Occult Tectonics: Five Deviant Beliefs Shaking the Planet
The fault lines between Trumpism, Millerism, Christian Dominionism, Billionaire Nihilism, and Putinism
“Man is not what he thinks he is; he is what he hides.”
— André Malraux, Antimémoires (1967)
In the White House today, Donald Trump made his neo-Chamberlain plans clear. He intends to abandon support of Ukraine, Europe, and NATO—a decision clearly prearranged in Alaska, which he will sanctify in Budapest with Vladimir Putin. When asked about the three-and-a-half year Russian war of terror on Ukrainian civilians, Trump said:
“It doesn’t affect us in any way.”
He followed up this aggressive ambivalence with surrender:
“Ukraine could still win it. I don’t think they will, but they could still win it.”
To complete the picture of Trump’s “foreign policy,” when asked why he doesn’t just give Ukraine the ability to “finish this war tomorrow,” Trump attacked the female reporter as ignorant instead of answering the question.
REPORTER: “Would you support Senator Lindsey Graham’s bill to declare Russia a terrorist state? And you have within your power the most powerful man on earth. Why don’t you just enable Ukraine to finish this war tomorrow?”
TRUMP: “Well, if you knew anything about what you were talking about, you’d be able to—”
REPORTER: “I do. I know.”
TRUMP: “I don’t think you do, I don’t think you do, because it’s a little more complicated than that, but it sounds easy. We’re in the process of trying to make a deal. If we make a deal, that’s great. If we don’t make a deal, it’ll be a lot of people that are going to be paying a big price. Quiet, quiet, quiet.”
You may understandably ask: What the hell is going on here? Why does he keep doing this? Why is Trump retreating from Ukraine and Europe?
Other reasonable questions of the day:
What is with the aggressive adventurism in South and Central America?
What’s going on in Gaza?
Why are there masked paramilitary gangs and military attacking American cities?
Why is Trump posting videos of himself shitting on protesters—and why is he sending artillery over highways in California?
In my view, to understand these otherwise unexplainable actions, you have to look just below the surface.
Occult in Plain Sight
Occult religions worship the unseen—the hidden forces shaping the visible world. But there are other occult movements we all recognize, whose influence is diffused through the kaleidoscopic “news cycle” remixed as a flood of inexplicable, destructive events. These movements—each an evolving, deviant belief system—function like tectonic plates grinding beneath the surface of American life. We feel the quake. The question is what’s moving beneath us?
Here are the five hidden movements I believe explain the vast majority of the chaos being inflicted on America—the five occult tectonic plates shaking the world:
Trumpism—Not just MAGA, but a totalist system of control created through psychological warfare and cult dynamics. Trump is in collapse over the threat of Epstein which triggered a descent into late-stage autocratic messianism.
Millerism—A reanimated national socialist movement devoted to ethnic cleansing of Black and brown Americans, and converting “conservative” politics into warfare on liberalism. Born from Stephen Miller’s lifelong racist jihad; DHS/ICE expansion/aggression is a direct extension of his ideology.
Christian Dominionism—A constellation of theocratic movements which has captured 6 of 9 members of SCOTUS, the Speaker of the House, and much of the Trump regime, including the “War Secretary.” Shared goals: Christian domination of government, anti-communism, islamophobia, capture of oil.
Dark Enlightenment—The nihilistic, techno-fascist ideology of oligarchs like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks: anti-democratic monarchy, feudalism, destruction of liberalism, and racial hierarchy.
Putinism—Totalist project to resurrect a new Russian Empire spreading across Europe with Moscow as “Third Rome” aka Eurasianism. Putin wants the destruction of “western hegemony,” and “liberal modernity” in favor of a “multipolar” world.
This is by no means the only way to describe the underlying ideologies driving America’s ideological earthquake, but it provides a solid explanatory and predictive seismological model.
Trumpism
“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
— Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
Trumpism is not political, it is psychological. It is not an ideology, it is a system of control. Donald Trump is a uniquely dangerous personality type experiencing a uniquely dangerous moment, not just for his presidency, his “legacy,” and his ability to wield autocratic power—but for his monstrous ego, a moment that looks like annihilation.
Donald Trump is a sadistic malignant narcissist so terrified of whatever is in the Epstein Files he has converted the entire federal government into an engine of distraction and evasion. He has kept the House shut down, kept a Democratic representative from being sworn in for weeks, corrupted the DOJ and FBI beyond recognition, and launched attacks on anyone who wants transparency—including a grotesque symbolic flyover of Epstein victims.
This isn’t just Trump being Trump, this is existential to him; it is the end.
The “magic” of Trumpism is a psychological system of control; I’ve described how it works in detail. His followers and his operatives mirror him almost autonomically. They’ve been wired to feel what he feels, say what he says, and hate who he hates.
However, this emotional attachment to a singular figure may be the biggest opportunity for the downfall of the regime he controls—which has far bigger ambitions than he does. Regardless, a large plurality of the American population is not just affected by Trump’s tectonic plate—they are part of it.
Millerism
Stephen Miller’s influence on Donald Trump has grown from hardcore immigration hawk in the first term to effectively replacing Trump’s entire domestic policy agenda with warfare, not just on “illegal” immigrants, but on his own citizens. I’ve written extensively on Miller’s numerous motivations and influences, but he is most easily compared to Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda because he works at it; Miller is a seasoned Goebbels impersonator, if not a plagiarist.
Stephen Miller hates brown people; he hates Black people; he hates liberals; he hates everything that does not recreate the protected white environment he feels was stolen from him as a child in the mean streets of Santa Monica. As White House Advisor to DHS, this is reflected in everything it does.
Millerism is the engine of hate that creates Trump’s delusions. It is the source of conspiracy theories about “Antifa” and Soros. It is the reason troops are fanning out into Portland. He has created his own violent tectonic plate.
Christian Dominionism
Christianity, like all religions, has been frequently weaponized by those who are happy to abuse an intergenerational tradition for their own purposes. In America, this has metastasized into a critical conflict—a constitutional crisis that has long passed us, that we refused to correct, and that may be the end of us.
Six of nine Justices on the Supreme Court are Christian integralists—who believe that government and church should be merged into a single system of moral control. We allowed John Roberts, with the invaluable help of Leonard Leo, to steadily erode constitutional protections for years, until Donald Trump was able to nominate three Justices in his first term—locking in a supermajority of Christian dominionists.
It is SCOTUS who may pose the greatest danger of all. They act as the great validator, the supposed “highest court in the land” when they behave as nothing more than a massive steamroller for the authoritarian dictatorship of Donald Trump, crushing all precedent, legal sanity, and public dissent with ruling after devastating ruling.
Mike Johnson, Christian man, is another example, a man who has single-handedly reduced the entire Congress to an inert layer of American geology, while repeating every lie Trump puts in front of him.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of the Christian Dominionist tectonic plate is the military, which is currently being led by a deeply disturbed abuser who once yelled “Kill all Muslims” in a bar, and has the 12th century chant of the Crusades—“Deus Vult”—tattooed on his forearm. This same theology of conquest now animates America’s colonialism abroad, from Gaza to Caracas.
Billionaire Nihilism—“Dark Enlightenment”
“The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.”
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (1939)
The influence of Silicon Valley’s oligarchs on our current dilemma cannot be overestimated. In my view, without the influence of Peter Thiel in 2016, and Elon Musk in 2024, neither of Trump’s terms would have happened. It was their propaganda, their software, their operatives, and their money which allowed Americans to be conned into suicide.
They operate the alternate reality for MAGA that makes it seem like everything Trump does is for them, even when he does the opposite of what he promised. To witness this in action, see the propaganda echo chambers they’ve built or taken over—Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Rumble, and so on.
But underneath what they’re really about is darker. It is a nihilism that doesn’t just want total power over the population; it wants to oversee the end of the individual.
While we currently have Donald Trump to worry about, it is the tectonic plate of the Billionaire Nihilists that is the most stable because it has been grown under the cover of business, of innovation, of venture capital. It has wormed its way into the military, into ICE, and into the White House. And it controls trillions of dollars.
Putinism
Vladimir Putin is an imperialist dictator who has built a totalist regime based on a mythology of a new Russian Empire. While he is not a communist, he is determined to win the Cold War over America that he was born into; his mythology is not based on Marx, it is rooted in Russian nationalism, and a messianic belief in his own role in history. His KGB training, and the Soviet police state he was part of, is his toolkit.
In America, Putin has successfully infiltrated, exploited, and amplified domestic movements designed to produce precisely what we see right now—division and chaos. As I’ve often said, the best way to see what the enemy thinks, is to listen to them.
This is an astonishing eight minutes that is worth watching, just to see the scorn and disdain for America and its president. It includes a section on the obvious symbolism of Pete Hegseth’s Russian tie:
“Did [Trump] impose sanctions? Of course not.
Were any new weapons delivered? No. [..]
Here’s what I can tell you, we know what Hegseth is doing every year.”
Putinism is a volcanic tectonic plate growing its size through magma flows, engulfing and colliding with its neighbors. Ukraine is just the western edge of the same quake that Putin triggered in America.
Ring of Fire
These movements, these beliefs, these tectonic plates, are in motion in unprecedented ways; the collisions are seismic and the effects are already devastating. Like the Earth, in the seismology of America’s demise, it is at the boundaries, the fault lines, where the most devastation takes place.
Let me give you three representative examples:
Trumpism and Millerism
Where Trump’s existential ego-terror and Miller’s genocidal racism collide, the most gut-wrenching real-time action is taking place. Contrary to popular understanding, Trumpism and Millerism are very different. Trumpism is about self-aggrandizement and self-preservation, Millerism is true ideological warfare. But the two belief systems have found common ground—for a decade.
Miller has convinced Trump that the way to hold on to power is to use state violence against people that don’t like him—and don’t look like him—and that the way to make people love him again is to return America to a white fantasy world. Their mutual sadism and shared love of transgression has created a deep connection along these racist lines, a totalist system of self-reinforcing delusion that threatens America’s way of life.
However, there is a historical precedent for this kind of relationship, between Hitler and Ernst Röhm, the founder and leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Brownshirts. After a friendship of many years, when the SA became too powerful for Hitler’s comfort, in 1934, he murdered Röhm and hundreds of others in the Night of the Long Knives. The fault lines are dangerous for everyone.
Trumpism, Christian Dominionism, and Putinism
Trump’s campaign of escalating aggression to provoke regime change in Venezuela and Colombia, his support of Netanyahu’s Gaza genocide, and his retreat from Ukraine and Europe, are all signs of a collision—one with generational domestic and geopolitical implications. Trumpism needs a war, Christian Dominionists need a holy war, and Putinism’s multipolar vision of a divided world needs allies.
Pete Hegseth may be the ultimate totem of this rapid converging of ideological tectonics. A self-described “Christian Nationalist” who identifies as a Crusader, wearing a Russian flag tie in a meeting where Donald Trump reportedly yelled at Zelenskyy to “take the deal.”
When you look at the timeline of Trump’s sudden adventurism in Venezuela, the first ship set off quietly towards the Caribbean on the same day Trump met with Putin in Alaska. This was no coincidence. This was the deal Trump made at the geologic boundary of Trumpism and Putinism—Trump will back off of Europe and Ukraine, if Putin allows Trump to capture the Americas, North and South.
Meanwhile in the House of Representatives:
Chip Roy: “The truth is the marxist, radicals, and Islamists the Democratic Party promoted this weekend, they cannot handle the truth. The truth is that there is a king and that king is Jesus. And the president has been willing to say it, and Charlie Kirk was willing to say it and he got killed for it.”
Millerism and Billionaire Nihilism
Perhaps the darkest future is represented by the erupting border zone between Millerism, and Peter Thiel and Elon Musk’s nihilism. This is how you get Palantir being paid tens of millions of dollars for ImmigrantOS, Musk and Thiel’s operatives being giving access to all of our data through “DOGE,” and the prospect of SpaceX building an AI-controlled “Golden Dome” of attack satellites over America.
Miller requisitioned, and received, a $200 billion budget to do “mass deportations” over the next three years, but that’s not at all what it’s really designed for. The combination of data, AI, surveillance capability and carceral capacity is a system of political repression that will only be rivaled by Putin and Xi.
This is a system designed to erase the freedoms of liberal democracy in favor a regimented system of control that turns the individual into a way to execute code.
Consider that Donald Trump intends to give $40 billion to the man who shook a chainsaw on stage with Elon Musk, when the total budget of USAID—which was personally targeted by Musk—was $35 billion, whose destruction will cost 15 million lives.
DROP, COVER, and HOLD ON
The basic advice for an earthquake is disappointing: DROP, COVER, and HOLD ON.
There is no escaping them. That’s why they’re so frightening—and so destructive. But generally speaking, earthquakes are survivable. In California, I’ve experienced dozens without a scratch. I don’t consider it a serious risk, even though technically, a mile from the beach, I could drop into the ocean any minute.
But the tectonics of California are fairly understandable, there are physical fault lines you can see stretching for hundreds of miles. There has been a huge amount of science and political capital invested in trying to make sure that the average temblor doesn’t bring all the houses down.
The series of earthquakes ripping America and the world apart, on the other hand, is not recognized as a system with understandable dynamics, it is seen as a series of disconnected initiatives only tied together by the carnival barker who cheerleads it. But what I’m calling the occult tectonic plates, the hidden movements underneath the performance, and the way these plates amplify, cancel, and collide is what holds it together—and will ultimately tear it apart.
Here’s what the tectonics say are coming in the relatively near term. These are not hard predictions—like all seismology, they are based on probabilities:
Trump will officially abandon Ukraine and Europe in Budapest. It will be Chamberlain in Prague, 1938.
Trump will send the military into Gaza to help Bibi complete his ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and begin a long occupation to satisfy biblical narratives.
Trump will use military force to overthrow Maduro to seize his oil under the guise of bringing “peace” to Venezuela, and defeating communism. He will threaten Colombia with similar action and use this show of force to start pressuring Greenland and Canada.
Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act, suspend habeas corpus, and arrest his political scapegoats when he doesn’t get what he wants from the courts. This will be followed by an attempt to dissolve the Democratic Party.
SCOTUS will gut the Voting Rights Act and take whatever other measures are necessary to pack the House so Trump doesn’t lose the majority in the midterms.
SCOTUS will authorize Trump’s use of the military in overseas regime change and in domestic law enforcement without authorization from Congress.
Trump will expand his occupation of cities across America with a special focus on ensuring paramilitary forces are in place in key districts before the midterms.
Again, maybe none of this happens, or maybe all of it does. But I don’t see anything stopping him, except a military coup.
This has been a test of your early warning system.
“If the world is to be saved, it will be saved by people with the courage to see it as it is.”
—James Baldwin (1963)
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"Again, maybe none of this happens, or maybe all of it does. But I don’t see anything stopping him, except a military coup." I've been thinking that for some time now.
Perfect horror story for Halloween! I feel like the Christian Dominionism plate is also being controlled by Russell Vought. Do you feel he is just as dangerous as Miller? god I really hate all these people.