The metaphor I use for the White Empire's collapse is then. This is a bad metaphor because it requires explaining, but let's go on. When the big thing in the sky dies, it won't just explode. The sun will try to eat heavier elements, get terrible gas that envelops the inner planets, and only then implode. Our own Sun will go angry red giant before white dwarf, and the big thing dying before our eyes is no different.

America—as the core of White Empire—is trying to eat heavier elements (Venezuelan crude, Greenland ‘rare’ earths) and getting terrible gas in the process, enveloping near continents. White Empire is outgassing to envelop ‘its’ hemisphere and near ‘allies’ like Denmark while calling it power projection. They're just projecting. The violent outbursts look terribly impressive until you remember our metaphor. Just as the Sun goes red giant before it dies, so the sun sets on the White Empire now.

American Empire, by design, has fused lighter elements than open occupation. They used airy-fairy ideology (Human Rights®, Democracy™, Freedom©) to get increasingly atheist elites to piously participate in colonization. This same bastardized ideology was used to get local elites to colonize themselves, and feel good doing it. The velvet glove of NGOs, ‘international’ institutions, media, and Hollywood propaganda hid the iron fist of coups, color revolutions, civil wars, and invasions. But for much of the Empire, the heavier elements weren't necessary. White Empire was fused with much lighter stuff, Nobel Prizes and the such. It's only in its later phases that it must go hard or go home. Go hard and go home is more like it.

Gone, today, are the complicated justifications, long-buildups of oriental despots to knock down, and wooing of vain Europeans to keep them wagging along. Now America just says they're stealing oil, they fingerpaint their villains with blood, and openly humiliate Europeans in public. The invisible empire has become visible which they are not designed for at all. American empire has been so stretchy precisely because it was light (CIA more than Army, IMF more than Treasury) but as it gets heavy-handed it finds that it cannot hold as much. Asia is effectively lost and all genocided America can grasp is the Americas, and even that not for long.

Ideology is a very light element, invisible really, but it can fuse an invisible empire together.

What held America Empire together internally was its own elite belief that they weren't an Empire at all. The messyanic belief in Mediterranean religion was replaced with a messyanic belief in Mediterranean democracy, neither of which they understood, but that didn't matter. Belief systems work if enough people believe them, and Liberal Democracy worked good, despite being a total misnomer. Well-meaning young elites could pretend like they were good people while administering empire, and native elites could pretend like they were bettering their own people by colonizing them. As Mary Poppins said, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. Now all that's left is very bitter medicine, and openly corrupt pedophiles, thieves, and charlatans administering it to increasingly incredulous populations. You have to be a moron to believe in this Empire anymore, and a degenerate moron to work for them.

So just as our own Sun will die by fusing into what the scientists call degenerate helium, this Empire dies by fusing into degenerate morons. What is left to believe in anymore? That the rapists of Epstein Island (née Columbus Island) should continue raping the world? That children should starve so old men can cling to power? That the obviously corrupt are defending Democracy™, while the people defending their homes are Terrorists©? The Empire isn't even keeping their stories straight anymore. They've installed Al-Qaeda in Syria, pardoned drug traffickers in Honduras, and suspended elections in Ukraine. They just expect people to believe the old lies out of sheer inertia, they're not even trying anymore. But inertia eventually runs out, for reality TV stars as well as real stars. You can only spew so much hot air outwards, before collapsing in exhaustion.

I feel a bit like Chicken Little saying the sky is falling for years now, but it is, it really is, cluck cluck. The White Empire is not reviving with its latest violence, it is precisely dying, as I reason through metaphor. The White Empire outgassing to envelop ‘its’ genocided continent is not a sign of great power, it's a sign of great power collapse. This is precisely what an empire collapsing looks like. As Dylan Thomas said, they rage rage against the dying of the White, they do not go gentle into that good night. The orange man is making the White Empire go angry red giant, before it finally, finally, goes out. The White Empire is not coming back with this latest bout of continental violence. The White Empire is going white dwarf.