Ian Welsh

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Joe Biden’s Three Genocides in Four Years: Ukraine Part 3

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On September 23, 2026

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UPDATED: 13:37 GDT I added stuff about the “51 former intelligence officials” and the MSM eating crow about the laptop being confirmed to be real.

Russia’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine didn’t just happen. It was a passion project many years in the making.

And no one was more passionate about provoking war with Russia than Joe Biden.

Now that we’ve got the virulently anti-Russian prime minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, telling his parliament that Ukrainian casualties are currently 27,000 a month, it’s not time to let up on old Joe and the rancid ghost of Democratic administrations past.

In part 1 of this mini-series within a series (the prequel covered COVID, we’ll wrap with Gaza), I covered the post-Cold War years when Joe Biden ran point in the US Senate under the Clinton and Bush 2 administrations.

In part 2, I covered Joe’s misleadership role as Vice President up to the success of the Maidan Coup in 2014.

And this bad boy is going to finish out Biden’s term as VP, during which his portfolio included a nearly free hand in Ukraine because Obama was busy hanging out with Jay Z or some shit.

It’s too bad, because Obama seems to have been one of the few decision-makers in his administration with anything approaching a clear-eyed view of the situation.

I covered the Iran War update at Naked Capitalism today. Read it here.

Obama Said No to Arming Ukraine

In early 2016, Obama was quoted by The Atlantic Monthly’s Jeffrey Goldberg in a piece entitled “The Obama Doctrine”:

Obama’s theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.

“The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” (Obama) said.

I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic.

“It’s realistic,” he said. “But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for. And at the end of the day, there’s always going to be some ambiguity.”

…
“There is no evidence in modern American foreign policy that that’s how people respond. People respond based on what their imperatives are, and if it’s really important to somebody, and it’s not that important to us, they know that, and we know that,” (Obama) said. “There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be very clear ahead of time about what is worth going to war for and what is not. Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it. The idea that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area is somehow going to influence the decision making of Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the last 50 years.”

Obama said this having said no to a joint Brookings, Atlantic Council, and Chicago Council demand that the US arm Ukraine to the tune of $1bn a year for three years.

I realize that’s chicken feed compared to the vast sums Biden would pour into the Ukrainian black hole, but it was big money in its day. Back before RussiaGate when most Americans agreed with Obama’s 2012 remark that “the 1980s called, they want their foreign policy back” in response to Mitt Romney declaring Russia “our foreign policy challenge”

Despite presiding over the beginning of the Ukrainian Civil War from 2014 on, Obama’s term was seen as time wasted by true freedom-loving patriots like The Atlantic Council’s Adrian Karatnycky, who wrote the following for Foreign Policy in 2023:

Obama’s Russia policy, including his embrace of the doctrine of Kremlin escalation dominance, has continued to shape U.S. policy during the Trump and Biden administrations. Although Donald Trump behaved badly toward Ukraine by trying to enlist Kyiv in his efforts to weaken presidential rival Joe Biden, he greenlighted the shipment of Javelin anti-tank weapons in 2017 and 2019. Nonetheless, years of fierce debate merely over sending Javelins stifled discussion of other weapons needed by Ukraine, including air and missile defense, battle tanks, fighter jets, and long-range missiles. These could have made Ukraine more secure before 2022, and some of them are still not in Ukraine’s arsenal today.

To his credit, Biden advocated arming Ukraine with defensive weapons when he was vice president under Obama. But when he became president himself, Biden brought many of the architects of Obama’s timid approach to Russia back into the government. As a result of their influence, from the moment in the fall of 2021 when the U.S. government knew Putin was planning to invade to the start of the invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the United States lost a crucial window in which to provide Ukraine significant new weapons and the training to use them. Instead of much-needed howitzers, tanks, multiple-launch rocket systems (such as HIMARS), and heavy ordnance, Washington doled out modest assistance enabling not much more than partisan resistance.

But that’s enough about what Biden couldn’t do as Obama’s VP; let’s look at what he and the policies he backed did do to land Ukraine and the EU in deep doo-doo.

If It’s 2014, That Must Be Crimea Seceding

There’s no way to discuss the events of 2014 without taking a bracing dip into the Black Sea waters surrounding that most strategic of peninsulas, Crimea.

Yeah, yeah, the official Western narrative is that Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine under military pressure from Putin in a patently rigged vote.

And it does seem to be true that the Crimean parliament voted 61-3 to hold the referendum after the building was taken over by unmarked troops.

But I’ve got to point out that Maidan company commander Volodymyr Parasuk bragged after the 328-0 vote in the Rada to remove Yanukovych and install the Maidan government that “our people simply came up to the Verkhovna Rada and detained the deputies, so that they would sit and work and not run off anywhere”.

This followed Parasuk’s threats from the main stage of Maidan of an armed assault on the presidential administration and the Rada that preceded Yanukovych fleeing Kyiv the night before the vote.

I’ll also quote Canadian-Ukrainian scholar Ivan Katchanovski (remember him from last time when a 2025 Ukrainian court confirmed his version of who shot who in the Maidan) who wrote about that 328-0 Rada vote (he also claims that videos of the session show about 262 deputies present for the vote):

“Many others voted under threat of violence by the far-right group of Maidan snipers, the Maidan Self-Defense, and a mob which surrounded the parliament. The commander of the far-right-linked Maidan company of snipers admitted that his group impelled, by force, deputies from the Yanukovych Party of Regions to vote for his removal.”

Anywho, I’m not going to argue about whether or not shenanigans happened in the Crimean vote that followed, but I will point out that Crimea was the only autonomous republic in Ukraine with its own parliament, its own Council of Ministers, and its own constitution, adopted 21 October 1998 and approved by the Rada. It even had its own president until 1995, when Kyiv abolished both the presidency and the Crimean constitution.

I’ll also point out that as of 2001, the last census of Crimea taken, the population was 58.3% ethnic Russian, 24.3% Ukrainian, 12% Crimean Tatar — and 77% Russian-speaking (that’s not including the port city of Sevastopol, which was 71.6% Russian, 22.4% Ukrainian in that same census).

How do you think that overwhelming Russian-speaking majority felt about the new Maidan government’s immediate revocation of the use of Russian as an official language?

The last polling I’ve been able to find of Crimeans shows that in May 2013 — 9 months before the events of February 2014 — 53% of them wanted autonomy and 29% wanted to join Russia.

Do you think those numbers held following the violence in Maidan and the fall of Yanukovych, the President backed most strongly by Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine?

But, the main point to make about Crimea is that the Russian Black Sea Fleet was already there and had been since 1783.

No Russian leader, even drunk Yeltsin, would have voluntarily surrendered the country’s only warm-water port.

That’s like asking Team America to give up the naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

Enough about that; let’s get to the fun part: Hunter Biden and Burisma, laptop included!

Hunter in Kyiv: A Four-Year Fappening

https://www.instagram.com/p/C9GKlTIyCwR/

The fun mostly happened at a Ukrainian gas company called Burisma, founded under noble circumstances when Yanukovych’s ecology minister, Mykola Zlochevsky, granted gas licenses to companies he owned.

I am not a linguist, but I suspect Ukrainian has more words for “self-dealing” than Inuit has for “snow.”

Whatever you may have to say about Zlochevsky’s ethics, he’s a nimble and flexible politician, and he promptly gave two Burisma board seats to two principles of the storied American natural gas powerhouse….Rosemont Seneca Partners.

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By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Yemen and Obama & Trump’s America, Too

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On September 21, 2026

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Trump is cruising for a bruising the USA has had coming since Obama’s second term.

Saturday night I was trying to relax, get over COVID, and enjoy some fights. I found myself doomscrolling instead.

And one particular info-juxtaposition stuck with me, stuck in my craw like my dry COVID cough.

First there were a series of posts from sources on X I consider credible West Asia war news and analysis accounts warning that POTUS Trump and Bibi Netanyahu were telegraphing some kind of massive attack in response to the beating Yemen has been putting on the fragile House of Saud this week.

Late Sunday I’d find out that Trump TACO’d again, but the point remains.

My first thought was, what are we gonna do, turn this:

Sights of the old city of Sanaa, Yemen

Into this?

The devastation of Gaza, 2026

Meanwhile over on Facebook, a very sweet and sincere Democratic friend was posting some tired old bullshit about Barack Obama speaking in complete sentences and all and all the replies hit the same stale note: man, those were the days.

I had to get all Biblical and shit and cite Matthew 7:16-20 “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

Listen up, y’all, the ruin of Gaza and the righteous wrath of Ansar Allah are the fruits of our bipartisan firm of False Prophets Obama, Trump, Biden and Trump and if we Americans continue to let our senescent shitbag POTUS keep throwing mad ordnance around like it’s the day before The Day After, we’re all gonna get what we’re asking for good and hard.

Karma, that is.

About the Oh So Eloquent Barack Hussein Obama

If only he’d spent that eloquence on something other than glossing over the continuation of the worst surveillance and military policies of the Bush/Cheney administration, the biggest destruction of Black wealth in American history, the insurance industry protection racket Rahm Emanuel called the Affordable Care Act, a fascist coupin Ukraine, genocidal attacks on Yemen, Libya and Syria, and making damn sure not one bankster did a single day for the biggest fraud in human history up to that point.

But yeah. Those were the days. Back when the POTUS spoke in complete sentences and bullshitted us right past the massive war crimes he was committing and/or enabling like the Saudi/UAE genocidal assault on Yemen.

In March 2015, the Saudis started bombing Yemen and the Obama administration made sure they had all the Made in America weapons and technical support to do it. And what support it was. In fact, the 2015-2025 attacks on Yemen have been so lavishly funded, and so spectacularly unsuccessful at achieving their stated goals, that it really makes me go, “Oh we’re gonna strike Yemen again? With what exactly, that we haven’t already done given that we’ve dumped about $250 billion on one of the poorest countries on Earth for eleven years and all we seem to have accomplished is really pissing them off?”

Let’s Do Some Accounting

The Pentagon flew aerial refueling for Saudi and Emirati warplanes from March 2015 through November 2018, at a cost of about $300 million — and then couldn’t be bothered to collect. It turned out the Pentagon had undercharged the coalition by some $331 million. As of late 2023 Riyadh still owed $15.1 million of it and told The Intercept they were “not aware of the outstanding debt.”

Eleven and a half years later the tab just keeps getting bigger and Ansar Allah just gets stronger and more defiant.

$’s Spent attacking Yemen, March 2015 – September 2026

  • Saudi Arabia — $100–330bn — Air campaign, air defense, propping up its Yemeni clients
  • UAE — $25–90bn — Its own war plus a decade of paid militias
  • United States — $9–15bn — Refueling, intel, carriers, four bombing campaigns
  • Israel — $0.3–1.5bn — Strikes on ports and airports, plus the interceptors
  • United Kingdom — ~$0.1bn — Typhoons out of Cyprus, Navy missiles

Grand total, low to high: $135–440bn

Every president since has kept it going

Trump vetoed the War Powers resolution in April 2019 — the first time both chambers of Congress had ever passed one — to keep it going. Biden stood up at the State Department in February 2021 and said “this war has to end,” then spent his term running Operation Prosperity Guardian and Operation Poseidon Archer and parking carrier strike groups in the Red Sea at $9 million a day.

Then Trump 2.0 and his dumbass Secretary of Defense War Greasy Pete Hegseth. Operation Rough Rider, March to May 2025: more than $1 billion in under eight weeks. Roughly 2,000 bombs and missiles worth $775 million. Seven Reaper drones shot down, $200 million gone. Three F/A-18s that fell off the deck of a carrier, $210 million. Brown University’s Costs of War project found us firing $2 million missiles at drones that cost the Houthis $2,000.

And it’s still going. On September 10 the Saudis flew 64 airstrikes in a single day to no discernible effect on the battlefield in a dramatic contrast to Ansar Allah’s missile and drone strikes on Saudi cities in response which have clearly lit the Saudi’s shit up.

The only reason we can put a number on any of it is that one economist at Brown — Linda Bilmes, of the Costs of War project — sat down and counted the carrier days, the C-17 flights and the Tomahawks themselves. The Pentagon has never published a Yemen figure, and Congress has never made it. The Saudi and Emirati numbers are guesses built on daily burn rates, because those are monarchies and they don’t have to tell anybody anything.

Now They Want To Do It Some More Again

The Houthis put ballistic missiles over Riyadh, the Saudis intercepted them, and Trump spent the night at Camp David reviewing Yemen strike options before heading back to the White House early. CNN had already reported the pressure building on him to intervene, and that Riyadh itself is out of options. Embassies across the region are issuing warnings.

Strikes? What are we gonna do? Vandalize the world historic Old City of Sanaa?

We’ve spent billions bombing Yemen for the last eleven years and the Brits have spent a century trying to destroy and subjugate the place.

It’s not gonna work and it’s just gonna make the outcome more disgraceful.

What are we going to do to Yemen that we haven’t done already in an eleven year, ~$250B orgy of genocidal destruction waged on a country that never presented a threat to the US or UK and only threatens their neighbors now because they’re tired of being attacked by them?

The only card we haven’t played is sending the 101st Airborne in to get slaughtered in house-to-house fighting in the Old City of Sanaa.

Call it “Fleet of Black Hawks Down.”

And that’s before the oil math. Iran has Hormuz effectively closed, which left the Saudis pushing some 5 million barrels a day across the East–West pipeline to Yanbu instead — until drones out of Iraq hit its pumping stations on September 10 and 11 and Riyadh shut the line. Brent went over $110. What’s left is Project Freedom, the Navy walking tankers down a southern route past Iranian waters.

Brett Erickson, September 19:

“The reality is clear: Too much is going wrong at once. The United States doesn’t have any good options to change the outcome of this war.

The only solution is to cut a deal with Iran and bring an end to this disastrous failure from the Trump Administration.”

Or we could fire off nukes and really go out like world historic chumps whose name will never be mentioned without the survivors’ grandchildren’s grandchildren spitting before they say the hated word “Americans.”

And then there are our European allies lackeys, who are getting wrecked as a consequence of the Saudi decision to bomb the Sanaa airport following the Ayatollah’s funeral and break the truce that had held since 2022:

One in nine French filling stations is out of petrol or diesel, diesel is past €2.39 a litre at a record, and Macron has called an emergency meeting with the presidential candidates. In Grand Est it’s 16% of stations. European diesel cleared $200 a barrel on the benchmark. French officials say the shortage is logistical, not a crude shortfall.

The EU and its governments of US lackeys deserve this, but the European people don’t. Wake up and throw off your Ursulavonderchains.

This is the part that matters

Obama’s Hopey McChangey BS led directly to Trump.

“By their fruits ye shall know them.”

By the big JC’s own definition, Barry Obama meets the definition of a false prophet.

“Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.”

Matthew 7:16–20

The reason this matters — provided that civilization survives the weekend and coming months — is that if Americans don’t abandon this blue vs. red BS and wake up to the fact that both parties are hopelessly corrupt and in thrall to the most sinister forces of militarism and graft imaginable, we are going to get six years of clown show after big Dem wins in 2026 and then another, scarier fascist queued up and ready to go in 2032.

God help us if “we” “nominate” Klonopin Kamala again in 2028, because we might get an “anti-war” Tucker Carlson right away instead. And POTUS Tucker, I fear, would be as good as his word. He’d pull us out of Europe and West Asia and then get down to business rounding up immigrants and minorities here at home and rampaging across Latin America.

Brett Erickson, September 19:

“All of the alerts issued by the Middle East embassies in recent hours could VERY well be in relation to potential U.S. strikes on YEMEN, not Iran.

The wars between Saudi/Yemen and U.S./Iran could be merging into one…”

Let us pray for deliverance. This shit is insane and scary. The mad, dying empire might kill the planet in its death throes.

America, all the murder we’ve been exporting for 80 years is coming home to roost.

It’s on us for not stopping this shit sooner. Karma’s a bitch.

Information Overlord: AI Doomers Up to No Good, House of Saud or House of Cards?

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On September 18, 2026

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Nat Wilson Turner = Information Overlord = Flames Up = Phones Out = No Sense of Urgency

From me this week

From me at the Let It Roll Podcast

From me as Nate Wilcox — The MMA Draw

Me Elsewhere

AI Bubble

Iran War

  • Steve Jermy: End of U.S. Military Primacy – New Strategic Thinking Required — YouTube
  • Republican launches impeachment effort against Pete Hegseth over Iran war — USA Today. “Frances Farmer will have her revenge on Seattle/She’ll come back as fire to burn all the liars/Leave a blanket of ash on the ground”
  • Experts Declare Fuel Crisis Imminent as Global Wars Choke Out Supply — Simplicius. “This type of short-sighted, bumbling diplomacy is like haphazardly putting out random fires one at a time, all while inadvertently starting new ones. Trump thinks the US can act recklessly hostile against the entire world, unscrupulously supplying weapons to Ukraine to destroy major sectors of Russian infrastructure, ruthlessly attacking Iran, etc., and then wonders why the blowback is starting to poison the domestic economy.”
  • The Collapse of American Hegemony and Global Nuclear Risks — The Unz Review. “Raised in a family of Iranian exiles, Trita Parsi came from a background that was less than friendly towards the Islamic Republic. A few years ago, he became co-founder and vice president of the very respectable Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. That organization advocates realism and restraint in foreign policy, with its major donors being leading American foundations, including Open Society, Koch, Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller. “And as Parsi explained in a recent interview, “The United States and Israel threw everything they had at Iran and they failed. As a result, the Iranians are far more confident in their capabilities than they were before.” Meanwhile, regional trust in America had completely collapsed, with the GCC countries recognizing that America could not protect them against Iranian retaliation.”
  • The End of the American Middle East — Foreign Affairs. “The American Middle East is finished. The regional order that has prevailed since 1991 has been one of the many casualties of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. The American and Israeli failure to dislodge the regime in Tehran has proved the bankruptcy of decades of sanctions and violence. The inability of the United States to protect its Gulf allies from Iranian attacks or to keep the Strait of Hormuz open has fatally undermined the core security bargain that justified its network of military bases in the region. And Israel’s increasingly threatening posture and abandonment of any pretense of interest in reaching an accommodation with the Palestinians have ended Washington’s decades-long mission of bringing its Arab allies and Israel together into an enduring security partnership.”
  • Maximum Pressure on Iran Will Fail — Foreign Affairs. “Trump’s War Has Brought American Strategy to a Dead End”
  • Alastair Crooke: West Asia Is Incubating a New Era of Revolutions — “A Decisive and Historic Stage” — YouTube

Ukraine

  • Ukraine: “It’s not a tragedy it’s a crime” — YouTube. “I’ve lived in Ukraine for 5 years. I’ve had a lot of Ukrainian friends, even if I’ve probably lost all of them because we see things very differently now. But still, I actually take Ukraine very seriously. I know the language. And it’s it’s not a tragedy. It’s a crime how ordinary Ukrainians are being sacrificed by their puppet regime and by Western governments who have a sick dream of inflicting a geopolitical setback on Russia. It’s a sick dream under any circumstances. What makes it even more insane is it’s totally futile. In the end, hundreds of thousands, maybe over a million Ukrainians will be dead and they on top of it will lose the war. And this is what von der Leyen wants to go on for even longer. Unbelievable. And in this case, Lavrov made some extraordinary statement about the legitimacy of the Ukrainian statehood itself.”
  • Ukraine Will Be a Cancer on Europe and Russia. Iran a Quagmire for the USA | Amb. Chas Freeman — YouTube. Ambassador Freeman is one of the few wise men left.

Saudi Oil Crisis

Gaza

Israel

Palestine

  • The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Pro-Palestine Israeli — Alon Mizrahi. “We are not the victims here, the story is not about us, and we by no means can replace Palestinian voices. Still, the truth is what it is, and you pay a price for being an anti-Zionist Israeli/Jew”

US Politics

Elections 2026

Economy

  • The Structural Incentives Of Western Capitalism Make Competing With China Impossible — Ian Welsh. “The reason VW and other German firms made so much money in China for so long is that they had, brace for it, better cars. More technologically advanced. Better handling. “But…they didn’t try and keep that lead. They let the Chinese beat them by refusing to properly re-invest their profits. “This is a constant problem in the West: our elites don’t want to compete on price. They don’t want to compete on quality. They want “moats” — they want monopoly profits just for existing.”

Ari Emanuel

Sports Business

Music

Alt Media

Predictive markets

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Joe Biden’s Three Genocides in Four Years: Ukraine Part 2

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On September 16, 2026

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With the toxic and stupid Trump 2.0 regime collapsing in the polls and the useless Democratic establishment licking their chops at the prospect of another electoral gimme in 2026, it’s more important than ever to rub shitlibs’ faces in the abysmal and inexcusable record of the murderous Biden administration.

If we keep voting blue no matter who, we’re gonna keep getting what we got.

In the interest of the public good, therefore, I make my humble offering, attempting to chronicle the three mass death events the senile husk of Joe Biden nominally presided over in his four years in the White House.

I covered COVID first. That was a debacle that many Democrats exclusively blame on Donald Trump and many GOPers and Independents have concluded was a hoax or some shit, but the reality is (as brilliantly documented by Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism in real time) that Biden’s deliberately negligent policies resulted in the death and disabling of over one million Americans.

Next I covered Biden’s role in provoking the Ukraine War from 1992-2008 as a powerful US Senator who never met a war that didn’t give him a stiffy.

Now we’re going to get to the grit, because Vice-President Biden had Ukraine as part of his portfolio under POTUS Obama from 2009-2016 and we all know what he did as President, even if some dumbasses still insist he bears no responsibility for the disaster he spent decades making.

No, Ukraine Is Not ‘Winning’

First I want to establish some facts about the current state of consensus reality by citing some very pro-Ukraine, pro-war authorities who are throwing in the towel.

I’m going to save a few thousand words by using images of the relevant headlines.

Up first, from The Spectator (UK) one of the most blood-thirsty, Russia-hating publications in the English speaking world:

From the “liberal” Wall Street Journal:

From former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who’s made killing Russians his passion project for years now, in the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post (who had to give it multiple headlines so as not to upset sensitive pro-war liberal readers):

HT Simplicius

With that out of the way, let’s get into the time machine, loser, and go back with me to a time when a young Black President that so many Americans had invested with their “Hope and Change” fantasies needed to have an old racist white guy next to him at all times to make idiots and assholes feel comfortable patting themselves on the back for voting for a Black president.

And note, the point isn’t to excuse Putin for his actions. I’m not Russian, Putin’s not my responsibility. I do have the sense to treat Russia with respect, because I’m a student of history and I don’t know of a single instance where fucking with Russia ever ended up in anything but disaster whether for the Swedish Empire, Napoleon’s France, or Hitler’s Germany.

I’m an American and I’m concerned with the conduct of the elected officials who are supposed to be representing me.

Get In, Loser, We’re Going to Kyiv

Biden wasted no time in building upon the disastrous actions of the Bush/Cheney regime at the 2008 Bucharest summit which called for Georgia and Ukraine to be invited to join NATO. By July 2009, on his first trip to Ukraine as Vice-President Biden was already in Kyiv (we spelled it Kiev back then) lecturing Ukraine’s leadership and then flying off to Tbilisi telling them that NATO membership would be cost free (this is after they’d already had their heads cracked in the 2008 Russo-Georgian War that followed immediately on the heels of the Bucharest summit. Anyone remember John McCain saying “We’re all Georgians now”, as he tried to campaign for President on his desire to drag America into a war in a place few had heard of?).

Here’s some of what Biden said on that first visit to Kyiv in 2009, per the Christian Science Monitor which gave Biden that kind of tough guy headline (“Biden’s tough love for Ukraine”) that got him all riled up and gropy with the females on his staff:

Vice President Joe Biden had some surprisingly pointed comments for Ukrainians yesterday.

Speaking in front of 400 Ukrainians in a speech that was billed as an address to the nation’s citizens, Biden chastised Ukrainian officials for, among other things, their immaturity in dealing with inter-party conflicts. Evoking poet Taras Shevchenko, a national icon, Biden said Shevchenko would likely “be wondering why the government is not exhibiting the same political maturity as the people.”

Reforms have stalled and political bickering has become widespread after Ukraine‘s 2004 Orange Revolution. Coupled with neighboring Georgia‘s Rose Revolution a year earlier, the Orange Revolution was a source of hope for Western countries that democracy could take hold in states of the former Soviet Union.

Frustrated by the stalemate and lack of progress, Ukrainians have showed signs of throwing their support to opposition leader Viktor F. Yanukovich, a move that would more closely align the country with Russia and, according to some, could tip the country back toward authoritarian rule.

Biden’s remarks seem to indicate that Ukrainians aren’t the only ones who are frustrated. The vice president was expected to address Washington’s concerns only behind closed doors, according to the Wall Street Journal, and the weight of his public remarks were unexpected.

“Centuries from now, what will Ukrainians say of this time?” he said. “What will they say of their leaders? Will they say they returned to the past, or will they say the beginning of the 21st century launched a period of prosperity, freedom and independence?”

But lest the news out of Ukraine been seen as all harsh, Biden was also overheard praising the country’s women. “It’s certain you have so many beautiful women,” Biden is reported to have told President Viktor Yushchenko at an unscheduled visit to a Kiev pub.

What a charmer. Note that bit about the “color revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia. At the time I thought all that shit was organic and awesome. I also thought Gene Sharp was the greatest man since Gandhi.

I’d love to get a poll of Ukrainians today on whether they think following the US and NATO down the garden path to war with Russia was “the beginning of…a period of prosperity, freedom and independence?”

But let’s keep moving.

How’d That Russian Fleet Get In Crimea? Oh Yea, Legally

Turns out the Ukrainians did, in fact, democratically elect the pro-Russian President Yanukovych. Biden’s visits to the country cease for the full duration of Yanukovych’s term.

Yanukovych signed something called the Kharkiv Pact, which extended the Russian Navy’s lease on Sevastopol for 25 years to 2042 in return for a major discount on natural gas. The Accord easily survived an opposition attempt to renounce it in 2013 in the Rada.

The Yanukovych administration also oversaw the passage of a law that forbade Ukraine from entering into military alliances with anyone. Neutrality is always the first step to fascism, war, and disaster, as all Swiss people know.

2013: Ukraine Caught Between the EU and Russia in Trade Tug of War

Shit hit the fan in November 2013 when Yanukovych backed out of the EU Association Agreement, suggesting instead the “creation of a tripartite commission of Ukraine, the EU and Russia, which would work to remove barriers in mutual economic cooperation and trade liberalisation.”

Yanukovych’s reasons couldn’t have been more sinister and inexplicable, per the OSW:

In the context of the upcoming presidential elections in early 2015, where victory is a priority for Ukraine’s ruling elite, President Viktor Yanukovych’s most important task is to stabilise the increasingly difficult economic situation. To this end, it is necessary to ensure Ukrainian goods’ continued access to the Russian market, and to guarantee external financial support. The Ukrainian government is hoping that, in exchange for the postponement of its rapprochement with the EU, it will manage to come to an agreement with Russia on the issue of a stabilising loan and renegotiating the gas contract.

The crazy cat also blamed the IMF for the collapse of the deal with the EU — and certainly everyone knows that the economic hitmen at the IMF and their ilk only bring prosperity in their wake — per the NYT:

Prime Minister Mykola Azarov of Ukraine told enraged opposition lawmakers on Friday that his government’s decision to walk away from far-reaching political and trade agreements with the European Union was based on fiscal imperatives, and ultimately prompted by the International Monetary Fund’s overly harsh terms for an aid package.
…

Protests against the government’s decision were held in several Ukrainian cities, including Lviv, the largest city in western Ukraine and a hotbed of anti-Yanukovich sentiment, where more than 5,000 people joined a rally in the main square, led by Mayor Andriy Sadovy. Kiev, the capital, was pulsing with emotion that officials and commentators said they had not seen since the Orange Revolution of 2004.

On Friday evening, about 1,000 people protested in the rain in Independence Square, the revolution’s central gathering point, waving European Union flags and chanting, “Ukraine is Europe!” A bigger rally was set for Sunday. The jailed former prime minister, Yulia V. Tymoshenko, issued a statement urging people “to react to this as they would to a coup d’état” and take to the streets.

Note that it was western Ukraine that was the hotbed of protest. Good old Western Ukraine, home of legendary freedom-lovers.

Maidan Protests, Entirely Organic, Break Out

I’ll use the definitely not edited by the CIA Wikipedia entry on the Maidan Protests to tell the next part of the story:

The scope of the protests widened, with calls for the resignation of Yanukovych and the Azarov government.[90] Protesters opposed what they saw as widespread government corruption, abuse of power, human rights violations,[91] and the influence of oligarchs.[92] Transparency International named Yanukovych as the top example of corruption in the world.[93] The violent dispersal of protesters on 30 November caused further anger.[5] Euromaidan was the largest democratic mass movement in Europe since 1989[94] and led to the 2014 Revolution of Dignity.

During the uprising, Independence Square (Maidan) in Kyiv was a huge protest camp occupied by thousands of protesters and protected by makeshift barricades. It had kitchens, first aid posts and broadcasting facilities, as well as stages for speeches, lectures, debates and performances.[95][96] It was guarded by ‘Maidan Self-Defense’ units made up of volunteers in improvised uniform and helmets, carrying shields and armed with sticks, stones and petrol bombs. Protests were also held in many other parts of Ukraine. In Kyiv, there were clashes with police on 1 December; and police assaulted the camp on 11 December. Protests increased from mid-January, in response to the government introducing draconian anti-protest laws. There were deadly clashes on Hrushevsky Street on 19–22 January. Protesters then occupied government buildings in many regions of Ukraine. The uprising climaxed on 18–20 February, when fierce fighting in Kyiv between Maidan activists and police resulted in the deaths of almost 100 protesters and 13 police.[71]

And about those protests, much like the 2004 Orange Revolution, I’d love to see the US State Department’s books on how much of the $5 billion Obama (and Bush and Clinton and later Biden) State Department official Victoria Nuland bragged about investing in Ukraine between 1991 and 2013 went to that kind of crap. I think there are some words for when one country spends immense fortunes to cause civil unrest in other countries; oh yea, it’s called subversion. Unless the US is doing it, then it’s just spreading freedom and democracy to a grateful world.

Crazy that some Ukrainians still wanted to be neutral and do business with Russia, who offered $15 billion in cash and a massive reduction in what Ukraine paid for natural gas. Evil Rooskies. Always up to something sneaky like that.

America’s investments in peace and democracy were bearing their fruits in the Maidan Protests in Kyiv, but a bipartisan pair of peace-loving US Senators went to the Ukrainian capital to help those fruits ripen even faster.

John McCain (R-Hell) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) addressed a crowd estimated at ~200,000 people saying, “We are here to support your just cause… And the destiny you seek lies in Europe.”

McCain shared these noble sentiments while standing shoulder to shoulder with one of Western Ukraine’s most notorious freedom lovers:

Those Putin-puppets at FAIR were still bitching about it in 2018, when then-Washington Post columnist (and current never-Trump freedom lover and Substacker) Jennifer Rubin got to singing McCain’s praises for his sterling human rights record, under an unfortunately chosen photo:

The Washington Post (8/27/18) published an op-ed by conservative staff opinion columnist Jennifer Rubin praising the late Sen. John McCain for his supposed commitment to “human rights.”

Rubin waxed poetic on the ostensible “lost champion” of human rights, who “model[ed] for others the behavior of a free society.” She declared, quite paradoxically, “With the possible exception of the US military…no group was more indebted to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) than the human rights community.”

There was an, er, optical problem, however: For the header image on this column, the Washington Post used a photo of McCain speaking next to the notorious Ukrainian neo-Nazi leader Oleh Tyahnybok.

Tyahnybok, a longtime fascist, has called for a war on the so-called “Muscovite-Jewish mafia” (BBC, 12/26/12). The far-right leader has attacked the role of “Jews-Bolsheviks” in his country’s history, and claims that there is still today a cabal of “Jewish oligarchs who control Ukraine” (JTA, 3/25/09).

John McCain met with Tyahnybok and stood next to him as the senator gave a speech in Ukraine in late 2013, as Business Insider (12/16/13) reported at the time. The Washington Post indicated in the caption on its header image that McCain was “wav[ing] to protesters during a mass rally of the opposition in Kiev, Ukraine, on December 15, 2013.” But it failed to identify the man standing next to the Arizona senator—or his extremist politics, which are the antithesis of human rights.

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Information Overlord: Houthis Roll, Hegseth Bumbles, AI Doomer Hype, Lots of Music Talk

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On September 11, 2026

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Nat Wilson Turner = Information Overlord = Flames Up = Phones Out = No Sense of Urgency

From me this week as Nat Wilson Turner

This week at Naked Capitalism I pulled a shift covering the Iran War and tried to connect the dots between Pete Hegseth’s Department of War and what’s going on with Meta and OpenAI.

I also continued my “Joe Biden’s Three Genocides in Four Years” series with the first installment of the Ukraine debacle.

More of what I wrote and recorded for The MMA Draw and The Let It Roll Podcast is at the bottom of this post but I wanted to feature the news links and think pieces.

What I’m Reading and Watching

The Iran War

  • The Iran War Has Just Had A Major Phase Change — Ian Welsh. On the interceptor math: the US runs out long before Iran does if Iran chooses to go all out, and hitting only three or four tankers a day was a choice rather than a ceiling.

“As I said day one of the war, the math is on Iran’s side: the US will run out of interceptors long before Iran if Iran chooses to go all out.”

Empire, and what it remembers

The AI trade

The AI Doomers really had their moment this week. I hope y’all know most of that crap is as overblown as the hype.

Money

What the heck is going on with the bond market, private equity, etc

 

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Joe Biden’s Three Genocides in Four Years: Ukraine, Part 1

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On September 9, 2026

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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.

Map of NATO enlargement in Europe since 1949, with member states shaded by the year they joined
NATO enlargement in Europe since 1949. Map by Patrickneil and Spesh531, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

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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Information Overlord: Dmitry Orlov Changes His Hypothesis for US Collapse

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On September 5, 2026

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Nat Wilson Turner = Information Overlord = Flames Up = Phones Out = No Sense of Urgency
From me this week

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

Politics and corruption

Also worth your time

Support my work at NatWilsonTurner.com

Joe Biden’s Three Genocides in Four Years, Part 1: COVID

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On September 2, 2026

41 Comments

From the vantage point of September, 2026 it might seem like pointless assholism to kick cancer-ridden, senile old Joe Biden when he’s down.

After all, we’ve got a rancid dotard in Trump threatening to nuke Iran in the midst of what John Mearsheimer is calling the greatest geo-strategic disaster in US history, why bother with ol’ black-hearted Joe?

The reason is simple.

Until Americans, particularly Democrats reckon with just how vile, stupid, and deadly the last three Democratic presidential administrations have been (yes, America’s neocon foreign policy starts with Bill Clinton blowing up Yugoslavia and turning NATO into an offensive alliance and has continued to warmonger ever since, regardless of which party was in power), we’ll keep getting stuck with more of the same “not quite as bad as the Republicans” bullshit and the end of the republic will only escalate.

There is currently a well funded counter-revolution occurring in the Democratic party in which centrist Dems and the MSM are aligning to destroy anti-genocide candidates like Graham Platner in Maine (got him) and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan (they’re still trying although he’s up in the polls).

If Dem voters don’t belatedly realize that their party establishment leadership is as corrupt as the GOP and actively push to purge them, we will not be able to vote our way out.

Never forget the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

So let’s look at the Delaware liar’s abysmal record as US President.

I’m going to argue that the senile asshole and the people around him actually running the country were responsible for not one, not two, but three mass death events that may or may not meet the legal definition of genocide, but certainly meet the moral one.

We’ll start with COVID.

Somehow Biden’s COVID Policies Were Worse Than Trump’s

An idiot like Trump, who’s openly an anti-science ignoramus could have been expected to bungle the response to a once-in-a-century pandemic like COVID. And of course Trump’s policies were a disaster. I don’t have time or space to litigate that here.

I’m just saying that as awful as Trump was on the issue, Biden managed to be even worse — when competence and sanity were key parts of his campaign pitch.

But Biden explicitly promised a return to best practices, “follow the science” and all that.

Instead we got “take the vax” and “get back to work.”

There was never a correction of the bad science of 2020 to clearly explain to people that COVID was spread via aerosols in the air, was rarely transmissable outdoors, and could be largely contained indoors with good ventilation systems and air quality monitoring.

There was also the huge lie that the vaccine would prevent transmission. That lie fooled a lot of people because many vaccines do prevent transmission (measles, polio, mumps, etc), but not for a corona virus like COVID. It shouldn’t have been a hard sell — people know that there’s no point in making a common cold vaccine because it’s a corona virus and changes too fast. We’ve accepted the need for new flu vaccines every year for the same reason.

But no explanations were forthcoming from the ghouls in the Biden administration. Just quiet announcements that data was going to be restricted2

It was the gaslighting of the Biden era that was the hardest thing to take (as long as his policies didn’t give you COVID that is). Four years of assholes insisting “he’s not senile, he’s got a stutter,” “the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine”, “the IDF is investigating” and all that crap. Was enough to drive a person insane. It certainly strained my relationships with friends and family and cost me at least one decade-long creative partnership.

The injury added to the insult was diverting money for COVID relief and prevention diverted to law enforcement3 and other bullshit.

Nearly twice the toll of the first year
444,583
Covid deaths under Trump
Weeks ending 1 Feb 2020 through 16 Jan 2021.
776,832
Covid deaths under Biden
Weeks ending 23 Jan 2021 through 18 Jan 2025 — 1.75 times as many, in a period when vaccines were free and universally available.

Both figures are sums of CDC’s own weekly provisional counts of deaths with Covid-19 on the certificate (dataset r8kw-7aab, data as of 27 Aug 2026). 2021 alone — the administration’s first year — killed more Americans than 2020 did.1

Bar chart of recorded Covid deaths and CDC excess deaths by year, 2020 through 2024. Recorded deaths peak at 463,267 in 2021; excess deaths peak at 530,876 the same year. The excess-death series stops after 2022, when CDC quit publishing it.

The green series ends after 2022: CDC’s excess-death dataset stops at the week ending 16 September 2023 and was never resumed. The gap in the chart is the blackout, drawn to scale.

If Biden Was Out of It, Who Actually Did This?

Funny you should ask.

I happen to think it’s important to lay the blame where it belongs with murderous vermin like Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Obama’s ebola coordinator whose hiring was supposed to signal a return to competence.

Instead he pulled shit like retweeting MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle calling the OSHA vaccine rule “an ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations” which retweet was then cited by The Fifth Circuit as an endorsement when it stayed the rule, and Gorsuch pointed to it when the Supreme Court killed the mandate that January. The chief of staff’s own tweet helped sink the only workplace-safety rule the administration attempted.

Then there was Covid-19 Response Coordinator Jeff Zients, a management consultant and one-time Facebook board member with no public health background, wwho was somehow selected to run the response as a logistics problem for the entire vax-only stretch: the May 2021 unmasking, the Delta summer, the December 2021 rapid-test shortage, the blame-the-unvaccinated presser that December.

Criticized on the way out for rosy predictions of a Covid-free summer and for the test shortage; Public Citizen went after him on global vaccine access. He failed upward to become Biden’s chief of staff in February 2023 with God only knows how many American corpses ground under his wing-tips.

Somehow Zients’ Deputy Response Coordinator Natalie Quillian didn’t save the day, I guess her experience as Deputy Campaign Manager hadn’t really prepared her for handling a pandemic. Go figure.

And who can forget CDC Director Rochelle Walensky who wrote the May 2021 guidance telling vaccinated people to unmask at roughly 35% full vaccination, the statement that vaccinated people don’t carry the virus, the December 2021 isolation cut from ten days to five under airline pressure, and the February 2022 Community Levels metric that turned the map green. A regular magician of mass murder!

And then there’s Zients’ replacement as Covid-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha, who kicked off the “personal risk assessment” era and fobbed off the government’s responsibility to lead a united national pandemic strategy off on individuals left to fend for ourselves.

Jha’s October 2022 National Strategy for Improving Indoor Air Quality is the document that proves they knew what ventilation would take but for reasons that have always baffled me, the chance to do well by doing good (ie it would have been a massive honest graft and payoff opportunity, the kind good government runs on) and funding and leading a national campaign to improve indoor ventilation in schools, hospitals, nursing homes and workplaces….instead he declared the pandemic over while hundreds of thousands died.

And let’s have a special shout-out for the The Biden-Harris transition COVID advisory board: Co-chairs David Kessler, Vivek Murthy, Marcella Nunez-Smith. Members Ezekiel Emanuel, Michael Osterholm, Céline Gounder, Atul Gawande, Luciana Borio, Rick Bright, David Michaels, Julie Morita, Loyce Pace, Eric Goosby, Jill Jim, Jane Hopkins.

Special plaudits to board members David Michaels and Ezekiel Emanuel (older brother of disgraced ex-Chicago Mayor Rahm and UFC and WWE owner Ari Emanuel).

Michaels, an epidemiologist and Obama’s head of OSHA for eight years, who publicly called for an emergency OSHA standard covering inhalation hazards but was awful quiet when Biden (or someone not senile acting on his behalf) killed his own OSHA’s proposed rule.

Emanuel joined five other former transition COVID advisory board members in publishing three JAMA viewpoints calling for a “new normal” of life with COVID, explicitly rejecting elimination, just as Omicron peaked.

Dr. Emanuel boldly said “we’re not going to defeat the coronavirus. It’s here to stay.”

The White House distanced itself from the papers — and then adopted the posture seven weeks later with the Community Levels change.

But never fear, Zeke got his back when he was very early to distance himself from the Biden administration’s disastrous COVID policy. Family trait of the Emanuels to be on both sides of every issue.

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Notes

1. Four ways to count the dead

“Excess deaths” means different things depending on the baseline, and the answers differ by a factor of two.

Measure 2021 2022 Baseline
Recorded Covid deaths
CDC provisional counts, r8kw-7aab		 463,267 246,297 None — a direct count of death certificates.
CDC excess deaths, all causes
CDC xkkf-xrst, summed by year		 530,876 331,469 Observed deaths minus the average expected from prior years.
Same, conservative version
observed minus the upper bound of expected		 443,697 232,223 The cautious read of the same CDC data — the floor.
Academic pandemic baseline
Paglino & Stokes et al., Science Advances		 538,708 — County-level model, March-to-February years. Year one was 620,872.
Peer-country gap
Bor et al., JAMA Health Forum		 1,098,808 820,396 Deaths that wouldn’t have happened at the death rates of 21 peer countries. Only partly Covid.

These measure different things and are not additive. Excess deaths include overdoses, missed screenings and untreated disease — everything a wrecked health system does to people, not only the virus. ↩

2. The order in which the counting stopped

1 May 2021 CDC stops investigating breakthrough infections that don’t end in hospitalization or death. Everything milder goes uncounted — including the data that could have tested the claim that the vaccinated weren’t spreading it.
20 Feb 2022 The Times reports the CDC is withholding most of the data it collects — booster effectiveness for adults 18 to 49, hospitalizations by age, race and vaccination status, wastewater. The stated reason was fear the numbers would be misinterpreted.
25 Feb 2022 “Community Levels” replace community transmission, four days before the State of the Union. The threshold for a green county moves from under 10 weekly cases per 100,000 to as many as 200. Most of the map turns green overnight and the mask recommendations lapse with it.
Spring 2022 Free testing winds down and reported cases detach from wastewater readings. From here the case count measures who can still get a test, not who is sick.
18 Sep 2022 Biden, on 60 Minutes at the Detroit Auto Show: “The pandemic is over.” The line complicated his own administration’s pending request for Covid funding.
11 May 2023 The public health emergency ends and the authority to collect goes with it. CDC stops reporting new cases nationally, loses the power to compel labs to report results, and electronic reporting of negative tests ends. Hospital reporting drops from daily to weekly.
16 Sep 2023 The last week of data in CDC’s excess-death dataset. The tracker simply stops, and was never resumed — which is why the chart above has nothing to show after 2022.
30 Apr 2024 Federal hospital reporting requirements expire and reporting goes voluntary. CMS reinstated mandatory reporting for Covid, flu and RSV on 1 November 2024.

No single order shut this off. It went piece by piece over three years, each removal defensible on its own, the sum of them leaving the country unable to say what was happening to it. ↩

3. The Covid money that went to the police

This one isn’t an inference. The administration campaigned on it in public, and the spending was tallied by reporters.

13 May 2022 Biden asks cities to spend more relief money on police. A Rose Garden event and a fact sheet urging state and local leaders to “deploy as many dollars as possible before the summer months.” By then $10 billion of American Rescue Plan money was committed to public safety, $6.5 billion of it from State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds across 300-plus communities — which the White House itself called one of the largest single-year federal commitments to state and local law enforcement on record.
7 Sep 2022 The Marshall Project tallies where it landed. Of $101 billion allocated by governments through the first quarter of 2022, $52.6 billion was booked as “revenue replacement” — and roughly half of that, an estimated $26.3 billion, went to criminal justice. The LAPD took over $300 million for officer salaries; Alabama put $400 million toward two new prisons. Community violence intervention, the program Biden kept naming, got $187 million — under 1 percent. The figure is a keyword tally of vague Treasury filings, so treat it as an estimate rather than an audit.
More on the same flow: The Appeal, EPIC on relief money buying police surveillance tech, Prism.

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