from the show. I've not seen it, but I've seen clips here and there. And so the redone versions of scenes take place from a little bit of a different angle and a bit of a different spin on the event. So this isn't just directly copying something
else that was already produced. This is creating something that could have been included in the show series production to represent various scenes, but wasn't. And of course it wasn't because it wasn't actually recorded this way when the show
was made over a decade ago. But now, from the footage that exists from the previous show and the capacity of the C -Dance 2 .0... underlying its operations that creates new video and audio effects that look like they could have come from the exact time that the actual thing that is being impersonated or that is having a new reimagined spin on it presented, that you would be totally unaware of that if not for having previous knowledge
of the show that is being riffed off of. And one of the criticisms of AI is that it's putatively can't come up with anything new. It's just remixing things that already exist. But while that might be in some sense tautologically accurate, it doesn't really what critics insinuate that it
means. Because, of course, the same criticism could be made of any author who is writing some new novel or some... new piece of non -fiction unless he is coming up with neologisms that are literally words that have never been used before he's just recombining words that already exist out there but the output i don't think people would say well there's nothing new in here because we have definitions for all of these words and phrases and terms being used ergo this isn't
anything new But by taking the collective output of humanity that is recorded in some digital form and remixing it in effectively infinite different ways that can be guided by simple prompts, input prompts from users, that is every bit as novel as a new show or movie or book or... Soon, computer game being created. What CDance 2 .0 shows is that big budget action slop, romantic comedies, anime, horror, all of the different genres of film are going to be trivially easy
to produce. What CGI did to Claymation is going to be what AI is going to do to CGI. Not just CGI, but the entire... The entire edifice that surrounds video production and audio production
now. The studios and the sets, the actors, the agents, the stunt people, the years it takes on sites to cobble together these big budget Hollywood productions that have production costs running into the... hundreds of millions of dollars, it is very little, if any, exaggeration to say that that is, we're on the cusp of that being able to be done by a single person sitting on
a personal computer in his basement. That person sitting in his basement coming up with things via prompt for CDance 2 .0 to create isn't as, of course, easily able to take advantage of the network effect that Universal Studios can. But that was the same type of argument that was made when YouTube was in its seminal stages. Sure, people could broadcast themselves on a screen just like ABC or CBS, NBC, Fox, whatever did,
but they don't have any network effect. Nobody's going to go seek them out, and if they do, they're not going to be able to share their experience with anyone else because there isn't that shared social and cultural experience that people have by watching the NBC nightly news. Well, here we are today where the largest YouTube creators get orders of magnitude, literally hundreds times, not hundreds more, hundreds of times more views
than any of the old network stations do. And unlike the YouTube versus TV network battle. yesterday. Seedance versus the old studio production battle is one in which the old studios have an additional major weakness that the networks didn't have and that the network Model was a free one, subjected to some advertisements, but it didn't cost anything to partake in what the networks were putting out. But of course, to watch studio productions, especially when they first come
out, requires an expenditure of resources. And so not only are the network big budget productions going to be almost indistinguishable in terms of the... on -screen product they're also going to take years instead of hours to produce and they're going to ask you to fork over a bunch of money to have access to them while cdance will be free or will operate on a sort of freemium model where people if they want to be patrons can but the general public will be able to watch
these see dance productions for free. There is also the sense among critics of AI that humans aren't going to go for this artificially generated cultural content, even if it is indistinguishable to the naked eye and naked ear from the cultural production of individual humans or committees of humans in the past. But the practical problem aside of being able to distinguish what's what.
Because undoubtedly, and it's probably already happened, undoubtedly, once it becomes impossible, effectively impossible with the naked eye or ear to detect what's AI and what's not, what people are going to create, and I use that term loosely to refer to simply putting in prompts into these AI systems to, quote, create, unquote.
movies and songs and books, and that are going to, to the extent that they're able to, going to market those productions as not being AI, as being things that they produce the old -fashioned way, at least until the threshold for tolerance of AI gets on an equal footing with the old -fashioned way of making movies or writing books. And not surprisingly, there is a generational component
to this. The Economist YouGov In a poll conducted this week, asked respondents how much they trust artificial intelligence, those under the age of 30, 12 % said a great deal. Among those aged 30 to 44, 11%. And then between the ages of 45 and 64 is 3%. And among those 65 and older, 2%. So Zoomers and millennials. about five times, five to six times, is likely to express a great deal of trust in artificial intelligence compared
to Xers and Boomers. From the digitally artificial to the analog artificial, YouGov also ran a recent survey questioning respondents on their views of foreign leaders, and this is among Americans, people in the United States, U .S. citizens, presumably. and actually looking at the technical notes explicitly, U .S. citizens, they were asked about 25 world leaders and asked to rank them as those that they have the most favorable view of and those they have the least favorable view
of. And in terms of net favorability, the one who came out on top among those 25 world leaders that were asked about is the president of our greatest ally. And I don't mean our oldest ally, although Macron does do pretty well coming in
seventh place among the 25. world leaders and i'm not even talking about our greatest ally in the 20th century in the early part of the 21st century benjamin netanyahu in fact he does quite poorly coming in at 17th out of 25 coming in below donald trump but no number one is the man who before becoming president was famous for playing a piano with his penis and that is zielinski of ukraine And it's not even particularly close. He beats the second place, who is Mark
Carney of Canada, by eight points. Donald Trump comes in at 16th out of 25. Rounding out the very bottom of the list is Kim Jong -un of North Korea at 25th, but just behind him. Only beating him by a single point is Vladimir Putin of Russia. And so the most favorably viewed world leader among Americans is Zelensky, and the second most poorly viewed leader among Americans is Putin.
And so here, with everything that was promised about Ukraine falling through and being... unequivocally now at this point shown that Ukraine cannot win this war with Russia, that it never had a chance, that the only reason it's been able to limp along is because of perpetual infusions of support, military and financial support from the West.
While Russia, which unlike Ukraine, is a real country with a real leader who is popular among... the Russian citizenry who has put the country back together and who has managed in the face of a war on the border that has cost Russia a lot in terms of blood and treasure, has strengthened the Russian economy and has done so in tandem with a reclamation back to... traditional Russian culture, both secular and spiritual, in terms of the embrace of the Orthodox Russian Church.
So here is yet another example of where the managerial state or the system, the blob, the nothing, globo, homo, whatever term you want to use to describe it. Here is another example where since 2022, it has just fallen flat on its face and failed entirely. All of the objectives that were put out have not been reached. All of the promises
made have not been kept. Hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars at this point have been siphoned off from the West into this corrupt money laundering pit of lies and death and destruction. And yet through all of that, the unstoppable juggernaut maintains its control and has even managed to convince if this polling is to be believed. And as we've discussed previously, there is plenty of reason to put a lot of stake
in these polls. Economist YouGov is a very reliable polling operation that has shown impressive predictive power in the past. And so if we take this seriously, as we should, we see that, again, the global homo, the system, the managerial state, it gets what it wants. And even though it loses objectively in terms of all the things that it promised on the eve of this latest debacle that it forced the world kicking and screaming into, that even after failing, it continues to chug along, not
much worse for the wear. And it even gets the assent of the people who have suffered because of what the Western world has done over the last... four years in funding and impoverishing its own citizenry to money launder and prop up this proxy military regime to engage in a hopeless struggle against russia just to enfeeble russia i guess at least ostensibly that's the reason i think that real reason is more A mix of glee and seeing the bloodlust of a bunch of Slavs killing each
other and also the money laundering opportunities that Ukraine has afforded members of the managerial elite. But whatever those confluence of reasons, the result is, while the Ukrainian population lost, the Western system, of which Zelensky is
part of, won. And speaking of winning... Contra Candace Owens, who asserted that the TPUSA put on, quote, all -American halftime show, unquote, that was to compete with the Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime performance that featured someone who didn't speak or doesn't speak English, putting together a halftime show that featured a bunch of Central and South American countries' flags.
and celebrated that culture not just in Latin America, but inside of the United States as well, most iconically with a bodega storefront, La Marquita, with a neon sign in the window that says, We Accept EBT. As an alternative to that, TPUSA put on what was styled an all -American halftime show featuring Artist without the mainstream popularity today of Bad Bunny, who is allegedly the most downloaded musician in the history of
the world. The headliner of that TPUSA show being Kid Rock, and that is the only name I'm familiar with at all from the lineup. Kid Rock was a pretty big name from about 20 years ago in the aughts. But even in his heyday, the toppy wasn't equivalent to a Taylor Swift today. And yet the All -American halftime show was, by any objective measure,
quite a success. In the first day after it was played, TPUSA claimed that it had something like 20 million total views across all platforms, and Candace Owens came out scoffing at that, saying that that had to have been based on the comment ratio on the YouTube page, that that
had to have been artificial. And there are ways to goose those numbers through bot farms and the like, but to such an enormous scale, it would have required YouTube being an accomplice who... through the platform itself, artificially boosted the numbers without users, whether they be real people or bots, clicking on the link, or it would have required a bot farm push, the likes of which have never happened up to this point with such
rapidity. And while that, I suppose, wouldn't be impossible, given the enormous amount of money... the hundreds of millions of dollars that TPUSA has made in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death,
that wouldn't be impossible. But the simpler explanation and the one that is backed up by this Economist YouGov poll that was conducted this week that asked respondents if they had watched the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl halftime show, or the All -American halftime show, well, this pool of respondents, some 24 % say that yes, they did. quote, watch the All -American halftime show featuring Kid Rock and Brantley Gilbert, unquote. And that broadly checks
out. The poll also asked respondents what percentages, these are adults over the age of 18 in the United States, watched the Super Bowl this year. The figure that Economist YouGov found was 53%, and the official... TV rating for the Super Bowl was 128 million viewers in the United States, and that comes to right about exactly at 53 % of adults in the United States, about half of them. If there's 128 million who watch the Super Bowl, well, that's among about 250 million adults
in the United States. And so that 24 % of all adults watching the All -American Halftime Show comes to about 60 million people. Now, not all those people watched it live. which is where, and I need to make a quick addendum looking here, I said that that was 20 million viewers. That's what TPUSA claimed among all platforms. I misspoke.
That is just on TPUSA's YouTube channel. And so across all platforms and all iterations, the Economist YouGov survey suggests that about 60 million people have seen it in one form or another. And so while it might be gay, the numbers there do not appear to be fake. And apropos of not a lot of anything, the Economist YouGov poll posed the question of support or opposition to the death penalty. Just 29 % of respondents said that they are opposed to the death penalty. 47
% were in favor and 24 % not sure. That is a figure that hasn't moved much at all in the last generation. It's not one I track particularly closely, but there is a general sense that the cultural ratchet always shifts to the left and support for capital punishment tends to be associated with right -wing political beliefs. And in fact, that's the case with this poll, with 73 % of Trump supporters favoring the death penalty compared to just 24 % of Harris voters in the 2024 election.
But where the pro -capital punishment side really gets the advantage is among political independents who 41 % to 29 % favor the death penalty for convicted murderers. Also included was a question about legal immigration. Most of the attention and the ICE deportations and everything surrounding that that has been part of the... National conversation, as they say, over the last several weeks. That
all has to do with illegal immigration. The question of legal immigration, which by the numbers now on a year -over -year basis is the more significant form of immigration in terms of the raw numbers of people coming to live inside the geographic boundaries of the United States. To the question of whether legal immigration should either be reduced or halted entirely, among Trump supporters, 49 % want it reduced or stopped compared to just
8 % of Harris voters. And so that breaks down to an overall population support for reducing or eliminating legal immigration of 29%, a little less than one in three Americans want to see a reduction in legal immigration. One interesting thing that distinguishes immigration restrictionist sentiments by whether the immigration in question is legal or illegal is that the... the question of illegal immigration is less racially divisive. Among whites, 31 % support a reduction or elimination
of legal immigration. That figure for blacks
is 25 % and for Hispanics is 28%. The reason it is less racially divisive is because unlike illegal immigration, which is largely coded as Hispanic migration or black migration in the case of haiti legal immigration is largely thought of as pertaining accurately thought of as pertaining to asia in general and subcontinental indian immigration in particular and Blacks and Hispanics, what we used to call NOMs, non -Asian minorities in the United States, are not as concerned about
the prospects of Asian aspiring migrants to the West as they are about Blacks and Hispanic migrants to the United States. The YouGov Economist survey doesn't break out responses. among Asians, but I suspect if it did, that there would be the strongest support for legal migration would be found among Asians living in the United States.
The CDC has released preliminary numbers on births in 2025, and a talking point on the heritage American right has been that non -Hispanic white births actually ticked back up to just barely constitute a majority of recorded births in the United States in 2025. And that is not a function of the white birth rate going up. The white birth rate in 2025 among non -Hispanic white women came in a little under 52, whereas when Biden was on his way out, it was over 53. And so it
continues to drop. or in the last couple of quarters of Trump's second term, it has stayed steady. But the reason it has now, at least for 2025 preliminarily, represented an outright majority at just a hair above 50%, up from 49 % the year before, is because Hispanic and especially Black fertility has dropped, and that really is remarkable.
For the first time possibly in all of U .S. history, certainly the first time in the modern age, black fertility in the United States is lower than white fertility, and that's among non -Hispanics. The most recent figures for white fertility is 52 births per thousand women, whereas for blacks it is just under 50 at 49 .6. To reach a total fertility rate of which is about what is required for replacement, requires a birth rate per 1
,000 women in the 70s. And unfortunately, what the CDC reports data in primarily is birth rate figures, whereas for the sake of clarity, total fertility rate is a lot easier to understand. It's hard to conceptualize what does 50 live births per 1 ,000 women in a year mean compared
to 70 live births. among 1 ,000 women in a year, whereas total fertility rate gives you what the expected total number of children a woman will have over her lifetime at any given point, and that's a lot easier to grok because if it's less than two, then it's below replacement, and if it's above two, then it's above replacement. And just intuitively, you can sense that if a woman has one child over the course of her entire life, that's below fertility, whereas if she
has three, that's pretty high fertility. But that corresponds to a birth rate of 30 and a birth rate of 90 per 1 ,000, respectively. That is harder to intuitively make sense of. And we'll bookend this with a look at the total fertility rates by race in the United States. But to get back to the birth rate, among whites, it's gone from 53 in 2023 to 52 now in 2026, presumably, the end of 2025, which is a decline in the birth
rate of about... 2 % in the last two years. By contrast, among blacks in 2023, it was over 56, and now it's under 50, which is a decline of about 12 % in the black fertility rate in just the last two years. The Hispanic birth rate has declined at a rate about in between those two, going from 66 a couple years ago to 63 now, which represents a decline of about 5 % in the Hispanic birth rate in the United States. I'm not sure
exactly how to interpret this. It's significant, and not just statistically significant, but also culturally. Is it Roe versus Wade being overturned,
playing into this in some way? The thought was that that would boost fertility, especially on the lower end of the socioeconomic status ladder, since in some states abortions couldn't happen, so the thought would be that the people with the lowest conscientiousness, the lowest... capacity for forward planning would be the ones who would end up having more children than would have otherwise been the case if Roe versus Wade hadn't been overturned and abortion protections were kept
in place in mostly red states where the populations didn't want abortions occurring. but maybe even in the case of the lower end of the socioeconomic stratum, that without the abortion backstop, or at least the sense that there is an abortion backstop, of course abortions can still be obtained in most places in the country, but with the idea that that is more difficult to pull off, there is less unprotected sex going on, especially
among blacks. Taking a look at the total fertility rate by race from the CDC, this data is from the end of 2024, so the preliminary data from 2025 is out, but it won't be completely formalized and cleaned up for a few months. This is the latest annualized data that is available. The overall total fertility rate in the United States is 1 .63. Again, replacement is a little bit over 2%. It's often referred to in the shorthand
as being 2 .1. That's misleading with... infant death being as low as it is, it's probably closer in the developed world to something like 2 .02, but I think just using two as a mental benchmark is a perfectly fine and intuitive way of understanding whether fertility is below, at, or above replacement. Because on an individual level, the procreative question is one in which if you have one or zero children, you are losing ground. If you have two, you're treading water. And if you have more
than two, then you are expanding. And so at 1 .63, the total fertility rate of the United States is well below replacement. The lowest fertility rate of any measured... Racial or ethnic group in the United States is among American Indians at 1 .37. Next is Asians at 1 .46, followed then by blacks, again, below white replacement at 1 .52. Whites are at just a hair higher at 1 .53. Hispanics at 1 .95 are just a hair below
replacement in the United States. And then Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders come in at 2 .22, the only group in the United States that is above replacement currently. Another continuing trend in the nature of natalism in America, the only age range where birth rates are growing. is among women aged 40 and over. That has continued to increase over the last couple of years. It's a trend that has been in place for decades now, but that increasing modest uptick is from a very
low base to start with. The CDC breaks down birth rates by five -year age ranges, the highest birth rate range currently. and these numbers again are from 2024, is among women aged 30 to 34. Having in the last couple of years surpassed what used to be the highest, which was among those aged 25 to 29, and that continuing increase in the median maternal age surely has something to do with the rise of attendant health problems in kids, including things like an increase in
early -term births. which is another thing that the CDC monitors. Early -term births are on the rise. Expected -term, normal -term births and late -term births are both on the decline. More C -sections, more gestational diabetes and the like. The healthiest age, that is the most nubile age, which is something men can assent to if they have a pair of eyes that work, is in the
age range of 20 to 24. But the birth rate for women in that age range is 54 .2, which is actually marginally lower than the birth rate for women aged 35 to 39. So women in the United States are more likely to have children in their late 30s than they are in their early 20s. If American total fertility is below replacement, and it has been since the 90s, then why does the U .S. population keep growing? One major reason, of course, is... Immigration, net migration to the
United States is positive. That is, there are more people coming into the country than leaving. But another reason is because the average age has to go from low in a population up to high
in a population before absolute numbers. And a generation that helps make that easy to understand are the baby boomers in the United States, where there was a... post -war population boom, a bunch of babies being born in the late 40s and the 50s and into the early 60s before the continued secular decline in fertility took hold in the 70s, that bulge of baby boomers meant that in the 70s, the median age of an American was 28.
If you were in the 70s, 28 years old, which is about where the boomers would have been in 1975, Donald Trump and Joe Biden were 29 and 33 respectively. If you were 27 in the 1970s, there were as many Americans younger than you as there were Americans older than you. But as subsequent generations had fertility below replacement. The population was still growing because the boomers weren't dying off. They were just getting older. And so the median age continued to increase and increase.
And now the median age in the United States has gone up more than a decade on average from the
1970s with the average American now. little over 39 years old 39 .2 as of 2024 and so if you are 39 now in America there are as many people younger than you as there are older than you and so what happens to a population that's on the decline is first it's it's young then it becomes old then it begins to shrink and so most of the country is still in the going from young, getting older stage, but there are several states that are now in the not just old, but declining because
more people are dying off than being born. Those states as of 2024 are Delaware, Rhode Island, Kentucky, Ohio, Arkansas, Alabama, New Mexico, Vermont, New Hampshire, Mississippi, Michigan, Florida, Oregon, Maine, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. The Rust Belt states are definitely overrepresented there, as is New England. This doesn't tell the whole story, of course. Net migration matters, too, in terms of births and deaths. It's not as though New York is some bastion of fecundity
in America. Its fertility is well below replacement, and its fertility rate is actually lower than Florida, but Florida... is experiencing more deaths than births in large part because a lot of people live in New York, you get old, and
then go down to Florida to die. But it is the old white, and also to a significant degree black, but not... immigrant -heavy states where deaths are outstripping births because those states have already moved past the aging process to one in which people are dying off faster than
they're being born. But those states are just cars farther along on the... same train that is heading the same direction because there is not, as has been mentioned before here, there is not a single state in the United States where fertility is at replacement, let alone above replacement. And on that sterile note, we'll end it for this week. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next time. Thank you.