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Higgenbotham wrote: Tue Sep 09, 2025 11:49 am Though I expect this to be the type of crime that will be committed with increasing frequency (while being ignored by the media and others)...as the new dark age tightens its grip.

Higgenbotham wrote: Fri Oct 24, 2025 11:57 am It's no longer accurate to say that Trump is "just another liberal," though he is far from a conservative. At this point he really has differentiated himself, which is what he needs to do to survive...as the new dark age tightens its grip.

AI Overview

The phrase "as the new dark age tightens its grip" is a contemporary, dramatic expression used in informal commentary, likely a political or societal forum, to describe a perceived decline in intellectual, cultural, or political progress. It is not a widely known quote from a specific historical figure or prominent text.

The expression alludes to the historical concept of the Dark Ages, a term coined by the Italian scholar Petrarch to describe the period in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, characterized by a perceived lack of cultural and scientific advancement and a scarcity of historical records.

In the search results provided, the phrase appears in a few posts on a specific online forum, "Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel," where users are discussing current events, a "new dark age," and figures like Trump.

The phrase is an evocative metaphor intended to suggest a period of regression or crisis, using strong imagery of a "grip tightening" to imply an intensifying, negative situation. Its usage is generally subjective, reflecting the speaker's personal view of current events rather than an objective description or an established term.

AI Overview

The phrase "as the new dark age tightens its grip" is a rhetorical expression used to evoke a sense of deepening decline in intellectual, cultural, or societal progress. It suggests a contemporary period is entering a phase characterized by ignorance, a breakdown of established institutions, or general societal decline, similar to how the historical "Dark Ages" were traditionally (though often inaccurately) perceived.

The phrase itself does not have a single famous origin or author but appears in contemporary discourse, particularly in informal settings like online forums, where individuals discuss current political or world events. It is a descriptive, often hyperbolic, way of expressing concern about negative trends such as:

Political instability or the decline of democratic norms.

Economic hardship or resource scarcity.

A perceived decrease in critical thinking or the rise of misinformation.

In essence, the user of the phrase is expressing a personal or shared anxiety about the future, suggesting a return to a more primitive or chaotic state of affairs.

The phrase "new dark age tightens its grip" is not a widely known quote from a prominent public figure but rather a descriptive phrase used in contemporary commentary, often in online forums, to express a sense of worsening societal conditions.

The phrase suggests:

A "new dark age," implying a decline in knowledge, progress, reason, or stability, perhaps due to political polarization, the misuse of technology, or a breakdown in social order.

The "tightening grip" emphasizes that this perceived decline is intensifying and becoming more pervasive and difficult to escape.

The specific phrasing appears multiple times in a single discussion thread on an online forum (gdxforum.com), where users are discussing current events and potential future crises, linking it to political figures like Donald Trump and a general sense of societal decay. In this context, it is used to describe a pessimistic outlook on the current state of affairs.

Other contemporary discussions also touch upon related themes, such as the "digital dark age," referring to the potential loss of data and cultural heritage due to rapidly changing technology and data formats.

Yes, Everything Crashed--Just Not For You

When people stop participating in their own servitude, then things change.

A dedicated cadre of readers is devoted to reminding me that I’ve been wrong since 2009, as stocks, housing and GDP have all soared. We skeptics and doom-and-gloomers have all been wrong, and when stocks briefly dip, we’re identified as broken clocks--right on occasion but not for being “right.”

These readers are of course doing well. None are in the bottom 50% of Americans who have already experienced the crash. But since the top 10% dominate the media, both legacy and social media, and they’ve done splendidly in the Everything Bubble that’s been inflating for the past 16 years, then they don’t see the crash the 50% have experienced, for the top 10% live in a completely different world from the bottom 50%, whose experience tracks a third-world country far removed from jetting around the world and complaining about high taxes.

Life has crashed for the bottom 50% since 2009, but since those reporting the “news,” issuing glowing commentary about AI, nuclear power, missions to the Moon, etc., and making big bucks as influencers didn’t experience the crash, it has gone largely unnoticed except for occasional reporting in the legacy and social media: people making substantially more than minimum wage living in vans and cars because they can’t afford the local rents, and similar stories.

In a Snow Paradise, They Live in This Parking Lot People experiencing homelessness can sleep in their cars in this wealthy ski town in Colorado, but only if they have a job.

The Invisible Man We see right through the unshowered soul living in a car by the beach, or by the Walmart, or by the side of the road. But he’s there, and he used to be somebody. He still is. A firsthand account of homelessness in America.

An American physician with nearly 50 years of experience brought me up short when he reported that for many Americans, the healthcare they receive is equivalent to what third-world residents receive. Third World--which evokes grinding poverty, inescapable immiseration, failing infrastructure, a neofeudal divide between the few wealthy and the many poor, a society with no limits on exploitation and profiteering ruled by elites that are not merely corrupt but also incompetent--has been replaced by the sanitized developing world, but the point here isn’t the trend to sanitize repellent realities with textual tropes, it’s the refusal of America’s top 10% to acknowledge that for many of the bottom 50%, America under their leadership is a third world nation.

The top 10% cling to the soaring stock market and rising GDP as markers of the nation’s robust economy and success to avoid dealing with lived reality, as if their fairy-tale belief that soaring stocks means life is good is actually real; if you’re falling behind, well, work harder, work smarter, be more frugal--be more like us, in other words.

While the top 10% busy themselves with using AI to improve work flow, obsessing over geopolitics and the decay of the perks of their Titanium credit card, other Americans are concerned with finding a second or third side-hustle as the soaring costs of utilities, rent, auto insurance and repairs, childcare and healthcare are forcing choices nobody wants to make: what not to pay.

As the cracks widen, it gets harder not to avoid falling into one. So much of everyday life in America is now a parody of precarity that is right out of a black-comedy script of a nation blindly telling itself that all is well because AI is amazing and we’re going back to the Moon while families are abandoning their beloved pets because they cannot afford four-figure vet bills.

The top 10%, secure in their bubble, don’t even notice that private equity is snapping up vet clinics precisely because people will pay whatever it takes to care for their pet. This is exploitation and profiteering on a scale that makes a mockery of the fantasy that ours is an economy of opportunity.

The withdrawal of the top 10% from the bottom 90% is not a new trend; it’s merely gathered momentum. Author Christopher Lasch described this class bifurcation decades ago in his 1995 book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.

It’s important to the top 10% to maintain the illusion that they didn’t benefit from conditions that are no longer available to all. They are loathe to admit that the US economy is now one in which the bottom 90% work to serve the top 10%, who account for half of all consumer spending and the lion’s share of discretionary spending--all the goodies such as vacations overseas, mileage upgrades to business class, etc.

As I outline in my recent books, Progress is illusory, a myth that cloaks the reality that life is getting more difficult, not easier: this is Anti-Progress, the opposite of Progress.

This reality is fragmented by distractions and addictions and the busy-ness of trying to do all the unpaid shadow work now required to keep everything glued together. All that was once authentic has been slowly replaced by Ultra-Processed Life, artifices that are easier to manage than messy reality.

What happens when people can no longer pay for everything they need to live? If history is any guide, somebody figures out that rather than scattered individuals defaulting here and there, an organized default is the only real power left. If 100,000 tenants in a city all go on a rent strike, withholding rent until there is some recognition of the unviability of the status quo, what’s the response? To evict 100,000 households?

There are many historical examples of general strikes, where those serving the top 10% don’t show up for work. All the real work--not the phony AI work flows--is no longer performed.

When people stop participating in their own servitude, then things change. People can opt out on their own, or they might cooperate in a group opt-out. The point here is the crash that the top 10% didn’t experience and therefore ignore has already happened.

Here’s how the bottom 50% experienced the S&P 500 soaring from 666 in 2009 to 6900 this week. Their share of the nation’s expanding financial wealth is so small it’s signal noise.



The bottom 90% have lost ground. And it’s not because they’re not working hard enough.



Just because we didn’t experience it doesn’t mean there was no crash. Is this uncomfortable? Undoubtedly. But more importantly--what’s our response?

New York Times Magazine is out with a long story about “The Blade,” a strip in LA known for child sex trafficking and prostitution. The reporter on the story, Emily Baumgaertner Nunn, focuses her profile on the street itself, an LAPD vice officer and a 19-year-old girl named “Ana” who has been working the street since she was 15.

“She knew which motels had rooms set aside for just this purpose,” Nunn writes, “which schools and businesses didn’t padlock their parking lots at night.”

School parking lots in LA are routinely used for tricks.

The story is only hours old and has prompted all sorts of reactions on social media. Some are calling for Trump to “invade” LA with the National Guard. Some are calling for Gov. Gavin Newsom himself to deploy them.

Trouble is, Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass are as much to blame for the explosion of trafficking as the pimps and players enslaving children. First, you’ve got sanctuary status in California and LA, driving human trafficking numbers ever skyward. Remember Joe Biden’s admin losing 233,000 illegal alien minors?

How many of them ended up working the Blade?

Hard to find out because following the death of His Holiest George Floyd, Saint of Productivity, Bass cut the LAPD’s budget.

“In 2021, the Police Department’s central human-trafficking unit was disbanded following budget cuts,” Nunn writes.

Not woke enough, apparently. Next, Newsom repealed a law allowing police officers to interdict obvious street trafficking. They called it “SB 357” and the explicit intent was to prevent cops from “profiling black, brown and trans women based on how they dressed.”

And how are they dressing? The story pinging around social media turned me toward a YouTube page that’s been posting videos of the Blade since 2023. It’s called “Los Angeles Hoods,” and it has nearly a million subscribers.

All it posts are videos of women walking the streets in lingerie, sometimes just flat-out G-strings and thigh-highs, in broad daylight. Hours and hours of footage. The streets are disgusting and run-down, the buildings unkempt. It’s decay for all to see, unchecked and spreading. The only thing that appears modern and clean are the cars lining the streets.

As if we need more signs, the YouTube channel even sells “LA hood” swag.

From the NYT (emphases mine):

The Blade was an eight-minute drive from the University of Southern California, and yet another universe. Parents pushed strollers past the trafficked girls as they took their own children to school. Amid boarded-up storefronts were a few that catered specifically to the trade: a smoke shop with the banner “free Magnum condom with any purchase” and a lingerie store named — in cursive — Sluts. Figueroa seemed to be the one street in all of Los Angeles where nobody ever honked: Customers waited politely, as if in line at a drive-through, to peruse the menu and take their pick.

The NYT even talked to Bass:

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass said she’s seen the trafficking firsthand. Though the county, not the city, oversees foster care, she called it “a failure of government, period,” adding: “It is our responsibility, and therefore, it is our fault.”

Welcome to the pre-apocalypse of America, where minors are sold in open slave markets in broad daylight on public streets and the elected leaders who set the conditions for the decay simply say “oops.”

Food banks are preparing for a surge as federal food aid could be paused in the government shutdown

Food banks and pantries were already struggling after federal program cuts this year, but now they’re bracing for a tsunami of hungry people if a pause in federal food aid to low-income people kicks in this weekend as the federal government shutdown persists.

The rush has already begun. Central Christian Church’s food pantry in downtown Indianapolis scrambled Saturday to accommodate around twice as many people as it normally serves in a day.

“There’s an increased demand. And we know it’s been happening really since the economy has downturned,” volunteer Beth White said, adding that with an interruption in funding for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, “it’s going to continue to get worse for folks.”

It’s a concern shared by charitable food providers across the country as states prepare for lower-income families to see their SNAP benefits dry up. SNAP helps 40 million Americans, or about 1 in 8, buy groceries. The debit cards they use to buy groceries at participating stores and farmers markets are normally loaded each month by the federal government.

At Our Wits' End: Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for the Future (Societas) Paperback – November 1, 2018
by Edward Dutton (Author), Michael A Woodley of Menie (Author)
4.6 out of 5 stars 241 ratings

We are becoming less intelligent. This is the shocking yet fascinating message of At Our Wits' End. The authors take us on a journey through the growing body of evidence that we are significantly less intelligent now than we were a hundred years ago. The research proving this is, at once, profoundly thought-provoking, highly controversial, and it's currently only read by academics. But the authors are passionate that it cannot remain ensconced in the ivory tower any longer. With At Our Wits' End, they present the first ever popular scientific book on this crucially important issue. They prove that intelligence -- which is strongly genetic -- was increasing up until the breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution, because we were subject to the rigors of Darwinian Selection, meaning that lots of surviving children was the preserve of the cleverest. But since then, they show, intelligence has gone into rapid decline, because large families are increasingly the preserve of the least intelligent. The book explores how this change has occurred and, crucially, what its consequences will be for the future. Can we find a way of reversing the decline of our IQ? Or will we witness the collapse of civilization and the rise of a new Dark Age?

This replication study furthermore found, using sRTs, that the decline in g had been around 1 IQ point per decade between 1885 and the year 2004. That is about 10 points, in a century—and probably more over the past two hundred years. Dutton and Charlton have explained that, to put this in perspective, 15 points would be approximately the difference in average IQ between a low level security guard (85) and a police constable (100), or between a high school science teacher (115) and a biology professor at an elite university (130).* In other words, in terms of intelligence, the average Englishman from about 1850 would be in roughly the top 15% of the population in the year 2000—and the difference would be even larger if we extrapolated back further towards about 1800 when the Industrial Revolution began to initiate massive demographic changes in the British population.

Reference: Dutton, E. & Charlton, B. (2015) The Genius Famine, Buckingham: University of Buckingham Press, pp. 158–159

Civilisations seem to follow a fairly predictable pattern. Low g, stressful, religious societies undergo group expansion and selection for g via downward social mobility. Eventually, they blossom into civilisations. However, civilisation reduces selection for g due to medicine, improved living conditions, and lower levels of stress leading to kindly attitudes to the poor. Civilisation innovates contraception and reduces religiousness both by reducing stress and by reflecting an elevated level of g. As a consequence, the wealthiest—who also tend to have higher g —reach a level of rationalism and security where they take control of their lives. They understand that children arrive through their effort, not God’s will; their child mortality is relatively low, they want to give a high standard of living to their children so they can compete, and they are, anyway, interested in intellectual pursuits and irreligious ideas which incline them not to have children. So, they successfully use contraception to reduce their fertility. Those with lower g are less able to use contraception, insufficiently forward thinking to do so, have more stressful lives, are more religious, and are less rational. So, society’s average g starts to decline and civilisation eventually collapses back to a Dark Age. Selection for high g then strongly reasserts itself, especially when the climate becomes harsher and colder, and the process occurs all over again. ‘What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes, 1:9).

At least 25 states plan to cut off food aid benefits in November

The pause in benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program would begin in states from California to Arkansas just before the busy holiday season.

By Grace Yarrow
10/23/2025 04:45 AM EDT

Millions of low-income Americans will lose access to food aid on Nov. 1, when half of states plan to cut off benefits due to the government shutdown.

Twenty-five states told POLITICO that they are issuing notices informing participants of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — the nation’s largest anti-hunger initiative — that they won’t receive checks next month.

Higgenbotham wrote: Sun Oct 12, 2025 1:42 pm From the front lines of the breakdown of Western civilization, r/Teachers...

Breaking Point’: Teachers Beg For Help As Post-Pandemic Classroom Violence Spirals

Jaryn Crouson
Education Reporter
October 23, 2025

Teachers in Modesto, California are begging their school district to institute changes to behavior policies as students are becoming increasingly violent since returning to school after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The teachers association for Modesto City Schools (MCS) confronted the district’s school board on Monday armed with photos of destroyed classrooms to voice their distress that the violence and chaos overtaking classrooms made it near impossible for them to do their jobs. Teachers said they have been bitten, kicked and cursed at, and said other students were scared, according to CBS News.

“If there’s no consistency and there’s no reinforcement, then your classroom becomes chaos,” Jennifer McGrath, president of the Modesto Teachers Association, told CBS. “Some things have to change so that we can start educating again.”

Higgenbotham wrote: Fri Mar 03, 2023 1:36 pm The liberal welfare state is collapsing. In the big picture Trump was just another liberal. He spent copious amounts of money and ran up copious amounts of debt, just less than the far left liberals. A conservative position would have been to issue shoot to kill orders for illegals crossing the border, not fund a wall. Bullets are cheap. The individuals that emerge out of the coming anarchy, as Navigator suggests, will do that type of thing.

DOJ Warns Pelosi, Other California Democrats To ‘Stand Down’ Or Face Consequences For Threats To Arrest Feds

Hailey Gomez
General Assignment Reporter
October 23, 2025

Department of Justice (DOJ) Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche warned California Democrats on Thursday to “stand down or face prosecution” amid threats to arrest federal agents.

The warning comes after California Democrat Rep. Nancy Pelosi suggested Wednesday that San Francisco police could potentially arrest federal agents if they were found violating state law during U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. In response, Blanche posted a letter on X that he had sent to Democrat California Gov. Gavin Newsom, state Attorney General Rob Bonta, Pelosi and San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins.

“California politicians want to arrest federal agents for enforcing federal law. We just sent them a letter: Stand down or face prosecution. No one threatens our agents. No one will stop us from Making America Safe Again,” Blanche wrote in his post.