Is the United States moving into a new political formation that is not fascism in the old sense, but something even colder: a “techno-oligarchy” that seeks to replace human judgment, democratic process, and the rule of law with automated systems of control? I explore this in my latest Substack essay (see link in comments).

We need to zero in on the deep transition now underway: from law, which is slow, interpretive, and mediated by human beings, to code, which executes instantly and admits no appeal. In such a system, institutions like government, journalism, universities, and even basic rights can be dissolved into data flows and private platforms. AI does not simply assist governance. Increasingly, powerful actors imagine AI becoming governance. What used to require deliberation, friction, and accountability gets replaced by machine-speed decision-making, whether in housing, employment, policing, surveillance, or war.

Reviewing Anton Shekhovtsov’s analysis of “techno-oligarchy,” I argue that this order does not mobilize society around a collective destiny. It hollows out the state while preserving coercion. It treats human beings not as citizens but as units of value, risk, and utility. In this framework, those who fall behind can be excluded, locked out, or even erased. After all, human beings are seen as obsolete, slowing down the progress toward a cyborg utopia.

In the U.S., we are living in a failed state where the system pushes growing numbers of Americans toward homelessness, despair and rage. As inequality deepens and democratic channels are blocked, resistance may spread in unpredictable forms. If the ruling class refuses to meet basic human needs, social breakdown, resistance and revolt will become rational alternatives to many. 

 

Addendum: We have been inundated to be canonicals by our government. We have been taught since birth to be motley worms, and clowns in the court of the hell created to sustain our pitiful existence of slavery by those who rule us, and to not only accept it, but defend it. 

 

Okay - I went DEEP on this - and I want everyone to PAY ATTENTION.

There will be a test.

So one network had two huge wins this week and the guy at the center of it isn't getting named in either story.

Have you heard of Leonard Leo? The Federalist Society guy. The one who helped build the current conservative Supreme Court majority and advised Trump on who to put on it, then went off to do bigger stuff.

On April 29 the conservative Supreme Court majority he helped build handed down what voting-rights advocates say is the biggest rollback of the Voting Rights Act in decades.

On May 4 the Department of Education opened a federal civil rights investigation into Smith College for admitting trans women. Totally different fights. Totally different agencies. Totally different legal frameworks. Nobody putting them in the same story.

But the same $1.6 billion dark money network is sitting behind both of them.

I had to dig into this one because honestly when the Smith news dropped I thought it was just another Trump trans panic move. Standard culture war stuff. Then I saw the complaint came from a group called Defending Education, and the name rang a bell from the parental rights school board stuff a couple years ago, and I started pulling on the thread.

Defending Education is run by Nicole Neily. She's a Koch network lifer - Cato, FreedomWorks, Competitive Enterprise Institute, all the usual suspects. The group says it's grassroots moms, which, lol.

According to IRS filings summarized by SourceWatch, the group paid Leonard Leo's PR firm CRC Advisors $1,392,656 between 2021 and 2024 for "strategy" and "public relations." Their legal work runs through Consovoy McCarthy, a firm that has worked extensively on conservative civil rights cases. Neily's other nonprofit, Speech First, got $750,000 from Leo's 85 Fund.

So Leo's nonprofit hub gives money to one Neily group, and a different Neily group pays Leo's for-profit firm. The money goes in a circle. The "grassroots parents" are a pass-through.

So when "a parents group" filed the Smith complaint, that's not a parents group. That's a Leo-network-aligned operation using a friendlier brand name.

OK let me explain how the money actually works because once you see it you can't unsee it.

In 2022 an Illinois businessman named Barre Seid gave $1.6 billion to a Leo entity called Marble Freedom Trust. Largest political donation in American history.

That money flows from Marble through a donor-advised fund at Schwab Charitable, which then grants it to Leo's main funding hubs, the 85 Fund and the Concord Fund.

Those funds then grant it out to all the nonprofits doing the actual fights - judicial groups, parents groups, election groups, "free speech" groups.

Schwab in the middle is the anonymity layer. When the 85 Fund's tax return says "we got our money from Schwab Charitable," nobody can trace it back to Marble, which means nobody can trace it back to Seid. The donors stay anonymous.

A significant amount of Leo-network nonprofit money has flowed back to Leo's own for-profit firm CRC Advisors - over $100 million since 2020, according to Court Accountability's Lisa Graves. He owns three houses now including a $3.3 million Tudor in Maine that he paid cash for in 2021. The network's nonprofit money also flows into his private consulting operation.

That's the machine. Now the wins.

Win one is Callais. The case was about a Louisiana map that restored a second majority-Black district and led to the election of a second Black representative. A group of "non-African American" voters sued to kill the map. Alito wrote the 6-3 opinion holding the map was unconstitutional and substantially narrowed how racial-gerrymandering claims can be brought going forward. Critics say the ruling shifts the fight toward proving intentional racial discrimination, making Section 2 claims much harder to win.

Kagan in the dissent said it makes Section 2 "all but a dead letter."

The conservative majority that wrote that opinion came through the judicial pipeline Leo helped build.

And the response was immediate.

Tennessee pulled off the most aggressive move. The day after Callais, Trump posted that Governor Bill Lee was going to redraw Tennessee's map. Lee called a special session two days later.

The session opened May 5. On May 7 the legislature repealed a 1972 state law that had banned mid-decade redistricting for fifty years, passed an entirely new congressional map that carves Memphis into three pieces, eliminates the state's only majority-Black district, and pushes toward a 9-0 Republican delegation.

Lee signed it all into law. Same day.

The NAACP filed a lawsuit within three hours.

They repealed a fifty-year-old law and passed a brand new map in three days. You don't draw a map like that in a weekend. You don't repeal a fifty-year-old statute in a weekend. Somebody had this ready.

Alabama filed an emergency request the day after Callais to bring back maps a lower court had already thrown out for being racially gerrymandered. Florida started redistricting immediately. Three Republican states moving in the same week, with more lining up behind them.

Win two is Smith.

Smith College is a 155-year-old women's college in western Massachusetts. The kind of place that shows up in old movies as a stand-in for "smart, slightly intimidating young women in cardigans." They've been admitting trans women since 2015, which is to say, for over a decade, on the simple logic that a women's college admits people who identify as women. Nobody outside the school cared. It wasn't a fight.

Then last spring Smith handed an honorary degree to Rachel Levine. You might remember Levine. She's the trans former Assistant Secretary for Health under Biden, the first openly trans federal official ever confirmed by the Senate, and basically Trumpworld's favorite person to put in attack ads. The Trump campaign featured her face in ads going after Kamala in 2024. Right's been obsessed with her for years.

Smith invited her to commencement. Gave her a degree. That was the trigger.

Defending Education - Nicole Neily's group, the one running money in a circle with Leonard Leo - filed a complaint with the Department of Education. On May 4, the Trump administration opened a federal civil rights investigation into Smith for, and I'm quoting here, "admitting biological men and granting them access to women-only spaces, including dormitories, bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic teams."

The "victims" in the complaint are "biological women" who somehow got harmed by Smith admitting trans women. There are no actual women being denied admission. Smith takes any applicant who identifies as a woman, period. There's no named student who came forward saying their rights were violated. No incident. No event. Just a policy that exists, and the possibility that someday, maybe, somebody could feel like their rights got taken away.

That's the move. Sue over something that has not happened to anyone. Get the precedent before the harm exists, so by the time anyone could have actually been harmed, the door is already closed.

We've seen this play before. The clearest example is 303 Creative, the Colorado web designer who sued for the right to refuse to make wedding websites for same-sex couples. She had never been asked to make a wedding website for a same-sex couple. She did not have a wedding website business. The "request" she cited in her court filing turned out to be from a guy who was straight, already married to a woman, and had never contacted her.

The Supreme Court ruled in her favor anyway, 6-3, and carved a First Amendment loophole into public accommodations law over a customer who did not exist.

Now look at what the Trump administration is doing with executive orders. Designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization with no specific act tied to a specific person. Deporting people under the Alien Enemies Act based on tattoos that might indicate gang membership. The whole pre-crime architecture, where you get punished for what the government thinks you might do, not what you did.

The Smith investigation is the same logic applied to civil rights enforcement. Stop waiting for harm. Open the case on the possibility of harm. Let the threat of losing federal funding do the work of forcing the school to change its policy before anyone has actually been hurt by anything.

Listen. I've written about Leo before, mostly the climate cases - his network funds the lawsuits while ProPublica documents him paying for the justices' vacations. The Smith case is the same playbook in a new costume. The lawyers are there. The plaintiffs are pre-built. The PR is pre-positioned. The federal agencies are now staffed by people from the same conservative legal world.

Leo's network isn't waiting for harm. They're manufacturing the precedent in advance. Callais was queued for years. The Smith complaint sat at the DOE for ten months. Tennessee passed a brand new map and repealed a fifty-year-old law in three days. Alabama filed the day after Callais. None of this was improvised. They're firing on all cylinders.

The press will cover Callais as a voting rights story and Smith as a trans story and nobody is going to put them in the same paragraph. But the donor map does. The money runs in a circle and the circle includes both fights.

If you're a Black voter in Louisiana watching your district disappear, and you're a trans student at Smith watching the federal government try to throw you out of your school, you don't have the same enemy on paper. You have the exact same enemy on the bank statements.

And if you're on the left and you've been watching this from the sidelines wondering why we keep losing, the answer is simple.

They've been planning all of this for decades. Now, they show up to every fight with the lawyers, the plaintiffs, the PR, the donors, and the federal agencies already lined up.

Time to stop watching and start taking notes.

#ratcclips

 

HUMANITY JUST FAILED A SPIRITUAL TEST IN FULL PUBLIC VIEW

And predators learned something terrifying about humanity this year.

The most dangerous part of the Epstein scandal is what happened after the shock.

Because a civilization reveals its soul by what it refuses to confront.

“Look over here.”

“Look over there.”

“Quick… the next crisis.”

“The next war.”

“The next outrage.”

“The next distraction.”

When I was young, I became fascinated with magicians.

Doug Henning.

Harry Houdini.

Masters of illusion.

I studied sleight of hand, misdirection, the psychology of perception.

A master magician understands something profound…

Human attention can be hijacked.

Even brilliant minds trained to observe carefully can be emotionally redirected away from what matters most when the nervous system gets flooded with stimulation, fear, novelty, outrage, and overload.

And now the entire world functions like one giant stage act.

Shock.

Fear.

Outrage.

Distraction.

Redirection.

Repeat.

Attention hijacked.

Conscience diluted.

Humanity catches a glimpse of something horrifying…

then instantly gets emotionally herded toward the next firestorm before collective reckoning ever lands.

That is the mechanism.

Keep humanity moving fast enough and people never fully stop to absorb what just happened.

Never fully land.

Never fully confront.

Never fully reckon.

Never fully act.

We are being trained into perpetual motion.

Perpetual reaction.

Perpetual stimulation.

Perpetual emotional exhaustion.

A civilization trapped in constant reaction loses the capacity for deep reckoning.

And deep reckoning is exactly what this moment demands.

Because the Epstein revelations opened a doorway into something darker than politics.

Darker than scandal.

Darker than corruption.

Human trafficking.

The desecration of innocence.

The abuse of children.

Predatory networks operating behind wealth, influence, intimidation, blackmail, and power.

Humanity saw enough to understand the smell of rot.

And now the machine wants everyone emotionally rushed toward the next thing.

“Look at the UFOs.”

“Look at the war.”

“Look at the markets.”

“Look at the next political circus.”

Meanwhile the deepest wound remains open.

And here is the part that should shake every soul awake…

A civilization capable of seeing evil clearly…

feeling the horror of it…

witnessing the desecration of innocence directly in front of their faces…

and then emotionally moving on anyway…

creates permission structures for that evil to deepen, spread, and grow.

Humanity saw it.

Humanity felt it.

Humanity recoiled in horror.

Then humanity kept scrolling.

And what message does that send to the people operating inside those circles?

What conclusion do predators draw when humanity witnesses their actions and then drifts back into comfort, entertainment, distraction, routine, and numbness?

They feel untouchable.

They feel protected.

They feel empowered.

Somewhere behind closed doors, powerful people are laughing, celebrating, toasting to humanity’s short memory.

“Look how quickly they move on.”

“Look how briefly outrage burns.”

“Look how easily attention fractures.”

“Look how quickly comfort reclaims them.”

“Look how fast fear and distraction herd them toward the next thing.”

That realization must feel intoxicating to predatory power.

“We can show them fragments of truth.”

“We can leak pieces of the machinery.”

“We can place horror directly in front of civilization.”

“And still they drift back to sleep.”

That is the real battlefield.

Because once evil realizes humanity lacks the will to sustain pressure, demand justice, insist on exposure, pursue prosecution, dismantle corruption, and protect innocence with ferocity…

evil expands.

Boldly.

Systemically.

Confidently.

Permission structures get written into civilization itself.

And the message becomes:

Humanity tolerates this.

Humanity absorbs this.

Humanity adapts to this.

Humanity keeps scrolling.

That is the spiritual catastrophe.

Because civilizations collapse slowly through normalized distraction.

Outrage without sustained courage changes nothing.

Evil grows wherever attention fractures.

And here is the deepest confrontation of all…

Fully admitting what is happening would require a different kind of humanity to emerge from all of us.

A more courageous humanity.

A more spiritually mature humanity.

A humanity capable of staying present inside unbearable truths instead of emotionally fleeing toward the next manufactured distraction cycle.

Because this entire system profits from fractured attention.

Media.

Politics.

War.

Pharmaceutical empires.

Fear economies.

Power structures feeding on perpetual emotional activation.

Your nervous system is being fought over.

Your attention is being fought over every hour of every day.

This is spiritual warfare over human attention.

And most people feel it.

Deep in their nervous system.

Deep in their bones.

Deep in the soul.

I know this confrontation personally.

I know the weight of looking directly into darkness without turning away.

I know the psychic impact of realizing how deep corruption and predation can actually go.

And honestly…

I cannot imagine what this confrontation feels like for many women…

for deeply sensitive people…

for gentle-hearted human beings whose nervous systems were never forged through life-and-death forms of Warriorship.

Your tenderness matters deeply.

And humanity also needs fierce protectors.

Grounded protectors.

Spiritually awake protectors.

WarriorSages who refuse hypnosis by chaos.

Warriorhood begins the moment truth matters more than comfort.

Humanity requires fewer spectators and more guardians.

Guardians capable of holding the whole picture without collapsing into apathy, overwhelm, cognitive dissonance, helplessness, sedation, or passive spectatorship.

Because yes…many issues matter.

Wars matter.

Economics matter.

Global instability matters.

A mature civilization holds complexity without abandoning the deepest wound underneath it all.

And the deepest wound right now is the violation of innocence combined with humanity’s growing tolerance for looking away.

That tolerance becomes the breeding ground for darkness.

If humanity keeps emotionally moving on every time truth surfaces…

then predators receive civilization-wide permission to continue.

That is the part people refuse to fully grasp.

Silence protects predators.

Distraction protects predators.

Fragmented attention protects predators.

Emotional exhaustion protects predators.

And every cycle of collective forgetting emboldens them further.

So stay awake.

Stay present.

Stay coherent.

Stay fiercely clear.

Anchor into God.

Anchor into truth.

Anchor into courage.

Anchor into disciplined attention.

Because civilization shifts the moment enough human beings refuse psychological capture.

The Soul of our civilization depends on what we refuse to normalize.

Predators thrive whenever good people drift back to sleep.

The future belongs to those who remain awake.

Eyes Open.

Heart Clear

Spine Strong.

We Arise Together in this Great Remembering

Satyen Raja+ai

 

Blackrock. Vanguard, you know, State Street, Fidelity, Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan, DuPont, Aster, Windsor, Gates, Soros, Schwab, Kissinger, Brzezinski, Cheney, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Crown Corporation, City of London, Vatican City, Washington DC, the unholy trinity of sovereign states, the World Economic Forum, Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, Club of Rome, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of International Settlements, IMF, World Bank, Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Bayer, Monsanto, Nestle, PepsiCo, Cargill, Unilever, Blackstone, Halliburton, Bechtel, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, DARPA, Mitra, In-Q-Tel, NSA, CIA, FBI, Mossad, MI6, NATO, NASA, WHO, Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, TikTok, Hollywood, Disney, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, BBC, Reuters, Associated Press, Skull & Bones, Freemasons, Jesuits, Opus Dei, The Knights of Malta, MKUltra, Paperclip, Mard Gladio, Mockingbird, Stargate, Phoenix, Artichoke, 9-11, COVID-19, Epstein, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Gaza...

They are not conspiracy, they are coordinated continuity, a syndicate of institutions, and ideologies that have shaped every breath of your life without your knowing.

They manufacture war, then sell both sides the bullets, they design the sickness, then sell you the cure, they poison the food, the air, the soil, then build hospitals and charge you for healing, they inject you with patents, then claim ownership of your DNA.

They flood your children's minds with chemicals, cartoons, and code. They teach obedience as virtue and debt as freedom, and still we call it life.

The consent, how we let it in...

This system exists because we built it.

Because we fed it, because we inherited it and didn't question it.

We paid taxes into wars we didn't understand.

We sent our children to be programmed by standardized lies.

We took the jabs because we were told it was noble.

We let the skies be sprayed while we filmed sunsets for likes.

We clocked in and sold our time for pieces of paper, backed by nothing but belief.

We put our elders in nursing homes, our infants in daycares, our food in packages, our land in deeds, our truth in silence.

We didn't sell our souls, we rented them.

Hourly.

 

 

Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur has made one of the most explosive statements of his public career — claiming that Robert Maxwell, the British media magnate and father of Ghislaine Maxwell who ded under controversial circumstances in 1991, stole American nuclear secrets and transferred them to Israel without the United States government making any serious attempt to arrst or prosecute him for it.

The claim connects directly to declassified intelligence reporting and investigative journalism that has circulated for decades — including work by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh and others who documented Maxwell's alleged relationship with Israeli intelligence and his reported role in the PROMIS software scandal that involved stolen American intelligence technology being transferred to multiple foreign governments including Israel during the 1980s.

Uygur's framing goes beyond the historical claim into a present tense political argument — asking publicly how long America has been in a state of foreign policy capture that allows intelligence theft of this magnitude to go unprosecuted while simultaneously funding and defending the same government that allegedly received those stolen secrets.

The question lands in a specific 2026 context where the State Department confirmed America went to war at Israel's request, Tucker Carlson said Trump told him yeah I know when warned Netanyahu wanted to destroy him and 98% of Congress accepts AIPAC funding — making Uygur's occupied framing the most direct articulation yet of what others are describing in more diplomatic language.

We are living in an occupied nation, but the occupying force didn't arrive in tanks or uniform. They arrived in server racks and boardrooms, selling our enslavement back to us under the guise of convenience and national security. The creeping surveillance state isn't being forced upon a resistant public; it is being welcomed with open arms by a populace asleep at the wheel.

Palantir is the Lockheed Martin of the domestic data war, acting as the defense contractor for an invisible battlefield, but their depravity extends far beyond American borders. They don't merely sit on the sidelines building the overarching dragnet that seamlessly ingests the Ring camera footage oblivious citizens hand over to local police. They are active participants in global slaughter. This is the very same company supplying the algorithmic targeting systems and AI intelligence used by the Israeli military to facilitate the genocide in Palestine. They test and refine their digital kill chains on the bodies of innocents abroad, only to package those exact same mass-surveillance weapons and turn them inward against the American public. And to feed this beast domestically, Palantir relies on far more than voluntary home surveillance. They aggregate billions of data points involuntarily harvested from your daily life—sucking up automated license plate reader data, scraped social media, purchased cell phone location pings, and even medical records—creating an inescapable digital panopticon you never consented to.

This infrastructure wasn't built by well-meaning public servants, but rather by the darkest elements of the global elite. According to leaked audio, Jeffrey Epstein explicitly advised former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to "look at" Palantir back in 2013 to monitor citizens. Furthermore, Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel shows up extensively in the infamous Epstein files, with Wired reporting his name appearing over two thousand times in the disgraced financier's records.

These are the individuals constructing the systems designed to monitor your every move, and their reach is now absolute. As we have documented extensively at The Free Thought Project, whistleblowers are screaming from the rooftops that Palantir has effectively taken over the US government data infrastructure from the inside out.

The most terrifying aspect of this takeover is how the two-party paradigm is utilized to manufacture consent for our own subjugation. The political Left, who now decries Palantir for its contracts with ICE, suddenly cheered for the surveillance apparatus when it served their biomedical agenda during the COVID-19 panic. Palantir built the Tiberius software platform for the Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC, serving as the backbone for vaccine tracking and distribution while harvesting immense amounts of demographic and health data. They learned to love the surveillance state the moment it enforced their mandates.

Now that the political pendulum has swung, the "small government" Right is enthusiastically applauding the exact same corporate behemoth. Palantir recently secured massive contracts to build AI-driven platforms like ImmigrationOS, pulling data from IRS records, license plate readers, and private-sector sources to track and monitor populations for mass deportations. The conservatives who correctly recognized the danger of biomedical surveillance are completely silent when a defense contractor builds a domestic tracking database, simply because it targets a group they currently despise. The state grows larger, and partisans on both sides applaud their own chains.

And if you think it's only going to be used on illegal immigrants, think again. This algorithmic dragnet is now being weaponized against your financial life. The Small Business Administration is working with Palantir to ostensibly root out fraud, establishing a dangerous precedent for the algorithmic oversight of Main Street commerce. This financial stranglehold extends to the IRS, which is utilizing Palantir's data-mining contracts to scour unstructured data, including bank transactions, asset moves, and even social media. The state is compensating for its lack of human auditors with a ruthless AI dragnet designed to target citizens automatically.

The traditional banking sector is rushing to deploy the very same pre-crime technology. The financial technology giant FIS is now deploying agentic AI in partnership with Anthropic to autonomously police bank transactions for alleged financial crimes in real-time. This entirely bypasses the need for human due process, allowing algorithms to freeze your life on a whim.

This nightmare extends directly into the cryptocurrency space, effectively birthing the Central Bank Digital Currency we have spent years warning you about. Centralized stablecoins like Tether have become a de facto arm of law enforcement, adding thousands of addresses to their USDT blacklist and freezing hundreds of millions of dollars without a single trial. Take note of the exponential rate at which these technocrats are stealing people's money.