DEAD SOULS: Gabbard keeps charging Obama with treason!

MONDAY, JULY 21, 2025

"God bless us everyone:" The dead souls which fuel our nation's discourse were widely visible, for all to see, over the warm, humid weekend.

The Fox News Channel crawled with the repeated charge that President Obama played an active role in a "treasonous conspiracy"—in a "seditious conspiracy," no less.

It was the sitting president's Director of National Intelligence who kept making the charge. Indeed, she has now said, again and again, that the former president should be indicted and prosecuted because of his treasonous conduct. 

She says she has forwarded the files to Attorney General Bondi. It will be Bondi's decision.

As we noted in Saturday's report, Director Gabbard appeared on Saturday morning's Fox & Friends Weekend to repeat the charges she had made on Friday night's Hannity program. A trio of friends wee thrilled:

Fox & Friends Weekend: July 19, 2025
Charlie Hurt: co-host, Fox & Friends Weekend
Rachel Campos-Duffy: co-host, Fox & Friends Weekend
Griff Jenkins: co-anchor, Fox News Live

The trio of friends believed every word. When they asked Gabbard if Obama and his henchmen should face criminal charges, Gabbard responded with this:

I'm not a lawyer. We're referring this to the Department of Justice. I know Attorney General Pam Bondi is committed to bringing about justice to those who have broken the law. And in this case, again, what these documents detail, to me, in my view, cannot be explained as anything but a treasonous conspiracy.

At this site, we're scoring that as a yes.

A collection of flyweights on The Big Weekend Show excitedly ran with the charges on Saturday night. On Sunday morning, Gabbard made her most dramatic presentation yet, interacting at length with the near-hysterical Maria Bartiromo on the Fox Business program, Sunday Morning Futures.

To watch that lengthy interview, you can just click here.

As we noted on Saturday, the New York Times had quickly reported a basic fact—a groaning conflation lies at the heart of Gabbard's remarkable charges. That said, even this very morning, mainstream news orgs continue to ignore the conduct which is now general on the Fox news Channel—conduct which comes live and direct from the heights of the Trump administration, with the clear suggestion of criminal charges to come.

President Obama might be headed for a "treasonous conspiracy" charge! On its face, this apparent madness emerged full-blown from the head of some massively bungled reporting, but it swept across Red America's "cable news" channel as the weekend rolled along.

On Sunday morning's Fox & Friends Weekend program, it was Campos-Duffy who continued to lead the charge. That evening, Dr. Saphier was back on The Big Weekend Show. With respect to Gabbard's charges, she led this ragtag congregation at the start of the two-hour show: 

The Big Weekend Show: July 20, 2025
Kevin Corke: Fox News Channel correspondent
Katie Pavlich: Fox News contributor
Dr. Nicole Saphier: chyroned as BOARD CERTIFIED RADIOLOGIST
Tom Shillue: Gutfeld!-affiliated D-list comedian

Citizens, we're just saying! In the hands of that aggregation, Obama's treasonous conduct continued to be the topic of the moment.

So it went on Fox. In a separate manifestation, the New York Times published an illuminating colloquy between Ezra Klein and Will Sommer about the previous topic of the moment. This was the headline atop the lengthy interview:

Why Trump Can’t Shake Jeffrey Epstein

How did Epstein get back in the news? At this point, we ourselves can hardly remember.

That said, Epstein had suddenly been very much back—and this lengthy interview took Times readers deep into an ongoing realm of apparent madness. After a prologue by Klein, the interview started like this:

Why Trump Can’t Shake Jeffrey Epstein

[...]

KLEIN: Will Sommer, welcome to the show.

SOMMER: Thanks for having me.

KLEIN: I want to begin with the dominant conspiracy theory of Donald Trump’s first term. For the uninitiated: What was QAnon?

SOMMER: QAnon, in a nutshell, is the idea that Donald Trump was recruited by the military to take on a pedophile cabal that runs the world—or what we might also call the deep state.

Trump supporters got this idea because starting in late 2017, someone named Q was posting cryptic messages online, and then they would decode them. That’s really what formed the basis of QAnon.

That's how the lengthy interview started. As Klein continued to question Sommer, on and on the apparent madness went, reminding us that an ancient nostrum—Man [sic] is the rational animal—actually has little to do with the most primal instincts of our vastly imperfect species, or with the peculiar shape of the current political time:

Barack Obama has engaged in a seditious conspiracy—in an act of treason! 

Also, powerful elites have sexually abused and murdered children in satanic rituals, drinking their blood as they did—and this behavior is apparently still underway within the thought patterns of the tortured souls who inhabit large parts of our world.

Klein and Sommer were exploring the background to the previous topic of the moment. Meanwhile, all across the Fox News Channel, employees were excitedly spreading Gabbard's conflation-fueled new message about President Obama's seditious / treasonous crimes. 

This is the shape of what's left of our discourse, such as it ever was! We're going to cite a third manifestation as we try to define the actual tenor of the actual times—as we try to define the cognitive and ethical boundaries within which that discourse now functions.

We're going to cite a third manifestation. On Saturday afternoon, it appeared at Mediaite:

Greg Gutfeld’s Disruptive Rise: How a Fox News Prankster Broke Late-Night TV

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show is over, and while the official reason has yet to be confirmed, reports suggest CBS was hemorrhaging money to the tune of $40 million a year. The show reportedly employed more than 220 staffers and cost an eye-popping $100 million annually to produce.  Yes, there is the whole corporate fealty to Trump at play, which I went into great detail on Friday, but this blockbuster-movie money for a nightly talk show. In an age of media belt-tightening and digital fragmentation, that model may simply no longer be sustainable.

Which brings us to Greg Gutfeld.

Yes, Gutfeld—the often smirking, occasionally cringeworthy Fox News host who somehow emerged as a legit force in late-night-style comedy...

And so on from there.

For the record, the author of this piece—Colby Hall—is a good, decent person. Along with the higher-profile Dan Abrams, he was co-founder of Mediaite, the site where his essay appears.

In his unintentionally revealing essay, he offers a hall of mirrors adjacent account of the way a certain "prankster" has risen to the top of the "late-night" comedy world! All this in spite of the fact that the Fox News Channel program in question doesn't air in "late night," not even on the east coast.

(In fact, the program airs in prime time, at 10 p.m.—though only on the east coast. Out on the Pacific coast, the program airs at 7 p.m.—and no, that isn't late night. Within the standard entertainment context, it isn't even yet prime time!)

Colby Hall isa good, decent person. but he fails to capture the actual nature of the Gutfeld! program. His headline describes Greg Gutfeld as "a prankster," one who seems to be part of "late-night TV." 

In both representations, that headline defers to Fox News Channel messaging about the program in question. In that way, Hall follows the lead of the wildly distorted profile of Gutfeld which appeared in Variety in February of this year.

Is Greg Gutfeld a "prankster?" Does his (primetime) "cable news" program really offer "smart, fun, non-lecturey comedy," the characterization Hall is somehow able to offer at one point in his piece?

Those questions lead directly to another:

Are we humans up to the challenge of running a modern "democracy?" Sadly, but unmistakably, the evidence continues to suggest that the answer may not be a yes.

Sad! At any rate, we'll be examining these three topics this week:

We'll examine the remarkable charges by Gabbard, along with the stumblebum way those charges are being pimped across the widely-viewed programs of the Fox News Channel.

We'll look at Klein's detailed interview with Sommer—at what it teaches about the ways our human minds actually work. Also, we'll look at Hall's portrait of the Fox News Channel's popular "prankster"—at the actual nature of the smart, fun, non-lecturey "comedy" he and his flyweight companions churn out night after night.

We'll be looking at the actual shape of the actual world in which we all actually live. You'll rarely hear about that world from the journalists our corporate minders in Blue America keep saying that we can trust.

 Meanwhile, also this, from the leading authority:

Dead Souls

Dead Souls is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842, and widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. The novel chronicles the travels and adventures of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov and the people whom he encounters. These people typify the Russian middle aristocracy of the time. Gogol himself saw his work as an "epic poem in prose."

[...]

The original title, as shown on the illustration (cover page), was "The Wanderings of Chichikov, or Dead Souls. Poema," which contracted to merely "Dead Souls."

In the Russian Empire, before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, landowners had the right to own serfs to farm their land. Serfs were for most purposes considered the property of the landowner, who could buy, sell or mortgage them, as any other chattel. To count serfs (and people in general), the classifier "soul" was used: e.g., "six souls of serfs." 

The plot of the novel relies on "dead souls" (i.e., "dead serfs") which are still accounted for in property registers. On another level, the title refers to the "dead souls" of Gogol's characters, all of which represent different aspects of poshlost (a Russian noun rendered as "commonplace, vulgarity," moral and spiritual, with overtones of middle-class pretentiousness, fake significance and philistinism).

As always, we'll suggest a kinder reading than that as you ponder the struggling souls of the moment.

In truth, we've never read Dead Souls, not even in the original Russian. That said, the title of the book popped into our heads as we watched the nation's largely undisclosed demise unfolding across the various platforms on this warn humid weekend.

"God bless us everyone!" That's what Tiny Tim said. That statement came to mind too.

Tomorrow: Well scripted, every one