Ian Welsh

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

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

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On September 9, 2026

10 Comments

This is the first of two parts of the second part of a longer three part series. Part one covered COVID.

POTUS Joe Biden wasn’t just a senile fool who insisted on running for re-election when obviously senile, costing the Democrats the 2024 Presidential election and giving us Trump 2.0, he was also the nominal architect of three mass-death events that rank with this awful Century’s worst.

So yea, I’m back to hammering nails in the dying ghoul’s coffin so people don’t forget what he was and what he (or the administration with his name on it) did.

Last time I pounded home the Biden administration’s horrific, criminally negligent responsibility for ~1M deaths of American citizens and residents.

This time I’m going to be pounding home the extent to which Biden & co. knowingly provoked Russia into invading Ukraine in February 2022, put the kibosh on a peace deal Russia and Ukraine had allegedly worked out on in April 2022, and squandered massive fortunes pouring money and weapons into the yawning black maw that is Kyiv under Zelensky, and in so doing signed the death warrant of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, mostly the former.

And because the trap that Russian President Vladimir Putin fell into was loaded not only with billions worth of military preparations and massive economic sanctions, but also with the biggest and most brutally effective propaganda campaign of my lifetime (and I lived through the post-9/11 Karl Rove Great War on Terror nightmare as a full-grown ass adult), trying to speak up for a modicum of reason and objectivity got anyone even mildly opposed to the dominant narrative labeled a “Putin puppet” and cast out of polite liberal American society.

That wasn’t new in 2022, of course. By that point we’d enjoyed six years’ worth of RussiaGate panic and the neo-McCarthyism from the establishment shitlibs in charge of the Democratic Party and their “vote blue no matter who” idiot supporters.

Hillary Clinton, whose 2016 presidential campaign kicked off RussiaGate the day after she lost the election to Trump as a great way to distract from how shitty her campaign was and the fact that the Democratic party put its thumb on the scale in her favor against Bernie Sanders, went full-on commie hunter like the ’64 Goldwater girl she once was against Tulsi Gabbard in 2019. Clinton said on Campaign HQ with David Plouffe (that’s former Obama 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe) that the Russians have “got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate” and calls her “the favorite of the Russians.”

Gabbard filed a $50 million defamation lawsuit but then dropped it to “defeating Donald Trump in 2020 (ie the future worthless Trump Director of National Intelligence dropped the suit so she could focus on helping Biden beat her future boss. Oh the places you’ll go, indeed.).”

So I should have been hardened to that kind of crap by 2022, but despite Mueller coming up completely empty (“the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”) and RussiaGate adding up to a giant distraction that helped Trump get away with tons of bribe-taking and other real crimes (emoluments clause anyone?) because the Dems only seemed to care about his antics if it interfered with their Ukraine plans or could somehow be linked to Russia and Putin.

I mean if they tried to impeach Trump for taking bribes from foreign countries, that might hit Dem legislative playas like Nancy Pelosi and Bob Menendez right in the wallets.

Finding out later that that bullshit was a psyop from the get-go fills me with rage and I’d love to go all Borger, Texas on any of the fuckers involved should I ever get the chance.

Remember the Hunter Biden laptop story — you know the bombshell pre-election NY Post article that no one could post on Facebook (Zuckerberg later apologized) or share on Twitter (even via DM) which revealed a great deal of lucrative scumbaggery on the part of Hunter Biden, some of it maybe even involving “the old man”, some of which took place in Ukraine where Hunter enjoyed a $50,000/month gig at a natural gas company despite knowing fuck all about natural gas or Ukraine?

Remember how fifty-one former intelligence officials — including James Clapper, Michael Hayden and Leon Panetta — signed a one-paragraph statement saying the laptop story (later confirmed to be true) has “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” They concede in the letter itself that they have no evidence.

Politico ran it as “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former officials say.”

In 2023, former acting CIA director Michael Morell told the House Judiciary Committee he organized the letter after a call from Antony Blinken, then a Biden campaign adviser, and that a purpose was to give Biden a “talking point” for the debate. FWIW Blinken denies it was his idea. Since I don’t believe a word that double-genociding mofo says, rest assured I’m just including it for the record.

Blinken, of course, became Biden’s Secretary of State and ran Ukraine policy for four years because of course Sleepy Joe was too senile to run a fucking lemonade stand by 2022.

Did anyone happen to catch the study covered by FAIR showing that American corporate media were seven times more likely to quote think tanks with military-industrial funding than those without? Good times were had gaslighting everyone’s liberal family and friends.

I lost friends, relationships with work colleagues and online friendly acquaintances, and my family, and marital relations were deeply strained by this most epic fucking gaslighting campaign (which was presaged by the Atlantic Council’s John Deni in his Dec, 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The Strategic Case for Risking War in Ukraine” oh yea, Deni is also a research prof at the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute).

And who could forget Ivan Krastev’s Feb. 3, 2022 New York Times op-ed which warned, “Europe Thinks Putin Is Planning Something Even Worse Than War” — and the horror Putin planned?

Why nothing less than a negotiated European security architecture that acknowledges Russian interests. Krastev passionately argued that “an invasion “could, in a perverse way, save the current European order.” And God knows, perversity is what the current European order (and its ruling Epstein class) is all about.

The WSJ and NYT truly know their audiences and the goldfish memories they have because both papers beat the war drums while Putin was begging for negotiations (the Russians even drafted a full signature ready document) and then spent the next three years calling the invasion of Ukraine “unprovoked” and insisting that the rest of the Western MSM media do the same.

But before I can get to hammering on the coffin I’m preparing for Genocide Joe Biden’s reputation and historical standing, I have to cover some historical background.

That ought to chase off all the fucking Americans reading this. Goddamn, it’s crazy-making to be a student of history in the USA in the short-attention-span 2020s. Well, so be it.

This is going to be quick and link heavy because I’m writing a blog post for a topic that merits multiple books.

NATO Stopped Being a Defensive Alliance in the 1990s Under Bill Clinton

Despite assurances to then Soviet Premier Gorbachev from President GHW “Poppy” Bush’s Sec of State James Baker that NATO will not move “one inch eastward” when Gorby allowed German re-unification, NATO moved east even more relentlessly than the Wehrmacht did in 1939-1942.

Just look at this fucking map.

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

And Bill Clinton (who was busy with other things and barely cared about foreign policy) and his administration (some of whom very much cared about foreign policy and will recur in administration after administration to the present day) were warned by fifty foreign policy veterans (including Robert McNamara, former CIA director Stansfield Turner, Paul Nitze, Jack Matlock, Richard Pipes, and Senators Bill Bradley, Gary Hart and Sam Nunn) that NATO’s eastern expansion was “a policy error of historic proportions.”

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Different Times And Places Are Different

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On September 8, 2026

13 Comments

One of the failures of imagination I see most often is the inability to understand that things were, actually, different in the past and that they are different in other places.

I live in Canada. In the West. Our leaders are all functionally psychopaths. They’re all corrupt and they all lie like they breathe. They have zero interest in anything but making their donors happy, and have spent over 50 years destroying the egalitarian society built by FDR and his successors, in order to give more money to the rich.

Many people think this is universal behaviour. It isn’t.

Different places and times are different.

Someone like Trump could not have become president even 30 years ago. Impossible.

These days the children of elites don’t fight in wars. In WWI and WWII they did, even FDRs sons went to war and the carnage in the British ruling class in WWI was epic because they personally lead the charges right into machine guns.

Different times are different.

Right into the early 90s it was possible to walk into almost every government and private building in Canada. No security guard would stop you. Not just walk into, take the elevator to pretty much any floor. You might have trouble getting to a few people, because they had secretarial or receptionist gates, but you could definitely get right up to that receptionist and if you insisted you could walk right past her.

Oh, and you could go into almost every building and use the bathroom.

I remember when there were no food banks because they weren’t needed.

For decades inequality decreased, not increased. This was a choice and the political elites were mostly onside with it. Even a lot of business elites were (though definitely not all.) When John Kenneth Galbraith investigated why corporate leaders in the 60s didn’t earn more he came to the conclusion it was cultural: they didn’t believe in paying more and anyone who tried was shut down hard by that consensus.

Even small things can be very different. We go on and on about female breasts and attractiveness, but traditional Japanese society did not find breasts sexy, and bound them tight: they associated them with child raising. They even didn’t like bright white smiles, this was considered “showing your bones” and disgusting, so women often blackened their teeth.

Anthropological studies show that in hunter-gatherer bands leadership is often chosen from people who are slow to anger and not aggressive. When testosterone was studied carefully, it turned out that high-normal testosterone isn’t actually about violence, it’s about status behaviour. Put a male with high T in a society that favors hugging and being empathetic and that doesn’t like aggressiveness and suddenly they’re the big huggers and empathizers.

Chinese leadership is not the same was Western leadership. They have different goals, incentives and values. They don’t act or think like us. This is also true of Russian leadership.

All of these things are contingent: they change over time based on circumstances. People have biology, but they also have vast amounts of conditioning based on what their society is like which forms their personalities. Leaders are chosen and promoted in different ways, emphasizing different morals and personalities at different times. Western leaders right now are mostly soulless psychopaths, but that hasn’t always been the case and even when it was, the morally neutral virtues they valued were different. (Courage, for example. Think what you want of 19th century British elites. They were scum. They were not cowards and intensely shamed cowards and people who didn’t do their duty.)

Humans are always humans, but the details change with the society and the time. If you over-generalize from your own time and experience you will make serious mistakes when you try and understand outside your time and society. This often becomes clear to people as they get older: I can assure you that the culture and the type of person was quite different back in the 70s and even 80s from now. I remember people who grew up in the Great Depression and they were not like Boomers, let alone like Zoomers. Nor would they have put up with someone like Trump.

Time change. People change. Different places are different and produce different types of people.

This shouldn’t need saying, but it is evident that it does.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Open Thread

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On September 7, 2026

9 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 06, 2026

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On September 6, 2026

17 Comments

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 06, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

 

Don’t look away any longer – Solidarity with Hüseyin Doğru

[defenddemocracy.press, Aug 30, 2026 ]

 

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025

 

A Twenty-Year-Old is Dead Because the United States Government Put a Monitor on His Leg – Pierre Damas Bel, Wright State University, class of 2029

Mike Brock, Sep 03, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]

Pierre Damas Bel was twenty years old. He wanted to be a doctor. He was in JROTC. He graduated high school in May and started at Wright State University in Ohio a few weeks ago. On August 31, he called his father on a video call at 8:03 in the evening and said, “I’m not feeling okay mentally because of the bullying.” His father told him to come home so they could talk. Around eleven that night, police came to his father’s door and said Pierre had parked his car on the shoulder of an interstate in Springfield, Ohio, walked into oncoming traffic, and been hit by a tractor-trailer. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

He was wearing an ankle monitor. ICE had put it on his leg after summoning him to a mandatory in-person check-in. He had come to the United States as a child under Temporary Protected Status. His parents fled Haiti in 2024 because armed gangs were burning their neighborhood down. The family had a pending asylum case. In late July, the Trump administration terminated Haiti’s TPS designation, putting roughly 350,000 Haitians on notice that the United States government intended to deport them to a country whose capital the United States itself will not fly passenger aircraft into because it is too dangerous. The offer ICE made to the Haitians of Ohio was this: wear a monitor or accept $2,600 and a flight to Port-au-Prince. Pierre wore the monitor.

It was too heavy to play soccer in. It restricted him to a seventy-five-mile radius. It was visible under his clothes. When his JROTC unit distributed uniforms, Pierre did not receive one, and his father believes the omission was because of the device on his leg. Classmates saw it and taunted him. On Instagram in late July, before he died, Pierre wrote: “I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone. Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”

His father said Pierre felt like he was treated like an animal.

The Republican Party did this. Not “the system.” Not “policy.” Not “immigration debates.” The Republican Party, as a coordinated political organization, made a set of decisions that produced exactly this outcome at exactly this scale on exactly this timeline. They ran a Vice-Presidential candidate who stood on a debate stage and said Haitians in Springfield were eating pets. He said it knowing it was false. He said it because he wanted an atmosphere. He got the atmosphere. A twenty-year-old walked through that atmosphere with a monitor on his leg for the last few weeks of his life, in that same town, and now he is dead on the shoulder of an interstate….

 

Inside Trump’s Nightmare for Haitians in Springfield: ‘We’re Following Our Orders’ – The most urgent moral test in all of Trump’s America today is happening in a small Ohio city – and we as a country are failing it miserably.

Asawin Suebsaeng, Sep 03, 2026 [Zeteo]

However bad you think things must be in Springfield, Ohio, today, the reality on the ground is worse.

Even if you are looking on, as a distant observer, in disgust at recent headlines (including about the suicide of 20-year-old student Pierre Damas Bel), it is difficult to grasp the scale of what is happening in and around this small Midwest city, and to its Haitian population, their friends, and neighbors.

For years, Donald Trump and his party have waged a protracted campaign of racist lies, fear, and demagoguery on Springfield. This summer, that campaign culminated in the Trump administration’s ICE clampdown in the city, following President Trump’s destruction of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that once shielded the Haitian community. The crackdown – blessed by the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority that this president cemented – is unlike anything else occurring now in Trump and JD Vance’s America.

The president and his allies are orchestrating horror and degradation all over the country. But in Springfield, the heightened level of fear is so widespread, and the state-imposed terror against a vulnerable minority so constant, that it is impossible to see this as anything but the Trump administration’s proof of concept for the president’s militarized vision of what America should be – a place where everyday people are afraid to go outside, in a republic of “law and order” that the federal government meticulously and arbitrarily constructs. It is the latest front in Trump and his party’s mission to codify MAGA’s brand of American racism and sadistic cruelty into law.

 

 

 

Pentagon secretly employs conservative influencers to promote Hegseth, attack critics

[Drop Site Daily, 08-30-2026]

The Pentagon has quietly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings into government roles, including retired colonels Rob Maness, Kurt Schlichter, and Thomas Anderson, without disclosing their assignments, according to The Washington Post.

Maness, Schlichter, and Anderson have published columns and social media posts defending Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and attacking military critics without disclosing their Pentagon ties.

Maness and Schlichter, who have over 135,000 and nearly 620,000 X followers, respectively, hold active “.civ” government email addresses assigned to the office of Undersecretary of Defense Anthony Tata, though a Pentagon spokesman declined to say whether any are paid or detail their roles.

WSJ: Pentagon to take stake in Venezuelan oil venture: The Pentagon will reportedly receive a 35% stake in “North American Blue Energy Partners,” run by Alejandro Betancourt, a Venezuelan businessman close to Rodríguez who authorities have investigated after allegations of money laundering.

The stake will come through “penny warrants,” allowing Washington to acquire shares for a token price with little upfront spending. The U.S. could also buy 20% of the company’s future oil output at cost.

 

What Might Happen to Trump’s Ill-Gotten Gains

[The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2026]

 

ICE arrests in San Francisco Bay Area area up nearly 70%, data shows

[ABC 7 Eyewitness News, via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2026]

 

A single signature by Trump can remove you from the internet

[Il Fatto Quotidiano, via Naked Capitalism 09-02-2026]

Yesterday the Trump administration hit Autistici/Inventati, a European technology collective whose main activity is providing digital infrastructure, with a banking blockade with PayPal and Banca Etica closing its accounts.

 

Trump’s DOJ Blocked Serious ICE Shooting Charge Over Federal Prosecutor’s “Strongest Possible” Objections

[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 09-04-2026]

 

War on voting

I Doubt You’re Surprised – There’s a whistleblower addressing the USPS plan to implement Trump’s EO on mail ballots

Joyce Vance, Sep 01, 2026 [Civil Discourse]

 

War

U.S. military commanders call Iran war “unsustainable”

Drop Site Daily, September 1, 2026

Four senior U.S. commanders formally warned War Secretary Pete Hegseth that the prolonged Iran operation is unsustainable and is already weakening the military’s ability to confront threats elsewhere, including threats to the U.S. homeland, according to the Washington Post.

The objections appeared in a classified August 14 assessment covering the worldwide availability of U.S. forces and weapons.

Those involved in the warning include the Navy’s top admiral, Daryl Caudle, and the commanders of the European, Southern, and Indo-Pacific commands.

Caudle reportedly warned Hegseth that the Navy cannot maintain its current support for the war indefinitely, with barely one-quarter of the destroyer fleet reportedly ready to deploy.

The Pentagon attacked the publication of the classified information but did not deny that the commanders filed formal objections.

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Information Overlord: Dmitry Orlov Changes His Hypothesis for US Collapse

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On September 5, 2026

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

Worth watching

  • Disgraceful Degradation — Dmitry Orlov. Orlov, one of the founders of “collapseology,” moves to YouTube and makes a major change to his famous analogy that US collapse will resemble Soviet collapse.

    I feel sorry to have led people down a garden path that doesn’t lead to anything specific. People wanted to know when to throw the bags full of cans of spam and shotgun shells into the back of the pickup truck and drive for the hills. Feel free to do that anytime you like, I kept telling them. But I feel that I must do better. And now I believe that I finally can. If I think about something long and hard, sometimes a good idea does eventually pop into my head. I have no idea how that happens. It just happens. or it doesn’t. And in this case, it has finally dawned on me that there was to begin with a flaw in my comparison of the USA and the USSR. They’re not quite symmetrical after all.

    There is a key difference that have that I have been neglecting to take into account. Yes, they were both 20th century military and industrial superpowers, and they both espoused opposing now defunct ideologies. and my superpower collapse soup analogy applied almost equally to both of them. But there is a rather important difference between them. The US is a colonial empire much like the British Empire and other western empires were once. These empires were based on the exploitation of their colonial possessions. They sucked resources out of them while preventing their social and economic development. Along the way, they saddled them with permanent debt servitude. They enforced their trade policies through military means. But the heavy-handed tactics of previous colonial eras are no longer necessary. Instead, there is control of mass media, cyber warfare, color revolutions, the IMF, the World Bank, and the US Treasury with its endless sanctions. These are all means of coercing compliance. from countless from countries around the world. And what this compliance means is willingness to export products and commodities in exchange for US government debt.

    This is the wealth pump which the US has been running for decades to drain wealth from around the world to export inflation and to subjugate much of the planet. This wealth pump has become less effective over time. But even if it stops working altogether, there is a fall back to an older American technique, piracy. How well it can be made to work in the 21st century remains to be seen. But it won’t fail for the lack of trying.

  • Cold War 2.0 #84: Russia Secretly Helps Iran Develop Supersonic Missiles — Syriana Analysis, with Tarik Cyril Amar. Tarik Cyril Amar’s weekly appearances on Syriana Analysis are a weekly must listen to me. I love their dynamic, their accents, their humor, and they are subject matter experts I trust as much as I trust anyone about these topics (I trust no one about these topics).
  • Russia’s Ukraine Endgame — Putin Has Lost Patience With Zelensky — Vladimir Brovkin. Former Harvard Prof Dr. Vladimir Brovkin understands Russia better than most. He’s worth listening to.
  • Setback for Trump: Iran intensifies US strikes as Vance denies wedding attack — Janta Ka Reporter. Great daily anti-Imperialist news round ups, and presenter Rifad Jawaid’s vicious and hilarious commentary on Trump regime buffoonery is always amusing listening — even when covering the most awful shit.
  • On Sh*t… Another Private Credit Fund Just Blew Up — Eurodollar University. My go to for coverage of private credit’s struggles.

The AI bubble and its doomers

Politics and corruption

Also worth your time

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Lack of Fear of Death

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On September 4, 2026

28 Comments

Back in 93 I spent 3 months in hospital. It was… beyond bad.

But it had one great advantage. I lost my fear of death.

I don’t know what happens after death (though as someone whose done ludicrous amounts of spiritual work I have strong suspicions) but even if it’s “that’s it, it’s over” I don’t fear it because I know that bad shit, beyond most people’s imaginations, can happen while you’re alive. Death can becomes one’s best friend.

Westerners fear death greatly. They say stupid things like it being your job to make the other person die for their country.

Sure. Obviously killing them and not dying is preferable in most cases.

But being willing to die for your beliefs, whatever they are, is also incredibly powerful. You’d think so-called Christian countries would understand the power of martyrdom.

Shi’a society is remarkably based around this. Iman Hussein refused to acknowledge the Umayyad caliph Yazid I, whom they considered corrupt. He went into battle knowing he would lose and indeed he did. He did the right thing even though it cost him his life.

And what that has lead to, in the modern era, is organizations like the Iranian government and Hezbollah. Sure, they’d rather not die, but they know there are worse things than death, like living on your knees or crawling on your belly. Martyrdom is celebrated. It helps, of course, that they believe there’s a heaven waiting, but so do many religions whose followers are far less willing to die for their beliefs. (Most Christians aren’t any more.)

You see Iranian leaders say things like death is preferable to living in an unjust world. Almost every single senior leader of Iran from before the war was killed in the first part of the war. I believe only two survived.

And it didn’t make a difference, except that it strengthened hard-liners who wanted to fight.

Western leaders are, as a group, cowards. This wasn’t always the case: in WWII elites fought or sent their children to war. Many of the died. In WWI the cream of Britain’s elite youngsters died in the trenches, often leading suicidal charges.

But our modern leaders like Trump are cowards. They never fought in war and they don’t send their kids to war. They aren’t willing to die.

Further they lead societies where they are hurting the majority of the population. Western leaders think they are special because the people who work for them fundamentally don’t want to. There is no sense of mission, despite all the MBA bullshit trying to create purpose and meaning in corporations.

Everyone knows that the only thing Western leaders believe in is making the rich (themselves, usually) richer. So to get a western organization to work requires extreme incentives: greed for the rulership class, the whip of hunger and homelessness for the peons.

Western leaders thus consider themselves special, because they need to force people to do what they want and without their constant threats and incentives their organizations would fall apart. No one works for a bank or private equity because they believe in anything other than getting rich, or at the lower level, they believe in not winding up homeless.

So Western leaders are, in fact, important: they’re leading their societies in directions that are bad for most people, and that takes an immense amount of cunning and work.

Further there isn’t a deep bench. Because no one believes in the mission who isn’t near the top. Why would they? It doesn’t benefit them, and there’s nothing uplifting about “mint more billionaires”.

This is not to say that all Iranians are true believers or support the government. But the people in the military and government, do believe in the “mission”. They are the metaphorical children of Iman Hussein. They do not fear death.

Hezbollah is the same, but more so: if you’re a Hezbollah member, odds are you believe strongly and you know that Israel only left Lebanon last time because you forced them to.

And if you get killed, someone else replaces you who believes. There’s a deep bench, right from the top to the soldiers and bureaucrats (and remember, Hezbollah runs clinics, picks up garbage and even provides pensions. It’s a government within Lebanon.)

Western leaders can’t wrap their heads around this. They’d do anything to save their own lives and they don’t understand people who would rather die than give up their beliefs. They don’t understand the people who then replace the dead and continue the fight.

If Iranian leaders feared death, the war would be over. They would have cut the sort of deal Delcy Rodriguez did in Venezeula “yes master, I’ll do whatever you say if you leave me at the top of a society I no longer run. Just don’t kill or kidnap me, please.”

Greedy coward.

That won’t happen in Iran. There’s no one in the leadership with enough support to pull it off, if there’s anyone at all who would consider it.

Sometimes to serve your cause, to remain true to your beliefs, you have to be willing to die. Americans knew that once. The West knew it once. Christians knew it once.

Today? The leadership of the West are substantially all cowards.

The truth is that if you will do anything to avoid dying, you’re a slave to anyone who can credibly threaten you with death.

Iranians and Hezbollah members refuse to be slaves.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

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

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On September 2, 2026

39 Comments

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

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

The reason is simple.

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

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

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

Never forget the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

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

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

We’ll start with COVID.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nearly twice the toll of the first year
444,583
Covid deaths under Trump
Weeks ending 1 Feb 2020 through 16 Jan 2021.

776,832
Covid deaths under Biden
Weeks ending 23 Jan 2021 through 18 Jan 2025 — 1.75 times as many, in a period when vaccines were free and universally available.

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

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

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

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

Funny you should ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow and support my work at NatWilsonTurner.com on Substack.

Notes

1. Four ways to count the dead

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

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

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

2. The order in which the counting stopped

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

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

3. The Covid money that went to the police

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

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

Tit for Tat US/Iranian Strikes Resume

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On September 1, 2026

17 Comments

America hit Iran last night, taking out a couple launchers and radar aiming at ships the US is trying to get out of the Strait. Iran responded by hitting a US base in Jordan.

Today, around 8pm Iranian time, the US hit a variety of targets, some civilian (a fish powder plant?) and some military. Iran has now started its retaliation, which includes a lot of anti-ship missiles going after US naval vessels.

Last night’s attack by Iran:

launched its attack on U.S. bases in response to an American strike on Iranian naval facilities, which caused multiple casualties. The reported expenditure of more than 80 PAC-3 interceptors in a single engagement by some estimates represents more than ten percent of the entire American arsenal, at a time when interceptors are in very short supply across the Western world primarily due to mass use against Iran, but also due to mass donations to Ukraine. While U.S. government sources claimed that there was no damage to facilities from Iranian strikes, footage from the ground and satellite imagery has confirmed damage, compounding longstanding concerns regarding the Patriot’s limited effectiveness.

This comes back to what I said day one of the war: that the math favors Iran—the US and Israel will run out of interceptors long before Iran runs out of missiles and drones.

Both sides have been degrading the other sides radar (the US was late on this, but is now hitting the hard), but both sides still have satellite imagery to work from. (I’m 99% sure that China, Russia or both are providing real time feeds to Iran.) Loss of radars degrades defense more than offense, so more attacks can be expected to get thru on both sides, but, of course, Iran never had a lot of AD to begin with so this effects the US more.

Today’s attacks seem to mostly be tomahawks launched from US naval vessels, which are also in short supply.

The US attacks came as:

just yesterday, the U.S. Secretary of the Army AND the U.S. Deputy Undersecretary of the Army both reportedly resigned from their roles, leaving the United States without the Army’s number one and number three man.

Three of the remaining five regional commanders also gave Hegseth a non-concur on the plans, which means “we’ll do it because it’s a legal order, but we think it’s stupid.”

After the second set of American attacks Trump bloviated:

Once again, America can’t do this without indiscriminate use of nukes. Those nukes would not take out Iran’s missiles, which are deep in mountains, and Iranian commanders would then take out Israel, which yeah, they can do. Probably effectively destroy the physical economy of every US vassal within range and those regimes would not survive the fallout. Saudi Arabia is already in enough trouble that they’re negotiating an 8 billion dollar loan.

Iran was willing to let the war drag out because their calculation was that they could take the economic pain for longer than the US, and it avoided a lot of damage to Iran. But that doesn’t mean they can’t win a hot war, by my calculations they can, will and in fact, really already have except that Trump (unlike most of his generals) won’t admit that America has lost.

We’ll see if this keeps going. I don’t really see how it should, given American weaknesses, but Trump isn’t a rational actor. though I’d guess he really wants the war over before the midterms.

As for Iran, they’re digging their heels in hard, saying that peace only happens if Trump and Israel obey the MOU (which includes an end to Israeli attacks in Lebanon, where they are bulldozing entire towns that have existed for thousands of years.)

Since Trump can’t or won’t rein in Israel, if Iran’s serious, this is going to go on until Israel is begging for peace.

And folks? You’re living thru a war which will be studies by historians for ages as the war that marked the end of America as a superpower.

Update: interceptor depletion is real

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