In 2025 we are witnessing a political blender: the collapse of old political alliances and the emergence of new coalitions.
The metaphor comes from John Michael Greer and its impact was dramatically enhanced by the synchronicity of my Twitter feed.
These are the posts I saw back-to-back:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) August 26, 2025
I’ll explain who Jake Shields and Shaun King are and why they matter at the end of this piece, but first let’s look a little deeper at Greer’s analysis.
And before we do that, I need to mention that I’ll barely be discussing the collapse of the Western right because that has been manifested by Donald Trump’s destruction of the old center right G.O.P. in 2016, which was sealed in 2024, and in the utter collapse of the Tory party in the U.K. in the David Cameron-Theresa May-Boris Johnson-Liz Truss-Richie Sunak era.
Now it’s the Democrats’ (and Labours’) turn.
In his piece, “The Narrative Trap“, Greer sums up the strategic cul-de-sac faced by the American Democratic party specifically and all Western centrist parties more generally:
…the narrative that Democratic politicians and their sock puppets in the media use to interpret today’s politics. That narrative, as I’ve discussed before, insists that the sole source of all the world’s problems is that a Bad Person wants to change things. Whether you call the Bad Person Sauron or Voldemort or Palpatine or Donald Trump, it’s always the same narrative, as rigidly clichéd as the plot of a porn flick or a bodice-busting romance novel. It leads the people who believe it into the self-defeating notion that all they have to do is get rid of the Bad Person and nothing else has to change.
What the Democrats are refusing to deal with is that a substantial majority of Americans are bitterly unhappy with the results of what, until Trump’s rise, was a bipartisan policy consensus in American public life. They’re not flocking to Trump for no reason at all. They’re flocking to him because he’s the only figure in the political scene offering them an alternative to a state of affairs they find intolerable.
The abysmal failures of the Kamala Harris campaign in 2024 and Joe Biden’s presidential administration have left the Democrats as naked as any emperor who ever paid gold for magic robes.
And that robe might be invisible and intangible but somehow it’s been caught in a very real political blender.
I haven’t written my “Why People Hate Joe Biden: Three Genocides in Four Years” piece yet, but it’s coming. My basic outline is as such:
- Biden’s cynical “COVID is over, go back to work” policies led to the deaths and disability of millions American, many of them avoidable
- Biden’s Ukraine policies led to the deaths and forced emigration of millions of Ukrainians
- Biden’s Israel policies led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians
Even though the Western corporate media has done its level best to obscure the true significance of those death tolls, murder will out.
And mass murder will out in a big, big way.
The Democrats are being dragged into Greer’s political blender.
Despite the “COVID’s not a big deal, we overreacted” narrative taking hold as conventional wisdom.
Despite the “well actually, it’s the Russians who have lost a million casualties” claims of official Western sources.
Despite the endless genocide denials of mainstream pundits.
We can see the Democrats being dragged into the political blender via their plummeting voter registration numbers:
The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls.
Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot.
That four-year swing toward the Republicans adds up to 4.5 million voters, a deep political hole that could take years for Democrats to climb out from.
We can see the Democrats being dragged into the political blender over the concern trolling of Democratic New York City Mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani by U.S. House Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
CNN’s Dana Bash: You have yet to endorse Zoron Mdani, who of course your party (nominated) about two months ago to be the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City. As a New Yorker, what does he need to do to secure your endorsement?
Rep. Jeffries: Well, we had a very candid and constructive and community centered conversation a few weeks ago before he went off to Africa. I’ve of course been on the road uh for the last several weeks dealing in part with the Republican effort to try to rig the midterm elections through their gerrymandering scheme. But Congresswoman Yvette Clark, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and myself are scheduled to sit down with him in the next few days. I look forward to that conversation.
Jeffries’ Hamlet act has resulted in a chorus of “What happened to ‘Vote Blue, No Matter Who?’ critiques from former Bernie Sanders supporters such as Emma Vigeland on MSNBC:
From last night on @MSNBC: What happened to "vote blue no matter who?" My thoughts on House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries continuing to refuse to endorse @ZohranKMamdani, setting him up for a formidable primary challenge in his district, which Mamdani won by 12 points. pic.twitter.com/tIBCkEajHG
— Emma Vigeland (@EmmaVigeland) August 18, 2025
Jeffries seems to think he has more gravitational pull than the incredibly popular Mamdani, but Jeffries risks being dragged into the political blender.
As we see here with Jeffries being branded “AIPAC Shakur” by the immensely popular Black talk show host Charlamagne tha God:
Breakfast Club host Charlamagne says of Hakeem Jeffries: "I call him AIPAC Shakur."
"I just don't think he stands for anything." pic.twitter.com/BGuqattvk7
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) August 27, 2025
The Democrats being dragged into the political blender can be seen in Minnesota’s Democratic Farmer-Labor Party endorsing State Senator Omar Fateh’s candidacy for Minneapolis mayor only for the state DFL party to step in and rescind his endorsement.
Initially, the Minneapolis DFL appeared to agree. In the final formal balloting at the July convention, more than 60 percent of delegates chose to back Fateh over incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey, a DFLer who last year issued a record number of vetoes of measures approved by the progressive majority on the city council, including a Gaza ceasefire resolution.
In addition, just before the convention adjourned, and at a point when a number of Frey backers had departed, Fateh won a show-of-hands vote where delegates held up badges to indicate whom they supported.
Fateh began campaigning, accurately, as the “DFL-endorsed” candidate.
But then the surprise came. Last week, a state DFL party committee revoked the endorsement after Frey and his allies complained that a “highly flawed and untested” electronic voting system produced a significant number of uncounted votes at the convention. Concerns were also raised about delays tied to slow Internet connections and a host of issues that frustrated backers of both leading endorsement contenders.
Frey celebrated the decision to revoke the endorsement, saying, “I am proud to be a member of a party that believes in correcting our mistakes.”
We can see the Democrats being dragged into the political blender with the embarrassing “dark woke” floundering of Gavin Newsom, even as he is still pandering to the worst of the Kamala Harris coterie.
We can see the Democrats being dragged into the political blender when U.S. Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer’s stubbornly insists on attempting to recruit a 77-year-old into a Maine Senate race where the Democrats have already fielded multiple, younger, more promising candidates.
And underlying all of the Democrats’ problems is their willful refusal to accept the overwhelming will of their voters and oppose the genocide in Gaza.
Despite it being ever more evident that backing Israel was a top cause of Harris losing the presidential election. From The Nation:
As one Harris campaign staffer explained to The Nation, a senior official in the Harris campaign informed voter engagement organizers at the beginning of October 2024 that they were to no longer to record voter feedback about Gaza in their internal systems.
This meant that the campaign simply stopped engaging with voters concerned about Gaza in the crucial final weeks leading up to the election, around the same time that Kamala Harris embraced Liz and Dick Cheney and sent Bill Clinton to Michigan, where he alienated the swing state’s Arab and Muslim voters by declaring that Israel had been “forced” to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza. “The thought process in the campaign with Muslim voters, young voters, with anybody who was concerned about Gaza was, OK, we’ll lose you, but we’ll pick up two somewhere else,” the staffer said. We all know what happened after that.
In a letter from March, these groups cite January polling by YouGov and the IMEU Policy Project that found “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” was the top concern (29 percent) of those who had voted for President Biden in 2020 and cast a ballot for someone besides Harris in 2024. It notes that this was the case for 38 percent of these voters in Arizona, 32 percent in Michigan, 32 percent in Wisconsin, and 36 percent of voters under 45.
The polling also indicates that 56 percent of Biden 2020 voters who did not vote for Harris say they would prefer to support a candidate who voted to withhold weapons from Israel, while just 16 percent would prefer a candidate who voted against withholding weapons.
But they just can’t bring themselves to change:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) August 27, 2025
The Democratic Party’s divisions over Israel and the war in Gaza were on messy display at a meeting of the Democratic National Committee on Tuesday, as members weighed just how far to go in reprimanding Israel for its conduct on the battlefield.
Then, the party chairman abruptly abandoned his own proposal, kicking the subject to a task force in an acknowledgment of enduring intraparty tensions.
“There’s divide in our party on this issue,” Ken Martin, the D.N.C. chairman, said. “We have to find a path forward as a party and we have to stay unified.”
Mr. Martin’s unexpected move came during a morning session of the D.N.C. meeting in Minneapolis, where party activists had debated dueling resolutions about how to respond to the humanitarian crisis and war in Gaza.
The measures were almost entirely symbolic, yet laid bare the broader generational and establishment-versus-grass-roots fault lines shaping the party nearly two years after the war began.
One measure, backed by a number of younger D.N.C. members including the leaders of the College Democrats of America and High School Democrats of America, called on Democratic elected officials to endorse an arms embargo and the suspension of military aid to Israel, and to recognize Palestine as a nation.
The other, supported by Mr. Martin and his allies on the Resolutions Committee, sought to chart something of a middle course. Their resolution urged an influx of humanitarian aid to Gaza, an immediate cease-fire, the release of hostages taken captive from Israel during the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023 and “a credible, negotiated pathway toward a two-state solution” for Israelis and Palestinians.
Enough about the doomed Democrats who refuse to pull their neckties and fingers out of the political blender.
Let’s talk about the new schisms that the political blender is producing on the MAGA right.
It’s most obviously visible in the emergence of MAGA queen Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as a vocal and effective critic of Israel .
It’s one thing for a relative outlier like MTG to become a critic of Israel’s genocide, but she seems to have pulled along former Fox superstar talking head Megyn Kelly into serious criticisms of AIPAC:
Megyn Kelly: (MGT is) making headlines now over cracks in her support for some of (Trump’s) current stances—Ukraine, Israel, the Epstein files, just to name a few.
…
I’ve been very pro-Israel, and I’ve been very defensive of their right to defend themselves in this nightmare. And I’ve been very defensive of American Jews on campuses who are just being harassed, and it’s ridiculous, of course. But I have absolutely no skin whatsoever in defending any lobbyist group, including AIPAC.
I would love to know what they do to get the loyalty of politicians, because I will say I have had multiple reachouts to me, both from friends and from connected people in DC, begging me to go to Israel with them. And I have said no every time.
…
Lately it seems like it’s coming to be even more because I feel like there’s there’s a contingent of people who are worried that they’re losing me. I’ve said that I’m not on Hamas’s side. But…I’m looking at Israel in a different way right now than I was on 10/8. That’s for sure.Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene: Have you been invited by any other foreign country?
Kelly:: No.
Greene: We have tons of lobbyists (from) foreign countries that come to Washington D.C. Pretty much every country has some sort of representative. They have an ambassador they send to Washington. It’s naturally in their interest. We can understand that. They also are required to register under FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act). It’s a law. They have to register as a foreign agent, a foreign lobbyist. That is required. It’s extremely important.
Here’s the here’s the difference with AIPAC. AIPAC is not registered under FARA that requires anyone coming to lobby a member of Congress or a senator or department of the government and the federal government on behalf of another country.
So AIPAC argues, oh but we’re Americans. Yes, they are Americans, but they are coming to Congress and to the federal government asking on behalf of the country of Israel. And I fully agree with you, Megan. We are not against Israel.
We are all for their right to defend themselves. …However, Israel is the only country I know of that has some sort of incredible influence and control over nearly every single one of my colleagues.
This is a conversation on Kelly’s Sirius Radio show which is also streamed on YouTube, reaching over a quarter of a million views. These are numbers that are very competitive with the audiences drawn by Kelly’s old employer Fox News and blow past MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.
Now let’s get to the extremely odd emerging alliance I referenced at the top of this post. This is truly a political blender in action.
Jake Shields is a retired Mixed Martial Artist who once fought for a UFC title. He has over 800,000 followers on Elon Musk’s X.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has accused Shields of “spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories, male supremacist bigotry and white nationalist beliefs.”
I’m well aware of the SPLC’s dystopian “disinformation” turn under Margaret Huang, but I have to agree with their charges against Shields, whom I have followed closely for years in my work as a sports writer.
Shaun King is an activist who rose to prominence in the Black Lives Matter era. He has over 900,000 followers on X.
King has been dogged by controversy over his actual ethnicity, his fundraising practices, and his claims to have worked with Hamas to secure the release of Israeli-American hostages.
Despite all this, King has held on to a very large audience and has remained an advocate for African-Americans on numerous issues.
Shields and King have been online enemies for years.
And now?
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) August 27, 2025
While neither man is someone I would ever consider endorsing, or even take seriously as a pundit or thinker, I do take their influence over their respective mass audiences very seriously.
Shields has also allied with Jewish anti-Zionist comedian Dave Smith to oppose the genocide as seen in this inadvertently hilarious tweet:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) August 26, 2025
Forgive me a chuckle at Shields’ waving away of his and Smith’s divergent views on a certain German dictator in a parenthesis.
Smith recently debated British Zionist Douglas Murray on the Joe Rogan Experience in a confrontation that has been viewed nearly 5 million times.
I scored that discussion as a big public loss for the Zionist cause. And the hand-wringing and meta-discussions of wokespertise vs expertise by establishment right pundits at Quillette, UnHerd, and others only made me more certain that Rogan and Smith picked up Murray and his attempts to obfuscate genocide and threw them into the political blender.
Currently, Smith, Shields, and King are all three are working to expose Israeli government official Tom Alexandrovich, who might have escaped prosecution in the U.S., but he can’t escape the political blender.
Some background on that case via The Guardian:
An Israeli government official charged with soliciting a minor believed he was meeting a 15-year-old girl for “sexual contact”, according to police – and brought a condom to the planned rendezvous in Las Vegas.
Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, a division head at the Israel National Cyber Directorate, was arrested in a police sting operation aimed at online users seeking to sexually prey on children. The Las Vegas outlet 8NewsNow reported that Alexandrovich chatted with an officer posing as a teenager online before being arrested.
“The sexual contact included bringing a condom and taking the decoy to ‘Cirque du Soleil’,” which stages elaborate shows along the Las Vegas Strip, said police documents seen by 8NewsNow.
Details of the arrest came as the state department denied the US government played any role in releasing the Israeli official – after Alexanderovich was able to return to Israel once he had bonded out of jail in connection with the felony charge.
A swarm of commentary online, propelled in part by Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, speculated that Alexanderovich had been shielded by the government at a time when the Trump administration has been struggling to contain criticism over unfulfilled promises to release all files related to the prosecution of the late, disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
…
A post on Israel’s government website from November describes Alexandrovich as the “head of the Technological Defense Division at the INCD [Israel National Cyber Directorate]”. A screenshot on Alexanderovich’s LinkedIn page, first reported by Mediaite, describes him as the same. A post on Alexandrovich’s page alluded to his having been in Las Vegas earlier in August for the Black Hat Briefings, a yearly meeting of cybersecurity professionals.“Two things you can’t escape at Black Hat 2025: the relentless buzz of generative [artificial intelligence] and the sound of Hebrew … in every corridor,” Alexandrovich wrote in part in an accompanying post. Invoking an abbreviation for large language models and referring to one of Israel’s largest cities, the post continued: “The key takeaway? The future of cybersecurity is being written in code, and it seems a significant part of it is being authored in #TelAviv and powered by LLMs. An exciting time to be in the field!”
King has revealed that Alexanderovich, by his own admission, plays a major role in online censorship:
Israel does NOT want you to see this. It's an Israel news interview of the pedophile, Tom Alexandrovich, before he was arrested in Vegas for sex crimes against kids.
Here, he admits HE is the one submitting social media takedown requests for Israel.
40,000 of them
90% approved https://t.co/yuZ1Prn2Lu pic.twitter.com/mgxnvyREEu— Shaun King (@shaunking) August 22, 2025
Figures like Greene, Shields, King, and Smith might be well outside the pale of political respectability as most of us have understood it in previous decades, but the political blender is spitting up some unlikely leaders in the political vacuum produced by the utter corruption of mainstream politics.
Let’s talk money. The blender is being caused in part by money and attention. Democrats are accustomed to having much more money, and both a higher quantity and more favorable media coverage. Donors have not provided nearly as much money, in part because Dems are out of power, and in part because Kamala wasted over a billion.
We now have Democratic politicians and pundits trying things out to get attention or money. Cursing was a short term trend. Gavin has gotten attention with redistricting. However, that isn’t a long term theme, nor a national one.
People at the edges may stumble upon the future issues the Democratic Party will get mileage from. It will no doubt include suggestions no one cares about and ideas that attract negative attention.
That’s an excellent point and I had a whole roster of links on the Dems’ pathetic fundraising I could have thrown in there but it was already overlong.
Although I do want to push back with two caveats:
1) money doesn’t go as far as it used to. Paid advertising is anything but the persuasion ultimate weapon it was as recently as 2012, and
2) I’m a big believer that something like a coalition-destroying political blender has to be driven by political fundamentals like genocide and economic collapse. They can only put so much lipstick on these pigs.
For reference links on Dems’ anemic fundraising:
GOP leading in congressional fundraising
DNC’s money problems
Trump’s political operation has stockpiled a massive amount of cash ahead of the midterms
But meanwhile individual Dem candidates are raising huge money:
Ossoff raises record-breaking $11M for Senate reelect
How AOC built a Democratic fundraising juggernaut
In the same way that some podcasters now get more viewers tv networks, the DNC risks becoming MSNBC/MSNOW. Poorly funded, declining attention, and looking for a new direction.
The fate of individual Democratic candidates can be quite different. However, I must point out the army of pollsters, consultants, attorneys, local tv ads sales people, and news orgs that are looking for something to get money and attention. These are not DNC employees. Some are temporary employees of campaigns. The group that is most afraid is tv ad sales and news. If there are few competitive races and pharma ads on tv end, it’s a bloodbath of layoffs.
Just like podcasts vs networks, or independents vs political parties, those used to the old way are uncomfortable and have a hard time adapting.
Based on my experience of working in Dem politics for a lost decade, the big time consultants — pollsters, direct mail vendors, data gurus, media people (TV ad makers & buyers) — are the institutional memory of the party, such as it is and they work directly for the candidates with no DNC or other organizational oversight.
The entire time I was in politics the same set of Boomers were doing the vast majority of the polls, TV ads and mail and many of those asshats are still heavily involved.
The staffers — campaign managers, volunteer coordinators, communications directors — tend to be young kids who work a few campaigns and then work for elected officials or segue into corporate “public affairs.”
I have yet to see a new wave of innovators come in and sweep everyone aside. My experience was that most of the political operative types are complete dorks who think the West Wing is real life and live in that fantasy bubble their entire careers. They are also deeply conservative about comms strategies. But maybe that is changing.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
‘The Second Coming’ – William Butler Yeats
The Democratic Party is in a very difficult spot right now. It will require outside forces to revive, and it has a lot of hazards coming its way. One of the prime hazards is what they thought were completely safe local seats. A year ago, Republicans running for DC City Council seats would have been roundly laughed at. Now, Dems would say long odds, but still look uncomfortable.
The really big worry for Democrats and all the related infrastructure of consultants, pollsters, etc, is that their funding is permanently reduced, and whomever gets big new funding will be the DNC. It will be PACs or candidates. There will be no shepherding to a consistent message. Pick any recent major issue, and it could spread all over the place. Ukraine, Covid shots, tariffs, crime, immigration. The next national election is 2028, and candidates can go off on some very different directions searching for money and votes.
One of the most interesting parts will be Democrats in very Democratic areas. They might have a primary challenge. Without a strong national platform, what will they say? What will successful challengers say?
The DNC hasn’t controlled or even influenced candidate messaging in my adult life (started in politics in 1990). That’s purely been driven by think tanks, donors and the consultant network.
But you’re right they are all out of ideas…I should have linked to the New Democrats abysmal policy blueprints.
It’s not financial bankruptcy that’s the killer issue, it’s the intellectual & moral bankruptcy
Please correct me if I’m wrong. I believe I read that the billions of dollars for war
equipment and materiel going to Israel are ‘foreign aid’. That means that for Bibi
& Co., it is essentially free. Someone has to pay for all of it, and I have a strong hunch it’s US. No taxation without representation? I seem to have heard that phrase before….. somewhere.
Like with the empty suit Kamala Harris, the fact that the lizard Gavin Newsom, AKA Governor Good Hair, is still currently a strong contender for the Democratic presidential nomination shows how the party has either become deeply unserious or politically stupid because of the massive amounts of corruption bred incompetence.
Both political parties are now grifts with the Republicans being slightly more competent because they think slightly more long term and have a central authority figure in President Trump. But when President Trump either dies or retires, without some real luck, perhaps in the Vice President being very astute in a Machiavellian way, the Republican Party is likely to implode as well in the next three to four years.
I am predicting that both parties will implode within four years. First, the Democrats and then the Republicans unless Trump dies or becomes incapacitated before the Democrats finish melting.
Newsom is what one-party state politics like California produces. He’s the blue version of Greg Abbott.
Americans want socialism. The Democratic Party is the only one that doesn’t understand that.
We also want to stop this genocide. Neither party understands that.
It’s not just the Dems who’ve protected US capitalists from the American impulse to level the field, giving everyone a fairly equal shot at success. That word, “socialism,” brings out the killer in conservatives and liberals alike.
“They’re not flocking to Trump for no reason at all. They’re flocking to him because he’s the only figure in the political scene offering them an alternative to a state of affairs they find intolerable.”
True! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… Trump is the Republican Obama. Obama promised “Hope and Change” and Trump promised MAGA.
Now I will admit that Trump 2.0 has probably done a better job optically of delivering on his promises as of today; but we’re barely 8 months in and nothing has fully shaken out.
Those who voted for Trump who are… A) average Americans & B) have not been happy with the political scene… are likely going to find that they too have been left out of Trump’s America.
The elite are robbing us blind and doing their damnest to convince us that it’s other Average Americans who are responsible for it. It’s the old divide and conquer strategy. Rinse and repeat.
When both parties implode, which they will, we’ll be onto the next phase of things.
The big question for the GOP is whether or not Trump is a one-off. Can his model be replicated? I’m not sure J.D. Vance can do it and definitely Rubio, DeSantis, Abbott, et al can’t.
Problem is the D’s will have to put up someone better than their current batch to even beat those lames. Not seeing any such thing on the horizon.
Per the interviewee, Jonathan Mahler, in a recent Daily Beast podcast, DJT learned decades ago how to manipulate print media to dominate news cycles, and has adapted those skills well as media have evolved.
He may be a unique and unreproducible figure in the R party.
When Trump initially emerged, I was expecting other celebrities and famous executives to follow his path — Oprah, George Clooney, Mark Cuban — but so far that’s been a bust.
Trump might be a one-off.
But I am also extremely skeptical that we’ll have free enough elections in the future for the will of the polity to be a deciding factor.
Trump’s policy errors, particularly economic, are going to catch up to him.
Vance is no Trump, but I think people underestimate his intelligence and political abilities. I think his image can be buffed into something that would eat any Democrat for breakfast. He’ll also have the advantage of the technocracy’s ever-growing influence machine.
It’s a hat trick, turning a born jerk into a saint. Or will he become the new
Kamala Harris?
very little chance of that. He seems to do his homework and isn’t a drunk/klonopin enthusiast.
Why not? We’ve already done that with Obama.
Some posts, like this one, cry out for an editor.
No doubt. Apologies.
Because it’s too long or too sloppy or both?
Given that the post is about disorganization and an overly dynamic situation, I think the post does a fairly good job of providing thought-provoking examples. I don’t know how much more we could ask in real-time.
Thanks! I feel like I’m trying to drink from a fire hose without just pointing the hose directly at the NC readers.
The hero we need AND the hero we want. I can no longer stomach the Twitter insanity and I appreciate your field reports.
On the weird bedfellows thing – I first noticed it post 2008 and again strongly during the Syria twitter wars. I think the analysis by left/right fringes was similar (“this all fukt”) and for years there was a marriage of convenience on certain points. Definitely a lot of cross-pollination on blogs etc.
I think the divergence is that left/right have a different view of what a human is, and how humans should live together. So we often see the same problems but sometimes radically diverge on the solution.
Kinda tangential: The SV/accelerationists share with NC a great respect for John Mearsheimer. I see him here, and I also see him with David Sacks on the beyond cringey All-In Podcast
Love the link to John Michael Greer
One of the most lucid iconoclasts
I don’t agree with that. Greer is not really on our side— he does not distinguish between corrupt Democrats and the left more generally. I read him regularly for a few years and at first I thought he was saying the same things as you would find here, but he isn’t.
And on the flip side he tends to romanticize MAGA and claim that Trump is doing what Americans want on immigration, when in reality many people wanted violent criminals deported but are uneasy about the thuggishness of Trump’s approach. I see no such nuance in Greer— he despises the hypocrisy of the Democrats so much he won’t concede that most of the criticism of Trump’s actions are valid. It complicates his own narrative and it is really obvious he has a narrative which is as flawed as that of the mainstream Democrats, just in different ways.
I’m aware of Greer’s rightwing leanings. It’s easy to discount his stuff to account for that, but he remains IMO an insightful thinker and I’m personally not sure the old right-left axis means that much.
To me capitalism and socialism are two sides of the same coin and both are products of an era of industrial expansion.
We need new models to deal with degrowth and collapse, which appears to be happening.
David Sacks is the Techbro who seems the least insane but I cannot take Lex Fridman at all although I am glad to see them platforming Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs.
and thanks!
Nat,
I just appreciate your willingness to speak into this realm. You’re much more willing to get hit by shotgun blasts of Ideological Rock Salt than I am. ;-)
One quick edit-related question, though perhaps it was just me anticipating a tighter metaphorical connection than was intended. On this part:
Did you intend “rope” to be “robe”?
Either way, thanks sharing your point of view.
Ah I certainly did, thanks for catching that. Fixed.
I had no problem getting through this and I thank Nat for introducing us to powerful influencers and online personalities that I should probably know about but are apparently outside the circle of interests of many of us who comment here.
Thanks! I’ve been forced to follow these online influencer types for other work, and it’s staggering how huge the audiences for so many of these people are. And I haven’t even gotten into the completely idiotic Nelk Boys, who recently destroyed (hopefully) their career by interviewing Bibi Netanyahu.
I should probably do a full post on that case study, it’s pretty epic. In the meantime here’s a YouTube video on the topic.
So many gems – the Musk created empty shell that is Lex Friedman; The Thiel created UFO enthusiast Jesse Michels.
Lost boys selling fantasies to other lost boys
I’ll have to investigate this Jesse Michels. That one is new to me. Thanks!
Nat, I have a (US) colleague who is actual real world friends with one of the Nelk Boys and I heard some inside baseball about the fallout from their Netanyahu when I was on junket last month. If you’re interested I’ll strike up a conversation with him on the topic in the next week and shoot you an email with thoughts – what I heard in drunken passing conversation sounded amusing but not sure it’s anything earth shattering given the info that came out afterwards about how they took the script from the white house.
Please do, I’d love that.
Disagree. Thoroughly enjoyed. Thanks.
But what really becomes of the Democrat Party? With rigged districts, I don’t think there’s much possibility of Democrats substantially wiping out. The party would need to effectively collapse from within, and breakup or otherwise be replaced by some other entity, and you’d need to wrest the ballot lines away from the Democrats.
There’s a recipe here for deeper apathy, but no roadmap to transformative change in a meaningfully positive direction. And so the ping-pong game shall continue.
The way parties are organized in the US makes it hard for new ones to grow and field successful candidates. Only the Libertarian Party is filed in all states kinda sorta.
Trump essentially took over the GOP. Same thing could happen to Democrats.
That’s what will have to happen. Eventually, the candidates of the under-45 set will flush out the elders but it’s already taken 15 years longer than I thought possible.
I wish you well, Nat. Another generation thought that if we could just rid of Daley and Meany and Jackson and…
I’m already aged out myself. I took my shot at impacting politics in the 2000s and Obama destroyed everything I’d worked for and my political career.
These kids are on their own as far as I’m concerned.
I must say Daley, Meany, Jackson et al were gross and awful, it must’ve been your Obama moment when the post-Watergate generation turned out to be a bunch of neo-liberals like Carter, Gary Hart, Clinton, etc etc
Heh. I remember the college democrats were all in for Obama in Orlando. All over clearly. That brand of liberalism didn’t turn out so well for us. The West Wing really destroyed an entire generation. Sigh.
It was apparent mid-campaign 2008 that Obama was 100% fraud. What was the bill he had promised to veto but took time off the campaign trail so he could go home and vote for? IIRC was a surveillance bill of some sort.
I alienated friends and family badly when I was enraged by him whipping for TARP on the eve of the election. Had zero illusions by that point.
Wasn’t until 2016 that I could openly criticize Saint Barack in front of liberal friends & family.
>>>But what really becomes of the Democrat Party? With rigged districts, I don’t think there’s much possibility of Democrats substantially wiping out. The party would need to effectively collapse from within, and breakup or otherwise be replaced by some other entity, and you’d need to wrest the ballot lines away from the Democrats.
The American Whigs dissolved when the leadership refused to take a stand either for or against slavery, which caused the membership to leave including Abraham Lincoln. Admittedly, since the party had been pro-labor and especially pro-business and economic development using infrastructure, it is unlikely that being pro-slavery would have been good for the leadership, but the refusal to deal with the issue was worse.
I think the Whig Party did not collapse as much as it disappeared. Structure without substance that smoke like just faded away. And both current political parties are in the same position as the combined leadership is refusing to do anything about the current economic collapse caused by the massive corruption.
The Democrats’ fecklessness along with its primary members’ contempt for most Americans is also helping with the collapse, but the Professional Managerial Class’ contempt, even hatred, is spread throughout the American political system especially higher up. It is just more open and in opposition to what the party, formerly of the New Deal, has stated as its goal of helping the middle, working, and poor classes. However, both parties face similar problems of fecklessness, lying, and betrayal of the American nation including most of their own members aside from the wealthy oligarchy.
The key political divide today is a generational one. The divide seems to be around 45. And that more than anything will determine your views on healthcare, Israel, capitalism.
This even affects young Americans with ‘good’ jobs. An acquaintance was recently horrified to discover that her son with a good job didn’t get healthcare from his company, despite it being a good professional job. I know of lots of 30 somethings who want a second child, but have to pay off their debt from the first child first.
Older Americans are only really aware of these realities (which they didn’t experience), if they have adult kids and they’re still on speaking terms with those kids.
As the ‘young’ continue to age out (are you still ‘young’ as you appropach 50? Apparently if some pollsters are to be believed), the lack of representation for a large chunk of the electorate is going to become a political crisis. And grifters like Shaun will make out like bandits.
The refusal of today’s elders to let go of political power is unprecedented.
Better health care (the irony) + a rolodex of de facto infinite campaign contributions + deft usage of the Culture Wars to keep their tribes in-line.
and a minor role—there are a lot less Gen Xers, the population pyramid reflects a “hollow generation” as birth rates dipped in the late 60s and 70s (for a host of reasons).
Any revolution or system re-ordering is going to come from those born during/after the Reagan years.
If you’re offended by generational stereotypes, let me apologize in advance for this comment. I know it’s not necessarily accurate or a good thing to do, but…
My Gen X coterie has always been the most reactionary bunch of dumb fucks so naturally we are the most loyal Trump supporters. Look at the godawful bunch of GOP politicians we’ve produced — Ted Cruz is the avatar.
As much as I loathe Millennial generation culture their politics lean left and they’re a BIG generation but I never expected them to overthrow their Boomer parents. They were the kids raised with child safety seats and spill proof sippy cups so it was a brutal shock when our entire society decided to completely screw them (thanks, Obama!) and that has slowly but surely radicalized more and more of them.
The Zoomers have a historically unique gender based political bifurcation that is alarming and fascinating. Many of the males of that cohort went for Trump in ’24 but they’ve also been the first to turn against him, so we’ll see.
As a 78-year-old, I disagree with you most vigorously.
Not all of Boomers are right-wing cheerleaders!
I like to think not all Gen Xers are reactionary dipshits either, being one myself (Gen Xer that is), but by their fruits ye will know them and the tale of the 1970s and 80s and 90s is the good Boomers losing battle after battle and war after war.
Jealous of the Gen X reactionary dipshit crown? I certainly won’t argue with any Boomer that wants to claim that crown, you’ve certainly got a case from 1972 on.
But again, I’m not lumping in every member of any generation (and I’m not sure that’s even a valid way to group people) with the majority of their peers.
The gerontocracy atop the Dem Party apparatus are like unto the Nazgûl — neither living nor dead, they merely continue … 🤨
Your acquaintance should be more horrified that anyone gets their health care from their employer. Though I know this has been the system since even before oldsters like me before we were born.
It’s the rank tip of the rotten iceberg.
In the cynical parlance of 21st century politics, the very function of a political party is to refuse the will of their voters. This was metastable under the regime of legacy media and not overtly mass murdering millions of people on camera. But it is no more. What comes after is not something cynical politics can navigate.
Political party? Hmmm… I always thought of them as ‘public servants’- including
the president. Whatever happened to ‘you get what you paid for? (LOL,LOL)
yea, revolutionary and reactionary politics depend on idealism that is completely alien to the Newsoms and Buttiegiegs (I refuse to learn how to spell his name) of this world.
I’m not certain that the collapse of old political alliances and the emergence of new coalitions necessarily indicates a fundamental reshaping of political beliefs and values is coursing through the West at the moment. Human predispositions may shift a little as we age, face new personal circumstances and absorb new information, but not much. Most of us are a slightly shifting mix of social conservatism and liberal attitudes flecked with egalitarian tendencies and we tend to adjust our views as technology and the economy develop and as and as the moral and intellectual framework of our society shifts.
What has happened is less complex, and political financing is failing to fall into the right places to effectively shift elections. Too much is going too wrong, whether it is the genocide in Gaza or the ceasefire farce in the Ukraine. We’ve all pretty much retained the same personalities with the same hopes, desire and fears while our institutions and political and economic élites have have hit rock bottom morally, intellectually and ideologically, and have transparently failed to cope with many of the changes taking place which effect so many individuals so badly and seem completely unable to understand the people and societies they misgovern so badly.
So many of us are searching for alternative leaders and alternative parties to focus on their needs and bring about some of the changes to make things better. Things may be a bit stickier and messy in the US than in European countries with very different political systems, but as the West fails and the leading countries in BRICS develop economically and socially, we might well attempt to regain our sense of stability in Europe simply by adopting new models simply by seeking to trade with them on mutually agreeable terms without overriding economic and political structures like the EU, NATO and USMCA (if the latter still has any relevance since the Second Coming).
Rest assured I’m under no illusion that we are seeing “a fundamental reshaping of political beliefs and values.”
That is a much longer-term project that will take decades or centuries, which IMO industrial civilization doesn’t have.
But facts on the ground outrun theory in some cases. Look at the British Civil War. Cromwell temporarily overthrew the regime, but since Hobbes, Locke, Smith, Hume, et al had yet to do the work that the American Revolution and constitutional order were built on so as soon as old Oliver Cromwell died, the rotten old Stuart family was back.
Mr. Turner,
I’m not sure you’re aware of this, but John Michael Greer has stated on his main blog (https://ecosophia.net) that that x account is not run by him or anyone he knows of, and is not operating with his permission. I suspect it was ginned up by x/twitter themselves to promote x as a meeting place of minds. The account does apparently recycle actual quotes of his from his blogs, although I’m not sure if that’s all it does.
Nice hat, btw.
Ah, I did not know that. I’ve seen other creators who are very skilled at social media who do the exact same thing with their content on Twitter and just assumed he was similarly skilled. Thanks for letting me know.
Re: the hat, the photo is Wovoka aka Jack Wilson, the Paiute prophet who started the Ghost Dance phenomenon in the 19th Century.
The other image on my Twitter profile is a drawing of Nat Turner, the other inspiration for my nom de blog.
As far as I can tell all the JMG Xitter posts are direct quotes, although some are from the comment section or the Dreamwidth account rather than blog posts. I am pretty confident JMG could figure out how to get the account shut down if it was taking liberties.
I’m more pessimistic than you on this topic – I’m not so sure it’s that easy to get an account taken down. For example, Whitney Webb reports that there are social media accounts posing as her, that she’s tried to get taken down, but nothing is ever done. Who are you going to appeal to? Aren’t the big internet companies shielded from legal attack for the content they carry and disseminate but that’s originated by users? I think JMG chooses not to draw other’s attention to it nor feed it his attention.
LLMs can’t estimate probabilities 😂
That won’t stop the Gavin Newsom team from desperately feeding prompts into ChatGPT under they have a platform to campaign on.
Every political party gets to go into the blender sooner or later. But what is important is the binding agent in that party to see if it stays together or chunks of it are sloughed off. And the binding agent in the Democrats is weak at best. Blue collar workers? Who needs them. They can be replaced by appealing to suburban Republican votes instead. That was a catastrophic miscalculation but it got worse. The Democrats decided that they didn’t really need men which was based on nothing more than a fad. When last year’s election came around and realizing that they may have alienated half the voting population, they tried to change course. They had ads with imitation men asking for other men to vote for Kamala – at the same time having other ads telling women to lie to their men about who they were voting for in an imitation act of “cheating”. We all saw how that paid off. Politics is a numbers game and if you want the numbers, you have to be seen delivering concrete, material things to your voter base. People want change and have so for over twenty years. Democrat Obama promised it and decisively changed nothing and Democrat Biden promised that nothing would fundamentally changed and kept his word. And that is how you got Trump 2.0
They’re desperately floundering around trying anything to avoid having to offer material benefits to their voters because their first loyalty is to their donors.
In a system where the legislature is bought and paid for, it’s just a zombie republic.
RevKev, you are one of the most respected voices in this forum, IMHO.
As you say, people have been wanting change for 20 years. No one will dispute that.
But as the old saying goes, “Hindsight is 20/20.” Why now? Thus far the economy has
been pretty good. Not like the conditions that started the French Revolution, for example. There has been no Martin Luther, rebelling against papal indulgences,etc.
The inevitable mass migrations due to climate change are still in the early stages,
and bitcoins aside, monetary policies as of now unchanged. What is the missing link
here? Of course there is the sunspot cycle, whose peaks statistically paralleled
various wars, revolutions,etc. But not as scientific fact, only statistically.
Demographics certainly play a part in the changing patterns of behavior, but
have been VERY closely monitored by the powers that be. The winds of
change are sweeping the entire world, and the conclusion is that one generation
is getting quite old and the next are failing to repopulate, at least in this country,
as well as Japan and some other countries. I am left with a quote from Sherlock
Holmes- “I wanted to end the world, but I will settle for ending yours”.
This seems to be apropos of the situation in the United States, but the entire planet?
This economy has not been pretty good in a long long time. It’s just been unevenly distributed and the statistics have been carefuly modeled to lie about the economy.
Rural Americans are seeing conditions that IMO are worse than the 1920s and 30s mainly because people aren’t even able to do subsistence farming in 2025.
Nat Wilson Turner: I eagerly (unfortunately, but realistically) await your essay on the triple genocide.
This seems to me a good outline:
As someone opposed to all wars, and not inclined to entertain arguments that “this cunning war is a-okay,” I have been tying the slaughter in Ukraine (1.7 million dead Ukrainians, a couple of generations of men) and the genocide in Palestine, paid for by Uncle Sam. But tying it all back to a policy of destruction of the U.S. social state, the end of the New Deal ethic (of fairness), and the ethos of unbridled greed and unlimited self-interest that is neoliberalism places the three together. It isn’t a pretty picture, but it is where we are.
Also, I find the great detail of your post to be just fine: We require much “granular” reporting these days. Everyone likes to talk about “data,” but then when someone like you gives many data and observations, they complain. Hmmm.
A further note: The current chunky smoothie in the blender is not the end of the Left and the Right. I’m sure people want to go on about “I just don’t understand right and left — the seating chart in the French Revolution” blahblahblah. But the right and left have different ideas of the organization of the economy. That is, the real Left, not radical chic like Gavin Newsom and liberal brontosauruses like Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer (who still exists!).
This means that the alignment you are seeing has to be about other issues: I’d offer the following. Corruption at levels that is eating away at U.S. society. Obvious exploitation of the middle and working class, especially in the workplace and in medical care. The horrors of empire — the endless coups d’etat, massacres, bullying, and savagery. Dave Smith is a libertarian — and I don’t have much interest in libertarian ideas of the economy and society. But he is opposed to colonialism and imperialism, as are Katie Halper, Aaron Maté, and, it seems, Tucker Carlson. The soulless U.S. elites meet people who expect minimal standards in public life and in corporate behavior. Who’da thunkit?
Well said: “Corruption at levels that is eating away at U.S. society. Obvious exploitation of the middle and working class, especially in the workplace and in medical care. The horrors of empire — the endless coups d’etat, massacres, bullying, and savagery. Dave Smith is a libertarian — and I don’t have much interest in libertarian ideas of the economy and society. But he is opposed to colonialism and imperialism, as are Katie Halper, Aaron Maté, and, it seems, Tucker Carlson. The soulless U.S. elites meet people who expect minimal standards in public life and in corporate behavior.”
Corruption has always been with us. Peter Turchin (End Times) was a thirty year successful researcher of population trends among bugs, animals and other non-humans. Eventually he began to wonder if human populations followed distinct rise and fall trends. With his academic reputation he was able to pull together a research institute that, over the years, has generated hypotheses on the rise and fall of civilizations. Back in 2010, he began predicting that the U.S. (western civilization) would enter a crisis stage in the 2020s. And now we look about. I highly recommend his book. It’s not particularly sanguine.
Thanks for the recommendation. Just put a hold on it at my local library.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/04/a-simple-desultory-analytic-or-how-i-was-peter-turchind-into-perdition-by-i-lost-my-harmonica-albrt.html
Turchin is also blogging on Substack now.
Cool, I remember that post now that you’re linking to it. Will find Turchin on Substack. Thanks
Good article, thanks. I have in the past here in the comments section briefly talked about a new center being formed. Greenwald says the divide is between establishment and anti-establishment, where one has the UniParty on one side and the sort of converging anti-establishment grouping coming together on the other side. As representative of this, there is also Galloway in the UK and Wagenknecht in Germany (though they don’t seem to be able to break thru and gain mass appeal). My own view here, work with anyone who is for ending death and destruction. In this regard, I gotta say MTG has been truly remarkable, even though I wince at way more than 50 percent of her posts on X.
Yes, for me personally, watching Jake Shields evolve from a perfectly anodyne professional athlete (although he was always deeply boring to watch for fight fans) into a raving openly racist asshat and then circle all the way around to almost heroic foe of genocide has been very disorienting.
I sometimes wonder if he’s an op put out there to discredit the opposition, but when he pulls something like aligning with Shaun King, I’m beginning to wonder if he isn’t for real.
The evolution of Nick Fuentes has been similarly fascinating.
As a convinced Corbynista, albeit with a long, deep cynical streak and a pretty pessimistic view of humanity and its future after spending a goodly chunk of my life at the point where trades union politics and Labour politics brutally intersect to crush the dreams of the ever-spreading precariat, the debt-laden disabled, the victims of Long Covid, the generationally disadvantaged and the desperately impoverished, so that those totally removed from the likes of ordinary folk have been enabled through a Buchanunlike ability with their vast carelessness for people’s lives to flit to greener pastures and let others clean up the messes they had made, but not so much that it will cost them a penny to assist in solving the real problems the country faces.
As for the USA and it’s vassalage to Zionism, I can’t really speak, but I am really impressed by Marjory Taylor Greene and the way she is prepared to fight for her people and her principled approach to The Man on the Cross and His Teachings rather than all that Satanic rent-a-quote nonsense in the Old Testament the fundamentalists lean on to justify any old nonsense – like a Jewish State in Palestine without fixed borders other than those it rejected following the creation of “Israel”, for want of a better word.
But in the UK, yy feeling has long been that the media defined “political extremes” are the real centre of politics because they have operating belief systems and are more than happy to argue about serious issues and how best to prioritise them, and agree to disagree but still have the ability to create short term compromises to avoid running the show off the road – which seems to be the sole tragic gift possessed by the Western élite as evidenced by the Ukraine folly and their deep and criminal complicity in the Palestinian genocide.
I’ve come to believe that the two parties which will dominate the House of Common will be Reform and Your party (Our Party, perhaps?) as the stats alig with the stars and it’s hard to tell which one will provide the Prime Minister and which the Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, or if neither gets an overall majority will they be willing to form a coalition as a national short-term government to get us through the next few hard years where differences are argued out in pubs, alt media, public debates and Parliament, Select Committees, Cabinet Committees and the Cabinet itself – the latter a distinctly revolutionary thought (in the Rousseuian sense, of course). Your Party isn’t likely to let Labour fall into it’s arms and I think that if any Tories and Labour members do make it back into the House, Mr Farage and Jeremy Corbyn will merely place them on display to scare the children and treat them as the relics of of a quarter century of lies, political incompetence, corruption, and sheer willful destructive carelessness.
What’s gone in in UK politics over the last decade has been the stuff of nightmares. If the rumors are true that the Bank of England is looking for an IMF loan, all bets are off. I suspect your diagnosis of Reform vs Your Party (terrible name) is correct but the powers that be will fight it to their last breath.
The thing about the powers that be in the UK is that they have more reach than should be expected from a country with a tiny and shrinking economy and no military to speak of.
It’s my suspicion that the Brits are not just puppets or complicit lackeys in Ukraine and Palestine but are actively driving forces behind the very worst decisions and atrocities.
Smith recently debated British Zionist Douglas Murray on the Joe Rogan Experience in a confrontation that has been viewed nearly 5 million times.
I scored that discussion as a big public loss for the Zionist cause.
Listened to that whole broadcast yesterday. First time I’ve ever listened to more than a selected blurb from a Rogan episode.
Murray was making me furious, but I don’t understand the “big public loss for the Zionist cause”. Never participated in debate clubs but I saw Murray using the age-old, speak softly, never concede, and always side-track, while Smith seemed to always start a rebuttal with “I agree to your point…”.
Didn’t read any of the comments from the YouTube so what makes you think the Zionists lost?
Strictly based on the public feedback, including the number of pro-Zionist publications that rushed to declare it a win for Murray, and the reactions on X.com.
It was a big icebreaker for many in Joe Rogan’s broverse who seemed to suddenly have had the scales removed from their eyes about Gaza. Rogan has made many other anti-Zionist, anti-genocide remarks so maybe I’m mistaken to attribute the anti-Israel turn of his followers to the Murray debate, tho.
Scoring a debate like this in any academic terms is an exercise in irrelevancy. If not, Hillary Clinton would have been president.
Now that the dust has settled, I’m seeing Zionist pundits on Piers Morgan and other shows regularly refer to Murray as having “made mistakes” or joking about “pulling a Murray.”
Sorry, I don’t have the bandwidth to track down specific examples.
Corruption has always been with us.
But there is another explanation that promises to be useful for as long as there are “civilizations”. Peter Turchin’s book End Times, spent 30 years researching populations of insects and animals. He eventually began to wonder if human populations also held regular sequences that they went through. After pulling together a research institute, creating a computer model and spending years coming up with the proper descriptors for available history he decided to try predicting the trajectory of a current civilization. He chose civilizations as the research topic since they tended to leave records. In 2010 he predicted that the 2020s would be a crisis point for the U.S. (and Western Civilization). So far that seems to be accurate.
I strongly recommend End Times.
My apologies for the double post. The first one seemed to disappear, so I posted again.