A little-noted centenary.     This month, November 2023, marks [sic] a hundred years since the peak of the hyperinflation that afflicted Germany after World War One.

When the 1,000-billion Mark note came out, few bothered to collect the change when they spent it. By November 1923, with one dollar equal to one trillion Marks, the breakdown was complete. The currency had lost meaning [Paper Money, by ”Adam Smith,” 1981].

In my English adolescence I knew an elderly couple of Silesian Jews, the ”Kellermans,” who had themselves been adolescents in Germany when hyperinflation hit. They had lurid tales about it: kitchen cabinets stuffed full of banknotes to pay for the family’s bread and cheese, cigarettes in widespread use as an alternative currency, and so on.

How fortunate we are to live in this time and place, under governments far too wise, responsible, and incorruptible to let such misfortunes fall upon us!

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The Musk biography.     My book of the month—actually my Audible download of the month—has been Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk. What a story!

Isaacson makes clear what I had always supposed: that Musk is an Aspergery low-empathy geek. The geekiness comes, however, with massive strength of will: unshakable faith in his own vision, relentless drive, defiance—often angry defiance—of all risk and negativity.

Listening to Isaacson’s very detailed account of Musk’s work schedule I found myself alternately wondering: (a) When does the guy ever sleep? and (b) How on earth do his employees put up with him?

By way of illustration: Fall of 2008 was a low point for Musk. The first three attempts by his company SpaceX to launch their first rocket, the Falcon 1, had all failed. Both SpaceX and also Musk’s electric-car company Tesla were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

Most of us would have quit at that point, but Musk was determined on a fourth launch attempt, in the teeth of skepticism not only from investors but also from his own engineers.

That fourth attempt, at the end of September 2008, was a success. Fifteen years later, in my November 25th edition of The Economist [SpaceX tests Starship, and prepares to face down Amazon] I read this:

In the 21 years since it was founded, SpaceX, a rocketry firm set up by Elon Musk, has become the world’s space superpower. Its cheap, reusable Falcon 9 rocket dominates the launch industry. Thanks mostly to its Starlink satellite-internet business, the firm sends more mass into orbit each year than every other company and country on Earth combined.

It has bigger ambitions still. November 18th saw the second test flight of its Starship rocket, the biggest ever built. The first test, in April, ended with a damaged launchpad and a rocket that self-destructed after trouble with several of the first stage’s 33 engines and the failure of its second stage to separate properly.

Earlier by Peter Brimelow: Trump’s Indictment—Like I Said, This Is A Communist Coup

Perhaps the greatest contribution of the Trump Administration and its aftermath has been to reveal to Americans how completely formerly revered institutions, like the FBI, the Judiciary, and often the police are in fact controlled by the totalitarian Hard Left—essentially, Communists. Not least, as in Britain, they also appear to be controlling immigration policy.

This did not come as a surprise to Diana West, to my mind the best conceptual thinker about as well as one of the best-informed observers of this frightful disaster.

In April 2020—in other words more than six months before the Democrats stole the 2020 election—VDARE carried Social Distancing With Peter Brimelow and Diana West.

Presciently, they discussed in penetrating detail the mechanisms of the Left conquest. In view of the atrocities surfacing subsequently, this podcast, like a fine wine, has become hugely more impactful in the three and a half years since. I strongly commend it to those wondering what on earth is going on.

Fending off a suggestion by Peter Brimelow that with her background and early career she could have been Jennifer Rubin, West says (2:30):

Here’s the difference. I was never a Marxist. I was never even a liberal.  

and goes on the define Neoconservatism as:

…endless war, and open immigration. 

From 2:39 on, West and Brimelow discuss the Cold War amnesia which has seemingly been inculcated into anyone under 50, causing total ignorance about how dangerous this period was—and therefore, of course, systematic underestimation of similar forces. West says-

This is what happens when the education system is

The result of the recent Dutch general election result is being widely touted as a victory for the “Dutch Trump,” strident anti-Islam campaigner Geert Wilders [What Geert Wilders’ victory means for Dutch society, by Anne Holligan, BBC News, November 25, 2023]. But I see the reality as more nuanced. Wilders is certainly the latest evidence of the gathering backlash in white countries against the Great Replacement. But there’s also increasing polarization—the centrist parties collapsed and Leftist parties expanded. And balkanization—literally: DENK, a party representing Turkish and other Muslims, won three seats. The impact of immigration is making Dutch politics more… interesting, across the board.

Though Wilders has toned down his rhetoric in recent years in order to make his Freedom Party more electable, his policies have included banning the Koran and banning the building of new mosques in the Netherlands, and he has a “Hate Speech” conviction for referring to Moroccans in the Netherlands as “scum.” In 2009, he was briefly banned from the U.K. as a threat to public order, and he has lived under police protection since 2004 due to threats over his views on Islam. (This is not a joke: the previous most prominent immigration patriot leader, Pim Fortuyn, was assassinated by a white Leftist pro-immigration fanatic in 2001.) His current policies include the Netherlands leaving the European Union, banning Islamic headscarves in public buildings, a complete halt to asylum seekers entering the country, ending all foreign aid, and putting the Dutch people first [Geert Wilders: Who is he and what does he want?, by Paul Kirby, BBC News, November 24, 2023].

There are a number of clear reasons for the “victory” of his party, which was the third largest in parliament after the last Dutch election and has now risen to first place. The massive influx of foreigners into

I’ve just finished reading the hilariously terrible book What’s Left Unsaid by Melissa DeRosa, secretary to former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (New York) that is so unself-aware, so arrogant, so embarrassing that I have to review it.

I only read it in the first place because I wanted to interview Cuomo on my Substack, figuring that after his defenestration, he’d be a fun interview. But I’m willing to sacrifice that possibility just to wallow in the awfulness of this book. (Plus, recent press reports say he’s thinking of running for mayor of New York, so it’s topical.)

Most dumbfounding, DeRosa brags about Cuomo bullying everyone into implementing his tyrannical COVID policies—all of which, as we now know, accomplished absolutely nothing (other than causing half a million New Yorkers to flee the state, making 2020-2021 New York’s largest single-year population loss in history).

• First, Cuomo bulldozed the legislature into giving him emergency powers to “institute mass quarantines, order businesses to close, suspend laws and issue sweeping directives.”

For the Lügenpresse, the recent fad for “fact-checking” has always really been about protecting the Talking Points of the Deep State, most notably on immigration. Granted, we shouldn’t attribute to mendacity what could be stupidity. But the problem with giving the Lying Press the benefit of the doubt is that most reporters seem willfully ignorant of the basic facts about immigration. Think of Hannah Hudnall. The end result is the same: The communist Mainstream Media’s “fact checks” are mostly fact-free.

Which brings us to a pair of Gen Z “fact-checkers” at PolitiFact, Samantha Putterman and Marta Campabadal Graus. They “fact-checked” Ron DeSantis’ claims that Joe Biden has allowed more than 6 million illegal aliens to invade the country.

Looking at those data requires some knowledge of Biden’s Zerg Rush, including his Administrative Amnesty, and a detailed knowledge of how immigration enforcement works. However, that is not what one gets from Senoritas Putterman and Graus.

Government reporter Putterman’s qualifications to write