Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Author: Nat Wilson Turner Page 2 of 4

The Twin Pillars of the Interregnum of Unreality Are Under Stress

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On April 8, 2026

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Guest Post by Nat Wilson Turner

Last Fall, I posited that the US and greater West are in the grips of an Interregnum of Unreality that began when Barack Obama successfully papered over the Great Financial Crisis while addressing none of the causes and leaving the very same banksters whose antics caused the crisis in place.

The Interregnum of Unreality is the legacy of Barack Obama who achieved near-total information dominance via traditional and social media and used that power to promulgate a message that everything was fine, nothing ever happens, the neo-liberal order will never end because it rests on two indestructible pillars:

  1. The perception of American prosperity
  2. The perception of global American military dominance

Thanks to Trump’s impericidal decision to attack Iran in February, kicking off a war he can’t TACO out of, the reputation of American invincibility has taken a beating.

The estimable Aurelian writes in his latest missive of the global political implications of the ass-whipping the American military has taken in the Ramadan War:

That hit is going to be all the larger because of the massive, orchestrated PR campaign that has been going on for more than a generation, presenting the US as the Empire and the Hegemon, its military the unstoppable colossus trampling small countries underfoot. But the test of a hegemon is not how loudly you shout, but whether you can in fact do what you claim. In spite of defeats in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and the ignominious scuttle from the Red Sea, both boosters and critics of the US have been prepared to believe the US had that much power until the last month or so. But now we have price discovery, and it turns out that the US has large and quite capable forces, but it’s not the unstoppable giant ogre that it claimed to be, and never was. The whole “hegemon” thesis, people are beginning to realise, was smoke and mirrors all along: it’s just that now it’s obvious. It’s not just how it is now, it’s how it always was: a traditional result of wars, after all, is to reveal the truth about militaries. No doubt even as I write, pundits are busy composing apologias along the lines of “well, of course by hegemony we just meant Quite a Powerful Nation with a Large Military, actually.” But overselling and underperforming will have their usual political consequences.

He also brings in the second pillar of our interregnum of unreality, the markets:

There’s an interesting comparison to be made with the “Artificial Intelligence” racket, which was similarly hyped, and also expected to somehow guarantee world-dominating status for the US. But in quiet corners away from the hysteria, people who know what they are talking about have been pointing out for several years now that “AI” is a scam, that as an industry it will never be profitable, and that the money, and even more the power and the infrastructure needed, will never be available. And just in the last few weeks, the media are discovering that that’s how it is, and indeed that’s how it always was, if you had bothered to do a few sums. We can add the interesting rider, however, that in a world where generating power is going to have to be rationed, and silicon chips may be scarce, the “AI” scam may come to a swifter and more brutal end than even its worst critics supposed. Exactly what that will do to the US economy I’m not qualified to say, but I imagine it won’t be pretty.

And the damage will not just be financial. Most of the big names of international business, the Musks, the Zuckerbergs, the Altmans and the rest of that lot, treated with fawning reverence by the media and governments of the world, and who have persuaded us that what they think is actually important, will turn out to have empires built on not very much. How badly the poisonous mixture of world depression, financial crisis, and shortage of power and chips will hit them I don’t think anybody knows, but if they survive, their image, and that of the US as a technological leader, will have suffered as badly as the image of its military.

Earlier this week I posted at Naked Capitalism about the deep ties between OpenAI, Oracle and the UAE and that there are indications they are deepening those ties even as the foundations of their partnership are being lit on fire.

The weak links in the AI boom and the Middle East — OpenAI, Oracle, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — are strengthening their ties even as the Ramadan War exposes their increasing vulnerabilities.

Spoiler alert: Despite OpenAI’s jarring strategic shifts last week, the UAE is still pouring money down that hole.

Is reality finally intruding on our generation-long delirium?

When Trump failed to calm the markets last week with his ridiculous address to the nation, it seemed that a little reality was peeking through the veils.

But when Iran joined Trump yesterday in claiming that the basic terms of a ceasefire and ensuing negotiations had been reached, the markets roared their approval, with American equities markets posting huge gains.

This despite the ceasefire never taking place and the Strait of Hormuz only being open for a few hours.

As I attempted to document in a post earlier today at Naked Capitalism, “cognitive dissonance and conflicting agendas among key players” has allowed the western media to engage in an orgy of chatter about this ceasefire that never was even as Israel, Iran, and reportedly the UAE all launched strikes at civilians and industrial infrastructure.

One hopes that Trump realizes he went too far in his genocidal threats to destroy Iranian civilization and will at least refrain from implicitly threatening to nuke Iran going forward.

However it’s almost certain he will attempt more attacks on Iran involving US ground forces and equally certain that those attempts will end as disastrously as his first.

We’re seeing a full-on anti-Trump mutiny from leading MAGA media figures and even 70 of the senescent US House Democrats are calling for Trump to be removed from office because Trump’s rhetoric freaked the American mainstream the fuck out.

Democratic 2028 aspirants Rep. Ro Khanna and Sen. Chris Murphy both capitalized on the Trump-triggered panic and ensuing TACO to raise their profiles. Most of rest of the Dem 2028 aspirants have been caught flat footed, trapped by their zionist obligations and inability to recognize the political moment.

The freakouts and cognitive dissonance will continue until they can’t.

And as Aurelian pointed out, the consequences of the Interregnum Ending will be serioius:

For the US, as I’ve indicated, the shock is likely to be existential: Americans have been so misled for so long by their governments and media about their economic and military strength that the sudden discovery of its limits will be brutal and de-stabilising. Above all, a political culture of entitlement, which is used to issuing demands and threats to try to get what it wants, will suddenly have to cope with the US becoming the demandeur, as it is over the current “ceasefire,” obliged to make compromises and sacrifices to get what it needs to keep the country going, and seeing others expand into the strategic space it has vacated. Whether the current political system will survive the shock, and whether it will be capable of actually making the concessions necessary for survival, are very open questions.

Meanwhile the majority of Americans are getting their faces vigorously rubbed in the litter box of reality every time they pump gas and soon the inflationary impact of Trump’s war will resonate throughout the economy.

The longer it takes for the official narrative to adjust to new circumstances, the longer the Interregnum of Unreality continues, the worse the impact will be and the bigger the looming revolutionary moment will seem to be and the more forceful the ensuing crackdown will need to be to snuff it.

The Illusion of a Revolutionary Moment

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On April 3, 2026

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As the blowback resulting from Trump’s foolhardy attack on Iran begin to directly impact Americans, it’s natural to hope for substantive, positive political change in the U.S. of A.

Polls show Trump hemorrhaging support from all quarters, even among his base.

Polls show the Democratic leadership is deeply unpopular, even with a majority of Democratic voters.

In Maine, polls show sitting Governor Janet Mills is getting crushed by Graham Platner heading into the June 9th primary vote which will determine the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate.

Platner has already survived a brutal oppo dump that dropped just as Mills (backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer) entered the race last fall, including getting caught with a nazi tattoo on his chest.

Platner’s rhetoric is getting remarkably leftist, even using the old Coal Miner’s Union song “Which Side Are You On” in a campaign ad.

And the average price of gasoline in the US has only just hit $4/gallon.

Just wait until it’s $6/gallon nationally and $10/gallon in California.

And wait until more than 45% of the American public figures out that Trump’s War on Iran is not only “not going well”, but that the empire has already suffered a crushing, permanent blow.

This is all happening in a context of economic collapse that was well underway before Trump’s February 28th attack.

In review, we’ve got:

  1. Looming US military defeat
  2. Looming economic crash
  3. Trump and the MAGA movement bleeding out
  4. A rotten, unpopular Dem leadership class hated by all sides

Seems like a recipe for political turmoil, maybe even serious political change, right?

Right.

Yes. This part is obvious.

The not-so-obvious part is this: who will fill the looming political vacuum?

The answer is simple, if not obvious: the political void will be filled by those who are most prepared to seize the moment, and possibly just seize power.

The MAGA forces that brought Trump to power are the most to blame for his disastrous reign.

The Christian Zionists who latched onto MAGA (and took it over) have made their play and it is ending disastrously in West Asia. They could only have emerged as a force in a completely degenerate United States built on delusion and propaganda.

Their day is done.

So, who else?

The Techbros, as the biggest winners to emerge in the neo-liberal era, intend to conquer and dominate the coming era.

They’ve had the most cash and are used to running rings around incumbent powers.

They’ve planned feverishly for the coming opportunity and have massive resources to back their play.

Except they’ve sunk it all on a bet on Large Language Models aka AI which is seemingly on the verge of imploding disastrously (at least from a financial and economic perspective).

Should we join Whitney Webb and Taylor Lorenz in warning against the Techbros?

How scared should we be of the idiot who wasted $83 billion on “the Metaverse”?

Thought much about being “de-banked“? Might want to consider it before “hitting the streets” or just doing journalism.

Americans think it can’t happen here? Well just avoid Ohio and you’ll be fine….for now.

Prepare to Pay for the Despicable Cowardice of Pete Hegseth and Our Loathsome Masters

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On March 5, 2026

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We’ve maybe reached FAFO time for the sleeping American public. Our idiotic asshole officials and oligarchs and genocidal child-predator overlords have done did it this time.

The U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth spoke about the sinking of an unarmed Iranian ship in the Indian Ocean. Here’s what he said:

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth: Last night we sunk their prize ship, the Solamani.

Looks like POTUS got him twice.

Their Navy not a factor.

Pick your adjective. It is no more.

In fact, yesterday in the Indian Ocean, and we’ll play it on the screen there, an American submarine sunk an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo. Quiet death.

The first sinking of an enemy ship by a torpedo since World War II like in that war back when we were still the War Department. We are fighting to win.

Alex Christoforou calls him out:

Alex Christoforou: He talked about death and destruction. He was talking like a maniac. Pete Hegseth. A very unfortunate press conference from the Secretary of War, a top official of the United States of America.

A very, very unfortunate press conference.

Just tell the American people what’s going on with the war in a professional manner.

There’s no need to to talk about death, destruction, hitting them while they’re down.
…
He took a victory lap for sinking a an Iranian ship in the Indian Ocean.

And this Iranian ship was not a combat ship. It was not in combat. It had no ammunition because it was invited to India along with 200 crew members to take part in a ceremony.

It was a guest of the the Indian government, a non-combat ship which was sunk by a US submarine.

So the whole thing was was premeditated. The the US knew exactly what this ship was doing in India. They knew it was not a combat ship. They knew it had no ammunition. They knew it was taking part in a ceremony invited by the Indian government and they went to the Indian Ocean.

The submarine made its way to the Indian Ocean and decided to sink this ship. And my understanding is that all 200 crew members died.

That’s my understanding of it. I’m not sure if there were any survivors.
…
We’re starting to get statements from from India, from various people in India who are who are very, very angry at this incident pointing out that that this is embarrassing, a humiliation, completely wrong for for India to invite Iran to this ceremony and then for the United States to know that this ship is there and then to sink this ship.

And the worst part is that Pete Hegseth was actually proud of this. What are you proud of? What are you freaking proud of? He thought this was some sort of of act of strength.

He was talking about this is about how this is the first time uh a submarine has sank a ship since World War II or something like that.

What are you talking about, psycho? It was there to attend a ceremony (thousands of) freaking miles away without any any weapons on on board.

I couldn’t believe what I was watching. The Secretary of War taking a victory lap for for sinking an unarmed, no ammo ship that was participating in a peaceful event invited by by India.

Hegseth and Trump and those commanding them are so ignorant of the concept of honor they can’t even pretend to have any.

Ryan Grim elaborated:

And the cherry on top of the sundae of evil, the U.S. did not render aid in violation of every law of war and conduct:

Tuomas Malinen, a Finnish investment analyst put it succinctly:

This one requires that I excerpt the full quote:

Tuomas Malinen: So, let me get this straight, @SecWar
.
You just sank an Iranian frigate, which was returning from an international naval exercise in India, near Sri Lanka. In other words, you attacked an unsuspecting “enemy ship” in international waters, thousands of nautical miles from the combat zone in the Middle East.

You know, who conducted such cowardly attacks on unsuspecting naval targets before you? Nazi Germany.

And his follow up:

Most of you do not get this, so let me explain, with one sentence.

The Strait of Hormuz is closed by Iranians and the U.S. navy dares only attack an unaware Iranian ship 3000 miles from this chokepoint of the global economy.

Modern U.S. navy is a bloody fucking joke.

Even gung ho pro US merchant marine and shipping expert John Konrad is baffled as to why Hegseth would do something so stupid and chickenshit.

I’m a bit too panicked to be blogging much more at the moment. Time to stock up on canned foods, etc because these idiots have triggered the biggest oil supply shock in recorded history.

And starvation is just the appetizer:

These idiots might be suicidal and/or stupid enough to trigger a nuclear war which will immediately escalate out of control just like the rest of this insane and reckless operation.

This is unconfirmed but seems entirely likely

For those looking for hopeful signs, Trump is losing the support of his base, like legendary Ultimate Fighting Championship fighter Matt “The Immortal” Brown:

And at least one former high ranking NATO official says “there is no special relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. The former does what it wants and it’s time for Britain to act in our own interest.”

I Miss the Lies of the 1990s but I Don’t Want to Go Back

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On February 17, 2026

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Watching this Richard J. Murphy podcast with John Christensen I was struck by an anecdote that Christensen shared about corruption on the Isle of Jersey in the late 1990s (note that I didn’t have time to confirm spelling of the proper names mentioned or fact check, so I’m redacting those):

John Christensen:I for quite a long time I had been very disillusioned with the government in Jersey. It’s become clear to me that by and large the the regulatory pro processes the laws in play and regulations in place were window dressing exercises and there was very very weak enforcement or compliance.

So the whole thing as far as I was concerned was a charade.

Late one January evening (and this is 1996) the phone went at my home and it was a Wall Street Journal investigating investigating journalist calling an and he started questioning me about a currency trader who was operating in Jersey and a subsidiary of the Swiss bank UBS.

The subsidiary was called [redacted] and and and a major churn client churning exercise which had cost a bunch of American investors tens of millions of (dollars).

And what he said was that the government of Jersey was thwarting any attempt at investigating this and allowing these investors who had lost tens of millions to have access to justice.

I said, “I know nothing about this whatsoever.”

He clearly thought I was bullshitting. He said, “But it’s your department that issued the license to the currency trader to trade in Jersey. (The trader) was not a Jerseyman, and it’s your department that gave him the housing or or supported his application for a housing license to rent property in Jersey.

And I said, “Well, to be honest, mate, I know everything that goes on in my department. I’ve never heard of this.”

He clearly thought I was a liar. And I did a deal. I said I will go in first thing tomorrow morning and check the files and if what you’ve said is correct then I will help you. I will cooperate.

Now I was in this extraordinary situation because I was a very senior civil servant. In fact I headed the government economic service. Part of my job was to work with international media.

I went in, checked everything he said, stood up and I realized that in order to circumvent me and my department, my boss, [redacted], the chief adviser…had gone round my back um and issued a license which should never have been issued and had given support for a housing consent which by policy should not have been supported.

And he’d done that because it turns out that at that at the time when this felony started, the most important politician in Jersey happened to be a member of the board of [redacted].

So here’s corruption in a very British form.
…
Another part of the corruption lay with the media in Jersey. BBC Radio Jersey never asked the the correct questions. The Jersey Evening Post never asked the correct questions; which were how the hell did this guy get a license to operate in Jersey and how the hell did he get a housing permit?

Because both were against government policy. And the reason they did that was because the Jersey Eden Post at that time belonged to a very senior politician which itself is corrupt.

This is all very British. This is the way things operate in Britain.

Journalists go to great lengths to not ask the right questions because they are themselves corrupted. …It was a staterun organ in effect at that period and it probably still is to some extent.

This anecdote raised conflicting points in my mind.

On the one hand, I admire the seriousness, technical expertise, and ethics of Murphy and Christensen. They represent the best of their generation and have multiple qualities I don’t see from younger reformers.

I also am nostalgic for an era in which a whistleblower like Christensen could actually make an impact by talking to the press. People were tried and convicted, etc.

That kind of thing is much missed in the Trump/Starmer era.

On the other hand, my lived experience of the 1990s contrasts so strongly with how the period is damned to be remembered historically that it inspires awe at the power of the dominant narrative in the West in that era.

The 1990s was the age of Sir Jimmy Saville after all.

In America we had Bill Cosby and Woody Allen, who may not have been knighted but had a comparable status as secular sages, beloved and admired.

Of course, we didn’t know then what we know now about Saville being a prolific sex predator, or Cosby being a serial rapist or in Allen’s case, people were trying to tell us, but many people were convinced his marriage to his ex-wife’s daughter was a love match.

We certainly didn’t know Woody was having dinner with Noam Chomsky….and a man we hadn’t heard of yet named Jeffrey Epstein.

It was comforting to watch the official propaganda of Ken Burns’ Civil War series on PBS and be reassured about the noble nature of both sides in that war and then follow it up with Eyes on the Prize which taught us that things had been bad in the racist past but the miraculous 1960s had solved everything.

Perhaps I was just young and naive, but in the 1990s it somehow seemed plausible to accept the mythologies of the capitalist west.

Things like the Iran-Contra Scandal or Watergate showed that there was corruption, but it was limited and could be dealt with.

After all, wasn’t that bright young Rudy Guliani bringing down the Mafia itself?

Hadn’t the evil empire of the USSR fallen without a war?

Hadn’t an American president united the whole world against Saddam Hussein’s aggression and fought and won a war to liberate Kuwait?

Even better hadn’t the Color Revolution in Serbia shown that Gene Sharp had distilled the non-violent revolutionary techniques of Gandhi and MLK into a formidable instrument for freedom?

From the vantage point of 2026, post-Enron, post-9/11, post-2008, post-Maidan, post-Trump/Brexit, post-COVID, it’s just as impossible to look back fondly at Gene Sharp and company as it is to enjoy the comedy of Bill Cosby with your kids.

Yes, it is upsetting and alarming to watch David Ellison’s CBS blatantly censoring a late night show or US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declaring a new era of colonialism, but perhaps it’s good that the lies of this era are so flagrant.

Trump’s Religious Liberties Commission Implodes Over Zionism

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On February 13, 2026

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POTUS Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission is tearing itself apart in a fight about zionism.

The leading dissident, Carrie Prejean Boller, the 2009 Miss California USA is a right-wing Catholic who picked a fight with zionists at a meeting of the Commission.

Here’s how NBC describes the dust-up:

A member of the federal Religious Liberty Commission has been ousted after a hearing this week that featured tense exchanges on the definition of antisemitism. The ousted member, Carrie Prejean Boller, had defended prominent commentator Candace Owens, who routinely shares antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Prejean Boller, a model turned conservative activist, denied that Owens had ever said anything antisemitic, quoted a Bible verse that attributed the death of Jesus to Jews and pushed back on the idea that some people mask antisemitism in their criticism of Israel.

“No member of the commission has the right to hijack a hearing for their own personal and political agenda on any issue,” said Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, chair of the commission, in a statement Wednesday. “This is clearly, without question, what happened Monday in our hearing on antisemitism in America. This was my decision.”

Boller fired back on X.com that Patrick could not fire her, only Trump could.

Patrick’s tweet got over 4.4 million views and Boller’s reply 2.3 million views. This is the mainstream of 21st Century American political discourse.

Boller spoke to Yair Rosenberg at The Atlantic:

“It is not a biblical mandate that I have to worship Israel,” Carrie Prejean Boller told me today. The former Miss California USA turned social-media influencer was dismissed from President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission yesterday after drawing charges of anti-Semitism. But, she wanted to make clear, she regrets nothing—and has no intention of disappearing without a fight.

On Tuesday, the Religious Liberty Commission held its fifth hearing, in Washington, D.C., to discuss anti-Jewish prejudice. Meetings of blue-ribbon panels are typically sleepy, stage-managed affairs designed to serve the purposes of whatever administration put them together. But Boller had other ideas. She repeatedly interrogated the participants about their opinions on anti-Zionism, which she distinguished from anti-Semitism, and complained that other panelists had called Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, the wildly popular podcasters, anti-Semitic.

Video of Boller’s interjections went viral, sparking furious recriminations on the right. “I’m with her,” declared former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Boller took to social media in her own defense and began resharing others’ support for her conduct, including Owens’s claim that the two women were being assailed for refusing to “support the mass slaughter and rape of innocent children for occult Baal worshipers.” Boller’s performance raised her profile—her previously marginal X account increased its following 20-fold. “Be a good Goyim and give me a follow,” she posted Tuesday afternoon, inaccurately using the plural form of the colloquial Hebrew word for “non-Jew.” Yesterday, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, the chair of the Religious Liberty Commission, announced that Boller had been removed, saying in a statement that “no member of the Commission has the right to hijack a hearing for their own personal and political agenda on any issue.”

Trump influencer Laura Loomer chimed in (600K views) to claim that the White House ordered Boller’s removal from the Commission:

For those not following this administration closely, here’s some background on Loomer and her role in Trump 2.0 (“chief loyalty enforcer”) from PBS last summer:

Laura Loomer has successfully lobbied to remove aides from several key government roles, including the National Security Council. Despite her close alliance with the president, she’s drawn some foes within the Republican Party, including Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Laura Loomer: “I’m not working for President Trump. I’m not getting paid by President Trump. I’m not in the Trump White House. I wasn’t even on the Trump campaign. And yet I feel like every single day it’s a full-time job just to make sure the president is protected and that he’s receiving the information that he needs to receive.”

The open war over zionism on the right side of the political spectrum is a dramatic contrast to the more subdued conflict between Democratic party voters (who overwhelmingly oppose Israel) and their elected officials (who overwhelmingly support Israel).

2028: Red and Blue Vs. Tech?

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On December 10, 2025

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By Nat Wilson Turner

Sounds good to me.

Not my idea though. I must give credit where credit is due.

Balaji meant it as a warning to his fellow tech bosses, but I’m taking it more as a great suggestion.

Those of you not familiar with Balaji Srinivasan should reference this Gil Duran piece from the New Republic from 2024.

Relevant bits:

…you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for what’s to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.

“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balaji’s 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories. I mentioned Balaji’s ideas in two previous stories about Network State–related efforts in California—a proposed tech colony called California Forever and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco’s government.

Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”

“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.

Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless.

The Financial Times had more on the “network state” or as they call them “for-profit cities.”

John P. Ruehl at Naked Capitalism has covered a specific “network state” in Honduras called Próspera that has been underdevelopment for some years and may have played a role in Trump’s decision to interfere in the recent Honduran elections after pardoning their drug-dealing ex-president.

I’d include an excerpt or two from the above, but I want to stay on topic as this is just by way of background on Balaji.

The main point is he can tell that the techbros (and the rest of the oligarchy) are close to wearing out their welcome with the American people.

When/if the AI bubble pops and when/if it takes down the larger stock market and possibly the entire U.S. economy, their welcome will be thoroughly worn out.

The secondary point is that Balaji and his ilk don’t care about The United States of America, they’re already planning their post-nation state moves.

His rhetorical tactics remind me of those AI boosters who choose to contribute to Nvidia’s stock price by “warning” that “imminent AGI” is a threat to destroy humanity.

Larry Summers Being Awful Has Little to Do With Jeffrey Epstein

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On November 21, 2025

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After three decades of creating ruin and disaster across the globe, Larry Summers is finally being pushed from the lofty heights of power and prestige.

The proximate cause of his downfall are recently released emails between Summers and suicided arms dealer/sex trafficker/intelligence asset/money launderer Jeffrey Epstein.

The emails show the married, middle-aged Summers going to Epstein for advice on how best to manipulate a woman he claimed to be mentoring into a sexual relationship.

Summers comes off like a complete putz in the exchange:

Summers: We talked on the phone. Then “I can’t talk later”. Dint think I can talk tomorrow”. I said what are you up to. She said “I’m busy”. I said awfully coy u are. And then I said. Did u really rearrange the weekend we were going to be together because guy number 3 was coming” She said no his schedule changed after we changed our plans. I said ok I got to go call me when u feel like it. Tone was not of good feeling. I dint want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits.

Epstein: shes smart. making you pay for past errors. ignore the daddy im going to go out with the motorcycle guy, you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh.

While it’s nice to finally see Summers pushed off the world stage (we hope!), Matt Stoller, Rudy Havenstein and others are pointing out that Summers’ loathsome exchange with Epstein is the least of his sins.

Surely it’s more important that Summers was “wrong on the big important stuff for most of his career” as Stoller put it than that he was a creep who looked to a monster for advice on attempted adultery.

Politico sums up Summers’ prodigious rise in politics, for which he abandoned his Harvard tenure:

Summers would never achieve the type of intellectual breakthroughs that his uncles had. Perhaps he was too attracted to — too distracted by — the more muscular life of political power and influence that he first experienced in 1981, when he went to Washington to work with Feldstein, Ronald Reagan’s chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. The year after winning the Clark medal, Summers headed to the capital again to work at the World Bank, then joined Lloyd Bentsen’s Treasury Department in the new Clinton administration.
…
(Summers) would become Robert Rubin’s deputy when Rubin took over from Bentsen in 1995. Their work together on the international debt crises of the 1990s made Summers famous; in February 1999, TIME magazine put him, Rubin and Fed chair Alan Greenspan on its cover, with the headline “The Committee to Save the World.” A few months later, Summers succeeded Rubin as Treasury Secretary, serving until the end of the Clinton presidency.

Havenstein recommends (among other excellent pieces) this 2010 Charles Ferguson take down of Summers from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Some highlights:

…rarely has one individual embodied so much of what is wrong with economics, with academe, and indeed with the American economy.
…
As a rising economist at Harvard and at the World Bank, Summers argued for privatization and deregulation in many domains, including finance. Later, as deputy secretary of the treasury and then treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, he implemented those policies. Summers oversaw passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed Glass-Steagall, permitted the previously illegal merger that created Citigroup, and allowed further consolidation in the financial sector. He also successfully fought attempts by Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the Clinton administration, to regulate the financial derivatives that would cause so much damage in the housing bubble and the 2008 economic crisis. He then oversaw passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which banned all regulation of derivatives, including exempting them from state antigambling laws.

Summers didn’t just lay the groundwork for the economic crash of the 2000s, he actively mocked those who warned it was coming:

When other economists began warning of abuses and systemic risk in the financial system deriving from the environment that Summers, Greenspan, and Rubin had created, Summers mocked and dismissed those warnings. In 2005, at the annual Jackson Hole, Wyo., conference of the world’s leading central bankers, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Raghuram Rajan, presented a brilliant paper that constituted the first prominent warning of the coming crisis. Rajan pointed out that the structure of financial-sector compensation, in combination with complex financial products, gave bankers huge cash incentives to take risks with other people’s money, while imposing no penalties for any subsequent losses. Rajan warned that this bonus culture rewarded bankers for actions that could destroy their own institutions, or even the entire system, and that this could generate a “full-blown financial crisis” and a “catastrophic meltdown.”

When Rajan finished speaking, Summers rose up from the audience and attacked him, calling him a “Luddite,” dismissing his concerns, and warning that increased regulation would reduce the productivity of the financial sector.

But the punchline came when Summers was put in charge of the Obama administration’s response to the very crash his policies created:

after the 2008 financial crisis and its consequent recession, Summers was placed in charge of coordinating U.S. economic policy, deftly marginalizing others who challenged him. Under the stewardship of Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke, the Obama administration adopted policies as favorable toward the financial sector as those of the Clinton and Bush administrations—quite a feat. Never once has Summers publicly apologized or admitted any responsibility for causing the crisis.

Incredibly, before the release of his Epstein correspondence Summers had been playing a leading role in formulating the Center for American Progress’s Project 2029, intended to guide the policy for a potential Democratic administration to follow Trump 2.0.

The highest-profile think tank on the center-left, the Center for American Progress (CAP), has assigned several high-profile policy types to lead an effort that documents show was internally described as “Project 2029.”

According to two people with knowledge of the arrangement and a member of CAP, one of the leads on the economic policy plank for this project is Harvard professor and former Treasury secretary Larry Summers…

They also said that Summers was the final sign-off on a CAP housing policy paper set to be released next week.

Could it be any clearer that the Democratic party and all its policy apparatchiks are enemies of the people and must be completely purged from the party for it to have any chance on delivering positive results for the American people?

No matter how vast the conspiracies of Jeffrey Epstein, no matter how deeply tied he was to American and Israeli intelligence (and Drop Site News has proven Epstein was both), Larry Summers ruined vastly more lives, caused more death and suffering, and did more harm in his public roles as an economics advisor to two Democratic U.S. Presidents.

It’s also important to note that he started his political career working for the Republican Reagan administration and seamlessly transitioned to the Democratic Clinton and Obama administrations to complete the neoliberal economic transformation begun under Reagan.

Now that the U.S. economy is completely hollowed out and its days as a global hegemon are rapidly coming to a close, Summers is finally being pushed from his high seats at Harvard, Open AI, and the Center for American Progress.

Too bad it came at least 20 years too late.

Did Burry, Altman, Friar, Huang, Karp and Sacks Just Pop the AI Bubble?

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On November 7, 2025

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The stock market bubble inflated by AI hype since late 2022 might finally be popping. If this week’s reversals turn into a sustained downtown, analysts might look back at the actions of tech executives and Trump adminstration figures this week as the straw that finally broke the camel’s back.

The warnings have been coming for a while.

Ed Zitron (on the business side) and Gary Marcus (on the technical side) have been warning about the AI bubble for years now.

Even rubes such as myself noticed when 7 AI-fueled stocks exceeded 50% of NASDAQ’s market cap.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been warning of an AI stock market bubble since August.

Dumbass META boss Mark Zuckerberg started saying bubble a month or so later.

JPMorgan’s Michael Cembalest noted that AI-related stocks have accounted for 75 percent of S&P 500 returns and 80 percent of earnings growth since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

Harvard economics prof Jason Furman pointed out in late September that U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2025 would have been 0.01% without AI capex investment.

Yet Another Bad News Cycle for AI

Meanwhile the litany of bad headlines for AI continued.

This is just a sampler and just from this week:

The Big Short Comes For AI

On Monday, November 3, legendary short seller Michael Burry shorted Nvidia, the chipmaker at the heart of the AI/LLM mania, and Palantir, the AI-powered government contractor.

As of Friday, he’s up about $1B.

Going for That Government Money

That’s when the AI hucksters blinked.

Well, Sam Altman had already blinked, flipping out at podcaster Brad Gerstner and walking out after a testy exchange:

Brad Gerstner: “How can a company with $13 billion in revenues make $1.4 trillion of spend commitments? You’ve heard the criticism, Sam.”

Sam Altman: If you want to sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer. Enough.

I think there’s a lot of people who talk with a lot of breathless concern about our compute stuff or whatever that would be thrilled to buy shares. We could sell your shares or anybody else’s to some of the people who are making the most noise on Twitter about this very quickly.

We do plan for revenue to grow steeply. Revenue is growing steeply. We are taking a forward bet that it’s going to continue to grow and that not only will ChatGPT keep growing, but we will be able to become one of the important AI clouds, that our consumer device business will be a significant and important thing, that AI that can automate science will create huge value.

We carefully plan. We understand where the technology, where the capability is going to grow and how the products we can build around that and the revenue we can generate. We might screw it up. This is the bet that we’re making and we’re taking a risk along with that. A certain risk is if we don’t have the compute, we will not be able to generate the revenue or make the models at this kind of scale.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp went on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday and was asked about Burry’s bet:

“The two companies he’s shorting are the ones making all the money, which is super weird. The idea that chips and ontology is what you want to short is batshit crazy. He’s actually putting a short on AI. … It was us and Nvidia. I do think this behavior is egregious and I’m going to be dancing around when it’s proven wrong. It’s not even clear he’s shorting us. It’s probably just, ‘How do I get my position out and not look like a fool?’”

Wednesday OpenAI CEO Sam Altman went on the Conversations with Tyler podcast and openly called for a government backstop:

“ When something gets sufficiently huge … the federal government is kind of the insurer of last resort, as we’ve seen in various financial crises … given the magnitude of what I expect AI’s economic impact to look like, I do think the government ends up as the insurer of last resort.”

That same day, OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar echoed the same message at a Wall Street Journal technology conference.

The Journal led its story with “OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said that …the company hopes the federal government might backstop the financing of future data-center deals.”

As OpenAI ramps up its spending on data center capacity to unheard of levels, the company is hoping the federal government will support its efforts by helping to guarantee the financing for chips behind its deals, Friar said. The depreciation rates of AI chips remain uncertain, making it more expensive for companies to raise the debt needed to buy them.

“This is where we’re looking for an ecosystem of banks, private equity, maybe even governmental, the ways governments can come to bear,” she said. Any such guarantee “can really drop the cost of the financing but also increase the loan-to-value, so the amount of debt you can take on top of an equity portion.”

Friar said OpenAI could reach profitability on “very healthy” gross margins in its enterprise and consumer businesses quickly if it weren’t seeking to invest so aggressively.

“I’m not overly focused on a break-even moment today,” she said. “I know if I had to get to break-even, I have a healthy enough margin structure that I could do that by pulling back on investment.”

OpenAI is losing money at a faster pace than almost any other startup in Silicon Valley history thanks to the upside-down economics of building and selling generative AI. The company expects to spend roughly $600 billion on computing power from Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon in the next few years, meaning that it will have to grow sales exponentially in order to make the payments. Friar said that the ChatGPT maker is on pace to generate $13 billion in revenue this year.

Friar realized immediately she’d screwed up and went to LinkedIn to course correct:

Unfortunately for Friar, she couldn’t take it back nor did she address the other dumb things she said at the WSJ confab, per Bloomberg:

“I don’t think there’s enough exuberance about AI, when I think about the actual practical implications and what it can do for individuals. We should keep running at it.”

Regarding charts like this that argue that many of the AI industry’s recently announced deals are just a circular money-go-round, Friar said:

“We’re all just building out full infrastructure today that allows more compute to come into the world. I don’t view it as circular at all. A huge body of work in the last year has been to diversify that supply chain.”

Thursday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang flagrantly linked the fortunes of Amercian AI companies to American national security, telling the Financial Times that “China is going to win the AI race.”

The Nvidia chief said that the west, including the US and UK, was being held back by “cynicism”. “We need more optimism,” Huang said on Wednesday on the sidelines of the Financial Times’ Future of AI Summit.

Huang singled out new rules on AI by US states that could result in “50 new regulations”. He contrasted that approach with Chinese energy subsidies that made it more affordable for local tech companies to run Chinese alternatives to Nvidia’s AI chips. “Power is free,” he said.

Gary Marcus was on it fast, pointing out that he’d been warning that the AI bros would go for government funding since January:

Former Blackrock ace Edward Dowd quickly called out the scam as well.

Dowd also warned that:

A cluster of 3 Hindenburg Omens and Altman & Jenson signaling the end is near on the AI bubble by asking for taxpayer assistance does not bode well for the short term on $SPX.

Should Trump green light government assistance and we get a pump it will likely be faded as it will not be nearly enough. Congress has true purse strings.

The stink of desperation is in the air to keep the headline indices afloat with 7 AI stocks. Ends badly at some point.

Sam Altman went into backtracking mode too.

I’d quote the whole thing but it’s mostly bullshit and Altman is a known liar (just check out this 62 page deposition from OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever which references Altman’s “consistent pattern of lying”).

Altman’s claims were complicated when this October 27 letter from OpenAI’ Chief Global Affairs Officer to Michael Kratsios, Executive Director of the U.S. government’s Office of Science and Technology Policy emerged. The letter says (via Simp for Satoshi):

The Administration has already taken critical steps to strengthen American manufacturing by extending the Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit (AMIC) for semiconductor fabrication. OSTP should now double down on this approach and work with Congress to further extend eligibility to the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain; grid components like transformers and specialized steel for their production; AI server production; and AI data centers. Broadening coverage of the AMIC will lower the effective cost of capital, de-risk early investment, and unlock private capital to help alleviate bottlenecks and accelerate the AI build in the US.

Counter the PRC by de-risking US manufacturing expansion. To provide manufacturers with the certainty and capital they need to scale production quickly, the federal government should also deploy grants, cost-sharing agreements, loans, or loan guarantees to expand industrial base capacity and resilience.

Altman spoke to Reuters to “clarify”:

OpenAI has spoken with the U.S. government about the possibility of federal loan guarantees to spur construction of chip factories in the U.S., but has not sought U.S. government guarantees for building its data centers, CEO Sam Altman said on Thursday.

Altman said the discussions were part of broader government efforts to strengthen the domestic chip supply chain, adding that OpenAI and other companies had responded to that call but had not formally applied for any financing. He said the company believes taxpayers should not backstop private-sector data center projects or bail out firms that make poor business decisions.
…
Tech officials argue that these investments are tantamount to a national security asset for the U.S. government [Reuters supplies no source for this argument. Nat], given AI’s growing role in the U.S. economy. OpenAI has committed to spend $1.4 trillion building computational resources over the next eight years, Altman said Thursday.

Regardless of Altman’s backpedaling, the whole thing became moot after the Trump administration shut down talk of AI bailouts.

Trump Tech Czar Slams That Door Shut

David Sacks, the White House’s AI czar (and founding member of the PayPal mafia alongside Elon Musk and Peter Thiel) was quick to shut this talk down, tweeting Thursday morning:

I have to wonder if Sacks’ statement — which was a political must following GOP losses in Tuesday’s elections — might not be a Lehman Brothers moment for AI and the larger stock market bubble.

Ed Zitron’s latest report won’t stop the bleeding:

Based on analysis of years of revenues, losses and funding, from 2023 through 1H2025, OpenAI took in $28.6bn in cash and lost $13.7bn.

It was just reported that OpenAI ended 1H 2025 with $9.6bn in cash.

OpenAI has burned $4.1bn more than we thought.

And as long as we’re risking 2008 flashbacks, never forget that in 2023 the infamous Larry Summers joined the OpenAI board. I’m shocked Larry hasn’t already saved the day.

Sarcasm aside, this may be the beginning of the end for the Interregnum of Unreality that I posited began in 2008.

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