Introduction

The lay of the land

I recently sold my house and garden in the city. I have often told people, I bought the place about 12 minutes after the market peaked (2006). Lately I have felt confident saying, with everything I have learned since, I sold it about 6 minutes before the peak. A coworker who was a real estate agent said, “more like 6 seconds.” I sold it on the Saturday before the second Federal Reserve rate increase (2022). 

It is a 1bdr house on a SE facing corner lot and a half, with 20 fruit trees, many fruit shrubs, vines and canes, 200 species of plants and mushrooms, edible mushrooms growing in wood chips and logs and a greenhouse I built with reclaimed wood and sliding glass doors. The yard was mostly a sheet of turfgrass when I moved in. 

I also have been working as a Parkkeeper for the Minneapolis Park Board for the last year. This spring I was transferred to historic Minnehaha Falls park, five minutes away. I held the “bid” which means I could stay on that job for the rest of my working life, if I want to. 

Instead I am leaving the city I have spent the last 22 years living in, returning to the house I was born in, to help my aging parents. Also, I  bought a travel trailer, which I intend to remodel and set on 80 undeveloped acres, 30 minutes north of my parents, which land I intend to spend the next ten years transforming in a similar way I did my city lot. It seems like an extraordinary opportunity the universe has provided me.

The title of this Substack comes from the fact that I, like my nation, was born on the fourth of July. When I still believed in Santa Claus I was sure all those fireworks were for me. It wasn’t until grade school I learned why we call it Independence Day. 

All of my life, however, America seems to have become a less and less free place. Current trends seem to be leading to the establishment of a new kind of digital, bio tyranny. Many of my fellow Amercans seem to wish to destroy America, by way of “saving Democracy”, or “building back better,” or plain old hating and dehumanizing of the Other. It is very easy to destroy a thing, it is very hard to build something. I grieve for the state of my country. 

I was born in 1973. It was a time of the first energy crises, Earth Day, the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, there was a burgeoning appropriate tech movement. There was also a kind of decadent hangover from the tumult of the 60’s, economic stagnation and a growing economic despair. 

Reagan stepped in and told us it was morning in America. Our best was ahead of us. By that he meant the first real steps toward corporate globalization, the hollowing out of our productive capacity and hyper financialization. We wanted growth like growth was infinite and nothing else mattered, and Reagan said yes. As jobs flowed out of the country and especially the inner city, crack cocaine flowed in. As money and meaningful work flowed out of rural country, chronic alcoholism took its place.   

Clinton unleashed finance, media, corporations generally and pharmaceutical companies. He and Democrats abandoned America’s working classes, which had been bludgeoned by Reagan, offering them up as a kind of sacrifice to the economic wolves, vultures and ringwraiths of Moloch apparently. Bubble economics became normalized, which is the process by which wealth is transferred up the social pyramid and Americans are treated like 3rd world nobodies. 

GW Bush accelerated that process, presiding over the greatest credit bubble yet, while gorging with hubris on the plunder of war (or rather unlimited unaccountable military and intelligence spending). This initiated the proliferation of methamphetamine, especially in the rust belt and breadbasket. When that credit bubble blew up as Obama became president, Obama threw Americans and especially black people under the wheels of requisitioned war hardware, while giving the keys to the kingdom to the bankers, as pharma grew untouchable as their opioids lay waste to a generation. 

Both parties and their elite were hated by an increasing number of Americans - in walked Trump like a sentient flame thrower. For Democrats and Neocons it seemed the end of “Democracy!” In the name of saving Democracy they made an unholy alliance with corporations, Media, Big Tech and the Intelligence community, dedicated to getting rid of Trump by any means necessary, including extrajudicial, unethical and immoral, saving Democracy by embracing authoritarianism. 

Russia and Putin demonization, the Hunter Biden laptop, the supposed plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Whitman, Jan 06, Critical Race and Trans Ideology, Big Tech censorship of anything contrary to official narratives and even Covid, are all a kind of psy-ops perpetrated by American elite against Americans, to institute controls to protect Elite from ever having to face anything like another uprising of the deplorables. 

In that way the least secure election in generations becomes “The most secure election ever,” and the least effective and most dangerous “vaccine” in history, that is not in fact a vaccine, is “Safe and Effective.” A radical and never before the covid jabs spectre of healthy people dying suddenly, becomes Sudden Adult Death Syndrome and a general frenzy to explain away pathology, a post mRNA jab reduction in births and increase in birth defects is due to Climate Change! Men apparently did have federally protected access to abortion on demand (until Roe was overturned), while women become That Which Shall Not Be Named and are put in their place as third tier subservients behind Trans and men, as Nazi’s in Ukraine become the last line of defense of Democracy! and a Western Civilization that is evidently nothing at all but one long line of white supremecist violence and oppression.

Now we are looking at a World Economic Forum and World Health Organization Great Reset, the controlled demolition of the economy and the dollar, a Chinese Communist Party-style social credit system, globalized, programmable digital currency, total surveillance panopticon, transhumanists thinking they can engineer a better human and society (Metaverse), by way of a bio-medical, bi-monthly multi booster, eat your insects, bike to work in the winter, total narrative controlled, eugenicist, planned depopulation regime - in the name of saving the earth.

If it seems like society has gone insane, I suspect that has a lot to do with how far we have become disconnected from nature, the fact that global population has expanded as if there are no resource limits, while those hard limits increasingly present themselves, the control freaks who broke it think they can fix it, and just about everybody else can’t imagine anything but economic progress as we have known it unto the stars.

There is an old precept in occult studies (the study of that which is hidden) that suggests, when society heads in one direction that leads to destruction, head in some different direction. In that sense, while America wishes apparently to descend into some kind of civil war between Left and Right, Democrats and Republicans, I think of myself as a philosophical as opposed to political Anarchist, reimagining the traditions of politics in America. I also believe in magic. By magic I mean, imagining what is possible and then creating it with will. 

I have been imagining a novel, and a substack page, an orchard, big garden and a house milled from the woods, a more quiet, contemplative life in a forgotten rural place. I think my country is desperately in need of healing, and I don’t see how I can effectively articulate what I think might be done about that, living in the city and shouting into the din.

Substack allows for readers to financially support writers. I have written well more than a million words, for which I have earned to date approximately $300. I have written two books (unpublished), a screenplay (unpurchased), something like 8 blogs the longest for 7 years, I wrote extensively at the now-defunct and extirpated Doomstead Diner. I have no expectation of anyone reading this, less supporting me financially, at least not until I have established myself here as a dedicated writer worth reading. In the meantime everything I post will be free. 

Most of all, I see a growing trend toward Authoritarianism by people who claim to be defending and protecting Democracy, and it is time again to raise my voice in defiance, to speak where I stand, to help my fellow Americans make sense. I intend here to write about Anarchism, magic and building a homestead. I am something like a master builder, gardener and writer, intending to use everything I have learned the last 49 years, to build something truly beautiful. I hope you will support me in that. Thank you for reading,

William Hunter Duncan