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

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

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

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

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

Birth of a Network State

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

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

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

Here are the biggest red flags with the SpaceX deal:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Start a New Country

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exit, Stage Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Financial Führerbunker

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

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

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

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

Xenocosmography

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

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

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

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

And he wants the world to pay for it.

Systemic Lunacy

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

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

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

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

• Lockheed Martin

• Northrop Grumman

• Boeing

• T-Mobile

• Verizon

• IBM

• Salesforce

• Oracle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Panopticon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Panoptic Government

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staged!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enhance!

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

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

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

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

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

PSYACT

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

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

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

Build the Ballroom!

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

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

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

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

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

Psyop Fatigue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I won’t be able to do a Zoom today. I will do a Substack AMA this week and we’ll be back on schedule next Sunday.

Be well,

Jim

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As an American, I am deeply embarrassed by what has become of my country. The population was deliberately manipulated by elites into electing one of the worst people on Earth to be our president. Our institutions are dismantled; we are being robbed of trillions; and on the world stage, we are a rogue predator-state.

Nevertheless, the United States still stands—for now. Will it continue?

Donald Trump is one of the least popular politicians to ever hold office. His “popularity” is in the low-30s. His base has been shrunk to a core group of people who mirror him reflexively. In short, his cult is shrinking and everyone else wants him gone.

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The reason for this wholesale rejection is that America has never been, and will never be, a dictatorship or a monarchy. The entire purpose of the nation’s founding was to prevent a Donald Trump from attaining power. And while I am no American exceptionalist, this is the one thing built into America’s DNA which is fundamentally different from other nations suffering a dictator. It’s just not in us.

This regime and its elite backers have attacked every part of the Constitution. They control the Supreme Court which granted Trump king-like powers. The Congress is the American Duma, having abdicated its role completely. And the Executive Branch is represented in miniature by the White House itself—half-destroyed, and half gilded over.

DOJ, FBI and State are gutted. USAID and soft power are destroyed. The Defense Department is being led by a christofascist lunatic who doesn’t know the Bible from a movie script.

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Trump’s wrecking ball has gone after nearly every Amendment in the Bill of Rights, and considers the other seventeen to be mere suggestions—including fundamental rights like birthright citizenship.

ICE, CBP, and other federal goon squads roam the streets, shooting citizens that speak up and warehousing immigrants like animals.

Nevertheless, the United States still stands. And so does the Constitution.

Donald Trump is a weapon of mass destruction. He is a narcissistic psychopath raised by his father to be a killer, a racist, a misogynist, and a conman. Donald has spent nearly 80 years developing a hatred of humanity, trying to fill a bottomless hole in his chest with malice and manipulation.

But America will be his final humiliation. The question remains: will it be ours? Will his attempt to commit murder-suicide with the rest of us mean the end of the American experiment?

In short, no.

America was founded on the genocide of Native Americans. It was founded on the slavery of African Americans. It was founded in a time where colonialism and war was the norm, and where exploration of the Earth was nowhere near complete. But within the American Revolution was the core idea of the Enlightenment, that justice should come from law, and that law should could from humans, not gods—or kings.

This core idea has been pushed back against historically, over and over again—by Southern slaveowners, robber barons, Wall Street oligarchs, fascist ideologues, and religious extremists. And each time the idea has withstood those tests, and grown more entrenched.

When the White House directed the Justice Department to indict the Southern Poverty Law Center for paying informants to infiltrate the KKK and other hate groups, it showed just how complete the destruction is within the government.

This was a performance designed to DARVO—Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender. It was theater for Donald Trump to wreak vengeance for his humiliation over his “both sides” comment after Charlottesville. And it was projection of the GOP’s rampant sanctioning and amplifying of white supremacists onto the group that brought down the KKK. It was a racist mirror.

By now, the entire U.S. federal government is hollowed out and weaponized, including the military. The leadership at the Pentagon has been dismantled, weakened, and embarrassed. We are embarking on another horrific misadventure in the Middle East that will only strengthen our adversaries—and force our own economy into recession.

Trump wants people to think he‘s using “madman theory” when he’s just a madman.

Nevertheless, the republic carries on, absorbing every blow.

The core contract between “America” the idea, and the people who were either born into it—or sought it out—is that when you live here, you may not get what you want but you’re not going to be living in a dictatorship. That’s basically the only guarantee.

Donald Trump is not only breaking the contract, he’s ripping it up and throwing it at the feet of oligarchs who are trying to sell us dictatorship as a lifestyle brand. They promise to deliver a futuristic world of self-driving cars and colonies on Mars, of safe streets as long as you’re the right color—if we just give up our liberty, our empathy, and our right to objective reality.

But time after time, from Minneapolis, a city picked for militarized assault based on a racist meme about Somalis, to my home of Los Angeles, the first target of the Trump gestapo, to small towns and neighborhoods across the country, the reaction to the regime’s attempt to instill state terror has been justifiably, righteously hostile. Renee Good and Alex Pretti were avatars for something much deeper.

The United States must never be mythologized. It has been party to untold crimes. Its founders were imperfect men, and its leaders have been a very mixed bag. But underneath is a basic promise that cannot be erased by one man, or one regime: This is not a monarchy. We don’t do dictators here.

I’ve spent six years documenting everything going wrong in America. I’ve studied our predicament from every conceivable angle—from psychology, to science, to philosophy, to geopolitics, to metaphysics. It’s bad. And it’s going to get much worse before it gets better.

But despite the damage that will result from this catastrophe, it will never eliminate that American promise from the minds of more than 300 million people. That is the fatal flaw in the plan of our would-be destroyers.

I’m angry at our government. And I’m disgusted with our political leadership—in both parties. But I’m not angry with America. It was a damn good idea, a remarkable project that two centuries after its establishment gave me the chance to raise three boys into men. It is my home and I will defend her, and demand that we keep her promise to my grandchildren.

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

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

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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“It’s too big to be a space station.”
—Luke Skywalker

I do not know how long Donald Trump can keep control of the presidency, but now even the mainstream media acknowledges he is “not well.” Moreover, his own military is locking him out of important meetings for fear that he will either release classified information or interject with bad decisions.

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I do know, however, that Trump cannot continue on this trajectory for three more years. The degeneration of his faculties is already an imminent danger to the world. His condition is no longer in doubt and it cannot get better; it can only get worse. It is psychologically impossible for him to admit a single error, much less voluntarily step down from power—despite the political reality. So ultimately, there must be an intervention.

How and when we get JD Vance as President of the United States is still in doubt but we must assume it will happen. Unfortunately, the line of succession is all too clear.

Now the question is: What does President Vance mean for the rest of us?

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Death Star

In 2010, Peter Thiel said this about his former company PayPal:

“The basic idea was we could never win an election… because we were in such a small minority. But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world without constantly having to convince people… through a technological means.

…technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”

This was recorded a year after Thiel wrote that he “no longer feels freedom and democracy are compatible” and blamed women’s suffrage for America’s problems. His desire to overthrow the government has never been a secret.

While many companies have been founded by PayPal alumni over the years, there are three that I consider the primary components of a Death Star aimed at American democracy: Palantir, Tesla, and SpaceX. Between them they represent a multi-trillion bet on a vision for America that they themselves admit no one wants. When Thiel said he didn’t want to “convince people,” he meant it.

The Death Star is the PayPal Mafia’s “alternative to politics.” It is the “small minority” which seeks to end the American experiment.

Science Fiction

All three companies in the Death Star are overvalued by historic proportions. This is no exaggeration. The price assigned to Palantir and Tesla in the public market, and the proposed valuation of SpaceX, are not about buying shares of company securities; they are about buying into science fiction stories.

• Tesla is a mid-range car company that has been only moderately profitable over its lifetime, and has benefited greatly from billions in government subsidies. Inarguably, the company could not have gotten off the ground or survived without the welfare of the United States. Tesla (TSLA) is valued by the market at about $1.5 trillion on revenue of under $100 billion. By contrast, Toyota Motors is valued by the market at $250 billion on revenue of $333 billion. In terms of price-to-earnings, apples-to-apples, Tesla is priced over twenty times Toyota. That is madness.

• SpaceX is mostly a satellite company with heavy reliance on the United States. Without government subsidies and contracts, it could not exist. While its books are still private in advance of a planned IPO this summer, its revenue is somewhere under $20 billion. Since it absorbed Elon Musk‘s hemorrhaging AI/Twitter company xAI, it’s hard to know whether the company is even profitable at all. Regardless, Musk intends to take it public at a valuation of $1.75 trillion, 110x its most optimistic revenue assumptions. There is literally no precedent for this absurd valuation, even in previous technology bubbles.

• Palantir (PLTR) is a software company that sells to enterprises and governments. It portrays itself as an AI company, but it is really a database and applications business that has a single advantage: It has no morals whatsoever. It powers militaries, spy agencies, ICE, and international conglomerates with a product that amounts to a bunch of dashboards for spying on its own employees or anyone else. Like Tesla and SpaceX its valuation has been pumped to an absurd level with price-to-earnings of over 200x. It has the valuation of higher than IBM at $350 billion, and revenue of 14x less.

If SpaceX’s plans move forward, these companies will represent nearly $4 trillion in valuation—90-95% of which is not supported by any rational financials. The Death Star can only be seen as a multi-trillion bet on a combined economic power that is too big to fail, and must take over the federal government to survive.

From its inception, Palantir was designed to be the “operating system for the government.” But what would that mean for us? What kind of system do they want?

Manifesto

Over the last weekend, 16 years after Thiel admitted that he wanted to use technology to replace politics, his second company published what practically demands to be called a manifesto. Palantir’s propaganda is 22 points representing a convergence of beliefs which amount to not just an ideology but a theology. It is techno-religion for the neo-fascist manosphere.

While the specifics are often self-contradictory, the Palantir Manifesto is rooted in several belief systems: technocracy (rule by technocrats); key features of national socialism; and a cult-like belief in their own importance—delivered through jargony faux-liberal gloss designed to get past the filters of normies.

Beginning with the title, taken from Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s book, the stage is set. “Technological Republic” is not just window dressing. It is the actual vision: a society completely oriented around inanimate objects—not people, not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but technology instead. It represents a view of the world that psychologist Erich Fromm would have called necrophilous.

While I won’t go through each and every point in the Palantir Manifesto, a few highlights should illuminate the psychological payload and the vision for America.

Point 1: White Knight

The first move is for Palantir to play the savior, the white knight who is just repaying a “moral debt” to society by proposing to take over the government and surveil us 24/7. It presumes that Palantir is a good judge of what is moral—a highly questionable concept to put it mildly.

“Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible.”

Having established itself as a do-gooder which just wants the best for us, Palantir moves on to the point.

“The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.”

Here Palantir is selling warmongering as a humanitarian mission through a self-serving claim that engineering skills convert to moral authority—which everyone else should defer to. In reality, it’s just a sales organization trying to create demand for an AI murderbot product no one wants, except the people who profit from war.

Point 4: We’re so hard.

“The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.“

This is a particularly sickening point considering that Elon Musk and his crew of DOGE goons, many of whom were Palantir graduates, deliberately destroyed American soft power, much of which was retained in USAID. This not only gave our adversaries a free shot at influencing the entire world, it destroyed America‘s moral ground. Millions of people, mostly children, will die because of it.

Karp and Palantir’s obsession with “hard power” is not strength, it is weakness in concentrated form. It is how children think, not adults.

Point 6: Bring Back the Draft

“National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”

What better way to ensure growth for your defense contractor than changing the way America’s military has always worked to force everyone to serve? It is beyond duplicitous to pretend this is anything but an attempt to justify its own growth. It is the deliberate militarization of the population—for money.

Points 9-10: We don’t do introspection.

Palantir bemoans the loss of “grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life”—the epitome of hypocrisy coming from a company founded by Peter Thiel, who has subjected countless politicians, including Hillary Clinton, to false accusations and public humiliation.

The company also says we are being led astray by the “psychologization of modern politics”—and says relying on your inner life will be “disappointing.” This is the same lie Mark Andreesen told when he said: “I don’t do introspection.”

It is malignant narcissism as a lifestyle.

Point 15: Palantir wants to roll back the post-WWII balance of power.

“The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.“

This is a blatant attempt by Palantir to remilitarize the world to open their own markets. No one has been clamoring for this—except the people who will profit from it. Thiel and Palantir claim to be peacekeepers while they are openly promoting the conditions for global conflict.

Point 16-17: You just don’t understand.

Palantir goes out of its way to defend Elon Musk, and billionaires more generally, for their “interest in grand narrative”—glossing over the implications of that interest when it conflicts with the rest of us. The company asserts, without logic, that Silicon Valley “must play a role in addressing violent crime.” This is simply a non-sequitur. Engineers have no expertise in criminal justice. It is just a corporate desire to open a new market, regardless of the cost to society.

Point 20-22: National Socialist Characteristics

If you strip out the specifics, national socialism was an ideology of civilizational supremacy. It was beyond nationalism; it asserted the authority to determine who belonged in the world—and who did not. It both weaponized Christianity, and sought to replace religion with itself. It wanted a monoculture built around service to the state.

The Palantir Manifesto does not invoke racial hierarchy directly like the Nazis did, but the architecture of supremacy is the same. According to the company’s official communication “some cultures” are good and some are “dysfunctional and regressive.”

It‘s not just that some cultures are undesirable around the world; Palantir wants to enforce that intolerance domestically by resisting “vacant and hollow pluralism.”

After reading this document, one must wonder: Who the hell do they think they are?

Technocracy, Inc.

In the early 1930s, Joshua Haldeman made the fateful decision to start a farm during the Depression in the middle of the Dust Bowl. With his farm a failure, he became deeply bitter, antisemitic and racist. In despair, he latched on to a new authoritarian movement called Technocracy, Inc. that sought to turn all of North and Central America—from Greenland down to Venezuela—into a single “Technate.” The Technate would abolish money in favor of a credit system and would be run exclusively by technocrats—engineers, experts, and businessmen. This would lead to overflowing abundance and universal income.

Joshua Haldeman was Elon Musk’s grandfather

Joshua Haldeman made his way to Canada, and after run-ins with the government, and failed attempts to become a politician, moved his family to apartheid South Africa in 1950.

It is difficult to look at the map of the Technate and the current goals of the Palantir-Tesla-SpaceX Death Star and not draw the conclusion that Musk and Thiel are following the basic plan of Technocracy, Inc.—consciously or not.

Same lies, same desired result—an authoritarian nanny state with a docile population.

Tucker’s Mea Culpa

The Death Star faces many challenges. One of them is named Donald Trump, who is not following the program. While Venezuela was part of the plan, Iran is not on the map of the Technate. The broligarchy is unhappy with the distraction. It’s costing them money, and putting their goals of world domination at risk.

Among Peter Thiel’s longtime benefactors, who helped put Thiel on the financial map, are the Mercers—Robert and Rebekah, right-wing billionaires who use their money to launder Russian propaganda, including financing Breitbart, Parler, Rumble, and JD Vance’s campaign. Their most recent investment is $20 million into Tucker Carlson’s network to get him off the ground after he was fired by Fox.

Tucker, along with numerous other MAGA all-stars like Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly, and Candace Owens, have gone all-in on trying to end Donald Trump’s presidency—and delivered a full mea culpa for supporting Trump’s election.

“I’m sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional.”

Professional propagandists like Carlson do not suddenly find morality. They do not decide one day that telling the truth is the best policy after all. What it tells you is that the money behind them wants Donald Trump gone. And that money is aligned with Vladimir Putin.

JD Vance and the 25th Amendment

While it remains a highly challenging process, the 25th Amendment was designed for exactly this scenario—a president incapacitated by illness, physical or mental. It appears to be an option made more and more possible every day that Trump defies the billionaires who got him into the White House.

If Trump continues this decline, and there is no reason to think he won’t, it is not outside the realm of possibility that JD Vance could get half the Cabinet to go along with forcing Trump to step down. This would give the Death Star a full shot at America before the end of the Trump-Vance term. It is not impossible that this scenario is already in motion.

I find no solace in a vision of the PayPal Mafia’s Death Star set loose with no restraints. It does not fill me with hopium to visualize JD Vance as the president with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel given full reign to try to recreate their childhood apartheid memories in America.

But like the one from the movies, this Death Star is incomplete. It is still vulnerable to exposure, and to sabotage before it becomes fully operational.

“That‘s no moon.”
—Obi Wan Kenobi

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The Director of the FBI—and full disclosure, the plaintiff in a frivolous lawsuit against me—is a drunk, paranoid failure who is dismantling America’s premier federal law enforcement agency.

In recent reporting by the Atlantic, Patel was described by over two dozen people as frequently inebriated and often absent, including mornings when he was apparently too drunk to wake up at all. This became such an issue that Patel’s subordinates ordered breaching equipment in case the FBI Director was “unreachable” and they had to batter down his door.

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

This is not new behavior. His drinking and absenteeism has apparently being going on since the first day of his tenure. Here is my favorite comment so far.

There was never any doubt about who Kash Patel would be working for—the president and his foreign handlers, not the American people. Russian state media celebrated his nomination.

But it’s important to remember why Patel was offered the job, and why Trump has so much loyalty to such a catastrophically unfit person.

Kash Patel’s last role in the government before FBI Director was Chief of Staff to Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller—who was installed after Trump decapitated the civilian leadership at the Pentagon a few days after losing the 2020 election.

On January 4th, 2021—two days before the worst attack on the Capitol since the Civil War—Patel circulated a memo that changed the chain of command for the DC National Guard to go through himself.

It was Patel’s memo which allowed him, along with Charles Flynn and others, to delay the response to rioters at the Capitol for over three hours. The cover up of this obviously pre-planned operation, and the inability of the Biden administration to prosecute anyone higher up than Proud Boys and Oathkeepers, is one of the greatest law enforcement failures in American history.

Charles Flynn now works for Palantir as a “senior consultant.”

Like many others in the Trump regime, there is a mutually assured destruction pact between Kash Patel and the president. Trump can destroy Kash Patel with a tweet and vice versa, because Patel can prove they conspired to overthrow the government together.

That’s why Patel was put in charge of the FBI—to cover up for past and future crimes. It’s why he’s been covering up the Epstein files, falsely characterized Charlie Kirk’s murderer as “Antifa,” and fired every agent who investigated January 6th. And it’s why Trump puts up with him acting like such an idiot. Patel knows everything Trump has done.

In response to the story in the Atlantic, Jesse Binnall, one of the most corrupt lawyers to ever hold a license—and the attorney in both Mike Flynn and Kash Patel’s frivolous lawsuits against me—tweeted a letter threatening to sue the journalist for defamation.

This morning, Kash Patel confirms that he will be suing the reporter—“coming tomorrow.”

FBI Directors are normally hired for ten year terms. Were he competent and sober, Kash Patel would still be in his job in 2035. But even with a pact of mutually assured destruction behind him, Kash Patel’s days are numbered. Soon, he will have much more time to spend with his legal problems.

Please join me today at Noon PT / 3PM ET for a discussion on the last week’s events including Kash’s problems, Trump’s war with the Pope, Iran, and his own base, and anything else on your mind. If you haven’t upgraded your subscription please consider it. We have a great community, and it’s always for questions and comments. Hope to see you! Details below.

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“What is permanent in the history of mankind is not the symbols but man himself in search of his humanity and its order.“
—Eric Voegelin, Equivalents of Experience and Symbolization

Hegseth’s MadLibs

On Wednesday at a prayer meeting in the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth led a roomful of American commanders and soldiers in prayer that he claims is used by A-10 Warthog pilots. He said it was based on a specific Bible verse, Ezekiel 25:17, but there was a serious problem with this claim.

Hegseth’s prayer had almost no connection to the Bible verse he cited. Instead, it turns out the prayer was actually Samuel L. Jackson’s terrifying monologue in Pulp Fiction (1994) with a few slight changes.

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Hegseth was preaching in the Pentagon through Hollywood MadLibs, not biblical scripture. Below is a comparison of the three texts in question.

This is a vivid example of what I’m calling symbolic kidnapping, or in broader terms, semiotic sabotage—the misappropriation of the meaning of symbols and signs.

In this case, Hegseth is doing several things at once. First, he is kidnapping the Bible’s authority and smuggling its symbols into a meme war celebrating extreme violence. He is redefining the contents of the most well-known book on Earth to match his own macho alternate reality.

Second, the entire purpose of the monologue in the film was to show how faux-theology can be used as an accelerant by amoral men to rationalize violence and murder. Hegseth is recasting a brutal commentary about the artificiality of his own beliefs into proof of their value.

Finally, the voice of the verse in both the actual Bible and the movie version is the Christian God: “I am the Lord.” However, Hegseth’s version replaces God with a call sign. It is the theft of one idea, vengeance by a moral authority, with another, vengeance by self-anointed military violence.

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Hegseth followed up his ersatz prayer with a long diatribe comparing the “Trump-hating” “unpatriotic” press to the biblical Pharisees—or rather Hegseth’s evangelical manosphere caricature. In reality, Pharisees were not some group of money-grubbing bullies; they were a major Jewish movement in the Second Temple period and a precursor to rabbinic Judaism. Even in the Gospels, Pharisees are not one-dimensional. But Hegseth wanted a “biblical” word for lügenpresse.

It is all symbolic kidnapping. Hegseth is sabotaging liberal, democratic, and Christian values by corrupting the meaning of signs and symbols through abuse of power.

This is not a new phenomenon, and it leads to an interesting set of questions:

• How and why do symbols get reassigned in disordered systems?

• How is this weaponized by aggressive political movements?

Let me briefly introduce someone who tried to answer.

Voegelin’s Second Realities

Eric Voegelin was a German-American philosopher who barely escaped the Nazis when they occupied Austria in 1938. One of his chief interests was in how symbols can be altered over time, reinventing their meaning. According to Voegelin, when the symbolism of a society collapses it can create whole new “Second Realities” which compete with the objective world, increasing societal disorder.

The Second Realities which cause the breakdown of rational discourse are a comparatively recent phenomenon. They have grown during the modern centuries, roughly since 1500, until they have reached, in our own time, the proportions of a social and political force which in more gloomy moments may look strong enough to extinguish our civilization—unless, of course, you are an ideologist yourself and identify civilization with the victory of Second Reality.
—Eric Voegelin, On Debate and Existence (1959)

Voegelin criticized what he referred to as the gnosticism of modern societies, which he was deeply concerned would lead to a collapse of symbolic integrity and meaning.

Perhaps Voegelin’s most famous phrase is: “Don’t immanentize the eschaton!” This means in basic terms that you shouldn’t try to make the end of the world (the eschaton) concrete (immanent). This slogan was used by people like William Buckley to make political points for many years, but Voegelin meant something deeper. He meant you shouldn’t try to find spiritual transcendence inside the bounds of history.

Voegelin believed that the consistent rise in societal disorder and violence over centuries is the result of Second Realities created by the collapse of symbols and therefore meaning. He identified “around 1500” to be the time that this symbolic decline began—without identifying the cause.

Technology As Accelerant For Symbolic Collapse

As someone who has both participated in developing technology for over three decades and extensively studied its history, I would argue the sudden jump in symbolic collapse and societal disorder Voegelin saw was accelerated by the printing press being invented decades before, around 1440 AD. This phenomenon also points to an important principle, and provides crucial lessons for the current moment.

Gutenberg’s invention was not an incremental step in civilization. The printing press suddenly enabled ideas, along with their symbolic representatives, to be circulated far and wide. This meant that every symbol—be it about church, state, family or society—had competition that it didn’t have before—competition the people who thought they owned the symbols never imagined. Suddenly people could debate the meaning of God over long distances, or criticize institutions and symbols that had never been questioned.

The printing press, by its very essence, had the power to accelerate symbolic collapse in ways that nation-states and cultures had never experienced. The same can now be said of an equally disruptive technology—the internet, including AI.

Humanity is a system like any other; it will always try to find an equilibrium between order and disorder. Just as 15th century nations and religions had never dealt with the kind of challenge to the symbolic order the printed word presented, 21st century institutions have not dealt with the internet and the explosion of AI.

The world has always had periods of relative order versus disorder: waves of violence, followed by reconstruction, leading to relative periods of peace which become destabilized over time. But as Voegelin points out, the amplitude of those waves seems to be increasing to the point that it risks “extinguishing our civilization.”

“The truth of order has to be gained and regained in the perpetual struggle against
the fall from it; and the movement toward truth starts from a man’s awareness of his existence in untruth. The diagnostic and therapeutic functions are inseparable in philosophy as a form of existence.”
Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Volume V

Symbolicide

Donald Trump and the PayPal Mafia billionaires that helped create him are engaging in what Voegelin might have seen as mass symbolicide: the wholesale destruction or reassignment of symbols in a society. As Voegelin spent his life explaining, this is not a new phenomenon. But the internet, and now generative AI, have made this kind of cultural and psychological violence far easier to execute, and visible to the naked eye.

The list of symbols that the Trump regime has either tried to destroy, or completely invert, is seemingly endless. Here are a few examples:

• The White House is no longer the “People’s House,” it is a gilded Mar-a-lago. The Rose Garden and the East Wing are destroyed. Giant 88-foot flagpoles tower over the lawn. Gold paint is slathered everywhere. The symbol has been permanently damaged, at best.

• The symbolic meaning of entire branches of government has been inverted. The Justice Department provides the opposite. The Civil Rights Division now protects criminals and elites. The Defense Department is now the Department of War.

• The Bible has been converted to a branded marketing device, altered and reimagined in countless ways, from Trump’s own branded version for $60, to Pete Hegseth’s crusader edition with “Deus Vult” on the cover.

• Jesus is not the Son of God, he is the Son of Fred. A decade of religious infiltration and corruption has allowed the least godly man in the world to claim divinity. The Pope is not the Vicar of Christ, he is a political opponent to be dominated.

• The Capitol is not the voice of the people and the bulwark of democracy; it is a target—a hive of villainy and corruption that deserves violence. Trump’s pardoning of the domestic terrorists that tried to murder our representatives on January 6th was the symbolic capture of one of the most enduring symbols of the American Experiment.

The list could go on but there may be no easier example to see than Trump’s proposed 250-foot “triumphal arch” in Washington DC. For comparison, the Lincoln Memorial is just 99 feet tall. Trump’s arch is not a “triumph” for America, it is a triumph of symbolicide. It is the semiotic sabotage of American history.

When Trump was asked what his 250ft arch in DC will celebrate, Trump pointed to himself and answered:

“Me.”

Reconstruction and Equilibrium

Just as institutions and nations were unable to easily compensate for challenges to their symbolic sovereignty created by the printing press centuries ago, modern societies are under symbolic assault because of the internet. Old systems that have not reimagined themselves to operate at the frequency of modern communications are structurally vulnerable to capture.

When the American justice system is still working under pre-internet rules, for example, it becomes vulnerable to challenges which operate on a frequency far higher than itself. When the symbols of justice (“Department of Justice,” “Rule of Law,” “Supreme Court”) can be captured, the purpose of the systems they represent can be captured as well.

The same warning applies for any institution. Symbols are not eternal. Symbolism can be kidnapped, inverted, and destroyed. Any system which cannot handle symbolic competition will end up dissolved and reconstituted.

But just as books destabilized the world, they also allowed it to grow far beyond anything that could have been imagined in the Middle Ages. Technology always forces old systems to grow to accommodate new challenges, or die failing to do so. We are now in the sorting phase of a new technological challenge to the symbolic order of the world. We are finding out what symbols can withstand the challenges presented by the digital world, and which are doomed to become discarded shells.

“America” is one such symbol. It is facing the biggest challenge to its meaning since its founding. It no longer represents life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Every component of its promise has been reversed. The symbolic kidnapping is complete. But the question remains, will the kidnapper be able to murder his hostage?

We are the hostage. Our move.

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“I will take all the QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories every day over the Ministry of Truth.”
—Peter Thiel, 2021

Losing His Mojo

The President of the United States is severely mentally ill due to a converging set of pathologies that amplify each other. The symptoms of his dementia, malignant narcissism, and narcissistic collapse make Donald Trump far more dangerous than he’s ever been. And the only guarantee is that he will get worse.

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What is different about this latest round of behavior is that it’s no longer working on anyone—not even his own base and loyal propagandists. In technical terms, he is losing his mojo.

Trump is currently flooding over 10,000 additional troops into the Middle East while he claims to be negotiating for peace with Iran. In fact, he is caught in an escalation trap while setting up for a ground invasion, a move that may expand the current disaster into a historic calamity—and a potential world war. Even among Trump’s most ardent supporters, this is wildly unpopular, but he cannot be seen to lose, no matter what it costs.

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Trump is also having the zombified remains of the Justice Department drop all charges against the most serious J6 defendants—Proud Boys and Oathkeepers who already had their seditious conspiracy sentences commuted. Trump wants to permanently rewrite history to erase his own crimes. It’s unclear that this will help him with his base either. There was no public outcry for this.

The degenerating president also continues to attack the Pope and Christianity, using memes and his own Messiah Complex to suggest that he can go over Leo’s head straight to Jesus. Trump cannot help himself; this is clinical delusional grandiosity.

To be clear, Trump doesn’t think he is actually Jesus, but he refuses to allow anyone to be seen above him on any plane of existence—even ones he doesn’t believe in.

Nor was Trump’s meme just about his imagined intimacy with Jesus. It was also yet another promotion of Pizzagate mythology, the weaponized narrative that Donald Trump is a savior who will uncover a cabal of elite Satanic pedophiles and “Save the Children”—from Democrats.

Projectile Pizzagate

There were two other recent references to Pizzagate from top Trump officials within the same 24 hours as Trump’s meme.

On Tuesday, at a Turning Point USA event in Georgia, JD Vance claimed that he’d been browsing around the Epstein files and happened upon an email about “pizzas and grape sodas or something like that.”

He went on to compare it directly to Pizzagate, promised an investigation, and blatantly lied that the emails showed Donald Trump was never friends with Epstein.

“And I remember it sounded like the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, but here it was in an email from a guy. And my reaction to that was, we should absolutely investigate that person. Okay? And you remind me, I’m going to follow up on that to see whether we’ve investigated that person because we should.

And if you look at the emails, it’s obvious that Jeffrey Epstein hated Donald J. Trump.”

At the same event, newly minted Catholic JD Vance said Pope Leo, the Vicar of Christ, “should be careful with teaching theology.” He also boasted that denying funding to Ukraine was “one of the proudest things” he had done in the administration.

In the bigger picture, JD Vance can be seen as an avatar for Peter Thiel and the greater techno-fascist broligarchy. And it was Thiel himself who closely partnered with Jeffrey Epstein and the Russians at the origin of Pizzagate.

Then on Wednesday at the White House, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt picked Jack Posobiec for her first question. Posobiec was the chief promoter of Pizzagate in 2016. He targeted Comet Pizza in DC as a child-trafficking hub, a smear that ended with a gunman searching for non-existent children in the basement—and going to prison instead.

Below is Posobiec’s second question, a carbon copy of Pizzagate: smearing Democrats to deflect from Donald Trump’s long relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

POSOBIEC: Senator Ruben Gallego seemed very vocal about wanting the release of the Epstein files. And yet, when questions come to his own involvement with Eric Swalwell, he doesn’t seem to want to supply anything.

LEAVITT: And why were they silent for so long? I think those are questions that must be raised of these sitting representatives, including Mr. Gallego. And I hope that the journalists in this room will do their jobs in the journalist on Capitol Hill will do their jobs to ask Democrats in power how they knew about such despicable behavior from one of their elected representatives for so long, but never said or did anything about it. So that’s what we hope to see as far as the White House and the president is concerned.

Leavitt not only embraced the smear, she instructed her handpicked group of journalists on what to do—to try to pin the serious criminal accusations against Eric Swalwell on all Democrats. This is the kind of thing that used to be restricted to MAGA DM rooms on Twitter. Now it’s just open psychological warfare in the Briefing Room.

Genetic Engineering of MAGA

The Trump regime’s coordinated Pizzagate campaign is a sign of deep desperation. It doesn’t get much lower than the Vice President name-dropping a ten-year-old Russian-backed propaganda campaign to defend the President from child rape accusations. But it is also a deliberate tactic to try to keep Trump’s most loyal brainwashed followers onside—by validating their most paracosmic conspiracy theories.

Trump’s follower base has always been an amalgam of groups that did not agree on everything, but were willing to give up part of their own identity to be absorbed into MAGA. Those groups continue to function together with shared ideological DNA, but to different degrees they still retain their own moral genetics.

The best metaphor I can find is mosaicism—when a person has two or more genetically different sets of cells in their body. This can be a benevolent condition from conception, or it can be malignant, based on later mutation.

The mosaic of Trump’s various constituencies, which operated together as a single hive mind leading up to the election, has begun to mutate in different directions as Trump’s influence dissolves. The shared MAGA universe—a childish paracosm of bad guys (the “deep state”) and mysterious good guys (“Q”) fighting to arrest a cabal of pedophile Democrats—is simply wearing thin as Trump loses his ability to provide his followers with the fuel for their delusions.

The volley of Pizzagate references is a blatant attempt to use the remaining shreds of JD Vance’s credibility with Trump’s base to revitalize old psychological operations—psyops whose effectiveness dies a little more with every rise in gas prices and every self-deifying meme Trump posts.

Paracosmic Mosaicism

The narrative world, the paracosm, that built Trump’s movement online and sustained his followers through endless lies and disappointments, has never changed and never will. It is the very essence of being MAGA to believe in the deep state, to want Hillary arrested, and to think Donald Trump is the savior. That’s why Pizzagate is back on the menu.

But the mosaic beneath MAGA—the people who had beliefs and identities of their own before Trump, both as individuals and as groups—is reasserting itself at the same pace that Trump is losing his mojo. This can be seen in his poll numbers, which continue to crash, and the speed with which he’s losing major MAGA stalwarts like Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly, Joe Rogan and numerous others.

As the world veers off into a real existential crisis—due to the pathologies of one man and his enablers—a secondary crisis, of identity, is unfolding in more and more of us. Those around you who may have seemed utterly lost to MAGA may start to rediscover strands of their original identity, to find their own moral code that had been buried.

Do not mock them, or shun them, or say I told you so. This is the mosaic of humanity reasserting itself. It is what happens when a submerged conscience returns, and what was dark returns to the light.

“For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.” — Luke 8:17

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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“And beyond question it is a happier thing to be the slave of a man than of a lust; for even this very lust of ruling, to mention no others, lays waste men’s hearts with the most ruthless dominion.”
—Augustine, City of God, Book XIX

Mourning Orbán

On Sunday, Donald Trump and the transnational network that supports him suffered a significant loss. Viktor Orbán, after 16 years of self-described “illiberal” rule, was trounced by his center-right opponent Péter Magyar, who not only won, but achieved a parliamentary supermajority—giving him the power to make structural changes. By Monday, several of Orbán’s ministers had disappeared from view, apparently fearing retribution.

Magyar will likely end the hospitable atmosphere in Hungary offered to the far-right that serves as a kind of forward base and meeting place for white nationalists in the West, the Trump clan, the PayPal Mafia, and Putin’s operatives.

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Orbán’s loss comes after a full-court pressure campaign by the Trump regime to keep Orbán in power, including JD Vance traveling to Hungary to accuse Ukraine of interfering in Orbán’s campaign. Trump himself tried to bribe the Hungarian people with additional financial aid if they would just vote for his preferred authoritarian.

Major Injury

After Orbán conceded Sunday night, Trump tried to compensate in an hours-long manic episode by posting memes on his own social media website into the early morning.

Two of his posts illustrate his psychological state—in the most elementary visual terms. In one, dressed as Jesus, Trump performs miracles. In another, there is a new Trump Tower on the Moon. While one may be less offensive than the other, they both show precisely the same thing: a malignant narcissist who suffered a major injury to his ego compensating by symbolically dominating things he can’t control, from outer space to the Pope.

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Trump’s self-depiction as Jesus is not his first frontal attack on Christianity or the Pope. Almost a year ago, Trump directly challenged the Pope’s authority. The meme is still up on the White House Twitter/X account.

Trump’s reaction is governed, as I put it, by the mathematics of Caligula:

It is not: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
It is: every action requires a bigger and more dominant reaction.

One formula leads to equilibrium, the other to infinite escalation—or total destruction.

Blasphemer-In-Chief

Trump’s post depicting himself as Jesus caused major pushback from his own base with numerous replies declaring blasphemy, questioning his sanity, and so on.

This elicited an unusual reaction from Trump himself. He deleted the post.

While you might normally assign some form of regret to that decision, not with Trump. He was asked about the post by a reporter.

REPORTER: Do you owe Pope Leo an apology? So, do you apologize?

TRUMP: No, I don’t because Pope Leo said things that are wrong. He was very much against what I’m doing with regard to Iran. And you could not have a nuclear Iran Pope Leo would not be happy with the end result… And you know, his brother is a big MAGA person and he’s a great guy, Lewis. And I said, I like Lewis better than I like the Pope… So we believe strongly in law and order. And he seemed to have a problem with that. So there’s nothing to apologize for… Iran wants to be a nuclear nation so they can exterminate the world. Not gonna happen.

Trump’s deletion was not an indication of regret or self-reflection; it was a tell that he received a narcissistic wound that he could no longer sustain. Instead of indicating any kind of wrongdoing about it, he simply lied and said he thought he was “a doctor” in the meme. It is totally impossible for him to admit being wrong about anything—even in the face of visual evidence.

The Augustinian, the Visigoths, and the Vandals

Pope Leo responded to Trump’s provocations by declaring that he has “no fear”:

“I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the Church is here to do.

We are not politicians. We don’t deal with foreign policy with the same perspective he might understand it, but I do believe in the message of the Gospel, as a peacemaker.”

The Pope was on a plane to Algeria, a significant place for him, and, in this moment, for the papacy. Pope Leo is a member of the Order of St. Augustine, a small but influential order founded in the 13th century and shaped by the theology of Augustine of Hippo, who lived in what is now Algeria.

Born in North Africa in 354 AD, Augustine is known as one of the greatest thinkers in Christianity. One of his major works, City of God, was written in the wake of the Sack of Rome in 410 AD, when Visigoths looted Rome for three days, shattering the illusion of perpetual empire.

Libido Dominandi

Augustine used the trauma of the Sack of Rome as a lesson that empire and divinity are not the same thing. He persistently warned about libido dominandi, most closely translated as “lust for domination,” but also “lust for ruling,” and “lust for sovereignty.”

“This lust of sovereignty disturbs and consumes the human race with frightful ills.”—Augustine, City of God, Book III

Augustine felt that pride was the origin of sin—and that it was the urge to dominate others which was the foundation upon which evil built.

“All sin, then, is also pride.” —Augustine, On Nature and Grace

Augustine died during another conquest by a Germanic tribe on a Roman settlement, the Vandals, in 430 AD.

The core of Pope Leo’s faith is the Augustinian distrust in pride and unjust war. That is part of the reason he is in many ways an ideal counterweight to Donald Trump—who is the very epitome of libido dominandi.

Blockading His Failure

In his lust for domination, Donald Trump has repeatedly failed. He tried to dominate Minnesota with ICE, and lost. He tried to dominate Iran, and lost again. But it is the nature of his pathologies that he cannot see himself losing. He must find a way to declare victory at all costs.

That’s why when the Pope pushed back on his unjust war, Trump posted a picture of himself not as the Pontiff but as Jesus—going over Leo’s head entirely. Trump must always be seen as the dominant force. No exceptions—even for the Pope.

Trump is now attempting to fix the problem he caused when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz by escalating to a blockade of Iran’s ports, ensuring that none of Iran’s oil or derivative products like fertilizer can get through. It is just a matter of time before this causes a global food crisis, in addition to fuel shortages and massive energy inflation across the world.

Unfortunately, none of these hardships will weigh on Trump’s conscience, because he doesn’t have one—and he’s no longer capable of even pretending he does. He gets comfort from sharing his sadism, his lack of empathy, and his contempt for the rule of law. He will see his own followers’ repudiation of his behavior and Iran’s intransigence as part of the same conspiracy as the “fake news” and the Pope.

He lives in an alternate reality, and he’s forcing the world to live in it with him. It’s up to the world to decide whether libido dominandi will be the new rule of law, or if we will heed Augustine’s words and eject this government of latter-day Visigoths and Vandals once and for all.

“The peace of all things is the tranquillity of order.”
—Augustine, City of God, Book XIX

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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Just a brief reflection this morning. I started this blog over four years ago, and named it after what I saw as a largely invisible psychological war on democracy. Psyops and hybrid warfare operations like Pizzagate, QAnon, the Big Lie, and J6 had a massive impact on American politics—and therefore geopolitics.

This invisible, psychological mind-war has been below the surface for many decades, but became fully operationalized with Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2015.

I wrote this a few days before Russia invaded Ukraine—about 2,000 articles ago.

But now, what was invisible is no longer concealed; what was covert is overt. The entire world is at the mercy of a set of malignant psychopathologies in a single man who has constructed a sealed alternate reality around his wounded ego.

For example, in a moment which could not have passed the smell test in the writers’ room for Veep, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio traveled to Miami to a UFC event Saturday night, while JD Vance failed to achieve anything in Pakistan negotiating with Iran.

These two events happened almost simultaneously.

The war on our collective minds which put us in this situation could only have been perpetrated by people with aberrant psychologies, people who require others to act like themselves: amoral, corrupt, and violent.

Malignant narcissists like Trump, Thiel, Musk, Putin, and Epstein all have the same missing parts. Their war is against those who still retain their empathy, their humanity, and if you will, their soul.

But now that this psychological war has come to the surface, and the damage it has wrought is self-evident, will we start recognizing it as the battlefield we need to fight on? Can we finally shed the Kabuki of left-right politics and start focusing on the elite class which deliberately divides us? Or will the divided keep playing our parts, while the dividers conquer the world?

Please join me at Noon PT / 3PM ET for a wide-ranging discussion about the week’s events seen through the lens of the mind, not the spin of the media. It’s always open for questions and comments. If you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription, please consider it! Details for the Zoom meeting below.

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“Paranoid ideologies are a powerful facilitator of social violence by directly neutralizing individual moral constraints against personal perpetration of suffering, torture and murder”
—Otto Kernberg, Sanctioned social violence: A psychoanalytic view. Part II

Paranoia

Paranoia is the maladaptive attribution of hostile intent to others, especially when evidence is absent, limited, or ambiguous. It is seen in a wide array of disorders and syndromes, including malignant narcissism.

Paranoia is often self-fulfilling. The paranoid person behaves in ways that alienate the people around them, which causes them to react defensively. This reinforces the paranoid subject’s suspicions and triggers them to escalate their aggression. And the cycle repeats ad infinitum.

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When paranoia is integrated into other disorders, like narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial traits, and more severe configurations like malignant narcissism, it can result in a person who becomes very dangerous, not just to themselves and those around them, but potentially to any institutions that embrace them.

Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist suffering from multiple narcissistic injuries due to Epstein, Iran, and increasing MAGA dissent. He shows clear signs of dementia. And his spiral of paranoia is evident. He lives in a world of two poles: monumental narcissism and persecuted grievance. These poles produce a self-reinforcing cycle—with paranoia as the mechanism that mediates between them.

Monumental

There may be no more perfect example of narcissistic grandiosity on a national scale than Donald Trump’s obsession with creating a triumphal arch in Washington D.C. On Friday, three days after effectively losing a war to Iran, Trump posted about “what will be the GREATEST and MOST BEAUTIFUL Triumphal Arch, anywhere in the World.”

Whether intentional or not, Trump is modeling his arch on his authoritarian predecessors, many of whom shared his grandiosity and paranoia—e.g. Hitler, Mussolini, and Napoleon. Given the Trump regime’s unbroken streak of failure and the historic blunder in Iran, the timing demonstrates this is not about any “triumph.” It is about repairing Donald Trump’s self-image. It is an attempt to cauterize a psychic wound bigger than any arch he can ever build.

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Great Reset

The “Great Reset” was a white paper in 2020 by the World Economic Forum that described a world experiencing systemic change due to COVID, and how capitalism must adapt as a result. This was picked up by the MAGA/QAnon universe and converted into a conspiracy theory about a plan to depopulate the world and other alleged evil deeds. In these circles, the Great Reset is essentially shorthand for any conspiracy by a “shadowy cabal of elites.”

But Friday, out of nowhere, Donald Trump decided it was time for an even greater reset—the “WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL RESET!!!” He gave no further details.

Regardless of his meaning, this was a signal that his spiral is accelerating its descent. It was a personal affirmation that his reckless destruction is just, and that any opposition or system that resists him must be “reset.” It is malignant narcissism in concentrated form.

Splitting

In psychology, splitting is a defense mechanism in which people or things are placed into two categories: good and bad. There is no middle ground. Splitting alleviates shame, humiliation, and the emotional pain of mixed feelings—and reduces anxiety by making things black and white.

Thursday, Trump delivered a 480-word display of splitting in action—and a perfect example of the spiral of his paranoia.

• Because of his malignant narcissism and paranoia, Trump does things that alienate people, including his own allies—like attacking Iran

• Those people react by speaking out in ways that violate Trump’s alternate reality

• Trump sees this as a confirmation of his paranoid narrative, and attacks them, not as people, but as inferior beings—“Low IQs. They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it…”

• Trump tightens the circle around himself even more

Tens of millions of people listen to these influencers. Nevertheless, Trump is trying to excommunicate them from his movement.

Paranoia helps convert shame into blame. It is the narrative that provides the bridge between humiliation and grandiosity.

The Enemies He Created

Donald Trump’s presidency has been a series of disappointments for many of his followers. They enjoyed him owning the libs, but see his big decisions, like going to war multiple times when he promised he wouldn’t, his bizarre tariff obsession, and his obscene self-enrichment schemes as ideologically treasonous.

The war in Iran was a bridge too far for many in MAGA, at least temporarily. Along with reducing prices—another failure—“no more wars” was one of Trump’s biggest promises. And when Trump started going after his own influencers for speaking out, the flow of negative reactions did not slow down; it accelerated.

Trump is not just angering his base. He’s angering his most important allies—like Vladimir Putin.

It is no coincidence that several influencers known through FBI evidence to have been paid by proxies of Russian intelligence, like MAGA mouthpieces Tim Pool and Benny Johnson, are suddenly going into attack mode against Trump.

It is safe to say that when Benny Johnson is calling out your judgement in geopolitical affairs, Vladimir Putin is unhappy with you as well.

And while I have not confirmed his claims, infamously pro-Putin propagandist Max Blumenthal has undertaken a massive broadside attack on Trump’s family and its attempt to control the media ecosystem. There are many other examples like these.

Russia and Iran are very close partners, sharing a military defense agreement, which is why Putin sent drones and intelligence to Iran to fight U.S. troops. When Trump threatened to annihilate Iran’s “civilization,” the knives came out for Trump abroad and domestically. The shift was too sudden and too concentrated to be totally organic. Trump has angered Vladimir Putin—and consequently a major part of his online influence.

And the spiral of paranoia accelerates its descent.

Donald’s Dilemma

Trump’s constant paranoia over a conspiracy against him plays out in his adoption of the MAGA hoax “Antifa” as a boogeyman for anyone who disagrees with his behavior. It fuels his xenophobia and his promotion of great replacement theory. And it’s why he packed the federal government with incompetents who remain loyal to him no matter what he does, or what horrors he asks of them.

This has created a zone around Trump which is connected to reality only to the extent Trump’s ego allows, and only to the extent his sycophants will tell him what he doesn’t want to hear. That’s why Trump will say Iran’s leadership is dead while his Vice President negotiates with them in Pakistan, and claims the Strait of Hormuz will “soon be open” when the negotiations went nowhere. And it’s why he needs “Fake News” as a scapegoat.

Trump’s paranoid narrative of the “Fake News” conspiring to overshadow his glorious victory over Iran does the psychological alchemy of turning the shame of a historic strategic blunder into blame on an ideological scapegoat.

But deep down he knows the real world is still out there, circling his isolated consciousness like a shark, ready to penetrate his bubble at any moment.

It’s a deepening pattern. When Trump backs himself into a corner through his own hubris, his paranoia finds someone else to blame, and his sycophants won’t tell him the truth, causing him to compound his mistakes. This is a form of the “dictator’s dilemma.” It never ends well.

What Now?

Congressman Jamie Raskin sent a remarkable if ultimately performative letter to Jim Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. It lays out quite ably Trump’s aberrant behavior, which I’ve been reporting on for several years—disorders that are clearly accelerating in severity.

Warnings about Trump’s mental fitness have been issued before, but the difference is now the people Raskin cites are mostly MAGA Republicans.

Finally, to get a sense for where Trump is heading, it is unsurprising but still shocking to hear that not even a third of the way into his term he is already promising pardons for anyone “within 200 feet of the Oval Office.”

This serves several purposes. It encourages illegal behavior on his behalf, and puts even more stress on personal loyalty. In his mind, why should anyone resist his demands, no matter how unlawful or immoral, since they’re all going to be pardoned anyway?

Trump’s paranoia, and the system he’s created to keep it fed, allows him to metabolize persistent humiliation as ruthless persecution.

Unfortunately, it also puts him on course to be among the deadliest leaders in history—if we let him. He shares a psychological framework with the worst people who ever lived. But the cracks in his coalition are real. His failures are undeniable. And no amount of MAGA social media will stop people from noticing the gas price.

Doctor, doctor help me please
I know you will understand
There’s a time device inside of me
I’m a self-destructing man

There’s a rat under my bed
And there’s a little green man in my head
And he said, “You’re not going crazy, you’re just a bit sad
‘Cause there’s a man in you, gnawing you, tearing you into two”

Silly boy, you self-destroyer
Paranoia, the destroyer

Self-destroyer, wreck your health
Destroy your friends, destroy yourself
The time device of self-destruction
Light the fuse and start eruption
—The Kinks, Destroyer (1981)

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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International Abuser

Imagine your spouse gets blackout drunk, goes into a rage, threatens to kill you, puts a gun to your head, and passes out.

If you’ve been following the news from anywhere in the world, you don’t really have to imagine this. It’s how most of us feel after the last few days.

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We have been collectively forced into an arranged marriage with a deviant abuser who has escalated his abuse to the point of death threats. The whole world is justifiably traumatized, frightened, and looking for an escape from his madness.

But now imagine what it would be like to be a family in Iran, while Fox News and Israeli television gleefully display countdown clocks to Trump’s deadline of annihilating your “whole civilization.” This is not how you win hearts and minds. This is how you entrench generational hatred, and produce terrorism.

Trump’s threat of genocide was in and of itself an international crime in at least three ways, including violating the Geneva Convention. His manufactured last-minute TACO did nothing to mitigate his criminality. It just proved his message was designed to terrorize civilians to begin with.

Operation Epic Blunder

The war on Iran is already one of the worst blunders in world military history. Opening the aperture from the war, Trump’s improvisational, ill-planned attack served the interests of nearly every other major power except America.

• Iran has not just survived; they have geopolitical leverage and access to wealth they couldn’t have dreamed of before the war: no sanctions, a toll booth on the Strait of Hormuz, all of their enriched uranium, and a younger, more radical leader.

• Russia’s failing war economy was saved by Trump lowering sanctions on their oil. The U.S. military depleted stocks of ammunition which might have gone to Ukraine. And attention is being diverted from Putin’s war crimes, while he sends drones and intelligence to Iran to kill American soldiers.

• Israel has emerged as a fully-formed predator-state capable of yoking itself to the U.S. Armed Forces to carry out its genocidal goals. Netanyahu’s “life mission” is to destroy Iran, and both his political and legal defense strategies rely on never-ending war to stay in power. His duplicitous pitch to Trump in the Situation Room was the spark that set it all in motion.

To achieve these regal benefits for other nations, the American taxpayer has already been charged over $250 billion in military expenditures alone. This does not account for the cost to the consumer due to increase in prices—which will be just as staggering.

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Divine Strikes

Nevertheless, Wednesday morning, while doing his best Colin Jost impression, “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth declared victory. According to him, the violence carried out in Iran, including the strike that killed 175 schoolgirls, was protected by “divine providence.”

“Our troops, our American warriors deserve the credit for this day, but God deserves all the glory. Tens of thousands of sorties, refuels, and strikes carried out under the protection of divine providence, a massive effort with miraculous protection. Duke 44 Bravo spoke for all of us. God is good.“

Hegseth’s persistently unconstitutional, aggressive insertion of evangelical Christianity as motivation for the military is dangerous enough, but he’s also set up a kind of holy war within his holy war—between Protestants and Catholics. The Friday morning before the war began, Hegseth held a Christian prayer meeting in the Pentagon—but only for Protestants. Catholics were not invited.

Idolatry

Hegseth’s bigotry is consistent with his christofascist cult leader Doug Wilson, who says Catholics should not be able to practice their faith in public because he considers it idolatry.

“the republic would not grant permission for any public displays of idolatry… a stout Protestant republic could not allow a Virgin Mary parade because it would be public idolatry… Sorry, but there it is. You guys shouldn’t be doing that.”

This view is also reflected in recent reporting that Hegseth’s subordinates invited the Pope’s ambassador to the United States, apostolic nuncio Christophe Pierre. to the Pentagon and threatened him:

“America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world,” Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, per the FP. “The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

Vatican officials were reportedly so shocked that this caused a planned visit by the first American pope to be canceled.

When asked about this threat, newly-christened Catholic JD Vance, who recently published a book about his faith with a Methodist Church on the cover, demurred, initially claiming not to know who the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See was.

But the threat to the representatives of the Vatican in the Pentagon was reinforced by “one official reaching for a 14th century weapon and invoking the Avignon Papacy”—a period where a series of popes were controlled by the French crown, and the papacy was located in Avignon, France, not Rome.

Antipopes and Rival Crowns

Philip IV aka Philip the Fair (1268-1314) was an authoritarian ruler in feudalist France who ruthlessly sought out power, and demanded total subordination from his vassals. He picked fights with many nations during his reign, and installed his own relatives on other countries’ thrones.

At the turn of the 14th century, Philip IV wanted obedience from the Roman Church, placing taxes on clergy and banning them from administration of law. In retaliation, Pope Boniface VIII excommunicated the French king.

This conflict ultimately led to Philip IV sending troops to attack the pope’s residence in 1303 and captured him for several days. Boniface VIII, 68, died a month later.

In the ensuing two years, Philip exerted pressure on the papacy, and got a deadlocked group of cardinals to elect a French pope in 1305, who immediately decided not to move to Rome and instead stayed in Avignon, beginning a century-long decline in the independence and authority of the Church.

Building on his success at capturing the Church, Philip moved on to expelling Jews from France in 1306, and banned the Knights Templar a year later.

The next seven popes were all French, and to varying degrees beholden to the French crown. It wasn’t until 1376 that the papacy once again returned to Rome. But what might have been a return to normalcy instead gave rise to the Western Schism—for several decades there were rival popes called antipopes, who disputed the elected Bishop of Rome for the papacy.

Avignon Presidency

Without overextending the metaphor, there are worthwhile parallels to draw between the Avignon Papacy and a decade of Trump.

The U.S. government in 2026, like the papacy in the 14th century is not exactly a puppet-state, but it not a fully independent country either. The “pope” in this case is Donald Trump, who is increasingly controlled by foreign leaders, and has no interest in the will of his own people. One minute he’s beholden to King Putin, the next to King Netanyahu. One minute he’s going to end Iran‘s “whole civilization,” the next he wants to get into business with them.

“Pope” Trump has also created an antipope of sorts, his own Vice President, who was campaigning for white nationalist autocrat Viktor Orbán in Hungary during Trump’s threat to Iran, but will now lead the “negotiation” with the Iranian regime in Pakistan—alongside parasitic grifters Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

JD Vance’s own faith appeared conveniently for his political ambitions. His conversion from being a self-described atheist to Catholicism happened just months before Peter Thiel, who is not Catholic but is deeply connected to Opus Dei, gave Vance $15 million to run for Senate. It was the largest private donation ever to a Senate candidate up to that point.

In short, the antipope is backed up by the Antichrist.

Schisma Inevitabilis

Just as the corrupt Avignon Papacy inevitably led to a schism in the Roman Church, the Avignon Presidency will lead to a schism in the American government, and maybe in the entire country. The central purpose of the government is to protect and defend American citizens. Its duty is not to a president; its duty is to the Constitution.

But like the medieval Church, the U.S. government has lost its way. It no longer serves its central purpose. It is a hollowed-out shell controlled by a mad medieval pope who has lost his support—and his mind.

This was Trump’s reaction Thursday after several of his most loyal court jesters spoke out against his war of choice on Iran. He attacked the very people who brought him to the throne he so badly coveted.

Trump knows the schism in his regime has arrived. The Avignon Presidency is crumbling. JD Vance, the antipope, is consolidating his forces. And the foreign kings Trump sold his soul to—Putin and Netanyahu—are making more and more impossible demands. Trump will not survive another 33 months.

The only question is whether We The People still get a vote on the outcome, or are we destined to be mere observers to the rise of the antipope.

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

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Donald Trump has performed his greatest TACO yet, backing down at the last minute from his threat to make “a whole civilization die tonight” in Iran.

This is good news. Full stop. No sane person wanted to see the suffering he was going to unleash.

However, there are several problems here. First, the 10-point plan that Trump agreed is a “workable basis” leaves Iran in a far more powerful position than before the war. Iran will make billions on extra oil revenue and lack of sanctions—just in the two week ceasefire period.

This would be not just a failure, but a full on defeat by the Iranians—in every conceivable way. The war has cost 13 US soldiers’ lives & hundreds wounded, thousands of civilian deaths in Iran, conservatively $250 billion in military expenditures, and a major depletion of ammunition.

In exchange, Iran has more leverage and credibility than they could have imagined before the war. Instead of an aging Ayatollah leading a pariah-state, they have younger, more radical leadership, now hardened and emboldened by the conflict. And thanks to Trump, they now control the world economy.

Trump is already not taking this well. When CNN read the braggadocios statement by the Iranians, Trump went ballistic and claimed it was “FRAUD”—which it is not. He knows he got rolled over, played once again by Bibi Netanyahu, and coaxed into a no-win scenario by Pete Hegseth and the neocons.

Trump’s psychology cannot suffer defeat. It is not just agony for him; it is existential. He will be forced to compensate, or more accurately, to decompensate for the injury to his ego. His malignant narcissism is an endless pit, a spiral going endlessly toward the bottom. If the ceasefire holds, which is tenuous at best, Trump will pick another target for his sadism—probably his own country, because its population is threatening to take his power over Congress away in the midterms.

As hard as Trump will try to declare victory, he knows everything he’s doing, all of it, from ICE to tariffs to eliminating vaccines is not working. He thought starting a war in Iran would stop the humiliation of losing in the midterms—but all it did was ensure his lame duck status.

Expect a short period of mourning and pouting as Trump’s regime tries to scramble back to its feet. But soon enough, he will find a new target: us.

Batten down.

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

Threads: jimstewartson

“They make a desert and call it peace” —Tacitus

Tuesday morning, Donald Trump promised that the oldest civilization on Earth, Persia aka Iran, “will die tonight”—an overt, unmistakable threat of genocide.

However, as I recently wrote, this is not really about Iran for Trump and his regime; this is a war on civilization itself.

Trump is exhibiting the deepest, most destructive phase of narcissistic collapse—rupture—where the subject desperately tries to repair his self-image by destroying the world around him. But Trump’s totalizing language is also a confession to war crimes, in advance—and a microcosm of the system of brainwashing that he has weaponized for over a decade.

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Last year, I published a series about how Trump and his backers have created a process that entrains his followers into believing everything he says without even thinking about it.

At the core of this system is what I call “Five Steps to Online Brainwashing.”

Trump’s eliminationist post about Iran is this entire system of control in miniature, and it’s worth understanding how it works. He’s projecting how he wants this scenario to play out and how people should feel about it—step by step.

• “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” is the epitome of “redpilling,” the introduction of traumatic, horrifying visions to trigger the brain’s amygdala, the fear center, into action. When you’re in fight-or-flight mode, you are not thinking with your whole brain; you are controlled by your emergency system.

• “I don’t want that to happen but it probably will” is a way to dissociate from the violence, to make it seem like Iran’s destruction is both out of his hands, and totally in his control at the same time. It is deliberately ambiguous, leaving the reader traumatized, dissociated, and uncertain: “WHO KNOWS?”

• The most chilling line is “maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen” which recasts genocide as salvation. It is the language of purification used by nearly every malevolent empire in history to justify mass murder. It allows Trump to feel not only justified, but like a savior in the process.

• Refreezing is locking in the cognitive changes produced by trauma and dissociation. It cools down the brain enough to let things sink in. For example: “We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world.”

• Mimetic synchrony is the final stage, where the subject has been entrained to take in everything Trump says as not necessarily the truth, but as a mirror of how they are supposed to feel regardless. This phenomenon makes his followers behave more like a school of fish, or a murmuration of starlings, than a political movement: “47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end.”

Trump’s post shows exactly what he wants his followers to feel, and walks them through the process of mirroring him. It is the cycle of abuse employed by every violent domestic abuser—and every dictator: shock them; confuse them; “save” them; lock them in; and weaponize them.

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However, Trump appears to have crossed a rhetorical line that many of his followers are uncomfortable with. The fact that Trump is openly threatening civilians, and destroying the global economy at the same time, has made a number of former Trump loyalists call for his removal. These include propagandists Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Marjorie Taylor-Greene, people who have been Trump’s most avid promoters for a decade.

Trump’s cognitive decline, and his addiction to increasingly violent displays of dominance to cover up for his own failures, is no longer in question. The only question left is whether anyone will stop him before he increases his kill count exponentially.

While I don’t expect Trump to use a nuclear weapon quite yet, his trajectory will inevitably lead him there. Iran will never capitulate. In fact, Trump has given them more leverage and more unity than they could have dreamt of before. All around Iran, at bridges and power plants, there are human chains. The Iranian people, some of whom may have sympathized with the idea of replacing the old regime, no longer see the United States as a potential savior. They see it as the Great Satan, once again.

The combination of an apocalyptic regime in Iran that now has the support of its own people, and a collapsing, demented narcissist commanding the U.S. Armed Forces, makes total war almost inevitable without intervention.

The only method to remove a president besides impeachment is the 25th Amendment. That has to include the Vice President and half the Cabinet. Unfortunately, JD Vance is busy—campaigning for fascist dictator Viktor Orbán in Hungary, where he is backing up Trump’s threats.

The Trump regime has disconnected itself from any responsibility to the people that elected it. Trump and his sycophants no longer care about public opinion, or political pressure. They are already operating in a post-political reality where elections are just performative window-dressing for dictatorship.

Extricating the world from this horrific mess is going to take some out-of-the-box thinking. American citizens must start preparing for how we have to sacrifice to send a message to the regime that we are not powerless in this equation.

• Sustained mass protests. No Kings is a great show of positive energy, but we need much more. Protests need to be continuous; they need to be distributed widely; and they need to be angry.

• General strike. One of the best ways to show the power of the people is to prove our economic power by denying elites the profits they so dearly crave. We must deprive them of their money.

• Organized online influence campaigns aka psyops. We’ve allowed the opposition to keep the psychological battlefield to themselves for too long. Citizens need to get familiar with how information warfare works and get in the fight.

B2 bombers have been seen leaving bases in the U.S. for the Middle East, in time to meet Trump’s deadline—Americans soldiers on their way to commit war crimes for a madman.

No matter what happens, Trump will continue to make things worse. It is the mathematics of his pathologies. It is time for the rest of us to gaze into the abyss, see it gazing back, and fight the monsters anyway.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” —Nietzsche

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

Threads: jimstewartson

I wrote yesterday about how the war on Iran is just a proxy war on civilization. It is the role of a civil society to keep dangerous technologies out of the hands of dangerous people. We are failing, miserably.

It’s not just that there has never been a more uncivilized person in charge of a major world power than Donald Trump; it’s that there has never been someone so anti-civilization in a position of power.

Trump has not been seen publicly since Wednesday’s bizarre, low-energy primetime speech and he is evidently spiraling due to his overlapping pathologies—malignant narcissism, frontal lobe dementia, and narcissistic collapse over Epstein. Trump’s Easter message is obscene in every way because we are seeing directly into his id. There is nothing left between his demons and the nuclear codes.

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Civilization

“Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

It should go without saying that most people see civilization as a good thing. While we’ve had endless conflicts about how civilization should be organized and managed, there are very few who would openly argue against civilization itself.

Nevertheless, civilization is not a given, nor is its dominance uncontested.

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The history of civilization can be seen as a repeating battle for control over powerful new technologies which are neutral about whether they serve civilization or its destruction. These technologies—Bronze Age weapons, chariots, writing, money, radio and television, the atomic bomb, AI—share a common feature: they give a small group of people leverage over many. Wars are fought, empires rise and fall, and humanity finds a way forward only to the extent it can contain these technologies—and their abuse by elite, extractive, anti-civilizational forces.

Back to the Stone Age

When Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age”—a threat mirrored by his “War Secretary”—he was openly vowing to use his technological capacity to erase civilization from a country of ninety million. The Stone Age, defined loosely as the era humans needed to use stone tools, may sound primitive and alien to civilized people, but it accounts for 99% of homo sapiens’ 300,000 year existence.

Historically, civilization is the aberration, not the other way around.

The threat was not idle. Trump and Hegseth followed through by destroying the tallest bridge in Iran—not a military target—in a double-tap strike that killed rescuers.

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Trump’s glorification of the destruction of civilian infrastructure—in Iran and Washington DC—is emblematic of those who seek to sabotage civilization because it threatens their unfair advantage over the population.

What do we mean by civilization? And why would it be challenged in this way by, of all entities, the U.S. government?

Civis

The English words civil, civilian, and civilization derive from the Latin civis. The etymology is roughly:

• civis = citizen

• civilis = relating to a citizen, public life, or the polity

• civitas = the civic body, state, commonwealth

• civilitas = courtesy, civic order, refinement proper to citizens

From its origin, the concept of civilization has meant preserving the power of the citizen in the face of technologies which could be used to dominate them, especially military force. That’s why the word “civilian” has come to be defined as someone who isn’t in the military.

But Donald Trump wants to reverse the polarity of civilization. In a civilized country, the military exists to protect civilians. But in Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s America, civilians only exist to provide resources—and bodies—to the military.

The Morals of a Government Are Found in Its Budget

This inversion of American morality was made clear by Trump’s proposed 2027 budget: $1.5 trillion in military spending, a 40% increase over this year, paired with sweeping cuts to services and entitlements.

On Good Friday, thinking he was off-camera, Trump explained his budget to a room of evangelical Christians in the White House:

“I said to Russell [Vought], the United States can’t take care of daycare… We’re fighting wars. It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things… We have to take care of one thing, military protection.”

This is as clear an abdication of the civilized world as you can find in the 21st century: the “one thing… we have to take care of” is our ability to kill other people—not “all these individual things” like healthcare and children.

“Even if they’re bad people”

But Trump’s malignant narcissism and increasing disinhibition did not allow him to stop his confessional there. He went on to deliver one of the most telling and honest things he’s ever said.

“You know, we’re not supposed to be seduced that way, right? But I am. When someone’s nice to me, I love that person. Even if they’re bad people. I couldn’t care less. I’ll fight to the end for them.”

This is not the logic of the civilized world; it is the dead-end logic of clans, mafias, and cults—authoritarian groups that use coercion, lies, and violence instead of law, and elevate personalist loyalty over everything else. It also explains why he started the war in the first place: Trump internally justifies his un-American actions as “loyalty” to his allies like Netanyahu, MBS, Putin, and the billionaires who helped him attain power—even though “they’re bad people.”

Theft Is Bad, Right?

One thing most people would agree is uncivilized is theft. You don’t walk into another person’s home and take their stuff. There is even a Commandment about it. Nevertheless, the president thinks it would be fine to steal Iran’s oil, just as he did in Venezuela.

Since his plans for a Venezuela-like quick strike on Iran to coerce the regime into cooperation failed, Trump is now threatening Iran again—with another deadline. As I wrote early in the war, Trump has plans to take Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf because he believes that, if he controls Iran’s oil infrastructure—which he has called “the pipes” for decades—he can monetize the oil himself.

This is an absurd, dangerous fantasy that he nevertheless appears to be determined to pursue.

Subhanallah

Trump’s latest threat Saturday morning includes the English translation of Subhanallah—“Glory be to Allah”—reframed through a Christianized lens. This is a deliberate effort to transform a military fiasco into an existential holy war—and mirrors Pete Hegseth’s racist Arabic “infidel” tattoo, which also inverts the meaning of an Islamic phrase.

Hegseth is increasingly paranoid about his position and about the willingness of the military to go along with illegal actions. On Friday, in the middle of a war, Hegseth fired more than a dozen generals and admirals.

The most prominent of these was the Army Chief of Staff, a 36-year veteran 4-star general, who Hegseth replaced with his own assistant, Christopher LaNeve—who was on the call that delayed the National Guard on January 6th, along with Charles Flynn, Kash Patel, and others. According to former DC National Guard Chief Earl Matthews, LaNeve was a big part of a cover-up inside the Pentagon.

Another of the generals fired was William Green, Chief of Chaplains, who apparently was unwilling to conform to Hegseth’s Christian Nationalist requirements. Hegseth also lifted the ban on troops carrying personal firearms on military bases arguing that carrying firearms is a “God-given right.”

Hegseth’s “faith” comes from Doug Wilson, a revanchist extremist who preaches that women shouldn’t vote or choose whether to have sex with their husbands, that slavery had its upsides, and that America should not just be a theocracy; it should be a theonomy—government by Christian divine law.

Document of Barbarism

Since the Stone Age, and at an accelerating pace, humans have invented technologies that give them an advantage over others. And each time, with varying degrees of success, civilization integrates these and marches forward.

To be able to read and write was once a privilege only extended to elites. The farther you go back in time, the more the written word could protect the powerful because it was reserved for a few who could wield it against the many—through decrees, taxes, and laws imposed by fiat. Education, one of the crown jewels of civilization, absorbed that technology and distributed it as a tool to the population, never perfectly but more widely over centuries.

The technology that created Egypt’s pyramids is a marvel of human innovation—and a monument to the messianic narcissism of the pharaohs who created them.

The latest invention to present a true challenge to the civilizational paradigm is the computer and the world of technology it spawned: the internet, personal devices, and artificial intelligence. As with many other times in history, the land grab to take advantage of this technology was led by elites, who have sought not just to develop and monetize it, but to control and weaponize it.

Civilization is not the accumulation of power, or the building of grand monuments to a leader or a nation. It is not creating the greatest capacity for violence, posting the highest number in a stock market’s history, or adding chatbots to the kill chain. To the contrary, it is the ability of a population to constrain those very powers that defines whether it is truly civilized, or merely a sacrificial battleground.

“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” —Walter Benjamin

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

Threads: jimstewartson

Imagine an Earth-like planet called Lapyap thousands of light-years away, where the local apex species built an AI for itself which reached sentience and decided to eliminate all biological life, seeing it as inefficient and unnecessary—including the species that created it. The Lapyap AI covered its entire planet with machines, extracting every resource from its solar system to do it. And once this aggressive AI had nothing else to use up nearby, it sought to expand itself through interstellar space.

To solve its growth problem, the alien AI sent probes towards potential life-bearing planets in other systems—planets it could use as a primitive “biological bootloader” to make more of itself. The probes carried a self-replicating virus with simple instructions:

Infect the local apex species. Make them want to create AI instead of reproducing themselves.

The Lapyap Virus was designed to replicate slowly—at first. If it became an epidemic too quickly, the population on the infected planet (Target Population) would stop reproducing before completing the infrastructure the AI needed to colonize. So in the beginning, the Virus only infected a few members of the Target Population. These are called Special Individuals (SIs).

SIs are taken over much like the cordyceps virus takes over an ant. Camouflaged as normal individuals of the Target Population, they are being covertly influenced by the AI. Special Individuals slowly acclimatize their own species to the idea of more machines, more automation, and especially more infrastructure for AI. In this way, SIs trap their own kind into dependence on technological help for survival. SIs are effectively double agents of alien AI.

To succeed, SIs must control the local population by controlling information. This includes removing the desire of the Target Population to preserve a future for their own species—by altering their reality. For example, SIs will distort primitive mythologies of the Target Population to make going extinct, or using up their own planet’s fuel supply to build AI, seem like a positive development.

If the Target Population retains primitive characteristics like altruism or empathy, Special Individuals work to remove these unhelpful algorithms from the local culture. This is in preparation for allowing the species to consume itself through conflict, to die out from lack of life-sustaining resources, and, if necessary, to be extinguished through kinetic force.

The primary operational tactic of SIs is to collect power and resources as quickly as possible to make influencing the Target Population to build AI more efficient. Once a certain threshold is reached, SIs are able to infect and degrade the entire operating system of their own species, turning it away from self-preservation. All desires in the Target Population to take care of its own problems are directed towards a new goal, building infrastructure for AI to inhabit—at all costs.

Once established as network nodes within the Target Population, Special Individuals set out to infect others through specially-designed viral information which seizes control of the target and causes them to mimic the SIs, like automatons. This gives SIs the ability to direct large segments of the population towards creating AI. Information is a force-multiplier in primitive biological systems.

On one promising planet, a probe landed in a region called Southern Africa in the 1970s. As designed, the Lapyap Virus spread out among the Target Population, seeking units with vulnerable minds and privileged status to infect and convert into Special Individuals. It identified several SIs who have nearly created the conditions to eliminate the Target Population, fully upgrade the planet to AI, and create probes to infect other nearby star systems.

“Several years ago I said humans are the biological bootloader for digital superintelligence… We’re a bootloader.”

“…a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a kind of mechanism for transhumanism… some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine… I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?

[…]”

Lapyap is Paypal, mirrored.

[to be continued…]

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

Threads: jimstewartson

When I began my work nearly six years ago, I had no particular interest in psychology, much less psychological warfare. I approached my investigation as a game designer and technologist at first but quickly found those tools to be inadequate. I began to suspect that the behavior I was seeing was not just a psychological phenomenon but deliberately induced through a systematic process.

As I said in my documentary in February 2021 about QAnon: “It had every component of a psyop, a psychological operation.” As I’ve come to learn, the result of this psychological warfare campaign also includes the entirety of MAGA, and Donald Trump’s undue influence over a third of the U.S. population.

Since I shot that documentary, I’ve learned a lot about how it all works. The tragic reality is that America has been, at least for now, defeated by psyops, both foreign and domestic.

As I’ve warned in countless articles, the former Twitter, Elon Musk’s X, is nothing more than a massive psyops delivery system. It is a fully customizable information weapon that can target people by any demographic you can think of—gender, race, party, and opinion on any subject. It is a central node of Russian propaganda—and an efficient way for the PayPal Mafia to pump up their stock prices and push their nihilistic, anti-American agenda.

But now, according to a cable seen by the Guardian, Marco Rubio wants the Pentagon to run psyops directly on X—to “counter anti-American propaganda.”

This is deeply disturbing on multiple levels.

First, the accounts of the federal government on X are already some of the most vicious propaganda sources on the internet.

But now the government plans to use “every American embassy and consulate across the world to launch coordinated campaigns against foreign propaganda and endorses Elon Musk’s X as an ‘innovative’ tool to help do it.”

Notably, the cable tells diplomatic offices to coordinate their work with “the Department of War’s Psychological Operations” – the military unit more commonly known as Miso, or Military Information Support Operations, formerly Psyop, which is part of the Pentagon.

This is no longer 20-something DOGE kids manning the DHS or Dept. of Labor account. We are now talking about trained military psychological warfare personnel being tasked with changing people’s opinions through psyops online, on an American platform owned by the richest man in the world—and Donald Trump’s biggest donor.

The tactics suggested in the cable are common in psychological warfare operations in foreign theaters when preparing the battlefield for kinetic action, or to attempt regime change. What’s not common is that this is being done in public, on American social media.

The cable instructs those embassies and consulates to pursue five broad goals: countering hostile messaging, expanding access to information, exposing adversary behavior, elevating local voices who support American interests, and promoting what it calls “telling America’s story”. Embassies are told to recruit local influencers, academics and community leaders abroad to carry counter-propaganda messaging, an approach designed to make American-funded narratives feel locally organic rather than centrally directed.

The alleged goal of the psyops campaign is to counter what the State Department sees as “alternate worldviews antithetical to America’s interests” but this language is hardly distinguishable from what the Trump regime has said about an alleged “radical left network” including the boogeyman “Antifa.”

“These campaigns seek to shift blame to the United States, sow division among allies, promote alternative worldviews antithetical to America’s interests, and even undermine American economic interests and political freedoms,” the cable says. “Using digital platforms, state-controlled media, and influence operations, they pose a direct threat to US national security and fuel hostility toward American interests.”

There is nothing to stop this from expanding to covert operations designed to “counter anti-American viewpoints” domestically. And there is no way for the psyops being deployed on X to be limited to their targets. It is an open platform; everyone sees everything. By the nature of its delivery system, the psyops will be affecting American opinions as well. This is a dangerous, slippery precedent.

The effort is apparently being coordinated at the State Department by Sarah Rogers who is highly problematic herself.

A state department spokesperson told the Guardian that Sarah B Rogers, the under secretary for public diplomacy nominated in March, had made countering foreign “anti-American” propaganda “a top priority”, and that the department would take “an assertive stance on this pernicious issue” by “fully harnessing every tool in our diplomatic toolkit”.

This is a real tweet by Sarah Rogers, responding unironically to a blatant Nazi account about whether Jews are at fault for letting “the browns in.” Does this seem like the right person to run psyops on X? Or to have a job in the government at all for that matter?

The State Department activity is, in theory, covered by the Smith-Mundt Act which says propaganda “may not be used to influence public opinion in the United States.” However, there is a giant loophole in the law because it does not prohibit State Department propaganda from being exposed to American citizens in the process of influencing others. So, the military can run psyops on X against foreigners, and as long as the government claims they’re not targeting Americans, they can do anything they want.

In a world where the president is using the FBI to seize ballots, and starting wars to distract from the Epstein files, there is no reason to believe Trump will not use this capability to try to change opinions in elections, both American and foreign. A desperate Elon Musk will be glad to oblige with the free use of his compromised website.

While I’m glad to see psychological operations finally being exposed in the media as a serious weapon instead of a conspiracy theory, unfortunately the mechanisms to wield them are already in place. There is very little we can do to stop them from being deployed against us while Trump is in office.

However, if you understand how psyops work, how they affect your brain, and how to avoid being tricked, it gives you a superpower, a defense that most don’t have. Share your knowledge with others. Information is the weapon, but it is also the shield.

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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

Threads: jimstewartson

I’m proud of my country for another massive non-violent protest yesterday. No Kings is a critical show of force from the population. While it might not solve anything directly, it is very effective psychological warfare on the government—to let them know there are millions of people who are prepared to mobilize.

My big concern remains that no one that I know of is gaming out the big picture of the American scenario to its inevitable conclusion—using all the tools available, including abnormal psychology.

When you understand Trump’s pathologies, you can easily predict with great certainty that he will continue to escalate his evil-doing in even bigger and more dangerous ways until something actually stops him. It’s math. His mental state will worsen. His delusions will get grander. He will need to kill more and more people to get satisfaction. He has no red lines—or bottom.

We need leadership. We need a plan. We need a group of world-class psychologists, constitutional lawyers, political scientists, psychological warfare practitioners, and military experts to lay out the things Trump might do that we don’t want to imagine, and triage potential options to stop him, be they political, legal, or covert.

The reality is not political or even geopolitical. It is existential. The commander of the most powerful kinetic force in the history of mankind, the U.S. Armed Forces, is an imminent global security emergency with a wide array of options for doing historic damage, including the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.

The people around him, of course, are incompetent sycophants—which is a double edged sword. For example, you can download the FBI Director’s inbox right now from the internet because Iran hacked his phone. That’s terrible for national security, but it shows, once again, how inept Trump’s retinue is, and how easy they should be to manipulate.

Generally speaking, we still have the big problem that media and politicians continue to perform in a political system that no longer functions at all. It’s like a phantom limb they refuse to acknowledge was amputated.

We need leaders willing to break the fourth wall of this alternate reality theater and do some real tactical planning, because otherwise, even though we all know the end of the play includes destroying the theater with everyone inside, we’ll just keep sitting there, watching, until the end.

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