Ian Welsh

This is the first of two parts of the second part of a longer three part series. Part one covered COVID.

POTUS Joe Biden wasn’t just a senile fool who insisted on running for re-election when obviously senile, costing the Democrats the 2024 Presidential election and giving us Trump 2.0, he was also the nominal architect of three mass-death events that rank with this awful Century’s worst.

So yea, I’m back to hammering nails in the dying ghoul’s coffin so people don’t forget what he was and what he (or the administration with his name on it) did.

Last time I pounded home the Biden administration’s horrific, criminally negligent responsibility for ~1M deaths of American citizens and residents.

This time I’m going to be pounding home the extent to which Biden & co. knowingly provoked Russia into invading Ukraine in February 2022, put the kibosh on a peace deal Russia and Ukraine had allegedly worked out on in April 2022, and squandered massive fortunes pouring money and weapons into the yawning black maw that is Kyiv under Zelensky, and in so doing signed the death warrant of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, mostly the former.

And because the trap that Russian President Vladimir Putin fell into was loaded not only with billions worth of military preparations and massive economic sanctions, but also with the biggest and most brutally effective propaganda campaign of my lifetime (and I lived through the post-9/11 Karl Rove Great War on Terror nightmare as a full-grown ass adult), trying to speak up for a modicum of reason and objectivity got anyone even mildly opposed to the dominant narrative labeled a “Putin puppet” and cast out of polite liberal American society.

That wasn’t new in 2022, of course. By that point we’d enjoyed six years’ worth of RussiaGate panic and the neo-McCarthyism from the establishment shitlibs in charge of the Democratic Party and their “vote blue no matter who” idiot supporters.

Hillary Clinton, whose 2016 presidential campaign kicked off RussiaGate the day after she lost the election to Trump as a great way to distract from how shitty her campaign was and the fact that the Democratic party put its thumb on the scale in her favor against Bernie Sanders, went full-on commie hunter like the ’64 Goldwater girl she once was against Tulsi Gabbard in 2019. Clinton said on Campaign HQ with David Plouffe (that’s former Obama 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe) that the Russians have “got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate” and calls her “the favorite of the Russians.”

Gabbard filed a $50 million defamation lawsuit but then dropped it to “defeating Donald Trump in 2020 (ie the future worthless Trump Director of National Intelligence dropped the suit so she could focus on helping Biden beat her future boss. Oh the places you’ll go, indeed.).”

So I should have been hardened to that kind of crap by 2022, but despite Mueller coming up completely empty (“the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”) and RussiaGate adding up to a giant distraction that helped Trump get away with tons of bribe-taking and other real crimes (emoluments clause anyone?) because the Dems only seemed to care about his antics if it interfered with their Ukraine plans or could somehow be linked to Russia and Putin.

I mean if they tried to impeach Trump for taking bribes from foreign countries, that might hit Dem legislative playas like Nancy Pelosi and Bob Menendez right in the wallets.

Finding out later that that bullshit was a psyop from the get-go fills me with rage and I’d love to go all Borger, Texas on any of the fuckers involved should I ever get the chance.

Remember the Hunter Biden laptop story — you know the bombshell pre-election NY Post article that no one could post on Facebook (Zuckerberg later apologized) or share on Twitter (even via DM) which revealed a great deal of lucrative scumbaggery on the part of Hunter Biden, some of it maybe even involving “the old man”, some of which took place in Ukraine where Hunter enjoyed a $50,000/month gig at a natural gas company despite knowing fuck all about natural gas or Ukraine?

Remember how fifty-one former intelligence officials — including James Clapper, Michael Hayden and Leon Panetta — signed a one-paragraph statement saying the laptop story (later confirmed to be true) has “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” They concede in the letter itself that they have no evidence.

Politico ran it as “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former officials say.”

In 2023, former acting CIA director Michael Morell told the House Judiciary Committee he organized the letter after a call from Antony Blinken, then a Biden campaign adviser, and that a purpose was to give Biden a “talking point” for the debate. FWIW Blinken denies it was his idea. Since I don’t believe a word that double-genociding mofo says, rest assured I’m just including it for the record.

Blinken, of course, became Biden’s Secretary of State and ran Ukraine policy for four years because of course Sleepy Joe was too senile to run a fucking lemonade stand by 2022.

Did anyone happen to catch the study covered by FAIR showing that American corporate media were seven times more likely to quote think tanks with military-industrial funding than those without? Good times were had gaslighting everyone’s liberal family and friends.

I lost friends, relationships with work colleagues and online friendly acquaintances, and my family, and marital relations were deeply strained by this most epic fucking gaslighting campaign (which was presaged by the Atlantic Council’s John Deni in his Dec, 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The Strategic Case for Risking War in Ukraine” oh yea, Deni is also a research prof at the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute).

And who could forget Ivan Krastev’s Feb. 3, 2022 New York Times op-ed which warned, “Europe Thinks Putin Is Planning Something Even Worse Than War” — and the horror Putin planned?

Why nothing less than a negotiated European security architecture that acknowledges Russian interests. Krastev passionately argued that “an invasion “could, in a perverse way, save the current European order.” And God knows, perversity is what the current European order (and its ruling Epstein class) is all about.

The WSJ and NYT truly know their audiences and the goldfish memories they have because both papers beat the war drums while Putin was begging for negotiations (the Russians even drafted a full signature ready document) and then spent the next three years calling the invasion of Ukraine “unprovoked” and insisting that the rest of the Western MSM media do the same.

But before I can get to hammering on the coffin I’m preparing for Genocide Joe Biden’s reputation and historical standing, I have to cover some historical background.

That ought to chase off all the fucking Americans reading this. Goddamn, it’s crazy-making to be a student of history in the USA in the short-attention-span 2020s. Well, so be it.

This is going to be quick and link heavy because I’m writing a blog post for a topic that merits multiple books.

NATO Stopped Being a Defensive Alliance in the 1990s Under Bill Clinton

Despite assurances to then Soviet Premier Gorbachev from President GHW “Poppy” Bush’s Sec of State James Baker that NATO will not move “one inch eastward” when Gorby allowed German re-unification, NATO moved east even more relentlessly than the Wehrmacht did in 1939-1942.

Just look at this fucking map.

And Bill Clinton (who was busy with other things and barely cared about foreign policy) and his administration (some of whom very much cared about foreign policy and will recur in administration after administration to the present day) were warned by fifty foreign policy veterans (including Robert McNamara, former CIA director Stansfield Turner, Paul Nitze, Jack Matlock, Richard Pipes, and Senators Bill Bradley, Gary Hart and Sam Nunn) that NATO’s eastern expansion was “a policy error of historic proportions.”

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 06, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

Don’t look away any longer – Solidarity with Hüseyin Doğru

[defenddemocracy.press, Aug 30, 2026 ]

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025

A Twenty-Year-Old is Dead Because the United States Government Put a Monitor on His Leg – Pierre Damas Bel, Wright State University, class of 2029

Mike Brock, Sep 03, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]

Pierre Damas Bel was twenty years old. He wanted to be a doctor. He was in JROTC. He graduated high school in May and started at Wright State University in Ohio a few weeks ago. On August 31, he called his father on a video call at 8:03 in the evening and said, “I’m not feeling okay mentally because of the bullying.” His father told him to come home so they could talk. Around eleven that night, police came to his father’s door and said Pierre had parked his car on the shoulder of an interstate in Springfield, Ohio, walked into oncoming traffic, and been hit by a tractor-trailer. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

He was wearing an ankle monitor. ICE had put it on his leg after summoning him to a mandatory in-person check-in. He had come to the United States as a child under Temporary Protected Status. His parents fled Haiti in 2024 because armed gangs were burning their neighborhood down. The family had a pending asylum case. In late July, the Trump administration terminated Haiti’s TPS designation, putting roughly 350,000 Haitians on notice that the United States government intended to deport them to a country whose capital the United States itself will not fly passenger aircraft into because it is too dangerous. The offer ICE made to the Haitians of Ohio was this: wear a monitor or accept $2,600 and a flight to Port-au-Prince. Pierre wore the monitor.

It was too heavy to play soccer in. It restricted him to a seventy-five-mile radius. It was visible under his clothes. When his JROTC unit distributed uniforms, Pierre did not receive one, and his father believes the omission was because of the device on his leg. Classmates saw it and taunted him. On Instagram in late July, before he died, Pierre wrote: “I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone. Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”

His father said Pierre felt like he was treated like an animal.

The Republican Party did this. Not “the system.” Not “policy.” Not “immigration debates.” The Republican Party, as a coordinated political organization, made a set of decisions that produced exactly this outcome at exactly this scale on exactly this timeline. They ran a Vice-Presidential candidate who stood on a debate stage and said Haitians in Springfield were eating pets. He said it knowing it was false. He said it because he wanted an atmosphere. He got the atmosphere. A twenty-year-old walked through that atmosphere with a monitor on his leg for the last few weeks of his life, in that same town, and now he is dead on the shoulder of an interstate….

Inside Trump’s Nightmare for Haitians in Springfield: ‘We’re Following Our Orders’ – The most urgent moral test in all of Trump’s America today is happening in a small Ohio city – and we as a country are failing it miserably.

Asawin Suebsaeng, Sep 03, 2026 [Zeteo]

However bad you think things must be in Springfield, Ohio, today, the reality on the ground is worse.

Even if you are looking on, as a distant observer, in disgust at recent headlines (including about the suicide of 20-year-old student Pierre Damas Bel), it is difficult to grasp the scale of what is happening in and around this small Midwest city, and to its Haitian population, their friends, and neighbors.

For years, Donald Trump and his party have waged a protracted campaign of racist lies, fear, and demagoguery on Springfield. This summer, that campaign culminated in the Trump administration’s ICE clampdown in the city, following President Trump’s destruction of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that once shielded the Haitian community. The crackdown – blessed by the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority that this president cemented – is unlike anything else occurring now in Trump and JD Vance’s America.

The president and his allies are orchestrating horror and degradation all over the country. But in Springfield, the heightened level of fear is so widespread, and the state-imposed terror against a vulnerable minority so constant, that it is impossible to see this as anything but the Trump administration’s proof of concept for the president’s militarized vision of what America should be – a place where everyday people are afraid to go outside, in a republic of “law and order” that the federal government meticulously and arbitrarily constructs. It is the latest front in Trump and his party’s mission to codify MAGA’s brand of American racism and sadistic cruelty into law.

Pentagon secretly employs conservative influencers to promote Hegseth, attack critics

[Drop Site Daily, 08-30-2026]

The Pentagon has quietly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings into government roles, including retired colonels Rob Maness, Kurt Schlichter, and Thomas Anderson, without disclosing their assignments, according to The Washington Post.

Maness, Schlichter, and Anderson have published columns and social media posts defending Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and attacking military critics without disclosing their Pentagon ties.

Maness and Schlichter, who have over 135,000 and nearly 620,000 X followers, respectively, hold active “.civ” government email addresses assigned to the office of Undersecretary of Defense Anthony Tata, though a Pentagon spokesman declined to say whether any are paid or detail their roles.

WSJ: Pentagon to take stake in Venezuelan oil venture: The Pentagon will reportedly receive a 35% stake in “North American Blue Energy Partners,” run by Alejandro Betancourt, a Venezuelan businessman close to Rodríguez who authorities have investigated after allegations of money laundering.

The stake will come through “penny warrants,” allowing Washington to acquire shares for a token price with little upfront spending. The U.S. could also buy 20% of the company’s future oil output at cost.

What Might Happen to Trump’s Ill-Gotten Gains

[The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2026]

ICE arrests in San Francisco Bay Area area up nearly 70%, data shows

[ABC 7 Eyewitness News, via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2026]

A single signature by Trump can remove you from the internet

[Il Fatto Quotidiano, via Naked Capitalism 09-02-2026]

Yesterday the Trump administration hit Autistici/Inventati, a European technology collective whose main activity is providing digital infrastructure, with a banking blockade with PayPal and Banca Etica closing its accounts.

Trump’s DOJ Blocked Serious ICE Shooting Charge Over Federal Prosecutor’s “Strongest Possible” Objections

[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 09-04-2026]

War on voting

I Doubt You’re Surprised – There’s a whistleblower addressing the USPS plan to implement Trump’s EO on mail ballots

Joyce Vance, Sep 01, 2026 [Civil Discourse]

War

U.S. military commanders call Iran war “unsustainable”

Drop Site Daily, September 1, 2026

Four senior U.S. commanders formally warned War Secretary Pete Hegseth that the prolonged Iran operation is unsustainable and is already weakening the military’s ability to confront threats elsewhere, including threats to the U.S. homeland, according to the Washington Post.

The objections appeared in a classified August 14 assessment covering the worldwide availability of U.S. forces and weapons.

Those involved in the warning include the Navy’s top admiral, Daryl Caudle, and the commanders of the European, Southern, and Indo-Pacific commands.

Caudle reportedly warned Hegseth that the Navy cannot maintain its current support for the war indefinitely, with barely one-quarter of the destroyer fleet reportedly ready to deploy.

The Pentagon attacked the publication of the classified information but did not deny that the commanders filed formal objections.

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From me this week

• Joe Biden’s Three Genocides in Four Years, Part 1: COVID — NatWilsonTurner.com
• Irving Berlin Defined American Music — Let It Roll
• Short the Saudis in Combat Sports and Everywhere Else — The MMA Draw

Worth watching

• Disgraceful Degradation — Dmitry Orlov. Orlov, one of the founders of “collapseology,” moves to YouTube and makes a major change to his famous analogy that US collapse will resemble Soviet collapse.
  

  I feel sorry to have led people down a garden path that doesn’t lead to anything specific. People wanted to know when to throw the bags full of cans of spam and shotgun shells into the back of the pickup truck and drive for the hills. Feel free to do that anytime you like, I kept telling them. But I feel that I must do better. And now I believe that I finally can. If I think about something long and hard, sometimes a good idea does eventually pop into my head. I have no idea how that happens. It just happens. or it doesn’t. And in this case, it has finally dawned on me that there was to begin with a flaw in my comparison of the USA and the USSR. They’re not quite symmetrical after all.

  There is a key difference that have that I have been neglecting to take into account. Yes, they were both 20th century military and industrial superpowers, and they both espoused opposing now defunct ideologies. and my superpower collapse soup analogy applied almost equally to both of them. But there is a rather important difference between them. The US is a colonial empire much like the British Empire and other western empires were once. These empires were based on the exploitation of their colonial possessions. They sucked resources out of them while preventing their social and economic development. Along the way, they saddled them with permanent debt servitude. They enforced their trade policies through military means. But the heavy-handed tactics of previous colonial eras are no longer necessary. Instead, there is control of mass media, cyber warfare, color revolutions, the IMF, the World Bank, and the US Treasury with its endless sanctions. These are all means of coercing compliance. from countless from countries around the world. And what this compliance means is willingness to export products and commodities in exchange for US government debt.

  This is the wealth pump which the US has been running for decades to drain wealth from around the world to export inflation and to subjugate much of the planet. This wealth pump has become less effective over time. But even if it stops working altogether, there is a fall back to an older American technique, piracy. How well it can be made to work in the 21st century remains to be seen. But it won’t fail for the lack of trying.

• Cold War 2.0 #84: Russia Secretly Helps Iran Develop Supersonic Missiles — Syriana Analysis, with Tarik Cyril Amar. Tarik Cyril Amar’s weekly appearances on Syriana Analysis are a weekly must listen to me. I love their dynamic, their accents, their humor, and they are subject matter experts I trust as much as I trust anyone about these topics (I trust no one about these topics).
• Russia’s Ukraine Endgame — Putin Has Lost Patience With Zelensky — Vladimir Brovkin. Former Harvard Prof Dr. Vladimir Brovkin understands Russia better than most. He’s worth listening to.
• Setback for Trump: Iran intensifies US strikes as Vance denies wedding attack — Janta Ka Reporter. Great daily anti-Imperialist news round ups, and presenter Rifad Jawaid’s vicious and hilarious commentary on Trump regime buffoonery is always amusing listening — even when covering the most awful shit.
• On Sh*t… Another Private Credit Fund Just Blew Up — Eurodollar University. My go to for coverage of private credit’s struggles.

The AI bubble and its doomers

• Did 700 AI bots actually form a civilization? — User Mag. Betteridge’s law of headlines in action. Doomerism is the other side of the coin of AI hype.
• Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit — The New York Times. What for the doomer swerve. He’s playing up the scary trying to save MSFT’s investment into OpenAI. This is straight bullshite.
• Dwarkesh Patel’s wildly popular but dangerously misleading account of the OpenAI Hugging Face incident — Gary Marcus. Marcus calls out the well-written and compelling AI doomer BS, with a classic Douglas Hofstadter line about Ray Kurzweil.
• Red Alert: OpenAI is poised to cross an AI safety redline — Gary Marcus. Everytime you think Scam Altman can’t make things worse, here he comes with some new outrage.
• The new Sanders-Casar Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act – and why I oppose it — Gary Marcus. I am generally politically aligned with Sanders and Casar but I do not trust them on tech issues.
• Taxpayers Must Not Be on the Hook for Bailing Out the AI Industry — Truthout. Oh but we will be.

Politics and corruption

• Michael Needham — The White House Hack Tells All — John Helmer. A great piece on one of the newest idiots in the Trump administration, possibly the least qualified Deputy National Security Advisor in US history.
• How a Brazilian Billionaire Helped Shape Trump’s Beef Import Plan — The Wall Street Journal. Joesley Batista met with Trump a day before the president announced a plan to waive tariffs on beef imports, angering farmers and ranchers.
• A Crash Course Into the 14 Names on Rep. Thomas Massie’s Epstein List — bekahdayyy. Fine folks.
• Rahm Emanuel: ‘You Don’t Like My Ideas? Show Me Yours’ — Rolling Stone. This asshole….
• Rahm Emanuel and Brothers to Donate $550,000 to Train Palestinian Pediatric Doctors in Israel — Haaretz. Cynical.
• Democrats shocked after 2 members cross aisle to help Republicans — CNN. Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez rescued a GOP procedural vote, reportedly to clear the way for Golden’s lobstermen bill. It also let Johnson proceed to messaging votes Democrats oppose, including a resolution condemning socialism.

Also worth your time

• Paid actors, AI writing: How a new kind of video business cashed in on America’s divided politics — Semafor
• US Crude Oil Production Is Showing A Lot Of Weakness — HFI Research. Not good for Team America.
• Spy-scammer shootout — Events in Ukraine. Ukraine just over the top insane.

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