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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please join me and our thriving community for a Zoom call on Sunday at Noon PT / 3PM ET. I’m now free to talk about my court cases with Kash Patel and Mike Flynn should there be any questions. We can also discuss anything else on your mind. No pressure to talk, but it’s always open to questions and comments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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Some good news. A federal judge granted my Motion to dismiss in the case of Kash Patel vs. Jim Stewartson. The case was covered in the New York Times a few weeks ago, and overnight it was covered by the Daily Beast and Raw Story.

To give a sense for what this absurd, frivolous lawsuit looked like, here is one of the greatest footnotes I’ve ever seen in a legal document. Kudos to the judge for including the phrase “googly-eyed Kremlin bitch” in his ruling.

Here’s a transcript to the video. Thanks to all of my readers, and everyone else who has supported me.

Six years ago, I started looking into QAnon because it was using game techniques and psychological tactics that I was familiar with because I had helped design them decades before. And what I saw was not normal. It was not a natural outgrowth of the internet. It was a death cult.

And so I tracked it for six months until I saw that it was organizing to attack the Capitol. So I warned about it. I yelled about it online. Other people did as well. No one listened. Sure enough, on January 6th, the worst political crime in American history happened.

The seat of our democracy was attacked. And I identified who did it, who conspired to do it, including Mike Flynn as the leader of QAnon and the cheerleader of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, who was cheering for his digital soldiers to be ready to die on January 6th.

And Kash Patel in the Pentagon, ensuring through a memo, through Chris Miller, through Mike Flynn’s brother Charles, that the National Guard could not help, could not prevent that crowd of violent QAnon, Proud Boys and Oath Keepers from trying to murder Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi—and cops.

So I’ve spent seven days a week for six years trying to unravel why it happened, how it happened, and how we can build a system that will not allow it to happen again. 38 months ago, Mike Flynn and Kash Patel decided it was going to be a good idea to sue me, somebody who was tweeting about them, who was blogging about them. Not because I defamed them, but because I was right about them. I could have made it go away.

I could have deleted my posts or going crying away and tried to settle. This is America. It is my right to speak about people, especially when it involves crimes against my government.

So if I can be any inspiration or model to anyone, it’s all been worth it. I don’t like the attention. I am not somebody who enjoys being in the spotlight. But if you come at me, an American citizen exercising my rights, I am going to defend them.

And if there’s one message I have for people, it’s that if you are afraid to exercise your rights, you have already lost them. Fight for them. We can and will get through this. We can and will build something better. But we can’t do it if we’re cowards, if we appease them, if we let them rule us.

Not here, not in America. I want to thank everybody who has helped me along the way. There are far too many to mention. You know who you are. And I am so grateful. Thank you. We’ll get through it.

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I grew up watching Star Trek. While the original series aired for just three years around the time I was born, it was in constant reruns so I know every show by heart. My mom was a Trekkie and used to take me to conventions where you could meet the actors, including Captain Kirk played by William Shatner who I met sometime in the late 70s when I was about ten.

Shatner, now 95 years old, is not without his issues but I’ve always seen him as a relatively benevolent steward of sci-fi and Star Trek fandom. He was granted a trip to space by Jeff Bezos on a Blue Origin rocket and was suitably awed by the experience.

Unfortunately, however, he has also attached himself to another, even more amoral oligarch. When Elon Musk posted that he was a “(Former) Trillionaire,” Shatner posted “I still love you.”

While this is not the first time they’ve interacted, when I noticed it I felt compelled to respond. This created a flood of Elon’s bots and trolls coming to defend the world’s richest racist.

Shatner’s response was to block me.

As someone who has thought of him as something of an icon for half a century, I admit this was pretty hurtful. You’d think a man who performed the most famous interracial kiss in television history—with Lt. Uhura played by Nichelle Nichols—would be against racism.

But in the end, Shatner’s kowtowing to billionaires is just business to him, even at 95 years old. And while I’m disappointed, at least I briefly got his attention before he passes on, even if it was to cut me off.

Sadly, we are in a time where confrontation is necessary. Appeasing the people who put us in this situation is unacceptable. If you choose to attach yourself to someone so publicly evil, you should expect people to be angry. It should, and must, have consequences.

Please join me and our amazing community today, Sunday, at Noon PT / 3PM ET to discuss recent events, the three Dead-Enders threatening the planet, and anything else you’d like to talk about. There is no pressure to talk but it is always wide open for questions and comments. Hope to see you! Details below.

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Three Malignant Narcissists

The world has never been in more danger—not because Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Elon Musk are succeeding but because they are failing.

• Musk is losing his money—and his connection to reality.

• Putin is losing to Ukraine—and the loyalty of his people.

• Trump is losing to Iran—and at everything else.

Each of these men is very different with radically divergent beliefs but they share a rare trait—a constellation of psychopathologies referred to by many psychologists and psychiatrists as malignant narcissism. This is not a quirk of personality; it defines them. As Erich Fromm, who initially coined the term, described it, malignant narcissism is a combination of narcissism, psychopathy, sadism, and paranoia.

The world has seen these kinds of men before, and the world has paid the price for allowing them to rise to power—and ultimately to fail spectacularly. But the world has not seen three of them with this much power at so much risk of losing it at the same time. Two men who control the vast majority of the world’s nuclear weapons, and the world’s richest man who controls a great deal of global infrastructure and influence, are all in danger of collapsing at once.

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The scenario is made even more perilous because these three authoritarians have historically been allies. The increasing divide between them makes them less effective collectively but far more volatile as individuals.

Three Quagmires

Iran

Trump’s war on Iran is not just a quagmire; it is metaphysical trap. He cannot win militarily but he also cannot lose psychologically. He is unable to process defeat so, as a sadist, he converts pain into winning.

“They haven't received enough pain yet.”
Donald Trump, Axios, 7/23/26

Trump has no good options remaining. He blundered through every solution except the two worst: 1) accept an even worse humiliation than the first surrender; or 2) commit a potentially existential error by launching a ground invasion of Iran. While Trump can continue to deplete our ammunition with his fruitless bombing campaign for a little longer, so far he has only managed to kill more Americans, punish our own allies, and endanger the global petroleum supply.

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Ukraine

Similarly, Vladimir Putin’s “three day war” on Ukraine is now 4 1/2 years old. His own narcissism and totalist belief in Russia’s destiny to be restored as an Eurasian empire has steered him into creating his own existential quagmire.

Putin has essentially the same two choices as Donald Trump: radically escalate with a national conscription or face humiliating surrender.

Zelenskyy has effectively proven to Putin—and crucially to the Russian people—that Ukraine can project military power into any region of Russia it wants. Drone attacks have destroyed half the warehouses of Wildberries, the “Amazon of Russia,” which has been increasingly used as a military supply chain. Nearly every major oil plant in Russia has been hit. The skies of Moscow and St. Petersburg—both cities Kash Patel intends to visit—have been repeatedly darkened.

Like Trump, Putin’s reaction to his losses is to try to reestablish dominance through sadism—by bombing Ukrainian hospitals, apartment buildings, and day care centers.

Elononomics

Elon Musk has a different kind of self-created quagmire. His empire has started to crack, and not in a small way. As predicted, both Tesla and SpaceX are struggling to justify their absurd stock prices. Tesla came in with a terrible quarter, in which they lost money despite growing revenue. And SpaceX, which has never made money without government subsidies, has lost 50% of its value from the peak and continuing to drop.

Musk has also had a string of such extreme racist, bizarre behavior that it has started to get the attention of even mainstream publications. After his months-long effort to discredit Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey for hiring a Black woman to play Helen of Troy, the film is set to be Nolan’s biggest yet. This led Musk to pledge to make a new “historically accurate” (ie. white) version of the story built with Grok.

The Economist, which published parts of an extended interview with Musk on Thursday, also exposed how extreme and unconnected to reality he has become. Musk was agitated, aggressive, and disrespectful. When asked how many people he thought would be killed by his cuts at USAID, Musk threw up a sign used by white supremacists and sneered “Zero” several times—before blaming Bill Gates and “NGOs.”

In the clip below, Musk predicts that within ten years, humans will be “like chimpanzees” compared to “superintelligent AIs” who “will be in charge” of us. He admits that there is a “10-20% chance” that killer robots will wipe out humanity in the interim, but he’s decided—for everyone—to just “roll with it.”

This kind of techno-apocalyptic lunacy can slip by when you’re making people money, but it’s far harder when you’re making people feel like bagholders.

Musk’s only real options are to get a bailout from Donald Trump or to merge Tesla into SpaceX which would make him the unaccountable sovereign of a multi-trillion dollar company—that still loses money. It would just concentrate his losses into a single target. There would be nowhere left to run.

In summary:

• Putin can’t win.

• Trump can’t win.

• Elon’s money is a mirage.

But malignant narcissism is a bottomless pit. These men have no morals, no empathy, and no humanity. No transgression of laws or norms will stop them from trying to keep their status. And no amount of bloodshed will appeal to their “better angels”—because they have none.

Cascade

It is unique in modern history to have a world so thoroughly dominated by malignant narcissists. While we’ve had plenty of prominent ones across the ages, we seem to have reached a kind of peak narcissism which the world must confront. Otherwise, we will fall into a kind of global neo-feudalist techno-fascism that extracts more and more from the population—while the elites get more and more untouchable.

However, the three quagmires bedeviling Trump, Musk, and Putin are threatening to create a more fundamental problem for them. A very good case is being made against the core ideology of all three men—dominance as the only true path to power. Elon’s case for financial and racial dominance, Trump’s case for his own personal dominance, and Putin’s case for imperialist dominance, are all being shown to be fraudulent.

This threat to their collective sovereignty is compounded by the significant overlap in America between people who have believed all three of their core ideas. MAGA and Musk’s cult have been led to believe Putin is a great leader. MAGA was led to believe crypto and Musk meant infinite wealth. The technology gurus were led to believe Trump was good for them and their industry. And so on.

But as the realization hits that any one of these men are a failure, questions may naturally arise about the others:

This may create a cascade of realizations, or at a minimum raise more doubts about all three men at once. This is how the fall of personality cults often work: one insight that breaks through may lead to many others. Once it starts, it may be impossible to stop.

Desperate men mean desperate times. Malignant narcissists will consume anything and anyone to stay in power—including their own people, or each other.

• Putin extracts military power from the bodies of his own people

• Trump extracts personal aggrandizement from America’s resources

• Musk extracts radicalization, influence, and money from his 240M followers

Of course, all of this consumption of people and resources is a dead end. But these are the ultimate dead-enders—messianic demagogues with nothing inside and everything to lose.

Malignant narcissists don’t believe anyone else deserves to enjoy life, or even to exist without them—so they always try to take the world with them when the end comes.

As I was finishing this article Friday night, at the second attempt at the 2026 White House Correspondents Dinner, Trump said this as if to demonstrate:

But you people have no idea how lucky you are when I’m gone. You’re all going to be broke. Your business model is going to be finished. No, it’s true. When I’m not around, you’re going to be broke. There’s not going to be anybody to report on. Nobody gives a damn about anybody else.

He means it. Trump would prefer that when he goes, everyone is miserable—or dead.

The greatest challenge to the survival of the human race is preventing the rise of the most dangerous psychopathologies to the most powerful positions in the world. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of time before a malignant narcissist succeeds in making themselves the last one—by taking us all with them.

“Power without love is reckless and abusive.”
—Martin Luther King Jr.

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As many of my readers know, current Director of the FBI Kash Patel frivolously sued me in 2023 for defamation. Although he never managed to serve me with the lawsuit, after almost three years—while he was FBI Director—he convinced a Nevada federal judge to issue a $250,000 default judgment against me anyway. I’m currently in the process of trying to have that ruling overturned.

One of the statements Patel sued me over was that I called him a “Kremlin asset” in a tweet.

Despite his legal protestations, however, on Monday Politico reported that Patel is planning a trip to Russia in mid-October, three weeks before the midterm elections.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations, of course, is a domestic law enforcement agency. There is no reason for the FBI Director to take a trip to Russia—the primary foreign government interfering in American politics—right before an election. That is, unless he were trying to get some tips on how to rig them—or some help.

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Kash Patel’s host for this trip is reportedly the FSB, the modern-day KGB. The FSB has been responsible for ensuring that Vladimir Putin stayed in power for the last quarter century—by any means necessary, including bombing their own citizens.

The last decade of Kash Patel’s life has been spent helping the Russian government—like running the “Russiagate” investigation in House Intelligence with Devin Nunes to cover up for Russian interference in the 2016 election, and taking $25,000 to appear in an anti-FBI Russian propaganda film in 2024.

But today, Patel is not a congressional aide or a podcaster; he’s the FBI Director. Just making the trip to Russia is a huge gift to Vladimir Putin—who is currently in an existential battle for his own survival as Ukraine turns the tables in the war. Patel’s trip is official U.S. validation of a regime so desperate it launches ballistic missiles into apartment buildings in Kyiv and sends drones on “human safari” in Kherson.

This trip is similar, but far worse, than eight congresspeople traveling to Moscow on July 4th, 2018. Then, it was deeply suspect and a clear message from Putin. But Patel’s trip is more like a middle finger to everyone who cares about American democracy. They are just rubbing the collusion in our faces.

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Just imagine what someone in Patel’s position could do. He could take a thumb drive in his pocket of any secrets he wants, any database, and hand it to Russian intelligence without the slightest concern of detection. He could receive a Bitcoin account with payment for services rendered—no one would have any idea. And he could coordinate with the Russians on how they should interfere in the midterms.

If anyone doubts his willingness to commit election crimes, remember that Kashyap Patel was elevated to the #2 position in the Pentagon after Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden. Patel then wrote a memo on January 4th, 2021—two days before the riot at the Capitol that transferred control of the D.C. National Guard to himself and the Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller.

It was premeditated. It was the worst political crime in American history.

Here are Patel and Miller in 2022, simply lying directly into the camera about what happened. Patel spent four years blaming J6 on Nancy Pelosi, the FBI, and “Antifa.”

Kash Patel has no morals, no conscience, no shame, and no loyalty whatsoever to America. He is a sociopath in the employ of foreign governments, and a criminal who appealed to Donald Trump because he is willing to do anything to hold on to power. I am just a citizen who saw right through him from the start.

While I try not to let my own emotions obscure my writing, in this case I will make an exception. I am deeply angry with a system that after I’ve spent six years warning about all of this, has learned nothing.

“Toldya” is insufficient and unsatisfying. I’m not interested in being right. I’m interested in my grandchildren growing up as free people in a free country—a prospect growing dimmer and dimmer in the rear-view mirror.

Joe Biden is a good man and in many ways was a good president. But in the crucial role of stabilizing democracy to ensure its existence for future generations, he and his administration utterly failed. For four long years, I battled armies of trolls, stalkers, multiple lawsuits, and the inability to work to try to bring accountability for what happened to America.

Instead of a sweeping investigation into the planners of J6, the DOJ focused exclusively on the rioters. No one above Proud Boy leaders were prosecuted. And now, because of our own negligence and failure, even the rioters are free to commit more crimes.

While this is not about me, I do feel a bit like an avatar for a wide swath of the American people who saw what happened, are angry that we allowed it, and want to be assured that when adults are able to retake power, that we don’t blow the chance again.

If we normalize a Kremlin asset, who already conspired to try to overthrow the U.S. government, walking into the actual Kremlin three weeks before a critical election, we have already lost. No amount of “toldyas” will ever save us.

Treason is on the ballots, again. Now all we can do is hope that treason isn’t counting them.

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Solipsism is the belief that one’s own mind is the only thing that can truly be known to exist. Others are merely characters which serve to support or interfere with one’s personal reality.

Group solipsism is the counterintuitive phenomenon of individual solipsists working together to support each other’s realities despite the conviction that they themselves are all that matters. The result is a kind of Marvel Universe, a solipsistic cartel, where each person in the group has an assigned domain in which to rule—and agrees, mostly, not to interfere in others’ alternate worlds.

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The Trump regime and its enablers create a form of mass solipsism in which a number of completely different realities intersect around one thing—the shared acquisition of power at all costs. Every individual has, with notable conflicts at the boundaries, a reality to defend and to ensure stays aligned with the overall project.

• Trump: dominance, humiliation, and personal loyalty

• Thiel: eschatology, Antichrist fantasy, techno-fascism

• Musk: white supremacy, eugenic futurism, space fantasy, technocracy

• Miller: white rage, siege, racial purification

• Christian nationalists: spiritual warfare, divine providence

• Accelerationist billionaires: collapse as opportunity, hypercapitalism

• Republican Congress and SCOTUS: submission to the ordained power structure

What they all have in common is, to varying degrees, adoption of the belief that other people aren’t actually real. To the modern solipsist, most humans are what they sometimes call “NPCs“ or “non-player characters.”

When Musk says “arguing with NPCs is pointless” he means it literally. Unless people conform to his personal reality and to the overall cartel’s project of collecting power regardless of the consequences, they simply don’t exist except as a resource to extract or a barrier to break down.

This is what Hannah Arendt meant when she described how “ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality” in the same way terror ruins relationships between people.

But how do the solipsist, the tyrant, and the totalitarian expand their universe into the minds of their victims? Arendt described it as a kind of political technology she referred to as “organized loneliness.”

Loneliness is not the same thing as solitude, which is often a healthy state of being with oneself. If you are thinking, and believe yourself to be a reliable narrator, you may be alone—but you are not lonely. Loneliness is different. Under the right social and psychological conditions, you may find yourself in a crowded party and feel lonelier than ever before. You have not just lost connection with others; you have lost connection with yourself.

This is the goal of the totalitarian. This is the goal of the Trump regime and the solipsistic oligarchy that supports it. They don’t just want to drain us of access to each other; they want to drain us of our ability to form our own reality—so they can fill our loneliness with their own ideology.

As I’ve written before, in complexity theory, there are two orthogonal (90-degree) continuums: simple vs. complex; and order vs. chaos. The goal of the totalitarian is simple order. They want to reduce complexity at all costs because they see it as inefficient and unprofitable. A functional democratic republic is a form of complex order and the way to break it down is through simple chaos—or as Arendt called it terror.

This is why there are roving bands of ICE agents terrorizing Americans with simple chaos. This is why a majority of Republicans actually believe that vandals destroyed the Reflecting Pool. It is totalitarianism applied to both relationships between people, and to every individual’s relationship to reality.

The simple technology for pushing back on organized loneliness is empathy. The purpose of reducing complexity through terror and destruction of common reality is that it becomes far easier for the totalitarian to extract what they want. If you are not just alone, but lonely, you will be desperate to find connection almost anywhere—which is where the tyrant comes in.

Empathy represents one’s internal psychological connection to other humans. If that can be stripped away by the totalitarian, the solipsism quickly turns to barbarism.

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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Thursday night, Donald Trump gave a primetime speech allegedly about election interference that was largely just a shambolic rehash of old conspiracy theories and mischaracterized declassified information. It was extraordinarily dangerous because it provides a pretext for unconstitutional actions around the midterms—but the content was so empty and badly delivered even Fox News doesn’t want to talk about it.

However, a few hours before Trump’s dud of a speech, Stephen Miller gave a “ministerial” to an international audience at the State Department that was nothing short of Third Reich plagiarism. If this had just been a rally speech, it would be extremely disturbing, but it went along with a simultaneously released document entitled “Trump Administration Unleashes Global Campaign to Crush Radical Left Terrorism.”

Put together, Miller’s speech and official policy document enshrine an overtly fascist, transnational program to persecute nearly anyone the regime wants in the name of “leftist terrorism.”

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Here is a key section of Miller’s speech which is textbook dehumanization—the precise language Joseph Goebbels used to target Jews, communists, and Bolsheviks.

Miller draws a picture of the in-group as “morally superior,” ordered,” “beautiful,” and “normal.” The out-group on the other hand, identified as “leftists,” is “abnormal,” “scarred,” and “deformed.”

The in-group “goes to church on Sunday”—despite the fact that Miller is Jewish. The out-group, however, is “violent,” “junkies,” and “predators.”

This exact formulation was used by Joseph Goebbels to justify his atrocities. According to Goebbels, the “German people” were under threat by violent, predatory, immoral Jews who had to be “taken out of circulation.” This was accompanied by a campaign promoting eugenics and physiognomy—the long-discredited idea that you could determine someone’s characteristics just by looking at them.

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If you were to take that idea into practice with Stephen Miller, you would have to come to the conclusion that his characteristics are identical to Goebbels. Miller’s impersonation and appearance makes them virtual doppelgängers.

Goebbels was clear for years what his ultimate goals were. The below is from a 1929 article published in Goebbels’ own periodical Der Angriff, called “Der Jude.” You could swap a few proper nouns and it would be hard to tell if it was Miller or Goebbels.

When Miller uses the boogeymen “Antifa” or “communist,” he is deliberately mirroring the Nazi program of eliminating the original “Antifa” aka “Antifaschistische Aktion”—a group of antifascist activists in Weimar Germany sponsored by the Communist Party who were among the first people sent to Dachau in 1933.

Miller’s rage against Democrats and “leftists” is nothing new, but he is creating official policy in the State Department using the full power of the federal government—to hunt almost anyone he wants domestically or internationally:

“Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.“

This is not a theoretical concept. As I wrote, a young man was already put in prison for 30 years for moving a box of antifascist leaflets. This is a concerted effort to target anyone Stephen Miller doesn’t think looks “American.”

Miller is also behind the DHS policies that have resulted in three deaths over just the last week. He has already sent thousands of unqualified, remorseless neo-Nazis roaming the streets looking for people to assault and kidnap. There is no reason to believe he won’t expand their operations to actively include “leftists” who don’t look “normal.”

While this kind of rhetoric combined with policy is deeply evil and potentially deadly, there is an essential difference between the United States and Nazi Germany. Hitler was personally popular in his country until near the end, even when the population turned against the war. Also, Nazi ideology and mythology were always consistent.

Miller, despite writing Trump’s speeches to regularly include Nazi references, and being the architect of the mass deportation program, is uniquely radical in his obsession to rid America of anyone who isn’t “normal.” Trump seems more interested in pursuing a six year-old grievance about the 2020 election, or finding ever more extravagant ways to abuse his position to make money.

Trump’s coalition is unhappy with the current scenario. While he retains a core 30% level of support, his war is not winding down; it’s expanding. Gas prices are rising in reaction. Getting people excited about culture wars is easier when you are succeeding at other things. Trump is not.

So it is not clear at all that the combination of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are the braintrust that will finally break America. The future is not written yet, and we still have the chance to be the people who choose to learn from history instead of repeating it.

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
—Martin Luther King Jr., Beyond Vietnam, 1967

The world is very ill. The planet is rejecting a pathogen.

The virus is not people—at least not most of them. Humans have lived on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years without destabilizing our own planet.

The virus is psychopathy. It is the absence of empathy and the systems that reward antisocial psychopathologies. It is the entire process that enabled scenes like below to take place in America.

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An unarmed 26-year-old man was shot and killed by ICE agents in his car in Biddeford, Maine. After the shooting, they yanked him out of the driver’s seat like meat, threw him to the ground, handcuffed him, and searched his pockets while he bled out in front of his family—without a single sign of concern over the life they took.

This is the same psychological deviance that called Renee Good a “fuckin’ bitch” and shot Alex Pretti in the back ten times for helping a woman who was being beaten.

At the same time, the President of the United States appears to have consciously decided that plunging the world into an economic winter is preferable to feeling like a loser. Both the U.S. and Iran are now busily destroying petroleum supply infrastructure for much of the world in a tit-for-tat that could lead to calamity.

The Strait is not “open.” It is controlled by Iran. What Trump said he wants to do by taxing cargo is illegal—and by Tuesday he had already backed down. Becoming the “GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT” was not one of the military objectives America was sold. But none of that matters because Trump lives in a totalizing alternate reality which allows no competing information to penetrate.

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This was his only public appearance Monday—bragging about his NASCAR race in D.C. He’s not just out of touch; he’s in a different dimension.

But looming behind this propaganda and domestic violence is the biggest threat of all. The Earth is heating faster than even most doomers predicted. We have already passed the point of no return in many respects. The current “Godzilla” El Niño has only just begun—and it is already quite literally off the charts.

This event may kill millions of people regardless of Trump. But cutting off fertilizer from the Strait of Hormuz will make the impacts far worse. And the longer it goes, the more people die. It’s really that simple. Trump’s decision to relaunch his war could turn a disaster into civilization-scale mass death.

Of course, Trump’s reaction to climate change has been to not just deny it, but to actively stop new government subsidies for wind and solar—and to gut the Endangered Species Act—while America bakes under a record-breaking heat dome. It is a kind of murder-suicide theater.

But what ties all these things together—from Gestapo-like ICE officers, to Trump’s malignancy, to a hypercapitalist system that deliberately ignored climate change until it was too late?

Organized psychopathy.

A psychopath has one primary interest—themselves. To the psychopath, other people may only enter the calculus when they can be of benefit. Otherwise, humans have no inherent value and can be freely manipulated or destroyed. This gives the psychopath an extreme advantage over others—unless the system in which they operate recognizes them as a danger before they can cause serious damage.

This is a phenomenon seen in a number of primate species including bonobos where physically weaker females form coalitions to wield power over aggressive males.

On the other hand, chimpanzees in Uganda have been engaged in a constant “civil war” since 2015—which has escalated to brutal tactics like widespread infanticide.

Humans are built from over 98% of the same matched-pair DNA as these animals. We inherit both of these patterns: forming coalitions to equalize power with dominant individuals; and breaking down into senseless violence over control.

The American government itself can be seen as an attempt to mitigate the danger of psychopathologies. The founders were clear from the beginning about what they saw as the greatest threat—aggressive individuals wresting control from the people.

“It is in the Interest of Tyrants to reduce the People to Ignorance and Vice.”
—Samuel Adams, writing in the Boston Gazette, 1772

George Washington, who likely could have remained president indefinitely, voluntarily stepped down from power after two terms and gave the following warning.

“Cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp … the reins of government.”
—George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

65 years later, the United States entered a Civil War in which the original sin of slavery—psychopathy writ large protected within the American system by the founders—finally engaged in an existential battle with the principles of representative democracy where everyone is “created equal.“

The world is now in danger of devolving into total war because the systems for containing aggressive individuals who value power over human life have failed.

We are being reduced to Adams’ “Ignorance and Vice” because tyrants banded together to destroy the ability for much of the population to receive, as Madison called it, “popular information.”

“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy.”
—James Madison, 1822

The United States is currently both a “Farce” and a “Tragedy” because much of “popular information” has been taken over by amoral, psychopathic people. This failure allowed aggressive individuals with dangerous psychopathologies to recruit, reward, and multiply themselves.

Arguably, the beginning of the end was Reagan canceling the Fairness Doctrine—and vetoing an attempt to codify it into law. This allowed people like Rush Limbaugh to proliferate and set the precedent for entire networks like FOX to dedicate themselves to building a vision of America as a jungle civil war—ignoring truth and empathy in favor of profiting from a cult of anger.

Four decades later, a tyrant has taken the White House for a second time, after poisoning popular information through the same channels.

No serious, permanent solution to our descent into cruelty and violence can fail to address the psychological and epistemological root of the problem. It is impossible to inform people who live in a self-contained alternate reality where their own neighbors are the enemy.

America and the world are ill because we allowed psychopathy to organize itself through new forms of technology, starting over the airwaves, and now through the internet and social media. This pathology has now spread to the government and to an oligarchy that seeks total power.

“An elective despotism was not the government we fought for.”
—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1784

While America’s founders were imperfect men who allowed slavery and misogyny to persist within the system, those pathologies have been slowly dissolved by centuries of tears and blood. But now those 250 years of progress are in danger because the safeguards against a return to those barbaric practices have been deliberately broken down.

The temperature of the planet is just a symptom of humanity suffering a relapse. The disease is a civilization which selects for individuals who don’t care about the damage they create.

“The plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good.”
Albert Camus, The Plague

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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The White House and the Pentagon have been releasing videos of “UFOs” which are allegedly unexplainable, including a large batch on Friday. This has been treated seriously by numerous mainstream major networks and newspapers, not to mention the usual swarm of paid Trump propagandists.

As a lifelong sci-fi fan and astronomy buff, I have always been fascinated by the probability of life outside Earth. There would be nothing cooler than finding out that we’ve been visited by extraterrestrials.

But there are zero alien ships in this batch of old, fuzzy videos. The “star-shaped object” being shown by ABC News is just a flare. And the “object shape-shifting through a sharp maneuver” is just two objects crossing paths.

These two random shapes could be almost anything at this resolution—a bird and a bug, for example. Or, according to the government and our entire media ecosystem, it could be one shape-shifting alien spacecraft. Occam’s Razor would like a word.

As one more hilarious example, this was included in the files of “unidentified objects”—a metaphysically perfect example of a weather balloon.

The reason for this “disclosure” couldn’t be more obvious. The U.S. government is not just failing, it is driving the entire world economy into a ditch, and risking untold millions of lives with Trump’s suicidal war on Iran. The release of these UFO files is precisely equivalent to throwing chum in the water. It’s just a garden variety psyop to distract people from all the losing.

As Trump’s psychopathologies continue to worsen, so does the possibility of quickly escaping the war. His posts on Saturday ran the full gamut of his disorders. They clearly show a malignant narcissist suffering from frontotemporal dementia, collapsing out of rage and terror of being seen as a loser.

The alternate reality Trump created around himself is dissolving as the real world keeps butting in. He is bored of the war but the war is not bored of him.

This was a speech Friday by Iran’s leader at the funeral of his father, Ayatollah Khomeini—a clear threat of coordinated terrorist attacks.

The aliens are not from outer space. The aliens are a small slice of humanity with deviant, sociopathic psychologies who hijacked the world to benefit themselves. Do not be distracted by their theater.

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“Bullying was considered a virtue.”
Kimbal Musk, on apartheid education

South African apartheid was designed to enable the white minority to extract labor from the majority Black population. This racialized social structure was enforced through physical violence, geographic separation of races, and a program of educational and psychological control starting at birth. While apartheid officially ended in 1994, I argue it has now been firmly replanted in American soil.

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Three members of the PayPal Mafia—a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who met while building PayPal in the late 1990s—are part of the apartheid diaspora: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and to a lesser extent former White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks.

Understanding how apartheid’s education and pervasive propaganda systems indoctrinated its youth is extraordinarily instructive about the psychology of the men it produced—and about what they really want.

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During the 1970s and 80s, the South African apartheid government was increasingly under pressure for its racist policies. Three propaganda campaigns summarize the South African apartheid government’s strategy for controlling both the white and Black populations in the 1970s and 80s.

• swart gevaar: Black danger! (Black crime and violence)

• rooi gevaar: Red danger! (communist infiltration)

• total onslaught: A perceived campaign by foreign (especially communist) countries and South African left-wing movements against the Nationalist government and its policies, believed to be aimed at weakening South Africa through offensives in the military, economic, psychological, social, political, and cultural spheres.

Here is a short testimonial about what it was like to be brought up in a paranoid, militarized environment where the Black population planned to “destroy white life as we know it” and “there’s now these communist and socialist ideals that come with it.”

Full conversation here.

The anti-communist propaganda of the apartheid South African government was only partly ideological. While there were some communist groups that participated in anti-apartheid activities, there was no concerted plot to overthrow the government. Instead, the apartheid regime used communism as a catch-all phrase for anyone who was seen to pose a threat.

This is highly reminiscent of the current anti-communist hysteria being generated by the Trump regime and its supporters after Mamdani was elected in New York City—and helped several Democratic Socialist candidates become nominees in the midterms.

This is more than just propaganda. It has quasi-legal backup. Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7)—which threatens prosecution of people based on “leftist” or “antifascist” dissent or ideology—has strong echoes of South Africa’s 1950 Suppression of Communism Act.

In 1953, South Africa passed the Bantu Education Act creating a permanent separation of education for Blacks and whites which deliberately disadvantaged the Black majority while providing white children a far higher standard.

Perhaps the most revealing illustration of the ideological connection between the American failed state today and the apartheid-bred oligarchs who helped engineer it, is the 1967 National Education Policy Act which gave legal force to Christian National Education doctrine, excerpts below.

This could easily be seen as a blueprint of the desired end-state of the broligarchy, evangelical Christianity, the GOP, and the Supreme Court. The National Education Policy Act was explicitly racist against Blacks, mandated a “Christian National” ideology, and defined the parameters of a cultic indoctrination system to perpetuate its ideology.

While the American right is not yet asking for a mandated Christian nationalist education with a privileged white elite in control; it’s not far from it. The denial of the separation of church and state, the mandating of Bible reading in Texas, and the rapid erosion of civil rights all head in the same direction.

Another important aspect of the white apartheid system was an emphasis on hyper-masculinity, aggression, and physical prowess. As a nation under both perceived and real threats, South Africa mandated military service at 18 for white men, and required military training during school for white boys, including “wilderness camps” called veldskools. Elon Musk described them as “paramilitary Lord of the Flies” where boys would fight for survival.

Musk was a strange, asocial nerd who did not get along with his schoolmates, often referring to them as “stupid.” While he describes being severely bullied, at one point during high school he used “stupid” one too many times—to describe a schoolmate’s father who had just died of suicide. In response, his fellow student threw Musk down the stairs and kicked him in the head, putting him in the hospital. According to Elon and his father, this left a lifelong impression.

Elon Musk fled South Africa at 17 to Canada, just in time to avoid military service, but psychologically, being rejected by his own society clearly motivated his long arc into darkness.

Musk was taught that he is part of a privileged white elite who will inherit the Earth, that Black people are dangerous and only useful for labor, and that communism is the ultimate enemy. But those elites rejected him, leaving him full of rage and shame. Emotionally, he was stuck hating everyone else, and hating himself as well. He had no place to go with his rage, so he withdrew to believing that he alone was privileged, and would prove to the people who hurt him that he was right about them being “stupid” all along.

Now Musk spends his days as the world’s first trillionaire on his social media platform effectively reproducing his apartheid education to his 240 million followers. Communism is everywhere, Black and brown people are all dangerous, and the world is a total onslaught against persecuted white victims.

His solution to this problem happens to be the same as apartheid’s: more colonialism; only let elites vote; exile or persecute dissidents; encourage vigilante violence; label your enemies communists.

Now, if it were just the first trillionaire trying to psychologically influence his quarter-billion followers that apartheid is a great solution to America’s problems, that would be very, very bad. But in many ways, Musk has literally co-opted the presidency to enact policies that seek to turn his apartheid beliefs into real action.

First, he was given carte blanche with DOGE and immediately cut USAID, the one program that kept hundreds of thousands of Black people in South Africa alive, and millions more elsewhere. He eliminated all “DEI” programs, mentions of Black history, and any other possible recognition of Black and brown people.

Second, he engineered the inversion of the entire asylum program to only allow in white farmers from South Africa with false claims of “white genocide.”

The Afrikaner Exception: Race and Strategic Dismantling of U.S. Refugee Protection under the Trump Administration

This is not the behavior of a patriotic American immigrant. This is the behavior of an apartheid agent infiltrating liberal democracy to abuse and convert it to his alien ideology, from within.

Musk is not alone in his desire to harken back to the simpler and safer days of apartheid boarding school. Peter Thiel spent a decade—from one year-old to eleven—in South Africa and SW Africa (now Namibia)—both controlled by the apartheid state.

While Thiel is not very forthcoming about his childhood, we know it was highly unusual and psychologically formative. He attended at least seven different apartheid elementary schools, including two years at a strict German Christian school in Swakopmund, SW Africa—known to be the last place on Earth to greet each other with “Heil Hitler.”

Moreover, Thiel‘s father was effectively an asset of South African apartheid because he developed a secret uranium mine for the regime’s illegal nuclear program.

For a young gay boy in the 1970s whose favorite pastime was chess, this might be the least hospitable environment outside of prison. Similar to Musk, you can only imagine the impact of being indoctrinated to believe you are the superior race deserving of special treatment, combined with the message that you personally are excluded because of your sexual preference.

This is a psychological vicious cycle: I am special and superior because I am part of a group—which rejects me for who I am.

Thiel’s hatred of the American education system has been repeatedly expressed. He doesn’t believe higher education should be universally offered, and thinks for most people college is a waste.

Thiel has repeatedly appeared in public with infamous “scientific” racist Charles Murray who wrote the long-debunked racist book The Bell Curve to argue that “college education is a disaster” because some people just aren’t smart enough to go.

This is a signature tenet of the apartheid system—elites are naturally built to use their brains and everyone else is built to do labor for them.

It is symptomatic of the psychological trap they experience as men both obsessed with and rejected by apartheid that Thiel and Musk are both major proponents of transhumanism—the desire to extend or replace the physical human body—despite Musk’s vicious transphobia and his rejection of his own trans daughter.

Thiel has said transgender surgery “doesn’t go far enough.” Musk wants to put chips in everyone’s brain. These are men who are so uncomfortable with the world and themselves, they want to escape their own bodies.

While neither Thiel or Musk claim to be practicing Christians, Musk has repeatedly said he is “culturally Christian”—which is true because it was mandated by the South African government. Thiel says he is “religious, not spiritual” and doesn’t claim to believe in God, but “believes in Christ.”

This is made more remarkable by Thiel’s own obsession with the Antichrist, who Thiel attributes to people like the Pope and Greta Thunberg.

Musk’s religion is not Christianity, or even capitalism, it is messianic superiority. For example, Tuesday he tweeted this four-minute AI-generated video which is chock full of retro, jingoistic, over-the-top Americanism, using 100% white people.

It contains the following lyric:

“Promise me that we’re gonna make it to the light
So is it an awakening or is this a knife in the night?
so come on brothers, sisters, stand up tall
Because guess what?
Where we go one, we go all”

This refers to at least three QAnon slogans—“Dark to Light,” “Great Awakening,” and “Where We Go One, We Go All.” But in this case “we” is overtly white people. This is a deliberate attempt to pull Trump’s followers into Musk’s own domain by fusing QAnon symbology with his own open racism.

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk both share a hatred of multiracial, multicultural society, and a self-hate at being rejected by the only place they felt safe—so they are seeking to rebuild it, step by step, in America.

The United States is not just being sent backwards in time by revanchist white supremacists, in many ways we’re being sent backwards to the other side of the world a half-century ago—to an alien civilization that collapsed under its own evil.

I might suggest a simple counter-message: No Apartheid in America.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” —Desmond Tutu

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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I spent July 4th watching the unfolding humiliation in Washington DC, starting with masked Nazis marching unencumbered through the nation’s capital. When the El Niño-fueled heat index hit 115F and numerous people passed out at Trump’s “fair,” the parade was canceled, leaving 400 white men waving Confederate flags to get all the attention.

The weather problems continued into the night, with a long rain delay and Trump’s 850,000-shell fireworks display finishing around 1AM. While I love fireworks, as with everything else he touches, Trump managed to ruin them out of sheer excess.

But to me the most remarkable July 4th sentiment was the richest man finally coming out with his true feelings about democracy. Like his fellow apartheid-bred oligarch Peter Thiel—who famously said “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible” and blamed women’s suffrage for it—Elon Musk is now against voting by “takers” like Zohran Mamdani.

This sentiment, that only “makers” should vote, is identical to the ideology of Elon Musk‘s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, who joined a movement called Technocracy, Inc. that advocated for disenfranchising the population in favor of allowing a small group of “technocrats” to run a North American superstate.

Maye Musk says: “My family is so proud to be Americans.” But Joshua Haldeman left America in the mid-1930s for Canada after he tried to start a farm during the Dust Bowl. Haldeman blamed Jews and Blacks for his own failure and in 1950, after failing to start a career in Canadian politics, Haldeman left for the self-proclaimed “whites only paradise” of South Africa.

Of course, in South Africa, Black people couldn’t vote. The year suffrage was granted to the Black population, Elon Musk and his family fled back to Canada and then the U.S. Now over 30 years later, the only asylum seekers allowed in America are South African white farmers who stake a false claim of “genocide.”

If the United States survives beyond the Trump regime, we must learn from this experience. The U.S. government should not and must not be in the business of supporting people who are against the very foundations of constitutional democracy. Our collective blindness to the danger posed by Thiel and Musk, despite all the warnings of who and what they are, must never be repeated.

Please join me and our bright, passionate community of democracy-enjoyers at Noon PT / 3PM ET for a discussion of the events of the past week, the Necrocracy, our long history of violence, and anything else you like to discuss. Hope to see you. Details below.

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“During the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.”
—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651

For a quarter-millennium, violence has been central to the identity—and the reality—of the United States. The fight for America’s independence began years before the “shot heard around the world,” but it was the use of violence in the founders’ cause that signaled the true beginning of the revolution.

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However, imagine we did not have a George Washington or a Paul Revere, and the British had put down the rebellion. The same violence would not be seen as a brave act but as treasonous and futile.

America was successfully founded by men who were bathed in the blood of colonialism, slavery, and revolution. This violent beginning has always remained an undeniable part of America’s genetics.

American civic mythology is commonly taught as a series of righteous military victories, conflicts leaving hundreds of thousands or millions dead, bracketing periods of expansion and relative peace. The Civil War, the Great War, WWII—this is the violence that we celebrate as the mark of a great and exceptional nation.

There is of course some merit to this picture, and even more that it elides, but America’s early identity with righteous military violence is now being distorted to unimaginable proportions.

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To celebrate the beginning of American independence 250 years ago, Trump began with gladiatorial bloodsport on the White House lawn with a paywalled UFC event. He canceled long-planned events from the Smithsonian, criminally funneled money to himself and his cronies, and managed to produce a nearly empty National Mall for two weeks with the “Great American State Fair.”

The violent theme resumed on July 3rd with a half-day military air show in DC—although Trump’s fair was forced to shut down due to excessive heat after 11 people were transported to the hospital.

In the evening, Trump speaks at Mt. Rushmore, undoubtedly to explain in detail why he needs to be the fifth man carved onto it.

To end the festivities, July 4th is scheduled to be a nearly 12-hour marathon in heat conditions verging on deadly—the “feels like” index will approach 110F. Another air show that appears to include most of the airborne killing machines used by the military will blanket the region.

Trump has scheduled a “really long speech” for himself at 9:45PM, when temperatures will still be in the 90s. As he told an audience at the opening of Teddy Roosevelt’s Presidential Library:

“On July 4th, it’s going to be approximately 107 degrees out. And I’m going to make a really long speech just to show that I could do anything.”

There is a deep sadomasochistic violence to this statement. He’s openly calling it a physical test, not just for himself but for his followers. This is on the same psychological continuum as the kinds of tests Jim Jones put his cult members through—to prepare them for violence.

“You will suffer with me until the end.”

After a speech that may stretch until 11PM, Trump has one more violent surprise in store. Last year, the July 4th fireworks on the Mall, always among the most spectacular in the nation, used 7,000 shells. For this year’s show, more than 850,000 will be used—120 times more. This is potentially a world-record but may also make the air in the region nearly unbreathable. On average 354 shells per second will be shot into the hot, humid air, creating a blanket of ash and particulates.

It’s difficult to imagine that after this long physical ordeal, there will not be casualties at the event. That the actual stage seems to be falling apart does not help with the impression that safety will not be the first priority.

On the day before the long federal holiday weekend to celebrate American independence, and 250 years of constitutional democracy, former Fox propagandist and now US Attorney for DC, Jeanine Pirro, gave her own definition of violence. She said this when announcing the indictment of Olympian David Hearn for touching the Reflecting Pool:

“By Hearn’s own admission of June 19th he reached down into the pool. Our evidence for those shows that the National Park Service employees observed Hearn actually forcefully and violently pulling up and removing the bottom liner with both hands.”

There is no evidence that David Hearn did anything but touch the water and a piece of already detached liner caused by Trump’s own negligence and incompetence. Nevertheless, Pirro wants to put David Hearn in prison for ten years—because of his “violence” against a shallow pool of water.

With this sadistic, post-truth definition of violence by the state—not to mention the street murders of Americans in Minneapolis by masked federal agents just a few months ago— is it any surprise that more than a third of Americans believe that violence might be necessary to get the nation back on track?

A new Marist/NPR poll says 37% of respondents saw violence as necessary, while 83% said America has strayed far from its founding principles and ideals.

Crucially, the poll did not specify what those principles and ideals were, but according to 37% of Americans, violence is apparently compatible with restoring them.

As alarming as this is, it is not inconsistent with Enlightenment philosophers, much less the American revolutionaries they inspired.

“He who attempts to get another man into his absolute power, does thereby put himself into a state of war with him…

In all States and Conditions the true remedy of Force without Authority, is to oppose Force to it.”
—John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 1690

Locke was not calling for violence, nor was he saying it was usually justified. But it was core to his model of government that violence without authority was an act of war. Both he and the founders believed that the burden was not the victim’s to endure.

The respondents to the survey were not necessarily answering out of bloodlust or extremism. Many are surely rational Americans who simply share the founders’ worldview—and see the signs of a state imposing force without authority. They’ve seen a man get 30 years for moving a box of pamphlets, and another indicted for touching water. They‘ve seen not just physical violence but psychological, legal, constitutional, and moral violence by a regime which has lost its authority.

Perhaps it’s time to ask, once again, the basic question: Does might make right?

If so, violence is never the answer, because violence is only the privilege of those who already have the power to wreak it. If not, sometimes the best answer is the only one left.

“Since no man has a natural authority over his fellow, and force creates no right, we must conclude that conventions form the basis of all legitimate authority among men.”
—Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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I have a curious ability to consume large amounts of complex information and develop a mental model from it which I can keep building on. This sometimes gives me a kind of probabilistic picture of certain events ahead of most people. But it comes with a lot of tradeoffs. Basically, I learn wicked fast but I’m terrible at most regular stuff, like money—and sales.

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Necrocracy

The U.S. federal government, including the oligarchy that effectively controls it, has stopped concerning itself with the wellbeing of the living. Instead, it has become an instrument of demographically targeted death. I’m going to refer to this as a necrocracy.

America’s necrocracy is a dark, complex animal, created over decades by a layered stack of interests that barely align, except when it comes to white supremacy—and the capital penalty for not being part of the in-group. It is a single racist death cult, but it is not a monolith, and the seams between its parts may be the best way to slow it down.

The major components of American necrocracy are a dying, degenerating Donald Trump and his fracturing MAGA cult; a corrupt, theocratic, hypercapitalist Supreme Court; and the technofascist oligarchy that funds and supports it all. The examples of this are becoming so abundant that it’s no longer a theory of what the necrocrats intend to do. It’s just about how fast they can do it.

When you add it all up, it shows the unmistakable desire to cause mass death in demographics that the necrocracy deems unworthy. The signals from every part of this elite death machine are indistinguishable from early Nazi programs: causing and rationalizing mass death by starvation and disease in the poorest people in the world; pogroms of millions of immigrants; institutionalization of the disabled; and even sterilization of undesirables are all being normalized as legitimate policy.

This has the unmistakable fingerprints of a new holocaust in motion—institutionalized, targeted mass murder.

Malignant Narcissists Do Not Die Quietly

Donald Trump is dying, physically and politically. Seemingly every appearance shows another decline in his ability to control himself, and to make rational decisions. He is increasingly disheveled, incoherent, angry, and apathetic about anything except his “fountains,” his personal grievances, and cheating to hold on to power.

Trump was asked Monday about why he stopped a bipartisan housing bill from passing Congress.

“To me, compared to the Save America Act, everything else is a big yawn.”

Trump is not just play-acting this lack of interest. And he is no longer able to even feign caring about anything but himself and his vanity projects.

Malignant narcissism, defined by Erich Fromm, is a combination of antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, paranoia, and sadism. A malignant narcissist may learn how to mimic empathy or love, but is totally incapable of feeling either. When the frontal lobe is affected by disease like dementia, the ability to pretend to care about others ceases to exist as well.

Death to a malignant narcissist represents the ultimate grievance. The nature of their pathology means they never allow others to have a superior position, even at the end, so the natural reaction to impending death is to take everyone else with them.

“If I can’t live, why should anyone else?”

For others in the necrocracy who want targeted death, Trump is an ideal weapon of mass destruction—desperate, gullible, and immoral enough to go along with anything. The near-perfect Nazi eagle in Trump’s meme below was a deliberate signal of what they want. It even has 11 stars, which represent the Confederacy, not the Union.

Trump resorts to full-fledged fascist signaling because he no longer has the ability to care about the consequences of doing it. His capacity for judgment, or to worry about a negative reaction are gone. For example, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of being free of a tyrannical king, Trump is considering selling 250 pardons to criminals. (Gift article)

The Great Necrocratic Enabler

The Supreme Court is not a court of law. It is a christofascist bribery cult intent on creating a “unitary executive,” ending the administrative state, and aggressively enabling the Republican Party—and its demented, collapsing leader—to wield and keep unprecedented power.

This includes the capacity to cause targeted death. In the last week, they rendered these decisions:

Trump vs. Slaughter—Invalidated Humphrey’s Executor, 1935, which ruled that Congress can limit a president’s power to fire certain government officials. This means that Trump can replace leaders, commissioners, and boards at these agencies:

• Federal Trade Commission

• National Labor Relations Board

• Federal Communications Commission

• Securities and Exchange Commission

• Federal Election Commission

• Federal Energy Regulatory Commission

• Consumer Product Safety Commission

• Nuclear Regulatory Commission

• Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board

• Merit Systems Protection Board

• Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

• Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission

Who might Trump put in charge of nukes, or hazardous chemicals, or workplace safety? This is a recipe for actual national disaster, and another way for the necrocracy to increase its kill count: by replacing governance with grift, patronage, and racial malice.

Monsanto v. Durnell—allowed Monsanto to escape responsibility for a potentially massive liability for glyphosate-caused cancer.

Mullin v. Doe—held that the judiciary does not have standing to limit Trump’s ending of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians and Syrians, throwing hundreds of thousands out of work, and putting them at risk of being detained and deported immediately. Haiti and Syria are both in extremely desperate condition—this pogrom will undoubtedly cause death.

As a different example, over 100 Venezuelans are missing after the hotel they were deported to collapsed in the recent earthquakes—the day after they arrived.

Mullin vs. Al Otro Lado—allows border crossings to keep asylum seekers on the Mexican side of the border, leaving them exposed to a multitude of dangers while they spend months or years attempting to legally enter.

Wolford v. Lopez—struck down a Hawaii law allowing private business to refuse consent to gun owners to carry on their property. This will put people at risk in their own establishments. An even more terrifying case is coming: the Court just took a case to review the legality of states banning semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15.

West Virginia v. B.P.J. / Little v. Hecox—upheld laws in West Virginia and Idaho banning transgender athletes, adding to the increasingly hostile environment created in rulings like upholding the military ban. Trans people are being methodically used as a test case for other groups of people the necrocracy wants to dispose of.

The Supreme Court did hold, in a terrifyingly close 6-3 decision, that the plain English meaning of the 14th Amendment granting birthright citizenship still applies. However, Trump has already unconstitutionally demanded that Congress make a law violating the Amendment. And people like the editor of the Federalist, Sean Davis, are displaying the underbelly of the necrocracy in the open.

Davis suggests that the United States “require sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.” You first, Sean.

Finally, in National Republican Senatorial Committee vs. FEC the Court overturned a 25-year-old precedent and blew away the remaining limits on campaign financing, allowing a huge amount of money from billionaires, most of whom support Trump, to be funneled into elections—just in time for the midterms.

One of the people who will undoubtedly take advantage of this ruling is Elon Musk—the Crown Prince of the American Necrocracy.

Death Wish

As someone who has been writing about Musk consistently for five years, I can tell you his rhetoric and his behavior are getting more and more extreme all the time. He has spent much of the last week in a full meltdown about an analysis by The Lancet that by 2030 more than 14 million people will die, mostly in Africa, as a result of his dismantling of USAID.

Confronted with this statistic, rather than acknowledge any responsibility, Musk demanded to know the names of the children who starved to death or died of AIDS due to his actions. When Nicholas Kristof, who traveled to Africa to document what was happening, provided a list of names to him, Musk’s tantrum was volcanic: “You’re an utter piece of shit and a liar.” “Kristof is utterly evil.”

At no point in time has Musk, or any of his major supporters even considered that they’re talking about people—real people suffering and dying unnecessarily—because death is the whole point in a necrocracy.

But Musk has not been solely focused on avoiding blame for the death of millions of Black people. He is also busy trying to cause the death of immigrants and “race traitors” through vigilante violence, calling for massively increasing capital punishment, and extolling the virtues of “white colonialism.”

Musk’s frantic efforts to radicalize his followers into his personal Death Wish fantasy would be disturbing enough if he hadn’t just been given an unlimited budget by the Supreme Court to interfere with the 2026 elections by bribing voters—like he did in 2024. He will use every tool, legal or otherwise, to avoid having to sit in Congressional hearings and be held accountable.

Nature Is Cooperating With the Machine

The final component of the necrocracy is not a person willingly going along with a program of death, it is a planet reflexively reacting to the abuses of a species with no ability to control itself—a species on the verge of causing its own extinction.

The planet has passed the tipping point of catastrophic climate change. It has already arrived, and this year it is showing its teeth in a way that cannot be ignored or denied—although some will still try.

Europe is suffering from three consecutive extreme “heat domes” caused by an overheated climate exacerbated by the start of a Super El Niño that is already surpassing all-time ocean temperature records. In France alone, the current heatwave has killed over 1,200 people. Not in the most vulnerable parts of the world—in western Europe.

The first major effect to hit the U.S. has started with a historic heat dome building over the Eastern states. On July 4th in Washington DC, when Donald Trump is expected to have a major rally for himself, the temperature may reach 105F with a “feels like“ temperature of 115F. That is close to the death zone for people to stay outside for an extended length of time.

The peak of the El Niño won’t hit for another six months. Imagine the impact on an already impoverished, weakened Africa with no USAID to help. The scenario is badly complicated by the fact that Trump’s war prevented much of the fertilizer Africa needs to grow food from arriving in time for this year’s crops. Worse, there are now very concerning breakouts of both Ebola and Marburg virus.

This confluence of circumstances is almost guaranteed to cause a major humanitarian catastrophe. I shudder to think how this regime will react or rather fail to.

Life and Death

While I struggle to find any “silver lining” in this bleak vision, I do get the unmistakable sense that the American people, and the world more generally, are beginning to catch on to the true consequences of our collective failure. And while I fear what’s coming in these next six months and beyond, perhaps for people to fight for life, first they need to see what death really looks like.

In the end, this is not a left-vs-right war. In many ways, it’s not even a class war. It’s a life-vs-death war. It’s about whether we organize around the argument of who deserves to die? or, how is life is best lived?

We need a revolution of the living.

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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In many ways, I grew up on the National Mall. As the only child of a single mom just outside the DC border, summer vacations largely involved getting on the Metro and spending all day in the museums.

The Mall is big. Football field after football field of grass. But on a summer day, the paths along its length would be always be bustling with people from literally every corner of the world. The Smithsonian was a kaleidoscope of humanity—and to me it was magic.

That’s why the images and video coming from the “Great American State Fair” which Donald Trump’s regime says is a celebration of the semiquincentennial of America’s founding, are so shocking to me—and such a perfect visual metaphor.

To empty out the Mall so thoroughly on a weekend day is, in a twisted way, an achievement. On your average Saturday there would be—and I’m just eyeballing it—about a zillion times more people on the Mall than there are for Trump’s “fair.”

As it turns out, there was a real plan for a real celebration. The Mall would have been open, as it always has been for the Folklife Festival, instead of looking like a cordoned off military green zone in a zombie movie.

Instead of a festival of festivals, people got $27 burgers and empty exhibits. Even Vanilla Ice was cancelled. The Great American State Fail, unfortunately, is exactly what we deserve right now. When you elect a failure, failure is what you get in return.

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“I believe in an America where separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote”
—JFK, to Southern Baptist leaders, 1960

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“Religious Liberty”

In the White House Friday, standing behind a somnolent president, Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick made a startling pronouncement:

“The key is… one phrase, that’s not in the Constitution, and that phrase is separation of church and state. The left has used that one phrase that was one line out of hundreds of letters by Thomas Jefferson to batter and hammer people of faith for the last 70 to 80 years. And this report will speak very clearly that we want to be sure Americans understand that they cannot be attacked by that phrase any longer.”

Patrick is the chair of the Presidential Religious Liberty Commission, a White House office directed by the Justice Department, which delivered Trump a report on alleged incidents of people being persecuted for their beliefs. It offers a series of conclusions and actions which will supposedly ensure “religious liberty.”

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In reality, it is 220 pages of some of the weirdest and most insidious propaganda I’ve ever seen, especially from a government.

Little Voice

In his White House comments, Dan Patrick defined “religious liberty” this way:

“The question is what is religious liberty? It’s our conscience. It’s that little voice inside of us that tells us right from wrong. It’s that voice that when we’re in trouble we can talk to in our quiet moments. It’s that voice that we feel unloved and alone that can comfort us through a higher power.”

Dan Patrick’s “little voice” is very powerful apparently. It is at least three things: a moral conscience, a way to frame self-talk, and an emotional regulator. It covers most of human inner experience—all in the form of a “higher power.”

But that is not “liberty.” That is a private interior realm that has nothing to do with me or you, dear reader. To equate it with freedom is just an abuse of language to transform a personal belief into a legal weapon. Nevertheless, it starts a chain of twisted logic that ends in ripping up the Constitution:

“When governments can take away your religious liberty, they’re putting their hand in your heart and taking everything you believe in. And if governments can do that, then they become God. The president spoke earlier today at the Communist threat in this country. We know what communists do around the world. They remove God. They close the churches. They punish the believers.”

Dan Patrick is saying that somehow the government can “take away” your “little voice” without ever explaining how or why it would do that, or what happens if you don’t have one. But what he really means is that anyone who doesn’t share his ideology is a godless “communist threat.” It follows from this line of thinking that everyone must be forced to obtain the little voice through government intervention.

Required Reading

This is no idle talk. On the same day the report was delivered, in Dan Patrick’s own state, Bible stories became required reading in Texas. His little voice is becoming mandatory.

Separation of church and state is not just an interpretation of the Constitution. And it is not a liberal myth. It is bedrock to the entire American project—and has been from the beginning. “God” does not arise in the Constitution, and the only time it’s mentioned in the Declaration of Independence is as “Nature’s God,” a deliberately non-Christian, deist, Enlightenment-era formulation.

To make it as clear as possible, the founders chose to make the first ten words of the Bill of Rights the Establishment Clause: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

In 1796, the government of George Washington started to negotiate the Treaty of Tripoli, which was ratified by Congress and signed by John Adams in 1797. In order to reassure potential partners who had been the targets of Christian colonialism, the document read in part: “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded upon the Christian religion.”

In 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant said:

“Leave the matter of religion to the family circle, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contribution. Keep the Church and State forever separate.”
—Address to the Army of the Tennessee, Des Moines, September 29, 1875

You can find reaffirmation of this basic tenet of government throughout American history because it was one of the most important pillars of the Enlightenment, which inspired the founders and provided the basic architecture for the Constitution.

The Existentialists Did It

Despite the facts of America’s founding, in a truly ignorant, ahistorical passage, the Religious Liberty Commission report asserts separation of church and state is a kind of 20th century mythological construct caused by the influence of European existentialists. Three in particular I’ve written about: Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Sartre.

While a full philosophical rebuttal to this reductive illogical nonsense would take a book, generally speaking the mere presence of the report itself, along with its theocratic recommendations, provides a perfect example of what each of these thinkers feared most.

Nietzsche’s “God is dead” was not a celebration of the decline of religion. He was not a nihilist. He saw the Enlightenment as a substitute for God, which he thought was a catastrophe. He believed destroying the foundation of religion—the belief in God—through science and reason while retaining its morality was a fundamental error.

He would have seen the Commission’s report as what he called ressentiment—outrage at the perceived cause of one’s persistent frustration.

Michel Foucault was deeply interested in the use of “regimes of truth” by institutions like religions and governments—which define reality in whatever way serves their purpose. The actions recommended by the report would set up a kind of Christian panopticon, which Foucault saw as a method to make the population feel watched at all times, whether they really are or not.

Sartre would have seen the report as a quintessential artifact of what he called mauvais foi—bad faith—lying to yourself to be relieved of the anxiety of choice.

“I attempt to evade the anguish of my own freedom by making myself a fixed role, by being something rather than someone—and that is bad faith.”
—Existentialism Is a Humanism, Jean‐Paul Sartre (1946)

The caricature offered by the Commission’s report of three of the most important thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries as subversive anti-American influences says far more about the authors than about their targets.

Nightmare

In the first Trump administration, you might dismiss this report as propaganda, and see the recommendations as merely performative. But this is a different group with an unhinged, unrestricted president, and they want to do real damage. When seven people who committed no violence are condemned to 450 combined years in prison for being in “Antifa,” you have to believe the regime is capable of following through on its threats.

Here are some of the report’s recommendations:

• Redefine church–state separation through DOJ guidance.

• Create federal hotlines, portals, and reporting systems for alleged religious-liberty violations.

• Expand litigation and funding penalties against noncompliant schools and institutions.

• Promote “school choice” and stronger parental control over curriculum, gender, and healthcare.

• Broaden religious expression rights in public schools.

• Expand conscience exemptions in healthcare and the military.

• Restore benefits lost over COVID-vaccine refusals.

• Repeal the Johnson Amendment.

• Increase enforcement against private employers and alleged religious “debanking.”

• Intensify “anti-Semitism investigations” and funding sanctions, targeted at liberal schools.

• Appoint judges committed to aggressive religious-liberty rulings.

• Create official medals for religious-liberty “heroes.”

This does not create an environment for “religious liberty.” It institutionalizes a Christian worldview—and punishes non-believers.

America was created under the proposition that everyone should be entitled to their “little voice” if their religion gives it to them; and that everyone should be entitled to not have a secret friend that determines their morality if that works for them.

To have the government decide that its people must have a little voice in their heads is the nightmare the founders built America to prevent. It is mind control through altered reality.

For me, and for my grandchildren, it is the hill I am willing to die on.

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada is a legal immigrant with a green card, who came to live in America at 14 years old. On July 4th, 2025, his wife, Maricela Rueda, was arrested at a protest at an ICE facility in Prairieville, Texas. A police officer had been shot and injured, although Maricela had nothing to do with it. After she called to tell him, Daniel moved a box of antifascist magazines from one apartment to another.

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He was being surveilled by the FBI. For moving a box, he was arrested, jailed, and repeatedly threatened with deportation if he didn’t plead guilty. Believing himself innocent, he didn’t.

On Tuesday, Daniel was convicted on terrorism charges and given a sentence of thirty years in prison. His wife was given fifty years, despite having committed no crime other than being at a protest and trying to leave when she was told. In total, eight people from a group of under a dozen protesters were convicted and sentenced to the maximum possible 450 combined years in prison.

Only one of them committed any violence. The others committed no serious crimes, if any. Instead, they were accused of being “Antifa.”

To put this case in perspective, the leaders of the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers received 22 and 18 years respectively on seditious conspiracy charges for planning and executing January 6—which resulted in hundreds of cops being beaten, tortured, and injured.

The average homicide sentence is 22.5 years.

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The case was seen as a test of the Trump regime’s National Security Policy Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7)—a policy which criminalized anti-fascism and “Antifa” as terrorism.

But “Antifa” is simply a hoax. There is no organized group called Antifa. The meme was started in 2017 by alt-right trolls after Charlottesville.

But that did not stop Trump’s personal defense attorney Todd Blanche, and the man who sued me for calling him a “chud,” Kash Patel, from boasting about “dismantling Antifa.”

“Today’s sentencings show the FBI remains committed to identifying, locating, and dismantling Antifa and its funding networks across the country”
—FBI Director, Kash Patel

“The sentences handed down today make clear that Antifa terrorists who attack law enforcement and federal facilities will face swift and uncompromising justice”
—Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche

This is a mass delusion shared by Trump’s entire government. “Antifa” is just a boogeyman to project right-wing violence onto. Here is convicted seditious conspiracist Joe Biggs describing how he planned to “dress like Antifa” on January 6th so he could ambush protesters.

Joe Biggs was set free by the Trump Justice Department. Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, on the other hand, is going to prison for three decades for moving a box of paper.

This is not my country. It is unrecognizable. It is textbook fascism of the kind not seen since Nazi Germany. Life sentences for protesting is just one step from executing dissidents like Sophie and Hans Scholl and their friends in White Rose who were guillotined for distributing pamphlets mocking Hitler.

But the Trump regime has no intention of stopping with protesters. It is trying to put a Congresswoman in prison for 17 years for showing up at an ICE facility. Given their glee at destroying the lives of eight people for being in a non-existent “Antifa” cell, this threat must be taken very seriously.

NSPM-7 was put in place after Charlie Kirk’s assassination as a kind of retribution against the “radical left.” The effort was led by Stephen Miller, who has another project in motion. He wants to move disabled people from community care to “institutions.”

This is pure, unadulterated Nazism.

Just as eliminating antifascists from Germany was one of Hitler’s goals, so was eliminating the weak, the disabled, and the “work-shy” from communities so they could be “institutionalized.”

Between 1939 and 1941, 300,000 disabled people were murdered in institutions or concentration camps in the Nazi program Aktion T4.

Railroading non-violent protesters for life on blatantly manufactured charges, and trying to purge the disabled from our communities, are not just signs of fascism. They are limbs of the death machine fascism always creates, in full motion. Stopping it is not going to be easy—or peaceful—I’m afraid.

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”
— Antonio Gramsci, 1930, Prison Notebooks

The Superpower Is Dead

If someone told you in 2016 that within a decade, Russia would lose a war to Ukraine and the United States would lose a war to Iran, you would have likely thought them insane.

Nevertheless, Putin is in dire straits—his economy is in a shambles. The Russian army has made no territorial advances in months, while Ukraine surgically destroys Russia’s energy infrastructure and sets Moscow oil fields ablaze. And on Monday morning, the United States signed a deal amounting to total surrender to Iran.

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This double loss represents more than just two incompetent narcissists launching wars they couldn’t win. It represents a break in the foundational myth of the post-WWII world order: The myth of the superpower is dead.

While the end of the Cold War was supposed to signal the end of Russia’s dominance over its neighbors, in reality, its status as a superpower never really ended. It was still one of the three countries at the Yalta Conference which recreated the world. And it still had the biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons. With Putin’s rise and successful influence operations over numerous foreign countries, particularly in Eastern Europe and America, Russia worked hard to make itself look ascendant.

But that image is no longer believable. Seemingly every day, as Putin desperately bombs and drones civilians after more than four years of failure, Ukraine reaches another long-range target of Russia’s energy infrastructure. In the last two weeks, Moscow has been turned into a dystopian hellscape with “black rain” from exploded oil tanks falling on the city.

Russia’s status as a paper tiger is being cemented over a long brutal war.

On the other hand, America’s demise as a superpower has been accomplished in just a few months. Donald Trump’s whim that he would take a “little excursion” in Iran cost hundreds of billions, not counting the increase in prices at the gas pump. But the real price was to the geopolitical stature of a nation seen as a dominant force for eight decades—but nevertheless managed to lose a war to the global equivalent of a gas station in a bad part of town.

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The humiliation was total—the Iranian delegation disrespected JD Vance and walked out of the talks Sunday after Trump threatened the negotiators with death. The final “deal” was not a deal at all—more like the concept of a plan to surrender—which nets Iran $300 billion. And despite the tenuous nature of the agreement, the U.S. lifted sanctions on Iranian oil for the first time in decades, rendering Iran’s “shadow fleet” legitimate.

These wars represent more than two big countries being beaten by two much smaller countries. They represent the collapse of the most load-bearing beams in geopolitics—twin defeats creating a power vacuum unlike any the world has seen in modern history.

Power Vacuum

“While men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in a state of war.”
— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

The projection of military power is not just about the ability to apply actual kinetic force; it is even more about leveraging fear. It is about the psychological power to get your way without firing a shot. Prior to 2022, both Russia and the United States retained an aura of near-invincibility, along with China. Trying to take any of the three superpowers on directly, seemed like a suicide mission.

But Ukraine, and now Iran, have changed that calculus, probably forever. Each took the best punch a superpower could take, and emerged in glory—at least so far. Occupied Crimea—the “crown jewel” of Putin’s conquest—is currently cut off from food and gas, while the Russians who moved there are waiting in long lines trying to escape back home.

In America, however, the main story on the news is not losing a war to Iran; it’s the Reflecting Pool being turned into a swamp. It’s people being arrested for putting their hands in the water of a monument kids have been swimming in for decades. It’s the president of the United States blaming his own failure on “vandalism.” And it’s the White House and Pentagon appealing to QAnon believers.

Who on Earth would take America seriously?

The collapse of the Russian Bear, and of America’s ability to act as the world police, have implications that are impossible to predict right now. But one physical law can give us a framework: Nature abhors a vacuum.

The hole where “American exceptionalism” used to live must be filled. The collapse of the Russian claim to empire in Europe will also need to be replaced. If the world no longer fears America and Russia, the world must and will reshape itself. But how?

The Broligarchs Have a Plan

“A country you can start from your computer.”
— Balaji Srinivasan, Network State

Since Putin took over Russia, his “Brain,” ultra-fascist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, has promoted the concept of a “multipolar world” to combat the “hegemon” of the United States. One of the poles in this model would be “Eurasia”—essentially a reconstruction of the Soviet Union, with Moscow as the “Third Rome.” Other poles would include China, India, and the United States.

But Putin’s dream of a Russian Empire stretching from the Pacific Ocean to Germany seems far less likely at this point than Putin being brought down by his own hubris. And the long project of the far-right to destroy “globalism,” continuing with Trump’s dismantling of U.S. soft power, has left us isolated, weak, and vulnerable.

If nature abhors a vacuum, and the superpowers that took up so much space in the geopolitical order are shrinking, who will fill this yawning chasm?

Well, the broligarchs have a plan.

The big idea is that the nation-state itself is a dying concept. The broligarchs do not need to replace the territorial reach of the superpowers. They want to own the infrastructure through which weakened states communicate, fight, and govern.

The techno-fascist movement led by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel religiously believes that the internet and AI have changed the rules so that geography no longer represents the most salient boundaries. Instead they have proposed the network state—a sovereign digital nation run by billionaire—or trillionaire—dictators.

SpaceX is a novel, gargantuan variant.

As I recently wrote, you can also look at the combination of SpaceX, Anduril, and Palantir as an alternate military-industrial complex, a Trojan state within a state parasitizing the government—while preparing to ultimately replace it.

The suicidal abdication of America’s superpower status by Trump’s regime gives this movement an immense opportunity, one which is being exploited at an accelerated pace. These companies are burrowing deeper and deeper, hoping to become impossible to remove by any government, because they want to be the government.

The myth of the national superpower has served America’s interests for 80 years, but that myth appears to be permanently broken. No country that backs itself into a trillion-dollar crisis and has to surrender to Iran, much less one that falsely arrests people for sabotaging a pool of water, can be taken seriously.

Even if we manage to eject this regime and put adults back in the White House, it’s hard to see how America ever returns to its former stature. We have been proven to be untrustworthy.

Our fight is no longer really with Donald Trump, although we still need to get rid of him. Our fight is with the people who deliberately put him there—to break us down into rubble and sell the pieces to the highest bidder.

“In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
— Antonio Gramsci, 1930, Prison Notebooks

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The Reflecting Pool fiasco strikes me as more than just a metaphor. It is a perfect reflection of the man who ruined it. The Pool, in its own way, is doing its job.

After draining the Pool, and giving it to a no-bid swimming pool contractor, Trump painted it dark blue, which turned it into an algae swamp. In a rush to fix the problem, they dumped corrosive 12% hydrogen peroxide into the Pool, which is heavier than water and sunk to the bottom, detaching big chunks of the blue epoxy paint.

Now, after ginning up conspiracy theories about leftists sabotaging the Pool, they are arresting people for even putting their hands in the water—because Trump has to blame someone else for everything. I have dubbed this psyop “AlgaeGate.”

This is Trump’s psyche in miniature. He saw something he was jealous of, decided to “fix it,” destroyed it instead, and is now trying to find a way to blame someone else.

While the Reflecting Pool can be cleaned up, many of the other things Trump is trying to “fix” cannot be so easily corrected. He tried to “fix” the threat from Iran, and ended up making them great again instead. Now, at the same moment JD Vance is opening “negotiations” with Iran to stop the fighting, Trump is sabotaging him by threatening to “take over the rest of your country” and “blow the shit out of them.”

We are experiencing a unique historical event—a superpower collapsing with the psychology of its leader. While Trump can’t last much longer—he’s very ill—until he moves on, it’s going to be a long, dark summer. Losing a war to terrorists is a severe narcissistic injury. He will need to take it out on someone else.

Please join me and our community for a Zoom today, Sunday, Noon PT / 3PM ET. We’ll talk about Government 2 and why it’s not the Trump regime that we really need to worry about—it’s what comes after. As always, it’s wide open for questions and comments. Hope to see you! Details below.

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P2

On March 17, 1981, the Italian financial police raided furniture maker Licio Gelli’s villa in the Tuscan countryside. In the course of the raid, they discovered a list of almost a thousand members of a previously unknown Masonic Lodge.

Gelli, a fascist and former fighter for Mussolini’s Blackshirts in the Spanish Civil War, turned out to be the head of a right-wing secret society known as Propaganda Due, or P2. The name had nothing to do with propaganda as we know it. It came from Propaganda Massonica a Masonic lodge created in the 19th century to keep its prominent membership secret.

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Within three months, the discovery of Gelli’s list brought down Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani’s government. Gelli had created a secret society within the secret society of Masonry, that included top figures across government, military, and media. Although the P2 lodge had its Masonic charter revoked in 1976, Gelli maintained this double-shell structure until 1982.

P2 was not just powerful men trading favors. Gelli’s papers included a “Plan for Democratic Rebirth”: a program to concentrate media power, weaken organized labor, strengthen the executive, and remake Italian democracy from inside its existing institutions.

Strategy of Tension

The “strategy of tension” is a political project that encourages chaos, bombings and street violence in order to push a population towards the perceived order of a strong government. It is most closely associated with the Years of Lead in Italy (1968-1982). It was during this period that Licio Gelli’s group P2 was most prominent.

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While P2 was never formally found guilty of bombings, it ran cover for terrorist perpetrators and interfered with investigations of their crimes—from inside the government. This includes the Bologna Massacre, a bombing at a train station that killed 85 people, and injured 200, in August of 1980.

P2 was acting as a kind of secret state within the Italian government, one which threatened to swallow Italy whole. While Italy survived the near-collapse that followed the Years of Lead, had P2 not been discovered when it was, it might have grown “too big to fail.”

Dialog

45 years later, a list of several hundred registrants to a secret society have been discovered in America. While this is by no means the full extent of the underlying network, it is a small window into a movement with architectural similarities and remarkably congruent ambitions to Propaganda Due: a Trojan government being orchestrated in parallel to the official one by a secretive group of anti-democratic elites and political operatives.

Here are some of the previous attendees of Dialog, which include people from both sides of the political aisle, including Democrats like Cory Booker, House Intelligence leader Jim Himes, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, and the governor who promotes crypto and freed election denier Tina Peters, Jared Polis of Colorado. It also includes a who’s who of antidemocratic operatives like Leonard Leo, Elon Musk, Jared Kushner, Scott Bessent, and Peter Thiel’s Palantir co-founders Alex Karp and Joe Lonsdale.

The list was first published by a new reporter in Wired in an article which fails to mention the former editor-in-chief of Wired and current editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Nick Thompson is also on the list.

The group was started by Thiel and venture capitalist Auren Hoffman in 2006. It also appeared in the Epstein files when someone sent an invitation to Epstein and asked if it was worth attending an event.

Dialog sessions include topics like:

• Navigating WWIII

• Disinformation and Deepfakes

• Democracy Under Surveillance

• How’s Your Sex Life?

• Build-a-Cult

Thiel has backed even more transgressive events like the “Enhanced Games”—an alternate Olympics that encourages doping and body hacks—and “Hereticon” where topics include “Must a Human Be an Ape?,” “The Bright Side of Nicotine,” and “How to Steal an Election.”

The invitation to Hereticon, put on by Thiel’s Founders Fund, suggests:

“Maybe if you aren’t trying to destroy the world, you aren’t trying hard enough.”

There is a lot more to learn about Dialog, but rather than being the inner lair of Thiel’s influence, it is more like the top of the initiation funnel into a much larger, and darker, network.

The membership of Dialog, spanning the highest levels of government, media, and industry, who all chose to register for a secret society created by Peter Thiel, is not the operational core of Thiel’s influence. But it is just a small window into what I will call Government 2, or G2.

G2

“Public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
—Dwight D. Eisenhower

Government 2 (G2) is my name for the long project by Thiel, Musk, and the extended PayPal Mafia network to create a set of parallel services to the U.S. government with the ultimate goal of replacing it altogether.

They are not shy about this. In 2012, at a libertarian student event, Thiel said:

“As a society we may have to still go through one last really crazy bubble but when this one is over it will be time to sort of reassess the entire history of the last 200 years and I think the only thing left standing will be something like a libertarian account of what’s going to happen. When the government bubble breaks the people in this room will be the people who will be the only people who have been right all along.“

Breaking the “government bubble” is Peter Thiel’s chief goal because he believes he has a better alternative. For years, Thiel’s CIA-backed surveillance and data mining company Palantir described itself as: “the operating system for the government.”

But when you connect the various pieces of Thiel’s extended network together, it’s not just the operating system G2 intends to replace; it’s essentially everything.

Three G2 companies have already been deeply integrated into the government, receiving billions of dollars in government contracts for projects like Trump’s “Golden Dome” boondoggle, and placing operatives throughout the regime, including the “Department of War” CTO Emil Michael, and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. These companies represent an alternate military-industrial complex.

• Palantir: Central operating system, surveillance, data collection

• SpaceX: Satellites, communications, AI, rockets, chips

• Anduril: Drones, military weaponry

Thiel’s former chief of staff Michael Kratsios is currently Trump’s Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and is collecting all the government’s secrets under one project.

One of Thiel’s long-time operatives, and a Dialog member, venture capitalist Jim O’Neill, oversaw the dismantling of the CDC. Measles is now rampant in some areas of the U.S., and there is an Ebola outbreak in Africa due to DOGE cuts. O’Neill has been nominated to lead the National Science Foundation.

Infamously, in the first few months of Trump’s reign, Musk’s DOGE ran roughshod through the government, accessing vast troves of data, and destroying many of the systems that would regulate or exercise oversight over G2 companies. This was a calculated strike to set the stage for Government 2.

And until recently, PayPal Mafia member David Sacks was the White House “AI and Crypto Czar” helping to inflate the AI bubble to extreme, dangerous dimensions. He is now co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Despite their success, G2 leaders know, as did the leaders of Propaganda Due, that without control of the media, there is no chance of getting away with such a wide-ranging plot. That’s why G2 has recruited Thiel’s old friends the Ellison family to gobble up mainstream media and covertly promote the G2 project. G2-aligned entities now control: TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, CBS, Warner Bros./CNN, Paramount, Fox, and a vast network of digital channels and influence agents.

“The real power lies in the hands of the owners of the mass media.”
—Licio Gelli

Trojan State

When you add it all up, Government 2 is not just a “reactionary” movement. It is a seditious Trojan state, doing as much damage to the existing government as it can from the inside out and preparing the population for a takeover through media capture.

With Donald Trump’s decline into dementia, and his increasingly dysfunctional regime, G2 sees a perfect opportunity over the next two years to make itself too big to fail. Peter Thiel’s personal project JD Vance was installed as Vice President for just such a purpose.

It’s easy to become lost in the onslaught of transgressions by the Trump regime, and to see it as an aberrant period through which we must simply endure. But for Government 2, the chaos, suffering and death is a feature, not a bug—and the Constitution is just a dusty old relic.

The U.S. government is being shed, like a snakeskin.

“The accumulation of all powers… in the same hands… may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
—James Madison, Federalist 47

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• Live Zoom call each Sunday

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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