Ian Welsh

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

Author: Nat Wilson Turner Page 5 of 6

The Mainstreaming of Nick Fuentes

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On September 30, 2025

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In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s death, there is a frenzied competition to replace him as the face of the young American right.

Nick Fuentes, who largely built his following by trolling Charlie Kirk for his support of immigration and Israel, seems to be the biggest immediate beneficiary.

The Bulwark has a good backgrounder on the relationship between Kirk and Fuentes before September 10, 2025. It was called “How the Groypers Won: In the clash between Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes, the Pepe people prevailed” and was published in June:

“I’ve noticed people like Charlie Kirk and Matt Walsh are now calling for an immigration moratorium,” Fuentes said, in comments first noted by Media Matters. “That means they want to shut down all immigration. And suffice to say, the groypers have won. It’s just not even a question at this point.”

Fuentes has a point. After nearly a decade of being treated as the skunk at the Grand Old Party (so much so that even Trump had to claim not to know him after the two had dinner with Kanye), some of the Republicans’ leading thinkers have adopted his ideas.

No one better symbolizes the right’s surrender to Fuentes than Kirk.

The day before Kirk’s murder, Fuentes got the classic New York Times soft-focus feature article.

The Times featured some red-hot quotes from Fuentes bashing Trump:

“When I was a teenager, I thought he was a Caesar-like figure who was going to save Western civilization,” Mr. Fuentes, 27, said in an interview. “Now I view him as incompetent, corrupt and compromised.”

Specifically, he has criticized the president for showing solidarity with Israel over the war in Gaza, for refusing to release the Epstein files and for considering extending student visas to Chinese nationals. On Labor Day, Mr. Fuentes posted on social media, “Trump 2.0 has been a disappointment in literally every way but nobody wants to admit it.”

In the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s death, as I posted at Naked Capitalism, Fuentes reacted sharply to widespread allegations that Kirk’s accused killer, Tyler Robinson, was one of Fuentes’ groypers:

He seems to have bounced back, maybe this piece by Graeme Wood of The Atlantic calling the accusations of Kirk’s accused killer being a groyper “outlandish” turned things around.

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And things are on the up for Fuentes, as Wired reports:

In the aftermath of Kirk’s death, Fuentes struck a more conciliatory tone, urging followers not to pick up arms, but also repeated that he believes Kirk was “complicit in the Israeli capture of the right wing for a very long time.”
Rather than damaging Fuentes’ popularity, Kirk’s death has accelerated it. His X following has grown by almost 175,000 since Kirk’s death, and he has seen his following on Rumble increase by more than 100,000.

His livestream commemorating the death of Kirk was among his most watched by far, with over 2.5 million views. His livestream the following Monday discussing who was responsible for Kirk’s death also saw a higher-than-normal viewership. In the space of less than an hour, Fuentes earned over $5,500 from the top 50 Super Chat donations made by supporters…

Despite being suspended from most major social media platforms, last year Fuentes was reinstated on X by Musk, who wrote that he could stay on the platform “provided he does not violate the law, and let him be crushed by the comments and Community Notes.”

Rather than being crushed, Fuentes has seen his following skyrocket from 168,000 at the time his account was restored in May 2024, to almost 925,000 today.
…

Despite his growing influence within the GOP and the Trump administration, as well as his rapidly rising support among young white men in America, Fuentes has repeatedly said that in order for his movement to make an impact, it needs to operate in the shadows.

“No rallies, no protests, we don’t need to show everybody how many of us there are because the second that we do, they will identify, isolate, and destroy us,” Fuentes said on a recent livestream. “We want them to have no clue how many Groypers there are, where they are, who they are. We want them to be completely in the dark.”

…

Fuentes’ disdain for many of his supporters appears to have no impact on his popularity, but the 27-year-old is clear that what he refers to as the “grug-level” supporters are not what is needed in order for his movement to take control. Instead, Fuentes speaks about attracting “elite human capital,” supporters who will then become part of an “officer class” of “super intelligent, entrepreneurial” people.

“Once we get 1,000, 5,000 of those guys, those are going to be the party officials, party apparatics as an analogy,” Fuentes said. “I’m kind of interested in inspiring those people, indoctrinating those people. They watch a show, they get the ideas, they get the inspiration, they kind of take a project into their own hands.”
Great.

Fuentes certainly bears watching.

Other things I’m watching/reading:

Words From the Right: Some Surprising Restraint, Some Shocking Horror

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On September 23, 2025

24 Comments

By Nat Wilson Turner

In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I’ve been following the American right especially closely.

I want to share two responses that I initially found surprisingly sensible and reassuring, and one response that is appalling in its shamelessness, vile almost beyond belief.

And even the second response ultimately left me chilled by the end.

The first was a podcast featuring former BlackRock portfolio manager Edward Dowd that I was watching because I’m a financial doomer. The conversation turned to Charlie Kirk:

Edward Dowd: Anecdotally, people are saying they’re leaving the Democrats because they’ve lost. A lot of normal Democrats who aren’t high media consumers who just are watching what’s going on and hearing some of some of the people that they thought were friends saying abhorrent things are running (from the) center to the right.

So that needs to show up in the poll numbers because right now it’s anecdotal.

The worry of course is this Charlie Kirk assassination. Charlie Kirk interviewed me three times. He’s a wonderful human being. I’m 58 and I marveled at his communication skills and his ability to create what he did from such a very young age.

I mean, he was he was a phenom in at 19 and he just built something that, quite frankly, I was in awe of. He was quite an individual and I’m sad that he’s gone.

But when you step back and analyze this, my biggest fear is that this is the beginning of a divide and conquer strategy. I’ve said forever that this is a class issue, not an us versus them, left versus right, black versus white, Hispanic, Muslim.

This is this is a class issue and we are at the end of a grand cycle and we need to focus on who’s really in charge and the divide and conquer strategy has been well used throughout the millennium.

The key to focus on is whatever narrative is coming out. If it’s about dividing, ignore it. And remember, this is a class issue. When I say class, I’m not talking about someone with $10 million. I’m talking about the oligarchs, the super ultra wealthy, the .01% 01% that control the lion share of the wealth of the globe.

I must admit I was not expecting a former BlackRock portfolio manager to come out with a class war angle on Charlie Kirk. I must say I agree.

Which might make me more open to the things he had to say about the COVID pandemic and illegal immigration later in the video, or maybe not.

The second was a video featuring John Robb of Global Guerrillas, a security consultant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and a tech millionaire who was involved in the creation of RSS, among other things). Robb was contacted by a younger self-described Patriot, Brian Keith, in the aftermath of Kirk’s death, and the two streamed their conversation live on X.com.

Keith described the conversation as “part WTF, partly why am I so angry, partly how can I avoid being someone else’s tool, and how to deal with this swirl of current events.”

He goes on to quote some advice from Robb’s writing that inspired the conversation:

Brian Keith: I remember I was out hiking when I heard about (the death of George Floyd), and I remember being tribalized on the side of anti-cop when I was experiencing the empathic triggers that you talk about. And then later upon learning more, you realize, wait a minute, what I was immediately experiencing was quite different from after I had backed away from the empathic trigger or looked at more of the data, I had quite a different conclusion than I had in that first moment.

But that was then. This time’s different. This time, my immediate response is right, because my tribe I’m currently identifying with is completely accurate. So that’s how I feel in the moment. And you’re talking me down in chat.

With George Floyd, it was I didn’t know at the time when I first saw the empathic trigger. It was a black guy in an inner city of some kind. But it was police violence and I’ve experienced police harassing me. So it was sort of like me.

But then there’s Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk’s a lot like me. He’s who I wish I would be in some ways. So can you help us, John? Can you help us not necessarily decouple from the empathic trigger, but contextualize it in a way that helps us be more sane and less tribalized, make better decisions?

John Robb: With Charlie Kirk you feel that the bullet hit the neck it’s an internal transfer it’s a massive amount of information from the head of the victim how they’re seeing the world their fear their their desperation and it comes right into your head and it’s instantly modeled and it’s overwhelming . We don’t have the kind of barriers that we would have in real life when we’re online. When that happens, you feel an intense rage at the perpetrator.

You’re immediately jumping to a conclusion that fits your new framework, your tribalized mentality. That somebody says something, they’re immediately enemy. non-human, absolute evil. And if you get to that point where you’re bouncing around like that, you’re just a redshirt in Star Trek kind of thing. You’re just a fodder.

Keith: You don’t have any agency in this conflict. And what does fodder look like in the digital age? It looks like retweeting things or commenting on things or… acting in a way that if someone was attempting to control you they would want you to act as opposed to treating yourself as an individual that has ability to orient that might be different than someone else who looks sort of like you. Yeah, um fodder.

So far so good, right? Then the conversation took a turn that I wasn’t expecting, which sent a chill down my spine:

Robb: Usually in a civil conflict, the people who get activated, who lose agency, are the first ones to jump on board, the first ones to initiate violence. Those are the people that almost invariably get killed. Those people, those groups are run over by the bigger players that come later. So just for this audience you don’t want to be in that first group.

Keith: This reminds me of Eric Prince’s new phone, where some of the thought when he came out with his new phone was, well, do you want to be aligned with Eric Prince?That may have significant pros or significant cons in the future, depending on what you believe the future holds.

And now all this happens and Prince is on Twitter saying executions, executions, executions. He could easily be the next president right now. I’d vote for him. Trump has a few days before he loses me. I’m like, no, no, we need executions right away.

Because I’m so angry that it’s the whole seeing red thing. It’s seeing red for a guy I’ve never met in a place I’ve never been and yet, I’m ready to say, oh yeah, Eric Prince, President for life. Executions everywhere. No mercy against them.

Robb: But that’s life. You’re connected at a deep level. And that’s one of the major reasons Trump has to act, to designate many of these groups, left activists, as terrorist organizations and act. in order to prevent the kind of upswing and violence where we get those kind of street battles between the right-taking kind of revenge or action against these groups at a level of violence that we haven’t seen so far.

I’d like to see some compelling evidence for this wave of “leftist” violence before the death of Kirk is used to justify a horrifying clampdown in the U.S.

I’m not aware of any actual leftists in the U.S. with any measure of influence, and I’m not aware of any organized “leftist” violence since the Weather Underground disbanded in the early 1980s.

But let’s get to the really bad, totally appalling shit.

Of course, it’s Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, speaking at the Kirk Memorial in Arizona:

So yeah, this is bad, and things will continue to get worse in the United States.

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Late Nite of the Long Knives for Liberals

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On September 19, 2025

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By Nat Wilson Turner

Former POTUS Barack Obama tweeted about the firing of late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel:

Obama followed that tweet with one linking to a recent NY Times op-ed by Never-Trumper Republican David French. Adding insult to injury, Obama followed up with a link to an excerpt from a Frederick Douglas speech.

People were quick to respond with links to French’s previous tweets celebrating the deplatforming of Donald Trump in 2020.

Historian of the American right, Corey Robin had an excellent retort to Obama on Facebook:

I understand the impulse, at moments like these, for politicians and public spokespersons to say, as Obama did yesterday, and as he did multiple times throughout his presidency, that we need to be able to talk across the divide, we need to acknowledge our similarities despite our differences, that we need leaders who understand there is no red America, no blue America, just America. It’s not my sensibility or way of thinking, but it runs deep in our political tradition, so it’s not surprising that people turn to it in moments like these.

People like Obama usually point to Lincoln, particularly his First and Second Inaugurals (or least the conciliatory part of the Second), as their model and exemplar for their interventions.

But Lincoln actually is an instructive case for a quite different reason. And that is that despite starting his career issuing bromides like these, he came to understand, as time went on, a quite different relationship between words and deeds, between toleration and power, between reconciliation and reality.

From a very young age—specifically, when he was 28 years old, long before he came to national prominence—Lincoln had an uncanny sense that the growing violence in Jacksonian America was  caught up in the question of slavery and abolition. In 1838, he delivered a fascinating address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, where he meditated on the growing predilection for violence, both political and apolitical, in the country, and offered cautionary words about where things were headed. Despite his keen understanding of the roots of the violence and its direction, the best counsel he could offer was that all Americans needed to recommit themselves to the rule of law and the Constitution. Otherwise, he warned, some Napoleon type would come along and do one of two terrible things: free all the enslaved or enslave all the free. Despite his own opposition to slavery, in other words, Lincoln’s recommendation at this point was for people to gird their loins of lawfulness against abolitionists and enslavers. Both sides do it; we, the good, in the middle, must not.

What made Lincoln great was not that early speech, though it’s interesting in all sorts of ways that I can’t do justice to here. Nor was it his later giving into some bloodthirsty militarism during the Civil War, though there are moments of holy violence in his Second Inaugural that still send shivers up my spine and that I cannot read aloud with my throat seizing up and my voice cracking.

No, what made Lincoln great was that he understood that, in the end, there would be no establishment of the rule of law until justice had been served and slavery abolished. There could be no refusal of violence that would stick, that would sound like anything but the blandest sanctimony, until the underlying social violence—the combination of the Negro Question and the Labor Question—was resolved, through concerted action by the state.

What makes today’s calls for reconciliation and pleas for recognition of everyone’s humanity so empty and formulaic is that they are completely severed from any sort of action or larger awareness, any attempt to get at the underlying social and economic roots of the problem. 

Robin gets at Obama’s moral vacuity and communicates what made Lincoln different than today’s loathsome liberals.

But Robin’s post avoids the very same glaring issue that the liberals upset about Kimmel’s firing are ducking: Gaza.

My immediate reaction was summed up by anti-Zionist Jew, Alon Mizrahi, commenting on Kimmel and his firing, not Obama’s response:

Jimmy Kimmel could have been fired for being a man and a human being, speaking out against a genocide and all the horrors of Gaza and paying a price with his head up high. Instead, he’s being kicked in the ass for some idiocy no one will even remember.

There is zero dignity in American public life. Zero. This is a big reason why Zionists took them over this easily. They may have a lot, but they are forever worthless.

Professional clueless centrist Matt Yglesias has been similarly castigated by Palestinian activists for willfully ignoring the murder of journalists in Gaza and the relentless bipartisan attack on the free speech rights of anti-genocide protestors. Some choice examples:

Meanwhile, Yglesias’ former partner at Vox dot com, Ezra Klein, is doing his very best to restore the centrist-conservative alliance that dominated the post-9/11 GWOT Bush-Cheney years.

First, Ezra wrote a hagiography of Charlie Kirk that avoided quoting its subject a single time. Then he followed up with a long and friendly interview with Ben Shapiro, the man taking over Kirk’s organization, entitled “We Are Going to Have to Live Here With One Another.”

Which is a pretty elegant way of announcing he is on board with the current right-wing moral panic and assault on speech.

American centrism has well and truly exposed itself as utterly bankrupt in every sense. Now that it is clear the Obama-Clinton-Biden-Harris project has lost to Trumpism, craven careerists like Klein (or Gavin Newsom or Disney’s board) only know one thing to do, surrender and get back to attacking the left.

The problem for centrists is that once the right has fully taken over, there is no more need for them.

Even being a Democrat in good standing with AIPAC won’t save you from your angry constituents as freshman New Jersey US Rep. Nellie Pou is learning:

Republicans believe Pou, who succeeded Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. after Pascrell died last August, is the most vulnerable House Democrat in New Jersey, and have targeted her over her votes against GOP spending bills and for her opposition to President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Progressive activists, meanwhile, are criticizing her for joining other Congress members on a recent trip to Israel paid for by a pro-Israel lobbying group.

…

Pou’s vulnerability was exposed last November when she won her election by a relatively small margin. Pou defeated Republican Billy Prempeh by five points. The last time Pascrell sought reelection in a presidential election year, he defeated Prempeh by 34 points.

At a time when Rasmussen believes laying low would be the safest way for Pou to keep her seat, he said her trip to Israel made her an even bigger target.

…

The 9th District, which includes parts of Bergen, Hudson, and Passaic counties, has historically been a solidly Democratic one. But Trump won the district by about one point (in 2020, Biden won it by nearly 20 points), a win fueled in part by support from Latino voters. The district is 41% Hispanic…

The ground is falling out from under the useless, bought-and-paid-for centrists nationwide.

As the Ramones once sang, Glad to See You Go Go.

Jimmy Kimmel was never funny anyway; his humor revealed no larger truths, and he won’t be missed. We’re not talking about Lenny Bruce here, or even Jon Stewart.

I’ll mention that Trump had openly targeted Kimmel since he took down Stephen Colbert and that the Kirk kerfluffle was only a pretext, but it’s a small point, to be noted and no more.

Americans lost our free speech rights when the Biden administration started cracking down on anti-genocide protests on college campuses, and Trump finished the job when the deportations started.

Interregnum of Unreality 2008-???

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On September 16, 2025

34 Comments

By Nat Wilson Turner

I would like to propose that the United States and associated English language information sphere remain in what I call The Interregnum of Unreality, which I posit kicked off in 2008.

It’s tempting to declare us in a new regime, given Trump’s re-election and seeming consolidation of power, which has seen him bring the Silicon Valley companies and much of the MSM onside.

But I think it’s more useful to think of Trump’s second term as merely a change in management for the pre-existing apparatus of control, which seeks total information dominance via traditional and social media.

Until the pillars of American power (the dollar as reserve currency and the perception of American military primacy) fall, the Interegnum continues.

Symptoms include this and this.

And monsters flourish in interregnums. It was the interregnum between the Russian defeats of 1904 and the final fall of Nicolas II in 1917 that produced Rasputin after all.

Until or unless the United States openly goes through the financial crash, market crash, and admits we are back in recession (or Depression), The Interregnum of Unreality will continue.

The Interregnum of Unreality kicked off when Obama’s administration and Bernanke’s Fed elected to keep the markets and economy going via massive Quantitative Easing rather than structural reform of the markets that failed under Bush and Obama.

It was paired with a change in geostrategic tactics. No new boots on the ground invasions, although the Iraq and Afghanistan occupancies were maintained as long as possible.

Instead, Obama preferred no-fingerprints regime changes (Egypt, Tunisia, Ukraine, etc) or proxy wars  (Syria, Ukraine). He also happily accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for essentially not being GW Bush, even while continuing and expanding on many of Bush’s worst policies (surveillance, drones, etc).

A new era will also require the undeniable end of the United States’ pretense to be the global military hyperpower, capable of facing China, Russia, and Iran simultaneously while brutally dominating the Western Hemisphere.

Obama inaugurated a style of total information dominance completely removed from actual policies or outcomes. He built on the media strategies pioneered for John F. Kennedy: slick TV and print media packages with Obama as the inspiring figurehead.

They initially ran wild with social media, unleashing it on the Arab world in 2011 and rapidly realizing more control was required.

After Trump’s election win in 2016, Obama and the Democrats moved to set up a Silicon Valley censorship regime, sending RussiaGate ringleader Mark Warner to Twitter and other companies to let them know that if Adam Schiff wanted an account removed it would be removed.

The “Resistance” to Trump in his first term included much genuine grassroots opposition but was headed by resistance from the Deep State, the MSM, and the online monopolies.

Biden attempted to expand on the total information control, but since he was as charisma-challenged as Obama was blessed and the wheels came off of so many of his policies mid-term, the Democrats lost control of the machine along with their credibility.

Biden was Benedict to Obama’s John Paul 2.

The MSM and Silicon Valley have moved into Trump’s camp (or been bought and destroyed by Trump’s backers like CBS News).

I suspect one of the reasons for our Interregnum of Unreality is caution on the part of America’s major ops who don’t want to provoke a suicidal attack from the dying eagle.

The Interregnum of Unreality (2008-?) is one in which The Empire can suffer enormous, humiliating defeats in what is basically the WW3 preseason, but it cannot be openly, undeniably revealed to the populace of the US that we are no longer the world’s dominant military power.

It’s why pausing the 12 Day War was so critical. It was essential for everyone to temporarily de-escalate things before someone got nuked.

Now Bibi’s Qatar attack is another instance of possibly self-destructive overreach. Poor Ukraine is losing out on the narrative control as it’s slowly strangled by the Russian python, which has little interest in conquering territory and every interest in drawing the UAF into bloody battles that are slowly but surely demilitarizing Ukraine, their stated goal in the SMO.

In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, we’re seeing the Trump administration moving to expand its power ala the post 9/11 frenzy which produced the Patriot Act, mass surveillance, the Afghan and Iraq wars.

But because someone like Kash Patel has nothing like the control of the apparatus of state power that say, John Ashcroft enjoyed in 2002, we’re seeing a kind of keystone cops clampdown so far.

ICE is similarly limited to self-defeating debacles despite the much more capable Stephen Miller essentially having the funding to rebuild it from the ground up.

I argued at NakedCapitalism that this clampdown might not go according to plan, but I expect things to blunder along until one or both bubbles (economic or military) pop.

Explaining Ukraine To Your Uncle: The Causes of the War

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On November 26, 2024

10 Comments

Now that even the Council on Foreign Relations is admitting Ukraine can’t and won’t win its war against Russia, there might be some serious cognitive dissonance for people who’ve not been paying much attention and bought into the official narrative on the war.

If you find yourself faced with the proverbial ignorant uncle at Thanksgiving this year and want to appear fact-based rather than conspiratorial, maybe the following round up of links and sources about the beginnings of the war will help.

It’s bad enough that hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in a losing and pointless effort, but it’s important to rebut the narrative that Russia was the aggressor and not NATO and the US.

The work of researcher Ivan Katchanovski is definitive and completely debunks the official US narrative on the Maidan Revolution:

His work was vindicated in a Ukrainian court in 2024.

Uncle Ignorance should also familiarize himself with the names Stephan Bandera & Yaroslav Hunka. Bandera has been regarded as the “Father of Ukraine” since 2014. Hunka is a Ukrainian SS veteran who received a standing ovation at a session of the Canadian Parliament last year.

That’s not to even get into the consensus reality that NATO expansion backed Putin into a corner and that US foreign policy legend George Kennan called it “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”

The Brookings Institute 1999 history of the post-Cold War efforts to enlarge NATO will read like “Russian propaganda” to anyone whose knowledge of the war came from MSNBC starting from a blank slate in 2022.

Also, your Uncle will want to be beaten about the head and shoulder with this 2008 confidential cable from current head of the CIA and then US ambassador to Russia, William Burns who strongly opposed Bush & Cheney’s offer to invite Ukraine into NATO (revealed by Wikileaks.)

Also the story of the Ukrainian Civil War from 2014 to 2022 has been systematically mistold.

Key graphic which shows how Ukraine dramatically upped their shelling of civilians in the independent republics just prior to Russia’s invasion — forcing Putin’s hand.

Graph of explosions per month in Ukraine from 2014 to 2022.

Source:The Special Monitoring Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE SMM)

Uncle “Ukraine Is Heroically Resisting Aggression” will also want to learn all about the horrific mass murder of anti-Maidan counter-protestors in Odessa in 2014 that is VERY well known in Russia and Ukraine and almost completely unknown in the US.

Norwegian Professor Glenn Dieson has a fine piece explaining “How the Strategy of Fighting to the Last Ukrainian Was Sold to the Public as Morally Righteous..”

Here’s a sample quote from his piece:

For almost three years, NATO countries have boycotted diplomatic contacts with Russia, even as hundreds of thousands of men have died on the battlefield. The decision by diplomats to reject diplomacy is morally repugnant as diplomacy could have reduced the excess of violence, prevented escalation, and even resulted in a path to peace. However, the political-media elites skilfully sold the rejection of diplomacy to the public as evidence of their moral righteousness.

This article will first outline how NATO planned for a long war to exhaust Russia and knock it out from the ranks of great powers. Second, this article will demonstrate how the political-media elites communicated that diplomacy is treasonous and war is virtuous.

This is just scratching the surface but essentially for those who been exclusively following US & UK media, everything they know about Ukraine is wrong.

Enjoy those awkward conversations around the table!

Democrats will not adapt to this defeat

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On November 6, 2024

20 Comments

There won’t be any introspection.

Empires, like fortunes, are lost slowly and then all at once.

I’m afraid what is coming is going to fall on every American fairly equally like the snow on the graveyard at the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead”

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Democrats who have themselves not yet fallen into precarity or the economic abyss can not and will not accept that our system is completely rotten and we need to change course and leadership.
It took the GOP from 2008 to 2016 to admit that the Reagan/Bush playbook and leadership class was bankrupt and had to go.
It will likely take multiple election cycles before some figure or movement arises that can win a Democratic primary. And given that the Democrats have a long and proud history of sabotaging the most popular and most likely to win the general election candidates it might require a whole new party emerging.
Democrats had their chance at a new direction and likely multiple administrations and an even longer dominance of the Congress with Bernie Sanders but rejected the clear will of the overwhelming majority of the young voters of their party.
Those young voters are drifting away in multiple directions.
Of my comfortably retired upper-middle classic acquaintances none are even willing to admit publicly (some will in private) that the Democrats make poor tactical choices, much less admit that the whole party and every individual needs to really re-evaluate their approach and even core beliefs.
Trump is at least a wild card which presents some chance of positive change, but the odds of radically negative change are much higher.
Regardless, the status-quo has been thoroughly rejected by the majority of the American public.
That is a fact people need to accept in order to try and steer that majority in the least self-destructive direction possible.
It’s unfortunate that the members of professional-managerial class (and those of us who have pretensions to it) have never truly accepted the idea of majority rule.
We’re going to lose a war in humiliating fashion — with an outside chance that it will be over quickly — which will trigger economic collapse (and that’s if we don’t start nuking people).
Then and only then will our ruling elites turn on each other in something that will be like a post-modern parody of the first American Civil War.
Hopefully it’ll be over in 5-7 years and some of us will be alive to adjust to the new normal and enjoy a few decades of relative peace as we adjust to penury, plagues, and rapidly worsening climate change.
Jonathan Cook had some good observations:

Kamala Harris didn’t lose because she’s a woman or because she’s black.

She lost because, if your political and media system – rigged by donors – limits the choice to two hardline neoliberal candidates, with anything else denounced as “communism”, the most hardline, neoliberal candidate has an edge.

Over time, the system keeps moving further to the hardline, neoliberal right. You can’t stop that relentless shift by voting for one of the two symptoms of your diseased political system.

You have to rise up against the diseased system itself.

As did Freddie de Boer:

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Jill Stein.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Putin and the Russians.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Bernie Sanders and his supporters.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Rogan.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Glenn Greenwald and The Young Turks.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the decision to run with Tim Walz.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the New York Times and its occasional Democrat-skeptical opinion pieces.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Biden for getting out of the race too late.

You can’t pull all the usual Democrat tricks. You have to actually figure out what’s wrong with your party, root and branch. Because you called the guy a fascist, again, and he walked right through that insult to the Oval Office, again. And the eternal question presents itself: what are you going to do about it?

Postliberalism, Liberal Apogee, Routine Elite Failure and Then?

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On October 23, 2024

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I was alerted to Nathan Pinkoski’s “Actually Existing Postliberalism,” by N.S. Lyons’ response “The Post-Cold War Apotheosis of Liberal Managerialism,” and enjoyed both tremendously.

Pinkosi’s piece is an excellent short history of the public-private partnership currently aiming for absolute global cultural control via the weaponization of finance that he calls postliberalism.

I thought it would be fun to excerpt all the times Antony Blinken’s name appears in the piece.

First mention:

When Bill Clinton took office, he continued the pursuit of openness. In 1993, he ratified NAFTA and relaxed the ban on homosexuals in the military. However, he made it clear that the old liberalism was not enough. Eager to extend the reach of democracy and confront foreign enemies who stood in its way, his administration developed new tools to advance America’s global power. In September, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake outlined a new paradigm. His speech, “From Containment to Enlargement,” bespeaks a political revolution. It provided the blueprint not only for the foreign policy agenda of nearly every U.S. president since then, but for the convictions of every right-thinking person. Lake’s speechwriter was Anthony (sic) Blinken.

Second mention:

After Biden was sworn in as president, his administration shelved a plan to overhaul sanctions policy. A consensus held that if the kinks of the past could be worked out, then the Americans and Europeans had all the weapons in place to launch a devastating financial first strike against their preferred targets. Planning began in the first year of the new administration, with Secretary Blinken’s State Department taking the lead. So by February 2022, just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine faltered, the arrangements were already in place. The strategic possibilities seemed limitless. Russia could be brought to its knees; Putin would follow in the ignominious footsteps of ­Milosevic and Gaddafi.

The execution of the strike was dazzling. The scale, especially the involvement of SWIFT and the targeting of Russia’s central bank, caught the Kremlin by surprise. It was ­Barbarossa for the twenty-­first century. Yet the first strike did not yield the promised results. Nor did the second, third, or fourth. Putin’s approval ratings soared, Russia’s industrial output increased, and its military continues to grind away at the Ukrainian army. Despite implementing nearly 6,000 sanctions in two-plus years, the euphoria of spring 2022 (let alone that of the holiday parties of 2011) is long gone. Although American policymakers have said again and again that they have mobilized a global coalition against Russia that has left the country isolated, that is not the case. The map of the countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia closely resembles the map of the countries that have legalized same-sex marriage. Economic warfare against Russia has exposed the limits of the global American empire.

Lyons applauds Pinkoski’s essay but rejects the notion that this is a revolution against liberalism — instead, it is its apogee.

Sadly, he doesn’t mention Blinken, but he does elaborate on the frightening ambition of this movement:

The managerial ideal is the perfect frictionless mass of totally liberated (that is, totally deracinated and atomized) individuals, totally contained within the loving arms of the singular unity of the managerial state. To achieve its utopia of perfect liberty and equality, liberalism requires perfect control.

This ideal is, of course, the very essence of totalitarianism. Yet if we wonder why the distinction between public and private has everywhere collapsed into “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics,” this is the most fundamental reason why. Perhaps, for that matter, this is also why the U.S. and EU now habitually sponsor LGBT groups in Hungary or India, and finance human-trafficking “human rights” NGOs in Central America and the Mediterranean: because managerialism’s blind crusade to crush any competing spheres of social power has gone global.

In response, a comforting tonic from The Archdruid, John Michael Greer at Ecosophia, whose reader “Dave” asks him:

I’ve noticed a growing and extremely worrying trend of the “elites” of politics and entertainment pursuing reckless and (to me) clearly wrong courses of actions that blow up in their faces, and then instead of honestly looking at the situation they’ve had a large hand in creating and doing a mea culpa, either doubling down and getting mad at regular people when they’re less keen to do what the elites tell them, or trying something else without ever really honestly accounting for their mistakes. The actions remind me of signs of elite collapse that this blog has talked about for years now and it’s very surreal and worrying to see happening in real time. What is going on and why can’t the “elites”, the people with access to more data and resources and advisers than anyone else, seem to realize what’s going wrong? Do they not care or are their actions part of a larger plan, not to sound conspiratorial?

Greer’s response was just what I needed to hear:

Dave, I don’t think that it’s any kind of plan. Quite the contrary, this is normal elite failure, the thing that comes right before an elite replacement crisis. Just as the capitalist elite of the 1920s crashed and burned, and was replaced by a managerial elite in the 1930s and 1940s, the managerial elite of the 2010s is crashing and burning, and will be replaced by an entrepreneurial elite in the 2020s and 2030s. The entitled cluelessness of a class that has remained in power too long is a familiar thing; comparisons to French aristocrats just before the French Revolution also come to mind.

Although, honestly if this means that Elon Musk and company are going to win what Chris Hedges calls “The Choice Between Corporate and Oligarchic Power”…eek!

Kamala Harris, anointed by the richest Democratic Party donors without receiving a single primary vote, is the face of corporate power. Donald Trump is the buffoonish mascot for the oligarchs. This is the split within the ruling class. It is a civil war within capitalism played out on the political stage. The public is little more than a prop in an election where neither party will advance their interests or protect their rights.

And what do the oligarchs want?

Warlord capitalism seeks the total eradication of all impediments to the accumulation of profits including regulations, laws and taxes. It makes its money by charging rent, by erecting toll booths to every service we need to survive and collecting exorbitant fees.

Trump’s cohort of Silicon Valley backers, led by Elon Musk, were what The New York Times writes, “finished with Democrats, regulators, stability, all of it. They were opting instead for the freewheeling, fortune-generating chaos that they knew from the startup world.” They planned to “plant devices in people’s brains, replace national currencies with unregulated digital tokens, [and] replace generals with artificial intelligence systems.”

As much as I eagerly anticipate the long-overdue fall of our current elite, I truly dread what’s coming up in their wake.

Germany Honors Biden For Destroying Nordstream & Their Economy

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On October 19, 2024

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I cannot believe this is happening:

Germany honored U.S. President Joe Biden for his contribution to trans-Atlantic relations on Friday, ahead of his meetings with European allies on Russia’s war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East.

TIME Magazine: Germany Honors Biden for His Contribution to Trans-Atlantic Ties as the U.S. Election Looms

Germany Honors Biden for His Contribution to Trans-Atlantic Ties as the U.S. Election Looms

The sheer delight the pathetic “Traffic Light” coalition government takes in abasing itself before the US hegemon is pornographic in its shameless indecency. Especially the same week that the Danes reported this:

Just days before the Nord Stream gas pipeline attack in September 2022, warships belonging to the U.S. Navy were on the scene and ordered nearby officials to keep away.

That is according to John Anker Nielsen, who is harbour master at Christiansø, the easternmost part of Denmark in the Baltic Sea, northeast of the island of Bornholm and close to the sites of the Nord Stream explosions.

Map showing the route of Nord Stream 1 and 2 in the southern Baltic Sea and location of the leaks. AWZ=Exclusive Economic Zone
Map: AFP / Nadine EHRENBERG, adapted

Nielsen late last month told a reporter at Politiken, a major Danish daily, that he went out with a rescue team four or five days before the blast to check on nearby ships with switched-off radios, suspecting there might have been an accident, only to find U.S. warships, whose staff ordered the team to turn back immediately.

Never forget Biden threatened Nordstream:

Biden: If Russia invades uh that means tanks or troops crossing the uh the border of Ukraine again then uh there will be uh we there will be no longer a Nordstream 2. We will bring an end to it.
Reporter: What? How would you how will you do that exactly since the project and control of the project is within Germany’s control?

Biden: We will. I promise you we’ll be able to do it.

and Nuland did it too. This video is still up on the State Department’s official Facebook page because they’re proud of it:

“If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

And Never forget what Nuland said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on January 26, 2023:

“I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you [Ted Cruz] like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

Blinken celebrated it as an economic opportunity:

“…ultimately this is also a tremendous opportunity.  It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.  That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come…”

And then there was this from Anne “It’s Time to Prepare for a Ukrainian Victory” Applebaum’s husband who’s a Polish official:

Former Polish FM thanks US for damaging Nord Stream pipeline

The consequences of this have been the deindustrialization of Germany:

German industry increasingly struggles to compete on the world stage. Particularly hard hit are its mighty chemical and heavy industry sectors, which are now in rapid decline. One of the main drivers is policies that have made energy costs skyrocket, and there Germany serves as a canary in the coal mine for other leading industrial nations.

It’s kind of grimly amusing that Forbes’ use of the euphemism “policies that have made energy costs skyrocket” rather than say “self-defeating sanctions on cheap Russian gas combined with the biggest act of industrial sabotage in modern history” and it also doesn’t mention that it’s been America’s policies that have deindustrialized Germany.

It’s also so humiliating as an American that the neo-conservative cabal of psychopathic nitwits has been in sole control of US foreign policy since the Clinton administration and now they have a lock on US corporate media as well.

The above mentioned Anne Applebaum provided the perfect example of their delusion and idiocy with her September, 2022 prediction that Ukrainian victories in Kharkov would bring down Putin.

But that brings me back to Germany’s pathetic ruling coalition. This is how well they’ve done in recent state elections:

In the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, the far-right AfD received more than double as many votes as the three parties which make up the federal coalition government — the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), environmentalist Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) — combined. These parties’ results are each in the single digits. The Greens in Thuringia and the FDP in both states even failed to meet the 5% threshold to be represented in the state parliaments.

And on the left:

A newly established populist party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), managed to score votes in the two-digit range in their very first election.

The German people are chomping at the bit to vote out the gang of traitors who have allowed the US to annihilate their economy.

Although in fairness, they also gave the last US President who walloped the Germany economy the same award:

“Biden received the highest class of Germany’s Order of Merit, which was also bestowed on former U.S. President George H.W. Bush for his support of German reunification.”

Kind of fitting that the era of American unipolarity is framed this way. Bush at the beginning. Biden at the end. The Germans footing the bill for American foreign policy.

 

 

 

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