James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler        (social critic)
Born	October 19, 1948 New York City, New York, U.S.
Nationality	American
Founder/Owner of	Kunstler.com
Interests	peak oil
American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger. Covid-dissident.

James Howard Kunstler is an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger. He is best known for his books The Geography of Nowhere (1994), a history of American suburbia and urban development, The Long Emergency (2005), and Too Much Magic (2012). In The Long Emergency he imagines peak oil and oil depletion resulting in the end of industrialized society, forcing Americans to live in smaller-scale, localized, agrarian (or semi-agrarian) communities. In World Made by Hand he branches into a speculative fiction depiction of this future world.

“It’s getting harder to conceal the deaths and injuries caused by the vaccines, including a striking drop in fertility and the permanent damage to millions of people’s immune systems that will lay them low with [cancer]], neurological illness, and cardiovascular disease in the months ahead.”
James Howard Kunstler (17 June 2022) 

Background

Kunstler was born in New York City to Jewish parents, who divorced when he was eight. His family then moved to the suburbs on Long Island. His biological father was a middleman in the diamond trade. Kunstler spent most of his childhood with his mother and stepfather, a publicist for Broadway shows. While spending summers at a boys' camp in New Hampshire, he became acquainted with a small town ethos that would later permeate many of his works.

In 1966, Kunstler graduated from New York City's High School of Music & Art, and attended the State University of New York at Brockport, where he majored in theater.

He lives in Greenwich, a town in Washington County, New York.

Career

After college, Kunstler worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone. During the 1970s and 1980s, Kunstler worked "a lot of odd jobs, from orderly in the psychiatric wing of the hospital, to digging holes for percolation tests in housing subdivisions".

In 1975, he began writing books and lecturing full-time. Kunstler's blog states that he has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, RPI, and the University of Virginia, has appeared before professional organizations such as the AIA, the APA, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Kunstler lectured on topics related to suburbia, urban development, and the challenges of what he calls "the global oil predicament", and a resultant change in the "American Way of Life." He lectured at the TED Conference, the American Institute of Architects, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the International Council of Shopping Centers, the National Association of Science and Technology, as well as at numerous colleges and universities, including Yale, MIT, Harvard, Cornell, University of Illinois, DePaul, Texas A & M, the USMA, and Rutgers University.

As a journalist, Kunstler wrote articles for The Atlantic Monthly, Slate.com, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and its op-ed page where he covered environmental and economic issues. Kunstler is also a supporter of the movement known as "New Urbanism."

He popularized of the concept of peak oil, for which he was a prominent spokesman, such as in the 2004 documentary The End of Suburbia. His 2005 book The Long Emergency became an oft-cited reference for the predicted imminent collapse of human civilisation. However, oil supplies increased due to fracking, and the collapse did not eventuate.

Political views

Kunstler is a harsh critic of both the Republican Party, describing them as "a gang of hypocritical, pietistic sadists, seeking pleasure in the suffering of others while pretending to be Christians, devoid of sympathy, empathy, or any inclination to simple human kindness, constant breakers of the Golden Rule, enemies of the common good." and also the Democratic Party and their "underhanded attempts" to get rid of Donald Trump, a man whom Kunstler sees as showing "strength". He also wrote that the deep state worked to overthrow and thwart Trump. He endorsed Trump for re-election and declared that he intended to do "everything he can to prevent the Democrats from winning the election."

In an interview with American Conservative, Kunstler attacked gay marriage, describing it as "cultural mischief" that would further damage "a struggling institution". He is has written that the 2020 United States presidential election was fraudulent, describing it as a "fraud-inflected election" on his website, and he suggests that the 2021 Washington D.C. Riots was the work of left-wing infiltrators and agents provocateurs.

In recent times, Kunstler has had financial problems, and was described as "seethingly angry" about his writing income falling to only a few thousand dollars annually because of "the tidal wave of free content on the web". In addition, his "lucrative college speaking fees" have disappeared, which he blames on "the rising hysteria on campus against threatening ideas". Kunstler now uses Patreon to crowdfund his writing.

In an interview with Doug Casey published on October 13, 2021, Kunstler called the COVID-19 "pandemic" a scam, and on October 11 he predicted that the jab would kill people "steadily over the weeks and months" and went on to name hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as effective treatments.

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References

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