Perhaps one of the first revelations of Trump 47's tenure is the confirmation that the Deep State and the Democrats are not as one; one has been using the other to achieve its ends. Neither Trump nor Musk has majored on the historic activities of USAID or NED – 'soft power', aka colour revolutions – but it won't take the brains of an archbishop to work out that this subversion predates the coronation of The Chosen One, in 2009:
“Think of the Democratic Party as the entertainment arm of the overall operation. Its aim has basically been to induce you to doubt your sanity. You were asked to swallow one fabulous absurdity after another — lockdowns, vaccines that don’t prevent illness, mostly-peaceful arson, US soldiers in puppy masks, pronoun police, shoplifting-is-reparations, the wide-open border — an epic acting-out of manifold mental illness in living color...Now, the fate of the blob itself is a thing somewhat apart from the fate of this evil vaudevillian Democratic Party fronting for it. A purge of the blob is pretty clearly underway.”(1)
Shouty progressives, afflicted with a psychological version of St Vitus' Dance, were a gift that kept on giving, provided they were paired with a monolithic media operation which brooked no dissent. And since Obama's time, they were given their head by the string-pullers. It may be that Obama is (or was) the CEO of Deep State Inc., but there were others before him. My guess would be Clinton, Bush Senior and Allen Dulles of the CIA, in reverse order, but it's tricky getting a fix on dark matter. However, regime change operations date from 1953, with a coup d'état in Iran followed by another in Guatemala the following year and both sides of the aisle have played their part.
What Trump is dismantling is both the front-facing Administrative State framework that enables the behind-the-scenes shape shifters to mould events at home, and many of the funding mechanisms that have paid for influence and action overseas. There are different entities – the permanent bureaucracy has subverted the will of elected officials for decades, although they found common cause with Obama's gang as they shared a similar pathology. But the real power has lain somewhere in the nexus between the CIA (primarily) and the robber barons of Wall Street. The safety net is the judiciary, as we are in the process of discovering.
Trump is determined that his agenda will be enacted, not that of the Deep State, so he's hacking away – in a well-planned manner – at the systems that enable the latter. In the process, he is also undoing the wokery that was part-and-parcel of an alliance with the Leftists. So, whilst it's true that USAID funding went to a menagerie of nutty initiatives across the globe – the progressives' goody-bag – it also went to narrative engineers in the media (a shared obsession) and to fund colour revolutions, the latter a priority for the string-pullers, but not so much for Bernie or AOC. Trump is also handing in his membership card to as many globalist cartels as he can and repudiating climate change orthodoxy.
How is all that going to play in Europe? Badly. The woke mind virus exercises almost total control over all the heads of state who matter, although the totalitarian impulse is equally prominent. The European Union Commission and Starmer's troupe of humourless autocrats are cut from the same cloth. The immediate reaction to Trump nuking the Paris Accords? “Ursula Von Der Leyen expressed her unwavering commitment to upholding the European Union’s climate and economic strategies when she asserted that “Europe will continue on its current path..””,(2) followed by a manoeuvre that reveals the Eurocrats' true agenda, which is clearly not motivated by any genuine concern about climate change:
“To avoid all trade tariffs being imposed on the EU by the US, the EU is considering a methane emissions trading market that would allow high-methane gas to be labelled as low-methane by buying certificates from low-emissions producers.”(3)
As we know, Trump has defunded the propaganda organs – both foreign and domestic – and is allied with Musk, who owns the social media platform most committed to a version of free speech. He's also cut off the money spigot to the 'civil society' NGOs and the astroturfing rent-a-mobs that USAID and NED were using to undermine elected governments guilty of wrongthink. Contrastingly, the EU, using the usual deceptive language, has created the European Democracy Shield, tasked with identifying – wait for it - “ foreign information manipulation, interference and disinformation... and to also address domestic threats to democracy.”(4) Or, in reality, a tool with which to prevent populist groups from winning elections. As Mike Benz notes;
“The ‘democracy shield’ has one purpose & one alone: to stop domestic populist groups from winning domestic elections in Europe. It will do so using a fake predicate that Russians are backing them & thus activating domestic spycraft & prosecutions of popular political adversaries.”(5)
Just like they've just done in Romania, without providing any proof. The former EU apparatchik Thierry Breton – the martinet who made a name for himself by threatening Twitter a while back – then unwisely informed the French media that “we will have to do [the same], if necessary, in Germany.”(6) There is a reason for this brazen usurpation of the will of the people:
“The World Economic Forum and NATO/Western Alliance cannot permit a nation to stand on principles of nationalism. Allowing a point of contrast that would showcase the weakness of globalism and multiculturalism is something the western control system just cannot permit.”(7)
And, as I have previously set out (Glass Half Full), the political elites' view of what constitutes democracy is considerably at odds with the understanding the rest of us have. Rather than being a system of government “where power is vested in the people”,(8) they believe that it is the institutions themselves (which they, the elites, have summoned into existence) and the experts that staff them that represent the democratic process. The EU's stance is anathema to Trump, as it is a carbon copy of the Administrative State that he is dismantling domestically and, if anything, it is more arrogant yet if it believes that it can simply cancel the results of national elections.
He is going to trample all over the Commission and cut them out of every meaningful discussion. In addition to denying them a voice on Ukraine, he has instructed Rubio to give them the cold shoulder and instead focus on bilateral relations with some (not all) European nations.(9) Some EU countries (likely the hawkish Baltic states, to whom Russia is still the Soviet Union) are mulling whether to deal Putin yet another embuggerance by seizing some of Putin's shadow fleet of tankers and disrupting Russia's revenue flow,(10) but the proposal reeks more of the habitual performative petulance that those nations exhibit when they don't get their way, than it does of an implementable course of action.
Vance has just told the Munich Security Conference that the biggest problem the EU has is “the threat from within,”(11) the abandonment of core values. He also reminded them that “democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There's no room for firewalls.” Then he met with the AfD, an act that was a combination of a red rag and the middle finger.(12) The day prior he had told the Wall Street Journal that the Commission had adopted a “Soviet-style vocabulary”(13) in suppressing dissent. It seems as though Trump is going scorched earth on the EU and, predictably, the Leftists in charge don't like it up 'em. For reference, the German state's repudiation of the AfD – a bog-standard Eurosceptic, anti-illegal immigration, right-of-centre party – has resulted in the leader sending her family to live abroad and leaving home herself due to the risk of violence.(14)
The German Defence Minister's response to Vance's speech was emblematic of the dishonesty, quoting a motto of the Bundeswehr - “we fight for your right to be against us” -(15) which, in context, is an outright lie, given that it's already a crime to 'insult' someone in public (or online) or spread 'malicious gossip'.(16) The cops bring along the media when they arrest you at six in the morning.(17) But everyone accepts that a motto trumps observable reality, don't they? Even though the EU has awarded itself the power to demand that American tech companies take down posts globally by rubber-stamping the Digital Services Act (DSA) in 2022.
As it is, the Commission already sends letters to said companies after a major event, even one outside the EU, asking how they will censor 'disinformation'.(18) Sometimes, they'll even put the quill to use before an event, such as was the case with Musk's interview of Trump in August 2024. If the EU doesn't like what it sees, it can try and levy a fine of up to 6% of global revenue. Suffice to say, there may be trouble ahead, because Trump isn't going to accept some German autocrat regulating political speech in the US.
Meanwhile, Starmer is doing his best teacher's pet impression, a strategy that is easier on the eye than von der Leyen's obduracy, but still a short-term deception that must inevitably end in tears. The UK has its own free speech monstrosity on the books, the Online Safety Act (introduced by the Tories, in yet another act of betrayal) which mirrors the DSA in most respects. It would also give the government the power to scan encrypted messages.(19) And, as per the DSA, any fines will be levied on worldwide revenue.
The British PM is “willing to renegotiate elements of the Act in order to strike a trade deal, should it be raised by the US”,(20) which it will be. But any attempt to squirm out from under blame-wise (Labour voted against the Bill),(21) will likely flame out in spectacular fashion. His government has made liberal use of the legislation, with 292 individuals having been charged with communications offences on his watch,(22) many for spreading 'disinformation' – a not-so-subtle mechanism giving government the authority to determine what's true and what isn't. It's also Starmer's gauleiters who are demanding that Apple create a back door to its encrypted iCloud storage systems, so that they browse private content whenever they feel like it.(23)
This will also be badly received by the White House, as will the revelation that they also want to protect workers by “classing ‘sensitive’ topics of conversation in the workplace such as religion, women’s rights, or transgenderism as ‘harassment.’”(24) An 'unintended' consequence of that legislative diamond in the rough, would be the possibility that barmen would have to decide whether overheard private conversations in the pub constitute a violation of the law. I suspect Trump is going to have some fun with Sir Keir Something, who will find the strain of being reasonable and loyal too much to bear at some point, probably quite soon.
On other subjects, they are also philosophically night and day. Trump is canning the Department of Education, due to its malign influence, whereas Starmer's minister – yet another of a seemingly endless supply of middle-aged harridans – is busy undoing all the decentralising reforms that have transformed English schools.(25) 47 bins the Green Agenda, but the doltish Milliband continues to drive the British over the Net Zero abyss at top speed. His latest jape involves chopping down 280 acres worth of trees in North Carolina, of all places, so that woof pellets may be transported over the seas to be fed into the UK's Drax power station.(26) The fact that burning wood produces more CO2 than burning coal seems to have escaped him, along with the reality that it takes decades for a new tree to absorb the same amount of CO2 as the old one.(27) Not that anyone is bothering to replant.
Figure 1
I'd be somewhat surprised if The Donald is impressed by the current PM's role in not prosecuting rape gangs that are still active countrywide (Starmer was head of the CPS whilst some of the worst excesses were coming to light)(28), nor is he likely to view the cancellation of local elections for 5.5 million people as anything other than a brazen attempt to avoid accountability from the voters –(29) the Reform Party has surged in recent polling and Labour is most keen to avoid any dilution of their supposed mandate, granted to them by just 20% of the electorate.(30)
So, the United States is setting off in a new direction, whilst the rest of the West's parliament of Canutes continue to attempt to hold back the tide. Whilst the second half of that equation is readily discernable, Trump's victory is an anomaly. We can dispense with the 'too big to rig' fantasists - there is no such scenario. If the Democrats run out of fake ballots, they simply run an algorithm and/or delete votes from the opposition, which they did in at least four Senate races and Heaven knows how many House elections, so they wilfully bypassed a presidential steal and went down-ballot instead. Just one example – in Florida (allegedly one of the cleaner states) local Democrats received more votes than either Trump or Harris.(31) That doesn't happen organically; it happened here because nearly 600,000 ballots were illegally issued and nearly 500,000 were returned and counted.(32) The swing states produce 'wins' on command and the notion that Lara Trump's RNC stymied them is bunkum.
We are, therefore, left with the possibility that there has been a seismic re-ordering of factions behind the scenes. It's either that or the same entities still have their hands on the wheel and they think they have a plan to take Trump down. If it's the latter, a long-overdue economic implosion would likely be the vector of choice:
“It is possible other members of the Big Club have attempted to set Trump up as a patsy, based on the dumb and dumber candidates they put up against Trump in the 2024 election. If they can engineer a financial disaster... to sweep over the planet during his reign, the opposing factions hope to seize back power and control of the Big Club. I don’t believe Trump has been play acting his role for the last decade.”(33)
Neither do I. But there is scope for bad actors in the financial realm, especially as that's where Trump is already hard-charging. The known unknowns are firming up – the Treasury revelations, notwithstanding – but, given the scale of the malfeasance already visible, there will be plenty of unknown unknowns, too. One of them might concern the state of the US gold reserves held in Fort Knox and what that might signal to the rest of the world in terms of the dollar.
As at main Treasury, a reckoning is long overdue and there is reason to suspect that all is not well. The same department is supposed to be holding around 4,580 metric tons in Kentucky, but the last time there was even the pretence of an audit – a photo op involving the opening of only one of the fifteen vaults, no checks on serial numbers nor testing of purity – was in 1974.(34) It's fair to say that there are a number of Doubting Thomas' knocking about, particularly due to the reticence evinced by lawmakers who, when offered the opportunity to pass legislation demanding said audit, didn't even bring it to a vote.(35) Given the vast fraud already exposed, $392 billion may appear to be chump change, but still...
Even without a potentially disappeared gold reserve, it is apparent that the US economy is a basket-case. Leftists like to pretend that they have gradually become aware that there is something of a 'disconnect' between the government's numbers and reality on the ground, which is now causing them to 'question' the official figures. Apparently, the methodology is flawed and, shockingly, “voter perception was more reflective of reality than the incumbent statistics”.(36) Now that they've spotted their mistake (or, rather, had it revealed to the public by a different administration), it's all hands on deck in an effort to right their unintentional wrongs.
Amazingly, this has resulted in Politico – brought to you by USAID, if you recall – coming to the conclusion that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) has underestimated the inflation that matters by a factor of 35 since 2001. Who'd have thunk it? The penny finally dropped, supposedly, when they realised that those who are struggling financially spend most of their earnings on the bare necessities and not on luxury goods and second homes.
So, the Incompetence Defence by well-intentioned individuals, given yet another run out. Leaving aside the fact that, if we adopt their special pleading, the so-called 'experts' have been owned once again, it is perfectly obvious that the books have been cooked intentionally, not least because the many 'miscalculations' are far from random, but instead all serve to hide the deliberate tanking of the economy. If you print money like it's going out of fashion, wreck the energy market and import illegal aliens to drive down wages, things go badly. The people know this, but if you fiddle the figures egregiously, you can insist that they disbelieve the evidence of their lyin' eyes. Three charts encapsulate the problem.
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Naturally, this finds expression in measures of ordinary Americans' debt.
Figure 5
However, there is good reason to doubt the 'collapse the economy and blame Trump' hypothesis. After all, MAGAnomics is no longer an unknown quantity and, despite what establishment Jonahs will no doubt continue to whine, tariffs will not send the economy into an inflationary death spiral. Impacted nations devalued their currencies, subsidised their major industries and American imported deflation. Year-on-year inflation was around 1.7% and life was cool and groovy. Giving Trump the opportunity to perform another rescue act would not be a sound Deep State strategy, methinks.
Figure 6
There's always the invocation of manufactured pestilence ('bird flu' may very well be incoming) or war and, when Trump has excised all the waste, the Left will – ironically – be handed another stick with which to beat him:
“US GDP stats rely greatly on government spending in their calculations (they shouldn’t, but they do). Government spending accounts for around 36% of our nation’s GDP – It’s a methodology used in recent decades to make our economic health look stronger than it really is.”(37)
There will be (and already is) massive pushback on Ukraine. Zelensky and the supranational Deep State encompassing the US, UK and Europe are all in league and Trump's determination to put an end to the conflict is creating some clear fault lines. At the recent Munich Security Conference, the occasion when J.D. Vance upset the apple cart after Secretary Hegseth had already poured cold water on Ukraine's ambitions, we were treated to the remarkable spectacle of at least thirteen senators – both Democrat and Republican – glad-handing Zelensky, telling him “you're amongst friends here”.(38) The insurgency optics were openly displayed.
These insiders – facilitators of the permanent government's agenda – are undoubtedly also aware of the role that Zelensky is believed to be playing in the narcotics trade in Europe, a longstanding modus operandi that tops up the CIA's black budget.(39) He is a useful idiot in several different ways.
Figure 7
Compounding matters, inveterate RINO Lindsey Graham has tabled a Senate funding bill, supported by the Senate Leader, that would fund the war until 2030,(40) despite the fact that Trump was elected on a promise to negotiate a peace. The insubordination and hypocrisy is something else. Leader Thune appears to think that gaslighting the public is but the work of a moment.
Figure 8
The first signs of what, I suspect, will become a theme were also set in motion. Whether it be false flag events or undisguised attacks on US-owned interests, as with the Ukrainian drone strike on Russia's Kropotkinskaya oil pumping station,(41) there will be desperate attempts to force Trump to keep the war going. 'Mad Dog' Medvedev, former seat-warmer for Putin, thinks that Ukraine could “create any provocation to upend a settlement and prolong the war to the last Ukrainian”,(42) and doesn't dismiss the prospect of a dirty bomb detonation, to be blamed on Russia. Zelensky himself is a hamster on a wheel, with an expired mandate, ruling by fiat under martial law. He needs the war to continue, as a ceasefire followed by elections may not work out so well - he is now in the business of personally imposing sanctions on political rivals.(43)
The European leadership, whilst opposing peace talks on the one hand and then complaining that they aren't part of them on the other, has never been in possession of a viable off-ramp and still isn't. Prior to Trump's second go-around, they were as one with the Russophobes leading the charge in the US. Now, despite having months of warnings, they have still been caught unprepared. Le petit roi called an emergency summit (for those deemed to be sufficiently on message, which naturally excluded Slovakia and Hungary), so that they could whine face-to-face rather than over Zoom, but nothing came of it. They don't have sufficient military clout and they aren't united on tactics.
They are now floating yet another blatant attempt at getting NATO troops on the ground (officially, that is, as elements have been in Ukraine since the get-go), this time a force of 30,000 'reassurance' troops backed by the US support and yet more sanctions It's a plan that explicitly breaches Moscow's red lines and also has the potential to ruin any ongoing negotiations, which is precisely the point.(44) The Brits and the French, the authors of the scheme, just cannot let things go. They are not going to be taken seriously.
In contrast to the absence of European coherence, Trump and co have been increasingly clear where they stand. Trump has referred to Zelensky as a “modestly successful comedian” turned “Dictator without Elections”, who played Biden “like a fiddle”,(45) which he knows to be only partly true as Biden was never in charge of the Ukraine imbroglio. Zelensky bit nonetheless, accusing Trump of living in “disinformation space”,(46) perhaps not the wisest turn of phrase in the circumstances, as it hands 47 another reason to back away – biting the hand that feeds is rarely a winning strategy. An ex-diplomat from Ukraine, seemingly a non-pretender, has this analysis:
“First of all, Zelensky thinks he’s being backed by the globalists in the Deep State. That’s why he’s fighting Washington; that’s why he’s fighting the president of the US. He was never backed up by Biden. Biden was just a picture. He was backed up by the Deep State, Nulands, Clintons, Soros, whatsoever. USAID and the CIA. That’s why he thinks he has the power to go against the incumbent president.”(47)
The latest co-ordinated wheeze is a retread, an attempt to once again paint Trump as a Putin-appeaser. So, the UN tries to get him to sign up to a draft resolution condemning 'Russian aggression' without addressing the war's root causes,(48) the EU's over-promoted Commission VP informed us that the Russians were winning the diplomatic exchanges and that “if some deal is agreed that we don’t agree to, then it will just fail, because it will not be implemented.”(49) I don't suppose that Trump gives two figs for what the EU thinks, even though they will be the ones left holding the baby in Europe if he wins through.
At some point, however, if the string-pullers behind the curtain don't throw in the towel – and there is no reason to think that they will – the outline of what is really going on may start to dawn upon the public. Already, the actions of the Republican-led US Senate will be raising eyebrows, as they clearly not aligned with the administration. The Deep State appears to be in the process of outing itself, which may be exactly what Trump is hoping to engineer. The very last thing the old hands want to see again is this, which is exactly what Trump is planning to give them.
Figure 10
And, improbable as it sounds, there is also a real possibility that there's been some sort of backstage coup against that same Deep State. The signs are there. Peter Thiel – CEO of Palantir – invested in Vance some time ago and endorsed Trump in 2016, even speaking at the Republican National Conference. Musk, having initially backed DeSantis, went all-in on Trump directly after he was almost killed at Butler, as did Bill Ackman. Larry Ellison is a Musk backer, having bailed him out when Twitter/X was foundering due to the advertising boycott. Marc Andreessen, another tech baron, has perhaps been tasked with assaying an explanation-of-sorts.
Andreessen was a backer of Substack and The Free Press, which is promising, even though he had previously endorsed all the usual suspects – the Clintons, Obama, Kerry and Gore.(50) Even though, in his view, the Democrats “basically broke every part of that deal for people in my world”,(51) it wasn't until a meeting at the White House in May 2024 that the penny finally dropped, when he was told the following:
“We will implement [AI] in the Biden administration and in the second term. We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups...And that’s the day we walked out and stood in the parking lot of the West Wing and took one look at each other, and we’re like, “Yep, we’re for Trump.””(52)
The Democrats were also trying to kill crypto – most of the Tech Bros were not even slightly impressed and, although Bezos, Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai (the Google CEO) seem to have been a little late to the party, they still managed to score an invite to the inauguration.
Figure 9
So, some heavy hitters lined up behind Trump. Nonetheless, how could they possibly be able to muster enough firepower to take down “a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department...[and] the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street.”(53) I don't know and it's possible that they haven't and that we will begin to make out the outlines of a deal. What is clear is that the relationship between tech and government dates from the outset of the internet age and has been the vital cog in the machinery of 'information management'. In fact, the word 'cog' might not do it justice.
Back in the day, the control arm of the US Deep State had us where it wanted us. Information was released in a controlled fashion, through a few trusted sources and, as we now know – after Operation Mockingbird was uncovered – a narrative could be spun and established with relative ease. Today's equivalent of a billion dollars a year was disbursed by the CIA and over 400 journalists – from the likes of The New York Times, CBS, ABC, Newsweek, the Associated Press and others – were recruited. Just the kind of programme that USAID has been funding latterly.(54)
But, for the most part, the CIA could operate with impunity, as nobody else paid it any mind, nor did anybody, least of all government, have any real idea what it was up to. It financed its covert wars and assassinations with black budgets – not that any elected official was auditing the Treasury, as we now know – and its own projects on the side, which frequently involved arms-dealing and drug trafficking.(55)(56)(57)(58)(59)(60) While there was the occasional misstep, most of the activity of the Deep State's paramilitary wing was concealed. Over the same period, the government's retreat from accountability continued apace without attracting much in the way of attention.
The Masters of the Universe were able to run riot, but only because their tracks were covered up by the few with an audience; ”[w]e left out a great deal of what we knew about US intervention in Guatemala and in a variety of other cases”, admitted the New York Times in 1954.(61) The biggest threat to their parallel universe came from JFK who, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 – an operation approved by his predecessor, Eisenhower – realised that the CIA was already a rogue agency, which he wished he could “splinter...into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds”,(62) but he was taken off the board, before he could take action.
Nonetheless, there was the odd dissenter and, as far back as 1964, the term 'Deep State' had already been coined as a descriptor for the CIA and its cousins in the intelligence community (63) and the public was starting to sense that there was a significant disparity between what foreign policy was supposed to be and what it actually was. Inevitably, the next question was 'Who had their hand on the tiller? Elected officials or shadowy intelligence operatives?'
The shallow state had to respond to these concerns and the key Deep State players had to briefly relocate operations offshore during Carter's presidency, as he attempted to clean house after Watergate, but the arrival of the Reagan/Bush administration in 1981 marked a return to business as usual, as the now-head of the Blob assumed the vice-presidency and the various congressional investigations, a succession of limited hangouts, were put out of their misery. But some stories couldn't be unheard - Seymour Hersh's exposés in the New York Times prominent amongst them,(64) which revealed that the CIA had violated its charter by spying on Americans in America. William Colby, CIA Director, also aired some dirty washing.(65)
Things were in the early stages of unravelling, not helped by the cluster that was the Iran/Contra scandal, which introduced the public to the realisation that it wasn't just the CIA that had gone off-road, it was also elements of the military, elected officials and bureaucrats. An additional finding – by a Senate sub-committee - that the CIA had also been accruing funds by trafficking cocaine and marijuana, was largely ignored by the media,(66) but it was apparent that there were limits to the code of omerta.
At this remove, I cannot tell whether the introduction of the internet and worldwide web was actively promoted or whether it was a fait accompli and the opportunities that it would inevitably provide were simply foreseen and exploited. I suspect the former, as the technology originated with the US military in 1969 as a defence system called Arpanet.(67) In the mid-seventies the TCP/IP tech was developed, which allowed the world's mini-networks to communicate with each other.
In the nineties, the pace quickened. Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web - “an internet that was not simply a way to send files from one place to another but was itself a “web” of linked information that anyone on the Internet could retrieve” -(68) gratis and, a year later in 1992, a crew of researchers and students at the University of Illinois developed a browser they named Mosaic, (later to be recast as Netscape), which included Andreessen.(69) So far, so seemingly innocent.
In 1994, two post-graduate Stanford students (Sergey Brin and Larry Page) made the decisive breakthrough on the “first automated web-crawling and page ranking application. That application remains the core component of what eventually became Google's search service.”(70) The research was seed-funded by a programme called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS), which was in turn administered by two agencies; the NSA and the CIA. A further grant from DARPA was also funding Page.(71) The development of the Google search engine was overseen by representatives of these agencies for five years, until the month that Google went public in 1998.(72) Ever since, it has been in bed with the US intelligence services
It was Google that provided the NSA with the search tools that allowed it to parse the knowledge stolen via abuses of the FISA Act.(73) It was Google that entered into a “formal information-sharing relationship” with the same agency in 2010.(74) The company also became enmeshed in the Enduring Security Framework (ESF) and, by 2014, the chief of the NSA was telling Brin that "your insights as a key member of the Defense Industrial Base are valuable to ensure ESF's efforts have measurable impact."(75) That would be the same Defense Industrial Base that provides "products and services that are essential to mobilize, deploy, and sustain military operations."(76)
In 2017, Google was caught making petabytes of American citizens' personal data available to US intell via the PRISM programme,(77) along with Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.(78) The head of its Google Ideas division, at the time a consummate revolving doorist named Jared Cohen, used to zip around the world's trouble spots, performing duties somewhat removed from his company's “Don't Be Evil” tagline:
“Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do…[Cohen] is going to get himself kidnapped or killed. Might be the best thing to happen to expose Google's covert role in foaming up-risings, to be blunt. The US Gov't can then disavow knowledge and Google is left holding the shit-bag.”(79)
All this in addition to its copiously documented censorship activities, which long pre-date the Biden administration.(80) To be sure, there is much opprobrium directed at Google – and fines galore – but that seems to be mostly for show. When a private company has been captured by government – Google's corporate jets were even stored at a US Air Force base -(81) and is required to curate content and surveil users, some smoke and mirrors might be necessary.
There are plenty of other examples of start-up tech companies being funded by the CIA's venture capital firm In-Q-Tel.(82) Zuckerberg's Facebook was founded on the same day that DARPA shut down its Lifelog universal surveillance project in 2004, a remarkably similar endeavour which "aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, the plane tickets bought, the e-mail sent and received.”(83) Peter Thiel's Palantir was not only funded by In-Q-Tel, it was also created with help from US government intelligence analysts over the course of three years.(84) Now it helps the NSA spy on the entire world.
And, in the background, there is the Pentagon's Highland Forum, a Deep State entity that coordinates external researchers and private contractors with the goals of the military-industrial complex, in this case the targetting of alleged active and future threats.(85) Which assessment is, of course, entirely subjective and untainted by any discourse with the public, in direct contravention of federal law, which mandates transparency.(86) We are left with the following conclusion:
“The push for indiscriminate, comprehensive mass surveillance by the military-industrial complex — encompassing the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, defense contractors, and supposedly friendly tech giants like Google and Facebook — is therefore not an end in itself, but an instrument of power, whose goal is self-perpetuation. But there is also a self-rationalizing justification for this goal: while being great for the military-industrial complex, it is also, supposedly, great for everyone else.”(87)
At least, that's what they tell themselves, because these grey people, remote from the democratic process, believe that they are best placed to decide what's good for us. Not politicians, not voters – them. And so, they built a huge infrastructure, a vast improvement on yesteryear's mechanisms of control, and attempted to get their way permanently. This was not solely an American problem; the 'pandemic' brought us little known 'nudge units', although the term 'behavioural insight teams' was the official designation. Ten governmental departments in the UK had such teams, whose job it was to shape public opinion by providing expertise “aimed at anticipating and helping people adhere to interventions that are recommended by medical or epidemiological experts.”(88)
But the dawn of the tech era also seems to have resulted in a sea change as the Deep State engaged with a new set of actors. The news media was still very much a weapon, both home and away – as we've seen with the USAID revelations – but the Tech Bros were the new kids on the block and the Wall Street/CIA duopoly was diluted. Whilst three is undoubtedly a crowd, there doesn't seem to have been too many bumps in the road. Not until recently, at any rate and, even then, not with all of them.
As previously noted, Thiel was the first to break ranks nine years ago, but it wasn't until mid-2024 that others followed suit with public endorsements. Given their pivotal role in Deep Sate operations, this was more noteworthy than credited. Why back Trump, the man who campaigned on a vow to destroy the entity that they served and that their businesses depended on? And how did they think they were going to get away with such open defiance?
The answer may lie in what I had previously assumed to be more of a master-servant relationship between the intelligence community and Silicon Valley, whereby the latter are dependent on the former's largesse. However, that may be too simplistic and the shoe may be on the other foot; there were already 854,000 contractors with top secret security clearances a decade ago,(89) a number greater than that of government employees with the same clearance. In addition :
“Unlike military and intelligence contractors, Silicon Valley overwhelmingly sells to the private market, but its business is so important to the government that a strange relationship has emerged. While the government could simply dragoon the high technology companies to do the NSA’s bidding, it would prefer cooperation with so important an engine of the nation’s economy...”(90)
Or, put another way, without the tech provided by Palantir, Oracle, Google, Amazon, SpaceX et al, the national security apparatus (and the Administrative State in its entirety) would be more screwed than it would be sans an alliance with Wall Street, and the Tech Bros read the relevant parties the Riot Act and silently pulled a Brutus. It certainly seems like a takeover, rather than an alliance, as the carnage being unleashed by Trump and Musk doesn't appear to be just another display of sound and fury signifying nothing. Nor do Trump's appointees, at least initially, seem to be doing their very best to frustrate his agenda. Rubio, Vance and Hegseth are all singing from the same hymn sheet and the song will sound like fingernails on a blackboard to the denizens of the Deep.
No victory in Ukraine, a policy that seeks to bring an end to more than a century of angst in the Middle East, swingeing cuts to the slush funds that financed the CIA's foreign policy, an ongoing decimation of the useful idiots in the credentialed class and an uncovering of the rampant corruption that is clearly endemic to the Administrative State. It doesn't feel like smoke and mirrors, although one should still be wary. The 'controlled awakening' is still a thing, although it has evolved somewhat:
“The system doesn’t just create propaganda—it creates contained paths for those who see through propaganda. Breaking free from mainstream programming is only the first step. What follows is both subtler and just as disturbing. Untethering from institutional narratives creates an immediate vulnerability—the need for new answers, new leaders, new direction. Those who steer the first matrix wouldn’t leave the off-ramps unsupervised. This illuminates the deeper mechanics of the second matrix: capturing awakening through sophisticated channels of inauthentic opposition.”(91)
That's a succinct summary of what we have been consistently presented with. It's why nothing ever seems to get fixed, why a committee is all talk and no trousers, why official inquiries accomplish nothing, why the 'conservative' press is generally so anaemic. We are so familiar with the process that, when Trump actually axes an entire department – rather than just saying he will – it's a shock to the system. We have become estranged from the genuine.
But we might usefully remember that the genuine follows through when it meets resistance. So, when federal DEI departments get folded into other entities rather than being disbanded, they need to be dealt with. When the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) only pretends to comply with an Executive Order that keeps men out of women's sport, it must be called out.(92) When Hegseth's DoD makes a Horlicks of the reinstatement of those who left the military due to the vaccine mandates, it needs to be corrected.(93)(94) The ongoing prep for the next 'pandemic' should be nipped in the bud.(95) And every single court order that impedes the government needs to be overcome. No excuses. This is a war, not a skirmish.
Then, perhaps, we can be sure that it's different this time. For now, it seems to be. In the same way that the lawfare campaign against Trump – plus the other attempts to dispose of him, which I suspect are more numerous than are public knowledge – made it pretty much impossible to believe that Trump was a phoney playing a role, so taking huge lumps out of the Deep State must surely be a genuine assault. But, whilst I have no particular difficulty in discerning Trump's motivation, working out why (or even if) some of the Tech Bros jumped ship is considerably more difficult.
It may just be a question of temperament and/or an eye for the main chance. With the exception of the oft-mentioned Thiel, the others made their support public pretty late in the piece. Perhaps, while the public frog was being boiled slowly, they were prepared to keep their heads down and crack on, but were less enthusiastic about the direction of travel once the gas was turned up high. Because that's what happened and, together with one other crucial element, it's been that impatience that has been instrumental in creating friction.
The US Deep State had always been a necocon/American exceptionalism enterprise, not that it was above slowly fleecing its own population, too – an undertaking that became a whole lot easier once Nixon had decoupled the dollar from gold and fiscal responsibility started disappearing in the rear-view mirror. But there was no overt move to enslave Americans, if one discounts the long-term implications of the climate scam which was officially set in train in 1992. While domestic activity was macro in impact, it wasn't overtly oppressive. Even in the febrile atmosphere post 9/11, it wasn't immediately obvious that the Patriot Act had fundamentally altered the relationship between the government and the people.
And while the internet wasn't completely tamed, acceptable political discourse was constrained and that was what counted. There can be all sorts of disclosures doing the rounds, but as long as they can be officially discredited, it doesn't much matter; for a while, at least. At the time Obama descended from the heavens to selflessly show us the way, it seems to me – looking back – that the string-pullers had it all pretty much under control. While the seeds of Brexit had been planted long ago, perhaps the conditions that produced Trump 1.0 had not yet taken root.
However, the Deep State had now thrown its lot in with the progressives. This was a departure from the Uniparty of the Bushes and Clinton but, presumably, a decision taken with eyes wide open. Perhaps, somebody had decided that they needed to get a clip on. Perhaps, the assessment was that control of the narrative was slowly ebbing away, although that's not the way it seemed to me. More likely, what happened was what always happens when one partners with the narcissistic and the mentally ill; things go pear-shaped, quickly. They just can't help themselves – they can't let the water simmer.
And so we were subjected to an onslaught of progressive obsessions, in the foreground, whilst other, more consequential developments gathered a head of steam off stage. Perhaps I was a little slow on the uptake, but it gradually occurred to me that every single aspect of the woke/globalist/technocratic agenda had a role to play, even the more esoteric ones that don't, at first blush, appear to be connected, other than by the fact that the same people are promoting them. For instance, it isn't immediately obvious what connects the trans agenda to climate change, nor what the linkage is between CBDCs and the attempted destruction of parents' rights. But they are interrelated.
It's all about two of the most basic of autocratic requirements – control and the looting of treasure and one is, long term, impossible without the other. Every single agenda item, when viewed through the control/larceny prism, can be seen to be part of a coherent whole, rather than being a hodgepodge of the Davos Blofeld, Ibram X Kendi, George Soros and morbidly obese lesbians. They weren't hiding it, really. It's not called The Great Reset for nothing and, if a system is to be reset, first it needs to be halted. In this case, the system was Judeo-Christian based Western civilisation.
So, traditional cultural mores and what have been natural rhythms and beliefs needed to be undermined. Structures that threatened the power of the state were to be weakened at every opportunity. White men were a particular target, particularly if they were straight and/or of faith, because they were both heads of families and also wielded the cultural clout that is typical of a majority. Feminism, all the nonsense about the patriarchy, toxic masculinity and white privilege were all weapons aimed primarily at that group of people. The LGBTQ agenda, the Pride Months and drag shows in schools, the pornography disguised as education and the trans agenda are all weapons that compromise normality and the nuclear family. The oppressor/oppressed dialectic, if imposed, inevitably upends society.
Immigration, particularly of those who do not share a similar cultural background and enforced multi-culturalism – not assimilation – weakens society further and, as a Brucey Bonus, tends to give the socialists a leg-up in the voting booth, legally or otherwise. Either way, the state is the entity that is imposing its will on the masses, not taking its cue from the masses. Out of control public spending, on any and all boondoggles, reinforces the message, as does government by rules and regs, magicked into existence by unaccountable bureaucrats.
Keeping a lid on the resentment that ensues is accomplished with the creation of 'hate crimes', for the protection of arbitrary groups selected by the state. The fact that this treatment is obviously 'two tier' is just fine and dandy, as it reinforces the impotence of the opposition. Dis- and misinformation are whatever the state says they are, because it alone is the arbiter of truth. The AI revolution can be harnessed to create greater distance, and less accountability, between rulers and subjects.
The connections between climate change, CBDCs, a digital ID and social credit scores are clearly pronounced. The myth of global warming is used to justify controls on consumption and fake food. The credit score, if it can be introduced, will be used as an enforcement mechanism. A central bank digital currency will give the state complete control over every individual's finances; negative interest rates, glitches and outright thievery (with no one individual answerable for any loss) will inevitably ensue. All that we are will be digitalised, accessible to whoever - we won't know who, after all.
I fancy that, by 2016, the West's Deep States thought they we firmly in control. Cameron had the champers on ice and Hillary was everyone's shoo-in, but that's not how it worked out. So, on both sides of the pond, we got to see the enraged establishment go to the mat. In the UK, the Uniparty – which most didn't, until that point, realise was a thing - just could not bring itself to do the necessary and exit the EU. It resisted, at every turn, for over three years. In the US, the same creature fought Trump, in contrasting ways. The Republican arm stabbed him in the back, repeatedly, and the progressives – denied the power that had been promised them – went off the deep end. It was all deeply unattractive and necessarily revealing.
By 2020, we'd had over a decade of onslaught, albeit the digital guff wasn't front and centre, as of yet. Then, of course, it was decided that the string-pullers would deploy the nitrous and we entered what may have been intended as the end-stage – a 'global pandemic'. The likes of the WEF didn't hold back; they were convinced that this was the opportunity that they had craved, the chance to lock-down and reset. Control measures reached their zenith, with the masking, social distancing, PCR testing and all-but mandatory 'vaccination', the latter after a year of eliminating the weak and ensuring we had no access to treatments that worked.
For Americans, 2020 has additional resonance, as it was the year that a presidential election was stolen. In the aftermath, the legacy media did what they were required to do, mechanically, and not entirely convincingly. When they all read from the same script, the words they use start to lose meaning. 'Baseless', 'debunked', 'most secure' and 'election denier' were words and phrases that were peddled relentlessly, but ineffectively. The 'denier' sobriquet was already being used to smear 'anti-vaxxers' and climate change sceptics and utilising it once more had the effect of weakening all three narratives.
Then there was the fact that, when polled, one in five mail-in voters admitted that they had cheated (96) and, within three months of the election, a third of voters did not believe that Biden was the legitimate president – that proportion held even with unaffiliated voters.(97) By May 2022, 55% thought that cheating had likely affected the outcome of the election.(98) And Trump, famously, wouldn't shut up about it, which was a sound strategy given the likelihood that the Democrats would do it all over again in 2024.
Four years of mayhem, a lawfare campaign that even a third of Democrats acknowledged was a strategy to take Trump off the board,(99) the relentless erosion of rights and freedoms, an energy policy tailored to impoverish Americans, DEI and ESG by the bucketload, unfettered wokeness and a state-sanctioned invasion at the southern border do not a successful re-election make, without both thumbs and a lot of bodyweight on the scale.
The signs were there – Bud Light, Target, Harley Davidson and others were subjected to conservative boycotts when they decided to wallow in wokeness. Fox News, ever the fair-weather friend, established itself at the top of the cable TV pile by avoiding overt hostility towards Trump, but MSNBC and CNN continued to give air-time to the Loony Left and were punished accordingly.(100) CNN now attracts 400,000 viewers in primetime, 4% of Joe Rogan's audience.(101) The Washington Post lost over $70 million in 2023 – 20% of its audience – and even more in 2024.(102)
The New York Times has lost 43% readership in the past five years and its west coast equivalent – the Los Angeles Times – is down 73% over the same period.(103) With the exception of the permanently unhinged, the public is no longer buying what traditional media is selling. Which brings me to the second inflection point; Musk's acquisition of Twitter/X in April 2022.
While majorities of Facebook, Instagram and TikTok users do not frequent the sites for news updates, the opposite is true of X.(104) Hence, control of Twitter was always a Deep State priority and one wonders what the banks were thinking when they financed Musk's purchase of the site. Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, neither of which are friends of freedom – the latter's CEO is fond of de-banking conservatives -(105) committed $13 billion in debt financing,(106) but so did a number of Silicon Valley investors including Larry Ellison.(107) Many of the usual suspects immediately started complaining about an immediate failure to “uphold community standards and content moderation”, otherwise known as establishment censorship,(108) and battle was joined.
The ADL, the notorious Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), the equally execrable Media Matters and others managed to halve Twitter's advertising revenue,(109) but couldn't apply the coup de grâce. Advertisers seemed to think that they could dictate terms; Musk, on the other hand, laboured under the impression that the First Amendment still meant something and that he would cleave to the law, rather than providing top cover for Leftist proxies.(110) And by the time the pains were coming on, the Twitter Files release had substantially undermined the state by revealing the depth of its manipulation of information.
Nonetheless, by August 2023,(111) the noose was tightening and cash flow had become a major issue. It was then that Musk's mentor, Larry Ellison of Oracle fame, gave the X CEO the breathing space that he needed and, gradually, it became clear that the worst was over.(112) It was also becoming apparent, in retrospect, that not everyone in Big Tech was singing from the same hymn sheet. Bezos' Washington Post was still giving terminal TDS sufferers a platform and Zuckerberg, fresh from dropping over $400 million on 'election integrity' in the 2020 election, was still on the Biden train but, unknown to us, some big beasts were on different kinds of manoeuvres.
DeSantis, not Trump, was the initial stalking horse of both Musk and Ellison, until he showed himself to be overmatched – he quit the race in January 2024. Haley limped on, but had to rely on open primaries and Democrat voters to remain vaguely viable. She finally accepted the inevitable in early March, having lost every state except Vermont and Washington DC.(113) Trump was the last man standing. Plans solidified:
“In the spring of 2024, the broad outline of a technocratic team falls slowly into place. By summer 2024 we see Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, David Sachs, Peter Thiel all in common alignment. The technocratic team bring in the RFK Jr element along with the Vivek Ramaswamy element, and Peter Thiel’s background seeding of Senator JD Vance blossoms.”(114)
This is the story that now emerges. If the timeline is accurate (and it seems to be, given the fact that some of these Tech Titans were fund-raising for Trump by early summer), then Trump's near-death experience was not the primary catalyst for most of this group. They had already made their choice. So, back to the pivotal question – why? Is it as simple as Andreessen says it is? Is it all about AI? Or is there more to it – is it also about personalities?
Figure 11
Well, besides Ellison, our man Thiel seems to be a key figure, one whose motivations are complicated inasmuch as his stated positions, when set against his professional life, seem frequently antithetical. This is a man who presents himself as a critical thinker on subjects such as the JFK assassination and the Covid narrative and as a defender of the First Amendment, the codicil of which is a free internet. He says he is against the warrantless surveillance of Americans as codified by Congress, in yet another dereliction of their duties.
He's all in favour of declassifying the state's secrets, but then says that Trump hesitated to do so first time around because he “still believed in the rightwing deep state of an Oliver Stone movie. This belief has faded.”(115) He may be parsing his words carefully here, with the phrase 'rightwing' providing him with plausible deniability, because Trump certainly hasn't discarded a belief in the existence of the Deep State and, after a harrowing four years out-of-office, he'd have to be naïve in the extreme were he to do so. Indeed, in 2023, he published a 10-point plan setting out exactly how he'd take it apart.(116)
And, if anyone would know it existed, it would be someone like Thiel, an attendee at sixteen Bilderberg jamborees, including the last three.(117) It also seems as though not all speech is created equal in Thiel's book; when Gawker outed him as a gay man in 2007, he bankrolled the shuttering of the website in retribution nine years later.(118) In addition, for a man who waxes lyrical about privacy, his choice of career is a little strange. Palantir's products are the key to bringing order to wholly disparate sources of information, structured and unstructured. The company is also signed up to a global spy network that is building out a programme called XKEYSCORE, which collects a user's communications, which not only includes;
“...emails, chats, and web-browsing traffic, but also pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, computer network exploitation targeting, intercepted username and password pairs, file uploads to online services, Skype sessions, and more.”(119)
Thiel says that his mission is to “reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties”,(120) and that “liberty does not have to be sacrificed to enhance security”.(121) However, he's on the same team as Ellison, who believes that a surveillance state will ensure that “citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.”(122) Those perspectives are clearly not in synch – there's a vast difference between targetting terrorists (although we all know how loose that definition is, depending on which shade of autocrat is making the judgement) and scooping up everyone in the same net. As is usual in these circumstances, one should assume the worst. There is no point building capability if there is no intent to use it and, if Thiel himself believes the government he works for is demonstrably corrupt – which, based on his op-eds, he does – why is he providing it with additional tools?
It is apparent that Palantir is deeply embedded with the US intelligence community, with GCHQ in the UK and with the other members of the Five Eyes community.(123) It is not clear to me how Thiel can be certain that his various clients share his libertarian impulses, particularly with the latest revelations from the UK with regard to Apple. And that particular demand is just the latest act in an encryption saga that goes back at least ten years. The FBI was harassing Apple after the San Bernadino shooting in 2015 and, after receiving static, hacked the phone anyway.(124)
But it was a British bill, 2016's Investigatory Powers Act, which quietly put the mockers on encrypted privacy, as it granted GCHQ the right to use equipment interference techniques (hacking) and to “employ “bulk” searches using “general” warrants. Instead of concrete individuals, the UK can target a location or a group of people who “share a common purpose””.(125) These targets could be from any jurisdiction, foreign or domestic. The only justification required is some wafty verbiage invoking a threat to national security, or to “protect the “economic well-being of the UK,” and for the “prevention or detection of serious crime.””(126)
One the bill became law, transatlantic resistance was futile. The British floodgates opened, as the Twitter Files revealed, and American authorities were soon (informally) permitted to break into anything they wanted, provided they had a warrant.(127) This still wasn't enough for the US Deep State, which wanted a law with the same reach as the UK's – and the French, Germans and EU in toto.(128)(129)(130)
Thusfar, it has failed to achieve lift-off, so Thiel's selective approach is currently ascendant, rather than Ellison's one size fits all technocracy. And, in truth, the Oracle chief's option isn't currently viable, due to the vast server farms that would be required and the automated search tools that could make sense of it all. However, it is at this juncture that events may be taking a dark turn, because if there's one thing that the Tech Bros all agree on, it's that AI is the future. Quite how it will be deployed is the $64 million question.
They eulogise the technology without ever really getting into the specifics, apart from Ellison's ill-advised blurting about AI-generated mRNA, personalised cancer 'vaccines'. Quite why he chose to focus on that possibility I know not but, as the mRNA technology is not fit for purpose and has – as of now – been used to maim and kill, it was a dumb thing to say. Nicole Shanahan, RFK Jnr's ex-running mate, made some timely observations about Trump's recent launch of Stargate:
“There are so many [AI applications] that could have been shared in yesterday’s conference that are really excellent uses of AI. I heard a few that were kind of out there and if deployed too quickly could lead to an extinction event. So I think we need to be careful.”(131)
Stargate is marketed as a $500 billion public/private initiative, which is supposed to utilise AI to make advances in healthcare, infrastructure and defence. Quite how it's going to do that is anyone's guess. I'm not convinced that even most insiders really have a handle on the entire scene or on exactly how AI and Quantum computing are going to redefine our world. Further, it seems to me that the Tech royalty are being deliberately opaque and utilising language in the same way that our enemies do.
The term AI itself is a complete misnomer. As it stands, there is nothing artificial about it and it's not intelligent – nor will it ever be. ChatGPT is effectively an audio version of Wikipedia. There is no guarantee of accuracy or truth; in fact, the opposite can be taken as an inevitability. If we are to 'trust the science', we might begin by acknowledging that software algorithms are not intelligent – they can be made more efficient or more capable, but they remain lines of code. If AI can work problems out, it's because humans have programmed it in such a way as to enable it to do so. Despite all the lofty rhetoric, I've never seen anybody explain how it can ever be anything more.
Are we to believe that the combination of AI and lightning-fast computing can benefit humanity? I can see how that might be accomplished, but I can also see that whoever it is that is writing the code is effectively playing God. There is no need to wrack one's brain in an effort to identify how a good initiative might be subverted by bad actors yet, in alt-circles, few are prepared to admit that what we are being asked to accept is some kind of technocracy, an outcome that we are supposed to be against. Why would we want to replace the unelected, credentialed class of alleged experts with another cadre of specialists?
Thiel's prominence, once again, is problematic as it forcibly reminds us of the other side of the coin. As Sundance at CTH puts it:
“A person could make the argument that splitting the atom was a great altruistic decision to create abundant energy. However, it must also be accepted the good decision ultimately created a serious weapon, the atomic bomb.”(132)
Or, as Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park laments, “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”(133) AI may be capable of great things, but it will also allow Palantir to connect Real ID with facial recognition (as an example), which Thiel beta-tested when he was given access to federal databases so that he could identify attendees at the Capitol on January 6th at the behest of the FBI, who then prosecuted hundreds of them with obstruction charges that were obviously bogus and so ruled by the Supreme Court.(134)
The Palantir connection does not inspire confidence, because AI is surely the wettest of wet dreams to a technocrat, especially one who has made billions from his association with the intelligence community and the Deep State. Musk, despite the popular positions he takes, is cut from similar cloth. He announced a change to the Twitter algorithm a little while ago, which were not well-received. When Grok (Musk's AI information system) was questioned by users keen to avoid having their user voice diminished, it offered the following advice:
“Don’t criticize your government, don’t criticize foreign governments, don’t talk about conspiracy theories, stop telling people to fuck off in the comments, and don’t accuse government officials or members of the media of malfeasance or dishonesty.”(135)
That's how Musk is structuring Twitter's algorithm, so one must assume that it reflects his 'coded values'. Perhaps they are also the values of his Tech Bro colleagues. Were that to be so, and if the beta test was followed up, it isn't hard to imagine a 'Computer Says No' dystopia:
“Take your “REAL ID” as required by the United States Government (Passport or Driver’s License compatible), now overlay your identity as facially recognized by the tech system around your identity and connect it all to the metadata of your digital life that you leave as a fingerprint within every interaction with technology, and finally add in the coded values that will determine your “liberty status” or what might be called your social credit score (China version).”(136)
Perhaps that's the sort of thing Ellison had in mind with his 'best behaviour' remark. What's certain is that multi-billions are being ploughed into AI without any real attempt to set out the what and the why, which is a repeat of the play-book used with 'climate change'. And it's not as if Musk and others are incapable of offering cogent explanations, so the absence of anything beyond the skimpiest of rationales is disturbing.
Which is not to say there aren't also some encouraging signs, too. Trump and Vance are strong free speech advocates and another of Trump's initial Executive Orders (EO) banned CBDCs and promoted crypto blockchain access 'without persecution' –(137) Biden's administration had hounded the crypto industry, presumably as a prelude to the introduction of a digital currency. Biden was allowed to avoid the subject on the campaign trail, but he signed an EO of his own in March 2022, placing “the highest urgency on research and development efforts into the potential design and deployment options of a United States CBDC.”(138) But both Trump and RFK Jnr (and even DeSantis) are fully cognisant of the danger.
So, what are we to make of it all? While the truth may well be out there, the data points that might guide our way are all over the map. How to reconcile the Thiels and Ellisons of this world with Trump and RFK Jnr? Are the Tech titans who previously connived with the enemies of liberty to now be trusted, or are they Deep State infiltrators? What was it about Trump that made their faction switch sides?
I suspect that personalities did play a large role. That and self-preservation. Imagine, if you will, the folly of telling a cohort of über-entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley the following:
“We will implement [AI] in the Biden administration and in the second term. We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups.“(139)
Yet that's what the progressive minions at the White House did in May 2024. That took care of the Johnny-come-latelies, but some of the big names had already voted with their wallets. As we've seen, Ellison had been swimming against the tide since he bailed out Twitter/X, in defiance of the Deep State affiliates that were trying to tank it. Thiel has been a Trump-backer from the outset, although he has tended to blow hot-and-cold. Musk was vaguely Democrat until the lock-downs (that began, ironically, on Trump's watch), which proved to be the issue that suddenly opened his eyes to the threat of the Deep State. It is the view of Jeffrey Tucker, a perceptive commentator and himself a recent walkaway, that the Twitter CEO underwent a transformation:
“By 2023, he was a changed man, newly aware of the threat of Leviathan, and did a deep dive into anti-statist literature...Whereas he once regarded the bureaucracy as annoyingly necessary, he increasingly viewed it as the source of unchecked tyranny...he became convinced that Western civilization itself was at risk from a woke Leviathan that had shown its teeth in the most brutal way during the Covid years. His reason for purchasing Twitter for $44 billion was to bust up the censorship cartel that was constructed to enforce lockdowns and promote the vaccine. Once having taken over, he discovered the extent of government control, uprooted it, and unleashed free speech on the US.“(140)
I hope he's right, notwithstanding the 'coded values' misstep. Musk can be inconsistent – see the H1-B visa dust-up, also – and he tests the limits of his power regularly, but if he really has undergone a Damascene conversion it would inspire confidence. I'm not convinced that all the other techies are equally enthused, especially the oddball that is Bill Gates. That's a man who's all-in on digital ID and CBDCs, all wrapped up in his 'digital public infrastructure' programme. He's busy liaising with the UN's '50 in 5',(141) signing up fifty governments within five years into a scheme that will accelerate the UN's 'Master Plan for Humanity', known to us as Agenda 2030's odious Sustainable Development Goals.(142) As such, Billy is still aligned with what appears to be the losing faction, for which we should give thanks.
If this overall analysis is correct, there are a number of takeaways, the first of which is to pay even less mind than usual to the Democrats. Even their donors are deserting them, as they have “no message, no organization, no forward thinking“.(143) They couldn't win without cheating anyway, and now that option has seemingly been denied them, they are of little use to the Deep State. The latter is currently fighting a rearguard action through the judiciary, the entrenched bureaucracy, the RINOs in the Senate and, as is already starting to become clear, the odd calamitous personnel choice.
The DoJ, in particular, is going to be a disappointment, as the AG (Pamela Bondi) is a woman suffering from a severe lack of moral fibre and the two FBI picks are inside-the-Beltway players. Expect the usual script of faux outrage, strongly worded letters, the collection of low hanging fruit and little else besides,(144)(145) unless Trump rides them hard. Bondi is already facing her first Rorschach test – if the Epstein client list and JFK declassified documents are adulterated with oceans of Tippex, her reign may be on the short side. Normal service is not going to be tolerated this time around, but the FBI (in particular) is going to try and ride out the storm.
However, without political dominance and with a drastically reduced revenue stream, the intelligence community's actvities will likely be severely constrained. Getting stuff done in Serbia, for instance, without the moolah to grease the wheels and lavish upon the wholly organic protests may become problematic and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – CIA front and proud purveyor of regime change - has just joined USAID on the scrapheap.(146)(147) I would not be surprised to see some of the functions of these organisations brought back to life, but utilised in pursuit of Trump's priorities, not the Deep State's. And regime change operations to take down populist governments is not going to be a plank of his foreign policy.
The EU, properly viewed as the European arm of the globalists, is going to have a rough time and not just on Ukraine. Vance's speech at the recent AI summit in Paris wasn't just about the 'enemy within', although his code wasn't hard to crack when he did make that point - “we've watched as hostile foreign adversaries have weaponised AI software to rewrite history, surveil users and censor speech...I want to be clear – this administration will block such efforts, full stop...”.(148) He also put the Commission on notice as to any excessive attempts to regulate US tech companies and stifle AI development, which will likely be another flashpoint, as Trump will not take any prisoners when von der Leyen and co inevitably cross the line.
But the Americans will have no qualms about dealing with individual countries, especially as doing so will further undermine the EU. Hungary is already floating a trade deal that Viktor Orbán says is already agreed in principle and Hegseth is signalling a US pivot towards Poland - “the model ally on the continent“ - and away from the dysfunctional regimes in France and Germany.(149)(150) 25% tariffs, coming soon, and Trump's belief that the EU was formed “in order to screw the United States. And they've done a good job of it“,(151) point to an upcoming attempt to undo a Union which is increasingly on its uppers.
In Romania, the globalists have predictably doubled down, as cancelling the election had only delayed the inevitable and their mortal enemy was still the front-runner. So, in time-honoured fashion, the cops stepped in, investigated him on allegations of involvement “in a fascist organization and the promotion of controversial ideologies and historical figures in the public space”(152) and then raided his supporters and arrested the candidate himself. In Germany, the right-wing AfD doubled its share of the vote in last week's election to become the second biggest party in the Bundestag, yet the ostensibly conservative CDU/CSU – which won – will almost certainly govern in coalition with the Leftists of the SDU, who booked the worst result in the party's history, unless the Chancellor-to-be suddenly grows a spine.(153) That's the way to reflect the will of the voters.
Meanwhile, Fico's Slovakia has re-opened the Turkstream pipeline and is receiving Russian gas once more,(154) in open defiance of the EU, which is an option that Estonia should probably explore as it can no longer afford to run its largest pulp mill “due to skyrocketing electricity prices after the Baltic nation disconnected from the Russian-Belarusian energy network (BRELL) and synchronized with the EU’s grid.“(155)(156) Latvia and Lithuania will also be under the cosh, as the average daily price of electricity has doubled.(157) And when rabid Russophobia is combined with the West's Net Zero 2050 project, labelled a “sinister goal...impoverishing...citizens in pursuit of a delusion“ by Trump's Energy Secretary,(158) the result will be the continuing slow motion car crash that is the EU economy. As opposed to the US version, which will be powering ahead, fuelled by cheap energy.
Nowhere will the contrast be more obvious than in the UK which, under Starmer, will continue to deteriorate. The country already has the highest domestic electricity prices in the world, around 80% above the median and nearly three times the US rate.(159) It'll only get worse as the progressives dig in. The panoply of woke policies, under both Labour and the Tories, have had a prfound affect on the mental health of the British people, who are now the second-most miserable in the world, ahead of only Uzbekistan.(160) That's eight places behind Yemen and twelve behind Ukraine. In fact, all the Anglophone nations surveyed sit in the bottom quartile. Nonetheless, as things stand, there is every indication that the beatings will continue until morale improves.
But the globalists throughout the West are going to come under immense pressure if Trump can follow through in the US. If he continues to dismantle the Administrative State, if his appointees are up to the task, if he returns integrity to US elections, if the Tech Bros have won out over the Deep State, and – a big if amongst several – they are not simply another iteration of the same malignancy, then America will become a huge mirror to the rest of the West. We saw how that worked at the end of the 'pandemic'. Once Boris caved, it was only a matter of time before the rest did. It's already a thing; Musk's exposure of USAID has been matched by the European version, which reveals the same pattern of funding for Leftist NGOs undermining conservatives.(161) How surprising:
“The massive EU-NGO propaganda complex exposed in this report — a central pillar of what can rightly be termed the European deep state — serves as a stark reminder that the greatest threat to democracy in Europe today comes not from external forces, but from within. Rather than upholding democratic values, the EU has systematically leveraged its institutional power to manipulate public discourse, suppress dissent and entrench its supranational agenda at the expense of national sovereignty and democratic accountability.“(162)
Almost feels like a coordinated hit, doesn't it? Just after Vance said the same thing. Trump will doubtless agree with Orbán's take – that the EU is just a “bad contemporary parody“ of the USSR.(163) The same almost certainly holds true for the other members of Five Eyes. And it's not simply politics as usual. The Great Reset is an existential threat; we can't agree to disagree with globalists who are attempting to enslave us. There is, therefore, no obligation to play nice and doing so would be taken as a sign of weakness to be exploited. If the likes of Macron, Starmer and von der Leyen aren't visibly appalled by Trump's administration, it isn't trying hard enough.
Nonetheless, it seems to me that the enemy needs to win every battle, whereas we probably only need to triumph in a few key conflicts. Trump and his team will continue to dunk on the climate scam, they won't allow free speech to be trashed, the vehicle for world government – the UN – is also being de-legitimised and without an American CBDC, it's difficult to see how we can be suborned.
Dangers remain. The AI build-out and the ever-encroaching surveillance state are indisputably threatening to liberty and swapping one set of 'expert' rulers for another is a non-starter. Those of us outside the US are still going to be under the cosh for the foreseeable and there is an overall dearth of knights on white chargers. Elections Down-Under only offer the voting public the opportunity to swap one set of deckchairs for another, there's something about Pierre Poilievre that doesn't sit right – possibly his smugness – and it seems that Farage is more politician than freedom fighter which, given his exposure to Trump, marks him out as a slow learner, as this is what the public thinks of them.
Figure 12
Love him or loath him, Trump is sui generis. He alone will set the tone, but while there is clearly a major disturbance to the Force stateside, the rest of the supranational Deep State is still atop the commanding heights, the cultural rot is deep and the project is decades old. Whilst 'conservative influencers' will no doubt be full of premature hosannas, it'll be a long road – assuming we're even on it. But at least there is now hope and the satisfaction that comes from finding that common sense has made a comeback.
Citations
(1) https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/02/james-howard-kunstler/last-rites/
(2) https://www.dlacalle.com/en/european-leaders-double-down-on-stagnation-at-davos/
(3) https://expose-news.com/2025/02/14/eu-is-having-to-re-think-its-methane/
(4) https://expose-news.com/2025/02/06/european-committee-to-protect-democracy-fails/
(5) https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1814324355519684823?ref_src=twsrc
(6) https://www.rt.com/news/612730-us-vp-jd-vance-europe-threat-within-values/
(8) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy
(9) https://www.politico.eu/article/us-secretary-state-marco-rubio-trump-ghost-eu-meeting/
(10)
(11) https://www.rt.com/news/612706-vance-eu-soviet-censorship/
(13) https://www.rt.com/news/612706-vance-eu-soviet-censorship/
(14) https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/02/german-afds-weidel-fiery-exchange-bild-merz-refusing/
(15) https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1890438116659667208?ref_src=twsrc
(16) https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1891302425190863347?ref_src=twsrc
(17) https://x.com/60Minutes/status/1891282314899910910?ref_src=twsrc
(18) https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1889691984379408620.html
(19) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023#Opposition
(21) https://votes.parliament.uk/Votes/Commons/Division/1416
(24) https://x.com/MailOnline/status/1879042738512863430
(25) https://dailysceptic.org/2025/02/13/labours-plan-for-education-is-simple-nobody-is-allowed-to-win/
(26) https://dailysceptic.org/2025/02/16/how-ed-milibands-net-zero-fantasy-is-deforesting-north-carolina/
(27) Ditto
(28) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keir_Starmer
(32) Ditto
(33) https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/02/jim-quinn/its-a-big-club-and-you-aint-in-it/
(35) https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3526/actions?s=1&r=1
(37) https://alt-market.us/conspiracy-theorists-were-right-about-everything-now-what/
(40) https://x.com/lsferguson/status/1892565102047453401?ref_src=twsrc
(41) https://www.rt.com/russia/612874-ukraine-strike-western-oil/
(42) https://www.rt.com/russia/613050-zelensky-dirty-bomb-medvedev/
(43) https://www.rt.com/russia/612865-zelensky-attempt-eliminate-influence-poroshenko/
(45) https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114031332924234939
(47) https://www.rt.com/news/613120-us-ukraine-ties-destruction/
(48) https://www.rt.com/news/613077-us-opposes-term-russian-aggression/
(49) https://www.rt.com/news/613011-russia-us-talks-ukraine/
(50)https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/02/tech_god_marc_andreessen_boards_the_maga_train.html
(51) Ditto
(52)
(53) https://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/
(54) https://wikispooks.com/w/index.php?title=Operation_Mockingbird
(55) https://isgp-studies.com/cia-heroin-and-cocaine-drug-trafficking
(56) https://factsanddetails.com/southeast-asia/Thailand/sub5_8j/entry-3523.html
(57) Ditto
(58) https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1998/06/history-101-cia-drugs/
(59)
(61) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02684527.2023.2291871
(62) https://crooksandliars.com/2014/01/jfk-wished-he-could-splinter-cia-thousand
(63) https://www.jstor.org/stable/2147321?seq=3
(66) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerry_Committee
(67) https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/invention-of-the-internet
(68)-(69) Ditto
(70) https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e
(71)-(72) Ditto
(73) http://insidegoogle.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/GOOGGovfinal012411.pdf
(74)-(77) Ditto
(80) https://arstechnica.com/culture/2024/08/in-a-divided-america-one-thing-now-unites-hating-google/
(81) http://insidegoogle.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/GOOGGovfinal012411.pdf
(82) https://worth.com/2013/06/how-startups-helped-the-nsa-build-prism/
(83) https://www.military.com/defensetech/2004/02/04/lifelog-dead
(84) https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palantir-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-the-whole-world/
(85) https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/why-google-made-the-nsa-2a80584c9c1
(86) https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e
(87) https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/why-google-made-the-nsa-2a80584c9c1
(89) https://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/
(90) Ditto
(91) https://brownstone.org/articles/the-second-matrix-break-the-controlled-awakening/
(93)https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/02/dod-memo-falls-incredibly-short-former-service-members/
(95) https://expose-news.com/2025/02/19/bird-flu-they-are-re-running-the-covid-script/
(101) https://nypost.com/2025/01/02/opinion/freefalling-medias-grim-prospects-as-reach-influence-wane/
(102) Ditto
(103) https://callmestormy.net/2024/12/04/power-legacy-media-in-freefall/
(106) https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/how-will-elon-musk-pay-twitter-2022-10-07/
(108) https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/technology/boycott-twitter-campaigning
(109) Ditto
(110) https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/29/23981928/elon-musk-ad-boycott-go-fuck-yourself-destroy-x
(113) https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/06/politics/nikki-haley-2024-presidential-race/index.html
(115) https://www.ft.com/content/a46cb128-1f74-4621-ab0b-242a76583105
(117) https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Peter_Thiel
(118) https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdrange/2016/06/21/peter-thiels-war-on-gawker-a-timeline/
(119) https://theintercept.com/2015/07/01/nsas-google-worlds-private-communications/
(120)-(121) Ditto
(123) https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palantir-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-the-whole-world/
(124)
(125)https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2016/25/pdfs/ukpga_20160025_en.pdf
(126) Ditto
(127) https://www.securityweek.com/fbi-gchq-get-foreign-hacking-authority/
(129) https://www.ceps.eu/ceps-projects/the-impact-of-the-german-netzdg-law/
(130) https://www.hoganlovells.com/en/publications/eu-parliament-adopts-terreg-regulation-for-combating-online-dissemination-of-terrorist-content# :~:text=Cooperation%3A TERREG also requires hosting,%2C Art 14(5).
(134) https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/supreme-court-january-6-ruling-06-28-24/index.html
(135) https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2025/01/04/coded-values/
(136) Ditto
(139)
(140) https://brownstone.org/articles/the-party-is-over/
(141) https://50in5.net/
(142) https://thenewamerican.com/print/un-agenda-2030-a-recipe-for-global-socialism/
(143) https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5158323-democrats-struggle-rebuild-party/
(146) https://serbia.news-pravda.com/en/world/2025/02/26/2362.html
(147) https://williamblum.org/chapters/rogue-state/trojan-horse-the-national-endowment-for-democracy
(148) https://x.com/TheChiefNerd/status/1889300783440495025?ref_src=twsrc
(149) https://hungary.news-pravda.com/en/world/2025/02/07/4331.html
(151) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/trump-eu-ukraine-security-tariffs-b2705397.html
(152) https://www.rt.com/news/613335-georgescu-presidential-romania-arrested/
(153)
(154) https://www.rt.com/news/612530-slovakia-russian-gas-turkstream/
(155) https://www.rt.com/business/612914-estonia-pulp-mill-halt/
(157) Ditto
(159) https://dailysceptic.org/2024/10/06/u-k-faces-economic-ruin-with-worlds-highest-electricity-prices/
(160) https://sapienlabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/4th-Annual-Mental-State-of-the-World-Report.pdf
(161)https://brussels.mcc.hu/uploads/default/0001/01/efbecea2012e33f88794130dae1b7a38d3778bcb.pdf
(162) Ditto
Figure 1 https://dailysceptic.org/2025/02/16/how-ed-milibands-net-zero-fantasy-is-deforesting-north-carolina/
Figure 2 https://www.theburningplatform.com/2024/12/31/the-futures-uncertain-and-the-end-is-always-near/
Figure 3 Ditto
Figure 12 https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/broken-beyond-repair-barely-anyone-trusts-politicians