The End of the Age of No Consequence in American Politics
I recently spoke with a knowledgeable source about the genocide in Gaza and the wider political context in the Middle East and elsewhere. My source, a veteran political insider with very deep connections to Palestine, told me this (which I am paraphrasing):
“Zionists act inhumanly towards Palestinians, towards those who are not Israeli Jews. Look at the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which seems almost unmistakably to be the work of Israel. Charlie Kirk realized what was going on and was killed before he could convince other Americans to speak up for their and others’ humanity.”
Charlie Kirk had dared question Israel’s murder campaign in Palestine. Israel soon dealt with him as it does, every day, with Palestinians, whom the Israeli government deems sub-human and worthy only of liquidation. This is all very true.
But as I typed up the paragraph above from the notes I took from my conversation with my source, I began to see that Charlie Kirk was only one small part of the story. I reflected on the past several decades of American life, during which political violence has not been nearly as pronounced as in other parts of the world. How odd that the country doing the killing should be spared from the blood guilt that comes from taking innocent life. Washington has roamed the planet, killing innocent people at will, ravaging communities, laying waste to entire countries, imposing sanctions that have brought death, suffering, and misery to millions of children, elderly, and disabled people, and generally dismantling the human fabrics that sustain shared life for people on every inhabited continent. And yet, apart from very notable exceptions—9/11, for instance—most Americans have been almost entirely insulated from political violence at home. Washington’s depredations have been almost exclusively a one-way street.
That is beginning to change. The harvest of Washington’s and Israel’s murder spree is coming in.
When Charlie Kirk was killed about a year ago, almost certainly at the behest of Israel, many American conservatives were shocked. I was, too. I, we, should not have been. Americans have been killing for Israel for decades. Americans have been getting killed for Israel for just as long. It happened (not for the first time) on American soil in September, 2025. Does the dawning awareness among many Americans that Washington’s depravity has consequences for the homeland signal a change in understanding of the arrogant watchword, “American exceptionalism”?
My Palestine-linked source told me this, too (also in paraphrase):
“Why was Ismail Haniyeh killed? Because Haniyeh went to the Ayatollah Khomeini and said he would not work with them anymore. Haniyeh was disgusted by what was happening in Gaza. The Iranians killed him. Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Ziyad al-Nakhalah and Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas leader as of July 26, 2026, were in the same building on July 31, 2024. Both were wanted by the Americans. Neither was killed or injured in the blast that took Haniyeh out. I don’t believe that it was the Israelis who killed Haniyeh. It was the Iranians. Haniyeh wanted to end the killing, to get Hamas out of the equation, to bring the Palestinian Authority in and find a way out of the genocide. He put humanity before politics, before power. And for that, he was blown up.”
Could it be that Ismail Haniyeh and Charlie Kirk were killed for the same reason, namely, that both men were willing to speak up for innocent people and against the blood game of geopolitics? Many might think the connection ironic, but I think that, if true, it would be only fitting. America has never enjoyed a natural exception to consequences of Washington’s actions. The “exceptionalism” of which Americans boast has been enforced with unspeakable violence. In eastern Europe, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Asia, in Latin America, and also at home as needed, Washington and its terror partner, Israel, have concocted wars, conflicts, medical emergencies, and information blackouts to keep the consequences of Washington-Israeli hate from coming back to bite the perpetrators. What is exceptional about America is that only Americans do not have to worry about Washington or Israeli drones swooping down to blow up apartment buildings or wedding ceremonies.
The key is Palestine. Palestine is the anode of global political slaughter, the mudsill of government genocide. The people in Palestine are the lowest of pawns in the filthiest of games. If state actors in Iran can use Palestinian suffering and death to further political causes at home, then they will do so, just as Washington and Israel have been doing. The difference between Iran, on the one side, and Washington and Israel, on the other, however, is the extent to which non-combatants, regular citizens, pay a price for their what their governments do. In Iran, the price is very high. In Israel and Washington, the situation has long been the opposite.
In both countries, Israel and America, a nauseating state of exception has prevailed—impunity on one side, suffering everywhere else. In the United States, the 1990s through the 2010s were a time of rupture from the rest of the world. Perhaps we could include the 1980s, and even the 1970s, in the time span. Political murder in America was at a pitch in the 1960s, but after that it began to recede, and the nation, internally, was relatively untouched by the fallout (sometimes quite literally nuclear fallout, as in the Bikini Atoll) from Washington’s planetary killing fields abroad.
Americans have spent the past fifty years or so in a daze, acting as though the suffering in the rest of the world had nothing to do with them. It is in this sense that Kirk and Haniyeh are not the same. Charlie Kirk and Ismail Haniyeh are different in that there are many, many other Ismail Haniyehs in Iran. There are many people, many of them children, who get blown up despite not wanting to be involved in Washington and Israeli mass murder. Charlie Kirk’s assassination does not happen everyday, the way that it does, by the dozens, by the hundreds sometimes, in Gaza, or in Iran.
I recall a rally organized in 2010 by an American comedian named Jon Stewart. The “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” featured Stewart, his insufferable sidekick Stephen Colbert, and a crowd of their fellow sarcastic narcissists holding signs reading “This Is a Sign,” “God Hates Signs,” and “Does This Sign Make Me Look Fat?” Politics had become an inside joke. Stewart and Colbert were on stage, gesticulating wildly, hamming it up for the slightly bored, very hip, “very online” carnivalesque throng. In Iraq, American soldiers were at work turning that country into a wasteland. Ditto in Afghanistan. American liberals in Washington, D.C., by contrast, stood in a sunlit park and drew attention to themselves and their dissociated wit.
It was a time of no consequences in America. It was truly a state of American exceptionalism. Washington could do, it seemed, anything to anyone, no matter how grotesque the action against no matter how innocent the person, and Americans could turn it all into a punchline. Other Americans spent their time at the shopping mall or at sporting events. Sitcoms, Netflix, trips to Disneyland. Bath and Body Works, Old Navy, snark, cocktails, Paris Hilton and Taylor Swift, some “gay marriage” to give the hedonism a moralizing sheen. There has never been a society as decadent, as completely debased, as America after the Cold War. Such a coolly atheistic, casually cruel, flippantly sadistic people has never existed in human history, and likely never will again. American exceptionalism meant untold horror elsewhere in the world. Americans, for the most part, thought it was hilarious.
That age seems to be ending now. It’s not just Charlie Kirk. The 2026 attack on Iran has set in motion a reckoning about Washington terror that has been long overdue. American bases—that is to say, Washington terror outposts—in the Middle East have been damaged by Iranian defensive counter-strikes. Washington is hoist on its own petard at the hook of Hormuz, and is flailing about trying to appear powerful while looking helpless and scared. As a result of weakening American power, America’s last carrier in Asia left that theater and headed for the Middle East. The petrodollar is dying. China and Russia are tightening the screws on the American imperium. The Global South is not the plaything of global capital any longer. Even many Americans have begun to wake up.
It may not be in time to prevent a hemispheric conflagration, though. In a last-ditch attempt to remain relevant to his handlers, Washington’s junior terror partner Volodymyr Zelenskyy is trying to merge the Ukraine war with the Iran war by attacking Iranian ships in the Caspian Sea. Will the CIA and MI6 puppet Zelenskyy succeed in fusing the Ukraine and Iran wars into one global conflagration? Even if he does, it will only end Washington’s imperial hubris sooner.
My Palestine-connected source had this to say:
“The Ukrainians were sending out special militias to murder Russians in eastern Ukraine. The Americans and Israelis, along with some European countries, pushed Ukraine into the war with Russia. In Trump’s first term, Trump told NATO to pull its own weight. NATO told him to get out. Then Russia invaded during Biden’s administration. When Trump came back in, the Europeans were afraid. Expanding the war makes it harder for the Americans to extract themselves from Ukraine, which appears to be Zelenskyy’s gambit.”
Yes, of course this is what is happening. Zelenskyy is a puppet, a comedian whose punchline is the shelling of Russian villages. Now Ukraine is paying the price for what its foolish leaders have done. Ukraine is paying dearly. And the price keeps going up. That is what happens when a leader cuts deals for his own political gain in the currency of his people’s blood and treasure.
Washington has been doing the same as Zelenskyy, only on a much bigger scale, for a much longer time. The days of American exceptionalism, of America being able to exempt itself from reprisals due to the pitiless and genocidal nature of its leaders and the Hessian military who works for them, are coming to a close.
A man with roots in Palestine, a man who has understood the meaning of death and loss for many years, told me all of this plainly. He could see it. For a long time, I could not. I lived in the age of no consequences in America. I lived in the time of American exceptionalism. The owl has flown. Now, too late, I can see it, too.