Recent Items

Generational Political War in a Hypernormalized Context

Posted on by

The hypernormalized state of 2025 America is dramatically impacting political campaigns in the U.S. as the empire rapidly loses hegemony.

This post is a grab-bag to follow up on my previous posts this week: “Zionism’s Pyrrhic Victory Drives Dystopian High Tech Drive for Control” and “Who’s Delusional, Who’s Drugged, Who’s Disinformed? It’s Hard to Tell.”

I’m trying to chronicle the crazy and there are a lot of narrative threads to carry if we’re going to keep up.

The Stupid Burns Bright Among Billionaires

Important reminder to start our post from Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs:

Bill Ackman is a billionaire Zionist who came up previously in my “Influencer Apocalypse” post on the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Tucker Carlson used Ackman as a punching bag and a punch line in his fateful Turning Point USA appearance shortly before Kirk’s death.

Now Ackman is putting his stupid directly into the NYC Mayoral campaign which we’ve been covering since before the primary:

Ackman’s ally in hasbara, Elon Musk also came forward to represent Nathan Robinson’s point by posting complete bullshit and getting caught by his X’s community notes (a pathetically frequent occurrence), but this was a good one:

The Completely Corrupted America Political Process

The United States 2025 isn’t just ridiculously hypernormalized because our billionaires are in charge, but because they’ve managed to completely rig the political process.

I sometimes handwring about the relevance of political campaigns when we’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover that might render them moot, but they’re a big part of the distraction spectacle if nothing else.

David Sirota has a new book out (based on the podcast) “Master Plan: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America” so he’s been tweeting some things about how we got here, that relate to current themes.

I’m sharing two for context:

It’s classic that the recently indicted Trump 1.0 official turned target of the regime, John Bolton, was involved with a key of the early step in legalizing bribery in American politics:

Sirota also points out that the ruling by the post-legal Trump Supreme Court fits in with my recent themes of derangement and delusion and the battle for narrative control:

AIPAC Goes Plata O Oro on the CBC

And since AIPAC can’t keep itself out of the news lately, I guess it’s fitting to discuss their use of one of legendary Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar’s favorite strategies: plata o plomo (silver or lead/bribes or bullets), which I’ve inelegantly adapted to a campaign context dominated by money to plata o oro (silver or gold).

Take the money or we’ll take you out with massively funded media campaigns (although I’ll talk about the increasing kinetic element of hasbara further down).

There’s an important piece at The Nation called AIPAC and the Congressional Black Congress that details how that strategy has been deployed very effectively against a key element of Democratic congressional power:

The CBC’s silence isn’t accidental: More than half of its current 61 members have been endorsed or funded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful US lobbying arm for Israel’s agenda. In the 2023–24 election cycle alone, AIPAC endorsed 26 of the caucus’s members, raising $4.6 million for them and another $3.5 million for Black Democratic candidates.

So that covers the silver, now let’s look at the gold AIPAC threw around to beat multiple CBC members in the last cycle:

AIPAC’s targeting of Black lawmakers such as Cori Bush of Missouri, who lost her seat in 2024, for speaking out against Israel’s crimes against humanity.
…
The group also targeted … Pennsylvania Representative Summer Lee, who spoke out against Israel… (Lee survived that AIPAC offensive, but now, like other congressional critics of Israel, she has to be prepared for AIPAC-funded primary challenges each time she runs for reelection.)
…
What has rendered the Democratic Party such an impotent voice in combating the Gaza genocide, in other words, is a matter of fundraising math. A single-issue lobby reliant on strong financial backing from GOP donors has successfully managed to keep Democratic critics of Israel out of Congress.

…look at what happened to Jamaal Bowman. In May 2023, while serving as a Democratic representative from New York, Bowman cosponsored a resolution seeking to ensure that US funds to Israel would not be used to harm Palestinian children. This would seem an uncontroversial aim—but not for AIPAC and its allied PACs.

…Bowman learned the cost of speaking truth to the spending power of AIPAC. “When you go against one of their pieces of legislation, depending on what it is, they will e-mail you, relentlessly call you, relentlessly protest outside of your office, and stop you from even being able to do your job,” he continued.

In the 2023–24 election cycle, AIPAC (made) an unprecedented outlay of $15 million in a single House race by the group in its successful primary challenge against Bowman. He was replaced on the Democratic ticket by the AIPAC-endorsed former Westchester County executive George Latimer, a white candidate with a record of racist remarks.

Pro-Israel groups spent millions to defeat other Black members of Congress, including Bush and Lee as well as Maryland Representative Donna Edwards. … Lee is the only CBC member in that cohort of Israel critics who’s still in office.
…
The 2024 purge represented a dramatic upsurge in the group’s battle against Black progressives. Records indicate that AIPAC did not spend any money against Bush or Bowman during the 2022 elections. After Bush sponsored a resolution in October 2023 that called for de-escalation and a ceasefire in Gaza, AIPAC spent $8.6 million to replace her on the Democratic ticket with Wesley Bell, who abandoned his bid to become Missouri’s first Black senator in order to supplant Bush in the House.

…spending against Bush in 2022 only reached $170,602—which means that AIPAC boosted anti-Bush and pro-opposition spending by nearly 5,000 percent in the 2024 cycle. AIPAC’s anti-Bush and pro-Bell cash offensive also worked out to four times the $2 million that the progressive PAC Justice Democrats contributed to Bush’s primary campaign and anti-Bell efforts.

AIPAC Aipac Lying Low Because Opps Are Fundraising off Their Opposition

Fortunately, brutal politics like that triggers a reaction and thanks to groups like Track AIPAC the political action committee is becoming too toxic to follow standard operating practice.

One of the clearest signs is when U.S. Senate candidates are bragging that they refuse AIPAC money, not something often seen before October 7, 2023. This is from Illinois:

Let’s beat AIPAC, one sticker sale at a time.
Thanks for the idea, @mehdirhasan.bsky.social !

Get yours here: www.rayguncustom.com/collections/…

[image or embed]

— Kat Abughazaleh (@katmabu.bsky.social) Oct 21, 2025 at 2:27 PM

And it works:

Rolling Stone covered the launch of Kat Abughazaleh’s campaign, when she challenged the 80-year-old incumbent Jan Schakowsky in March, running so strong she forced Schakowsky to announce she wouldn’t run by May:

Illinois 9th District has only been represented by two people since 1965, and there hasn’t been a competitive primary since the race Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, the district’s current representative, won in November 1998. “I wouldn’t be born for another four months,” deadpans Kat Abughazaleh, the TikTok-famous political commentator now running to represent the district.

Abughazaleh is transparent about the fact that she is not what anyone thinks of as shoe-in for Congress: a 26-year-old narcoleptic freelance social media creator who doesn’t live in the district and has only lived in the state for less than a year, challenging a Democratic Party leader who has represented this part of Illinois for more than a quarter of a century.

That’s kind of the point: She is a normal person — with a rental lease she can’t break before it’s up, financial pressure bearing down on her, and prescription medication that she needs to function properly and that has been challenging to obtain since Elon Musk went after her employer, and she and many of her colleagues were laid off.
…
“We are in an emergency,” Abughazaleh says. “Right now, the answer to authoritarianism isn’t to be quiet. It’s not matching pink outfits at a state address. It’s not throwing trans people under the bus. It’s not refusing to look at the party at all and see where it could be better. The answer is to very publicly, very loudly, very boldly, stand up. The only way to fight fascism, and this has been proven over and over and over again, is loudly, proudly, and every single day.”

Even if Abughazaleh doesn’t win the seat, simply forcing gerontocrat Schakowsky to step down is a worthwhile accomplishment.

Now there are about 20 Democrats in the primary, including Daniel Biss, the Mayor of Evanston who has served in the U.S. Congress and ran a losing race for Governor in 2018, but Abughazaleh is still leading the money race — a huge feat for a first-time netroots candidate.

AIPAC’s response has been to pour stealth money into the race, supporting a fairly obscure GOP candidate. Matthew Eadie reports from Illinois:

Over 270 donors, many of whom have backed dozens of Republican politicians and the nation’s largest pro-Israel lobbying group, donated over $319,000 to State Sen. Laura Fine’s congressional campaign since May, campaign records show.

Hundreds of Fine’s donors who drove almost half of her campaign fundraising had previously supported several candidates, both Republican and Democratic, through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, including Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tx.), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.).

One donor, a physician from Fort Myers, Florida, donated $500 to Fine’s campaign on Sept. 18, just three days after a fundraising email from AIPAC calling her opponents, Kat Abughazaleh and Daniel Biss “dangerous detractors” from AIPAC’s mission. The donor had previously donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republicans, including over $20,000 to two of Donald Trump’s largest super PACs in 2024.

Of the over 740 individual donations Fine received since launching her campaign, over 270 came from donors with strong links to AIPAC, which has often been criticized for targeting critics of the Jewish state, previously supported candidates directly through AIPAC, Evanston Now’s analysis of hundreds of records shows.

Fine’s donations, as listed in both her July and October FEC filings, were not earmarked as being made through AIPAC and are displayed as individual donations. Evanston Now crosschecked hundreds of the donors and their donation histories, compiling a list of candidates her donors had previously supported.

Matthew Eadie does a lot of supplemental work on X.com

AIPAC vs Thomas Massie
Here’s a tweet from a mysteriously popular seemingly AI infused anonymous account trafficking in conspiracy theory, but as we’ve learned from Dr. Aaron Good, zionists are pulling so many conspiracies that even anti-Semitic right-wingers are doing some good work:

Then there’s how AIPAC handles maverick Republicans like Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, a principled libertarian in the Ron and Rand Paul mode. Now, I could go on for hours about how wrong all those principles are, but I respect the man for having an ethos and sticking to it.

As Dr. Good told BettBeat Media:

Dr. Aaron Good: Zionism is something unique and powerful and important to grapple with and that we are kind of ill-suited to do so because of indoctrination about anti-semitism and what it is and is what it is and is not acceptable to say about Israel.

Ultimately, I am not on the side of the right-wing conspiracists who don’t really have a problem with capitalism or imperialism per se, but but focus on the conspiratorial uh activity of Zionists, which is, and some of these people will do good work because there are so much terrible conspiratorial things that (zionists) are doing. But I think it’s a mistake to just try to to fixate on that and not recognize that it’s the system that kind of created this Game of Thrones environment for oligarchic factions to act the way that they act.

But enough clarifying why I’m not exactly on Team Massie but support him in his fight with Trump and AIPAC.

Another fascinating “political blender” case is Mel The Villge Crazy Lady who does the Lord’s work battling Zionists on X, despite being all kinds of sus in other regards. Here she is fighting the good fight for Massie:

Politico had a good piece this summer explaining Massie’s district and why it will be a tough one to dislodge him from:

in Rep. Thomas Massie’s fourth Congressional district, there are a few other pillars to know about: Cincinnati chili, served over spaghetti with Greek spices; a life-size Noah’s Ark; and a political culture that, in the words of Northern Kentucky’s political class, is a good fit for Massie’s libertarian conservatism — even if it means facing the wrath of President Donald Trump.

“Yes, we’re conservatives, but we also have independent thinking,” said Republican state Rep. TJ Roberts, a protege of Massie’s in Frankfort. “We have a consistent track record of having a very different taste, especially when we talk about foreign affairs.”
…
“I am consequential here in Washington, D.C. In between launching B-2 bombers to the other side of the planet, the president spends some portion of his attention worried about what I’m going to do next,” said Massie, a 54-year-old, MIT-educated entrepreneur who founded a haptics company before moving back to his family home of Lewis County in the early 2000s.
…
Kentucky Republicans have been needling Trump like it’s a part-time job ever since his return to the White House — from Sen. Mitch McConnell’s long feud with Trump, to Sen. Rand Paul’s vote against the “big, beautiful bill” and support for a Democrat-led measure to end Trump’s tariffs on Canada.
…
His confidence is based on the particular contours of the electorate in his district, which is focused around Cincinnati’s Northern Kentucky suburbs with a healthy bite of Appalachia and exurban Louisville. Local political professionals know Massie’s fief to be a quizzical mixture of many right-leaning factions that don’t always get along: suburbanites who identify with Ohio; Appalachians who are deeply skeptical about all forms of federal control; and a strong Catholic tradition that contrasts with the state’s Bible-thumping stereotype.

Now Trump has recruited a Navy seal to run against Massie, per Politico:

Trump hailed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL captain who ran unsuccessfully for state Senate last year, as a “WINNER WHO WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN” in a Truth Social post last week. He also said Massie “must be thrown out of office, ASAP.”

Massie is dismissing Gallrein as a threat, casting his opponent to POLITICO last week as a “failed candidate and establishment hack.” He later took to X to post vote totals showing he outran Gallrein in the counties they overlapped last year. And he recently posted the biggest fundraising quarter of his career, hauling in $768,000 from July to September and entering October with more than $2 million in cash on hand.

The president has been searching for a challenger to Massie since the Kentuckian voted against the “big, beautiful bill.” Trump’s political operation launched a super PAC aimed at unseating Massie in June, as the representative pushed to reassert congressional authority over Trump’s military actions in Iran. The group, MAGA KY, has spent $1.8 million on independent expenditures so far.

But there are reasons to be skeptical of Massie:

This will be a race I’ll be following for Naked Capitalism.

Influencer Apocolypse: The Sequel?

And to change subjects again, an alarming development in terms of hasbara manifesting in kinetic form against media, right here in the USA.

When I covered Kirk’s death I quoted Yasha Levine and he seems unfortunately prophetic:

The hit did something I haven’t seen before. It spooked the political influencers. They are scared. Many of them spent last night issuing lengthy, serious statements on X about the gravity of the situation. Some of them are calling it a 9/11 event — a 9/11 for the influencer class.

Political assassinations are one thing. Killing a president, however horrible, was seen as within the rules of “the game.” But influencers? Political commentators? They were supposed to be a protected class. Their free speech was supposed to matter. It was supposed to be protected by “the rules.” Many of them see themselves in Charlie Kirk. And they are clearly afraid for their lives. The world — their world — has turned upside down. Nothing will be the same to them. And it’s not just the influencers on Charlie Kirk’s team. The liberal and left wings of the influencer class are panicking, too. If a righty influencer can be whacked, so can they. The rules have changed.

Now it’s Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks in the barrell:

This is how Canary Mission kicked off their attacks on Kasparian:

Hopefully she stays safe.

UPDATE: As Lyman Alpha Bob points out in the comments, Kasparian is a skilled story teller and professional attention grabber so looking at the actual footage is pretty essential for evaluating the real threat presented by the woman and her dog:

As Levine pointed out, the Kirk assassination brought some awareness of kinetic reality to many influencers and that is not always an easy thing to handle if you live in the spectacle full-time.

I’ll have more on the Democrats’ generational war on today’s Coffee Break. Chuck Schumer is going all out to stop Bernie Sanders’ choice in the Maine Senate primary. And by all out, I mean he’s drafted a 77 year old to run for the U.S. Senate.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Subscribe to Post Comments
51 comments

      1. The Rev Kev

        As the Chinese curse goes, ‘may you live in interesting times.’ As far as I can see, it is going to take decades to un*** American politics but I am not sure that it is possible. Years ago a Princeton study found that America is effectively an oligarchy which ex-president Carter confirmed. Excuse the long quote here-

        ‘Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population. Federal policy is increasingly dictated by the wealthy, by the financial sector, and by powerful industries. These policies are implemented and praised by these groups’ willing servants, namely the increasingly bought-and-paid-for leadership of America’s political parties, academia, and lobbying industry.

        If allowed to continue, this process will turn the United States into a declining, unfair society with an impoverished, angry, uneducated population under the control of a small, ultrawealthy elite. Such a society would be not only immoral but also eventually unstable, dangerously ripe for religious and political extremism.

        Thus far, both political parties have been remarkably clever and effective in concealing this new reality. In fact, the two parties have formed an innovative kind of cartel—an arrangement I have termed America’s political duopoly, which I analyze in detail below. Both parties lie about the fact that they have each sold out to the financial sector and the wealthy. So far both have largely gotten away with the lie, helped in part by the enormous amount of money now spent on deceptive, manipulative political advertising. But that can’t last indefinitely; Americans are getting angry, and even when they’re misguided or poorly informed, people have a deep, visceral sense that they’re being screwed.

        The real challenge is figuring out how the United States can regain control of its future from its new oligarchy and restore its position as a prosperous, fair, well-educated nation. For if we don’t, the current pattern of great concentration of wealth and power will worsen, and we may face the steady immiseration of most of the American population.’

        Charles Ferguson – “Predator Nation” 2012

        Reply ↓
        1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

          Ferguson was prophetic. I remember the Princeton study. Seems like it’s finally becoming conventional wisdom.

          This part from Ferguson really hit the basket in pre-describing 2025 from 13 years out:

          an impoverished, angry, uneducated population under the control of a small, ultrawealthy elite. Such a society would be not only immoral but also eventually unstable, dangerously ripe for religious and political extremism.

          Reply ↓
          1. RookieEMT

            I will have to read him up soon. Another prophet of sorts would be Alfred McCoy.

            He is strange now, a pro-intervention liberal, but his book In the Shadows of the American Century is still aging well.

            He predicts the American empire comes apart by around 2030, with Trump accelerating the process.

            Reply ↓
              1. Cian

                McCoy is best known for his book ‘The Politics of Heroin’ where he forensically analyzed the CIA use and promotion of heroin in SE Asia to advance US interests.

                It was strange reading his later stuff and discovering that he was a lot less radical than I assumed.

                Reply ↓
            2. jsn

              Wait a minute: find me a mainstream liberal since Samantha Powers who’s not pro-intervention? They even sucked in Bernie, the CIA Democrats exist to beat that drum.

              Reply ↓
              1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

                very key point. Something happened to the post-1968 generation, where they arrived at a militaristic consensus sometime after Reagan’s election.

                Reply ↓
                1. flora

                  Good essay here from Matt Stoller in the October, 2016 issue of The Atlantic.

                  How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul

                  In the 1970s, a new wave of post-Watergate liberals stopped fighting monopoly power. The result is an increasingly dangerous political system.

                  Reply ↓
                  1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

                    that was an essential influence on my thinking. I had never really put together the zeitgeist shift of the post-Watergate Dems.

                    Combine with the work of trying to establish if the creation of the individualistic, identity focused “new left” was a CIA op or not (no time to track down author or title of that book ATM sorry) and bang! paranoia deepens.

                    Reply ↓
                    1. flora

                      Thank, Nat.

                      Was the post-Watergate era of the younger Dems the start of the era of draft-deferments for college kid Dems? Did Bill ever serve? Were only or mostly working class kids drafted? Is that why Hills much later referred to the working class kids, then the biggest draftee group, as ‘deplorables’? I’ll never know. Was that the start of the reverence for credentalism in the Dem party?

                      As for ‘individualism and identity politics’, CIA op or Wall St divide and conquer. It was a good way to undermine the workers’ Union cohesion based on class and working conditions. So there’s that.

            3. flora

              Paul Kennedys book
              The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000
              is also aging well.

              One interesting aspect discussed is the dissolution of social cohesion and physical well being of the country’s general population when empires fail. We saw something like this when the old USSR failed.

              Reply ↓
              1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

                agree on that. read that in high school or the year after, and it established my geostrategic worldview. amazing how few understand that military empires rely on their economic bases and that military overstretch is an inevitable outcome of imperial expansion and the overall military spending inevitably kills the economic foundation they rest on.

                Reply ↓
            4. flora

              “He predicts the American empire comes apart by around 2030….”

              One wonders if this is why the Western govts are eager, even desperate to install digital ids and CBDCs. They know what social upheavals can occur when empires fail.

              Reply ↓
        2. David in Friday Harbor

          I attended Charles Ferguson’s book tour for Predator Nation. His remarks were already bleaker than this quote from his book. Ferguson is an interesting character. Educated at Berkeley and MIT, he sold FrontPage to Microsoft for tens of millions in 1994; he consulted for the Clinton administration but became disillusioned. He won an Oscar for Inside Job, a brilliant film about the 2008 GFC.

          I suspect that Ferguson would agree with me that money is speech. I was treasurer of a public employee labor organization and I can testify that we only started being heard when we funded a PAC and began spending conspicuously. The problem is that the anti-worker forces unleashed under Clinton-Gingrich stripped us of the ability to organize, band together, and out-spend the billionaires.

          The naive mistake of Anthony Kennedy in Citizens United is his belief that radical transparency would solve the problem of money in politics by declaring constitutional a requirement of immediate disclosure all sources of political spending via the internet, just like the warning on a pack of cigarettes. Obama was still pretending that he wasn’t wholly-owned by Penny Pritzker and Goldman Sachs and he quashed the transparency bill that Kennedy had invited. The Democrats love their Dark Money just as much as Republicans do.

          Reply ↓
    2. PlutoniumKun

      +1 from me. The manner in which previous ideological blocks are rapidly splitting and reforming, especially over Israel, is fascinating, although I fear the eventual outcome won’t be good.

      Reply ↓
      1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

        thanks! The current outcomes are already disastrous enough for me, hard to see any of this leading anywhere good beyond very temporary schadenfreude.

        Reply ↓
      2. Cian

        Antisemitism is rapidly becoming an important political issue on the right, particularly the young activists.

        I can see the US tearing itself apart over Israel.

        Reply ↓
  2. pjay

    The Citizens United decision was truly a turning turning point in our history, not because money didn’t dominate politics before but because now we could stop even pretending that our oligarchy was anything else. As wealth becomes increasingly concentrated, we are increasingly at the mercy of whatever idiosyncrasies our new feudal lords believe. So if a billionaire is “a one-issue voter, and that issue is Israel,” then their billions will guarantee that this issue will also be important to our “elected” officials. And when their interests coincide with other well-financed lobbies representing, say, Raytheon, then policy is almost predetermined. I hear Peter Thiel is gearing up to battle The Anti-Christ, so we’d better pay attention to his theological interpretations.

    I’ve always thought repeal of the Smith-Mundt Act was a similar symbolic turning point. Again, it was not that we weren’t saturated by propaganda before, but now we didn’t even have to pretend. We don’t have to launder our propaganda through foreign sources or covert funding of academics or journalists. Now we can just make s**t up at State Department press conferences or feed it to friendly journalists who will report it directly as fact. It makes oligarchic rule so much easier when you don’t have to jump through a bunch of pretend hoops.

    Reply ↓
    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      great point re: Smith-Mundt Act. I need to write on that an absolutely critical inflection point.

      Reply ↓
      1. Jason Boxman

        So much has happened these years, I forget, that case where the Supreme Court said that there’s no corruption unless an elected takes a bag of gold in one hand and provides a receipt for it. I actually forgot which VA governor that was now. Meanwhile, Gov. Don Siegelman was in prison for 6 years.

        America is just an obvious farce anymore.

        Reply ↓
      2. jrkrideau

        As some one who is not from the USA, the Smith-Mundt Act is amazing. It tells me and everyone else in the world not be believe anything the USA says.

        Reply ↓
    2. jsn

      In a grand application of the “mosaic strategy”, turning one tile face at a time, case by case, definition by definition, the SCOTUS has extra-legislatively and without any popular input transformed a notional Republic into a pure, legally structured Oligarchy.

      Policy is bought and sold openly now, with power blocks (where they’re not carefully concealed) tracked by the Forbes list.

      Whatever looks like a problem for the erstwhile citizenry, reduced to consumers where not simple feed-stocks to some your-money-or-your-life cash harvest, is inevitably revealed on close inspection to be a “profit center” for some Oligarch. And to the extent real conflicts, rather than the Team Red/Team Blue kayfabe, manifest in our public discourse it’s because upstream Oligarchs are contesting cashflows through the various money sluices that apparently only the Whitehouse can impact now.

      Reply ↓
    3. Cian

      It was also a stupid act by the right. The US has never been very democratic, but it because it had a lot of voting it was easy to disguise that – particularly given the success of propagandist US education

      Citizens United made it impossible even for the most boomer brained liberals to pretend that the system is fair, or democratic. When a system loses legitimacy, things get messy and chaotic fast.

      Reply ↓
  3. lyman alpha blob

    I saw Kasparian’s take on this yesterday and watched some of it – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LObfaI3EAp4

    To me, it seemed like she ran into a Karen who resembled Kyle’s mom from South Park and she used it to make a news segment out of something that wasn’t the most newsworthy. Sorry, but that Karen’s poodle didn’t exactly have me cowering in fear when I watched the clip.

    However, given what else we’ve seen recently from Zionist fanatics, clubbing old ladies in the head and much worse, her situation definitely bears keeping an eye on.

    Reply ↓
    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      Yea I should add that to the post. Kasparian (and the whole Young Turks operation) is not someone I trust implicitly even if I sometimes agree.

      Reply ↓
  4. Major League Fungo Stick

    The answer to authoritarianism is to blame the International Jewish Conspiracy. Sorry, I mean “AIPAC”, against which the main complaint appears that they’re effective at their jobs. If only AIPIC would raise less money, somehow other democratic causes will automatically raise more to cover the difference. It has nothing to do with illiberal interests getting their opposition to dismantle their own most effective fundraising networks going into the midterms.

    Whatever we’ve caught, it has clearly progressed to Stage IV. Because if twitter bots in the service of thieves can promote Tsarist anti-Semitism enough to convince one to destroy one’s own democracy by embracing slogan-mimics, age 26, for political leadership, a la the Cultural Revolution, how much work did the bots really have to do? At least those historical constituencies were grappling with a feudal elite economically falling behind neighboring empires. White guard elites committed to squeezing an illiterate work force, go after the literate first. There’s is no step two, that’s it, ideas cease to be exchanged. Now, like a summer blockbuster built around existing IP nostalgia, we’re implored to divide each other with the same self-replicating off-the-shelf medieval tropes foisted upon our feudal ancestors, so as to pocket the savings on the marketing the product.

    Just a coincidence this is a paid post funded by a Harvard-educated financier pulling in ad revenue from precious metal exchanges targeting a thoroughly segmented audience with a high CPM return. Heiliger Bimbam! All you need now is a car blogger.

    Reply ↓
    1. Jason Boxman

      What was that rant even about?

      Genocide is bad. AIPIC funds challengers to Democrat politicians that oppose genocide.

      That’s it. That’s the reply.

      Reply ↓
    2. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      I didn’t include any of the stuff about AIPAC spending the vast majority of its money to support extreme right GOP candidates at every opportunity — sometimes even against the Democrat they supported in the primary IIRC. So yea, whatever dude. Your magic words don’t work anymore, the spell is broken.

      Reply ↓
  5. Expat2uruguay

    Before I left the US I was a very committed activist in the years during and following Obama’s 8 years of betrayal. I was committed to Occupy Wall Street in Sacramento even though I couldn’t understand their meeting forum that allowed anybody to interrupt with crossed arms. I fought for raises in the minimum wage, even though I was an engineer making a good salary. I tried to become part of Black Lives Matter but I was too white, old, and experienced. Only young black idealist were permitted. I organized calls into Congress trying to pass the extension of the unemployment insurance, but of course that failed. So I gave up on federal staff and focused on State and local.

    Which brings me to Money in Politics and the fight in the California State house against the Citizens United decision. I fought the hardest for this because I thought it was the most important. I was arrested twice in organized sit-down protests designed to lead to peaceful arrest. In the first instance, organized by 99Rise, a small group of protesters would get arrested each night during the week or so the California state house was debating whether or not to join a campaign against Citizens United. Myself and a couple other women were arrested that night and that campaign ended up being successful if I remember correctly.

    But the next one wasn’t. It was a campaign to get overturning Citizens United on the state ballot as a advisory vote to our state government. By the Supreme Court of California knocked it off of the ballot, so voters wouldn’t even get a chance to think about it, much less voice their opinion. Me and one other were arrested on the steps of the State Supreme Court building. My last effort was in the lead-up to that election, again organized by 99Rise, to fast, water only, for 10 days before the election to bring attention to the problem of money in politics. I didn’t eat anything for 10 days, and nobody cared. Not my coworkers, not the press, nor my friends or family that were outside of my activism contacts. That led me into a terrible depression which made me fear for my own sanity and commitment to life. The only way I saw out was to leave the country. To leave the fight before I did something stupid. And I’ve been in Uruguay since early 2016 and the things I’ve seen looking back at the US leave me without words. My impression is that nobody cares in the US. Or not enough anyway. Nowhere near enough. Apathy rules and perhaps I’m bitter.

    But I’m proud of myself for being merely fearless when it came to confronting money in politics, for as long as I could. Saludos y namaste.

    Reply ↓
    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      Well done. Makes me think of Matthew 21:25 ” ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.”

      I hope Uruguay has been a safe haven for you. Fighting this system is madness-inducing.

      Reply ↓
    3. Janeway

      With the country the way it is, I can not understand why it is that hunger strikes or whatever personal public actions are thought to move the needle outside of anyone’s personal sphere? It’s not main character syndrome per se, but the thought that starving oneself would make anyone care more about something (again, other than inside one’s personal sphere) makes no sense in light of the sihtshow that is 2025.

      Just last week a few students at U of R went on a hunger strike over Gaza. The social media comments were exactly what 2025 social media comments are – wishing them a slow painful wasting away.

      Reply ↓
        1. judy2shoes

          “I suspect she’s very moved by suffering and assumed the same was the case with others.”

          And that, Nat, is the most difficult thing for me to understand. I just cannot grasp why the 7,000,000 or so No Kings marchers can’t muster the same kind of energy and will to protest the Gaza genocide. I suspect that’s because they might face something similar to what Expat2uruguay experienced (thank you, Ex2u for your comment). Look what happened after Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation. Nothing.

          Thanks again, Nat, for another fine piece.

          Reply ↓
          1. Cassandra

            Well… I was going to sit out the 2024 presidential primary after voting religiously for almost half a century, but I went after all and wrote in Aaron Bushnell’s name. You might argue that he wasn’t qualified, being too young and too dead, but Joe Biden won my state and Donald Trump won other states so I think you could make a strong case for President Bushnell. RIP, Aaron.

            Reply ↓
          2. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

            Thanks!

            Never forget that Bushnell has been celebrated by millions of Yemenis and Palestinians as a martyr. The damned might not notice the passing of a saint, but those fighting a righteous cause do.

            Reply ↓
  6. aj

    Then there’s how AIPAC handles maverick Republicans like Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, a principled libertarian in the Ron and Rand Paul mode. Now, I could go on for hours about how wrong all those principles are, but I respect the man for having an ethos and sticking to it.

    “I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” – Walter Sobchak

    Reply ↓
  7. Henry Moon Pie

    About halfway through this piece, I thought, “Why does this seem familiar?” And then I remembered: excerpts plus pithy commentary. Lambert’s Water Cooler! And a big smile came on my face.

    I’m lovin’ it. But Nat, make sure you get some sleep somewhere along the way.

    Reply ↓
    1. aj

      I miss Water Cooler. *sadface*. Was what brought me back to NC every day. These days, I’m only a once or twice a week reader.

      Reply ↓
      1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

        Well, selfishly, I hope that Mondays and Wednesdays are your days. ; ) Although I personally am still a daily coffee break reader. Great lineup, I always learn a ton.

        Reply ↓
    2. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      High praise. I’m only busting hump this hard for a week while Yves is away but it’s gotten me into such a good rhythm I’m definitely going to be pumping my output way up (as much here as Yves needs and elsewhere I can find audience) but going to try to avoid 4 posts days in future!

      Reply ↓
  8. John Merryman

    It’s not like the Ancients didn’t develop debt jubilees as circuit breakers to the feedback loops of compound interest and we find ourselves caught up in the same doom loop.
    The West is going into its reset phase. Russia went through one from the fall of the Czars to the collapse of the Soviet Union. China, between the Opium Wars and the Cultural Revolution.
    Wouldn’t it be nice to put some of our top heavy crowd out in the rice fields?

    Reply ↓

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *