Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
By Nat Wilson Turner
Former POTUS Barack Obama tweeted about the firing of late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel:
This commentary offers a clear, powerful statement of why freedom of speech is at the heart of democracy and must be defended, whether the speaker is Charlie Kirk or Jimmy Kimmel, MAGA supporters or MAGA opponents.
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) September 19, 2025
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:
There were two vigils for journalists killed by Israel here in DC, where Matt lives, last month – and he did not show up to support those. There will be more protests later this month when Netanyahu visits – Matt won’t be at those either. https://t.co/G7XjUlbdXK pic.twitter.com/n03UTlhEu5
— Hamid Bendaas 🇩🇿🇵🇸🇮🇷 (@HBendaas) September 17, 2025
do you think it might have something to do with the previous administration criminalizing those protests, expelling students, disbanding student groups, and targetting administrations for not cracking down harshly enough?
— Communist Dog Tail (@pointblaek) September 18, 2025
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.
In the aftermath of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, US president Teddy Roosevelt brought together negotiators from Russia and Japan to hammer out a peace. This was the first time the US was ever seen as an ‘honest broker’ in international relations. In 1919 President Wilson sailed to Paris with his 14 Points doing his level best to get the Europeans to negotiate an honorable peace. The wily Europeans outfoxed the rigid and moralizing Southerner in just about all the negotiations. Nevertheless, the US retained the aura of ‘honest broker’ until this century. I can’t say exactly when we lost it—probably when Colin Powell lied to the UN in testimony before the Second Iraqi War—but lost it we did. Somewhere in there we lost the aura of exceptional power we possessed by pissing away a metric shit-ton (yes, an American who can do metric!) of blood and treasure in the sands of Iraq and mountains of Afghanistan—and with that loss, we shot whatever credibility we retained right in the foot. But those, shall I say, are different discussions for a different day.
Lost auras being the one thing—at least we still got a chakra, right? (Ugly and poisoned though it may be.) It’s the second thing that grates the teeth at night: an everlasting chronicle of bullshit deeply eroding any sense of diplomatic norms that’s transfigured us into OG rogue nation. So, grab some popcorn, rewind the Wayback Machine and head back to 2014 cause I got a whopper to tell you.
It’s late summer of 2014 and a brushfire war is simmering between Russia and the Ukraine. The US and its European allies are eager to see the Ukraine join NATO. They bring Russia and the Ukraine together and pretty much force feed them the Minsk Accords. Then, over the course of the next eight years the NATO allies string the Russians along encouraging the Ukraine in its ever persistent demands to renegotiate the Minsk Accords.
Nota bene: yes, I write it as the Ukraine. I know the Ukrainians desire their benighted lot to be call Ukraine.
Do I care?
Not one iota.
It was always called the Ukraine—I mean, the Russians use the partitive genitive (don’t ask) when describing the Ukraine as a nation—and it will ever thus be called the Ukraine.
Now, it took the Russians—rarely gullible—a long time to figure out our stunning acts of “bad faith.” But “bad faith” it was. The US and its European allies had no intention of ever compelling the Ukraine to live up to its international agreements with Russia. They were only ever playing for time, waiting for the day they could present Ukrainian membership in NATO as a fait accompli, hoping for a démarche, a dénouement. Damned if we got war in its place.
But the forever-war nation ain’t gonna let a little war-war stop it, no, no, no! Once America sets a precedent it’s game on, bitches! So, in late May-early June 2025 the US negotiated directly with Iranian diplomats signaling that no military action was imminent. While negotiations were held, the US and Israel agreed on America logistical support for an Israeli attack on Iran. A week after Israel launched its first strikes against Iranian nuclear sites, the United States followed suit. Not only is this acting in “bad faith” it’s outright deceit, a line no nation should ever cross in the conduct of negotiations. It’s one thing to bring two sets of instructions to negotiations, one always needs a fall-back position. But deceit? WTF?
Twice then, the US has acted in “bad faith.” It’s at number three when the wise recognize a pattern, three also being proof of outright illegality in the conduct of international affairs, at least according to international and domestic law. So, there is that, you know?
Domestic law, you ask? How so?
“Young grasshopper,” says Master Po, “sit and I will tell you.” (Anyone who gets the reference wins a cookie.)
Treaties signed by the United States and ratified by the Senate are, in accordance with the 1920 Supreme Court ruling Missouri v Holland, the supreme law of the land.
Skeptical-like, you query, “what treaty did we violate, Sean Paul?”
Easy, the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. This treaty enshrined, in international and domestic law, a norm of diplomacy dating back 575 years to the city-state of Milan and its then ruler Francesco Sforza—a norm, or custom only violated three or four times in the last century it’s so sacred. So basic, so important is the principle of the personal sanctity of the negotiator, aka the diplomat, that it is respected by every nation on the goddamned planet.
It is the singular, fundamental law of diplomacy from which spring all the other elements of reciprocity evident in the conduct of international relations. And in typical American fashion, just days ago, we nuked that norm into oblivion when we in concert with Qatar and Israel arranged for an attack on credentialed Hamas negotiators.
I don’t have anything else to add except a few questions. Why would any nation enter into negotiations with us ever again? Who would be that stupid and reckless? And what, if anything, can ever be done to regain international trust? What I’ve detailed are fundamentally outrageous betrayals of diplomatic norms, norms developed over 500 years ago and used for centuries.
It’s not rocket sceince. Hell, it ain’t even algebra. Christ, it’s more basic than fractions. It should be easy to comprehend. And the behavior is so fucking counter-productive I would expect even the stupid to fathom.
I would be wrong.
P.S. And consequences,those things be bad, like ju-ju bee tree bad shit. Didnae take long, aye?
P.P.S. Oh, and by the way, this leads directly to the massive diversification away from petrodollar settlements, which gets us a fuckton closer to the end of the dollar as global reserve currency. That’s going to be one serious painful adjustment for Americans to make, domestic production notwithstanding.
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You may have heard that Tesla’s board has proposed giving Elon Musk a one trillion dollar payday. Tesla is falling apart, and the ostensible theory is that only Musk can save it, as if he’s not the guy who ran it into the ground with his bad decision making.
Elon, of course, is currently “the world’s richest man” but his fortune is probably under 500 billion. So he wants to triple it.
This, as you may have figured out already, is not about saving Tesla, but looting it before it crashes out completely, which is what’s going to happen. Only 100% anti-china EV tariffs are keeping Tesla alive right now, but the problem is that non-Chinese companies are now producing cheaper, better cars and no, Tesla isn’t going to regain its lead.
Elon is just a rat trying to leave a sinking ship with a huge wheel of gold embossed brie, and the board (his cronies) are helping him.
Meanwhile:
(Every person who told you that the end of dollar hegemony was impossible was either an idiot or lying to you.)
Oh, and meanwhile China has banned all its tech companies from buying NVidia AI chips. Seems they figure their homegrown chips are now as good as the lobotomized versions NVidia is allowed to sell to Chinese companies.
In about three years, China’s chips will be as good as NVidia’s. In about six years they’ll be as good and a lot cheaper. Then every country outside the West will switch.
Meanwhile, as I’ve discussed before, every non-Western country will use Chinese Open Source AI, because using American or European AI is way too risky (if you don’t understand why, you’ve been a coma for the past 40 years.)
NVidia is driving something like 40% of American stock valuations and AI is the huge bet America is making. America can’t even make magnets.
So what happens when China can produce essentially everything the West can, at equal or better quality, and it costs less? Passenger jets, military tech, chips, AI, robots, drones, cars, consumer goods. Everything. (or a reasonable facsimile, well north of 90% within five to ten years, and it’s already north of 80%.)
Well, the oligarchs who have been competing to be the richest guy in America are going to find they have a whole bunch of US dollars that the most important economy in the world, China, won’t accept for anything meaningful. You won’t be able to buy Chinese companies with it. You won’t be able to buy Chinese tech secrets with it. Chinese scientists won’t want to work in the shithole that the US is turning into, especially given all the racism against Chinese.
American oligarchs will, as my father put it, find out that they were competing to be “King Shit of Turd Island.” Like being the world’s richest Indian in 1950. You’ll live a nice life, but you don’t matter.
Serious elites have three jobs, in order of importance.
- Keep their country powerful and advanced and important;
- Keep control of their country
- Compete among themselves.
American elites reversed the order of these tasks for generations. They’ll be lucky to avoid a civil war, is how badly they’ve fucked up. And the tech-bro “masters of the universe” are about to watch China roar past them and gain the tech lead in everything that matters. They can own America’s Tik-tok, but who cares, because America is a has-been nation, coasting on legacy fumes, and it’s only going to fall further and further behind.
Thiel and Musk and so on are just crabs in a bucket, competing for power in country going to Hell. May the best most ruthless crab be crowed King Shit of Turd Island.
***
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I always wondered where the term ‘unconditional surrender’ came from during World War II. After reading a biography of U.S. Grant as an undergraduate in the early 90s I learned. When attacking Fts. Henry and Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, respectively, when the commaders of the Confederate forts requested terms Grant replied, “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender,” which earned him the sobriquet ‘Unconditional Surrender’ Grant–at least until the aftermath of the bloodbath at Shiloh.
Why do I bring this up? I just completed the Ron Chernow biography of Grant. As a work of popular history it’s good; however, Geoffrey Perret’s biography is much more rigorous and drips with historical sensibility. Still, credit to Chernow for a related reason: his biogrpahy led to a docu-drama miniseries about Grant. I cannot recommend this series enough. It’s also had the knock on effect of launching a much needed reappraisal of the man, the general and the president. Also, know this: I’m a born Southerner, native Texan. The Confederates were traitors. Grant and Sherman gave them what they deserved.
The “Lost Cause” revisionist history movement at the turn of the 20th century reframed the Civil War from a war to end slavery into a war about states rights. Moreover it did grievous damage to Grant’s reputation as a general and president and elevated Lee to divine heights. Both balderdash, mind you. But, the damage was done. Grant was the better general. He was a genius who conceived of operations and strategy two orders of magnitude greater than Lee. And, well, you know, there would be no 14th and 15th Amendments without a Grant presidency. So, read Chernow’s book or watch the series.
Both will learn you some good knowledge.
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If you’ve read this far, and you’ve read some of my articles and most if not all of Ian’s, then you might wish to Subscribe or donate. Ian has written over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, need the money to keep the shop running. So please, consider it.
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.
In the aftermath of several errant Russia drones crashing into Poland, said nation’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, invoked Article 4 of NATO, and whilst giving an interview to a German paper, called for “a limited, NATO/EU-run no-fly buffer for drones nearing alliance airspace.”
Dmitri Medvedev, the former president of the Russiann Federation while speaking at a Russian Security Council meeting on Moday said that “Russia would consider NATO forces protecting Ukrainian airspace as a declaration of war. . . .”
Russia, it should be added, asserted that “that “no targets on the territory of Poland were planned for destruction,” and that the drones it used in Ukraine have a flight range of no more than 700 kilometers (435 miles).” I would add the Russian first deputy Permanent Representative to the UN made a very good point in an interview this morning. He asked simply, “cui bono?”
Cui bono notwithstanding, a lot remains open for interpreation, especially without the evidence being reported on seriously and assiduously. (Which won’t happen in the West.) That said, the number of drones that landed or were shot down in Poland is troubling. Look at this map for a better idea of what worries me. I’ve heard several explanations, from Ukrainian spoofing and EW warfare, to a false flag operation. Spoofing, EW warfare, cui bono or false flag–any others?–really doesn’t matter. It is simply bad ju-ju for all parties concerned.
Regardless of what really happened, are we absolutely insane?
Have our diplomats and leaders lost all touch with reality? If we declare and attempt to enforce a No-Fly Zone over the Ukraine we are declaring war on the Russian Federation. Declaring war on a nuclear power that could absorb a full force first strike by the USA much better than we could absorb their very robust response is as stupid as someone with brains for dynamite who cannot blow the wax out of their ears if their brains exploded.
Thank heavens for the brothers Lieven, one, Dominic, is an historian of empire, the other, whom I will quote below, is foreign policy analyst that writes frequently for the site Responsible Statecraft. Anatol is an adult in a childish firmament of foreign policy know-nothings, like Kaja Kallas. As one Russian observer said about her: she is critically undereducated. But back to Anatol, as he writes on the drones falling in Poland: “We should remember that during the Cold War, there were a number of far more serious violations of air space by both sides, some of them leading to NATO planes being shot down and American and British airmen killed. These incidents led not to threats of war, but careful attempts to de-escalate tensions and develop ways to avoid such clashes.” What a mature idea. I wish we had more adults in the room, so to speak.
The whole Ukraine debacle has only unravelled our power faster than if adults were running our foreign policy. And a No Fly Zone over the Ukraine is the height of childish, bat-shit crazy ideas. But then, we have not had an adult running our foreign policy since George Schultz left foggy bottom on January 20, 1989. I take that back, the last adult to manage our foreign policy was James A. Baker, who left foggy bottom on August 23, 1992. It has been unipolar willy nilly serially destroying nation after nation ever since.
It has got to stop. I just fear how it ultimately will stop.
If you’ve read this far, and you’ve read some of my articles and most if not all of Ian’s, then you might wish to Subscribe or donate. Ian has written over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, need the money to keep the shop running. So please, consider it.