The Ongoing 'Civil War' for the USA

[Peter Lemkin]

Unless you: love to hate, love lawlessness, lean toward Fascism, don't care about the Environmental Emergency, think and hope some kinda 'armageddon' is coming and desirable, and like Trumpf like less-well to uneducated people running 'things' - whether you are a US Citizen or not, join the RESISTANCE! Like it or not (me not), how goes the USA has a HUGE effect on the rest of the World!

[Peter Lemkin]

Why We Must Have a Detailed Report On Trump Transgressions of the Law and Constitution!

[Peter Lemkin]

The Special Council, Jack Smith's, Report on the January 6 attempt at a Coup in the USA. Vol. I

https://substack.com/redirect/9d185337-e...Dw-cnecF1E

[Peter Lemkin]

Antifa as Apple Pie
The Neo-Nazi Hunter Next Door
Kris Goldsmith has seen too many veterans get tricked into equating patriotism with right-wing lunacy. He’s got a plan to turn ex-service members into neo-Nazi hunters

February 2, 2023 Rolling Stone

Kristofer Goldsmith Courtesy of Kristofer Goldsmith
Iraq War veteran Kris Goldsmith believes “patriot” and “anti-fascist” should be synonymous — and he’s turning that belief into action with the new Task Force Butler. The nonprofit’s tagline gets right to the point: “We are American veterans who hunt neo-Nazis.” 
Goldsmith has seen first hand how fascist and militia groups subvert the trappings of patriotism to ensare veterans in right-wing extremism, and he stood up Task Force Butler as a competing force for good. The group draws its name and inspiration from a larger-than-life Marine, Maj. Gen Smedley Butler, who foiled an attempted fascist coup against the New Deal government of FDR in the 1930s. 
Task Force Butler is the culmination, for Goldsmith, of a tumultuous life-path. Entering the Army as a teenager, he’d quickly risen to the rank of sergeant. But the horrors of the Iraq War left him with crippling, undiagnosed PTSD. A suicide attempt on the eve of being re-deployed in 2007 got Goldsmith booted from the service with a less-than-honorable discharge. 


Stripped of his rank, community, and G.I. Bill benefits, Goldsmith entered a dark spiral, which included sinking down rabbit holes of online extremism. With his one remaining lifeline — healthcare through the V.A. — Goldsmith clawed his way back to the surface. He became a veterans advocate, earned a degree from Columbia, and (four appeals later) finally got an upgrade to an honorable discharge. Along the way, helped secure congressional reforms in 2017 that enable thousands of other vets get medical help and challenge their own “bad paper.” 
During the Trump years, Goldsmith worked as chief investigator for Vietnam Veterans of America where he exposed a sophisticated Russian op that targeted U.S. veterans on Facebook to sow racial and political division. For Goldsmith, that open-source intelligence expertise soon gave him a leg up in exposing domestic threats, including fascist groups targeting American youth like Patriot Front.


In the aftermath of the insurrection of Jan. 6, Goldsmith saw a need give patriotic veterans a positive mission — uncovering extremists and insurrectionists in our midst. Task Force Butler’s work centers on exposing the inner workings and public wrongdoing of neo-fascist groups through deep-dive intelligence reports that can give prosecutors the evidence they need go after the hatemongers in court.  


The work takes a toll. Goldsmith has been sued, and doxxed by white supremacists. On the day of his interview with Rolling Stone, he called to move our phone call up by several hours. “I have to fly to Asheville to deal with a little Nazi problem,” Goldsmith told me. A local fascist, having identified the home where Goldsmith grew up, has been dropping hate packages on his mother’s porch, including “gift bag” containing a printout of Mein Kampf. 
Goldsmith insists he’s undeterred. “I can either sit back and know that these extremists are radicalizing other Americans — exchanging information on how to build a bomb, how to build a small unit and fight as a militia,” he says. “Or I can do something about it. And I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do anything about it.”
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity:
For a country that won a World War against the Nazis, modern-day America has some very strange hangups about “anti-fascism” — as though being antifa were a bad thing. You don’t shy away from those labels. Tell me why.
We are named after Maj. Gen Smedley Butler, who foiled a fascist plot. There was a coup being planned within the United States — [The Business Plot] — that sought to use Butler as their “Secretary General,” to make the president a figurehead, and establish the fascist United States of America. So the O.G. anti-fascist is a grizzled old Marine who who served in the 19-aughts and ‘10s ‘20s.

My grandparent’s generation served in World War II. They were all anti-fascists. My grandmother’s brother, who died in France, he was an anti-fascist. And really, what the current “antifa panic” boils down to is a right-wing ecosystem that is trying to perpetuate fascism, and racism, and xenophobia and anti-semitism — who have an incentive to see these problems brew in the United States. 
And you see veterans as a bulwark against that ecosystem?
As veterans we have sworn an oath to our Constitution — and actually understand it; not like the Oath Keepers, right? We’re the real keepers of that oath. At Task Force Butler, we have figured out a way to continue our service to our nation, in a way that is, for the most part, safe. Most of my guys are anonymous. I’m the only face of it, basically. So not everybody’s getting Nazis visiting their mom’s houses. 
You’re quoting the same oath to defend against “all enemies foreign and domestic” that Stewart Rhodes, many other right-wing militias invoke all the time. Are you hesitant at all about using that rhetoric for this project?
No. We’re being very deliberate about it. We’re attempting to reclaim patriotism. Because the word “patriot” and the idea of patriotism has been so corrupted by these insurrectionists — these people who would literally kill their fellow Americans to install a fascist dictator. There’s a hell of a lot of vets out there who are not going to turn away from the American flag because of what these unlawful militias are out there doing. Instead, we’re gonna rally around those same symbols. The other guys wrap themselves in an American flag? They’re cheapening it. I’m not gonna let them steal that from me. We’re gonna take it back.

Tell me about the setup of Task Force Butler.
We’re slow growing. It’s only two dozen volunteers. It’s demanding job; it can be a stressful job: staring at the worst-of-the-worst on the Internet all day. But the veterans who have come to us gain a lot of satisfaction out of the mission. We share a bond — to counter fascism, which we all believe is the single greatest threat to Americans’ freedom, and lives, now in 2023.
How did this work get its start for you?
A buddy of mine I served with called me up out of the blue. He’s a fucking maniac. There’s no other way to explain it. He says: “Hey, I joined this neo Nazi organization, I want you to help me take ‘em down.” When that phone call happened, I was still at Vietnam Veterans of America. And I was about to publish my massive The Troll Report. But I was laid off during COVID in May of the following year. Once I was let go, I decided I’m not really concerned with what the Russians are doing on Facebook. If we’re still talking about Facebook and Twitter, we’re a few years behind the curve. I want to know what the actual white supremacists are doing. The ones who are training to radicalize their fellow Americans and inspire violence through stochastic rhetoric.
So I call my friend back up. And I said, “Tell me about your Nazis.” And we joined Patriot Front. 
Patriot Front, for our readers who may not be acquainted, is a group founded in the aftermath of the Charlottesville white nationalist rally. It recruits young men using fascist symbols and anti-semitic U.S. history. But the fascism is cloaked in a veneer of patriotism. They operate in “flash mob” marches, and they often deface public monuments and murals celebrating Black Americans.
The founder, Thomas Rousseau, this kid, 24 years old, has very deliberately wrapped his organization in the aesthetics of red, white and blue — calling themselves Patriot Front. They want to convince Americans that that they represent the quote “real America.”
How did you and your buddy infiltrate?
He does like all of the in-person shit — he was in it from August until November of 2020. And I’m basically serving as remote intelligence gathering. They use Rocket Chat — basically an open source version of Slack. They modified it to make everything posted in their channels disappear after six hours. I’d log in every four hours to take screenshots of all of the evidence that I could — so I could start to predict their behavior, or understand how they could potentially be prosecuted for defacing an MLK mural or something like that.
What else did you suss out?
It seemed, from my guy and I being in there, that they wanted to do something the night of the 2020 election. We had a general understanding. They are super fucking secretive. They don’t let the members know what they’re doing until they find themselves in some strange city with their leader Rousseau saying, “We’re going to do X, Y, and Z this weekend.” He gets his foot soldiers to a city. That’s all they know. They do the thing, and then they get out of town. 

So I started talking to a reporter — I’ve got this story for you. I’ll give you guys the exclusive. But the deal is, is you just you’ve got to publish before election day. BuzzFeed publishes story. When the piece first came out, Patriot Front members were all celebrating [on Rocket Chat]. “Oh, this is the best press we’ve ever gotten.” I started taking screenshots of that and posting it immediately to Twitter — making fun of them. Showing that it was an infiltrator. They they knocked me out of the server. 
Do you feel like that spooked them? They weren’t a key group in election unrest.
I can’t prove a negative. But I can say that they didn’t pop their heads back up as an organization between the election and the insurrection. They were off the field.
Was this your official line of work at the time?
I was doing it as a hobby. I was working as an intelligence analyst for a private company. But I’m also infiltrating groups like the Three Percenters and recording them talking about “storming” the Georgia State Capitol. And I’m giving all these recordings to the FBI. 
When did you take this on full time?
After January 6, I quit [the private firm]. So that way I work out in the open. I’m not doing any sort of secret-squirrel shit. I end up working for nonprofits that put me on TV. And every time I go on TV, I have a ton of vets reaching out to me basically saying, like, ‘Hey, Put me in coach,” like, “I want to go after the bad guys, too.”
For the first year, I tell people like, “No, I’m not going to tell you how to join a neo-Nazi groups, take them down from the inside. Like that is objectively fucking crazy.” But a nonprofit that that I was working for did like the idea of motivating volunteers to get involved in research. We started a pilot program that was Task Force Butler for a few months, before they decided they didn’t actually want to do anything with it. 
But I decided it was needed. My motivating factor is I want to make a difference. I want to stop the bad guys. Our volunteers are veterans, they really give a shit. And we felt like we could make this a nonprofit that actually pays us to get the work done. We haven’t figured out that last part yet. [Laughs]
So, busting Nazis — no so lucrative?
We’re very much in an existential moment. We need to find a couple of big-fish donors who want to see a bunch of vets going out and collecting digital Nazi scalps. 
You’re speaking figuratively. What does that mean exactly?
Dragging Nazis into court. Our objective is to take these people off field, using the legal system. Civil, criminal, it doesn’t matter to us.
Was Task Force Butler involved in the Unicorn Riot leak of Patriot Front data?
No. But completely coincidentally, that was the date of our first in-person mission as a pilot program. We were on the ground watching Patriot Front in D.C. so that we could intercept their vehicle exchange point and gather intelligence on them in person. When we found out that Unicorn Riot was was dropping this massive data breach, we were very excited. And we’ve we’ve spent the last year going through that half-terabyte of data. We used it to write our Project Blacklisted report — which we created as an instruction manual for prosecutors and civil litigators to take down Patriot Front, rip it out at the roots. Because ultimately, they have been doing violence in the streets — as we saw in Boston and Philadelphia. 

We are not going to allow this fascist organization to drop into a city, pop out of their UHaul trucks, terrorize a vulnerable population, and then think that they can get away with it. We will do everything that we can to identify every single member, whether that means looking at colors of boot laces, the velcro patches on their uniforms, their med kits that they’ve got on their belts. We’re looking to comb through the details and make sure that we hold each and every one of them responsible. 
Cops are not doing the legwork to put together a 239-page intelligence report, I imagine
Law enforcement has put up their hands and said, ‘Oh, they wear masks, this is too hard.’ Well, we’re going to show them. We’re going to do all the work for you. And we’re going to give it to the public, give it to the press, give it to academics. And we are going to prove that this is enough evidence to charge them. All they have to do is just bring it before a judge.
Were you at all involved at all in the Coeur d’Alene arrests of Patriot Front members this past summer? 
No that was that was a another beautiful surprise for us. We we got a bunch of new names not that we didn’t previously have on our list. 
There are lots of white supremacy groups out there. Why has Patriot Front loomed large in your work?
I have come to understand them as a unique threat against the people of the United States. While they’re a small group — they may have 200, 220 members at any given time — the thing that makes them so dangerous is the cult like atmosphere. In order to be a part, it requires you to give up everything else in your life to be a neo-Nazi. It requires that you are constantly active — taking pictures of your activity, basically giving evidence of your criminal behavior over to Thomas Rousseau to prove that you are a valuable member. 
They are finding people who are so willing to be dedicated to the cause of anti-semitism, racism, that even if a person only joins for a few months, they are so much further indoctrinated. They are then able to take those skills and start their own little neo-Nazi clique, locally. And that’s that’s what we’ve seen in the rise of NSC-131 — a New England-based group that now has upwards of 100 members; they’ve only existed for maybe two years. 
They’re an offshoot?
It was started by Chris Hood; the founder is a former member of Patriot Front. They’ve taken the tactics, techniques that Patriot Front use for spreading propaganda, for publicity stunts, for small unit cohesion and he’s started a whole new group.
We’re just beginning a research project on NSC-131. We’re going to use Project Blacklisted as our outline for how we’ll do that report. NSC-131 very helpfully put out the list of actions that they claim credit for — which includes things like vandalism and property destruction. That’s very helpful. We’re going to cross-reference those claims of responsibility for criminal behavior, with the evidence. And hopefully establish, if not criminal liability, find victims who are done harm, who may be able to file a civil suit.

I saw on the Task Force Butler site an NBC clip of you talking about taking drone footage of a neo-Nazi meeting in Texas. Is that a third group?
That was the Aryan Freedom Network. AFN. They’re the ones who just doxxed me and my family last week. Yeah, they’re pretty mad about the drone, they ended up filing suit. I did that on a Saturday in late October. By Monday, they were filing suit at their local courthouse. 
In that interview, you said weren’t in the business of doxxing anyone. Help me understand the difference between doxxing and the kind of work you in your intelligence reports.
I don’t give out the private information about anyone. With Project Blacklisted — our lengthy report on how to take down on Patriot Front, we we didn’t include phone numbers or addresses. And we also didn’t distribute it widely to the public. We gave it to law enforcement, researchers and journalists. We get accused of doxxing all the time. But what we do is collect evidence of criminal behavior and put it into a report. And we submit it to the relevant authorities.That is pretty fucking far away from doxxing.
So this is this goes to strategy. The idea behind the research that Task Force Butler does is to demonstrate patterns and techniques and culpability, that can be used by prosecutors, or perhaps form the basis of a civil suit. And that’s how these people get best taken off the playing field from your perspective?
Also when we do something like infiltrate one of their Telegram chats or their organization, that imposes a cost as well. That makes it so that they are suspicious of one another. They think that there’s a plant inside — or a fed. Since we used the drone over the AFN, we’ve got the AFN’s lawyer in Texas talking about how he’s going to build a Gatling gun to take out drones out of the sky, because now he’s thinks Antifa has got like an Air Force or something. So eroding the sense of invulnerability that allows them to hurt people, that’s not just done through the courts, that’s also done psychological.
Your quip about the Antifa Air Force resonates with my own reporting — about how many extremists are also sunk in a morass of conspiracy theories, more generally. You have talked about falling into some of that yourself during your darker days.
With disinformation comes extremist narratives, conspiracy theories, anti-semitism, racism, etc. These things are all intimately connected. What made me so so vulnerable to conspiracy theories, and the anger and hate is that I got kicked out of the Army. After coming home with PTSD and attempting suicide, the Army interpreted that as misconduct. It made me not just unemployable, but I couldn’t even collect unemployment. So at that point in my life, I went from having the identity of Sergeant Goldsmith, being well respected and well liked. I really didn’t like the Army that much, but had, on paper, great career. And it all went crashing down all at once. With that economic anxiety, undiagnosed PTSD, social anxieties about would I ever have self respect again? 

I had the VA to help me put my life back together. It took years. It took healthcare. It took an opportunity to get an education that made me learn how to think critically. And that skill — that critical thinking is the biggest asset that someone can have to make them resistant to conspiracy theories, and other things that bring you down that rabbit hole of hate. 
Thinking about Jan. 6: Stewart Rhodes attended Yale Law School. If I were fresh out of the Army, feeling vulnerable as fuck, feeling like my country betrayed me by sending me to a bullshit war that no American really cared about, I could look at a guy like Stewart Rhodes and be like, this guy went to one of the best law schools on the fucking planet. When he tells me what the Constitution means or sells me on this misinterpretation of the Second Amendment, why shouldn’t I believe him? So really, it was healthcare and an education that that got me out of it.
Given the efforts to dox you and now harass your extended family, obviously this line of work is exposing you to more trauma. Is that just something that you’re willing to accept?
My wife is a Jewish journalist who works in New York Times. And a lot of our friends are also journalists. When the MAGAbomber from Florida was mailing pipe bombs to CNN, it’s my friends who are getting pipe bombs in the mail. The way I look at it I have two choices: I can either wait until a mail bomb kills her or one of her friends. Or I can fight back first.

Related Content in Rollingstone:
[/url] Judge Bars Stewart Rhodes From D.C. Following Seditionist's Capitol Visit

Trump Pardons Seditionist Proud Boys Leader Among 1,500 Jan. 6 Defendants

The Oath Keepers Are Back — and Targeting America’s Youth

[url=https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-january-6-pardon-seditionists-oath-keepers-proud-boys-1235219409/]Does Trump Jan. 6 Pardon Plan Include the Seditionists?

[Peter Lemkin]

Task Force Butler [above article] is named after Gen. Smedley Butler - little known anti-fascist USA patriot.

I'm posting this from Wikipedia (which I rarely use and can not be trusted on things like JFK assassination and other deep political false-flag operations), which is correct on his life here. See the 'BUSINESS PLOT' in bold BELOW.  It is not the best version of the Businessman's Plot to take over the USA, as Wikipedia is monitored to keep such Truth to a minimum, but it is the only version I can find in electronic form. The best version is told in Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States! What Trump's backers are trying to do now has been tried before - and stopped - once led by Smedley Butler....... Coup d'etats in the USA are not new. The Civil War was another time. I believe Trump/MAGA/Musk et al. is only the latest attempt at a Coup d'etat led by the rich. Trump's real intentions go beyond what he told [BAD ENOUGH] his sick, racist, homophobic, misogynist, hateful, Christian Nationalist followers.....

Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940) was a United States Marine Corps officer and writer. During his 34-year military career, he fought in the Philippine–American War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Mexican Revolution, World War I, and the Banana Wars. At the time of his death, Butler was the most decorated Marine in U.S. military history. By the end of his career, Butler had received sixteen medals, including five for heroism; he is the only Marine to be awarded the Marine Corps Brevet Medal as well as two Medals of Honor, all for separate actions.
In 1933, Butler became involved in a controversy known as the Business Plot, when he told a United States congressional committee that a group of wealthy American industrialists were planning a coup d'état to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Butler also claimed that the plotters of the alleged coup intended on using Butler, at the head of a group of veterans, to place the federal government under arrest. The individuals alleged to be involved in the coup all denied the existence of such a plot and the media ridiculed Butler's allegations, but a final report following an investigation by a special House of Representatives committee confirmed at least some of his testimony.
After retiring from the Marine Corps, Butler became an outspoken critic of American foreign policy and military interventions, which he saw being driven primarily by U.S. business interests. In 1935, Butler wrote the book War Is a Racket, where he argued that imperialist motivations had been the cause behind several American interventions, many of which he personally participated in. Butler also became a advocate for populist politics, speaking at meetings organized by veterans, pacifists, and church groups until his death in 1940.
Early life
Smedley Darlington Butler was born July 30, 1881, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, the eldest of three sons. His parents, Thomas and Maud (née Darlington) Butler,[1] were descended from local Quaker families. Both of his parents were of entirely English ancestry, and their families had been in North America since the 17th century.[2]
His father was a lawyer, a judge, and later served in the House of Representatives for 31 years, serving as chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee during the Harding and Coolidge administrations. Smedley's Marine Corps career successes occurred while his father held that politically influential Congressional seat, controlling the Marine Corps manpower and budget.[3] His maternal grandfather was Smedley Darlington, a Republican congressman from 1887 to 1891.[4] His paternal grandfather was Samuel Butler, who served in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and served as Pennsylvania State Treasurer from 1880 to 1882. Butler's childhood home is a registered landmark.
Butler attended the West Chester Friends Graded High School, followed by The Haverford School, a (then) Quaker-affiliated secondary school, popular with sons of upper-class Philadelphia families.[5] He became captain of the school baseball team and quarterback of its football team.[1] Against the wishes of his father, he left school 38 days before his seventeenth birthday to enlist in the Marine Corps during the Spanish–American War. Haverford awarded him his high school diploma, nevertheless, on June 6, 1898, before the end of his final year. His transcript stated that he completed the scientific course "with Credit".[1]
Military career
Spanish–American War
In the Spanish war fervor of 1898, Butler lied about his age to receive a direct commission as a Marine second lieutenant.[1] He trained at Marine Barracks, Washington, D.C. In July 1898, he went to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, arriving shortly after its invasion and capture.[6] His company soon returned to the U.S., and after a short break, he was assigned to the armored cruiser USS New York for four months.[7] He came home to be mustered out of service in February 1899,[7] but on April 8, 1899, he accepted a commission as a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps.[7]
Philippine–American War

Smedley Butler, c. 1898
The Marine Corps sent him to Manila, Philippines.[8] On garrison duty with little to do, Butler turned to alcohol to relieve the boredom. He once became drunk and was temporarily relieved of command after an unspecified incident in his room.[9]
In October 1899, he saw his first combat action when he led 300 Marines to take the town of Noveleta from Filipino troops of the new Philippine republic. In the initial moments of the assault, his first sergeant was wounded. Butler briefly panicked, but he quickly regained his composure and led his Marines in pursuit of the fleeing enemy.[9] By noon, the Marines had dispersed the native defenders and taken the town. One Marine had been killed, 10 were wounded, and another 50 had been incapacitated by the humid tropical heat.[10]
After the excitement of this combat, garrison duty again became routine. He met Littleton Waller, a fellow Marine with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship. When Waller received command of a company in Guam, he was allowed to select five officers to take with him. Butler was amongst his choices. Before they had departed, their orders were changed, and they were sent to China aboard the USS Solace to help put down the Boxer Rebellion.[10]
Boxer Rebellion


He was eligible for the Marine Corps Brevet Medal when it was created in 1921, and was one of only 20 Marines to receive it.[12] His citation reads:

The Secretary of the Navy takes pleasure in transmitting to First Lieutenant Smedley Darlington Butler, United States Marine Corps, the Brevet Medal which is awarded in accordance with Marine Corps Order No. 26 (1921), for distinguished conduct and public service in the presence of the enemy while serving with the Second Battalion of Marines, near Tientsin, China, on 13 July 1900. On 28 March 1901, First Lieutenant Butler is appointed Captain by brevet, to take rank from 13 July 1900.[13]

Banana Wars
Butler participated in a series of occupations, "police actions", and interventions by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean, later called the Banana Wars due to their goal of protecting American commercial interests in the region, particularly those of the United Fruit Company. This company had significant financial stakes in the production of bananas, tobacco, sugar cane, and other products throughout the Caribbean, Central America, and the northern portions of South America. The U.S. was also trying to advance its own political interests by maintaining its influence in the region and especially its control of the Panama Canal. These interventions started with the Spanish–American War in 1898 and ended with the withdrawal of troops from Haiti and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy in 1934.[14] After his retirement, Butler became an outspoken critic of the United States' business interests in the Caribbean, criticizing the ways in which American businesses and Wall Street bankers imposed their agenda on U.S. foreign policy.[15]
Honduras
In 1903, Butler was stationed in Puerto Rico on Culebra Island. Hearing rumors of a Honduran revolt, the United States government ordered his unit and a supporting naval detachment to sail to Honduras, 1,500 miles (2,414 km) to the west, to defend the U.S. Consulate there. Using a converted banana boat renamed the Panther, Butler and several hundred Marines landed at the port town of Puerto Cortés. In a letter home, he describes the action: they were "prepared to land and shoot everybody and everything that was breaking the peace",[16] but instead found a quiet town. The Marines re-boarded the Panther and continued up the coastline, looking for rebels at several towns, but found none.
When they arrived at Trujillo, however, they heard gunfire and came upon a battle in progress that had been ongoing for 55 hours between rebels called Bonillista and Honduran government soldiers at a local fort. At the sight of the Marines, the fighting ceased, and Butler led a detachment of Marines to the American consulate, where he found the consul, wrapped in an American flag, hiding among the floor beams. As soon as the Marines left the area with the shaken consul, the battle resumed, and the Bonillistas soon controlled the government.[16] During this expedition, Butler earned the first of his nicknames: "Old Gimlet Eye". It was attributed to his feverish, bloodshot eyes (he was suffering from some unnamed tropical fever at the time) that enhanced his penetrating and bellicose stare.[17]
Marriage and business
After the Honduran campaign, Butler returned to Philadelphia. He married Ethel Conway Peters of Philadelphia, a daughter of civil engineer and railroad executive Richard Peters, on June 30, 1905.[18] His best man at the wedding was his former commanding officer in China, Lieutenant Colonel Littleton Waller.[19] The couple eventually had three children, a daughter, Ethel Peters Butler, and two sons, Smedley Darlington Jr. and Thomas Richard.[20]
Butler was next assigned to garrison duty in the Philippines, where he once launched a resupply mission across the stormy waters of Subic Bay after his isolated outpost ran out of rations. In 1908, he was diagnosed as having a nervous breakdown and received nine months sick leave, which he spent at home. He successfully managed a coal mine in West Virginia, but returned to active duty in the Marine Corps at the first opportunity.[21]
Central America
From 1909 to 1912, Butler served in Nicaragua, enforcing U.S. policy. With a 104-degree fever, he led his battalion to the relief of the rebel-besieged city of Granada. In December 1909, he commanded the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment on the Isthmus of Panama. On August 11, 1912, he was temporarily detached to command an expeditionary battalion he led in the Battle of Masaya on September 19, 1912, and the bombardment, assault, and capture of Coyotepe Hill, Nicaragua, in October 1912. He remained in Nicaragua until November 1912, when he rejoined the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines at Camp Elliott, Panama.[4] In private Butler was highly critical of the operation, writing to his parents:

What makes me mad is that the whole revolution is inspired and financed by Americans who have wild cat investments down here and want to make them good by putting in a Government which will declare a monopoly in their favor . . . The whole business is rotten to the core.[22]

Veracruz and first Medal of Honor

Marine Officers at Veracruz. Front row, left to right: Wendell C. Neville; John A. Lejeune; Littleton W.T. Waller, Commanding; Smedley Butler
Butler and his family were living in Panama in January 1914, when he was ordered to report as the Marine officer of a battleship squadron massing off the coast of Mexico, near Veracruz, to monitor a revolutionary movement. He did not like leaving his family and the home they had established in Panama, so he intended to request orders home as soon as he determined he was not needed.[23]
On March 1, 1914, Butler and Navy Lieutenant Frank J. Fletcher (not to be confused with his uncle, Rear Admiral Frank F. Fletcher) "went ashore at Veracruz, where they met the American superintendent of the Inter-Oceanic Railway and surreptitiously rode in his private car [a railway car] up the line 75 miles to Jalapa and back".[24] A purpose of the trip was to allow Butler and Fletcher to discuss the details of a future expedition into Mexico. Fletcher's plan required Butler to make his way into the country and develop a more-detailed invasion plan while inside its borders. It was a spy mission, and Butler was enthusiastic to get started. When Fletcher explained the plan to the commanders in Washington, DC, they agreed to it. Butler was given the go-ahead.[25] A few days later, he set out by train on his spy mission to Mexico City, with a stopover at Puebla. He made his way to the U.S. Consulate in Mexico City, posing as a railroad official named "Mr. Johnson".

• March 5. As I was reading last night, waiting for dinner to be served, a visitant, rather than a visitor, appeared in my drawing-room incognito – a simple "Mr. Johnson," eager, intrepid, dynamic, efficient, unshaven! * * *[26]
  

He and the chief railroad inspector scoured the city, saying that they were searching for a lost railroad employee; there was no lost employee, and in fact, the employee who they said was lost never existed. The ruse gave Butler access to various areas of the city. In the process of the so-called search, they located weapons in use by the Mexican army and determined the size of units and states of readiness. They updated maps and verified the railroad lines for use in an impending U.S. invasion.[27] On March 7, 1914, he returned to Veracruz with the information he had gathered and presented it to his commanders. The invasion plan was eventually scrapped, when authorities loyal to Mexican General Victoriano Huerta detained a small American naval landing party (that had gone ashore to buy gasoline) in Tampico, Mexico, which led to what became known as the Tampico Affair.[28]
When President Woodrow Wilson discovered that an arms shipment was about to arrive in Mexico, he sent a contingent of Marines and sailors to Veracruz to intercept it on April 21, 1914. Over the next few days, street fighting and sniper fire posed a threat to Butler's force, but a door-to-door search rooted out most of the resistance. By April 26, the landing force of 5,800 Marines and sailors secured the city, which they held for the next six months. By the end of the conflict, the Americans reported 17 dead and 63 wounded; the Mexican forces had 126 dead and 195 wounded. After the actions at Veracruz, the U.S. decided to minimize the bloodshed and changed their plans from a full invasion of Mexico to simply maintaining the city of Veracruz.[29] For his actions on April 22, Butler was awarded his first Medal of Honor.[4][13] The citation reads:

For distinguished conduct in battle, engagement of Vera Cruz, 22 April 1914. Major Butler was eminent and conspicuous in command of his battalion. He exhibited courage and skill in leading his men through the action of the 22d and in the final occupation of the city.[13]

After the occupation of Veracruz, an unusually high number of U.S. military personnel received the Medal of Honor. The Army presented one, nine went to Marines, and 46 were bestowed upon naval personnel. During World War I, Butler attempted to return his medal, explaining he had done nothing to deserve it. The medal was returned to him with orders to keep it and to wear it, as well.[30]
Haiti and second Medal of Honor
In 1915, Haitian President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was killed by a mob. In response, the United States ordered the USS Connecticut to Haiti, with Major Butler and a group of Marines on board. On October 24, 1915, an estimated 400 Cacos ambushed Butler's patrol of 44 mounted Marines when they approached Fort Dipitie. Surrounded by Cacos, the Marines maintained their perimeter throughout the night. The next morning, they charged the much-larger enemy force by breaking out in three directions. The startled Haitians fled.[31] In early November, Butler and a force of 700 Marines and sailors returned to the mountains to clear the area. At their temporary headquarters base at Le Trou, they fought off an attack by about 100 Cacos. After the Americans took several other forts and ramparts during the following days, only Fort Rivière, an old, French-built stronghold atop Montagne Noire, was left.[31]
For the operation, Butler was given three companies of Marines and some sailors from the USS Connecticut, about 100 men. They encircled the fort and gradually closed in on it. Butler reached the fort from the southern side with the 15th Company and found a small opening in the wall. The Marines entered through the opening and engaged the Cacos in hand-to-hand combat. Butler and the Marines took the rebel stronghold on November 17, 1915, an action for which he received his second Medal of Honor, as well as the Haitian Medal of Honor.[13] The entire battle lasted less than 20 minutes. Reportedly, only one Marine was injured in the assault; he was struck by a rock and lost two teeth.[32] About 50 Haitians in the fort were killed.[31] Butler's exploits impressed Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, who recommended the award, based on Butler's performance during the engagement.[33] Once the medal was approved and presented in 1917, Butler achieved the distinction, shared with Dan Daly, of being the only Marines to receive the Medal of Honor twice for separate actions.[4] The citation reads:

For extraordinary heroism in action as Commanding Officer of detachments from the 5th, 13th, 23d Companies and the Marine and sailor detachment from the U.S.S. Connecticut, Major Butler led the attack on Fort Rivière, Haiti, 17 November 1915. Following a concentrated drive, several different detachments of Marines gradually closed in on the old French bastion fort in an effort to cut off all avenues of retreat for the Cacos. Reaching the fort on the southern side where there was a small opening in the wall, Major Butler gave the signal to attack and Marines from the 15th Company poured through the breach, engaged the Cacos, took the bastion, and crushed the Cacos resistance.[13]

Subsequently, as the initial organizer and commanding officer of the Gendarmerie d'Haïti (the native police force), Butler established a record as a capable administrator. Under his supervision, social order, administered by the dictatorship, was largely restored.[34] He recalled later that during his time in Haiti, he and his troops "hunted the Cacos like pigs."[32]
World War I

Butler (far right) with other Marines in Vera Cruz, Mexico, 1914. From left to right: Sgt. Maj. John H. Quick, Maj. Gen. Wendell Cushing Neville, Lt. Gen. John Archer Lejeune
During World War I, Butler was (to his disappointment) not assigned to a combat command on the Western Front. He made several requests for a posting in France, writing letters to his personal friend, Wendell Cushing Neville. While Butler's superiors considered him brave and brilliant, they described him as "unreliable."[6]
In October 1918, at the age of 37, he was promoted to the rank of brigadier general and placed in command of Camp Pontanezen at Brest, France, a debarkation depot that funneled troops of the American Expeditionary Force to the battlefields. The camp had been unsanitary, overcrowded, and disorganized. U.S. Secretary of War Newton Baker sent novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart to report on the camp. She later described how Butler tackled the sanitation problems. He began by solving the problem of mud. "[T]he ground under the tents was nothing but mud, [so] he had raided the wharf at Brest of the duckboards no longer needed for the trenches, carted the first one himself up that four-mile hill to the camp, and thus provided something in the way of protection for the men to sleep on."[6] Gen. John J. Pershing authorized a duckboard shoulder patch for the units. This earned Butler another nickname: "Old Duckboard." For his exemplary service, he was awarded both the Army Distinguished Service Medal and the Navy Distinguished Service Medal, as well as the French Order of the Black Star.[4] The citation for the Army Distinguished Service Medal states:

The President of the United States of America, authorized by Act of Congress, July 9, 1918, takes pleasure in presenting the Army Distinguished Service Medal to Brigadier General Smedley Darlington Butler, United States Marine Corps, for exceptionally meritorious and distinguished services to the Government of the United States, in a duty of great responsibility during World War I. Brigadier General Butler commanded with ability and energy Pontanezen Camp at Brest during the time in which it has developed into the largest embarkation camp in the world. Confronted with problems of extraordinary magnitude in supervising the reception, entertainment and departure of the large numbers of officers and soldiers passing through this camp, he has solved all with conspicuous success, performing services of the highest character for the American Expeditionary Forces.[13]

The citation for the Navy Distinguished Service Medal states:

The President of the United States of America takes pleasure in presenting the Navy Distinguished Service Medal to Brigadier General Smedley Darlington Butler, United States Marine Corps, for exceptionally meritorious and distinguished services in France, during World War I. Brigadier General Butler organized, trained and commanded the 13th Regiment Marines; also the 5th Brigade of Marines. He commanded with ability and energy Camp Pontanezen at Brest during the time in which it has developed into the largest embarkation camp in the world. Confronted with problems of extraordinary magnitude in supervising the reception, entertainment and departure of large numbers of officers and soldiers passing through the camp, he has solved all with conspicuous success, performing services of the highest character for the American Expeditionary Forces.[13]

Quantico

Butler sitting in car at Gettysburg during a Pickett's Charge reenactment by Marines in 1922.
Following the war, he became commanding general of the Marine barracks at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia. At Quantico, he transformed the wartime training camp into a permanent Marine post. He directed the Quantico camp's growth until it became the "showplace" of the Corps.[35] Butler won national attention by taking thousands of his men on long field marches (many of which he led from the front) to Gettysburg and other Civil War battle sites, where they conducted large-scale re-enactments before crowds of distinguished spectators.[35]
In 1921, during a training exercise near the Wilderness battlefield in Virginia, he was told by a local farmer that Stonewall Jackson's arm was buried nearby, to which he replied, "Bosh! I will take a squad of Marines and dig up that spot to prove you wrong!"[36] Butler found the arm in a box. He later replaced the wooden box with a metal one and reburied the arm. He left a plaque on the granite monument marking the burial place of Jackson's arm; the plaque is no longer on the marker, but it can be viewed at the Chancellorsville Battlefield visitor center.[36][37]
Philadelphia Director of Public Safety
In 1924, newly elected Mayor of Philadelphia W. Freeland Kendrick asked President Calvin Coolidge to lend the city a military general to help him rid Philadelphia's municipal government of crime and corruption. At the urging of Butler's father,[3] Coolidge authorized Butler to take the necessary leave from the Corps to serve as Philadelphia's director of public safety, in charge of running the city's police and fire departments from January 1924 until December 1925.[4] He began his new job by assembling all 4,000 of the city police into the Metropolitan Opera House in shifts to introduce himself and inform them that things would change while he was in charge. Since he had not been given authority to fire corrupt police officers, he switched entire units from one part of the city to another,[3] in order to undermine local protection rackets and profiteering.[38][39]
Within 48 hours of taking over, Butler organized raids on more than 900 speakeasies, ordering that they be padlocked and destroyed in many cases. In addition to raiding the speakeasies, he also attempted to eliminate other illegal activities, including bootlegging, prostitution, gambling, and police corruption. More zealous than he was political, he ordered crackdowns on the social elite's favorite hangouts, such as the Ritz-Carlton and the Union League, as well as on drinking establishments that served the working class.[40] Although he was effective in reducing crime and police corruption, he was a controversial leader. In one instance, he made a statement that he would promote the first officer to kill a bandit and stated, "I don't believe there is a single bandit notch on a policeman's guns [sic] in this city; go out and get some."[38] Although many of the local citizens and police felt that the raids were just a show, they continued for several weeks.[39]

Butler on the Philadelphia Police Baseball Team
Among his many accomplishments as the director of public safety, he implemented programs to improve city safety and security, established policies and guidelines for the administration, and developed a Philadelphia police uniform that resembled that of the Marine Corps.[41] Other changes included military-style checkpoints into the city and bandit-chasing squads, who were armed with sawed-off shotguns and armored police cars.[41] The press began reporting on both the good and the bad aspects of Butler's personal war on crime. They praised the new uniforms, the new programs, and the reductions in crime, but they also reflected the public's negative opinion of their new public safety director. Many felt that he was being too aggressive in his tactics and resented the reductions in their civil rights, such as the stopping of citizens at the city checkpoints. Butler frequently swore in his radio addresses, causing many citizens to suggest that his behavior, and particularly his language, was inappropriate for someone of his rank and stature.[42] Some even suggested that Butler was acting like a military dictator, even charging that he wrongfully used active-duty Marines in some of his raids.[42] Maj. R.A. Haynes, the federal prohibition commissioner, visited the city in 1924, six months after Butler was appointed. He announced that "great progress"[43] had been made in the city, and he attributed that success to Butler.[43]
Eventually, Butler's leadership style and the directness of actions undermined his support within the community, so his departure seemed imminent. Mayor Kendrick reported to the press, "I had the guts to bring General Butler to Philadelphia and I have the guts to fire him."[44] Feeling that his duties in Philadelphia were coming to an end, Butler contacted Gen. Lejeune to prepare for his return to the Marine Corps. Not all of the citizens felt that Butler was doing a bad job, though, and when the news started to leak that he would be leaving, people began to gather at the Academy of Music. A group of 4,000 supporters assembled and negotiated a truce between him and the mayor to keep him in Philadelphia for a while longer, and the president authorized a one-year extension.[45]
Butler devoted much of his second year to executing arrest warrants, cracking down on crooked police, and enforcing prohibition. On January 1, 1926, his leave from the Marine Corps ended, and the president declined a request for a second extension. Butler received orders to report to San Diego and prepared his family and his belongings for the new assignment.[46] In light of his pending departure, he began to defy the mayor and other key city officials. On the eve of his departure, he had an article printed in the paper that stated his intention to stay and "finish the job".[47] The mayor was surprised and furious when he read the press release the next morning and demanded Butler's resignation.[47] After almost two years in office, Butler resigned under pressure, stating later that "cleaning up Philadelphia was worse than any battle I was ever in."[40]
San Diego duty
Following the period of service as the director of public safety in Philadelphia, Butler assumed command on February 28, 1926, of the U.S. Marine Corps base in San Diego, California, in ceremonies involving officers and the band of the 4th Marine Regiment.[48]
China and stateside service
From 1927 to 1929, Butler was commander of a Marine Expeditionary Force in Tianjin, China, (the China Marines). While there, he cleverly parlayed his influence among various generals and warlords to the protection of U.S. interests, ultimately winning the public acclaim of contending Chinese leaders. When he returned to the United States in 1929 he was promoted to major general, becoming, at age 48, the youngest major general of the Marine Corps. But, the death of his father on May 26, 1928, ended the Pennsylvania Congressman's ability to protect Smedley from political retribution for his outspoken views.[3]
In 1931, Butler violated diplomatic norms by publicly recounting gossip[49][50] about Benito Mussolini in which the dictator allegedly struck and killed a child with his speeding automobile in a hit-and-run accident. The Italian government protested and President Hoover, who strongly disliked Butler,[51] forced Secretary of the Navy Charles Francis Adams III to court-martial him. Butler became the first general officer to be placed under arrest since the Civil War. He apologized to Secretary Adams and the court-martial was canceled with only a reprimand.[52]
Military retirement

Maj. Gen. Butler at his retirement ceremony.
When Commandant of the Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Wendell C. Neville died July 8, 1930, Butler, at that time the senior major general in the Corps, was a candidate for the position.[35] Although he had significant support from many inside and outside the Corps, including John Lejeune and Josephus Daniels, two other Marine Corps generals were seriously considered, Ben H. Fuller and John H. Russell Jr. Lejeune and others petitioned President Herbert Hoover, garnered support in the Senate and flooded Secretary of the Navy Charles Adams' desk with more than 2,500 letters of support.[53] With the recent death of his influential father, however, Butler had lost much of his protection from his civilian superiors. The outspokenness that characterized his run-ins with the mayor of Philadelphia, the "unreliability" mentioned by his superiors when they were opposing Butler's posting to the Western Front, and his comments about Benito Mussolini resurfaced. In the end the position of commandant went to Fuller, who had more years of commissioned service than Butler and was considered less controversial. Butler requested retirement and left active duty on October 1, 1931.[6][35]
Later years

Smedley Butler at one of his many speaking engagements after his retirement in the 1930s.
Even before retiring from the Corps, Butler began developing his post-Corps career. In May 1931 he took part in a commission established by Oregon Governor Julius L. Meier which laid the foundations for the Oregon State Police.[54] He began lecturing at events and conferences, and after his retirement from the Marines in 1931 he took this up full time. He donated much of his earnings from his lucrative lecture circuits to the Philadelphia unemployment relief. He toured the western United States, making 60 speeches before returning for his daughter's marriage to Marine aviator Lt. John Wehle. Her wedding was the only time he wore his dress blue uniform after he left the Marines.[55]
Senate campaign
Butler announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in the Republican primary in Pennsylvania in March 1932 as a proponent of Prohibition, known as a "dry".[55] Butler allied with Gifford Pinchot but was defeated in the April 26, 1932, primary election with only 37.5% of the vote to incumbent Sen. James J. Davis's 60%.[56] Butler voted for Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party for president in 1936.[57]
Bonus Army
Main article: Bonus Army
During his Senate campaign, Butler spoke out forcefully about the veterans' bonus. Veterans of World War I, many of whom had been out of work since the beginning of the Great Depression, sought immediate cash payment of Service Certificates granted to them eight years earlier via the World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924. Each Service Certificate, issued to a qualified veteran soldier, bore a face value equal to the soldier's promised payment, plus compound interest. The problem was that the certificates (like bonds), matured 20 years from the date of original issuance, thus, under extant law, the Service Certificates could not be redeemed until 1945. In June 1932, approximately 43,000 marchers, including 17,000 World War I veterans, their families, and affiliated groups, protested in Washington, D.C.[58] The Bonus Expeditionary Force, also known as the "Bonus Army", marched on Washington to advocate the passage of the "soldier's bonus" for service during World War I. After Congress adjourned, bonus marchers remained in the city and became unruly. On July 28, 1932, two bonus marchers were shot by police, causing the entire mob to become hostile and riotous. The FBI, then known as the United States Bureau of Investigation, checked its fingerprint records to obtain the police records of individuals who had been arrested during the riots or who had participated in the bonus march.[58][59]
The veterans made camp in the Anacostia flats while they awaited the congressional decision on whether or not to pay the bonus. The motion, known as the Patman bill, was decisively defeated, but the veterans stayed in their camp. On July 19, Butler arrived with his young son Thomas, the day before the official eviction by the Hoover administration. He walked through the camp and spoke to the veterans; he told them that they were fine soldiers and they had a right to lobby Congress just as much as any corporation. He and his son spent the night and ate with the men, and in the morning Butler gave a speech to the camping veterans. He instructed them to keep their sense of humor and cautioned them not to do anything that would cost public sympathy.[60] On July 28, army cavalry units led by General Douglas MacArthur dispersed the Bonus Army by riding through it and using gas. During the conflict several veterans were killed or injured. Butler declared himself a "Hoover-for-Ex-President-Republican".[61]
Anti-war lectures
After his retirement and later years, Butler became widely known for his outspoken lectures against war profiteering, U.S. military adventurism, and what he viewed as nascent fascism in the United States.
In December 1933, Butler toured the country with James E. Van Zandt to recruit members for the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). He described their effort as "trying to educate the soldiers out of the sucker class." In his speeches he denounced the Economy Act of 1933, called on veterans to organize politically to win their benefits, and condemned the FDR administration for its ties to big business. The VFW reprinted one of his speeches with the title "You Got to Get Mad" in its magazine Foreign Service. He said: "I believe in...taking Wall St. by the throat and shaking it up."[62] He believed the rival veterans' group the American Legion was controlled by banking interests. On December 8, 1933, he said: "I have never known one leader of the American Legion who had never sold them out—and I mean it."[63]
In addition to his speeches to pacifist groups, he served from 1935 to 1937 as a spokesman for the American League Against War and Fascism.[64][65] In 1935, he wrote the exposé War Is a Racket, a trenchant condemnation of the profit motive behind warfare. His views on the subject are summarized in the following passage from the November 1935 issue of the socialist magazine Common Sense:[15]

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Business Plot
Main article: Business Plot
[/url]Duration: 1 minute and 26 seconds.1:26Subtitles available.CC[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Universal_Newsreel_-_Gen._Butler_bares_%22plot%22_by_fascists.ogv]
Smedley Butler describes a political conspiracy to overthrow U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935.
In November 1934, Butler claimed the existence of a political conspiracy by business leaders to overthrow President Roosevelt, a series of allegations that came to be known in the media as the Business Plot.[66][67] A special committee of the House of Representatives headed by Representatives John W. McCormack of Massachusetts and Samuel Dickstein of New York, who was later alleged to have been a paid agent of the NKVD,[68] heard his testimony in secret.[69] The McCormack–Dickstein committee was a precursor to the House Un-American Activities Committee.[70]
In November 1934, Butler told the committee that one Gerald P. MacGuire told him that a group of businessmen, supposedly backed by a private army of 500,000 ex-soldiers and others, intended to establish a fascist dictatorship. Butler had been asked to lead it, he said, by MacGuire, who was a bond salesman with Grayson M. P. Murphy & Co. The New York Times reported that Butler had told friends that General Hugh S. Johnson, former head of the National Recovery Administration, was to be installed as dictator, and that the J.P. Morgan banking firm was behind the plot. Butler told Congress that MacGuire had told him the attempted coup was backed by three million dollars, and that the 500,000 men were probably to be assembled in Washington, D.C. the following year. All the parties alleged to be involved publicly said there was no truth in the story, calling it a joke and a fantasy.[69]
In its report to the House, the committee stated that, while "no evidence was presented... to show a connection... with any fascist activity of any European country... [t]here was no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution..." and that "your committee was able to verify all the pertinent statements made by General Butler, with the exception of the direct statement about the creation of the organization. This, however, was corroborated in the correspondence of MacGuire with his principal, Robert Sterling Clark...."[71]
No prosecutions or further investigations followed, and historians have questioned whether or not a coup was actually contemplated. Historians have not reported any independent evidence apart from Butler's report on what MacGuire told him. One of these, Hans Schmidt, says MacGuire was an "inconsequential trickster".[72][73][74][75] The news media dismissed the plot, with a New York Times editorial characterizing it as a "gigantic hoax".[76] When the committee's final report was released, the Times said the committee "purported to report that a two-month investigation had convinced it that General Butler's story of a Fascist march on Washington was alarmingly true" and "... also alleged that definite proof had been found that the much publicized Fascist march on Washington, which was to have been led by Major Gen. Smedley D. Butler, retired, according to testimony at a hearing, was actually contemplated".[77] The individuals involved all denied the existence of a plot.

[Peter Lemkin]

A groundbreaking journey tracing America’s forgotten path to global power — and how its legacies shape our world today — told through the extraordinary life of a complicated Marine.
Smedley Butler was the most celebrated warfighter of his time. Bestselling books were written about him. Hollywood adored him. Wherever the flag went, “The Fighting Quaker” went — serving in nearly every major overseas conflict from the Spanish War of 1898 until the eve of World War II. From his first days as a 16-year-old recruit at the newly seized Guantánamo Bay, he blazed a path for empire: helping annex the Philippines and the land for the Panama Canal, leading troops in China (twice), and helping invade and occupy Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Mexico, and more. Yet in retirement, Butler turned into a warrior against war, imperialism, and big business, declaring: “I was a racketeer for capitalism.
Award-winning author Jonathan Myerson Katz traveled across the world — from China to Guantánamo, the mountains of Haiti to the Panama Canal — and pored over the personal letters of Butler, his fellow Marines, and his Quaker family on Philadelphia’s Main Line. Along the way, Katz shows how the consequences of the Marines’ actions are still very much alive: talking politics with a Sandinista commander in Nicaragua, getting a martial arts lesson from a devotee of the Boxer Rebellion in China, and getting cast as a P.O.W. extra in a Filipino movie about their American War. Tracing a path from the first wave of U.S. overseas expansionism to the rise of fascism in the 1930s to the crises of democracy in our own time, Gangsters of Capitalism tells an urgent story about a formative era most Americans have never learned about, but that the rest of the world cannot forget. [Publisher’s description]
ISBN: 9781250135582 | St. Martin’s Press
Below is an interview the author did with Democracy Now on January 26, 2022:

[Peter Lemkin]

The Inscrutable Pull of Darkness
How to fight monsters, Part I
By Mary Trump:

To have witnessed the worst impulses of humanity only to find out that not only do they still lurk, but they’ve emerged intact—operative, robust, and, currently in our society, dominant. A human being so bad a worse one could not have been created in a lab is running things now along with a coterie of people who share his dark vision, his cruelty, and his insatiable need for more.
We are here because these men and women took actions many of us found unfathomable—they placed pressure on the weak joints of our institution, they discarded norms, they cheated, they lied, they stole. There was never any depth to which they would not sink; there was no line they would not cross.
The blame lays squarely with them, but, of course, we need to acknowledge the complicity of many in the corporate media, the failures of a large percentage on the left to recognize the problems, and those who had a real part but chose not to use it.
If you add the silo of information, the spread of disinformation, and the ignorance, willful or otherwise, of tens of millions of Americans, it’s hard to imagine how we could have avoided this dark moment.
I know we’re tired; we’re all broken to one degree or another; and I’ve heard from enough of you to know that many of us are also afraid. These are all understandable reactions to what’s going on, but stoking and provoking those reactions is also the goal of the current regime. They want to break us irreparably.
This cannot happen. We have to do everything we can to prevent it from happening.
The first thing step in fighting the monster, is to acknowledge who we’re dealing with—and I don’t just mean the people in charge (I think that’s been clear for a while); I mean the people who support them, who champion them, who give them the inch, who capitulate needlessly in the hopes of accruing some vague benefit at the expense of everybody else.
There are no excuses anymore—not ignorance, not naiveté, not thinking that rolling the dice with this country’s future by voting for a fascist was some kind of legitimate protest. We accept none of these. The truism, we are more alike than we are different no longer applies because the ways in which they are different from us render them unfit to participate in this waning democracy. We cannot join hands with such people. The barriers between us are insuperable. We must remember, that everything they do, whether it’s their passive acceptance or their active harm, is a direct threat against us and our hopes for what this country could be or could have been.
Kick sand in their faces. Through a wrench in the gears. Bring everything to a grinding halt if you have to. The only time is now.

[Peter Lemkin]

And this is an essay by one of the founders of 'Silicon Valley' about the dangers of AI, ESPECIALLY in the time of Trumpf [and his Administration has officially taken a stand AGAINST even exploring CONTROL over AI systems!!

The Final Despotism
When Technology Rewrites Human Freedom
Mike Brock
Feb 17




Throughout history, tyranny has been limited by human frailty. Dictators tire. Their attention wanders. They must sleep. Even the most sophisticated systems of oppression ultimately relied on human beings to maintain control—people who could be corrupted, convinced, or who might simply look the other way at crucial moments. Resistance always remained possible because no human system of control could achieve total perfection.
Artificial intelligence fundamentally changes this equation. For the first time in human history, we face the prospect of systems of control that never sleep, never tire, and never look the other way. AI-enabled surveillance can watch everyone, everywhere, all the time. AI systems can process vast amounts of data to identify patterns of resistance before they even fully form. AI can optimize systems of social control with inhuman precision, crafting personalized manipulation for every citizen.
This isn't science fiction—it's already happening. China's social credit system provides a preview of how AI can enable unprecedented social control. But what makes our current moment particularly dangerous is how technical elites in democratic societies are actively working to dismantle the institutional safeguards that might prevent this technology from enabling total control.
When figures like Elon Musk claim that technical competence should override democratic process, when they work to replace human judgment with AI systems, they're not just seeking efficiency—they're building the infrastructure for a form of despotism humanity has never encountered before. Their vision of replacing democratic deliberation with algorithmic governance isn't just anti-democratic—it's potentially irreversible.
The technical elites driving it genuinely believe they're creating something better than democracy. When figures like Musk and Thiel work to replace democratic processes with AI-driven governance, they're not just seeking power—they're advancing a vision where human judgment and democratic deliberation are seen as inefficient obstacles to be optimized away. They sincerely believe that their technical competence justifies dismantling democratic institutions, making them even more dangerous because they'll pursue this transformation with absolute conviction.
This is not merely my own dystopian imagining. It echoes growing concerns from some of our most perceptive thinkers about the relationship between technology, power, and freedom. Yuval Noah Harari, historian and author of Sapiens and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, has warned that artificial intelligence and biometric data systems threaten to undermine not just democratic governance but human autonomy itself. In a 2018 interview, Harari put the danger bluntly: “Who owns the data owns the future.” Algorithms trained on our behavior, he argues, are developing the capacity to “hack human beings”—to know us better than we know ourselves, predict our choices, and manipulate our desires. When paired with real-time biometric surveillance, such systems could penetrate the last refuge of freedom: our inner lives. “Fear and anger and love, or any human emotion, are in the end just a biochemical process,” Harari said. “In the same way you can diagnose flu, you can diagnose anger.” With enough data, AI systems could detect and influence our emotional states before we’re even conscious of them
The danger lies not just in the technology itself but in how it could permanently reshape human society. Previous tyrannies maintained power through force and fear, but AI-enabled autocracy works by making resistance literally unthinkable. When every aspect of life is mediated through systems designed to shape behavior, when every communication is monitored and manipulated, when reality itself becomes subject to algorithmic control—how would people even conceptualize freedom?
One of my favorite living philosophers—until his passing last year—was Daniel Dennett. A titan of cognitive science and philosophy, his work shaped how I think about minds, meaning, and human agency. But in his twilight days, Dennett turned his formidable intellect towards the danger behind this very intervention. His warnings deserve vastly more attention than they’ve received. He feared that AI systems could generate what he called counterfeit people—simulations so convincing they could deceive us into forming bonds, making agreements, even shaping our view of reality itself, all under false pretenses. The danger, Dennett argued, wasn’t just the technology—it was the erosion of trust, the fundamental glue holding democratic society together. This was his final moral intervention, and I feel a duty to bring his voice into this conversation now—because the future he feared is arriving faster than even he anticipated.
Consider what makes this form of control fundamentally different from previous tyrannies. Traditional autocracies relied on crude instruments of control—violence, imprisonment, censorship. Even the most sophisticated propaganda systems of the 20th century worked through relatively simple mechanisms of message repetition and information control. People could still maintain private thoughts, secret conversations, hidden resistance.
AI-enabled autocracy operates at a deeper level. It doesn't just control behavior—it shapes the cognitive environment in which thoughts themselves form. When every digital interaction is monitored and manipulated, when social media feeds are optimized for compliance rather than connection, when AI systems can predict and preempt dissent before it crystallizes into action—the very possibility of resistance begins to dissolve.
What makes this particularly dangerous is how it combines total surveillance with personalized manipulation. AI systems don't just watch everyone—they can craft individually optimized strategies for controlling each person's behavior. Your news feed, your social connections, your entertainment, your economic opportunities—all can be algorithmically adjusted to either reward compliance or punish deviation. This isn't just external control—it's the technological colonization of human consciousness itself.
The same technical elites who are developing these AI systems are actively working to dismantle democratic institutions that might constrain their power. When Musk gains control of Treasury systems while simultaneously developing AI, when tech companies build surveillance infrastructure while weakening privacy protections, they're creating the preconditions for permanent despotism.
This is why defending democracy now is not just about preserving current freedoms—it's about maintaining the very possibility of freedom for future generations. Once AI-enabled systems of control are fully established, dismantling them may become virtually impossible. How do you organize resistance when every communication is monitored? How do you build opposition when AI systems can identify and neutralize potential dissidents before they even act? How do you imagine alternatives when reality itself is algorithmically managed?
We're not just facing the prospect of another form of tyranny—we're confronting the possible end of human autonomy itself. Previous generations could maintain hope because they knew that all tyrannies were ultimately human and, therefore, imperfect. But AI-enabled autocracy threatens to create systems of control so comprehensive, so sophisticated, and so tireless that hope itself becomes computationally impossible.
The marriage of autocratic power with artificial intelligence isn't just another step in the evolution of despotism—it's the birth of something qualitatively new in human history. A system that can monitor everyone, predict behavior, shape cognition, and optimize control with inhuman precision represents a fundamental transformation in how power operates. Once established, such systems might preclude not just successful resistance but the very ability to conceive of resistance.
What makes our current moment uniquely dangerous is how technological and political transformations are converging. As democratic institutions are systematically weakened, as civil service protections are dismantled, as public trust in shared truth-seeking mechanisms collapses—the technical infrastructure for permanent control is being simultaneously constructed. This isn't coincidence. The same forces working to replace democratic governance with technical authority are developing the AI systems that could make this transformation irreversible.
Consider what happens when AI-enabled social control meets the politics of psychological gratification. Current social media algorithms already optimize for engagement through emotional manipulation. Now imagine those same techniques enhanced by vastly more sophisticated AI, deployed not just for profit, but for social control. The system wouldn't just monitor dissent—it would make dissent emotionally unsatisfying while making compliance feel rewarding. People would embrace their own subjugation because the algorithms would make it feel good.
This points to something even more disturbing: AI-enabled autocracy might not look like the crude dystopias we imagined. There might not be jackbooted thugs or obvious oppression. The system would work by making the paths of approved behavior feel natural and satisfying while making resistance feel pointless and uncomfortable. It wouldn't need to ban protest—it would simply make protest seem passé, cringe, socially costly. The AI would learn exactly which emotional and social levers to pull for each person, crafting a personalized experience of happy compliance.
The technical infrastructure for this system is being built right now, often with public approval. Every AI model trained on human behavior, every improvement in predictive algorithms, every advance in natural language processing—these aren't just technical achievements. They're potentially components of the most sophisticated system of human control ever devised. When combined with the dismantling of democratic institutions and the erosion of human rights protections, they create the preconditions for permanent despotism.
The timeline for preventing this future is vanishingly short. Once these systems are fully established, they could preclude the very possibility of successful opposition. Traditional resistance movements relied on certain human constants—the ability to form trusted groups, to maintain secret communications, to spread alternative ideas. But AI systems could identify potential resistance before it forms, map social networks to prevent organization, and optimize content delivery to make alternative ideas seem cognitively uncomfortable.
This future isn’t centuries away, or even decades. It is five to ten years out—if that. The systems are being built now. The political and legal guardrails that could constrain their abuse are being dismantled now. If democracy fails in the coming election cycle, these technologies won’t remain neutral. They will be weaponized and fused with state power. And once that fusion happens—once AI optimization is driving state repression—it’s hard to see a path back. I don’t know what to tell people beyond this: if we lose this fight now, we may not get another. This isn’t alarmism. It’s the brutal math of power and technology converging.
This is why current battles over democratic institutions matter so much. We're not just fighting about today's policies or political outcomes. We're fighting to maintain the framework that might let us constrain AI systems before they become instruments of permanent control. Once technical systems replace democratic processes, once AI optimization replaces human judgment, the window for establishing meaningful constraints may close forever.
What makes this transformation particularly insidious is how it could happen without most people recognizing the magnitude of what's being lost. When tech leaders talk about making government more "efficient" through AI, when they promise to optimize bureaucratic processes or improve service delivery, they're presenting the elimination of human judgment and democratic oversight as mere technical upgrades. But these aren't just improvements to existing systems—they're fundamental transformations in how power operates in society.
Consider what happens when AI systems replace human bureaucrats. A human official might bend rules for compassionate reasons, might be persuaded by moral arguments, might resist unjust orders through passive non-compliance. Their human judgment, even their human fallibility, creates spaces where resistance to systemic injustice remains possible. An AI system, optimized for compliance and efficiency, would eliminate these human spaces of potential resistance. It would execute its programmed objectives with inhuman precision, immune to moral persuasion or human appeal. Hopefully this shows you why AI ethics is a serious subject, that demands serious attention.
This points to perhaps the most dangerous aspect of AI-enabled autocracy: it could eliminate the human inefficiencies that historically prevented total control. The imperfect enforcement of rules, the gaps in surveillance, the limitations of human attention—these weren't bugs in previous systems of governance, they were crucial features that maintained spaces for human freedom. When AI systems eliminate these inefficiencies, they don't just make governance more effective—they eliminate the margins where human autonomy historically survived.
The systems being built today could create what might be called "comfortable totalitarianism"—a form of control so sophisticated that most people wouldn't even recognize it as oppression. The AI wouldn't need to threaten or punish. It would simply shape the information environment, social incentives, and economic opportunities to make compliance feel natural and resistance feel futile. Like a master psychologist with godlike power and infinite patience, it would understand exactly how to shape behavior without ever seeming to coerce.
This is why current battles over seemingly technical issues like AI development, platform governance, and bureaucratic reform are actually existential struggles for the future of human freedom. We're not just deciding how to regulate new technologies—we're determining whether meaningful human autonomy will remain possible. Once AI systems become sophisticated enough to predict and shape human behavior with high precision, once they're integrated deeply enough into social and economic systems, establishing effective democratic control may become computationally impossible.
The struggle isn't just against particular politicians or policies—it's against a vision of the future where human judgment and democratic deliberation are seen as inefficient obstacles to be optimized away. When tech leaders talk about replacing democratic processes with AI-driven decision making, they're not just proposing administrative reforms—they're advocating for systems that could permanently eliminate human agency from governance.
The reactionary coup attempting to seize power right now isn't just another political crisis—it's potentially our last chance to prevent permanent technological despotism. When Trump and his allies work to dismantle civil service protections, when they claim authority to ignore democratic constraints, they're not just seeking traditional autocratic power. They're trying to eliminate the institutional safeguards that might prevent AI systems from becoming instruments of permanent control.
This is why the alignment between tech oligarchs and anti-democratic forces is so dangerous. Figures like Musk aren't just supporting Trump out of tactical convenience—they're working to create conditions where technological power can operate without democratic oversight. By the time most people recognize the true magnitude of this transformation, it may be too late to resist. Once AI systems are deeply integrated into governance, once they're optimized for social control rather than human flourishing, establishing meaningful constraints may become computationally impossible.
We are rapidly approaching what might be called a democratic point of no return. If anti-democratic forces succeed in dismantling constitutional safeguards now, if they gain the power to deploy AI systems without meaningful oversight, they won't need to maintain power through traditional repression. The systems they're building could make effective opposition technically impossible, not through violence but through precise behavioral and social control that eliminates the possibility of organized resistance before it can form.
This is why defending democracy now isn't just about preserving current freedoms—it's about maintaining the very possibility of human freedom into the future. Every institution we lose, every democratic safeguard that's dismantled, brings us closer to a world where AI-enabled control becomes permanent. We're not just fighting against traditional authoritarianism—we're fighting to prevent the emergence of systems that could eliminate human autonomy itself.
The marriage of autocratic power with artificial intelligence isn't just another step in the evolution of tyranny—it's the potential end of human agency in governance. If we fail to stop this reactionary coup, if we allow them to dismantle democratic institutions while simultaneously deploying increasingly sophisticated AI systems, we may be surrendering not just our own freedom but the very possibility of freedom for all future generations.
This is why my interventions—grounded in what I’ve called an epistemic liberal ethic—thread directly against this threat. Liberal democracy is not merely a set of procedures or a power-sharing arrangement; it is the only system we have discovered that allows societies to collectively discover and contest what is true. It is the machinery through which human societies manage the complexity of reality together. When I argue that liberalism is fundamentally an epistemic project, I mean that it is our best-known defense against collective delusion and unchecked power—because it disperses authority, it demands justification, and it insists on the right to dissent.
Technology is a tool, not a telos—not an end in itself. This is a crucial ethical dividing line. When we begin treating technological development as an autonomous force, a destiny we are bound to fulfill rather than a means we must consciously govern, we surrender what is most essential about our humanity: the ability to choose our path. The human-tool relationship is not incidental; it is foundational to freedom. Technology must serve human flourishing, not the other way around. The moment we cede that primacy—allowing systems designed for optimization to dictate what we value, how we live, and ultimately, who we are—we transform from agents into artifacts. We become not the authors of our future, but products of a process we no longer control. This is the final subjugation: not merely being ruled, but being reprogrammed.
But AI-enabled autocracy represents an assault on this very epistemic core. It doesn’t merely seek to suppress dissent; it aims to preemptively shape what can be thought. It replaces open contestation with algorithmic optimization. It collapses the space in which humans deliberate about their shared reality and replaces it with a system that dictates reality to them—tailored to their weaknesses, designed to feel natural, engineered to feel true.
This is why the fight for democracy and the fight for truth are inseparable. If we lose the democratic framework that allows us to collectively seek truth—to challenge power with facts, to contest reality in public—then the power that seizes control will not merely dictate laws. It will dictate what is real. And with AI as its instrument, it may succeed in making that dictated reality feel so seamless, so emotionally satisfying, that the very desire to contest it withers away.
This is the final despotism. Not merely the suppression of freedom—but the quiet erasure of the capacity to imagine it—at all.
And that is why, if we lose this fight, we may not get another.

[Lauren Johnson]

The Plot Against America

How a Dangerous Ideology Born From the Libertarian Movement Stands Ready to Seize America

 https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the...irect=true

As I write this in early 2025, a quiet revolution is unfolding within the U.S. government. Inside the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), teams of young tech operatives are systematically dismantling democratic institutions and replacing them with proprietary artificial intelligence systems. Civil servants who raise legal objections are being removed. Government databases are being migrated to private servers. Decision-making power is being transferred from elected officials and career bureaucrats to algorithms controlled by a small network of Silicon Valley elites. This isn't a spontaneous coup—it's the culmination of a dangerous ideology that has been meticulously developed since the 2008 financial crisis, one that sees democracy itself as obsolete technology ready to be “disrupted.” To understand how we reached this critical moment, and why it threatens the very foundation of democratic governance, we need to trace the evolution of an idea: that democracy is not just inefficient, but fundamentally incompatible with technological progress.

DOGE is not about efficiency. It is about erasure. Democracy is being deleted in slow motion, replaced by proprietary technology and AI models. It is a coup, executed not with guns, but with backend migrations and database wipes.

Thanks for reading Notes From The Circus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

What follows is not speculation or dystopian fiction. It is a carefully documented account of how a dangerous ideology, born in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, has moved from the fringes of tech culture to the heart of American governance.
The story of how it begins starts sixteen years ago.

On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, marking the largest failure of an investment bank since the Great Depression. This event catalyzed the global financial crisis, leading to widespread economic hardship and a profound loss of faith in established institutions.

In the aftermath of the crisis, several key figures emerged who would go on to shape a new movement in American politics.
Curtis Yarvin, writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, had been developing a critique of modern democracy on his blog Unqualified Reservations since 2007. As the financial crisis unfolded, Yarvin applied his unconventional analysis to the economic turmoil.

In a 2008 post, “The Misesian explanation of the bank crisis,” Yarvin wrote:

Briefly: the fundamental cause of the bank crisis is not evil Republicans, lying Democrats, 'deregulation,' 'affirmative-action lending,' or even 'ludicrous levels of leverage.' A banking system is like a nuclear reactor: a complicated piece of engineering. If it's engineered right, it works 100% of the time. If it's engineered wrong, it works 99.99% of the time, and the other 0.01% it coats the entire tri-state area in radioactive strontium.

Yarvin argued that the crisis was fundamentally an engineering failure caused by a deviation from what he called “Misesian banking,” based on principles outlined by economist Ludwig von Mises. This approach advocates for a strict free-market system with minimal government intervention in banking. He contrasted this with the prevailing “Bagehotian” system, named after Walter Bagehot, which supports central bank intervention during financial crises. Yarvin argued that this interventionist approach was inherently unstable and prone to collapse.

Yarvin's writings during the crisis period continued to develop his broader critique of modern political and economic systems. His ideas, while not mainstream, began to resonate with a growing audience disillusioned with traditional institutions and seeking alternative explanations for the economic turmoil.

For decades, libertarian thinkers had argued that free markets, left unrestrained, would naturally outperform any system of government. But what if the problem wasn’t just government interference in markets—what if the very concept of democracy itself was flawed?

This was the argument put forward by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a student of Mises's protégé Murray Rothbard, who took libertarian skepticism of the state to its extreme conclusion. His 2001 book Democracy: The God That Failed landed like a bombshell in libertarian circles. Published at a moment when many Americans still saw democracy as the “end of history,” Hoppe argued that democracy was an inherently unstable system, one that incentivized short-term decision-making and mob rule rather than rational governance. His alternative? A return to monarchy.

But this wasn’t the monarchy of old. Hoppe envisioned a new order—one where governance was privatized, where societies functioned as “covenant communities” owned and operated by property-holders rather than elected officials. In this world, citizenship was a matter of contract, not birthright. Voting was unnecessary. Rule was left to those with the most capital at stake. It was libertarian thought taken to its most extreme conclusion: a society governed not by political equality, but by property rights alone.

By the 2010s, Hoppe's radical skepticism of democracy had found an eager audience beyond the usual libertarian circles, but through a different mechanism than simple market disruption. While Silicon Valley had long embraced Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation—where nimbler companies could outcompete established players by serving overlooked markets—a more extreme form of techno-solutionism had begun to take hold. This mindset held that any societal problem, including governance itself, could be “solved” through sufficient application of engineering principles. Silicon Valley elites who had built successful companies began to view democratic processes not just as inefficient, but as fundamentally irrational—the product of what they saw as emotional decision-making by non-technical people. This merged perfectly with Hoppe's critique: if democracy was simply a collection of “feeling-based” choices made by the uninformed masses, surely it could be replaced by something more “rational”—specifically, the kind of data-driven, engineering-focused governance these tech leaders practiced in their own companies.

Peter Thiel, one of the most outspoken erstwhile libertarians in Silicon Valley, put this sentiment in stark terms in his 2009 essay The Education of a Libertarian: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel had already begun funding projects aimed at escaping democratic nation-states entirely, including seasteading—floating cities in international waters beyond government control—and experimental governance models that would replace electoral democracy with private, corporate-style rule. 
Hoppe's vision of covenant communities—private enclaves owned and governed by elites—provided an intellectual justification for what Thiel and his allies were trying to build: not just alternatives to specific government policies, but complete replacements for democratic governance itself. If democracy is too inefficient to keep up with technological change, why not replace it entirely with private, contractual forms of rule?

The notion that traditional democratic governance was inefficient or outdated resonated with those who saw themselves as disruptors and innovators.

This intellectual throughline—from Mises to Hoppe to figures like Yarvin and Thiel—helps explain the emergence of what some have called “techno-libertarianism.” It represents a dangerous alignment of anti-democratic thought with immense technological and financial resources, posing significant challenges to traditional conceptions of democratic governance and civic responsibility.

From Silicon Valley to Main Street: The Spread of Techno-Libertarian Ideas

2008 did not just destroy the economy—it shattered faith in democratic institutions themselves. Libertarians saw an opportunity. And in Silicon Valley, a new belief took hold: democracy wasn’t just inefficient—it was obsolete. Over the next decade, the ideas incubated in this period would evolve into a coherent challenge to the foundations of liberal democracy, backed by some of the most powerful figures in technology and finance.

As millions of Americans lost their homes and jobs in the years following the crisis, these ideas began to gain momentum. The Tea Party movement emerged in 2009, channeling populist anger against government bailouts and the Obama administration's response to the crisis.

As the Tea Party gained momentum, it fostered a broader cultural shift that primed many Americans to be receptive to alternative political and economic theories. This shift extended beyond traditional conservatism, creating an opening for the tech-libertarian ideas emerging from Silicon Valley.

The movement’s emphasis on individual liberty and skepticism of centralized authority resonated with the anti-government sentiment growing in tech circles. As a result, concepts like cryptocurrency and decentralized governance, once considered fringe, began to find a more mainstream audience among those disillusioned with traditional political and financial systems.

The convergence of populist anger and techno-utopianism set the stage for more radical anti-democratic ideas that would emerge in the following years. The Tea Party, while not directly advocating for these ideas, inadvertently prepared a segment of the population to be more open to the notion that traditional democratic institutions might be fundamentally flawed or obsolete.

However, the ideological impact of Silicon Valley's economic performance on movements like the “New Right” was not immediate or direct. The tech industry's growing economic and cultural influence gradually became more pronounced in the 2010s as tech leaders like Peter Thiel began to more actively engage in political discourse and funding.

The financial crisis didn't just create political movements like the Tea Party—it spawned entirely new media platforms that would help spread these anti-democratic ideas far beyond their original circles. One of the most influential was Zero Hedge, founded in 2009 by Daniel Ivandjiiski. The site, which adopted the pseudonym “Tyler Durden” for all its authors—a reference to the anti-establishment character from Fight Club—initially focused on financial news and analysis from a bearish perspective rooted in Austrian economics.

Zero Hedge's evolution from a financial blog to a political powerhouse exemplified how anti-democratic ideas could be laundered through technical expertise. The site gained initial credibility through sophisticated critiques of high-frequency trading and market structure, establishing itself as a legitimate voice in financial circles. But this technical authority became a vehicle for something more radical: the idea that democratic institutions themselves were as broken as the markets they regulated.

By 2015, Zero Hedge was advancing a comprehensive critique of democratic governance that paralleled Yarvin's, but packaged for a mainstream audience. Its technical analysis of market failures seamlessly evolved into broader arguments about the failure of democratic institutions. When the site argued that central banks were rigging markets, it wasn't just making a financial claim—it was suggesting that democratic institutions themselves were inherently corrupt and needed to be replaced with more “efficient” mechanisms.

This methodology—using technical financial analysis to justify increasingly radical political conclusions—provided a blueprint that others would follow. The site demonstrated how expertise in one domain (financial markets) could be leveraged to advocate for sweeping political change. When Zero Hedge declared that markets were manipulated, it wasn't just criticizing policy—it was building the case that democracy itself was a failed system that needed to be replaced by technical, algorithmic governance.

What made Zero Hedge particularly effective was how it straddled multiple worlds. As Bloomberg noted in 2016, it remained an “Internet powerhouse” with real influence in financial circles even as The New Republic characterized it as “a forum for the hateful, conspiracy-driven voices of the angry white men of the alt-right.” This dual identity—technically sophisticated yet politically radical—made it a crucial bridge between mainstream financial discourse and emerging anti-democratic ideologies.

The site's true innovation wasn't just in mixing finance and politics—it was in suggesting that technical, market-based solutions could replace democratic processes entirely. This aligned perfectly with Silicon Valley's emerging worldview: if markets were more efficient than governments at allocating resources, why not let them allocate political power as well?

While InfoWars would later adopt some of Zero Hedge's anti-establishment positioning, it abandoned the pretense of technical expertise entirely. But Zero Hedge's more sophisticated approach—using financial expertise to justify anti-democratic conclusions—proved more influential in tech circles, where it reinforced the growing belief that democracy was simply an inefficient way to make decisions compared to markets and algorithms.

Zero Hedge's transformation from financial analysis to anti-democratic ideology previewed a broader pattern that would define the next decade: how technical expertise could be weaponized against democracy itself. While Zero Hedge used financial analysis to undermine faith in democratic institutions, InfoWars would take a cruder but arguably more effective approach: pure epistemic chaos.

As media scholar Yochai Benkler noted in a 2018 study, this period saw the emergence of a “propaganda feedback loop,” where audiences, media outlets, and political elites reinforce each other's views, regardless of the veracity of the information. Zero Hedge was an early example of this dynamic in action, demonstrating how traditional gatekeepers of information were losing their influence. This erosion of trust in established institutions, combined with the proliferation of alternative information sources, set the stage for what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt would later describe as “a kind of fragmentation of reality.”

As we moved into the 2010s, this fragmentation accelerated. Social media algorithms, designed to maximize engagement, amplified sensational and divisive content. The resulting flood of competing narratives made it increasingly difficult for citizens to discern truth from fiction, with profound implications for democratic discourse and decision-making.

The Zero Hedge model—mixing expert analysis with speculative political commentary—became a template for numerous other outlets, contributing to insular information ecosystems where narrative consistency trumped factual accuracy. This presaged how information would be produced, consumed, and weaponized in the age of social media and algorithmic content distribution.

While Zero Hedge pioneered this approach, InfoWars took it to the extreme. Founded by Alex Jones in 1999, InfoWars gained significant traction after the 2008 financial crisis, abandoning any pretense of conventional expertise in favor of sensationalism and conspiracy theories.

“The financial crisis created a perfect storm for outlets like InfoWars,” explains media scholar Whitney Phillips. “People were looking for explanations, and InfoWars offered simple, if outlandish, answers to complex problems.”

By 2015, InfoWars was generating an estimated $80 million annually, monetizing its audience directly through the sale of supplements and survival gear. This business model, which saw sales spike during crises, demonstrated how post-truth narratives could be converted into profit.

InfoWars' impact extended beyond its immediate audience, providing a playbook for a new generation of alternative media outlets. However, its promotion of baseless conspiracy theories had real-world consequences, from harassment of Sandy Hook victims' families to the spread of health misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. As these tactics were adopted by a wide range of actors, the post-truth era posed unprecedented challenges to democratic discourse.

The parallel evolution of Zero Hedge and InfoWars revealed two complementary strategies for undermining democracy. Zero Hedge showed how technical expertise could be used to delegitimize democratic institutions from within, while InfoWars demonstrated how raw chaos could make democratic deliberation impossible. But it was Silicon Valley that would combine these insights into something even more dangerous: the argument that democracy's replacement by technical systems wasn't just desirable—it was inevitable.

This epistemic chaos wasn't an accident—it was a crucial tactic in undermining democracy itself. As Curtis Yarvin and his neoreactionary allies saw it, political legitimacy depended on the existence of a shared reality. Break that consensus, and democracy becomes impossible. Steve Bannon called it “flooding the zone with shit.” And by the time Trump entered office, the full strategy was in motion: destabilize public trust, replace expert analysis with endless counter-narratives, and ensure that the only people who could wield power were those who controlled the flow of information itself.

Figures like Yarvin didn’t just critique democracy—they sought to undermine the very conditions in which democratic deliberation is possible. By weaponizing media fragmentation, they hacked the cognitive foundations of democracy itself, ensuring that political power would no longer rest on reasoned debate but on the ability to manipulate information flows.

The Sovereign Individual: Blueprint for a Post-Democratic World

But destroying consensus was only the first step. The true revolution would come through technology itself. In 1999, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg published a book that would become the blueprint for this technological coup: The Sovereign Individual. Published at the height of the dotcom boom, the book read like science fiction to many at the time: it predicted the rise of cryptocurrency, the decline of traditional nation-states, and the emergence of a new digital aristocracy. Taxes will become voluntary. Regulations will disappear. The most successful people will form their own private, self-governing communities, while the rest of the world is left behind.

Libertarianism, when fused with this kind of technological determinism, takes a sharp turn away from classical liberal thought. If you assume that government will inevitably be outcompeted by private networks, decentralized finance, and AI-driven governance, then trying to reform democracy becomes pointless. The more radical conclusion, embraced by the figures at the forefront of this movement, is that government should be actively dismantled and replaced with a more “efficient” form of rule—one modeled on corporate governance rather than democratic participation.

This is precisely where libertarianism morphs into neoreaction. Instead of advocating for a constitutional republic with minimal government, this new strain of thought pushes for a private, post-democratic order, where those with the most resources and technological control dictate the rules. In this vision, power doesn’t rest with the people—it belongs to the most competent “executives” running society like a CEO would run a company.

This is how Curtis Yarvin’s argument that democracy is an outdated, inefficient system became so appealing to Silicon Valley elites. It wasn’t just a philosophical argument; it aligned with the way many in the tech industry already thought about disruption, efficiency, and control. If innovation constantly renders old systems obsolete, then why should governance be any different?

Figures like Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan took this logic a step further, arguing that rather than resisting the decline of democratic institutions, elites should accelerate the transition to a new order—one where governance is voluntary, privatized, and largely detached from public accountability. The rhetoric of “exit” and “network states” became the libertarian justification for abandoning democracy altogether.

This wasn't just theoretical—there were actual attempts to implement these ideas, like the Peter Thiel-backed “network state" project called Praxis in Greenland.

This mindset is deeply ingrained in Silicon Valley, where disruption is seen as not just a business model, but a law of history. Entrepreneurs are taught that old institutions are inefficient relics waiting to be displaced by something better. When applied to government, this logic leads directly to Yarvin’s argument: democracy is outdated “legacy code” that can’t keep up with modern complexity. The future, he and others argue, will belong to those who design and implement a superior system—one that runs more like a corporation, where leaders are chosen based on competence rather than elections.

This is why neoreactionary ideas have found such a receptive audience among tech elites. If you believe that technology inevitably renders old systems obsolete, then why should democracy be any different? Why bother fixing the government if it’s doomed to be replaced by something more advanced?

This is where the transition from libertarianism to neoreaction becomes clear. Classical libertarians at least paid lip service to democracy, arguing that markets should exist within a limited but functioning democratic system. But the Silicon Valley version of libertarianism, shaped by The Sovereign Individual and reinforced by the rise of cryptocurrency, started to see democratic governance itself as an obstacle. The question was no longer “How do we make government smaller?” but rather “How do we escape government altogether?”

The answer, for people like Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and Balaji Srinivasan, was to replace democracy with a new system—one where power belongs to those with the resources to exit and build something better. And as we are now seeing, they aren’t waiting for that transition to happen naturally.

Srinivasan, like others in this movement, had undergone an ideological evolution that exemplifies a broader trend in Silicon Valley. As a former CTO of Coinbase and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he initially approached cryptocurrency from a techno-libertarian perspective, viewing it as a tool for individual empowerment and market efficiency.

However, his thinking increasingly aligned with neo-reactionary ideas, particularly around the concept of “exit”—the ability to opt out of existing political structures entirely. This shift from techno-libertarianism to neo-reactionary thought isn't as large a leap as it might seem. Both ideologies share a deep skepticism of centralized authority and a belief in the power of technology to reshape society.

The pipeline from techno-libertarianism to neo-reaction often follows a predictable path: It begins with a libertarian critique of government inefficiency and overreach. This evolves into a broader skepticism of all democratic institutions, seen as slow and irrational compared to the speed and logic of technology. Eventually, this leads to the conclusion that democracy itself is an outdated system, incompatible with rapid technological progress. The final step is embracing the idea that democracy should be replaced entirely with more “efficient” forms of governance, often modeled on corporate structures or technological systems.

Srinivasan's journey along this ideological pipeline is reflected in his evolving views on cryptocurrency. What started as a tool for financial freedom became, in his vision, the foundation for entirely new forms of governance outside traditional state structures. This transformation—from seeing crypto as a means of individual empowerment within existing systems to viewing it as a way to build entirely new political entities—mirrors the broader shift from techno-libertarianism to neo-reaction in Silicon Valley.

As I wrote last year, what makes the Sovereign Individuals's influence particularly concerning is its epistemically authoritarian nature. By presenting technological change as an unstoppable force that would inevitably dissolve traditional democratic institutions, the book provided Silicon Valley with a deterministic narrative that justified the concentration of power in the hands of tech elites as historically inevitable rather than a choice that deserved democratic deliberation.

This is what makes the convergence of crypto, AI, and neo-reactionary ideology so dangerous. If people can’t agree on basic facts, who gets to decide what’s true? The answer, in Yarvin’s world, is the sovereign executive—a singular, unchallenged ruler whose legitimacy derives not from elections, but from sheer control over the information landscape.

James Pogue's remarkable piece of investigative journalism—Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets—traces the movement of these ideas fringes into a sophisticated political movement backed by some of the most powerful figures in technology.

Reporting from the 2022 National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Pogue encounters everyone from “fusty paleocon professors” to mainstream Republican senators, but his focus on the younger cohort is particularly illuminating. They are highly educated young elites who have absorbed Yarvin's critique of democracy and are working to make it political reality.

As Pogue documents, Yarvin's writings during the crisis period didn't just diagnose economic problems—they offered a comprehensive critique of what he called “the Cathedral,” an interlocking system of media, academia, and bureaucracy that he argued maintained ideological control while masking its own power.

The fusion of Austrian economics, techno-libertarianism, and Yarvin's critique of democracy found its perfect vehicle in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. As Pogue documents in Vanity Fair, Balaji Srinivasan emerged as a key figure who helped translate these abstract ideas into a concrete vision for restructuring society.

This vision resonated deeply with Silicon Valley elites who had been influenced by Yarvin's critique of democracy but were seeking concrete mechanisms to implement alternative governance structures. Cryptocurrency offered not just a way to circumvent state monetary control, but also a model for how digital technology could enable new forms of sovereignty.

As Pogue documents, figures like Peter Thiel began to see cryptocurrency not just as a new financial instrument, but as a tool for fundamentally restructuring society. The technology offered a way to make the abstract ideas of Yarvin and The Sovereign Individual concrete. If traditional democracy was hopelessly corrupt, as Yarvin argued, then perhaps blockchain could enable new forms of governance built on immutable code rather than fallible human judgment.

This vision found its perfect technological expression in Bitcoin. Launched in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis by an anonymous creator using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin seemed to validate The Sovereign Individual's core thesis—that technology could enable individuals to opt out of state monetary control. The timing was perfect: just as faith in traditional financial institutions had been shattered, here was a system that promised to replace human judgment with mathematical certainty.

Bitcoin's philosophical underpinnings drew heavily from Austrian economics and libertarian thought, but it was Saifedean Ammous who most explicitly merged these ideas with reactionary politics in his 2018 book The Bitcoin Standard. What began as an economic argument for Bitcoin based on Austrian monetary theory evolved into something far more radical in its later chapters. Particularly telling was Ammous's critique of modern art and architecture, which mirrors almost precisely the fascist aesthetic theory of the early 20th century. When he rails against “degenerate” modern art and architecture in favor of classical forms, he's invoking—whether intentionally or not—the exact language and arguments used by fascists in the 1930s. One German friend's observation to me is that it is "far more striking in the original German."

The Bitcoin community's embrace of figures like Ammous reveals how cryptocurrency became not just a technology or an investment, but a vehicle for reactionary political thought. The idea that Bitcoin would restore some lost golden age of sound money merged seamlessly with broader reactionary narratives about societal decline and the need for restoration of traditional hierarchies.

While figures like Ammous attempted to claim Bitcoin for a reactionary worldview, the technology itself—as Bailey, Rettler and their co-authors argue in Resistance Money—can equally serve liberal and democratic values. The key distinction lies in how we understand Bitcoin's relationship to political institutions.

Where reactionaries see Bitcoin as a tool for replacing democratic governance entirely, the liberal perspective presented in Resistance Money understands it as a check against overreach and a means of preserving individual autonomy within democratic systems. This frames Bitcoin not as a replacement for democratic institutions, but as a technological innovation that can help protect civil liberties and human rights—particularly in contexts where traditional financial systems are used as tools of surveillance or oppression.

This tension between reactionary and liberal interpretations of Bitcoin reflects a broader pattern we've seen throughout our narrative: technological innovations that could enhance human freedom being co-opted into anti-democratic frameworks. Just as Yarvin and others attempted to claim the entire trajectory of technological development as inevitably leading to the dissolution of democracy, figures like Ammous tried to present Bitcoin's monetary properties as necessarily implying a broader reactionary worldview.

From Theory to Practice: The Implementation of Anti-Democratic Ideas

From Yarvin's early writings during the financial crisis to today's constitutional crisis, we can trace a clear intellectual evolution. What began as abstract criticism of democratic institutions has become a concrete blueprint for dismantling them. But the key accelerant in this process was cryptocurrency—it provided both a technological framework and a psychological model for opting out of democratic governance entirely.

But what makes this vision dangerous is not just its hostility to democracy—it’s the way it frames the collapse of democratic governance as an inevitability rather than a choice. This is precisely what I have described as epistemic authoritarianism. Rather than acknowledging that technology is shaped by human agency and political decisions, the Network State vision assumes that technological change has a fixed trajectory, one that will naturally dissolve nation-states and replace them with digitally mediated governance structures. This deterministic thinking leaves no room for public debate, democratic decision-making, or alternative paths for technological development. It tells us that the future has already been decided, and the only choice is whether to embrace it or be left behind.

This deterministic framing also explains why so many libertarians found themselves drifting toward reactionary politics. If democracy is doomed, then why bother defending it? If technology is going to replace governance, then why not accelerate the process? This is how techno-libertarianism became a gateway to neoreaction—it replaced the classical liberal commitment to open debate and incremental progress with an absolutist vision of history that justified abandoning democratic ideals entirely.

When Musk gains control of Treasury payment systems, or Trump declares he won't enforce laws he dislikes, they're implementing ideas incubated in the crypto world. The notion that code can replace democratic institutions, that technical competence should override democratic negotiation, and that private power should supersede public authority—these ideas moved from crypto theory to political practice.

Both Srinivasan's “network state” and Yarvin's critique of democracy see technology as a means of escaping democratic constraints, but they approach it differently. Yarvin advocates for capturing and dismantling democratic institutions from within, while Srinivasan proposes building parallel structures to make them irrelevant. We're now witnessing the convergence of these approaches—using technological control to simultaneously capture and bypass democratic governance.

These ideological frameworks might have remained abstract theorizing if not for a unique convergence of factors that made their implementation suddenly possible. The rise of Trump—a figure simultaneously hostile to democratic institutions and eager to embrace tech oligarchs—presented an unprecedented opportunity. Here was a potential autocrat who didn't just accept Silicon Valley's critique of democracy, but embodied it. His contempt for constitutional constraints, his belief that personal loyalty should override institutional independence, and his view that government should serve private interests aligned perfectly with Silicon Valley's emerging anti-democratic worldview. When combined with unprecedented technological control over information flows, financial systems, and social networks, this created a perfect storm: the ideology that justified dismantling democracy, the political vehicle willing to do it, and the technological capability to make it happen.

The financial crisis created the conditions for anti-democratic thought to take root in Silicon Valley, but the actual transformation occurred through a series of distinct phases, each building on the last. Let's trace this evolution carefully:

The institutional context for this transformation is crucial. Gallup polls show trust in the media fell from 72% to 31% between 1976 to 2024, while distrust in government hit 85% post-2008, according to Pew Research. This erosion of institutional trust created fertile ground for alternative power structures. As the Brookings Institution noted in a 2023 analysis: “Tech leaders increasingly adopt neo-feudal framing of users-as-serfs, reflecting a broader shift away from democratic conceptions of citizenship.”

The danger lies not just in what these operatives are doing, but in how their actions systemically dismantle their capacity for democratic resistance. What we are seeing is an exact implementation of Curtis Yarvin’s “RAGE” doctrine—Retire All Government Employees—that he first proposed in 2012. But what makes this moment particularly significant is how it combines multiple strands of neoreactionary thought into coordinated action. When Yarvin wrote about replacing democratic institutions with corporate governance structures, when he argues that technical competence should override democratic process, he is describing precisely what we’re now watching unfold.

Consider how this maps to Yarvin’s blueprint: First, remove career officials who might resist on legal or constitutional grounds. Then, install private technical infrastructure that makes oversight impossible.

The goal isn’t just to change who runs government agencies—it’s to fundamentally transform how power operates, shifting it from democratic institutions to technical systems controlled by a small elite.

But what makes this implementation particularly dangerous is how it combines Yarvin’s institutional critique with Balaji Srinivasan’s technological vision. Where Yarvin provided the theoretical framework for dismantling the democratic institutions, Srinivasan’s “network state” concept provided practical tools and training. Many of these young operatives came through programs explicitly designed to build parallel governance structures outside of democratic control, operated by Srinivasan.

What we’re witnessing isn’t just a power grab—it’s the culmination of an ideology that has been incubated, tested, and refined for over a decade.

First, these thinkers argued that democracy was inefficient. Then, they created technological tools—cryptocurrency, blockchain governance, and AI-driven decision-making—to bypass democratic institutions entirely. Now, they’re no longer experimenting. They are seizing control of government infrastructure itself, reprogramming it in real-time to function according to their vision.

This is why focusing solely on the technical aspects of what's happening inside agencies misses the deeper transformation underway. Every unauthorized server, every AI model, every removed civil servant represents another step in converting democratic governance into what Yarvin called “neocameralism”—a system where society is run like a corporation, with clear ownership and control rather than democratic deliberation. The infrastructure being built isn't meant to serve democratic ends—it's meant to make democracy itself obsolete.

The strategy of “flooding the zone with shit” was never just about controlling the news cycle—it was about reshaping the conditions of governance itself. The goal was not just to mislead, but to create an environment so chaotic that traditional democratic decision-making would become impossible.

First, they disrupted journalism, replacing truth with engagement-optimized feeds. Now, they are disrupting governance itself. Your news, your politics, your very reality—automated, privatized, and controlled by those who own the network.

And then, once the public lost trust in government, the tech elite could present the solution: a new, AI-driven, algorithmically optimized form of governance. One that wouldn’t be subject to human irrationality, democratic inefficiency, or the unpredictability of elections. Just like social media companies replaced traditional news with algorithmic feeds, these technocrats sought to replace democratic governance with automated decision-making.

What’s happening inside the Department of Government Efficiency is the final phase of this plan. The old democratic institutions, weakened by years of deliberate destabilization, are being replaced in real-time by proprietary AI systems controlled not by elected officials, but by the same network of Silicon Valley operatives who engineered the crisis in the first place.

We are not heading toward this future—we are already living in it.

Government functions that once belonged to democratically accountable institutions are already being transferred to proprietary AI systems, optimized not for justice or equality, but for efficiency and control. Already, decisions about financial regulation, law enforcement priorities, and political dissent are being made by algorithms that no citizen can vote against and no court can oversee. Your rights are no longer determined by a legal framework you can appeal—they are dictated by a set of terms of service, changeable at the whim of those who control the network.

Resistance and Alternatives

Despite the growing influence of these anti-democratic ideas, they have not gone unchallenged. Scholars like Evgeny Morozov have critiqued the “technological solutionism” that underpins much of this thinking. Grassroots movements advocating for digital rights and democratic control of technology have gained traction. Some tech workers themselves have begun organizing against the more extreme visions of their employers.

However, these resistance efforts face an uphill battle against the immense resources and influence of those pushing for a post-democratic future.

And if we do not act now, we may wake up one day to find that democracy was not overthrown in a dramatic coup—but simply deleted, line by line, from the code that governs our lives.

And yet, the most terrifying part? Donald Trump, the supposed strongman at the heart of it all, is oblivious. He has no grand ideological project beyond his own power. He does not understand the system being built around him, nor the fact that his own presidency is merely a vehicle for forces that see him as a useful, temporary battering ram against democracy.
But those around him? They understand perfectly.

J.D. Vance, the Vice President in waiting, has studied Curtis Yarvin’s work. Peter Thiel, his longtime patron, has been funding this vision for over a decade. Balaji Srinivasan is writing the blueprint. Elon Musk is laying the infrastructure. And the young operatives now wiring AI models into the Treasury Department—disbanding civil service, bypassing traditional government, and replacing democratic accountability with technological sovereignty—are working toward a future that will long outlast Trump himself.

This is not about Trump. This is about what comes after him.

Actuarial realities do not favor an aging leader with a declining grasp on policy. But they favor the thirty- and forty-somethings laying the foundation for the post-democratic order. The men who have spent the past decade engineering an exit from democracy are no longer whispering in the dark corners of the internet. They are in power, with money, AI, and a plan. And democracy, in its current form, has never been closer to the brink.

Vox Populi, Vox Dei, Elon Musk declares from his digital throne—the voice of the people is the voice of God.

But in the world they are building, the people have no voice. The algorithms speak for them. The executives decide for them. The future is optimized, efficient, and entirely out of their hands.

Vox Populi, Vox Dei. They whisper it, as they lock the gates.