or, An Investigation Into the Dynamic Flow State of Sovereignty Publics
(6,744 words.)
Networking is the most important skill I never prioritized developing until much later, and nearly every success I’ve ever had can be attributed to how I was able to conduct myself in meeting people in rooms. This is a tall order for someone like me who opens conversations with “did you see the new meme where Pink Glasses Jesse Plemons from Civil War asks them what TYPE of Hegelian they are?”
There is a Schmittean maxim circulating in our political spaces that goes something like “the sovereign is he who decides the exception.” This is to say that whoever holds real power has the responsibility to affirm order but the ability to break the rules when necessary, and you can identify who truly holds power based on their ability to break the rules when they deem necessary. There is undeniable truth in this assertion, but if taken too literally it mischaracterizes the superstructure of power itself, in every instance, as apexing in a monarch from which all authority flows.
There are other similar assertions that sound good in particular and feel good when subsequently universalized, things like “if you want to know who truly has power, consider who you are not allowed to criticize.” While there is explanatory power in that, taken to the extreme you are liable to mistake Children With Down Syndrome Occupied Government as an assessment of the state of play rather than aspirational.
There are the rooms, and there are the people who fill those rooms, but there is not one boss of the rooms lurking in the backrooms. These encounters are certainly how you can access the keyholders of influence, how you can appeal to those in power. They need not be orgies.
In fact, I would hazard to say that no business is ever conducted at an orgy.
The person in possession of the most power is situational; in any negotiation or environment where hierarchies formulate, leaders reflexively emerge. This has lead many to assume that all these discrete hierarchies are part of a larger hierarchy mirroring this molecular blueprint, once again with a supreme singular power atop it all. Donald Trump is currently the President of the most powerful country in the history of the world, he sits atop the empire as a charismatic strongman. Do you get the sense he has total power to decide the exception? Is he the sovereign when his executive orders are struck down by both the Supreme Court and Congress? Commentators cry out for him to seize the reins and assume totalitarian control as our long-awaited Philosopher King as if he could. We fumble for the name of the true power behind the throne; Netanyahu, Schwab, Leo XIV, John Nominalism? We then debate the list.
My purpose for writing this piece is to discuss the ecosystem of power, having already explored the structure of elites themselves. There I spoke more of the relationship elites have with society and what constitutes a lateral operating system, but here I will speak on the flow state of power as such. Power as a prevailing wind, power as an egregore.
You could be forgiven for believing that the previous article was an endorsement of what’s commonly known as Elite Theory, and I want to state at the outset that there is an ocean of illuminating data and pragmatic theory in that schema for how civilizations function. I am more concerned with the more current branches of this scholarship, a radical interpretation that dismisses all populist influence and casts multivariant elites as chilled secular Caesars.
Elite theory has evolved from Machiavelli’s practical overview of how an individual placed in a structurally sovereign position can survive in confounding jungles of interests into a political theory unto itself universalizing how change occurs in human systems. What people more specifically cite is the Italian School of Elite Theory which gained traction in the late 19th century. Luminaries such as Vilfredo Pareto demonstrated that beneath the surface of human cultures lie consistent underlying patterns of non-logical motivation. In attempting to clear the way of obstructive proselytizing he outlined an aggregation of fundamental and conflicting personality hemispheres. “Instinct for Combinations,” drive innovation and change. “Persistence of Aggregates,” function as conservative forces that judge and select which innovations become permanently programmed into the social order. Order vs. change, tradition vs. revolution, conservatism vs. reform. Left vs. Right. I have written before about how the Left/Right conflict in Western politics can have a multitude of political parties spun up to ultimately fall into one of these oppositional systems.
Contrasted against Pareto’s horizontal segmentation, the cornerstone of Gaetano Mosca’s theory of power is vertical in its outlook, describing how democratic self-governance is a structural impossibility. Power does not rest nor will ever rest in the will of the people at the bottom, but rather in the organized efforts of the ruling minority above. Every movement that seeks to challenge existing elites will, if they grow large enough, develop its own oligarchy. The accusation that there is no true populist revolt is correct; each revolution is initiated by a counter-elite and could be interpreted as a coup d’etat by another name. The mob exists, but there is no collectivist spirit that is singularly guiding them.
These new and revolutionary elites, however, can ascend from the populace, and indeed can both wield and immerse themselves within the mass, acting as its collective will. They may love their people, they may be of the people.
Elite Theory unites a coherent argument that what we know as ideologies are simply rebrandings of much deeper motivations. Understanding this framework exposes how ideologies, theologies, and political doctrines function primarily as derivations that justify pre-existing sentiments. Even if you reject this particular categorization, you can understand how people’s ambitions, temperaments, and even their behavioral faults can seek out uniforms to justify themselves. This is an important dimension to keep in mind, and if there is any takeaway it’s this: nobody on Earth is truly motivated by their public moralism.
For example, someone who highly exhibits the trait of disgust and a general closed-mindedness will gravitate toward conservatism while those with low trait of disgust and open-mindedness will find appeal in Liberalism.
What do we say to those high in disgust and also open-minded? We tell them to subscribe to Vanguardist Journal.
It is essential to peel away the membrane of intellectualism constituting ideology and peer at the guts beneath. The danger presented forthwith is substituting a similarly reductive explanation to the forces controlling society. If there is a constant rebalancing between Left and Right across every state, every empire, every tribe, why do they all appear so different? Political theories struggle to ascend the ladder of universalization when their discrete expressions are so divergent.
“A political formula is simply a legitimating myth. The simplest one is something like Divine Right: the king rules because he is God’s representative. Another simple one is ‘the will of the people’: the government rules because the people chose them. In the cold light of day, these formulas are at worst totally false or at best unfalsifiable. Most of the time when a government claims to act ‘in the will of the people’ it is a lie.” – Neema Parvini
The “populist delusion” – an otherwise multivariant phrase summarizing the bedrock of Elite Theory – is the dangerous belief that mass opinion, popular resentment, or electoral mobilization can redirect political power. The irony is that while academic agents such as Neema Parvini argue that governments are run by elites governing solely according their own interests, they apparently require the consent of the population, even without the electoral mandate of that population. We all accept that our votes cannot change the status quo, but it’s clear these people care about your votes. They care about you being on their side.
If all that matters is power, and all that drives events are the whims of the powerful, why do they even need to lie at all? Put another way, if power can really do whatever it desires, why does it work so hard to assuage the populace? It would imply that there is a latent power dwelling on the peripheries that they are, if not fearful, then mindful of. The very fact that any political formula, or really any lie deployed to bewitch the masses, exists informs us there is a practical necessity for the lie. Why does power seem so powerless?
Further, if ideology, religion, values, and culture are merely instruments to cloak the dagger of Machiavellian ambitions, then the framework cannot account for elites who genuinely believe in their own ideology and act on it at personal cost. Has there ever been a ruler who felt subservient to a religious leader, thus compromising their power? Has there ever been a sovereign who went insane? What is driving transhumanist technocrats if not romantic faith in technology? Dismissing all of this requires we inhabit a world where subversion is simply not present at the highest echelons of power.
There are parallel schools of thought concerning the centralizing tendency of power, namely Bertrand de Jouvenel, a French political theorist drawing inspiration from French historian Fustel de Coulanges. Both of these intellectuals converged with C.A. Bond’s Nemesis. Examining history through the lens of the high-low vs. middle mechanism, Bond lays bare the hyper-centralization of power under liberal democracy. More concerned with the zones of power and how they interact, the theory describes a tripartite structure of any given political order, one that is expanded upon in the sequel “Themis.”
The Centre (or “High”) is the nucleus of Power, or the state and the financial-intelligence apparatus that surrounds it. The Subsidiaries (or “Middle”) is the intermediate powers that mediate between the Centre and the mass of society such aristocracies, churches, guilds, power brokers, and wealthy facilitators (the bourgeoisie.) The Periphery (or “Low”) constitutes the masses, the dispossessed, the socially marginal. This is regular people, and increasingly those whose dependency makes them available for mobilization.
Bond is explicit that this is not simply a description of the relationship between ruler and ruled, rather the perpetual war within power itself. Both spheres of power alternatively vie to direct the aggression of the citizens towards each other at various times to check their dominance. Both campaigns are offered to various Low Publics as one form of populist revolution or another.
This does not prohibit the masses from being revolutionary in their intent, only that coordination is not conjured from the collective will of the lowest rungs of society. The ideology backing each movement of liberation offered to the low varies; the structural logic does not.
“The leveling process need find no place in Power’s programme: it is embedded in its destiny. From the moment that it seeks to lay hands on the resources latent in the community, it finds itself impelled to put down the mighty by its natural tendency… Its work is that of demolishing feudal castles; ambition motivates it, but the former victims rejoice in their liberation. Its work is that of breaking the shell of petty private tyrannies so as to draw out the hoarded energy within; greed motivates it but the exploited rejoice in the downfall of their exploiters. The final result of this stupendous work of aggression, does not disclose itself till late.” – CA Bond, Nemesis
I am seeking to shatter the same reductive inversion of “the foolish masses vs. cunning power” that the elite theorists correctly, justifiably accomplished with “the benevolent masses vs. corrupt power.” In a recent Vanguardist Journal piece titled “Do Not Read This Article” I addressed the twisting evolution of the Hegelian dialectic through 20th century Leftist intellectualism, and keeping our attention trained on that space we can also notice the curious trend of systemic phenomenon isolated into metaphysical forces and thus animated into self-sustaining entities. We run the risk of repeating this with the concept of Power, making assertions such as “power wants…” and “power believes…”
I have witnessed people earnestly say, “power is power.”
I have been guilty of something like this when I would cite De Maistre’s definition of sovereignty as not an achievable status but rather an ontological space that calls out to be filled by an individual representing the pure context of his time and place. Sovereignty is the throne demanding an occupant. There you have it, “demands.” I am committing a spatialization of the concept along with the language of motivating desire of this place. It may sound semantical, but this is the root of the problem. The spatialization is inevitable, but the inclination to grant it awareness or even a life essence opens a ontological labyrinth.
Spaces for the powerful to pursue these veiled interests are occasionally observable, frequently imagined by the Platonic Fetid Proletarian represented by this author. Austin Carson asks us to visualize major powers as actors in a stage play, moving between a space in which their behavior is known and acknowledged to all, which he calls “frontstage”, then shifting towards a place where actions are covert, visible only to other performers, meaning “backstage.” He frames this strictly in geopolitical terms, directing our attention towards the zone of diplomats, red phones ringing, and cards overturned atop the table.
The logic follows that since World War I, large-scale escalation of war has become unacceptably costly, yet leader control of the escalation process has been simultaneously weakened contrasted against wars throughout history. Two specific escalation-control problems are thus revealed: constraints created by domestic hawks and misunderstandings among adversaries about the value of limited war. The former exists in the front-stage while the latter occurs in the backstage.
Backstaging military intervention through covert ops, proxy negotiations, and even secret wars allows rival leaders to insulate themselves and one another from domestic hawkish constraints, including those in the media and their military industrial complexes. Backstage actions are never fully concealed, because other actors are also able to detect them. As a result, leaders and governments seek to control the pathways to large-scale escalation, occasionally communicating publicly in displays picked over by even the most competent conspiracy theorists.
It is this author’s belief that much of the alien disclosure discourse – specifically the white pill-shaped UFOs that seem to appear only to American jets – is a subtle show of force over contested waters.
“The covert sphere is more than a venue for rivals to deceive and outmaneuver one another during war. The backstage is also a segregated space that can help major powers, even adversaries, manipulate perceptions and control the escalation risks of war. The book also shows that the domestic politics that shape secrecy decisions are complex. Rather than the evasion of antiwar mass mobilization to initiate and maintain intervention, I demonstrate that secrecy is alluring to democratic leaders seeking to insulate themselves from hawkish reactions that would make limiting war more difficult.” – Austin Carson, Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics
States’ restraint can become politically infeasible if calls for belligerence are severe, both in democratic and non-democratic settings. Weiss’s study of nationalist mobilization argues that hawkish protests strengthen China’s hand in coercive diplomacy precisely because such protests risk the Communist Party’s hold on domestic power. Bargaining models of coercive diplomacy also suggest that domestic political constraints on leaders can influence the likelihood that one side capitulates during a prewar crisis. Audience cost theory, for example, posits that leaders can be punished by hawkish domestic constituents if caught visibly and clearly bluffing.
Even the most powerful nations on Earth, especially those possessing thermonuclear apocalypse engines, place a heavy value on controlling the perspectives of their subordinates. It must create a space for itself to permit weakness for both belligerents. If either side shows weakness publicly, they can fall victim to death by one thousand externalities (regional competitors) and internalities (latent contenders for control.)
Rival nations frequently help each other maintain their covert cover, like the Soviets and Americans concealing direct air engagement during the Vietnam war. This is not out of goodwill, but out of shared strategic self-interest: neither side wants the conflict to escalate into something uncontrollable. If they lose their grasp of the narrative, or if entire secret wars are uncovered, they will feel the pressure to escalate beyond reasonable bounds.
Civilians have a surprising thirst for total war.
If Carson provides the macro-theory, Victor Ostrovsky provides the micro-anatomy. A former Mossad case officer (known as a katsa,) his autobiography offers a granular portrait of how a major intelligence agency actually functions: not as the disciplined instrument of state policy it presents on the frontstage, but as a semi-autonomous power center, often pursuing agendas at odds with the government it nominally serves. Israel is an interesting case in the study of power: a regional juggernaut vying for status as hegemon, could it be said that their leaders show no allegiance to race? Faith? Ethnoreligious perpetuity?
Perhaps the most remarkable structural feature of the Mossad described by Ostrovsky is the Sayanim network: a global web of civilian helpers, recruited from Jewish diaspora communities worldwide, providing logistical, financial, and intelligence support to Mossad operations without formal employment or compensation. Mossad is the most outrageous example of the blurring boundary between the intelligence apparatus and civilian society. Former Mossad director Meir Amit created the Sayanim in the 1960s, and now every country is believed to have a Sayanim network concealed within their Jewish community.
This is the essential logic of black operations finance: when an intelligence agency wants to operate outside the oversight of its own government, it requires funding streams that cannot be traced through official budgets. Criminal enterprises such as drugs, arms trafficking, and money laundering become the economic infrastructure of unaccountable power. The demarcations between agents carrying licenses to kill, haberdashers offering safe houses, and criminals providing logistical support are effectively non-existent.
“We were to do what was good for us and screw everybody else, because they wouldn’t be helping us. The further to the right you go in Israel, the more you hear that. In Israel, if you stay where you are politically, you’re automatically shifting to the left, because now the whole country seems to be rapidly heading right. You know what Israelis say: “If they weren’t burning us in World War II, they were helping, or if they weren’t helping, they were ignoring it,” Yet I don’t remember anybody in Israel going out to demonstrate when all those people were being murdered in Cambodia. So why expect everybody to get involved just for us?” – Victor Ostrovsky, By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer
We return to the nature of belief in circles of power and whether ideology can make subservient those who occupy proximal zones of sovereignty. At the highest offices of Israeli power, can we even entertain the notion that their actions are not possessed by an ethnoreligious agenda? Is Zionist power truly for the sake of power, or is for the Jewish people? As Ostrovsky pointed out with a true insider’s insight, the commitment to defend God’s chosen people permeates every level of Israeli society, and that manifests both in their propensity for viciousness in warfare and the open secret of The Samson Option. Ask yourself: how many Americans would choose to doom the planet to nuclear hellfire if America was on the brink of collapse? Now ask yourself how much of Israeli leadership would do the same, and then ask how many Israeli citizens would rather kill the world, including themselves, than be murdered by the goyim. You need to account for this information backstage when you negotiate.
If you get in a room with Netanyahu, does he reveal that everything he does is for calculated self-interest, or does he actually believe in this whole Jew Thing?
It’s not only Israel attempting to subvert nations around the world from within. Elite capture has been of primary concern to any intelligence community of consequence for decades. Daniel Golden’s Spy Schools is an investigation into how American academia has been infiltrated by the top intelligence agencies both foreign and domestic. From China to the CIA, the halls of the Ivy Leagues are lousy with spies. Their goals are to recruit, subvert, and extract valuable research from key targets. The real prize is to bring someone entirely into an adversarial sphere of influence. This is where the elites of the future are captured and the changemakers of today are exploited for murky interests.
Project 111 is one of a vast array of Chinese “brain gain” programs that encourage theft of intellectual property from U.S. universities. These initiatives attract overseas scientists, especially those born in China, offering generous salaries, laboratory facilities, and other incentives that a borderline candidate may be tempted by to improve his chances by bringing back somebody else’s data or ideas. The 2013 report of the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property concluded that China accounts for between 50 percent and 80 percent of the more than $300 billion in intellectual property that the United States loses annually.
In a knowledge-based economy, universities are where brilliant minds of all nationalities mingle freely with few questions asked, permitted to extend the horizons of what’s thinkable. Academic research offers a valuable and low-risk target for foreign espionage. Ignorance about intellectual property safeguards, or even hostility toward them, is rife among science students and faculty. Many of America’s brightest minds believe themselves to be part of an enlightened class beyond the concerns of petty politics. The STEM leaders of tomorrow are frequently bewitched by boutique political affiliations and, despite claims to Vulcan-like focus, they are not above ego, bitterness, and delusions of grandeur.
Conversely, Harvard currently allows the CIA to send officers to the midcareer program at the Kennedy School of Government while continuing to act undercover, with the school’s full consent. Russian spies have also enrolled at the Kennedy School, although without Harvard’s explicit cooperation, nonetheless with their full knowledge. The school thus becomes a precise microcosm of the larger dynamic: a frontstage of international dialogue and academic freedom, and a backstage where rival intelligence services are simultaneously running covert operations against each other.
“One former CIA operative overseas explained to me how it works. Let’s call him ‘R.’ Between assignments, he would peruse a list of upcoming conferences, pick one, and identify a scientist of interest who seemed likely to attend because he had spoken at least twice at the same event in previous years. […] He invented a company name, used GoDaddy.com to build a website, and printed business cards. He created billing, phone, and credit card records for the nonexistent company. […] For the rest of the conference, R would “run around like crazy,” bumping into the scientist at every opportunity. With each contact, called ‘time on target’ in CIA jargon and counted in his job performance metrics, he insinuated himself into the professor’s affections. After a couple of days, R would invite the scientist to lunch or dinner and make his pitch: his company was interested in research or consulting in the scientist’s field, and would like to support his work.” – Daniel Golden, Spy Schools
China entrapped Glenn Duffie Shriver by paying him to write essays, the same trick that U.S. agents play on scientists at academic conferences. American intelligence pressured Dajin Peng and Carlos Alvarez to spy and Iranian nuclear scientists to defect. All services take advantage of students’ ideological fervor, as Cuba did with Marta Rita Velázquez and Ana Belén Montes. These infamous cases have succeeded only in normalizing the practice. There currently exists no interest at any level of government or academia to address this trend, only accelerate it.
If we zoom back out we may behold the culmination of all these microcosms: a chaotic ecology of competing institutions, each pursuing its own survival and advantage, constrained only by fear of detection and escalation, generating outcomes that no single actor fully controls or intended. Democratic governments routinely deceive their own citizens in the name of managing the backstage. Intelligence agencies deceive their own governments in the name of operational security. Universities deceive their own students and faculty in the name of maintaining lucrative government relationships. Power pools in the middle while the top and the bottom carve it up from either side. But who rules the middle?
Before us is a sketch of the uppermost class of wealth and influence subdivided into strata and further split into columns. To understand this ecosystem we must exit the 19th century frame of class affiliation and gravitate towards one of publics, one of identity affiliations of religion, family, gender, fandom, and ideology, all of which create schisms that must be overcome or leveraged.
The rest of us are agitated to commentate from the sidelines while yearning for some other clandestine elite to seize control in our interest.
I am reminded of a lively chat I got into with my favourite Book Club, specifically my friend Fansy who believes he has my number but he does not. They were all discussing the implications of “agency,” specifically how to identify it lurking in others. Who are the people who can operate purely under their own strength of will, who are the shape-rotators? From my perspective they, like many of us, were smuggling a great deal of biases inside the word, whispering correlations with high IQ and superior forms of consciousness. The word “agency” is very specific, it primarily means whether or not you have the capacity to pursue your own interests and secondarily whether or not they can change the world around them. My take was that the qualifiers for agency are present in innovators and rapists alike. We like to assume those with true agency are the leaders of men, and while this is true they can also be degenerate criminals. I’m not going to steelman their position because they can start their own Substack actually.
If we are defining agency to mean someone who pursues their interests against the consensus – possessing a cognitive ability that betrays a higher order awareness – that is a very large bucket for kings and sociopaths. It was my contention that what we should be searching for is Agency+, which is agency plus creativity plus High IQ plus discipline, removing one attribute in that sequence effectively dooming the individual to dank obscurity. You can also have agency plus high time preference plus manipulation, and you end up a gambling eCeleb with face tattoos. We want there to be a correlation between agency and one’s ability to visualize complex systems, or perhaps betray an enlightened self-awareness. I believe one can weave stronger connective tissue between agency and criminality, mental illness, and general strangeness.
Hunting for those who can act misses multitudinous dimensions similar to people hunting for those with power. Power is circumstantial, power is transactional, power is multi-dimensional, and power has a gradient of qualitative attributes.
Perhaps no better example of this web of relationships entrapping the characteropathic exists than the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Even calling it a scandal minimizes the scale of what was splayed out before the world. It was a case study depicting the forces we have been describing thus far.
Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail, published across two volumes, explores not only the crimes of New York Financier Jeffrey Epstein and his trusty sidekick Ghislaine Maxwell, but more importantly the megalithic system they inhabited and were selected to service. The story begins not with Jeffrey Epstein but with World War II, recounting a tale that represents the most consequential act of High-Low alliance in American history. The U.S. government’s intelligence apparatus formed an shadowy partnership with a loose cooperative of Italian and Jewish mafias known as National Crime Syndicate. The purpose was to secure control over the waterfront dominated by labor unions and other intermediary bodies that the wartime state needed to bypass. The crime syndicate headed by boss Meyer Lansky was later credited with obtaining compromising photos of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sometime in the 1940s, which allegedly depicted Hoover involved in a homosexual dalliance which Lansky and his associates used as leverage to direct Hoover’s attention away from the plague of organized crime. He publicly referred to organized crime as a “local” problem in which the FBI did not need to intervene for most of his nearly fifty-year stint as the top law enforcement administrator in the country.
Observe the blackmail system functioning not as a tool of pure domination but as a regulatory mechanism of the middle. Hoover, the most powerful law enforcement figure in America was neutralized by the organized criminal Low that the High had armed with compromising material.
The dynamic and occasionally adversarial partnership between state intelligence and the criminal underworld is the impetus of the entire sordid tale. It discombobulates the entire economy of power, revealing the astonishing degree legitimate organs can be captured by measly Jewish drug trafficking pimps.
“It is worth noting that, during and before this period of Epstein’s career (i.e. the early to mid-1980s), both Israeli and British intelligence were already involved in the acquisition of sexual blackmail domestically within the United States. Some of the blackmail sources were call services operating in New York and Washington, DC that sexually exploited minors. In 1982, the New York State Select Committee on Crime, which investigated nationwide networks of underage sex trafficking and the production of child pornography, saw committee investigator Dale Smith reveal that an accountant for ‘several call service operations’ in Washington, DC, named Robert Koehler was selling ‘information on the sexual proclivities of the clients to agents of foreign intelligence services.’ Two other call service operations were called Brian’s Boys and Fantasies Unlimited, which were operated out of Alexandria, Virginia, and managed by Jonathan C. Reynolds III. Reynolds told Smith that he was “selling information out of the call services” specifically ‘to British and Israeli intelligence.’” – Whitney Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail Vol. 2
An exciting new strategy was inaugurated, one that would become very popular during the Cold War. Much of the wartime OSS and CIA as well as Mossad operated in close proximity to, and were effectively indistinguishable from, organized crime. The nexus between intelligence and organized crime developed the sexual entrapment tactics that would later enable the blackmail operation and other crimes of Epstein; a node in a graph of blackmail, state spycraft, and elite persuasion.
Epstein’s inner circle included Ghislaine Maxwell, once considered a passive ludicrosity, under the light of scrutiny recast as an essential player in the interlocking schemes. Her father Robert Maxwell was himself a wealthy titan of industry, notorious Israeli intelligence operative, and by all counts the pimp of his daughter.
Perhaps the most damning evidence is the documented statement that Epstein belonged to intelligence, according to then-Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta. He had signed off on Epstein’s “sweetheart deal” during his first criminal case because he was commanded to back off of Epstein. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” Acosta had reportedly told the Trump transition team.
It is impossible to tell the story of Epstein without elucidating the Jewish interests at play, and we need only look at the people surrounding Epstein to understand the disparate yet collective missions. One such figure was Leslie Wexner, who employed Epstein as his personal financial manager from 1987 to 2007. Wexner’s singular purpose later in life appeared to be marshalling his substantial influence to inject Israeli corruption into American society.
The same year he and Epstein began donating to Harvard in 1991, Leslie Wexner teamed up with Charles Bronfman to establish an exclusive group of 20 of the nation’s wealthiest Jewish businessmen, thereafter referred to as either the “Study Group” or the “Mega Group.” They outwardly asserted a mission of philanthropy, but it was more of a financial black box through which they could pool and distribute funds towards Zionist non-profits.
The Wexner Foundation’s stated purpose was to assist “emerging professional Jewish leaders in North America and mid-career public officials in Israel.” Throughout the 1980s, Wexner was one of the largest individual contributors to the United Jewish Appeal in America and, after creating the Wexner Heritage Foundation, became UJA’s vice chairman. While Wexner was serving in these capacities, he was also engaged in closed door meetings with the highest levels of Israeli leadership. We see a man that leveraged his wealth and business success to serve the ethnoreligious interests of his kinfolk half a world away.
The logic of Epstein’s operation concerning young women recruited from vulnerable, economically desperate backgrounds, trafficked upward into encounters with powerful men, documented and archived is, in the Elite Theory framework, precisely the High-Low mechanism made flesh. The women in financially precarious situations were mobilized through Epstein as a middle instrument, against other middle-tier figures (politicians, scientists, businessmen, royals) to generate leverage for the Centre’s intelligence and control operations.
What cynical power interest could so possess a diaspora while ignoring collectivist ethnoreligious inclinations? The nefarious network of sexual blackmail is undeniably populated by ruthless minds, but if we analyze the musculature of the thing we can identify systems of belief that reject the linear cartography of up and down, inside and out.
The connection between Epstein and Wexner represented the financial and structural foundation of Epstein’s entire operation, one which appears to have been severed before his arrest, suggesting that the network that had built him was withdrawing its protection. Epstein was surrendered by his partners as the walls closed in.
Epstein was arrested for the second time in July 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges and found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center the following month, in what the government and the media immediately ruled a suicide. The internal fractures within the elite that produced the 2019 prosecution are visible in the political contradictions surrounding it.
It would be a mistake to assume Epstein was not aware of his precarious status and carving out a space for his own interests, in all likelihood collecting private files to be used against his contemporaries. Similarly, whatever criminal enterprises he was hooked in with had their own emergency vaults. Epstein himself, employee that he was, perhaps overestimated his own power within the grander system. The investigation into the extensive client list was shut down because pulling back the curtain would have exposed a depth of corruption that would undermine the entire civilization. People are not ready for how deep the corridors of the backstage extend.
The intelligence-crime-technocrat nexus, along with the network of compromised elites, did not vanish with Epstein.
The backstage gravitated closer towards the center of power, and everyone inside of it must have heard the music slowing. While he courted top scientists and tech moguls, Epstein had become intimately involved in planning key aspects of major philanthropic chimera that would later become major drivers of global health policy in the developing world: the Clinton Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to name two. Epstein’s decision to court tech scions, while also rebranding as a tech investor and entrepreneur, was carefully calculated. Both he and the Maxwells were aware of how the digital revolution was drastically reshaping the face of blackmail and influence operations.
With a few lines of surreptitious code, intelligence agencies could gain access to troves of sensitive data in real-time, which previously would have required scores of highly embedded and sophisticated spies. While this shift may have provided new opportunities for Epstein and Maxwell, it also made them irrelevant.
What sole sovereign was responsible for breaking the rules and sacrificing Epstein to the public, destructing the redundant system of blackmail upon which so much American power was constructed?
The technology sector with its data accumulation capabilities and its intelligence partnerships (including Palantir and Google’s inevitable JEDI-adjacent operations) represents the next evolution of Middle Autonomy. The security panopticon cycled in a new breed of elites, sovereign in their own territory.
Scandalous liaisons orchestrated by charismatic shoeless creeps were rapidly becoming unnecessary to secure embarrassing data. Or even fabricating it. We exist in a paradigm where blackmail can not only be collected at an unprecedented scale, it can be artificially generated entirely by novel AI-powered constructs; not the platforms you are granted access to, but the more advanced systems kept from the public. In this world the only solution would be hijacking what’s known as “blackmail inflation,” or flooding the algorithms with such a volume of false blackmail that it becomes valueless.
A new cartel for the discerning 21st century tyrant – one that now includes state power interlinked with organized crime and international tech corporations, each lead by charismatic Caesars – presents a network of power so consolidated that it has no meaningful external check.
There are still elites, there are still people in rooms having meetings that drive the true change we see in the world, but the landscape has shifted proving that there is no supreme sovereign who actually decides the exception. Those who make intellectual careers leveraging Elite Theory have shown difficulty in describing the transactions of power so they speak of power as a disconnected entity. What’s one more egregore repelling itself miraculously off the wall of Plato’s cave?
Ultimately I believe people who speak on the motivations of a half-imagined aristocrat class are strivers signaling from below that their insight is valuable while hopping excitedly upon the shoulders of their audience.
The concealed motivation behind much of this is not so much the acute desire to be accepted by the elites but assume a peripheral proximity by talking down to their contemporaries. I am unable to locate the proof of which I am about to speak, but I saw a post from a prominent influencer that posited how disliking tattoos on women is actually low-class. I recorded an episode of Real Secret Coffee Hours unpacking the claim that the genetic elite should be pursuing women with borderline personality disorder. It is eugenic to spawnmaxx with the woman who will turn your kids trans and give them slices of your severed, mummified penis for Goat Solstice Day.
Another explained how seeking to build muscle through strength training was affiliated with underclass obsession. Forget that the nepo babies of the world are influencers promoting their diets and intense workout routines, and forget that everyone from Barack Hussein Obama to Warren Buffet lift weights even if they’re girl weights. If they’re not doing water polo and high-intensity tanning, they don’t count.
This is a popular – and lucrative – discursive zone in our convoluted political milieu. Adherents of Elite Theory will inevitably speculate on the behaviors and qualitative attributes of the elites the same way an overworked mother consumes celebrity culture. Sometimes it is humourous, like the meme of “the aristocratic elegance of the small breasted woman.” Oft credited to poweruser Bad Billy Pratt, people forget that he just started repeating what some woman genuinely proposed (here’s him pretending he came up with it.)
This is all to say there’s a great many people who are everyday citing sociopolitical, biological, even spiritual justifications for their wild flights contemplating what guides the elites of the world, a word typically used interchangeably with aristocrats and powerful. People are just making up wild nonsense on the internet, which is acceptable, even laudable. I argue that’s what it should be used for, that’s what it is.
The unfortunate consequence is that people begin to take it seriously and forget that opining on how the elites move about the world is the singular low-class activity. Commentating on the powerlessness of the plebeians is a pinheaded hack for a profoundly reductive schema of power politics. The study of transactions in the realm of sovereignty has mutated into a fandom of status, or more accurately a verbose and monetized disdain for scenes. You don’t appeal to the elites by becoming a scholar on their fashion, and once this becomes apparent the only thing these take merchants succeed in selling is stasis to their naïve audiences.
Power is a space that cremates; the people plagued by Agency+ are drawn to it despite all evidence that people are sacrificed to it, never truly holding it. It is not to be held any more than the explosive propulsion of a bullet is to be held. These people believe themselves to be pulling the trigger when in fact they’re the bullet. Don’t think about it.