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 #1 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.
different clue
I have to get to work within minutes. If we are in the Interregnum currently, then various wannabe-ruling groups are probably organizing themselves to kill all the other wannabe ruling groups except themselves. Each one hopes it will be the strongest and will outlast and outkill the others and be the victorious survivor and successor.
Those of us too squeamish to prepare for mass murder and mass democide might at least try organizing and preparing to resist and repel mass democide efforts aimed at whatever group we are percieved to be a part of. We might also engage in certain kinds of pre-violent brain war to gather ourselves together and give heart to like minded individuals.
Here is an example of such brain war in action, in Merrie Olde England. ” The UK welcomes Donald Trump’s state visit by rolling out the world’s biggest photo of the President with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein outside Windsor castle ” . . . visible from the air so President Taco ‘ Fat Donald’ McPedophile can’t miss it if he arrives by helicopter.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1nilxkc/the_uk_welcomes_donald_trumps_state_visit_by/
bruce wilder
It is a sideshow of Unreality at best, but I am fascinated by the hypothetical narrative that Kirk was assassinated by Israel. Max Blumenthal is pushing it pretty hard and Bill Ackman is implicated in the hypothetical.
Narratives are spinning out of control, which is part of the abnormal or unreality, I suppose. I do not see any reason to “believe” here in objective reality where I breathe, but find it difficult to sift facts from the torrent. But, I wonder if it is irresponsible not to speculate, as a way of semi-consciously processing the emerging facts of war, WW3 style, as they are rapidly emerging. Facts like Israel having the capability to assassinate with means ranging from missiles to cellphones. Or Israel having unchallenged political control of the U.S. Here in Unreality, we have to have some way of processing the Brave New World.
Curt Kastens
I think that the date has to be pushed back to November/Dezember of 2000 at the latest.
Things were already visably out of control by the time the Supreme Court elected Bush II as the President.
But things had to be out of control long before that for them to become visable by that time.
The date I now use for hijacking of the American Experiment is the end of reconstruction. It should be clear to historians in this day and age that that is the time that the leadership class in America committed itself to achieving global hegomony.
I am now going to place a comment on the open thread related to the achievement of global hegomony. Check it out when you are done here.
Nat Wilson Turner
@CurtKastens while I agree that things were really screwed up in what I call the post-9/11 GWOT era, I think it differs from the Unreality Interregnum because American hyperpower was unquestioned, the economy had not yet collapsed (and been propped back up) and we were confident (and semi-competent) enough to send hundreds of thousands of American troops into combat.
While Rove, McKinnon, & Dowd certainly had a mastery of spectacle (Mission Accomplished, etc) Bush failed so spectacularly that their showmanship started to show the puppet strings by the time of Katrina in 2005.
Obama put things into stasis to keep the status quo propped up as long as possible after the great financial collapse and set the table for Biden’s completely ersatz term and now for Trump to take the reins.
The thing we’re waiting for is what we got at the end of the Bush regime — obvious and undeniable failure which makes the public insist on change. Obama gave us “Change” instead.
different clue
Here is another step along the way of the TrumpenVance Occupation Regime and its owner-backers advancing their Triple Nazian agenda, step by step.
” Attorney General Pam Bondi: “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society…We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” ”
https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nifvhk/attorney_general_pam_bondi_theres_free_speech_and/
Sean Paul Kelley
@Nat: first, brilliant turn of phrase. Interregnum of Unreality. One of those phrases I wish I had written myself. Me jelly? Yup.
Second, you are correct in your implicit argument that the death spiral of our republic into unreality began in 2008. Obama coulda ‘ben a contenda! But, instead, he consolidated the madness, lawlessness–domestic spying–and corruption of the Baby Bush years.
And thus the Republic dies. What will rise in its ashes is anyone’s guess at this point.
someofparts
Friends who still think the NYT is the flagship for honest reporting are so awkward to talk to these days. At least with neighbors who follow Fox we can admit our differences and agree to avoid speaking about politics altogether.
Must say however that I can appreciate the impulse to flee reality. I do it as much as possible myself.
As to whether military or economic failure will put a harsh end to the interregnum of unreality, in this country I find it hard to separate the two. Sure, in my fantasies the military gets shown to be a paper tiger, yet the economy stumbles on in some mutated form or another. But the military in this country is such a cornerstone of the economy I don’t think it can fail without dragging the economy down with it.
An odd reversal these days is the way people are still flummoxed and reach for euphemisms if I mention being old out loud. There I am, standing in front of them with a head full of gray hair and they invariably get rattled and rush to assure me that I am not old. It’s kind of charming really. The sad thing is that I don’t have the heart to tell them that I feel much sorrier for them because they are young.
someofparts
Obama made Hope a four-letter-word, in a manner of speaking … don’t get me started
Feral Finster
What we are seeing is not an interregnum but the United States ceasing any further pretense that it is anything other than an empire.
Sean Paul Kelley
@Feral: are you going to add the same comment in every post today?
Sean Paul Kelley
@Nat: one last thing: you are correct in your assertion that interregnums produce monsters. But Rasputin was a symptom–not the disease. The assassin of Imperial Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, Dmitri Bogrov was the first monster, the next was Lenin.
bruce wilder
Back in the day, when I was young and politics and political news was more enjoyable as a spectator sports, I had two things, which I do not have in this Interregnum of Unreality (and I miss them):
1.) I had a fairly accurate feel for what other people thought about “things” — political events or revelations or whatever — not just people I knew intimately, but people generally. Looking back, I realize this rested on personal encounters to some tiny extent, but also on being able to see what they saw. There just weren’t that many sources of political news and opinion in the golden age of broadcast television — 3 networks and every big city had at most two daily newspapers, a liberal prestige rag and a conservative vendor of fishwrap usually.
2.) I had a high degree of confidence in sources of information about “objective” fact. I felt confident about the tables in my Statistical Abstract and the assertions of the World Book Encyclopedia. Newspapers and news programs on television seemed genuinely concerned about accuracy and carefully phrased statements to be consistent with an “objective” view. My teachers in school were also great respecters of “objectivity”. I use scare quotes now only because my own view regarding both the possibility and necessity has matured, shall we say?
different clue
Here is another entry for the “birth of monsters” department. ” Outrage as pro-Trump rapper and country singer release pro-lynching song ”
https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/1niqnfr/outrage_as_protrump_rapper_and_country_singer/
I only have a few minutes left before my lunch break is over and I have to get back to work. Maybe after work I will read this entry in more detail. Maybe even listen to the song to refresh the spring of righteous outrage.
I have been watching created content lately by various American Black American content creators. They all seem to agree over the past many months that ” Anti-Black America” in general and the TrumpAdmin in particular want to lure Black America outside their homes and into the streets in great big marches and protests. Every American Black American content creator keeps telling his/her audience to “not take the bait”, to stay indoors and off the streets No Matter What.
They will probably see this as just another rage-bait attempt to get them out onto the streets, just like removing plaques about slavery, suggesting the pardoning of George Floyd’s kiler, etc.
I remember some years ago at my workplace just sort-of overlistening to two black co-workers casually discussing the details of various kinds of firearms and some details about their respective personal arsenals. I don’t remember their names – as far as you know – and I certainly don’t remember a single detail of what they discussed.
My feeling is that Black America is quietly getting ready for when the NaziTrump Administration decides to “go kinetic” against Black America. I have no idea what preparations they might be making. If indeed the NaziTrump Admin takes things to that place, I quietly hope that Black America is able to inflict extremely one-sided casualty counts against its enemies. ( And the same would go for any so called ” lone wolves” or “lone wolf mobs”.)
different clue
Here is an MSNBC segment on early pre-legal developments regarding the Kirk alleged-shooter in custody. It has the totally fake disleading title: ” Utah Cops BLAME TRUMP for Charlie Kirk SHOOTING: “YOUR FAULT DONALD” “. I see enough fake disleading titles of enough YouTube items that I wonder who is writing these titles on purpose? Artificial Intelligence? YouTube’s own paid in-house ragebait farmers? Who?
Anyway, here is the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA8m0MQ_xQI
I might not have even bothered to bring this, except that I saw a comment in its thread that matched things I have read and heard elsewhere, about people right next to and behind Charlie Kirk making various sorts of hand signs leading up to the shooting. Here is that comment.
” @RonSteph-uo9nc
34 minutes ago
If we look at the videos, the people around Kirk seem to be making signs, like in baseball 😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮 ”
and then . . .
” @TerryShaw-l6t
2 minutes ago
He is showing that he is in shock that the people that were supposed to be behind him aren’t ”
Behind whom? Behind Charley Kirk?
Since this is a real-life snuff film and I am too squeamish to even watch it, I won’t be seeing the people behind-around Charley Kirk giving hand signs to somebody or something, nor will I see the apparent shock on the part of Charley Kirk that the people who are ” supposed to be behind him” suddenly are not behind him.
Tougher people than me could watch this video and see if they see Kirk handlers giving hand signs and then suddenly getting out of the line of fire . . . or not. If that is what the video actually shows, then this seems like evidence of an Inside Job conspiracy. People better save that video and make it photo-shop proof and AI-proof to the satisfaction of a Court of Law, in case ” Inside Job Conspiracy” becomes a legal question.
different clue
Here is an actual event that just recently took place and which none of the Big Reach media are mentioning. Instead they have apparently all dropped their Cone of Silence over it. So a very small You Tube-dwelling content creator is videoing about it.
” Horrific Mississippi Hangings Raise Questions as Mainstream Media Goes Quiet ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6hvXRMBbg4
Klanmaga is moving. Can Black America catch up and then get ahead of this Trumpistani Klanmaga initiative? I can think of a high-risk response, namely to send out seemingly-alone Black men as decoys with suitably armed and trained Black “action teams” carefully out of sight and just seconds away. If the Black decoy were to alert the “action team” by radio beacon or electronically or some other way, the “action team” could move in fast and “take action”. What action? I don’t know. Maybe some action designed to take the wannabe-lynchers “off the board” ?
different clue
And here is a video about something . . . a trend? a background sentiment? . . . that the Democrats don’t want anyone to know about and don’t want anybody to have an opportunity to act upon.
Titled: ” I Took Bernie Into Deep Trump Country. Can He Win Them Over? ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP8Oxe6OxJc
There is a difference between Magas of despair as against Magas of desire. One more sign of the pieces of America society grinding around like ice floes as America delaminates. A ” New Deal Revival” Party might do well in West Virginia if such a thing could be invented and if it had a powerful Intelligence-CounterIntelligence Bureau to find and “deal with” every ClintoBamacrat agent which the ClintoBamacrat party would send to infiltrate it.
Daniil Adamov
What on Earth do you mean by Rasputin being a monster? He was only ever a peasant scapegoat that everyone dumped the ruling class’ dysfunctions on. If he was so powerful as was popularly claimed, we would never have gone to war with Germany and Austria-Hungary, as he implored Nicholas to avoid it on account of the suffering it would inevitably bring to the peasantry. I suppose one might more plausibly accuse him of sexual misbehaviour, though that also seems exaggerated, and of being a quack – but hardly worse than the historically godawful palace doctors.
Curt Kastens
Nat Wilson Turner,
That was an excellent explination.
Carborundum
I would place the start date slightly earlier – 11 March, 2007 Austin TX.
someofparts
My biggest complaint about the NYT is their utterly dishonest coverage of Russia. Anyone I know who uses that sad rag as their most trusted source of information thinks that 1) Putin is a dictator and 2) the military action in Ukraine was unprovoked. It seems the NYT has made sure that their readers are completely unaware of the Maidan coup in Ukraine or of the dreadful harm we did to Russia in the 90s.
Nat Wilson Turner
@Daniil Adamov: I am speaking of perceptions, not realities. Rasputin’s death was down to his being perceived as a monster, one so potent it is still used to frighten credulous Americans over a century later. From my point of view, the Czar and the Romanovs were the monsters in that situation. But hapless Nicolas was hardly in command of events. Unfortunately he was in command of an empire.
@SPK No need to be jealous, I was inspired by my jealousy of your burst of produtivity lately. Or maybe jealousy is good if yours motivates you similarly. And thanks for the kind words.
Re: your comments about Rasputin, of course he was a symptom. So were virtually all of the other players in the drama. I’d include Lenin in that category, although he was obviously much more formidable than the unfortunate Siberian monk. Stalin is the undeniable monster in the story. Maybe Trotsky as well. Very interesting to contrast with the CCCP and their “monsters”….that story seems to have a happy ending in a way that Russia’s does not.
Feral Finster
My apologies – computer problems.
Anyway, @different clue:
Sam Kriss notes that “Five years after they were all making very principled objections to cancel culture, the American right are currently combing the internet for insufficiently respectful posts about the newly canonised Saint Charlie.”
Actually, the right was bewailing cancel culture less than a year ago. Then they got the whip hand.
bruce wilder
. . . . Then they got the whip hand.
whocoodenode that would happen?
Purple Library Guy
The right have been purging pro-Palestinian academics from campuses for years and years now, along with anyone else remotely left-ish that they could get a chance to crush. Their whole cancel culture complaint was always massively hypocritical from the start, just like their supposed dedication to free speech which, lest we forget, was ALWAYS a maneuver to suppress speech. Like the right wing “free speech” drill always went “You can’t say bad things about what I just said because that suppresses my free speech!” which I don’t understand how anyone managed not to notice was . . . a suppression of the speech of people wanting to comment on fascists.
Now they get to do it harder and more often because they have more power, that’s all.
different clue
When people say that Trump is a “symptom”, I would say that , no . . . Trump is a “complication”. Or an “opportunistic infection”.
The Clintobamacrats finished the process of giving America political HIV to suppress America’s politicultural immune system. So America’s political AIDS was caused by the Clintocrats and the Obamacrats. Trump is the secondary Pneumocystis carinii infection or maybe the Kaposi’s Sarcoma which easily infected an AIDS-ridden America.
Or if you like the diabetes metaphor better, the Clintobamacrats worked with the Republicans to give America advanced diabetes. Trump is the secondary gangrene setting in after the Clintobamacrats compromised circulation to America’s extremities. And of course the the malignant metastatic Maganoma we have now was permitted to arise by the Clintobamacrats standing down or destroying all of America’s political T-Killer cells.
different clue
Here’s a neat little post . . . ” It was expected that he would be sadder ”
https://www.reddit.com/r/MurderedByWords/comments/1njemz9/it_was_expected_that_he_would_be_sadder/
It is about Trump’s real personal reaction to Kirk’s assassination. If Team Blue has any meme-war digi-war masters, perhaps they could inject this into the mass mind brain-collective of the Maga community. Perhaps it could be “one more heavy alpha” which could begin the process of Magabrain chain reaction fission.
Nat Wilson Turner
@different clue No offense but I don’t care about what memes Team Blue might put out to “score points” on Trump.
I’m waiting for the bubble of unreality to pop so we can get out of this hall of mirrors, not trying to help one “side” or the “other” attempt to run through it faster.
I can’t tell when they’re headed right into a glass wall or what.
Nat Wilson Turner
@Carborundum re: “I would place the start date slightly earlier – 11 March, 2007 Austin TX.”
Care to elaborate for our readers who weren’t at the SXSW blogger confab in 2007?
different clue
@Nat Wilson Turner,
Thank you for having printed my comment despite your distaste for it. One thing I have always respected about this blog in particular is that comments are published even if they do not validate or support the views of the poster or the other commenters . . . so long as standards of civility and politeness are upheld.
(Am I being ironic? No. I have a chronic irony defficiency. I don’t do irony.)
Carborundum
The award Twitter received at SXSW marked the start of its rise to prominence. Network effects and the ceaseless barrage of high-emotion, low-data content the platform pounds into every available informational crevice explain a significant part of why unreality flourishes.
Nat Wilson Turner
@Carborundum thanks. that has explanatory value and is definitely a factor to be considered.