The buffoons who orchestrate fascism, with its quack science, idiocy, penchant for violence and grotesque hypermasculinity, are ripe for satire. It is easy, as late-night comics do — and as the cabarets did for the Nazis in Berlin — to pillory the goons, misfits and mediocrities who hold power and spew fascist bile. But this form of satire blinds opponents to its destructive power and murderous core. It ignores the real centers of power. It does not engender resistance. It engenders disdain and cynicism. It furthers the social and political divide between us, the “enlightened” and “educated” elite, and them, the despised and ridiculed “basket of deplorables.”

There are two forms of satire. That of the educated elites, which dominates the commercial media, ridicules the foibles and pretensions of Trump and his hapless followers. This satire does not attack corporations or the war industry. It ignores the decay and rot within our political institutions, including the Democratic Party, which created Trump. It pretends we live in a democracy. It breeds cynicism, not resistance. It is characterized by a repugnant moral and intellectual superiority and heartless demeaning of the underclass. It fosters the social divisions and alienation that feeds fascism.

Antonio Gramsci warned that elitist satire is counterproductive. He called for a “passionate sarcasm,” which targets the machinery of power. Satire, he wrote, must excoriate the dominant myths and ideologies which buttress capitalism and fascism. It must expose not only the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of fascism, but acknowledge the legitimate grievances of those under its spell. It must focus on the institutions that perpetuate injustice and social inequality.

“Trump has also been necessary to expose the plastic progressives, the liberal anti-Trump imperialists who, in their opposition to Trump’s deal with Iran, can only look like warmongering imperial psychopaths,” writes Nate Bear. “From all those sharing memes on social media about surrender, from the Democrats and CNN talking heads decrying the deal, to Jimmy Fallon dragging Trump for giving Iran back the money the US stole, there is no articulation of an alternative to endlessly bombing Iran. There’s no anger from liberals over dead Iranians, or at the imperial state, at Zionism or the embedded death machinery that made this violence possible. No, they’re just embarrassed for empire. And they don’t want to recognise the limits of that empire.”

Elitist satire — whether on “Saturday Night Live” or other late-night shows — punches down. It seduces liberals into believing that the thugs and grifters who have taken power are too stupid and too inept to last. There are millions of political exiles who understand how this self-delusion, this failure to take fascists seriously, is the great facilitator of fascism. They too once dismissed the goons who now run their countries as a joke.

The Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran, driven into exile by the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in her book “Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century,” lays out the familiar pattern:

It begins with a movement that divides society into two: the ‘real people’ versus the ‘corrupt elite’, and with a leader who insists they alone embody the ‘real’ people. The next step is the dissolution of truth and the prioritisation of loyalty above decency. Then shame is dismantled. The leader breaks the long-standing political and moral consensus with unprecedented relentlessness. The longer they remain in power, the boundaries of what is acceptable begin to stretch. What once felt unthinkable or despicable gradually becomes normal. As the institutions that hold democracy together are quietly hollowed out and the very definition of democracy is rewritten as being simply majority rule, universal values — human dignity and the rule of law — are replaced with a fierce nationalism, a proud victimhood, and a rewriting of history. Cruelty and ruthlessness are deemed just, not only in the highest echelons of politics but also trickling down to daily life. The circle of who counts as ‘us’ grows smaller, while millions of fellow citizens are recast as permanent suspects.

As Temelkuran warns, Americans, like those in other nations that have been down this path, “...soothe their fears by repeating the same illusionary line, ‘The institutions will hold.’ They do not yet dare to recognize their future country, and soon, they will not be recognized as citizens unless they follow the new rules in Trump’s America.”

Comedians such as Kimmel function like the cabaret star, Fritz Grünbaum, who during Nazism, once quipped when the power went out during a performance: “I can’t see a thing, not a single thing; I must have stumbled into National Socialist culture.” Grünbaum would eventually find himself in the Dachau concentration camp — along with other actors, performers and satirists — where he died of tuberculosis.

The Nazis moved swiftly to close the cabarets — along with all institutions that defied Nazi control — and replaced them with mindless variety shows. They hated mockery as much as Trump, who after Stephen Colbert’s final show, gloated that Colbert was “finished” and called him a “total jerk.” Trump also shared an AI-generated video of himself throwing Colbert into a dumpster, slamming down the lid and dancing. Trump wrote that Colbert’s exit was the “beginning of the end” for other late night hosts.

Jokes about dictators in totalitarian regimes are a criminal offense. Satire is permissible in fascist states only when employed to mock political opponents and demonized minorities. It is not permissible when directed at centers of power. As Gramsci pointed out, the consolidation of power by fascists requires them to win the “cultural battle,” by dominating the public discourse, policing language — including satire — and redefining social, cultural and political norms.

Elitist satire is a pressure-release valve. But because it refuses to confront the roots of our political, social and cultural degeneration — which preceded the Trump presidency — it solidifies the fascist project it seeks to destroy. It reduces the catastrophe to the clown show around Trump: the sycophantic cabinet secretaries, ICE Barbie or Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s bizarre war on medical science. It does not address our failed democratic institutions — the academy, elections, courts, Congress, or the media. It deflects attention from the billionaires and corporations that have slashed regulation, imposed austerity and deindustrialization and distorted the economic and political system to facilitate the largest upward transfer of wealth in U.S. history. It does not address the murderous war industry or the domestic security apparatus that makes us the most watched, monitored, spied upon, tracked and photographed population in human history.

This elitist satire simplifies the complex social, economic and political forces we must dismantle. It ignores or pays deference to the subterranean forces that created Trump. Gramsci’s “passionate sarcasm” is too revolutionary and too truthful to be broadcast on media conglomerates such as CBS.

“Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr noted in “Humor and Faith.” “Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence which threaten the very meaning of our life.”

“There is no laughter in the holy of holies,” Niebuhr continued. “There laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humor is fulfilled by faith.”

When satire is the end point, it is deleterious. It masks what is coming. It must be, as Niebuhr pointed out, the entry point. It must push us, as Gramsci understood, into hard analysis and the organization of mass movements that alone can save us from tyranny. It must cease to play into the hands of a polarized nation, one where opposing factions write each other off as irredeemable. It must acknowledge that given the gravity before us, laughter is not enough.

---

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto.Subscribe to Chris Hedges on Substack

[Find the web link for this article in the comments]

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The Banality of Peter Thiel’s Evil

Newly unearthed details of the tech giant’s secret annual retreat show the malignity of his influence—and the mundanity of his ideas.

For someone obsessed with the imminent arrival of the Antichrist and other doomsday scenarios, tech baron Peter Thiel sure is keen to place himself within the existing political order’s power elite. An early Silicon Valley recruit to the MAGA movement, Thiel donated heavily to Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He then distanced himself from Trump’s 2020 campaign, but resumed his role as a MAGA kingmaker during the 2022 cycle, donating to 16 hard-right House and Senate candidates. And as his pet software and surveillance company Palantir continues to rake in massive government contracts from the second Trump administration, Thiel is already spending big to support the Republican House majority in this year’s midterms.

But electoral politics is just a small part of Thiel’s self-appointed purview as an aspiring thinker of big civilizational thoughts. Since 2006, the reclusive mogul has hosted a series of confabs called Dialog—a private, invitation-only gathering of global power brokers and influencer-types, funded by a cool $16,000 registration fee for participants. Reports of Dialog’s activities have been sketchy at best, since all the group’s sessions are held off the record, and its membership list has been jealously guarded from public view.

 

𝐈𝐬𝐫𝐚𝐞𝐥 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐀𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐞, 𝐄𝐱𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭 𝐈𝐭 𝐍𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐇𝐚𝐬: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐨𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐢𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐭 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐑𝐞𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐈𝐭

Facebook Summary:

There is a sentence the Israeli prime minister returns to whenever the pressure from his patron grows uncomfortable. If Israel is forced to stand alone, he says, Israel will stand alone. It is built for the domestic ear and aimed at the foreign one, and it has the ring of a hard truth spoken by a man prepared to face it. There is only one difficulty. The entire history of Israel at war says it is not true, and it says so beginning in October 1973, when Israel did not stand alone, because it could not.

In October 1973, attacked on two fronts, Israel burned through its arms and ammunition faster than it could replace them. As the shortages grew critical, the United States launched an emergency airlift, flying thousands of tons of weapons and equipment into Israel over the course of the war, replacing what was being consumed. [1] It is widely credited with helping Israel stabilize and turn the fighting. At the first existential test of the modern state, what allowed Israel to keep fighting was not the depth of its own resources. It was the arrival of its patron supply. That was not an exception. It was the rule. In the decades after, Israel became the largest cumulative recipient of American military aid in the world, its missile-defense systems funded substantially by the United States, its expended interceptors replaced from American production. The state that proclaims it will stand alone built its entire defense on the certainty that it never would. And the war of 2026 confirmed it on the largest scale yet: through months of fighting, Israeli air defense was sustained by a continuous American resupply of interceptors, drawn down faster than they could be made, and as the war ended the United States began rebuilding the stocks the fighting had emptied. [2] The most advanced shield in the world could not sustain itself through one war without its patron.

Set the boast beside the record. In 1973, the airlift. In the decades after, the aid that became the foundation of the defense. In 2026, the resupply without which the shield could not have functioned. At every decisive moment, what let Israel keep fighting was the supply of the United States. There is no chapter in which Israel stood alone and prevailed, because there is no chapter in which it stood alone at all. So why make the claim? Because it does work unrelated to its accuracy. To a domestic audience frightened by a patron making decisions over the head of Israel, it is a comfort. To the patron, it is a lever, a way of saying the client cannot be taken for granted. Its one function it cannot perform is the literal one. And the deepest reading turns it inside out: to declare you will stand alone, if forced to, is to concede that standing alone has become a real possibility. No leader secure in his alliance announces his readiness to do without it. The boast is not a sign of strength but a symptom of the fracture. When he says Israel will stand alone, he is not reporting a capacity. He is registering an anxiety, that the supply on which the state has always depended may no longer be assured, surfacing as bravado because it cannot be said plainly. The words are meant to suppress the fear. Instead they reveal it.

The pattern set in 1973 has never been broken, only confirmed, down to the interceptors flying off American production lines to refill a shield emptied in 2026. The state that says it will stand alone has never taken a single step alone. The boast and the record cannot both be believed, and the record is written in tonnage and dollars and the manifests of resupply, while the boast is written only in the air.

When a state insists most loudly that it can stand alone, what has just happened to make the insistence necessary?

Read the full analysis at fikr.institute:

https://fikr.institute/post.html...

Support independent geopolitical analysis. Help keep Fikr Institute running:

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References:

1. Historical accounts of Operation Nickel Grass, the US emergency airlift to Israel during the October 1973 war; specific tonnage to be confirmed against primary sources before publication.

2. Analysis of the 2026 war on the continuous US resupply of interceptors and the multi-year stockpile rebuild, including Harvard Kennedy School and CNBC, April 2026.

#Israel #Netanyahu #1973 #YomKippurWar #NickelGrass #USIsrael #Dependency #Iran #Geopolitics #MilitaryAid #StandingAlone #MiddleEast #MuslimNations #Ummah

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Peter Thiel’s Pseudo Catholic Apocalypse: A leaked directory this week exposed Peter Thiel’s secret elite forum. The tech billionaire who lectures on the Antichrist is also the patron who led JD Vance into the Catholic Church.

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is not a Catholic and does not claim to be one, but he is clearly obsessed with Catholicism.

On June 20 the Guardian’s Jason Wilson reported a leak that exposed the guest directory of Dialog, the invitation-only forum Thiel founded in 2006 and that critics set beside the Bilderberg Group. The list surfaced in the source code of Dialog’s own website, preserved in an Internet Archive snapshot and first flagged by a hacktivist on Bluesky. It gathered Elon Musk, senators of both parties, Trump cabinet officers, Gulf royals, the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, OpenAI’s president, and New York Times columnists.

The leak landed in the same season as Thiel’s other public turn, the one in which he lectures elite audiences on the Antichrist and warns that Armageddon is near. The two roles belong to one project. Thiel borrows the vocabulary of Catholic apocalypse to dignify a politics of power, and he has supplied that politics with a Catholic Vice President of his own making.

He calls himself a Christian of broadly Protestant background. He studied at Stanford under René Girard, the French literary theorist and Catholic convert whose theory of mimetic desire became Thiel’s master key to markets, rivalry, and now the end of the world. Over the past year Thiel has carried a traveling lecture series on the Antichrist from city to city -- four closed-door sessions in San Francisco in the fall of 2025, organized by the ACTS 17 Collective at the Commonwealth Club, then private talks in Paris reported by Le Monde and Politico, and in March 2026 a four-day series in Rome.

The Rome sessions ran invite-only, no recordings, no press. The Vincenzo Gioberti Cultural Association, tied to the Italian far right, organized them with the independent Cluny Institute and praised Thiel for the “courage and intellectual liberty” to discuss forces it described as bent on destroying what remains of the West.

Italian newspapers first reported the venue as the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas -- the Angelicum, where the American-born Leo XIV once studied -- and the pontifical universities hurried to deny any role. In a parliamentary session, Italian lawmakers called Thiel’s ideas scandalous and demanded transparency about the government’s contracts with Palantir, the surveillance firm Thiel chairs. Voices close to Leo XIV called the content heretical.

A Protestant billionaire delivered a private theology of the last days a short walk from St. Peter’s Square, and the Catholic institutions of Rome backed away from the room.

Ross Douthat asked Thiel on a New York Times podcast what the Antichrist meant to him. Thiel answered, “How much time do we have?” His formula comes from Paul. The slogan of the Antichrist, Thiel says, is “peace and safety,” the phrase from First Thessalonians that arrives just before sudden destruction.

He draws the rest from an improbably assembled bookshelf: St. John Henry Newman’s apocalyptic sermons; Russian mystic Vladimir Soloviev’s A Short Story of the Anti-Christ — a 1900 tale of an Antichrist who presents himself as a humanitarian and a benefactor; German Nazi political philosopher Carl Schmitt’s katechon — the restrainer who holds back the end of the world and provides the only bridge between an eschatological paralysis of all human effort and great historical power like that of the early Christian Empire of the Germanic kings.

In Thiel’s telling, the Antichrist of this century wears the costume of a reassuring administrator who promises to end existential risk -- the regulator, the arms-control negotiator, the global-governance official, the precautionary state that slows the machines. Greta Thunberg serves as his recurring example. Thiel hands his audiences a choice between a one-world state under the Antichrist and an Armageddon if that project collapses.

His account of the Antichrist and his commercial interest run in the same direction. If safety is the slogan of the enemy, then the people who would slow artificial intelligence, audit Palantir, or restrain the surveillance frontier are doing the enemy’s work. The chairman of a surveillance company has produced an account of the end times in which restraint is the temptation and acceleration is the faithful act.

Thiel met JD Vance in 2011, when he spoke at Yale Law School and the future Vice President was a striving student from Ohio. Thiel handed him Girard. Vance has credited that encounter for his conversion, which he recounted in a 2020 essay, “How I Joined the Resistance.”

Girard was Catholic. Thiel is not. Vance became one. The line ran from the dead French Catholic to his Protestant student to the convert that student would fund into the United States Senate in 2022. Thiel is also credited with handing Vance the work of Carl Schmitt, the jurist who served the Nazi state and defined politics as the division of humanity into friend and enemy.

Girard exposed the scapegoat so that communities might stop sacrificing their victims, the crucified Christ being the innocent the civilization wronged. Critics who read Girard closely, among them the Jesuit commentators in Ireland who have tracked Vance’s turn, argue that he absorbed the mechanism and now works it -- defending the administration’s indictments, its deportations, and its lists of enemies. Thiel calls himself a Girardian while building a politics organized around the enemy: the woke, the climate activist, the globalist, the regulator. By that reading, both men took the anatomy of the scapegoat as an instruction manual.

He handles the other sources the same way. The katechon restrains the Antichrist and delays the end; Thiel reassigns it, treating the global order of safety and control as the danger and calling disruption the faithful answer. Paul’s “peace and safety” warns of false comfort on the edge of judgment; Thiel turns the phrase into the slogan of tyranny, which lets him brand AI safety, climate caution, and arms control as the devil’s work. He conscripts the texts rather than submitting to them.

The living Pope has answered the program directly. In his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi te, Leo XIV condemned “ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation,” and he has denounced the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States. In April 2026, Vance -- the Catholic Thiel made -- told the Pope to be careful when he speaks about theology. The Church that received Vance now rebukes the agenda Thiel funds.

The fusion of maximal technology, friend-enemy politics, and Christian end-times language repeats a Weimar formula. The historian Jeffrey Herf called the pairing reactionary modernism, the embrace of the machine joined to a rejection of Enlightenment reason and liberal democracy, with Carl Schmitt among its theorists. Thiel revives it and routes Schmitt to the second-highest office in the country.

The faction is specific. Thiel, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, Joe Lonsdale, and the Founders Fund orbit carry the technology side; Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and the postliberal Catholics around Vance carry the religious one. The leaked Dialog list runs wider than that circle and older than Thiel’s turn to Trump. It holds Democrats who hurried to disown it -- Wes Moore, Cory Booker, and Jared Polis among them -- and writers with no stake in any of it. The argument is about Thiel’s faction, not Silicon Valley and not the American right.

He takes the categories -- Antichrist, katechon, the two cities of Augustine -- and the two-thousand-year vocabulary of cosmic struggle, and he leaves behind the magisterium that interprets them, the preferential option for the poor, and the Pope who is alive and disagreeing with him.

The forum the leak exposed is the material body of that vision. Dialog meets off the record under a confidentiality its members prize; Auren Hoffman chairs it, Raffi Grinberg directs it, and the group is building a permanent campus in the Washington suburbs. Wired’s account of the August retreat near Dublin listed sessions called “Navigating WWIII,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” and “Build-a-Cult.” Records released by the House oversight committee show Hoffman invited Jeffrey Epstein to the 2014 gathering, alongside Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton. Janine Wedel, who studies power elites at George Mason University, calls these closed forums “a problem for democracy,” the rooms where agendas get set past any vote the rest of us could cast.

The source Thiel cites describes a figure he seems unable to recognize. In Vladimir Soloviev’s tale, the Antichrist arrives as a benefactor and a peacemaker, a superman who ends scarcity, unites the world under a single government, wins the gratitude of nations, and convenes the churches to ask them to bow to him in exchange for everything they have wanted. That likeness fits the technologist who promises to cure death and administer the human future more closely than it fits an official asking for a safety review. Thiel drew a careful portrait of the Antichrist and addressed it to the wrong man.

Catholic social teaching levels a sharper charge than excess piety. The first commandment forbids the worship of substitutes, and a man who borrows God’s vocabulary to consecrate his own power has raised a god he can manage.

The borrowing does political work. Thiel funds the 2026 Republican campaigns, chairs a surveillance company that sells to governments, and has placed his protégé a step from the presidency. His apocalyptic story dignifies that power and brands the people Leo XIV defends, the migrant and the poor, as frightened masses who would trade their freedom for the Antichrist’s safety.

When he brought the performance to Rome, the Catholic institutions there heard him out and refused him the bow that Soloviev’s Antichrist demands of churches. The Church — and, we hope, most Catholics, can tell the difference between Thiel’s mashed-together distorted pseudo-religion for the real thing.

This post is also available on Substack: https://mikefoxcatechist.substack.com/.../peter-thiels...

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This report dropped just hours ago. Published this morning by NBC News. Based on a brand-new study that is already shaking Silicon Valley to its core.

In just 90 days — January, February, and March 2026 — ordinary American citizens with no lobbyists, no corporate lawyers, and no billions of dollars stopped Big Tech dead in its tracks.

The number is almost impossible to believe. But it is real. It is verified. And it changes everything.     $130 BILLION. BLOCKED. IN 90 DAYS.

A new study conducted by Data Center Watch — a project of AI intelligence firm 10a Labs that tracks local data center activity — found that data center opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 projects nationwide worth about $130 billion from January through March 2026. That is the most blocked and delayed data center projects ever recorded in a single three-month period since tracking began in 2023. 

75 projects. $130 billion. In 90 days.

To put that in perspective — $130 billion is more than the entire annual GDP of Hungary. More than the annual revenue of Walmart. Stopped — not by governments, not by regulators, not by courts — but by regular Americans who showed up and said no.

The total number and value of data centers blocked or delayed during just the first three months of 2026 roughly matched the total for ALL of 2025 combined. 

Everything that took an entire year to block in 2025 — communities matched it in just one quarter of 2026.

This is not a trend. This is an avalanche. THE STUDY THAT SENT SHOCKWAVES THROUGH SILICON VALLEY.

The researchers at Data Center Watch did not just count the blocked projects. They explained exactly why this is happening — and their conclusion is the part Big Tech least wants you to read.

The authors wrote: “The quarter reflected a structural shift rather than a cyclical spike: communities have internalized an opposition playbook, legislative sessions introduced formal regulatory uncertainty, and the number of active opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states.” 

A structural shift. Not a spike. Not a temporary protest. A permanent, organized, nationwide movement that has now taken root in 49 of America’s 50 states.

Data Center Watch stated that opposition to data centers has “consolidated into a national political force” — adding that “what began as individual zoning disputes is now reshaping elections, regulation, and site viability nationwide.” 

Individual zoning disputes. That is how this started — neighbors showing up to complain at a county meeting. Now it is reshaping elections. Replacing politicians. Rewriting laws. And blocking $130 billion in 90 days.

THE RUMOR OF A DATA CENTER IS NOW ENOUGH TO TRIGGER A REVOLT

Here is the detail in today’s study that stopped every data center executive in their tracks.

The study found: “In some cases, opposition mobilized before any project was officially filed. The mere rumor of a data center was enough to trigger organized resistance.” 

Not an announcement. Not a permit application. Not a groundbreaking ceremony.

A rumor.

Communities are now so organized, so alert, and so determined that the moment anyone hears a whisper that a data center might be coming — the resistance begins. Before a single document is filed. Before a single acre of land changes hands.

Big Tech used to be able to quietly file permits, quietly buy land, quietly start construction — and by the time communities figured out what was happening, it was too late.

Those days are over.

AND THE LAWMAKERS ARE FOLLOWING THE PEOPLE

The grassroots movement did not just block projects. It forced politicians to act — fast.

More than 300 bills were introduced in statehouses across the country just in the first six weeks of 2026 alone — marking what researchers described as “a clear shift from incentive-focused policies toward regulatory oversight as the scale of energy demands became clearer.” 

300 bills. In six weeks. In legislatures across America. From red states to blue states. From Oklahoma to New York. From Texas to Maine.

Three years ago — data centers were handing out press releases and politicians were lining up for ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

Today — 300 bills in six weeks. All driven by the same force: ordinary Americans who got fed up and showed up.

AND YET BIG TECH IS NOT BACKING DOWN — IT IS DOUBLING DOWN

Here is the part of today’s story that makes this a true David vs. Goliath battle for the ages.

On May 11, Moody’s Ratings raised its capital spending projections for the top six U.S. hyperscalers — Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Meta, Alphabet, Oracle, and CoreWeave — to $785 billion for 2026 and nearly $1 trillion for 2027. 

$785 billion this year. $1 trillion next year. From just six companies.

Against 833 grassroots opposition groups. Armed with community meetings, petitions, and votes.

That dynamic — community opposition steam rolled by corporate momentum — is playing out across America at accelerating speed. 

Big Tech is spending more. Communities are fighting harder. And right now — today — the communities are winning more often than anyone in Silicon Valley predicted possible.

In the town of Saline, Michigan, residents voted against a $16 billion data center in their backyard. Weeks later — construction began anyway. 

The people voted. The company built anyway.

That single sentence explains why 833 opposition groups now exist across 49 states. Because democracy was ignored. And Americans do not forget that.

TWO OUT OF EVERY THREE FIGHTS — COMMUNITIES ARE WINNING

And here is the number that should give every community in America hope — and every data center executive nightmares.

Opposition groups were successful in blocking or delaying two out of every three projects they protested — underscoring the growing impact of organized local resistance. 

Two out of three. When communities organize and fight — they win the majority of the time.

This is not a movement that is losing. This is a movement that is winning. Consistently. Repeatedly. Across 49 states.

Every town council member who supported Amazon’s proposed data center in Warrenton, Virginia has subsequently lost re-election — starting in 2023 and continuing through every election since. 

Every single one. Lost their seat. Because they chose Amazon over their community.

Politicians across America are reading that sentence very carefully right now.

 WHAT HAPPENS NEXT — AND WHY THE NEXT 90 DAYS ARE EVEN MORE IMPORTANT

Today’s study covers January through March. The second quarter of 2026 — April, May, and June — is not yet fully counted. But the early signals suggest the numbers will be even larger.

The New York moratorium bill passed both chambers. Nashville’s zoo petition hit 386,000 signatures. Nassau County voted for a full pause. North Carolina is fighting to protect its aquifers. Ohio farmers are battling eminent domain proposals. The EPA said it won’t protect communities. And 833 opposition groups — across 49 states — are more organized today than they were on January 1.

As Data Center Watch concluded in its report published today: “As political resistance builds and local organizing becomes more coordinated, this is now a sustained and intensifying trend.” 

Sustained. Intensifying. Nationwide.

$130 billion blocked in 90 days. By regular Americans. With no corporate backing. No billionaire donors. No armies of lobbyists.

Just neighbors. Showing up. Saying no.

And winning.

This study was published TODAY by NBC News — just hours ago. SHARE this post so every American knows that their community has the POWER to stop Big Tech — and that 833 groups across 49 states are already proving it. FOLLOW this page for the most important and most current data center news in America, updated every single day. 

 Comment below: Does it give you HOPE that ordinary Americans are blocking $130 BILLION in data center projects — or do you think Big Tech will ultimately win? Tell us what you think!

 

 Sources: NBC News — June 12, 2026 (Published TODAY, 10 hours ago) | AOL / NBC News — June 12, 2026 | International Business Times — June 12, 2026 (Published 2 hours ago) | 

 

 

ESCAPE OR RESPONSIBILITY? 

 Elon Musk asks a grand question:

Should humanity invest in ambitious technologies to become a multi-planetary species and secure its long-term survival?

Gil Scott-Heron asks a different question.

What obligations do societies have to solve urgent problems on Earth before pursuing distant frontiers?

What they're really arguing about isn't Mars alone.

It's priorities.

One side sees exploration, innovation, and long-term survival as essential investments in humanity's future.

The other asks whether technological ambition risks overshadowing immediate human needs such as poverty, inequality, and environmental challenges.

The deeper question is:

How should societies balance preparing for the future with caring for the present?

History repeatedly shows that civilizations are shaped by both visionaries and critics.

Progress requires imagination.

But philosophy asks who benefit from that progress and who is left behind.

Perhaps the challenge is remembering that these goals do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Because the measure of a civilization is not only whether it can reach new worlds…

…but whether it can improve life on the one it already inhabits.

Is anyone else watching what’s happening in Sacramento right now? The hypocrisy is honestly unreal.

Right now, Gavin Newsom is using taxpayer-funded staff to file aggressive federal FOIA requests demanding the DOJ hand over records about the investigations into him and his wife. When he wants answers, transparency is an absolute right.

But look at what California lawmakers are trying to do to the rest of us at the exact same time. They are quietly pushing Assembly Bill 1821, which will absolutely gut the California Public Records Act. If this passes, everyday citizens, local journalists, and whistleblowers will be completely locked out of holding the government accountable at a state AND local level.

Here is what they are trying to accomplish……

Pay-to-play

Agencies will be allowed to charge you anywhere from $22 to $66+ AN HOUR just for staff to look for public documents. (which they are already paid to do).

A basic request could end up costing you thousands of dollars.

The government will actually get the power to sue YOU if they decide your records request has "malicious intent." Example…if you are trying to uncover corruption you believe is happening in your hometown…

Imagine getting taken to court just for asking questions. 

It gives agencies more time to stall, and lets them hit you with an $88/hour fee if they decide your request is for "commercial use."  yes… say you post it on FB or other social media platforms… that could be deemed commercial, especially if you get paid for your content.

It is the ultimate definition of "rules for thee, but not for me." Newsom gets to weaponize transparency laws for his own personal defense, while his party strips those exact same rights away from the people of California.

Keep an eye on AB 1821 people…if this passes you will have challenges on keeping an eye on our government. Why should the rest of this country care? Well we all know he will be running for president next and this is what the rest of the country can expect for themselves as well.

 

 

We've all heard of Peter Thiel's "secret society" by now, and WIRED just dropped a new investigation that claims Dialog, the invite-only "secret society" co-founded by Thiel, secretly ranks its members using an internal scoring system based on factors such as wealth, influence, fame, and perceived value to the group.

According to leaked records, members and prospective attendees receive letter grades (A, B, or C), with the highest-ranking participants often being some of the most influential people in politics, technology, finance, media, and government. The organization also assigns "value-add" scores that help determine who gets invited, who sits with whom, who moderates discussions, and in some cases whether someone remains part of the network.

The documents suggest Dialog tracks personal information, professional connections, political leanings, and relationship networks to help curate interactions, almost like surveillance of the wealthy. The group also uses algorithms and staff evaluations to recommend introductions, arrange seating, and optimize networking opportunities among attendees.

Wildly, some members can reportedly be downgraded or removed for reasons such as "poor culture fit," declining influence, or insufficient value to the community (shows you how these people see the world). The leaked records also reveal that membership status and rankings may affect event pricing, with some attendees paying significantly different fees for the same gatherings.

What this looks like to me is a private network where some of the world's most powerful people are quietly ranking one another, building relationships, and shaping influence outside public view - the very thing many of us have been saying is a huge part of what decides the direction of the world.

I'll ask those who have denied this stuff for a long time, if influence increasingly flows through powerful, invisible, private networks rather than public institutions, how much of society's future is being shaped in rooms most people will never enter or hear about what happens in?

Consider AI for one second, we realize how powerful that tech is and how it's going to reshape the entire world soon. A handful of people are not only building out where AI goes but ultimately deciding what it builds. Power is indeed concentrated in the wealthy. Democracy is an illusion to keep the public pacified.

One step further, we're literally seeing a network influencing the world that has a worldview of 'ranking people' by values based entirely on non-intrinsic qualities. Funny enough, this is exactly why these powerful people don't value the average person, love, nature, water, a tree, animals etc. Their worldview is foundationally a story of separation rather than love or interconnection, and yet they are deciding where the world goes.

By Joe Martino, CE founder

The American public is constantly told that the MAGA movement is a grassroots crusade against the establishment. We are told they are fighting for the forgotten man and woman against a corrupt global elite. But while those politicians stir up chaos to distract us, the people pulling the strings are busy building their own private, insulated reality. Wired just exposed a list of over 200 members belonging to a secretive group called Dialog, run by billionaire Peter Thiel. This is not just a club for the wealthy; it is a shadow network of power brokers, investors, and political operators who are quietly mapping out the future of our society behind closed doors.

When you look at who is involved and how these circles operate, the parallels to other notorious elite cabals become impossible to ignore. They claim to represent the people, but their actions prove they only serve themselves. This is the blueprint for oligarchy—an infrastructure designed to bypass democratic institutions entirely. We are witnessing the solidification of a ruling class that believes it is above the reach of public accountability. If we do not recognize this for the danger it truly is, we are choosing to let them own the future.

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Americans Against Fascism 

For someone obsessed with the imminent arrival of the Antichrist and other doomsday scenarios, tech baron Peter Thiel sure is keen to place himself within the existing political order’s power elite. An early Silicon Valley recruit to the MAGA movement, Thiel donated heavily to Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He then distanced himself from Trump’s 2020 campaign, but resumed his role as a MAGA kingmaker during the 2022 cycle, donating to 16 hard-right House and Senate candidates. And as his pet software and surveillance company Palantir continues to rake in massive government contracts from the second Trump administration, Thiel is already spending big to support the Republican House majority in this year’s midterms.

But electoral politics is just a small part of Thiel’s self-appointed purview as an aspiring thinker of big civilizational thoughts. Since 2006, the reclusive mogul has hosted a series of confabs called Dialog—a private, invitation-only gathering of global power brokers and influencer-types, funded by a cool $16,000 registration fee for participants. Reports of Dialog’s activities have been sketchy at best, since all the group’s sessions are held off the record, and its membership list has been jealously guarded from public view. Until now, that is. On Tuesday, Wired magazine published a trove of leaked Dialog documents and information about the group’s membership.

The leak includes the schedule for the group’s pending August retreat outside Dublin, Ireland. The subject matter gives the lie to the notion that Thiel’s vanity project is brokering any meaningful dialogue, in the sense of a probing exchange of opposing views. Instead, it seems closer to a list of trending topics on Truth Social: Session titles include “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and, somewhat randomly, “How’s Your Sex Life?” “Other talks include ‘Build-a-Cult,’ moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com,” write Wired correspondents Dell Cameron and Yulia Almazova, “and ‘Build-a-Party,’ run by a former White House national security official.”

Read more from Chris Lehmann: https://www.thenation.com/.../peter-thiel-dialog-leak-wired/

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THE SWITCH WAS FLIPPED. AND THEY DIDN'T TELL YOU.

On June 11, 2026 — JP Morgan executed its FIRST live transaction through the XRP Ledger. Connected to Ondo Finance. Connected to Mastercard. Routed through ISO 20022 protocol.

No press conference. No announcement. Buried in a technical filing at 4:47 AM Eastern.

THE OLD BANKING SYSTEM DIED THAT MORNING.

SWIFT processed its last independent transaction on June 10. Since June 11, every single cross-border settlement between the 47 participating institutions has been routed through the new ledger. Not tested. LIVE. Processing $4.2 billion per hour as you read this.

You were told this would never happen. You were told XRP was a scam. You were told the quantum financial system was a fantasy.

IT IS RUNNING RIGHT NOW.

Congress passed the CBDC prohibition clause on June 16. Buried inside a housing bill. No standalone vote. No debate. They banned the government digital dollar PERMANENTLY through 2030 — because the PEOPLE'S system is already operational, and they cannot compete with it.

They didn't ban CBDC because they don't want digital currency. They banned it because THE REPLACEMENT ALREADY EXISTS AND IT'S DECENTRALIZED.

Here is what I was told on June 9 — two days before the JP Morgan switch:

TIER 4B notifications begin between June 22 and June 28. The first wave covers 1.2 million verified accounts. Redemption centers in 14 cities are staffed and operational since June 1. Military personnel are present at each location. NDAs will be required.

The exchange rates you've been told are not public yet. But the structure is locked. Gold-backed. Asset-verified. Quantum-encrypted through Starshield satellite coverage that went FULL GLOBAL on June 9.

This is not coming. THIS IS HERE.

The man who signed Executive Order 14178 on March 2 — banning CBDC development and ordering a "digital asset strategic reserve" — did not do it for Wall Street. He did it for YOU. Every patriot who held. Every person who was called crazy. Every family that believed when the world laughed.

Your patience is about to be rewarded in ways that will change your bloodline FOREVER.

QFS-LIVE-0611

TIER4B-WAVE1-0622

SWIFT-DEAD-CONFIRMED

The old guard is watching their system die in real time. And there is nothing they can do to stop it. Share This 

MrPool_Q

#highlight #love #peace #faith #truth #freedom #naturelovers

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