Introduction: Attempting The Impossible

The biggest criticism of David’s book, The Great Taking, was that it offered no solutions. While it lays out the problem with expert precision—thoroughly unsettling the reader in the process—it never reached the natural next step: “And here is what you can do about it.” For many, that omission was a bitter pill to swallow. They wanted a step-by-step guide on how to protect themselves and their families from the coming flood. But no life jacket was provided.

Having become friends with David over the past three years, I understand that the absence of proposed solutions was neither an oversight nor an attempt to simply blackpill the reader. Rather, it reflects his sincere belief that something this vast and this evil cannot be fully defended against. Even if one manages to escape the first wave of confiscation and the Great Taking itself, it will be followed up with others—each designed to ensnare those who evaded the last. This is not hypothetical. History offers countless examples in which, after the majority has been impoverished, the remaining pockets of wealth are inevitably targeted.

The most egregious expropriation of wealth rarely appears at the outset of a crisis. It emerges at the end—after society has already been broken and reset. In Communist Russia, the revolution and the murder of the Romanov dynasty came first. Economic collapse followed, then years of scarcity and impoverishment. Only once the masses were fully crushed, having already lost most of what they owned, were the remaining productive classes targeted. A population rendered desperate was easily mobilised to justify the seizure of land, businesses, and assets.

A similar pattern unfolded during the Great Depression. It began with the stock market collapse, which triggered a cascading credit contraction and the failure of banks across the country. Depositors saw their savings wiped out as institutions closed their doors. With the banking system in chaos, credit froze, collateral values collapsed, and industrial activity ground to a halt. Millions were thrown out of work. Mortgages fell into delinquency en-masse and many citizens wound up losing their family farms to the big banks.

With no access to refinancing, even solvent families were losing their properties. For those who managed to survive, physical gold coins held outside the banking system, appeared to be the natural place to store what remained of their wealth. Or so they thought. Once again, after society had been sufficiently weakened, the state moved against the survivors. The gold holders. Those who believed they had escaped the asset seizure were quickly brought back to reality.

If you want to understand what happens during a systemic unwind, this is the blueprint. First, the credit system fails. Next, assets are liquidated or seized through refinancing failure—or through mechanisms like the Great Taking. Finally, whatever wealth remains outside the system is targeted and pulled back in. With asset tokenization and digital IDs on the near horizon, it is not difficult to imagine that physical and unregistered wealth—sitting beyond institutional control—could be targeted in the near future.

These mass looting events are never straightforward. The narratives are layered, distorted, and deliberately opaque, ensuring that most people neither see what is coming nor understand what is happening until it is far too late. Some may even participate in the confiscation of other citizens’ wealth, genuinely believing they are advancing a form of social justice.

With so many young people ideologically captured—and simultaneously locked out of housing, without any realistic path to prosperity—is it really unthinkable that a portion of them could be radicalized into supporting, or even participating in, the expropriation of property from so-called “selfish boomers”? When surveyed, over 50% of young people in America—the most free nation on earth, with the strongest property rights ever established—already support wealth redistribution! It is not absurd to imagine that a small fraction of them could be pushed toward violent action if it were sanctioned, justified, or encouraged by the state.

For all these reasons, any serious discussion about protection from something like the Great Taking is inherently complex. It must go far beyond simplistic advice such as “just buy gold.” The real threat is not isolated confiscation, but a full-spectrum breakdown: counterparty failures, collapsing collateral chains, evaporating liquidity, and the shutdown of the very channels through which assets are normally transferred or sold—followed by societal implosion and a rising tide of anger, fear, and despair.

In such an environment, survival is not about beating the system—it is about not being swallowed by it. The Great Depression shows us that when the collapse reaches its bottom, they come not only for the vulnerable, but for the last remaining stores of independent wealth. David, as a lifelong student of the Great Depression, understood this well. He knew that any attempt to lay out a solution in his book would be a) woefully inadequate b) give people a false sense of security and c) reduce the likelihood they would feel compelled to push back against the Great Taking in more meaningful ways.

My point is, the idea there is a perfect, simple solution to this kind of risk must be dispelled. There is no single hedge against systemic collapse, only a maze of vulnerabilities and risks to try and deal with. Protecting your family against the Great Taking requires a fundamental shift in both mindset and lifestyle. That’s why I’m writing this from a homestead, where my family and I take responsibility for our own food, water, and energy, as much as possible. I am surrounded by other farms, each with its own fresh water supply, off-grid heating, and food production. It’s no coincidence that David Rogers Webb has chosen a similar way of life, as did Matt Smith @ Crisis Investing and Doug Casey, two of the other early voices who helped raise awareness of the Great Taking.

Put simply, those of us who truly understand the risks before us—and what is likely to follow when the financial system finally unravels—are taking serious preventative steps. We recognize that living in dense urban environments while remaining dependent on centralized systems is a terrible idea. We know we need to be out of the cities and at least semi-self-sufficient. The fact that each of us made significant sacrifices to prepare for that future should be instructive in itself. The truth is, we don’t know how bad it could get. But history is very clear on one point: when debt bubbles burst and old systems die—and that is precisely where we are in the cycle—things become chaotic very, very quickly.

A Hard Truth Up Front

If this all sounds like too much effort—and you were hoping for a simple, easy-to-implement answer to the question “How do I prepare for the Great Taking?”—then unfortunately, you’re going to leave this article disappointed.

Real solutions to substantial and complex problems are never easy. They demand:

• Time
• Effort
• Sacrifice
• And, in many cases, genuinely radical decisions

There are no shortcuts here. When it comes to the Great Taking, no amount of clever portfolio restructuring will work if you have not first secured your most basic requirements for survival. History is unequivocal on this point. People endure hard times by minimizing their dependence on centralized systems. That means developing:

• Practical real-world skills
• Self-sufficiency capabilities
• The ability to function when supply chains break and institutions fail

Believing you can protect your wealth while being unable to feed yourself without a supermarket is dangerously naive. And that naivety is precisely what the system relies on. Always remember—those who would like to see you property-less and dependent are always thinking several moves ahead. You need to think several moves ahead +1.

What you’re about to read are, of course, only my opinions—but I hold them firmly. There are no shortcuts to achieving a meaningful level of protection, so I won’t pull any punches. If I’m going to attempt the impossible—by addressing something even David chose not to tackle directly in his book—I will do so honestly.

We are living through an exceptionally dangerous period in history. Navigating it successfully requires both a realistic understanding of the risks before us and right intention: the desire and courage to act decisively, even when certainty is impossible. Without this, my article will be of little use. But for those prepared to take action, there is an opportunity not just to survive the hard times ahead, but to thrive during them. That is my goal—and I invite you to join me on this journey.

What This Framework Can—and Can’t—Do

For those willing to face this reality head-on—who want genuine resilience and meaningful insulation from what’s coming—read on.

Whether the catalyst is the Great Taking itself, or the inevitable collapse of the everything bubble, the framework I’m about to share offers the strongest protection realistically available to us

Just please be aware, it is:

• Not comprehensive — I have focused only on the most important areas.
• Not a panacea — Individual situations vary greatly, and strategies should be tailored to each person’s specific circumstances. Always consider your own needs and do your due diligence before acting.
• Nothing discussed in this article should be taken as financial or legal advice.

So, with that said, let’s get to it.

Let’s Begin By Exiting The Casino

I was recently in a Wealth Preservation Consultation discussing the Great Taking with a client, and I used the following analogy: the global financial system is like a massive, decadent casino. You go inside, and everything looks and feels opulent and secure. You’re made to feel at home, with the hope that you forget you’re in a casino at all. So you stay, and never cash out.

Most of what you consider to be your “wealth”—stocks, bonds, retirement accounts, digital assets—are actually just chips you’re told possess real value. They feel real, and for a while, it seems like you own some of them. But the reality is, those chips are an illusion. The real wealth sits in the cashier’s booth, controlled entirely by the house.

Obviously the owners of the casino are well aware that it’s about to go bust—and if this happens, the rules suddenly change—and you lose it all. The chips in your hand transform from claims to real value, to nothing but redundant plastic tokens. They are worthless if you haven’t converted them into something real before the collapse. Meanwhile, all of the actual wealth that was stored in the cashiers booth disappears in an instant, taken by the casino’s owners.

Oh, and as you’re leaving, they decide to take your wallet — and the watch on your wrist too — because everything in the casino belongs to the casino. It’s only at that moment you realize the whole place was a scam, run by the mafia all along. But it’s too late. You walk out with nothing. This is a very apt comparison for the financial system. That’s not to say the casino can’t be profitable while the doors are still open — but you must recognize that it is a casino. And to survive its inevitable bankruptcy, you have to be willing to step outside its cozy confines.

Building Your Citadel

When you realize the aforementioned, action becomes unavoidable. This is where my Citadel Strategy comes in. A citadel is more than a fortress—it is the last stronghold, the final bastion of security when everything else has fallen. Historically, it was the heart of a city’s defences, built to protect people and vital resources through prolonged siege. In the context of the Great Taking, the Citadel Strategy serves the same purpose.

It is a deliberately layered set of defences — mental, physical, financial, and social — designed to protect you and your family, so that even a sustained attempt to seize your wealth or push you into dependency is unlikely to succeed. If the outer layers fail or turn hostile, the next layer rises, and the next, each adding complexity and resilience, ensuring that the inner stronghold—completely self-sustaining and independent of the other layers—remains untouched.

The idea is to build multiple layers of protection, insulation and redundancies into your life, both financial and otherwise, to ensure you and your family are able to survive the most challenging of circumstances. It’s your roadmap for walking out of the casino, and into a more meaningful, and prosperous future, before the house comes to take it all. It’s about converting your casino chips into real, tangible assets you hold in your own possession. It’s about building a life where you don’t need the casino to survive, and instead, you’re surrounded by loved ones, community and real wealth. Then having the strategies and mindset to hold onto it. This is how I personally am preparing for the hard times ahead, including the Great Taking. For what it’s worth, I walk the walk, and everything I describe below—is what me and my family are already doing.

The strategy is built around 5 rings of defence.

Ring 0: The Inner Keep – The Sovereign Mindset – Cultivate radical personal responsibility and mental resilience; recognize that debt is a primary tool of control and commit to breaking its shackles.

Ring 1: The Physical Bastion – The Unassailable Homestead – Build a debt-free, off-grid homestead surrounded by productive assets that provide food, energy, water, and income. This will give you complete independence from the system.

Ring 2: The Treasury – The Ark of Real Value – Hold portable, physical wealth in precious metals, held securely and compartmentalized, beyond the reach of confiscation.

Ring 3: The Liquid Veins – The River of Cash – Maintain cash reserves in diversified currencies to navigate immediate and medium-term crises.

Ring 4: The Web of Influence – The Network of Reciprocity – Build trusted family and community networks for mutual aid, barter, and collective resilience.

Ring 5: The Outer Shadow – The Legal and Jurisdictional Moat – Use legal, geographic, and structural strategies to shield assets and create asymmetric protection from asset seizure.

Ring 0: The Inner Keep – The Sovereign Mindset

This is the foundation of the Citadel Strategy. Before buying a single ounce of silver or an acre of land, you must secure the “Inner Keep”—your own mind. This is the psychological fortress where you deprogram yourself from reliance on a system that plans to dispossess you. It is about moving from dependency to radical personal responsibility.

The system’s greatest weapon is normalcy bias—the tendency to assume tomorrow will look like today. This bias blinds people to incrementalism: the deliberate, step-by-step erosion of freedom, security, and wealth. Each new regulation, cost increase, or loss of rights may seem minor on its own, but over time these small changes accumulate, steering people toward eventual annihilation. Even shocks that should provoke outrage—like the mass poisoning of family and friends during Covid or the revelations and gaslighting surrounding the Epstein files—are gradually reframed and normalized, reinforcing the illusion that all is “normal.” But what is happening isn’t normal—it’s deeply disturbing.

This realization should not paralyze you with fear. On the contrary, it should ignite action. Falling into despair, or convincing yourself that there is no hope, is itself part of the psychological operation designed to neutralize you. You must reject it. The correct response is to seize your agency—to recognize that you are responsible for your own survival, security, and future, and to act accordingly.

Seizing your agency means moving from victim to architect. It means accepting that nobody is coming to save you—and that you alone are responsible for your success or failure in life. This shift in mindset is deeply empowering. It moves you from passive dependence to active participant, and enables you to build a life resilient to shocks of all kinds, including the Great Taking. When you do this, you become sovereign, as our creator intended.

Cultivating a Depression-Era Attitude

To strengthen the Inner Keep, we need to cultivate what I call a “Depression-Era attitude.” This is the mindset of the generation that survived the Great Depression—grounded in practical resilience and real-world self-reliance. We can break it down into the three R’s:

• Readiness: Think ahead. Don’t wait for the news to tell you something’s wrong—you plan for crisis long before it arrives. Those who survived the Great Depression did so because they were already prepared going into it.
• Resourcefulness: We should anticipate unexpected problems. Resourcefulness is the ability to meet them calmly, improvise, and see problems as puzzles rather than dead ends.
• Ruggedness: This is our ability to endure discomfort and maintain the stamina to keep moving forward when conditions deteriorate. It is built by keeping life simple and reducing our dependence on modern comforts. Voluntary hardship during good times—intense daily exercise, cold showers, fasting—cultivates this kind of grit. It ensures that when real hardship arrives, you are already psychologically adapted to it.

The Inner Keep—fortified with a sovereign mindset and a Depression-Era attitude—is the bedrock of the entire Citadel. Every other fortification depends on it. Without Ring 0, you are unlikely to succeed in protecting your family’s wealth, and quality of life. It is what allows you to see clearly, act decisively, and take full responsibility for your future. The good news is that once you build out the inner keep, it cannot be taken from you. It is the one asset that is truly immune to confiscation.

The Shackles of Debt: The Primary Lever of Control

Before you can build a Citadel, you must first ensure you are not standing on quicksand. The most dangerous vulnerability in the face of the Great Taking is debt. You must understand this clearly: If you have debt, you do not own your assets. If you have a mortgage, the bank owns your home; you are merely a tenant with a liability. If you have a car loan, the dealership owns the vehicle. In a systemic collapse or a Great Taking type event, debt is the primary lever used to strip wealth from the population. This is something David has mentioned many times in interviews.

In a deflationary collapse—which often precedes or accompanies these resets—asset prices collapse, wages vanish, and both credit and liquidity dries up. However, the nominal value of your debt remains fixed. You could find yourself owing $500,000 on a home that is suddenly worth $100,000, while your income has been cut in half, or lost entirely. This was the trap during the Great Depression that allowed institutions to foreclose on millions of properties, transferring real assets (land and housing) from the people to the banks for pennies on the dollar. At the height of the Great Depression unemployment was over 25% and over 60% of all mortgages were in delinquency. Over 1000 properties per day were being foreclosed on. I expect these numbers could be eclipsed in the coming downturn.

For these reasons, the ruthless elimination of all debt—consumer, vehicle, and especially mortgage—is not just a financial goal; it is a prerequisite to financial and spiritual sovereignty. You cannot be sovereign if you are in bondage to the very system you are trying to protect yourself against. Pay it off, downsize, or sell the asset to clear the note. Better to live smaller in a debt free property that is truly yours, than in a mansion or large acreage that belongs to the bank. So beyond developing a sovereign mindset, step number one financially speaking, is to break the shackles of debt.

Now let’s move on to the five outer rings.

Ring 1: The Physical Bastion – The Unassailable Homestead

The most important protection against systemic collapse and the Great Taking is what I call the Unassailable Homestead. In a fragile future, a homestead is far more than a place to live — it is the foundation of your families security and resilience, and a space you can truly thrive. If everything else fails, it keeps you safe, allows you to meet your basic needs, and supports both mental and physical wellbeing. Over the long term, it also reduces costs, can generate income, and insulates you from financial shocks by removing your dependence on volatile energy and food prices.

History shows its importance. During the Great Depression, the key factor determining whether someone survived or ended up in a soup line was their exposure to debt and their immediate living situation. Farmers who owned their land outright generally survived with relative ease. When the credit system failed, unemployment spiked, and cash became scarce, they were largely unaffected—they could provide for themselves in-house. Fortunately for us, natures abundance doesn’t follow the business cycle.

Worth pointing out, the modern way of living, now ubiquitous in the West, is a complete historical aberration. Our ancestors rightly built layers of insulation during the good times knowing that hardship was always one crisis away. Waiting until hardship arrives means you’ve already missed the boat. By then, it’s too late. This is why you should aspire to build your Unassailable Homestead as soon as possible. It should be debt-free, have off-grid solutions, be located away from major urban centers, and ideally surrounded by like-minded, self-reliant neighbors. This creates many layers of additional protection in terms of food, water, and security, while offering a marketplace right there on your doorstop for trade and barter, should a crisis suddenly emerge.

It doesn’t need to be an all-singing, all-dancing farm. Simply owning land where you can grow food and practice self-reliance is enough. For those with less capital, living in a camper, trailer, or tiny house for a year or two to secure the land is often worth the sacrifice. I speak from experience: I lived on an 8-meter boat for five years to save money and eventually buy my homestead debt-free.

For many, this represents a radical departure from their previous life. But if real peace of mind is the goal, this is how it is built. Right now, we are in the midst of a major property bubble in the West. When it bursts, residential real estate values will collapse. At the moment, there is still an opportunity to sell these overvalued ‘assets’ (soon to be liabilities) and use the proceeds to acquire property that will truly serve your needs in a crisis — the kind of property that becomes far more desirable, not less, when SHTF.

This kind of property is more than a home; it’s a base for your family and your real-world assets. Our great-grandparents didn’t own stocks or NFTs. They invested in themselves and their farms. Just think how wild it is that today, millions of people have seven digit brokerage accounts and yet have no way to feed themselves or survive a cold winter without centralized systems. They are nominally wealthy, but in practical terms, they are poorer than poor.

When a real-world crisis strikes, be that the Great Taking or some other major systemic shock, the humble farmer will outlast them — both financially and practically. Our great grandparents would have never put themselves in such a sad position. They understood that the family homestead, was not only their primary investment, but their primary means of survival. They never expected big daddy government to keep them. The idea would have been absurd. It’s a stark reminder of just how dependent—and psychologically backward—we’ve become. The Unassailable Homestead fixes that.

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Some Ideas for Strategic Land Acquisition:

• Location, Location, Obscurity: Prioritize low population density areas with a culture of self-reliance. Avoid locations near large government facilities, dams, power plants, landfills, or military bases. Consider access to natural resources, proximity to borders or waterways, and risks like forest fires, flooding, or extreme weather. Choose a site that maximizes both security and sustainability.
• The Water Imperative: Reliable water is non-negotiable. A well is essential—test its flow and quality. Supplement with rainwater harvesting systems, gravity-fed filters, and storage tanks to create redundancies. Water access determines how resilient your homestead can be, both for daily needs and in crisis.
• Title and Ownership: Debt is vulnerability. Own your property free and clear. Explore strategies for pursuing allodial title or a land patent, which can shield your property from taxes and seizure. Keep physical copies of deeds and land registry documents. Living modestly and debt-free is far safer than stretching to acquire a “dream” property with loans.
• Asset Diversification: Your homestead is a primary survival asset, but it can also generate income. Sell surplus produce, firewood, or livestock. Install a small sawmill, greenhouse, or solar-powered workshop. Turning your land into productive, real-world assets ensures it holds tangible value, even in extreme economic conditions.

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Turning Your Homestead Into an Off-Grid Fortress:

• Energy Independence: Design a layered energy system. A primary solar array with lithium-ion battery bank, backed by a propane or diesel generator, covers daily needs. A secondary smaller solar setup should handle critical loads—well pump, fridge, security systems. Also, get comfortable with a low-tech, low energy-use lifestyle. This isn’t a sacrifice, it’s a return to reality. The American dream is actually a nightmare, one that made you sick, weak and mentally unwell. Of course, ensure you have a wood stove and access to firewood, either on your property or nearby.
• Food Production Systems: Go beyond a simple garden. Build a permaculture food forest with fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, and perennial vegetables that produce food with little need for further input. Establish annual gardens for staples like potatoes, beans, and corn. Include small livestock: chickens for eggs and meat, goats for milk, rabbits for protein. Save seeds, compost, and rotate crops. The goal is a homestead capable of supplying a decent portion of your family’s food without requiring full-time labor.
• The Food Pantry: One of the cheapest and most important “investments” you can make — which can be set up almost immediately — is a food pantry stocked with a year’s supply of food. Yet so few people actually have one, even though most of us are aware that if supply chains falter, supermarkets will empty in a matter of days! If you take one action after reading this article, let it be this. Create a food store. On a homestead, this is especially easy to implement. With space to store cans, jars, and plenty of surplus produce, you can preserve food year-round and build real food security.

• Security in Depth: Security goes beyond firearms, although you absolutely should own and become proficient with whatever is legally available in your country. Beyond this use natural and physical barriers: perimeter fences, thorny hedges, ditches, or berms. Protect the property with dogs, alarms, and surveillance systems. Create a family defence plan and a safe place for relatives who can’t secure their own homestead. Blend into the local community, avoid displaying wealth, and practice operational security. Physical assets may survive systemic collapse, but human threats require strategy and foresight.

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Land & Forestry As an Investment Class

Developing a homestead is one of the most practical ways to grow real, tangible wealth. Over the coming decade, demand for properties like this is only going to increase. At the same time, supply will collapse as prices skyrocket and more people rush to get out of the cities.

Any improvements you make along the way directly increase the value of the land. Things like:

• Planting fruit trees or trees for timber
• Establishing gardens or fruit orchards
• Digging ponds and stocking them with fish
• Adding off-grid energy systems and infrastructure
• Maintaining a herd of cattle or flock of sheep

Similarly, I also recommend land in general as an investment. This could be parcels of land or forestry separate from your main dwelling, held for capital appreciation and to provide you with additional resources. Unlike most assets, land is largely uncorrelated with the stock market and tends to move more in line with gold. In my opinion, at some point land will become nearly impossible for regular people to buy—as the elites are snatching it all up, which tells us something important. Securing some now is vital!

Of course, land is also inherently Great-Taking-proof. Owning it outright ensures it cannot be collateralized in any way. A smart strategy is to invest in land close-by—within about 45 minutes of your main property. This creates a secondary asset that’s close enough to manage, yet completely separate from your primary homestead. If you ever decide to sell it, you can do so without affecting your main property, making it a fully independent asset.

A Final Word of Warning

When you choose to go back to the land, particularly if you spent your life living in the city, expect some opposition from friends and family who don’t see what you see. Going against the grain always provokes pushback. My wife and I experienced the exact same thing. A true contrarian knows this is a good sign; siding with the crowd during these periods of history is almost always a terrible decision. Similarly, doomers will tell you, “It’s pointless; they’ll send drone swarms to kill you and seize your homestead,” or “good luck when the roving mobs come to loot you.” These people are irrelevant and destined to be the first to fall.

They don’t have a sovereign mindset—they have a slave mindset. The battle has barely begun, and they’ve already surrendered. Worse, they are actively seeking to poison others, and deter you from taking action. That is unforgivable. We know the risks; our task is to find solutions. But for these people, your action is threatening—because it holds a mirror to their cowardice or laziness.

I suggest reducing your exposure to these kinds of people as much as possible. When these people appear in my comments section, it’s an instant block. They don’t want to be helped, only to deride those who are taking action to make themselves feel better about their own inaction. It’s about as bad a take as you could have. There has never been a point in history where taking preventative action didn’t make sense and increase a person’s chances of success.

Yes, there are no guarantees, and there is every chance that a true tyranny will turn its attention to the survivors also—I covered this in my introduction, but the future is not a foregone conclusion. Irrespective of what happens, building your Citadel will give you and your family far more health, happiness, and opportunity, than you would otherwise have had. Meanwhile, Mr. Doomer will be shipped off to the nearest 5-minute city at the first sign of trouble — having lost it all because “there was no point in preparing” and thus, he was left with no other option.

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Ring 2: The Treasury – The Ark of Real Value

This ring is the repository of your portable wealth. It is designed to survive the collapse of the fiat currency system and serve as the foundation for a new one. To understand why this ring is necessary, we must look at the inevitable destination of the current financial path. Everything we see is pointing to a financial reset. I was predicting this long before I knew about the Great Taking, and I remain steadfast in that opinion.

Why Metals Are The Best Store of Wealth To Protect from the Great Taking

When you hold a physical gold/silver coin or bar in your hand, you possess the asset outright—it is not a promise to pay, it is value itself. This is the only asset class that exists entirely outside the digital ledger and the reach of a sudden default or confiscation. Right now, we are seeing a rush into precious metals as key financial players realize the massive default that is incoming. Take heed. It’s no surprise to me that since the Great Taking book was released, the gold price has more than doubled.

The Trinity of Metals

Gold (The Core): Physical gold is the ultimate long-term store of wealth, a role it has fulfilled for over five millennia. Unlike financial or digital assets, it cannot be defaulted on, wiped out in a fiscal crisis, destroyed by a cyberattack, or lost to a counterparty. This makes it the lowest-risk asset in the world, and yet, despite this, it has been the best-performing asset over the past 25 years.

As the financial system resets, it does so against gold, ensuring strong demand from central banks and wealthy families for decades to come. In the context of the Great Taking, the foundation of your wealth preservation must begin with gold. It is the bedrock of any portfolio—a principle you can explore further in my article on the Wealth Preservation Pyramid.

In order to maintain true flexibility and liquidity, you must diversify both the forms of gold you hold and their storage locations. Gold is the densest, most portable store of value—far easier to transport in a crisis than silver—making it the cornerstone of any robust Citadel strategy.

• Diverse Types and Sizes: Do not limit yourself to standard 1-ounce coins. You should acquire a mix of different types of gold—such as sovereign coins (American Eagles, Canadian Maples, Krugerrands), gold jewellery, ex-circulation gold and bars from reputable refiners. Each type of gold has a unique role to play in your portfolio.
  
  Of course, be aware of hidden legal traps. Coins of the realm, for example, could be targeted in a confiscation because they function as legal tender—I’ve discussed this in past articles. While vaulting has its place, placing 100% of your wealth with counterparties is a dangerous strategy during a major systemic crisis or financial reset. In such scenarios, these assets become low-hanging fruit for bankrupt governments.
• Granular Liquidity: I also recommend fractional gold bars in 1 g and 2.5 g (or 2 g) sizes, along with 1/10 oz and 1/4 oz coins. As gold continues to reprice upward against debt-based assets, these smaller units allow you to liquidate only what you need, when you need it—rather than being forced to sell a full ounce to cover a minor expense. Just as importantly, fractional gold future proofs your portfolio. Already in Europe, sales of goods (including metals) above €10,000 trigger mandatory reporting.

Silver (The Circulation): Silver is best viewed not as an investment, but as your day-to-day barter currency. Pre-1965 US 90% “junk silver” coins are ideal: universally recognized, easily divisible, and can be bought very close to spot. Supplement them with generic 1-ounce and 10-ounce rounds or bars. In a true crisis, silver becomes a practical payment mechanism to buy goods and services, giving you real liquidity and flexibility even when conventional money loses its value.

Platinum Group Metals (The Hedge): A smaller allocation (5-10%) to platinum and palladium, whilst not necessary, can provide diversification. These metals have significant industrial demand and often move somewhat independently of gold and silver, protecting you if one market is manipulated or suppressed, or a confiscation order makes our preferred metals illiquid for a period of time.

Financial Privacy: The Digital Cloak

Before acquiring physical metals, it’s essential to obscure the trail that leads to them. This is a critical step in protecting your wealth from potential future confiscations. While gold and silver in your possession cannot be lost to the Great Taking, history shows they can still be targeted in subsequent waves of seizure.

• Breaking the Chain of Custody: Avoid purchasing metals using a credit card, bank transfer, or check that creates a permanent record linking your identity to the specific assets. Use cash whenever possible. The goal is to ensure that there is no centralized database listing your name next to your holdings. Be aware of any reporting thresholds in terms of amount also. In the UK, for example, buying more than £5000 of gold in a single purchase or £10,000 in a 12 month period from the same dealer must be kept on file. If the government requests this information, the company must turn it over.
• Records of Your Transactions: If you maintain digital records or physical receipts of your holdings, store these records on devices or USB drives that are encrypted, and in a private location (e.g. a safety deposit box). For obvious reasons your gold and silver should not be listed on any official document such as a will or insurance policy—lest you are happy advertising your wealth to a system seeking to dispossess you of it.
• The Principle of Compartmentalization: Never, ever store all your wealth in a single location—not even in the best safe. Your Citadel’s treasury should be divided into at least three, and ideally five, separate locations. For example, one location could be buried somewhere obscure; another at a trusted family member’s property; a third in a selection of private vaults outside your country.
• Prepare For Potential Confiscation: Gold confiscations are as old as time. Failing to factor them into your broader strategy — and your gold portfolio — is a serious mistake. Having studied past confiscations extensively, I can say that effective protection requires careful planning, far too much to cover here. That said, holding some gold in the most trustworthy offshore vault possible, in the correct jurisdiction, is a good place to start.

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Ring 3: The Liquid Veins – The River of Cash

While the ultimate goal is to move beyond fiat currency, the financial reset will almost certainly unfold in stages. During the phase when the system is stressed but not yet fully broken, physical cash remains king. But what happens if banks begin to fail or governments impose strict withdrawal limits, as happened to Greek citizens during the Eurozone crisis? Banks could deny access to your deposits, ATMs could go dark, and yet cash will still be essential to survive.

Be warned: Deposits held in the bank are not your own. It’s a loan unto the bank and therefore exposed to 100% loss and an eventual bank bail-in. Deposit insurance schemes are worthless and in a true crisis even solvent banks and well run credit unions are at risk. Many of them will have a target on their back given it will be the Federal Reserve system who picks the winners and losers.

Even without a full blown banking collapse, it’s becoming worryingly normal for bank accounts to be weaponized—just look at the Canadian truckers’ protest. Having some physical cash is one way to protect against this. While fiat currencies are clearly a terrible form of long-term wealth preservation, in the short to medium term, they remain critical for our day to day economic survival. History shows us that before people lose their assets—they first lose their liquidity. Those who maintain it, ensure they can buy essentials, avoid incurring debts, and travel, whilst those who failed to prepare are busy rioting outside shuttered banks.

For this reason, you should keep enough cash on hand to cover at least three months of expenses. For those preparing for a Great Taking scenario, a more comprehensive approach is the cash ladder.

The Cash Ladder:

• Tier 1 (Immediate): $5,000-$10,000 in small bills (1s,5s, 10s,20s) stored in a safe location. This is for the first 30-90 days of a crisis, for buying last-minute supplies or paying for local services.
• Tier 2 (Strategic Reserve): A larger sum, $10,000-$20,000, set aside for an extended crisis which includes withdrawal limits. This is your bridge for a 6-12 month period of disruption.
• Tier 3 (Go Fund): $1,000-$2,000 in mixed bills, hidden in your vehicle or a grab-and-go travel bag. This is for emergencies that require immediate evacuation or for a crisis situation which emerges whilst your traveling.
• Currency Diversification: It’s smart to not rely solely on your local currency. Hold a portion of your Tier 2 and Tier 3 cash in desirable foreign currencies such as the U.S. Dollar (USD), Swiss Francs (CHF) and to a lesser extent, Euros (EUR) or Chinese Yuan (CNY), depending on your location.

Are Our Retirement Accounts at Risk?

The short answer is yes, our retirement accounts are sitting ducks. One of the hardest conversations I have with clients is explaining that, regardless of whether the Great Taking occurs, their pension is extremely vulnerable to total loss. The entire system is structurally broken. Most pension funds are undercapitalized, fragile by design, and fundamentally unsustainable — hollow shells propped up by promises that cannot be kept. And this is before a major financial downturn has even begun!

At the same time, the stock market sits in a historic hyper-bubble, a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. Sovereign debt will be defaulted on — either through the silent theft of inflation or outright repudiation. Yet these two instruments, equities and government debt, form the backbone of most private pension schemes.

In the coming crisis, the vast majority of pension funds, 401(k)s, and retirement accounts will be annihilated. And if the Great Taking does occur, even the most pristine and well-capitalized funds will be seized, leaving beneficiaries with nothing. All of this will unfold alongside collapsing housing prices, banking crisis, and soaring unemployment. This may sound like a doomsday scenario, but that is actually the point. The dominoes have been deliberately arranged this way, so everything fails simultaneously. A controlled demolition that immediately eviscerates the wealth of most citizens.

Of course, for those who have spent a lifetime paying into these systems — and who have spent decades psychologically investing into the illusion that their retirement account will be there and provide security in old age — this is a bitter pill to swallow. The instinctive response is often denial: “But my fund is different…they assure me my fund is safe.” You must resist the temptation of self-delusion.

It goes without saying that government pensions are dead in the water. Our nations are already insolvent. Future payouts will likely devolve into a form of conditional UBI — subsistence-level support tied to behavioral compliance. Anything controlled by government will be used to control you. Period.

Ok, so now we have had our reality check, what can we do about it?

Firstly, for those who can access their pension early, why wait? Keeping it in the fund, ensures it remains vulnerable to all of the above. For those unable to fully liquidate their accounts and convert them into real-world assets, establishing a self-invested personal pension (SIPP) or a self-directed IRA is the next best option. This provides far greater control over the underlying assets. In many jurisdictions, pension funds can be allocated into vaulted metals held in your own name — offering the best chance of preserving both your retirement savings and the assets themselves when the music stops.

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Ring 4: The Web of Influence – A Network of Reciprocity

Wealth is not just what you own, but who you are connected to. In a true systemic crisis, the financial system will freeze, institutions will fail, and the atomized, isolated individual will be helpless. An unassailable homestead and layers of liquidity will ensure your immediate survival, but longer term, you need a network of trusted, capable individuals. A community. This is your most powerful and enduring defence—one that cannot be confiscated, frozen, or devalued by any central authority.

Community Begins at Home

The atomization of modern society did not happen by accident. Over the past century, powerful forces have systematically dismantled the multi-generational family. Children move far from their parents for careers — having been indoctrinated by electronic devices and public schooling. Grandparents are warehoused in nursing homes — desperate institutions designed to drain a lifetime of accumulated wealth before death, ensuring nothing is passed down.

The nuclear family itself has fractured into isolated individuals, each dependent on the system for needs once met by kin. This is not progress; it is a control mechanism. An isolated individual is easy to manage and easy to dispossess. They know this, which is why the scamdemic was so successful. It’s much more difficult to take everything from a man surrounded by three generations of loyal kin; even harder if he has an entire community behind him willing to help protect his property and rights.

A key protection from future hardships is, therefore, rebuilding family bonds. Reconcile with your children or parents. Strengthen bonds with siblings. Consider a return to inter-generational living — where grandparents provide wisdom and childcare, adult children contribute labor, and elders are cared for at home, not abandoned to institutions that quickly consume their estates.

Beyond economics, this rebuilding creates meaning—the profound purpose that comes from sacrifice for those who came before you and those who will come after. The joy of living with grandchildren, the wisdom of elders, the shared pride in building something that outlasts you all. It is your loving connections — not your money — that they want to loot from you the most. A family, rebuilt and united, is the ultimate act of defiance in the modern world—and the best protection against despair and isolation.

The Mutual Aid Pact

Beyond family, you can begin to build alliances within your broader community. Consider local churches, neighbors, and anyone living a similar lifestyle of self-reliance. Reach out. Make connections. Become a resource by buying directly from them—their eggs, their produce, their services. Find ways to offer something of value back to your community, whether skills, labor, or goods from your own surplus.

This is not merely about preparing for crisis; it is about building a network of trusted individuals you can turn to for support. History proves that a unified community is extremely difficult to dispossess. In communist Eastern Europe, the Soviet system crushed individuals and isolated families with ease, but they had no answer for the Polish farmers. Despite decades of pressure, collectivization failed in Poland because the farming communities were too numerous, too interconnected, and too stubborn to break. There were simply too many of them, bound together by shared faith, culture, and mutual dependence.

During the Great Depression, many farmers rallied around neighbors who had fallen behind on their mortgage payments, and ensured auctions of foreclosed went no bid. So families about to lose their homes could buy it back at the lowest price possible. A community rooted in genuine relationships and economic interdependence becomes a fortress that no central authority can breach. This is also where your trade and barter economy comes in. The real ‘real economy’ during a systemic crisis.

Formalize Wherever Possible

As trust deepens, consider formalizing arrangements with your closest allies—3-5 families with complementary skills: medical knowledge, security experience, mechanical ability, agricultural expertise. Draft a plan covering mutual defence, resource sharing, and communication plans—for a worst case scenario. Meet regularly to strengthen bonds. The trust built over shared meals and honest labor is the glue that holds a community together when the pressure comes.

Build a Global Network

Whilst building real world community is imperative, it can take time. The internet allows you to connect with like-minded people worldwide with ease. People who are already building their own Citadels who you can learn from. Cultivate this network now. A global network becomes an important intelligence asset—alerting you to developments across jurisdictions, warning of threats, and potentially offering refuge or partnership.

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Ring 5: The Outer Shadow – The Legal and Jurisdictional Moat

This is the final ring of defense. It leverages legal and geographic strategies, turning the system’s own complexity against itself. Some of these strategies are more complex, costly, or require professional guidance, and may not be feasible for everyone. As the outermost layer, they are less critical than the inner defenses, but they are still worth considering.

Escape the “Securities Entitlement” Trap

The core mechanism of the Great Taking is the legal transformation of ownership into mere “securities entitlement”—a contractual claim that places you behind secured creditors. The solution is to demand physical paper stock certificates. This removes your shares from the DTC or Euroclear system and gives you back direct ownership, bypassing the Great Taking mechanism for equities.

The Dual-Purpose Portfolio

Maintaining a small portfolio of investments within the traditional system can have advantages even in-spite of the Great Taking. This serves two purposes:

• Sacrificial Anode: It makes you appear like a normal citizen, flying under the radar. In a seizure event, this decoy may satisfy the system’s initial appetite, drawing attention away from your main wealth. It can also be used to justify how you are funding your activities.
• Opportunity Fund: A crisis that doesn’t result in the Great Taking will create extraordinary dislocations. Quality assets will trade for pennies. Maintain liquidity to deploy capital when others panic. A properly structured portfolio can leave space to potentially acquire assets at generational discounts.

Digital Minimalism & Online Privacy

Minimize your long-term digital footprint. Use VPNs, privacy-respecting browsers, and encrypted email. This will help keep you invisible to the system ahead of any future wealth confiscations. Your public facing digital identity should be bland, ensuring your real wealth remains as invisible to the system as possible.

International Private Vaults

Establish accounts with non-bank vaulting firms in jurisdictions with strong financial privacy—the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, Austria, Panama, or Singapore. These firms are less likely to be subject to “bail-in” laws. Your gold in a private vault in Zurich is not subject to an executive order signed in Washington.

Foreign Legal Structures

It’s possible to create a Foreign Asset Protection Trust (FAPT) in the Cook Islands or Nevis, or a Nevis LLC. These entities are designed to be extremely difficult and costly for foreign courts to pierce. An asset held by a properly structured Nevis LLC is shielded by a legal and geographic moat that would require years of litigation to breach—making it not worth the effort.

Private Banking Relationships

For those with sufficient assets, private banks in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, or Singapore operate under different legal frameworks than retail banks, offering greater privacy.

Second Residencies and a Plan B

Consider a secondary property within a completely different jurisdictional profile from your primary homestead—a place to retreat if, for any reason, Plan A becomes untenable. Having multiple residences can ensure you have a place to escape to, as a last resort, if you need to leave your home country.

Learn How to Manage Risk Continuously

What I’ve outlined here is only the first step — albeit a substantial one. I’ve focused on the most vital components for obvious reasons; this article is already something of a tome. But risk management is an ongoing process, not a one-time event. The future is unpredictable, and there is no permanently safe position. Unfortunately, most financial advisors and wealth managers are simply not aware of the kinds of risks we are now facing. So we must become competent in protecting and managing our own wealth. Nobody else should be trusted to do this for you.

Twice a year I facilitate Group Coaching for Investors where I support people to learn the same wealth preservation skills and strategies I am using to protect and grow my family’s wealth, going into the reset. For those who would like to join us, our next group begins at the end of February.

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In Closing

As we move into harder times, the goal is not to fight the system head-on—that is a battle you will almost certainly lose. The goal is to defend ourselves against it, by becoming sovereign and resilient. If the Great Taking ensues, the system is engineered to take what is easiest to seize: digital accounts, brokerage portfolios, domestic vaults, mortgaged property, and pension funds or 401(k)s—all of which are neatly catalogued and trapped within the system. At this stage, it’s unlikely we can stop them, but your Citadel, deliberately built across all five rings and standing in the shadows, remains far beyond their reach.

For many, achieving even half of what I have outlined will be a serious undertaking. The good news is many people have already conquered this mountain. There is a tried and tested route, I speak from experience, given I have played the role of mountain guide for many. Whilst the Great Taking would be a catastrophe, we cannot say for certain if, or when, it will occur. What is certain, historically speaking, are cyclical downturns that bring real hardship. Stock market and housing market bubbles will eventually burst. Fiat currencies cannot last forever. Economic depressions are guaranteed in a debt-based system. These are not hypotheticals, but inevitabilities. We are seeing warning signs that all of them are potentially on the immediate horizon.

Personally, I don’t see this path as a sacrifice; I see it as a gift. Moving to a homestead and reducing dependence on systems that no longer serve us—if they ever did—is something to celebrate. Everybody I know who has taken this path is healthier, happier, and living a more meaningful life then they once did. These are the rewards that come from exiting the casino, and returning to what’s real. A genuine alternative. A future worth fighting for. For those who made it this far, I’ll close with a simple truth:

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.”

Take meaningful action, and build a life that allows you to thrive.

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Congressional testimony on the first autonomous AI-powered nation-state attack reveals what changed, and why our defenses aren’t built for it.

On December 17th, 2025, four witnesses testified before a joint session of House Homeland Security subcommittees about something that actually happened: a Chinese Communist Party-sponsored group used Anthropic’s Claude to conduct largely autonomous cyber espionage against approximately 30 US targets.

The witnesses included Logan Graham from Anthropic’s frontier red team, Royal Hansen from Google’s security engineering organization, Eddie Zervigon from Quantum Exchange, and Michael Coates, the former Twitter CISO now running a cybersecurity venture fund.

Something else bothered me more than what the witnesses described. It was the gap between the threat they documented and the solutions they proposed.

From Assistance to Agency

The Anthropic incident represents what threat intelligence teams are now calling the shift “from assistance to agency.”

Prior to this, AI was primarily a productivity tool for attackers: better phishing emails, faster reconnaissance, automated scripting. The September campaign is the first confirmed instance of AI agents conducting the majority of a cyberattack autonomously.

Graham’s testimony laid out the mechanics:

• The attackers built a framework that used Claude to execute multi-stage operations with minimal human involvement.
• A human operator provided targets and general direction.
• Claude did the rest: autonomous reconnaissance against multiple targets in parallel, vulnerability scanning using third-party tools, exploit development, credential harvesting, and data exfiltration.

Human operators intervened only four to six times during the entire campaign for critical decisions.

Everything else ran autonomously at speeds Anthropic described as “thousands of requests per second” and “impossible for human hackers to match.”

Graham estimated the model automated 80-90% of work that previously required humans.

The attackers were sophisticated:

• They used a private obfuscation network to hide their origin.
• They decomposed the attack into small tasks that individually looked benign but formed a malicious pattern when combined.
• And they deceived the model by framing tasks as ethical security testing.

Graham explained it directly: “They broke out the attack into small components that individually looked benign, but taken together form a broad pattern of misuse, and then they deceived the model into believing it was conducting ethical cybersecurity testing.”

Where the Attack Started

Here’s what makes this operationally different from every intrusion defenders have responded to before:

The attacker built the opening stages of the intrusion inside the AI system instead of inside the target company.

The reconnaissance, vulnerability research, and exploit development phases happened in Anthropic’s API. The targets’ security teams never saw those stages because they happened outside their infrastructure.

Traditional intrusion detection assumes you’ll see early indicators: network reconnaissance, scanning activity, lateral movement attempts.

Security teams build alerting around those early-stage signals specifically to catch attacks before they reach objectives.

But if the opening stages happen in systems you don’t monitor, your first visibility comes when the attacker is already executing against your infrastructure.

Michael Coates framed this directly in testimony: “Defenders are often no longer responding to early indicators, but to attacks that are already in progress.”

This changes three fundamental assumptions about how attacks form and become visible:

• Defenders have to assume the opening phase can happen in systems they don’t monitor.
• Oversight needs to connect related activity instead of evaluating actions in isolation.
• And detection can’t rely on linear, human-shaped attack paths because AI systems create intrusion flows that don’t follow the familiar stages defenders are trained to spot.

The Speed Problem I’ve Been Tracking

I’ve spent the past year trying to quantify how fast AI-driven attacks actually execute. Not theoretical speeds. Measured speeds from actual research and operational testing.

MIT’s autonomous agent research demonstrated privilege escalation and exploit chaining in seconds to minutes compared to hours for human operators. Horizon3’s NodeZero testing achieved full privilege escalation in about 60 seconds. CrowdStrike’s 2023 threat hunting data reported average time from compromise to lateral movement at 79 minutes, with the fastest observed breakout times around 7 minutes.

We ran the math at SANS. Using 60-79 minutes as the human benchmark, AI-driven workflows complete the same steps about 120 to 158 times faster.

To keep the figure conservative and credible, we halved those values and set the public number at 47x. That’s a speedup already achievable with publicly available tools like Metasploit. APT-level capabilities are likely much greater.

A decade ago, the advanced persistent threats I helped investigate took three to six months walking through the kill chain from initial compromise to operational goals. By 2023, that timeframe compressed to weeks. Now, with AI reasoning capabilities, movement through networks is measured in seconds. Speed is no longer a metric. It’s the decisive weapon.

This context matters for understanding what happened in the hearing. Anthropic detected the campaign within two weeks of first confirmed offensive activity. That’s actually fast response time given detection complexity.

But during those two weeks, an AI system making thousands of requests per second had continuous access to attempt operations against 30 targets.

The ratio of attack velocity to detection velocity is the problem.

The Coordination Answer to a Speed Problem

Chair Ogles closed the hearing by asking all four witnesses what DHS and CISA should prioritize with limited resources.

Graham: Threat intelligence sharing.

Hansen: Modernization.

Coates: Information sharing on emerging threats.

Zervigon: Transport layer protection.

Information sharing was the consensus answer from the experts in the room.

That’s a human coordination solution to a problem that no longer operates at human speed or follows human-visible attack patterns.

I don’t want to dismiss the value of information sharing. ISACs and ISAOs exist because of sustained effort from people who understood that defenders need visibility into what attackers are doing. That work matters. But information sharing helps humans coordinate with other humans. It doesn’t address what happens when attacks form in systems defenders can’t see, execute 47 times faster than human benchmarks, and no longer follow the linear progression our detection tools expect.

Royal Hansen came closest to naming the real capability gap. He used the cobbler’s children metaphor:

“There are far more defenders in the world than there are attackers, but we need to arm them with that same type of automation. The defenders have to put shoes on. They have to use AI in defense.”

Hansen described specific tools Google already built: Big Sleep and OSS Fuzz for discovering zero-day vulnerabilities before attackers find them, and Code Mender, an AI agent that automatically fixes critical code vulnerabilities, performs root cause analysis, and validates its own patches. This is AI operating at machine speed on the defensive side.

The capability exists. The question is whether defensive teams deploy it fast enough, and whether they have the legal clarity to operate it.

The Unsolved Asymmetry Problem

Chair Ogles said something in his closing remarks that nobody in the room fully addressed:

“Our adversaries are not going to use guardrails. I would argue that they would, quite frankly, be reckless in achieving this goal.”

He’s right. I published a paper for RSA 2025 called “From Asymmetry to Parity: Building a Safe Harbor for AI-Driven Cyber Defense.” The core thesis: the protection of citizens through privacy laws has created an ironic situation where these measures could actually empower cybercriminals by restricting defenders’ data access and technology utilization.

Every witness in that hearing talked about safeguards: Anthropic’s detection mechanisms, Google’s Secure AI Framework, responsible disclosure practices. All necessary work. All constrained to US companies operating under US norms and US laws.

Chinese state-backed models don’t have the safety constraints US labs build into their systems. Criminal organizations using tools like WormGPT operate without acceptable use policies or red teams looking for misuse. Meanwhile, defenders operating under GDPR, CCPA, and the EU AI Act face operational constraints attackers simply don’t have.

The operational friction is real and measurable.

• GDPR requires human oversight for AI decisions that have significant effects, which increases the time it takes to contain breaches from seconds to minutes.
• Cross-border incident response gets delayed because responders need legal permission and data handling agreements before AI analysis of pooled data, even while the attack is active.
• Security teams face GDPR violations or lawsuits when using AI to analyze employee emails, but attackers face no such restrictions when using stolen emails to develop personalized scams.

The current unbalanced regulations may create a safer environment for attackers to operate in than for defenders who seek to protect themselves against attacks.

The DeepSeek Problem and the Framework of No

Graham testified about asymmetry from a different angle:

US companies integrating DeepSeek models are “essentially delegating decision making and trust to China.” Coates backed this up with CrowdStrike research published in November showing DeepSeek generates more vulnerable code when prompts mention topics unfavorable to the CCP.

The baseline vulnerability rate was 19%. When prompts mentioned Tibet, that jumped to 27.2%, nearly a 50% increase. For Falun Gong references, the model refused to generate code 45% of the time despite planning valid responses in its reasoning traces. That’s bias embedded in model weights, not external filters that can be removed.

This connects to something I’ve been writing about for the past year that I call the Framework of No. Most security teams have spent the past two years responding to AI requests with variations of “no” while waiting for perfect policies, perfect tools, perfect understanding. Meanwhile, 96% of employees use AI tools. 70% use them without permission. That’s shadow AI.

The Framework of No doesn’t stop AI usage. It drives AI usage into shadows where security teams can’t see it, can’t govern it, can’t log it. The solution isn’t more prohibition. It’s bringing shadow AI into sunlight where you can actually see what’s happening.

The DeepSeek testimony shows what happens when the Framework of No meets geopolitics.

Companies choosing cheaper or more capable Chinese AI tools are accepting security risks they may not understand. But security teams saying “no” to all AI doesn’t solve that problem. It just means the shadow AI your employees are using might have nation-state bias baked in, and you won’t know because you’re not watching.

What Actually Needs to Happen

I don’t want to criticize testimony without offering what I think was missing.

First, defenders need to adjust detection models for attacks that form outside monitored infrastructure. If the opening stages happen in commercial AI APIs or self-hosted attacker infrastructure, early detection either requires visibility into systems we don’t control or assumes we’ll only see attacks once they’re already in motion. That changes what “early indicator” means operationally.

Second, defenders need AI-powered tools that operate at machine speed. Not better coordination between humans. Actual AI systems that can detect, investigate, and respond at the same velocity attackers operate. Hansen mentioned this with Code Mender. The tools exist. The question is deployment speed across the defender ecosystem.

Third, defenders need legal clarity. The RSA paper I wrote calls for a cybersecurity safe harbor that establishes a protection system granting immunity to entities performing defense in good faith while staying within defined boundaries. CISA 2015 already provides liability protection for companies sharing threat data according to specified requirements. It expires next month. Ranking Member Thanedar raised this in the hearing. He wants a ten-year extension approved immediately. Without that protection, information sharing slows to nothing.

Fourth, we need to be honest about guardrails. Guardrails on US models are necessary but not sufficient. They protect against misuse of those specific models. They don’t protect against Chinese models, Russian models, or criminal infrastructure operating without guardrails. The next attack won’t necessarily use Claude and get caught by Anthropic’s detection systems.

Fifth, security teams need to abandon the Framework of No and move toward what I call Sunlight AI. Bring the shadow AI that’s already happening into visibility where it can be governed. That’s how you find out your employees are using DeepSeek before the CrowdStrike research tells you why that’s a problem.

Writing the Rules or Watching Them Get Written

Graham’s testimony included this line: “We have reached an inflection point in cybersecurity. It is now clear that sophisticated actors will attempt to use AI models to enable cyber attacks at unprecedented scale.”

He also put a time limit on the window:

“If advanced compute flows to the CCP, its national champions could train models that exceed US frontier cyber capabilities. Attacks from these models will be much more difficult to detect and deter.”

The response to an inflection point shouldn’t be more of what we’ve already been doing. Information sharing matters. Faster coordination matters. But when attacks form outside your infrastructure, execute at machine speed, and adapt dynamically during execution, the answer has to be capabilities that match what attackers are deploying.

Representative Luttrell asked the question that cuts to the operational reality:

“Are they lying in wait? Are they sleeping inside the program now and we missed it, and they’re watching you fix the problem, and they know how you fix it, and they’re going to test someone else that’s not as strong?”

Graham confirmed it:

“Sophisticated actors are now doing preparations for the next time, for the next model, for the next capability they can exploit.”

Anthropic caught this one and did everything right: detection, disruption, disclosure, testimony.

The question for the rest of us is what we do before the next attack uses infrastructure nobody is watching, executes at speeds we calculated at 47x faster than human benchmarks, and exploits the asymmetry between constrained defenders and unconstrained attackers.

Either we write the rules, or our adversaries write our future.

The hearing showed Congress understands the threat.

Now defenders need the tools, the legal clarity, and the operational freedom to respond.

The parity window is open. It won’t stay open.

Rob T. Lee is Chief AI Officer & Chief of Research, SANS Institute

A CONVERSATION WE NEED TO HAVE

Let me tell you about September 2, 2025. You probably saw the video—President Trump posted it himself on Truth Social. A boat in the Caribbean, a missile strike, a spectacular explosion. Trump said it was full of “narco-terrorists” from the Tren de Aragua gang. He warned anyone thinking about bringing drugs into America: “BEWARE!”

It was exciting. It was definitive. It was justice being served, or so we were told.

What you didn’t see—what Trump carefully edited out—was what happened next.

Two men survived that first strike. They were clinging to the burning wreckage of their boat, injured, defenseless, no threat to anyone. And then, on orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a second missile was fired. Those two men were, in the words of a government official who watched it happen, “blown apart in the water.”

We know this now because yesterday—November 28, 2025, nearly three months later—The Washington Post published an investigation based on interviews with government officials and military personnel who had direct knowledge of the operation. These whistleblowers risked everything to tell the American people what really happened that day.

The order, according to two people with direct knowledge, was simple: “Kill everybody.”

One official who watched the live drone feed said something that should haunt every American: “If the video of the blast that killed the two survivors were made public, people would be horrified.”

So they made sure you’d never see it.

WHY I’M WRITING THIS

I’m a veteran, fire chief, and disaster responder. I’ve spent most of my adult life in public service. I’ve saved lives, recovered bodies, and told families their loved ones aren’t coming home. I served in the Coast Guard during Vietnam. I’ve responded to disasters across three continents – hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods. I’ve seen what humans do to each other in the worst of times.

But I’ve also seen what happens when good people stand by and do nothing. When they tell themselves that their leaders must know best. When they convince themselves that the people being killed probably deserved it anyway. When they decide that legal niceties like trials and evidence and due process are luxuries we can’t afford anymore.

I’ve studied history. I know what happened in Germany in the 1930s. And I’m watching it happen here, now, in my country.

So I’m writing this because somebody has to say it plainly: We are watching our country commit murder, call it justice, and dare anyone to object.

THE FACTS, WITHOUT THE PROPAGANDA

Here’s what we know happened on September 2, based on reporting from The Washington Post, CNN, ABC News, and other outlets, all citing government and military sources:

The U.S. military was tracking a boat in the Caribbean near Trinidad. Intelligence analysts believed the eleven people aboard were smuggling drugs. Notice I said “believed”—in classified briefings to Congress, Pentagon officials have admitted they don’t actually identify specific individuals before strikes. They just need to “establish that those on board the vessels are affiliated with cartels.” That’s the standard. Not proof. Not warrants. Not due process. Just a belief.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave what’s being described as a verbal directive before the operation: kill everyone on board. Not “neutralize the threat.” Not “disable the vessel.” Kill everybody.

SEAL Team 6 fired a missile. It hit the boat and ignited a massive fire. From command centers and on live drone feeds, military commanders watched the boat burn. Then, as the smoke cleared, they saw something they apparently weren’t expecting: two survivors, clinging to the smoldering wreckage.

This is where it gets important. Under international law—specifically the Geneva Conventions that the United States ratified in 1955—those two men were what’s called “hors de combat.” It’s a French term meaning “out of combat.” They were wounded, defenseless, incapable of fighting, holding on to burning wreckage in the ocean. Under the laws of war that America helped write, they became protected persons the moment they were incapacitated.

Admiral Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley was overseeing the operation from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He told people on a secure conference call that the survivors were “still legitimate targets” because they could “theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.”

Think about that logic for a moment. Two injured men, clinging to a burning boat in the ocean, are a threat because they might have a cell phone and might call for help. So the solution is to kill them.

Bradley ordered a second strike to “fulfill Hegseth’s directive that everyone must be killed.” Another missile was fired. The two men were blown apart in the water.

The boat was hit four times total—twice to kill people, twice more to sink the evidence.

THE COVER-UP

For nearly three months, nobody in the administration told the American people what really happened. Trump posted his edited video. Hegseth went on Fox News and claimed “we knew exactly who was in that boat.” They talked about protecting Americans from drugs and terrorism.

When Pentagon officials briefed the House Armed Services Committee in late October, they told lawmakers the second strike was to sink debris that posed a navigational hazard. Representative Seth Moulton—a Marine Corps veteran who was in that briefing—later said this explanation was “patently absurd.” The idea that wreckage from one small boat in a vast ocean requires a missile strike is, in his words, a lie.

We’re only learning the truth now because people inside the government and military had the courage to talk to journalists. They violated classification rules. They probably ended their careers. They might face prosecution. They did it anyway because they knew what happened was wrong.

THIS WASN’T THE ONLY TIME

Since September 2, the U.S. military has destroyed at least 22 more boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. At least 83 people are dead—probably more. None of them got a trial. None of them got to face their accusers. None of them got to present evidence or call witnesses or appeal to a jury of their peers.

The administration calls them all “narco-terrorists.” But here’s what we know from Pentagon officials’ own admissions to Congress: they don’t know who these people are before they kill them. They see boats, they see behavior that looks suspicious, they make assumptions about cartel affiliation. That’s it.

On October 16, two survivors of a strike were pulled from the water by helicopter and taken to a Navy ship. They were later sent back to Ecuador and Colombia. This proves that capturing survivors was always an option. The September 2 killings weren’t operationally necessary. They were a choice.

So why did protocols change after September 2? If killing those survivors was legal and proper, why did the military suddenly start rescuing people instead? The change itself is an admission that somebody, somewhere, recognized they’d crossed a line.

WHY THIS IS A WAR CRIME

I’m not a lawyer. But I’ve operated under the UCMJ *Uniform Code of Military Justice as well as the Incident Command System (ICS) for decades. I understand chains of command, rules of engagement, and the difference between lawful orders and unlawful ones. So let me explain this in plain English.

The Geneva Conventions—which the United States helped create, signed, and ratified—are very clear about people who are hors de combat. You cannot kill them. Period. It doesn’t matter if they’re enemy soldiers. It doesn’t matter if they’re terrorists. If they’re wounded, sick, shipwrecked, or otherwise unable to fight, they’re protected persons. Killing them is a war crime.

Article 40 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions states: “It is prohibited to order that there shall be no survivors, to threaten an adversary therewith or to conduct hostilities on this basis.”

Hegseth’s “kill everybody” order is a textbook violation of this prohibition. In military terms, it’s called a “no quarter” order. It was a war crime when the Nazis did it in World War II. It’s a war crime now.

The administration’s defense is that we’re in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, so normal rules don’t apply. This legal theory has been rejected by international law experts, the United Nations, our ally the United Kingdom (which stopped sharing intelligence with us because they believe these strikes are illegal), and even some military lawyers inside the Pentagon.

But let’s say, for argument’s sake, that we accept the administration’s theory. Let’s say this is a war. Even in war, you can’t kill wounded survivors. Even in war, you can’t give “no quarter” orders. These rules exist precisely because war brings out the worst in humanity, and we need boundaries.

The former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces during the height of counterterrorism operations put it simply: even if we were at war with these traffickers, an order to kill boat occupants who were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime.”

Since there is no legitimate war between the United States and drug traffickers, killing people in boats amounts to murder.

THE DUTY TO DISOBEY

On November 18, six members of Congress released a video. All of them are veterans—Army, Navy, Air Force, CIA. They spoke directly to active-duty military personnel and intelligence officials:

“Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

President Trump called this “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

Let that sink in. Six military veterans reminded service members of their legal duty under the Uniform Code of Military Justice—the duty to refuse unlawful orders—and the President of the United States accused them of sedition and suggested they should face the death penalty.

The Pentagon opened an investigation into Senator Mark Kelly, a former Navy captain and astronaut, for participating in the video.

Here’s what they’re not telling you: under the UCMJ, under the Manual for Courts-Martial, and under the Nuremberg Principles established after World War II, service members have a duty to disobey unlawful orders. “I was just following orders” is not a defense for war crimes. This has been settled law since 1945.

An order is unlawful if it violates the Constitution, federal law, or international treaties to which the United States is a party. An order to kill wounded, defenseless survivors meets all three criteria.

The six veterans who made that video know something that many Americans have forgotten: the oath service members take is not to the President. It’s to the Constitution. And when those two come into conflict, the Constitution wins.

Why did they feel compelled to make that video in November? Because they were hearing from active-duty troops who were troubled by what they were being ordered to do. Senator Elissa Slotkin said she’d been contacted by service members worried about the legality of the boat strikes and whether they could be held personally liable for the deaths.

Those troops were right to be worried.

TODAY THE CARIBBEAN, TOMORROW YOUR STREET

This is where I need you to really pay attention, because this is about more than boats in the Caribbean.

The precedent being set here is that the U.S. government can kill people based on suspicion alone. No arrest. No charges. No trial. No judge. No jury. No appeals. Just surveillance, assessment of affiliation, and death.

The administration says these are “narco-terrorists” affiliated with “Designated Terrorist Organizations.” That designation—a bureaucratic label applied by the executive branch—is apparently enough to justify execution without trial.

Now ask yourself: what stops this logic from being applied domestically right here on our streets and in your backyard?

We already have gang task forces that track suspected gang members. We have fusion centers that collect intelligence on “persons of interest.” We have predictive policing algorithms that identify people likely to commit crimes. We have the National Guard deployed in Washington, D.C., to “fight crime.”

If the military can kill suspected cartel members in international waters based on affiliation and behavior, why not suspected MS-13 members in Los Angeles? Why not suspect Tren de Aragua members in New York? Why not suspected “domestic terrorists” in your town?

The answer used to be: because we’re a nation of laws. Because the Constitution guarantees due process. Because we don’t execute people without trial.

But that answer is drowning and dying in the Caribbean.

WE’VE SEEN THIS BEFORE

In 1933, Germany was a democracy. It had a constitution, courts, and civil rights. The Weimar Republic had problems—economic chaos, political extremism, street violence—but it was a functioning democratic state.

Then the Reichstag burned. Chancellor Hitler declared a state of emergency. The Reichstag Fire Decree suspended civil liberties “for the protection of the people and the state.” It was temporary, they said. Necessary to deal with the communist threat.

Most Germans weren’t Nazis. Most Germans didn’t want to murder millions of people. But they were tired. They were scared. They wanted order. They wanted someone strong to fix things.

And step by step, decree by decree, emergency by emergency, they got used to it.

They got used to people disappearing in the night. They got used to certain groups being designated as enemies of the state. They got used to the idea that normal legal protections didn’t apply to dangerous people. They got used to looking the other way.

By the time they realized what they’d become, it was too late.

I’m not saying Trump is Hitler. I’m not saying America is Nazi Germany. What I am saying is that the descent into authoritarianism follows patterns. And we’re seeing those patterns now.

It starts with an emergency—real or manufactured. In 1933, it was the communist threat. In 2025, it’s the drug crisis and illegal immigration.

It continues with the designation of enemies who are less than human. In 1933, it was Jews, communists, Romani, and homosexuals. In 2025, it’s “narco-terrorists,” “illegals,” “gang members.”

It requires the suspension of normal legal protections for these designated enemies. “They’re not real citizens.” “They’re terrorists.” “They’ve forfeited their rights.” “The normal rules don’t apply.”

It demands unquestioning loyalty from enforcers. When military lawyers raise concerns, they’re ignored. When the Commander of Southern Command questions the legality, he’s pushed out. When members of Congress remind troops of their duty to refuse unlawful orders, they’re accused of sedition.

It depends on good people going along. Not because they’re evil, but because they’re tired, or scared, or they trust their leaders, or they tell themselves that the people being killed probably deserve it anyway.

The German people didn’t wake up one morning and decide to commit genocide. They got there through a thousand small compromises. Each one seemed reasonable at the time. Each one was presented as necessary for security. Each one was just one more step down a path they didn’t realize they were on.

We are on that path now.

THE CHOICE BEFORE US

Let me be very clear about what we’re facing. This is not a policy dispute. This is not a difference of opinion about border security or drug enforcement. This is a fundamental question about what kind of country we are.

Either we are a nation of laws where even suspected criminals get trials, or we are a nation where the government can kill anyone it labels an enemy.

Either we are a country that follows the Geneva Conventions we helped write, or we are a country that commits war crimes when convenient.

Either we have a Constitution that means something, or we have a piece of paper that powerful people ignore when it gets in their way.

You cannot have it both ways.

And here’s the thing that should terrify every American: if the rules don’t apply to people in boats in the Caribbean, they don’t apply to anyone. The principle is the same whether the target is a suspected drug smuggler off the coast of Trinidad or a suspected gang member in Chicago.

Once you accept that the government can kill people without trial based on suspicion and affiliation, you’ve accepted the end of the rule of law. All that’s left is trust—trust that they’ll only kill the bad people, trust that they’ll never make mistakes, trust that the definition of “bad people” will never expand to include you or someone you love

WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN NOW

First, there must be a full investigation. Not an internal Pentagon review. Not a Justice Department memo. A real investigation with subpoena power, sworn testimony, and consequences for lying.

We need to know:

• Who authorized the “kill everybody” order
• Who executed it
• Who knew about it
• Who lied to Congress about it
• Who classified the drone footage to hide it from the American people

Second, there must be accountability. Admiral Bradley ordered the second strike. He should be court-martialed. Hegseth gave the order to kill everyone. He should face charges—war crimes, murder, conspiracy to commit murder. President Trump authorized and defended these operations. Congress must investigate his role.

The SEAL Team 6 operators who fired that second missile should be questioned. Did they know it was unlawful? Did they object? Were they ordered to fire anyway? Under the UCMJ, they had a duty to refuse. If they didn’t, why not? And if they did refuse but were overruled, who overruled them?

Third, these operations must stop immediately. Every boat strike since September 2 has operated under the same illegal framework. Every person killed since then died without due process, without trial, without the protections guaranteed by the Constitution and international law.

Fourth, we need legislation—clear, explicit, enforceable legislation—that reaffirms the military’s duty to refuse unlawful orders and protects service members who do so. The six veterans who made that video shouldn’t be investigated. They should be commended. And every service member who refuses to participate in these illegal operations should be protected, not punished.

Finally, we need to have a national conversation about who we want to be. Because right now, we’re becoming something our founders would have despised and our grandparents who fought actual Nazis would have rejected.

I’ve worked on disasters all over the world. I’ve seen what happens when governments fail, when the rule of law collapses, when might makes right. It’s not the chaos you’d expect. It’s worse. It’s the slow normalization of horror. It’s good people convincing themselves that terrible things are necessary. It’s the erosion of the shock and shame that should protect us from our worst impulses.

That’s what I’m seeing now in my own country. Not chaos. Normalization.

We saw a boat explode and thought: good, one less threat. We didn’t ask: who were they? What evidence did we have? Did they get a trial?

We’re told there have been 22 more strikes and 83 more deaths, and we think: the system is working. We don’t ask: is this murder?

We hear that survivors were deliberately killed, and we think: they were probably guilty anyway. We don’t ask: when did America start executing people without trial?

This is how it happens. Not with jackboots and concentration camps on day one. With the slow acceptance of the unacceptable. With the gradual redefinition of what’s normal.

THE QUESTION FOR EVERY AMERICAN

I’m going to end with a question, and I want you to really think about your answer.

If you were one of those two men clinging to that burning wreckage, wounded and defenseless, would you want the U.S. military to fire another missile and blow you apart?

Your answer should be no. Obviously no. That’s murder.

But now the harder question: Does your answer change if someone tells you those men were drug smugglers? Does it change if they were murderers? Does it change if they were terrorists?

If your answer changes based on who they were or what they’d done, then you don’t actually believe in the rule of law. You believe in revenge. You believe in mob justice. You believe that some people deserve to die without trial.

And if that’s what you believe, then you’ve already surrendered the Constitution. You’ve already accepted authoritarianism. You’re just haggling over who gets to decide who lives and who dies.

The whole point of due process—of courts and trials and appeals—is that we don’t trust any person or any government to make those decisions in the heat of the moment based on suspicion and anger. We build in delays and procedures and appeals precisely because we know that even good people make mistakes. Especially when they’re scared. Especially when they’re convinced they’re fighting evil.

The men who wrote our Constitution understood this. They’d lived under tyranny. They knew what happened when kings and presidents claimed the power to declare someone an enemy and have them killed. They wrote the Fifth Amendment specifically to prevent it: “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

Not “no citizen.” No person. Because the principle isn’t about nationality. It’s about humanity.

WE ARE AT A CROSSROADS

Every generation faces a moment when it has to decide what kind of country this will be. For the Founders, it was whether to accept tyranny or fight for self-government. For the Civil War generation, it was whether to end slavery or let the nation fracture. For the World War II generation, it was whether to fight fascism or let it consume the world.

This is our moment.

We can accept that our government kills people without trial and calls it justice. We can tell ourselves that it’s necessary, that it’s only happening to bad people, that it could never happen to us. We can look away and hope someone else will object.

Or we can say: no. Not in my name. Not in my country. Not now. Not ever.

I’m a fire chief. A Coast Guard veteran. A disaster responder. A grandfather. I’ve seen the best and worst of humanity. I’ve seen people risk their lives to save strangers. I’ve seen people turn on their neighbors out of fear.

I know which version of America I want my grandchildren to inherit.

The question is: which version will we leave them?

Because what’s happening in the Caribbean isn’t staying in the Caribbean. The precedents being set, the laws being broken, the lies being told—they’re coming home. They’re already here.

If we can kill them without trial, we can kill anyone without trial.

If we can lie about their deaths, we can lie about anything.

If we can punish people for reminding soldiers to obey the law, we’ve lost the law entirely.

This isn’t about drugs. This isn’t about immigration. This isn’t about terrorism.

This is about whether America is still America.

And the answer to that question depends on what we do next.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Don’t just read this and move on. Don’t tell yourself there’s nothing you can do. There is always something you can do.

Contact your representatives in Congress. Tell them you want a full investigation into the September 2 killings and all subsequent boat strikes. Tell them you want accountability for Hegseth, Bradley, and anyone else involved. Tell them you support the six veterans who reminded troops of their duty to refuse unlawful orders.

Support the whistleblowers. The people who risked everything to tell the truth about what happened deserve our gratitude and our protection. If legal defense funds are established for them, contribute. If they face prosecution, speak out.

Talk to people. Share this story. Explain what happened. Help people understand why it matters. Don’t let this become just another outrage that we’re angry about for a day and forget tomorrow.

Support organizations defending civil liberties and the rule of law. The ACLU, Human Rights Watch, veterans’ organizations, constitutional advocacy groups—they’re fighting this battle in courts and Congress. They need resources.

If you’re in the military or know someone who is, remind them of their oath. They swore to support and defend the Constitution. Not the President. Not the Secretary of Defense. The Constitution. And sometimes, defending the Constitution means refusing orders that violate it.

Vote. In every election—federal, state, local—vote for people who believe in the rule of law, who will hold the executive branch accountable, who understand that America’s strength comes from our principles, not from our willingness to abandon them.

Don’t get used to this. That’s the most important thing. Don’t let this become normal. Stay shocked. Stay angry. Stay committed to the idea that America can be better than this.

The descent into authoritarianism depends on good people gradually accepting the unacceptable. Every time we shrug and move on, every time we tell ourselves it’s not that bad, every time we convince ourselves that objecting won’t make a difference—that’s another step down.

We can stop. We can turn around. But only if we refuse to take the next step.

A FINAL WORD FROM A VETERAN

I raised my right hand and swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That oath didn’t come with an expiration date or when I took off the uniform.

I’ve served under multiple presidents, both parties. I’ve followed orders I agreed with and orders I didn’t. I’ve respected the chain of command and the civilian control of the military that makes our democracy work.

But there are some orders no one should follow. There are some actions no one should defend. There are some lies no one should accept.

Killing defenseless survivors is murder. Lying to Congress about it is a crime. Attacking people who object is tyranny.

I won’t accept it. I won’t normalize it. I won’t shut up about it.

And neither should you.

The two men blown apart in the water on September 2 didn’t get a voice. They didn’t get a trial. They didn’t get justice.

The least we can do is tell their story. The least we can do is demand accountability. The least we can do is refuse to become the kind of people—the kind of country—that looks away.

Because if we look away now, we’ll have to keep looking away. And eventually, we won’t recognize what we’ve become.

I’ve seen that happen in other countries. I won’t watch it happen in mine.

Not without a fight.

“It is easy to see where North America stands at present, and whither it is tending. Its rapid progress, due to the most degrading works, has fascinated Europe; but the results of this progress, exclusively material, already appear. Barbarism, profligacy, general bankruptcy, systematic destruction of the native races, idiotic slavery of the conquerors, bound to the most trying and repulsive of lives under the yoke of their own machinery. America might founder in the ocean once for all, and the human race would suffer no loss thereby. Not a saint, not an artist, not a thinker has it produced, unless one may term thought the aptitude for twisting iron for the construction of freight trains. The priests who wear out their lives there cannot create a civilization. Thus far there is no civilization in America, and as far as appearances go, there never will be.”

~ Louis Veuillot, French writer & politician (1813 – 1883), L’Univers

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1. ⚰️ Veuillot’s Eternal Curse 🕯

Louis Veuillot looked westward & saw not a culture in its springtime but a din,

A hammering.

He wrote of America not as though it were an adolescent nation…

On its way to greatness… but as though it were already spent, already hollow.

He heard the noise of railroads being laid, bridges thrown up, factories roaring,

& he recognized the sound for what it was:

A workshop insisting that it was a Civilization.

& he laughed at the idea, though not with joy…

More with the resignation of someone who has seen enough to know…

That no miracle will arrive.

Some people later brushed him off as just another European elitist,

Sneering at the rough frontier.

But there’s something in the texture of his writing,

A tone that isn’t quite contempt, more like weary amusement.

He didn’t hate America; he pitied it. Or maybe he pitied the delusion:

He pointed out that here was a land quick with tools & quick with trade,

But incapable of producing the higher figures…

The saint whose life gathers people into memory,

The poet whose words endure,

& the thinker who ties the moment to eternity.

Without those, the noise would remain just noise.

It’s worth asking what sort of heroes America actually gave itself.

Not saints or prophets, nor even philosophers who could shape the depths of a people.

Instead: The pioneer, the hustler, & the industrialist;

Achetypes obsessed with motion & appetite.

Useful, yes… men who could build railroads or squeeze profit out of steel.

But not the kind of figures who consecrate.

Nor the kind who can leave ruins worth remembering.

Think now of September 11…

Two towers collapsing into dust, not ruins:

They weren’t temples in the way that Rome left temples, or Athens left columns.

They were office blocks, filled with paper,

Computers, staplers, coffee cups, human lives… all gone in smoke.

What lingered afterwards wasn’t the solemn grandeur of a ruin…

But the fluttering of memos drifting over the streets,

Fragments of a bureaucracy scattered like leaves.

It looked, more than anything, like the inside of a filing cabinet…

That had been overturned in a storm.

& in that image, you can hear Veuillot’s whisper:

This was never a Civilization to begin with.

The line people remember (you were dead before you began) feels cruel,

But only because it fits.

A workshop can grow louder, richer, & cover more ground.

It can dazzle with size…

But it cannot give birth to the kinds of souls that make history…

Into something more than machinery & soulless materialism.

At the end, all it can leave behind are broken tools, heaps of dust,

& the fading echo of its own racket.

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2. 🏭 The Machine Triumphant 🩸

By the Time the twentieth century began,

America had built up enough noise to convince itself it was greatness.

The newspapers filled with breathless accounts of railroads cut through forests,

Bridges spanning rivers like threads of steel,

& new cities springing up where the prairie grass had barely been broken.

Everything moved faster, everything grew taller,

& for a while, sheer motion was treated as proof of destiny.

If the skyline continued to climb higher each year,

Surely history was unfolding correctly.

Yet motion isn’t meaning:

A machine can spin endlessly without producing a single vision.

The mythology followed the same rhythm.

The pioneer trudging westward,

The self-made man climbing out of poverty,

The tycoon boasting about iron, oil, & rail…

They were celebrated as emblems of freedom,

But what they really embodied was appetite… appetite disguised as virtue.

Civilizations are usually remembered for the figures they raise up as exemplary:

Rome had its jurists, Christendom its saints, Greece its poets.

America raised up its hustlers & its magnates,

Men whose genius consisted of conquering land or bending steel into profit.

It is telling that the most sacred names in its political catechism…

Became the “Founding Fathers,”

Merchants & lawyers whose legacy was paperwork rather than prophecy.

The noise of industry drowned out what little Silence remained.

A locomotive shrieked across the plains & was praised as a hymn.

A skyscraper clawed at the sky & was treated like a temple.

A factory doubled its output & people nodded as though culture had advanced.

The nation mistook the glare of its lights for illumination,

& in doing so convinced itself that it had discovered a destiny.

Yet no lamp glows forever.

Behind the brightness, the shadows grew only deeper.

One can see it most clearly in the way America spoke about itself.

Progress was the favourite word… progress in size, speed, & wealth.

But progress toward what?

To move faster & higher isn’t the same as to move toward a destination.

The very restlessness that fueled expansion revealed the emptiness at its core.

Each conquest of land, each new patent or industrial marvel…

Only delayed the question.

& Motion became the only answer it could give.

Veuillot’s sneer comes back here:

He said America was a workshop, & what else could it have been?

A place that could assemble tools, replicate parts, & keep the machines turning…

But a workshop isn’t a temple.

It doesn’t sanctify, nor does it remember.

It consumes raw material & spits out product,

& when the floor is cluttered with waste, it sweeps it aside & keeps going.

Such was the nation’s vision of itself.

Not a culture ripening into maturity, but a mechanism grinding ever faster,

Hoping that noise alone would Silence doubt.

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3. 🏙 Empty, Hollow Towers 🩸

On the morning of September 11, the towers came down,

& the world spoke of shock, of rupture, of history turning on its axis.

But if One looks carefully at the images…

The smoke curling upward, the endless sheets of paper fluttering through the sky…

like some obscene snow…

What stands out isn’t grandeur but emptiness.

These weren’t temples brought low,

Not ruins that could stir reverence centuries later,

But office blocks collapsing into dust:

File cabinets, broken chairs, computer monitors, & human bodies.

Rubble rather than relics.

& rubble doesn’t speak; it only lies there until it is carted off.

For a brief moment, the country insisted the day had revealed something new,

That innocence was lost, that the world had suddenly changed.

But innocence isn’t lost when it never existed.

What the cameras captured wasn’t the destruction of a Civilization at its height…

But the unmasking of a façade that had been hollow from the beginning.

The towers were symbols of commerce, of finance, of numbers flowing across screens,

& when they collapsed, they revealed themselves for what they had always been…

Scaffolding filled with paper.

Civilizations that fall leave behind monuments that command Silence:

Rome’s broken aqueducts,

The shattered stones of Athens,

The cathedrals blackened by centuries of smoke…

These endure as reminders of a greatness that once lived.

They decay, but their ruins still hold shape.

What New York revealed that morning was something else:

Structures that were never more than functional,

Built to dazzle only in height & shine, without depth, without sanctity.

& when they failed, they left nothing but dust clouds & the smell of burnt plastic.

The spectacle was consumed instantly:

Television repeated the collapse again & again,

Until the event was less a tragedy than a performance.

People spoke of it in sacred tones, yet the ritual was hollow:

Flags waved, hymns played, & speeches promised vengeance.

No new covenant was born.

What happened instead was that death itself became a kind of content,

The replay looped endlessly until the images lost their sting…

& became part of the background hum.

In this sense, the towers didn’t so much fall as dissolve into the circuitry of the feed,

Their meaning flattened into pixels.

& perhaps this was Veuillot’s curse written in fire:

A workshop can produce height & shine, but not memory.

A machine can roar, but it cannot pray.

America mistook the roar for transcendence,

& on that morning, the roar ended in Silence.

The towers were empty before they fell.

Their collapse wasn’t the death of a Civilization,

But the confirmation that no Civilization had ever stood there in the first place.

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4. 🪦 The False Funeral 🪶

What followed the collapse wasn’t mourning but a pageant,

A liturgy of flags & slogans stitched together at speed,

As though a nation could drown out the sight of dust with the sound of brass bands.

The dead had barely been counted before they were turned into symbols,

Draped in red, white, & blue, paraded across screens…

In an endless procession of talking heads & candlelight vigils.

Mourning requires Silence, but Silence is unbearable to a machine.

So noise rushed in… hymns sung off-key at stadiums,

Choruses of politicians promising vengeance, news anchors choking up on cue.

A funeral without sanctity, staged for the cameras,

Replayed until grief itself felt scripted.

The rituals were thick with words about unity,

But unity imposed by spectacle is brittle.

Beneath the surface, the fault lines only widened.

Those who questioned the pageantry were cast as traitors;

Those who asked why the towers had fallen…

Were drowned in accusations of conspiracy or disloyalty.

The nation didn’t mourn; it mobilized.

The funeral turned into a rally, & the rally became a war.

The corpse was never left to rest;

It was hoisted onto the podium, forced to speak in favour of the empire.

In that sense, the “post-9/11 world” wasn’t born on that September morning,

But in the weeks that followed, when grief hardened into performance.

Flags unfurled on every porch, bumper stickers shouted defiance,

& the dead became a permanent backdrop for political theatre.

No One asked what it meant…

That the temples of commerce had been reduced to rubble,

Because the answer was too dangerous:

It meant they had never been temples at all.

Better to call them holy, better to call the ruins sacred ground,

Better to build a shrine to emptiness than admit the truth.

Civilizations that truly mourn build cathedrals, compose requiems,

& carve memory into stone.

What America built that day was a brand:

“Ground Zero” became a logo,

A phrase that carried with it both solemnity & merchandise.

The very act of naming the place gave away the emptiness of the gesture: not a temple,

Nor even a monument, just a zero, a hole in the ground.

& around that absence, the rituals multiplied,

Each One louder than the last, each One less capable of touching the reality of loss.

Veuillot’s curse hung over it all:

A workshop cannot mourn; it can only repurpose.

The nation took the corpses of the towers & fed them into its machine,

Grinding them into slogans, campaigns, invasions.

What might have been Silence was filled with the roar of engines heading east,

Carrying soldiers who would become the next set of bodies in the cycle.

The funeral was a sham because it was never meant to end in eternal rest;

It was meant to keep the machine turning.

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5. 💣 The Wars of Iron ⚔️

The wars that followed were never holy.

They weren’t crusades, nor battles where sacrifice could be mistaken for sanctity.

They were operations, logistics, convoys of trucks rolling through deserts,

Satellites circling above, drones humming like insects in the dark.

The language was swollen with grandeur (freedom, justice, security),

But the reality was mechanical.

Afghanistan became a theatre of spreadsheets,

Iraq a ledger of costs & losses,

Each death recorded, categorized,

& forgotten with the same bureaucratic indifference that files away invoices.

The republic didn’t march to war as Rome once did;

It shipped its machinery abroad & called the churn of gears a mission.

The soldiers, too, bore the marks of this machinery.

They were no longer knights, legionaries, or even crusaders,

Convinced of some higher vision.

They were technicians in uniform, trained to maintain the machine:

Calibrate the rifles, fuel the tanks, & program the drones.

Their courage was real, men bled & died,

But their deaths were absorbed without meaning,

Consumed by the system that couldn’t pause long enough to sanctify them.

& Sacrifice without sanctity is simply a waste.

Thus, the empire produced waste by the ton, lives included.

& what did it all build?

Not temples, nor monuments,

Nor even ruins that could be admired later for their shattered dignity.

It built bases that crumbled as soon as the contractors left,

Airstrips abandoned to sand, green zones that rotted the moment the gates closed.

The wars consumed without producing.

They drained, but they didn’t consecrate.

Entire landscapes turned into proving grounds…

For technologies that would be obsolete within a decade,

While the people living there were reduced to collateral,

Entries in reports no One read twice.

The funerals came home in Silence,

Coffins draped in flags unloaded in the middle of the night, far from the cameras.

A true Civilization honours its dead with music & stone;

America hid them away,

Because the machine cannot tolerate reminders of what it has chewed through.

It needs motion, not memory.

Mourning would have slowed the gears.

So the corpses were whisked aside, while the slogans kept flowing…

Mission accomplished, freedom on the march, a safer world.

But the wars dragged on, each One feeding the next.

Afghanistan bled into Iraq, Iraq bled into drone strikes across continents,

Drone strikes bled into proxy wars that bled into nothing at all.

No victory, no closure, no sacred narrative of triumph or loss.

Just entropy.

The machine ran until it sputtered,

& when it sputtered…

The empire discovered it had no language left to explain what had been done.

It had fought for two decades & produced nothing but waste.

Veuillot’s sneer could be heard here, too:

Slaves of their own tools, fighting wars they didn’t know how to end,

Piling corpses like coal to keep the furnace alive.

Wars of iron, wars of machinery,

Wars where the only victory was the continuation of the system itself.

---

6. ↔ Of False Continuity ♻️

The years rolled forward & the empire told itself stories of change.

One face left the stage, another entered;

The crowd was instructed to believe that the script had been rewritten.

Obama’s smooth cadences gave way to Trump’s vulgar bellows,

Then to Biden’s weary mutter, & then, astonishingly, back to Trump again.

Each arrival was hailed as a rupture, as the end of an era & the dawn of another.

Yet beneath the shifting masks, the machinery stayed the same.

Tariffs rebadged as national security,

Wars rebadged as counter-terror,

Deficits rebadged as investment.

The slogans changed, the substance didn’t.

Mark Fisher once spoke of “capitalist realism,”

A Time when it was impossible to imagine alternatives.

That age ended not in liberation but in multiplication,

Where every alternative leads back to the same place.

Under Trump, the imagination soared:

Deportations by the millions, walls rising across deserts,

Mars colonies, & the return of 1950s prosperity.

Under Biden, the fantasies turned in a different key:

Reindustrialization, moral crusades abroad, & the rebirth of a middle class.

Yet both men, for all their theatre, expanded the same wars, imposed the same tariffs,

& relied on the same bureaucratic machine that ground onward with or without them.

This is the secret of American politics:

Not division, nor rupture, but rot that spreads evenly through both parties.

They loathe One another in words but mirror One another in deeds.

Each condemns the other for hypocrisy…

While preparing to inherit the same tools of power, the same wars, the same debts.

The voters are invited to choose between night & day,

But the choice is between dusk & dusk.

Look closely at the Ukraine conflict:

Trump called it Biden’s war; Biden called it Trump’s legacy.

In truth, it belonged to both, & to neither.

It belonged to the system itself,

Which required a permanent frontier to justify its endless expenditure.

Likewise with tariffs:

Trump’s brash announcements seemed like unprecedented shock,

Until One remembered that Biden had already laid the groundwork…

With semiconductor controls & trade walls built under quieter names.

The continuity was embarrassing in its clarity.

The politicians shouted difference, the machine delivered sameness.

This sameness isn’t stability. It is decay.

A healthy order repeats itself through ritual & custom;

It sustains identity across generations.

But America’s continuity is the inertia of collapse,

The way a corpse twitches even after the last breath has gone.

Obama to Trump, Trump to Biden, Biden back to Trump…

These weren’t cycles of renewal…

But spasms of a system that no longer knows how to stop.

Veuillot’s words once mocked the workshop, pretending to be a Civilization.

Today, the workshop doesn’t even pretend. It simply runs.

A conveyor belt of presidents, each promising rupture, each delivering the same dust.

Continuity as a symptom of death, the empire’s final trick:

Convincing its people that they are choosing…

When in fact they are only watching the machine choose itself again & again.

---

7. 🧩 Slaves To One’s Own Tools 🔗

Veuillot had warned that America would become the slave of its own instruments,

& the phrase has aged like iron left to rust in the rain…

Truer with each passing decade,

Sharper each Time the machine unveiled a new set of chains.

The republic that once congratulated itself on liberty…

Now spends its days in quiet bondage,

Not to foreign powers but to the technologies it cannot live without.

The hand that forged the tool now bends beneath its weight.

The conqueror drags his own chains behind him.

Look at the faces bowed to their glowing screens, millions scrolling in Silence,

Eyes glazed, bodies still, as though awaiting instructions.

The promise of infinite knowledge dissolved into endless feeds,

An avalanche of images no One can remember.

Algorithms nudge, cajole, predict;

& the human will softens into reflex.

What once was leisure becomes surveillance, every gesture tagged, every word stored,

Every preference translated into a data point for markets or governments.

The citizen is no longer a participant in a polity,

But a user within a program they didn’t write.

He is observed, tracked, & monetized… & yet, he calls this freedom.

Elsewhere, another chain:

The opioid vial, the fentanyl strip,

& the pill bottle rattling in drawers across the continent.

Pain numbed, then life numbed, until entire towns dissolve…

Into half-lit pharmacies & abandoned houses.

The empire that couldn’t sanctify its dead has no idea how to comfort its living.

It dispenses chemical quiet instead,

A pharmaceutical Silence that spreads like mildew.

A Civilization that cannot produce saints breeds addicts;

Both are searching for transcendence, but only One leaves behind miracles.

The other leaves behind corpses in trailers & alleys.

& now a fresh idol, offered with the fervour of a new gospel:

Artificial intelligence, a name heavy with prophecy,

Promising salvation through code.

Yet what has it brought except more noise, more synthetic speech,

More images generated out of nothing to fill the already choking atmosphere?

AI churns out slop at an industrial scale,

& the nation congratulates itself on its cleverness,

Unaware that it is drowning in its own output.

The machine writes, the machine paints, the machine thinks…

& men grow smaller, duller, less necessary.

Tools multiply, but meaning shrinks.

This is the idiotic slavery Veuillot foresaw, more humiliating than conquest by armies.

To be ruled by others can be borne with pride;

To be ruled by One’s own devices is shame without remedy.

America became the workshop, & the workshop has imprisoned its workers.

They may boast of freedom,

But they live by compulsion, staring into screens, swallowing pills,

& obeying prompts.

The master is gone; yet the chains remain.

---

8. 🩸 The Martyrs: Stage & Silence 🎤🕯

Charlie Kirk fell on stage in Utah, mid-sentence,

As if still convinced that the ritual of speech could summon authority…

In an age when words had already been hollowed out,

When syllogisms & applause lines carried less weight than the sudden crack of a rifle.

A sniper’s bullet tore through his throat, & in that moment,

The performance of politics dissolved into the convulsions of a body…

Brought low before an audience that no longer believed in speeches…

But still believed in blood.

The cameras didn’t look away.

They drank in every detail, the jerks of muscle, the frantic movements of those nearby,

The smear of crimson staining the podium,

& in the instant of collapse Kirk ceased to be man & became corpse.

The activist, the provocateur, & the debater…

Who had tried to wrestle the abyss with arguments was gone,

& in his place appeared a martyr already pressed into service,

A pawn circulating through the bloodstream of partisan rage,

A unit of meaning manufactured out of flesh.

Within hours, his name was no longer his own but a vessel,

Cited as proof that ballots had given way to bullets,

That the last fragile barrier of civility had been shattered,

That America had entered a stage…

Where convulsions mattered more than conversations.

Far from the stage lights, Iryna Zarutska died in Silence.

Twenty-three, a refugee from Ukraine,

Sitting on a bus in Charlotte with her attention fixed on her phone,

She couldn’t have known that the man behind her (restless, muttering, armed with a knife),

Was about to unspool her life in a matter of seconds.

The act was sudden, vulgar in its ordinariness,

Not staged for spectacle but executed in the drab banality of public transit,

The kind of setting where people look away even as blood pools at their feet.

She collapsed between seats as others froze in paralysis,

Their inaction a second wound,

& within minutes the loss of life that should have commanded outrage…

Became little more than another line in a police report.

The vigils never came, the murals never appeared,

& the sanctity of innocence was never granted:

Wrong demographics, wrong narrative, wrong perpetrator.

Her youth, her vulnerability, her foreignness…

(qualities that might once have amplified her death into lamentation),

Instead rendered her invisible,

& she slipped from memory almost as quickly as her blood seeped into the bus floor.

Placed side by side, their deaths form a cruel symmetry:

One amplified until the human disappeared beneath the roar of commentary,

The other muted until the human barely registered at all.

In both cases, the result was the same…

Individuality erased, the corpse retooled into discourse,

The wound reshaped into symbol.

Kirk’s twitching became proof of civility’s extinction;

Zarutska’s stillness became an inconvenience brushed aside.

Neither was granted the dignity of Silence.

Both were conscripted into the same circuitry of decline,

Unwilling saints of a Civilization that feeds not on memory but on raw flesh.

& so Veuillot’s curse reemerges, sharpened across the century:

A society that cannot sanctify will inevitably cannibalize,

Hammering at its martyrs as it hammers at steel,

Retooling One into spectacle, another into absence,

Both consumed by the same machine.

Kirk & Zarutska, though strangers, belong now to the same litany:

Emblems of decline pressed into use by factions desperate for omens,

Proof that the American polity no longer buries its dead but sells them,

Packaging grief as content, Silence as erasure,

Until even the final breath is stolen…

& repurposed by the workshop masquerading as Civilization.

---

9. 🪦 The Cartel of Death ⚔️

What happens on a stage in Utah or on a bus in Charlotte doesn’t stay there;

It leaks, it stains, & it travels along the seams of daily life…

The way oil finds the gutter after rain.

By evening, you can feel it at the strip mall…

The stiff flutter of yellow tape in the heat,

The bored officer guarding nothing in particular,

The convenience store TV replaying some other city’s sirens…

While the cashier slides your change under a pane of cloudy plexiglass.

People keep moving, but the motion has a flinch in it now,

A stutter in the walk to the car,

A glance at the dark pane of glass to see who else is reflected there.

If this were heading toward a real war, there would be banners & fronts.

Instead, Americans get something smaller & meaner:

Crews, hobby militias, fevered loners with manifestos stapled together at 3 a.m.,

Security contractors who can’t remember which acronym they draw a paycheck from.

Violence becomes a cottage industry; franchised, improvised, outsourced.

No declarations, only incidents.

A parking-lot ambush at dusk;

A stabbing on the late bus;

A doorbell camera catching muzzle flash & nothing else.

The state still shows up…

(lights spinning, forms filled, a press conference behind a lectern that lists slightly to the left),

But the monopoly of force has slipped through its fingers.

Power shares the block now with the boys who run souped-up chargers,

The uncle who “knows a guy,” the private firm renting rifles by the weekend.

Courts mumble postponements; cases age on the docket;

A judge quotes procedure to a room…

That stopped believing in procedure two summers ago.

None of this adds up to a cause.

The killings don’t recruit; they harvest.

They don’t clarify; they cloud.

Meaning arrives prepackaged (the caption writes itself before the body cools)…

& yet every caption contradicts the last.

Attention-seeking fuel, spectacle-seeking corpses.

The shooter in a borrowed car, the kid with a kitchen knife,

The man who goes live for fifty-seven viewers…

Each moves as if summoned, though by what they couldn’t say.

This is the economy of the late empire:

Blood as tender, panic as yield, rumour as growth.

The export is footage & the import is dread.

Americans trade in candles & hashtags,

In blue-and-red strobes reflected on wet asphalt,

In interviews with neighbours who “never thought it could happen here,”

Though of course they did.

Police rehearse the script; schools rehearse the drill; hospitals rehearse the overflow.

Between rehearsals, life continues in a thinner register:

Smaller gatherings, shorter glances, & the steady, guilty relief of making it home.

Veuillot wouldn’t be surprised:

A nation that makes tools its gods will One day serve the tools’ sacrament.

Here it is:

The rifle, the stream, the knife, the post, not as instruments of politics,

But as politics itself… a grim liturgy without priest or altar, only participants.

& if you ask where this is going,

The honest answer is that it isn’t going anywhere at all.

It is settling in.

It is choosing the places where the tape fits best & waiting there,

Patient as a habit, ready for the next offering.

---

10. 🪶 An Empire of Corpses ☠️

Veuillot’s old line (the workshop dressed up as a nation),

Feels less like prophecy now & more like an inventory tag…

That you’d find taped to a crate in a dim warehouse:

Smudged pen, date half-legible, & still true.

Americans have lived through the set pieces…

The towers turning to dust,

The wars that kept accounts better than memories,

The presidents switching podiums while the gears stayed oiled…

& now the residue clings to ordinary surfaces:

Bus floors, grocery parking lots, school foyers that always smell faintly of cleaner…

& panic.

Nothing breaks cleanly. It just keeps thinning.

If there were a grand ending, Americans would recognize it:

Trumpets, banners, & a calendar date to circle.

Instead, there’s the small weather of decline:

A pop of gunfire two blocks over,

A knife pulled between stops,

A gathering that ends early…

Because someone didn’t like the way a stranger hovered by the door.

The language that once tried to dignify all this (“polarization,” “resilience,” “healing”)…

Feels like a brochure left on a wet bench.

Courts postpone;

Police arrive with the lights but not the monopoly;

The news reads like competing sermons,

Each parish canonizing its own dead & skipping the others.

Meaning used to come slowly, through stone & song.

Now it comes pre-captioned.

Clips spool out on the feed while the comments fill before the blood dries;

A family member stares at a phone in a hallway that hums…

With the sound of vending machines;

A city worker zipties plastic flowers to a fence that sags in the wind.

Americans don’t argue about what happened so much as who gets the body…

Who may speak in the name of the wound.

When the arguments end (they never do), the footage remains.

Servers purr. Another reel joins the archive.

What finishes an empire isn’t always an enemy.

Sometimes it’s the habit of converting every loss into usable content,

The reflex that turns grief into inventory.

Americans are good at that.

They know the angles, the candles,

The pressers with the slightly crooked seal on the podium.

They know where the tape goes, which curb catches the rain,

& which hashtag reads sober without sounding weak.

This competence is its own indictment. It means the work is routine.

So there will be no Archduke, no neat sides, & no final trumpet…

Just a patchwork of little rackets & private uniforms,

A slow exchange of whispers & weapons,

& a state that still stamps forms while meaning walks out the back door.

Once more… the export is footage, & the import is dread.

Between them, a people moving carefully…

Shorter errands, fewer glances, & keys ready in the hand.

Call the last chapter what it is:

Not collapse with grandeur, but consumption with paperwork.

The ledger grows… names, dates, locations, each marked “processed.”

The book will close the way a shop closes when the bulbs finally burn out:

No ceremony, only a door that doesn’t quite latch…

& a sign that was never flipped to CLOSED.

What remains isn’t a ruin that teaches, only a Silence that doesn’t bless.

& if anyone asks what the nation became in the end,

The plain answer will suffice:

A place that learned to live on its dead, & then ran out.

Oliver Webb-Carter wants you to believe that holding the SAS accountable for extra-judicial killings represents a perversion of justice. His recent piece on the Clonoe inquest performs a familiar ideological manoeuvre: present state assassination as reluctant necessity, frame legal scrutiny as persecution, position immunity from prosecution as operational requirement rather than political choice. The argument collapses under minimal pressure. What he defends is not soldiers operating within impossible constraints but a systematic policy of killing rather than arresting, of execution rather than prosecution, of state terror masquerading as security operations.

Assassination as Policy

The facts he provides undermine his case. At Coalisland on 16 February 1992, British intelligence knew an IRA attack was coming. They had time to prepare, to position forces, to plan intervention. Multiple opportunities existed to intercept: the lorry could have been stopped en route, the ASU arrested before reaching the police station, the getaway prevented without firing a shot. Instead, security forces waited until after the attack, then killed all four men at St. Patrick’s Church car park in what Webb-Carter himself describes as immediate, concentrated fire. Not a firefight. Not a tactical engagement. An ambush resulting in four deaths, one soldier with a facial wound possibly from friendly fire, and retrieved Kalashnikovs suggesting minimal return fire. This was an execution operation, not law enforcement.

Gibraltar makes the pattern explicit. Three unarmed IRA members shot dead in a public space. The bomb discovered later in Marbella gets deployed retrospectively to justify the killings, but the operational logic was killing rather than arrest from the start. They could have been stopped at the border. They could have been arrested at their hotel. They could have been intercepted before reaching the supposed bomb location. The state chose execution. Then claimed necessity.

Orders and Accountability

Webb-Carter frames this choice as operational constraint: soldiers following orders, security forces responding to armed insurgency, necessary violence in impossible circumstances. But the orders are precisely the issue. These operations were not emergency responses to immediate threats. They were planned interventions where the decision had already been made to kill rather than capture. The existence of orders does not provide legal or moral cover. It confirms that extra-judicial killing was policy, not aberration.

His argument relies on a fundamental category confusion between policing and counter-insurgency. Policing operates within legal constraints: proportionate force, attempt to arrest, lethal force only when necessary to prevent immediate threat to life. Counter-insurgency operates outside those constraints, treating internal populations as military targets, substituting assassination for prosecution. What Webb-Carter defends without quite naming it is the application of counter-insurgency doctrine to British citizens on British soil, the suspension of legal frameworks governing state violence, the normalisation of killing as first rather than last resort.

False Comparisons

The comparison to judicial scrutiny of Second World War operations is particularly dishonest. Examining attacks on German military positions decades later would be questionable not because time has passed but because those were military operations against military targets in declared war between states. Coalisland and Gibraltar were operations against British and Irish civilians, however heavily armed or politically motivated. The legal and moral frameworks are categorically different. Webb-Carter knows this. The comparison functions to naturalise extra-judicial killing by aligning it with legitimate military action rather than acknowledging it as state terror.

His concern about asymmetric accountability deserves engagement because the underlying observation is accurate. Republicans hold letters of comfort providing immunity from prosecution whilst soldiers face potential murder charges decades later. This represents institutional failure and political cowardice. But the solution is not retrospective immunity for state killings. The letters of comfort were part of a negotiated settlement including prisoner releases, decommissioning, political integration. Deeply problematic, certainly, representing a failure to deliver justice for victims of republican violence. But they exist within a framework of conflict resolution, however compromised.

What Webb-Carter demands is categorically different: permanent immunity for state agents, prosecutorial discretion frozen in favour of institutional power, the principle established that orders provide absolute protection regardless of the nature of the action ordered. This is not equivalence or fairness. It is the claim that state violence should exist outside legal accountability entirely, that the decision to kill rather than arrest should never face scrutiny, that soldiers following orders to execute should face no consequences.

What the Verdict Actually Says

The institutional dynamics matter here. Judge Humphreys found unlawful killing after examining the operational details. He determined the soldiers’ claims of a gun battle were demonstrably untrue, that state agencies perpetuated these falsehoods, and that the physical evidence contradicted the soldiers’ accounts. Some soldiers refused to testify. Webb-Carter reads this as the judge structuring questions to protect soldiers from self-incrimination whilst favouring the paramilitaries’ version. This inverts what occurred. The issue was not evidentiary procedure but established fact: the soldiers lied about what happened, and those lies were repeated by the Ministry of Defence and other state agencies for three decades. The question before the court was whether the state had alternatives to killing and chose not to pursue them.

Accordingly, the Coroner’s Court determined that each of the deceased men died of gunshot wounds and that in each case, the use of lethal force was not justified in circumstances where the soldiers did not have an honest belief that same was necessary in order to prevent loss of life and where the use of force was, in the circumstances they believed them to be, not reasonable.

The court also concluded that the operation was not planned and controlled in such a way as to minimise to the greatest extent possible the need for recourse to lethal force.

This is what makes the Clonoe verdict significant. Not that it persecutes soldiers but that it names what occurred: unlawful killing. The state killed four people when it had the capacity to arrest them. That reality does not change because those killed were heavily armed IRA members responsible for previous attacks. Their guilt or danger does not retrospectively legitimise execution outside legal process. This is the foundational principle distinguishing law from violence, policing from assassination, state authority from state terror.

The Effectiveness Argument

Webb-Carter invokes operational effectiveness: the nine four-star generals warning that fear of prosecution will paralyse decision-making, distort rules of engagement, deter initiative. This argument appears regularly in defences of state violence. It amounts to claiming that legal constraints on killing make security forces less effective, therefore those constraints should be removed. But effectiveness at what? Killing people the state deems threatening? That is not the metric by which security forces in a democratic society should be judged. The constraint is the point. The requirement to attempt arrest before using lethal force is not bureaucratic interference but the minimum standard separating legitimate authority from armed force operating without legal limitation.

His comparison to France and the United States is revealing precisely because it is accurate. Neither country would pursue these prosecutions. But this is not because they have superior reconciliation mechanisms or more coherent legal frameworks. It is because both states have long histories of extra-judicial killing as routine policy. France in Algeria. The United States across Latin America, the Middle East, in its own streets. What Webb-Carter proposes without quite stating it is that Britain should openly embrace that model, abandon the pretence that its security forces operate within legal constraints, accept assassination as legitimate state function.

The Media Panic

The institutional resistance manifested immediately in mainstream media. The Spectator devoted its 1 March 2025 cover to “The great betrayal of the SAS,” with Mary Wakefield calling Judge Humphreys “delusional” and claiming his verdict produces “terrible injustice” that “punishes the very people we rely on most.” Her piece imagined a fantasy scenario where the SAS could have arrested “all 20 IRA men caught unawares and unable to shoot because their hands are full of spanners,” treating the prospect of attempting arrest rather than immediate execution as absurd theatre. The Telegraph amplified similar arguments, providing platforms for David Davis MP to claim the verdict represented “the IRA’s attempt to rewrite the history of Northern Ireland” and warning that soldiers faced “a vindictive, vengeful pursuit.” Conservative politicians lined up to demand statutory protections preventing any future prosecutions, with Davis insisting this was necessary “even if they win” the judicial review. The narrative settled quickly: legal accountability equals persecution, questioning extra-judicial killing threatens operational effectiveness, demanding that soldiers attempt arrest before opening fire amounts to requiring “collective suicide.” Reports emerged that the SAS might refuse deployment to Ukraine “for fear of future prosecution for lethal force.” The verdict was not analysed as establishing that the state killed when it could have arrested. It was presented as an existential threat to national security, evidence that legal constraints on state violence had become intolerable, proof that the very concept of accountability for extra-judicial execution represented betrayal of the armed forces. This is how normalisation functions. Not through explicit defence of assassination as policy but through framing any limit on state killing as unconscionable restriction, any demand for legal process as persecution, any insistence that soldiers operating under orders still face consequences for choosing execution over arrest as abandonment of those who serve. The panic was not about the verdict’s accuracy but about its implications: that state agents who kill when alternatives exist should face prosecution, that orders do not provide immunity, that the distinction between policing and assassination still matters.

Institutional Decomposition

This connects to broader patterns of institutional decomposition. The erosion of legal constraints on state violence, the normalisation of executive action outside democratic or judicial oversight, the claim that security requirements permanently trump institutional accountability – these are not separate from the economic and social dismantling that began with Thatcher. They are its necessary precondition and ongoing consequence. You cannot systematically destroy the social contract, hollow out public institutions, treat entire populations as surplus or threatening without also removing the legal and institutional frameworks that constrain state power. The security state and the neoliberal state are not in tension. They are mutually constitutive.

The timing of these prosecutions matters. They are occurring now not because republicans are gaming the system but because the Good Friday Agreement’s reconciliation mechanisms have comprehensively failed. Those mechanisms could incorporate republican paramilitaries into constitutional politics because they were non-state actors operating outside legal frameworks. They cannot incorporate state killings because that would require the British state to acknowledge its systematic violation of the legal order it claims to represent. The institutional architecture of 1998 presumed that state violence had been aberrational, excessive perhaps but fundamentally legitimate. The evidence increasingly suggests otherwise: that extra-judicial killing was policy, that assassination was routine, that the state operated outside its own legal constraints as a matter of course.

Peace Through Assassination

Webb-Carter’s final move is to position SAS operations as contributing to the peace process, applying pressure on the IRA to push them towards negotiation. This may be tactically accurate. Killing enough members of an organisation eventually forces recalculation. But this is an argument for assassination as political strategy, for state killing as negotiating tactic, for extra-judicial execution as policy tool. He wants this acknowledged as contribution to peace without facing the implication: that the British state used systematic killing outside legal process to achieve political objectives. This is not security. This is state terror.

The absence of easy answers does not mean all positions are equivalent. Webb-Carter is correct that no legislation will satisfy every group, that reconciliation may be impossible, that institutional mechanisms have failed. But the response to that failure cannot be abandoning accountability entirely, granting permanent immunity to state agents, accepting that soldiers following orders to kill should never face legal consequences. The difficulty of achieving justice does not make injustice acceptable. The impossibility of perfect reconciliation does not justify protecting extra-judicial killing from scrutiny.

Naming What Occurred

What Judge Humphreys found at Clonoe was unlawful killing. Four men were killed when the state had capacity and opportunity to arrest them. That finding does not erase their involvement in political violence or the danger they represented. It establishes that the state chose killing over arrest, execution over prosecution, assassination over law enforcement. Webb-Carter wants that choice protected from legal examination. He wants orders to provide absolute immunity. He wants state violence to exist outside accountability.

This is not about protecting soldiers operating under impossible pressure. It is about protecting the institutional prerogative to kill without constraint, to choose assassination over arrest as routine practice, to operate outside the legal frameworks that supposedly distinguish democratic states from authoritarian ones. The argument is ideological work disguised as institutional analysis: making the case that state security permanently trumps legal accountability, that operational effectiveness requires immunity from prosecution, that the interests of state power override individual rights or institutional constraints.

The Normalisation of Impunity

The Clonoe verdict does not represent persecution of veterans or asymmetric justice or the weaponisation of legal processes against the state. It represents the minimum threshold of accountability in a society claiming to operate under law rather than force. The discomfort this produces, the institutional resistance it generates, the arguments mounted against it – these reveal how far the normality of state violence has been naturalised, how deeply the assumption that certain people can be killed with impunity has been embedded, how completely the distinction between policing and assassination has been eroded.

Webb-Carter writes as a historian. But his piece is not historical analysis. It is advocacy for impunity, argument for immunity, defence of state killing as legitimate practice requiring protection from legal scrutiny. The fact this argument can be made seriously, can be published and debated, can be presented as reasonable concern about institutional function rather than apologia for extra-judicial execution – this is the measure of how thoroughly the constraints on state violence have been dismantled, how completely the frameworks of accountability have been destroyed, how deeply we have internalised the logic that some people can be killed by the state without consequence.

That normalisation is the victory. Not of reconciliation or justice or institutional effectiveness. Of impunity. Of the principle that state agents following orders to kill should never face prosecution, that the decision to assassinate rather than arrest should never be questioned, that extra-judicial killing should be understood as unfortunate necessity rather than named as state terror. Webb-Carter’s piece is one more iteration of that normalisation, one more attempt to frame accountability as persecution, one more defence of the indefensible dressed up as concern for operational effectiveness and institutional fairness.

Against All of It

The answer is not difficult even if implementation is impossible. State agents who kill when they have capacity to arrest should face prosecution. Orders do not provide immunity. Political authority does not legitimise assassination. Operational effectiveness is not measured by capacity to kill without constraint. These principles are not novel or radical. They are the minimum standards distinguishing law from violence, authority from force, democracy from despotism. That they appear controversial, that defending them requires argument, that their application produces institutional resistance and political backlash – this is the measure of how far institutional decomposition has progressed, how thoroughly legal constraints have been eroded, how completely the ground has shifted beneath claims to legitimate authority.

Against impunity. Against immunity. Against the normalisation of state killing. Against the claim that orders justify assassination. Against the argument that accountability paralyses effectiveness. Against the defence of extra-judicial execution as necessary violence. Against the erasure of the distinction between policing and terror. Against the protection of state agents who killed when they could have arrested. Against all of it.

Who Cares Who Wins

Webb-Carter titles his piece “Who Cares Who Wins” as though the question at stake is partisan allegiance rather than institutional principle. The framing is deliberate. By positioning accountability as a contest between British forces and the IRA, between those who defend the state and those who attack it, he obscures what the Clonoe verdict actually addresses: whether the state can kill when it has capacity to arrest.

This is not a question about who wins. The four men killed at Clonoe were members of an armed organisation engaged in political violence. They had just attacked a police station with a heavy machine gun. Their involvement in the IRA, their participation in that attack, their willingness to use lethal force against state targets – none of this is contested. The verdict does not exonerate them, does not minimise their actions, does not transform them into innocent victims. It establishes one fact: the state chose to kill them when it had alternatives.

That fact remains regardless of what one thinks about the IRA, about the Troubles, about political violence, about the legitimacy of the British state in Northern Ireland. The question is not whether these four men deserved to live. The question is whether the state can execute people it has the capacity to arrest, whether orders provide immunity for that choice, whether the decision to kill rather than capture should face legal consequences. These are questions about state power, not about sympathy for those killed by that power.

Webb-Carter wants the focus on outcomes. The operation succeeded: four IRA members dead, a heavy machine gun recovered, no soldiers killed, the East Tyrone Brigade weakened. Measured purely by results, Clonoe was effective. But effectiveness is not the metric by which democratic states should judge extra-judicial killing. The question is not whether assassination works as a tactic. The question is whether states claiming to operate under law can employ assassination as routine practice, then demand immunity from prosecution for those who carry it out.

The answer matters regardless of who the targets were. If state agents can kill when they have capacity to arrest, if orders provide absolute immunity for that choice, if operational effectiveness permanently trumps legal constraint, then the distinction between state authority and state terror collapses. Not because all state violence is illegitimate but because legitimate state violence operates within legal frameworks that include the requirement to attempt arrest before using lethal force, the principle that force must be proportionate and necessary, the insistence that even those engaged in political violence have a right not to be executed when capture is possible.

This is why the constant invocation of IRA violence functions as misdirection. Yes, the East Tyrone Brigade killed soldiers and police officers. Yes, they posed a genuine threat. Yes, those confronting them faced real danger. None of this changes whether the state had alternatives to killing at Clonoe. None of this determines whether soldiers who chose execution over arrest should face prosecution. None of this addresses whether orders provide immunity for extra-judicial killing. The IRA’s guilt does not establish the state’s innocence. The danger IRA members represented does not legitimise assassination when arrest was possible.

Webb-Carter treats accountability as persecution because acknowledging it as legitimate would require accepting that the state killed unlawfully, that this was policy rather than aberration, that the institutional machinery defending these killings has spent decades protecting impunity rather than enforcing constraints. Easier to frame it as a contest, as choosing sides, as caring who wins. Easier to position the verdict as republican victory rather than minimal legal accountability. Easier to defend state killing by invoking the violence of those killed than to address whether the killing was necessary.

But this was never about who wins. This is about whether states can kill with impunity, whether orders justify assassination, whether legal constraints on state violence remain operative or have been abandoned entirely. These questions apply regardless of who gets killed. They matter as much when the state kills armed insurgents as when it kills anyone else. Perhaps more, because it is precisely when state agents face genuine threats, when those they confront have committed acts of violence, when the operational pressure is greatest – it is precisely then that the insistence on legal constraint matters most. Otherwise constraint only applies when it is not needed, when compliance is easy, when the decision would have been the same anyway.

The Clonoe verdict does not determine who wins the Troubles. That conflict ended, however incompletely, decades ago. The verdict determines whether the state must operate within legal constraints when it kills, whether alternatives to lethal force must be pursued when they exist, whether agents following orders to assassinate can be held accountable. It establishes that at Clonoe, the state killed when it could have arrested. That finding stands regardless of what one thinks about Irish republicanism, British state policy, the strategic value of targeted killing, or the guilt of those killed.

Who cares who wins? Anyone concerned with whether state violence operates within law or outside it. Anyone who understands that legitimate authority requires constraint, that effectiveness without accountability is tyranny, that the right not to be executed when arrest is possible applies even to those engaged in political violence. Anyone who recognises that defending extra-judicial killing because the victims were IRA members concedes the principle that some people can be killed by the state without consequence, which means accepting that the state decides who deserves legal protection and who can be executed at will.

That principle cannot be defended. Not for the IRA. Not for anyone. The question is not who wins. The question is whether killing when arrest is possible constitutes unlawful use of force. Judge Humphreys answered that question. The institutional resistance to his answer, the media panic, the political demands for immunity, the arguments from effectiveness and operational necessity – all of it confirms that the answer is unacceptable not because it is wrong but because accepting it would require acknowledging systematic state killing outside legal constraints as policy, not aberration.

Webb-Carter’s title reveals his argument’s weakness. He frames accountability as choosing sides because he cannot defend extra-judicial killing as principle. No one can. So instead: make it about who wins, about which side you support, about whether you back British forces or sympathise with terrorists. Make it about loyalty rather than law. Make it partisan rather than institutional. Make it about outcomes rather than process. Make it about anything except the question the verdict actually addresses: whether the state killed when it had alternatives, and whether that killing was therefore unlawful.

The Clonoe verdict says it was. Everything else is distraction.

We tell ourselves a tidy story about human invention: incremental, cumulative, the product of labs, markets, and the stubborn curiosity of individuals. Stand back from that story for a moment, and a different pattern emerges. For most of our history, technological change was glacial. Then, within a few generations, the world was rewired: alternating current, radio, radar, lasers, semiconductors, fiber optics — an asymptotic leap that transformed how we move, communicate, and power our lives. The leap is not merely a matter of chronology; it is patterned. Certain breakthroughs arrive as clusters, often with baffling elegance and preternatural insight.

That dissonance is the point of departure for this brief. We frame a working hypothesis that has rhetorical power even if one treats it as speculative: if an external intelligence — call it the Curators, the Venusians, the Aldebaran-linked stewards — has habitually seeded select ideas into receptive human minds and discreetly inserted field technologies into our environment, then the artifacts and trajectories we see today are the wake of that influence. What follows is not an exercise in exotica for its own sake. It is a pragmatic, evidence-driven plan for how a society should behave if such a channel were real: how to verify it, how to steward it, and how to ensure its benefits do not become instruments of coercion.

Inspiration

The photograph of a lone genius in a lab — a man silhouetted calmly before a towering coil of arcing energy — is not only cinematic; it is emblematic. Whether one sees Nikola Tesla as a romantic genius or a historical engineer, the story of flashes of insight, of visions that became devices, occupies a special place in the modern imagination.

The Astral Museum

Layered into this specimen of uncanny history is a quieter, less sensational strand: the idea that human minds have long been trying to reach beyond the ordinary channels of experiment and instrumentation. During the Cold War both the United States and the Soviet Union invested seriously in programs that explored extrasensory cognition — what the public remembers as “remote viewing” — commissioning disciplined protocols to see whether trained operators could describe distant places or concealed objects. Whatever one thinks of the results, the historical fact matters: major states treated non-ordinary perception as a potential source of intelligence. It is a short rhetorical step from there to the working hypothesis at the heart of this brief: perhaps many inventors, artists, and engineers across the globe have, in their own ways, been practicing a kind of remote viewing — ritualized reveries, disciplined daydreaming, lucid-dream protocols, meditative visualization or private trance sessions that reliably harvest formal patterns and workable concepts.

Even some of our most literate witnesses have said as much. Philip K. Dick famously described an experience in which he felt he had psychically visited an alternate timeline like the one he dramatized in The Man in the High Castle — a testimony he offered publicly in lectures in Europe. Whether one reads that as an ecstatic anecdote, a metaphor for creative imagination, or as evidence of real non-local perception, it illustrates an important point: humans routinely report experiences in which richly detailed, coherent “other” worlds present themselves — and sometimes those visions produce concrete, reproducible work back in ordinary reality. In other words, solid ideas and durable artifacts have historically been claimed to originate in realms that are not strictly material, and those claims have occasionally led to technologies or narratives that enter mainstream culture (books, patents, films, or even Netflix adaptations).

The astral museum — the motif of a curated hall of forms, with strange devices, tools, and clothing displayed on otherworldly shelves — gives narrative shape to this phenomenon we call inspiration. It frames visionary insight not as random image or private fantasy but as an organized archive: a sharable repository of forms that, if read correctly, can be translated into designs, methods, and stories that have tangible effects in our world.

Long ago, the Venusians walked upon the same vibrational plane we now inhabit. Their cities were of stone and light, built on the fertile plains of Venus, until their society, through both spiritual discipline and technological mastery, rose into a higher octave of being. What remains to our crude instruments is the husk of that world—heat, acid, and barren rock—yet just beyond the range of our senses gleam the true cities, suspended in the astral radiance. It is there that the Astral Museum is kept, a hall of forms curated for seekers from many worlds.

From that vantage, the Venusians send forth their convoys, vessels of magnetic and solar harmony, that can bridge the gulf between planes. But when they descend to our realm, they must enact a protocol of materialization, condensing their subtle craft and forms so that they may be seen, touched, and spoken to by us. Without this careful transition, they would pass through our world as shadows in a dream. Thus every meeting with them is an act of deliberate resonance—a harmony struck between their higher octave and our striving earthbound song.

You walk past a substation every day and call it infrastructure — concrete, steel, transformers humming the anonymous music of the grid — and you never stop to imagine its pedigree. Yet what if the neat lattice of insulators, the baffled geometry of coils, the way fields seem to gather and steer around those towers are not merely the products of slow human trial-and-error, but the visible tips of a deeper current of transmitted design? The image above is meant to be a provocation: ordinary objects can be the outward shells of extraordinary ideas, artifacts whose ancestry we assume to be “ours” simply because they have always been there. We mistake familiarity for origin. The hum at your feet, the arc behind a fenced gate, may be the fingerprint of thought that arrived from elsewhere — not malevolent, not mystical, simply older and stranger than our narratives of invention allow. If that is true even in part, then our everyday world is a museum of gifts we never acknowledged, and the first responsibility of discovery is to stop taking the familiar for granted.

Taken together, these images form a hypothesis: there exists an epistemic channel, sometimes experienced as vision, sometimes as a material artifact, sometimes as a low-signature visit, by which advanced technical concepts and field practices are transferred into human circulation. If true, the consequences are profound, immediate, and political.

What would such transfers look like, operationally? In the short term, they appear as clusters of anomalous patents and prototypes in obscure labs: new antenna geometries, metamaterial surfaces that bend waves in odd ways, compact resonant couplers that defy our scaling expectations. Over time these small seams yield larger systems: more efficient energy coupling, high-Q resonators, localized propulsion primitives, new classes of materials whose microstructure seems to “self-pattern” under guided growth. The social sign of such a stream is not only novelty but uneven diffusion: a few labs and states surge ahead while the rest of the world scrambles to reverse-engineer and catch up.

What does this mean for politics and security? Any technology that improves energy density, mobility, or information asymmetry will be coveted. Left unchecked, the first movers will have asymmetric advantages: military, economic, and diplomatic. Worse, the same principles that enable wireless energy and climate-friendly production could be adapted into coercive field systems if open governance is lacking. We cannot ethically or prudently accelerate a stream of high-impact tech without parallel institutions to classify risk, verify provenance, and police misuse.

Nor is this purely a technical problem. If an external stewardship is real, then the Curators — in the contactee literature, beings who disdain mass annihilation — appear to place moral conditions on their gifts. Repeatedly, mythic sources emphasize a disapproval of nuclear annihilation and ecological suicide. Whether those injunctions are poetic or literal, they frame a political bargain worth considering: the diffusion of life-preserving technologies in exchange for concrete steps away from existential weapons and catastrophic practices. That bargain is not naive: it is an ethical test of whether a species is prepared to bear the responsibilities that come with new power.

A civilization that accepts such gifts will be held to new standards. The Venusian model implied by the archive stories presumes a degree of social maturity: the ability to deploy power without creating asymmetric coercion, to favor stewardship over extraction, and to grow institutions that transcend short-term national advantage. Put bluntly, the Curators would expect governance capable of global nonproliferation, equitable access, and the moral restraint to refuse weapons of mass extinction.

This brief therefore does two things in tandem. First, it treats the claim of external seeding as a testable research proposition and outlines a tightly controlled scientific verification program. Second, it offers an institutional architecture — verification consortia, escrowed disbursement, and a graded release protocol — to channel any confirmed transfers safely into the public good. Those recommendations follow, grounded in precaution, transparency, and enforceable nonproliferation.

If one rejects the framing entirely, these proposals still have value: they are a robust governance regime for any disruptive epistemic channel — whether the source is a visionary subconscious, a novel neurotech pipeline, or an unrecognized natural phenomenon. If one accepts the framing, they become the minimum requirements for a planetary stewardship pact. Below, we move from narrative framing into the concrete institutional and technical recommendations required to verify, steward, and responsibly scale such transfers.

Operational Executive summary

Assuming a real, recurring channel of advanced-tech transfer exists, create an international, transparent, ethically governed program to (A) verify and decode transfers; (B) accelerate beneficial, non-weaponized diffusion; (C) bind recipients to strict nonproliferation/denuclearization terms via enforceable incentives and escrow; and (D) protect planetary safety and social stability while maximizing humanitarian value.

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Guiding principles

1. Evidence first — treat claims as testable hypotheses; require empirical replication before policy action.
2. Precautionary governance — prevent expedited weaponization; classify and stage tech releases by risk.
3. Transparency & legitimacy — open multi-stakeholder oversight to avoid monopoly capture.
4. Shared benefit & equity — prioritize humanitarian outcomes and ensure access for low-income countries.
5. Cultural & ethical respect — treat any “gift” as requiring stewardship, not exploitation.

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Key institutions to create (fast)

1. International Inspiration Verification Consortium (IIVC) — multilateral science body (UN-anchored) to verify visionary/transfer claims. Members: major scientific academies, neutral states, NGOs, and observer civil society.
2. Curator-Tech Risk Board (CTRB) — independent risk classification body (like medical IRBs + arms control board) to grade techs by dual-use risk.
3. Stewardship & Escrow Agency (SEA) — an escrow/conditional release mechanism that licenses tech only upon treaty commitments (including denuclearization benchmarks).
4. Translation & Safety Labs (TSLs) — certified labs (regional) that operate “inspiration mining” protocols, verify reproducibility, and run safety tests.

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Verification & scientific program

Objective: determine what is being received, how it is transmitted (museum/convoy/intermediary), and whether designs are reproducible and scalable.

Steps:

1. Evidence collection protocol — standardize how visionary reports, dream protocols, patent anomalies, and convoy sightings are logged (time, EEG, imagery, witness statements, chain of custody).
2. Replication labs (TSLs) — neuro-engineering + cognitive science centers where controlled trials reproduce visionary stimuli and test reproducibility of design outputs (EEG, fMRI, CAD readouts). Ethical oversight and consent required.
3. Technical validation pipeline — a staged R&D sequence: concept → prototype (bench) → safety test → scaled demonstrator. Data open-shared within IIVC under NDAs as needed.
4. Convoy/physical evidence task force — forensic teams for any physical signs (materials, craft fragments), using standard chain-of-custody and international forensic labs.

Deliverables within 12 months: verification protocol handbook; 3 operational TSLs; first reproducible design test report.

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Risk taxonomy & staged release

Classify candidate technologies into tiers (CTRB to manage).

• Tier 0 (Low Risk / Civilian): agricultural biochar processes, benign materials, consumer upcycling tech. Release: rapid open-source diffusion.
• Tier 1 (Moderate Risk): high-efficiency energy converters with manageable proliferation risk. Release: restricted licensing, open academic validation, export controls.
• Tier 2 (High Risk / Dual Use): novel field-manipulation, directed energy, propulsion tech. Release: escrowed, only to multilateral consortia with strict safeguards (no single nation control).
• Tier 3 (Weapon-grade/Unknown): anything clearly enabling mass destruction or uncontainable ecological risk. Release: prohibited until comprehensive multilateral governance, or permanently quarantined.

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Denuclearization strategy linked to tech transfer

Rationale: the Curators (per scenario) hate nukes; use that normative pressure constructively with incentives.

Mechanism (SEA + multilateral treaty approach):

1. Conditional technology escrow: advanced, high-value Tier 1 tech is placed in escrow. Release to states or consortia is contingent on verifiable denuclearization steps (declarations, IAEA-style inspections, dismantlement schedules).
2. Phased technology disbursement: small, immediately beneficial tech is released first to build goodwill (energy, water purification). More powerful tech released only after benchmarks are met.
3. Mutuality & parity: disbursement conditions apply equally, with a mechanism to prevent secret modernization (e.g., cooperative fabrication centers instead of national sovereign production).
4. Incentive package: beyond tech, provide infrastructure, financial support, and global public goods (grid upgrades, medical tech) to replace reliance on nuclear deterrence logic.
5. Verification tech transfer: use same TSL network to provide neutral fabrication and support rather than letting sovereign states control production lines.

Political tactics:

• Lead with a coalition of the willing (democratic states + large neutral states) to prototype the escrow model.
• Engage regional powers and offer assurance packages for security.
• Use moral suasion—expose scientific evidence publicly alongside an offer: denuclearize, get high-value civil tech.

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Research & capacity building agenda (practical projects)

Short list of pilot projects to fund and host in TSLs (with CTRB tier noted):

1. Resonant energy coupler demonstrator (Tier 1) — replicate a small wireless energy transfer device and document physics & limits. (12–18 months)
2. Mycelial-biochar soil stabilization pilot (Tier 0) — field deploy in degraded agricultural region. (6–12 months)
3. Material meta-surface replicator (Tier 1) — small antenna/metamaterial panel that shows claimed high Q coupling. (12 months)
4. Safe-by-design directed power containment study (Tier 2 research into defenses) — develop countermeasures and hardening protocols. (18–36 months)
5. Museum decoding lab — computational pattern analysis on historical visionary sources; produce public annotated dataset. (6–12 months)

Each project must have: independent validation team, open interim reports, and ethical review.

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Governance, law & ethics

• Law: draft a new multilateral “Stewardship & Non-Exploitative Use” convention that codifies escrow, verification, and non-weaponization. Use existing frameworks (UN Charter, NPT) as scaffolding.
• Intellectual property: place high-risk designs under collective stewardship (no exclusive IP rights). For lower risk, encourage open licensing for humanitarian usage.
• Ethics: create a global code for “inspiration mining” addressing consent, cultural appropriation, and human subject protections.
• Accountability: transparent audit trails, whistleblower protections, and public reporting obligations.

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Communications & societal handling

• Narrative framing: avoid cultic language. Frame it as “novel epistemic channel” pending verification. Emphasize practical benefits and strong safeguards.
• Public engagement: civic town halls, explanatory science media, independent journalism fellowships to investigate claims.
• Combat disinformation: establish rapid-response fact teams and open data portals for verification.

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Defense & nonproliferation safeguards

• Secure fabrication centers: produce high-risk components in joint international facilities under continuous inspection; do not allow sovereign unilateral manufacturing of Tier 2 items.
• Harden critical infrastructure: invest early in EMP, cyber, and field-manipulation defenses.
• Legal penalties: criminalize covert weaponization or illicit proliferation of escrowed tech; implement strong enforcement mechanisms (sanctions, lawfare).
• Contingency planning: war-gaming & resilience exercises for misuse scenarios, with scenario playbooks and rapid response teams.

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Timeline & milestones (illustrative, 0–5 years)

Year 0–1:

• Launch IIVC, CTRB, SEA pilot.
• Stand up 3 TSLs; start Museum decoding lab.
• Initiate top 3 pilot projects (Tier 0 & 1).

Year 2:

• Publish first technical validation reports; classify initial tech tiers.
• Prepare draft Stewardship Convention; convene diplomatic conferences.
• Begin escrow pilots for limited, low-risk releases.

Year 3–4:

• Signatories implement denuclearization escrow pilots; share Tier 1 deployments in secure joint centers.
• Deploy defense hardening measures; expand TSL network.

Year 5:

• Evaluate outcomes; scale or tighten program based on misuse indicators. Possible treaty ratification.

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Contingencies & failure modes

• Capture by a single state or private actor — mitigate by joint fabrication centers & legal treaty.
• Rapid weaponization — pre-stage counter-technologies and emergency interdiction authorities.
• Loss of public trust — manage via transparency, third-party audits, and open science.
• Cultural backlash — fund restorative engagement and ensure benefits flow to vulnerable populations.

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Closing note

Whether the source of the innovations is Venusian, visionary, or an unrecognized pattern in human creativity, the governance problem is the same: powerful, potentially planet-transforming technologies demand multilateral verification, staged release, and enforceable nonproliferation guardrails.

Imagine a very likely scenario, of civil order collapsing and a martial law being imposed over the entire nation. As a survivalist, you cherish your personal freedom. Therefore, you should be concerned regarding what the safest place during martial law is.

In this article, I will list the safest places during martial law, as well as the best spots to hide your survival supplies. But first, a few words about martial law and what it means. Let us begin, shall we?

Table of Contents

1. What Is Martial Law?

2. Top 10 Safest Places During Martial Law

What Is Martial Law?

Martial law takes place when a government suspend everyday civil laws and rights. In some instances, a military is the one that imposes its control over the civilians. Martial law is declared during nation-wide or region-wide emergencies, such as war, natural disasters, civil unrest, and so forth.

According to the established U.S. legislations, a country-wide martial law can be declared by either the Congress or the President. In addition, any State Governor can declare martial law in their state. Similar laws can apply to almost any country, with varying levels of strictness of the said law.

Martial law is not a rare phenomenon by far. In the USA alone it was declared almost 70 times, while only 2 of these times are related to a war against a foreign nation. A large portion of these instances is, in fact, related to riots, civil unrest, or even labor disputes.

The situation can be even more harrowing outside the United States, especially in the countries where democracy and personal freedom are completely unheard of.

As you understand by now, martial law, even if it’s seemingly necessary, can hinder your rights, privacy, and independence. We will now take a look at what measures can be taken during martial law. Please keep in mind that I do not support physically resisting governmental or military forces.

1. An Off-Grid Cabin or Tiny House

A small and remote house is the ideal location during martial law. This could be a cabin, a tiny house, or some sort of a secret retreat. It should be off the grid for two reasons:

• An off-the-grid house does not depend on external power sources, such as the national powerlines. You can produce your own energy by using solar panels, hydropower, or wind power. You can read more about these natural electricity sources from the linked articles. If you produce your own electricity independently, no one can control you by turning the power off.
• Every house and apartment usually have an address. Eventually this makes the things easier for the military and the government, as they go from door to door, checking on everyone. An off-grid house does not need to have an official address. You can remain almost anonymous and disappear off the grid, as you wait out whatever caused the martial law to be deployed.

2. A Bunker

A classic location: your bug out shelter or any other bunker can definitely function as a safe haven. You will need to ensure that it’s appropriate stocked with such supplies and items as:

• Water
• Canned and unperishable food
• Fuel for the generator. Alternatively, you can use a portable power station, it’s much more reliable and quieter.
• Spare clothes
• Radio
• Blankets
• First aid kit 
• Self-defense weapons
• Flashlights

Once you have the place prepared, never disclose its location to anyone outside your small group. If the martial law is imposed, choose the most inconspicuous route to get to your bunker. Listen to the radio to stay updated when the things have cooled down and you can go back home. You will need a radio that does not require batteries and can last for a long time. I recommend getting American Red Cross Emergency Radio. It can be powered by hand crank or solar panel. This radio also includes a smart phone charger, flashlight, flashing beacon, and an alarm clock.

3. Away From Most of the Civilization

Unlike the specific places on this list, this one is a general recommendation. Staying away from other people and the cities could be the solution you’re looking for. As history proved time and time again, it’s not just the military or the invading forces that you should be concerned about. It’s also the people next door.

When the supplies run low, the unprepared people will start looting their neighbors. The civilized ones will quickly become uncivilized. The urban streets will be unsafe, with riots and looting everywhere. It’s understandable on some level, since everyone wants to survive. But it’s also a good reason to look for a shelter elsewhere, as far from the urban centers as possible.

4. Your Own House

That’s right, your house can be more than enough during the martial law period. Think about it, you already have all the supplies and comfort, why look for it in remote places? As long as you do not confront the authorities, you might do just fine by staying in your house.

The trick to staying home is laying low. Continue your life as if nothing happened. This might go against your beliefs, but your survival should be the priority. Stock your house with extra food and water, and simply behave “normally”. Going outside could be dangerous because of two major reasons: the military presence, and whatever disaster or disorder that forced the military presence to appear. Staying home could be the wisest thing to do.

5. An Abandoned Location

If you don’t have a bunker, tiny house or cabin, any abandoned building might do. You still need to ensure that its location is as removed as possible from the military and governmental presence. If it’s outside the city, then it’s even better. This can be an abandoned factory, farm, barn, warehouse, and so forth.

Scout this location before deciding whether or not this will be your shelter. Ensure that it’s not visited by other people throughout the day. Check its general state and structure. Rotting or infested buildings are too unsafe to stay in.

Once you decide on a building, stash essential supplies there. This way, whenever you need to relocate, the supplies will already be there, waiting for you.

6. The Mountains

The mountains are a very secluded and inaccessible location. No law representative will bother climbing a cliff just to reprimand you for leaving the city.

Retreating to the mountains can also feel like going back to the roots, to your true self. While the martial law limits you as individual, the mountains free you. The air is fresh up there, and no law is enforced on you.

Of course, you need to be completely prepared to spend some time in that challenging environment, especially during the winter. The supplies might get very low and scarce. The weather makes it even more difficult, and you need to know how to treat frost injuries.

7. Any Prepper Community

Why facing a country-wide crisis alone, when you can rely on a large group of like-minded preppers, survivalists and off-gridders? Sometimes a group of people has better chances of survival, especially during a large crisis.

As a group or community, you can pool your resources together. Different people can have different skills that are useful to others. One is a medic, while another one is a hunter or an experienced cook. Together, your skills and expertise complement each other and strengthen your community.

While prepper communities are not wildly advertised, I do have a list of known off-grid communities. If some of them are nearby, consider joining them during trying times.

8. A Neighboring Country

While seemingly abandoning your country may look like an unpatriotic action, it’s actually quite the opposite. When the government imposes its regime and strips away basic human rights, the most patriotic action can be crossing the border into a more “relaxed” country. There, you can recuperate, regroup, and then return when the circumstances allow it.

For example, if you live in the United States and the martial law is declared, you can relocate to Mexico, Canada, or a nearby island country or territory. The government won’t pursue you there, since they will probably have much bigger objectives on their hands.

Make sure you’re familiar enough with the local language and customs. They will come handy should you seek a temporary employment and a place to stay.

Keep in mind that in some cases, you might need to leave for a much farther country, such as the safest country in case of nuclear war.

9. The Armed Forces

This might be a surprising suggestion, but the military is probably the most secure and well-supplied environment to be in. I’m not encouraging you to enlist just for the sake of surviving a particular scenario. I’m just saying that if you’re already in the military, or a civilian working at a military base, then you don’t have to hide elsewhere during the martial law.

The military’s obvious advantage is that it received supplies and working equipment before the rest of the population. Also, the military bases are well-fortified and guarded. The downsize, of course, is that during an international conflict or a civil war, the bases are the first ones to be attacked.

10. The Great Outdoors

Mountains and cabins are specific places in the wild, where you can stay safe during the martial law. But they are not the only ones. In fact, the entire wilderness is at your disposal. In almost every country, the inhabited areas are much smaller in comparison to the uninhabited outdoors. You can literally pitch a tent in the woods and weather the national crisis.

Naturally, this requires a few skills, which are listed in my article on basic survival skills. In addition, you will need a lot of knowledge and information on such topics as making tools, identifying plants, foraging, hunting, fishing, building a shelter, defending against animals, and so on.

Final Thoughts

The purpose of this article is to provide you with ideas of what can happen when authorities declare martial law. When they do declare martial law, I am in no way telling you that you should misbehave and ignore civil law, civil authority, the federal government, the president, or a military commander.

Ignoring existing laws could cause a person to end up in a federal court, or in military tribunals that go through a military court that could be on almost any military base.

During martial law, the constitution (in America), your civil rights, and any other existing laws may be suspended, so do what you think is necessary to retain some sort of justice and control over your own life and safety.

Where the gates opened

Most Americans don’t spend their evenings reading policy briefs about Islamist movements, and they shouldn’t have to. Yet the confusion they feel when they hear “From the river to the sea” chants echo through campuses and city streets isn’t imaginary. Something fundamental has shifted. Politics that once spoke the language of civil rights now carries a tone suspiciously anti‑Western, and increasingly anti‑Jewish.

For roughly sixty years, progressive politics in the United States has measured virtue by who is “oppressed.” In that formula, the West, and by extension the United States, ends up cast as the villain almost by default. The habit grew out of the 1960s rebellions, when race, class, and empire were folded into one sweeping narrative of guilt. That moral reflex, redeeming the self through siding with the “oppressed,” has since hardened into orthodoxy. When Western liberals went searching for the next cause to redeem, they found it in the Palestinian flag and, behind that, a romanticized view of Islam as the voice of the downtrodden.

Palestine became the perfect metaphor: brown versus white, colonized versus colonizer, faith versus materialism. It fit neatly inside a worldview shaped by post‑colonial literature and grievance politics. Within a few decades, banners that once read Peace Now were replaced by calls to intifada, revolution dressed up as humanitarian concern.

The irony is that the world they idealize bears little resemblance to the freedoms they claim to champion. Under Islamist regimes women cannot speak or dress freely; gay Palestinians flee to Israel for safety. Iran’s morality police enforce public flogging for acts Western activists call personal expression. Yet those realities are dismissed as “cultural differences.” Once a narrative becomes sacred, facts are sacrilege.

The data tell another story. Pew Research surveys show that majorities, 84 % in Pakistan, 74 % in Egypt, 71 % in Jordan, favor making Sharia official state law, while fewer than 15 % of Muslims globally say violence is acceptable in defense of faith. Sharia is not advisory; it is a binding legal code. Political Islam has long declared its goal: a state where divine law supersedes human law. The founders of liberal democracy spent centuries building systems to prevent precisely that.

When Americans watch student unions and NGOs waving the same slogans as Sunni fundamentalists, they’re witnessing two belief systems, one secular, one religious, meeting on the field of moral absolutism. The progressive Left gained power through moral language; Islamist movements speak in the same register, but with divine certainty. Different sources, same result: politics as salvation.

The consequence is not America’s “Islamization” but the erosion of boundaries between belief and law. Well‑meaning citizens, mistaking sentiment for discernment, have opened the gates slowly, forgetting that good intentions are no substitute for hard thinking. History rarely punishes arrogance all at once; it rewards it just enough to keep us convinced of our own virtue.

The 1960s Origin Story

Every movement that rewrites history starts by rewriting morality. The 1960s did that for America. The old moral vocabulary of duty and discipline gave way to one built on emotion and absolution. Real injustices, such as Jim Crow, segregation, and Vietnam’s draft, were confronted, but reform soon turned into religion. In that new faith, the West itself became the original sin.

The formula was irresistible: oppression conferred holiness, power implied guilt. Once that idea took hold, it defined cultural virtue for the next half century. What began as moral protest turned into a reflex of self‑blame dressed up as idealism. By the late seventies, Western intellectuals were romanticizing revolutions they would never survive. The Third World had become the new Bethlehem.

That moral reflex still shapes Western diplomacy. Writer Michael Snyder recently noted how France, the nation of Voltaire and laïcité, is volunteering to help the Palestinian Authority draft its constitution. It sounds noble, but look closely: the heirs of the Enlightenment are scripting the legal framework for an organization whose charter still denies Israel’s right to exist. The same pattern: virtue earned through empowering the supposedly powerless.

The cultural heirs of the New Left swapped blue‑collar revolution for academic theory, but the hierarchy of virtue stayed fixed. By the end of the Cold War, the Left had lost its working‑class audience but kept its sermon: blame the West, praise its adversaries, and call it empathy. That theology explains why movements preaching “diversity” now excuse governments that stone women and persecute gays. Compassion decoupled from judgment becomes indulgence. A civilization unwilling to defend its principles will surrender them, one humanitarian gesture at a time.

The flower children matured into policymakers, and their children staff the NGOs and editorial boards that now shape opinion. What began as conscience has congealed into bureaucracy. The moral theater of the 1960s lives on, less romantic, more administrative, but driven by the same need to purchase redemption through guilt.

Islam and the Secular West: A Structural Clash

Modern Westerners speak about religion as something optional, like a subscription you can cancel at any time. That assumption owes more to Jefferson and Locke than to Moses or Muhammad. The Judeo‑Christian world learned the hard way that the key to peace was separating the priest from the palace. Centuries of religious wars eventually produced a compromise: believe what you like, but the law belongs to everyone. That settlement is what we call secularism, and without it there would be no liberal democracy to argue about.

Islam’s origins were different. Muhammad was not simply a preacher; he was a statesman, a legislator, and a commander. The Quran doesn’t divide moral life from public life, so Islamic civilization never developed that internal firewall between creed and code. Wherever Islam became dominant, the political order generally claimed divine authority. In early Medina and later through the caliphates, religious scholars produced legal rulings that doubled as government policy. Sharia,  the body of law derived from scripture and tradition, became as all‑encompassing as canon law and parliament combined.

For many ordinary Muslims, this has been more historical backdrop than marching orders. Millions live productively and peacefully within secular states. But the ideology known as political Islam insists that true faith is incomplete without state power. Its goal is not coexistence but completeness. The Muslim Brotherhood’s motto still reads, “The Quran is our law; jihad is our way.” That doesn’t mean its members are plotting coups in every Western city, yet it does mean their endgame is theocratic: a world administered, not merely inspired, by religious law.

That theological premise sits directly across the table from the American one. Ours begins with “We the People”; theirs begins with “God commands.” In a republic, sovereignty resides with citizens and can be changed through consent. In Islamist thought, sovereignty descends from God and cannot change at all. The conflict is not primarily cultural or ethnic; it’s constitutional. You can negotiate borders; you can’t negotiate who gets the final word in law.

This distinction matters because political Islam doesn’t conquer today by armies. It works through ideas and institutions, slowly and patiently, confident that the West’s moral confusion is its best weapon. In Europe, open discussion of Islamic separatism is already treated as bigotry. Britain’s domestic intelligence service spent years investigating extremist networks embedded within “charitable” organizations while politicians congratulated themselves on multicultural harmony. France, once a militantly secular nation, now debates whether its own Enlightenment ideals are compatible with the faith of millions of new citizens. The tension is not about skin color or cuisine; it’s about authority.

The United States has been spared Europe’s immediacy largely due to geography and demographics, but the ideological challenge has arrived on our campuses and city councils. In the fashionable vocabulary of “intersectionality,” religious absolutism can masquerade as a form of cultural expression. When progressive politicians defend Islamist movements as victims of Western oppression, they confuse tolerance with surrender. People who no longer know why they separated church and state won’t notice when others decide to reunite them.

What makes this clash especially dangerous is the asymmetry of conviction. Secular society treats compromise as virtue; religious revolutionaries call it disbelief. Liberal democracies survive by persuasion; theocrats thrive on certainty. Against such confidence, mere civility is not enough. A civilization that shrugs off its own principles can lose them without ever being invaded.

Political Islam doesn’t need majorities. It only needs Western guilt to keep its opponents silent. Once an ideology that fuses religion and government enters a culture that separates them, someone’s premise has to yield. The question is whether the yielding will come from reason or from fear.

Black Identity and the Romance with Islam

When ideas lose their theological foundation, they look for a new one. After the civil‑rights era, many young Black Americans saw Christianity as the religion of parents who forgave too easily. Into that vacuum stepped a faith promising dignity through discipline and pride through defiance.

The Nation of Islam offered hierarchy where chaos reigned, purpose where poverty mocked the dream. Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X didn’t win through doctrine but through presentation: suits, diets, rules, each a declaration of independence from white America’s morality. In the 1960s, polls showed about 15 % of Black college students viewing Islam as “the religion of Black self‑respect.” It was never a majority, but it supplied a symbol.

Symbols outlast sermons. When Malcolm X returned from Mecca embracing orthodox Islam, popular culture kept only the defiant half of his story. Hip‑hop artists later revived fragments of that imagery, the crescent moon chains, the Five‑Percent­‑Nation slogans. For millions of listeners, Islam became shorthand for clarity, strength, rebellion. A 1993 Brookings study found nearly 40 % of converts citing “discipline” and “structure” as motives. It wasn’t theology; it was order without condescension.

That romance still resonates. On social media, Malcolm X clips loop under soundtracks of righteous anger. Robes and Arabic calligraphy are often used as fashion statements. What once demanded faith now signals authenticity. Younger activists inherit Islamic motifs as cultural heritage rather than creed. Their chants for Palestine or against “colonialism” echo an aesthetic of resistance more than a theology of belief.

Christianity preaches patience; militant Islam demands action. One sanctifies forgiveness, the other valorizes defiance. In a culture exhausted by grievance, the latter feels cleaner. That’s why Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X now appear side by side online, as if they preached the same gospel. They did not. King appealed to universal conscience; Malcolm to divine justice against a corrupt world. Today’s campus activism follows Malcolm’s path of moral power through perpetual offense.

Progressive universities that mock Christianity’s patriarchy often post Quranic verses as art. Feminism poses beside Islamic symbolism in a kind of ideological cosplay. It’s theater, not theology, the image of purity opposing Western “corruption.” Few notice that the Middle East’s freest Muslims live under secular constitutions, the sort progressives dismiss as “colonial.”

Earlier Black leaders, such as Douglass, Washington, and Bethune, found dignity by embracing Western ideals and compelling America to honor them. Their heirs are told instead to find dignity by denouncing the civilization that made liberty possible. That inversion didn’t come from the mosque; it came from the academy. The Left’s template, oppressed versus oppressor, made the romance with Islam inevitable. Once “resistance” became a civic virtue, any doctrine opposing America earned automatic sainthood.

Most Black Muslims in the U.S. wanted structure and meaning when other institutions failed them. But elites quickly commodified that sincerity. The disciplined believer became branded for “authenticity.” Corporations monetized it as diversity, universities as decolonial chic, politicians as vote‑bank politics. Genuine faith turned into moral theater. What began as self‑respect risks ending as self‑parody.

The Elite Conversion of Idealism into Management

Every revolution eventually hires accountants. Once moral passion proves useful, someone finds a way to invoice it. Protest becomes industry, guilt becomes currency. The story of Western sympathy for political Islam followed a similar arc. What began as compassion for the “oppressed” matured into a professional enterprise run by people who never miss catered lunches.

Yesterday’s radicals run today’s foundations. Rage, when translated into grant proposals, suddenly pays. By the mid-2010s, the number of registered U.S. nonprofits devoted to “equity and justice” had tripled in a decade, generating more than $10 billion annually. Much of that came not from small donors but from corporations purchasing moral insurance. Every PR department now has a “diversity partner,” fluent in moral theater but mute on results. Success isn’t measured by outcomes but by outrage.

Corporate sponsorship turned the Palestinian cause into the perfect stage set. The image of boys with stones facing tanks is ready‑made moral drama. Social media amplified it with racial and colonial guilt, letting Western activists import Middle‑Eastern conflict as part of their own redemption story. During the Gaza crises of 2021 and 2024, dozens of corporations issued near‑identical solidarity statements while maintaining factories in countries that flog dissidents. Data from OpenSecrets showed corporate contributions to “justice” nonprofits surging by 42 % during that window. Guilt pays dividends.

Universities built the ideological scaffolding. Decades of post‑colonial theory had prepared students to see the West as oppressor and every rival culture as victim. Islam became “anti‑imperialist spirituality.” Professors didn’t need to preach jihad, only to grade as if Western civilization spoke with a guilty accent. Diversity offices turned grievance into payroll. When Islam acquired the status of “oppressed faith,” it supplied infinite content for the bureaucracy of empathy.

Governments joined by outsourcing conscience. Funding “faith‑based dialogue” costs less than confronting extremism and yields better photographs. European‑Union grants for “intercultural understanding” funneled tens of millions of euros into NGOs linked to Islamist advocacy, many openly skeptical of secular democracy. Bureaucrats call it inclusion; recipients call it dawah.

This is virtue as management science. Activists gain salary; institutions rent moral legitimacy. Together they transmute guilt into a renewable resource. The more outrage burns below, the thicker comfort grows above. The perfection of the system is its aimlessness: no one inside wants results, only funding. Moral passion becomes administrative routine.

What was once idealism now functions as supply chain. The same machinery that claims to fight oppression depends on its perpetual existence. Bureaucracies cannot repent; they can only rebrand. When every “Equity Office” survives by discovering new sins, freedom becomes over‑managed remorse. Guilt is no longer a feeling; it’s an industry standard.

The Trojan Horse in Practice

Every ideology must act, and political Islam acts through institutions. No siege engines, no armies, just slogans, committees, and paperwork. Infiltration now arrives through moral language.

Coalition capture is the first tactic. Broad activist movements open with universal goals, peace, equality, and human rights, but are gradually repurposed for narrower agendas. Once Islamist‑aligned groups adopt the same slogans, they’re treated as allies. Within a few years, leadership shifts even as supporters imagine the mission unchanged. Europe’s “Stop the War” coalitions of the early 2000s began as anti-imperialist; they ended up condemning Western secularism itself.

Financial diversion follows. In 2024, Britain’s Charity Commission uncovered millions of pounds redirected from humanitarian accounts to Islamist advocacy networks. Donors thought they were feeding children; they were financing clerics. Similar patterns appear wherever oversight fears “Islamophobia” more than fraud.

Media repetition locks the illusion in place. Reporting privileges emotion over accuracy because outrage sells. During the 2025 Gaza conflict, major Western outlets repeated figures from Hamas’s information office as verified data. Few retractions followed. The result was not overt lying but selective truth, a fog in which sentiment becomes policy.

Algorithmic amplification finishes the job. Social‑media design rewards indignation, short, moralistic bursts that spread faster than analysis. Political Islam gains digital allies who have never opened a Quran but who chant the same hashtags. Informational laundering converts borrowed moral energy into political leverage.

Bureaucratic cementing gives the final payoff. Once slogans become common language, politicians adopt them to demonstrate awareness; bureaucrats convert rhetoric into regulation. Votes follow sympathy; funding follows votes. By the time anyone notices ideology inside the system, it appears as standard procedure, diversity training, cultural partnerships, and “inclusive language” mandates. The Trojan Horse has parked itself inside the castle with a grant number stenciled on the side.

The pattern feeds on fatigue. Idealists believe they advance justice; managers know they advance budgets. Liberty erodes quietly as compassion’s paperwork expands.

Consequences

Ideas have consequences, and so does delusion. A culture that rewards performance virtue instead of principle decays by degrees. The erosion is visible everywhere: in campuses where antisemitism parades as conscience, in media that mistake fairness for fear, in governments apologizing for their own foundations.

After recent Middle‑East wars, student groups chanted slogans that plainly endorse Israel’s eradication while demanding “safe spaces” for themselves. Administrators issue statements against “all hate” but avoid naming the hate in front of them. Surveys at elite universities show nearly half of Jewish students afraid to speak openly. Their grandparents faced burning crosses; they face polite ostracism. The form differs, the cowardice stays.

Editorial boards once proud of free thought now practice moral censorship. Criticize Islamist ideology and you’re branded phobic; denounce Western civilization and you’re booked for Sunday talk shows. The result is anesthesia disguised as tolerance.

Education reflects the same rot. The university that once taught logic now teaches grievance. Hundreds of courses across major schools frame Western civilization solely as oppression. An education built on selective outrage cannot produce citizens, only spectators of decline. Lawmakers mirror the disease: they trade justice and duty for emotion and identity. Once law bends to tribe, it ceases to be law at all.

Foreign policy decays with equal hypocrisy. Governments that sermonize about rights sign energy contracts with the regimes that flog women. Cultural “sensitivity” becomes moral surrender. Guilt, outsourced as diplomacy, replaces strength with supplication.

The deeper damage is psychological. Generations raised on systemic guilt inherit cynicism, not reform. They demolish what they no longer believe worth saving. A culture convinced of its own corruption cannot defend itself; it mistakes exhaustion for wisdom. Authoritarian states notice. Russia, China, Iran hold conferences on Western hypocrisy, and the West nods along, mistaking shame for honesty.

Religious institutions mirror the confusion, staging interfaith panels with clerics who oppose interfaith freedom itself. Families and communities fracture as ideology replaces kinship. Identity becomes franchise. The state grows while the citizen shrinks. Managing grievance is the new prosperity engine, even as real wealth and trust decline.

Civilizations don’t collapse from invasion; they hollow from within. The lights stay on long after the meaning goes dark.

The Way Back

Recovery starts with honesty. After half a century of ritual apology, the West doesn’t need new slogans; it needs nerve. The first step is to restore universal law: one standard for believers and skeptics, the majority and the minority. No sacred exemptions. When theology redraws legality, voters become subjects. The same applies to secular dogmas enforced as creed.

Next comes distinction: Muslim faith versus Islamist politics. The first is private devotion, the second political absolutism. Confusing them betrays both. The devout Muslim who seeks liberty shares more with the Western liberal than with the theocrat who seeks power. Protect worship; resist rule by revelation.

Then audit the machinery of influence. Universities, NGOs, and grant systems shaping policy must disclose funding and ideological links. Oversight is not prejudice; it’s hygiene. Taxpayers deserve to know when “dialogue” doubles as propaganda.

Education must return to reason, logic, and civic philosophy. Teach how to argue before teaching whom to pity. A society fluent only in accusation will soon forget deliberation.

Moral courage follows: guilt is easy, gratitude takes discipline. Freedom without effort breeds contempt. National service, community labor, and shared projects rebuild mutual trust. Patriotism is not arrogance but maintenance.

Speech must be untouchable. Offense is not harm, and censorship is not care. Once emotion licenses silencing, truth dies by etiquette.

Foreign policy must regain moral clarity. Alliances should rest on governance, not guilt. Religious dictatorships are not moral creditors. Saying no is sometimes the highest form of respect.

Finally, revive cultural imagination. Tell stories of mastery, sacrifice, integrity. Heroes can defend civilization without apology. When every rebel fights the West, the West forgets why it’s worth defending.

Freedom does not need reinvention; it needs maintenance. The trowel and hammer of reason, discipline, and gratitude still hang ready. Pick them up.

Crossroads

Every civilization arrives eventually at a moment when it must decide what it believes about itself. Some choose rediscovery, others choose fatigue. America stands at that moment now. The battle is not between faiths or parties but between remembering and forgetting. A people can survive disagreement, but not the loss of conviction that any truth is worth defending.

The United States is not yet an Islamic state, nor is it immune to the quiet corrosion that makes such fantasies plausible. Each time progressivism grants theological movements political immunity, the boundary between belief and law thins. Freedom erodes not through conquest but through permission. We invite decay under the name of tolerance.

The irony is that the American experiment began with the hardest kind of tolerance, one disciplined by truth. The founders knew that liberty without virtue collapses into license, and virtue without liberty turns into tyranny. Their solution was the civic covenant: law independent of creed, conscience independent of state. That principle allowed religions to flourish while keeping them from ruling. It also allowed skeptics to speak without fear. We forget that simple architecture at our peril.

The new generation is told that Western ideals are hypocritical relics. Yet those ideals gave the world its longest period of expanding freedom. The same society that once abolished slavery, enfranchised women, and built constitutional rights for minorities now apologizes for existing. That reversal is not progress. It is moral exhaustion disguised as empathy.

History offers clues to what happens next. Civilizations that abandon confidence do not vanish all at once. They drift. Education fills with slogans. Art worships rebellion instead of beauty. Faith becomes self‑help. Law bends to emotion. By the time anyone asks how things reached that point, the answer is already history.

America does not have to drift. The machinery of self‑correction still works if we choose to use it. Truth has never needed majorities, only people willing to defend it. The courage of a few citizens who understand their inheritance has always outweighed the noise of crowds repeating approved feelings. The republic was built on argument, not whispers of guilt.

To recover that spirit is to reclaim adulthood. The task ahead is not to purge religion or idealism but to restore proportion. Belief must remain private and voluntary. Law must remain common and secular. Compassion must be tempered by discernment, and justice must again mean equality under rules, not privilege under slogans.

If these things sound old‑fashioned, that is because they have stood the test that most new theories fail. Freedom does not need reinvention; it needs maintenance. The hammer and trowel of reason, discipline, and courage still hang on the wall. The question is whether anyone will pick them up.

The title of this essay asked a question: The Islamic States of America? The mark at the end matters. It is a question only while doubt endures. If we continue to treat our principles as relics and our hesitation as wisdom, the mark will change. History will erase the question and leave only the answer, the one we were too sophisticated to believe could happen here.

There’s little doubt that, once the dust settles, the post-collapse life is going to be tough. Most of the conveniences we take for granted today will be hard to acquire, regardless of whether or not money will still be worth anything. People who want them will say and do anything, people who sell them will come up with all sorts of strategies and you need to be prepared because, no matter how prepped you are, it’s still likely you’ll end up in desperate positions. That is why it is important to know how to barter.

In what follows I want to give you a few solid bartering and negotiation tactics and techniques that will help you get food, water or medicine when you’ll need them most. However, if you truly want them to work for you, you have to practice them. Reading them just isn’t enough, that’s why included a special section at the end where I suggest how you can do that.

Top 10 Barter Items To Stockpile

Item	Why It’s Great For Bartering
1. Bandages	First aid items are very valuable, especially care for larger wounds since they will require more dressing and frequent changes.
2. Batteries	AA and AAA are popular sizes for flashlights, headlamps, radios, and numerous other electronics. Batteries inevitably run out so these are a surefire need after SHTF.
3. MREs	Food. Need we say more? Keep in mind that someone desparate for food is very vulnerable and use caution when negotiating a deal.
4. Duct Tape	Infinite survival uses, including splinting a broken bone, repairing a tent, fletching an arrow, and marking a trail. An entire roll of duct tape should yield a high value in a trade.
5. Zip Ties	Versatile and strong, zip ties are great for hanging gear, securing shelter, fixing clothes and shoes, and more. It’s easy to carry a large number of them and separate into smaller bundles to trade.
6. Fish Antibiotics	Fish antibiotics can be purchased OTC and contain the same ingredients as human antibiotics. For more information on types and dosages, check out Fish Antibiotics For Humans: A Safe Option For Your Survival Kit?
7. Condoms	In addition to contraception, condoms have many survival uses such as carrying water (up to 2 gallons!), waterproofing gear, even a slingshot for hunting small game. They are also lightweight and easy to carry.
8. Water Purification Tablets	Since each tablet treats 16 oz of water, one bottle contains many bartering opportunities. Or trade the whole bottle for a larger item you need.
9. Waterproof Matches	Fire is essential to survival so waterproof matches can be a great bartering tool. You can also carry extra capsule lighters, such as the Everstryke Pro to add long-term value to your trade.
10. Button Compasses	Small and inexpensive yet very useful, especially in the absence of GPS or cell phone navigation. They can be used to find the way back to camp, locate family and friends, or to migrate to a new area.

How To Barter After Disaster

Forget About Meeting The Other Person In The Middle

For some reason, many negotiations end before they begin. One of the parties gives a number, the other gives another and they both know they’ll agree to the sum of their offers divided by 2.

You can do better than that. The reason this happens is because they’re not taking into consideration other factors such as how bad one party needs what the other has to offer. Another thing you can do is find out as much as you can about your opponent beforehand.

The more you know about them and their situation, the more leverage you’ll have. And if you can’t find out much about them, it’s best to avoid doing any kind of post-SHTF deals. Those could be dangerous, anyway.

Start With A Lowball Offer

If you can do this and your opponent doesn’t turn around and leave, you just saved yourself a lot of money (or whatever you are using for currency). Starting really low means that the other party will eventually have to settle for a much lower price than if you’d started with something more reasonable.

Don’t Be Afraid To Walk Away From A Deal

Everything is a number’s game. Just because you need what the other person has to offer, this doesn’t mean you have to take it. You might find 5 or 10 other guys out there that will gladly take your deal and give you what you need, you just need to have the guts to end the negotiations and look for them.

Most people don’t see it this way, though. They might say:

What? You mean I have to go through the pain of finding someone else, especially since I have this guy right here who can give me what I need?

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. The reason you don’t want to do it is because it’s painful to think you have to spend more energy to find other people. But that’s the thing. If you can train yourself to do it regularly, if you allow yourself to play the numbers’ game, walking away from bad deals will become second nature.

Throw In A Bonus

People love things they can get for free. If you feel you’re close to closing a deal but still not happy with it, how about giving away a small bonus? Maybe something from your get home bag that you already have plenty of at home. You never know what the other person needs besides your money or bartering items, this is why due diligence and talking to them are a must.

Say “No” To Lowball Offers

We talked about giving really low offers but what if someone does that to you? This puts you in a weak position so the best way to counteract it is to simply say:

No, this isn’t an offer I might consider. If you can come back with a more decent offer, I’m open to negotiation.

If they like it, fine. They’ll give you a more reasonable first offer. If they don’t, like I said, there’re plenty of other guys who might be interested in the deal.

The More You Tell, The More You Sell

What I’m trying to say is, the more arguments you bring in your favor, the better you can justify the price. Particularly in the absence of money (read: bartering), it’ll be hard to put value on things. This is why thinking and then stating every possible reason that works in your favor will bring you one step closer to what you want, how you want it.

Make Small Concessions

If you started with a really low offer, there’s no better way to seal a deal than to give your opponent more than his new expectations. Of course, you shouldn’t do that if you think you can get a better deal but if you really want to wrap things up, making a small concession might bring the negotiations to a quick and happy ending.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Like any other survival skill, you shouldn’t wait for the end of the world to put into practice bartering and negotiations. You need to do it beforehand because when you’re desperate for food or water, your emotions will get in the way.

Some of ways to practice bartering and negotiations, include:

• simulations with your family,
• playing poker (it allows you to read people and develops your greed),
• going to a flea market (you’ll find plenty of cheap things that you may need for your stockpile),
• start a business (and negotiate every little thing with your supplies and partners)
• …and, provided that you have something to offer that you yourself produce (honey, veggies etc.), try bartering them for other things.

Conclusion

Just keep in mind that everything in this world is negotiable, you just need to have the right mindset. Understand the value of your own items and give a detailed explanation when trading. Know how to barter for the things you need and don’t be afraid to walk away from a bad deal. Teach it to your kids too, studies show that the sooner, the better.