In Part 1 of this series, we explored the political philosophies that have long been adopted and promoted by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and considered the implications, given both men’s obvious influence on the Trump administration. Musk is a high-profile advocate of Technocracy, and Peter Thiel is an accelerationist neoreactionary who favours, in particular, the Dark Enlightenment. Before you read this article (Part 2), I urge you to familiarise yourself with the explanations of Technocracy and the NRx (the neoreactionary movement) provided in Part 1. Otherwise, many of the references here will lack context.

As we noted in Part 1, Thiel and Musk are part of the oligarchic class by virtue of being invited to join a network led by other oligarchs whose stratospheric wealth far surpasses that of the names published on the “richest people in the world” lists. Welcomed into their exclusive club, Thiel and Musk are made men. In Part 2, we will explore how the political philosophies and the associated economic theories of Thiel and Musk are shaping public policy. Keep in mind that these two men are far from alone in attempting to create an American gov-corp Technate.

Libertarian Technocrats?

Although they borrow some libertarian ideas, there is nothing truly “libertarian” about either technocrats or accelerationist neoreactionaries. Their convoluted theories, once applied, could not be more authoritarian, more anti-liberty. Just as it is an oxymoron to describe Musk as a “libertarian technocrat,” so is it absurd to think of Peter Thiel as an “anarcho-capitalist.” Yet propagandists persist in encouraging us to see them in these terms. Witness a 2014 article in The Atlantic titled “The Libertarian Capitalist’s Case for State Power and Making No Money.”

It is possible that people like Thiel and Musk self-identify as libertarians because they think “liberty” means freedom granted by — and to — the oligarchy.

In Part 1, we referenced the Venetian Republic. The Doge of Venice was the ruler of the banking, finance, and commercial empire of the Venetian Republic. That is to say, the Doge was given the liberty to rule by the oligarchs of the day. We might wonder if the naming of the Department of Government Efficiency (the DOGE) that Musk leads deliberately references the Venetian magistrate. Some say it does, while others suggest another possibility. 

Created as a joke in 2013 by cryptographers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, the Dogecoin, a memecoin, has seen its price and market cap soar and fluctuate wildly thanks in no small measure to Elon Musk’s comments about it. Much of Musk’s talk about Dogecoin has been deliberately provocative. For example, in 2019 he declared himself the “former CEO of Dogecoin,” though that was never the case. His social media posts alone have provoked major changes in the price of Dogecoin. Musk has also aggressively hiked its value by, for instance, hinting it might become the basis of the proposed “X pay” payment system on his newly acquired ‘X’ platform — formerly Twitter. 

Musk encouraged bullish investment in Dogecoin. Of course, just because someone encourages you to do something that doesn’t negate your personal responsibility to conduct due diligence. When some investors lost their shirts, as Dogecoin prices tumbled, they tried to sue Musk in 2022 with a potential $258 billion class action lawsuit. The case was dismissed last year. The judge ruled that Musk’s comments were just “aspirational and puffery, not factual and susceptible to being falsified.” Though it is worth noting the offhand comments of one man took the Dogecoin from a literal joke — a crypto parody — to achieving a market capitalisation of $14.5 billion in 2021. 

If there is an in-joke to the naming of the DOGE, nominally led by Elon Musk, some argue it is Musk’s fondness for the Dogecoin that is reflected in the D.O.G.E acronym. Yet, the symbolism of “the Doge ”— one who is granted the liberty to rule by oligarchs — is perhaps more conspicuous. Just as with the term “Accelerator” — meaning high-impact investment to accelerate the growth of a startup — an obvious underpinning ideology is implied, even if rarely discussed.

In the introduction to his 2012 treatise, “The Dark Enlightenment,” political philosopher Nick Land highlighted the importance of an article written three years earlier by oligarch Thiel. 

Land wrote:

One milestone was the April 2009 discussion hosted at Cato Unbound among libertarian thinkers (including Patri Friedman and Peter Thiel) in which disillusionment with the direction and possibilities of democratic politics was expressed with unusual forthrightness. Thiel summarized the trend bluntly: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

In a related article Thiel penned, titled “The Education of a Libertarian,” he was describing himself, and yet the personal philosophy he outlined in it was pure accelerationist neoreactionism.  

Thiel opined that “the prospects for a libertarian politics appear grim indeed,” given that the government’s response to every crisis was “more government.” He also claimed that the post-WWI deflationary depression in Western nations was the last “sharp but short” shock to have allowed the alleged advantages of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” to flourish. After that depression, he said, so-called “democratic” politics had stifled the opportunities to capitalise on crises. As a result, Thiel said he no longer believed “that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world.” 

Asserting, in so many words, that democracies were useless, Thiel announced he had found a new life goal:

In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.” The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it.

For Thiel, the “unthinking demos” is us: the holders of the “neo-puritan faith” in progressive “social democracy” — the acolytes of the Cathedral (and the people whom Nick Land considers “inarticulate proles”). In Thiel’s view, we must embrace our “technoplastic” future, become intelligible, move beyond politics, and liberate capitalist innovation by swearing fealty to the gov-corp model. 

To this end, Thiel identified three “technological frontiers” upon which he could construct his darkly enlightened aristocracy.

[1] Cyberspace was the first frontier he identified. There, Thiel focused on creating “a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution.” Cyberspace would enable “new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states” — and would result in a new world that would “force change on the existing social and political order.”  [2] Outer space would be another Thiel frontier, where the “libertarian future of classic science fiction” could be built.  [3] Seasteading would be his interim frontier, where the unclaimed oceans could be settled by humans. He called seasteading “more tentative than the Internet, but much more realistic than space travel.” Seasteading would at least give us the time to develop the outer-space ideas on earth, prior to colonising the stars.

These frontiers are necessary, Thiel insisted, because “we are in a deadly race between politics and technology.” He concluded: 

We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person [Trump?] who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism. [Emphasis added.]

Between 2006 and 2012, Thiel was instrumental in organising the Singularity Summits convened by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute — originally the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) — in partnership with Stanford University. Thiel provided much of the funding.

Thiel cannot be both an advocate of accelerationist neoreaction and simultaneously an anarcho-capitalist — a libertarian. The two philosophies are mutually exclusive.

In Part 1, we noted the technocrats’ rejection of the notion that “all men are created equal.” In a similar vein, Land, Yarvin, Fisher, and other accelerationists consider it essential to have a ruling entity, which can only be comprised of a few human beings exercising an unequal, additional right to rule. Both the technocrats and the accelerationists fundamentally misunderstand, or misinterpret, what the Preamble to The Declaration of Independence means. They completely ignore the second clause of the relevant declaration — namely, “that they [human beings] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

“Equality,” in real libertarian thinking, does not infer a held belief that everyone is the same — though that is certainly how technocrats interpret the word.

Libertarian “equality” doesn’t deny that people have relative strengths and weaknesses. It is not a rejection of either leadership or possible forms of meritocracy. It self-evidently means that every human being has an equal right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” These rights are unalienable — or inalienable. Our rights are not decided for us by others or limited by others, and no one on earth has any more or any fewer “equal rights” than anyone else.

This idea is not difficult to grasp. It is central to the political philosophy of anarcho-capitalism, as clearly enunciated by Murray Rothbard (1926–1995):

[N]o man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the “nonaggression axiom.” “Aggression” is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else.

Anarcho-capitalism wholeheartedly rejects the initiation of the use of force — the aggressive imposition of claimed authority — by the state to coerce individual persons or seize their property. An example is the threat of fining or imprisoning someone who hasn’t paid taxes to the “proper” authorities. Anarcho-capitalism resoundingly rejects the state and all its dictatorial demands.

By contrast, the proponents of Technocracy and the proponents of the Dark Enlightenment, such as Musk and Thiel, are not interested in restricting state power, though they may say otherwise. Instead they wish to move the state from the public to the private sector and expand its power once sufficiently privatized. True, they oppose “representative democracy” and characterise it as both a “democracy” (which it isn’t) and a bureaucratic system riddled with problems (which it is), but the solutions they offer, to all intents and purposes, magnify the power of the very state they supposedly condemn.

What the believers in Technocracy and the believers in the Dark Enlightenment both propose are compartmentalised, hierarchical sociopolitical power structures that couldn’t be more state-like or more authoritarian. They seek to expand and maximise the power of the state, though in slightly different ways. Calling their new model of the state either a Technate (as technocrats do) or a gov-corp (as accelerationist neoreactionaries do) doesn’t change the nature of the tyrannical statism they desire to foist on the rest of us.

The Technopopulist Myth

The term “technopopulism,” coined by political theorists Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Accetti, has increasingly been bandied about. While the US voters who elected Trump were offered technopopulist promises, this was clearly a sales pitch to entice them to support a gov-corp Technate.

“Populism” can be broadly defined as a political attempt to “appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.” “Technocracy” is commonly said to mean “a government or social system that is controlled or influenced by experts in science or technology.”

Neither left-wing nor right-wing, technopopulism promises a new kind of politics based on the belief that the more limited role of elected politicians is to put the appropriate teams of experts together to guide policy and to find technological solutions to social and economic problems, thereby benefiting “ordinary people.” But the apparent technopopulist offer to retain democratic accountability in the US is a deceit.

The technopopulists say they want to unleash “technocracy” — with a small “t” — for the public good. But the new government system they propose is constructing “Technocracy” — with a big “T” — to serve the interests of the “American elites.”

This is evident from The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (aka The 2025 Presidential Transition Project), Promise to America. It claims its purpose is to “defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America.” While defanging and defunding woke warriors holds allure for American voters, the Project 2025 methodology actually subverts US “representative democracy.”

The Trump administration is evidently closely allied with Project 2025 — denials notwithstanding. One such obvious tie: Trump has nominated Russell Vought to return to the post of director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and, by no coincidence, Vought was a key figure in convening the Project 2025 initiative. Project 2025 contributors were influential in Trump’s first administration and are no less conspicuous in his current picks for office.

Project 2025 sets a presidential agenda for the first 180 days in office that seeks to empower the executive branch to meet these key goals: dramatically reduce the size of the public sector bureaucracy; privatise and deregulate the functions of the state; and liberate American technological innovation by “shuttering” it off from the China tech sector’s alleged infiltration.

Thus, according to Project 2025, US technology can, if applied properly, be used to resolve all manner of social problems—from anti-American inequality of opportunity in the education system to woke propaganda infesting the media. In other words, American technology produced by Americans and for Americans can supply every long-sought answer to America’s ills. The power of American AI can be set free to, for example, police social media and tackle abuses such as Medicare fraud. Project 2025 offers the additional justification that the US is in an AI arms race with China and, therefore, must invest in AI accordingly.

Trump issued a slew of executive orders following his inauguration. These days, this is not an unusual practice for an incoming US president. However, Trump’s EOs were clearly heavily influenced by Project 2025.

Ironically, The Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 are bankrolled by some of the “elites” the project accuses of betraying Americans. The Coors, Koch, Uihlein, Barre Seid, Bradley, and Scaiffe families are among the financial backers of both the Foundation and Project 2025.

Rather than technopopulists it is the “TechnoKings” (see Part 1) who have been “assisting” Trumps selection of his administration’s personnel. Musk’s influence is well known but Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, is another influencer. Andreessen has not just been involved in making Trump’s picks for technology and economic related positions — areas where he perhaps has some expertise — but also for US defense and intelligence posts.

Andreessen’s Machiavellian reasons for supporting Trump are obvious. As reported by the Verge, in July 2024 Andreessen spelled out that he and his partners were backing Trump, not because they shared any of the concerns voiced by Republican voters, but because they could use the Trump administration to deliver the regulatory environment they wanted for their project to succeed.

That project is a gov-corp Technate. Not technopopulism but Techno-Optimism. 

In 2023, Marc Andreessen published The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. He explained precisely why he and his TechKing partners have seized their opportunity: 

We can advance to a far superior way of living, and of being. [. . .] We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology. [. . .] We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance. Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it. 

[. . .] Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance.[. . .] We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to [. . .] ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever. [. . .] 

We believe intelligence is in an upward spiral, [. . .] as people form symbiotic relationships with machines into new cybernetic systems. [. . .] We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone. [. . .] We believe in Augmented Intelligence just as much as we believe in Artificial Intelligence. Intelligent machines augment intelligent humans, driving a geometric expansion of what humans can do. 

This is pure accelerationist neoreaction strongly influence by Technocracy. It is Nick Land and notably not Curtis Yarvin that Andreessen considers among the “Patron Saints” of Techno-Optimism.

People like Thiel, Andreessen, and Musk are serious. They want to implement the Dark Enlightenment and are hell-bent on establishing gov-corp Technates. Their oligarch network is indistinguishable from the Trump administration. Currently, the most powerful nation on earth is in their hands.

In true technopopulist fashion, it is perhaps Andreessen’s identification of gov-corp enemies that is most revealing: 

Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas. Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.This demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas, many derived from Communism, disastrous then and now.

The eradication of these “enemies” reads like an American voters’ wish-list. Ridding themselves of the globalist’s overreach exercised through institutions like the WHO, the WEF, the UN and even NATO, is what they seemingly voted for. Andreessen attempt to associate ideas like “sustainability,” “stakeholder capitalism” and even “social responsibility” with communism is, at best, wrong, but appears to be disingenuous and mere pandering. This is the Dark Enlightenment’s technopopulist sales pitch.

Escaping the grasp of the oligarchs was obviously a vote winner. But the American public has not escaped, on the contrary it has fallen into the clutches of the most authoritarian oligarchs imaginable. Oligarchs who, perhaps for the first time in history, not only have the political authority but the technology to make their gov-corp Technates a reality.

This is a clear and present danger to all of us. Not just Americans.

The same commitment to accelerationism and creative destruction is evident everywhere. In essence, gov-corp is the ultimate public-private partnership — a kind of inverted fascism where the private stakeholders use the claimed authority and violence of the state to achieve their goals.

The construction of Technates is not limited to the US. Arguably China, for example, is already operating a public-private Technocracy. What is happening under our noses is no libertarian dream realized. It is the construction of an all-cognizant, all-controlling, all-consuming global network of gov-corp Technates overseen by a bureaucracy of multiple poles.

On the surface, the new brand of technopopulist politics we’ve been examining seems to be anti-Establishment. At least, that’s how it’s being presented. It will use high-tech solutions and AI analysis to, for instance, deliver “lower taxes, much cheaper energy (green and fossil), faster growth and a productivity revolution.” Lest we forget, it will “make America great again” (MAGA).

The trouble with this pipe dream, though, is that the ostensible “technopopulists” and avowed neoreactionaries behind it are actually installing Big “T” Technocracy and gov-corp as their solution. Not MAGA, but “Dark MAGA.”

American Gov-Corp Technates

In 2020 Pronomos Capital, a venture capital firm backed by Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen , and Coinbase established the low tax, low regulation nascent city state called Próspera on the island of Roatán in Honduras. The promotional blurb for Próspera read: 

Próspera is a startup city with a regulatory system designed for entrepreneurs to build better, cheaper, and faster than anywhere else in the world.

The current Honduras government considers Próspera’s claim to enjoy special economic and regulatory status illegal. The previous Honduras administration under Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH) — who was later convicted of drug smuggling in the US — initially created three so-called Zones for Employment and Economic Development (ZEDEs) of which Próspera is one. The initiative was fiercely opposed by the people of Honduras.

The ZEDEs create a “special regime” where investors — Pronomos Capital (Thiel, Andreessen, etc.) — have absolute control of “fiscal, security and conflict resolution policy.” For all intents and purposes, the ZEDEs are startup gov-corps.

In 2022, the incoming administration of Xiomara Castro Sarmiento started the process of repealing the ZEDE legislation. This is proving difficult because the Próspera ZEDE framework has a fifty year “built to last” clause in it guaranteeing the project for that period. Gov-corp investors instigated an $11 billion law suit to stop the Honduras government’s attempts to stymie their ambitions.

The technocrat oligarchs deployed the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) mechanism against the elected government of Honduras. It is not unreasonable to describe their action as a direct threat to bankrupt the entire nation. As we’ll discuss, these oligarchs are not “nice” people. Whether they call themselves Christian or not.

Many of the Próspera trademarks are held by NeWay Capital LLC, founded by Erick Brimen and Trey Goff. NeWay Capital formed the Freedom Cities Coalition (FCC) which is similarly backed by Pronomos Capital — Thiel, Andreessen, Coinbase et al. In 2023, Trump proposed establishing ten so called “Freedom Cities” in the US. The mainstream media focused on his comments about “flying cars,” but he was really talking about embryonic gov-corp Technates.

Reportedly, the FCC is now supposedly “in discussion” with the Trump administration to create gov-corp Technates across the US. Trey Goff said “the energy in DC is absolutely electric” and the ambition was to create “not just ten, but as many as the market can handle.”

If approved by Congress, these “startup nations” — neoreactionary realms — will be city states like Próspera. The FCC calls these “special districts” Prosperity Zones. The technopopulist offer is to unleash innovation, onshore employment opportunities and revitalise the American economy. The FCC objective is to “accelerate the development of new urban centers.”

Freedom Cities will operate in de facto US ZEDEs. The objective is to remove all regulation and allow tech-oligarchs the freedom to do whatever they like. These will be cities without limits, say the FCC and will be “zones of regulatory clarity and economic dynamism, [. . .] allowing entrepreneurs and builders to move at the speed of human ingenuity.”

The accelerationist neoreactionaries and the technocrats are racing ahead. As evidenced by Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, there is no doubt what they have in mind. 

In 2022, Balaji Srinivasan — former Andreessen Horowitz general partner and former chief technology officer for Coinbase — published his book The Network State: How to Start a New Country. In it, he outlined the neoreactionary strategy to “escape politics in all its forms” and enable tech-billionaire oligarchs to form their own sovereign states—sov-corps.

There is nothing pro-American about the NRx’s collective vision. Srinivasan wants the proposed “startup nations” to secede from the US and considers the US outdated and obsolescent.

Shortly we’ll discuss Trump’s peculiar and seemingly unilateral declaration that his administration is intent upon grabbing Greenland — and Gaza apparently. We are supposed to believe that it is Trump who wants Greenland (and perhaps Gaza); that Trump is the great strategist playing some sort of 5D geopolitical chess game. But it is Peter Thiel and his oligarch network that wants to build a gov-corp Technate called Praxis on Greenland. The people of Greenland should be wary. There is no legal limit to the “built to last” territorial expansion of Próspera and the TechnoKing oligarchs have the backing of the World Bank to make sure their project does last. 

A Humane Alternative to Genocide?

Following Trump’s inauguration, The New York Times published an adversarial interview with aforementioned political theorist of the neoreactionary movement (NRx) Curtis Yarvin.

Outlining Yarvin’s contention that the US should be run as a corporate monarchy (gov-corp) under the leadership of an all-powerful CEO (Trump), Times‘ writer and interviewer David Marchese formulated his arguments on the suspected racist aspects of Yarvin’s ideology.

The pair debated nothing of notable interest. The piece allowed Yarvin to forward some of his ideas to a wider public — but without disclosing any of their appalling implications. Meanwhile, the Times‘ Marchese posited a practically irrelevant counterargument.

The legacy media is not going to point out those appalling implications. But this is what Yarvin, the leader of the NRx admired by Peter Thiel and other neoreactionary oligarchs, had proposed in 2008 under his pen name, Mencius Moldburg:

Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide. That is: the ideal solution achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society), but without any of the moral stigma. The best humane alternative to genocide I can think of is not to liquidate the wards [people]—either metaphorically or literally—but to virtualize them. A virtualized human is in permanent solitary confinement, waxed like a bee larva into a cell which is sealed except for emergencies. This would drive him insane, except that the cell contains an immersive virtual-reality interface which allows him to experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.

The suspected racist streak in Yarvin does matter when we consider the implications of his gov-corp philosophy. But to imagine that identity politics provides any kind of intellectual basis to tackle the NRx dooms all such opposition to failure. If the objective is to resist accelerationist neoreaction, then harping on about the divisions between the progressive left and the right-wing — or “alt-right” — serves no useful purpose. Such arguments don’t even come close to comprehending what the Dark Enlightenment is. They only deflect the public from paying vital attention to real threats.

The Dark Enlightenment is not racist. It is anti-human race. Its advocates do not care what colour gov-corp’s customers are. They seek, rather, to transform all of humanity, to bring an end to what it is to be a sovereign human being.

Government Customers

Musk has already stated his desire to transform his X platform into a payment service provider and finance portal that, he hopes, could become “half of the world’s financial system.” Thanks in part to the headway made by Facebook’s Libra (Diem) project — more in this shortly — in 2023, Musk was able to start applying for the necessary regulatory approval for his financial domination project.

Via its “Digital State” — again, we’ll cover this in a moment — Ukrainians are the Digital State’s “customers.” Musk wants to X to form the basis of a worldwide Digital State in which all users will be customers.

Citizens as customers of government services is a key component of the gov-corp structure that neoreactionaries like Thiel and Andreessen desire. Just as we see the rise of the accompanying “accelerators” everywhere, so to the description of us as “customers” is seeping into the lexicon of governments the world over.

In 2019, the US multinational corporation IBM, whose operations make it the largest industrial research organization in the world and whose chequered history includes assisting the Nazis to perpetrate a holocaust, explained why we all need to consider ourselves the customers of our governments: 

Today’s society is changing at a record pace as companies worldwide develop innovative solutions designed to make the world a more efficient and sustainable place. [. . .] Apps provide us with personalized information based on geolocation; we can shop online from the comfort of our couch, and organize our finances on our smartphones.[. . .] [I]t’s time to rethink and reinvent public sector services, [. . .] a digital reinvention helps build trust in the public sector as a brand: the government has your back. [. . .] At IBM, we’re there to guide you through the current age of digital reinvention.

IBM, alongside CIA-linked Oracle, is a partner of the UK government’s Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and is assisting it to “accelerate transformation” to a new digital DWP service. For its part, as it proceeds to make a £6 billion cut, the UK DWP has stopped winter fuel payments to pensioners and has committed to freezing and restricting access to disability payments to the disabled. It is effectively lowering unemployment benefits for the sick and disabled and tightening the eligibility criteria for nearly all state benefits. At the same time, the UK government is pushing through the Terminally-ill Adults (End of Life) Bill — commonly referred to as the Assisted Dying Bill — to make it easier for the state to kill people who just can’t take it any more. All of this, according to the DWP, is part of its drive to provide a better “customer experience.”

In 2021, The Biden administration issued Executive Order 14058 to improve the US federal government’s customer’s experience. Consequently, according to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS):

[. . .] every person who pays taxes or uses Medicare is a customer of the federal government. Every veteran who uses a VA facility is a customer, every government employee that fills out their timesheet is a customer. The “customer experience” is how people experience and perceive our government services. It is what happens at the touchpoints when someone interacts with a government service. The customer experience can be a single touchpoint or several over a longer relationship between the “customer” and government. Each touchpoint is an opportunity for a positive interaction that adds up to a positive customer experience.

The mainstream media is avidly pushing the idea that politicians like Trump are in charge. But, not only does EO 14058 illustrate the clear shift towards NRx gov-corp aligned thinking, it also shows that the transformation is not dependent on whatever administration happens to be in office at the time. Gov-corp represents the underlying philosophy driving this governance reinvention. Technocracy is the operating system for the impending Technates, regardless of who you vote for.

The shift to digital money and “digital states” is key to the reimagining of society. Rather like the WeChat “everything app” in China, which operates as a public-private partnership between the government and Tencent — enabling the technocratic state to directly influence an estimated 1.3 billion Chinese customers –– the size of the X user-base gives Musk’s network an opportunity to construct his version of an everything app digital state. 

With an estimated 600 million users, Musk’s team is ready to launch his platform’s X-money payment system. It seems Musk doesn’t anticipate any regulatory problems, as another building block of the X-digital state is dropped into place. As X moves toward becoming a “comprehensive financial services hub,” working in partnership with Visa, the plan is to reportedly integrate digital currencies into the X-money system by the end of the year.  

The new interoperable global monetary system that is emerging has been designed to perpetuate the same old monetary game with the added benefit of AI surveillance and behavioural control. Investors can speculate — engaging in creative destruction — while protecting their digital finance empires by storing value in new digital reserve assets, almost certainly bitcoin. A so-called Synthetic Hegemonic Currency can and is being created, primarily using USD-denominated stablecoins underwritten by US debt. In contrast to the investor experience, it is unlikely to benefit many of its customers. 

Gov-Corp Technocrats Are Not “Nice” 

Contemplating new methods of genocide to rid yourself of whomever you find “undesirable” is something we associate with tyrannical megalomaniacs not egalitarian democratic “leaders.” Unfortunately, certainly in the US, it seems the maniac tyrants have the upper hand. 

As many Unlimited Hangout readers already know, Thiel received investment funds from the CIA’s In-Q-Tel to accelerate Palantir. Part of that arrangement was for Palantir to establish a public-private partnership that would rescue a US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project called Total Information Awareness (renamed the Terrorism-IA program in 2003). The purpose of the TIA was to create an all-pervasive US surveillance and population control system, with a heavy focus on pre-crime and other “predictive” interventions that would allow the state to justify any policy it chooses. 

The TIA project faltered when the US public learned of its intentions. State funding was officially withdrawn — which simply meant that the “less controversial” aspects continued under the guise of combating terrorism while the controversial projects went darker still. Ever since 9/11, “terrorism” has been the convenient PR buzz word for covering up a multitude of illegalities. The TIA program continued, unabated, to spy on the entire US population as a public-private partnership. 

Shortly after incorporating Palantir in 2003, Thiel and Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp reportedly met with the TIA’s chief architect, John Poindexter. The pair apparently impressed upon Poindexter that they shared his vision of a US domestic digital gulag. Yet, unlike TIA, which had been housed at the Pentagon’s DARPA, they would develop the TIA system as a private entity. According to New York magazine, Thiel and Karp convinced Poindexter that Palantir would “pull together data collected by a wide range of spy agencies — everything from human intelligence and cell-phone calls to travel records and financial transactions.”

Evidently, In-Q-Tel’s seed funding followed soon thereafter. The CIA remained Palantir’s sole client until 2008. That is to say, Palantir enjoyed a monopoly due to its partnership with the state. 

Although Thiel’s cadre at PayPal — often called the PayPal Mafia — is supposedly responsible for ousting Musk from the company’s CEO spot, the rift between the two men seems somewhat overstated. Just as it is clear Musk hankers to install Technocracy, Thiel’s passion for the Dark Enlightenment is equally unambiguous. Both ideologies are mutually reinforcing. While there are some apparent tensions between Musk and Thiel, they are on the same path. Yarvin, for one, certainly values Musk’s contribution.

Thiel and Musk are already megarich magnates on the order of the robber barons of old. As such, their respective Dark Enlightenment and Technocracy dreams, when realized, are intended to make them “sovereigns” of what Yarvin calls a “patchwork of realms.”

The shared view of technocrats and neoreactionaries that society would be better if it were ruled by the likes of Musk and Thiel is an absurd and dangerous folly. We shouldn’t labour under any illusions that they’re nice.

Anduril Industries CEO Palmer Lucky is another Thiel protégé who, having sold his Oculus VR headset business to Mark Zuckerberg, moved into the war business with the help of Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund. Through Anduril, Thiel is investing in a defence technology that maximises AI’s ability to kill.

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have both been instrumental in the development of AI. They combined forces in 2015 to accelerate Thiel protégé Sam Altman’s OpenAI as a “non-profit” research company. Today, propelled by the success of its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot, OpenAI is valued at around $160 billion. Consequently, its “for profit” subsidiary, OpenAI Global LLC, is poised to make fantastic profits.

OpenAI was pitched as a tool for developing AI to “benefit humanity as a whole.” Presumably, OpenAI’s defence contracts and its participation in the Silicon Valley consortium bid to dominate the US military-industrial complex reflect this principled commitment. Or perhaps the ethical stance of the team behind OpenAI is about as plausible as their “non-profit” pretensions.

There is every reason not to trust hypocrites like Thiel and Musk. One of those reasons is Palantir’s encroachment into national health-data systems, which is creating a virtual healthcare data monopoly in some countries — including the UK. This is extremely concerning, because it is obvious that patient care — or even basic human compassion — is not a priority for Thiel’s Palantir. There is nothing “Christian” about Thiel’s conduct. 

On the contrary, Palantir has actively participated in Israel’s Palestinian genocide and in the almost-complete destruction of the Palestinians’ healthcare system. In January 2024, Thiel and Palantir CEO Alex Karp agreed to a strategic partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defense and signed a deal with the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) to “harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions.”

Of this deal the British Medical Journal observed: 

IOF operations have been described as a “war on hospitals” because of the systematic destruction of Gaza’s entire health system and 943 IOF attacks on healthcare. Hundreds of health workers have been detained, tortured, and killed. 

In addition to directly attacking healthcare, ongoing bombardment, forced displacement of Palestinians, and near complete siege of Gaza, the IOF has created a severe health and humanitarian crisis with high rates of malnutrition, infectious disease, famine, and dehydration.

Several Thiel-backed companies — Palantir (seed-funded by In-Q-Tel),Anduril and digital surveillance company Clearview AI — have all evidently used the Ukraine-Russia conflict as a test bed for their technology. As noted by Stavroula Pabst in her Unlimited Hangout article, “How Peter Thiel-Linked Tech is Fueling the Ukraine War,” these companies are “taking advantage of the conflict to develop controversial AI-driven weapons systems and facial recognition technologies, perhaps transforming both warfare and AI forever.”

Despite Thiel’s self-described libertarian and Christian beliefs, Pabst noted that the net impact of his venture capitalism couldn’t be more inhuman:

[T]hese Thiel-backed groups’ involvement in war serves to develop not only problematic and unpredictable weapons technologies and systems, but also apparently to advance and further interconnect a larger surveillance apparatus formed by Thiel and his elite allies’ collective efforts across the public and private sectors, which arguably amount to the entrenchment of a growing technocratic panopticon aimed at capturing public and private life. Within the context of Thiel’s growing domination over large swaths of the tech industry, apparent efforts to influence, bypass or otherwise undermine modern policymaking processes, and anti-democratic sentiments, Thiel-linked organizations’ activities in Ukraine can only signal a willingness to shape the course of current events and the affairs of sovereign nations alike.

Though Pabst’s piece was written in October 2023, her prescient observations have certainly been playing out. As we embark on 2025, it is clear that Thiel and Musk are among a troop of tech titans who have ingratiated themselves with the Trump administration.

While the war in Ukraine has evidently been used by the “TechnoKings” behind Trump to develop AI weapon systems, the Trump administration has hypocritically positioned itself as peace broker.

Replacing Representative Democracy

On their own, the ideologies of communitarianism, stakeholder capitalism, Technocracy, the Dark Enlightenment, and any other political ideology amount to little more than academic musings. Once implemented through the power and authority illegitimately claimed by the state, however, they couldn’t be more significant.

Thiel has heavily backed current Vice President JD Vance and other Republican political candidates, such as Blake Masters, who co-authored Zero to One: Notes on Startups, Or How to Build the Future with Thiel in 2014. There is a nexus of Thiel protégés surrounding the new Trump administration. It is hard to see how Vance could rise to what some call the second-most-powerful position in the US were it not for the career-long support he has received from Thiel.

As Thiel’s man, Vance’s admiration for the Dark Enlightenment is transparent. Adopting Yarvin’s “Retire All Government Employee” (RAGE) motto, which now seems to be embodied by the DOGE, Vance suggested that a future Trump administrator should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, [and] replace them with our people.”

In 2017, Buzzfeed published extracts from the dump of an email exchange between Curtis Yarvin and Milo Yiannopoulis. In one email, Yarvin revealed that he had watched the 2016 US election results with Thiel and said that Thiel was “fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.” In his 2021 book, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, Bloomberg Technology writer Max Chafkin describes Yarvin as the “house political philosopher” of the “Thielverse,” according to a July 2024 article by Gil Duran in The New Republic.

Of course, Thiel does not want it widely known that he supports the Dark Enlightenment of the NRx. With its aim to destroy the political realm and replace it with a corporate monarchy, the Dark Enlightenment, if fully understood by the public, would outrage them and would be, for Thiel, a PR disaster. Despite the potential for that to happen, Yarvin’s ideas continue to influence him.

One such crazy notion was revealed by Yarvin in his talk at the March 2012 BIL Conference (an alternative to TED). Speaking as Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin advocated for gov-corp: 

There is no difference between a CEO and a dictator. If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.

Just a few weeks later, Thiel gave a lecture at Stanford, where he said:

A startup is basically structured as a monarchy. We don’t call it that, of course. That would seem weirdly outdated, and anything that’s not democracy makes people uncomfortable. We are biased toward the democratic-republican side of the spectrum. That’s what we’re used to from civics classes. But the truth is that startups and founders lean toward the dictatorial side because that structure works better for startups.

Ten days prior to Trump’s inauguration, Thiel used the Financial Times as an outlet to pontificate about the second-term President’s second-time promises to disclose details of the Kennedy assassination plot and to protect free speech, etc. Time will tell if these promises are kept.

In the same article, Thiel laid bare the lineage of his own philosophy:

Darker questions still emerge in these dusky final weeks of our interregnum. [. . .] The future demands fresh and strange ideas. New ideas might have saved the old regime, which barely acknowledged, let alone answered, our deepest questions — the causes of the 50-year slowdown in scientific and technological progress.

Certainly from 2009 onward, Thiel has viewed politics as a vehicle to promote his accelerationist NRx-aligned objectives. Not because he particularly shares the values of any political party, either Democrat or Republican — or, for that matter, Libertarian — but because he recognises that people are programmed to feel comfortable as long as they believe whatever they support has something to do with “democracy.” Remember, Thiel calls us the “unthinking demos.”

In 2014, reporting the evidence of some of the other links between Yarvin and Thiel, Corey Pein, writing for The Baffler, accurately lumped Thiel in with the NRx and called them collectively a bunch of “mouthbreathing Machiavellis.”

Responding to Pein’s piece, Thiel said, according to an article published shortly thereafter in The New York Times:

Actually, I found that vaguely flattering. [. . .] It was the full-on conspiracy theory. In truth, there’s nobody sitting around plotting the future, though sometimes I think it would be better if people were.

This was blatant baloney. Thiel well knows there are people “sitting around plotting the future.” He himself maintains a web of connections with the plotters of which he speaks — and is obviously one of them.

Thiel, as President of Thiel Capital, sits on the Bilderberg Steering Committee. The steering committee sets the agenda for the secretive Bilderberg Meetings where around 130 selected globalist delegates debate policy initiatives behind closed doors. Palantir CEO, Thiel’s associate Alex Karp, is also on the steering committee, as is former chair and CEO of Google Eric Schmidt and the President of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Børge Brende. Consequently, it isn’t surprising that the main topic for debate at the last 2024 Bilderberg meeting was Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has been selected as the chair for the next Bilderberg Meeting and will also serve as chair of the next Munich Security Conference (MSC). The UK Guardian reports that his appointment marks a moment where the “influential” Bilderberg group is contributing toward the “concentration of control at the top of the Atlantic alliance.” Noting that Bilderberg brings together “prime minsters, EU commissioners, bank bosses, corporate CEOs and intelligence chiefs,” it was ridiculous for Thiel — a senior Bilderberger — to feign ignorance of those who evidently are “plotting the future.”

Yarvin, in the earlier-referenced interview with David Marchese in The New York Times, was asked what he meant when he said Thiel was “fully enlightened”:

Fully enlightened for me means fully disenchanted. [. . .] It’s a disenchantment from believing in these old systems. And the thing that should replace that disenchantment is not, Oh, we need to do things Curtis’s [or Peter’s] way. It’s basically just a greater openness of mind.

Sure, the Dark Enlightenment rejects the “old systems” — i.e., representative democracy — but Yarvin’s diplomatic response cannot hide the fact that Thiel and other members of the NRx evidently know what they want to replace it with: gov-corp overseeing a network of sovcorp-managed functional sequences in a Technate instead of within existing nation-states.

The US Satellite Gov-Corp Technate In Ukraine

While the war in Ukraine has evidently been used by the “TechnoKings” behind Trump to develop AI weapon systems, the Trump administration has hypocritically positioned itself as peace broker. Obviously, any sane person would welcome the end of hostilities, but there is a clear subtext to the US policy shift.

The Trump administration has emphasised the US potential deal with Ukraine to access Ukraine’s possible rare earth metal deposits as a “win” for US voters. He told the US public that there were “$500B worth of rare earth” in Ukraine. This is highly speculative.

While Ukraine certainly has a lot of coal, oil, gas and uranium, much if that is in territory currently occupied by the Russian Federation. The estimates of rare earth metal deposits in extant Ukrainian territory were made around half a century ago and some, such as independent energy and mining consultant Tony Mariano, have significant doubts about the commercial viability or even the presence of the alleged deposits:

As far as I know, there are no economically viable rare earth deposits in Ukraine. I have evaluated clay deposits that I thought had potential, but I found that they are not viable. This does not mean that there are none, but that more exploration and evaluation is needed.

With regard to the minerals deposits that are known to exist in Russia’s “new territories,” including any possible if unlikely rare-earth deposits, Russian president Vladimir Putin has indicated his willingness to collaborate with the US again. In the spirit of public-private partnership (stakeholder capitalism), Putin told journalist Pavel Zarubin that Russia was ready “to offer [cooperation] to our American partners – when I say partners, I mean not only administrative and government structures, but also companies.”

While Russians and Ukrainians continued to die, Kirill Dmitriev, former Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Company and WEF investment guru, and the current CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund — appointed in 2023 by Putin as special representative of the Russian president for investment — said that US energy corporations would welcome “access to Russian natural resources.”

In 2014, the US enabled and supported Ukrainian Nazis (the Right Sector and others) to orchestrate the violent Euromaidan Coup that overthrew the elected president Victor Yanukovich. Ukrainian Nazi atrocities in Odessa and Mariupol immediately followed and marked the start of an eight-year-long war that Russian forces officially entered in 2022.

From the moment Russia began its so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine, the US response was focused on seizing economic, financial and resource control of Ukraine in exchange for bolstering its military. It is not unreasonable to observe that Russian intervention enabled the US public-private partnership to capture Ukraine. With the Russian government now looking forward to working with its US partners, and given that the US state was instrumental in instigating the current conflict, one has to wonder what this war has really been about.

Large US corporations, such as Microsoft and Amazon, began the process of digitising the Ukrainian government on February 24^th 2022, the day Russia is said to have “invaded” Ukraine. This process has since seen Ukraine become a world leader in “digital democracy.” Ukrainian citizens are being coerced towards accepting digital ID, digital payments and into total reliance on digital infrastructure for many of their everyday needs. This has been met with great enthusiasm from globalist think tanks, such as The Centre for International Governance Innovation.

As Ukrainian energy and technological infrastructure became more reliant on US corporations, global investors — through the asset management giant BlackRock — agreed to deals with the Ukrainian government to “structure the nation’s reconstruction funds.” 

In November 2022 BlackRock announced: 

BlackRock FMA [Financial Markets Advisory] will advise the MoE [Ukraine Ministry of Economy] on establishing a roadmap for the investment framework’s implementation, including identifying design choices for the envisioned setup, structure, mandate and governance. The MoU [Memorandum of Understanding] formalizes the discussions the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, held in September on the possibilities of driving public and private investments into Ukraine.

The WEF arranged further meetings between Zelensky’s administration and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon alongside a consortium of investors represented by executives from BlackRock, Bridgewater Associates, Carlyle Group, Blackstone, Dell, ArcelorMittal, and others. With the financial architecture in place, and US and other multinational corporations set to capitalise, the emphasis shifted in early 2024 towards reducing the investment risk.

War is the preferred business model for private military contractors (PMCs – mercenaries), or International Defense Companies (IDCs) as they are called in Ukraine. With Ukrainian government legislation in the pipeline to legalise IDCs operating in post-war Ukraine — coinciding with the Pentagon’s decision to ease restrictions supposedly placed on US PMCs (IDCs) working in Ukraine — US PMCs are just one corner of the US military industrial complex set to exploit the thirty-five-fold increase in the Ukrainian defence market created by Russia’s “invasion.” This is yet another tantalising Ukraine war opportunity for multinational financiers, such as BlackRock’s investors for example.

Obviously, a “post-war” Ukraine is needed to turn these investment opportunities into solid ventures. With the US public-private stakeholder invasion of Ukraine complete, and the Russian public-private stakeholders ready to do business, Ukraine finds itself in a precarious position. It is almost completely in the hands of US corporations.

For example, Ukraine is now heavily reliant on Musk’s Starlink for its internet connectivity and other communication systems. Indeed Ukraine’s “digital democracy” is now largely controlled by oligarchs like Musk.

The Ukrainian Diia app is the product of a joint project between the CIA front organisation USAID and the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation which named Diia the literal Digital State. Diia is an “everything app.” It ties Ukrainian citizens to a centralised digital control system (Diia) through which they access government services. Their digital IDs and digital passports, driving licenses, fine levies and payments, their tax returns, tax accounts, their mRNA vaccine certificates and more can all be overseen by the Digital State.

Of course, the overwhelming priority is to end the war. From a humanitarian perspective, at this point, nothing could be more important. Trump will almost certainly be credited if his apparent diplomacy succeeds and this will surely be perceived as more evidence of his great leadership by his supporters.

We are supposed to believe that the Ukraine government’s stalling over Trump’s deal for US corporations’ access to Ukrainian rare earth deposits is the reason why the US has reportedly threatened to cut off Ukraine’s Starlink connectivity. The privatisation of a state like Ukraine couldn’t be more dangerous for its people. Musk was quick to point out that he could personally end Ukraine’s war effort, claiming the Ukrainian military’s “entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.” He later added this is something he would not do. Though obviously, given the Dogecoin debacle, Musk’s team fully comprehend the impact his comments have.

In truth, there is a vast network of international investors looking at a post-war Ukraine with avarice. The rare earth deal is a sideshow to keep the public bemused. The whole nation state of Ukraine is ripe for the picking and the transition to a US satellite gov-corp Technate is already well underway.

The New World Currency

As previously noted, one of Peter Thiel’s long-term ambitions has been to create “a new world currency.” Fortuitously, one of Trump’s first executive orders was aimed at strengthening US leadership in digital financial technology. In it, he promised his voter base that he would prohibit “the establishment, issuance, circulation, and use of a CBDC [Central Bank Digital Currency] within the jurisdiction of the United States.”

But there is a caveat: The order “shall be implemented consistent with applicable law.” As we know, legislative “laws” are subject to change at any time.

Trump included in this EO a US government commitment to promote and protect “the sovereignty of the United States dollar, including through actions to promote the development and growth of lawful and legitimate dollar-backed stablecoins worldwide.” [Emphasis added.]

As extensively reported in the four-part investigative series on the cryptocurrency industry published last November by Unlimited Hangout writers Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin, rather than averting the societal risks associated with CBDC, Trump’s January 23^rd executive order arguably portends something far worse.

As Webb and Goodwin pointed out:

[T]he policy of the Federal Reserve since last year has made it clear that they favor “private stablecoin issuance rather than official CBDC issuance.” With stablecoins being just as programmable and surveillable as CBDCs, and some stablecoin issuers like Tether already allied with U.S. intelligence and security agencies, the current stablecoin bill is poised to pave the way for the U.S.’ de facto CBDC and to ensure that Wall Street and well-established titans of digital finance like PayPal have the advantage.

In particular, Thiel, PayPal, Facebook (now Meta), and US financial regulators have, for some time, been preparing for “a new world currency.” In order to understand the process they have been setting up, we first need to consider how this public-private partnership has apparently shaped the financial regulatory framework in the US.

Thiel emphasised the “new world currency” idea in his aforementioned 2009 article, “The Education of a Libertarian” (the piece, you may remember, that influenced Nick Land’s conceptualisation of the Dark Enlightenment). In that piece, he wrote:

[T]he founding vision of PayPal centered on the creation of a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution — the end of monetary sovereignty, as it were. In the 2000s, companies like Facebook create the space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states. By starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new world. The hope of the Internet is that these new worlds will impact and force change on the existing social and political order.

Peter Thiel sat on the Meta (Facebook) board of directors until 2022, when he left to reportedly “focus on political endeavours.” Upon his departure, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered his personal gratitude to Thiel for “teaching me so many lessons about business, economics, and the world.”

In 2019, under Thiel’s evident influence, Facebook announced its intention to launch a stablecoin payment system called Libra, which it soon renamed Diem. The project was co-headed by David A. Marcus, who moved to Facebook from PayPal in 2014, and by Morgan Beller, who migrated from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Libra appears to have failed. But, as Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin explain, that interpretation depends upon what one views the purpose of Libra (Diem) to have actually been.

With an estimated two billion-plus Facebook users worldwide, if Libra had succeeded, it would have represented the potential “end of monetary sovereignty” as far as central banks were concerned. Apparently, the mere announcement of Libra’s proposition sent financial regulators into an tailspin. The unregulated issuance of “money” couldn’t be allowed to happen! Hence, Zuckerberg had to be seen being quizzed by pretty much the entire global financial and political “elite.”

The Synthetic Hegemonic Currency (SHC)

In May 2019, Thiel protégé Sam Altman wrote a blog post in which he said:

Although I don’t think the US government can stop cryptocurrency, I do think it could create the winner — let’s call it “USDC” for US Digital Currency — and fix some challenges that governments currently face with cryptocurrency. I think the first superpower government to do something like this will have an enviable position in the future of the world, and some power over a worldwide currency.

In August 2019, at the G7 central bankers symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the main topic of discussion was what the Bank of England’s then-Governor Mark Carney called a growing “destabilising asymmetry at the heart of the IMFS” [International Monetary and Financial System].

Carney told the gathered bankers and financiers that the “world economy was being reordered.” He said that the US dollar remained “important” in the short term but that “the game” must change to suit a “multipolar world.” Therefore, “the global reserve currency”—the US dollar (USD) — needed to transform into some sort of “Synthetic Hegemonic Currency” (SHC).

Carney added:

While the likelihood of a multipolar IMFS might seem distant at present, technological developments provide the potential for such a world to emerge. Such a platform would be based on the virtual rather than the physical. [. . .] 

Technology has the potential to disrupt the network externalities that prevent the incumbent global reserve currency [the USD] from being displaced. [. . .] 

The most high-profile of these has been Libra—a new payments infrastructure based on an international stablecoin fully backed by reserve assets in a basket of currencies including the US dollar, the euro, and sterling. [. . .] 

The Bank of England and other regulators have been clear [. . .] the terms of engagement for any new systemic private payments system must be in force well in advance of any launch. As a consequence, it is an open question whether such a new Synthetic Hegemonic Currency (SHC) would be best provided by the public sector, perhaps through a network of central bank digital currencies. [. . .] 

Even if the initial variants of the idea prove wanting, the concept is intriguing. It is worth considering how an SHC in the IMFS could support better global outcomes, given the scale of the challenges of the current IMFS and the risks in transition to a new hegemonic reserve currency like the Renminbi.

So, here is Carney saying that the Libra stablecoin raised the “intriguing” possibility of creating a new SHC “backed by reserve assets” but that Libra itself was “wanting” due to the lack of clear “terms of engagement.” However, if the requisite regulatory “terms of engagement” were “in force well in advance of any launch,” Carney raised the potential to create an SHC using Libra-like stablecoins. This, he proposed, could stave off challenges from new possible hegemonic reserve currency alternatives, such as China’s Renminbi, and create a USD SHC suitable for a “multipolar IMFS.”

A month after Jackson Hole, in September 2019, Zuckerberg met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill to discuss “future internet regulation.” He was also invited to the White House for a “surprise” meeting.

Then, in October, Zuckerberg testified before the House Financial Services Committee about the aforementioned Libra (Diem) and was invited again to the White House — this time for dinner and this time accompanied by then Facebook board member Peter Thiel. The Trump administration didn’t think it necessary to disclose what was discussed, according to an NBC News report.

Immediately thereafter, Zuckerberg’s Libra project began to shift away from a stablecoin based on “a basket of currencies,” and by 2020 it was more closely aligned with the USD. The Financial Times reported in late November 2021 that Libra would initially launch as “a single coin backed one-for-one by the dollar.”

Webb and Goodwin speculate, with good reason, that the whole point of Facebook’s purportedly aggressive pursuit of Libra (Diem) was not so much about the stablecoin itself but rather about creating a threat that would appear to warrant regulatory change. It appears the team behind Libra always anticipated the failure of Libra and the resultant formation of a regulatory framework for a potential USD Synthetic Hegemonic Currency.

Going back to July 2019, two months before the Jackson Hole symposium, Facebook stated in an SEC filing:

Libra has drawn significant scrutiny from governments and regulators in multiple jurisdictions and we expect that scrutiny to continue. [. . .] These laws and regulations, as well as any associated inquiries or investigations, may delay or impede the launch of the Libra currency. [. . .] As such, there can be no assurance that Libra or our associated products and services will be made available in a timely manner, or at all.

The fact that Facebook (now Meta) knew Libra might fail and was counting on new regulations that would open new digital financial markets could cause careful observers to conclude that Zuckerberg’s Libra project was intended to be an embodiment of “creative destruction.”

While the Libra (Diem) stablecoin didn’t make it, the stablecoin market as a whole has done quite well, if one measures by market capitalization. The leading stablecoins are Tether’s USDT ($140 billion), Circle’s USDC ($44 billion), and the Ethereum blockchain-based “decentralised” DAI ($3 billion). Then we have FD121 Ltd.’s FDUSD ($1.8 billion) and USDD ($750 million), initially issued on the TRON blockchain.

PayPal stablecoin PYUSD, issued by the Paxos Trust Company and currently at $480 million market cap, stands apart because Paxos is a fully regulated US custodian. What’s more, PYUSD is perhaps the most firmly 1:1 USD-pegged stablecoin, backed as it is with a mix of USD deposits, short-term US Treasurys, and cash equivalents.

When the Nixon administration closed the gold window in 1971, ending the monetary system formulated at Bretton Woods in 1944, the USD became fully disassociated from any real intrinsic value (gold), though fractional reserve banking had already practically relinquished the dollar-and-gold association. The subsequent fiat currency monetary system has led to an enormous expansion of the money supply and ballooning of global debt. Those inevitabilities ultimately caused what Carney described as the “destabilising asymmetry at the heart of the IMFS.”

Carney recognised that the world’s leading holders of US debt were Japan and China. Both countries have been accelerating the process of dumping US Treasury securities (government bonds). Their bond market moves further threaten the dominance of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Now Trump has come to the White House with a fiscal policy package promising low domestic taxes and higher international trade tariffs at the very time that his country’s “exorbitant privilege” — the US economic advantage gained by funding its own deficit by issuing the reserve currency every other nation needs to buy — is receding. 

US public spending is fuelled by borrowing — by issuing government bonds. The traditional monetary view would suggest that the only option available to the US is to massively inflate the money supply — again! But, with its staggering $36 trillion national debt, and with other national governments increasingly unwilling to buy that debt (creating a lower demand), US borrowing costs seem set to rise and exacerbate the mounting debt problem.

Bluntly put, the US dollar and the US economy would appear to be screwed. Unless, of course, the US can find some other outlet to absorb its debt. If it can, there’s no reason why the monetary Ponzi scheme can’t carry on. Obviously, it will continue to have a terrible impact on people around the world, especially the poorest — including the poorest Americans. But when have rapacious oligarchs ever cared about social deprivation?

The total supply of stablecoins has now eclipsed $200 billion. In the US, Tether is currently the third-largest buyer of US 3-month Treasuries and the 16^th-largest purchaser of US government bonds globally. Because they absorb US debt, stablecoins are seen as the key to stabilising US interest rates. The proposed Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act has led some to suggest that it might become a regulatory requirement for USD-denominated digital tokens (stablecoins) to back their coins with nothing but US Treasury bills. If so, under Paxos’ custody, PYUSD is already well-placed to take advantage.

The bitcoin (BTC) hard cap, embedded in its code, ensures that no more that 21 million BTC can ever be “mined” (that is, issued). Every four years “halving” occurs, thereby theoretically reducing bitcoin issuance. This is the polar opposite of the fiat monetary system, in which the money supply can, realistically, only expand. The resulting inflation persistently devalues fiat currency. Bitcoin, however, is inherently deflationary. It is a tempting store of value for oligarchs who have treated the fiat currency system as if it were their own fiefdom to control and have run it into the ground.

Currently the top 21 holders of bitcoin collectively possess 2.3 million BTC, representing around 11% of the total bitcoin supply. At today’s prices, that is the equivalent of $236 billion in BTC holdings.

The presumably pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, author (or authors) of the original bitcoin white paper and possessor of perhaps as much as 1.1 million BTC, is officially the 19th wealthiest individual on the planet, worth around $91 billion. He may not be an individual but a collection of bitcoin founders. Some believe the name was made up by intelligence officials who could be behind the creation of bitcoin.

MicroStrategy, which provides business intelligence and mobile software services and whose leading shareholders are Capital Group, Vanguard, Morgan Stanley, and BlackRock, is the second-largest holder of bitcoin after Nakamoto. The third largest are the combined governments of the US and the UK, which reportedly hold $19 billion and $6 billion of bitcoin, respectively. Block.one — backed by Thiel — is the fourth largest, with more than $15 billion. The fifth-largest holder is Tether, owner of the USDT stablecoin, which has $8 billion and is the world’s largest trader of cryptocurrency. Tether has committed to investing 15% of its annual profits in bitcoin.

MicroStrategy founder and Executive Chairman Michael Saylor, grilled last March by Yahoo Finance, called BTC “the most valuable asset in the world” and “the endgame for anybody that wants to own the greatest property in the 21^st century.” And, according to a blurb last October by Forbes senior contributor Billy Bambrough, who has the magazine’s bitcoin and blockchain beat, “Saylor has revealed [MicroStrategy’s] endgame [. .  .] to become a bitcoin investment bank—and to buy up to $150 billion of bitcoin.”

MicroStrategy investors are presumably eager to see that bid succeed. They’re aware, as is Saylor, that being bullish on bitcoin further stimulates demand for BTC and brings “the endgame” closer.

BlackRock apparently agrees. The multinational investment company has seen its global asset portfolio increase to approximately $11 trillion, thanks in no small measure to its pivot toward digital currencies. Hitherto cool on cryptocurrencies, as other large investment houses have been, BlackRock now considers bitcoin in particular to be a digital asset. “We believe,” said CEO Larry Fink last October, that “bitcoin is [an] asset class in itself, an alternative to other commodities like gold.” Also, BlackRock is now among those advocating digitizing the dollar.

Trump’s executive order establishing the Presidential Working Group on Digital Asset Markets has tasked that group with developing “a Federal regulatory framework governing digital assets, including stablecoins, and evaluating the creation of a strategic national digital assets stockpile.” 

Simultaneously, the trajectory toward setting bitcoin as the “new gold alternative” is well underway. Notably, the Swiss government has already started the formal process of amending Article 99 of the Swiss Federal Constitution to allow the Swiss National Bank (SNB) to hold BTC reserves.

“On-ramps” are payment services that allow users to exchange fiat currency for digital assets like stablecoins. “Off-ramp” services allow users to convert digital assets back into fiat currencies. Using stablecoins, pegged 1:1 to the USD, greatly simplifies the process if you want dollars. That said, in a “multipolar IMFS,” Chinese and Japanese customers, for example, might not want USDs. Advances in decentralized finance technology (DeFi) are homogenizing global currencies. An effective SHC, with the USD set to dominate, is rapidly approaching.

Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) facilitates cross-border payment in USDC. This is fine if you want to off-ramp into fiat USDs, but if you want Euros, you still need to deal with the USD-Euro exchange rate (market price). This additional exchange reduces speed and increases the cost of the transaction (gas fees), thereby limiting scalability to non-USD customers.

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs), such as Uniswap, make use of Automated Market Maker (AMM) DeFi. This better enables cross-border transactions between stablecoins backed by different fiat currencies. Cross-chain interoperability protocols facilitate communication and data-sharing between different blockchains. Combined with AMM advances, cross-border stablecoin transactions are consistently becoming faster and cheaper.

Circle’s EURC is a Euro-backed stablecoin fully compliant with the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). In 2024, researchers from Warwick Business School on-ramped in USD (USDC) and off-ramped in Euros (EURC) using Circle’s AMM.

The researchers reported:

Given that EURC is pegged to the Euro and USDC to the US dollar, trading in the EURC/USDC market should closely track developments in the traditional EUR/USD market. Indeed, we found that the blockchain market operates efficiently, with EURC/USDC prices staying within 20 basis points — or 0.2 percentage points — of traditional EUR/USD market prices. Furthermore, blockchain prices responded to macroeconomic information, such as interest rate announcements from the US Federal Reserve.

The USD-backed stablecoins have primacy, and a USD-denominated SHC seems by far the most likely outcome. That said, some experts, such as former Binance.US CEO and 1Money founder Brian Shroder, predict a multicurrency stablecoin future. In a recent interview with CoinTelegraph, Shroder said, “We envision a global network powered by stablecoins representing all major currencies.”

Equally, if interoperability protocols and AMM DeFi development continue to accelerate, such a multicurrency system is still likely to protect the USD. Those pushing USD dominance, such as the Thiel-led consortium behind the Global Dollar Network’s USDG stablecoin, with its proposed cross-chain interoperability, evidently have the edge.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) runs The Taskforce on Cross-border Payments Interoperability and Extension (PIE Taskforce). The committee was formed in response to the G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-border Payments (established in 2020 with the final stage three report published in 2023 — hereafter referred to as the G20 Roadmap), which, the BIS notes, seeks to enhance “cross-border payments’ speed and transparency, while increasing access to cross-border payment services and reducing their costs.”

The G20 — short for Group of 20 — is an international forum comprised of 19 member states (including the US, the UK, Russia, China, and India) plus the European Union (EU) and the African Union (AU). Formed in 1999, it is structured as a multipolar global forum of five internal groups with the aim of coordinating economic policy. The finance ministers and central bank governors of the respective G20 member states and of the EU and AU dominate G20 deliberations.

An important contributor to the G20-and-BIS-aligned CPMI-PIE taskforce is Coinbase, which was accelerated into existence by Y-Combinator (see Part 1). Coinbase responded to the recent PIE consultation by making the point that all the G20 Roadmap targets could be met by properly regulated stablecoins. Coinbase observed that “a mixed-payments ecosystem” that supports “traditional bank rails and wholesale payments” can benefit from stablecoin adoption.

The global digital ID network is being created from a range of “interoperable” but “vendor-agnostic” digital ID products. There won’t be just one global digital ID card or biometric ID product—such as a single facial recognition system. Instead, all such products and systems will export data using an agreed-upon machine-readable format. In the case of digital ID products and systems, they will comply with ISO/IEC 19794 Series and ISO/IEC 19785 biometric data interchange formats.

Thus, it is entirely possible that a single global database, perhaps the World Bank’s ID4D or some similar global solution, could collect data from all the interoperable vendor-agnostic digital ID products and systems worldwide. The ID4D project is supporting the introduction of global interoperability standards that will be “capable of facilitating transactions in the digital age.”

The International Organization for Standardization, abbreviated as ISO (not IOS), has an international standard for electronic data interchange between financial institutions. This standard, called “ISO 20022,” is explained as: 

[. . .] a global messaging standard designed to improve communication between financial institutions through structured, machine-readable messages. [. . .] ISO 20022 facilities interoperability and efficiency across payment systems, securities markets, and other financial domains. Its rich data fields and extensibility make it a cornerstone for modernizing global financial infrastructure.

It goes without saying that the BIS — specifically its Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) — is eager to embrace the ISO’s “payments data harmonisation,” which it announced last month. As noted by CentralBank.com, “A key factor in achieving more efficient cross-border payments is the use of the same data standards by all countries, and the ISO 20022.” 

ISO 20022-compliant stablecoins and underlying blockchains are emerging, according to a December 2024 article in CryptoNews.com. This innovation is being propelled by the multipolar G20 Roadmap and raises the potential of establishing a global “unified ledger” — or “shared ledger” — that effectively oversees every digital financial transaction on earth.

In 2024, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, recognizable by its acronym, SWIFT, reported:

The concept of a new, universal shared ledger for digital payments and assets is gaining interest as a way of transforming how transactions are recorded and settled. [. . .] In its Annual Economic Report 2023, the BIS presented its blueprint for a future monetary system, envisaging a new type of financial market infrastructure—a “unified ledger”—which could “capture the full benefits of tokenisation.” [. . .] [T]he shared ledger model could potentially help to improve the cost, speed, predictability and accessibility of cross-border payments — thereby supporting the G20 roadmap. [. . .] [A]n ISO 20022-based messaging layer will enhance the shared ledger proposition.

A Synthetic Hegemonic Currency (SHC) is being constructed, but, like its global digital ID counterpart, it is very unlikely to be one stablecoin or one digital asset or token. Rather, as Coinbase developers put it, the SHC will be a “mixed-payments ecosystem.”

The SHC is going to be an interoperable network of “vendor-agnostic” digital tokens. Stablecoins are accelerating the SHC’s development. Interoperability, enabled by machine-readable data harmonisation, will revolutionise business-to-business (B2B) transactions.

The race is on to seize control of the “new world” of regulated stablecoins. Peter Thiel and his protégés, working in partnership with Musk and others, have established a global network of tech and tech-finance companies that have been key drivers in creating a “new world currency.” That we find ourselves where we are today is no accident.

The Public-Private SHC Surveillance State

In 2023, Tether’s new CEO, Paolo Ardoino, was under investigation by the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs for potential sanction-busting financial activity. He submitted a letter to the committee in which he reported yet more evidence of the close relationship between leading players in the financial technology (FinTech) development community and the US defence-and-intelligence complex.

Ardoino wrote:

On December 1, 2023, we launched a wallet-freezing policy designed to significantly enhance the tools available for law enforcement agencies seeking to combat illicit use of stablecoins. [. . .] Tether recently onboarded the United States Secret Service into our platform and is in the process of doing the same with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). These strategic relationships reinforce our commitment to supporting law enforcement. [. . .] We have assisted in freezing, as of the date of this letter, approximately 326 wallets totaling approximately USDT 435 Million for the Department of Justice, US Secret Service, and FBI. [. . .] We look forward to maintaining a close working relationship with law enforcement, policymakers, and regulators in shaping a secure, compliant, and resilient future for digital currencies.

During the Canadian trucker protests against pandemic mandates in early 2022, commercial banks and payment providers facilitated the Canadian government’s demand to freeze protesters’ financial assets and disable supporters’ ability to donate to fundraising campaigns for the truckers. Similarly, the UK government is currently forming legislation that would allow authorities to access citizens’ bank accounts and seize control of their finances — under the guise of combatting fraud.

In both of these examples of the public-private abuse of claimed authority, two mechanisms were and are needed to enforce tyranny: agreement (that is, the banks and payment providers’ willingness to collaborate) and legislation (either existing or new). But in a world of solely digital money, neither policy debates nor the passing of legislation are strictly necessary. Total surveillance of our use of money and the ability to programme our spending is innate to the “new world currency” —USD SHC.

From humanity’s perspective, no matter where we reside, the most alarming aspect of digital currencies — stablecoins, retail CBDC, or otherwise — is their surveillance capabilities and, in particular, their programmability feature. Trump’s new executive order on digital finance suggests that instead of elected officials programming our money, this task should be handed over to multistakeholder partnerships.

To understand why programmability is a risk to all of us, consider the words of Bo Li, the former Deputy Governor of the Bank of China and the current Deputy Managing Director of the IMF. In October 2022, Bo Li said:

CBDC can allow government agencies and private sector players to program — to create smart contracts — to allow targeted policy functions. For example, welfare payments; for example, consumption coupons; for example, food stamps. By programming CBDC, [. . .] money can be precisely targeted [to] what kind of [things] people can own, and [the kinds of ways] this money can be utilised. 

Digital “money” can be programmed to automatically bar us from donating to the “wrong” cause or from transacting with certain “undesirable”individuals. Every transaction we make and all funds we receive will be recorded on the corresponding “ledger” (likely to be a blockchain) from which our financial activity will be monitored, analysed, and inspected. Such a system obviates the need for legislation to snoop into our bank accounts.

China’s digital states — WeChat pay, and the similarly popular Alipay — are fully integrated with China’s e-CNY retail central bank digital currency (r-CBDC). China’s stakeholder capitalist approach to controlling its “customers” payments is not dissimilar to that currently being pursued in Ukraine—using its e-Hyrvnia r-CBDC—and a similar system is proposed by the Russian public-private state.

The head of the State Duma Committee on Financial Markets, Anatoly Aksakov, told the news outlet Rossiyskaya Gazeta that the battle against cybercrime and financial fraud meant that the Russian retail CBDC — the digital ruble — would allow accounts to be blocked, depending on “certain rules.” Payment restrictions could be applied, transactions inspected and control measures taken “if necessary,” he said.

Also adopting the stakeholder capitalism model, Aksakov said Russia’s “major telecom operators, cybersecurity experts and key IT companies,” alongside the commercial banks, would partner with the Russian government to put together these “new measures.” Looking to the future, he suggested “joint ventures” could include the “American banks,” adding that “Visa or Mastercard” could assist with the rollout of the digital ruble control measures.

Like Bo Li, Anatolov also emphasised the social engineering potential of the digital ruble: 

Payments in the digital ruble can be linked to smart contracts, where the transfer or remuneration to the contractor is regulated by a computer program, not a person. [. . .] We are now focusing on using the digital ruble to control the targeted spending of the [fiscal] budget. [. . .] Should we convert maternity capital or child benefit into the digital ruble and make it so that they cannot be spent on alcohol and cigarettes? In my opinion this is a justified measure and such restrictions are necessary.

The US is evidently taking a different path towards its proposed digital state, preferring cryptocurrencies and stablecoins for programmability. But irrespective of whether your government and its partners opt for the retail CBDC or the approved stablecoin route, the outcome is a digital surveillance and control system.

The Programmable Digital State

Stablecoins are certainly no less programmable than CBDCs. Global outsourcing digital employment agency Rise observed:

The programmability of stablecoins through smart contracts opens avenues for innovations such as machine-to-machine payments in IoT applications. [. . .] The future of stablecoin payments is bright, with ongoing innovations and increasing adoption promising to transform how we conduct financial transactions.

These technological innovations portend much more than simply transforming “how we conduct financial transactions.” In its totality, interoperable, AI-controlled digital technology threatens to change every aspect of our lives. If it does, we should not lose sight of the fact that AI is programmed by motivated human beings who hold ideological beliefs.

The Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet of Bodies (IoB); advances in machine-to-machine (M2M) payments — with AI algorithms automatically deducting digital money from our digital wallets absent any human interaction –– and an interconnected network of smart homes on smart grids paints a dystopian future few of us wish to contemplate. Unfortunately, the enabling gov-corp Technates are being built.

The digital currency powered smart home concept has already arrived. This is achieved by linking IoT powered homes to digital wallets overseen by surveillance of the smart grid to which they are attached. Howard Lutnick’s—Trump’s pick for secretary of commerce — investment in Satellogic, via Endeavour, places him and his partners in prime position to capitalise on what the WEF calls the “trillion dollar opportunity” presented by the Earth Observation industry (EO). Orbiting satellite networks harvest data from digital devices and the subsequent AI analyses of the gathered EO data is set to revolutionise pretty much every industrial sector.

Now in office, Lutnick can be confident in his assertion that Satellogic and its investors, including Tether, are “uniquely positioned to dominate the Earth Observation industry.” Just as cryptocurrencies, stablecoins in particular, are providing space for expansion of US debt, so to they are enabling accelerated investment in the development of the emerging “digital states.”

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, such as that being developed by Musk’s Neuralink, is bringing us closer to becoming “technoplastic beings.” It comes as no surprise that Peter Thiel is a Neuralink investor. Thiel also invests in Musk’s BCI competitors — Blackrock Neurotech is one. Again, Tether is also an investment partner of Blackrock Neurotech.

There is evidently technological competition. On the one hand we have Musk’s Space X, Neuralink and X-pay, on the other we have Sattelogic, Blackrock Neurotech and Tether. But as we can see from Thiel’s investment strategy, it is the transhumanist and neurowarfare potential of BCI technology that excites technopopulist oligarchs. Competition stimulates development until the winning monopoly establishes itself.

The programmable nature of the so-called “digital money,” combined with smart devices on smart grids, enabling precise monitoring of our energy use means that, de facto, “Energy Certificates” are being rolled out. 

Trump’s digital finance executive order does not nullify the threat posed by CBDCs. It simply diverts public attention away from the immense threat posed by programmable digital currency in general.

Programmable, privately issued stablecoins are intended to avert the looming US debt crisis by absorbing US debt in cryptocurrencies. But the evident additional hope is that this tactic will give the US a head start in the race toward Technocracy.

When Technocracy was designed in the 1930s, the scale of the surveillance and control system it proposed was soon discarded as unworkable. The idea of creating a bureaucracy capable of monitoring the energy use of every citizen and every business across a continent, using the technology of that day, was a fantastical proposition. Measuring a citizen’s or business’ energy usage via any kind of manageable monetary system, with expenditures controlled by linking the currency to identity, was simply not feasible.

But today, not only is Technocracy finally technologically possible, the infrastructure for the rollout of Technocracy is ,as a result, being actively constructed.

Technologically, such a dystopia is well within the realm of possibility. Do you imagine that the oligarchs behind the construction of the necessary infrastructure would never implement this digital panopticon? If so, perhaps it is time to ask yourself why they are building it. Is it simply because people like Elon Musk want us to live “lives of abundance”?

To be clear: programmable money combined with digital ID is likely to enable oligarchs, via public-private partnership, to oversee “the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism”—that is, Technocracy. It will potentially give them total control of the distribution of “goods and services to the entire population.” In short, technological innovation has made a Technate eminently possible.

The American Multipolar Technate

The newly not-elected prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, is among the few, in the current crop of politicians, who is closely and directly connected to the globalist oligarchy. In a interview with Juno News, given shortly before he became prime minister, Mark Carney argued for the alleged benefits of said global oligarchy:

I know how the world works, I know how to get things done, I’m connected. [. . .] People will charge me with being elitist or a globalist, to use that term, which is, well, that’s exactly, it happens to be exactly what we need. 

Carney’s proposed Synthetic Hegemonic Currency (SHC) is intended to position the West in preparation for the emerging multipolar world order. It is obvious, therefore, that multipolarity poses no threat to globalist oligarchs.

The so-called “global elite” have always been quite open about their ambitions, but Carney’s words suggest that they feel extra-emboldened at the moment. There is nothing new about their concept of a world split into more manageable “regions” or “poles,” but we do seem to be approaching the end of an inexorable path toward it.

We do not have to take that path. It is not yet set in stone.

Carney has openly told us that he and his globalist cronies have not haphazardly stumbled into his proposed SHC, nor have they randomly meandered into the clutches of a multipolar world order or its new IMFS. Conscious, deliberate decisions have been made, and specific steps have been taken, to bring about this state of affairs.

There are people who insist that the push toward multipolarity is being led by the BRICS+ nations — in particular, the Russian and Chinese governments. President Putin and Paramount Leader Xi Jinping have been prominent advocates of multipolarity, for sure. Speaking in October 2024 in the lead-up to the 16^th BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, Xi explained the multipolar vision. He said it is about fostering “inclusive economic globalization.” This can be done, he noted, by building “solidarity and cooperation” between countries.

The BRICS (now BRICS+) project forms a bloc, or “pole,” of nation-states. It has already started to redesign globalism. As pointed out by former Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff, who now chairs the New Development Bank (NDB) at the heart of the BRICS+ project, “measured by GDP, the BRICS countries have already surpassed the G7 in importance.”

In truth, a multipolar world order has always been the penultimate destination prior to establishing full-blown, centralised global governance. The evidence supporting this conclusion is abundant.

Renowned American historian, professor, and author Carroll Quigley meticulously catalogued the activities of the British/American oligarch network that was inspired by the imperial vision of the early-20th century Rhodes-Milner Group (also known as the Round Table Group). In a 1974 interview with Washington Post reporter Rudy Maxa, Quigley spoke about the “three-power world” that the network envisaged prior to WWII. The idea was that a transatlantic bloc and a united European bloc and an Eastern Soviet bloc would dominate a global “balance of power” structure.

Following a 1956 Special Studies Project directed by Henry Kissinger at the request of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a 500-plus-page document titled Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports emerged (its copyright spans 1958–1961). The five reports in it aimed to define the problems and opportunities the US faced in the late 1950s, clarify national objectives, and develop a framework on which national policies could be based.

The United Nations had already been established in 1945 (the UN headquarters was built on land donated by the Rockefellers), but, according to some of the panel report researchers, this international organisation hadn’t delivered on its goals. So, these researchers returned to the original prospect outlined by the Rhodes-Milner Group and suggested “a world divided into smaller units” [page 26] that would “consist of regional institutions under an international body of growing authority” [page 26]:

The most natural multination arrangements are frequently regional. [. . .] Fully developed, they imply a joint accord on monetary and exchange arrangements, a common discipline on fiscal matters, and a free movement of capital and labor. [. . . ] We believe that this regional approach has world-wide validity. [. . .] What is needed immediately is a determination to move in the direction they imply. Regional arrangements are no longer a matter of choice. They are imposed by the requirements of technology, science, and economics. Our course is to contribute to this process by constructive action [pages 188–190].

In October 1968, the Rockefellers supported the foundation of a globalist international policy think tank — the Club of Rome — to implement the “regional arrangements” that they had declared seven years earlier to be “no longer a matter of choice.”

The 1973 third symposium of the WEF is considered by the WEF to have been an important moment in its history.  At this event, Club of Rome co-founder Aurelio Peccei outlined the Club’s concept of the “sustainability of global economic growth” which, WEF delegates were told, required society to reconcile “economic development and environmental constraints.” Consequently, with this in mind, the WEF adopted “Klaus Schwab’s stakeholder concept.”

In same year, September 1973, the Club of Rome wrote a confidential report titled “Regionalized and Adaptive Model of the Global World System.” It proposed that the world be divided into ten “Kingdoms”—comparable to blocs, or poles. Though presented simply as an analytical computer model, the Club of Rome added a vision statement to its report:

Our efforts in the immediate future will be concentrated on further use of the already developed [Kingdoms] model. [. . .] Implementation of the regional models in different parts of the world and their connection via a satellite communication network [will be] for the purpose of joint assessment of the long-term global future by teams from the various regions [Kingdoms or “poles”]. Implementation of the vision for the future outlined by leaders from an underdeveloped region in order to assess with the model existing obstacles and the means whereby the [multi-Kingdom or multipolar] vision might become a reality.

More recently, World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab co-wrote, with Thierry Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset. One point they made in their book is that global supply chains are fragmenting due to global existential crises. They pinned the blame on a lack of cohesive global governance and offered a solution:

The most likely outcome along the globalization–no globalization continuum lies in an in-between solution: regionalization. The success of the European Union as a free trade area or the new Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in Asia (a proposed free trade agreement among the 10 countries that compose ASEAN) are important illustrative cases of how regionalization may well become a new watered-down version of globalization. [. . .] In short, deglobalization in the form of greater regionalization was already happening. COVID-19 will just accelerate this global divergence as North America, Europe and Asia focus increasingly on regional self-sufficiency rather than on the distant and intricate global supply chains that formerly epitomized the essence of globalization [page 79].

Shortly before the 2025 Munich Security Conference, Trump’s pick for Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave an interview to Megyn Kelly where he said: 

[. . .] it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. [. . .] That was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. [. . .] [F]oreign policy has always required us to work in the national interest, sometimes in cooperation with people who we wouldn’t invite over for dinner or people who we wouldn’t necessarily ever want to be led by.  And so that’s a balance, but it’s the sort of pragmatic and mature balance we have to have in foreign policy.

Casting the multipolar world order as a confrontation between great powers but also a “pragmatic and mature balance,” Rubio’s comments were congruent with the view of the globalist think-tank the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)—which has consistently promoted multipolarity. The CFR believes the international rules-based order (the unipolar model) is “disintegrating at an accelerating pace.”

CFR fellow Thomas E. Graham sees five potential regional poles in a multipolar global governance system consisting of the US, China, India, Russia, and Europe. The CFR line of thinking is that the US can contribute to multipolarity through foreign policy that seeks to constrain China as a great power; nurture India as a power, preserve Russian power and promote European power.

Europe is considered the greatest challenge by the CFR because, despite its economic and possible military might, it “lacks political cohesion.” Therefore, in January 2025 the CFR argued for a new US foreign policy mindset “to encourage Europe to assume the responsibilities of a great power [. . .], one that has the hard power needed to deal with most security contingencies in its immediate neighborhood.”

In March 2025, the Trump administration’s very public press conference spat with the visiting Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy was immediately followed by the US supposedly withholding military aid to Ukraine. This was met with seeming condemnation from the US’ European partners who responded by publicly announcing an €800 billion ($841.5 billion) “ReArm Europe” plan. This gives further impetus to the EU’s long-held desire for European military unification.

It seems that Trump’s order not to supply US arms to Ukraine doesn’t apply to Thiel-backed enterprises like Anduril. While Trump was telling American and European voters that the US would not supply arms, Anduril was finalising a deal with the UK government to send their Altius 600m and Altius 700m attack drones to Ukraine.

It is hard to say if the press conference between Trump (the former reality TV personality) and Zelenskyy (the former actor and TV comedian) was entirely staged or not. Obviously, both presidents were, at the very least, briefed prior to their quite extraordinary public row. What is not in doubt is that the trajectory of the global policy response is precisely as modelled and suggested by the think-tanks.

Elon Musk’s ‘X’ social media platform is, at the time of writing, heavily promoting Trump as the global peace maker who just wants to stop the slaughter in Ukraine. Consequently, the public debate swirling across the entire western media and social media landscape is polarising opinion between those who want peace and those who argue this is short-sighted appeasement and Ukraine must keep fighting to stave off “Putin’s aggression.” Meanwhile, the globalist plans for a multipolar world order are surging ahead regardless of which of those two, pre-determined options is championed by the US or any other government.

Political leaders, influential financiers, and representatives of policy think tanks across the West have evidently been planning for some time, even enthusiastically endorsing, construction of a regionalised multipolar world order. Their fundamentally globalist project is the latest iteration of the oligarchs’ persistent dream: global governance under their exclusive control.

The Munich Security Conference (MSC) is ostensibly a transatlantic forum where hi-ranking so-called “thought leaders” engage in a “marketplace of ideas.” The self-appointed glitterati discuss, plan and agree security and defence policy trajectories. The theme of MSC 2025 was “Multipolarization.”

In the executive summary for the Munich Security Report 2025 we are told that “multipolarization is a fact.” Again, presenting us with the idea that things just happen organically: there is no design.

We are given to understand that those who are positive about multipolarity see “opportunities for more inclusive global governance and greater constraints on Washington.” Whereas, those who are more pessimistic believe it “increases the risk of disorder.”

The report notes the international enthusiasm for the United Nations 2024 Pact for the Future, replete with its Global Digital Compact and a Declaration on Future Generations. Following the UN’s “quiet revolution,” the Pact is grounded in stakeholder capitalism’s public-private partnerships and “draws on the energy and expertise of governments, civil society and other key partners.”

The UN Pact promises more public-private global censorship, centralised world economic and financial control partnerships (global taxation), and firmer mechanisms for global governance partnerships to seize control of nation states as deemed necessary. The MSC thought leaders conclude “for this cooperation [UN Pact] to materialize, the world could well use some ‘depolarization’.”

The evident plan is for the global order to undergo a process of creative destruction to deterritorialize it in its current form and reterritorialize it as a more efficient multipolar global governance structure. To this end the MSC report notes:

The next four years will show whether a more selectively engaged US fuels or contains global disorder. As other actors will (have to) step up to fill the gap, the multipolarization of the international system could accelerate.

Despite US policy decisions supposedly being designed to confront and oppose China, again, as a result of the same US policy decisions, China has shown it is ready to “fill the gap.” In his MSC speech the head of China’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission — China’s foreign minister — H.E. Wang Yi said:

[. . .] we should work for an equal and orderly multipolar world. [. . .] China will surely be a factor of certainty in this multipolar system, and strive to be a steadfast constructive force in a changing world. [. . .] The U.N. is at the core of practicing multilateralism and advancing global governance. [. . .] We have firmly upheld the authority and stature of the U.N.

J.D. Vance address to the MSC has been reported as harsh criticism of European censorship of its citizen’s and its media, especially with reference to the censorship of US commentators. Within his criticisms, Vance also advocated construction of a European “pole”:

[. . .] the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense. [. . .] [W]e think it’s an important part of being in a shared alliance together that the Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger.

The extremely rapid response to the US foreign policy shift toward Ukraine has stimulated EU military unification and rearmament. This is entirely in keeping with the strategies and plans laid out by globalist policy think-tanks. Perhaps random events collide and every decision is nothing more than a reaction, but the weight of evidence thoroughly contradicts mere “coincidence theory.”

We are supposed to believe that US isolationism is the pessimistic response to multipolarity while the more positive multilateral approach is closer aligned to the essence of the UN’s Pact for the Future. Either way, both pessimistic isolationism and positive multilateralism seem likely to accelerate multipolar global governance.

Despite the different approaches, the geopolitical outcomes are seemingly indivisible. Both portend a regionalised world order bureaucracy and this has always been the planned administrative reorganisation of the planet prior to imposing firm global governance and, ultimately, global government.

The Trump administration is blatantly declaring its isolationism. Trump, has publicly withdrawn from the World Health Organisation, the Paris Agreement, and the US pact with the OECD to work on a Global Tax Deal. He has imposed international trade tariffs and his toughening of US border security is apparently one of the primary reasons he was re-elected.

A lot of what Trump and his staff say is rhetoric and horse-trading.

A lot of what Trump and his staff say is rhetoric and 
horse-trading. OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann has already said Trump’s posturing was interpreted as “concerns raised.” Cormann also said the OECD would “keep working with the U.S. and all countries at the table to support international cooperation that promotes certainty, avoids double taxation, and protects tax bases.” Trump may be haggling for a stronger negotiating position, and we should certainly take his grand statements with a pinch of salt.

That said, if we put all this together, what we see is a distinct narrative shift toward polarisation. It is important to stress that we’re witnessing a full-on propaganda offensive. Nevertheless, we are supposed to believe that there are real geopolitical tensions between the EU and the US, not just in relation to Ukraine, but in relation to Greenland. The European Council President António Costa said Denmark had the EU’s “full support” in the Danish government’s alleged confrontation with the US government.

Trump has also made aggressive gestures toward BRICS+, warning that tariffs will rain down if the group dumps the USD.

Meanwhile, one of the BRICS+ leading nations, Russia, has said that Trump’s “withdrawal” from the WHO risks “dangerous consequences.” Alexei Kurinney, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Health, said that “from the point of view of protecting exclusively the interests of the United States, this is an isolationist step.”

In response to seeming US isolationism, the Chinese government has also criticised the US withdrawals from the WHO and from the Paris Agreement. As we’ve just highlighted, China has offered itself as a reliable global partner to these two entities. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said:

China is concerned about the US announcement to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. [. . .] Climate change is a common challenge that all of humanity must face. [. . .] The role of the World Health Organization should only be strengthened, not weakened.

The stage is clearly set for the final push toward the multipolar world order. But, strange as it may seem, this very push toward multipolarity is bringing the nations closer to a single global political, economic, and (perhaps most notably) financial and monetary “union.” In other words, multipolarity, as it is presented to us, appears to be a monumental psychological operation (psyop).

There have been many attempts over the years to form a North American Union (NAU), which would be composed of Mexico, the United States, and Canada. This geopolitical goal received a boost in 1994 with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but the plan stalled after receiving strong resistance by the populace of all three countries.

On and off, the US government has made numerous attempts to pry Greenland away from Denmark — more often than not citing US defence needs. Greenland is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. Its inhabitants are therefore citizens of Denmark and, by extension, of the European Union. In 1951, the US and Danish governments signed the Defense of Greenland Treaty, which ostensibly appeased US national security concerns. The US maintains the Pituffik Space Base — formerly known as Thule Air Base — on the island of Greenland.

Greenland has never been mentioned with respect to any proposed versions of either a North American Union or a free trade agreement. The prospect of building the Praxis gov-corp Technate on Greenland has evidently reignited enthusiasm.

The original American technocrats, however, did include Greenland, along with Caribbean island states and Central American states — as far south as the northernmost territory of South America’s Columbia and Venezuela — in their proposed model of a North American Technate.

Prior to this year’s inauguration, Trump outlined his dreams of establishing  what can only be described as a plan almost geographically identical to Technocracy Inc.’s original North American Technate. In a series of off-the-wall-sounding statements — not unusual for him — Trump indicated that he wanted to add Greenland, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama to a NAU of Mexico, the US, and Canada. He even threatened the use of force, both economic and military, to construct a geopolitical map that is exactly mirrors the aforementioned North American Technate.

There is no realistic prospect, in any geopolitical sense, of this imaginary North American Technate actually being formed. But, as we have already discussed, the Dark Enlightenment and Technocracy portend a kind of geopolitics more reminiscent of the system of city states ruled by the Venetian bankers. The Venetian city state was perhaps the most powerful seasteading project the world has ever known.

Trumps seemingly weird ideas about seizing control of Gaza and Greenland, as if they can simply be acquired as sovereign states, and where the sovereignty of the people living there is considered “with derision,” is the epitome of the Dark Enlightenment thinking. Forced displacement of the “unthinking demos” is meaningless if you fervently believe “the system must be first.”

The North American Technate map that Trump appeared to deliberately outline first appeared on the cover of the Technocracy Study Course. Yet even the original technocrats didn’t explain how all these nation-states would fall in line with their unhinged ideas.

Ironically, the technological advances that have today made the prospect of a Technate feasible have also rendered the concept of a geographical Technate moot. By its nature, global communication technology globalises. The technocrats’ notion of a geographically bounded political Technate has largely been subsumed by the globalist oligarchs’ rollout of global governance architecture and technology.

The Club of Rome’s Ten Kingdom model was precisely that: a model. While it is obvious there has been a global effort to make that model a functioning reality, it is clear that the gov-corp Technates under construction will first and foremost be economic and financial administrative zones rather than physical or geopolitical nations as we understand them. The technology used to construct each digital state is common to all.

Gov-corp realms may be distinct, with, for example, Amazon dominating its sov-corp realm in the West and the Alibaba-Group dominating its sov-corp realm the East, but the “patchwork of realms” will be global. The decentralisation toward the digital city state is the network enabling centralised control. The formation of regionalised poles looks more like bureaucratic reorganisation in preparation for a simplified global governance administration of realms.

Nonetheless, the symbology of Trump’s otherwise bizarre imperial statements seems relatively easy to interpret. Trump and/or his close advisers want to make it clear that Technocracy and the Dark enlightenment are the ideas driving the administration. I suspect Trump will say whatever he is told to say, within reason, on this subject or any other. In my opinion, posturing as a would-be emperor probably appeals to his ego. Personally, I doubt Trump even understands what a gov-corp Technate is, but he may.

Whatever the case, the communicated signal could not be made more obvious: The neoreactionary technocrats are in control.

Thiel and Musk are not the leading architects of the project to establish the global gov-corp Technate. But they are firm believers and, as made men, have been positioned to lead the US in that direction. Ultimately, the digital transformation of the Fourth Industrial Revolution renders the very concept of the nation-state superfluous. The technocrats and accelerationist neoreactionaries know this.

Oligarchs have never had an affinity for one nation more than for any other. The system they seek ignores nation-states completely. If their plan succeeds, the only borders that will still have any relevance to them will be those delineating the “Kingdoms” or “poles” of a much-simplified multipolar global governance structure overseeing a network of realms. 

Once the mycelium-like global financial network is thriving and once seamless cross-border transactions are instantaneous — enabled by a digital SHC fit for a multipolar world — then geographical political borders will cease to have any economic or monetary meaning. As Peter Thiel observed in a 2001 PayPal all-hands meeting:

The ability to move money fluidly and the erosion of the nation-state are closely related.

The global system of gov-corp Technates that is emerging represents the most oppressive, totalitarian system of absolute behavioural control ever devised. There will be no need for government policy when entire populations — comprised of millions of individual human beings who were born to think for themselves — can be mentally hijacked and literally programmed by corporate behemoths.

But of all the psyops foisted upon us, the greatest among them is the millennia-long propaganda campaign to make us believe we are powerless. This is perhaps most clearly illustrated by the “representative democracy” charade.

Recognising the staggering audacity of the globalists’ plans and the enormous resources they presently have under their command is not to be “blackpilled.” On the contrary, it is the first step toward liberation. In order to resist the maniacs, we first have to understand what they’re doing and how and why they’re doing it. After that, the only hurdle we must surmount is that of putting all of our own solutions into effect.

Our solutions do not have to reimagine the world, we just have to reimagine our tiny portion of it. You don’t need to worry about energy costs if you are energy self sufficient—or as close to it as you can be. You don’t need to be too preoccupied with food prices if you grow it yourself or barter goods and services with those that do, and you don’t need to be overly concerned with exchange rates if you choose your own medium of exchange and trade with other like-minded people in your own community.

International financial institutions do not control “money.” Oligarch investors do not control technological development. Governments do not control populations. Only deception, coercion and the use of force ensures these false perceptions. Deception works by bombarding people with propaganda and psyops. Coercion and manipulation are designed to convince us to accept that which we can — and must — decisively reject. Force will almost certainly be used if we do, but there are also eight billion of us.

There are better alternatives to top-down oligarch control. Despite the hopes of Musk and Thiel and their ilk, gov-corp Technates are not inevitable. We need only peaceably decline to obey their demented edicts, quit subscribing to their insane schemes, and build something better.

The Dark MAGA Gov-Corp Technate — Part 2.

President Donald Trump has publicly stated, “I know nothing about Project 2025,” and “I have nothing to do with Project 2025.  . . . I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it purposely. I’m not going to read it.” Trump has also averred, “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying, and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” Obviously, these statements are contradictory, for if Trump is truly oblivious to the machinations of Project 2025, then how can he honestly disavow its policies, especially if he didn’t actually read the official “Playbook,” Mandate for Leadership: Project 2025? 

While contemplating the answer to this question, consider that Project 2025 contributor Russell Vought was recorded with a hidden camera which caught him saying that Trump’s public distancing from Project 2025 is merely a feint intended to deflect and placate his opponents in media and politics. Meanwhile, at least 29 Project 2025 contributors, including Project 2025 Director Paul Dans, have served under Trump in official positions across various levels during his first presidential administration. 

Moving forward into Trump’s second term, many of his picks for high-level officials in his executive branch are Project 2025 contributors. These include Cabinet appointments, such as John Ratcliffe, who is the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Russell Vought, who is the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Other appointments include Tom Homan, who is Trump’s Border Czar, and Brendan Carr, who is the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Altogether, this constellation of Project 2025 contributors orbiting Trump indicates that his administration will be adopting at least some of the Project 2025 directives, such as the mass deportation operation already being carried out by Homan.

Concerning education policy, Trump has nominated Linda McMahon to serve as the Secretary of Education. While McMahon did not contribute to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation, which oversaw the publication of Project 2025, has been funded by America First Works Inc. where McMahon serves as a “Board Member” and a “Senior Advisor.” McMahon, like Trump’s previous Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has led several non-profit corporations, such as America First Works Inc. and the America First Policy Institute, which advocate for public-private “school choice” partnerships that are also championed in Project 2025. 

In anticipation of her secretarial confirmation, McMahon has already met with multiple members of Congress, including Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), Senator Dave McCormick (R-PA), and Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), to get the ball rolling for corporatist school choice overhauls that align with Project 2025. Given McMahon’s pedigree, her nomination as Secretary of Education signals that the Trump administration will be going forward with Project 2025 plans for dismantling the Department of Education (ED) and expanding school choice corporatization.  

Far from abolishing government control of schools, the Project 2025 plan to disband the ED would only restructure the bureaucracies involved in administering federal education entitlements. In the meantime, Project 2025’s school choice reforms, which include federal “Education Savings Accounts” (ESAs), will likely expand government control over private schools, including religious schools, and home schooling, while also publicly subsidizing ed-tech corporations. At the same time, Project 2025’s school choice tax credits are primed to expand the corporatization of education through public-private partnerships that leverage ed-tech to data-mine how “Pay for Success” (PFS) impact scholarships streamline student outcomes for the social credit economy of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). 

To be sure, as I have documented extensively in a litany of articles and my book, School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education, “school choice” is nothing more than a euphemism for an array of public-private partnerships that corporatize government education by funneling tax subsidies into private schools, charter school companies, and ed-tech businesses. Rather than foster curricular freedom independent of federal control, Project 2025’s menu of “school choices” is primed to restrict options to government-regulated private schools, charter edu-companies, and ed-tech corporations, or corporate-managed PFS scholarships, which data-mine students’ learning analytics for social credit commodification in the digital economy of the 4IR. In fact, key architects of Project 2025 are entrenched in the State Policy Network (SPN): an old swamp of neo-conservative and beltway-libertarian think tanks that has long been bankrolled by Koch Brothers philanthropy to push public-private “school choice” corporatization and social impact finance, which are integral to the planned stakeholder economy of the 4IR.

The Dpt. of Education Reorganization Act: Shuffling the Chalkboards on the Titanic

Mandate for Leadership: Project 2025 recommends that the Trump administration dissolve the ED by passing a “Department of Education Reorganization Act.” Trump himself has essentially concurred as he has pledged, “[o]ne other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington D.C., and sending all education and education work and needs back to the states.” Keeping his promise, Trump is preparing to sign an executive order that “would shut down all functions of the department [of ED] that are not written explicitly into statute, or move certain functions to other departments,” according to Newsweek. In the meantime, the Department of Government Efficiency has cut nearly $1 billion worth of ED contracts and grants. Republican Congressmen have also introduced HR 369 and HR 899, which are bills to “[a]bolish” or “eliminat[e]” the ED.

While Trump may align with Project 2025’s plan to sunset the ED, whether he knows it or not, doing so by itself would not return “all education . . . back to the states.” Rather than terminate the government’s control of education, axing the ED by itself would only reshuffle the bureaucracies in charge of schools as the federal entitlements provided under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the Higher Education Act (HEA), the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) would still remain. Unless the Trump administration were to also pass bills to repeal the ESEA, the HEA, IDEA, and WIOA, the mandates for administering federal education entitlements would merely be shifted to other government departments. In fact, such a reallocation of federal education entitlements through a “reorganization” of government bureaucracies is precisely what is laid out in Project 2025.

According to the Project 2025 Playbook, the proposed “Department of Education Reorganization Act” would transfer the bulk of federal education entitlements to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Labor (DOL) while transferring other entitlements to the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Department of Commerce (DOC), and the Department of State (DOS). 

For examples:

• The Office of Post-Secondary Education, which administers HEA entitlements, would be transferred to HHS.
• The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, which administers IDEA entitlements, would be transferred to HHS.
• The Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education, which administers WIOA entitlements, would be transferred to the DOL.
• The Office for Civil Rights, which enforces Title IX of the ESEA and HEA Amendments of 1972, would be transferred to the DOJ.
• The Institute of Education Sciences, which oversees the Regional Educational Laboratories provided under Title IV of the ESEA, would be transferred to the Census Bureau of the DOC.
• Programs that are “important to national security” would be transferred to the DOS.

In these ways, Project 2025’s “Department of Education Reorganization Act” would actually expand, rather than diminish, government reaches into education as five different federal agencies, rather than a single department, would be permitted authority over school systems. Meanwhile, the ED “employees whose positions are determined to be essential to the mission would move with their constituent programs” to the newly appointed departments, so much of the bureaucratic personnel will remain the same. 

At the same time, by yoking education to HHS and the DOL, Project 2025’s restructuring of the ED would basically revert the federal bureaucracy into a system that hearkens back the days of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), which implemented centralized “Planning, Programming, and Budgeting Systems (PPBS)” as the precursor to the ED and HHS. Whereas the 1979 “Department of Education Organization Act” broke up HEW and upgraded its Office of Education into the ED while upgrading its Offices of Health and Welfare into HHS, Project 2025’s “Department of Education Reorganization Act” would merely shift the Offices of the ED back to HHS and other departments, such as the DOL, which administers “Welfare-to-Work” grants. In brief, Project 2025’s disassembling of the ED would bundle together federal health and education bureaucracies under the same department of HHS, like they were bundled together under the same department of HEW, while other departments, such as the DOL, would administer school-to-work along with welfare-to-work programs.

In sum, the Project 2025 plan to dismantle the ED is just another contrivance to refurbish the labyrinth of federal bureaucracies which has always systematically reduced school learning outcomes to an aggregate of mental health and workforce competencies that determine student placement in the “human capital” supply chain of America’s planned economy. By scattering federal education entitlements to HHS and the DOL, data-tracking of students’ mental health and career pathways outcomes would be streamlined by HHS and the DOL respectively, thus magnifying the medicalization and corporatization of government schooling. In this redistributed bureaucracy, HHS and the DOL would also track student health and career outcomes linked with PFS scholarships subsidized by the school choice tax credits proposed in Project 2025.

School Choice, Social Impact Investing, and Government Control of Private, Religious, and Home Schools

There should be no doubt that Trump will greenlight the school choice reforms laid out in Project 2025. From his prior appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, to his current nominations of Linda McMahon and Penny Schwinn for Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Ed respectively, Trump has consistently staffed the ED with champions of school choice. Picking up where his first term left off, President Trump has proclaimed that “universal school choice,” which is advocated in Project 2025, will be a cornerstone of his “Agenda 47” policy platform. Making good on his promise, Trump has signed Executive Order 14191 (“Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families”), which directs the Secretaries of Education and Labor to formulate “discretionary grant programs to expand education freedom” while directing the Secretary of HHS to formulate “block grants . . . to expand educational choice . . . , including private and faith-based options.”

The universal school choice reforms of Agenda 47 and Project 2025 will crest on the wave of Republican-led school choice bills that were legislated throughout 2023, which was dubbed the “Year of Educational Choice” after twenty states added or expanded school choice subsidies. Three more states joined the trend during the following election year of 2024. Preparing for the federal legislative sessions of 2025, Republican Governors, such as Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and Texas Governor Greg Abbott, paved the way for the passage of universal school choice bills by ousting 2024 Congressional candidates, whether incumbents or challengers, who would not pledge to go along with school choice reforms. 

Now, with a Trump victory and a Republican mandate, there is an open lane for the Project 2025 expansion of school choice privatization through the deregulation of charter school corporations; the authorization of ESAs for dispersing ESEA Title I funds; and the subsidization of “Scholarship Granting Organizations” (SGOs) with federal tax credits provided under the “Educational Choice for Children Act” (ECCA). Taking the open lane, Trump has already gotten the Project 2025 ball rolling by convening a National School Choice Week Roundtable where he hosted Republican governors, including Lee and Abbott’s Lieutenant Governor Daniel Patrick, advising them on how they can capitalize on the school choice grants pending from his new EO 14191.

While the Project 2025 Playbook calls for “lessen[ing] the federal restrictions on charter schools,” the Playbook places a more ambitious emphasis on instituting ESAs and tax credits that funnel government subsidies not only into charter school companies, but also private schools, including religious schools, and home schools as well. To be sure, while both the ESA and tax-credit proposals of Project 2025 would siphon public tax dollars into private corporations, each entails different implications for expanding either the corporatization of public education or the federal regulation of private, religious, and homeschools. In particular, ESAs could expand the regulatory reaches of the federal government while the tax credits proposed by Project 2025 are primed to streamline “Pay for Success” (PFS) impact investments that turn profits based on whether student health and career outcomes conform to benchmarks standardized by ESG and other social credit indexes.

Concerning the prospects of ESAs, Project 2025 calls for a portion of each student’s ESEA Title I funding to be allocated for “education savings accounts . . . that parents can use to pay for personal tutors, education therapists, books and curricular materials, private school tuition, transportation and more.” Based on these stipulations, such ESA stipends could be used to subsidize not only “private school[s],” but also Big Tech corporations through the purchase of ed-tech products which are integral to the ubiquitous data-mining and omnipresent AI that are imperative in driving the social credit economy of the 4IR. For examples:

• ESA funds for “curricular materials” could be used to buy Skinnerian adaptive-learning courseware, such as Clever and Knewton, which have been financed by Peter Thiel, along with Dreambox and Brightspace LeaP, all of which data-mine students’ cognitive-behavioral psychometrics.

• ESA dollars for “education therapies” could be used to pay for assistive biofeedback wearables, such as HeartMath EKG monitors for managing test anxiety and BrainCo EEG headbands for managing ADHD, both of which data-mine students’ socio-emotional biometrics. 

• ESA money for “personal tutors” could be spent on GPT AI tutors, which data-mine students’ cognitive-behavioral and socio-emotional algorithms.

At the same time, ESA stipends for “private school tuition” could come with strings attached to federal regulations that subordinate private and home schools to government control. Consider the Alabama State “Creating Hope and Opportunity for Our Students’ Education (CHOOSE) Act,” which issues $7,000 ESAs for attending “an accredited private school, including church, parochial, or religious school” along with $2,000 ESAs for costs associated with attending “homeschool.” The CHOOSE Act stipulates that payouts from these ESAs are subject to the following provisions:

• “[P]articipating school[s]” that receive ESA dollars must “[a]gree to comply with all applicable health and safety laws or codes” and “require all participating students receiving program funds to take a standardized assessment.” Furthermore,  “participating school[s]” must “[p]rovide the department [of Revenue] with school-level test results for participating students.” Failure to comply “shall constitute grounds for the department, in its discretion, to suspend or disqualify the . . . participating school from receiving program funds.” 
• “[P]arent[s],” including “homeschool” parents, who receive ESA funds must “[a]gree to comply with rules adopted by the department for the administration of the program” and “[s]ubmit to the department any information required by the department for implementation of the program.” Failure to comply “shall constitute grounds for the department, in its discretion, to revoke, recover, suspend, or deny the [ESA] credit otherwise made available pursuant to this act.” 

To be sure, similar restrictions could be imposed through federal ESAs as Project 2025 indicates that the Alabama CHOOSE Act is one of the ten state ESA laws on which its proposal for federal ESAs is based. As a result, such Title I ESAs would federalize private schooling as much as corporatize public education, simultaneously expanding the reaches of Big Government and maximizing the profits of Big Business.

On the other end of Project 2025’s school choice platform, there is a proposal to pass the “Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA),” which would award federal tax credits to corporations that donate to “Scholarship Granting Organizations” (SGOs) designated to dole out “scholarships” to students to cover the costs of “qualified elementary or secondary education expense[s].” According to the ECCA, such qualified expenses include “tutoring expenses” and “expenses at private or religious elementary and secondary education institutions.” 

Unlike the CHOOSE Act, the ECCA stipulates that “[n]othing in this Act, or any amendment made by this Act, shall be construed to permit, allow, encourage, or authorize any Federal, State, or local government entity, or officer or employee thereof, to mandate, direct, or control any aspect of any private or religious elementary or secondary education institution.” However, the ECCA also stipulates that “[n]othing in this Act, or any amendment made by this Act, shall be construed to permit, allow, encourage, or authorize any Federal, State, or local government entity, or officer or employee thereof, to mandate, direct, or control any aspect of any scholarship granting organization.” In other words, while the ECCA prevents private and religious schools from being federally regulated as a result of accepting government-subsidized SGO scholarships, it does not prevent SGO corporations from controlling the terms and conditions, including PFS social impact provisions, of the scholarships.

To be sure, “Pay for Success” impact contracts are provided for in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which reauthorizes and amends the ESEA. In accordance with ESSA, “Pay for Success” contracts can stipulate that an SGO put corporate money upfront for scholarships and then receive that money back from the government, along with a potential profit, depending on whether student outcomes meet or exceed projected “social impacts” that align with ESG and other social credit metrics. In fact, many SGOs facilitate their scholarships through social impact contracts. 

Consider the Sagamore Institute, which is “an action-oriented think tank” that facilitates “social impact” investments through “sustainable initiatives,” such as its “Scholarships for Education Choice program.” Registered as a “Certified Participating SGO” under the Indiana State Department of Education’s “School Scholarship Tax Credit Program,” the Sagamore Institute grants “Education Choice” scholarships in “partner[ship] with large and small schools, traditional and classical schools, secular and faith-based schools, and schools that serve special needs populations.” The Sagamore Institute has also pushed “Impact Investing” aimed at “‘Supply Side’ Welfare Reform” that redistributes “Private Capital for [the] Public Good” of remedying socioeconomic disparities across racial demographics. 

Similarly, the Point Foundation, which is “the nation’s largest scholarship-granting organization for LGBTQ students,” doles out “impact” scholarships aimed at “mitigat[ing] generations of racism and an education system born from discriminatory policies by providing financial support, community resources, and professional development to LGBTQ students who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color [BIPOC].” Point Foundation scholarships, which are sponsored by World Economic Forum (WEF) partners, such as Amazon and Morgan Stanley, are bankrolled by donations stipulated for “advanc[ing] social justice, diversity, inclusion, and equality” along with “equity.” In other words, the Point Foundation’s impact scholarships are issued to advance social justice outcomes for LGBTQ-BIPOC stakeholders in accordance with the ESG social credit economy championed by the WEF.

If you think that such “DEI” impact scholarships have now been banned due to Trump’s recent executive orders (EOs), think again. EO 14151 (“Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing”)and EO 14173 (“Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity”) only repeal DEI provisions stipulated in prior executive orders, including EO 11246, EO 11478, EO 12898, EO 13583, EO 13672, and EO 13985. Although EO 14190 (“Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling”) expunges “Federal funding sources and streams, including grants or contracts, that directly or indirectly support or subsidize the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology,” it does so only “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” Since none of Trump’s executive orders repeal diversity, equity, inclusion, or PFS provisions codified in the ESSA law, none of his EOs prohibit ESSA PFS contracts that subsidize SGO impact scholarships which target DEI or ESG outcomes; nor do any of his EOs prohibit federal tax credits from subsidizing corporate donations to such SGOs.

To be sure, PFS impact investments are pushed not only by “left-wing” DEI organizations, but also by “right-wing” conservative think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) where Max Eden, who is a co-author of Project 2025’s “Department of Education” chapter, has served as a Research Fellow, a Senior Fellow, and an Education Policy Program Manager. In fact, in a “Research Paper” drafted for a 2014 AEI Research Conference titled School Choice: Encouraging New and Better Schools, Eden advocates for “social impact bonds” financed by “private school choice venture capital firms.”

Although the AEI does not endorse impact investments that target sociocultural DEI outcomes, the AEI does call for PFS investments that target socioeconomic outcomes, including workforce, health, and safety outcomes. In either equation, SGOs are primed to peddle PFS scholarships designed for advancing social impacts, whether sociocultural impacts or socioeconomic impacts, in order to socially engineer “human capital” markets in which students are commodified to streamline social credit supply chains for the 4IR stakeholder economy.

In sum, PFS scholarships fueled by ECCA tax credits will facilitate public-private education partnerships in which corporations steer the funding streams for both public and private schools while federal and state governments subsidize those companies’ investments in social credit and human capital markets. At the same time, Title I ESAs will expand government control over private schools, including religious and home schools, while federally subsidizing corporate ed-tech products geared to digitally track and trace PFS impacts on students’ social credit outcomes. Altogether, Project 2025’s school choice reforms will expand Big Government control of private, religious, and home schools while expanding Big Business management of both public and private education through impact scholarships which advance ESG and other social credit outcomes streamlined by Big Tech corporations that helm the planned stakeholder economy of the 4IR.

SPN Doctors: Meet the New School Choice, Same as the Old School Choice

The Project 2025 school choice agenda is nothing more than a revamping of a longtime Koch-SPN (State Policy Network) stratagem to cartelize corporate-government control of education through public-private partnerships that funnel public tax subsidies into ed-tech companies and private schools, including religious schools, home schools, and virtual-online charter schools. For over 30 years, Koch-SPN partners, including the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Cato Institute, the AEI, and EdChoice, have been advocating school choice subsidies for private schools and ed-tech companies that provide the digital infrastructure for data-mining PFS impacts on students’ learning algorithms and social credit analytics. In fact, a survey of the authors and Advisory Board of Project 2025 reveals that the school choice ESAs and tax credits proposed in Mandate for Leadership were put forward by affiliates of these Koch-SPN partners many of which have also been advancing PFS and other impact investment schemes.

The Project 2025 Advisory Board includes the Heritage Foundation and ALEC, the latter of which is a consortium of lawyers, legislators, lobbyists, and other “stakeholders” who draft boilerplate bills that are adopted by lawmakers to advance privatization schemes. For examples:

• ALEC has drafted the “Education Savings Account Act,” which codifies generic provisions for “ESA” subsidies that allocate government payments for “private school[s],” “charter school[s],” and “non-public online learning program[s],” including “[p]ayment for purchase of curriculum [and] any supplemental materials,” such as ed-tech courseware. 

• ALEC has also drafted the “Student-Centered Funding Act,” which offers guidelines for issuing government “voucher[s]” and “tax-credit scholarship[s]” for “private school[s]” and “charter schools” through “a student-centered finance model based on a weighted student formula in which money ‘follows’ a child to his or her school” by “tying funding to performance.” 

• ALEC has also spearheaded online school choice privatization by propagating the “Virtual Public Schools Act,” which has been used to legalize the public funding of virtual-online charter school corporations in alignment with the “10 Elements of High-Quality Digital Learning” standardized by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Digital Learning Council. 

Throughout Trump’s first presidential term, a roster of ALEC associates filled at least 19 of his White House and Cabinet appointments, including his Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, who staffed her ED with veterans of Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education (ExcelinEd). At ALEC headquarters, DeVos pledged her secretarial commitment to “get the federal government out of the way” so that ALEC could further its progress in legislating corporate school choice reforms, including “ESA,” “voucher,” and “Tax Credit Scholarship” reforms. Prior to her appointment as Secretary of Ed, DeVos bankrolled and/or chaired numerous school choice nonprofits, including EdChoice, the Alliance for School Choice, and the American Federation for Children, which sponsored several ALEC Annual Meetings, including the 2011 Annual Meeting where Bush’s “Elements of High-Quality Digital Learning” were adopted by ALEC’s “Education Task Force.”

Under Secretary DeVos, Robert S. Eitel and Jim Blew, who are both co-authors of Project 2025’s “Department of Education” chapter, served as “Senior Counselor” and “Assistant Secretary of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development” respectively. Eitel also served as the “national director” of the Alliance for School Choice where DeVos has served as chair. A longtime financial supporter of the Heritage Foundation, DeVos has announced that “the second Trump term agenda is very, very consistent with what we started. It’s a continuation of the first term.” In fact, DeVos advised that, during his second term, President Trump “needs to . . . get the federal tax credit passed and to de-power the Department of Education” in accordance with Project 2025’s school choice reforms. 

DeVos is not the only Secretary of Education to team up with ALEC to push technocratic school choice corporatization. Indeed, ALEC bestowed its Thomas Jefferson Award to Secretary of Education William Bennett, who took over the mantle of Project BEST (Basic Education Skills through Technology), which launched public-private partnerships between government schools and Big Tech corporations that laid the groundwork for ed-tech data-mining in the social credit economy of the 4IR. ALEC’s “Education Task Force” has included representatives from virtual-online charter school corporations, such as K12 Inc., which was set up by Bennett and financed by DeVos. 

It is worth noting here that K12 Inc. was also bankrolled by billionaire technocrat Larry Ellison, whom Trump recently tapped to deploy Oracle, a CIA-linked artificial intelligence corporation that collaborates with the WEF, for the Stargate AI infrastructure project. It is also worth noting that Trump’s “shadow president,” Peter Thiel, was a private consultant to Secretary DeVos and a speechwriter for Secretary Bennett.

Like DeVos, Bennett is a longtime ally of not only ALEC, but also the Heritage Foundation, which is the “arch-conservative” think tank that has driven Republican policies, including Project 2025, for more than a half century. In particular, Bennett has served as a Distinguished Fellow in Cultural Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation where Lindsey M. Burke, who is the main author of Project 2025’s “Department of Education” chapter, is the Director of the Center for Education Policy. One of Burke’s Project 2025 co-authors, Jonathan Butcher, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Center for Education Policy. 

Burke has also served as a “Fellow” at EdChoice, formerly known as the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which pioneered the push for public-private voucher systems that dole out government stipends for corporate school choice. EdChoice, the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, ExcelinEd, and the AEI are all partners with the State Policy Network (SPN), which is a Koch-backed consortium of think tanks that funnels “dark money” into neo-conservative and beltway-libertarian initiatives aimed at advancing corporatist political-economics. 

At the Charles Koch Foundation, another one of Burke’s Project 2025 co-authors, Erin Valdez, has served as a “Program Manager” for “Educational Partnerships.” Yet another of Burke’s co-authors, Andrew Gillen, has served as a “program officer” for the Charles G. Koch Foundation. He is also a “Policy Scholar” at the Koch-founded Cato Institute where he serves as a “research fellow” at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom. It is worth noting here that the roster of Koch-backed SPN partners includes the America First Policy Institute, where Linda McMahon serves as the “Chair of the Board.” 

It is also worth noting here that many of these Koch-SPN cronies have advocated PFS and other impact investment ploys. For examples:

• In a report titled “Pay-for-Outcomes: Transforming Federal Social Programs to Expand Individual Well-Being,” the Heritage Foundation weighed the cost-benefit pros and cons of “pay-for-success” contracts and “[s]ocial impact bonds (SIBs)” in favor of “pay-for-outcomes” financing that “combine[s] the best features of these [PFS and SIB] reforms.”
• In a whitepaper titled “Pursuing Innovation: How Can Educational Choice Transform K12 Education in the US?,” EdChoice called for “new social financial models that have emerged from partnerships between the public, non-profit, and private sectors. These include social impact bonds, innovation funds, and impact investing” along with “pay-for-success (PFS) contracts.”
• At the 2015 ExcelinEd National Summit, a “Strategy Session” discussing “school choice and Pay for Success” innovations was moderated by Chester Finn Jr., who was Bennett’s Assistant Secretary of Education. This Strategy Session convened a panel that included Kevin Chavous, who has served as a president of Bennett’s K12 Inc.; an Executive Team member of Bush’s Digital Learning Council; a board member of DeVos’s American Federation for Children; and an advisor to Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.
• The Charles Koch Foundation has collaborated with Google and Social Finance, which is a premier social impact investment corporation, in partnership with Per Scholas, to advance “diversity, equity, and inclusion” through “Zero Percent Loans” for “career pathways” training that fosters “sustainable tech talent pipeline[s]” for the “tech workforce.”

In sum, the Koch-SPN network encircling Project 2025 reveals that the Mandate for Leadership’s school choice reforms are nothing more than a renewal of a longtime stratagem to corporatize government education through ESAs and tax credits which subsidize the ed-tech infrastructure needed to data-mine students’ social credit analytics. Indeed, the history of the Koch-SPN syndicate behind Project 2025 illustrates that public-private school choice partnerships have always been geared for streamlining the digital ecosystem necessary to reduce student learning to human capital, which can be monetized and socially engineered through impact finance in the stakeholder economy of the 4IR. 

Pick Your Poison

Don’t get swept away in the disruptive whirlwind of Trumpian overhauls or the surrounding hype about how Trump is “winning” and the “Deep State” is “losing.” To be sure, it might seem like dismantling the ED, in conjunction with school choice reforms, will end federal government control of education. Yet the Project 2025 gameplan for dissolving the ED will only restructure bureaucratic control of education while ESAs will likely expand federal control of schools as ESAs conventionally come with government strings attached. At the same time, federal tax credits for SGO scholarships are primed to be leveraged through PFS impact contracts, which come with corporate strings attached to social credit outcomes. 

In the final equation, the terms and conditions of Project 2025’s school choice options will not be chosen by students, parents, or even schools, but will instead be chosen by Big Government, Big Business, and Big Tech stakeholders. Even the generic menu of charter schools and ed-tech vendors, which comprise much of the consolation choices afforded to students and parents, were prechosen by Koch-SPN corporatists long before the popularity of Trump or affiliated MAGA branding. Unfortunately, Trump’s planned school choice agenda is nothing more than a rebranding of a very old Koch-SPN blueprint for public-private ed-technocracy in the planned stakeholder economy of the 4IR.

TrumpED 2025: School Choice Corporatization, Social Impact Finance, and the Dismantling of the Department of Education.

Late last November, President Donald Trump announced Jim O’Neill as his nominee for deputy secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), where he would work under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for HHS secretary upon confirmation. As deputy secretary, O’Neill would essentially function as the Chief Operating Officer of the department, overseeing “the day-to-day operations of all sub-agencies” as well as leading “public health emergency preparedness,” i.e. the government’s policy responses to bio-terror events, pandemics, etc. In addition, O’Neill would “oversee the development and clearance of HHS regulations” and ostensibly be the main implementer of the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) policy agenda.

Built on a promise to eliminate industry capture of public health regulatory agencies and curb the influence of Big Pharma and Big Food, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA movement played a crucial role in funneling would-be Kennedy voters into the Trump camp. MAHA, in essence, granted the Trump campaign a tinge of populist legitimacy among Covid era dissidents, which grew out of the shuttering of RFK Jr.’s independent presidential run.

However, O’Neill’s business connections, both past and present, as well as his previous statements on public health policy, strongly suggest that he is not only unlikely to implement the policies that MAHA-centric voters are expecting, but that he may in fact pursue an agenda that stands in direct conflict with the main tenets of the MAHA movement. Specifically, he advocates reforming the FDA to deregulate and accelerate the pathway from drug development to legalization. This would notably aid the biotech industry, which has long struggled to get its products approved outside of an “emergency”-based deregulatory paradigm.

When considering the investments and board positions that O’Neill himself has made and held in biotechnology companies, this would likely include mRNA products that Kennedy and other MAHA influencers have spent years criticizing since the Covid-19 pandemic — a clear contradiction between O’Neill’s views on public health, and those which the MAGA base were sold on the campaign trail.

Perhaps standing in even starker contrast with MAHA principles, O’Neill currently sits on the board of a company that is currently pursuing the development of a neurotoxic substance as a “therapeutic” treatment for people with Alzheimer’s disease (a neurodegenerative disease). Ironically, that same substance has long been flagged by Kennedy and the organization he co-founded, Children’s Health Defense, as one of the main causative agents in their hypothesis for a vaccine-autism link and other chronic conditions suffered by many Americans, particularly children.

In addition to O’Neill’s biotech connections, he also boasts significant ties to the CIA-linked company Palantir and its co-founder Peter Thiel. Palantir, notably, is undertaking considerate efforts to apply a pre-crime paradigm to public health events, mainly through its several significant contracts with HHS that would greatly determine the nature of the “public health emergency preparedness” that O’Neill will directly oversee. Several of these contracts date back to the first Trump administration, when Palantir played a major role in the military-run Covid-19 biosurveillance and vaccine development / distribution program known as Operation Warp Speed – a program that has been heavily criticized by both Kennedy and the broader MAHA movement.

Indeed, Palantir has since further entrenched its role within the HHS apparatus, most recently via the CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA), a disease forecasting and mass biosurveillance program that Palantir runs significant amounts of data for.

Also indirectly connected to this CDC effort is Bill Gates, as the former vice-president of the Gates-connected Cascade Investment firm, Dylan George, now runs the CFA. Importantly, the Gates Foundation has significant investments in biotechnology, an industry that notoriously faces strenuous regulatory difficulties in getting its products through the standard Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval process. As a result, prominent players in the biotech industry, including Gates as well as others like Trump surrogate Vivek Ramaswamy, have embarked on an effort to dismantle the current regulatory paradigm and replace it with one friendly to “innovation,” or in other words, one with significantly less rigorous standards.

Unlimited Hangout previously reported on the industry players tackling this problem on the global scale, and it seems that now, with O’Neill poised to be at the helm of “development and clearance of HHS regulations,” experimental biotech may finally gain the unfettered access to the American market it needs.

As this article will demonstrate, O’Neill himself also stands to benefit financially if his desired regulatory model is achieved, as do key members of Trump’s cabinet. Further, given the pandemic preparedness model of monitoring and developing preemptive countermeasures for pathogens with pandemic potential, as well as the Big Tech surveillance that coincided with the distribution of the experimental Covid-19 vaccines, it appears likely that biosurveillance will play a crucial role in the future of the biotech market — especially a deregulated one. Such a model would notably benefit the public-private surveillance infrastructure built up by the man who helped kickstart O’Neill’s private sector career, Peter Thiel.

Yet, O’Neill’s role in the now-decades long effort to provide accelerated, deregulated paths to market for experimental drugs dates back to his time in public office, where he served during the height of the now infamous War on Terror. It was likely there that he first met George W. Bush’s HHS Secretary, Tommy Thompson, who implemented the consequential Project Bioshield Act of 2004 — a piece of legislation that marked a firm step forward in the path towards “emergency” deregulation of drugs and vaccines.

O’Neill’s Early Forays in Public Health: From Bird Flu Panic to Project BioShield

After attending elite universities like Yale University and the University of Chicago, Jim O’Neill landed a job in the George W. Bush administration, first at the Department of Education and then at HHS. He began his new role at the end of 2002 as director of the Speech and Editorial Division, where he led the speechwriting team for then-HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson and did the same for the first several months of the tenure of Thompson’s successor, Mike Leavitt.

The latter years of O’Neill’s tenure in this position are particularly notable, as many of Thompson’s and Leavitt’s speeches between 2004 and 2005 focused on fearmongering over the threat of pandemic “bird flu,” specifically H5N1, which were later deemed overblown. Much of the fear propagated by Thompson and others during this time about bird flu were notably based on the doomsday predictions offered by the now heavily-discredited British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College London. Several of Thompson’s speeches before Congress, which O’Neill presumably helped write, demanded significant funding for flu vaccine stockpiles and to help vaccines switch from traditional vaccine production methods to “a new cell-based technology.” Upon his resignation in December 2004, Thompson stated that his greatest concern at that time was bird flu, which he referred to as “a really huge bomb […] that could adversely impact on the health care of the world.” Leavitt was even more effective than his predecessor at causing fear in the public and thereby generating public support for ultimately unnecessary flu vaccine and antiviral stockpiles. According to O’Neill’s LinkedIn profile, several of the “major policy addresses” he developed for both Thompson and Leavitt dealt specifically with “pandemic influenza.”

Even though the fearmongering of Thompson and Leavitt along with other “experts” was unwarranted, the panic their speeches and public comments generated ensured that the U.S. government spent over $7 billion on combating the bird flu “threat” by purchasing significant quantities of medications like Tamiflu, an anti-viral produced by Gilead. Notably, Gilead’s former chairman was then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Gilead’s stock price had dipped in 2003 before the bird flu concerns emerged, and when panic around bird flu arose the company saw its revenues quadruple. Rumsfeld sold some of his Gilead shares when the fearmongering began, and he was estimated to have netted at least $5 million. At the end of 2004, his financial disclosure report revealed that he still held $25 million in Gilead stock.

Many of those pre-emptive Tamiflu purchases for this “emergency stockpile” that were never ultimately needed (and justified using faulty modeling) were made through the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). BARDA was established by the 2004 Project BioShield Act, which Thompson and his speechwriters heavily advocated for. The Bush administration justified the passage of this legislation in part by citing the dangers of the 2001 Anthrax attacks (a US military-linked false-flag tied to many of the same people who ultimately helped create and profited from BioShield and BARDA). Some of those figures would also go on to lead the government response to Covid-19 under the first Trump administration.

Beyond lining the pockets of Rumsfeld and Gilead through its mandate to create emergency drug stockpiles to thwart “bioterrorist” attacks, Project Bioshield also significantly advanced the emergency deregulation pathway for unapproved drugs—which notably saved Moderna from collapse during the Covid-19 pandemic 15 years later. Specifically, Project Bioshield granted the authorization of the “emergency use” of drugs that are “not approved, licensed, or cleared for commercial distribution” in the context of a potential or actual emergency.

Notably, O’Neill – after helping to write speeches that helped justify the creation of BARDA and the stockpiling of Tamiflu – joined the BARDA steering committee in 2006 and served in that capacity through 2008, the timeframe when many of these questionable Tamiflu purchases were actually made. A few months before joining BARDA’s steering committee, O’Neill had been promoted to the post of Associate Deputy Secretary and senior advisor to the Deputy Secretary in August 2005. During that time he oversaw policy for the CDC and worked on “emergency preparedness” and “homeland security.”

Presumably due to his utility to Thompson and his successor Mike Leavitt, O’Neill was again promoted, this time to the post of Principal associate deputy secretary of HHS in 2007, holding that position for close to a year. Again, O’Neill played an important role in developing pandemic preparedness policy and also focused on advising the HHS secretary and deputy secretary on homeland security, and in that capacity “led special projects related to policy and operations.”

After leaving the Bush administration, O’Neill became involved with Peter Thiel, who had previously helped the architects of mass surveillance during the Bush administration privatize its most controversial program, resulting in what is now the company Palantir. O’Neill began working as managing director at Thiel’s now-defunct Clarium Capital, a macro hedge fund that Thiel created shortly after selling PayPal to Pierre Omidyar’s eBay in 2002. O’Neill, relatively shortly thereafter, became head of the Thiel Foundation in 2009. There, he worked with Peter Thiel to create the foundation’s Thiel fellowship, which helped kickstart the careers of now prominent figures in military contracting (e.g. Palmer Luckey of Anduril), cryptocurrency and finance (e.g. Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum) and longevity-focused biotech (e.g. Laura Deming).

Around this same time, O’Neill became involved with the longevity-focused SENS research foundation, joining its board of directors in 2010 – a post he would hold through 2021. O’Neill also served as SENS’ CEO from 2019 to 2021, where he directed research focused on curing age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s. As will be noted again later, SENS’ earliest and most significant donor was Peter Thiel.

As Clarium Capital’s fortunes waned in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, Thiel teamed up with Ajay Royan to create Mithril Capital in 2012, with O’Neill serving as founding managing director. At this point, O’Neill left his post at the Thiel Foundation to work full-time at Mithril. While at Mithril, O’Neill oversaw current Vice President J.D. Vance, who joined Mithril in 2016 as a junior investor and left the firm in 2018. While at Mithril, O’Neill handled significant investments in some notable biotech companies as well as investments in the Thiel co-founded Palantir, which – as previously mentioned – controversially contracts with HHS and important HHS sub-agencies with major implications for public health, privacy and future pandemic response. O’Neill left Mithril in 2019, the same year that the firm came under FBI investigation for financial misconduct (those allegations, however, focused largely on firm co-founder Ajay Royan). 2019 was also notably the year that one of the companies Mithril had backed, uBiome, also came under FBI scrutiny, later resulting in its founders being charged with health care fraud conspiracies.

O’Neill’s Connections to the Biotech Industry

During O’Neill’s tenure in a top position at Mithril, the venture capital firm invested in several significant biotech companies. These include uBiome, which was also backed by Andreessen Horowitz and the Sam Altman-run Y-Combinator. The company was founded in 2012 “to sequence the microbiome,” allowing patients to “explore their microbiome” via the company’s microbial genomic test and their possession of the “largest microbiome database in the world.” The company’s series B funding was led by 8VC, the venture capital firm created by Palantir co-founder and Thiel associate Joe Lonsdale. The company was later caught overbilling patients, pressuring them to take multiple tests when it was unnecessary, and also pressuring doctors to approve tests, including for patients with no symptoms. The FBI raided the company’s offices in 2019. In 2021, the co-founders were each charged with more than 40 criminal counts, including healthcare, securities and wire fraud.

Another biotech company backed heavily by Mithril during O’Neill’s time as managing director is Fractyl Health, which Mithril began funding in 2014. Fractyl has been developing 2 products, Revita – an outpatient procedure that modifies the lining of the colon to target obesity and type 2 diabates, and Rejuva – a “one-time gene therapy” targeting the pancreas meant to “enable durable weight loss and long-term remission of type 2 diabetes.” Neither of the company’s products have been approved by the FDA and clinical studies on them have yet to be performed, despite the company having been in business for over a decade — representative of a common trend in biotech companies struggling to get drugs through clinical trials.

The chair of Fractyl’s board is the co-founder of Mithril alongside Thiel, Ajay Royan. Another board member, Marc Elia, sits on the board of the Mithril-backed biotech firm Invivyd (formerly Adagio Therapeutics). Also on the board of Fractyl is former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, who is also on the board of the Mithril-backed fintech and stablecoin-issuing firm Paxos. Bradley’s connections in tech also extend to figures adjacent to Jeffrey Epstein, as Bradley was notably affiliated with Ghislaine Maxwell’s husband Scott Borgerson and his firm Cargometrics—a satellite surveillance company that offers “unique data products and [software] solutions broadly to the investment management and maritime shipping & logistics markets.”

O’Neill has also had several notable connections to other biotech firms following his departure from Mithril in 2019. These include Oisin Biotechnologies, where O’Neill was a board observer from 2019 to 2021. Oisin develops therapies focused on longevity and “age-related diseases” that leverage a “new-non-viral delivery technology” they call Fusogenix Proteo-Lipid Vehicle.

That platform “enables extensive extrahepatic biodistribution for both DNA and RNA payloads.” The Fusogenix platform was not developed by Oisin directly, but by their partner firm Entos, which used the same platform to develop a “Covid-19 plasmid DNA vaccine” as well as several genetic treatments targeting obesity. Entos has four partner organizations/companies — three of them are Eli Lilly, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Oisin. John Lewis, the founder and CEO of Entos, co-founded Oisin in 2016 and has long served (and currently serves) as the Chief Science Officer of the company, further revealing the close association between the two companies.

O’Neill became involved with Oisin through his leadership roles at the SENS Research Foundation. During O’Neill’s time on the foundation’s board, SENS granted Oisin with an unlisted amount of seed-funding from SENS.

Notably, during his time at SENS, O’Neill served on the SENS board with a few important Thiel-associated figures. These include Blake Masters – a close Thiel associate who co-wrote a book with Thiel, served as COO of Thiel Capital and as head of the Thiel Foundation – as well as Kevin Dewalt. Dewalt maintained a position as the director of Strategic Alliances for the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel from 2005 to 2008. During that same period, Dewalt also worked with the Thiel-founded Palantir – specifically Palantir’s Stephen Cohen – to “deploy the company’s first AI product in the US Intelligence community.” Palantir’s earliest funder, aside from Thiel himself, was In-Q-Tel.

Some of those involved in “longevity” research importantly believe that AI and other emerging technologies will play a significant role in developing life-prolonging-tech. The SENS Research Foundation focuses on longevity research and many of its members, including its founder, believe that medical technology is capable of granting near-immortality to humans, if not immortality itself. The foundation’s first major donor was Peter Thiel, who has injected millions into the foundation since its inception.

According to his LinkedIn, O’Neill has only served on the board of directors of one biotechnology company, ADvantage Therapeutics, which he joined in March 2023. He continues to serve on the board, but will ostensibly recuse himself from that role if confirmed as HHS deputy secretary. ADvantage does not reveal its board of directors on its website, and thus O’Neill’s involvement is not visible there, but his position on the company’s board is noted in their SEC filings.

ADvantage as a company focuses on neurogenerative diseases, specifically Alzheimer’s. Their main product is a compound called AD04, previously known as Alhydrogel. It is an aluminum-based vaccine adjuvant (aluminum hydroxide) that has been used historically in human and animal vaccines, but ADvantage Therapeutics seeks to transform this adjuvant into a “therapeutic” for Alzheimer’s patients.

The origins of ADvantage as a company, and the quest to turn AD04 into an Alzheimer’s treatment, date back to a study that tested a failed Alzheimer’s vaccine candidate called AD02, produced by the Austrian company AFFiRiS. In the Phase 2 clinical trial of AD02, the group that received the vaccine fared significantly worse than the control group. Both the control group and the group that received the AD02 vaccine received doses of the vaccine adjuvant AD04.

Instead of considering that the AD02 vaccine significantly worsened the outcomes of Alzheimer’s patients, they instead concluded that the aluminum-based compound AD04 had actually made patient outcomes significantly better. This is despite the fact that aluminum toxicity has been studied as a factor in causing Alzheimer’s disease, as aluminum is a known neurotoxin. In addition, independent scientists outside the company did not share the conclusions of the AFFiRiS scientists. While company scientists claimed that the control group data showed “evidence of disease modification”, other unaffiliated scientists argued that the data implied no effect at all, as the correlations observed in the control group are also known to “occur in the absence of treatment.”

Despite the lack of data or consensus suggesting that injecting Alzheimer’s patients with a known neurotoxin would lead to better patient outcomes, the AFFiRiS scientists doubled down and acquired the patent rights to AD04. They then teamed up with Agustin Fernandez, a Cuban-born movie producer, and his business partner Jeffrey B. Madden to create ADvantage Therapeutics to commercialize AD04 as a treatment for Alzheimer’s. Notably, the ADvantage website notes that the initial AD02-AD04 study did not contain data supporting the use of AD04 as a “therapeutic entity”, and that the company and its founders are unable to explain how AD04 allegedly functions to reduce Alzheimer’s pathology.

Despite this admitted lack of evidence, the company is conducting pre-clinical trials in parallel to the clinical development of their AD04-based therapeutic as an attempt to shore up data that shows the compound has therapeutic potential. However, elsewhere on its website it treats AD04 as having passed Phase 2 clinical trials (and entering Phase 2b), but this seems to be a misleading reference to the original AFFiRiS study, characterizing it as a study that was testing for the effects of AD04. In reality, the AFFiRiS study was a Phase 2 trial for the failed AD02 vaccine, and was not a trial meant to test AD04.

In addition to AD04, the company is also attempting to develop two other products, AD09 and AD15. AD09 has an undisclosed mode of action, but appears to be a mRNA product based on the information provided on the company’s website. AD15 is also a mRNA product based on the Klotho protein, which can reduce symptoms of aging when over-expressed. The scientist who discovered the Klotho gene, Dr. Makoto Kuro-o, joined ADvantage as a member of its scientific advisory board in early 2024. As of late last year, the development of AD15 was spun-off from ADvantage Therapeutics and into a different company called Klothea.

According to a company press release, O’Neill’s appointment to the board of directors was aimed at facilitating the approval of AD04, the aluminum vaccine adjuvant, as well as its mRNA products. In the press release, CEO Jeffrey Madden was quoted as saying “The addition of Jim to our Board of Directors signals the next level of development for our company […] As we embark upon our confirmatory Phase 2b study for AD04 in early Alzheimer’s disease, we are fortunate to have Jim’s talents and experience to guide us during this exciting time.” Madden also stated that “Jim’s deep expertise in longevity will serve us well as we develop our mRNA technology to fight pathologies of aging by advancing and sustaining the capabilities of klotho, which many consider the longevity gene. We are developing platform technology to create a pipeline of [targets] to tackle the most common diseases of aging by using the klotho protein. We look forward to Jim’s guidance in this area.”

O’Neill himself had high praise for the company’s AD04 product, stating that “AD04 has the potential to radically improve the lives of millions. I am excited to collaborate with ADvantage to help propel it forward.” Even if he does recuse himself from ADvantage’s board of directors upon confirmation, his top role at HHS – where he will oversee the removal and creation of regulations at the FDA and other HHS agencies – would certainly place O’Neill in a position where he could propel products like AD04 forward.

O’Neill’s enthusiasm for turning an aluminum adjuvant into a therapeutic for a neurodegenerative disease clashes directly with past statements from incoming HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. For example, in his book Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak, co-written with Dr. Brian Hooker, Kennedy characterizes aluminum adjuvants as harmful to human health and as one of his major concerns with respect to vaccine safety. In addition, the Kennedy-affiliated organization Children’s Health Defense, in addition to publishing the aforementioned book by Kennedy and Hooker, has published many articles over the years warning of the dangers of aluminum vaccine adjuvants and have directly linked vaccines containing aluminum with adverse vaccine side effects, especially in children, as well as the increasing incidence in childhood autism rates. Unlimited Hangout reached out to Children’s Health Defense for comment on aluminum vaccine adjuvants and the attempt to commercialize one of them as a therapeutic, but did not receive a response prior to publication.

O’Neill’s significant biotech connections do not end there. He served as a “global health adviser” to Rational Vaccines, a company that, based on its founders and board, is deeply connected to ADvantage Therapeutics. The co-founders of ADvantage, former film producer Agustin Fernandez and CEO of ADvantage Jeffrey Madden, also occupy important roles at Rational Vaccines. Fernandez was the co-founder and is the current CEO of the company, while Madden sits on its board and is a lead investor.

The company is focused on treating herpes, mainly through the creation of a herpes vaccine. It was awarded $2.8 million by the National Institute of Health (NIH) to further its herpes product development, including a test that enables “routine population-based screening” of Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV) with higher sensitivity than other tests, and a vaccine to curb the spread of herpes—which the company calls a “global pandemic.”

The company’s focus on herpes, however, has not stopped it from developing biotechnology for Covid-19. It is currently developing a “serological assay” Covid-19 test, which the company claims boasts higher sensitivity compared to currently available tests. This is apparently due to its ability to test for “antibodies to most viral proteins,” as opposed to a “single or small subset of viral proteins.” Rational Vaccines developed the blood assay technology by repurposing its herpes tests, and is notably employing the same technology behind their herpes vaccine candidate to develop a Covid-19 vaccine. According to the company, they are “in the process of adapting [their] HSV immunotherapeutic candidate, RVx201, to a viral vector format” in order to “enable the development of multiple vaccine types, including to SARS-COV-2.”

While Rational touts its ability to repurpose its herpes vaccine technology for other immunizations, the company’s long and sordid history of unethical regulatory obfuscation paints an unsettling picture of any future product it develops.

The questionable nature behind Rational Vaccines’ business practices began before the company’s inception. In 2013, the co-founder of the company, the late Southern Illinois University professor William Halford, administered doses of a shot that contained a virus he had created “at a Holiday Inn Express and a Crowne Plaza Hotel that were a 15-minute drive from [his] SIU lab.”

Halford’s unconventional methods continued in the years to come, and importantly at Rational Vaccines itself. After he co-founded Rational Vaccines with Fernandez, he ran an offshore clinical trial from a house in the Caribbean Islands for the company’s herpes vaccine. Halford utilized American participants, most of whom Rational Vaccines claims were “Americans with herpes who were flown to the island several times to be vaccinated,” as reported by Kaiser Health News. However, the trials were entirely unmonitored — neither by the FDA or any institutional review board.

Robert Califf, Obama’s former FDA commissioner, told Kaiser Health News that “he couldn’t think of a prior instance in which American researchers did not set up an IRB abroad.” Califf did note, however, that doing so “may be legal.”

On a side note, Califf’s critiques of Halford’s trials appear odd, given Califf has spent much of his career dedicated to implementing the principles of the Fourth Industrial Revolution into public health. Among these principles involve a deregulated drug development process that replaces the standard randomized clinical trial with a technocratic, “innovative” approach. While Califf headed the Duke Clinical Research Institute, the institute co-founded an initiative which aimed to create more “efficient clinical trials,” namely by “maximally [leveraging] available clinical and nonclinical data, including data collected via digital technologies, to minimize collection of necessary trial specific data,” or in other words, prioritizing the use of medical data collected outside of a clinical trial setting. Instead, the prioritized data in this model would be extracted from novel sources (such as digital technologies like wearables) and be “interoperable,” maximizing the capacity for “all researchers and sponsors” to see and share that data.

Despite experts slamming the experiment as unethical, Fernandez claimed that he knew of “individuals who experienced positive outcomes from the vaccine,” effectively downplaying the dangerous methodology used during the testing.

One of Rational’s most prominent early donors, former managing director of Credit Suisse Bartley J. Madden, was intrigued by Halford after hearing him talk about his work at a symposium at Southern Illinois University. According to Wired, Madden “wrote a book called Free to Choose Medicine, which argues that the FDA’s risk-averse approach to drug approval gets in the way of innovation and keeps life-saving medicines off the market.”

As he describes in his book, A Foundational Explanation of Human Behavior, “The conventional goal of safe and effective drugs leads to a relentless demand for ever more expensive clinical testing demands, sky high prescription drug prices, and, importantly, delayed access to life-changing medical treatments. I argue that the appropriate goal is better drugs, sooner, at lower cost. The key constraint is the hugely expensive (time and money) FDA clinical testing process.” Fittingly, in Bart Madden’s eyes, “Halford embodied the part of the brilliant outsider tangling with the scientific establishment.” While Madden claims that he wasn’t aware of the offshore trials at the time of his donation, his own beliefs on regulation appear in line with Halford’s methods.

Also notable is that Jeffrey B. Madden—CEO of ADvantage Therapeutics and prominent investor in Rational Vaccines — is a board member and the Treasurer of Bartley J. Madden’s Bartley J. Madden Foundation. Bart Madden previously worked in the US Army where he was “involved with classified weapons development/testing” before his private sector finance career took off. While a familial connection between the two does not appear to have been established, the work of both has obviously intersected greatly through the world of biotech, an industry that would benefit significantly from Bart Madden’s deregulated vision of drug development.

Likewise, the regulatory evasion and safety controversy did not stop O’Neill’s associate Peter Thiel from investing $4 million in the research, with the caveat that future testing comply with FDA standards. While Thiel’s caveat indicates disapproval of Halford’s brazenly dangerous methods, Thiel does believe regulations stand in the way of progress. As the Kaiser Health News story notes, Thiel previously said that the FDA’s standards are so cumbersome that “you would not be able to invent the polio vaccine today.”

Eliminating Efficacy Testing in the Name of “Innovation”

O’Neill himself has long echoed the deregulatory rhetoric of Peter Thiel, Bart Madden, Califf and others. In fact, O’Neill’s past statements on regulations may be even more blatantly controversial than his contemporaries — seeking to eliminate efficacy trials altogether. He previously made these opinions clear at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Ana, California during a 2014 talk for the SENS Research Foundation:

“We should reform [the] FDA so that it’s approving drugs after their sponsors have demonstrated safety and let people start using them at their own risk, but not much risk of safety…But let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized.”

This speech first came under public scrutiny after it was reported in December 2016 that the first Trump administration’s transition team (of which Thiel was also a part) was considering O’Neill to head the FDA. O’Neill, at the time, was apparently deemed too controversial for the role and Scott Gottlieb was chosen instead. Gottlieb joined the boards of Pfizer and the CIA-linked biomanufacturing company Resilience shortly after his stint at the FDA concluded.

Notably, the current nominee to head the FDA, Johns Hopkins’ Martin Makary, has been deemed very friendly to the biotech industry. While Makary was a critic of Covid-19 lockdowns and some other policies, like vaccine mandates, he supported universal masking and early doses of mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. He also criticized the FDA during Covid-19 for being too slow to approve the “lifesaving” mRNA Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, arguing in a 2020 interview that the experimental vaccines should have been approved after Pfizer and Moderna’s application submissions within 24 hours. Mocking the FDA’s apparent dawdling on its review process, Makary called it “Operation Turtle Speed.” Upon his appointment to head the FDA for Trump’s second term, biotech industry leaders told STAT News they felt relief at Markary’s appointment, with one remarking we “dodged a bullet.” Other industry experts quoted by CNBC shared similar sentiments, with one stating that “we expect [Makary] will promote technology/innovation in a way that offers some reprieve for those that [are] fearing a department more aligned with different virtues.” In other words, it seems that Makary and O’Neill are quite aligned on deregulating the FDA drug/vaccine approval process.

O’Neill’s comments on the FDA, which he will oversee and greatly influence, ultimately fit into his larger plan to “[streamline] licensing and drug development and reducing time and costs” — which he remarked “was a big interest” of his during his time at HHS. Given his proximity to the centers of power that played an integral role in passing the consequential Project Bioshield Act of 2004, which authorized emergency use of unapproved medical products, this interest comes as no surprise. Notably, however, O’Neill’s advocacy in this context did not emerge from concerns of pandemic response or emergency situations, but instead from the desire to make biotechnology more viable, safe and attractive to investors.

This interest in “streamlining” drug development led him, per his own account, to “shut down” an effort by the FDA to start regulating In Vitro Diagnostic Multivariate Index Assays (IVDMIA), a kind of biotechnology used to diagnose “disease or other conditions,” or used to “cure, [mitigate, treat or prevent]” a disease. O’Neill used this story to segue into his controversial proposal to eliminate efficacy tests of drugs entirely, which he calls “progressive approval.” His calls for deregulation were met with applause from the crowd of academics, businessmen and investors present at the event.

O’Neill then proceeded to heap praise on the work of Richard Barker, founding director of Oxford’s Centre for the Advancement of Sustainable Medical Innovation, specifically his model of “adaptive licensing.” In essence, Barker’s model stands in direct conflict with the main principles of RFK Jr.’s MAHA agenda. While MAHA seeks to separate industry from public health agencies, Barker’s work focuses on infusing Big Pharma into the drug development process even further. He proposes this as a solution to what he describes as a problem so severe that it makes the current drug development process “not sustainable” — specifically, the alleged issue of those handling clinical development being “completely isolated” from those handling the commercial side of the process. He remarks that they remain “in their respective silos and report into different echelons of senior management,” and that as a consequence, “there is often a major disconnect between the clinical development program and the collection of value data.”

Barker’s solution is one eerily similar to Robert Califf’s aforementioned Fourth Industrial Revolution-inspired program at Duke. Barker believes that the utilization and collection of a massive array of “real-world data,” or data accumulated outside of clinical trial settings via unconventional sources, will solve this allegedly catastrophic problem. As Maddie Bannon described in her article on Robert Califf, real-world data “is collected from a vast array of sources including electronic health records (EHRs) submitted by medical professionals during a doctor or hospital visit, insurance claims and billing data, medical product and disease registries, the patient themselves (e.g. data submitted through an app), wearable devices, cellphones, and social media.”

This data, Barker says, can address the division between the commercial and scientific sides of development by integrating “value in the design of the clinical development, with an early crafting phase involving the input of regulators, payers, and patient associations, so as to ensure the collection of both clinical and value data.”

Further, he boasts that it can jack up drug prices by utilizing real-world data based on the surveillance of patients “to help establish the value of the product.” This would allegedly solve the problem of drug makers setting “the price as high as possible at the beginning of the process,” by allowing companies to continuously increase the price of a drug as they monitor its effects in the real world, using “compelling real-world data” as their justification for price hikes. In other words, Barker claims that a system should be in place to funnel mined biodata directly to drug manufacturers in order to alter the value of the product throughout its time on the market. Quite literally, this idea would allow Big Pharma to directly exploit the fragmented, data-mined parts of their customers to cultivate significant value and capital—a seemingly techno-feudalistic iteration of healthcare.

Yet this is not the only end Barker seeks to employ this data towards. In addition, he believes that mass profiling of patients should be used in order to “segment” communities “on a continuous basis” based on their medical needs. He claims that this would enable the industry to achieve its profits based on predicted, guaranteed “outcomes” as opposed to developing for volume. O’Neill recently expressed similar priorities on X (formerly Twitter) when he claimed that “Many Americans think we have free markets in health care. We don’t. Hundreds of bureaucratic rules, perverse incentives, and opaque pricing make health care more expensive and less efficient than it should be. Providers of care are usually paid by volume, not outcomes” (emphasis added).

This predictive, “outcome”-focused use of data would allow “products to be prescribed to and used by the right patient segment,” according to Barker. This line of thinking echoes the values of the mass surveillance based pre-crime, counterinsurgency culture that so many of the companies and figures surrounding Thiel pursue. It also bears striking similarities to Palantir’s Tiberius program that was used to distribute Covid-19 vaccines to AI-determined priority populations as part of Operation Warp Speed — which the CDC’s Center For Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics has since entrenched into HHS biosurveillance infrastructure.

However, Barker goes even further with this proposed strategy; he believes that when considering patients, “the industry needs to focus on the behavioral factors which drive adherence, either as accelerators or decelerators. The goal should be to collect evidence as to how to boost adherence, and the exercise is complex since there are many types of patients with different behavioral contexts and psychological barriers” (emphasis added). The breadth of data required to carry out such precise influence of behavior would obviously be vast, and comes out of a long term military strategy of weaponizing information.

This concept of utilizing knowledge accumulated from mass datasets to manipulate and direct human behavior dates back to J.C.R. Licklider’s time at the Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (ARPA) Behavioral Science and Command and Control division in the early 1960s, before the advent of modern computer networks. At least one of Licklider’s “Behavioral Science” schemes was performed under the auspices of standard military dealings, as his ARPA division deployed a project to study seemingly benign statistics of the Thai population “that sought to measure the body size of several thousand Thai military personnel to aid in the design of equipment and uniforms.” However, as Yasha Levine details in his book Surveillance Valley, beyond the physiological data the researchers collected, they also accumulated information on the participants’ ancestors, religion and their opinions on the king of Thailand. “The deeper purpose,” according to Levine, “was rooted in prediction and control.” Levine expounds on this idea by quoting Annie Jacobsen’s The Pentagon’s Brain: “If Thailand were to become a battle zone, ARPA would have information on Thai soldiers, each of whom could be tracked. Information — like who deserted the Thai army and became an enemy combatant— could be ascertained. Using computer models, ARPA could create algorithms describing human behavior in remote areas.”

Like Licklider’s strategy of utilizing data to control the “outcomes” of potentially insurgent populations in the Global South, Barker’s model relies on pushing populations towards the desired outcomes of bureaucrats that “trial participants” are likely unaware of. Both systems rely on the utility of seemingly neutral information to quell dissent, and ultimately manipulate (or even halt) what would be the organic decisions of people.

In addition, O’Neill’s views on ending efficacy testing would likely prove incredibly useful to the biotech industry, particularly those that manufacture mRNA products. Prior to the Covid-19 crisis, which facilitated emergency deregulation, mRNA products struggled to get to market under the existing regulatory paradigm. This is largely because most mRNA products struggle to be both safe and effective, as increasing effectiveness has tended to dramatically decrease safety while ensuring safety has tended to dramatically decrease efficacy. Thus, eliminating efficacy trials would allow mRNA products that have been unable to prove both safety and efficacy a much better chance at making it to market.

A telling example of this persistent issue in the mRNA industry is the company Moderna. Prior to its Covid-19 product, Moderna could not get a single mRNA product approved for over a decade and struggled to even get its products through animal testing. This issue for the company was largely based on its lipidnanoparticle (LNP) delivery system for mRNA. According to reporting from STAT News, this delivery system “created a daunting challenge [for Moderna]: Dose too little, and you don’t get enough enzyme to affect the disease; dose too much, and the drug is too toxic for patients.” Many major mRNA-focused companies, like Pfizer partner BioNTech and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Roivant, have bet heavily on this same LNP delivery system despite its dubious record, resulting in numerous legal snafus related to who exactly owns the rights to which aspects of that delivery system. It would be these types of companies that would stand to benefit the most from O’Neill’s prior proposals to eliminate efficacy testing for vaccines and other products, freeing them from long-standing concerns about their mRNA delivery mechanisms.

O’Neill’s Proximity to Palantir and What it Means for HHS’ Approach to AI

The merging of Big Tech, Big Healthcare and the public sector are part and parcel to the emergency deregulatory framework that O’Neill appears to support, both through his own statements and his business associations. It turns out that O’Neill has dabbled in all three of these ever-harder-to-distinguish sectors. As this article has previously noted, biosurveillance works in tandem with accelerated drug development, as the lack of regulatory scrutiny in these contexts provides the perfect pretext to justify the surveillance of those who receive the “experimental” drugs. This notably occurred during Operation Warp Speed. It just so happens that the government contractor on the front lines of this increasingly pervasive industry is Palantir, which was co-founded by O’Neill associate, Peter Thiel. Thiel remains the company’s leading investor. In addition, the VC firm of another Palantir co-founder, Joe Lonsdale, is deeply connected to the CIA-linked firm that produces the mRNA for Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, among others. Lonsdale has publicly praised O’Neill’s appointment as HHS deputy secretary, with O’Neill responding that Lonsdale has “greatly inspired me for a long time.”

While Palantir’s work with HHS dates back to at least 2010, the data company has become increasingly entrenched within HHS, influencing policy, resource allocation and more since the Covid-19 pandemic. Palantir gained major contracts with HHS during the Covid-19 era, particularly during the last year of the previous Trump administration. These included Palantir’s outbreak warning and wastewater surveillance system, HHS Protect, and its vaccine allocation program, Tiberius. The Covid-19 era FDA/Palantir program 21 FORWARD, which helped experts examine how Covid-19 incidence rates might affect the food supply, has expanded into a crucial part of the FDA’s “food supply chain disruption monitoring and crisis response.” The pre-crime operation turned predictive health iteration of DARPA, ARPA-H, tasked Palantir last year with running its core data infrastructure. Yet, arguably most importantly, in 2022, the two entities united a myriad of the Palantir and HHS/CDC biosurveillance programs together under the CDC’s “Common Operating Picture,” which aims to secure “strong collaboration across the federal government, jurisdictional health departments, private sector entities, and other key health partners.”

Preceding this pledge of CDC-Palantir unification was the announcement of the CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA) — a program dedicated to carrying out, among other things, the multi-sector goal of the CDC’s Common Operating Picture. Through a consortium of academic centers, private institutions and federal agencies all analyzing novel data sources, the CFA generates artificial intelligence (AI) forecasts of disease outbreaks in order to curate specified, targeted policy measures for specific communities/populations — purportedly to stop epidemics before they occur.

As Unlimited Hangout recently detailed, the policy implications for such a program could be vast. For example, the CFA’s data analysis and extraction will inform policies involving the “community migration” of individuals and/or populations; whether they are deemed “high risk” or not (with proceeding policy directly curated relative to a community’s/individual’s purported “risk level”); and key decisions on medical countermeasures during disease outbreaks. To demonstrate the “targeted” nature of the program, the CFA will likely factor in a myriad of “social determinants” in dictating such policy, including race, geography, household crowding and even financial data.

The material implications of CFA, therefore, stand to be huge — with Palantir guiding the ship, and Thiel’s associate Jim O’Neill overseeing it all. The conflicts of interest are apparent. O’Neill’s history of injecting funds into Palantir itself and Thiel-backed projects will likely not cease at HHS, and given Palantir’s full integration into the agency’s biosurveillance infrastructure, it may even expand. Such a possibility becomes even more likely considering one of the architects of the HHS Protect system that Palantir manages, Kristen Honey, was recently appointed HHS’ Chief Data Officer.

Further, beyond O’Neill’s connections to Thiel, his own positions on AI make him likely to uphold and support this predictive healthcare infrastructure. O’Neill has long been a vocal supporter of the “artificial intelligence-driven” healthcare system that CFA and Palantir are currently implementing, and which Big Tech, Big Healthcare and the Pentagon support. On X, O’Neill responded to a tweet from a biotech executive that called for the widespread use of “autonomous AI” to cut healthcare costs with a flowery endorsement: “AI is going to become essential across government and across health care….FDA and [Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services] can help doctors and patients by supporting rapid adoption.”

This proclivity for AI has seemingly characterized another new pick for Trump’s HHS. Meghan Dierks, the new HHS Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, previously acted as “the chief data officer of San Francisco-based health care software company Komodo Health.” It was there that she “spearheaded the development and evaluation of AI-powered healthcare analytics tools for life sciences companies, healthcare practitioners, and patient advocacy groups.”

Interestingly, Komodo’s business model relies heavily on utilizing AI to tap and interpret “real-world data” in order to help pharmaceutical companies navigate the “uncharted waters” of commercial drug launches. This navigational data comes from the massive dataset the company has built “which ingests information from more than 15 million new patient encounters each day, capturing the anonymized experiences of more than 320 million Americans through disparate medical claims, diagnostic labs, and prescription data sets.”

This data comes to life through its Healthcare Map, which “follows the entire patient journey by utilizing analytics that go wider and deeper than any other data sources.” Almost as if the company emerged straight out of Barker’s “adaptive licensing” solutions, the breadth of data put to use via Komodo’s Healthcare Map “can discover patient populations that would benefit from their therapy; pinpoint patients that are not being treated at the standard of care; [and] identify medical centers most likely to recruit patients for clinical trials.” In other words, Komodo equips its clients to “segment” patients “on a continuous basis” based on their targeted medical needs — utilizing, sharing and likely expanding huge troves of data in the process.

However, Komodo’s mass AI data interpretation functions do not stop at drug launch assistance. Komodo can help with AI hospital management, as it enables “payors and employers [to] better understand referral patterns and patient flows, more effectively manage risk pools, and offer their members better care.” It also grants “local and national governments” predictive powers to “track outbreaks in real time, better estimate disease burden, and act more swiftly on behalf of the public.” The company’s entire model bears a striking similarity in function to the CDC’s Palantir-partnered CFA, which Unlimited Hangout recently reported on in great detail. Now, given Komodo’s connection to HHS via Dierks and its previous projects with the CDC, the tech company stands likely to be tapped by the CFA as a potential “data source” for the CFA’s many AI-healthcare goals.

In fact, this predictive infrastructure is deeply entrenched into other HHS / Palantir programs as well (beyond the CFA). For example, the Palantir-partnered ARPA-H — which was initially pitched to the Trump administration as a pre-crime program before its pivot into public health under Biden — recently selected and awarded four different “teams” to “develop bioelectronic devices to be implanted in patients through minor outpatient surgery.” While one team “aims to create a ‘Living Sentinel’ to measure key biomarkers in the body and monitor their condition in real-time,” all of the teams “aim to develop an implantable ‘Living Pharmacy’ programmed to deliver therapeutic molecules to the patient on demand for an extended period.” While ARPA-H pledges that the implantable chips will improve the care of people with a myriad of chronic conditions, this invasive technology also provides a new “novel” source of “real-world data” for Palantir to utilize.

The regulatory paradigm O’Neill seeks to implement will likely lead to huge gains for Thiel associates and Trump administration officials, ranging from Roivant co-founder Vivek Ramaswamy, to biotech investor JD Vance, to O’Neill, and Thiel themselves. Further, if efficacy trials are eliminated from the drug approval process, biosurveillance will likely be deemed the necessary alternative in order to “prove efficacy after [the drugs have] been legalized,” justifying the entire biosurveillance infrastructure built up by Palantir and its public sector partners.

Vaccine “Innovation” Seems Likely in New Trump Administration

Under O’Neill’s desired system, the entire biotech industry at large would be liberated from the regulatory hurdles that so often block its most “innovative” products from getting to market. Perhaps this is best demonstrated by prominent mRNA and biotech proponent Bill Gates’ recent praising of Trump. Gates, whom people often associate with the liberal side of the political spectrum, stated that he was “frankly impressed” with Trump after a “wide-ranging,” three hour discussion with the current President in which they discussed Gates’ ambitions for global health. They even both apparently got “pretty excited” when discussing the possibility of fast-tracking a HIV vaccine in the same manner that Trump enabled with the Covid-19 vaccine.

However, given Trump’s history with Gates during his previous term, Gates’ comments aren’t surprising. For instance, while Trump cut funding and left the World Health Organization in 2020, his administration continued to fund the Gates-backed GAVI vaccine alliance to the tune of a three-year pledge totaling $1.16 billion through the alleged CIA-front organization United States Agency for International Development (USAID). In April 2020, Trump lauded this partnership in a televised address to that year’s Global Vaccine Summit, stating “it’s great to be partnering with [Gavi]. We will work hard, we will work strong.” Notably, Gavi is one of the most prominent funders of the WHO, along with the Gates Foundation, and also co-led the WHO’s vaccine distribution program, COVAX, which “delivered nearly 2 billion doses of vaccines” across the globe. While Trump’s administration seemingly cut ties with the WHO during this period, it nevertheless supported at least one organization crucial to the WHO Covid response (i.e. Gavi).

In addition, the Trump administration itself arguably played a crucial in Gavi’s COVAX, as it funded, via Operation Warp Speed, some of the main vaccines that COVAX distributed. Gates personally yielded colossal returns on his investments in the Covid-19 vaccines, which were obviously aided by COVAX and the Trump administration’s fast-tracking of the vaccines themselves.

Gates’ recent comments, along with the ties of O’Neill and Vance to the biotech industry, suggests that the Trump administration will enable the proliferation of mRNA vaccine technology over the next four years. This notably indicates another betrayal of the MAHA movement, as the Trump-brokered era of Covid-19 “vaccine innovation” recently touted by Bill Gates has been long criticized by his incoming HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. Indeed, in Kennedy’s book The Real Anthony Fauci, RFK demonstrated the integral role Gates played in Dr. Fauci’s “slow the spread, flatten the curve, wait for the jab” strategy of stopping the pandemic — specifically, in one instance, by literally orchestrating “homicidal” studies designed to kill clinical trial participants taking Hydroxychloroquine.

As Kennedy detailed:

“Dr. Fauci, Bill Gates, and WHO financed a cadre of research mercenaries to concoct a series of nearly twenty studies—all employing fraudulent protocols deliberately designed to discredit Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as unsafe…

Instead of using the standard treatment dose of 400mg/day, the 17 WHO studies administered a borderline lethal daily dose starting with 2,400mg on Day 1, and using 800mg/day thereafter. In a cynical, sinister, and literally homicidal crusade against HCQ, a team of BMGF operatives played a key role in devising and pushing through the exceptionally high dosing….

…Gate’s deadly deception allowed FDA to wrongly declare that HCQ would be ineffective at safe levels.”

Kennedy made these allegations as part of his larger argument that the medical establishment purposefully employed suspect and legally dubious methods to squander any chance that scientists might discover cheap, readily available medicines effective at treating Covid-19. This, he argued, allowed them to secure Emergency Use Authorization for the experimental vaccines. Based on this account, Gates played a crucial role in this grand scheme — committing medical “homicide” in the process.

RFK Jr.’s VP, Nicole Shanahan, said on the campaign trail that she and RFK were skeptical to endorse Trump because he had yet to acknowledge the failings of the vaccine-focused Operation Warp Speed. Now, Trump is negotiating with one of the most prominent perceived enemies of the MAHA movement, Bill Gates, to enact the exact same policy for at least one other vaccine.

To make things even more complicated for MAHA voters, Gates is not the only Big Tech executive seemingly giddy about the prospects of mRNA procurement under a Trump administration. Standing directly by Trump’s side at the White House to announce the $500 billion AI investment, Stargate, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made utopian promises about the ability of rapidly produced and personalized mRNA vaccines to cure cancer, seemingly causing Moderna stocks to surge. These vaccines would be created via AI, according to Ellison — with data derived from AI-performed scans of patient blood being used to rapidly develop these personalized vaccines. Ellison’s comments, and the context of him making them at the announcement of a multi-corporation AI infrastructure program, suggest others in Silicon Valley and Big Healthcare are similarly excited for the prospects of “vaccine innovation” that appear poised to return in Trump’s second term.

Such a possibility is also supported by recent reports that Trump’s transition team sidelined two top Kennedy aides for their views on vaccines, with the Wall Street Journal writing that this development “underscor[es] a split over immunizations in the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ movement.” Citing Trump and Kennedy associates, the Journal stated that it seems more likely than not that the incoming administrations’ HHS policies “will have little do with vaccines.”

Further underscoring the subversion of Kennedy at HHS is the recent appointment of Heather Flick, a former senior official at HHS during Trump’s first term, to be Kennedy’s chief of staff. While at HHS, Flick began as the department’s general counsel and eventually worked her way up to become senior adviser to former HHS secretary Alex Azar. According to a former FDA official, Flick is acting as “sort of the Trump guys’ eyes and ears within the department, too; it’s a very important liaison and information source…The chief of staff, they kinda lay down the law.” Indeed, another former FDA official told Politico that the chief of staff’s role “can be very, very involved in FDA business and FDA work,” meaning Flick will presumably play an important role in drug regulation policy. For the MAHA movement, this is especially concerning given Flick’s important role at HHS at the same time that Azar declared Covid-19 an emergency and also contracted Palantir to run vaccine distribution and wastewater surveillance. This suggests Flick would be more friendly to the interests of O’Neill than Kennedy.

O’Neill’s appointment to be deputy secretary at HHS at the least undermines the promises that the Trump campaign made during election season to “Make America Healthy Again” voters. More likely, O’Neill’s position at HHS signifies the direction the Trump campaign will go in relation to public health — namely, that it will fully embrace the goals of the biosecurity apparatus that grew out of the post-9/11, pre-crime, neoconservative Total Information Awareness program that Palantir quietly shifted into the private sector. The biotech executives and investors surrounding Trump stand to reap huge profits from this agenda. In fact, they may need it to survive.

Touting RFK Jr.’s endorsement on the campaign trail may have subverted the chance for critical analysis of Trump’s policy positions (or lack thereof) on public health and pandemic preparedness. As a result, the MAHA movement presumably led many voters who were disaffected, betrayed and harmed by the policies of Operation Warp Speed back into the very hands of the man who touted and took credit for them them in the first place. With RFK Jr. acting as the public face of Trump’s HHS — all while the most powerful forces of the biosecurity agenda lurk in the shadows behind him — resistance to this agenda from within the administration appears doubtful despite the hopes of the MAHA voting bloc.

Thiel-Linked HHS Nominee Threatens MAHA Ambitions with Biotech Stance.

Today, the world’s economy no longer runs on oil, but data. Shortly after the advent of the microprocessor came the internet, unleashing an onslaught of data running on the coils of fiber optic cables beneath the oceans and satellites above the skies. While often posited as a liberator of humanity against the oppressors of nation-states that allows previously impossible interconnectivity and social organization between geographically separated cultures to circumnavigate the monopoly on violence of world governments, ironically, the internet itself was birthed out of the largest military empire of the modern world – the United States.

The ARPANET

Specifically, the internet began as ARPANET, a project of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which in 1972 became known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), currently housed within the Department of Defense. ARPA was created by President Eisenhower in 1958 within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) in direct response to the U.S.’ greatest military rival, the USSR, successfully launching Sputnik, the first artificial satellite in Earth’s orbit with data broadcasting technology. While historically considered the birth of the Space Race, in reality, the formation of ARPA began the now-decades-long militarization of data brokers, quickly leading to world-changing developments in global positioning systems (GPS), the personal computer, networks of computational information processing (“time-sharing”), primordial artificial intelligence, and weaponized autonomous drone technology.

In October 1962, the recently-formed ARPA appointed J.C.R. Licklider, a former MIT professor and vice president of Bolt Beranek and Newman (known as BBN, currently owned by defense contractor Raytheon), to head their Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). At BBN, Licklider developed the earliest known ideas for a global computer network, publishing a series of memos in August 1962 that birthed his “Intergalactic Computer Network” concept. Six months after his appointment to ARPA, Licklider would distribute a memo to his IPTO colleagues – addressed to “Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network”– describing a “time-sharing network of computers” – building off a similar exploration of communal, distributed computation by John Forbes Nash, Jr. in his 1954 paper “Parallel Control” commissioned by defense contractor RAND – which would build the foundational concepts for ARPANET, the first implementation of today’s Internet.

Prior to the technological innovations explored by Licklider and his ARPA colleagues, data communication – at this time, mainly voice via telephone lines – were based on circuit switching, in which each telephone call would be manually connected by a switch operator to establish a dedicated, end-to-end analog electrical connection between the two parties. The RAND Corporation’s Paul Baran, and later ARPA itself, would begin to work on methods to allow formidable data communication in the event of a partial disconnection, such as from a nuclear event or other act of war, leading to a distributed network of unmanned nodes that would compartmentalize the desired information into smaller blocks of data – today referred to as packets – before routing them separately, only to be rejoined once received at the desired destination.

While certainly unbeknownst to the technologists at the time, this achievement of both distributed routing and global information settlement via data packets created an entirely new commodity – digital data.

A Brief History of Weaponized Financial Intelligence

Long before the USSR spooked the United States into formalizing ARPA due to fears of militarized satellite applications post-Sputnik launch, data brokers have played a significant role in warfare and specifically the markets surrounding military conflict. One well-known yet early example occurred during the Napoleonic wars in the 19^th century, when the banking stalwart Rothschild family used carrier pigeons and horseback couriers to gain an information settlement edge related to battle outcomes, while speedily communicating with their traders back in London. These animal-driven technological exploits allowed Rothschild-affiliated brokers to place well-informed bets on the outcome of France’s warmongering to position themselves on the winning sides of large currency and commodity bets. This similar but modernized technique would later be employed by figures like commodity trader (and Mossad asset) Marc Rich in the 1980s, who used satellite phones and optical imagery techniques to track and relay oil tanker flows between nations, giving his trades an asymmetric advantage when dealing within the active petrodollar system. Similarly, Louis Bacon’s Moore Capital achieved 86% gains in its first year largely due to correctly anticipating Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait due to astute intelligence sharing from military sources, and correctly going long on oil prices while shorting stocks.

As the front of modern warfare slowly evolved from direct military action into weaponized financial speculation, the market for data became just as valuable as the defense budget itself. It is for this reason that the necessity of sound data emerged as the foremost issue of national security, leading to a proliferation of advanced data brokers coming out of DARPA and the intelligence community, akin to the 21^st century’s Manhattan Project.

The San Jose Project: Google, Facebook, and PayPal

Exemplified by the creation of the CIA’s venture firm, In-Q-Tel, and the proliferation of Silicon Valley-based venture firms coalescing on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, CA, the financialization of a new crop of American data brokers was complete. The first firm to grace Sand Hill Road was Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, better known as KPCB, which participated in funding internet pioneers Amazon, AOL, and Compaq, while also directly seeding Netscape and Google. KPCB partners have included such government stalwarts as former Vice President Al Gore, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Ted Schlein – the latter being a board member of In-Q-Tel and member of the NSA’s advisory board. KPCB also had an intimate connection with internet networking pioneer Sun Microsystems, best known for building out the majority of network switches and other infrastructure needed for a modern broadband economy.

Outside of the obvious need for network infrastructure for a data economy, an early Sun employee and eventual KPCB partner Bill Joy patented a widely-used distributed file system software known as NFS, or Network File System. Sun also established a public-sector focused subsidiary known as Sun Federal at the start of the 1990s. By 1991, Sun Federal was responsible for more than half of the workstations ordered by local, state and federal governments in the country. Perhaps the world’s most famous data broker, Google, whose founders both came out of Stanford University, was seeded by former Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim and his partner at the Ethernet switching company Granite Systems (later acquired by Cisco), David Cheriton, with Google’s most iconic CEO, Eric Schmidt, being the former CTO of Sun Microsystems.

The emergence of Silicon Valley out of the academic circuit in Northern California was no accident, and in fact was directly influenced by an unclassified program known as the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project. The MDDS was created with direct participation from the CIA, NSA, and DARPA itself within the computer science programs at Stanford and CalTech, alongside MIT, Harvard and Carnegie Mellon. According to reporting from Quartz, this research, with clear national security implications, would be largely “funded and managed by unclassified science agencies like NSF (the National Science Foundation) allowing “the architecture to be scaled up in the private sector” in an attempt “to achieve what the intelligence community hoped for.” The MDDS white paper was released in 1993, and over a few years, more than a dozen grants of several million dollars each were distributed via the NSF in order to capture the most promising efforts, ensuring that those efforts would become intellectual property controlled by the United States regulatory regime.

“Not only are activities becoming more complex, but changing demands require that the IC [Intelligence Community] process different types as well as larger volumes of data,” reads the MDDS white paper. “Consequently, the IC is taking a proactive role in stimulating research in the efficient management of massive databases and ensuring that IC requirements can be incorporated or adapted into commercial products. Because the challenges are not unique to any one agency, the Community Management Staff (CMS) has commissioned a Massive Digital Data Systems [MDDS] Working Group to address the needs and to identify and evaluate possible solutions.”

The first unclassified briefing for scientists was titled “birds of a feather briefing” and was formalized during a 1995 conference in San Jose, CA, which was titled the “Birds of a Feather Session on the Intelligence Community Initiative in Massive Digital Data Systems.” That same year, one of the first MDDS grants was awarded to Stanford University, which was already a decade deep in working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was to “query optimization of very complex queries,” with a closely-followed second grant that aimed to build a massive digital library on the internet. These two grants funded research by then-Stanford graduate students and future Google cofounders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Two intelligence-community managers regularly met with Brin while he was still at Stanford and completing the research that would lead to the incorporation of Google, all paid for by grants provided by the NSA and CIA via MDDS.

While often not discussed when describing Google’s origin story, the principal investigator for the MDDS grant specifically named Google as directly resulting from their research: “Its core technology, which allows it to find pages far more accurately than other search engines, was partially supported by this grant,” wrote Jeffrey Ullman. Furthering this concept, Stanford’s Infolab website explains that “the development of the Google algorithms was carried on a variety of computers, mainly provided by the NSF-DARPA-NASA-funded Digital Library project at Stanford.”

Google would certainly set the standard for success during the first Dot Com bubble. Yet, shortly following their incorporation, two similar Silicon Valley companies with significant ties to the intelligence community would also emerge from colleges affiliated with the MDDS – PayPal and Facebook.

PayPal was launched in December 1998 as Confinity Inc. by founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, alongside Luke Nosek and Ken Howery. The company sought to provide financial institutions with the technological ability to make mobile and online economic transactions secure using cryptography – technology at the time heavily regulated by the United States. Thiel had graduated from Stanford Law School in 1992, and then had a brief stint at the Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell – a legal practice long known for its ties to the U.S. intelligence apparatus. Early on, Confinity Inc. operated out of 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, CA at, a building that had previously housed Google during their “formative years,” after previously sharing an office with Elon Musk’s X.com.

It was also during these formative years that the PayPal team worked closely with the intelligence community. Levchin later stated in an interview with Charlie Rose that: “I think the government working with a private sector is a great thing. When we were working on security and anti-fraud measures at PayPal, we collaborated with every imaginable three and four-letter agency and those were some of the best, most productive relationships I’ve had as a business person…I think if the private sector can help them, we should.” Due to an unprecedented viral growth of their user base, PayPal engineers spent much of the formation period of the company building software to help identify fraudulent transactions to mitigate the growing costs of rampant fraud in the ecosystem, eventually developing an adaptive algorithm named “Igor” after a Russian criminal that would frequently taunt PayPal’s fraud department.

In 2003, a year after PayPal was sold to eBay, Thiel approached Alex Karp, a fellow alumnus of Stanford with a new venture concept: “Why not use Igor to track terrorist networks through their financial transactions?” Thiel took funds from the PayPal sale to seed the company, and after a few years of pitching investors, the newly-formed Palantir received an estimated $2 million investment from the CIA’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel. Palantir’s co-founders consulted with John Poindexter during his tenure as head of DARPA’s then-embattled Total Information Awareness in efforts to privatize the controversial surveillance program. In 2020, Intelligencer spoke with a former intelligence official who was involved in the investment who claimed the CIA had hoped that “tapping the tech expertise of Silicon Valley” would allow it to “integrate widely disparate sources of data regardless of format.”

As of 2013, Palantir’s client list included “the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Centre for Disease Control, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point and the IRS” with around “50% of its business” coming from public sector contracts. Palantir is closely connected to the U.S. government, but its financial spin-off, Palantir Metropolis, is focused on providing “analytical tools” for “hedge funds, banks and financial services firms” to outsmart each other. As The Guardian reports: “Palantir does not just provide the Pentagon with a machine for global surveillance and the data-efficient fighting of war, it runs Wall Street, too.”

Facebook, not unlike Palantir, was one of the vehicles used to privatize controversial U.S. military surveillance projects after 9/11, having also been birthed out of one of the MDDS partners, Harvard University. PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel became Facebook’s first significant investor at the behest of file-sharing pioneer Sean Parker, whose first contact with the CIA took place at age 16. What Facebook became after the involvement of Thiel and Parker bore such an uncanny resemblance to another shuttered DARPA project of the same era, known as LifeLog, that LifeLog’s architect and project manager at DARPA has even noted the direct parallels. One of these parallels, though left unmentioned by former DARPA project managers, is the fact that Facebook launched the very same day that LifeLog was shut down. Facebook’s long-standing ties to the military and intelligence communities go far beyond its origins, including revelations about its collaboration with spy agencies as part of the Snowden leaks and its role in influence operations – some have even directly involved Google and Palantir.

An unspoken outcome of the global proliferation of Facebook was the sly, roundabout creation of the first digital ID system – a necessity for the coming digital economy. Users would set up their profiles by feeding the social network with a plethora of personal information, with Facebook being able to use this data to generate large webs of connectivity between otherwise unknown social groups. There is even evidence that Facebook generated placeholder accounts for individuals that appeared in user data but did not have a profile of their own. Both Google and PayPal would also use similar digital identification methods to allow users to sign into other websites, creating interoperable identification systems that could permeate the internet.

A similar evolution is occurring in the financial sector, as data broker social networks – including Facebook and Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) – are posturing themselves as the future of financial service companies. This idea makes more sense when you consider that money itself is a communication technology, and can easily be built into existing communication platforms – especially ones driven by user data and identity systems. We are simultaneously seeing financial services, such as the largest dollar stablecoin issuer Tether – with excessive ties to PayPal – spending millions on investments in next generation data broker technology. Tether has recently funded the Earth observation/Satellite-as-a-service company Satellogic, the brain chip company Blackrock Neurotech, AI-computation firm Northern Data, and even Rumble, a Thiel-funded competitor to Google’s YouTube.

From Public-Private, to Private-Public

As outlined above, it is clear that the public sector’s intelligence community used the veil of the private sector to establish financial incentives and commercial applications to build out the modern data economy. A simple glance at the seven largest stocks in the American economy demonstrate this concept, with Meta (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), and Amazon – with founder Jeff Bezos being the grandson of ARPA founder Lawrence Preston Gise – leading the software side, and Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA and Tesla leading the hardware component. While many of these companies have egregious ties to the intelligence community and the public sector during their incubation, now these private sector companies are driving the globalization and national security interests of the public sector.

The future of the American data economy is firmly situated between two pillars – artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. With the incoming Trump administration’s close advisory ties to PayPal, Tether, Facebook, Palantir, Tesla and SpaceX, it is clear that the data brokers have returned to roost at Pennsylvania Avenue. AI requires massive amounts of sound data to be of any use for the technologists, and the data provided by these private sector stalwarts is poised to feed their learning modules – surely after securing hefty government contracts. Private companies using public blockchains to issue their tokens generates not only significant opportunities for the United States to address its debt problem, but simultaneously serves as a “boon in surveillance”, as stated by a former CIA director.

Within the Trump administration’s embracing of the blockchain – itself the final iteration of the public-private commercialization of data, despite its libertarian posturing – reveals the culmination of a decades-long technocratic dialectic trojan horse. Nearly all of the foundational technology needed to push the world into this new financial system was cultivated in the shadows by the military and intelligence community of the world’s largest empire. While technology can surely offer solutions for greater efficiency and economic prosperity, the very same tools can also be used to further enslave the citizens of the world.

What once appeared as a guiding light beckoning us towards free speech and financial freedom has revealed itself to be nothing but the shine of Uncle Sam’s boot making its next step.

The Evolution of the Militarized Data Broker.

The Pentagon and Silicon Valley are in the midst of cultivating an even closer relationship as the Department of Defense (DoD) and Big Tech companies seek to jointly transform the American healthcare system into one that is “artificial intelligence (AI)-driven.” The alleged advantages of such a system, espoused by the Army itself, Big Tech and Pharma executives as well as intelligence officers, would be unleashed by the rapidly developing power of so-called “predictive medicine,” or “a branch of medicine that aims to identify patients at risk of developing a disease, thereby enabling either prevention or early treatment of that disease.”

This will apparently be achieved via mass interagency data sharing between the DoD, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the private sector. In other words, the military and intelligence communities, as well as the public and private sector elements of the US healthcare system, are working closely with Big Tech to “predict” diseases and treat them before they occur (and even before symptoms are felt) for the purported purpose of improving civilian and military healthcare.

This cross-sector team plans to deliver this transformation of the healthcare system by first utilizing and sharing the DoD’s healthcare dataset, which is the most “comprehensive…in the world.” It seems, however, based on the programs that already utilize this predictive approach and the necessity for “machine learning” in the development of AI technology, that this partnership would also massively expand the breadth of this healthcare dataset through an array of technologies, methods and sources.

Yet, if the actors and institutions involved in lobbying for and implementing this system indicate anything, it appears that another—if not primary—purpose of this push towards a predictive AI-healthcare infrastructure is the resurrection of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-managed and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-supported program that Congress officially “shelved” decades ago. That program, Total Information Awareness (TIA), was a post 9/11 “pre-crime” operation which sought to use mass surveillance to stop terrorists before they committed any crimes through collaborative data mining efforts between the public and private sector.

While the “pre-crime” aspect of TIA is the best known component of the program, it also included a component that sought to use public and private health and financial data to “predict” bioterror events and pandemics before they emerge. This was TIA’s “Bio-Surveillance” program, which aimed to develop “necessary information technologies and a resulting prototype capable of detecting the covert release of a biological pathogen automatically, and significantly earlier than traditional approaches.” Its architects argued it would achieve this by “monitoring non-traditional data sources” including “pre-diagnostic medical data” and “behavioral indicators.” While ostensibly created to thwart “bioterror” events, the program also sought to create algorithms for identifying “normal” disease outbreaks, essentially seeking to automate the early detection of either biological attacks or natural pathogen outbreaks, ranging from pandemics to presumably other, less severe disease events.

As previously reported by Unlimited Hangout, after TIA was terminated by Congress, it largely survived by privatizing its projects into the company known as Palantir, founded by Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel and some of his associates from his time at Stanford University. Notably, the initial software used to create Palantir’s first product was Paypal’s anti-fraud algorithm. While Palantir, for most of its history, has not overtly sought to resurrect the TIA Bio-surveillance program, that has now changed in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis.

In late 2022, Palantir announced that it and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would continue their ongoing work to “plan, manage and respond to future outbreaks and public health incidents” by streamlining its existing biosurveillance programs “into a singular, efficient vehicle” to support the CDC’s “Common Operating Picture.” This “Common Operating Picture” aims to secure “strong collaboration across the federal government, jurisdictional health departments, private sector entities, and other key health partners.”

The CDC and Palantir publicized this partnership just months after the CDC announced the creation of the its Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA). This office now plans to expand biosurveillance infrastructure via public-private partnerships across the country to ensure that local communities constantly supply federal agencies with a steady stream of bio-data to develop AI-generated pandemic “forecasts,” or viral outbreak predictions, that will inform pandemic policy measures during pandemics and before they even occur, theoretically before even a single person dies of a particular contagion.

On the surface level, such a mission might sound as though it would serve public health; if government and private institutions can collaborate to prevent pandemics before they happen, well then, why not? Yet, again, the origins of Palantir demonstrate that these “healthcare” surveillance policy measures actually work completely in tandem with the deeper, aforementioned “pre-crime” national security goal of TIA, which powerful forces have been slowly implementing for decades. The ultimate goal it seems, is to usher in a new, even more invasive surveillance paradigm where both the external environment and the public’s internal environment (i.e. our bodies) are monitored for “errant” signals.

Palantir’s founder and largest shareholder, Peter Thiel, incorporated the company the same year of Total Information Awareness’s (TIA) shut down—which resulted from prominent media and political criticism—with significant funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, as well as direct guidance from the CIA on its product development. As Unlimited Hangout detailed in its investigation into Donald Trump’s 2024 running-mate J.D. Vance and his rise to MAGA stardom, Thiel and Palantir co-founder Alex Karp met with the head of TIA at DARPA, John Poindexter, shortly after Palantir’s incorporation.

The middleman between the tech entrepreneurs and Poindexter was Poindexter’s old pal and key architect of the Iraq War, Richard Perle, who called the TIA-head to tell him that he wanted him to meet “a couple of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who were starting a software company.” Poindexter, according to a report in New York Magazine, “was precisely the person” with whom Thiel and Karp wanted to meet, mainly because “their new company was similar in ambition to what Poindexter had tried to create at the Pentagon [that is, TIA], and they wanted to pick the brain of the man now widely viewed as the godfather of modern surveillance.” Since then, Palantir has been implementing the “pre-crime” initiatives of TIA under the cover of the “free market,” enabled by its position as a private company.

This story, along with the CIA’s intimate collaboration in developing Palantir’s early software, the CIA’s unique status as Palantir’s only client for its first several years as a company and Palantir co-founders’ statements about the company’s original intent (e.g. Alex Karp – CIA analysts were always the intended clients of Palantir), demonstrate that the company was founded to privatize the TIA programs in collaboration with the military and intelligence communities to which Palantir is a major contractor. Notably, TIA’s survival was actually enabled by its alleged killer, the US Congress, as lawmakers included a classified annex that preserved funding for TIA’s programs in the same bill that ostensibly “killed” the operation.

Yet while it appears that the national security apparatus plans to use the coming AI healthcare system for “pre-crime” and mass surveillance of American citizens, this “predictive” approach to healthcare will also inform significant policy shifts for the next pandemic. Specifically, the next pandemic will likely utilize the currently expanding biosurveillance infrastructure and AI disease forecasting software to develop “targeted” policy measures for specific communities and potentially individuals during future pandemics.

While Palantir stands at the forefront of this technocratic transformation of healthcare, the national security apparatus in collaboration with Big Healthcare and Big Tech at large are all contributing to weaving this lesser known “bioterror” component of TIA into private business schemes that covertly carry on the duties of the officially “shelved” program. This network of institutions consistently and conveniently omits the origins of its predictive biosurveillance healthcare approach — but the special interests tied to their efforts, as well as the striking similarities between their alleged public health solutions, and the decades-old biowarfare responses / surveillance programs of the Pentagon, reveal the ulterior motive of this public-private collaboration.

This investigation will examine how the CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA) signifies a major step towards the “AI-driven healthcare system,” how Palantir’s management of the program’s data strongly suggests that this partnership is the latest multi-sector implementation of the “pre-crime” agenda of TIA and what frightening possibilities the “AI-driven healthcare system” could enable in a future pandemic and healthcare in general. This revolutionary system ultimately pushes society further into the sights of a digital panopticon that seeks surveillance and control of all that the makes up the average citizen—from outside their bodies, to within.

What Does the CDC Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA) do? 

The CFA demonstrates that the AI healthcare and pandemic prevention industry is being materially (and quietly) implemented into public life in a significant way. Its policy measures massively expand invasive surveillance measures and, through sweeping biodata collection, will transform the way that public health policy policy is developed and enacted during pandemics and healthcare in general.

Based on the CFA and related developments in the public sector and amongst government contractors, American public health agencies are poised to utilize the mass collection of biosurveillance data to fuel: 1) targeted vaccine development and distribution of pathogens with “pandemic potential,” 2) curated policy and targeted lockdowns of specific communities and/or groups based on their “risk levels” and 3) medical prioritization of patients based on their AI-determined “needs” and AI hospital management.

The CFA’s mission is to “advance U.S. forecasting, outbreak analytics, and surveillance capacities related to disease outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics to support public health response and preparedness.” It plans to achieve this mission through multiple methods, but the data aggregation accumulated via Palantir programs within the CDC’s “Common Operating Picture”, and the way this data will manifest into policy, bind all these strategies together.

I. Your Data For All

Crucial to this effort is the CFA’s goal (arguably its primary goal) of creating a concrete digital infrastructure that will provide multiple sectors and jurisdictions of government with the ability to share, access and implement the biodata they collect. One duty assigned to the program’s Office of Director summarizes this strategy succinctly; it is tasked with guiding “the facilitation and coordination” of all biosurveillance activities, ranging from disease modeling to viral forecasting and the data extraction and collection necessary to support these activities—from the local to federal levels of government and healthcare entities. In simpler terms, the Office of Director will ensure that the institutions that make up the CFA (and partner with it) see that the program’s intention to create multi-sector, interagency, collaborative data sharing infrastructure is carried out.

Several other codified aims of the program make clear how crucial this element of mass data sharing is to the overall mission of CFA. For example, the Inform Division is tasked with sharing “timely, actionable” data with the federal government, local leaders, the public and even international leaders. It also coordinates real-time surveillance activities between CDC experts and US government agencies, and maintains “liaison” with CDC officials and staff, other US government departments and private sector partners.

Similarly, the Predict Division will develop “scientific collaborations to harmonize analytic approaches and develop tools,” which likely implies the importance of interoperability in collecting/sharing this data. Interoperability, or “harmonized” analytical approaches and tools, is a necessary component of creating the multi-sector collaborative data mining infrastructure that the CFA aims to cultivate. Through making data and its collection tools interoperable, different vendors and institutions gain the ability to seamlessly work together by enabling the exchange of data between different sources, whether they be military, hospitals, academic centers or anything else. In essence, interoperability centralizes a seemingly decentralized network of different vendors and institutions, all of whom are collecting and analyzing data plucked from various sources.

Likewise, the Office of the Director is tasked with maintaining “strategic relationships with academic, private sector, and interagency partners” as well as procuring “opportunities with industry partners.” And finally, the Innovate Branch will collaborate “with academic, private sector, and interagency partners” as part of its goal to create “products, tools and enterprise enhancements” in order to make pandemic data analysis “flexible, fast, and scalable for CFA customers including federal, state, tribal, local, or territorial authorities” (emphasis added). In other words, the Innovate Branch will engage in cross-sector collaboration for the direct purpose of creating and improving technology that makes mass data sharing more vast, rapid and simple for both government authorities and “customers.”

In fact, in 2023 this goal materialized with the creation of the CFA’s Insight Net. It contains more than “100 total network participants” and spans “24 states and 35 public health departments.” Its vast network has expanded the CFA’s reach to influence “many critical public health decisions” made at the state and local levels, and it boasts that its network is integrated and unifying, “leveraging connections with state, local, private, public, and academic partners to create a consortium of collaborators.” This collaboration that Insight Net facilitates between the public and private sector manifests in the lives of citizens through the policy it informs—a central part of the program.

II. When Data Becomes Policy 

The CFA plans to utilize this vast array of data to inform real-time policy decisions related to future pandemic planning and response. Multiple divisions within the CFA will contribute to this strategy of creating policy through the implementation of data into policy decision making.

The Office of the Director will oversee the general direction of this aim, as it defines “goals and objectives for policy formation, scientific oversight, and guidance in program planning and development…” The Office of Policy and Communications will then presumably work to implement these objectives into concrete policies and regulations, as it is responsible for “review[ing], coordinat[ing], and prepar[ing] legislation, briefing documents, Congressional testimony, and other legislative matters” as well as coordinating the “development, review, and approval of federal regulations,” presumably surrounding pandemic policy, surveillance, data and response efforts.

The Predict Division will play a crucial role in informing the specifics of these policies, as it generates “forecasts and analyses to support outbreak preparedness and response efforts”, and collaborates with partners from the local to federal to international level “on performing analytics to support decision-making.” It will also perform tabletop simulations to “match policies and resources with [its AI-generated] forecasts,” leaving the fate of communities, relating to their freedom as well as access to medical care, in the hands of algorithms and datasets.

Importantly, the CFA will not only utilize this data in long-term preparation or research, but in critical, high-pressure moments. Specifically, the Predict Division’s data sets and models will be used “to address questions that arise with short latency.”

During outbreaks, such questions that may arise with “short latency” would likely relate to containment efforts, and thus, lockdown policy. The Analytics Response Branch of the CFA, which uses its “analytical tools” to aid “decision making for key partners” both during a potential or ongoing outbreak, is also responsible for analyzing “disease spread through existing data sources to identify key populations/settings at highest risk” and correspondingly providing “essential information to key partners in decisions surrounding community migration” (emphasis added).

This sentence, though somewhat vague, suggests that AI-informed policy will subject certain communities/individuals to an extraordinary level of intrusion. Specifically, beyond more general, overarching pandemic policy, it appears that AI-generated forecasts and “risk levels” will dictate policy on the local, or perhaps even individual, level—directly controlling the movement, or “migration,” of communities.

Indeed, the CFA’s cooperative agreement states that the ability to apply data-driven, “mathematical” methods to tackle health equity problems in the face of disease outbreaks is “of great interest to the CFA.” Key to this objective is the collection of data “on the social determinants of health” to utilize in disease forecasting.  These “social determinants” include “geography (rural/urban), household crowding, employment status, occupation, income, and mobility/access to transportation,” as well as race, so long as race is not recognized as an “independent exposure variable” but instead is seen as a “proxy” for other social determinants. 

While on the surface level, this “targeted” approach may seem to provide a solution to the previously implemented universal pandemic policy, the digitization of lockdowns still raises the potential to seriously threaten individual and communal autonomy—only this time, under the auspices of “objective” data, accumulated and interpreted by AI technology.

Who’s Behind the AI-Healthcare Push? 

The tentacles of the biosecurity apparatus spread across multiple sectors of government and business, transcending the heavily blurred and essentially illusory lines between the public and private sector and Big Tech and Big Pharma. Military officials, tech operatives and global public health institutions all play a significant role in the lobbying for and implementation of this emerging healthcare industry. 

I. The Military

While the idea of developing preemptive vaccines to treat novel infectious pathogens dates back to the Reagan-era, these ideas initially focused on developing preemptive vaccines for diseases that emerged in a human population via a bioweapon, making the strategy rooted in national security as opposed to traditional disease response. Yet in the modern era, this militarized approach to public health has become the dominant ideology in establishment public health sectors—demonstrated by the core ideology that the CFA is built on.

The CFA’s Office of the Director ensures that “the CFA strategy is executed by the Predict Division and aligned with overall CDC goals” (emphasis added). While the vagueness of this passage omits the exact intentions of the referenced “CDC goals”—the CDC’s national biosurveillance strategy for human health, however, sheds light on the hidden agenda here.

The strategy is cemented in “U.S. laws and Presidential Directives, including Homeland Security Presidential Directive-21 (HSPD-21), ‘Public Health and Medical Preparedness.’” HSPD-21 is a Bush-era Department of Homeland Security directive made to “guide…efforts to defend a bioterrorist attack” that are also “applicable to a broad array of natural and manmade public health and medical challenges.” The directive aimed to predict disease outbreaks—natural or bioweapon-induced—via “early warning” and “early detection” of “health events.” Strikingly similar to the TIA “Bio-Surveillance” objectives, these values appear to have been placed in good hands at the CFA, as the Center’s director, Dylan George, previously served as vice-president of In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA.

A recent trip that US Army officials made to Silicon Valley illustrates how the ideology behind this strategy has manifested through the relationship between Silicon Valley, academia and the Pentagon. In this “pivotal visit” to the San Francisco Bay Area in Aug. 2024, the US Army’s surgeon general, Mary K. Izaguirre, met with scientists at Stanford University and Google to further “the Army’s efforts to integrate cutting-edge technology and build stronger ties with civilian sectors.” Izaguirre rendezvoused with Civilian Aides to the Secretary of the Army (CASAs) and Army Reserve Ambassadors to discuss “their efforts to bridge the gap between the Army and the civilian community.”

When she met with Stanford scientists, who have “a long history of collaboration with the military, particularly through research initiatives that contribute to national defense and public health,” the scientists briefed her on advancements made in AI allegedly capable of “[revolutionizing] emergency medicine.” This tech was part of Stanford’s, and presumably the military’s and Big Tech’s, “broader mission to integrate AI into various aspects of health care…”

From there, Izaguirre traveled to Google’s headquarters where she and the tech experts discussed how Google’s “AI, machine learning, and cloud computing capabilities” could assist the Army’s healthcare ambitions. She also thanked Google for helping veterans “find their footing” after their time in the military, acknowledging the role that the company’s “SkillBridge” program plays in aiding soldiers in their transitions “into civilian careers”—which provides a convenient funnel from the military into Silicon Valley for lucky servicemen. The article concluded by remarking that through its collaboration with “leaders in academia and technology, the Army aims to equip its soldiers with the best tools and support for the challenges ahead.” Notably Google also shares a $9 billion cloud computing contract, along with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Oracle, with the Pentagon for the military’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability system (JWCC).

This meeting, along with the ever-growing partnerships between Big Tech and the Pentagon, obviously do not occur in a vacuum, but instead represent a natural culmination of years-long industry plans to merge Silicon Valley data with military data. In March 2019, for example, co-authors Dr. Ryan Kappedal, a former intelligence officer whose job pedigree summarily includes — lead product manager for the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), data scientist at Johnson & Johnson, and currently a lead manager at Google — and Dr. Niels Olson, a US Navy Commander and the Laboratory Director at US Naval Hospital Guam, wrote an article for the Pentagon-funded neoconservative think tank, Center for New American Security (CNAS), titled “Predictive Medicine: Where the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Could Build a Bridge in Artificial Intelligence,” in which they fantasized about the merging of these industries that Kappedal hails from:

“[With] the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare system, the federal government has the largest healthcare system in the world. In the era of machine learning, this translates to the most comprehensive healthcare dataset in the world. The vastness of the DoD’s dataset combined with the department’s commitment to basic biological surveillance yields a unique opportunity to create the best artificial intelligence–driven healthcare system in the world. (emphasis added)”

While the CNAS authors claim that the Pentagon and Silicon Valley merely aim to improve civilian and military healthcare through this AI healthcare system, this technocratic evolution of healthcare importantly presents a mutually beneficial opportunity for each of these institutions. For the private sector, as the CNAS article states, the DoD possesses a plethora of data with “intrinsic commercial value.” For the Pentagon, such a relationship with Silicon Valley would expand its data mining efforts into the body, allowing for a wider array of valuable data to use for national security purposes.

Further, implementing a predictive medicine infrastructure provides both sectors with the pretext to amass more health data, and to continuously do so, in order to train the predictive AI technology. This has already granted the Pentagon the pretext to increase data-collection efforts in the name of creating this AI healthcare system, potentially explaining the creation of predictive health programs such as ARPA-H and AI forecasting infrastructure like the CDC’s CFA. Importantly, the biosurveillance field’s biggest advocates also have a long history of stressing the importance of mass interagency data sharing, including between the public and private sectors — highlighting again the cross-sectoral commitment to utilizing this data for both profit and national security.

II. Big Pharma

While the CNAS authors wrote their “Predictive Medicine” article before the Covid-19 pandemic, the most prominent institutions in the pandemic preparedness / biosurveillance field have already begun selling the “predictive” approach to public health as the solution to the “next pandemic.” One of the most prominent aspects of predictive health involves using biosurveillance data to fuel the research and distribution of medical countermeasures—a policy that the CDC’s CFA is pursuing:

“[The Analytics Response Branch] works with key partners to inform decisions on medical countermeasures during an active outbreak.”

This policy unsurprisingly has the backing of the industry that most clearly stands to gain the most from it—Big Pharma. In 2023, scientists from Pfizer’s mRNA Commercial Strategy & Innovation department (one of whom hails from John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) wrote an article titled “Outlook of pandemic preparedness in a post-COVID-19 world” in which they pushed for the utilization of predictive AI technology to inform real-time policy during the “next pandemic.” The scientists pitched AI-informed policy decisions as the solution to the downsides of universal pandemic policies, specifically through a more “targeted” approach to pandemic policy.

The paper advocates for the development of  preemptive vaccines, which are vaccines developed for viruses that do not yet spread prominently in human populations. Surveillance data of pathogens with pandemic potential fuels this research, as the paper notes that vaccination benefits have “continued to progress” due to the power of constant biosurveillance and accelerated manufacturing, demonstrated by the development of “updated vaccines for evolving variants of SARS-CoV-2.”

Similarly, the authors tout the abilities of these preemptive vaccines to be quickly dispersed to protect populations from outbreaks of pathogens with pandemic potential if the pathogen “closely aligns” with a preemptively developed vaccine stockpile. These preemptive vaccines, however, would only offer temporary protection until “more tailored interventions” were developed, if deemed necessary.

This echoes the long calls of other global health institutions to develop preemptive vaccines. As a previous Unlimited Hangout investigation reported, the WHO’s 2014 CEPI-partnered program, Research and Development Blueprint for Emerging Pathogens (R&D Blueprint) aims to “reduce the time” that vaccines can get to market after the declaration of a pandemic. It does this, however, not only through conducting R&D on pathogens that already reach pandemic status, but also by conducting R&D on diseases that “are likely to cause epidemics in the future.” CEPI itself—started with investments from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust—was founded to develop “vaccines against known infectious disease threats that could be deployed rapidly to contain outbreaks, before they become global health emergencies.”

CEPI is currently assisting in building up an apparatus of research and private companies pursuing predictive vaccine development, who may up end being some of the “key partners” that the CFA plans to work with to “inform decisions on medical countermeasures during an active outbreak,” given CEPI’s close partnership with the Gates Foundation via the Gates Foundation’s Gavi, the Gates Foundation’s history of funding the CDC and Gates’ potential influence within CFA (demonstrated later in this article). CEPI made these investments to further its “100 Days Mission” that aims to “accelerate the time taken to develop safe, effective, globally accessible vaccines against emerging disease outbreaks to within 100 days.”

Interestingly, CEPI claims that the construction of a “Global Vaccine Library” is crucial to the success of its 100 Days Mission. The Library plans to utilize AI technology to predict how “viral threats could mutate to evade our immune systems” in order to identify specific “vaccine targets.” Richard Hatchett, the CEO of CEPI (formerly of the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA)) stated that building the Global Vaccine Library will require “coordinated investments in countermeasure development and, in outbreak situations, rapid data sharing.” Perhaps the datasets that the CFA will utilize and expand could assist in creating this Global Vaccine Library by making possible the “rapid data sharing” that CEPI requires.

III. Building on Tiberius

Another element of informing medical countermeasure policy through data is distribution—something that Palantir gained direct experience with during the COVID-19 pandemic. The CFA now plans to utilize its data and analytical tools to inform its “key partners” on “decisions on medical countermeasures during an active outbreak.”

During COVID-19, the Pentagon–run Operation Warp Speed initiated its vaccine distribution policy in direct collaboration with Palantir through the Palantir program “Tiberius,” which the CDC has since pledged to unite with other Palantir biosurveillance programs as part of its “Common Operating Picture.” Tiberius uses a Palantir software product called Gotham that also manages another Palantir-run government program called Health and Human Services (HHS) Protect, “a secretive database that hoards information related to the spread of COVID-19 gathered from ‘more than 225 data sets, including demographic statistics, community-based tests, and a wide range of state-provided data.’” The database notably includes protected health information, which led Democratic senators and representatives to warn of the program’s “serious privacy concerns”:

“Neither HHS nor Palantir has publicly detailed what it plans to do with this PHI, or what privacy safeguards have been put in place, if any. We are concerned that, without any safeguards, data in HHS Protect could be used by other federal agencies in unexpected, unregulated, and potentially harmful ways, such as in the law and immigration enforcement context.” 

During the pandemic, Tiberius drew on this health data so that it could “help identify high-priority populations at highest risk of infection.” Tiberius identified the risk levels of these populations in order to develop “[vaccine] delivery timetables and locations” to prioritize vaccines in specific “at risk” populations. Most often these populations were minority communities and notably, the COVID-19 vaccines are associated with an excess risk of serious adverse effects, and can cause fatal myocarditis.

Further, as noted in a previous Unlimited Hangout investigation, intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies, such as the Los Angeles and New Orleans police departments, also use Gotham for “predictive policing,” or pre-crime initiatives which disproportionately affect minority communities (ICE also used Palantir’s digital profiling tech to apprehend and deport illegal immigrants). The US Army Research Laboratory also found Gotham useful, as evidenced by its $91 million contract with Palantir “‘to accelerate and enhance’ the Army’s research work.” More recently, Palantir teamed up with Microsoft to provide national security leaders with an opportunity to exploit a “first-of-its-kind, integrated suite of technology,” including its Gotham software, among other products, for “mission-planning” purposes (the military also uses Gotham for “targeting enemies” through its “AI-powered kill chain”). These lucrative contracts with the intelligence/military state highlight the dual-use nature of the technology behind the “AI-healthcare” revolution, and thus raise the question: will Palantir and other government agencies utilize the health data that CFA can access for “dual-use,” national security purposes?

The Digitization of Healthcare: Kinsa, Palantir and the ‘Targeted’ Nature of Future Pandemic Response

Notably, some prominent institutions within the biosecurity apparatus have already begun pitching “targeted” pandemic policy as a solution to the now widely recognized failings of the more universal non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) policies of COVID-19, such as lockdowns, social distancing and school closures, which unleashed economic devastation, physical death and mental health decline upon many populations.

For instance, the Pfizer paper, “Outlook of pandemic preparedness in a post-COVID-19 world”, mentioned earlier, surmises that the negative effects of NPIs such as school closures, lockdowns and hospital policies may be felt years into the future and even be shown to increase in severity with further studies. Lockdowns in particular, the authors note, “resulted in significant economic, social, and health costs,” and they even state that “the effect of social distancing on the mental health of children and adolescents [continues] to be difficult to measure.” From a bureaucratic perspective, the paper also admits that consistent and long-term use of NPIs can be “challenging because people grow tired and apathetic toward them.”

The solution that the Pfizer scientists offer is “early action” being used to “leverage all available interventions as soon as possible in pandemic response,” and importantly, “geographically specific and informed NPI policies.” It appears that at least one of the solutions the paper puts forth, to both implement “early action” and “geographically specific” policies, is to “have a gradient of warnings that separate dangerous pandemics from more manageable outbreaks…” This proposed policy recalls the CFA measure that analyzes “disease spread through existing data sources to identify key populations/settings at highest risk” (emphasis added).

The paper goes on:

“In healthcare settings, an artificial intelligence platform could help prioritize patients based on their medical needs, effectively managing resources during triage situations. Similarly, a gradient-based warning system for pandemics could initiate appropriate responses at different levels of threat, with each level tied to specific actions. An early warning or Level 1 may involve increased surveillance and information sharing, while higher levels could trigger more drastic measures like regional shutdowns or global travel restrictions.” (emphasis added)

A system of surveillance this vast, importantly, could only be achieved through the “the facilitation and coordination” of all biosurveillance activities—from the local to federal levels of government and healthcare entities— that the CFA will carry out.

Other Pharma-backed organizations have also called for targeted pandemic response policy, such as the Committee to Unleash Prosperity which stated “identifying the most vulnerable groups and focusing resources on their protection will always be critical to any sensible crisis response.” The Committee to Unleash Prosperity is funded by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, whose members include Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Glaxosmithkline, Merck,and Sanofi among other Big Pharma companies. The group was also notably co-founded by Larry Kudlow, formerly one of Trump’s top economic advisors and directors of the National Economic Council during his first term, who—during Covid-19—was part of the group that decided to effectively outsource the U.S. fiscal reponse to the crisis to Larry Fink’s BlackRock.

The push for such “targeted” measures are furthermore indicative of an even greater systemic transformation taking place in the healthcare system. The calls to “help prioritize patients based on their medical needs” in order to “effectively manage resources during triage situations” allude to the industry effort to digitize hospital management, resource allocation and patient care, and, in doing so, expand the health datasets of the biosecurity apparatus. Private companies including Palantir, among others, it turns out, are already playing crucial roles in this AI-hospital revolution.

Meanwhile, the CFA codifies the push towards this AI-system through multiple policies:

“[The Predict Division] assists with tabletop exercises to match policies and resources with forecasts”

“[The Office of Management Services] provides direction, strategy, analysis, and operational support in all aspects of human capital management, including workforce and career development and human resources operations”

The first company involved in this shift worth noting is Kinsa Health—a company that “uses internet-connected thermometers to predict the spread of the flu”—which is carrying out the kind of data mining that would enable this kind of predictive and targeted pandemic policy that CFA seeks to carry out. According to the The New York Times, Kinsa is “uniquely positioned to identify unusual clusters of fever because they have years of data for expected flu cases in each ZIP code.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kinsa was allegedly able to forecast which locations would become “COVID-19 epicenters” before more traditional surveillance systems could.

The thermometers supply data by connecting “to a cellphone app that instantly transmits their readings to the company.” Interestingly, “Users can also enter other symptoms they feel. The app then gives them general advice on when to seek medical attention.”

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kinsa has emerged as a rising star within the predictive health industry, as it has secured a significant deal with healthcare company Highmark Health to “predict health care utilization, recognize staffing needs, and plan emergency department and ICU bed capacity when infectious diseases like COVID-19 and influenza spike.” The initiative is “the first health delivery system to utilize Kinsa’s early warning system to model staffing needs and bed capacity”—signifying Kinsa’s increasing role in this healthcare shift.

This preceded health technology company Healthy Together’s 2024 acquisition of Kinsa, which marked a significant step for the thermometer company, as the acquisition signifies the expansion of Kinsa’s predictive powers and datasets into the public sector. The announcement proclaimed that “the synergy between the two companies will empower pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, Medicaid agencies, insurance companies, and public health departments with AI-driven tools to proactively respond to and address illness.” The bold vision here is perhaps unsurprising—that is, only when Healthy Together’s peculiar ties to government and Thiel-connected figures, and its larger vision, are understood.

Healthy Together is a Software as a Service (SaaS), or a service that “allows users to connect to and use cloud-based apps over the Internet.” It prides itself on unifying “the objectives of government programs and the needs of residents into a single platform.” The way it does this is through its “One Door” approach, or rather—its mission to make available one’s health records and immunization history “all in one place,” that place being their proprietary app. Indeed, Healthy Together has already partnered with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Lighthouse program to access veteran’s health data ranging from immunization records, “test results, allergy records, clinical vitals, medical conditions and appointment records.” This connectivity was achieved via the VA’s application programming interface (API), as veterans using the Healthy Together app access their medical records through the VA API, which connects different computer programs together. This serves as a small-scale example of the growing harmonization between military and Big Tech data.

In addition to health data, the company also aims to link welfare data and access to its app—a particularly concerning feature given that some US health experts tied to the CIA’s In-Q-Tel and official government Covid-19 response policy previously pitched linking welfare benefits to vaccination status during the Covid-19 crisis.

When Healthy Together partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to join its AWS Partner Network (APN), it created a program that achieves this linkage of welfare data with its app. It was called the “Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Management Information System (MIS),” or Luna MIS. WIC is a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) federal assistance program that provides low-income pregnant women and children under the age of five with services such as EBT cards to help them afford food. Luna MIS apparently streamlines “the management of WIC benefits, from application and enrollment to benefit issuance and redemption,” meaning it transfers users’ entire interaction with WIC benefits, from registration to allocation, into the Healthy Together app. The company further supports this “One Door” approach for eligibility, enrollment and recertification for other social programs such as “Medicaid, SNAP, TANF…as well as behavioral health, disease surveillance, vital records, child welfare and more.”

Whether or not data collected via technology such as Kinsa thermometers or health records, such as immunization status, might informs one’s eligibility or enrollment for social programs in the future remains to be seen. Either way, the company already works directly on welfare benefits with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services , the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma, Missouri Department of Social Services, Maryland Market Money and Maryland Department of Agriculture and more. Given that the company already collects vast amounts of medical data, including vaccination records, linking such data to welfare benefits would likely prove an easy task for the company.

While there is not much public information available about Healthy Together’s board or funding, it appears that the “One Door” service was born out of another app—which is no longer available—called Twenty (as a significant number of Healthy Together’s co-founders/CEOs apparently still work at Twenty, and hold the exact same positions at each company).

According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Healthy Together was developed in the early days of the pandemic when the state of Utah “contracted with mobile app developer Twenty to launch Healthy Together” in order to track the residents of Utah’s “movements” and, for those that fell ill, equip public health workers with a digital contact tracing tool to discover “where they crossed paths with other users.” The Tribune reported that Utah provided Twenty with a $1.75 million contract, along with an additional “$1 million to further develop [Healthy Together].” In other words, Healthy Together was built as a public-private “contact tracing” (i.e. surveillance) app.

Twenty, according to its LinkedIn, was an app that aimed “to drive more human connection” by making it easier for friends to meet up and make plans. It does this, however, by allowing users to see the locations of nearby friends, even cluing them into their friends’ later plans and pinning events for people to meet up at. While Healthy Together and Twenty are separate apps, it appears that the seemingly social location-based tracking technology used for Twenty was swiftly repurposed to create the contact-tracing and health-focused app Healthy Together, as the co-founder and co-CEO of Twenty and Healthy Together, Jared Allgood, stated:

“…at the start of the pandemic, we were contacted by some state governments who are interested in using some of the mobile platform technology that we had built previously, to create a link between the health department and residents in their state…” (emphasis added)

The Salt Lake Tribune explained the contact tracing process that the repurposed technology of Healthy Together helped the state achieve:

“the app uses Bluetooth and location tracing services to record when its users are in close proximity. When a user begins to feel ill, he or she can enter symptoms on the app, which provides directions for testing.”

“State epidemiologist Angela Dunn further explained the process…‘So if you choose to share your data with our contact tracers’ by using the app, she said, ‘they’ll be able to know about the places that you’ve been while you were infectious, and it’ll also provide our contact tracers with a snapshot of other app users who you had significant contact with and potentially exposed with COVID-19 as well’…. ‘that will allow contact tracers to follow up directly with those people and provide them information about how to protect themselves and others,’ she said.”

Now, the goals and functions of Healthy Together seem to have expanded into AI viral forecasting and hospital management with its acquisition of Kinsa, making the private company a potential asset for the CDC CFA, as its experience in working with health data would seemingly make it a fitting “existing data source” for the program.

The people behind these companies too, however, make Kinsa and Healthy Together not too far removed from CFA’s other private sector partners. Healthy Together was funded by SV Angel, the venture capital firm founded by “The Godfather of Silicon Valley,” Ron Conway, who was an early investor in the Elon Musk-and-Peter Thiel-founded Paypal and also in the Peter Thiel-backed Facebook (Thiel and Conway were among the earliest backers of the social network).

Another co-founder and co-CEO of Healthy Together and Twenty, Diesel Peltz, boasts interesting ties to the incoming Trump administration via his father, billionaire and chairman emeritus of the Wendy’s Company, Nelson Peltz. Nelson Peltz claims responsibility for re-connecting Elon Musk and Trump, which led to Musk financially and very publicly backing the 2024 Trump campaign. Since the election, Musk’s outsized role in setting incoming government policy has become both obvious and controversial. Variety reported the following about the Peltz family role in uniting Musk with Trump:

“[Peltz] said Musk, together with Peltz’s son Diesel…‘had a breakfast at the house, we invited Donald for breakfast, and they [Musk and Trump] sort of reunited again… I hope it’s good, you know. I was a matchmaker.’” (emphasis added)

Importantly, both Thiel and Musk played critical roles in successfully lobbying for the appointment of Thiel protege JD Vance as Trump’s vice presidential nominee. Now, Musk is set to head Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency advisory group, along with the founder of the biotech company Roivant (which has created subsidiary biotech companies with Pfizer, and has invested deeply in mRNA technology), Vivek Ramaswamy, to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.”

The meeting between the two Peltz men, Musk and the President Elect took place in the late Spring, and it was only a few months later that Palantir and Wendy’s Supply Chain Co-op announced a partnership to “bring [the co-op] towards a fully integrated Supply Chain Network with opportunities for AI-driven, automated workflows,” by moving its supply chain onto Palantir’s Artificial Intelligence Platform. The platform is, familiarly, “designed to connect disparate data sources into a single common operating picture…” Wendy’s will eventually use Palantir to manage its supply chain and waste prevention, including through “Demand Deviation and Allocation.” All of this will push the fast-food company with an otherwise folksy aesthetic, personified through its ginger-haired freckled mascot, Wendy, towards the increasingly technocratic new age—and the Peltz family closer to the Thiel-verse.

Also worth noting is Arianna Huffington’s seat on the board of Twenty. Huffington’s appointment warrants mentioning only because of her relationship with another protege of Peter Thiel, CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman. The media mogul and tech entrepreneur recently teamed up to create the fitness app Thrive AI Health, which gives users a “hyper-personalized” AI health coach.

Thiel has been described as Altman’s “longtime mentor,” and apparently at the beginning of Altman’s career, “Thiel…saw in Altman a magentic figure who could expand the tech sector’s approach across the world.” Thiel’s rosy view of the OpenAI CEO is evidenced by the mutually beneficial relationship that matured between the two after Altman sold his company Loopt, and Thiel raised the bulk of the $21 million dollars that Altman later gathered for his own venture capital firm, Hydrazine Capital, according to the The Washington Post. Soon after, “Altman’s bond with Thiel blossomed: He helped Thiel’s venture firm, Founder’s Fund, get access to hot start-ups, and the men sometimes traveled together to speak at events.”

Recently, Palantir and another Thiel-backed company, Anduril, have partnered on behalf of the Pentagon to “unlock the full potential of AI for national security,” specifically by retaining data at the “tactical edge” of the battlefield, data that is usually “never retained.” Apparently, this new partnership will make the collection of this “tactical edge” data possible, and be used to train AI models and “deliver the U.S. an advantage over adversaries.” It will also enable “collaboration with leading AI developers, including [Sam Altman’s] OpenAI” (emphasis added). 

It now seems that Thiel, through the aforementioned relationships, is not too distant in proximity from (though not directly intertwined with) Healthy Together and Kinsa, all while Palantir further entrenches its relationship with the CDC (as well as the DoD) and positions itself as a health data empire.

Kinsa’s Connections to Bill Gates

Notably, the CEO and founder of Kinsa, Inder Singh, hails from the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) where he formerly served as the Executive Vice President. CHAI was controversially created with significant involvement from Jeffrey Epstein, the now infamous pedophile, sex trafficker and intelligence asset, and Epstein was simultaneously involved with Bill Gates during that same period, including the Gates’ family philanthropy (Epstein was notably an advocate for transhumanism and eugenics, which informed much of his “philanthropic” activities and funding of prominent scientists). Unsuprisingly, CHAI has been funded by none other than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the tune of tens of millions of dollars (see here and here), and also shares a nearly identical goal of vaccinating “as many children as possible” with its partner Bill Gates’ Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, by “creating dramatic and sustainable improvements to vaccine markets and national immunization programs.” The Gates Foundation notably envisions AI as central to its global health objectives, as it funded a United States Agency for International Development (USAID)—an organization that often acts as a CIA front—effort to push for the global implementation of AI in healthcare.

As a previous Unlimited Hangout investigation noted, Gavi’s stated goal is to create “‘healthy markets’ for vaccines by ‘encourag[ing] manufacturers to lower vaccine prices for the poorest countries in return for long-term, high-volume and predictable demand for those countries.’”

And to bring these relationships full circle once again, Palantir joined “The Trinity Challenge” in 2020, “a global coalition of prominent academic institutions and foundations as well as leading technology, health and insurance companies with the aim of increasing the world’s resilience against the pandemics of the future by harnessing the power of data, analytics.” Its members included Google, Microsoft, Facebook, McKinsey & Company and—the Gates Foundation. The Trinity Challenge has been criticized for framing invasive surveillance and neo-Malthusian policies as “solutions” to the “next” pandemic and as beneficial for global public health.

Indeed, the influence of Gates may have navigated its way into CFA itself, with the CFA director, Dylan George, previously serving as vice-president of biotech firm Ginkgo Bioworks. Ginkgo Bioworks, a partner of the World Economic Forum, was heavily funded by Cascade Investment when the company went public, an investment firm controlled by Bill Gates. By utilizing a “constellation” of shell companies that all connect back to Cascade, Gates also accumulated enough property to make himself the largest farmland owner in the United States during the Covid-era. Cascade is still the largest shareholder of Ginkgo Bioworks.

It should also be noted that Gates supports the United Nation’s (UN) efforts to implement a universal Digital ID as a “human right,” or in reality, a pre-condition for accessing other human rights, for the entire global population by 2030 through the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 16.9. Previously, the EU Digital Covid Certificate enabled governments to, as the Pfizer “Outlook” paper advocates, “restrict global travel” based on a form of digital ID, that importantly had health data attached to it (in this case, only COVID-19 immunization status, testing results and records of previous infections.). Multiple groups seeking to impose digital ID infrastructure globally were intimately involved in digital vaccine passport production during the Covid-19 crisis.

It is important to remember that local travel restrictions, or “decisions surrounding community migration,” during the COVID-19 pandemic were enforced using both physical and digital proof-of-vaccination—a form of ID that attaches “health data” to the ID, with that “health data” then being utilized to determine one’s accessibility to certain human rights (such as entry into certain businesses/events or job access).

Gates’ funding of the CDC, as well as his connection to the CFA and the program’s stated policy aims of analyzing disease spread to identify the “highest risk” key populations and utilizing data to influence “community migration” rights raises an important question: will CFA data be attached to a digital ID, and how might that data be used to determine one’s human rights (such as community migration, for example) during a declared, or anticipated, public heath crisis?

AI Hospitals

While Palantir’s recent transition into AI hospital management is not an exact illustration of life with digital ID, some of its features suggest what a future managed by constant surveillance and AI decision-making might look like—not only in healthcare, but the workplace in general.

According to its website’s “Hospitals for Palantir” page, Palantir is already “powering nurse scheduling, nurse staffing, transfer center optimization, discharge management, and other critical workflows” for more than 15% of US hospitals. Palantir’s “healthcare engineers” work “directly alongside caregivers and hospital operators to build and tailor workflows — prioritizing speed, effectiveness, and usability.”

The tech company has “deployed a first of its kind application that takes into account nurse preferences, granular patient demand forecasts, staff competencies, and existing staff information to automatically generate AI-driven, optimal nursing schedules,” a seemingly innocent project. Yet, the degree of influence that this “first of its kind” application already appears to wield in American hospitals spells a troubling precedent for humanity in the workplace—specifically, by dehumanizing the logistical and bureaucratic nature of hospitals through AI substitutes under the auspices of “objective” machine decision-making.

Palantir’s Foundry is already forecasting “the patient census for a hospital based on data from the emergency department, operating rooms, transfers, discharges, and more.” The tech systems also keep track of the skills and information for every nurse in a hospital, “including (but not limited to) competencies, languages, skills, certifications, tenure, and other talent profile information.” Both kinds of data apparently generate the prime nursing schedule for the entire hospital, down to any given “unit, floor, department, [or] facility.”

While these systems project the image of an altruistic product aimed at providing a more seamless experience for patients and hospital workers alike, critical media scholar Dr. Nolan Higdon, co-author of the book “Surveillance Education” which explores the invasive nature of surveillance technologies in schools (as well as the intersection between Big Tech and the military industrial complex), told Unlimited Hangout that Big Tech companies recycle this altruism-pitch time and time again as a way to mask their ulterior motives:

“Whenever these companies employ data collection mechanisms under the auspices of improving the lives of customers, it ultimately ends up being a scheme to make more money, and at the expense of labor and the customer.

What we’ve seen consistently over and over again is whatever readout they get of the data ends up being an excuse to cut jobs, to overwork individuals, to minimize services and access to services as a way to cut costs…So it’s: if we collect data, how much more work can we throw on the back of this nurse? Can we throw enough work on the back of this nurse where patients will complain and we can cut another job or two? Those are the kind of questions that this data is trying to help folks make.”

Yet Higdon fears that this goal of increasing profits could also enable even more vicious price gouging of patients that the healthcare industry already engages in with little transparency. Palantir claims that its tech can recommend in real time where a hospital should place incoming patients based on “patient-specific criteria” and “current and upcoming [hospital] capacity,” which obviously would require access to a breadth of patient data. Higdon wonders whether or not insurance providers might weaponize this data against patients by raising their premiums based on life decisions of the patient:

“Not everybody is totally honest with their insurer about maybe how much they sleep or how much they drink or how much they party or whatever, right? These tools can be a way to surveil people to find that information out to set premiums that are aimed at maximizing the amount of money you get from customers and save the amount of money for the insurance company.

The more they know about your life, the more justifications they can make about setting premiums. Maybe in their algorithmic counts, if you sleep six hours a night instead of eight hours a night, you’re more likely to have these health outcomes. So they’re going to charge you more money now until your sleep patterns change. Or maybe you eat X amount of processed food and that’s been associated with this outcome. So they’re going to charge more on this premium.

There’s so [much] ‘in the weeds’ evidence that can be used against folks, and you don’t have any recourse. Because again, they go back to, ‘well the objective algorithm has given us this readout.’”

While Palantir vows that it keeps “patient privacy and information governance a top priority,” promises like these simply provide tech companies smokescreens to obfuscate the vast amount of data sharing they engage in. Higdon claims that while many companies, like Palantir, promise users that they do not sell client data, those companies still share it between institutions they’ve entered agreements with. On Palantir’s Medium Blog, for example, it vows to readers that it does not sell or share its data with other customers…that is, “except where those specific clients have entered into an agreement with each other.”

However, whether or not this applies specifically to Palantir’s first and longest-running client, the CIA, remains doubtful. Many tech companies, particularly social media giants and search engines, were revealed in past years to illegally share user data with US intelligence to facilitate vast, post-9/11 surveillance programs of dubious legality. Importantly, at Palantir’s origins its founders collaborated with the intelligence state to resurrect a DARPA-CIA surveillance program that sought to merge existing databases into one “virtual, centralized, grand database.” Given this, it seems more than plausible that Palantir allows US intelligence to access more of the data the company handles than they publicly acknowledge.

Palantir also creates profiles of American citizens for the CIA based on their online activities (and other activities that are surveillable). If Higdon’s concerns of data sharing do indeed apply to Palantir, then Palantir could easily fold its trove of American health data into such profiles. In fact, the CFA requires organizations applying to become partners of the program to describe how they plan to leverage novel data sources “to create new analytic products.” An example they provide for applicants involves using “data fusion techniques” to merge data extracted from the internet with “existing public health data streams” in order to create detailed forecasts of present (or future) events that “reduce latency.”

This is particularly troubling given Palantir’s role in implementing “predictive policing”, i.e. pre-crime, in the United States and that law enforcement and intelligence agencies could weaponize mental health data in particular in the context of preventing crimes before they occur. While some may deem this scenario far-fetched, it is worth considering that the previous Trump administration closely considered a policy to use AI to analyze innocent Americans’ social media profiles for posts that could indicate “early warning signs of neuro-psychiatric violence” as a means of preventing mass shootings before they occur. Per that program, the government would subject Americans flagged by the AI to various mandated mental health interventions or preventive house arrest. A scenario in which law enforcement utilizes mental health data from healthcare settings tied to Palantir in lieu of, or in combination with, social media posts is not difficult to envision.

Further, while Palantir claims to make patient privacy a “top priority,” regulatory bodies have yet to enact any meaningful oversight of the company to prevent it from sharing this data with other organizations, much less itself and thus the other branches of government it actively works with. This lack of transparency creates a “hall of mirrors” that blurs the lines between organizations, and therefore who owns what data, covertly eliminating any rights to privacy while at the same time enabling the corporate construction of a digitized global consciousness made up of the data of unknowing civilians—in this case, all in the name of “public health.”

The Hall of Mirrors

The CDC CFA’s alleged commitment to utilize groundbreaking methods to better public health remains to be seen. Yet, what this article definitively illustrates is that the CFA further entrenches both the public and private wings of the public health apparatus into the “hall of mirrors” of intelligence agency-connected corporations and public institutions. Behind these organizations sit some of the most influential kingmakers of Washington, hailing from Silicon Valley, seemingly committed to utilizing any industry or catastrophe to expand their surveillance of human bodies, equipping them with the capital to become the robber barons of the digital age.

Importantly, however, the CFA does not signify a shift in public health policy, but rather a firm step forward in a years-long effort to drive the entire public health apparatus into the hands of hawkish national security ideologues and their oligarchic, technocratic benefactors. For normal people, the implications of such policy pursuits may be significant. During the “future pandemics” that this entire industry is already spending billions of dollars preparing for—with expected returns in mind—the CFA’s surveillance may dictate the average civilians’ global travel rights, even their ability to traverse their own communities, what medicines they take/have access to and whether they are deemed “high risk” or not.

The actors behind this system are unsurprisingly the same ones that planned, directed and carried out the COVID-19, halfway-digitized, iterations of similar biosecurity policy. The fingerprints of figures like Gates, with the head of the CFA hailing from the Gates-funded Gingko Bioworks, and those of Big Pharma and the Pentagon are plastered all over the program’s doctrine.

Critically, the program’s existence should be considered within the context of the coming Trump administration, which boasts deep ties to its most prominent figures. The Thiel-verse have exerted their influence over D.C. politics wisely, demonstrated not only by the plethora of government contracts won by Thiel-connected companies across agencies, but by the infiltration of Thiel proxies like Founders Fund alumnus J.D. Vance into Trump’s cabinet.

As Stavroula Pabst recently noted in Responsible Statecraft, Thiel “bankrolled fellow venture capitalist and now-VP elect J.D. Vance’s successful 2022 Senate Campaign in Ohio to the tune of $15 million — the most anyone has given to a Senate candidate. Thiel and Vance are in fact long term associates, where Thiel previously assisted Vance’s own venture capital career.” While Trump ended up picking the billionaire national security contractor billionaire Stephen Feinberg as his Deputy Secretary of Defense, he was eyeballing Trae Stephens for the position, formerly of Palantir and a “longtime partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund and co-founder and Executive Chairman at Anduril,” further demonstrating that the relationship between Thiel and Trump continues to endure. In addition, another Thiel proxy – Jim O’Neill, who boasts deep ties to mRNA tech – has been nominated to be the No. 2 at HHS and will likely serve as HHS Secretary if the Senate rejects the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. O’Neill’s upcoming role at HHS heralds not only a continuation but a likely deepening of Palantir’s involvement at HHS sub-agencies like the CDC.

Companies such as Kinsa and Healthy Together stand as well-positioned potential benefactors of this Thiel-friendly relationship with the coming Trump administration, not only because of the connections Diesel Peltz boasts to PayPal Mafia member Elon Musk, Trump himself and early PayPal investor Ron Conway, but because its products have made it a prominent data-miner at the intersection of healthcare and Big Tech. From this perspective, a myriad of other companies including defense contractors Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google, sit in a similar position.

Exactly which companies will be tasked to fulfill certain responsibilities remains to be seen, but the agenda-at-large remains the same; massively increase the surveillance powers of this biosurveillance apparatus, and then utilize these powers to influence public policy, increase control of civilian movement and access to rights, secure deregulated markets for biotechnology and, most importantly, make everything about the individual civilian subject to the surveillance, and scrutiny, of the shadowy organizations occupying the watchtower of the digital panopticon.

The privatization, and thus on-the-surface “decentralization” of this program grants it the appearance of the natural evolution of the free market. Yet Palantir’s origins in the DARPA/CIA Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, as well as the merging of all three of these sectors and the clear gains all stand to achieve, suggest a more organized and cynical pursuit of the policies that CFA appears to be making reality. Together, these industries form a technocratic iteration of the Mighty Wurlitzer. Playing specified tunes to targeted audiences, whether they be the altruistic notions of public health, the frightening potentials of unchecked domestic terrorism or bioterrorism, the catastrophe of global pandemics or even simple workplace efficiency, each melody this apparatus plays serves to manufacture consent for their ability to conduct ever-expanding surveillance of everyone. This obviously makes the declared “public health” purposes of the biosurveillance apparatus at large highly questionable.

After all, the AI-healthcare system promises a more efficient, convenient and effective healthcare system—yet the means by which this system is meant to lead the public to a predictive-health utopia involve the elimination of privacy and the dehumanization of healthcare itself. Left to algorithms controlled by corporate sharks and national security hawks, profits, surveillance and top-down influence are an all but guaranteed outcome, but what will the digitization of care do to the physical, mental and spiritual health of everyone else? Perhaps those people—beyond the data that corporations can extract from them—are an afterthought of those behind the AI-healthcare revolution.

The CDC, Palantir and the AI-Healthcare Revolution .

On November 19, President-Elect Donald Trump announced that Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and co-chair of his transition team, would be his nominee for Commerce Secretary. Lutnick’s company Cantor Fitzgerald and its subsidiaries are multinational in scope, promote the implementation of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (which have major implications for debt politics and economic activity), and are even directly partnered with foreign state-owned firms that recently came under scrutiny following the release of the contents of the laptop of the current (and recently pardoned) First Son, Hunter Biden.

Lutnick had previously been angling for a job as incoming Treasury Secretary, an unsurprising ambition given Cantor Fitzgerald’s outsized role in the U.S. Treasury market (i.e. the U.S. government debt market) and its relationship to dollar stablecoins, which are rapidly becoming one of the main purchasers of U.S. debt. It is unknown currently why Lutnick was passed over for Treasury, despite endorsement for the position from Elon Musk and RFK Jr., and appointed to Commerce instead. However, Trump’s previous Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, was widely believed to have been given the role to repay a past favor of major significance. In Ross’s case, it was his assistance in rescuing Trump from bankruptcy in the early 1990s. At the time, Ross worked for Rothschild Inc., and when clarifying why the European banking dynasty had bailed out the future President, Ross stated “the Trump name is still very much an asset.” Shortly before, Rothschild Inc. had been bankrolling the entry of Robert Maxwell, intelligence asset for Israel and arguably the Soviet Union, into the American economy, with a specific focus on New York City.

During and following the campaign, Lutnick has been a major supporter of Trump’s prospective plan to implement an extensive tariff regime in lieu of income tax. If confirmed, Lutnick will also oversee the approval of the export of sensitive technology of national security interest abroad, negotiate free trade agreements, and oversee the patents office, among other roles. While mainstream reports on his appointment have noted his “hawkish” trade stance with China and his connections to the cryptocurrency agency, much has been left out about Lutnick, his current business entanglements and historical connections to intelligence networks that have sought to undermine the Commerce Department specifically to facilitate the transfer of sensitive U.S. military technology to ostensible adversary states, like China.

Satellogic: Observation is Preservation

In exploring these issues, it is useful to look at one company now closely tied to Lutnick – Satellogic. Lutnick sits on Satellogic’s board, as does former Treasury Secretary from the previous Trump administration Steve Mnuchin and former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, General Joe Dunford. Mnuchin and Dunford invested heavily in Satellogic through the private equity they now work for, Liberty Strategic Capital. Mnuchin has led that firm since its founding. Liberty Strategic Capital’s first investment was in a controversial Israeli intelligence-linked cybersecurity firm called Cybereason. Cybereason’s co-founder and CEO Lior Div has described Cybereason as a continuation of his work in Israeli intelligence outfit Unit 8200, where Div worked on offensive cyber attacks targeting foreign nations. The firm became controversial in the lead-up to the 2020 election for simulating, along with U.S. security agencies like DHS, the necessary threshold of cyberattacks that would induce the cancellation of a U.S. presidential election and the imposition of martial law. Lutnick himself has significant ties to Israel and is a well-known billionaire mega-donor to Israeli and Zionist causes (discussed in detail later in this article).

Satellogic, for its part, employs a former Israeli intelligence officer, Aviv Cohen, as its head of “special projects.” Cohen previously co-founded Fraud Sciences Corp. with Unit 8200 alum Saar Wilf, which was later sold to PayPal and now forms the “back-bone” of its anti-fraud algorithm. Prior to that, Cohen worked for Core Security Technologies, the firm previously co-founded by Satellogic’s co-founders that contracted for numerous U.S. intelligence and military agencies. Since we reported on Cohen’s ties to Satellogic earlier this year in April, Satellogic has made Aviv Cohen’s biography on the company website private.

In an interview with Bloomberg in January 2022, Lutnick and Mnuchin expressed the reasoning behind their venture into Satellogic via Liberty Strategic and CF Acquisition Group V, a subsidiary of Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald. “We felt that space and the satellites in particular is really the next coming gigantic market for data,” explained Lutnick. “I mean, to have images of the whole Earth – data on the whole Earth – the amount of decisions that will unlock, and the ability and the economics of how that will unlock, was extraordinary.” Lutnick furthered that their proprietary lens technology allows customers of Satellogic to “count the containers on the ships,” “count the cars,” “count the trees,” or “count the number of [panels] working and what’s not working in a solar farm,” which “unlocks a vast, vast sea of opportunity in marketplaces.”

In the same interview, Mnuchin expressed similar excitement about the opportunities downstream of such detailed Earth observational technology, but with a telling insight on how said data, when paired with artificial intelligence, can advance the interests of the national security state and increase government-led markets. “We’re very focused on investments where not only can we bring capital but we can bring our expertise. And we’re particularly focused on the technology area, national security, and other forms where we can add a lot of value,” Mnuchin articulated. “So what we liked about this is great technology, very scalable, very affordable, and the combination of having a lot of data with a lot of AI really will enable both very big government markets, and more importantly, very big commercial markets.”

Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald, one of 24 primary dealers of the New York Federal Reserve, is no stranger to participating in the financing of the data broker industry, having given $100 million in equity financing to Near Intelligence Holdings’ effort to go public in May 2022. Near was founded by Idealab’s Bill Gross, the first institutional investor in PayPal, and currently boasts being “the world’s largest source of intelligence on people, places and products.” An October 2023 report by the Wall Street Journal revealed that Near had “provided data to the U.S. military via a maze of obscure marketing companies, cutouts, and conduits to defense contractors.”

While Near business model operates in the shadows, feeding off data scraped from clever advertising mechanisms and unread user agreements behind mobile applications, Satellogic is directly attacking the billions of potential revenue from “creat[ing] all new types of markets” downstream of “scalable, affordable imagery,” according to Mnuchin. Lutnick, in the same conversation with Bloomberg, boasted that Satellogic can “take a video from space of more than a minute of an airport and tell you the brand of plane that is taking off,” in his argument that “this kind of data is such a big market.” Lutnick added that “imagery from satellites” is “one of the world’s great marketplaces.” Echoing that same line of thinking, the former Treasury Secretary stated that he views Satellogic “as more of a data company than necessarily just a space company,” which can leverage “vast amounts of data” in order to “really analyze climate issues, energy supply, food security,” and “supply chains.”

In regards to climate issues, Lutnick claims that Satellogic’s technology will “finally end the concept of climate change” by “literally remap[ing] the Earth every day.” The death of the specific concept of climate change alluded to by Lutnick seemingly refers to the popularized “left wing” modeling of the climate emergency, versus the likely incoming “right wing” carbon market, as articulated in previous reporting from Unlimited Hangout. An unspoken wrinkle in the pricing of carbon, as proposed independently by Lutnick and fellow-Trump advisor Elon Musk, is the dollar denomination and thus the implications on the sale of United States’ Treasuries. In an idea to be explored later in this article, a carbon market denominated in dollars may not solve the “climate crisis,” but it just might help solve the ever-looming debt crisis.

This position has already been taken by Lutnick’s Tether, as the purchasing of government bonds by the stablecoin issuer continually increases in volume and remains poised to become systemically important, as covered in previous reporting by Unlimited Hangout. While Lutnick’s immense connection to the Treasury market – whether through Cantor Fitzgerald itself or its custodial relationship and investment in Tether – led many to believe he was in position to become Treasury Secretary, Trump picked him for Commerce Secretary, and thus placed him in a management position over many public sector entities directly related to his private-sector activities such as Satellogic.

The “very strong, patentable technology” built by Satellogic, as explained by Mnuchin, takes on a new meaning with the appointment of Lutnick to the Department of Commerce (DOC), due to the DOC management of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). This is far from the only conflict of interest within Lutnick’s venture into the public sector, as the DOC manages many bureaus directly impacted by the proliferation of a U.S.-based, private-sector Earth observation company such as Satellogic. Some of the dozen bureaus under the DOC relevant to Satellogic – not to mention Lutnick’s position within the digital asset space via Cantor’s relationship with Tether – include the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), the International Trade Administration (ITA), the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), not to mention the aforementioned NOAA, and USPTO.

Interestingly, the DOC also established the U.S. AI Safety Institute dedicated to upholding the asks within the October 2023 Biden-Harris executive order on “the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” In October 2024, the Biden-Harris administration issued the first ever national security memorandum on AI, empowering the DOC to “harness power of AI for U.S. national security.” Previous U.S. government-sponsored commissions, such as the National Security Commission on AI, had concluded that it was necessary to ensure U.S. military and economic hegemony by forcing American consumers off of “legacy systems” and onto AI-powered alternatives, lest American AI companies lag behind their Chinese counterparts, particularly in the fields of e-commerce and finance. They also made the case for increased, AI-powered mass surveillance – such as that facilitated by Satellogic – as a means of advancing this cause.

In August 2021, the Lutnick-linked Tether, via its subsidiary Northern Data, purchased over 223,000 GPUs (graphical processing units) used in AI computing from the cryptocurrency firm block.one, which was founded by Tether co-founder Brock Pierce. A month later, the stablecoin issuer spent nearly half a billion dollars purchasing Bitcoin miners from block.one in a deal facilitated by Christian Angermeyer, a long-time friend of Palantir’s Peter Thiel. Palantir, which has long-standing and very close ties to the CIA, is a Satellogic partner and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale donated heavily to Trump (as did Palantir itself) while Thiel has extremely close ties with the incoming Vice President J.D. Vance.

Since Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald helped take Satellogic public via SPAC, Satellogic – founded in Argentina and previously based in Uruguay – has now redomiciled in the United States in an effort to obtain lucrative government contracts. The company’s move to Delaware was prompted by Satellogic’s poor financials after going public. However, government contracts have been slow to appear for the firm, with Satellogic securing its first government contract with NASA just this past September. However, a Lutnick-run Commerce Department could alter Satellogic’s chances in securing future contracts. This conflict of interest between Lutnick’s private sector dealings with his newfound government appointment was noted by Politico in October 2024, which claimed that Lutnick was “improperly mixing his business interested with his duties standing up a potential administration.” According to the report, Lutnick took meetings on Capitol Hill under the guise of transition team matters, then “allegedly us[ed] the opportunity to talk about matters impacting his investment firm, Cantor Fitzgerald,” which also included “high-stakes regulatory matters involving its cryptocurrency business.”

This conflict of interest is notable in part because some of the bureaus Lutnick will oversee as Commerce Secretary, such as the NOAA, are targets of Satellogic’s contracting ambitions. For instance, Satellogic markets itself as able to measure carbon emissions from space and has promoted its recent NASA contract as part of the government effort to target climate change. NOAA and other agencies housed under the Commerce Department collect climate data for the U.S. government. As will be noted again shortly, Lutnick was an early pioneer of electronic carbon emissions trading and his company is a major advocate for the implementation of the UN’S SDGs, part of an over-arching UN-supported plan that includes using space satellites to measure carbon emissions.

Last year, the NOAA granted Satellogic a remote sensing license, helping secure “Satellogic’s strategy to capitalize on high-value opportunities in the U.S.,” specifically as it relates to U.S. government contracts. The license grants Satellogic NOAA oversight and the ability to secure contracts with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, a major goal of the company per Satellogic president Matt Tirman.

Satellogic was co-founded in 2010 by CEO Emiliano Kargieman and CTO Gerardo Richarte after spending “some time” at the NASA Ames Campus in Mountain View, CA. Both Kargieman and Richarte previously worked for Core Security Technologies, which was co-founded by Kargieman and boasted national security state clients such as Homeland Security, NSA, NASA, Lockheed Martin, and DARPA. In 1998, Core Security was recognized as an “Endeavor Entrepreneur” by the Endeavor Foundation, whereas Satellogic’s eventual seed round raise was funded by Endeavor’s Santiago Pinto Escalier, in addition to Ariel Arrieta and NXTP Ventures, and the Kargieman-advised Starlight Ventures. Kargieman later founded Aconcagua Ventures in a joint venture with Craig Cogut’s Pegasus Capital, and served as a Member of the Special Projects Group at the World Bank. Pegasus Capital became the main funder of Satellogic-partner CC35, a group seeking to impose a fraudulent carbon market on much of Latin America, as covered in previous reporting from Unlimited Hangout.

Another Core Security Technologies employee that migrated to Satellogic with Kargieman and Richarte is Aviv Cohen, the aforementioned ex-Israeli intelligence officer who is now Satellogic’s head of “special projects.” Chinese tech giant Tencent, which owns a significant stake in Elon Musk’s Tesla, also invested in Satellogic’s Series A, as did Endeavor Catalyst, which is run by LinkedIn/PayPal’s Reid Hoffman, and Valor Capital, whose partners include figures tied to U.S. military and intelligence activities in Latin America, a former CEO of PayPal, as well as CBDC development on the continent. Valor is also advised by Brian Brooks. Brooks was a former employee at OneWest Bank alongside Mnuchin, and was made Acting Comptroller of the Currency in May 2020 via Mnuchin’s designation, where he introduced “regulatory initiatives that provided banks with the green light to offer cryptocurrency custody services and stablecoin payment systems.”

In February 2022, Palantir – a private sector intelligence firm led by PayPal-founder Peter Thiel and created with CIA funds to replace a controversial DARPA mass surveillance and data-mining program – committed to a five year strategic partnership with Satellogic. Satellogic’s partnership with Palantir enables its “government and commercial customers”, which include the CIA and J.P. Morgan, access to Satellogic’s Aleph platform APIs to feed raw satellite imagery to Palantir’s MetaConstellation and Edge AI. This partnership builds on a previous collaboration between Satellogic and Palantir to “field unique AI capabilities to the orbital edge,” including “live upgrades to the satellite’s onboard AI” that enables “an ultra-low-latency maritime use-case.” Palantir and Satellogic customers, which include the Pentagon’s Space Systems Command, Space Force, SpaceX, the government of India, and others, will soon have access to the Edge AI platform running on Satellogic satellites “to offer customers tailored AI insights.” This is expected to increase Satellogic’s business of “data products, streamline pipeline management, and further scale customer delivery required for weekly and daily world remaps.” Some of their customers, like the government/military of Ukraine, have been applying both Palantir and Satellogic “insights” directly to the battlefield for over two years. This underscores that Satellogic’s technology is clearly intended for use in both civilian and military settings.

Epstein Entanglements

In 2022, Satellogic signed a far-reaching agreement with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, itself a major U.S. military and intelligence contractor. SpaceX remains Satellogic’s “preferred launch provider” for launching its satellites into near-Earth orbit. During the campaign and since the election, Lutnick and Musk have collaborated extensively, with Musk even endorsing Lutnick for his preferred nomination as Trump’s incoming Treasury Secretary.

Notably, Musk’s SpaceX was allegedly infiltrated by Lutnick’s former next-door neighbor, intelligence asset, pedophile and sexual blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein reportedly introduced a member of his “entourage” to Musk’s brother Kimbal, then on the board of SpaceX. That young woman, who had previously “dated” Epstein and lived at the 301 66^th St East apartment complex now known to have housed women Epstein trafficked, then dated Kimbal Musk from 2011 to 2012. As a consequence, the relationship with Kimbal “brought Epstein into contact with the Musk family and its businesses.” This allegedly culminated in Epstein touring SpaceX facilities in 2012, a claim a SpaceX attorney very belatedly denied after the incident was first reported by Business Insider. Kimbal Musk is also on the board of another of his brother’s companies – Tesla – and, prior to his 2019 arrest, Epstein confirmed claims from sources that he was privately advising Tesla in 2018 to journalist James Stewart. After Epstein was infamous, Musk denied the claims. Per Stewart, Epstein was apparently part of the attempted deal to take Tesla private with Saudi money in 2018. Epstein was also a very close advisor at that time to the then and current de facto leader Muhammad bin Salman. Since then, an Epstein associate turned venture capitalist, Nicole Junkermann, has become a significant investor in SpaceX.

In addition, Elon Musk himself was subpoenaed as part of the now-shuttered USVI lawsuit against the bank JP Morgan for its role in facilitating Epstein’s crimes and is known to have socialized with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell on several occasions prior to Epstein’s 2019 arrest and death later that same year. In one such meeting, brokered by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Musk was reported to have introduced Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook/Meta. Musk also attended the Edge Foundation’s “billionaire dinners,” which courted top figures in Silicon Valley and operated as a de facto front for an Epstein-run influence operation for several years, coinciding with the genesis of the “billionaire dinners.” Furthermore, Richard Sorkin, the CEO of Elon and Kimbal Musk’s first company Zip2, joined an Israeli intelligence-linked tech company headed by Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister Isabel Maxwell shortly after the sale of Zip2 to Compaq in 1999.

In addition, Musk shares some business links to Epstein associates. For instance, a major supplier to Tesla, LS Power (via its subsidiary EVgo), and its affiliated hedge fund Luminus Management are closely linked to Jonathan Barrett, who was a managing director of LS Power and has led Luminus Management since 2011. Barrett also held several other senior roles at LS Power between 2003 and 2008. Barrett is a former protégé of Jeffrey Epstein’s who started his career working at Epstein’s firm J. Epstein & Co. and also became the CFO and Vice President of Ossa Properties, the real estate firm run by Epstein’s brother Mark and co-founded by Barrett’s brother Anthony. Barrett listed his legal address for many years as being 301 66 St East in Manhattan, an apartment complex that is majority owned by Ossa that housed many of the women actively being trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and which was frequented by Epstein’s associates, including several who stayed overnight, like former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

LS Power, where Barrett was a top executive, has been investigated “for fraudulent conveyance of assets” in several bankruptcy cases. In addition, LS Power’s founder, Mike Segal – whose son Paul is now the firm’s CEO, did business with the Bufalino crime family. Luminus Management was also the largest shareholder in Valaris, which sold $650 million in oil rigs to Musk’s SpaceX in 2020. In addition, another firm closely linked to Luminus – Luminus Capital Management and the Luminus Capital Partners Master Fund – counts Alex Erskine as a director. Erskine was previously a director for the Jeffrey Epstein-chaired financial vehicle Liquid Funding, which was partially owned by Bear Stearns before its collapse during the 2008 financial crisis.

As recently noted, Howard Lutnick was the long-time next-door neighbor of Epstein’s now infamous New York townhouse at 9 E. 71^st St. Lesser known perhaps, is Epstein’s long history with that property and that connection of the entity that ultimately sold the home to Lutnick. Lutnick’s address, 11 E. 71^st St., was first purchased by a Leslie Wexner-controlled entity called SAM Conversion Corp in 1988, a year before the Nine East 71^st Street Corp. (of which Epstein was president) bought the neighboring home. In 1992, SAM Conversion Corp. – with Epstein now its Vice President – sold the 11 E 71^st St property to the 11 East 71st Street Trust – where Epstein was a trustee – for “ten dollars and other valuable consideration paid by the party of the second part,” according to Crain’s New York. During this time, Leslie Wexner “refurbished” the property at 9 E. 71^st St. for tens of millions of dollars, which included adding an unusual “security system” reportedly later used to record videos, allegedly for the purposes of blackmail, once Epstein inhabited the residence. It is unknown if similar “refurbishments” were made to the neighboring house later bought by Lutnick that was also under Epstein/Wexner control at the same time.

In 1996, with Epstein already inhabiting 9 E. 71^st St. for at least a year, the neighboring home at 11 E. 71^st St. was sold to Comet Trust for “ten dollars and other valuable consideration.” Some reports have suggested the price paid for the home was around $6.2 million. The trustee of Comet involved in the sale was Guido Goldman, the son of famous Zionist Nahum Goldman, a very close friend of Henry Kissinger and founder of the German Marshall Fund, which later spawned the controversial Alliance for Securing Democracy. Goldman was also the apparent liaison between the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the CIA. At the time the sale was made to Goldman and the Comet Trust, Epstein was also part of the CFR and, according to a 2001 report in the UK’s Evening Standard, told people that he had once worked for the CIA.

The Comet Trust was one of three trusts established “for the benefit of descendants of the late Minda de Gunzberg,” who was born Minda Bronfman and was the sister to Charles and Edgar Bronfman. Their father, Sam Bronfman, built the family liquor empire in large part to his ties to organized crime elements during the American Prohibition era. Charles Bronfman co-founded the “Mega Group” with Leslie Wexner in 1991, which spawned Birthright Israel, an organization that counts the Lutnicks as among their top donors. In addition, Edgar Bronfman was arguably the main player in the insider trading scandal that allegedly resulted in Epstein leaving Bear Stearns in 1981. Edgar’s son, Edgar Jr., also appears in Epstein’s black book of contacts and Edgar’s daughters, Sara and Clare, were central figures in the NXIVM sex cult scandal. The Comet Trust later sold the home to Howard Lutnick, again for “10 dollars and other valuable consideration” and Lutnick took out a $4 million mortgage on the property the same day the sale was made. Lutnick has never publicly commented on his property’s history or any information regarding his relationship with his former next-door neighbor.

Notably, Edgar Bronfman Jr. heavily funds and chairs the start-up accelerator network, Endeavor, which backs Satellogic, among other companies. Another major backer of Endeavor is Pierre Omidyar, a major donor to Clinton and Obama with a long history of collaborating with U.S. intelligence. (Lutnick himself was a major donor to Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and has long backed a variety of Democrats before deciding to back Trump relatively recently.)

In addition, alongside Lutnick on Satellogic’s board is Marcos Galperin, Argentina’s richest man, who is considered Endeavor’s earliest success story and who maintains close ties to the organization. Endeavor targets emerging market start-ups specifically and is also very closely connected to a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein’s, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Another major figure in the Endeavor network is Eduardo Elzstain, an Argentine oligarch who – like many other Argentines connected to Endeavor – has cultivated close ties to current president of Argentina Javier Milei. Elzstain, a long-time associate of George Soros, hosts the Argentine equivalent of Bilderberg – the annual, closed-to-the-public Llao Llao Forum which is frequented by members of Endeavor Argentina. Elzstain is also on the board of the WJC – whose long-time president was Edgar Bronfman Sr. Elzstain also boasts close ties to the apocalyptic-messianic Chabad Lubavitch movement, which has significant ties to Donald Trump, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and also to Howard Lutnick.

Lutnick and the Search for Dollar Debt Sinks

In addition to being backed by Endeavor, Satellogic is now also backed by Tether, which boasts important ties to Lutnick. Cantor, which is “majority-owned by its CEO Lutnick,” was recently revealed to be a 5% owner of Tether after a $600 million investment, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. The assumed largest shareholder of Tether, co-founder Giancarlo Devasini, reportedly told the paper that “Lutnick will use his political clout to try to defuse threats facing Tether.”

While already pegged for Commerce Secretary and verbally committed to stepping down as CEO at Cantor upon Senate confirmation, Lutnick is currently working closely with Trump by “vetting candidates for other top government jobs that could involve supervising Tether.” While naturally the regulation on stablecoin issuers would have profound implications for Tether and its minority-owner Cantor, the importance of this blossoming industry as a net-buyer of government bonds in an era of high inflation (and $36 trillion in already-issued debt) pegs Tether and its ilk as systemically important to the United States government’s survival.

In order for an incoming Trump administration to successfully meet the demands of their congressional budget, while also servicing our compounding trillions in debt already owed, the Treasury needs to find a willing buyer for that newly issued debt. In the past 18 months, a new high volume net buyer of this debt has appeared in the form of stablecoin issuers, such as Tether or Circle, which have purchased over $150 billion of U.S. debt in the form of securities issued by the Treasury in order to “back” the issuance of their dollar-pegged tokens with a dollar-denominated asset. For some perspective, China and Japan, historically the U.S.’ largest creditors, hold just under and just over $1 trillion, respectively, in these same debt instruments. Despite only existing for a decade, and only surpassing a $10 billion market cap in 2020 – the same year Trump’s OCC passed a bulletin allowing U.S. banks to hold stablecoins – Tether is already earmarked for over 10% the Treasuries held by either of the U.S.’ largest nation-state creditors. As previously mentioned, Tether’s impressive stash of Treasuries are custodied by Lutnick’s Cantor.

Using stablecoins as a method to mitigate the U.S. debt problem has been circulating among Republicans for some time, including former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who articulated this exact sentiment in a recent op-ed with The Wall Street Journal titled “Crypto Could Stave Off a U.S. Debt Crisis.” Ryan claims that “stablecoins backed by dollars provide demand for U.S. public debt” and thus “a way to keep up with China.” He speculated that “the [debt] crisis is likely to start with a failed Treasury auction,” which in turn leads to “an ugly surgery on the budget.” The former Speaker predicted that “the dollar will suffer a major confidence shock” and as a result asks, “What can be done?” His answer is to “start by taking stablecoins seriously.” Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino echoed this sentiment, referring to Tether as “the best friend of the U.S. government,” due to “hold[ing] more U.S. Treasury securities than Germany, much more than any other competitor or any other financial institution in the world.” Tether also notably is partnered with U.S. agencies like the FBI and Secret Service.

Dollar-backed stablecoins are arriving as “an important net purchaser of U.S. government debt,” Ryan notes, with stablecoin issuers now the 18th largest holder of U.S. Debt. Ryan goes on to say that “if fiat-backed dollar stablecoin issuers were a country,” that nation “would sit just outside the top 10 in countries holding Treasurys,” still less than Hong Kong but “larger than Saudi Arabia,” the U.S.’ former partner in the petrodollar system. Ardoino articulated that Tether is “happy to decentralize the ownership of the U.S. debt, making the U.S. much more resilient.”

Satellogic, and thus Tether and Cantor, are also involved in the development of carbon markets and predatory climate finance endeavors. Cantor was a pioneer of electronic carbon emissions trading and continues to promote climate finance as well as implementation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Satellogic positions itself as able to measure carbon emissions from space, a policy supported in the UN document “Our Common Agenda” and has begun to attempt to do this via GREEN+, as covered in previous reporting by Unlimited Hangout.

NOAA, which granted Satellogic a license and which Lutnick will oversee, collects climate data for the government and the Commerce Department in general would play a major role in establishing any form of “carbon pricing,” whether a carbon market, as Satellogic is helping to build, or a carbon tax, a policy long supported by prominent Trump backers like Elon Musk. Naturally, the promotion of a carbon tax –tellingly proposed by one of the world’s richest men who also happens to own the largest EV company in the world – would simply further the class divide that currently exists in the United States, with the rich having no problems upgrading to emission-free vehicles nor meeting the expenses brought on by such a tax system. The actual enforcement, and thus the successful creation, of such a proposal requires exactly the type of data provided by an Earth observation company – a field in which Satellogic stands somewhat alone.

Carbon pricing is simply not possible without government-vetted, accurate measurements of carbon molecule density, and thus the market for reliable data service providers has quietly been dominated by Satellogic. As the debt instruments of the private sector evolve alongside the proliferation of blockchain technology, the data that makes these smart contracts execute to eventually settle no longer goes to a human arbitrator, but rather a consciousness-free protocol that reduces a pair of potential outcomes to a single output. This oracle and settlement protocol is seemingly poised to be the blockchain, at least that is the argument made in this piece, and exemplified by many of the affiliates and partners of Satellogic, including Lutnick. These novel green finance instruments can be upheld and paid out by blockchains and smart contracts, including the Bitcoin-sidechain Rootstock, which was listed on documents as being another partner of GREEN+ alongside Satellogic and CC35.

Additionally, such as in the case of Satellogic partner O.N.E. Amazon, entities can create entirely new blockchain protocols to issue and uphold settlement of tokenized “real world assets,” known as RWAs. O.N.E. Amazon is chaired by Peter Knez, who oversaw the creation of ETFs (exchange traded funds) while heading Barclay’s iShares division. iShares is now owned by BlackRock after being purchased in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and features the fastest growing ETF in history, the iShares IBIT Bitcoin ETF.

O.N.E. Amazon aims to create “sustainable impact for the environment and investors by using next-generation technology to bring innovation to conservation.” The “innovation” O.N.E. Amazon offers is related to its issuance of a capped-supply of “regulated O.N.E. Amazon Digital Asset Securit[ies].” Per Knez, “each security will represent the perceived value of one hectare of biome in the Amazon rainforest, backed by a 30-year preservation agreement over that land,” capped at 750 million, “corresponding to the hectarage of the rainforest.” In other words, each security issued represents one hectare of the Amazon. O.N.E Amazon asserts that “investors will benefit from the potential capital appreciation of the security” in large part due to “the finite size” of the rainforest it is tokenizing.

Knez co-authored a paper with Mysten Labs – founded by former Facebook/Meta employees who helped develop their stablecoin project, Libra/Diem, as covered in previous reporting by Unlimited Hangout – titled “Preserving Nature’s Ledger: Blockchains in Biodiversity Conservation,” which promotes a framework that focuses on “tokenization strategies for biodiversity species and for IoT [internet of things] solutions, such as sensors, drones, and satellites to monitor and record data related to species and ecosystems.” Satellogic isn’t the only concerning firm partnered with O.N.E. Amazon, for instance, Aecom, – the successor to the CIA-linked Ashland Oil – currently contracts extensively with USAID, which is widely believed to be a CIA front organization. Interestingly, Knez’ co-founder, Rodrigo Veloso, played a significant role in the efforts to take Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) public, the parent company of the Trump-centric social network Truth Social.

With the carbon credit market and tokenized RWAs presenting themselves as the preferred debt instruments of the modern era, Lutnick’s Satellogic finds itself ready to act as a crucial pillar of the encroaching new financial system, assuming the U.S. can get other nations to participate in these new technology spheres. This is the role that the Department of Commerce has previously and controversially played, and thus worth investigating the recent history of the DOC as Lutnick prepares to commandeer it.

The Commerce Department and the Legacy of “Chinagate”

Though Lutnick’s aforementioned ties to the Epstein-Wexner-Bronfman network are circumstantial, Lutnick’s ties to the government of Israel (which had a significant relationship with Epstein) and Zionist causes are numerous. Indeed, Lutnick has said that his main reason for deciding to work with the Trump campaign was because of Trump’s extreme pro-Israel stance, with Trump having personally told Lutnick’s wife Alison that “I will be the best President for Israel.”

In that past year, Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, has donated heavily to support Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip in addition to $7 million the fund gave “to support those impacted by the way in Israel.” A portion of this went to the Israeli volunteer-based emergency services organization, United Hatzalah, which is itself a member of the World Economic Forum and whose founder Eli Beer, an Israeli real estate mogul, has been a WEF Young Global Leader and award recipient from Klaus Schwab’s Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. Lutnick and his wife chaired United Hatzalah’s United Hatzalah annual fundraising gala earlier this year. United Hatzalah became infamous in some circles last year for fabricating claims of Hamas brutality on October 7^th, including claims of a baby burnt in an oven, that the organization later admitted were untrue.

Lutnick’s appointment to be Commerce Secretary is significant in light of the fact of his ties to Israel, Zionist organizations and his circumstantial ties to the Epstein nework, as Israel – and Epstein specifically – were part of a major, largely forgotten scandal of the Clinton era that culminated with the apparent murder of Clinton’s Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and many employees of the Commerce’s International Trade Administration (ITA) office. Commerce and ITA had been targeted by figures tied to both the Chinese government and Israel with the goal of transferring sensitive U.S. military technology, mainly satellites, to China in exchange for the covert arms smuggling of banned Chinese weapons into urban centers in the U.S. West Coast. At the time, those urban centers were also being targeted with a CIA-manufactured crack cocaine epidemic, as reported by the late Gary Webb. The smuggling of arms into these areas was obviously meant to be aggravate a multi-pronged effort by what was essentially the Iran-Contra network (of which Bill Clinton had been part) to decimate minority communities in West Coast urban centers, with the apparent goal of facilitating the growth of the private prison industry and the prison labor pool.

As detailed in the book One Nation Under Blackmail, the Commerce Department – and the ITA specifically – deals with the export of non-agricultural U.S. products abroad, and was apparently the main target of what is now remembered as a “campaign finance scandal” often referred to as “Chinagate.” However, the scandal – though intimately involving Chinese government-owned firms – is significantly larger than China in scope and should be seen as a continuation of the CIA-Israeli intelligence nexus responsible for illegal operations that harmed American national security, such as those that formed the bulk of the Iran-Contra scandal under the Reagan and Bush administrations. Bill Clinton had been intimately involved with the Iran-Contra nexus while he was governor of Arkansas, which was partially facilitated by his long-time connection to his political benefactor Jackson Stephens, who was also tied to Iran-Contra. Ultimately, this is where the group responsible for the genesis of Chinagate can be found.

Stephens and his business partners, the Riady family, were largely responsible for the hiring of main Chinagate figures like Johnny Huang to the Commerce Department’s ITA. Shortly before Chinagate began, the Riadys became business partners of the Chinese government. Other central figures in Chinagate, like Mark Middleton and C. Joseph Giroir, were connected to and later employed by the Riady family directly as the scandal unfolded. Middleton, notably, was the main person whom Jeffrey Epstein would visit at the Clinton White House. Most of those visits were made in the lead-up to the 1996 presidential election, the election around which the “campaign finance scandal” aspect of Chinagate took place.

The campaign finance aspect of Chinagate ultimately served to grant non-American citizens, like the Riadys and their allies, unprecedented access mainly to Ron Brown, then head of Commerce. The Riadys and their associates used several “strawmen” to mask illegal campaign contributions to Clinton’s re-election campaign. There were also American businessman who sought special access to Brown, like Bernard Schwartz of Loral, who had been the biggest donor to the DNC for the 1996 election and used his access to Brown to secure meetings with major Chinese politicians and businessmen in charge of state-owned enterprises. A separate probe into Loral was opened as Chinagate began to be investigated, as Loral-produced satellites were discovered in the hands of Chinese military-linked firms and because of apparent evidence that Loral had facilitated “an unauthorized transfer of missile technology” to China. Schwartz had previously used his influence to lobby the Clinton administration to move approvals for satellite exports abroad from the State Department, to Brown’s Commerce Department.

Meanwhile, other figures in Chinagate successfully pushed Clinton to ban Chinese weapons imports (the U.S. was then their largest market for guns) in order to secure Congressional approval of “most favored nation” trade status for China. However, figures brought into close contact with Clinton by the Chinagate nexus, like China’s “top weapons dealer” Wang Jun, were later involved in efforts to illegally smuggle very large amounts of those banned weapons into the U.S. Those smuggling efforts were later partially foiled by the FBI in what is now referred to as Operation Dragon Fire. However, the top operatives – including those linked to Wang Jun – that were involved in the smuggling effort were tipped off and managed to escape the U.S., with only their underlings ultimately taking the blame.

Yet, there is also the possibility that the Iran-Contra era airline that had previously been involved in arms smuggling and drug trafficking in the Reagan/Bush era may have played a role in keeping it going. An American billionaire with close ties to both China and Israel, Leslie Wexner, and his close associate Jeffrey Epstein were involved with the re-location of that CIA-linked airline, Southern Air Transport, from Miami to Ohio and shifted its main routes from between North, Central and South America to between Ohio and Hong Kong. Ohio officials at the time suspected that the change in route and Wexner’s acquisition of the airline was linked to organized crime and, just years prior, Ohio law enforcement had produced documentation (which was later heavily censored) linking Wexner directly to organized crime interests. Meanwhile, Epstein cultivated close ties with key figures in Chinagate simultaneously, particularly with Mark Middleton – who was later killed in a murder made to look like a suicide after Epstein’s extensive visits with him at the Clinton White House were made public.

Middleton was not the only figure in Chinagate to suffer a grisly fate. Just as “Chinagate” was beginning to come to light, Ron Brown and much of the top brass at the ITA were “asked unexpectedly to travel to Croatia.” The “unexpected” travel offer was made shortly after Brown agreed to a plea deal where he would have testified in probes that would have exposed a significant part of the “Chinagate” nexus if he had been able to testify. The Croatia trip, however, ended in tragedy when the plane carrying Brown and top Commerce personnel crashed, killing everyone on board. President Clinton publicly said the crash was due to “a peculiar mix of circumstances” and, three days after the crash, the head of navigation at the Croatian airport allegedly “responsible” for the crash was found dead, shot in the chest. His death was quickly ruled a “suicide.” At the crash site, strange anomalies were found by the U.S. military investigators who responded to the scene, who identified an apparent gunshot wound in Brown’s skull that, obviously, would not have caused by the crash itself.

Ultimately, proximity to Epstein and the state of Israel is complicated when one considers the long-running and documented history of Israel passing sensitive American security technology shared with “our greatest ally,” a phenomenon that preceded and continued after the “Chinagate” scandal. Thus, Howard Lutnick’s ties not only to Israel and his circumstantial yet proximal relationship to Epstein should be scrutinized as should Lutnick’s business ties to China. For instance, the BGC Group, which Lutnick controls, has a joint venture with the Chinese state-owned China Credit Trust. China Credit Trust is the largest shareholder in Harvest Fund Management, which created BHR Partners alongside the Hunter Biden-linked firm Rosemont Seneca and the Thornton Group, headed by James Bulger, nephew of the infamous mobster James “Whitey” Bulger.

Notably, another figure in Trump’s sphere (though not poised to serve a formal or informal role in his next administration) – Blackwater founder Erik Prince – is closely financially connected to one of the main Chinese firms that had been involved in Chinagate, CITIC, which is the largest shareholder in Prince’s Frontier Services Group.

Lutnick, The Dollar and Financial Control

The reason behind exploring the role the Department of Commerce has played in the Chinagate and Iran-Contra scandals is not to falsely associate the incoming Lutnick-led DOC with historical corruption – seeing as how Lutnick has plenty of his own controversial connections and conflicts of interest, as detailed above – but rather to demonstrate the decades-long technology transfer as a necessity for imperial economic hegemony.

While the United States has been history’s most recent empire of choice for imposing a unilateral economic paradigm on much of the world in the post-World War II era, the groups that have long dominated the American establishment – or more appropriately the Anglo-American establishment – have been working for over a century to create “a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.” Per historian Caroll Quigley, this system would be controlled in “feudalistic fashion” by principally bankers, who hammer out secret agreements at frequent private meetings and conferences.

Samuel Pisar, a prominent lawyer for major U.S.-based corporations, stepfather to current Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and one of the closest friends and confidants of Robert Maxwell, openly told Congress in 1971 that this global system of financial control in private hands had already arrived. Pisar spoke of this system as the rise of the “transideological corporation,” where the firms of the “capitalist” West were merging and/ or forging significant agreements or joint ventures with the state-owned businesses of the “communist” East. The result, per Pisar, was that “all conventional tools of national policy” had become “anachronistic” and that nation states were no longer “dependable economic entit[ies].” Pisar, who declined to condemn this phenomenon, noted that the two main vehicles driving the rise of this global system of financial control in private (or semi-private) hands are the rise of the multinational corporation, technology transfer and the dominance of the US dollar outside of American domestic markets, e.g. the Eurodollar market. Now, with much of this global financial control system well-established and entrenched, the world can be more easily on-boarded onto a single, hegemonic currency controlled by entities that ultimately answer to the now hegemonic “transideological corporation.”

The successful proliferation of a new financial system across the globe with digital dollars native to the internet is innately reliant on broadband internet, cellular network providers, readily-available smartphones powered by economical microprocessors, and wide-spread operational knowledge of every pillar upholding blockchain technology. The technological infrastructure needed to issue digital securities, “decentralize” government debt, tokenize parcels of the rain forest, or to uphold a carbon market, bring about many surveillance concerns that come downstream of the realities of a completely digital economy.

The technology transfer – led in no small part by various iterations of the DOC – has enabled a globalized, internet dollar and thus severely neutered the ability of non-U.S. central banks and governments to retain capital within their border. Interestingly, the infrastructure upholding the national security interests of the United States is dominated by private sector, U.S.-based FinTech stalwarts, including the owners of the fiber optic cables running beneath our oceans and Satellogic’s satellites-as-a-service orbiting our skies. This legal or Constitutional barrier between the public sectors interests and the private sector that builds the technology actualizing said interests allows the data brokers that glean information directly from these technological spigots to package and sell user data to both private and public entities alike. In few industries is this concept more dangerous for the freedom and privacy of global citizens than it is within the purely digital economy perpetuated by Lutnick’s Tether, and the e-carbon market regime made possible by Lutnick’s Satellogic.

Despite the populist momentum present in U.S. political rhetoric since the dominating election night display put on by the incoming Trump administration, the country finds itself in a perilous position. Well, it certainly would be if not for the technology-driven financial revolution waiting in the (West?) wings. With the nation nearly $40 trillion dollars in the hole, and with defense spending now outpaced by simply servicing the interest on said debt, if it wasn’t for the private sector rescue unit – led in no small part by companies affiliated with Lutnick – the incoming Red-branches of American power would be facing a serious crisis. Thankfully, the global technology transfer needed to facilitate the dollarized panopticon has long been completed, and the hegemonic-weakening leaks in the proverbial dyke have been plugged by the likes of Tether and Satellogic, whose few competitive predators – be it fellow American FinTech companies or international intelligence affiliates – now find themselves at the whim of a Department of Commerce and executive branch all-but-ready to play king-maker via regulation and enforcement.

At the end of the day, the government is no different from a corporation, with a budget needing to be serviced alongside personnel and hiring requirements – both of which demand high quantities of high fidelity data. This data will be sequestered, distributed, and parsed via the fiber optic cables, the microprocessors, the blockchains and the satellites the U.S. produces. It is thus certainly fitting then that the next phase of American empire will once again be upheld by private companies and the likes of our new Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Howard Lutnick and the Commandeering of the Department of Commerce.

While many Republicans for years have railed against the official narrative around climate change and many of the solutions promoted to mitigate it, climate finance is poised to make a comeback over the next 4 years, despite Republicans taking both the White House and the legislature by a significant margin. This is because many of the most influential names in the incoming Trump administration, as well as the previous one, have become intimately involved in creating carbon markets in recent years, while others have a long-standing track record of pushing carbon taxes and other forms of “carbon pricing.”

Chief among these is Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of Trump’s transition team who has stated that he is tasked with finding the “talent” for the incoming administration. Lutnick is the long-time and current head of Cantor Fitzgerald, which was one of the earliest players in emission trading and has since become a global leader in ESG investing, “sustainable infrastructure” financing and green bonds. For example, Cantor’s sustainable infrastructure fund is expressly committed to “digital transformation, decarbonization and the improvement and modernization of aging infrastructure,” while “a primary focus for the Fund will be to invest in issuers that are helping to address certain United Nations Sustainable Development Goals through their products and services.” In addition, the top constituent of another Cantor infrastructure fund is Invenergy, a renewable energy company that has received a significant amount of subsidies from the Biden’s controversial Inflation Reduction Act and is run by the country’s first “wind billionaire” Michael Polsky.

Lutnick also servers on the board of a satellite surveillance company called Satellogic. In addition to Lutnick, former Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin chairs its board and also on the board is Joe Dunford, the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. military under Trump. Satellogic is an integral part of a consortium attempting to use opaque contractual agreements at the municipal level to impose a massive, blockchain-based carbon market on Latin America. That carbon market, operating under the name GREEN+, is poised to be built on a Bitcoin side-chain and, as previously reported, its carbon credit scheme is deeply inequitable for Latin American communities. For instance, the only money communities could make from the scheme would be only available for GREEN+-approved “sustainable” projects while GREEN+ members would reap the bulk of the profits. The program would also subject communities to Satellogic’s satellite surveillance apparatus (tied to the U.S. government and Israeli intelligence) without their consent.

In addition, GREEN+ is notably tied to figures close to Trump’s allies in the region. For example, a major figure in Nayib Bukele’s political party – San Salvador mayor Mario Durán – is a vice president of one of the main groups orchestrating the GREEN+ scheme while the Endeavor Argentina network, which has very close ties to Argentina’s Javier Milei, is also very closely linked to Satellogic. For instance, Satellogic itself is an Endeavor-backed company while Endeavor’s first billionaire entrepreneur, Marcos Galperín of MercadoLibre, serves on Satellogic’s board. In addition, a major investor in Satellogic, the dollar stablecoin issuer Tether, is also closely connected to Howard Lutnick. Lutnick is a long-time major advocate of Tether and Cantor Fitzgerald custodies the bulk of Tether’s U.S. Treasuries that back up their stablecoin and its peg to the U.S. dollar.

In addition to Lutnick, prominent Trump backer and donor Elon Musk, who has pledged to work with Lutnick to usher in an unprecedented age of government “efficiency,” has invested heavily in carbon removal technology and even created a $100 million prize to spur new carbon removal methods. Musk also previously broke ties with Trump during his previous administration after Trump pulled out of the Paris climate agreement in 2017. He is also a long-time advocate for carbon taxes. Musk previously lobbied the Biden administration on implementing a carbon tax, a policy supported by Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

Yet, under the Trump administration, the push for a carbon tax was led by Republicans, reflecting the policy’s bipartisan support. That Trump-era proposal, known as the Baker-Shultz plan, called to repeal emissions regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency and a roll-back of some Obama-era climate policies in exchange for replacing them with a carbon tax. The plan was framed as a way to “let the market decide” how to price carbon as opposed to government. Something similar could be deployed by the next Trump administration as a “compromise” that would see the Biden-era climate policies that Trump campaigned against rolled back in exchange for the implementation of some form of “carbon pricing,” like a carbon tax.

The Baker-Schultz plan is named for James Baker and George Schultz, two Republicans who served in the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. This is notable as it was during the Bush Sr. administration that emissions trading was first created with government support. The father of emissions trading, first for sulphur dioxide and then again for carbon, is Richard Sandor, a former executive at the scandal-ridden, corrupt Drexel Burnham Lambert (Drexel’s most notorious criminal – Michael Milken – was pardoned by Trump during his previous term). Drexel was a key figure in the financial scandals of the 1980s, including the Savings & Loans crisis which had intimate ties to James Baker and the Bush family as well as the CIA and organized crime.

Sandor is also considered the father of financial derivatives and helped draft the cap and trade component of the Kyoto Protocol. He did so in direct collusion with Maurice Strong, the architect of Agenda 21 – the pre-cursor to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Strong was also a long-time associate of David Rockefeller, an oil magnate and a notoriously corrupt UN official who later had to flee North America to China due to his involvement to the UN’s oil-for-food scandal. Sandor subsequently was a major influence on Obama-era climate policies, but also has close ties to Trump-era figures, like J. Christopher Giancarlo – who was made chair of the CFTC by Trump in 2017. Giancarlo, a major advocate of turning the U.S. dollar into a programmable, surveillable private sector digital currency, has called Sandor “one of the true visionary developers of new financial products.”

Ultimately, emissions trading itself was originally a Republican policy and has since been promoted in bipartisan fashion for several decades. While Trump did pull the U.S. out of the Paris agreement, the out-sized role of Lutnick and Musk (who cut ties with Trump last time over climate policy) in shaping his next administration’s policies and cabinet picks suggests that Trump has now softened his stance on “market-based” climate solutions. For anyone that has followed Trump’s policy record from his first term, it was quite clear that Trump – like any American politician – is usually willing to give Wall Street what it wants. Some examples of him doing this include giving Larry Fink, the veritable king of ESG, near complete control over U.S. fiscal policy during Covid, resulting in a massive wealth transfer, and Trump also deregulated the banking industry despite campaigning in 2015-2016 on reinstating Glass Steagall and other regulations on the biggest banks. (Other industries whose products have major environmental and public health consequences, such as GMO crops, were also heavily deregulated during the first Trump administration.)

Though it’s certainly true that Republicans in the legislature have largely rejected carbon taxes and markets earlier this year, the fact that Trump has surrounded himself with climate finance advocates and the fact that Wall Street needs climate finance to unlock an entire new asset class to fuel their casino (lest it collapse) are strong indicators that some sort of “carbon pricing” is in the works. Even prominent figures in the “MAHA” “unity” movement, like former RFK Jr. VP pick Nicole Shanahan have advocated for using tokenized carbon credits to facilitate U.S. government money printing (i.e. “quantitative easing”) and U.S. debt management. With a U.S. debt crisis in the cards and Howard Lutnick, one of the biggest traders of U.S. government debt, at the helm of choosing Trump’s next cabinet, the likelihood of a carbon market has never been higher, despite the recent Republican victory.

Featured Image: Elon Musk (right) speaks at an October 2024 Trump campaign rally alongside Howard Lutnick (left)

Get Ready for the Republican Carbon Market.