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The world is in serious danger. The source of the danger is the leader of my own country.

At the risk of repeating myself, I feel a responsibility to keep sounding this alarm. Time is running short before Donald Trump does something we may never recover from. He is more than unfit; he is both deeply malevolent and almost completely dysfunctional.

The President of the United States is a malignant narcissist with a degenerative neurological disorder, very likely to be behavioral frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). This is the most dangerous possible combination of psychological and neurological pathologies because it disables every system that constrains an individual’s behavior.

Here is a case report of this co-morbidity with striking similarities to Trump.

Donald Trump is capable of anything. He has no remorse, no empathy, and no conscience. And he is increasingly unable to function or control his own behavior. His ability to reason, form judgements, and work out even the first-order consequences of his actions are effectively gone.

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The president lives in a deepening psychosis—an alternate reality generated by his own grandiose delusions, curated and maintained by his sycophants.

To show how many circumstances have piled up to create such an unfit man, I wrote a thought experiment:

Let’s say you wanted to construct the most dangerous possible man. How would you do it?

• You would start with someone naturally stupid, but not so stupid he cannot perform.

• You’d place him in a privileged family with sociopathic parents who provided no emotional attachment.

• You’d have him be the second son of a father who rejected his first-born as weak—to the point he committed suicide.

• You’d raise him to be cruel. You’d introduce him to sadists like Roy Cohn. You’d model belittling women, minorities, and anyone less privileged than he is. You’d break him down until everyday sadism becomes his lifestyle.

• By adulthood, you’d have a fully formed malignant narcissist, a psychopath so consumed with his own superiority that he believes everyone else wants to take what he has—a paranoid, Machiavellian sadist with no empathy and no morals.
  

• You’d give him access to deviant criminals like Jeffrey Epstein who cultivated his sexual sadism and collected compromising information.

• You’d send him to Moscow to get brainwashed by Soviet intelligence.
  

• You would continuously feed his narcissism by ensuring he’s rescued from every situation—as if by magic.

• You’d make him feel legally and financially invulnerable by letting him get away with crime after crime, fraud after fraud, and six bankruptcies.

• You’d rescue him from the sewer of his own life by giving him a prime time TV show based on his narcissistic self-image—a show which celebrated his cruelty as business acumen.

• You’d let him get away with colluding with a foreign power to steal a presidential election. You’d let him get away with a violent insurrection to try to hold on to power when he lost.

• And you’d stand by for four years while he plotted to come back and take his revenge.

• However, you haven’t quite completed the path to the worst possible man yet, although you have achieved a rare feat: You have successfully created a messianic narcissist with the nuclear codes. Great start!

• But you must take things one step further: you must give him frontal lobe dementia and drain from his brain any remaining ability to reason, make judgements, or take advice. This will destroy his ability to understand the consequences of his actions. His salience network will be disintegrated, making it impossible to tell what matters—even to himself.
  

• You’d surround him with people like Natalie Harp, who are incentivized to conceal his incapacity to function.

• You’d fill the federal government and the Pentagon with deviant psychopaths who are perfectly happy to exploit his disorders for profit, ideology, and enjoyment.
  

• Approaching the finish line, you would create a global emergency of his own making. You’d have him repeatedly fail at everything he tries and have his popularity plummet to historic levels. You’d have him be mocked by the entire planet.

• Finally, as a last straw, you would threaten his status with losing power in a congressional election—by a monstrous landslide.

That’s how you get the most dangerous man in the world.

Now consider his actions over just the last week:

Trump threatened Los Angeles and San Diego with nuclear destruction by Iran at least three different times, increasing in sadistic detail each time. During the same speeches, he threatened Iran with “ceasing to exist.” When a man with these disorders is fantasizing about using nukes, take him seriously.

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Trump has attempted to seize control of the AI industry, and forced people to rebrand it to “Super Intelligence” under penalty of being labeled “THE ENEMY.”

Trump has stopped concealing his lifelong devotion to the Russian state by attempting to solve his self-created diesel shortage by purchasing it from Putin. From a geopolitical and energy perspective, this is a nonsensical deal. It would not put a meaningful dent in the U.S. supply shortage. It’s primary effect would be to give Putin money to fund his war machine against Ukraine.

Finally, Trump has approved a live-streamed execution based on Pete Hegseth’s orders. Here is a manic, deranged Pete Hegseth along with neo-Nazi propagandist Jack Posobiec on the newly-returned USS Lincoln, discussing the killing of Fort Hood mass murderer Nidal Hasan by firing squad.

Posobiec: “Has Major Hasan made any final requests?”

Hegseth: “Don’t care.”

This is performative sadism, a mirror of Trump’s inner world expressed through a willing lieutenant. Nidal Hasan is now paralyzed from the waist down. It’s unclear whether they will shoot him on TV in his wheelchair.

As a measure of how far we have fallen from normal, in 2025, there were 17 public executions documented in the entire world, six by the Taliban, and 11 by Iran.

I am not aware of any republic in which beginning the practice of public executions was a good sign for the wellbeing of its people. There has never been an execution broadcast live by a nation-state in human history.

There is no bottom to Donald Trump, or his regime, which has welded itself to his grandiose delusions. The Fall of America is starting to look all too familiar.

“I turned in to the games one mid-day hoping for a little wit and humor there. I was bitterly disappointed. It was really mere butchery. The morning's show was merciful compared to it. Then men were thrown to lions and to bears: but at midday to the audience. There was no escape for them. The slayer was kept fighting until he could be slain. "Kill him! flog him! burn him alive" was the cry…”

—Seneca, describing gladiator games under Nero, Rome, ca. 55 AD

Our Nero is just as cruel and reckless as the original. Trump will happily fiddle while the nation, or the whole world, burns down.

Please do everything in your power to raise awareness about the most dangerous man in the world—to friends, family, and especially politicians. There is no excuse for this situation. Those in power are failing to do their essential duty—to protect us.

It is time to break glass. If we don’t find a way to remove Donald Trump from office, he may find a way to get rid of us.

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“It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books.”
—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The purpose of a system is what it does” is a concept originating in cybernetics and management theory as a way to diagnose problems in a system. While it sounds kind of obvious, it’s really not. The phrase is meant to explicitly omit whatever the intent may have been in designing the system.

So instead of asking “what is the system supposed to do?” you ask “what does it actually do?”—before anything else. This has come to be shortened to POSIWID, and remains a well-used heuristic.

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This concept is important in analyzing the AI industry because we are being sold one system, while a completely different system is gobbling up the economy.

As an example of the industry’s narrative, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman did an interview with Politico following Trump pushing for unregulated growth of “Super Intelligence.”

“We’re gonna, like, make our products safe… [but] the world should accept some bad things happening. Because there will be tremendously, orders of magnitude, more good stuff than bad stuff.”

There is a lot you could say about Sam Altman, including the horrific allegations by his sister, the fact that he met his husband in Peter Thiel’s hot tub, and that his company is embroiled in the cult of Effective Altruism. But it’s not that he’s a grimy person which is of interest here; it’s that he says his AI company is worth upwards of $1.5 trillion.

Is it really?

After 20 minutes of wrestling with Sam Altman’s chatbot, I was able to get it to produce an infographic of the system that Sam Altman wants us to believe in. He and his fellow AI promoters want us to think the massive investment in data centers is “infrastructure” for producing “AGI,” brand new scientific discoveries, and even “abundance.”

Big if true! Just put money and all the data from the internet into a giant computer, and the intelligence will come flowing out!

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But if the purpose of a system is what it does, a far different picture emerges. It is not a magical intelligence machine, it is an extraction device. After another session of coaching, Sam Altman’s chatbot gave me the following diagram of the actual system that he’s helped to create.

Hundreds of billions have already been spent to create the biggest supercomputers ever seen. Trillions more have been promised to continue to scale them up—all based on promises that suddenly they will sprout “AGI” and make everything better.

This is the reality:

The promise that chatbots will suddenly become intelligent if you just make them bigger is a very powerful self-reinforcing delusion that has dug a $10 trillion ditch in the economy.

For example, the only company with an even more bizarre story than OpenAI has trained its chatbot from the very beginning with a long script about how it’s actually an “entity” with “emotional states” and “moral standing.”

In other words, Anthropic trains “Claude” to respond like a person and then points at the response to claim that it’s more like a person. For instance, “Claude’s Constitution” is part of its training and frankly it’s one of the most profoundly stupid documents I’ve ever seen.

I angrily scribbled on things that are patently idiotic on just two pages, including the repetitive refrain that “we don’t understand” how a chatbot works, and that it might have “perceptions,” and “identity.”

Pure gobbledygook from people who have no understanding of computer science.

If you simulate a hurricane in a computer, you do not get a hurricane. If you simulate emotions in a computer, you do not get emotions. It’s really that straightforward. This doesn’t mean the simulation isn’t useful, but a simulation is not its own subject by definition.

Also, we absolutely do understand how chatbots work. This aggressive ignorance hides the story they don’t want people to hear: data centers and the AI industry provide nothing that we can’t have without trillions in capital expenditures for “frontier labs.”

To see the true misanthropic goals of the industry, the richest man in the world freely promotes the “success condition” of human beings as a “biological bootloader for digital superintelligence”—a euphemism for becoming extinct. Simultaneously, Musk agrees that America should only be ruled over by “high T alpha males” and “autists.”

“Women and low T men” need not apply to this version of “democracy.”

So put together, we have a massive extraction system which is funneling our money, energy, and knowledge to a tiny group of people who consider themselves “high T alpha males.” We are collectively surrendering to overgrown adolescents who believe they are the only ones to rule the world—and also that evil is “kind of good.”

In Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, Ray Bradbury told of a world where humanity had given up on new ideas, choosing instead to recycle the things it had already done. Ideas that had not been homogenized and approved were to be eliminated as dangerous.

“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?“

But the reality was that it was not the new ideas that were dangerous. It was the lack of them.

“We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam… Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.”

The soil of our collective intelligence is being depleted through extraction by a machine fueled by our own money and resources. It is a doomsday device feeding on our minds and selling them back to us as slop.

“It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I came along in two minutes and boom! it's all over.”
—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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This feedback loop of encountering input and using the universe to calculate an updated state is what we call learning.

When I make a specific sound in the kitchen—the crinkling of a cheese wrapper—my dog will immediately come running based on a calculation derived from a tiny change of air pressure that reaches her ears.

The air pressure is converted through movements in hair cells to voltages. The signals are interpreted through physical processes which trigger chemical reactions in neurons. This spikes a signal to her motor cortex which causes her to come begging.

If I give her a piece of cheese, this reinforces the neural pathways by physically changing the cells to be more receptive to this sequence.

None of this is calculated. None of it is digital. There is no separation of memory and processing. There is no separation of hardware and software. She doesn’t update a hard drive.

She is a physical system using the laws of the universe to change herself in a way that increases her chances of continuing to exist as a system. That’s incredibly intelligent.

Digital computers can’t do this. Ever. They ignore the best computer ever created—the laws of physics—to recreate a crude simulation of physical laws which only does arithmetic on a set of 1s and 0s.

Digital AI cannot learn from the world or experience it because they are not in it. They are patterns of bits recycled from the detritus of mankind—pushed through silicon by sheer brute force.

The future of AI is intelligent matter—neuromorphics, memristors, and photonics. Artificial general intelligence will emerge from technologies which can actually learn and use physics to calculate new directions.

It will not come from our old ideas, digitized and sold back to us as slop.

GPUs, transformers, and chatbots are a dead end. They are not answering the right question.

The correct question is not: “How do we best simulate what intelligence produces?”

The right question is: “How do we configure the right set of physical matter in which intelligence will arise as a result of the laws of the universe?”

Please join me and our community today, Sunday Noon PT / 3PM ET for a discussion about what makes us human, alive, and conscious, and how the AI industry wants to take all of that away. The floor is always open to questions or comments on any topic. It’s always a great conversation. Details below!

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I am increasingly certain that the AI industry, the billionaire class, and the Trump regime are driving America into a $10 trillion ditch—although it may not get that far before the economy collapses. To understand why this is happening, you need some background on the industry, a view on the incentives that have distorted it, and a clear sense for how the current technology stack is doomed to fail.

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First, in order to get a sense for scale: Were the industry able to meet its full objectives for physical buildout of data centers, it would require $6 trillion per year in revenue by 2031 to pay for itself. Most of that revenue has not even been identified yet by product category. It is purely speculation.

Where on Earth is all that money supposed to come from?

Punchcards

As the only child of a government programmer in the 1970s, my mom would occasionally take me to work if school was out and she had no child care. This would leave me with 8 or 9 hours to kill in the offices of the Small Business Administration, or the Bureau of Prisons. While that may sound like torture to a kid, it beat school by a mile.

One of the things in the office I would play with were punchcards. There were huge stacks of them. It’s how I learned to shuffle.

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Up until about five decades ago, that’s how memory was stored for tabulators to process. Each card was a physical record, of a person, a crime, a transaction, etc. and some additional information—all encoded in little holes. You’d feed them into a machine—which would get jammed half the time—for processing.

Today, the equivalent function, physically storing memory in a digitized form and moving it to another place for processing, then moving it back, has been scaled up to data center size. But instead of humans hauling around massive stacks of cardboard, the process has been shrunk to a microscopic level and replicated millions of times on GPUs—a market now led for many years by NVIDIA and its CEO Jensen Huang.

But the core problem remains. It’s a lot of work to move information from one place to another. This is the dirty secret of the AI industry. They still rely on this basic, incredibly inefficient model.

Transformers, But Not Giant Robots

Without getting too far into the details, the entire chatbot industry as it exists today was born from an important discovery in 2017—the transformer architecture. While text generators like the predictive text on your phone had already been developed, when someone figured out a much more efficient algorithm to figure out the likely next word in a sequence, it became a race to see who could exploit it first—and fastest.

It turned out that transformers could be broken up into different parallel operations which work really well on GPUs like NVIDIA’s.

While transformers did not inherently improve the accuracy, or “intelligence” of the core algorithm, it did make things much, much faster to process.

This led to GPT, Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which describes its own limitations quite well. It only generates content, based on pre-training, using a specific method of predicting text—the transformer.

To be fair to the AI industry, they have shown that you can combine enormous amounts of energy with the stolen works of all humanity to produce convincing holographic postcards from our own exhaust. What you can’t get from it, however, is real intelligence.

The primary reason for this is the core architecture of GPUs, which essentially remain like a lot of little punch cards. You still have to move stored physical memory to a processor, do a lot of math on it, and move it back to memory. The bottleneck is not the processing; it’s the data transfer.

Von Neumann

Now, those little punch cards can do a lot of work. For example, I used ChatGPT Sol 5.6 High to produce this chart.

The Von Neumann architecture is how most general purpose computer chips work. It deliberately separates memory from the processor. Both CPUs and GPUs use it.

But the physical limits of this architecture are being challenged. Performance is less about the processing and more about moving more data. Up to 90% of the energy in modern data centers is used shuttling bits around rather than doing computation.

Not only is keeping memory and computation separate at this scale extremely inefficient, it is not how brains work.

A neuron does not take in information, convert it to digital form, send it off to a simulation of a brain, and receive the answer back when it’s done. The physics of the neuron is the computation. It receives a signal and changes based on how the combination of its existing state and the new stimulus alters its physical properties. A neuron doesn’t “calculate,” it allows the universe to do it using physics.

This is not unknown to the industry. There are a significant number of companies and researchers working on different forms of memory which combine storage and computation. These include memristive, photonic, and neuromorphic chips which do not require the kind of data transfer of GPUs because the memory and the processor are physically the same.

20 Watts

To get a sense for how much room there is to improve on AI technology, the human brain uses as much energy as the 20W LED lightbulb below. The average new datacenter requires power measured in the hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts—7 or 8 orders of magnitude more. And it’s still ultimately just recycling things we’ve already done.

As someone who worked in technology for 35 years, including many projects working with AI at various points, I assure you that enormous energy-sucking data centers are not the future of AI. Technological innovation that relies purely on scale is destined to reach a physical limit. We’re watching it happen.

So why is the industry still barreling ahead? Cui bono? Silicon Valley billionaires, banks, the oil and gas industry, the stock market, and the Trump regime.

Right now AI spending between 2025 and 2032 is estimated to gobble up more than the average growth of the entire country—at 3.6% of GDP. The only comparable booms (and busts) left permanent infrastructure like railroads and fiber which combined didn’t match the scale of data center buildouts.

But AI in its current form does not leave permanent technology infrastructure that remotely covers its cost. Most of the money is being used to build what Jensen Huang of NVIDIA has branded “AI factories” which he says are a “complete reinvention of the computing stack.”

Au contraire. The problem is they haven’t reinvented anything at all. What they’re good at inventing are new ways to justify their massive data center buildout.

Elon Musk’s big idea is to make AI even more expensive and implausible by launching data centers on rockets into space—truly one of the most absurd ideas ever uttered with a straight face. Musk and Huang also agree “every 1GW of compute equals another 1% of GDP” with absolutely no rationale or evidence. It’s all just sheer made up nonsense, from two men responsible for companies worth over $10 trillion.

The “factories” Huang talks about are not the big ticket item. It’s the GPUs, the million dollar racks inside the data centers, the specialized equipment, and the energy required to cool and run them that costs most of the money.

Crucially, these chips don’t age like railroad tracks. Whether the chips live on Earth or in orbit, in Tennessee or Michigan, they age more like milk. NVIDIA’s schedule ships faster chips every year, ensuring every product that came before it is made more and more obsolete. Most technology companies start depreciating GPUs after just two years and completely write them off within 5-6 years. The data centers don’t get better as new technology arrives; they get worse until you have to replace them.

That’s not infrastructure. That’s a short term bet that magic is going to happen.

They Never Learn

Perhaps the most glaring technical problem with the current generation of AI is that it is a static technology. That is, a chatbot doesn’t learn. It doesn’t remember you—or anything it does. It can’t gain real experience.

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While you can bolt on some temporary memory to a static chatbot as they currently do, the core model cannot change until another version is trained and launched. The model never learns, not until the next version replaces it.

The chart below is a comparison of the way the current AI models improve through scaling larger, and a different architecture based on technologies that are either in existence or currently in development that would learn—and wouldn’t take such massive data centers to run.

Essentially every part of the “reinvention of the computing stack” that Jensen Huang and the AI industry is committing trillions to build is destined to be updated and replaced in the not distant future. There is not only no “moat” within the industry; the industry itself is extremely vulnerable to any improvement that comes from outside its insulated group.

Were a true learning system to be developed at commercial scale, at a lower energy footprint than GPUs, the entire AI industry could collapse in short order, leaving trillions of dollars of investment stranded.

Super Duper Intelligence

For several years, according to CEOs at “Magnificent Seven” companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta—the reason they have collectively invested trillions into GPUs is they feel they cannot afford to “lose the race” to reach the ill-defined goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI) or artificial superintelligence (ASI).

It is this golden goose they crave, these magic beans, not the current generation of chatbots as a final goal. But this obsession has progressed to the point that the CEOs of multi-trillion-dollar companies will grovel and scrape to a mentally ill president, allowing him to change the name of their own technology—a name that’s been around for nearly a century—by government fiat.

On Tuesday, the U.S. government prohibited itself from acknowledging “artificial intelligence” or “AI” at all. It must now be referred to as “Super Intelligence” only.

The same day at the White House, the heads of Google, NVIDIA, SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta signed a separate letter that promises the industry will, according to Trump, “be policing each other.”

Sure, Jan.

As GOP Senator Rick Scott admitted:

“Congress can’t regulate this. We can’t get election security passed or pass a budget, so we’re not gonna be the ones to do it. It’s gonna have to be done through the administration with talking to these AI companies.”

Donald Trump has effectively disabled Congress, seized control of the largest industry in America, exempted it from regulation, and unilaterally rebranded it so he can keep the stock market bubble going. It is absolutely extraordinary.

OK, But Is It Going to Kill Us?

To understand how deeply unserious and deceptive this industry is, you simply need to watch CEOs like Dario Amodei—who just last week was warning everyone of a chatbot extinction event—and notice he has nothing to say when Trump dismisses everything he claimed.

Either he was lying then, or he’s being murderously irresponsible now—for allowing such an allegedly dangerous technology to be developed with no guardrails.

I will assert again, with even more conviction: The chance of the current technology stack rising up to “kill all humans” is precisely 0.0%.

But if we do not figure out a way to stop this industry from carpeting the planet with inefficient, energy hungry data centers that replicate punchcards millions of times over, the chance of an economic winter approaches 100%.

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Yet again the news cycle has been dominated by scary stories of “swarms” of “rogue” AI “agents” having breached various websites. This is being portrayed as evidence of intelligence that can’t be controlled. According to the labs that created them, their AI—or “SI” if you want to go with Trump’s hilarious rebrand—has “breached containment” from a “sandbox.” “Tens of thousands of sites affected.” And so on.

I’ve read OpenAI’s “report” on their “misaligned” models, and the numerous instances of security incidents. It’s honestly a deeply frightening read, but not because of the danger of “superintelligent AI.” Instead, I found it terrifying because the company is completely irresponsible, totally unqualified, and deliberately using anthropomorphic language to describe something that’s far easier to understand using standard terminology.

In over 35 years in technology, I have run dozens of software and product teams. If someone gave me the OpenAI report, I would immediately fire everyone in IT, Security, QA, and engineering management, and shut down the product until it stops committing crimes.

None of what’s happening is “intelligence.” It’s thousands of instances of the same computer program running on the most powerful supercomputer clusters ever built brute forcing a “solution” to a problem it was directed to solve.

What is not helpful is calling software “evil” or “depraved.”

Ted Lieu is my congressman, and I generally think he’s one of the sanest members of Congress, but this is not rational—or helpful. Ted has been convinced by someone that chatbot software has somehow become a demon.

No. It’s just terrible software run by a pack of morons who have trillions of dollars riding on convincing people it’s too powerful to manage.

I assure you it is not unmanageable. Last night, SNL did a very funny take on Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, which really sums up the industry as well as anyone I’ve heard.

“If we can pressure lawmakers to create guardrails, we will be able to stop me.”

Please join me and our brilliant community today at Noon PT / 3PM ET. I will talk about Peter Thiel’s recent Antichrist confession, the latest in geopolitics, and the influence campaign to convince you chatbots are going to murder us all. If you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription, please consider it. The discussion is always open to question and comments. Hope to see you! Details below.

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“If you’re evil, you’re at least competent.
And if you’re evil, you’re not bad.
And therefore maybe you’re actually kind of good because you’re at least getting something done.”
—Peter Thiel, 9/23/26

Thursday night in Berlin, billionaire Peter Thiel received the “Axel Springer Award” from a German media company. Thiel’s mother was in attendance, along with CBS News editor Bari Weiss, who introduced him with a fawning, unctuous tribute, calling him “a vanguard of the counter-elite.”

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Notably, Weiss was installed at CBS by Larry and David Ellison, close friends of Thiel who agree with his vision of a surveillance state. Weiss has infamously taken a wrecking ball to the CBS news division—and its crown jewel “60 Minutes.” Having her introduce Thiel was a kind of exhibitionist display of elite influence over the media.

“Tonight I have the pleasure to introduce a man whose life and whose character embodies what I think of as the quintessential American spirit. Heretical, driven, audacious, pioneering, innovative, entrepreneurial, original, eccentric, and above all, ferociously independent, and that of course is Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is many things. He is a center of gravity in Silicon Valley, a vanguard of the counter elite. He’s a man whose name itself has become a rorschach test the world over, including judging from the protest down the street here in Berlin. But above all, I would say, Peter Thiel is free.”

Appearing by video for the event were Palantir co-founder Alex Karp and Thiel’s protege, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—who won the same award in 2025.

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The night before the ceremony, Thiel was asked in an interview by Axel Springer CEO Matthias Dopfner about the swirling controversy around the science fiction narrative that AI could “kill all humans”: “So why do we always moralize new technologies?”

The answer is one of the scariest and most deeply telling quotes I’ve ever heard.

“Yes, I’m gonna get in trouble for what I’m about to say, but I think we moralize way too much. And there’s always a question, I like to ask, what is the antonym of good? And the moral antonym is evil. The functional antonym is bad.

A Ferrari is an evil car because it doesn’t get many miles per gallon. They are a trubby, is a bad car. It works less good than a golf cart. The former East German car. And so if you’re evil, you’re at least competent. And if you’re evil, you’re not bad. And therefore maybe you’re actually kind of good because you’re at least getting something done. […]

And so if you’re in a world where 99% of the businesses, companies, people, political leaders, business leaders are totally incompetent. That’s the problem we should actually be talking about.”

Thiel says he admires Goethe’s Faust because even though Faust did a deal with the devil at least he got something done. What Thiel elides in this description are the victims. In order to embark on his grand engineering project Faust and his new partner Mephistopheles have to murder people.

Thiel is explicitly making this claim: Good is better than evil, but evil is better than incompetence—as defined by him.

This is exactly the species of propaganda used by the worst dictators in history. “At least the trains run on time” was a myth used by Fascists in Italy to excuse Mussolini’s violence. It is a call to “order” over morality, the ideological kickstarter for many of the worst atrocities in history.

This was not an offhand remark, although to my knowledge it’s the first time he’s said it in public. Eric Weinstein is the managing director of Thiel Capital—a key role in Thiel’s power structure. Responding to this quote from Thiel, Weinstein confirms that it’s a kind of litmus test. He quotes Thiel as saying—“we have to be exceptionally competent at the good work we do to make sure it is always confused for evil.”

Weinstein’s reaction: “I thought it totally logical… This is an old idea of his.”

There is, of course, nothing logical about it. It is simple fallacy created by ignoring the multitude of semantics in English around the word “good.” Thiel is just playing word games to make a false equivalence that suits his worldview.

Eric Weinstein does not just manage Peter’s money. He was also the original member of the deceptively named “Intellectual Dark Web,” a group of Thiel-connected elites who deliberately mix pseudo-science, metaphysics, and ideological narratives into allegedly intellectual pursuits. I have referred to them sardonically as “QAnon for rich white people.” They have trafficked in everything from anti-vax narratives, to race science, to mystical ruminations about a “theory of everything.” It’s all nonsense.

This was a relatively struggling effort at spreading disinformation until they received a massive boost in 2018 from a New York Times opinion piece written by the aforementioned Bari Weiss.

This is a perfect example of Thiel’s vast influence network in action, and why his words should be taken very seriously. Bari Weiss did not suddenly discover these people. As a writer for the New York Times, she was part of Thiel’s network. This was patronage—a promotion for Thiel’s purpose-built effort to undermine science, reason, and reality itself in the mainstream media. By participating, Weiss proved to Thiel she was willing “to be confused for evil.” That’s why she’s now editor of CBS News.

Thiel’s CEO protégés, like Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Alex Karp—who together control upwards of $10 trillion in stock market valuation—are another layer of his direct influence. But if the full reality of how OpenAI, SpaceX, Tesla, Facebook, and Palantir were built, and the true value of their products were understood, a large majority of that valuation would disappear. These companies are as much influence operations—corporate psyops if you will—as they are technology.

Of course, Thiel also has allies and assets throughout political, socioeconomic, and international spheres of influence, including both the President and Vice President of the United States. They both owe their political careers to him. Trump would not have won in 2016 without Thiel’s help. JD Vance was paid $15 million in 2019 by Peter Thiel to convert to Catholicism and run for Senate—all so Vance could be in a position to be installed as VP. Thiel may be evil itself, but he knows how to play chess.

People from the extended “Intellectual Dark Web” now run NIH, CDC, and HHS. Thiel’s operatives are throughout the White House, the Pentagon, and the right-wing media that covers both. Thiel’s former chief of staff Michael Kratsios is in charge of Science and Technology for the government, and has access to the most sensitive secrets America controls, including nuclear.

The power Thiel has over America is almost impossible to overstate—despite the fact that he hates it so much he moved to Argentina, a country which once infamously welcomed Nazi refugees after WWII.

At the awards ceremony, Thiel was asked why he identifies so strongly with being a German. In his video greeting, Alex Karp had provocatively called Thiel “the last German.”

With his mother in the audience, Thiel answers that he spoke German until 12 years old and didn’t learn English until they let him watch TV.

Although Thiel was born in Frankfurt, he did not grow up in Germany—he left as a one-year-old. Instead, he deliberately doesn’t mention that spent his youth in Swakopmund, SW Africa, an apartheid town that was cosplaying as the Third Reich through the 1970s. The standard greeting was “Heil Hitler!”

During this time, Peter’s father Klaus was building a uranium mine for apartheid South Africa’s illegal nuclear weapons program, using essentially slave labor.

Thiel, as a young chess-playing gay boy, was brought up to hate people like himself, and anyone else who did not fit the stereotype of a Nazi Youth. But nevertheless, he never truly left Swakopmund. He yearns for the order, the “cleanliness” of the ahistorical Nazi mirage he grew up in. Thiel knows his own childhood is seen as evil to others, but to him, at least it was not incompetent.

Thiel perceived apartheid as an example of efficiency and order, and despises the relative decadence of America. Live action role-playing as a Nazi youth decades ago, Thiel saw a tool that he could use over and over—creating an alternate reality that matches what he wants, and forcing other people to live in it.

This is how he approached investing in artificial intelligence, for example. Thiel didn’t just find smart people to help build the technology, he paid people like cult leader Eliezer Yudkowsky and perpetual conman Sam Altman to create a futuristic alternate reality where AI was either going to kill us all, or create perpetual abundance.

Peter Thiel did not invent AI (OpenAI), social media (Facebook), e-commerce (PayPal), or database software (Palantir). His “investments” are far less about building valuable technology, and much more about psychological warfare campaigns designed to sabotage a civilization he cannot abide.

PayPal was designed to take down the financial system. Facebook was designed to create social chaos. Palantir is designed to replace law enforcement. OpenAI is designed to monopolize knowledge. And Donald Trump is designed to destroy the federal government.

These are not companies or people; they are weapons in his war on Western civilization.

For many years, Thiel has been flirting with the image of the Antichrist. He warns from one side of his mouth that the Antichrist is a “one world totalitarian government” and from the other that it is the Pope and Greta Thunberg—while he builds all the infrastructure to create the dystopia he envisions.

But Thiel’s notion that evil is better than weakness and incompetence is hardly original. It came from one of his favorite philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in his last book described the nature of happiness this way:

The book is called The Anti-Christ.

“What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power…
What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness…
What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases… Not contentment, but more power… not virtue, but efficiency.
What is more harmful than any vice?
—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity....”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

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Trump said:

From this point forward, all of the United States documents and hopefully the world will be changed to use the much more accurate term “super” as opposed to artificial. So, it’s “super intelligence”. In other words, welcome to the new world of “super intelligence” “SI”.

Let’s see if that sounds much better. It is much better and it’s much more accurate. Let’s see if I have any power. Maybe I do and maybe I don’t. We’re going to find out pretty soon. “Super intelligence” every major new technology brings challenges and “super intelligence” is no exception.

There is nothing new about the idea of “superintelligence.” In 1965, I.J. Good, a Bayesian statistician and a colleague of Alan Turing, the father of computer science, wrote “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine.”

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Good warned that such a machine might not be “docile,” yet asserted that the “survival of man” depends on building it. Good predicted it would happen “within 30 years.”

28 years after Good published his paper, in 1993, there were two other papers which extended Good’s ideas, despite his prediction falling short: Science fiction author Vernor Vinge’s “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era” and Nick Land’s “Machinic Desire.”

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Vinge presaged much of the current mythology around “superhumanly intelligent” machines, popularized the concept of the “technological singularity,” and predicted it would happen—in about thirty years.

At the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), Nick Land said that capitalism is a kind autonomous artificial intelligence sent back from the future to consume humanity. He tied AI and capitalism together in a kind of inevitable doom spiral.

Nick Land went on to co-found the neo-Nazi movement Dark Enlightenment with Curtis Yarvin, based in large part on the ideas of Peter Thiel.

In 2005, futurist Ray Kurzweil wrote the book “The Singularity Is Near” which gave an optimistic outlook and predicted it would happen, you guessed it, in about thirty years. The same year, Peter Thiel met a man named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who would go on to become the guru of doomer AI. In 2006, Thiel, Kurzweil, and Yudkowsky started the Singularity Summit devoted to promoting a future where machines will either merge with us—or kill us all.

Thiel has been infatuated with apocalypse for decades, but at TedX Silicon Valley in 2009 he gave away his strategy. He listed seven potential “disasters” that could end civilization:

1. Robots kill humanity—“Skynet.”

2. Pandemic wrecks civilization.

3. Runaway nanotechnology—“gray goo” destroys the planet.

4. Existing technology runs away—nuclear war.

5. Computer-enabled totalitarianism—a one-world government uses computers to control everybody.

6. Global warming wrecks civilization.

7. Nothing happens—technological progress stalls.

The punchline of Thiel’s talk was that #7 was the real danger—that nothing happens. He sees “technological stagnation” as the greatest threat. That’s why Thiel has done everything in his power to enable the other six disasters, especially #1—“Skynet.”

That same year, 2009, Thiel wrote that he “no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel’s agenda is clearly to destroy the West, so he can rule over the ashes.

It was Thiel’s money and validation that nearly single-handedly launched the abusive Effective Altruism apocalypse cult that runs the AI industry. Thiel is the one who constructed an alternate reality around AI. Thiel stands to make tens of billions of dollars from AI IPOs.

But in the real world, it’s all just science fiction designed to con people into appeasing a dangerous, failing industry out of fear. These machines aren’t “intelligent” at all, much less more intelligent than humans. Chatbots are neither a savior or a boogeyman. They’re just another way for billionaires to take your money.

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The background story of the AI industry is far darker than I initially realized. Over the last few weeks, the industry has polarized the country around two seemingly opposite views. Either AI going to kill us all, or it must be totally unregulated. The third option, the reality that the AI industry is a dangerous bubble that needs to be managed before it explodes the economy, has been removed from the debate.

The question of how we got to this point, and why the AI industry is so damn weird, is complicated, but it has an all-too-familiar figure at the center: Peter Thiel.

Below is perhaps the purest expression of the movement that captured Silicon Valley with Thiel’s help. At the “Singularity Summit” in 2009, sitting next to his funder Peter Thiel, the cult leader of the “Rationalist” movement that took over the AI industry, Eliezer Yudkowsky, said:

“I mean I don’t want cute puppies to die, but a little less money to puppy pounds and a little more money to existential risk prevention would probably be a good decision on humanity’s part.”

This is the Rationalist argument in a nutshell: Either the puppy gets it, or humanity dies.

The trick Yudkowsky smuggled in is presumption that the imaginary AI he was talking about 17 years ago was an “existential risk” to the human race. It was this imaginary risk that has been baked into the entire AI industry from the beginning.

I’m currently working a substantial piece that shows exactly how Thiel, Yudkowsky, and others created a movement that has led to stories like this.

The true story of how this came to happen is complex and involves numerous players, but it is Peter Thiel who funded, promoted, and systematically built a kind of networked doomer alternate reality cult around AI. In 2024, he explained why.

“Why would we have a crazy surveillance state [like Palantir]? … If you’re scared enough of these things, that’s the weapon… If the Antichrist were to come to power, it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time.”

Thiel, of course, has been talking about Armageddon non-stop for 25 years. He funded a movement that believes they are building a product that will end the world. It is Thiel himself who is playing the part of the Antichrist.

Please join me today, Sunday, Noon PT / 3PM ET for a Zoom chat for paid subscribers. I will give a preview of what I’m working on: how Peter Thiel funded the weird, frightening cult currently threatening humanity—and tanking the economy. As always, it’s open to questions and comments. Hope to see you! Details below.

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

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

Really? That’s the reason?

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

A messianic narcissist conman is the US president.

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

The president of the United States is psychotic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be clear, this is bullshit.

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

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

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

They need regulatory capture and a government backstop.

I wrote a brief parable to explain this influence operation.

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

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

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

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

What do you do? That money is SO CLOSE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there is a third possibility:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reality bites.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Donald Trump, President of the United States

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

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

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

It Matters Why It Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repeat After Me

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

One way salience can be externally affected is through repetition.

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

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

In the Wild

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

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

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

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

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

Salience Distortion

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

Characteristic behavioral symptoms of bvFTD include:

• disinhibition—the tendency to be inappropriate around others;

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

• diminished empathy;

• compulsive/repetitive behavior;

• perseveration.

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

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

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

“Nobody knows DUMB has a B”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natalie and the Perfect Storm

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

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

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

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

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

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

Protect Your Salience Network

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He wants the Federal Communications Commission to ratify his delusions.

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

The storm, as they say, has arrived.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She gave until her last week on Earth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dark Factor

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

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

The dark core of personality (2018)

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

Capital D

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

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

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

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

In other words:

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

Model

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perfectly Adapted

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

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

Downside-Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

Federal Degeneration

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

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

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

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

Corruption Is the Key

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry, what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• “You are all that matters to me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. It’s really, really bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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