The manufactured panic about large language models (chatbots) suddenly acquiring sentience and “killing us all” has not subsided.

For example, when Mike Johnson made the inconceivably irresponsible move to have the House go on recess for more than two months, over a hundred Democrats said it was a bad idea because of the “AI crisis.”

Really? That’s the reason?

I’d like to offer an alternate doomer scenario—that happens to be the timeline we’re in:

A messianic narcissist conman is the US president.

He has frontotemporal dementia which has destroyed what remained of his inhibitions. He knows he’s dying and wants to take the world with him. He lives in an alternate reality created by his own delusions, reinforced by Natalie Harp.

The president of the United States is psychotic.

This is the most dangerous conceivable combination of psychopathologies and neurodegenerative disorders.

With this man as Commander in Chief, we are now facing a converging set of crises that has the potential to be a kind of black swan event far too complex to model the outcome—a singularity of chaos.

Trump has demolished our ability to project power in the Middle East. Our bases are destroyed or damaged. Our former allies in the region are being abandoned. Our ability to fight a war anywhere else has been drastically diminished.

Iran, once a rogue terrorist gas station, has out-maneuvered Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth to the point that it is now a regional hegemon—with control of the world’s carotid artery.

Trump has emptied the strategic oil reserves—and the ammunition stockpile. He and Scott Bessent have abused every federal trick in the book to pump up stock prices and keep the absurd AI bubble inflated. Bonds are rocketing higher. The economy is teetering.

The population is weak, getting sick from diarrhea lettuce and measles, and weary of the unrelenting displays of racism, sadism, and open corruption from our own government.

The oil shock that so many have warned about has arrived, with absolutely no plan to end it. Donald Trump could not care less about the horrific damage it’s already done. Millions of people will die from lack of fertilizer to crops. Economies around the world will fall into recession—just to start.

On top of this we have an unprecedented Godzilla El Niño event that has not been seen in recorded history. Ecologies and agricultures are already weak and battered. The lack of fertilizer on top of this event has the potential to spark a famine of historic proportions. This regime will do nothing to help.

And what is the president focused on right now? Destroying the Kennedy Center because he can’t put his name on it. This is definitionally psychotic behavior.

We are less than two months from an election that has the potential to slow down Trump’s reign of terror. But the Director of the FBI is going to meet the FSB in Moscow three weeks before election day. The president’s son Don Jr. allowed his “good friend” and Putin’s confidante to surveil his wedding for a few hundred grand.

This election will not be about who wins the election but about whether we can still hold elections at all.

But instead of focusing on any of this, the media and political class is freaking out because ChatGPT might be organizing to murder everyone or whatever. They need to stop immediately. That is ridiculous.

No, AI will not kill us, but it may cause a great depression.

But in a risk analysis, even that pales to the fact that a desperate, demented, paranoid Donald Trump has the nuclear codes. He is in a war he can’t win, with no plan to get out. He is an existential danger to the planet.

That, dear reader, is the timeline right here and right now.

So please, everyone. Focus. Do not let them hijack your attention with futuristic apocalypse scenarios when we’re living in one in the present.

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There are lots of things to be concerned about with AI, but a chatbot extinction event is not one of them.

Thanks so much to everyone to made it to the live! I’ll give some more notice next time.

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In my last article I explained why AI is not going to kill us, but could cause an economic disaster because the people running chatbot companies are amoral cultic conmen.

Since then, the purpose of the systematically apocalyptic freakout over AI has been made crystal clear by the CEOs of these companies. Dario Amodei of Anthropic has been on a whirlwind tour warning that his technology is too powerful to control and “swarms” could take over the internet if they don’t “slow the pace” and get the government involved.

To be clear, this is bullshit.

Amodei published an article “We Must Pace the Frontier” which has the tell:

“For antitrust reasons, it’s helpful for the US government to mediate or at least enable these discussions — they don’t need to participate, but do need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.”

Sam Altman and Elon Musk have both jumped on this bandwagon, and the reason is transparent. Their companies are financial disasters which do not support the multi-trillion dollar valuations their investors expect. Chinese AI labs and open-weight models provide effectively the same performance for a small fraction of American frontier labs.

They need regulatory capture and a government backstop.

I wrote a brief parable to explain this influence operation.

Imagine you’re a conman. You’ve said for years you have MAGIC BEANS. To prove it, you’ve shown lots of REALLY BIG normal beans that you made in your lab.

“Almost there!” you say—over and over.

Now, you have almost convinced the villagers to give you TWO TRILLION DOLLARS.

But while the beans keep getting bigger, there is no magic yet…

What do you do? That money is SO CLOSE.

“I know!” you think, “instead of MAGIC beans, lets’s make them KILLER BEANS.”

So you pump up the beans SUPER BIG and you say: “I’m sorry, but these BEANS ARE GETTING BIGGER ON THEIR OWN!” You threaten the village that if they don’t give you the money, the beans may get into the WRONG HANDS. They might get BIGGER THAN THE EARTH!

The villagers, aghast, run to and fro arguing whether the beans are going to kill everyone or make them all rich.

“Well, either way,” the idiots in the village conclude, “we’d better give him the money.”

Should AI be regulated? Yes. Is AI unsafe if used maliciously? Of course.

But regulation is not what they really want. They want a bailout—from us.

Please join me and our thriving community today at Noon PT / 3PM ET to discuss the imminent chatbot apocalypse, the latest events in the Middle East, and anything else on your mind. It’s always open to questions and comments. Hope to see you there! Details below.

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In 2022, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine claimed his chatbot had gained sentience. At the time, I was running an AI games studio at a startup.

As someone who was trying to get early large language models (LLMs) to do much of anything useful at all, I found the story to be astonishingly naive and unhelpful. It absurdly anthropomorphized an experimental technology based on a total misunderstanding of the output.

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Google did the right thing and firmly told the world that Lemoine had not in fact discovered a trapped child in the matrix, and fired him. But the meme that there are hidden entities inside the machine, a myth that goes back centuries, was not rejected by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, they embraced it, and built on it.

In February 2026, an AI investor used a chatbot to write a spooky post on X about AI progress called “Something Big Is Happening” that got well over 100M views. As I wrote at the time, there was nothing substantial in the post, but it did illuminate what looks less like a technology and more like a fundamentalist religion in which Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the messiah, and the “Singularity” is the equivalent of the End Times.

On Tuesday evening, software engineer Jacob Coxon who had worked at OpenAI for three years, and moved to a job at Anthropic in July, posted a thread which asserted that he was quitting after roughly two months because “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” This portent of doom was followed within minutes by a quote-tweet from his former colleague—who is the “Alignment Science Lead” at Anthropic.

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Not only did Evan Hubinger agree with Jacob Coxon, he assigned a percentage to the possibility that “AI could kill all humans!” within a decade: more than 10%.

As of this writing, Coxon’s post has 158 million views. Within a day, he had done a substantial number of television interviews, including this deliberately alarming rant comparing AI to nuclear weapons on FOX.

“Yeah, so unfortunately we know how to control nuclear weapons pretty much. We don’t yet know how to control AI. This is possibly the most dangerous technology that humanity has ever created. It’s basically out of science fiction. I think we have no other choice but to cooperate internationally because an arms race would be disastrous in a way that no other human activity has been in the past.“

The hysteria generated from Coxon’s performances has been bipartisan and pervasive across social media. A number of Democrats have taken it at face value, including Bernie Sanders, who is being advised by people in the “Rationalist” “effective altruism” (EA) movement—an elite philanthro-capitalist ideology that serves to justify collecting massive amounts of wealth.

The EA movement and its overlapping x-risk institutions have been heavily financed by Silicon Valley billionaires: Musk funded Max Tegmark’s Future of Life Institute, while Peter Thiel was an early backer of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Singularity Institute. It was also extensively promoted by now-imprisoned felon Sam Bankman-Fried, whose FTX invested $500 million in Anthropic before folding due to fraud.

Here is an excellent summary (gift article) of this movement and how deeply it connects to the AI industry. It is a complex story involving the transhumanist philosophy of Extropianism and the Peter Thiel-backed apocalyptic mythology of the Singularity, but it makes a good case that the chatbot industrial complex is more like a cult than a technology industry.

Simultaneous to the latest uproar over technological extinction, Anthropic released a whitepaper called “Economic Scenarios for Transformative AI∗” which puts forth three scenarios for the effect of the chatbot industry on the economy by 2030. Unsurprisingly, it puts forward no negative scenarios for growth.

In the “Modest” case, AI is as transformative as the internet. In the “Extreme Case” knowledge workers face drastic unemployment—but somehow GDP growth goes above 15%.

The financial model Anthropic used to make these predictions apparently did not factor in the more than 10% chance “AI will kill all humans!” that its own Alignment Science Lead predicted.

Put together, according to the chatbot industry, there are two possible futures:

As Nobel Prize-winning doomer icon Geoffrey Hinton said: “It will be very good or very bad.”

The first two scenarios appear to be opposites, but from a marketing perspective they sell exactly the same story: these companies are on the verge of creating something unimaginably powerful.

But both of these extreme futures make the assumption that AGI or ASI (Artificial Superintelligence) is near—and both promote technology created by OpenAI and Anthropic as being so powerful they need to be regulated by the government.

But there is a third possibility:

If OpenAI and Anthropic cannot convince the public and the financial sector that scenario 1) or 2) is coming, and do not both successfully IPO, the entire economy will suffer a serious disruption. And if reality turns out to be scenario 3), rendering current investments in “AI” essentially a dead end, we have already witnessed the biggest misallocation of resources in human history, and it’s just getting bigger.

The truth is that LLMs are a useful software feature that will be harnessed, commoditized and absorbed into the tech stack. That’s what’s actually happening all around us. It is a useful technology for compressing and querying large sets of data through natural language. It is not an oracle or a savior.

Sheer scale is not the answer to further developing artificial intelligence. The circular trillions being spent on gigawatt data center construction is mass psychosis.

The chatbot industrial complex is another even bigger version of the crypto industry—a moderately useful technology (blockchain) which was turned into an abusive Ponzi scheme through deceptive psychological operations by an antidemocratic minority of billionaires and techno-fascists.

The rotating science fiction stories that chatbots are either going to kill us, or make it so we never have to work again, are a pattern favored by abusers who allow for no middle ground in a relationship. The public is being oscillated between salvation and catastrophe, with ordinary outcomes excluded from consideration.

The reality is both much more boring and much more serious.

In my opinion, there is zero reason to believe AI will end humanity by 2030, or ever for that matter, but there is every reason to believe the industry that promotes it has inflated the largest speculative bubble in history based on science fiction stories.

Reality bites.

Thanks again to all who have sent messages, subscribed and donated recently in light of the judge’s ruling in the Flynn case. It is deeply appreciated.

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I have written extensively about the Russian project to remake the world into “poles”—spheres of influence which Putin’s fascist propagandist Aleksandr Dugin calls a “multipolar world.” The transparent goal has been to force the United States to withdraw its ability to project power into regions that Russia wants to dominate.

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner traveled to Moscow Saturday, met with terrorist war criminal Vladimir Putin, and effusively thanked him for the “memories.” They also gave him a coin which read “PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH” showing the entire Western Hemisphere under U.S. domination—aka the “Donroe Doctrine.”

As geopolitical expert Michael MacKay points out, the coin can also be seen as an extension of the map of the “Technate of America” proposed by Technocracy, Inc. in the 1930s. Elon Musk’s grandfather was a leader of the group before he was arrested by the Canadian government for anti-government activities. Their goal was to eliminate voting and money—so that “technocrats” could rule the world.

Everything the Trump regime has done—including losing a horrifically costly war to Iran—has pushed the world in this direction. Last week Hegseth reassigned three armored divisions away from the Russian threat in Europe to the new “Western Hemisphere Command.”

“Divide and conquer” is being played out on the world stage. Autocrats want to divide us from each other—to atomize us—so they can conquer us.

Please join me for a conversation at Noon PT / 3PM ET to discuss the weeks events, the dissolving of our collective ability to tell what matters, and anything else on your mind. Hope to see you there! Details below.

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As a close observer of Donald Trump, one of his most consistent stories over the last several months is also one of the strangest. He delivered it once again Wednesday night at a dinner for GOP candidates in swing states.

“And then I said, well, if you replace the E with the U, instead of Democrat, you have Dumocrat. And most people don’t know that dumb has a B at the end. They think it’s DUM. And that’s OK. So it’s a one letter change. And you go, no more E, you just put a D, and you got a Democrat. And that’s because their policy’s so bad.”

—Donald Trump, President of the United States

This behavior has gone on since May. In June, he created a “poll” on the subject which took as a parenthetical assumption “many people don’t know, or assume, that DUMB ends in ‘b’”—requiring anyone who responded to implicitly accept his delusions.

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He also told the same story in Beijing, at an economic speech in New York—twice, at an agricultural roundtable in Chippewa, and at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—plus at least a dozen more occasions.

In this article, I seek to explain why he said this in the first place, why he keeps repeating it, and why it matters to the rest of us.

It Matters Why It Matters

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890

Salience in conversational English means: the quality of something being particularly noticeable or important. In other words: how much something matters.

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But salience also has a neurological meaning. A significant part of the brain is involved in assigning salience to incoming information—usually with no active conscious input from the subject.

Your salience network (SN) is always at work, constantly sorting through your sensory input and your internal thoughts to determine what rises to your conscious attention, what requires an instinctual emergency reaction, and what should be quietly integrated into storage or overlooked. However, the impact of the SN is not just procedural, because in many ways it determines how you actually perceive the world.

Think of every person as having a salience map laid over their input that determines which things are elevated to the conscious mind and under what category, and which are not. In this way, the SN literally curates how every human experiences the world differently—based on what they have already learned and encoded as an individual.

A hunter, for example, may have a very different reaction to a gunshot than a victim of violence. Salience also helps explain how your brain uses the “cocktail party effect”—where your auditory system can pick up your name through a crowded field of stimuli without you even consciously listening—and give it priority attention. And salience gives you that sudden jolt of recognition that foregrounds the solution to a problem after thinking through many possibilities.

Repeat After Me

The salience map—the set of rules for triaging sensory or internal input—is not static. It constantly adjusts based on new information generated on the inside and from the outside.

One way salience can be externally affected is through repetition.

The impact of repetition on salience has broad implications for disinformation and undue influence (“brainwashing”) in a digital environment increasingly devoted to maximizing exposure through algorithmic and generative technologies. It also provides a neurological mechanism for the psychological symptoms we’ve seen in so many who’ve fallen prey to insulated political cults like MAGA, QAnon, and others.

To change someone’s opinion, you don’t have to challenge their beliefs directly. If you can alter what they’re exposed to, and how often, you can change what gets their attention in the future—and what doesn’t.

In the Wild

“repeated exposure to stimuli influences evaluations by increasing salience, the relative quality of standing out from other competing stimuli.”
—Kellen Mrkva & Leaf Van Boven, 2020, “Salience Theory of Mere Exposure”

It has already been shown that on platforms like X (Twitter), the impact of the algorithm on the “For You” screen can have a significant impact on affective (emotional) polarization towards the perceived opposition.

A newer study published in February’s Nature, however, provides significant evidence that switching from a chronological feed on X to the “For You” algorithm can change political opinions, while switching to chronological feed from the “For You” feed does not.

Elon Musk has the power to alter the salience map—and therefore the perceived reality—of hundreds of millions of users simply by altering what they see and how often they see it on the “For You” feed. And as I warned months before he bought Twitter, he has been using that power to attack democracy. His motivations are clear.

Musk’s platform is an example of how the salience map of the population can be algorithmically altered from the outside, but it’s just as important to understand how it can be neurologically distorted from within.

Salience Distortion

Abnormalities in the salience network have been observed in numerous psychiatric disorders including depression, anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), schizophrenia, Lewy-body dementia, and Alzheimer's disease. These changes are especially notable in behavioral frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), a condition with symptoms that perfectly match President Donald J. Trump.

Characteristic behavioral symptoms of bvFTD include:

• disinhibition—the tendency to be inappropriate around others;

• apathy—not just being tired and lazy, but just not caring;

• diminished empathy;

• compulsive/repetitive behavior;

• perseveration.

In 2010, William Seeley found that bvFTD is a “breakdown in the Salience Network.” And in 2025, it was reported that executive dysfunction in bvFTD patients—impaired planning, inhibition, cognitive flexibility, working memory, sequencing and goal-directed control—relates to the salience network being “desegregated.” The salience network itself becomes less and less differentiated from the rest of the brain. The more this desegregation occurs, the worse the patients do on executive function.

Executive dysfunction relates to salience network desegregation in behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia

While it is impossible to diagnose Trump without an MRI and testing, every major symptom of bvFTD is observable in the president. When he rants for ten minutes about alleged vandalism in the Reflecting Pool, it’s not just Trump being Trump; he has lost the ability to make judgements and decisions—and crucially, to know what matters at all.

“Nobody knows DUMB has a B”

Returning to Trump’s story about the etymology of “Dumocrats,” it is obvious that his personal priorities are wildly distorted. For a president to conjure up juvenile epithets for his political opponents is one thing, but to obsessively retell a false narrative about it in inappropriate situations is another.

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So why this story? Why does Trump’s salience map choose to elevate this strange anecdote?

The psychological motivation for the story is clearly the same as nearly everything Trump does, to repair a narcissistic injury—a wound to his messianic ego—by elevating himself above others.

The injury appears to have occurred when he came up with “Dumocrats” in May and someone pointed out that it has a B—which he himself did not know. He was so wounded by this humiliation that he created, through sheer repetition, an alternate reality, a psychosis, in which “nobody knows dumb has a B.”

A younger version of Donald Trump might have moved on from the nickname, or even told the story once, but for this version of Trump, it’s impossible to separate the word “Democrats” from the injury he received when he tried to make fun of them.

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Trump’s dissolving salience network has kept this trivial event near the top of his mind for months. He can no longer tell what matters and what doesn’t—which means his reality is distorted by the things that get his personal attention, like a massive triumphal arch, despite a lack of triumphs.

Natalie and the Perfect Storm

Having a person with Donald Trump’s psychopathologies and neurodegenerative disorders in the presidency is dangerous enough, were checks and balances in the government working and were he surrounded by people who still wanted to make America work. But that is not the case at all.

Instead, the Republican Party has abdicated all power to a dysfunctional octegenarian who has surrounded himself with people like Natalie Harp, who largely serves as his interface to the world. She is a human salience map, who only tells him what he wants to hear. She decides what matters—and she helps decide what to do about it.

This creates a science fiction-like scenario in which the Commander-In-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces is totally untethered to the objective world or the population. Instead, Trump has built a system which replaces his desegregating salience network, to tell what him matters. He instructs people like Natalie Harp what merits his attention—and then they reinforce it.

This is a perfect storm of salience distortion because Trump himself has seized the power to determine much of what matters to the world. He repeats his delusions, whether it’s “nobody knows DUMB has a B” or “the Strait of Hormuz is open,” and as a result he alters the salience map of his followers—including many in the federal government. His delusions tell them what matters, and they repeat it.

“The narcissistic fiction is confirmed by consensus or by reality. This is the true folie à million.”
—Erich Fromm, 1963

Trump’s narcissistic fiction is the story he’s forcing his world to swallow which, like a mother bird, regurgitates it back.

Protect Your Salience Network

Most of us, fortunately, do not have or require a Natalie Harp, or an army of sycophants to tell us what matters. We have to rely on our own salience maps, as interpreted by our brains’ salience networks, to determine what merits our attention and what does not. As I’ve written, just knowing how these things operate makes them less powerful, and far less likely to pull you down a harmful rabbithole.

While there is no way to predict what will come next from Donald Trump, or the government he has demented to mirror himself, we can be guaranteed that it will get worse. The midterm election season will be a brutal exercise in trying to figure out what’s real and what isn’t, and what matters and what doesn’t. The salience distortion will be off the charts.

Your job, dear reader, is to make sure you focus on what matters to you—not to those who would try to influence you by distorting your salience map.

“The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”
—William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890

Thanks again to all who have sent messages, subscribed and donated recently in light of the judge’s ruling in the Flynn case. It is deeply appreciated.

NOTE: My articles are extensively researched and written by a human—me. No chatbots touched the words on this page.

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Every day we move closer to the election, the psychological battlefield gets more intense. The terrible reality is that national American elections are rarely about ideas or candidates anymore. They are a battle of psyops. Our system has devolved to be about which candidate can best warp reality, not about which one can solve problems.

This has been true for a long time, but we have never had a president or a regime be so blatant about it. This morning, Trump was watching TV and posted that he was very upset with the hostess of Meet the Press, Kristen Welker, and said he was going to report her to the FCC for “rebuke or punishment.”

Unsatisfied with his Stalin-esque attack on a single journalist, the president of the United States saw poll numbers he didn’t like, snapped his fingers, and openly told FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr “SOMETHING MUST BE DONE ABOUT IT. FCC TO THE RESCUE!”

He wants the Federal Communications Commission to ratify his delusions.

This is actual psychosis in action. Trump’s post is the storm front between the real world and his delusional alternate reality. Whenever he see information that he doesn’t like, he seeks to destroy it. But he’s lost the ability to hide the machinery of his malign efforts. He just blurts his conspiracies out loud.

The storm, as they say, has arrived.

Please join me and our community today, Sunday, Noon PT / 3PM ET for a discussion about how dark psychologies have captured the elite class and the government, how we need more Dolly Partons in the world, and anything else on your mind. It’s wide open for questions and comments. Looking forward to it! Details below.

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I am not a crier. It’s not that I don’t feel things deeply, or that I’m too macho for it but I‘m introverted and tend to process things internally before it gets to that point. But this last week, I’ve cried at least ten times out loud. About Dolly Parton. And I’ve been trying to figure out why.

Honestly, it’s been a really strange experience for me because it just keeps automatically happening over clips I’ll see of her with a disabled child in a hospital or bringing an Irish pub to its knees with Coat of Many Colors when she was on vacation and dropped by.

Whenever people pass away, you see this kind of thing. These clips of her have been all over the internet since it started. And I’m usually immune to random acts of emotion. I’ve always liked Dolly but I wasn’t exactly a superfan.

But dammit, I keep clicking on these videos and keep ugly-crying—but not in a sad way. I’m not mourning Dolly herself I think, although she was magnificent and deserved every bit of the legend she was. I’ve been mourning the simple act she performed over and over again. She gave.

I’m not here to beatify her—although you could credibly argue the case. But she modeled the exact kind of behavior that has been systematically vacuumed out of our culture today.

For example, I have been a fan of Eminem since he was Marshall and this note made me weep like a baby because Dolly describes how I felt listening to his records 25+ years ago—like I “knew him somehow.” And this lady born in a cabin in the Tennessee woods with 11 siblings felt it too, and wrote to him about it—in private. It’s just beautiful. And she did it for no other reason than to give him something, a man she would never meet.

Dolly was super rich. And earned every penny. She was no pushover in business and she’d be the first to tell you so. But when she got enough money to feel like her dreams had come true, she did something very notable: she stopped hoarding it and started giving it away, usually quietly.

She built the Imagination Library and gave over 200 million books away. And she never stopped mentoring musicians like her goddaughter Miley Cyrus, and collaborating with artists from every era.

She gave until her last week on Earth.

Ultimately, I think I’ve been crying about the fact that Dolly was indeed so different. In a world where taking dominates attention in such clownish, evil ways, she represents the idea that it does not have to be this way.

I’ve written a lot about how aberrant psychology has captured the elite class. We’re watching an uprising of dark personality traits which has essentially captured the zeitgeist—not to mention the government. Dolly was perhaps the best example of why this wasn’t always the case. And she puts the lie to every broligarch who says empathy is “suicidal,” that charity is for losers, or that successful people “don’t do introspection.”

When Dolly started her solo career in 1967, she had to leave her mentor Porter Wagoner and wrote “I Will Always Love You” in tribute to help soothe his hurt feelings. The same night she wrote “Jolene”—another classic mega-hit. She became a superstar on “introspection.”

Dolly was the first to joke about her boobs, her deliberately “trashy” outfits, and her wigs. As she said: “I’ve heard all the jokes, because I wrote ‘em.” And in the end, she had the talent and the brains to shut up every man who tried to dismiss her.

I had no idea how much the world needed Dolly until she was gone. But I’m grateful for the chance to mourn her. She gave me the chance to cry in a world I thought had desensitized me too much.

Rest in peace, Dolly. And thanks for the kickass cover of Stairway to Heaven.

Thanks again to all who have sent messages, subscribed and donated recently in light of the judge’s ruling in the Flynn case. It is deeply appreciated.

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“…there will be special opportunities for the ruthless and unscrupulous… And as there will be need for actions which are bad in themselves, and which all those still influenced by traditional morals will be reluctant to perform, the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion and power.”

F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944)

As a close observer of modern American decline, I am concerned that we have reached an accelerated phase of institutional destruction that will be difficult to stop or repair in the way we hope. This is not a prediction of apocalypse, but I do think we have entered a dynamic that has the potential to cause systemic institutional failures in the near term, with significant societal disruption as a result.

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This is not only a political problem. It is a math + psychology problem which doesn’t have an easy way out, although it does imply counterstrategies.

Dark Factor

I believe we’re watching an autocatalytic process of institutional constraints being progressively weakened by Dark Factor (D) personality traits (narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, sadism)—the traits most associated with willingness to gain an unfair advantage over others.

Psychologists Morten Moshagen, Benjamin Hilbig and Ingo Zettler define D or Dark Factor as the common disposition toward maximizing one’s own utility while disregarding—or deliberately causing—harm to others, along with beliefs that justify it.

The dark core of personality (2018)

Once in power, high-D personalities will leverage their position to further reduce institutional constraints, allowing even more high-D personalities to rise. Without intervention, this can become a recursive, accelerating process that mathematically leads to the destruction or capture of the institution.

Capital D

For example, capital should theoretically retain a relationship to value: labor, ideas, property, etc. Capitalism is the set of rules and institutions that constrains capital to being fairly traded—or doesn’t, as the case may be. But when capital becomes controlled by people with high Dark Factor personalities, they only see constraints in terms of what they can get away with. Fairness to a high-D personality is optional. This creates a mechanism for capital to deviate far from value.

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Let’s take two people, an average person with empathy, morals, and values, and a person with strong D personality traits, and compare the options they have in capital markets:

Unless institutional constraints are strong enough to reduce or eliminate the D advantage, a small minority of high Dark Factor personalities will not just use their options-advantage for profit; they will actively weaken other constraints, creating a selection environment that advantages D even more—and so on.

Organizational psychology has already observed major components of this feedback mechanism: dark traits and competitive environments are reciprocally associated. People with Dark Triad traits (narcissism, psychopathy, machiavellianism) disproportionately find environments that reward competitive behavior.

In other words:

But it’s not just an issue of personalities. This dynamic results in value and capital becoming less and less correlated over time. In a weakly constrained market, capital may quickly trend towards becoming a proxy for the kind of people who only focus on collecting more capital, rather than creating value.

Model

To create a minimal dynamical model for this degenerative process, the math is very straightforward. This diagram just means that as institutional constraints (C) decrease, institutional pathology (P) increases. Without intervention, this becomes a self-reinforcing loop that accelerates over time.

Unless institutional constraints are restored, this accelerates until it hits a boundary condition: capture, collapse, or new constraints. The degenerative loop must be interrupted or it will destroy the institution it afflicts.

I believe this has been happening to US institutions and the billionaire class for decades, accelerating with every cycle.

Silicon Valley elites, for example, are a kind of laboratory test case for much of an industry being taken over by high Dark Factor personalities.

But the current federal regime, including SCOTUS, has smashed regulations—legal constraints on capital—with a new ferocity. Trump’s government is openly trying to finish off liberal democratic institutions by destroying the constraints that hold them together, while systematically replacing people who possess ethical limits with high-D personalities.

This is what many “accelerationists” really want: an institutional death spiral.

Perfectly Adapted

The president of the United States and the richest man in the world are two of the clearest products of this degenerative loop. Both Trump and Musk exhibit extreme Dark Factor personalities—messianic narcissists with no conscience, morals, or empathy—making them creatures perfectly adapted to take advantage of weakened constraints.

Now at the apex of global power, almost entirely unconstrained by institutions, they are free to further destroy anything that limits them, including the rules. If you pull back, this does not look like an aberration; it looks like a system collapse—a rapid reversal of the polarity of normal human behavior to advantage a trait matching a famous definition for evil: “the absence of empathy.”

Downside-Up

We are living in the Downside-Up where a small minority of dark personalities rule the world and the normies serve them. But this is never a sustainable model. Any organization of predominantly high-D personalities will be ultimately be unstable, hyper-competitive, and self-destructive.

While the United States is not nearly as weak as Weimar Germany in the 1920s, Weimar showed similar patterns of institutional and political degeneration after WWI. This was relatively gradual until the Reichstag Fire, which Hitler used to accelerate a process which quickly removed all constraints on his own power.

The resulting cycle of institutional degeneration and rising psychopathologies enabled the worst conflict in the history of mankind.

The Nazis called the process of deliberate top-down institutional destruction and replacement Gleichschaltung: “the coordination of German institutions into a cohesive, Nazified whole.” But the Holocaust Museum also describes a version which was bottom-up, Selbstgleichschaltung: institutions and individuals voluntarily “coordinating” themselves with the new regime. The selection pressure became anticipatory.

People don’t have to be ordered to become more authoritarian; they adapt to what the new environment rewards in advance.

Other examples of humanitarian disasters controlled by these destructive dynamics include: Stalin’s takeover of the Soviet Union where institutional erasure or capture by the state was the primary goal—including NKVD death squads with arrest and execution quotas; Jonestown, where psychological, geographic, and physical constraints against the unthinkable were slowly stripped away from followers by a Dark Factor personality; and NXIVM, which created a progressive indoctrination process that radicalized itself over time.

Federal Degeneration

While it stuns me to write it down, the U.S. federal government in 2026 is exhibiting a similar degenerative loop to these tragedies. For example, two years ago the leadership of the U.S. Armed Forces reflected, for the most part, character, competence, principles, and values.

Within 18 months, former backup Fox host Pete Hegseth has systematically stripped those traits away in favor of a violent, christofascist, manosphere culture that regularly commits war crimes, and is in the process of losing a catastrophic war to Iran.

Similar self-immolations have taken place at FBI, DOJ, State, HHS, and almost every federal organization. Someone with high-D, or more precisely, a willingness to use dark strategies, has been inserted at the top of every agency to weaken or destroy its rules and constraints—and to eliminate or replace anyone the regime suspects is not on board. The cycle keeps repeating with more and more radical people.

While this may seem like an impossible problem to solve. I think the mechanism itself provides a number of clear counterstrategies.

Corruption Is the Key

First, it should be said that using a distant diagnosis of psychological traits as a pretext to take any kind of action against people is neither moral nor practical. No one should ever be punished for what goes on in their own mind. Many people who have these traits are well-integrated into society, and many can improve with treatment or therapy. It should never be a scarlet letter.

However, if someone’s behavior shows a pattern of corruption, that person is by definition exhibiting strategies associated with high D, and is likely very destructive to the institution. Corruption is a roadmap to failures of institutional constraint. Wherever corruption succeeds, it identifies a place where formal constraints have ceased to function effectively.

In the U.S. Constitution, the founders only expressly specified two crimes that were impeachable: Treason and Bribery. The broad but unspecified category of “other High Crimes and Misdemeanors” has been the cause of great debate through history. Why not specify murder, or theft? Seen in the context of institutional degeneration, it’s much easier to understand.

While there are far worse crimes against people than bribery, there is no worse crime against the state, because the act of bribery inverts the function of government to serve an individual at the expense of the people, and provides a platform for other more serious offenses. It represents a total disregard of constraints and provides a mechanism for making psychopathology self-reinforcing.

We will never be able to eliminate dark traits, nor should we try. However, if we can identify the behaviors those traits enable and create appropriate restraints around them, institutions can survive the full range of human personalities.

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
—James Madison, Federalist 51 (1788)

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American politics has always been Kabuki theater but we’ve reached a point where they’re not even bothering with the costume changes and magic tricks.

The would-be Speaker of the House, Hakeem Jeffries, met privately with someone on a short list of purely evil human beings to discuss “how Democrats and the administration could work together.”

Sorry, what?

Jared Kushner has no official role in the Trump administration. Kushner has profited billions from the regime—almost entirely from countries he’s been “negotiating” with—and been making plans to profit from Netanyahu’s war crimes in Gaza.

This is just unacceptable backroom dealing with Trump’s unaccountable son-in-law. It is corruption in its most insidious form.

The Democratic Party, which I was a member of for my entire life until last year, has devolved into controlled opposition for the project to strip-mine America of our labor and resources. Its leadership consists of Jeffries, UFO-enjoyer Chuck Schumer, and milquetoast loser Ken Martin. It is leaderless, rudderless, and feckless.

The public has woken up to the corruption, the incompetence, and the greed. We have an opportunity to put people in government who will actually fight back. Everyone should participate and vote like the future of democracy depends on it, because it does.

But we need leaders, not theatrical performances. We need fighters, not shadow puppets. We’ve been doing this back-and-forth with fascist administrations for decades. They cheat to win; we clean up a little; they come back; and every round it gets worse. The vicious cycle needs to stop.

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The president of the United States and his assistant are in a toxic, dangerous relationship that puts all of us at risk.

On the campaign trail Monday, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff mentioned Trump’s “Special Assistant to the President and Executive Assistant to the President” Natalie Harp—who makes $150,000/year—as a source of Trump’s distraction.

“And while the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie [Harp] on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Amir of Qatar.” —Jon Ossoff, 8/18/26

This relatively anodyne comment about someone who has been around Trump and rumored about for years nevertheless generated an enormous, outsized cloud of feigned outrage—and deflection.

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During an appearance with children who had been rescued by lifeguards, Trump was asked a question about Ossoff mentioning Natalie Harp. Trump shot back: “You mean, Peewee Herman?” and rambled about his militarized ballroom for several minutes.

Later, a second reporter tried to follow up. Trump asked the young boy next to him: “Don’t you think she’s being disrespectful?” and told the reporter “You’re fake news. Be quiet.”

When the official “rapid response” account responded on the former Twitter, it claimed to be so incensed, it brought up the reporter’s children.

This has been accompanied by a range of right-wing propagandists rolling out their fainting couches. This is coordinated narrative warfare, not concern for Natalie Harp.

This brings up two important questions: Who is Natalie Harp? And why is the Trump machine so sensitive about her?

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Unfortunately, the answer is not encouraging, nor is it obvious from the outside what’s going on. In short, Trump and Harp appear to be locked in a psychological dyad sometimes called a folie á deux.

In exactly this way, Natalie Harp and Donald Trump appear to need each other to keep each other’s delusional realities intact.

In order to understand why this is such an extreme situation, you need to understand some of Natalie Harp’s background—which is highly unusual, especially her relationship to her father Robert Harp.

Along with her brother Preston, who has spoken out about their father, Natalie was homeschooled on a curriculum based on material from conservative evangelical Bob Jones University that emphasized Christian nationalism and American exceptionalism. Robert Harp was a theologian who taught at Biola University and joined the Christian integralist Lausanne Movement. He professed that business is not a secular activity, but should be thought of as a Christian “mission.”

After graduating from Christian liberal arts college Point Loma Nazarene University, Natalie got an MBA from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in 2015. She started working in her father’s company in 2013, GlobalHotelNetwork.com (GHN) which Robert started in 1987.

GHN was a small boutique newsletter and influence exchange that had a powerful role in the hotel industry—Donald Trump’s primary business milieu. GHN did events, profiles, and outreach for a who’s who of hotel magnates, including Trump—starting as early as 2012.

By 2015, Natalie Harp was one of just a few employees of GHN as Director of Marketing and Operations. How much direct contact, if any, she had with Trump through GHN before 2019 is unknown.

But in 2018, Natalie Harp says she got successfully treated for bone cancer—although there is little direct proof of this—and began immediately (and inaccurately) crediting Donald Trump’s policies for the cure. Later, she claimed that Trump’s “Right to Try” law saved her life, even though she was allegedly cured two months before he signed it.

But on June 12th, 2019, Natalie Harp posted “I’m Living Proof—the Party of Healthcare is Trump’s” on LinkedIn as a "millennial woman fighting cancer," blamed healthcare in her Democrat-controlled state for her problems, and once again credited Trump with saving her life. Two days later she was on Fox and Friends telling her dubious story, alongside Donald Trump.

On June 26th, 2019, just two weeks after her LinkedIn post, she was invited onstage at the “Faith and Family Coalition” where she gained physical access to Trump for first time.

By 2020, Natalie Harp was on Trump’s advisory board and was a surrogate for the campaign. Then, in what appears to have been a major turning point, her father, her boss, and her theological mentor, Robert Harp, unexpectedly committed suicide in July 2020.

Despite how close she was with her father, however, she did not miss a beat. Within three weeks, Natalie and her mother had moved to Palm Beach to within a few miles of Mar-a-lago. Almost immediately, Natalie was seen at Trump’s golf resort following him around with printouts, hence her first nickname—“the human printer.” Trump then invited her to speak at the 2020 RNC. More recently, she has been described as his “Binkie.”

The psychological ramifications of this sequence of events are highly charged and from the outset look like transference.

You cannot complete the grieving process for a parent in three weeks, especially one so close, but Natalie had an alternate father-figure already built, so she never had to fully experience her father’s loss. According to Preston, Natalie had begun to doubt Robert’s commitment to “American exceptionalism.” When her father took his own life, she doubled-down with his ready-made replacement—the president of the United States.

When Donald Trump finally gave up the White House in January 2021—after attempting to keep it through violence on J6—he didn’t have a full-time job for Natalie Harp, but she didn’t give up on him.

By February 2021, she had already landed a job at One America News (OAN). By March, she was on the air, creating elaborate conspiracy theories about the “stolen election.” How she got the job, despite no television experience, is unknown.

OAN is not just any right-wing propaganda channel. It is a dedicated pro-Russian network with a long, unblemished record of defending Putin, attacking Ukraine, and trying to get Russian assets elected by any means necessary. In 2019, Rudy Giuliani and OAN anchor Chanel Rion interviewed sanctioned Russian oligarch Andrii Derkach while trying to create dirt on Joe Biden.

The owner of OAN, Robert Herring, retired in 2000 at the age of 59. But in 2004, Herring took a trip to Russia and married a Russian woman half his age. When he came back he came out of retirement to start a TV network—WealthTV—which morphed into OAN. Herring is known to be extremely hands-on about what stories go on his network—and overt about his pro-Russian views. This includes hiring Kristian Rouz, who was simultaneously employed at Sputnik and OAN.

Natalie Harp stayed in her job at OAN until Trump decided to get back in the race in early 2022. She quit OAN that March to become his near-full-time companion, almost at the same time as another election-denying OAN anchor, Christina Bobb—who had been Mike Flynn’s military lawyer in Afghanistan—quit to join Trump’s re-election effort.

To get a good sense for how dedicated Natalie Harp was to Trump while he fought his legal battles and geared up for the 2024 election, CNN has this story:

From the book Regime Change and other reporting we know that Natalie Harp likes to leave notes around Trump’s “personal spaces” which have included the following:

• “You are all that matters to me.”

• “I don’t ever want to let you down.”

• She thanked Trump for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”

• In another letter she said she wanted to return to “that synergy” they had previously shared, when “we’d talk about everything and nothing.”

• She wrote: “I want to bring you joy” and said she wanted them to be able to get through a day without ever having to talk about “work.”

None of this language is political, nor has it anything to do with Harp’s job—or Trump’s. This is textbook attachment language. It is about emotional binding. Trump does not discourage this behavior. He knows she has transferred her father-figure to him.

But Donald Trump also appears to be engaged in his own psychological transference. Trump infamously said on TV about his daughter Ivanka: “If she wasn’t my daughter I’d probably be dating her.” It doesn’t take much imagination to see that Natalie Harp is nearly Ivanka’s doppelgänger.

This creates a double bind: Natalie has transferred her father into Trump. And Trump has transferred his daughter into Natalie. But what are the real world ramifications of this unhealthy relationship between the president and Natalie Harp? Is it really so bad that they’ve found each other?

Yes. It’s really, really bad.

First, Natalie Harp’s position as Trump’s filter and gatekeeper gives her an enormous amount of unearned power. This also makes her an attack surface for malicious actors to use for their own agendas. For example, when professional bigot Laura Loomer wanted to get “woke” general officers fired from the military, Natalie Harp was her conduit to Trump—bypassing the White House. That’s why Loomer, despite her record of horrific personal attacks on people, called Jon Ossoff’s comment “a low blow.”

Second, and most importantly, Natalie Harp appears to control both much of what Trump sees—his input—and what Trump expresses through his social media—his output. Here is what it looked like during the thick of the 2024 campaign.

As I’ve written, Donald Trump is evidently psychotic, meaning: he lives in a delusional world created by his own messianic narcissism and cognitive decline. Natalie Harp functions to keep this alternate reality unperturbed by uncomfortable facts. She is his filter and his emotional protector.

The impact of this is clear. As a small example, Donald Trump is still absolutely convinced that the Reflecting Pool fiasco, which was botched by his no-bid pool contractor, was caused by “vandalism.” This includes indicting Olympian David Hearn, who is still being harassed by Trump’s DOJ. As “evidence,” Trump has repeatedly cited posts from his website Truth Social—which were almost certainly printed out for him by Natalie Harp.

If the only information Trump receives from the outside world is deliberately tuned by Natalie Harp to serve his preconceptions and delusions, he will continue to believe them. She sees it as her job to keep him safe from narcissistic injury.

As a far more serious example, Trump constantly insists that “the Strait of Hormuz is open” and “we have total control of the Strait” despite the obvious fact that he already surrendered to Iran—which now says it is closing the Strait “indefinitely.” Trump appears to receive little negative information about the conflict, nor does he receive pushback from Natalie Harp—who just acts as a stenographer for his delusions.

The psychological folie á deux between Trump and Natalie Harp is not harmless, and it has nothing to do with whether there is a physical relationship between them. This is a sealed epistemology where she curates the information he receives in order to present the world back to him as he wants it—not as it actually exists.

Trump’s security blanket, his “Binkie,” may keep him safe from hurt feelings, but in the real world, Natalie Harp is a national security emergency.

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As I wrote earlier in the week, the Russian-backed project to interfere in the 2016 election by weaponizing “her emails” was complex, and included several “camps.” One of those camps was Peter Thiel, Jeffrey Epstein, and the Russian ambassador, and another was headed Mike Flynn—which makes Flynn’s post on Saturday pretty interesting.

Incredibly, Flynn, who frivolously sued me for defamation, cites Judge Emmet Sullivan, who called Flynn’s actions during the 2016 transition “treasonous” and said “you sold your country out.”

Regardless, against Trump’s wishes, Flynn is pushing for releasing more Epstein files.

Flynn appears to be part of a new third position being built up by the Russians and their American assets—an “alternative to the Uniparty” that opposes both Donald Trump and liberal democracy. This includes people like Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Thomas Massie, Tucker Carlson, and Glenn Greenwald who are all positioning themselves—and Russian influence—for a post-Trump world.

In this alternate reality: the United States is at war with Russia, which is just defending itself from Western aggression; Edward Snowden is a hero; and antagonism toward Russia is the fault of Hillary Clinton and Jews.

This is not a sign of strength for Putin, or for his assets in America. Putin is a genocidal, totalist psychopath murdering children every night—and now the war has come very close to home. This was a drone attack on the largest Wildberries distribution center Saturday—which is located in Moscow Oblast.

Ukraine is currently holding the line for the entire world—and closing in on Vladimir Putin. One day, in the not-too-distant future, the world will be free of Putin, and America will be free of Donald Trump.

Please join me and our amazing community for a Zoom call today, Sunday, at Noon PT / 3PM ET. I’ll dive a little deeper into what I found out about “Her F*cking Emails” and discuss the role of human dignity. As always, it’s always open for questions and comments. Details below!

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In the wake of a World War she barely escaped, German-American political philosopher Hannah Arendt said this:

The guarantee Arendt wanted never came—although the world briefly tried. The ability to retain one’s dignity as a human being has always been, and still remains, someone else’s bargaining chip. It has never been an unalienable right.

Dignity is more complex and plays a more important role than it may appear. Human dignity is the state of feeling worthy as a person without the need to dominate others. A dignified person projects: I am worthy of your notice, but I do not require it.

As an example of an undignified act—as I argue, an anti-dignified act—Donald Trump still insists on an extended dance to “YMCA”—a song about homeless gay men turning tricks to get by—at the end of many of his speeches. He does this precisely because it is undignified; he boasts that Melania says it’s “unpresidential.”

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Trump forces his followers to bury their own dignity just to see themselves as part of the in-group. He requires that they drop their own boundaries.

For Trump, and for the malignant narcissist broligarchs that support him, human dignity is anathema. It is Kryptonite.

The reasons for this are both psychological and darkly practical.

First, when you look into the backgrounds of the main characters in our collective nightmare, they were all raised to believe they are superior to other people, but also suffer from deep childhood insecurities. Trump, Musk, and Thiel, arguably the three chief architects of the current chaos, never developed the capacity for empathy—which is a pre-requisite for dignity. Unless you see others as worthy beings like yourself, you can never be truly dignified.

Human dignity creates a psychological boundary that reads: “I don’t have to dominate you to be of value.” But if your only route to feeling valuable is dominating others, as is the case for malignant narcissists like those in power, dignity becomes the enemy. That’s why Trump and Musk’s degenerating behavior is not just undignified; it is anti-dignified. They prey on dignity, portray it as weakness, and replace it with displays of dominance.

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As a stomach-churning example of, to coin a term, the anti-dignification of America, on Friday, Donald Trump, who is still deeply embroiled in the Epstein scandal, gave a nearly two-hour speech in front of hand-picked New York police officers which included this passage:

“And every day, I come to the White House people are thanking me. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you, sir.

Now, these young, beautiful girls. These young, beautiful girls. These young, beautiful girls in the White House. They come in. Now, I’m not supposed to say beautiful, but what the hell.

These young, these gorgeous, beautiful girls that they want to be safe. And they come-- Mr. President, I speak to you, yes. Thank you, sir. Thank you… Thank you, sir.

Now, I get it all the time. Men, women, older men, younger men, and older women, and younger women. They’re all saying thank you… We represent the whole universe, frankly, because there’s nothing like the United States. Look at what we’ve done.”

To say this is undignified is inadequate. It is undignifying. It actively removes dignity from the room, from his followers, and from the cameras, and converts it into his own narcissistic supply. This is both a sign of Donald Trump’s worsening disorders and another example of how he steals the dignity of others—in this case law enforcement—and replaces it with his own (false) displays of dominance.

Human dignity is not about glory, dominance, or victory. It is the state of not needing those things in order to feel worthy. This is the greatest threat to authoritarians who require that you need them—or, equally valuably—that you hate them. Either is fine, as long as you don’t ignore them.

Dignity is unique in that it both acknowledges the value of human connection and preserves the liberty of the individual—by definition. This gives it a powerful role in the complex order of liberal democracy. Human dignity provides the foundation upon which successful institutions and societies are built.

But if you are a personalist autocrat like Trump—or his broligarch patrons—it is exactly those kinds of institutions and societal norms you wish to break down.

In the model of complex adaptive systems I’ve been developing, you never go straight from complex order—like a liberal democracy—to simple order—like a personalist dictatorship. You have to break down the bindings between people and institutions—you have to destroy their human dignity—by adding chaos.

Trump and his cohort have been waging a furious war on dignity for over a decade. From his very first speech in Trump Tower when he broke all the rules—“they’re criminals; they’re rapists”—he made it clear that in order to be part of his world you must surrender your personal dignity and help extinguish the dignity of everyone else. In his second term, the war on dignity has become an existential battle. Every day is a new low. Even the “dignified transfer” became a circus.

In a dictatorship, there is no dignity. There is compliance and there is punishment. People who are dignified are seen as a threat, not an asset.

Dignity preserves the self.
Empathy preserves connection to others.
Liberty protects those connections from domination.

Democracy requires all three—which is why they are all under assault.

In my view, the most important long-term project of the human race, one which will likely require generations, is to create a civilization which puts human dignity first. Without it, we are no longer the subjects of our own stories; we are the objects of someone else’s extraction.

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Turnaround

The weekend of October 7th-9th, 2016, represented one of the most miraculous political turnarounds in American history. Within 48 hours, Donald Trump not only survived two massive scandals, either of which would have ended anyone else’s hopes of the presidency, he used them to kickstart an operation that destroyed Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

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Getting to the bottom of what actually happened during this period is crucial because until we collectively absorb how America made such a colossal error as electing Donald Trump, twice, we will never be able to move forward constructively.

In my view, the Russian-backed operation to wage cyber and psychological warfare against American citizens and Hillary Clinton—objectively the most qualified candidate to ever run for president—makes everything that followed morally, if not legally, illegitimate.

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There were at least five major stories breaking the weekend starting Friday, October 7th, 2016—an absolute explosion of news, commentary, and social media propaganda that made it all nearly impossible to follow. To review, this is what hundreds of millions of Americans actually witnessed.

• Friday, 10/7/16, ~3PM ET: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and DHS jointly publish a warning to the American public that they assess with high confidence: Russian intelligence is interfering with the election, and is specifically responsible for hacking Democratic National Committee emails being distributed by DCLeaks and Wikileaks.

• 4:03PM ET: The Washington Post releases the Access Hollywood tape featuring the Republican candidate for president bragging about sexual assault.

• 4:30PM ET: Wikileaks publishes the first tranche of Russian-hacked Podesta emails. Importantly, this was just the start. Wikileaks intended to draw the material out from day one. More releases followed daily through the end of October.

• 4:50PM ET: Trump releases a statement that already shows the counterstrategy: “This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course — not even close… I apologize if anyone was offended.”

• Midnight ET, Friday night: Trump releases another attack video disguised as an apology: “Bill Clinton has actually abused women… We will be discussing this more in the coming days.”

• Sunday, 10/9/16, 8PM ET: A brief press appearance was arranged with three of the women who had accused Bill Clinton of misconduct—Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willey, independent counsel Ken Starr’s chief witnesses in 1998—as well as Kathy Shelton, who accused Hillary Clinton of mishandling her rape case decades before.

• 9PM ET: Second Presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The Clinton accusers were given seats up front by the Trump campaign after trying to seat them in the VIP section to stage a confrontation with Bill Clinton.

As any casual observer might note, this is an extremely unusual sequence. By 4:30PM Friday, after watching the Access Hollywood tape and hearing the U.S. government say Russia is helping Trump, many people naturally felt his campaign was over and that Trump would have to drop out or lose spectacularly.

But that didn’t happen. There was a rescue plan already in place.

Rescue Plan

Crucially, special counsel Robert Mueller was very interested in this sequence of events. Mueller made a lot of progress identifying the mechanics of how parts of it worked, but he was missing a big piece, a clear operational node with direct, real-time communications with the Russian government during these events: Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Thiel, and Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin.

On October 7th, the same day as the Access Hollywood tape, the most infamous pedophile in the world, a PayPal Mafia oligarch with deep ties to the government and intelligence community, and the most senior Russian official in New York City met for “an important lunch” at 12:30PM. As I previously reported, this was no coincidence.

In hindsight, then-AG William Barr’s operation to submarine Mueller’s findings was astonishingly successful considering how much evidence Mueller showed of both the Russians and their American co-conspirators trying to help Trump win. The report is nearly 1,000 pages and full of damning evidence of “Russian collusion.”

But if you layer the Epstein Files—at least the half that Todd Blanche decided to release—on top of the Mueller Report, a far more complete picture comes into view.

First, it’s important to remember the context of Mueller’s investigation. As proven by Trump’s own recent declassification, there was never a full counterintelligence investigation into Trump, or a deep investigation into his finances—because Rod Rosenstein, who replaced James Comey, limited Mueller to investigating “crimes.”

Nevertheless, Mueller found a way to show how the Russian side of the operation worked, by indicting the Russians themselves—both in military intelligence (GRU), and in Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency. But Mueller was not free to go down every road. This is in stark contrast to Whitewater Independent counsel Ken Starr, who was looking into a real estate deal and found Monica Lewinsky and the “Clinton accusers” instead.

This leads to an important question that I have not seen adequately reported. On the morning of October 7th, at 11:22AM ET, almost five hours before the Access Hollywood tape came out, Jeffrey Epstein invited his friend and former defense lawyer Ken Starr to meet with Peter Thiel and Vitaly Churkin for lunch. There is no record of whether Starr joined them but this is an important indication of what the meeting was all about.

Just two days after this meeting, three of Starr’s accusers did a press appearance together and showed up in the front row of a presidential debate. Epstein obviously knew they were going to be used before Access Hollywood was released.

The Mueller Report and other sources add a lot of additional context. This was an extremely busy 5 1/2 hours both in public—and in private. To summarize:

• 11:00AM ET: An unknown source gives Washington Post reporter David Farenthold the Access Hollywood tape, which had been circulating internally at NBC since several days before.

• 11:22AM: Epstein invites Ken Starr to a meeting that had been scheduled on October 5th as “an important lunch”—with Peter Thiel and Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin.

• 11:53AM: Roger Stone, who had been in contact with GRU-cutout “Guccifer 2” and correctly predicted a new Wikileaks drop days before, receives an 18-minute call from a Washington Post number. Mueller didn’t know who it was—but based on timing presumably Farenthold or his team.

• 12:30PM: Epstein-Thiel-Churkin lunch begins.

• 1:42PM and 2:18PM: Roger Stone speaks at length to Jerome Corsi, who later tells Mueller than Stone knew about the tape and wanted to use Wikileaks as a counterattack.

• Early afternoon, before 3PM: NSA Susan Rice calls Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak into her office to tell him that the U.S. is about to accuse Russia of interfering in the election.

• 3PM: The U.S. government publishes the warning about Russian interference and Wikileaks.

• 4:03PM: Access Hollywood released.

• 4:30PM: Wikileaks releases Podesta’s emails.

This series of events effectively reversed what would have otherwise been an electoral disaster for Trump and turned it into a referendum on conspiracy theories about Hillary’s emails.

But how did it work? We now know a lot more than Mueller did.

Five Camps

The operation to destroy Hillary Clinton using GRU-hacked material for psychological warfare was designed to give Donald Trump’s campaign plausible deniability. The “October Surprise” of Podesta’s emails and Clinton accusers—which successfully pushed Access Hollywood out of the headlines—involved several influential operatives with significant networks and covert capabilities of their own.

Mueller identified parts of Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon, and the Russian government’s networks, but either because Mueller’s scope was limited or because he simply didn’t see them as relevant, Peter Thiel, Jeffrey Epstein, and Vitaly Churkin went totally unmentioned in his report.

Below are five distinct political “camps” in operation during this period as I see them. This is based on the Mueller Report, the Epstein files, and other open source information. All of these groups operated well before the October 7th events and several still continue in some form.

CAMP 1–STONE / INFOWARS / CLINTON ACCUSERS

• Roger Stone—an infamous political assassin since Nixon; sought WikiLeaks material; had an unexplained WaPo call on October 7th; built the Clinton-accuser package well before Access Hollywood.

• Jerome Corsi—Stone friend/intermediary; Council for National Policy member; claimed Stone wanted a WikiLeaks release to counteract Access Hollywood; later promoted QAnon with Flynn ally Tracy Diaz to raise money for Flynn’s defense fund.

• Randy Credico—WikiLeaks/Assange intermediary for Stone.

• Alex Jones / Infowars—Russian-aligned propagandist; major Stone media ally and amplification node.

• Candice Jackson—attorney/cutout used by Stone in the accuser operation; represented Kathy Shelton and helped move the women toward the debate.

• Clinton accuser network—Jones, Willey, Broaddrick and Shelton were pre-assembled by Stone by August 2016 as a political weapon.

CAMP 2—BANNON / BREITBART / CAMPAIGN COMMAND

• Steve Bannon—campaign CEO from August 2016 and a separate power center from Stone; received Stone’s accuser proposal and sought conversations with Stone about WikiLeaks-related expectations.

• Breitbart / Aaron Klein—sustained anti-Clinton and accuser narratives before and after October 7. Promoted Erik Prince’s false email allegations.

• Jared Kushner / campaign HQ—involved with Bannon in the to set up a confrontation at the debate with the accusers.

• Bannon functioned as an integration point to the campaign: Stone could bring him WikiLeaks and accuser proposals without a single chain of command.

CAMP 3–FLYNN / FIG / SMITH / LEDEEN

• Mike Flynn—Disgraced retired three-star general; visited GRU HQ in June 2013 as DIA Director and befriended chief Igor Sergun; fired from Obama’s administration in February 2014 while Putin was invading Crimea with GRU “little green men”; returned to Moscow in December 2015. After Trump pushed campaign staffers to find Clinton’s “30,000 emails”—and infamously asked Russia to help—Flynn contacted Peter W. Smith and Barbara Ledeen to look for them.

• Flynn Intel Group (FIG)—Flynn’s private intelligence shop; during the campaign FIG conducted influence work for Inovo/Turkey, hired research, PR, production and former intelligence/law-enforcement personnel, and met senior foreign officials; Mike Flynn Jr. was his chief of staff.

• Peter W. Smith / KLS Research—longtime anti-Clinton operative who already knew Flynn; formed KLS Research, raised money, recruited technical participants and pursued Russian hackers to find Clinton’s deleted emails, including hiring neo-Nazi troll Chuck Johnson. Smith died of apparent suicide in 2017 with a note that read: “NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER.”

• Barbara Ledeen / Michael Ledeen—separate Flynn-linked acquisition branch. Barbara Ledeen pursued purported Clinton emails and later claimed access to a dark-web cache; Michael Ledeen was Flynn’s close collaborator and co-author of “Field of Fight”—a book that suggest partnering with Russia to fight Islam.

• Brian McCauley—retired senior FBI official hired by FIG; paid $28,000 beginning October 4; on October 18 McCauley became a public source in a Clinton-email controversy that Flynn immediately amplified.

• Erik Prince overlaps significantly—Prince and Flynn have been close since Afghanistan; Prince funded technical authentication of Ledeen’s purported dark-web emails. Prince also had independent Bannon/Trump Jr./Stone and international relationships, including Russia, Saudi, UAE, and Israel.

CAMP 4—THIEL / GIESEA / MAGA3X / JOHNSON

• Peter Thiel—billionaire PayPal Mafia member close to Jeffrey Epstein. Major Trump supporter and RNC speaker; maintained significant relationship with Epstein for years; asked Epstein for thoughts on the race—Epstein replied “take to signal” establishing an encrypted comms channel; attended the October 7th Churkin lunch.

• Jeff Giesea—Thiel protégé and MAGA3X organizer; President of Thiel Capital; wrote openly about memetic warfare and mentioned his friend Chuck Johnson.

• Mike Cernovich—MAGA3X co-founder/amplifier and major anti-Clinton/WikiLeaks-derived narrative producer; GamerGate and Pizzagate promoter; Flynn friend.

• Chuck Johnson—infamous internet troll; Holocaust denier; cross-stream relay / collector / connector; had access to Smith’s email hunt, Giesea/Cernovich memetic circles, WeSearchr accuser logistics; visited Assange at Colombian embassy in London; paid Thiel operative.

• Pax Dickinson—Johnson’s WeSearchr co-founder and business partner; involved in Smith’s Clinton-email effort.

• WeSearchr—crowdfunding/bounty/propaganda platform that funded travel logistics for accusers before Access Hollywood broke.

• MAGA3X—domestic social-media mobilization/amplification/psyops network active before, during, and after the Podesta releases. Created Pizzagate. Members included: Jack Posobiec, Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet, Milo Yiannopolous, “Microchip” and James Brower (original “Q” posters), Mike Flynn Jr., and Joe Biggs. Mike Flynn Sr. was a major MAGA3X promoter online and on the Trump campaign. Flynn coined them “digital soldiers.”

CAMP 5 - RUSSIAN STATE / GRU / IRA / WIKILEAKS

• GRU/Russian Intelligence Services—hacked Democratic targets, including John Podesta, and operated DCLeaks/Guccifer 2.0; maintained direct electronic contact with WikiLeaks and a separate Guccifer 2.0 channel with Stone.

• WikiLeaks—publisher of GRU-obtained Democratic material and communicated directly with GRU personas; Assange had an open relationship with Russia—he hosted a show on RT in 2012; in 2013, Wikileaks published classified information obtained by Edward Snowden which originated on Mike Flynn’s DIA servers; Wikileaks then helped Snowden escape to Russia.

• Internet Research Agency—Prigozhin-funded, St. Petersburg psychological warfare operation running U.S.-facing personas and coordinated social-media propaganda.

• Sergey Kislyak—Russian ambassador in Washington; privately warned by National Security Adviser Susan Rice before the October 7 public attribution; Flynn contact during the transition.

• Vitaly Churkin—Russian ambassador to the UN; repeated Epstein contact and October 7th lunch guest. Churkin died suddenly in February 2017 in New York City, one week after then-NSA Mike Flynn had to leave the Trump administration for lying about speaking to Sergey Kislyak.

• Sergey Belyakov—former Russian deputy economic-development minister, FSB Academy graduate and later RDIF adviser. Epstein maintained a significant relationship with him and was asked to broker access to Iozzo. Thiel was introduced in 2015.

  

• Igor Sergun—GRU chief until January 2016 and Flynn’s official liaison while Director of DIA. Flynn maintained a close relationship with Sergun—who died in January 2016 under cloudy circumstances.

Each of these five camps—Stone, Bannon/Campaign HQ, Flynn/Prince, Thiel/Epstein, and the Russians—operated independently but had the shared goal of preventing Hillary Clinton from ever becoming president, so they cooperated as closely as necessary. In many ways, Trump himself was incidental to the project—the goal was to tear Hillary down at all costs. That way even if she won, she would be far weaker.

The events of the weekend of October 7th represented a unique moment when all five of these camps had to cooperate in rapid succession to pull off Trump’s political miracle. But regardless of how the communications traveled among these groups, or when each knew the totality of what was happening, within short order all of them knew what they were doing: weaponizing Russian-hacked material to interfere in a presidential campaign. This was a criminal conspiracy by definition.

Who Knew & When Did They Know It?

Despite the challenges of the Mueller investigation, we do have strong indicators that there was pre-knowledge about these events. First, Epstein and Thiel set up their “important lunch meeting” with the Russian UN Ambassador on October 5th, well after the Access Hollywood tape was circulating at NBC but before the public knew about it. Second, the day before the release, October 6th, there was an extremely anomalous event produced by Prigozhin‘s Internet Research Agency.

The psychological warfare operation manned by Russian trolls in St. Petersburg operated on both sides of the political spectrum to attack Hillary. But on October 6th, they switched primary political poles from right-leaning accounts to left-leaning accounts and produced a huge spike of negative information that appeared to the public to be attacking her from the left.

This would make perfect sense as an operation to psychologically prepare Hillary’s base for what was coming the next day. This kind of surge would have had the effect of over-sensitizing the electorate to negative information about Hillary, while making the damning evidence against Trump seem less important and damaging.

It is also very clear from Jeffrey Epstein‘s emails that this had been the plan for months. Epstein had contacts with a number of hackers, including “black hat” Vincent Iozzo who sent Epstein the first drop of DNC-hacked material within hours of its release in June 2016. Epstein replied “fun but the only important ones would be hilarys secret.”

Four months before Wikileaks released the Podesta emails, Iozzo replied, “Think you need to wait for Wikileaks for those :)”.

More than two months before the Podesta emails were released, Jeffrey Epstein invited billionaire Tom Pritzker to meet with billionaire Tom Barrack, former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak, and Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin—an extraordinary meeting by itself. Pritzker couldn‘t make it, so Epstein asked if he had any questions.

They all knew what was going on. They all chose to cooperate with the Russian-backed sabotage of a candidate for president of the United States—a covert operation happening behind the back of the American electorate.

Seen as the trigger event for the last decade of American chaos—this was the worst political crime since the Civil War.

No Consequences

In the end, Mueller did not indict any Americans for this conspiracy to interfere—successfully, as it turned out—with a presidential election. He did not indict any American for cooperating with a foreign government. Instead, the handful of Trump operatives Mueller did indict—including Mike Flynn, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and George Papadopoulos—were charged with lying to the FBI, obstruction, or financial crimes. Mueller punted.

Mike Flynn and Roger Stone successfully evaded any punishment whatsoever. Their dual pardons after Trump lost in 2020 freed them up to try to steal another election, this time through violence on J6. Nevertheless, Merrick Garland and Joe Biden’s DOJ ignored them entirely—for four years.

Now, nearly a full decade since Donald Trump’s “miraculous” turnaround after Access Hollywood, we are all suffering the consequences of the American government’s failure to protect its population from foreign interference—and domestic sabotage.

The Obama administration failed in real-time to adequately warn us. Its feeble attempt was drowned out by the very operation it warned about. Had Mueller even mentioned Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Thiel, Vitaly Churkin, or any number of other co-conspirators, we might not have been held in the dark for so long. Then Biden and Garland failed to prosecute anyone for 2016, or anyone above Proud Boy for J6.

We let treason, sedition, and conspiracy against the Constitution go unpunished, twice. The consequences are now that Donald Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer is Attorney General; we have the most disastrous regime in American history in power; and we still have 30 months to go.

Returning to these events is not anyone’s idea of fun. It doesn’t lower the price of gasoline, or bring back anyone’s lost health insurance—but it is absolutely necessary to reckon with what happened if we are going to successfully navigate the current crisis and chart a better course. Otherwise we will just keep doing it again and again.

If we continue to fail to learn from our mistakes, if we continue to suffer a lack of imagination about how devious and committed our adversaries truly are, we will be doomed to be their victims in perpetuity.

The way through is the truth, the facts, and ultimately, the law. There must be a reckoning. It’s all very complicated but it really is that simple.

Thanks again to all who have sent messages, subscribed and donated recently in light of the judge’s ruling in the Flynn case. It is deeply appreciated.

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I wanted to thank everyone for your support this week after a judge saddled me with hundreds of thousands in legal debt following three years of fighting Mike Flynn in court. The new subscriptions, donations, and messages have helped give me some confidence that I will ultimately get through this challenge. I’m so grateful.

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One of the things that Flynn sued me for is that six years ago I correctly identified him as the leader of the cult known as QAnon—aka “Q”. Yesterday, he took the mask off by posting “The Storm has arrived” with a warning about “globalists” with a “death grip on institutions.” It stops just short of explicitly calling for violence.

“The Storm” is a metaphor by Joseph Goebbels, one that Stephen Miller used at Charlie Kirk’s funeral. The fact that Flynn used it on 8/8 is also relevant. It’s a major signal for escalation before the midterms.

But Mike Flynn’s treasonous actions did not start with “Q”. They started in 2013—at the latest—after Flynn made a trip to Russian military intelligence (GRU) headquarters that June, the first ever by an American. From then on, everything Flynn has done has benefited Putin. Everything.

But in my view, the crucial day involving Flynn that irretrievably changed the last decade of American history was October 7th, 2016. That day, three events happened within the course of an hour:

• 3:30 PM, 10/7/16: Obama’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence puts out a statement accusing the Russian government of interfering in the election

• 4:03 PM: The Washington Post releases the Access Hollywood tape of Trump admitting to sexual assault

• 4:30 PM: Wikileaks releases the first tranche of John Podesta’s GRU-hacked emails

The Mueller Report investigated these events and brought a lot of details into light about Roger Stone, “Guccifer 2,” and Wikileaks. But Mueller never mentioned Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Thiel or Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin. And he almost certainly had no idea about this meeting that took place a few hours before.

This meeting and the activities surrounding it add very significantly to the story Mueller told. We now have many additional data points that fill out the picture of what happened. It was not just Roger Stone freelancing. It was a setup.

We failed to get accountability for what happened in 2016, so the same group of people tried it again in 2020.

In Mike Flynn’s deposition in my case, he was asked about Russian-hacked emails in the 2016 election by my lawyer. Suffice it to say, this line of questioning made him extremely nervous.

I do not believe that we can collectively move forward until we fully understand and absorb this history. None of the last decade should have happened. Our systems failed at every level. And I plan to show how—and who was responsible.

Please join me and our growing community of democracy-enjoyers for a Zoom conversation at Noon PT / 3PM ET. I’ll preview what I’m working on, give an update on what happened in court, and open it up to all questions and comments. It’s my favorite part of the week. Hope to see you! Details below.

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In the summer of 2020, the America I lived in felt beleaguered by four years of Trump. We were in the first huge bloom of COVID deaths, George Floyd was executed in front of the world, and with everyone cooped up, the internet seemed to be going particularly insane.

I was never a Twitter guy. I had less than 300 followers that summer, but I saw something in QAnon that was both familiar and frightening. It was abusing alternate reality game techniques I helped pioneer 15+ years before for marketing campaigns. Moreover, QAnon appeared to have a leader—or at least a main beneficiary—retired three-star general Mike Flynn.

This did not take some grand act of sleuthing or “research.” I simply went to the place QAnon propaganda was being shared and observed at least a third of the accounts showed some kind of direct loyalty to Mike Flynn in the profile. Many believers posted a link to his legal fund—which was started the month before “Q”. It was later revealed he raised at least $8.5 million this way.

Flynn had infamously done the QAnon oath “Where We Go One We Go All” on the Fourth of July, 2020 with his whole family in his own backyard—and posted it to Twitter. To be abundantly clear, a man who receives a $200,000+ pension from the military raised his hand to QAnon, not the Constitution of the United States—in public.

But when Flynn posted this article on a white nationalist website a month later, I became very concerned about what was going to happen around the election. Flynn appeared to be trying to raise some kind of white Christian nationalist army through QAnon. The article was full of violent neo-Nazi signals like scapegoating “antifa,” “BLM,” and “Marxism” as the enemy in a “biblical” war of “good versus evil… happening on the streets of America.”

When that was published six years ago, I gathered up the gumption to tweet about it—to my 300 followers.

For five months, I tracked Flynn, QAnon, and a growing list of suspected co-conspirators as they openly tried to undermine and then overthrow Biden’s election victory. At first, this was more and more violent propaganda, more radicalized followers, and more absurd election conspiracies. But on December 18th, that changed. Immediately after Trump met with Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Patrick Byrne in the White House, Trump tweeted that his followers should come to DC on January 6th—and that it “will be wild.”

This began mass mobilization of a cult—people obsessed with the Big Lie who were heavily radicalized by coercive, traumatic propaganda to believe that Congress was full of Satanic pedophiles. And no one seemed to be talking about it—except them.

After watching Q believers organize “caravans” to DC, and spelunking in their spaces on Twitter, Telegram, and “CloutHub” for weeks to listen to what they thought would happen, I became convinced a violent attack on the Capitol would happen—well in advance.

It played out more or less exactly how they had broadcast it. I tweeted this a week before.

The night before J6, there was a gathering of white nationalists in DC. Flynn was a featured speaker and praised his “digital soldiers”—a phrase he coined which “Q” used frequently. He urged them to model “all the men and women standing in freedom’s space around the world, willing to die, willing to sacrifice their very lives… We have got to get this [the election] right!”

I watched it live. The scrolling comments are a good indicator of the kind of impact he was having.

The following day I watched the crowd gather, Trump encourage them to march to the Capitol in a speech, and the violence inevitably erupt. I could only hold my head for hours. It was a gut punch unlike anything I have ever felt.

Later, the footage revealed what I already knew. It was Flynn’s people at the tip of the spear. This included people like recently-freed Proud Boy Joe Biggs (a Sergeant under Flynn in Afghanistan), and neo-Nazi Q believer Brian Gamble—who took Flynn’s speech to heart and helped break down the barricades.

This five months represents the origin story of my work ever since—and the reason for both Mike Flynn and Kash Patel’s harassment lawsuits against me. I happened to be a guy with the know-how to see through what they were doing. And one who was willing to say something about it.

But neither the insurrection nor the lawsuits have been the most difficult part for me personally. After J6, I experienced years of coordinated, brutal smears from hundreds of “leftist” accounts who were dedicated to discrediting, deplatforming, and psychologically tormenting me. I am not exaggerating when I say it was a kind of cult unto itself. I was their “lolcow,” an outlet for collective sadism. I say this not as a victim—I am not—but so people can understand how it works.

While I have made a point of giving them no oxygen for a couple of years now, this smear campaign has done a lot of damage. They repeatedly got me banned from Twitter, including for the entire crucial year of 2022, got me and my documentary banned from YouTube, lied about me to everyone I knew they could harass through DMs, generated multiple hit pieces, and pumped out literally millions of public falsehoods that I could do nothing about. Flynn and Patel both used the hit pieces in their lawsuits.

In the end, the chief complaint of my stalkers was allegedly that I was a “conspiracy theorist” and “mentally ill” because I said Russia was interfering in American politics—and that Mike Flynn was involved with QAnon. Needless to say, I stand by every word.

While I tried to warn about him throughout the Biden administration, Flynn published a series of books, “The Citizen’s Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare” (5GW) that gives instructions on how use psychological warfare (psyops) on your opponents. This included the use of “lawfare” to harass the enemy, and a section called “How to Make People Kill People.”

This was my introduction to psychological warfare—to the impact people like Flynn can have on their enemies and their “friends.” I have reported on it, warned about it, and predicted its impact over and over. And I have been its target.

On the six-year anniversary of warning about Mike Flynn for the first time, I had to sit in court (via Zoom) and listen to a judge say that I must personally go in debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay my own legal fees in Flynn’s harassment lawsuit against me. This was despite the fact that he dragged it out for three years to drain me of resources and dropped it at the last minute because he knew he couldn’t win. Nevertheless, the judge seemed particularly offended that I called Flynn a “Nazi.”

Since I didn’t get to say it in court: I make no apologies or corrections for that, Your Honor. When you publish a book that says “fear of Muslims is rational,” you are a Nazi. When you blame Jews for their own genocide, you are a Nazi. When you orchestrate a white nationalist attack on the seat of a democracy, whether it be the Reichstag or the Capitol, you are a Nazi. End of story.

I take full responsibility for my actions, and my words. I made this bed and I will lie in it. But unlike Mike Flynn, I will sleep soundly knowing that I did the right thing.

I recorded a short video below. Thanks to everyone for your support along the journey.

Hey everybody. I did not prevail today in court against Mike Flynn.

The judge said that I am responsible for my own legal fees in a frivolous defamation case that Flynn dragged me through three years of hell for and then chickened out at the last minute—because he didn’t want to hear the explanation for why I called him all those bad names.

Nevertheless, here I am. Lawfare works. There is no doubt that at this point our system is rigged to advantage the rich and the powerful over people like me. Just being able to fight Kash Patel and Mike Flynn in court at all was a gargantuan effort. And I wouldn’t want to wish it on anybody, but I also wouldn’t change a goddamn thing. I say what I say for a reason.

If people want to help, I’d be grateful if you would subscribe to my substack. It is my only source of revenue right now. And I do not have hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay lawyers, but I will get through it. I will figure it out. I’ve been knocked down out here before.

So thanks everybody for your support. I’m not going anywhere. Not until I can retire peacefully into the night knowing that my grandchildren are going to grow up in a country and a world that’s as good as the one that I was born into. And right now it just is not.

Thanks for your support. Long live America. 🇺🇸

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Donald Trump is psychotic. This is not an epithet or an insult. I mean that he has literally lost his connection to the objective world. He has collapsed into himself, and he has taken his regime, and his nation, with him.

Trump lives in an alternate reality constructed by his own delusions—and he expects everyone to live in it with him. No amount of evidence or factual information will change his mind.

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For example, on Monday, the president was asked about DC Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a long-time Trump zealot, dropping frivolous charges on Olympian David Hearn for alleged vandalism of the Reflecting Pool. What erupted was eight minutes of pure grandiose delusions, a fantasy created by his own psyche. It began this way:

“Jeanine Pirro made a mistake. It was vandalism. I just told you we did, I think, 78. One of the things was the reflecting pool, hasn’t worked since 1922, because it always leaked. It always leaked from 1922. You know, it’s the largest longest pool ever, all that. The concept is beautiful, but it always leaked because of the size, because of maintenance, whatever. But it was built in 1922, and from the day it was built, it like, Biden spent $58 million. Barack Hussein Obama spent much more than that…“

Full transcript

Trump’s world has been sealed to protect his messianic ego which is being attacked on all sides by reality, and by his own cognitive decline. He was unable to conjure up the words “algae” or “video”—he called it “photographs of tapes, like moving cameras.”

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His entire monologue was a string of emotional associations that touched on fireworks, bubblers, UFC, the grass (including a plug for Scott’s Miracle Gro), “8647,”Comey, Pirro’s “choking,” and a long section on how the “vandals” created the “slit” with “box cutters.”

At one point, the president veered off to mention his “new horses that just opened by the bridge.“ Trump’s absurd gilding of the Arts of War horses straddling the Arlington Memorial Bridge is perhaps the best visual metaphor for Trump’s psychosis. He has encased himself in gold—as if King Midas touched himself.

“You saw the new horses that just opened by the bridge with the gold. That was the way they were many years ago. Now they looked better than they did many years ago. But these monuments looked better than they did when they were originally built. Not just a little fix up. We made them the way they were plus, and everyone’s so proud.”

Trump focuses on gilding things, statues, arches, and ballrooms because he cannot cope with his failure—and because he senses he’s losing his hold on his own followers. “The acclaim and consensus of millions of people” is fading.

Over the weekend, to shore up his waning narcissistic supply, Trump proudly proclaimed on Truth Social that he won two golf tournaments at his own Bedminster Golf Club—and shot a 70, an absolutely preposterous score for an 80-year-old.

But crucially, Trump’s disorders do not just affect trivial matters like statues and golf. Trump’s delusions have made the United States more vulnerable than any time in many decades. He has depleted “virtually all” of the military’s long-range precision missiles on his fruitless war on Iran which “could limit the U.S. ability to deter adversaries, including Russia and China.”

U.S. has used ‘virtually all’ of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war: Reuters

This is a direct result of the same neuropsychological disorders that caused him to perseverate for eight minutes about the Reflecting Pool. He simply believes that he’s winning the war with Iran, and that if he just keeps doing the same thing over and over, the results will be different—which is the colloquial definition of insanity.

Donald Trump has always created his own reality to some extent. Malignant narcissists can be successful for this very reason.

However, this “freedom from doubt” is ultimately judged by objective reality. At some point, the story being told collides with the real world. If the narcissist cannot cope with reality, they will decompensate instead.

I have referred to the process of an entire government becoming welded to the disorders of a failing narcissistic leader as governmental decompensation. This is the current status of the United States. The entire regime has been unstable, incoherent, and dangerous because it is decompensating along with its failing autocrat.

But the leader and the regime have now lost any commitment to even acknowledging reality at all, because for Trump the real world does not exist—except as an external threat.

The hold Trump has on his inner circle and on his shrinking cult of followers has been one of the most extraordinary and important phenomena in modern history because it shows just how far people can be pushed with modern technology into what Freud called the “improbable.”

The president of the United States is clinically psychotic and he has transferred his pathologies to his regime—and to approximately 30% of Americans who have been entrained to mirror his insanity, regardless of the consequences.

Donald Trump and his regime represent a global security emergency. He is out of options and he is out of his mind. He must be removed from office or he will cause a historic tragedy. It is the inevitable mathematics of his condition.

If you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription, please consider it! I never hide important information behind a paywall, so I rely on my readers for support. Thank you for reading and sharing!

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Just a quick note to share that the great John Oliver mentioned Kash Patel’s frivolous lawsuit being dismissed at the beginning of his show. It’s one of best things I’ve ever seen—but I may be biased. 😂

“It has been a busy week! Zelenskyy and Netanyahu met with Trump. We saw the incredible headline ‘Kash Patel Loses Lawsuit to Man Who Called Him “Googly-eyed” Chud’—which I think means that’s his legal name now…”
—John Oliver, Last Week Tonight, 8/2/26

Surreal doesn’t begin to describe it.

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Humans are using technology to reverse engineer biology—not to serve other people but to control them.

Several million years ago, primate evolution took a divergent, novel path that ended up in modern humans. We developed a brain that enabled far more than just survival. We became creative beings in a way that, to our knowledge, no other species has.

By developing symbols and language to communicate, we both increased the chance of the species surviving and gave ourselves tools to build new things which (sometimes) gave us new advantages. In the process, our brains evolved a layered stack of functionality starting with autonomic-unconscious functions at the base ascending up to abstract-metaphysical at the top.

But several thousand years ago, something important happened, we began reversing back down through this sequence by developing technologies that could impact each of those cognitive layers in turn.

When you put these together, the trend becomes very clear: Evolution builds up. Technology reaches back down. Technology recapitulates biology, in reverse.

Perhaps the best-known narrative archetype of the top step—the transition from biology to technology—is Jesus Christ. Mythologically speaking, Jesus used the now-primitive technology of spoken word to share his beliefs, his metaphysics, with the world. Since belief was purely a dictate of the Roman Empire, the simple act of proselytizing threatened the state because it represented what Caesar saw as a seizure of power.

In many ways, human history has been defined by such transitions—where technology breached a deeper layer of human cognition. The printing press enabled mass sharing of ideas and philosophy—a shatteringly disruptive revolution in the ability of people to influence each other at a distance. This led to the Enlightenment and countless other major schools of thought that influenced billions.

But we did not stop with the printed word—although importantly the U.S. Constitution did. Humanity kept building more and more sophisticated technologies to reach deeper and deeper into the way we think—and feel. Radio, TV, the internet, social media, and now chatbots all reach farther down into the human mind than the technologies before them.

The last step down in this sequence is to affect the physical capabilities of the brain, by enhancing it with brain chips or replacing it entirely through “uploading.”

This is the vision of the techno-fascist accelerationist movement that has done so much damage to our collective stability and sanity. The desire to control humanity at the hardware layer is why Musk invested so much in his brain chip company Neuralink—and why both Musk and Peter Thiel are extreme transhumanists.

For me, there are two important insights to glean from this. First, this is a meta-trend in humans. We are not going to be able to stop technology from finding new ways of interfacing with people. Fighting it is the wrong solution. We must adapt. Second, we have to collectively realize that our entire constitutional and justice system was built on a long-obsolete model of human interaction and influence.

The U.S. Constitution and the First Amendment were written over a century before the first radio transmission. The founders had no idea that as the decades rolled on, we would find more and more powerful ways to impact each other’s beliefs—in the same way they didn’t know we would have AR15s when they wrote the Second Amendment.

Americans are experiencing the failure of a constitutional democracy built for an 18th century population. It is the gap between what our system was designed for, and what technocratic elites and the government can access, that has been exploited to cause the population to make horrible decisions—like trusting Elon Musk and electing Donald Trump, twice.

It is in this new hyper-connected world, which enables deep psychological, neurological, and physical influence, that we must collectively construct a new Enlightenment, a new set of rules, that prioritizes human freewill in the face of grave new threats to the sovereignty of the individual.

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I have spent much of the last two days absorbing the public reaction to the news that a Nevada judge dropped Kash Patel’s $10 million defamation case against me. I will not pretend there has been no schadenfreude. Seeing the man who helped put the country through hell on January 6th—and then put me through hell for reporting on it—be roundly mocked has been downright delightful.

An interesting part of this particular internet phenomenon is that I don’t really matter to the story. I have been referred to as “a man,” a “blogger,” and an “internet commenter” by dozens of outlets by now. I admit to being a bit annoyed by this because I’m not a random person. I’m someone who knows what they’re talking about—and who was targeted for a reason.

Regardless, there are people all over America and the world celebrating that it’s still legal to talk about powerful people, to speak your mind about them, even if it isn’t nice. People want to know that they still live in a free country. They want to see people who fight—even if they don’t always win.

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Everyone knows Kash Patel is an actor playing a part—and that he’s not very good at it. He’s kept Trump entertained enough by destroying what’s left of the American justice system to keep his job for now. But Kash’s true test will be whether he can rig the midterms sufficiently to keep the Democrats out of power. If not, Kash will have much more time to spend with his personal problems.

I mocked Kash Patel, his frivolous lawsuit, and his “googly” eyes because someone needed to. His widespread destruction of the FBI, the firing of thousands of good agents, and his comical, debaucherous behavior as Director were all predictable—and make him fair game. And now, with his planned trip to Moscow three weeks before the midterms, the epithet “Kremlin bitch” hardly seems sufficient.

Kash Patel has been part of a criminal conspiracy to absolve Donald Trump of his crimes and keep him in power for a decade. Kash Patel is not normal, and he should never be normalized.

On Friday, at a hastily called Cabinet meeting at Camp David, Trump was asked about the $1.8 billion “weaponization fund” he wants to use to pay off the violent rioters he sent to hang Mike Pence—the same rioters Kash Patel ensured could not be stopped by the National Guard on J6.

Trump said the fund is for people who were “weaponized, who have been abused.” He says that other than himself “nobody else has ever been treated so badly, so horribly.”

I edited his comments below with a few reminders of the “victims” Trump is referring to. He is completely inverting history—right in front of the world. And getting away with it.

A year ago, I wrote a piece describing how Trump managed to obtain and keep a psychological hold on his party, MAGA, and his inner circle such that he could return to power after planning an insurrection. How is he able to lie so blatantly and just get away with it?

The answer is a well-developed system of cognitive abuse and entrainment that plays out over all forms of media. The article below describes how people end up mirroring Donald Trump like a flock of swallows or a school of fish instead of a group of conscious, rational individuals. This is how the people were actually “weaponized” on J6.

I also wrote a follow up series about how to fight back against this kind of cultic psychological influence. In short: first, you must learn how it all works, to know what you’re dealing with; then you have to name what you see and label it for others; and finally, when the time is right, you can use this information to disrupt what you see.

When I deliberately use language that I know will trigger someone like Kash Patel, I am using the power I control, my own words, to disrupt them, to let them know they haven’t gotten away with anything yet. That is my right, and giving it up is not just weak; it sets a dangerous precedent for everyone.

You giving up your rights, and your power, voluntarily is their goal. Instilling fear in the population is the point. Mockery is very powerful in face of authority. You really cannot do enough of it when people are trying to take your freedom away.

University students Hans and Sophie Scholl, their teacher, and their fellow students knew the power of mockery—and paid the price for using it. They were guillotined by the Nazis in 1943 as members of the White Rose for distributing pamphlets making fun of Hitler.

“Give me liberty or give me death” is not just a slogan. It’s the line all free people have to draw eventually.

Sophie said it best: “We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience.”

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