“We’ll have problems politically if there’s not enough growth.”
—Peter Thiel, 2016

“Nastier World”

While Karl Marx’s phrase about religion—“the opium of the people”—is often quoted out of context, the surrounding text is necessary to understand its full meaning. It was not a criticism of religious people, although Marx was an avowed atheist. By “opium,” he meant its 19th-century use as an analgesic to relieve suffering, not just its recreational use.

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.”

—Karl Marx, 1844, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

Marx saw religion as the result of suffering, not the other way around. People who have no hope in the practical world need something impractical, or supernatural, to salve their pain. To Marx, religion was a way for the masses to console themselves in the face of destitution.

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But now Marx’s theory has come back around to affect the very capitalists he spent a lifetime criticizing. While I’m no expert on Marx, much less a Marxist, I do think he had a diagnosis of capitalism that was perhaps premature but seems to be bearing out in many of the ways he predicted.

There is an essential truth about modern capitalism that gives it a finite life: it is based on growth. Without growth, you can technically still have a system based on capital but it looks nothing like the existing economy. As it currently stands, the true utility of capital is just a tool to seek out more capital.

Capitalism is not a theory exactly. It has no founder, although endless theories have been layered over it. It was a system that emerged from a colonial era, when the chief competitive drive was expansion, and resources were readily available to be extracted through labor, including that of slaves. Capitalism was purpose-fit over several centuries to optimize for growth as a competitive advantage.

But the signs that growth is running out of time as a good approximation of a healthy company, economy, or nation are clear. We are running up against physical limits across the board—in energy, population, and environment. The planet simply can’t handle much more human expansion. The problem is not that no form of improvement remains possible; it is that the existing financial regime has already priced near-infinite growth into the present.

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This presents a major dilemma for capitalists: Where is the growth going to come from? This anxiety about the next “frontier for growth” is a driving motivation for billionaires. It is a palpable fear that their time may be nearing an end.

“What I worry about is… we don’t have enough growth… In a world without growth, everything becomes a zero sum game. And that becomes a much nastier world.”
—Peter Thiel

But a “nastier world” for whom? Thiel says “in order to get ahead” the pie needs to keep getting bigger. But what if it wasn’t a given that getting ahead is necessary for happiness? This thought never occurs to elites because it’s like asking a hammer what it would be like if there were no nails.

Opium for Capitalists

Capitalists are like anyone else; they have fears about their own worth, status, and relevance. In my view, SpaceX and AI are different ways for people who rely on growth but are afraid it’s no longer working to console themselves.

SpaceX gives a new life to old colonialist, extractivist ideas by promoting space as an infinite opportunity for expansion. On the other hand, “AI” claims to provide “growth” in the opposite way, by promising to reduce the cost of labor to a number approaching zero over time, thus growing profits at the expense of human needs.

Both of these core premises are false.

While there are legitimate ways to expand into space that make sense to humanity and generate profits, that is not what Musk is selling. He is selling opium for capitalists, not a business.

The way the market has treated SpaceX, by granting it all kinds of exceptions to the rules, and by ignoring Musk’s pathological racism and interference in politics, is not rational. It is the sign that it sees SpaceX as a kind of savior for its problems—such a necessary part of the future that it’s worth forcing what amounts to a $3 trillion NFT for Musk on the market.

When you look at the SpaceX S1 filing with the SEC, which reads much more like a pitch deck for a video game than a $2 trillion financial disclosure, you can see why it was so appealing to growth-hungry capitalists. The filing doesn’t even try to justify itself; it just says whatever is most exciting to a system that needs a way for the numbers to go up. For example, the company concludes it has a total addressable market (TAM) of more than $28 trillion, comparable to the entire GDP of the United States.

It is opium for the capitalists. It is science fiction as an economic pacifier.

Meta-phor

The AI industry presents a different premise to solve the same growth problem—that humans are a disposable and replaceable component of the economy. This idea, and its impact on people, is perfectly illustrated by a recent massive change at Meta. After a huge layoff, many of the best software engineers were sent to a “gulag” where they were forced to train AI all day, rather than do any software engineering.

Everyone else in the company was forced to allow themselves to be monitored all day and used as AI training data.

Zuckerberg’s explicit goal is to extract the “intelligence” of his own employees to train an AI which would ultimately replace them. It is a dystopian, antihuman fantasy born of fear: the fear that he’s running out of ways to grow his mammoth social media company, and of being left behind in the big game of broligarch Survivor.

There is another component to the recent mania that I believe has skyrocketed SpaceX, a rocket company worth perhaps $75 billion by normal valuation metrics, to forty times that much on the market. The same opiate that works on elites also works on retail investors.

Reactionary Theology

“The computer turns out to be the Eye of the reinstated Sun God.”
—Lewis Mumford, 1970, Myth of the Machine

Over the weekend, Donald Trump humiliated America by hosting a gladiatorial circus on the White House lawn, and by surrendering to Iran, a nation which had been seen as an extremist pariah state before Trump’s war. While Trump has not officially released the terms of the deal with Iran, the details are out and they are shocking.

After spending upwards of $200 billion on the war, Trump agreed to some $500 billion in total compensation to Iran. He agreed to lift sanctions on its oil, and to effectively pull out U.S. military presence in the region. And he received almost nothing in return.

This was the apotheosis of Trump’s failure—a crass spectacle desecrating numerous symbols of American democracy combined with the worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history.

Nevertheless, the stock market soared, and SpaceX continues to rise. On Monday alone, Elon Musk’s SpaceX stock went up more than the net worth of Bill Gates or Warren Buffet.

Just as SpaceX and AI are opiates for billionaires and banks, they are also an opiate for people conditioned to being a follower of a group with waning energy, like QAnon, MAGA, or crypto. There is a major crossover, especially on Elon Musk’s X—which is owned by SpaceX—from the increasingly disillusioned Trump-MAGA universe to the techno-utopian fascism of Musk.

This is a kind of reactionary theology to a world that feels increasingly limited to a wide swath of people, many of whom have held on to Trump as the avatar of their grievances for a decade. Those people feel betrayed and hopeless. In Musk, they see a kind of Tony Stark who promises to make up for their disappointments with rockets and endless money.

All of it, of course, is just opium for retail investors.

The Big Move

The mania around SpaceX and AI is a reaction to fear—by capitalists of the end of elite, white male dominance, and by the people of a world increasingly antagonistic to their existence.

The theology of accelerationism, be it in the form of neo-Nazis like Atomwaffen and O9A, the “Dark Enlightenment,” or the SpaceX IPO documents, is about converting growth into a malignancy that will break the system that contains it. Accelerationism is not just about speed. It’s about going so fast you permanently escape the cops.

SpaceX is not about winning the game of capitalism, it is about being capital. It is about replacing the complex order of a free market and liberal democracy with the simple order of an authoritarian, techno-fascist, white ethnostate controlled by an elite class through AI.

The big move that appears to be well underway is to create a vertically integrated alternate reality that parasitizes the real world until it becomes so large that it swallows and replaces the existing system. With Donald Trump in increasingly obvious mental and physical decline, the rush by the PayPal Mafia to capture his splintering MAGA base before it dissipates is clear. The final transfer is not from Trump to Musk; it is from public government to private infrastructure.

Peter Thiel tells a story about Elon Musk’s attitude towards America. About 15 years ago, Musk described the aerospace industry as “fat cows in a grassy field” and if Musk “ever got in there, there was just going to be a bloodbath.”

Musk’s ambitions have now extended far past a slaughter of American companies in aerospace. The “fat cow” is the entire financial system. He’s jumped the fence and the “bloodbath” has started.

The quest for never-ending growth at the expense of the Earth and the people who live on it marks a phase transition in humanity. The current capitalist system has been warped to such an extreme that it can no longer even pretend to be compatible with liberal democracy.

We Earthlings have a choice. We can take a hard look at our lust for eternal growth and build a new system that prioritizes a sustainable planet and a healthy population, or we can submit to the will of entrenched capitalists who want to extract all the resources from Earth, including human intelligence, for themselves.

“Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion.”
Hannah Arendt, 1951, Origins of Totalitarianism

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However, as Trump was resurrected by a handful of billionaires and foreign governments for the 2024 election, his individual behavior and obvious psychopathologies became just as critical to understand. As I’ve repeatedly warned, Trump’s combination of malignant narcissism and frontal lobe dysfunction makes him extremely gullible and subject to manipulation.

Now acclaimed journalist Jeremy Scahill reports that Iran has brought on a “team of senior psychologists” to “work up a profile” on Trump because he is a “mentally incapacitated individual” that Iran is “dealing with like a patient.”

Scahill says after they did a psychological profile on Trump “they made some progress in the negotiations.”

What Scahill is describing is a foreign power programming the president of the United States by exploiting his mental illness. It is nearly impossible to imagine a more critical national security emergency.

If the Iranian government can exploit this, so can anyone else.

Nevertheless Trump and his regime have been focused on everything but the war in Iran, or skyrocketing inflation. Instead Trump spent months obsessing over his “renovation” of DC, including the Reflecting Pool—or as Trump calls it the “Reflecting Lake” or the “Reflecting Pond.”

But rather than bring in engineers, he brought in his personal pool guy. The result is that within a week the Reflecting Pool is a swamp, filled with algae because the “American Flag blue” Trump chose holds too much heat, allowing the algae to bloom.

Trump’s big birthday party for himself started Saturday with motocross on the White House lawn, complete with military Honor Guard—a vile abuse of our troops.

Saturday night there was a weigh-in at the Lincoln Memorial for Trump’s UFC fight. One of the fighters was so drunk he vomited on himself—which was gleefully pointed out by Russian state propaganda.

This obliteration of American competence, dignity, and values is a perfect mirror of what is happening to Trump’s mind. It is one man’s psychological disorders amplified by the biggest bullhorn in the world—the U.S. government.

We are losing the psychological war on democracy because we have failed to fight it, or even acknowledge it. Until that changes, we will keep racing to the bottom.

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To Deprave

deprave (verb): to make morally bad or evil; vitiate; corrupt.

While we usually use the passive adjective depraved to describe someone particularly perverse and evil, to deprave is also a verb, and there is no more perfect word to describe what Donald Trump—and Elon Musk—are deliberately doing to the United States. They are depraving America—making it “morally bad,” making it actually evil.

This is not a broad generalization about the American people. It is, however, a broad generalization about the systems in which those people operate. The sooner we accept that the institutions governing American life have been grossly distorted to serve an entirely different, more malignant purpose than intended, the more effectively we can manage the consequences.

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The full spectrum of foundational systems upon which democracy relies are being depraved, including the federal government, the financial system, the media, and the military. This week, all four collaborated to help launch the world’s first trillionaire, a new category of financial obscenity that feels like a kind of verdict.

The Bargain

I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and have spent my life buying into the bargain that capitalism and democracy were engaged in a kind of balancing act that needed adjusting from time to time. The government’s role was supposedly to ensure that competition was healthy but liberty was not infringed.

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But during the Reagan years, the K-shaped economy was born, where the wealth from productivity gains became increasingly funneled to a smaller and smaller percentage of the population. Elon Musk seems to be a kind of final boss for the trickle-down brand of capitalism that obliterated the basic promise that labor and money would bear some relationship.

With Musk successfully taking SpaceX public in the most spectacularly fraudulent IPO in stock market history, at a valuation of over $2 trillion, the economy has been wrenched completely from its connection to the objective world—with the full cooperation of the financial system.

Mass Insanity in a Casino

As a sign of just how terrible this is for the market, I posted some simple arithmetic showing how distorted the price of SpaceX stock is—and of all the people in the world, Reagan’s Russ Vought, former OMB Director from 1981-1985, David Stockman, quote-tweeted me with an elaboration of his own.

Stockman calls SpaceX “mass insanity in a casino” and correctly values SpaceX at less than 5% of its current price.

When I am in total agreement with Reagan’s budget director about anything at all, it is a sign that something very drastic has happened.

If it were just a stock market bubble, or one company being overvalued, we could go through the normal process of absorbing a market dislocation. But the depravity of this company—and the way it has been pushed down America’s throats—makes it much more than a financial risk. It is an existential risk to the bedrock values of the country.

Fourteen Rockets

Friday morning, minutes after he officially became a trillionaire, Elon Musk quoted-tweeted the lead banker on his IPO, Goldman Sachs, with 14 rocket emojis.

Elon Musk repeatedly uses 14 emojis as a stand-in for the “14 words”—a white supremacist slogan by Nazi terrorist David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

This signal came after Musk spent the bulk of the week promoting violent British fascist Tommy Robinson’s open effort to start a race war in Europe after a gruesome attempted murder in Ireland. While the riots were happening, Robinson—née Stephen Christopher Yaxley—was in Moscow at a conference with Elon Musk’s racist father Errol.

For the entire financial system—banks, VCs, private equity, the stock market—to bend over backwards to accommodate one man’s science fiction fantasies is dangerous enough. But when that man is a genocidal racist with a kill count heading to the millions, it doesn’t sound like a symptom. It sounds like a death rattle.

Whipsaw

Musk’s IPO came a day after Donald Trump whipsawed the stock market by committing a war crime in Iran by targeting civilian water towers, and then suddenly deciding “the war in Iran is over” to begin a hasty “peace deal.” This gave the market a huge lift right before closing—and right before Musk’s stock started trading.

This sequence was blatantly abusing the full power of the federal government, including our military, to support Trump’s top donor’s obscene stock price.

Peter Thiel, whose Founder’s Fund profited $50 billion from the SpaceX IPO, famously wrote in 2009:

“I… no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible… Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

I think what we’re seeing with SpaceX, and the other massive AI company IPOs that will follow it, is a kind of proof of Thiel’s thesis but in the inverse.

It appears we are seeing the failure of a long experiment in attempting to merge two fundamentally opposing systems: capitalism and liberal democracy. The bargain I grew up believing would give my kids and grandkids a chance to succeed is no longer operable—if it ever really was.

MONETIZE HOPE

This breach of systemic trust was illustrated in a conversation with Musk on Wednesday hosted by “Singularity University” grifter Peter Diamandis—wearing the shockingly appropriate t-shirt “MONETIZE HOPE.”

Musk is asked how humans fit into his plans for the future:

“And I do think we’ll have universal income. We’ll basically just issue money to people… AI and robots are going to make so much stuff and provide so many services that they will actually run out of things to do for the humans… I think money will stop being relevant at some point in the future. So just as you’re becoming-- It’s probably something like an Iain Banks Culture sort of future. And I think the AI down the road will really not use human currency.”

This is the utopian side of Musk’s neo-Nazi ideology—a hybrid of his grandfather’s fascist technocratic beliefs about eliminating money as a way to concentrate power, and socialist science fiction about AI creating super-abundance.

To Musk, the way to solve the world’s problems is to “just issue money to people”—but only when money is already essentially worthless, and he has purged everyone he deems inferior.

Terminal Capitalism

This weekend, Donald Trump is holding a birthday party for himself, with a UFC fight that only people with a subscription to Paramount Plus can see, on the grounds of the White House. The fight is sponsored by numerous companies, including the former enemy beer of MAGA, Bud Light.

Of course, Donald Trump bought stock in the parent company of UFC before the fight was announced. And Paramount is owned by David Ellison—who, on the same day as Musk’s IPO, had his $111 billion acquisition of Time Warner approved by Trump’s DOJ, after successfully destroying CBS and 60 Minutes for Trump.

We are witnessing the wholesale destruction of the mythology that held our economy together, that our financial institutions would provide guardrails, that our government would regulate dangerous industries, and that massive fraud would be prevented or punished. Instead we have seen each system—financial, regulatory, and criminal justice—completely inverted and weaponized to defraud the very people they are supposed to serve.

This has led me to a harsh conclusion: I no longer believe capitalism and freedom are compatible—at least in the current formulation. This doesn’t mean I have figured out the answer, but I think the evidence is in. We need something better. We deserve something better than this depravity.

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A quick note. I know my work is often grim. Unfortunately, it is the world we live in. I will never sugarcoat things. And I will never to use chatbots to pump out bland text for the sake of content.

I’ve spent every single day for six years tracking the darkness that has captured America—over 2,000 articles—and I will continue to do so until I feel my country is safe for my grandchildren to grow up in. If you appreciate my work, and can afford it, please upgrade to a paid subscription so I can keep going. Here is a lifetime discount.

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“I just can’t tell you when, and I can’t tell you how deep.”
“We will have a crash.”
—Andrew Ross Sorkin, 60 Minutes

The corruption of the federal government and the technology sector by anti-democratic elites has metastasized to broad corruption of the financial system.

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This has led us to a critical moment in which corrupt institutions are collaborating on a scheme to force Americans to backstop the largest bubble in human history—worse than the housing bubble, worse than the dotcom bubble, and worse than the excesses of the 1920s.

If this sounds alarming, you should be alarmed. It is a singularity of greed that may take down the U.S. economy.

“They’re going to like it better”

Here is what Donald Trump said on Air Force One on Friday.

“It’s a concept out there that’s so much money and it’s so big that there are concepts where pieces could be given to the American public where the American public essentially becomes a partner with the companies… I actually have a meeting scheduled in the very near future… with all of the companies… the American people can benefit from the success of AI and by doing that they’re going to like it better…”

Donald Trump thinks this is going to be like his stock picking. He thinks that by tying the government to AI, and continuing to “do deals” with AI companies, it will keep the bubble going. And he may be right, temporarily.

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But there is a key phrase embedded in Trump’s rambling: “that way they’re gonna like it better.”

Trump is aware, as is everyone else promoting “AI,” that it is deeply unpopular and getting more so all the time. The reality of chatbots is that they are a useful way to search large sets of data wth language, but they will never do the things being promoted by the industry. They will never be conscious. And we’ve run out of human data to give them.

Nevertheless, the chatbot industrial complex has created an economic monster. Trillions of dollars are being spent on data centers and “AI infrastructure” when no viable revenue model has been identified. Story after story has been coming out of companies who have tried AI and found it: 1) too expensive, 2) ineffective at increasing productivity, or 3) both.

Unknown Territory

The current state of the stock market is as stretched as it has ever been. The Shiller Price to Earnings ratio shows how expensive the market is historically. We are now at the same level as the top of the dotcom mania, and far above 1929.

Right now, over 40% of the market is concentrated in AI, or AI-related stocks.

If this market were left to its own devices, there would be a near-term crash. It’s simple mathematics. It’s basic economics. And I’m not alone in this assessment. Andrew Ross Sorkin, who wrote the bestseller 1929, says unequivocally: a crash is coming.

While such an event would be painful. It would not be unprecedented or even abnormal in the big picture. In the end, it would be helpful to flush out the excesses in the system, and uncover where the real value is.

However, we are not in normal times, and this bubble has unprecedented components. The chatbot industrial complex has more air to pump into this balloon.

There are three companies—SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic—expected to go public this summer, which would add a total of $4-5 trillion more to the market’s capitalization. Inflation-adjusted, that’s bigger than the entire dotcom bubble combined—layered on top of the current bubble.

Jailbreak

“Men… go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

In order to engineer massive inflation of an already thin-skinned bubble, the oligarchs behind these companies had to convince the financial system to jailbreak itself. The normal guardrails to prevent excessive speculation have been systematically and rapidly taken down.

For example, in the last few days, numerous brokerage firms have lowered their standards for allowing people to buy IPOs, including Fidelity lowering their account requirement to invest by over 99%.

And the federal government is determined to help: the SEC eliminated minimum requirements for day trading.

These moves are blatantly designed to entice lower income investors into speculating on one of the most overvalued companies that ever existed—SpaceX, which is going public on Friday, June 12th, at a valuation of $1.77 trillion. This is an absurd value, a near-100X multiple of 2025 sales, which were $18 billion with a loss of $5 billion.

To justify this, the banks taking it public are having to say patently ridiculous things. Morgan Stanley wants people to believe SpaceX will have revenue of $3.4 trillion in 2040. It’s hard to imagine an actual bank would say this.

But despite serious valuation concerns, Elon Musk wants to raise more than $75 billion from this offering. This will be double the largest IPO in history, shattering the $38 billion Saudi Aramco IPO in 2019. Musk has also offered an accelerated liquidity schedule for his early investors.

But to raise that money, he needs retail investors. In a normal IPO, usually 10% is allotted to highly qualified retail. But Musk is allotting 30% to retail—triple the normal amount.

However, merely enticing retail investors to speculate is not enough for them.

You May Own SpaceX, Like It Or Not

Elon Musk managed to convince NASDAQ and FTSE Russell to accelerate the schedule for “mega-caps” like SpaceX to be included in their index funds. This has serious ramifications, because it means that these funds, which are often a major part of retirement accounts, will be forced to buy the stock at inflated IPO prices.

Everyday citizens who work and pay taxes will unwittingly be the owners of a wildly overvalued stock which is totally controlled by pathologically racist con man Elon Musk. He is forcing retirees to be his exit liquidity. And the financial system is largely going along with it, although the S&P rejected the changes.

Between lowering all barriers to retail speculation, and forcing pension funds to buy SpaceX through rule changes, Elon Musk has punched a $2 trillion hole in the protection the financial system is supposed to provide citizens. Other IPOs will follow soon, including OpenAI and Anthropic.

Don’t Be Evil

Google once had “Don’t be evil” in its code of conduct and later removed it. Based on their dealings with SpaceX, perhaps we can now see why. Google has a reported 5-6% stake in SpaceX, which is worth nearly $100 billion at the current $1.77 trillion company valuation.

On Friday, a deal was announced by SpaceX with Google that is nothing short of investor fraud in my view.

In short, Google says it’s going to pay SpaceX $11 billion per year to rent Nvidia GPUs for AI, but either side can cancel, and SpaceX may not be able to pull it off.

This is a transparent marketing scheme to increase SpaceX reported revenue before the IPO—just this deal adds more than 50% to SpaceX gross sales. But it’s totally artificial. SpaceX is just acting as a broker between Nvidia and Google.

Google has the most sophisticated infrastructure in the world. It makes its own version of GPUs called TPUs. It has no reason to buy Nvidia hardware from a rocket company. It’s just using its own money to pump up its own investment to fool people who don’t have time to learn the details.

It’s fraud by any other name.

In a similar announcement, Anthropic, a company that seems to put out a press release every few days that its new AI model has become sentient, has agreed to pay SpaceX $15 billion per year to rent Nvidia GPUs. Again, this is a deal that makes little sense unless it’s just designed to increase Musk’s revenue.

Nowhere in these announcements is Elon Musk’s own AI mentioned. Apparently he doesn’t make AI anymore, he just rents out equipment for it.

Between the two deals, at $26 billion per year, Musk has already overtaken 2025 revenue—just in time for his IPO. But it’s smoke and mirrors. It’s alternate reality by press release.

Coordinated Systemic Breakdown

Stepping back from this systemic breakdown, the breadth of institutions that failed to work properly or deliberately disarmed themselves to enable this fleecing of America is frankly staggering. Each of these layers of theoretical accountability failed or conspired themselves:

• Venture capital

• Private equity

• Institutional banks

• Analysts

• Lawyers

• Markets

• Brokers

• Technology companies like Google

• SEC, Treasury, White House

It’s difficult to look at what’s about to happen and not see a coordinated takedown, a jailbreak by a group of elites that managed to corrupt the entire financial system, perhaps beyond repair.

The damage from this operation will not just be forcing the population to be exit liquidity for technology that seeks to replace us. The trust people had in things like index funds, 401Ks, and pensions may be shattered. Just as the Trump regime, and Elon Musk’s meddling has destroyed trust in government, this may destroy trust in the financial system. And without trust the system doesn’t work.

Right now, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed with no end in sight. The oil shock has barely started to bite. And the president is building a UFC stadium on the White House lawn, trying to boost his stock portfolio, and failing to remember the name of the Washington Monument.

There are no brakes. There is no conductor on this train. This is how you turn a market crash into a great depression.

“When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”
—John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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“Action is the only remedy to indifference: the most insidious danger of all.”
—Elie Wiesel

A-pathetic

The colloquial definition of apathetic is indifferent and uncaring, sometimes mistaken as laziness and low energy. The word comes from the Greek a- meaning “without,” and páthos: “suffering, emotion, feeling.” But it also has a clinical definition.

Perhaps the simplest way to communicate apathy is the sentence: “I don’t care.” Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with not caring about something, but if your ability to judge what you should care about is dysfunctional, you may be apathetic about things that deserve your attention.

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Apathy is not just inaction; when the machinery to judge what matters fails, it can be very dangerous.

For example, over the last month, the President of the United States has said he doesn’t care about:

• Whether Iran negotiations are over
  Trump told CNBC: “I don’t care if they’re over, honestly. I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less.” He also said the talks had become “very boring.”

• Oil prices
  When asked whether he was worried about oil prices after the apparent breakdown of talks: “No, I don’t worry about that, no.”

• Americans’ financial situation
  Asked whether Americans’ financial situations affected his Iran decision-making: “Not even a little bit… I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

• The midterms
  During a Cabinet meeting: “I don’t care about the midterms.”

• Criticism of the war
  Trump posted that Iran talks were continuing “at a rapid pace” and told his critics to “sit back and relax… it will all work out well in the end.”

Full Frontal Lobotomy

“Shape without form, shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture without motion…” —T.S. Eliot

As a close observer of the president and his decline, this is not Trump being Trump. While he has never cared about anything but himself, his ability to simulate caring has diminished to essentially zero because he has lost the link between motivations and consequences. This is neurological. It happens as frontal systems lose the ability to connect motivation, inhibition, salience, and consequence.

The first two major symptoms of behavioral frontotemporal dementia are disinhibition and apathy. This can be a strange combination, because disinhibition can seem very motivated and energetic, while apathy presents as the opposite.

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As an example, after saying he “doesn‘t care” about negotiations, Trump was asked by CNBC about whether NATO was going to help clear the Strait of Hormuz:

They would, if I wanted them to, but they would. I want them to. We don’t need them. We don’t need NATO. They were very, very weak and very sad. What they said, they said we’ll help you as soon as the war is over. NATO, Europe has lost its way. They have a tremendous immigration problem, and they have a tremendous energy problem, because all they want to do is build windmills all over the place, so anyway.

This is a series of disorders battling each other in his mind. To unpack this illogical train of thought:

• NATO would help if he wanted it to.

• He wants them to.

• He doesn’t need them.

• NATO is weak and sad.

• Europe has too many brown people and windmills.

In this answer, his grandiosity is fighting in real-time with his apathy—the inability to distinguish what matters. And his disinhibition is motivating him to present this internal cage match out loud.

Trump has flattened everything to equal importance—wars, windmills, oil shocks. It’s all the same. It’s all “very boring.”

Backtracking

Apathy is not just about inaction. It is also about abandonment. It is about willingly giving up things that no longer provide stimulation, narcissistic supply, or control.

As another sign things are changing with his personality, Trump has given up on two of his former pet projects: the $1.8 billion “weaponization fund” to pay off J6 rioters, and the Kennedy Center. In both cases, Trump could have pushed things further, but instead did a rare thing for him. He backtracked.

For example, as his combination of America’s 250th anniversary and his personal birthday party was falling apart, due to two-thirds of the performers bailing out, he discarded the Kennedy Center from Truth Social like an old toy that he never liked anyway.

Of course Trump insulted and belittled everyone he could in the process, including calling for a judge’s impeachment and predicting the “collapse” of the Kennedy Center without his oversight. Nevertheless, he was clearly bored with it and just washed his hands of the whole thing.

Paging Donald Trump

Finally, Trump has given up even phoning in his duties as president. As four recent examples:

• Trump appointed Bill Pulte, the 38-year-old Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to be Acting Director of Intelligence in addition to continuing his role at FHFA—where he has solely focused on digging up dirt on Trump’s enemies. Pulte has no experience in intelligence whatsoever and recently recommended that Trump post a picture of himself as Jesus.

• Trump endorsed Tom Kean, a Congressman who has not been seen in Congress since March, as someone “working tirelessly” who “WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”

• In the midst of a crisis involving Israel attacking Lebanon, scuttling peace talks, Trump posted “I had a very good call with Hezbollah, and they agreed that all shooting will stop.” Imagine If Biden or Obama tweeted that. Imagine if it was also a lie.

• Trump reportedly called Bibi Netanyahu as the ceasefire was falling apart: “What the fuck are you doing?” “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”

Paradoxically, as much as Trump is “bored” with it, the failure in Iran is causing him deep narcissistic injury at the same time. While he “doesn’t care” about the outcome, he does want to make the pain of losing stop.

Government by Apathy

“More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” —Primo Levi

As I have defined it, governmental decompensation is the phenomenon of an entire government mirroring an authoritarian leader who is suffering from narcissistic collapse and exhibiting psychological decompensation as a result.

Right now, the entire federal government has been trained to instantly react to the emotional state of a man who:

• possesses the most dangerous set of psychopathologies known to man, malignant narcissism

• is suffering severe narcissistic injury and collapse due to his own failures and fear about his decline

• is battling progressive frontal lobe dysfunction; very likely frontotemporal dementia

• is physically degenerating; Trump has been disappearing for a week at a time, usually after bragging about acing another cognitive test; he hasn’t been seen publicly since May 27th, the day after visiting Walter Reed

The fact that Trump invited his posting buddy, real estate enthusiast Bill Pulte—who got a following on Twitter by giving money away—to moonlight as Director of National Intelligence while the United States is in the most serious geopolitical quagmire since Iraq, is governmental decompensation under a magnifying glass. It is the most irresponsible possible signal to the government, the country, and the world.

Trump is saying very loudly: “I don’t care about anything.”

For criminals, foreign governments, and anyone else who wants to take advantage of the U.S., Trump is basically waving the white flag in advance. Unless a subject stimulates him personally, he has no interest. He does not care.

The apathetic state of America comes from the top. The question becomes now: Will his apathy become contagious? Will the rest of us stop caring too?

I know my answer.

“Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end.” —Elie Wiesel

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With the bubble in artificial intelligence looming over the economy, Donald Trump has decided he is in possession of “extreme intelligence” because he passed his fourth cognitive exam in 12 months.

As a reminder, the MOCA does not measure intelligence. It measures whether you are functioning normally, or have cognitive deficiencies. The simple fact that he has taken so many means that he is being monitored for cognitive problems. It is not normal to take these so often—at all.

On the same day he bragged about acing his cognitive test, Trump also posted this stuff in a multi-hour manic episode. This is apparently what you get when you combine “extreme intelligence” with “artificial intelligence”—malignant slop.

All joking aside, this is not sustainable. His obvious disorders are having a deep, lasting impact on all of our lives. And they have only one direction.

Please join me and our truly intelligent community to discuss the events of the week and the state of the world. We’ll talk about the oligarchs bunkering down, the current state of the AI bubble, and whatever else is on your mind. Hope to see you. Details below.

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“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.”
—James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village”

Writing on the Wall

In this historical moment, there is a strong case that the three most destructive Americans are Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel. For over a decade, it is the collaboration of the techno-fascist billionaire class with Trump’s quasi-religious political cult that has propelled America to the edge of a cliff. While their only common interest is the end of liberal democracy—because it gets in the way of their messianic desire for total power—it has been enough to keep their alliance intact.

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Donald Trump could not have won the 2016 election without Thiel’s help. Trump could not have won the 2024 election without Musk’s help. As immigrants, neither Musk nor Thiel is eligible to run for president—so they outsourced the role of nation-destroyer to a Russian-compromised reality TV conman. This arrangement has given all three men free rein for a decade to destroy our common reality while they enrich themselves.

The Biden administration was the last, best chance to stop them—and we blew it.

However, if their project were truly succeeding—if they believed they had tamed America and expected to retain their status as our overlords—they would not be bunkering down.

It appears the billionaires see the writing on the wall.

Ratlines

Peter Thiel, of all people, might be expected to be gloating about his tremendous success filling the government with his lieutenants—and filling his pockets with wildly overvalued Palantir stock. Thiel’s project to create “a technological means… to escape from politics” to satisfy a “small minority” has in many ways been a rousing success.

Thiel has positioned his personally-created mascot JD Vance just one 80-year-old heartbeat from the presidency. And his software company has infested the entire government.

Nevertheless, Thiel recently moved his family to Argentina and declared that he has essentially given up on America. Several months ago, Thiel melted down because Gavin Newsom announced that a 5% “billionaire tax” would be levied on the wealthiest Californians. Thiel also notably sold all of his Nvidia stock.

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Argentina’s president Javier Milei, who infamously used a chainsaw to describe his policies, welcomes the move.

"All billionaires of the world who want to flee countries increasingly regulated, with higher taxes and governments that persecute their citizens, are welcome in the Argentine republic, the new land of freedom"
—Manuel Adorni, spokesman for Javier Milei

Of course, Argentina has an infamous history of accepting fascists running from accountability—through underground ratlines after WWII. The modern ratlines, on the other hand, are not hidden at all.

Thiel appears to be planning to use Argentina as a testing ground for his network state concept, in which there is no need for politics, because all decisions are made by billionaire dictators instead of the people.

“It was an anarcho-capitalist who met another anarcho-capitalist who is bringing things to life”
—Javier Milei, on meeting Peter Thiel

State of Musk

As I’ve written, Thiel’s longtime collaborator Elon Musk is also trying to create a kind of network state—through his company SpaceXAI.

But recently it’s been reported Musk now also intends to fold Tesla into his mega-company. This would create a multi-trillion dollar behemoth, completely controlled by Musk, with no way to fire him.

Perhaps the most harmful consequence of SpaceX going public is that many of the protective rules the markets have on public companies are being changed or dropped—just to be able to list Musk’s stock.

• Profitability Requirement: Historically, the S&P 500 required 12 months of public trading and four consecutive quarters of positive GAAP earnings. S&P gutted this requirement to admit SpaceX.

• Seasoning Period: Nasdaq reduced its inclusion seasoning window from 90 trading days to 15, and FTSE Russell cut its requirement to just 5 days. S&P 500 historically required a 12-month public trading wait.

• Free-Float Minimum: Nasdaq and CRSP eased their minimum float thresholds to accommodate the relatively thin initial float (around 3%–5%).

This means index funds, which are held in most retirement accounts, will be forced to buy Musk’s unprofitable company. In effect, the richest man has figured out how to make almost half of America subsidize his empire, with vastly less oversight than it should require.

As diabolical as this is, however, it appears to be a defensive move, not an offensive expansion. Musk, like Thiel, seems to be bunkering down by consolidating his operations under one authoritarian roof.

But for what? Why is the broligarchy so nervous?

Full-Court Failure

Donald Trump’s pathologies were identified a decade ago by people like but they have deteriorated rapidly into a scenario not seen on the world stage since Stalin’s decline in the early 1950s.

At a Cabinet meeting, just after his third medical exam in 12 months, Trump’s dementia was unleashed on a new scale. I’ve watched a lot of Trump’s appearances, but I’ve never seen him go off on a completely absurd tangent for nine full minutes. I posted the full transcript here.

This was remarkable because it showed so clearly that the president has completely lost the ability to care what anyone else thinks—even if they’re sitting right next to him. He could have ended his rambling story dozens of times, but couldn’t resist another line about how amazing his pool guy is, or how disgusting things used to be in the “reflecting lake.” This went on for nine minutes, with his entire Cabinet around him.

Escape From the White House

Psychologically, for those nine minutes, Trump was in his happy place—construction, the art of ripping off and paying off contractors, etc.—and it just never occurred to him that his Cabinet and the world was cringing along with every sentence. He is deeply oblivious to the real world.

Trump wanted to relay how DC was “crime-ridden,” “disgusting,” and “filthy” before he heroically cleaned it all up—“ten dumpster trucks of garbage.” It was a microcosm of his internal model of the world, overlaid at length on our most sacred national monuments.

But like Thiel and Musk, underneath it was really about his desire to escape from the real world, from the numerous disasters he has created himself. Trump is trying to rebuild his own reality to soothe his deeply wounded ego.

Here is what the former White House looks like now. His pathologies are visible to the naked eye.

Trump is setting up for a UFC match on the White House lawn, and a “State Fair” complete with musical acts on the National Mall for the 250th anniversary of America. But he ran into a snag,. Two-thirds of the musical acts who were announced have pulled out—citing the fact that they did not know the event would be “political.”

While Vanilla Ice has confirmed his attendance, the infamous late-80s flash-in-the-pan Milli Vanilli, who lip-synced their own music, declined to attend.

It is hard to imagine a more humiliating outcome for Trump.

But what Trump is really focused on is his ballroom which he has called a “shield” for the bunker below. Trump is physically bunkering down—at least eight floors below the ground if reporting is accurate.

Exit Architecture

Nearly every criminal authoritarian in history, when confronted with the lie of their own omnipotence, has done what Trump and his broligarch allies are doing now: burrow in, bunker down, and prepare for a siege—Qaddafi, Hussein, Ceausescu, Hitler, Escobar, Marcos, Howard Hughes. The list goes on.

Typically, authoritarians don’t make this move when things are going well. They make this move when threatened with being overthrown.

This is not the strategy of winning; this is the exit architecture of failure.

This does not by any means imply that Thiel, Musk or Trump has abandoned their ambitions for America. But Thiel fleeing to a country that would never extradite him is not a coincidence.

Thiel is not worried about the chaos being created—that’s a feature, not a bug. Thiel is worried about subpoenas from Congress, and ultimately indictments from a future DOJ for his political and financial crimes. The Epstein files alone are a smoking gun.

Thiel’s retreat is strategic, but it does imply he believes a reckoning is coming.

Similarly, if Elon Musk believed that his multi-trillion dollar empire was really worth that much, he would not be consolidating everything under one roof and rushing to go IPO. If he thought his companies could really do what he claims, he would let them accumulate value. But that’s not what’s happening.

Musk is bringing his companies together to bury massive fraud, because like Thiel, Musk is at serious legal risk from a near-future Congress—and a new administration.

Trump’s ballroom, Thiel’s Argentinian retreat, and Musk’s consolidation are all the same exit architecture: bunkering down.

Multiple waves of chaos are converging, and the elites are trying to avoid accountability.

Slipping and Falling

The crash of the AI bubble is coming. The signs are everywhere. The data centers are grinding to a halt. Chatbots are not going to replace people—ever. But the deliberate propaganda about AI is going to make a lot of people suffer. The economic chaos from unwinding this mess is going to be, well, biblical.

Trump’s catastrophic war in Iran is similarly poised to wreak a tsunami of economic pain that radiates all around the world. For months, nations and oil companies have been drawing down their reserves to keep prices down, relative to what they might be—but those reserves are running at historic lows.

“You can’t print molecules.”

All week long, Trump used his social media accounts and stenographers in the press to manipulate the markets by falsely and repeatedly asserting “we’re very close to a deal.” In every case, the Iranians have said something different. There is still no “deal” and the White House says Trump is now thinking about it

The stark reality is that there are no good options for Trump. Every outcome of this deal is a humiliation—which is processed differently for him than most of us. Trump sees the shame of losing as an existential threat to his very being. It is his ultimate red line that must never be crossed. This means he will try to save face at all costs.

This is the trap every narcissist authoritarian, be they political or corporate, ultimately falls into—a trap of their own making. The more the world differs from their internal model of reality, the harder it is to keep under control—so they reduce the input they receive to only be what they want to hear. This causes mistakes, which makes the dissonance worse. In the end, they all bunker down.

For the rest of us, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that some elites feel that the stranglehold they thought they could get on America is slipping through their fingers. The bad news is that by slipping through their fingers, we are falling hard to the ground.

When the shockwaves from the multiple economic and geopolitical disasters that Trump, Musk, and Thiel have created meet, the waves will reinforce each other and America will once again be in a self-inflicted crisis.

To survive this manmade disaster, Thiel is building a jurisdictional bunker; Musk is building a corporate bunker; and Trump is building a literal bunker.

For the rest of us, those who cannot afford a bunker, it will be a form of siege warfare to evict them. The fortresses they’re building are formidable.

But always remember: we still vastly outnumber them.

“The more successful a liar is… the more likely… he will end by believing his own lies.”
—Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics”

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“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.”
—Genesis 11:1

Babylon

In Genesis, humanity has converged on one language and one location in ancient Babylonia to build a city and tower “with its top in the heavens” to “make a name” for themselves. God sees this singular project and confuses their language so they can no longer communicate. They lose their shared purpose and are scattered across the earth.

“Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth…”
—Genesis 11:9

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While Babel serves as an origin story for differences in language, it is also humanity’s first warning about over-centralizing power and technology. It is about pluralism as an antidote to dominance.

In my view, a similar lesson will be learned by the chatbot industrial complex—the enormous wave of new companies and investment centered around a singular interface: large language models (LLMs). While this is often referred to as “AI” and the “AI industry,” the vast majority of it is built around one class of neural network algorithms that were invented in the 1980s and improved on a decade ago with the invention of the transformer architecture.

Several years ago, the technology saw a major resurgence when LLMs achieved sufficient scale to provide responses that sounded credibly human. This created a psychological chain reaction that left us perched on the edge of a cliff.

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No Rational Basis

The current AI mania has already created an economic bubble greater than any in history, beyond 1929, 2000, or 2008 in terms of deviating from the mean. Perhaps the simplest way to see this is the discrepancy between consumer sentiment, which is at all-time lows, and the stock market which is soaring through all-time highs on a daily basis.

This extreme divergence between the outlook of the stock market and the rest of America is a sign that the market is in the midst of a mania that consumers do not recognize as beneficial to their futures. That mania, of course, is chatbots. Currently, a preposterous 41% of the stock market is exposed to “AI.” It’s the most concentrated market in history.

If and when SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI all go public, this concentration will hover around 50%. Half of the equities market will be connected to one technology. This has no rational basis in reality.

AGI Messiah

But why has this particular technology generated such a fervor among the elite, and among the people who heavily use it? The answer is not technical or economic; it’s psychological. In short, it has taken on the structure of a cult.

By example, here is broligarch Marc Andreessen, whose venture capital firm controls $90 billion in assets, telling Joe Rogan and his tens of millions of viewers that three months ago, every major chatbot suddenly achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI)—an absurd claim on every technical level. But this is not an appeal to the rational mind; this is about emotional attachment, his own and the audience.

AGI has become a kind of technological messiah, a prophet of the future which is always “coming soon,” or in Andreessen’s example “already arrived, but you have to be in the in-group to see it.”

Sometimes AGI’s promoters announce a time for its coming. But like every prediction of the End Times by a preacher, when it doesn’t come, they just move the date.

The believers in the dawning of AGI have been indoctrinated through exposure to a simulation of AGI: chatbots, which predict text based on massive amounts of human exhaust. The chatbots serve to mirror the thoughts and feelings of believers in a seductive way: “If it’s mirroring me, then it must be like me. If it thinks I’m smart, it must be smart too.”

For narcissist personalities, like many in the elite class, this can be an especially powerful, addictive drug.

This effect can fool people into assuming they are interacting with something intelligent that has the potential to either: 1) make everyone infinitely wealthy or 2) eliminate everyone like bugs. Of course, neither is true in the totalizing way being sold. Chatbots are just a clever way to use statistics and algorithms to search for patterns through enormous piles of data.

Nevertheless this mirage of intelligence is used by the priests of AGI to whip their followers back and forth between the heavenly promise of “abundance” and the terrifying hell of an AI apocalypse. One day, chatbots are going to take everyone’s job, and the next they’re going to make everyone rich. Following technology news has become more like watching a mythological battle between humans and robots than a sober reflection of reality.

The Cult of AGI

As someone who watched QAnon evolve from an alt-right internet phenomenon to a violent insurrectionist mob, to providing the mythology driving much of the Trump regime today, I see many of the same elements in the AGI cult.

Just as “Q” radicalized its followers by telling them “the Storm is coming,” chatbot promoters do the same by telling people “AGI is coming”—over and over again. Just as Q provided a would-be oracle of the future, so does AGI.

For many, this kind of propaganda, in conjunction with excessive chatbot usage, and deliberately created social media dynamics, amounts to a form of undue influence aka brainwashing. Anyone who interacts with true AGI believers online can see this for themselves.

Just as it was impossible to have a rational discussion with Q followers, AGI zealots leave no room for debate. AGI is not an opinion for them, or even a belief; it is a doctrine, a commandment.

It is no coincidence that a great deal of the harmful propaganda being delivered about AGI is on Elon Musk’s website, the former Twitter—or that right-wing mouthpieces like Glenn Beck are joining the chorus:

Beck’s message is emblematic of the empty bullshit sold by AGI promoters: “This is incredible, yet terrifying at the same time.”

This is true, but not for the reasons he says.

Tower of Babble

Just as the story of Babel was a warning about orienting everyone around a single language, or a single culture, the story of AGI is a warning about orienting everyone around a single idea.

While it might seem like the safest path to go along with the herd, easy answers to hard problems almost never pan out. If the cure for cancer, poverty, sadness, and coding is all supposed to come from one technology, it’s probably a good bet it’s not what it’s cracked up to be.

Nevertheless, in just the last few years, the economy has reoriented itself to be positioned for only one good outcome—a gold rush into AI like no other gold rush in history. But if that doesn’t happen, if it turns out AGI is just a phrase being used by conmen to create a tower of slop, Babel will fall. And while the cult of true believers will scatter across the earth to find another prophet, the rest of us will be left to clean up the tower’s rubble.

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Disinhibition

You don’t have to be a psychologist or a doctor to understand that the President of the United States is not functioning normally—even for him. Donald Trump said this at a rally Friday night:

“I don’t like friends that become very successful. I like people that are just OK. Even if they’re terrible, I like that, too. I hate like when I have lunch with somebody that’s really, really successful. I hate it. Because he or she is bragging about how great they are. And I hate that when they do that. Because they stopped me from talking about the fact that I became president.”

This is not Trump being Trump. It is the inevitable acceleration of a process I’ve documented for several years. This is extreme disinhibition due to dysfunction in his frontal lobe; it is the raw machinery of his amygdala exposed.

Donald Trump is clearly battling progressive dementia, very likely the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD).

This means he has little to no remaining ability for reflection, logical trains of thought, or emotional regulation. When something enters his mind, he just says it—or does it—without regard to consequences. Given the power of the U.S. president, this has existential implications. We have already seen this play out—countless people are dead because of it—in the Caribbean, Iran, Venezuela, Minneapolis, and soon Cuba.

Self Diagnosis

Remarkably, Trump’s quote is a self-diagnosis of malignant narcissism. He is saying what even the most extreme narcissists still consider to be the quiet part: the entire world must be beneath him. His superiority is all that matters, regardless of whether others are “OK” or “terrible.” Literally everything must be about him because otherwise someone else is getting attention.

Consider what he’s saying to America, our allies, and his employees—in and out of government. He is making a declaration of uncaring, an abdication of any pretense that he should give a damn about anyone else. He’s proudly displaying his solipsism.

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Of course, most people know Trump feels this way, but he’s never just come out and said it so plainly. In a way, it’s the most honest he’s ever been—like a three-year-old is honest. But it should not have to be said that a three-year-old’s mentality should not command a nuclear superpower.

Here are a few of the dozens of memes the president has posted over just the past 24 hours.

These are not just memes to tweak the libs. Trump truly believes he has the right to seize any territory he wants, to humiliate or arrest any political opponent he decides to, and to stay in power forever—bunkered under his golden ballroom if necessary. He is no longer capable of hiding any of his delusions. He experiences reality as it warps around his self-image, not as it actually exists.

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That’s why Trump has pushed ahead with his $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off the January 6th rioters for the inconvenience of going to prison for him. He simply cannot fathom that there will be consequences for installing his personal defense lawyer Todd Blanche as Acting Attorney General to raid the Treasury in order to pay hush money to terrorists.

The Blob

Physically, the president continues to deteriorate as well. He sits during nearly every press conference with people strangely gathered behind him. The swelling in his ankles and the bruising on his hands continues to grow, which has visibly expanded to his neck and face.

Trump has every appearance of incipient heart failure or some other acute circulatory problem. The only other obvious possibility that comes to mind is an unknown medication that might cause him blow up like a pufferfish.

Regardless, the president’s chronic pathologies are evidently merging into a critical condition, just as the nation is facing a similar convergence—entirely because of Trump’s own choices.

Mega-Crisis

This weekend, Trump faces a series of impossible-to-solve problems which would be a challenge for the greatest presidents in history to navigate. Yet all of it is the result of his own failures, or deliberate sabotage.

The situation has deteriorated to the point that Trump had to skip his eldest son’s wedding due to “circumstances pertaining to Government.”

The crisis in the Middle East that Trump caused, and then profited hundreds of millions of dollars from through stock and bond trades, has reached the point that with every day the Hormuz Strait remains closed, the oil shock will kill more and more people.

There are two historic, converging phenomena at work: 1) Trump choking off 30% of the nitrogen fertilizer to the world by blockading the Hormuz Strait; and 2) the onrushing El Niño, which looks to become an extreme Super El Niño, surpassing the 1877 event which led to millions of deaths in a worldwide famine.

Every day the Hormuz Strait stays closed, more food is removed from the world’s supply, not just for one season, but potentially impacting prices for many years as production drops, crops fail, and farmers go bankrupt. The potential of major droughts, flooding, and extreme storms from the Super El Niño threaten to make that shortfall exponentially worse. Together, this double whammy threatens the lives of hundreds of millions.

Through Saturday, Trump repeatedly claimed, for the umpteenth time that Iran and the U.S. were close to an agreement to open the Strait—but Iran has a different story.

Lunacy

Having someone with Trump’s self-evident disorders try to negotiate a deal with the lives of countless millions in the balance is, of course, sheer lunacy. Iran has outplayed Trump for months because he no longer has the ability to make good judgments. Trump’s condition makes people gullible, erratic, and apathetic.

Nevertheless, the world is involuntarily reliant on the worst man, at the worst time, to do what is impossible for him to do: compromise—to have a dialogue with people who don’t worship him, who won’t position themselves beneath him.

So he will, without a doubt, keep making it worse. It is the only thing he remembers how to do.

“There are other examples in history of megalomaniac leaders who ‘cured’ their narcissism by transforming the world to fit it.”
—Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man, 1964

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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I spent a long weekend in a college town with brand new graduates, including my son. It was deeply gratifying to see my child accomplish something I never did myself. But it was also a glimpse into the reality on the ground in America.

First, the good news: the kids are alright. While it’s just one school and one group of people, everyone I met was an energetic, empathetic, and intelligent young adult—no zombified chatbot addicts or radicalized anarchists among them. They were, you know, perfectly normal.

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For me, this was a bit of a relief. The environment since Trump was elected again has been so acutely toxic, I wondered how far the crazy had penetrated. Anecdotally speaking, not far. These young people were mostly indifferent to politics—they all seemed to understand that it had gone off the rails and just didn’t want anything to do with it.

That seems fair enough.

Their formative years were spent in the Decade of Trump with a short break in the middle. They’ve all watched the country get more and more radicalized. They’ve seen blatant racism and naked corruption in government. They watched an insurrection of the U.S. Capitol. And they watched the Biden administration fail to do anything about it.

They’ve seen the Supreme Court destroy a half-century of women’s rights, make the president a king, and institutionalize racial profiling. They’ve watched the U.S. Congress degenerate into a QAnon chat room fused with the Duma. And they’ve watched the Epstein cover up.

Now these bright young minds are being released into a nation where politics has been captured by a cult of billionaires waging resource wars overseas, raising prices at home, taking away student loan relief, and pushing for AI to take their jobs.

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Unfortunately for these graduates, things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. There is a perfect storm lining up, just as they try to find ballast.

The President they’re meant to follow is a racist, demented narcissist who just gave himself a $1.776 billion slush fund to reward people who stormed the Capitol, beat cops, or got in legal trouble for him. He essentially pardoned himself and his family of tax fraud. He’s currently blockading oil and fertilizer to half the world after losing a war to Iran. And he’s giving billionaire elites free rein to inflate the AI bubble to historic dimensions—leaving the rest of us behind.

Why would a young adult entering a system which allows all this to happen feel they will be given a fair shake? Why should they care?

When business leaders who represent the apex of American capitalism are people like pathological racist Elon Musk, a sadistic conman about to be the world’s first trillionaire, what are young people supposed to think about the system?

The U.S. is currently under a full-scale assault from within. The federal government has been captured and transformed into a personal grift for Donald Trump—and one more tool in a long techno-fascist world domination plan by the PayPal Mafia. The adults who were supposed to protect our kids, simply didn’t. Both parties failed them, as did their parents and grandparents.

I ask this looking right in the mirror: What have we done?

For decades, we allowed the worst of us to breed at the top of the pyramid. We allowed dark psychologies to oversee the slow erosion of our institutions, the degradation of our morals, and the capture of our technology. We sorted the psychopaths to the top because they talked a good game, made us money, or rationalized our grievances. We got lazy and comfortable. We did not do the work to ensure the system would still be there for our kids.

What we have done is fail. We have failed to do our jobs to keep the system working for our children and grandchildren. We failed to recognize that the evils of our past were never something we could leave behind, that we had to be constantly diligent against them. We failed to learn from history, so now we are repeating it.

But what I experienced from being with thousands of college kids—yes, I’m old enough to call them that—contained none of the darkness the regime is selling. The psychopathologies that captured the United States government and the technology industry are not shared by our youth.

The death of empathy, respect, and love has been greatly exaggerated. There is a wave of young people who take care of the stray cats near their apartments, who make friends with their neighbors, and accept people for who they are, not what they look like or where they came from.

But the people who screwed it up for them—the grown-ups who dropped the ball on keeping the system working—need to understand these young adults don’t care about our purity tests, our establishment politics, or our liberal sensitivities. They just want a job, a nice place to live, and maybe a family. They want a government that lets them be who they are and shuts the hell up.

They have no loyalty to the system that existed because they watched it die. They were the generation to see the death of the neoliberal experiment.

So again, the good news is that the kids are alright. We didn’t screw that part up too much. But the bad news is we’ve left them with a disaster, one they may spend a generation trying to recover from.

The least we can do is give them the chance to rebuild something different. Those of us who let this happen on our watch must break the corrupt crime ring that captured our children’s future so they can chart it for themselves.

What have we done? Not nearly enough.

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

Threads: jimstewartson

As I mentioned on the last Zoom, I’m attending a graduation today for my son, so I will see you all next week! Be safe and well.

Jim

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Weak T

On Tuesday, Donald Trump and a vast entourage of around 300 people landed in China—not to the extended hand of President Xi, but to his Vice President and a disturbing lineup of cheering kids—an obvious snub.

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This official White House video of the arrival, directed by accused sexual predator Bret Ratner (“MELANIA”) who went along on the trip, is straight outta North Korea.

Many of the people Trump brought along were CEOs and top executives, an impressive line up of titans of industry, including this group, who have one other thing in common.

• Nvidia Jensen Huang

• Boeing Kelly Ortberg

• Tesla/SpaceX Elon Musk

• BlackRock Larry Fink

• Meta Dina ​Powell ⁠McCormick

• Goldman Sachs David Solomon

• Blackstone Stephen Schwarzman

• Citigroup Jane Fraser

• Coherent Jim Anderson

• GE Aerospace Larry Culp

• Mastercard Michael Miebach

• Micron Sanjay Mehrotra

• Qualcomm Cristiano Amon

• Apple Tim Cook

• Visa Ryan McInerney

It turns out these are all companies that Donald Trump is personally invested in and actively traded during the first quarter of 2026—to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

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Here is a detailed analysis of Trump’s massive, professionally managed portfolio which almost perfectly overlaps with his decisions as president, apparently including who got to go to China.

It’s as if Trump had his stock broker book the trip.

The conflicts of interests in his portfolio, even to a jaded observer, are shocking. For example, on his trip, Donald Trump announced that China would be buying 200 jets from Boeing, a company whose bonds Trump bought in Q1 2026.

Another even more egregious example of Trump’s holdings is CoreWeave—a dedicated AI infrastructure company that hosts OpenAI’s chatbots. Trump bought junk bonds in CoreWeave in Q1 while they were struggling to pay their bills—right before Nvidia bailed them out.

This is insider trading, at the highest possible level. Full stop.

Trump’s investments are in perfect alignment with his own regime’s policies of domestic surveillance, AI accelerationism, and a massive military buildup. And they are perfectly timed.

For example, Trump bought Dell stock privately in Q1, and then said publicly “Go out and buy a Dell.”

It’s not just corruption being displayed by Trump’s profiteering from his decisions as president. It’s open corruption. These trades were filed late, but it’s a legal requirement that they be published.

Trump knew this information would come out, and did it anyway. He truly believes he is untouchable, that he can “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue” and get away with it. While grandiose delusions are a symptom of his overlapping pathologies, it’s unclear that he was wrong. There really seems to be no limit to his abuse of power.

Xi Spots the Mark

Trump, like most people in his party, has consistently used “communist” as an epithet to be aimed at any target to the left of Pat Buchanan. “Kommie Kamala” was a persistent meme in 2024. Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani is constantly smeared with the term.

Nevertheless, in China, a deferential Trump repeatedly called the dictator of the Chinese Communist Party his “friend” and a “great leader.” Xi never once returned the compliment, or spoke about Trump’s presidency. Trump was clearly the junior partner seeking approval—who brought along his sycophants and business buddies to try to “make a deal.”

But nothing really happened.

The psychological reality is that Xi is in a very small group with Putin who Trump sees as superiors. Trump’s core missing input as a child was the love of his father. Putin and Xi are emotional stand-ins for Fred Trump, the abusive racist who raised Donald to be a psychopath.

Dissolving Boundaries

Trump’s trip to China was an unprecedented bow down to communist China—and a nauseating display of weakness by a president. But it exposed much more than that. It showed that the boundaries we thought existed between corporate interests and the government were always illusions.

The trip was not just an indictment of the Trump regime. It was an indictment of the entire corporate, capitalist structure of the U.S. economy. The business leaders who traveled to China as baubles for the regime are just as guilty of deliberately smashing down the wall between government power and corporate profit as Trump.

Moreover, we have to accept that the business community is ambivalent about, if not outright hostile to constitutional democracy. The AI industry was born from a Silicon Valley primordial soup brewed in large part by Peter Thiel, who infamously said: “I no longer think freedom and democracy are compatible.”

The accelerationist, fascist broligarchy that seized control of the technology sector has thoroughly infected the whole economy. The obsessive meme that if we just make bigger data centers and better chatbots most of the labor force won’t be necessary is not just false; it is dangerous. What exactly will we do with all those “extra” people?

It is very clear that the economy is teetering on a bubble greater than anything in financial history. But so is our national morality. The very concept that we should care about each other, or that the government should put people first, is being attacked at scale by a psychopathology deliberately spread by elites.

It is, if you will, metastatic soul cancer.

If we’re prepared to watch our president and his harem of oligarchs steal from us in the open, and attack the very core of our humanity, what else are we prepared to watch? The boundaries being broken are not just political, or economic; they are the boundaries of common sense, and common decency.

When the smoke clears from this whole episode, we will have to recreate these boundaries, but much stronger and much thicker. If there is any silver lining to all this destruction, it’s that we may have one more chance to actually build back better.

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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The United States is headed towards a $5 trillion iceberg. The iceberg is made of three companies. SpaceXAI, which is Elon Musk’s merger of SpaceX and his failed AI company, XAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Combined, they are scheduled to go IPO at a $5 trillion valuation between them. SpaceX somewhere around 2, Anthropic and OpenAI somewhere around 1, 1 and a half, something like that.

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So, where in the world did these companies come from, and how in the world do they justify these valuations? Well, they can’t, and they don’t. They’re not businesses. We’re not looking at an industry. We’re looking at science fiction stories. And I want to talk about it from that point of view, from the point of view of storytelling.

Because they’ve pulled this before. They’ve done this before many times. And I understand it pretty well because it’s very related to work that I’ve done in the past. For marketing, for entertainment, for fun. I used to build something called alternate reality games, ARGs, for short. Large interactive experiences, where millions of people would run around and go on scavenger hunts, connect with each other online, do all kinds of things within the context of a story world.

The thing about our stories was they took place in the real world. They took place in the here and now, but just one thing was a little bit different.

Let me give you an example. In 2004, we did an alternate reality game, an ARG, for Microsoft, for Halo, 2 in particular, the video game, Halo 2. And we asked the designers at the time, “Okay, what’s the game about?” And they said, “Well, aliens come to Earth and blow shit up.” And we said, “Okay, what does that sound like?” Sounds like “War of the Worlds.” Right? Sounds like “Martians coming to Earth.”

And what’s the most famous version of telling that story? Orson Welles, in the 1930s, was doing a broadcast of War of the Worlds. And many people turned in, tuned in in the middle. This story’s a little apocryphal, but people tuned in in the middle and suddenly heard the story. And thought, “Oh my god, Martians are coming.”

Why did that happen? That happened because there was a combination of reality and fiction. Where this unbelievable fictitious world entered into reality in a way that was very emotionally compelling, in that case terrifying.

Well, in alternate reality games, we would do the same thing. So, for example, in this game I was describing for Halo, we wanted to tell the same kind of story of aliens coming to Earth and blowing shit up. And to tell that story in a way that was alarming to people but wasn’t going to cause a panic.

So, we decided to deliver the story over payphones. And so, we had an artificial intelligence. There were no artificial intelligences in 2004. But we had an artificial intelligence from the 26th century crash land on a website.

And it was my job as the technical director and one of the puppet masters of this experience to figure out how to make it look like this very basic 2004 website was suddenly infested with an artificial intelligence. And it’s very compelling because I designed it so that it was a very normal looking website that then would start to get strange and kind of be odd and give you strange messages and suddenly start going a little bit crazy.

And it was that mixture. It was that, wow, there’s something different, but it’s in the real world that is very compelling. So, we did this, this story, and millions and millions of people played. And for this went on for six months, nine months really. And it was absolutely exhausting because it was near 24/7 of performance art because the audience was always doing things we didn’t expect.

They would also do things—and this is important. They would always go too far sometimes. They would jump over the line and to try to hack the servers, or finding out who the actors were in our audio or whatever. They went too far.

And so what we did was try to reign them in, try to say, “hey, we know you’re interested, you’re into this story, but it’s just a story, please don’t hack our servers.” We’d have to give them that message.

Well, other experiences that have used the same kinds of ideas have not taken those precautions and have encouraged those behaviors. For example, Pizzagate, QAnon, and these large sort of psychological warfare operations that use propaganda and trauma to make people believe unbelievable shit.

What’s the most compelling thing about something like Pizzagate or QAnon? It’s that it involves real people. It’s not aliens from the 26th century. It’s Hillary. It’s John Podesta. It’s all the evil doers. So this technique, whether we were using it in our games for bringing people into a collective shared storytelling experience or used maliciously for Pizzagate and QAnon and these other kinds of harmful experiences. It’s the same idea. It’s alternate reality.

We used to build alternate reality games because you were playing inside of these worlds. The fascists for lack of a better word are using it to create alternate reality cults.

These are not worlds for people to play in. These are enclosures for people to be trapped in. And that is a different thing altogether.

Nevertheless, the basic storytelling techniques are often very similar. Let me give you an example. In the game that we did for Halo, there was a central character called the operator. And the operator gave out cryptic clues about what it was going to do. It told stories and ways that you had to piece together. It reached out to people who are participating in unusual ways, like calling them on the pay phone on the corner. And those, all of those techniques are still being used.

They were used for Pizzagate and QAnon and they were used in 2024 when Elon Musk and the right wing ran an enormous amount of propaganda on Elon Musk’s platform. Creating these alternate realities, creating these bubbles of lies is in my view the kind of hidden layer of a lot of what we’re seeing right now.

And I think one of the easiest ones to see is the one that I started with, which is the enormous bubble that has been created around AI and chatbots.

Because if you think about it, it’s a real thing. There’s real technology. Large language models are effectively neural networks, which are real fascinating mathematical constructs that help derive patterns out of huge amounts of data. And that’s that that can do great things.

I use chatbots, you know, once or twice a day, I use it as basically a search tool for human information. But it’s not conscious. It’s not going to replace people. Agents are not going to suddenly spring into into consciousness. None of that is real at all. It’s all manufactured.

When Anthropic says, oh, Mythos is too dangerous to release. That’s just bullshit. That was a lie. Was a straight up lie because they didn’t have the computing power to release it yet. Because they want to create the impression that these things are something more than they are.

Every single week we get all “this chatbot blackmailed somebody” or this chatbot you know, suddenly has feelings or whatever. And it always turns out the same way. It’s explained by the data that goes into it. So we’ve got a real technology advancement. It’s not a revolution. I’m sorry. It’s moderately useful. That’s about what you get.

It is not an industry that should be occupying as it currently is 40% of the stock market. 40% percent of the market is concentrated in this one industry. That is historically concentrated more concentrated already than the dot com era.

If we add these five trillion dollars worth of stocks to the market, the percentage is going to be over 50%. Over 50% of the value of American equities will be related to or fully invested in an industry that’s maybe one one hundredth of the value that it purports to have. I mean, 90 something percent of it is air. It’s just air.

And so, we already are in a situation where the fallout from this is going to be, if not catastrophic, disastrous. If we allow this if we just run straight into this iceberg, the music’s going to stop in a lot of ways for a lot of people. Taking that much of a hit when a bubble the size of half the market starts to deflate. It’s going to be very, very ugly.

And my biggest concern, I think, is that that’s not a bad outcome for the people who are helping to push this bubble to enormous size. Those people have a history of inciting conflict and violence and disorder. In order to come and pick up the pieces.

And I’m speaking specifically about Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and the broligarch class that has taken over so much. Including a massive chunk of the government and if Trump goes, the whole thing.

So, we are in an already precarious if not disastrous situation with a huge quagmire in Iran. A senile, to be charitable, president who is desperate for any approval, especially from the billionaire class. So, he is motivated to keep this going as long and as big as possible.

So this is my warning: That they have been creating an alternate reality fraud. A fraud that has created a completely different world. Where everybody must have more chatbots and chatbots are going to replace doctors and Elon Musk is going to make robots and we’re going to live on Mars and there’s going to be you know, a personal robot in everybody’s kitchen and you’re not going to need to work and all of those good things. They promise.

It’s science fiction.

It’s nonsense designed to get as many people as possible to support them in the destruction of our way of life in favor of their model of the world—authoritarian technocracy, fascism, white supremacy. That’s what it’s about.

So, thanks for listening. Be safe out there and let your friends know that this no joke. We’re already in a seriously bad situation with this alternate reality fraud. And we need to stop digging. Thanks.

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

Threads: jimstewartson

However, not all moms are the same. For example, this is the message Maye Musk’s son sent out late last night, on the eve of Mother’s Day:

The richest man in the world did not receive the kind of affection and attention from his mother—or his father—that he needed. As Errol Musk, who married Elon’s step-sister, said about Maye Musk: “She didn’t even know what school they went to.”

This upbringing resulted in a boy who never knew what unconditional love is—who never really learned that other people exist.

When young boys especially are left alone in the world with no parental emotional support, they turn inward. They can become deeply insecure—which gets reflected outward as narcissism. Elon Musk may be the most dangerous example of this deficit alive in the world today. His messianic, malignant narcissism is a mirror of the hole he has in his heart. He will never stop trying to fill it—with as many bodies as necessary.

Happy Mother’s Day to everyone—except Maye Musk.

Zoom today at Noon PT / 3PM ET for paid subscribers. Please consider upgrading if you haven’t! We have an amazing community of people, and it’s a great way to be reminded that you are not the crazy one. We’ll talk about the events of the week, the midterms, the upcoming chatbot meltdown, and anything else on your mind.

Hope to see you. Details below!

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Big Rig

When the Civil Rights Act was signed into law in 1964 by Lyndon Johnson, followed by the Voting Rights Act a year later, American racists began a long project to claw that progress back. The reactionary fervor to those laws was a major factor in Lyndon Johnson pulling out of the 1968 presidential race, and his Vice President Hubert Humphrey losing the election. And it’s why segregationist George Wallace had a credible candidacy as an independent.

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Another big factor, however, was the Johnson administration’s failure to end the Vietnam war. As we now know, Richard Nixon deliberately interfered to extend the war, so he would have an issue to run against—and Johnson knew about it.

I argue this was the beginning of the Big Rig, a systematic campaign by the Republican Party to steal elections—and a systemic failure of the opposition to stop them. Every Republican president elected from Nixon forward has cheated to win. All of them.

• Nixon deliberately prolonged the Vietnam war until after the 1968 election, costing countless lives over the next five years.

• Reagan conspired with the Iranians and Israel to keep the hostages in Iran in captivity until after his 1981 inauguration. has detailed this history extensively.

• Bush was elected in 1988 after covering up for the crimes of Iran-Contra as CIA Director for Reagan, and continued the cover up during his presidential term—using Bill Barr as frontman.

• Bush Jr. was elected in 2000, after Roger Stone and three of the current Supreme Court Justices (Roberts, Kavanaugh, Coney-Barrett) coordinated the legal case and “Brooks Brothers Riot” which prevented a recount in Florida which would have swung the election to Al Gore.

• Trump was elected in 2016 through psychological and hybrid warfare operations conducted by a conspiracy of the Russian government, Peter Thiel, Jeffrey Epstein, Mike Flynn, Erik Prince, and numerous others. At the end of his term, Trump tried to overthrow the 2020 election to stay in power.

• Trump was elected again in 2024 by Elon Musk purchasing Twitter to run right-wing influence operations—and by giving Trump $300 million to prop up his failing campaign.

At every step of the way, Democrats have failed to prevent these catastrophes in real time despite ample foreknowledge—and failed to get accountability afterwards, despite clear evidence of crimes.

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Revved Up

We are now six months before the 2026 midterms—an existential election for restoring a semblance of democracy to America, and the Big Rig has revved up its engines.

The same three lawyers who helped give us George W. Bush 26 years ago, voted to gut the Voting Rights Act last week—setting off a string of state legislatures unilaterally gerrymandering their districts to disenfranchise as many Black people as possible. This includes Tennessee’s legislature voting on Thursday to eliminate its single Black-majority Democratic district in Memphis.

But for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, this war on equal voting rights goes all the way back to the start of his career as a lawyer in the White House. John Roberts wrote a talking points memo to the Justice Department advocating for gutting the Voting Rights Act—in 1982, for Reagan.

Roberts and the christofascist supermajority on the Court are not there to interpret the Constitution. They are there to destroy the ability of the American people to move beyond our racist past. They are there to protect the white billionaire class that propelled them to power—and to advance their personal Catholic integralist beliefs.

Donald Trump would not be anywhere near power were it not for the Roberts Court. It is the Citizens United decision which gave billionaires the ability to launder money into the American political system to disinform the population—a loophole Trump drove a truck through in 2016.

Numerous other absurdly tortured SCOTUS decisions enabled Donald Trump to get elected a second time, including overturning a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that Trump was ineligible to run in 2024—and granted him the novel power of “presidential immunity.”

Not Just SCOTUS

On Friday morning, the Virginia Supreme Court handed down a 4-3 decision that may end up being historically crucial. After a successful referendum in Virginia, in which voters chose to redistrict the state to counter Republican efforts at gerrymandering, the Virginia Court struck down the results, disenfranchising 3 million voters, and handing Democrats a potential death sentence in the midterms.

The ruling is worthy of Aileen Cannon, the Trump judge that obstructed the Jack Smith investigation for over a year. It is a strange, twisted argument involving journeys into semantics and references to 19th century writers. The dissent however, is straightforward, clear, and based on the law.

The ruling was obviously designed for a political result and comes in stark contrast to other states being torn apart by Republican gerrymandering—each of which is being altered unilaterally by legislatures. Not a single Republican voter has approved any of their party’s actions to rig elections.

Nevertheless, this is the attitude of the GOP—because it is a nihilistic, paranoid personality cult, not a political party.

2020 Redux

In Summer 2020, four years into Donald Trump’s first regime, America was COVID-fatigued, deeply radicalized, and extremely divided. I became concerned about the security of the elections and the more I tuned into what was happening on American streets—and American social media—the more concerned I became about violence.

Two of the people who most concerned me were retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, who was cheerleading QAnon and the Big Lie, and Kash Patel, who was installed as the Chief of Staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller after Trump lost the 2020 election.

I was following their activities—and QAnon’s—closely which allowed me to predict the events of January 6th with high accuracy, weeks ahead of time.

Both Flynn and Patel were involved in planning the insurrection, and ensuring the rioters had a chance to try to find Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. Patel was working from the Pentagon and Flynn as the frontman for QAnon.

Georgia was one of the biggest targets for Big Rig interference in 2020, and after the case against Trump and over a dozen defendants was dropped, Lawfare was able to get the grand jury transcripts on Thursday. Here is what Mike Flynn testified: “The Fifth”—over and over, just as he did for the January 6th Committee.

Despite his non-cooperation, however, Flynn was never indicted or even named as a co-conspirator; he got off scot-free. Same with Kash Patel, who is now using the FBI to investigate a journalist who reported on his drinking, and is also suing her for defamation, while he continues to push the 2020 Big Lie for Donald Trump.

Desperate People

Full disclosure: Mike Flynn sued me in April 2023 and finally dismissed the case in March of this year. I am currently suing him back to get attorneys fees and sanctions under SLAPP.

Kash Patel frivolously sued me for defamation in Nevada six weeks after Flynn did. He received a default judgement for $250,000 in 2025 despite never having served me with the lawsuit. My lawyers are currently attempting to set aside the judgement in federal court.

The FBI Director’s lawyers, knowing I don’t have any money, have asked the judge to impose a bond to force me to pay them to sue me—which would essentially put me into bankruptcy and make me unable to fight them in court. This is an exercise in spite, designed to shut up the one guy who saw right through Patel and Flynn from the start.

Kash Patel is reportedly “in panic mode” trying to save his job by silencing his political opponents, harassing journalists, and giving Donald Trump whatever he wants by abusing the full power of the federal government. Like Trump, Kash is a prime example of the psychological marriage of narcissism, paranoia, and sadism in malignant narcissists.

And finally, it is now being reported that Patel has ordered polygraphs of over two dozen of his subordinates to “find the leakers” who told a reporter about his bourbon stash. He has no shame, no morals, and nothing to lose by continuing to commit more crimes for Trump. That is his only purpose.

Hitting the Wall

If you step back and look at the Big Rig over the six decades it has been in motion, you will notice a trend. While the conspiracy to steal elections started as covert operations to influence geopolitics behind the scenes—operations which could be easily dismissed as “conspiracy theories”—the conspiracies are no longer hidden. It is the stated policy of the Trump regime to deny that he lost in 2020. And it is a requirement of his sycophants that they go along with his delusions, including judicial nominees.

This trend cannot last forever. The oscillation between Republicans and Democrats gaining power—a tacit arrangement in which the GOP steals an election and then the Democrats clean up the mess they made—has gotten far too extreme. Either the population will roll over for totally performative elections, Russia-style, or we won’t. There is no gray zone left.

It is no longer possible to even pretend elections are about the candidates or issues anymore. Elections have been reduced to the practical question of whether Republicans will be able to successfully steal them. That is not a sustainable trajectory for a democracy. It is an out-of-control 18-wheeler heading towards a wall.

Either the Democrats stop staring, hypnotized, into the Big Rig’s headlights and move out of the way, or we will all get run over—again.

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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Model Collapse

When large language models (LLMs) like Claude, Gemini, Grok, and ChatGPT are recursively trained on model-generated data, hallucinations and errors compound, the models grow increasingly disconnected from reality, and finally undergo model collapse—a state where they may confidently output nonsense.

Think of it as being put in a sealed plastic bubble—you will be able to breathe fine at first. But slowly you will be breathing in more and more of your own exhaust—exhaled carbon dioxide—and your systems will break down.

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Model collapse is not a new discovery. The industry has known about it for several years.

This problem is fatal to the world-domination plans of the AI industry, which has been marketing the promise of near-infinite growth to its investors and customers since the LLM fad began. But model collapse is also a perfect metaphor for the dynamics driving the industry as a whole, and the American federal government.

Garbage In…

One of the most famous axioms in computer science is garbage in, garbage out (GIGO).

Simply put, if you put bad data into a calculation, the results of the calculation are meaningless. It is a trick of the human mind that just because something comes out of a complex system—like a person, or a chatbot—it automatically means you should trust it.

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But when GIGO is recursive—when the garbage out is recycled to be the garbage in—the relationships between the data progressively break down. Ultimately, it degenerates to a pile of near-random bits.

The solution to this problem may seem simple: Don’t train a chatbot on its own output. Only use human data.

But what if you don’t have any more human data? What if you have already consumed nearly the entire written corpus of humanity? What then?

We’re finding out right now because that is the scenario the AI industry is currently facing. The central lie of Sam Altman (OpenAI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Elon Musk and others who promote LLMs as an infinite growth opportunity is: the bigger you build the models and data centers, the better they become. Forever.

That’s only true if you have infinite data, in which case you don’t need LLMs in the first place. The reality is that human knowledge is limited, and chatbots cannot go outside what they are given. That’s why you don’t see new AI-discovered science, or see new software platforms created by AI—despite the hype.

All LLMs do is run statistics on existing data. And the useful data is almost entirely used up.

Garbage Out

One workaround the AI industry embraced to show the appearance of growth is synthetic data—to use the output of chatbots to train new chatbots. This is the exact scenario that creates model collapse. While it can work as a stop-gap for certain highly structured domains, like math and code, ultimately you cannot get blood from a stone. LLMs will never replace humans because it’s just a useful search tool for intelligence, not intelligence itself.

For most of the domains that people actually use chatbots—recipes, legal advice, research, writing, etc.—unverified synthetic data is poison. Once an error is introduced to the pool as a fact, it gets compounded. And so the output becomes less and less reliable. But it also means over time the output of LLMs sounds more and more similar. They are all converging on a gray middle because they’re all consuming each other’s exhaust.

It’s not just training data; now chatbot pollution is all over the internet. AI slop is a growing percentage of the output of humanity online. And as that percentage increases, the accuracy of future chatbots will be further reduced—creating a recursive trap for their operators.

Industry of Slop

The idea of being in an echo chamber is nothing new. Every cult, ideology, and identity group has a formal or informal system which enforces the boundaries of its followers’ beliefs. But sometimes an echo chamber can be an emergent phenomena in those who may not share much except a singular goal. This can create strange bedfellows—like Silicon Valley nerds, global financial markets, and the Trump regime teaming up to inflate the AI bubble.

For example, this is an executive at Anthropic, which is currently seeking to go IPO at somewhere around a trillion dollars, speculating that within 30 months chatbots will start “building themselves.”

This is just silly, an extension of the concept of the technological singularity—a moment after which technology will create itself and humans will become extinct or be forced to merge with machines. There is no evidence that this will happen, or can ever happen with current technology, and an increasingly irrefutable set of data that says quite the opposite: for LLMs, things will only get worse.

Even AI boosters and billionaires who are heavily invested in AI can’t help but notice the core problem. LLMs are unreliable, randomized token predictors. They don’t “know” anything. They don’t learn. And they’re just about as good as they can ever be.

The AI industry has not just been recycling its own ideas to create a mythology about its future; it is also recycling its own financial exhaust to create a fantasy about its solvency. The circular, recursive financing of the LLM craze has created the most concentrated stock market in history—trillions of dollars in alleged deals, all within a small incestuous group.

But when myths and mathematics collide, things have a way of resolving in one direction. This is an intelligent yet intelligible video summarizing the problem with LLMs and synthetic data:

Regime Collapse

Model collapse due to “forgetting the true underlying data distribution” and becoming “poisoned with its own projection of reality” is almost too perfect a description of both the AI industry at large and the information echo chamber masquerading as the U.S. government.

An AI will collapse if it trains on its own exhaust. An industry will collapse if it believes its own marketing. And a government will collapse if it believes its own propaganda.

In political science, when an authoritarian government becomes unstable because people are afraid of giving its leader bad news, it is known as the dictator’s dilemma.

Brutal leaders like Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi suffered from this problem because they engendered mortal fear. No one gave them bad news out of self-preservation.

But the Trump regime has taken the dictator’s dilemma into the 21st century. Trump’s entourage doesn’t just hide bad news from him; it manufactures propaganda around whatever he says so it appears to him that the world constantly rearranges itself to mirror his alternate reality.

The White House is a funhouse mirror of the inside of Donald Trump’s mind.

Sycophancy

One of the biggest problems with LLMs is sycophancy. A chatbot can be trained to make you feel like a genius, even if you’re speaking nonsense. It will simply mirror your ideas in the most flattering way possible regardless of whether they make sense. This can create a psychological dependency, and in some cases “AI psychosis.”

Similarly, Trump’s reality is generated by layers of sycophancy. His handlers ensure no outside information reaches him except what he wants to see—or serves their own purposes. And he spends hours every night consuming his own exhaust on his personal social media site “Truth Social”—which functions as narcissistic supply for his ego.

Today’s event in the White House below was a stark and nauseating example of how his bubble works. Trump brought a bunch of children in as props for an Executive Order regressing presidential physical fitness tests back 20 years. And he took the opportunity to relitigate his personal grievances and display his grandiosity—without the slightest consideration for those around him.

“And unfortunately, bad things happened. It was a rigged election. And I said, well, I’ll do it again. I had the ultimate fall. I did so well. And I had the ultimate fall. And we won in the landslide. We won every single swing state… On June 14th, we’re going to have the UFC. And the biggest fight they’ve ever done by far-- hardest ticket I’ve ever been involved with. And they’re building a 5,000-seat stadium right in the front of-- right by the front door of the White House.”

TrumpGPT

The difference in the faces of the adults who were trying to humor the president during his diatribe, and the faces of the kids who have no idea what he’s talking about, represents the difference between two completely different realities.

In the children’s reality, the model of the world is still being formed. Kids are information sponges and pattern matching devices. They reality-test by instinct. So this strange old man in a different world makes them cringe and wince as they try to process his ranting.

However, the sycophants around him have been trained, much like a flawed AI, to simply mirror him, regardless of his compounding errors.

We are all trapped inside a deteriorating LLM called TrumpGPT: a ruling chatbot trained on a lifetime of grievance and sycophancy, consuming his own exhaust, and bringing the entire system around him to model collapse.

“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth… but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world… is being destroyed.”
—Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics”

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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Despite the chaos, I hope you are able to find some time with family and friends, or just get some rest. Whatever recharges your batteries. This is a marathon, etc.

We are in a strange moment of suspended animation where powerful movements are butting up against each other—seemingly unstoppable forces meeting immovable objects. Sometimes I feel like a seismologist tracking huge economic, military, political, and psychological tectonic plates, watching them slowly collide, building an unsustainable tension.

While there is nothing I can do to prevent these movements, my goal is to provide a warning system so that when the inevitable quake happens, you’re more prepared to handle it. There is no way to predict exactly when and how things will unfold, but the patterns, the tectonics, are always there if you look.

Please join our community Zoom today at Noon PT / 3PM ET to discuss the tectonics reshaping the world—and the psychological backdrop. My apologies for missing last week. There is a lot to catch up on! Hope to see you! Details below.

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“It is fortunate for men to be in a situation where, though their passions may prompt them to be wicked, they have nevertheless an interest in not being so."
—Montesquieu

Birth of a Network State

Elon Musk’s company SpaceX has filed for an initial public offering (IPO) seeking to sell $75 billion worth of its shares to investors at upwards of a $2 trillion valuation, which would instantly make it one of the most valuable companies in the world. Details of the deal have begun to surface and it has never been more clear: SpaceX is fascist science fiction—literally and figuratively.

To understand how bizarre and dangerous this deal is requires understanding a bit of history of Elon Musk and SpaceX, some basic arithmetic, and a little imagination. But in short: one of the worst men in the world will have total, dictatorial control of a load-bearing beam of the U.S. economy, a beam which will have no way to stay intact other than financial mythology and government dependency—and no way to get rid of Musk when it goes sideways.

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SpaceX is not being set up as a normal public corporation. It has a wide variety of unique features that give Musk total control over an expansive entity with enormous resources and unlimited ability to tap the public market. He will be entirely unencumbered by federal or corporate governance. And he will be free to spew his racist poison, to interfere in politics, and to amplify AI-generated teenage girls on his website with no concern of consequences.

Here are the biggest red flags with the SpaceX deal:

• The valuation is more extreme than any company at this size in history. SpaceX made less than $20 billion in total revenue in 2025 but wants people to value it at more than 100 times that amount. That is totally unprecedented and has no basis in economic reality. It is purely a science fiction story.

• With up to $75 billion raised, it will be the largest IPO in history, surpassing Saudi Aramco’s in 2019, by more than double.

• Shares sold to investors (Class A) will have one vote per share. Elon Musk’s shares (Class B) represent ten votes per share. This effectively means shareholders are passive. They get financial exposure, but no control over the company whatsoever.

• As CEO, CTO, and Chairman, Elon Musk gets to decide who goes on the Board, which is the only way to fire him. He has thus made himself legally permanent.

• Musk’s compensation package is tied to meeting impossible, sci-fi goals: 1) a Mars colony with more than one million people; and 2) putting hundreds of terawatts of data centers in orbit.

The goals are self-consciously ludicrous but nevertheless SpaceX is being sold as a corporate dictatorship legally devoted to meeting its leader’s impossible vision. More importantly, its IPO represents the birth of what the Thiel-Musk-PayPal Mafia calls a network state.

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While there are other proofs-of-concept of the network state, including Thiel-funded Praxis and Pronomos Capital, it’s worth comparing SpaceX and the network state idea directly.

How to Start a New Country

Balaji S. Srinivasan wrote the book The Network State: How to Start a New Country and has been near the center of Peter Thiel’s investment thesis and ideology for over a decade. Previously, he was the CTO of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and was a partner at the broligarchs’ favorite venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Balaji defines a network state as essentially an online cult, using euphemisms like “highly aligned” and “collective action.” The idea is to collect enough money and power to demand recognition—by any means necessary. Elon Musk has been doing this for years—by pumping his companies’ stock price through paid influencers on social media, for example.

But when Musk bought Twitter, he exponentially expanded his ability to control the narrative, not just for himself but for politics writ large.

“A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.”

According to Balaji, a network state must have a “clear leader” who raises money to acquire land—providing the online cult a way to expand into physical space. Every network state is effectively a dictatorship by a “founding influencer” who decides where everyone should live. For example: Mars.

“A network state is a social network with a clear leader… the founding influencer, who organizes the online community that eventually buys land in the physical world. Crucially, that land is not necessarily contiguous.“

Perhaps the most sinister line in Balaji’s manifesto is his desire for “a polity that prizes exit above voice” which is a line from Dark Enlightenment co-founder Nick Land, who lifted it from political scientist Albert Hirschman’s book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970).

“A network state is thus an archipelago of digitally-linked, interconnected enclaves. It's also a country you can start from your computer… a city-state in the cloud… a polity that prizes exit above voice, a state that recruits like a startup, and a nation built from the internet rather than disrupted by it.”

Hirschman was a Jewish antifascist activist in Weimar Germany who escaped to the United States when the Nazis took power and fought for the U.S. Army in WWII. His book explores the idea that in any conflict, people have three choices: they can stay quiet; they can use their voice to change the system; or they can exit the system. If you’re unhappy at work, for example, you can try to change the management, or you can just quit. Your choice is mediated by loyalty.

Hirschman treated exit, voice, and loyalty as a tragic triangle of institutional decline while the Network State cult turns “exit” into a theology for elites powerful enough to abandon democracy, rather than help fix it. It makes the overt argument that democracy is a burden on those who don’t wish to change the liberal order, but would rather just leave it: “exit over voice.” Thus every network state is a dictatorship with no mechanism for change—except for people to leave it, regardless of the practicality.

“A parallel society… stands apart from mainstream society as a parallel version, as a fork. It's not set up in opposition to the mainstream on every dimension, but a parallel society is certainly differentiated from the mainstream on a key axis.”

Network states are explicitly reactionary against governments. That is, they seek to fix a “broken aspect of today’s world“ by “writing the history of… state failure.”

“[The Network State] combines (a) the moral fervor of a political movement with (b) the laser-focus of a startup company into (c) a one-commandment based startup society…

Each startup society is simply taking a broken aspect of today’s world, often a State-caused or at least State-neglected calamity, writing the history of that state failure, and then building an opt-in community to solve the problem.”

The structure of SpaceX, and the goals of its “founder influencer” are all in complete alignment with the network state. Elon Musk is not building an investment; he is creating a financial instrument for exit.

Exit, Stage Up

Elon Musk has been running away his whole life. As the child of two distant and abusive parents, Musk’s emotional problems started from infancy. But when the South African apartheid government fell in the early 1990s, Elon and his siblings ran away to Canada with his mom. According to Errol Musk, Maye was running away from Black people taking over the government.

Musk’s desire to create a safe, white space for himself, away from those he considers unworthy, could not be any clearer. His promotion of white supremacy and fear of Black and brown people is unrelenting—to the point that even mainstream media is noticing. His X posts revolve around two axes: technological escape; and pathological racism.

As a boy in apartheid boarding school, Elon Musk’s father was fascinated with rockets and learned about scientists like Nazi V2 Rocket designer Wernher von Braun—who later went on to lead NASA’s Apollo program. After WWII, von Braun was brought to Fort Bliss, TX during Operation Paperclip—a covert U.S. intelligence program which brought Nazi rocket scientists to America.

While at Fort Bliss in 1948, von Braun wrote an unpublished science-fiction novel, Marsprojekt, published as Project Mars: A Technical Tale in English in 1953. In it, von Braun wrote about a wealthy American who rallied Earth to fund a trip to Mars. On reaching the red planet, he discovers that there is already a civilization on Mars, an underground society ruled by technocrats under a leader called “the Elon.”

According to Errol Musk, von Braun’s book is why Elon Musk has his name—and why Elon is so obsessed with rockets and Mars.

But Musk’s obsession with von Braun didn’t stop with fiction. When he started SpaceX, he poached a scientist working at TRW, and got the original plans for von Braun’s rockets from NASA. SpaceX is built on von Braun’s technical legacy.

From the beginning, Elon Musk built SpaceX as a vehicle for his own escape—from the terrors of humanity—in all its colors—and from the terrors in his own mind.

Financial Führerbunker

Like Trump, Elon Musk is a textbook malignant narcissist. His messianic narcissism is only matched by Trump himself. Musk promotes his own sociopathy as an antidote to “suicidal empathy.” And his paranoia and sadism are evident to anyone who looks at his social media posts.

When this type of personality gets power, financial or otherwise, they see it as a confirmation of their own divinity, and that those who oppose them are evidently unworthy. Their psyche becomes a limitless engine of avarice and superiority. They believe they are destined to own literally everything. They become a black hole of ego.

So the prospect of any political opposition regaining power in America is existentially terrifying to Musk. After he bought the election for Trump, raided the government with DOGE, deliberately cut off food and AIDS drugs to millions of Black and brown people, showered himself in government welfare, and shut off all investigations into his companies, he has reason to worry. If the midterms happen as they should, he will be inundated with subpoenas.

SpaceX, in the form of a network state, is his financial führerbunker. Musk is trying to build an impenetrable quasi-nation-state he hopes will allow him to survive after Trump because Musk’s paranoia, narcissism, and pathological racism drive him more than money. His IPO is not about growth; it’s about survival.

Xenocosmography

Elon Musk’s vision, as indicated in his legal filings, of a million people living on Mars, is pure science fiction. It is not possible in his lifetime, or his children’s—period. The scientific challenges and immense costs are too numerous to list. But it is not a real goal to begin with; it is an impossible aspiration sold to people who don’t wish to think for themselves.

Underneath his absurd idea of populating Mars, however, is something darker still. Elon Musk is a de facto leader of the Dark Enlightenment—the neo-reactionary, antidemocratic ideology that has captured much of Silicon Valley, and the Trump regime. The two co-founders of the Dark Enlightenment, Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land, are both white supremacist eugenicists who believe that race should be used as a way to separate people into classes—or to simply eliminate people deemed to be unworthy.

Nick Land’s concept of “hyper-racism” is connected to his extreme desire for exit. In Land’s cosmology, outer space is the way for an elite group of white people to separate from the Earth, and to create a new species.

It is Land’s racist ideas, later commingled with Yarvin’s, which gave ideological form to Peter Thiel and Musk’s rage at what they see as the degeneracy of the world around them. It is the Dark Enlightenment which gave rise to the techno-religion of the network state, and the obsession with exit. SpaceX is not a vehicle for investment, it is the vehicle for Musk’s plans for escape.

And he wants the world to pay for it.

Systemic Lunacy

The impending SpaceX IPO is a symptom of not just Elon Musk’s lunacy, but of the entire political, financial and media system that enabled him. This includes everyone who added to his mythology as a genius and a visionary, avoided asking him hard questions for decades, and justified giving him money despite his overt fascist beliefs and psychopathologies.

Now there are no federal guardrails at all. After battering down every attempt to curtail his fraud through regulations—and by buying an election—Elon Musk is free to create an entirely new kind of entity that plays by different rules.

The SpaceX IPO is an unaccountable blank check in the tens of billions written to himself—one of the most toxic people to ever walk the planet—to do anything he wants.

Because of the sheer size of the proposed company, numerous index funds will be forced to buy it. Retirement funds will be exposed to it. And it will instantly become too big too fail. For reference, at $2 trillion the network state known as SpaceX will be worth more than these companies, combined:

• Lockheed Martin

• Northrop Grumman

• Boeing

• T-Mobile

• Verizon

• IBM

• Salesforce

• Oracle

The only real money-making business SpaceX has is Starlink—which made several billion in profit in 2025. But then Elon Musk added in his failing chatbot business xAI—which lost billions more. In total, the combined company lost more $4 billion last year.

SpaceX is not a stock in a company; it is a schoolboy’s racist fantasy. It is a dream of exit for not just Musk, but for an entire generation of people who have been influenced by his psychological operations, his fraud, and his misanthropy.

In 1915, the film Birth of a Nation justified white terrorism against Blacks, rewrote the history of Reconstruction, and helped revive the KKK. It told a story that helped convince a generation to go backwards.

Elon Musk wants to use the birth of a network state to chart the same course again. SpaceX is not about satellites, or Mars, or AI. It is about fear. It is about hate. It is about giving racism a safe space. It is about going up to go backwards.

In the hands of Elon Musk, SpaceX is a dangerous, potentially lethal parasite on America with no way to remove it. As soon as a sane government returns to power, SpaceX should be nationalized, or shut down entirely.

“I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.”
— C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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“A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.”
—Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon; or, The Inspection-House

Panopticon

A panopticon is a system in which people can be surveilled anytime but never know when. This means they have to behave as if they are being watched at all times. The term originally referred to an 18th-century prison design by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham: a central watchtower with concentric rings of cells around it.

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The design was first implemented in America in 1925 when Stateville Correctional Facility opened in Illinois, and was soon followed by Presidio Modelo in Cuba.

Michel Foucault extended the meaning to represent a diagram of political technology—a system of domination, not a building.

But the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.

— Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977)

Another example of this idea comes from the movies. When a Stranger Calls (1979) is best known for the line “the calls are coming from inside the house.” In it, a babysitter starts receiving calls from a psychopathic killer. After she contacts police, they trace the call, and in that instant the house flips from shelter to trap. Suddenly, she knows she’s being watched but cannot see her watcher.

Whether it’s a prison guard or a serial killer in the basement, the panopticon projects dominance over a target by controlling information. The target receives just enough to feel endangered and modifies their behavior to match the threat.

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Panoptic Government

All governments with functional law enforcement use panoptic logic to some extent. The difference between authoritarian control and law enforcement is whether you trust the watchers—or not.

You may not drive too fast because there might be a cop with a speed gun over the next hill. But in Trump’s regime, if you’re not white you might not leave the house for fear of being kidnapped by ICE. Either way, you modify your own behavior based on who might be watching.

The U.S. federal government is attempting to build a panoptic (all-seeing) system of control as quickly as it can. This effort includes its accelerating embrace of Palantir and the adoption of draconian policies like NSPM-7 which targets anyone on the left as a dangerous radical.

But like the watchtower in a panoptic prison which represents a constant threat to the inmates, a panoptic government requires a constant threat to keep the population under control.

On Saturday, April 25th, Cole Tomas Allen—a 31-year-old tutor, scientist, game developer, and devout Christian from Torrance, CA—ran towards a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The checkpoint was one floor above the ballroom where nearly the entire line of presidential succession was gathered. Shots were fired and a Secret Service member was hit in his bulletproof vest.

The Trump regime portrayed Allen as a leftist assassin who shot a Secret Service member just outside the ballroom before he was heroically stopped. The media simply went along with this narrative.

Staged!

Almost immediately, from all parts of the political spectrum, the chorus rang out: “Staged!” On the website formerly known as Twitter, this was typical of the sentiment:

Nevertheless, it was not “staged.” We now know a lot about Cole Allen, 31, most of it pointing to how normal he seemed to be to the people around him. His tutoring company had recently named him “Teacher of the Month.”

Just before the event, Allen sent a manifesto to his family which gave his motivation as a “friendly federal assassin” and laid out his political targets including Trump (“a pedophile, rapist, and traitor”)—but for some reason excluded “Mr. Patel.”

Allen also specified his biblical rationale for murder, and described his plan to limit collateral damage. Despite the propaganda of the regime after the incident, Allen was not anti-American or anti-Christian in any coherent sense. He was a radicalized Trump hater who gave himself ideological and religious permission to kill.

Trump released a grainy video of the incident which shows a figure running through a security checkpoint. No other video has been released. It does not appear that the suspect is holding a weapon. Instead it appears the agent in the lower left of the video shot an agent across the hall as the suspect crossed between them.

Monday, Trump’s personal defense lawyer and Acting AG Todd Blanche gave a press conference that made it clear there was something being hidden about the “shooting.” He refused to say that the suspect shot his gun, and acknowledged that a Secret Service agent had discharged his service weapon five times. Also, the charges brought by DOJ do not support a “shooting” at all.

Enhance!

“People for whom the distinction between fact and fiction… no longer exist[s].”
—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

The available evidence shows that Cole Tomas Allen did not fire his weapon, did not get anywhere near the ballroom, and that the agent that was hit was the victim of a friendly fire incident. But the Trump regime has deliberately suppressed information about it to build a narrative of a heroic near-miss.

This is exactly how a panoptic government tries to control its population. It releases only what it wants the population to see, to make the world seem maximally dangerous, so it can justify maximum government surveillance.

Just like the near-assassination in Butler, PA, this incident was not “staged” but it was distorted, amplified, and mythologized into an alternate history of the event.

As the situation unfolded, you could see Trump’s most loyal sycophants trying to manufacture a “moment” in real-time, like Dan Scavino, who tried to get a chant of “USA! USA!” going in the ballroom while it was not clear the danger had passed yet.

PSYACT

In military parlance, a psychological action or PSYACT is a planned and coordinated action—lethal or non-lethal—conducted to produce a psychological effect as part of a larger psychological operation (PSYOP). A staged assassination attempt to produce a psychological result would be a textbook example.

But a panoptic government does not necessarily need to execute a false flag attack, it just needs to create the conditions for violence, and then be prepared to capitalize on it faster than the full truth can be distributed.

Cole Allen’s actions were not technically a PSYACT, because they were not planned by the regime. But they were near-perfect PSYACT material: a real violent event useful to drive a narrative, except for the Secret Service agents shooting each other. That part did not create a compelling story—so they simply left it out. In a sufficiently sealed information bubble, a panoptic regime can do this kind of information alchemy on almost anything.

Build the Ballroom!

As everyone following the regime knows, Donald Trump really really wants his $400 million ballroom with the Palantir bunker beneath.

Within minutes of the incident, where security mostly worked as designed, nearly the entirety of Trump’s propaganda operation simultaneously started calling to build the White House ballroom—because obviously it’s needed for security.

On X, where Trump officials use DM rooms to coordinate messaging, there was a tsunami of Trump supporters having the exact same idea at the same time.

The DOJ also publicly leaned on the plaintiff in a lawsuit currently holding up construction of the ballroom—calling it “dangerous litigation” because Trump won’t have a safe space. And numerous regime officials have used their platforms to sell the ballroom as a solution to the epidemic of Cole Allens—despite the fact that the event could not have been held in a government building.

Trump invited himself to a private event. Protecting him there was the Secret Service’s responsibility. They did protect him. They also appear to have shot each other in the process.

Psyop Fatigue

The reason so many jumped to “staged” is that in many ways, it was. It’s just that Trump’s panoptic government repurposed a real attack into a theatrical production, leaving out the inconvenient details, and adding valor-under-fire as liberally as possible.

It was a PSYOP by any other name: a real, if futile, assassination attempt repurposed as a PSYACT to extract taxpayer goodies for Donald Trump.

Here is the unhinged motion filed by the actual Department of Justice that is nothing short of a giant Truth Social post, complete with ALL CAPS epithets and Trump-authored insult lines.

And finally, as I write this, the same DOJ is doing a press conference to indict James Comey for the second time for posting a picture of rocks spelling out “86 47.”

Unlike the WHCD incident, this PSYACT by the government actually is a manufactured theatrical performance. It is designed specifically as narcissistic fuel for Donald Trump, and to give MAGA something to focus on other than Epstein.

No one, not a single person, believes Comey meant his photo as a threat to Donald Trump. The DOJ indictment is self-consciously frivolous—which doesn’t matter for their purposes because it is not the Justice Department; it is a royal theater troupe.

But the regime’s commitment to rearranging the world to match Donald Trump’s demented model of reality, whether through distorting real events like the WHCD or manufacturing felony cases against former FBI directors, will ultimately be limited by the objective world.

The wheels are off the bus of the regime; the rims are on the pavement, throwing up sparks. How long it lasts before breaking down completely is impossible to know. But the fatigue is real. The psyops are exhausting. Living in a panopticon is frightening by design—not because everything is staged, but because anything real can be captured, edited, and made to serve the watchers.

“Every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

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