Ian Welsh

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

Author: Ian Welsh Page 5 of 423

Is Trump Going To Purge Democrats, Seize Power and Rewrite the Constitution?

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On October 12, 2025

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What can I say, it’s just the perfect Trump picture.

It’s for sure that there are those with great influence on him who want him to. Thomas Neuburger has the quotes, starting with Stephen Miller:

[This is] Legal insurrection. The President is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, not an Oregon judge. Portland and Oregon law enforcement, at the direction of local leaders, have refused to aid ICE officers facing relentless terrorist assault and threats to life. (There are more local law enforcement officers in Oregon than there are guns and badges in the FBI nationwide). This is an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers, and the deployment of troops is an absolute necessity to defend our personnel, our laws, our government, public order and the Republic itself.

“Legal insurrection … an organized terrorist attack on the federal government”. There are laws against that. Another example, Miller to Hannity:

The Democrat party … is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers, and illegal alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat party is not a political party. It is a domestic, extremist organization.

Noem and Hegseth agree (see here and here) and seem to be willing, as commanders of government forces, to fight by his side. Trump also agrees:

[T]hey’re throwing bricks at full force into the window and into the car. It looks like it’s a war zone. And I said, never let that happen again. From now on if that ever happens, and I say it here, you get out of that car and you can do whatever the hell you want to do …

Last month, I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room [the Pentagon’s generals] because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.

So, Thomas thinks this might be the start of a new civil war, or at least that’s what Miller wants and Trump may agree. (I think Trump is too fickle to be sure. But by all accounts Miller is the consummate Trump-whisperer.)

But what I see happening is something else. Just declare the Democratic party a terrorist organization and add in RICO penalties. Send law enforcement after them. Some may not be willing to, but ICE will do the job if no one else does, and other cops or military won’t fire on them, they’ll get the pols. Then put them in an ICE controlled prison. If really smart, set up an administrative court with executive appointed judges to try them, and either have the Supremes ratify it, or if that’s too far even for them (unlikely, but possible), ignore them.

Then, with full control of all legislatures, call a Constitutional referendum and change any and all amendments and the Constitution as Trump (or the smart lads who really do the work, like the 2025 crowd) desire, essentially changing America’s form of government permanently.

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Trump’s not smart enough for this, but Miller and various backers are, he’s got a Cabinet full of yes-men and women to back him, he’s purging the military and the three letter agencies of those who might try to stop him, and there’s no particular reason to think it might not work. There’d have to be a massive uprising, or enough soldiers and various types of police who resist to stop him.

If there are, it’s civil war. If there aren’t, well, it may be a low grade civil war anyway, or he may just get it thru. Hard to see most Democrats actually fighting back effectively, or fighting back at all.

Not saying this will happen. I don’t think they have the guts for it, and Trump is fickle. But there’s a large faction with a lot of influence who want it to happen, and they’re working hard to make it happen.

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Open Thread

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On October 12, 2025

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China Is Going To Leave The US What America Left Britain: Nothing

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On October 10, 2025

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Chinese and American flags

So, China has slapped draconian export controls not just on rare earths, but on all technology related to rare earths. If you want rare earths you have to beg for permission and certify it won’t be used for anything military or anything technologically related. If you want the rare earths or tech to catch up, you can’t have them. (Like when the US banned advanced lithography machines.)

As an extra fillip, China has also announced that all American ships must pay port fees. (This is symbolic, few ships are flagged American.)

The writing was on the wall for this when China, just recently, told all domestic firms to not buy Western chips. That mean that they had enough of the chip technology stack that they felt they were immune to counter-sanctions.

And now the whoop-ass.

You can thank Trump for this. His chip and Huawei sanctions taught the Chinese they had to control their entire own tech stack. Before that they preferred American, Korean and Taiwanese chips. No big Chinese company would buy Chinese crap chips. If the US hadn’t decided on its moronic trade war, China would have allowed it to gracefully age out of its Empire, letting it keep some areas of technological superiority.

As usual, the Chinese played this ice cold. They took their lumps, they devalued the yuan, they made concessions. When Biden came in, he doubled down so they realized it wasn’t just a democratic hiccup, but core policy agreed to by both parties. Then Trump came in and went on his insane tariff blitz. Worked against his vassals, but China doesn’t have to take America’s crap any more and it isn’t.

Now, as the kids like to say, having fucked around, America and the West are about to “find out.” Revenge served ice fucking cold.

I want to be really clear on a couple things here.

First, China is not going to leave the US or the West anything meaningful in terms of tech lead. They are going to take the tech lead, with the industry to back it up, in essentially everything (they’re already in the lead in at least 80% of areas, so don’t kid yourself about the rest.) And they are going to break the US’s hold on the Americas too. By the time China is done with America, they’ll be lucky to still have have Mexico and Canada as vassals (which is why they might invade and is why the US is threatening Venezuela before it gets a full suite of Chinese and Russian weapons.)

Second: if you are in charge of any country in the world that is an American vassal and you have an IQ above 90 and the smallest amount of interest in the future of your country, your job right now is to transfer your allegiance to China and get the best deal you can in exchange. The longer you wait, the worse the deal will be.

I do mean everyone: Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea.

Everyone.

Get out, now. The US has already lost the war, and while there may be a lot of screaming and even a shooting war (without rare earths, the US needs to fight a war in the next two years, or wait tent years as it rebuilds its military stack) it’s over. Just like Japan had already lost even before Pearl Harbor (and that sort of attack is the danger now.)

China is going to run the world for the next forty to sixty years, minimum, barring ecological collapse. It has zero love for the old hegemons. The US, the Anglo countries and the Euros will not be treated kindly out of some feeling of kinship or because they are needed, neither is true. Only Australia and Canada have something to offer the Chinese might want. Everyone else is just wasting assets.

Besides, the Americans are bastards. Right now they aren’t offering anything but “stay our vassal and let us loot you.” Pull out your knife and your pen. Sign an agreement with the Chinese, and drive a knife right between America’s shoulder blades.

I’d say “they do it to you” but they’re natural born bullies and you’re already on your knees begging them not to hurt you more. (EU, I am especially looking at you. To say you have the dignity of slaves would be to malign slaves, who at least have no choice.)

America’s done. All statesmanship for the next fifteen years will be about handling the fallout. If the West had any statesmen, even one, that might be good news.

I’d Like To Be Optimistic About the Latest Gaza Peace Plan

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On October 9, 2025

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Sounds on good on screen:

Hamas & Palestinian factions agree to Gaza ceasefire plan. A formal agreement is set to be signed today, Thursday, in Egypt, with Hamas officially approving the deal. The agreement includes the immediate opening of five crossings to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, adjustments to the Gaza withdrawal map, and the release of 20 Israeli captives alive in the first phase. The deal is guaranteed by the U.S., Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey, ensuring that attacks will not resume as long as both parties adhere to its terms.

But, after all, this is basically the same agreement as in January, with release of Israeli captives in phases. You’ll remember how quickly Israel broke that deal. The only good, possibly, will be getting some food and medicine in Gaza. (Remember, again, that Israel let in very little last time.)

Netanyahu, and most Israelis, want to commit genocide. The polling and their own statements are really clear on this. The vast majority of Israelis don’t want to stop till all Palestinians are dead or gone, whether from Gaza or the West bank.

That means the only way a deal like this can work is if Trump will cut off all military supplies in order to enforce it if Israel breaks it. Odds of that? Pretty close to zero, I’d guess.

Rarely have I wanted to be wrong about something more than this, however, and I pray I am. The counter-argument is that Israel is, in fact, exhausted economically by the war, reservists are increasingly refusing to call up, and Israel has become a pariah nation and thus it is time to declare victory, at least for now. May that argument prove correct.

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Is Good Or Evil More Effective? The Case of America and China.

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On October 8, 2025

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It’s our annual fundraiser. We’ve raised a little over $5,570 from 41 people in the last nine days, out of our goal of $12,500. If you’re a regular reader and can afford to support our writing, please subscribe or donate. Everyone reads for free, but without those who give the site would not survive.

(Second in a series. Read the first: “Is it more fun to be evil than good?“)

As I’ve repeatedly noted, China is now the most powerful nation in the world. If the US was to go to war with China, it would be crushed. After the first two to three weeks it wouldn’t even be close. China has magnitudes more ability to manufacture weapons, and there’s reason to believe that their missiles, drones and fighters are superior to Western ones.

It’s over. China won, and the US lost.

Why?

Well, one reason, bear with me, is that the people who ran China from Deng onwards were a lot less evil than those running America. Or if you prefer, more good.

One of the things you notice if you read Chinese documents about successes of government policy is that they almost never express success in currency. No “the new industry made ten billion Yuan.” It’s always “2 million apartments were built” or “12 nuclear plants are now operational” or “we have reduced the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere by X many thousands of tons” or “we now produce 50,000 tons more of wheat” or “we’ve built 5,000 of the 10,000 parks we promised and will finish the rest in four years.”

There’s no question that China had a lot of corruption till Xi’s crackdowns, and still has a fair bit, but China’s policy makers are focused on improving the lot of ordinary people. You can get rich helping do so, but you have to deliver. The CPC increased how long Chinese lived, gave them more education, gave them better homes, made access to health care cheap, and turned China into the world’s technological leader and primary industrial power.

This is because they were trying to make Chinese better off. It’s almost a side effect. If you make people healthier and better educated and give them good jobs, well, that’s good for the economy. China’s leaders weren’t primarily focused on making a small group rich, they were focused on making all Chinese richer, and on making China strong. You got rich by helping, not by hindering.

To give a recent example,  after Chinese complained that they couldn’t afford homes or rent, Xi said “homes are for living, not for speculation.” The government deliberately crashed the real-estate market, reducing the prices of both homes and rent.

Rent as proportion in income

 

It is literally inconceivable that the American government would do this. Developers went bankrupt, major landlords lost billions. Rich people were hurt! Instead, despite having far more homes than homeless people, the US has a homeless crisis and the response to it isn’t China’s (they cleaned this up recently by giving homeless people jobs and a place to live) it’s to put spikes anywhere people might sleep and when they form a tent camp to have cops kick everyone out violently and destroy their possessions. Some homeless people were even honored by having California’s government, Gavin Newsom, personally help kick them out and destroy their possessions. American values.

Next notice the lack of war-making in the last four and a half decades. Even in the recent clashes with India, weapons were forbidden. How many countries has the US invaded or bombed since 1979?  All that “not making war” has allowed China’s efforts to concentrate on China and Chinese. They focused on butter, not guns. Even today, the entire military is 2 million strong, in the world’s strongest economy (yes, it is) out of a population of 1.4 billion people.

There’s a trope that evil always wins. It doesn’t. I make no claim the CPC is full of Saints or always does good, but among major countries I can’t think of any where the leaders are as focused on the broad good of their people more than China right now. And polling all shows that Chinese agree—they’re far happier with their leaders than any Western population is. Turns out it’s not so much “democracy” that matters (not that we have that, as the EU is going out of its way to demonstrate) as whether your leaders are evil or not, and if the only choices you are allowed to make is “chocolate evil or vanilla evil”, the choice means nothing.

Good is very often stronger than evil. Evil consumes itself, as our elites have consumed their own countries power and real wealth in order to enrich themselves.

Good is bounty, it makes all those under its sway stronger and better.

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Is It More Fun To Be Evil Than Good?

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On October 7, 2025

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It’s our annual fundraiser. We’ve raised a little over $5,400 from 37 people in the last eight days, out of our goal of $12,500. These donations help us cover the changeover of hegemony from America to China, environmental collapse, internal US fascism, what a better society would look like, Gaza, AI, the coming stock market crash and various other issues. It’d be great if you can help out (please don’t donate if your financial situation is dire.) You can Subscribe or Donate here or contact me at ianatfld-at-gmail-dot-com if you need another way to donate (mail, usually. A lot of cash apps don’t work in Canada.)

 

Fairly often I run across the following piece of reasoning:

There must be punishment, including punishment by God, because otherwise who wouldn’t want the fun of being evil?

This occasions some side-eye and sidling away from the person in question. “Uh, if you think evil is fun and are only good because of fear of punishment, something is wrong with you. And you’re dangerous if you ever think you can ‘get away with it.'”

Now this is a difficult topic because it requires us to talk about the fact that doing some types of evil IS fun for some people. Do I have to explain that rapists often enjoy raping someone?

Many years ago, and I can’t find it now, I read an excerpt from a book whose author had been a torturer during the Lebanese civil war. He wrote, quite seriously, that it had destroyed him because torturing someone was the most ecstatic experience, way better than sex, and now that he didn’t torture anymore, the entire world was gray and lacked any pleasure for him.

Power isn’t just an aphrodisiac, it’s an amplifier… Making someone else do what you want them to do is experienced by many people as very pleasurable. That they don’t want to, and force was used, makes people feel powerful and potent. Trickery, convincing people to do something that is against their interest, is likewise experienced as a rush. Con artists (including the really big ones like politicians, Obama, for example) revel in their ability to manipulate people, then betray them.

The human condition is weak. We are at the mercy of fate, luck, our bodies, and other people from the moment we’re born. As children, this is especially the case. Experiencing power, feeling that we aren’t weak, is, for many, the ultimate rush and the ultimate relief from fear.

Hurting people for your own benefit, successfully, is to experience power.

Almost every CEO and executive and almost all politicians experience this repeatedly. And, as many studies have shown, powerful people lose empathy. So they experience the upside of their evil without feeling the suffering of their victims.

It’s not just that he doesn’t care that they die, but that forcing them to die for him is a rush.

Now you don’t have to be super powerful to get this. Find someone weaker, and use your power against them. Weaker is relative: they could be physically weaker (your wife and kids, perhaps?) or they could be stupider (be a con artist) or they could just lack will and you have plenty (see henpecked husbands who are physically stronger and earn more money) or you could have managed to get into a management position and they need their jobs and have to do what you say, or else.

There are millions of variations: no matter how weak you are, there’s someone weaker, and you too can experience the retail version of the wholesale pleasure offered to a CEO or high-ranking politician. You’ll never get the full thrills of torture and murder of a George W. Bush or Netanyahu, but you can taste from the same sweet swill.

Evil is fun. And that leaves aside that the most evil people tend to wind up stinking rich as a side benefit.

I’ve made the case for evil, and I’ve done my best to make the strongest case I can, but I personally think you’re a fool to accept it or choose evil.

The problem with evil is that, as Tolkien pointed out, it consumes itself. You can never trust another person who is evil, not completely. For now, it may be in their self-interest to help you or at least leave you alone, but if you’re ever vulnerable and there’s enough at stake, well, they’ll come for you. You must always be strong, or you must be subordinate to someone stronger than you. That person will only protect you as long as it is in their self-interest. If you need to be sacrificed, so be it.

Safety requires good. The obvious solution is to be a free rider. Be evil, but live among good people. But, eventually, they figure out you’re evil, and the more people try to free ride, the more a society becomes evil, till the good people, even if not a minority, are effectively powerless. (This is arguably where the US is. Probably a majority aren’t evil, but who cares? They have no power. Israel, on the other hand, is a country where something over 90% of the non-Palestinian population is evil. There is no reservoir of evil larger than a muddy puddle.)

But it’s not just safety. Evil people care only about others when it’s in their interest. If you’re good and live with good people, you know that when you’re sick, broken, scared, or down, someone will help.

This is, really, true freedom. The knowledge that someone is there to help when you need help means you can take risks and you can do what you want, so long as it doesn’t harm other people. If you’re in an evil society, you must always be sure to have sufficient power (money is secondary; it means nothing if you can’t protect it). Your effective freedom is vastly restricted.

But perhaps most important, as good as the exercise of power feels, most of the enjoyable emotions in life are oriented towards good. There’s nothing quite like the warm feeling of love. There’s nothing like true friendship, the feeling of safety it gives, and the playfulness it allows. And as for power, the power of a good community is massive. When a group comes together to do something because the members all want to, not out of fear, the feeling of being part of something larger than oneself is wonderful. (Everyone should take part in a barn raising to get a taste of this.)

The price of evil is fear. Of knowing that you’re always in danger. Perhaps you’ll be the alpha predator who “wins”, the Barack Obama or Trump (though he often seems unhappy), or the Bush Jr., but for every winner, for every aspirational evil mastermind, there are millions of predators who are sometimes the victimizer, and other days the victim. People who always have to worry about who’s coming for them next.

Of course, if you live in an evil society, many of the benefits are lost. But even there, good people find each other and create their own small groups, and even if it’s just you, there is a satisfaction in virtue that is very real. There is a peace in being good, and knowing one has red lines and, oddly, in knowing that there are things one will not do to stay alive: that there are depths one will not sink to.

In the end, evil is about wallowing in pleasures that always have sickness to them, that never fully satisfy. The ecstasy of torture or rape or killing the innocent is real enough, but there is a filth to it, which is why such people often wind up with nightmares and PTSD, despite being the powerful ones who did the evil.

Those who want evil, who think it is fun, often wake one day to find the filth they have wallowed in has consumed them.

Evil has its pleasures, but they are not worth what they cost.

(The next article in this series will argue that China has defeated the US in large part because it has been more good, or less evil, than America for quite some time.)

Open Thread

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On October 4, 2025

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Hegseth’s Speech and Fitness Standards For Soldiers

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On October 2, 2025

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I took the time to read a transcript of Secretary of War Hegseth’s speech to the gathered generals and admirals. To my surprise, I agreed with a lot of it, though not all. The crazy bits, especially combined with Trump’s statements, are the talk of domestic enemies and using the military against them.

But most of the speech is about standards. No beards, no slobs, and most of all, fitness standards:

Because war does not care if you’re a man or a woman. Neither does the enemy, nor does the weight of your rucksack, the size of an artillery round or the body weight of a casualty on the battlefield who must be carried. This — and I want to be very clear about this. This is not about preventing women from serving. We very much value the impact of female troops. Our female officers and NCOs are the absolute best in the world.

But when it comes to any job that requires physical power to perform in combat, those physical standards must be high and gender-neutral. If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is. If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it. That is not the intent, but it could be the result. So be it. It will also mean that weak men won’t qualify because we’re not playing games. This is combat. This is life or death.

And the thing is, I more or less agree with this.

But. (You knew there’d be a but.)

What fitness standards are really required?


The only major army, at war, to use a lot of women was the USSR. They weren’t allowed in all roles, but they were in some. Particularly famous were the snipers:

Roza was one of more than 2,000 female snipers trained and employed by the Soviets to put fear in the hearts of the invaders by striking thousands from the Germans’ “rations list.” Other women were even more deadly and more famous. Lyudmila Pavlichenko, for example, had 309 confirmed kills and was selected to go on a wartime goodwill tour of Allied countries that included a visit to Franklin Roosevelt’s White House.

The initial female snipers were individuals like Nina Petrova, who served as a nurse on the front, although she had been a physical education instructor who had trained marksmen before the war. At first, the Soviets had been reluctant to employ her as a sniper because of her sex and the fact that she was 48 years old.

But the nurse was persistent, got her hands on a sniper rifle, and eventually was given permission to “go hunting” in her free time. As her official kill tally mounted, she gained the go-ahead for further outings, and she began to teach frontline sniper courses.

Other units also set up similar frontline programs, and in March 1942, a Central School for Sniper Instructors was established in Veshnyaki near Moscow. Petrova, Pavlichenko, and other women on the front lines had already demonstrated their abilities and coolness under fire, so it was a fairly logical follow-through when the Soviet high command established a separate three-month-long women’s training program there in December 1942.

The Soviets thought that women made excellent snipers because they could handle cold better than men, and they were more patient and willing to wait for the right opportunities. The confirmed kill numbers on many of them were very high, in the hundreds, and there’s little question that unconfirmed kills were much higher.

That and other “decamping” events to the front lines led to further sanctions and an angry fit when a political commander refused to let her go on additional excursions. She was an adrenaline junkie who begged to go back on the front lines. “Some force draws me to the front lines,” she wrote. “I’m bored in the back. Some people say I just want to get back to the boys, but I don’t have anyone I know there. I want to see real war.”

In one frontline attack alone, Roza reportedly killed 54 Germans and captured three others. Those figures were not included in her official sniper tally but resulted in a front-page feature in a Moscow magazine. Her action prompted Soviet writer-propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg to “thank her 57 times over. She has saved the lives of thousands of Soviet people.”

I don’t have a strong view on this. I just suspect that there’s a sort of generalized misogyny at the heart of the MAGA movement, a resentment of women who “took our jobs” that will lead to the standards not actually reflecting the requirements of the field. Hell, I’m not even a fan of women in war (some latent chivalry from my upbringing, I suspect.)

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The snipers carried two grenades. One was to be used against the enemy, the second to avoid capture by killing themselves and hopefully taking some Germans with them. If captured they could expect rape and torture. (Many looted a German pistol and saved the last bullet for themselves instead.)

That said, fairness requires that those who can do the job and want to, be allowed to. The only thing that matters in war is if you can do what needs to be done. How many air force technicians are going to be separated because they’re a bit too fat, say? Does it really matter if they are? With widespread recruitment issues, can you replace them? The US military letting in more women and so on wasn’t just about “woke” it was about fairly consistent problems meeting recruitment goals with people who weren’t criminals or morons or who have serious health issues. Is it better to have American women serving, or to offer non-citizens a route to citizenship in exchange for service? (Hire mercenaries, in effect?)

Not, of course, that the US military being high functioning is in almost anyone’s interest, including most Americans. After all, Trump has deployed troops against Americans and wants to deploy more, against his domestic enemies. Nor has America been “the good guys” in many wars. America losing its wars, historically would have been good nine times out of ten. (Fortunately Americans have become better and better at losing wars.) Hell, America’s currently helping the Israelis commit genocide and a carrier task force is currently steaming thru the Med, perhaps to attack Iran again.

So perhaps Hegseth’s reforms will just make America’s military even crappier. Let’s hope so.

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