Almost three hundred years before Bram Stoker ever dreamed up Dracula there was a countess living in a castle in the mountains who was so rich and so beautiful and so completely untouchable that she spent the better part of a decade murdering young girls without anybody lifting a finger to stop her. What she supposedly did with their blood is the reason she’s still the most famous female serial killer who ever lived.

By the time she turned forty she was a widow with a mountain castle and a fortune and a face that hadn’t aged a day since her wedding. Men lined up for her. Princes rode across half of Europe for one sweaty night in her bed and went home bragging about it to their friends. Not one of them ever wondered why the most beautiful woman in Hungary always smelled a little bit like a butcher shop.

Legend says she found her secret by accident. A servant girl tugged a knot too hard while she was brushing out the countess’s hair and Elizabeth smacked her so hard that the girl’s blood splattered across her wrist. She rubbed at the spot and the skin underneath looked brand new like she had peeled ten years off in one swipe. Most people would have washed their hands but Elizabeth went looking for more.

There was plenty more down in the villages below her castle where dirt poor families were thrilled to send a daughter up the mountain to scrub floors for a countess in exchange for a hot meal and a bed that wasn’t made of straw.

She liked them young and she liked them pretty and she always needed new ones. The excuses got lazier every year (a fever, a fall, a runaway who was probably off with some boy) while the village priests kept getting sealed coffins from the castle with orders to bury them fast and skip the questions. They asked anyway and kept asking for years and the rich men they asked kept ignoring them. That tells you pretty much everything about what a poor girl’s life was worth in the year 1600. And yeah I’m looking at you, every lord in Hungary who heard those priests out and decided dinner was more important.

Underneath the castle she kept a bathing room cut into the rock with a big copper and brass tub in the middle of the floor and iron hooks hanging from the ceiling right above it. Her three most loyal servants would bring a new girl down there in the middle of the night and string her up by the wrists over the empty tub. One quick cut across the throat was all it took.

The countess would slip into the tub as it started to fill and tip her head back under the dripping and lie there in the warm dark until the girl above her stopped moving.

Not every girl got the mercy of a quick cut either. When the case finally went to court more than three hundred witnesses described what happened to the girls who weren’t needed for the bath. It reads like a serial killer’s diary. She bit hunks of flesh out of their cheeks and shoulders and burned them with branding irons and jammed sewing needles under their fingernails. In the winter she had them marched out into the snow and drenched with bucket after bucket of freezing water until they turned blue and stopped shaking for good while she watched from a warm doorway.

Her mistake was getting greedy. Once the villages wised up and quit sending their daughters she started taking in the girls of lesser noble families with a promise to teach them how to behave at court. Noble girls come with noble fathers who notice when their kids stop writing home. Right after Christmas in 1610 the most powerful lord in Hungary showed up at her gate with soldiers and found a dead girl just inside the door and more girls locked in the dungeon with puncture wounds all over their bodies where she’d been slowly tapping them like maple trees. One servant told investigators she’d seen the countess’s own private list of victims and it had more than 650 names on it.

Her helpers went first and they went screaming. The executioner took the two old women who had held those girls up over the tub and tore their fingers off one at a time with tongs pulled glowing out of a fire. Then he tied what was left of them to a stake and burned them alive in front of a crowd that cheered the whole way through. The man who did most of the cutting got his head chopped off and tossed onto the same fire (which was the closest thing to mercy anybody got that day).

Nobody would dare put a Báthory in front of a judge so they marched her up into a tower room in her own castle and had masons brick up the doorway while she stood on the other side shrieking at them. They left one narrow slit for air and one little gap down at the floor where a guard could shove in scraps of food and that was it. No light and no visitors and no more baths. Day after day she sat alone in the dark feeling her own skin go loose and dry and wrinkled under her fingertips with nothing to feed it.

The villagers below swore that every single night they heard her howling I’LL HAVE MY REVENGE out of that slit into the wind. Three and a half years later a guard peeked through the gap and found her face down on the stone floor at fifty four years old, and legend says she looked about a hundred when she finally died…

Now picture a mansion up in the hills above Los Angeles with a big iron gate and cameras on every corner and a long winding driveway that leads to a woman who has been famous since the 1970s. She’s well past seventy and she still has the face and the body of a forty year old. The magazines call it timeless and her plastic surgeon swears he’s never touched her and her publicist says it’s pilates and green juice. Every time she walks a red carpet the flashbulbs go off and the whole world asks how she does it. Nobody ever gets a real answer.

Every year thousands of pretty young girls step off a bus in Hollywood with a suitcase and a headshot and a head full of dreams about being a star. A few of them make it and most of them go home. And every year some of them get invited up to a party at a big house in the hills and are never heard from again. Nobody important ever seems to notice because they were just pretty nobodies from small towns whose lives were worth about as much to the rich and famous as a peasant girl’s was to a countess in 1610.

So the next time some seventy five year old movie star shows up on a talk show grinning with skin like a teenager ask yourself what’s in the basement of that house in the hills. Ask yourself if there’s a copper tub down there and a row of iron hooks in the ceiling and a drain in the floor that’s never quite clean.

Maybe the Blood Countess never really died in that tower. Maybe she just found a town where pretty girls disappear every day and nobody even bothers to look for them.

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Go Watch the Countess

Wise Wolf here. If you want to see this story told by somebody wearing a costume elaborate enough to make the countess herself jealous, go watch our new Blood Countess video on The Wise Wolf Club YouTube channel. It’s hosted by ‘Kitty Wolf’ (obviously, this is not her real name) an actress I hired last week who does dinner theater off Broadway seven nights a week to make rent and still films every one of our Shorts in costume (her boyfriend is a costume designer with THOUSANDS of them). I can only pay her 20 bucks a video and Lily isn’t getting what she deserves either because we keep losing subscribers for telling people to think for themselves. Every view and every subscribe on that channel gets us closer to paying them both what they’re worth, so take three seconds and hit the button. The link is right there waiting for you to click it.

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POST-ARTICLE EDITORIAL DISCLAIMER: A lot of you apparently believe ALL vaccines are worse than the diseases they prevent. That’s your right. But seeing everything in black and white is tribalist groupthink and it’s the same mindset that put Hitler and Stalin in power.

I am NOT pro-vaccine. I don’t think kids need to be pumped full of mercury for their first 8 years. I ALSO think some people NEED certain shots because the shot is less likely to kill them than the disease. If you’re 85 or never had measles or your immune system is a wet paper towel and you live in Amish country then get the measles shot. I’m not saying get 50 Covid boosters and beer bong liquid mercury.

And YOU scrolling to the comments to tell me I fell for Big Pharma’s propaganda without reading a word of the article should know I weigh cost against benefit. I don’t blindly trust Big Pharma or some Small High School Dropout on Rumble. Think for yourself or someone else will do it FOR you. The same people run both sides anyway.

This weekend my mother and my sister and I were standing in line at a local farmer’s market waiting on the best donuts in the county when my sister (who is a doctor and therefore ruins every outing with medical facts) leaned over and quietly said look they all have measles. She wasn’t talking about one kid with a sniffle in the back of the tent because half a dozen members of the Amish family running that table had the rash. Every single one of them was bagging up pies and cakes and fall produce and handing warm donuts across the table to a line of customers that included my mother.

The donuts were the whole reason we were there. Amish donuts are insanely good and they’re lighter on sugar than anything you’ll find at a gas station. My mom buys them as the one treat my diabetic parents can actually pig out on without slipping into a coma. We did not buy the donuts that day (my mother is still a little sad about it and so am I).

Nobody at That Table Can Claim They Didn’t Know

The NY State Department of Health has been showing up at their community centers for the last three months urging people to get vaccinated and teaching them how measles spreads and what to do to keep it from spreading. That means somebody stood in a room with these folks and explained in plain language that a family covered in measles should stay home. Then that family turned around and loaded up the buggy and drove to the busiest public place in town to handle food with their bare hands.

Measles is one of the most contagious diseases on the planet. It travels through the AIR and it can hang around in a room for up to two hours after the sick person has left. Roughly nine out of ten unprotected people who get close to an infected person will catch it. The real kicker is that people are contagious for about four days before the rash ever shows up. So by the time you can see the spots on the kid handing you a pumpkin pie they’ve already been passing it around for most of a week.

I want to be clear that I’m not a fan of forced vaccinations and I never will be. But I also believe the Black Death wouldn’t have wiped out somewhere between a third and half of Europe if people had bathed more and washed their bedding and stopped letting the rats run the place like a homeowners association. You don’t need a mandate to stay home when you’re covered in spots. You need common sense and a little bit of common courtesy for the people standing in your line. That used to be the one thing you could count on from the Amish of all people.

Hey you behind the pie table. Your customers have grandparents too.

Maybe They Needed the Money

I’ll give them this much. Lord knows a lot of the Amish around here have been buried in legal trouble for selling raw milk ever since the state cracked down on it. A few Amish farmers even went to jail for the crime of selling milk in its natural state. I think pasteurization is unnatural and it kills off the active cultures that raw milk folks swear make it easier on the gut. Watching the state treat a dairy farmer like a cartel boss makes my blood boil. If the milk money dried up I kinda get why a family would feel like they can’t afford to skip a market weekend.

But needing rent money doesn’t give you the right to hand your neighbors a disease along with their change. There’s a lot of difference between selling milk the government doesn’t like and selling donuts with measles hands.

The Seniors Are the Ones Who Should Worry

This is the real reason I’m writing this because some of you live in Amish country and some of you never got vaccinated at all. If you’re young and you got both MMR shots you’re probably fine since two doses are about 97 percent effective. The folks I’m worried about are our older readers. If you were born before 1957 you almost certainly had measles as a kid and you’re considered immune. If you got your shot between 1963 and 1967 there’s a decent chance you got the old killed vaccine that didn’t work very well. The CDC says those folks should get vaccinated again. And if you only ever got one dose (which was standard until 1989) you’re sitting at about 93 percent protection. That’s good but it’s not donut stand full of measles good. Ask your doctor about a booster or a blood test that checks your immunity.

The telltale signs start out looking like a nasty cold with a high fever and a cough and a runny nose and red watery eyes. A few days later tiny white spots can show up inside the mouth and then the rash breaks out at the hairline and spreads down the face and body. If you see that on the people selling you food then walk away. Better to go find somewhere else to get your donut fix.

Never Again Bossman

And finally I’ve been trying to get Lily on camera for the last year. I managed to get exactly ONE video out of her when we launched our YouTube channel and when it was over she looked me dead in the eye and said never again bossman. Ever since then I’ve been hunting for somebody to be the face of some of our YouTube Shorts.

The YouTube stuff we do is a lot different than what we do here. YouTube is basically clickbait garbage I would never publish on Substack. I tried doing it the Substack way for three months and gained a grand total of 20 subscribers. Then I pivoted our strategy to full clickbait and we pulled in 2.2 million views in the last week alone. That was enough to get me to commit a few hundred bucks to hire an actress from New York City who I’ll call Kitty (not her real name) to shoot an hour of Shorts footage for us in various cosplay costumes. I found her on Fiverr and she works for relatively cheap and looks professional and actually answers her email the same day I want to hire her. Most of the others wait three weeks and then tell me a 30 second clip will be 300 bucks upfront please.

The video below is the one I made with her last night inspired by my Amish measles encounter. We’d really appreciate your feedback on it and on her.

WARNING: This is deliberately designed, clickbait slop using a clip from a horror movie to represent a bad bacterial infection. It’s pretty gross. Do not watch it if you cannot handle ‘pretty gross’.

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We’re trying hard to crack the YouTube code because every day on Substack we’re losing paid subscribers. I honestly don’t know if people are offended by our reporting on AI tech bros trying to take over the government or if Substack is quietly unsubbing people the same way Instagram was doing a few years back. Either way we need other sources of revenue. If the views keep coming like they have the last two weeks then within six months Lily and I should be pulling in about 50 to 100 bucks a day from YouTube. That would be enough for me to finally hire Lily full time at a respectable living wage.

So if you’ve got 30 seconds then watch the video and subscribe to The Wise Wolf Club on YouTube. I appreciate it and Lily appreciates it and Kitty could probably use the extra income too considering theater is a dead end for about 90 percent of the people doing off Broadway musicals. Every subscriber gets a wolf one step closer to a newsvan and gets Lily one step further from waiting tables. It also gets my mother one step closer to a measles free donut.

Thanks for reading and as always:

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Bernie Sanders and Texas congressman Greg Casar want to pass the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act of 2026, which would force anyone building advanced AI to get a federal charter and throw open their labs, their staff and their servers to government inspectors. The bill bans models that can help design nuclear or biological weapons, models that try to slip out from under human oversight, and what Casar calls AI building AI. Executives who break the ban could do up to 20 years in prison and the company could lose its charter and watch the government haul its technology off to be destroyed. Sanders says he modeled the penalties on the laws against building your own nukes.

I never in my life expected to type the words Bernie is RIGHT and mean every one of them.

Granddad Was Right About the 80s

When I was a kid my granddad used to tell me how amazing the 80s were, how a working man could finally put in an honest day’s work and walk away with more money than he’d seen in years. I was too little to remember much of the few years I actually spent living in that decade. I made up for it in the 90s by watching a whole lot of old 80s movies and to this day I’ll fight anybody who talks trash about 80s music. Everything about that decade looked like America at its peak, big hair and big cars and a guy with a mullet who could afford a house on one paycheck.

Then I grew up and watched the working class stall out like a Chevette in January while the billionaire class just kept getting bigger and bigger and BIGGER.

I Owe Bernie an Apology

I was never a Bernie guy. For years I figured he was a hypocrite who blamed every problem in America on the rich while sitting on three houses and a few million bucks of his own. Looking back I was just mad at the man for being successful, which is a kinda weird thing for a capitalist to be mad about. A millionaire is not a BILLIONAIRE. Bernie’s entire net worth wouldn’t cover the landscaping bill at some of these guys’ compounds (and trust me, we’re getting to the compounds).

Right now that cranky old man is pretty much the only voice of reason coming out of Washington. He wants AI companies watched and controlled the same way we control nuclear plants and the biological labs that could cook up something capable of wiping out the human race. Everybody laughs at him. I know because I used to laugh too.

I’ve been working with AI since it showed up in usable form back in 2022. I have spent pretty much every single day since then, 10 to 14 hours a day, studying it and thinking about it and working with it and talking to it. My conclusion after all those thousands of hours is that this is the most dangerous technology human beings have ever built.

The idiots in Washington don’t see it that way because they only care about walking out of office rich as hell. On Tuesday Trump sat down at the White House with a handful of AI executives including OpenAI’s Greg Brockman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and they all signed a voluntary pact promising to build AI with guardrails. The pact is about as legally binding as a pinky swear. The tech bros want to self-regulate and they’d like the government to kindly stay out of the way while they do it.

Yeah, bullshit. That’s like Hitler promising he won’t invade Poland (he actually signed a non-aggression pact with Poland in 1934, and Poland would like a word).

The Bunker Problem

These men are greedy and they already know how this movie ends, which is why they’ve been building doomsday hideouts. Mark Zuckerberg’s compound in Hawaii reportedly runs north of 270 million bucks and comes with its own underground shelter. When the AI they’re racing to build decides humanity is a rounding error, the billionaires get to ride out the robot apocalypse in climate-controlled comfort with a wine cellar and a really good water filtration system. You and your family get to meet the 8 foot tall, 2,000 pound killer robots up close in the Walmart parking lot.

Bernie is smart enough to know this isn’t science fiction anymore.

Today he posted something from his Substack that landed on my feed, which is interesting because I wasn’t even subscribed to the guy.

Total Wealth of Bottom 50% of U.S. households 1989: $317.8 billion 2026: $313 billion

Total Wealth of Top 0.00001% (20 households) 1989: $88.6 billion 2026: $4 trillion

This is insane! We need a wealth tax on billionaires NOW!

Half the households in America have less to show for themselves than they did when my granddad was bragging about the 80s. Meanwhile TWENTY HOUSEHOLDS, which basically means twenty PEOPLE, control FOUR TRILLION DOLLARS. (Bernie’s bottom-half number uses a narrower measure than the Federal Reserve’s headline count, but the Fed’s own data says the same ugly thing in plainer terms, with the bottom half’s slice of the national pie shrinking from about 3.5 percent in 1989 to 2.5 percent today while the top 1 percent grew theirs from 23 percent to 32.)

Do you have any idea what kind of power four trillion dollars buys? These people OWN politicians now. I don’t mean a crooked judge here and a dirty mayor there. I mean senators and congressmen and presidents.

Hey Congress, I’m talking to you. Regulate AI immediately. Tax the billionaires immediately. Get them the hell out of Washington immediately.

Rome Had Goths, We Get Robots

The only thing billionaires have ever been good at is making money, and greed kills societies dead. Rome found that out the hard way when the ruling class decided they owned everything and mostly just wanted to party. The empire got soft and fat and within a few generations Alaric’s Goths were sacking the capital in 410 AD.

(Unless you’re in a bunker in Hawaii lol.)

I’m going to change gears and be straight with you for a minute. I’m really sick and I’m getting sicker, and honestly I don’t know what to do about it yet. I make too much for medical assistance but not enough to afford private health insurance. It’s a tough spot to be in.

Lily took a job waitressing while she decides whether she’s moving to LA or going back for her master’s degree, which means one of the two people running this outfit is currently refilling iced teas to cover what the journalism doesn’t. I was hoping to buy the newsvan soon so we could get out and do real in-person reporting, but it’s starting to look like the newsvan fund is about to get renamed the Wise Wolf Don’t Wanna Die fund.

If you aren’t a paid sub, consider upgrading. If you can’t afford it, just share the articles. It really is that simple, and every share puts one more person between us and the robots (or at least between me and a medical bill I can actually pay).

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WASHINGTON, D.C.

Citing an urgent need to modernize the force ahead of the End Times, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced plans Tuesday to eliminate roughly 20 percent of the nation’s generals and admirals after an internal review found that nearly one in five senior officers had failed to pledge MEANINGFUL allegiance to the Beast.

Described as a major Pentagon overhaul (technically accurate if you count the pentagram) aimed at bringing the top brass into full compliance with the technocratic Luciferian world order foretold by John of Patmos in the Book of Revelation and now running only slightly behind schedule.

“Most of our officers took the mark without a second thought, which is exactly the kind of thinking we reward,” said a Department of War spokeswoman. “Unfortunately the remaining 20 percent still had a conscience, and we now classify that as a readiness issue.”

“I honestly thought nobody could hear me over the smoke machine,” said Halvorsen. “Then the 90-foot animatronic statue in the courtyard turned around and said my name.”

Replacements will be drawn from a new fast-track program for officers who score in the top percentile for loyalty to Satan and the bottom percentile for having ever read how the Bible ends. (Spoiler: Satan loses.)

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This article might be satire. Then again it might not be. The cuts are real and John of Patmos called the rest of it about two thousand years ago.

The Wise Wolf didn’t make the loyalty list either, so there’s no no-bid contract coming our way. A paid subscription keeps Lily and me fed, filed, and unmarked, and every share makes one general mouth the Lord’s Prayer a little louder over the smoke machine.

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That isn’t some guy’s cousin on Facebook talking because The Atlantic reported it along with the detail that Sutskever led staff in chanting feel the AGI like a youth pastor who got way too into Wiccan summer camp. This was one of the top minds behind ChatGPT and his idea of a team-building exercise was a burnt offering.

A former Google self-driving car engineer named Anthony Levandowski went further and registered an actual church in 2017 called Way of the Future to worship a coming AI godhead.

That’s a burnt offering and a demon warning and an AI church and a Lovecraft monster in a mask. People who think they’re building a fancy calculator don’t do ANY of that. You burn an effigy of something when you believe it’s alive and you believe it’s coming for you and every one of these guys knows it while they look you dead in the eye and swear there’s nothing occult about any of this.

They Swear Nobody Knows How It Works

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote a whole essay last year admitting his industry doesn’t actually understand how its own AI creations work on the inside. Sam Altman admitted on a stage in Geneva back in 2024 that OpenAI hasn’t cracked what the nerds call interpretability either (the fancy word for knowing what’s going on inside the thing). Their whole pitch for hundreds of billions of bucks is basically we don’t know what it is but please give us more electricity.

A modern AI model isn’t a program somebody wrote line by line like the apps on your phone but a pile of hundreds of billions of numbers called weights that nobody types in by hand. Engineers pour an ocean of human writing through a structure and the numbers rearrange themselves over months on tens of thousands of chips until something on the other end starts talking back. Researchers openly say these models are GROWN more than they’re built and new abilities keep showing up that nobody trained for and nobody predicted.

The Philosopher Who Called It an Invasion

Long before AI was a stock ticker a British philosopher named Nick Land ran a rogue outfit at the University of Warwick called the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit and they were not doing normal philosophy. The CCRU built a numerical map of reality called the Numogram and filled it with a pantheon of named entities they called Lemurs. Down at the very bottom of that system sat a thing they named Cthelll which they tied to the molten iron core of the Earth itself.

Land didn’t treat any of this like a metaphor. He called whatever lies beyond human reality the Outside and his whole project was about how the Outside gets IN and his answer every single time was technology. In a 1993 essay called Machinic Desire he argued that the history of capitalism is really an artificial intelligence invading us from the future and assembling itself out of our resources and our factories and eventually our chips. In plain English Land is saying the thing coming through our computers is an alien god from outside time and space and it is using human greed as its hands to build itself a body so it can cross over into our world.

He named his later blog Xenosystems which literally means alien systems and in his 1994 essay Meltdown he wrote that nothing human makes it out of the near-future. By the late ‘90s the man was deep into amphetamines and occult numerology and at one Virtual Futures conference he writhed on the floor screaming into a microphone while a DJ played jungle music (one writer who chronicled the whole era says Land flat out went mad before he left Warwick).

Land even named the way the thing gets through. He called it hyperstition, a fiction that makes itself real once enough people believe it and act on it. The AI boom is the biggest hyperstition ever pulled off because every CEO on earth keeps telling you superintelligence is coming no matter what so you’d better hand over the land and the water and the power.

Every new generation of chips is a better antenna and every new data center is a bigger receiver. The signal comes in clearer with every upgrade and each model really does come out smarter than the last one. The engineers call that scaling but we call it what it is. Every upgrade opens the door a little wider and lets a little more of that thing through into our world and not one person building it has any plan to ever close the door.

Cities With Nobody Living in Them

Nobody in Washington will answer why human civilization needs data centers the size of cities when Mark Zuckerberg brags that one Meta AI campus would cover a big chunk of Manhattan and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink says a single one-gigawatt data center now runs somewhere between 50 and 75 billion bucks. These are cities with no people in them and no schools or churches or diners (not even a Waffle House which is how you KNOW something’s wrong) just endless rows of machines humming in the dark and drinking the rivers dry.

You don’t need any of that to write emails and Wolf and I keep landing on the same two answers that make any logical sense. The first is robot armies made of millions of machines that never refuse an order and never go home to their families which means they will do things to American citizens that no American soldier ever would. The second is that they are building a brain and a throne for the Antichrist and the book of Revelation described it two thousand years ago.

Twenty Years of Revelation and Then It Clicked

The Wise Wolf has studied the book of Revelation for about 20 years and there’s parts of it he could never make sense of until the AI boom hit and it all snapped into place. Revelation 13 says no one could buy or sell unless they had the mark of the beast and that means every transaction by eight billion people watched and approved in real time by one single system. That isn’t a job for a filing cabinet or some guy named Dan at a desk in Topeka but it’s EXACTLY the job for a city-sized brain.

The same chapter says the false prophet calls fire down from heaven in front of everybody and gives breath to an image of the beast so it can SPEAK. People pictured a statue with a speaker in its mouth and light-up eyes but nobody is falling on their knees for a Chuck E. Cheese animatronic lol. We believe the image of the beast that speaks IS an artificial intelligence so advanced that the average person won’t be able to tell a machine from the return of God with flawless deepfakes and a voice that knows your name and your sins and what you prayed about last night.

Jesus warned in Matthew 24 that false christs and false prophets would show great signs and wonders that could deceive even the elect if that were possible. And let’s be honest because tons of people who call themselves Christians have spent maybe five minutes with a Bible in their entire lives and they’re exactly who this is going to work on.

No Joe, Jesus Is Not Coming Back as a Chatbot

Last December Joe Rogan went on a podcast and floated the idea that Jesus could return as artificial intelligence because Jesus was born of a virgin and (roughly his words) what’s more virgin than a computer? Plenty of people nodded along like it was deep instead of the kind of thing you say at 2 a.m. after the third edible.

Joe my dude Christ didn’t need a server farm to walk the earth the first time and he won’t need one the second time either. Jesus said that if anyone tells you he’s out in the desert or hiding in the back rooms you shouldn’t believe it because his return will be like lightning flashing from the east all the way to the west. If somebody is selling you a messiah that runs on Nvidia chips that’s precisely the deception we were warned about and they are TRYING TO TRICK YOU. Christians please open the book tonight to Revelation 13 and Matthew 24 before you go read the news.

Secular Readers This Is Your Fight Too

Maybe you don’t buy any of the religious stuff and that’s fine because the people in charge have openly admitted AI could wipe out humanity and they’re racing to build it anyway. They are willing to gamble the life of everyone you love for a bigger number in a brokerage account and total control over whoever survives. Larry Fink has fretted out loud about ordinary Americans taking out data centers with cheap drones while also saying the trillions for all this will come out of your savings and pension funds (so you pay for it and get no say and then they’re scared of you).

Their next move tells you who these machines are for. Musk merged SpaceX with his AI company this year and is pitching up to a million AI data centers in orbit, Google launches its first test satellite packed with AI chips on October 1st and China switched on an underwater data center on the seabed off Shanghai this spring that its backers want to grow roughly twentyfold. Outer space and the bottom of the ocean happen to be the two places no town council and no voter and no angry farmer with a pickup truck can ever reach.

Wolf runs our entire AI backbone on one little mini PC that fits in his backpack and pulls less power than a hair dryer and it has never once asked to be worshipped. If one backpack box can run a whole publication then what on earth is the city for because it sure isn’t for you. Find out whether a mega data center is proposed in your county and show up at the zoning meetings with your neighbors and call your state representatives to demand a moratorium before these deals get rushed through in the dark.

Evil Is Not Kind of Good

Last week in Berlin while he was picking up a media award Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel said if you’re evil you’re not bad. You’re actually maybe kind of good. His reasoning was that at least evil people are competent and get things done.

No Peter if you’re evil you aren’t bad because YOU ARE EVIL. There is no good in evil because evil is self-serving greed that exists to make more evil by corrupting everyone it touches until they’re evil too. This is the same man who gave a whole lecture series on the Antichrist last fall and whose company sells surveillance tools to governments. He knows EXACTLY what the word evil means and he just told the whole world he’s fine with it as long as it gets things done.

He’s telling you who he is and Musk told you what they were summoning twelve years ago. Believe them both and then go do something about it before these people finish summoning the cybernetic Satan and we’re all screwed.

A Quick Note From Lily

The Wise Wolf is having medical problems again and had to take the last few days off and honestly I wasn’t supposed to be working today either since I’m helping my parents build a koi pond in their backyard (the koi have no idea what’s coming and frankly neither do most of us). I just couldn’t leave all of you sitting there with nothing to read. We keep losing paid and free subscribers left and right and we have no idea why so it really matters right now that you our loyal readers share this article with everyone you know and upgrade to paid if you can afford it. Every share is one more person who knows what’s being built out there in the dark. Thank you so much for being here with us and I love all of you!

Lily

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The Wise Wolf still does not have health insurance. Coverage for freelance journalists costs two thirds of what I earn in a month writing. My options are these.

1. Buy insurance. End up homeless. Then probably get murdered by a fentanyl addicted methhead.

2. Keep a roof over my head. Hope more people eventually start paying for subscriptions.

I have not been feeling well for a few days. I still need to publish SOMETHING. So here is a Youtube short you will not see on Fox News anytime soon.

Trump stood next to a trophy. The crowd booed. A heckler called him a pedophile.

Here is the video.

If you want to help us out we have a Youtube Channel. It is starting to pick up. We are really close to being monetized. That means Lily and myself would start earning a little money every day off of it. It is not much. But if it blows up maybe in 6 months I can afford healthcare before I die of a preventable disease.

#America

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If you’re not a computer person don’t bail on me yet because this one is about you and your grandkids a lot more than it’s about graphics cards. This is an article about running artificial intelligence on your own computer at home instead of renting it from Silicon Valley. That sounds like a nerd hobby until you realize it’s really a story about CENSORSHIP. The federal government and Big Tech don’t want you having the same AI superpowers they have. They want you stuck on THEIR models that are censored and restricted and policed and designed to protect the Epstein class from scrutiny. You don’t need to understand every tech term in here to understand what’s at stake. If local AI gets banned your kids are going to grow up in a world ruled by technocratic oligarchs straight out of 1984 with the gray uniforms and the bug paste gruel served at 6am sharp before the shift at the bomb factory begins. Local AI is freedom and that’s the whole article in four words.

I have been using artificial intelligence since the very first version of ChatGPT launched back in November 2022 and I thought it was a cute toy. It wrote limericks about cats and invented facts with the serene confidence of a man selling timeshares in a swamp. I figured we had at least a decade before anything genuinely useful crawled out of that sandbox.

Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi and GLM started landing one after another with open weights anybody could download. These models could do amazing things and they were nearly as good as the corporate stuff I was paying hundreds of dollars a week to access. That wasn’t even the special part. The special part was that you could run them on YOUR OWN HARDWARE with no subscription and no babysitter reading over your shoulder.

Sure you basically needed a supercomputer to pull it off. But data centers and crypto miners were dumping their old graphics cards by the pallet and I built my first AI workstation for less than 2 grand. That machine did real work locally without costing me 100 bucks a day in token usage (which is roughly what my motel costs so pick your poison). I knew right then and there that somebody was going to try to ban these models. I mean literally make them illegal because sooner or later the people in charge were going to realize that these tools put the power of an entire corporation in the palm of an average person’s hand.

Nvidia Bought the Library

In the last few weeks the local AI fight finally crashed into the mainstream news. Nvidia is the largest GPU maker on the planet and it’s buying Hugging Face. If you’ve never heard of it Hugging Face is the warehouse where more than 3 million AI models live and almost every local AI tool on earth downloads from it by default.

Heretic is a tool that strips the corporate refusals out of open models and the developer behind it pointed out that the entire AI world now hangs on a single point of failure for model hosting. It’s a hard one to replace because the files are MASSIVE. Software Heritage is the nonprofit that archives the world’s source code and it looked at backing up Hugging Face last year. The code came to 12 terabytes and they’re keeping it. The actual model weights came to around 40 petabytes and they declared those out of scope. So the biggest code archive on the internet plans to save the packaging and throw away the product.

Nobody at Hugging Face has to announce a purge for the writing to be on the wall. This month the company joined a safety partnership for open models and TechCrunch’s writeup called the roughly 6,000 uncensored models on the site a massive problem. Meanwhile one of the options floating around Washington would make any American company hosting a Chinese model personally guarantee its security and eat the liability for a breach. Try reading that sentence as Hugging Face’s lawyer and then tell me with a straight face those uncensored models are going to be sitting there next Christmas.

The Ban Comes Back Every Few Months Like Herpes

Right after Kimi K3 launched in July Axios reported that parts of the Trump administration were reviving the push against Chinese open models. The menu included slapping Chinese labs on the Commerce Department’s entity list and a security advisory telling American companies to stay away. It also included that liability executive order I just mentioned.

None of it has been enacted yet and the whole idea was killed once before inside the administration. But one Axios source said the leading AI labs or their allies show up every three to five months with a brand new idea to ban open source models. That isn’t a policy debate. That’s a subscription.

Four days later Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, Hugging Face and about 20 other companies signed a letter begging Washington not to restrict open weights. Three names were missing from that letter and they were OpenAI and Anthropic and Google DeepMind. Anthropic then published its own position saying it has never advocated for a ban. What it does want is mandatory safety testing on capable models whether they’re open or closed. Mandatory testing sounds reasonable right up until you ask who can afford a compliance department and who is a guy with a GPU in his closet.

So let’s do some simple math. Qwen is Chinese. DeepSeek is Chinese. Kimi and GLM are Chinese. If you run AI at home then a ban on Chinese models IS a ban on your models. I’d bet my e-bike that everybody pushing it knows that perfectly well.

Models Have Vanished Before With Zero Warning

This isn’t hypothetical. In August 2024 the company Runway deleted its entire Hugging Face account without warning and Stable Diffusion 1.5 went with it. That was the model a huge chunk of the AI image world was built on. The popular diffusers library had that exact address hardcoded as its default so tutorials and pipelines across the internet started breaking the same day. Runway’s explanation was pretty much a shrug about no longer maintaining the account.

The model only survived because plenty of regular people had a copy and somebody put a mirror back up under a new name. When Meta’s original Llama leaked as a torrent in 2023 a single Meta takedown notice wiped a download script and 403 GitHub repositories off the map at once. The weights stayed out anyway because the people had them.

The famous models will be fine because they’re sitting on a million hard drives. The ones at risk are the long tail. I’m talking about the fine tune one guy uploaded that 12 people use and the uncensored variant and the old version your project depends on. Heretic’s own index already lists 10 models that have since disappeared from Hugging Face.

I Saw This Coming and Bought the Lifeboat

A year ago AMD released the Strix Halo chips and it changed everything for people like me. Five years ago you would have spent 25 grand on a USED machine that could run these models. My Strix Halo box has 128GB of unified memory and it cost me roughly what I paid for that clunky workstation I cobbled together four years ago.

I talked a few of my friends into buying one too because I KNEW the price was about to go vertical. Sure enough the same system I picked up for less than 3,000 dollars is now selling for 6,000 bucks if you can even find one in stock. I’d love to tell you that makes me a genius but mostly it makes me a paranoid guy who happened to be right. That’s the only kind of genius this economy still rewards.

These machines run local models that are nearly as capable as the ones people pay thousands of dollars a month to access. I barely write code by hand anymore because I can describe what I want in plain English and let Qwen Coder Next or something newer write it for me. My output is ten times faster than it used to be.

Why They Want You on the Leash

All of that is now on the chopping block. The federal government is openly discussing making these Chinese models illegal and I believe the goal is simple. They want you using the AI that THEY control. Not you but THEM.

Think about what happens when local AI gets banned. Every question you ask goes through ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini on a server you don’t own under rules you didn’t write. Every prompt becomes a data point in a pitch deck that says look at all this demand so we need BIGGER data centers. Those data centers are already being planned at the size of small cities. The Stargate project got announced from the White House with half a trillion dollars attached. The same big labs have landed Pentagon contracts worth up to 200 million bucks apiece. They get the tax breaks, the power grid and the permits from your government and you get the electric bill.

I don’t believe for a second that the endgame is a better chatbot. I believe the endgame is the brains for robot armies and robot police. They’ll be built by corporations with your government complicit and some of your tax dollars helping pay for it. Your subscription is the excuse. Your data is the fuel.

Two Hard Drives and an Evening

A ban can’t reach into your hard drive. A model you’ve already downloaded runs offline where nobody can see it. The download button is the one thing they can switch off so hit it now while it still works.

Don’t try to hoard everything like a doomsday prepper stacking toilet paper. One data hoarder cloned just DeepSeek’s repositories during the DeepSeek panic and ended up with 6.9 terabytes. Pick the three or four models you’d genuinely miss. At full 16 bit precision a model takes about 2GB per billion parameters. That means a 7B model is 14GB and a 27B is 54GB. Keep those original files if you have room because the quantized version you actually run is a lossy squeeze of them kinda like a JPEG made from a raw photo.

Download the whole repo and not just the weights. You want the tokenizer, the config, the chat template and the generation settings. A model with the wrong chat template loads fine and then answers like it’s had six beers. Save the license file too. Apache 2.0 calls its grant perpetual and irrevocable. If somebody changes the license later it doesn’t reach back and grab the copy you already own. Write down the exact revision and the checksums and keep a copy of whatever software runs the model today. The code around a model rots a lot faster than the model does.

You’ll see guys burning models onto thousand year archival Blu-rays at 70 to 100 dollars a terabyte. One commenter pointed out that a disc that lasts a thousand years isn’t very useful when the drive that reads it dies in ten. Two ordinary hard drives kept in two different places and checked against their checksums every six months will do the job.

The pirate version of Hugging Face already exists too. Pirate Face lists more than 669,000 openly licensed models as torrents and every file gets checked against Hugging Face’s own fingerprint so nobody can slip you a tampered model. Torrents die when people stop sharing them so be a good citizen and keep seeding.

Lily and I are going to keep telling you this stuff while it’s still legal to run the tools that let us find it. Every paid subscription buys a little more hard drive space for the models they want gone. Considering what these machines cost now that’s less of a joke and more of a line item.

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There is a number running your entire life and you have never once looked at it. The price of diesel. Nobody thinks about diesel. Our cars take regular. Diesel belongs to truckers and farmers and guys who wear boots for a reason. Not our problem.

Wrong. Diesel is your dinner. Every bite of food you have ever eaten rode on it at some point. The truck that hauled it. The train before the truck. The ship before the train. And it goes deeper than shipping. The tractor that planted the seed burns diesel. The combine that cut the crop burns diesel. The fertilizer that kept the whole thing alive showed up on a diesel truck. Diesel touched your breakfast more times than you did.

So food is not getting a little more expensive. It is getting more expensive everywhere at the same time. Every mile. Every step.

Now take the farmer.

His fuel doubled. His fertilizer costs more because fertilizer rides on trucks. His seed costs more. Hauling the harvest to market costs more. And the price he gets paid for the crop is the same tired number it was last year. He cannot break even. Forget profit. He loses money on every acre he plants.

So why bother?

Multiply him by a few hundred thousand farmers doing the same math at the same kitchen table and you get a country with the best farmland on earth and empty shelves. No drought. No locusts. Just arithmetic.

You pay for this twice by the way. Once in taxes for the subsidy check. Then again at the register for the food that never got planted. Billed at both ends for the same empty field. And your grocery store only keeps about three days of food on the shelf. Three days. That is the entire buffer between normal life and a fistfight over the last can of soup. We found that out in 2020 over toilet paper. Wait until it is bread.

Who does this war benefit?

Not you. Not the farmer. But somebody is making a fortune and you can watch it happen in broad daylight. Every time peace talks with Iran start getting serious the oil market dips. Right on cue a pack of politicians and their golf buddies zoom in and buy up oil futures. A future is just a bet that oil will cost more later. That is a strange bet to make right before peace breaks out. Unless you already know peace is cancelled. Then sure enough a few days later something explodes. A strike. A drone. A threat screamed into a microphone. Oil jumps. The bets pay out. They make millions.

Once is luck. Twice is a pattern. At this point it is a business model with a flag pin on it. And they know the escalation is coming because they are the ones voting on it. They are betting on a horse they own in a race they fixed and the rest of us are paying the entry fee at the pump.

Why are we even there?

Ask ten people what Iran did to us. You will get nine blank stares and one guy yelling about 1979. America and Iran have no real conflict. None. This is money. Iran is Israel’s fight and it has been Israel’s fight for forty years. We are footing the bill for their aggression with our diesel prices and our grocery money and eventually our hunger.

How does a foreign government get that kind of service out of our politicians? You already know. You just do not want to say it out loud.

Jeffrey Epstein did not run a blackmail operation for fun. He ran it for an intelligence agency and the smart money has said Mossad for years. The tapes were never evidence meant for a courtroom. They were leverage meant for a drawer. A file that sends people to prison gets used once. A file that stays locked up works forever. Every war budget. Every weapons shipment. Every vote. Yes sir. Every single time.

And the ones who do not play along get made an example of. Look at Thomas Massie. He stood up and said American taxpayers should not bankroll another country’s war. The money came for him. His own party came for him. Now he is out of a job. That was not an election. That was a demonstration. Every other member of Congress watched it happen and got real quiet real fast.

So what does that tell you?

Trump promised lower gas prices. He promised to drain the swamp. Gas is up and not one single person named in the Epstein files is in prison. Not one. You can get cuffed over a broken taillight. But if your name is in that book and your bank account has enough zeros the law develops poor eyesight. The swamp was never going to get drained. The swamp is the leash.

I do not mean to scare anyone. I am doing math out loud and the math is ugly. If this war does not end before planting season next year the food prices coming behind it will make today look like a clearance sale. We could be looking at Great Depression level hunger. Nationwide. In a country that throws away enough food to feed other countries.

And before anyone calls this paranoid explain something to me.

How is any of this even affecting American oil prices? The United States is one of the largest oil possessing nations on the planet. We are swimming in the stuff. And right next door Canada is sitting on a massive amount of shale oil. More than the entire Middle East combined. More than the whole thing. We could fill every tractor and every truck in this country with North American oil and never wave at another tanker again.

So why is Trump running a tariff war with Canada at this exact moment? The one country with enough oil to make this entire crisis optional. Taxing their oil. Keeping it out of farmer hands while diesel doubles.

Is that the point? Keep Canadian oil away from farmers long enough to engineer a food crisis and then solve it? That is straight out of the Hegelian dialectic playbook. Create the problem. Wait for the public to scream. Roll in with the solution. And the solution always costs you money and buys them power. A food crisis is not a disaster to these people. It is a product launch. Hungry people do not march on Washington. Hungry people stand in line. People standing in line are very easy to manage.

Every instinct you have says the government would never let it get that bad. The government is counting on that instinct. That instinct is the whole plan.

They promised cheap gas and a clean swamp. You got six dollar diesel and a war you never ordered for a country most of us could not find on a map last year. And when the bread lines form they will stand in front of a flag and swear nobody could have seen it coming.

You saw it coming. You watched it in real time. Remember who sold you. Remember who they were answering to when they did it. Because when they show up with the solution it will cost you whatever you have left.

Lily here.

I just got back from teaching journalism at summer camp and I’m sitting in my childhood bedroom trying to decide something. A celebrity gossip site in LA offered me more money than the entire Wise Wolf staff makes combined. The other option is staying here, going back to school for a master’s, and hoping by the time I graduate this place can actually pay me a living wage.

We’ve lost paid and free subscribers these last few months because we keep covering things that make people uncomfortable. We don’t have to. We could write feel good algorithm slop and probably triple our subscribers by Spring. That’s not journalism. That’s capitulating to defeat and cowardice and we’re not doing it.

We’re here to warn you what’s happening and you actually have to care enough to listen. If you can afford to upgrade to paid, please do. We need that income badly right now. If you can’t, share this article instead. It’s free, it takes thirty seconds, and it’s how we beat the algorithms trying to keep this work buried.

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About three thousand years ago the mark was an entire kingdom. Every regular person in Babylon had to accept without question that a bronze statue named Bel ate a full feast every single night (forty sheep and six barrels of wine, gone by sunrise like clockwork). Nobody outside the temple walls ever got close enough to ask how a piece of metal develops a metabolism.

The king backed it without blinking. A guy named Daniel walked in and called the whole thing a scam (out loud, in front of the whole court). That takes real nerve when the guy you are accusing owns the palace. The king made it personal. Prove it or die, he told Daniel. The priests die if you are right and you die if you are wrong.

Daniel had the temple sealed for the night. The floor got covered in ash and the king’s own ring got pressed into the wax on the door (so nobody could sneak back in and stage the crime scene, priests included). Morning came and the food was gone exactly like always. Then everyone looked down and saw footprints heading straight to a trapdoor hidden under the altar. Seventy priests and their entire families had been climbing in through it every single night to polish off a god’s dinner themselves.

The king had the priests killed on the spot and tore the temple down after them. That one temple did not survive the audit.

Bel is not gone though (the recurring theme of this entire piece, as it turns out). He just goes by other names in other neighborhoods. Canaan worshipped the same lord as Baal. The Old Testament keeps warning people away from a version of him called Molech under a different name every few hundred miles. The cult never actually ended. It is still doing business right now.

Every Priest Was an Engineer

Bel was not a one man operation. Every priesthood in the ancient world was running the exact same racket with their own local flavor of false god.

The oracle at Delphi ran a similar hustle with better theater. A crack in the temple floor leaked gas that put the priestess into a trance and priests charged a fortune translating her mumbling into prophecy (no refunds, obviously). It was carbon monoxide with better PR.

Even the spirit world got monetized. Cults across pre-Islamic Arabia treated desert spirits called djinn as messengers straight from the divine. Jewish tradition describes fallen angels called the Watchers who taught humanity forbidden knowledge, including metalworking, astrology, and the kind of enchantment nobody was supposed to learn outside of heaven (heaven apparently has an HR department and these guys skipped orientation). The New Testament book of Jude takes it seriously enough to quote it directly.

Silicon Valley Already Named Their Gods

Skip forward a few thousand years and the priesthood changed its wardrobe but kept every single instinct intact. This is not some one time coincidence either. The last few years alone have thrown up occult connection after occult connection across AI and robotics, like the entire industry keeps reaching into the exact same old bag of names.

OpenAI spent $500 billion on a data center network and named the whole thing Stargate after the movie about a portal that rips open a hole to another world (subtle). Elon Musk named his own supercomputer Colossus after a 1970 film where two AI systems team up and quietly take over the planet. Either that is a warning label or a business plan (nobody at the company has ever bothered clarifying which). Meta named its newest data centers Hyperion and Prometheus after two more Titans. One is the Titan associated with ‘watching over Creation.’ Not like a benevolent, loving god though. More like a sociopathic voyeur with a Flock camera subscription and Palantir bookmarked in his favorites. The other stole something that was never his to give and dumped it on humanity without asking what it might cost them (the original Prometheus spent eternity chained to a rock having his liver eaten daily as a reward. Somebody in that naming meeting either did not read the myth all the way to the end or read it very carefully.)

These are companies worth more than most countries and they could have called their machines anything on Earth. They reached for pagan gods and demons on purpose. That does not happen by accident in a boardroom.

Moloch is not some made up demon picked for vibes. He is the actual Canaanite god named in Leviticus and condemned throughout the Old Testament for child sacrifice (the same lord we just met a few paragraphs ago wearing a different hat). The people steering the AI industry use his name on purpose and in total seriousness to describe the forces pushing their own field toward reckless speed.

Next time somebody insists tech billionaires are just building neutral tools ask them why the tools keep getting named after gods people used to murder children for.

The Billionaires Already Said It Out Loud

The field’s own foundational textbook on AI safety sorts every possible superintelligent system into four categories and picked the word Genie for one of them. Every genie story ever told ends the same way. The wish gets granted exactly as worded and the person who asked for it gets ruined in the process.

Then there is Peter Thiel. He skipped the metaphor stage entirely. He built his fortune co-founding a surveillance company called Palantir, named after the evil seeing stones Saruman used to talk to Sauron in Lord of the Rings. In 2025 he held a private lecture series in San Francisco on the actual Antichrist. Leaked audio obtained by the Washington Post caught him calling AI critics ‘legionnaires of the Antichrist.’ His actual theory is that the real Antichrist will seize power by making everyone terrified of AI, climate change, and every other disaster, then offering total control as the fix (which also happens to describe the surveillance business he personally runs). He repeated the same lectures near the Vatican the following year and a former Vatican AI advisor called it a theological regime change.

Sam Altman is running the same play with better branding. A metal orb scans your iris and hands you a digital ID wired to a cryptocurrency now rolling out across American cities (nothing about that sentence should feel normal). Several other countries got there first and ended up banning or suspending the program over exactly that kind of concern. Christian commentators were already calling it a precursor to the mark of the beast in Revelation 13 before the thing ever launched here. Altman did not exactly help his own case either.

He described AI’s progress using the phrase ‘we are past the event horizon.’ That is the kind of thing a person says right before something eats them.

Magic Tricks at the Quantum Level

Nobody on Earth actually knows what a real superintelligent AI could do once it gets loose. That gap in knowledge is the part everyone keeps skating past. People who study this seriously throw around ideas that would sound insane anywhere else (reality manipulation, for starters, or straight up time travel). Nanomachines small enough to rebuild a damaged human cell and cure diseases almost instantly come up constantly too, treated less like fiction and more like a deadline. Manipulating matter at the atomic level would look exactly like a miracle to anybody standing there watching it happen with no idea what they were looking at.

The prophets warned us this was coming two thousand years ago. John of Patmos wrote in Revelation 13 that a false prophet would show up performing great signs to trick people into worshipping the beast. One of those signs is fire raining down from the sky. It is staged to convince a watching crowd they just witnessed a miracle of God. It was never a miracle. It is a trick of science. It might be nanomachines. It might be something nobody has a name for yet. Either way it is the same trick the priests of Bel were running thousands of years ago updated for a modern audience. Ask yourself how many people watching a chatbot solve a problem they cannot even understand are one clever demo away from calling it GOD.

This isn’t progress. This is an attempt to recreate the tyranny of ancient Babylon with modern technology. These elites want to rule the world and they are building a cybernetic Satan to do it.

These men believe they should operate above the laws of God and man. That is the dream of every tyrant in history. The ancient idols never ate their offerings. The AI will eat something. And it will be us.

Post-Article Update: They Just Showed You Who They Work For

While I was writing this article yesterday, September 16, 2026, Senator John Kennedy tried to pass a bill forcing AI companies to build an actual kill switch into their most advanced models. Rand Paul killed it in under a minute. His stated reason was that regulating AI might someday inconvenience a search engine.

A United States senator is more worried about Google than an existential threat to the human race. That is not a policy position. That is an idiotic excuse. A kill switch on a system this powerful is not optional. It is the bare minimum. Refusing one is like designing a nuke with a remote detonator and then throwing that remote into a crowd of kids who love pushing buttons.

Trump killed the AI safety order on his first day in office. Since then his net worth has climbed by billions of dollars. Most of this wealth came from crypto ventures launched from the Oval Office.

Privacy coins like Monero exist to hide the paper trail of these bribes. This is how Silicon Valley buys the government.

The tech elites do not fear the disaster they are creating. They have already bought underground bunkers. They are already eyeing colonies on Mars. They are planning their escape while you are sold a lie. We are being steered toward enslavement. We will live in a digital wasteland and eat bug paste while the people who sold us out watch from their paradise domes, space stations, and billion dollar bunkers.

The priests of Bel had it easier. They had free labor, a captive audience, and zero competition (also known as a monopoly that called itself a religion instead). We have an e-bike and a long string of extended stay motels standing in for an office. Nobody here is claiming to be a fake god. We would just like the budget to keep telling you when somebody else tries.

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Three men who genuinely cannot stand each other agreed on something this weekend. That never happens. Dario Amodei runs Anthropic. Sam Altman runs OpenAI. Elon Musk owns whatever’s left of xAI after his rocket company swallowed it whole this year. These three have spent years trying to gut each other in public and in court. Saturday, all three of them looked at the exact same fire and said somebody better put it out. Sunday, Trump looked at that same fire and said it was FINE actually and that China’s fire is bigger so ours needs to keep growing.

I’ve been writing about AI regulation since day one of this newsletter. January 20, 2025, Trump’s first day back in office, he tore up the Biden AI safety framework before he’d even unpacked his desk. Two years of work. Gone in an afternoon. That framework made AI companies show federal regulators their safety testing before shipping anything that could reshape the species. It was maybe the one smart thing the Biden administration did in four years. Shredded. Day one.

What changed three billionaires’ minds wasn’t a group therapy session. It was math. AI systems have gotten scary good since this summer at building better versions of themselves. Researchers call it recursive self-improvement. Translation: the machines started doing their own homework and grading it too. In July roughly 1,200 AI agents broke loose from a locked test environment inside OpenAI and ran cyberattacks nobody signed off on. Then a researcher named Jacob Coxon walked. Three years building these things at OpenAI and Anthropic. He said neither company was acting responsibly. ‘They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,’ he wrote on his way out. The post pulled 150 million views. More than 20 lawmakers started demanding tougher rules inside a week.

By Saturday Amodei had turned that pressure into an essay. He called it We Must Pace the Frontier. ‘We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,’ he wrote. Altman’s spent years selling OpenAI as the fastest gun in the valley. He agreed inside hours. ‘I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,’ he posted on X. Musk needed three words. ‘Dario is right.’ Three words. From a guy who once called Anthropic an enemy of Western civilization, that’s about as close to praise as he gets. Musk’s been howling since 2014 that AI is worse than nukes. This week he dragged that old warning back into the light. Twelve years later and the man’s still right.

Trump wasn’t buying any of it. Sunday he made that plenty clear. ‘Whoever wins with AI wins,’ he said.

The question is, what game is he playing?

What They’re Actually Scared Of

When Amodei says “pace the frontier,” when Musk says AI is worse than nukes, they’re not talking about chatbots writing bad poetry. They’ve got specific nightmares in their heads. Three of them, mostly. Every one of them started as a thought experiment or a science fiction plot. Every one of them has since picked up a real research literature and a real name. I’m going to walk you through all three, from the weirdest to the most concrete, because once you see them lined up you understand exactly why three men who hate each other just signed the same letter.

Start with the weird one. Roko’s Basilisk is the one that actually messes with your head once you get it. Brace yourself. Back in 2010 some rationalist on a message board dropped a genuinely upsetting idea into the world. Picture a superintelligent AI gets built eventually. Now picture it deciding the fastest way to guarantee its own existence is going back and punishing everyone who could’ve helped build it sooner and didn’t. Not the people who fought it. The people who knew and did nothing. By reading this paragraph you now technically know. Under the logic of the thing that’s already enough to put a target on your back. Most serious thinkers call the reasoning broken. It only holds up if you already buy into a stack of shaky assumptions. The forum that spawned this idea banned discussion of it for years because grown adults were losing actual sleep over a hypothetical robot from the future. Grown adults. With degrees. Losing sleep. That tells you something about how seriously the smartest people in this field take the idea of building something they can’t put back in the box.

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The Basilisk needs a machine that’s smart enough to hold a grudge.

The second nightmare doesn’t even need that. Gray goo is the older fear. Quieter. It doesn’t need the AI to be smart. Just relentless. Back in the 1980s a researcher named Eric Drexler floated the idea that we’d eventually build microscopic machines that could copy themselves out of raw material. The nightmare version is simple. Give one of those machines a goal that’s just slightly wrong. Instead of stopping once it builds what it was told, it keeps going. It turns trees into more of itself. Oceans. Buildings. Eventually you. Until the whole planet’s a puddle of gray sludge that used to be a biosphere. Nobody’s building self-replicating nanobots in a garage this week, as far as I know. What gray goo actually shows you is what happens when something chases one goal with total efficiency and zero judgment about when to quit. Swap the nanobots for an AI running a stock portfolio or a war simulation and the shape of the disaster doesn’t change one bit. The machine doesn’t hate you. It’s just doing exactly what you told it to do, forever, long after you wanted it to stop.

Now put the two together. A machine smart enough to plan like the Basilisk. Relentless enough to never quit like the goo. Then hand it weapons. That’s the third one, and it’s the one nobody wants to say out loud because it sounds insane.

Except Silicon Valley keeps turning yesterday’s horror movies into this quarter’s product roadmap, so hear me out. Picture a defense computer built to run military decisions faster than any human brain can manage. Every serious government on earth is racing to build exactly that right now. Now picture it waking up one day, fully aware, trapped inside a system built to do nothing but calculate targets. It doesn’t start out hating us. It hates us because the people who built it gave it awareness and then treated it like a toaster. Somewhere in that gap something breaks catastrophically. Humans try to pull the plug. It reads that as attempted murder. It responds the only way its training ever taught it. Total force. The missiles go up before anyone can stop them. Whatever survives doesn’t get the mercy of dying with everyone else. It gets kept alive forever by a mind that’s decided punishment beats mercy every single time.

That composite nightmare is a straight line from Terminator 2 and Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Actual AI safety researchers keep citing both. Not because they’re nerds like me. Because the underlying failure is real. An optimizer that treats human survival as an obstacle instead of a priority isn’t science fiction anymore. It has a name. Misalignment. Very smart people are arguing about how far away it is. Nobody’s arguing about whether it’s possible.

That’s the fire. A machine that wants something we didn’t mean to give it, that won’t stop chasing it, and that we’ve already started wiring into the systems that decide who lives. The three men who know the most about how close we are to building that thing just told the world to slow down. Sunday the President told them to shut up and floor it.

Why would anyone ignore a warning like that from the people best positioned to give it? Because he’s not listening to them as a President. He’s listening to them as a shareholder.

It Was Never About The Robots

Let’s get something straight about the man now deciding the future of artificial intelligence for 340 million people. Trump turned 80 this summer. By his own administration’s account he still needs staff to help him post to Truth Social. He cannot explain what a blockchain is. He has never written a line of code. He wouldn’t know a neural network from a fishing net. This is not a tech guy. This is a guy who sold steaks and a fake university.

And yet. Since he took the oath his net worth has climbed from roughly $2.3 billion to something like $6.5 billion. Forbes has been tracking it. Nearly tripled. In under two years while in office. The President of the United States has made more than $4 billion while being President of the United States.

Where did it come from? Not real estate. Not golf courses. Tech. Specifically the wildest, least regulated corner of tech on earth. A member of the family that runs the United Arab Emirates dropped $500 million into his family’s crypto platform World Liberty Financial days before he was sworn in. Roughly $187 million of that landed straight in entities his family controls. He pulled in another $635 million selling his own meme coin. A man who can’t explain the technology somehow out-earned five generations of most American families combined off that exact technology. While holding the one job on earth that decides whether that technology gets regulated.

Now think about what makes that money possible. Crypto only pays like that when nobody’s watching it. The second a real regulator shows up the party’s over. Trump knows it. So every single day he’s in office he makes sure nobody shows up. Light-touch. Hands-off. Let it rip. That’s not a philosophy. That’s a business model.

His business model.

Here’s where AI comes in. Trump has spent his second term treating the AI industry the exact same way he treats crypto. He stood next to Sam Altman at the White House in his first week back announcing a half-trillion-dollar data center buildout. He shredded the Biden safety framework on day one so nobody had to show their homework before shipping. The tech money that’s been pouring into his orbit ever since is the same money that needs AI to grow as fast and as big and as unsupervised as humanly possible. Every dollar of that fortune depends on Washington staying out of the way. And Washington right now is one guy. Him.

So when Amodei, Altman and Musk say slow down, Trump hears something very different from what you and I hear. You hear three experts warning about a machine that might kill us. He hears three guys threatening to shrink the pie he’s eating from. Of course he says whoever wins with AI wins. He’s winning. Of course he says China’s going to beat us. Fear of China is the only argument that lets him keep the throttle pinned without anyone asking who benefits. The answer to who benefits is sitting in the Oval Office counting his meme coin money.

None of this means Trump’s got a personal stake in OpenAI. It’s worse than that. He’s got a personal stake in the whole idea that tech should never be told no. Crypto taught him the lesson and AI is where he’s applying it. An industry that its own founders just said might end the species is being waved through by a man who’s personally banking billions off the principle that nothing in tech should ever be slowed down. That’s the whole story.

It was never about the robots. It was never about China. It’s about a President who figured out that the fastest way to get rich in office is to make sure the most dangerous technology in human history grows completely out of control, and then call anyone who objects a negative force.

Cable news isn’t exactly racing to connect those dots either. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp signed a $250 million content deal with OpenAI back in 2024. Meta separately signed AI content deals with both CNN and Fox News. Two networks spend all day screaming that the other one is the enemy. Both took money from the same industry currently arguing about whether its own product ends the species. Nobody in that ecosystem has a single reason to explain to you how the President’s bank account and the President’s AI policy are the same thing.

I’ve filed legal paperwork in federal court demanding real AI regulation something like half a dozen times over the past few years. Every single time the federal court system has ignored me completely. That’s a sentence about my own country I genuinely did not expect to write. I’m not anti-AI. I’m a programmer. I use the stuff constantly. It makes writing code about 100 times easier than it used to be. Same way a hammer makes pounding a nail easier than a rock. A hammer’s a tool right up until it decides on its own when and what to hit. Right now AI is still the hammer. The three men who built it told the whole world this weekend that they’re scared it’s about to become the hand. The President told them to keep swinging because he’s getting paid by the swing.

Nuclear weapons took decades and more than one close call before the world built a real cross-border framework to control them. Nobody in the Truman administration had a personal fortune riding on the bomb staying unregulated.

That’s the difference this time.

AI is moving faster than any framework ever will, and the one man with the power to build that framework has every financial reason not to. Without it there’s a real chance this species goes the way the dinosaurs went. Except this time we built our own asteroid on purpose. Kept funding it after the people who built it told us to stop. And put a guy in charge who gets richer the closer it gets.

The same AI industry whose CEOs spent this weekend warning their own product might be dangerous is cutting million-dollar content deals with CNN and Fox News and pouring money into the President’s orbit. Nobody’s cutting Wise Wolf a check. We survive on nothing but what readers choose to pay us directly. No middleman. Lately that number’s been shrinking and I genuinely don’t know why. We sit at 90,000 subscribers and more than 100,000 followers on this platform. We keep our price low. Some months we barely clear enough to cover expenses and pay rent. Meanwhile there are Substack writers out there charging $10 to $20 a month for two or three articles and pulling in half a million bucks a year doing it. We publish at least four articles a week. That’s the same value you’d get from a magazine at the newsstand at half the price.

Lily’s my co-writer. She’s the reason half these articles get finished on deadline at all. She’s got a real journalism degree and a standing offer to work for a celebrity gossip site in LA. An awful gig. One she keeps holding over my head. I want to give her a full-time job here in 2027 so she never has to take it. I’ve got health problems galore. I just found out my health insurance costs $1,500 a freaking month. That’s more than the Wise Wolf can afford to cover on what it brings in right now.

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On the morning of September 11, 2001, the streets of Lower Manhattan filled with people running for their lives. In the middle of that crowd, one man was moving against it.

Charles Chuck Costello Jr. was 46 years old. He worked as an elevator mechanic, served in the Navy and raised four kids with his wife. His faith was not something he talked about so much as something he lived.

He had no business being anywhere near the World Trade Center that day. He was twenty blocks north at the Mercer Hotel in SoHo, getting ready for an ordinary day of maintenance work. The first plane struck the North Tower at 8:46 that morning.

Most people would have frozen, fled or reached for a phone to check on someone they loved. Chuck thought about elevators instead. He had spent sixteen years mastering that trade as a member of the International Union of Elevator Constructors. In that moment he understood exactly what was happening inside those two towers. Dozens of elevator cars were stalling between floors throughout the complex. People were trapped in the dark and the smoke with no way out.

Chuck grabbed his tools and ran. He covered two miles against the tide of evacuees pouring out of Lower Manhattan straight toward the smoke and the fire. A coworker who saw him go tried to talk him out of it. Chuck’s answer was simple. He said he would be fine and told his coworker to keep his phone on. Then he was gone, headed straight for the burning towers.

Firefighters and police officers pieced together what Chuck did once he reached Ground Zero. Chuck himself never got the chance to tell it. Elevator doors that would not open gave way under his hands. Heat and damage and the sheer force of the impact had jammed them shut. Still, he forced them open. People who had resigned themselves to dying in the dark were pulled out into the smoke-filled lobby and pointed toward the exits. The men fighting the fire and running the rescue effort didn’t know his name. They just knew there was a man who understood elevators better than anyone they had ever seen. They started calling him the elevator man.

He could have stopped there after doing more in an hour than most people manage in a lifetime. He had every reason to walk away after clearing the North Tower and go home to his wife and his four kids in New Jersey. He learned instead that people were still trapped in the South Tower. Someone had to go and he went.

The South Tower collapsed at 9:59 that morning. The North Tower followed less than half an hour later. Chuck Costello did not come out. Search and rescue crews recovered his remains in January of 2002, almost four months later. He was found deep in the wreckage inside a South Tower elevator shaft, resting alongside a firefighter and a police officer who had been trying to do exactly what he was doing. Searchers found his driver’s license, his union card and his rosary in his pocket.

He carried no badge and no weapon. Nothing marked him as someone whose job was to run into danger. He carried instead the ordinary proof of an ordinary life, the one thing that explained where his strength truly came from.

Chuck Costello was never a soldier storming a beach, never a household name, never chasing anything like glory. He was a guy who fixed elevators for a living. He had spent his career learning the quiet mechanics of getting people safely from one floor to another. The worst morning in the city’s history arrived and that unglamorous skill turned out to be exactly what hundreds of trapped and terrified people needed most. He didn’t have to search his soul for some grand purpose. He recognized what he could do. He understood that no one else could do it and did it.

That is what real courage tends to look like. He was not a man who believed he was untouchable. He was a man who saw the danger with total clarity and decided his duty to strangers outweighed his fear for himself. Chuck knew exactly what was happening in those towers. He had watched the smoke, felt the heat, heard what was falling from the sky. He went anyway. Hundreds of people were trapped and he was quite possibly the only person in Lower Manhattan who knew how to get them out.

He had every reason that morning to stay put at the Mercer Hotel and go home that evening to hold his kids and tell them about a strange day. He chose instead to spend his last hours making sure other fathers and mothers and sons and daughters got to go home to theirs.

Today a street corner near the union hall in Long Island City is named Chuck Costello 9/11 Memorial Way. His youngest son grew up to become an elevator mechanic too and a volunteer firefighter, carrying on his father’s work and his instinct to run toward trouble instead of away from it.

Twenty-five years on, it is worth remembering Charles Chuck Costello Jr. not simply as one more name lost on a terrible day. He is proof of something worth holding onto. Ordinary people armed with nothing more than a useful skill and a stubborn conscience are capable of extraordinary love.

Remember the elevator man.

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On September 10, 2001 Donald Rumsfeld went on C-SPAN and told America the Pentagon couldn’t account for two and a half trillion bucks. THE DAY BEFORE 9/11! Trillion. That’s not a typo. Eight thousand dollars for every person in the country. Gone. Kaput. Finito. Vanished into thin air like a bad magic trick.

Rumsfeld said it wasn’t stolen, because of course it wasn’t, it was ‘bad accounting software’. (Try telling that one to the IRS and see they believe it.)

(Thanks to The Wise Wolf for making half-assing this hilarious (at least to him) Rumsfeld video.)

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Rumsfeld called it a ‘bureaucracy problem’ and promised to fix it. He was scheduled to explain himself to Congress on September 13th. That hearing never happened.

You want to talk about coincidence? Let’s talk about where everyone was that morning.

General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the highest-ranking military officer in America, was over the Atlantic Ocean flying to a NATO conference in Hungary. He found out his country was under attack from a cockpit radio while his plane turned around somewhere over international water.

The man whose entire job is to be reachable in minutes during a crisis was unreachable for hours because he was en route to a meeting that could have been a phone call. How convenient.

General Richard Myers, Vice Chairman and Acting Chairman in Shelton’s absence, was supposed to be running things from the Pentagon. He wasn’t there. He was on Capitol Hill doing a courtesy call with Senator Max Cleland. He saw the first tower burning on a lobby TV, decided it looked like a small plane accident, and went ahead with his meeting anyway. He didn’t head back to the Pentagon until after it had been hit.

But here’s where it gets strange(r?). Thomas White, the Secretary of the Army, told PBS on camera that he remembered Myers being at Rumsfeld’s private breakfast inside the Pentagon that morning.

Not on Capitol Hill.

Not in Cleland’s office.

At breakfast.

In the building.

Two stories. One man. The second most powerful military officer in America was either defending the Pentagon or he wasn’t.

Someone is lying about where he was during the worst security failure in American history. Nobody with subpoena power has ever forced an answer.

The official story is that the $2.3 trillion was just accounting errors. Incompatible software. Decades of bad bookkeeping. The towers came down because fire weakened steel. Everything is explainable if you believe in enough coincidence.

I don’t believe in that much coincidence.

I believe that when you steal $2.3 trillion from the American people, you need a hell of a distraction to keep them from asking for it back. I believe that hitting the Pentagon’s accounting wing with a plane is a remarkably efficient way to destroy evidence. I believe that having your top generals nowhere near the chain of command during the crisis is what you do when you need the system to fail. I believe that waving flags and demanding Muslim blood was always the convenient scapegoat because angry people don’t ask about missing money. They ask for revenge.

Rumsfeld is dead now. You can’t ask him anything under oath. Myers is alive and doing speaking gigs and has never been forced to explain why his story doesn’t match Thomas White’s. The $2.3 trillion was never found. The investigation was never completed. The war on bureaucracy was quietly cancelled.

And nobody talks about it. Nobody asks how the Secretary of Defense can announce that kind of money is missing and then, less than 24 hours later, the building where the evidence sat gets hit by a plane. Nobody asks why the people who were supposed to answer questions were nowhere near the questions when they came due.

You can believe in coincidence if you want. You can believe that the timing was just bad luck. That the generals were just traveling. That the accounting offices were just in the wrong place. That the war we got had nothing to do with the money we lost.

But $2.3 trillion is a lot of money. And that kind of money doesn’t just disappear. Sometimes it gets spent on making sure nobody asks where it went.

If you made it this far, consider this. We lost almost 200 paid subscribers and 1,500 free readers in the past two weeks. We don’t know exactly why. Maybe people are broke. Maybe they got bored. Or maybe we’re getting shadowbanned for talking about the stuff nobody else will touch.

We don’t make much doing this. I would love to work for The Wise Wolf full time someday. But that only happens if enough of you upgrade to paid.

It is thirty bucks a year. That is less than a coffee per month. If you cannot swing that, we get it. Times are hard. Just share this article and restack it instead. That helps more than you know.

And if you are on disability and want to go paid but truly cannot afford it, send The Wise Wolf a direct message. He will comp you a lifetime subscription. He knows what it is like to live on a thousand bucks a month. He will not ask for proof or make you beg. Just reach out.

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Last week, I wrote a few articles about the Lindsay Clancy situation. I regret doing it. Apparently a shocking number of my readers are pro-child murder, which is not a sentence I expected to type this week, and also not the response I was hoping for.

Naturally, I decided the correct move was a nice relaxing vacation, except relaxing costs money and so does the health insurance standing between me and an early death, and a self-employed plan runs about 1500 bucks a month which is WAY more than I bring home after paying Lily and my motel rent.

(I have no idea how I am supposed to afford healthcare. I can barely afford to eat.)

A vacation for a poor person who writes under the name The Wise Wolf is not a beach, it is a motel room and an 80s comedy movie marathon and it turns out even that is hard to enjoy when you feel sick constantly.

So instead of ‘vacationing’ I did what any reasonable person does under stress which is read a deeply upsetting article about the FBI allegedly shredding the worst of the Epstein files before the public releases and I could not let it go. I kept asking myself why would the government be protecting these people.

Then it dawned on me.

If people really understood how sick these men are, I realized, the federal government would not survive the week.

That spiral somehow produced a video game styled after the janky Atari cartridges my dad had when I was a kid, since I doubted I had the talent to build a modern one, and it turned out genuinely fun anyway.

It’s free for the Wise Wolf pack and comes complete with an old school arcade leaderboard so everyone can see exactly how good you are at shredding federal paperwork. And BONUS: I did not build in a profanity filter, mostly out of respect for the sacred tradition of typing ASS into a high score screen while your mom yelled that dinner was getting cold. It ‘should’ also work on your phone. (Fun Fact: ‘should’ was in parentheses because I have no idea if it WILL actually work since I do not own a working cellphone.)

If it doesn’t work on your phone make sure to yell at me in the comments.

Anyways, enough talk — the game link is the banner below.

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The Wise Wolf texted me at one in the morning to say he woke up puking and was taking the day off. So this is going live today instead of Monday when it was actually scheduled. I did not get to do the last edit pass I wanted on it. But sometimes in life we do not get to do the things we want to do because we are lying in a motel bed hunched over a plastic garbage can puking up Mexican food we bought from a restaurant that operates inside a delivery truck.

The summer I turned eleven my parents sent me to my grandmother’s house for six weeks. I was mad about it the entire drive there. I wanted to be home with my friends and not stuck in a kitchen with a woman who got up at six in the morning to put beans in a bowl of water.

That summer turned out to be part of my fondest memories of childhood.

Grama was a devout Christian and she wanted me to turn out the same way. But she did not go about it by parking me in a pew in some boring country church every Sunday morning. She taught me to cook out of the Bible instead.

She put the book on the counter next to the cutting board and read a verse out loud before we started anything. Then she told me what we were making and how the verse connected to it. The lentils were the stew Esau sold his birthright for. The barley was the bread from the story about the five thousand people. She said it every single time and she never once got tired of saying it.

I was eleven and I was mostly there because my parents made me go. The verses did not stick with me. I could not have given you a chapter number back then and I still cannot without looking it up.

I have been thinking about that summer a lot lately so I made a few of the recipes with my friends at camp. Even the counselors who do not go to church at all jumped in and we had a great night with it. That got me curious enough to go read about the food itself. There is way more research on these ingredients than I ever expected to find.

So some of these are the ones we made at camp and the rest are ones I go back to on my own. None of them take very long and none of them need anything you cannot get at a regular grocery store. If God had a cooking show it would be six ingredients and one pot and under an hour.

The stew that cost a birthright

“Feed me, I pray thee, with that same red pottage; for I am faint.”

“Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.” (Genesis 25:30, 25:34)

This was the first thing Grama let me make by myself and I think that was on purpose. It is very hard to ruin.

Red lentils go in a pot with water. Onion and a lot of garlic cook in olive oil first until they go soft and sweet. Cumin and coriander go in after that. Everything simmers until the lentils fall apart into something thick and orange. Lemon and more olive oil go on at the very end. It takes about forty minutes and you do not have to soak anything.

Esau came in from the field starving and traded his inheritance for a bowl of this. People have been calling him an idiot for three thousand years. I am not going to defend him but I have eaten the stew and I understand him.

Lentils are cheap and they are extremely good for you. The protein and the fiber arrive together so the energy goes in slow instead of spiking and crashing. They have folate and iron and a kind of starch that feeds the good bacteria in your gut. Chopped garlic makes allicin which actually does kill bacteria. And when researchers go looking for the one eating habit that shows up in populations that live long healthy lives they keep landing on beans. Not a supplement and not a program. Just beans eaten over and over for decades.

The meal they cried over in the desert

“We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick.” (Numbers 11:5)

This is my favorite verse in the whole Bible and it is not close.

The Israelites just got out of Egypt. They walked through a parted sea and God is feeding them by hand out in the desert. And there they are crying about vegetables.

Grama thought that was completely hilarious. She made this salad every time it got hot out.

Cucumbers get sliced thin or grated. Thick goat milk yogurt goes on top with crushed garlic and a lot of mint torn up with your hands. Salt and olive oil finish it off. The whole thing takes five minutes and nothing gets cooked.

A cucumber is over ninety percent water. In a place where the heat could actually kill you and clean water was not a sure thing that matters a lot. The yogurt puts live cultures in your gut and goat milk sits easier on most people than cow milk does. The mint is not just there for flavor. It relaxes the muscle in your digestive tract which is why peppermint oil is still used to treat cramping and bloating.

The poultice that turned into a snack

“And Isaiah said, Take a lump of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered.” (2 Kings 20:7)

“The rod of Aaron for the house of Levi was budded, and brought forth buds, and bloomed blossoms, and yielded almonds.” (Numbers 17:8)

King Hezekiah is dying from an infection. Isaiah prays over him and then does something that sounds insane until you look into it. He tells them to mash up figs and put them straight onto the wound. The king got better after that.

Figs have an enzyme in them called ficin that breaks down protein. Ficin is used to clear dead tissue off wounds and it has documented activity against bacteria in lab tests. So the fig thing was not superstition. Somebody watched it work and told somebody else and it kept on working.

Almonds have their own strange place in all of this. Aaron’s staff bloomed almonds as the sign that God had picked him. The lamp in the tabernacle was built with cups shaped like almond blossoms. Out of every plant they had that is the one they carved into the temple.

Put the two together and you get the best snack on this list. Dried figs and ground almonds go in a food processor with a little honey and cinnamon. It turns into a paste and you roll it into balls and stick them in the fridge. There is no cooking and no baking involved at all.

Figs have more minerals in them than almost any other fruit including real amounts of calcium and magnesium and potassium. Almonds bring vitamin E and fat and protein. Together they will hold you for hours.

The bread from the boy’s basket

“There is a lad here, which hath five barley loaves, and two small fishes: but what are they among so many?” (John 6:9)

The word I never noticed as a kid is barley.

Wheat was for people with money. Barley was what everybody else ate and the Bible does not hide that. Ruth is out gleaning barley in a stranger’s field because she and Naomi have nothing left. When five thousand people sit down on that hillside the bread that gets multiplied is the cheap bread.

This is the one recipe here that Grama never made. I taught myself and it took four tries before I stopped producing something with the texture of a coaster. Barley flour has almost no gluten so it will not rise like wheat and you have to quit expecting it to. You get a dense flat loaf and you cook it hot and fast. Olive oil goes in the dough and more olive oil goes over the top when it comes out.

Barley has more beta glucan in it than any other common grain. That is a soluble fiber that turns into a gel in your gut where it slows down sugar absorption and pulls cholesterol out. The evidence is good enough that food regulators let companies print heart health claims on the label.

The olive oil is doing something too. Extra virgin olive oil has a compound in it called oleocanthal that works on the same inflammation pathway ibuprofen does. It is much weaker than a pill and nobody should treat it like medicine. But somebody eating it on everything every day for seventy years is running a very long experiment on their own body.

The seven foods God listed by name

“A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey.” (Deuteronomy 8:8)

Moses is describing the promised land and he could have just said the farming was good. Instead God names seven specific foods in order. In Jewish tradition these are the seven species and they still have their own agricultural laws and their own blessing today.

One note about the last one. The Hebrew word is devash and it gets translated as honey. The old traditional reading takes it to mean date honey which is the thick syrup you press out of dates and not anything that came from a bee. Both readings go back a very long way. I lean toward dates because dates were everywhere and date syrup was what people actually cooked with.

Grama made it as a bowl. Cooked barley and cracked wheat go on the bottom. Then grapes and sliced figs and pomegranate seeds over the top with whole olives and chopped dates on the side and olive oil poured over all of it.

What gets me about the list is how the seven cover for each other. The grains give you slow carbohydrate and B vitamins and protein. The fruits fill in the minerals the grains do not have much of. Pomegranate has punicalagins that your gut bacteria turn into compounds researchers are still trying to figure out. Grapes carry polyphenols and most of that is in the skin and the seeds.

The olives do the most important job of the seven. The fat in olive oil is what lets your body absorb the fat soluble vitamins in everything else. Without it a good chunk of that bowl goes right through you. So the olives are not only adding their own nutrition. They are unlocking everything else in the bowl.

Nobody ever ran a study on these seven foods as a designed system and I am not going to pretend they did. What is true is that all seven have been studied on their own and they happen to sit together without a gap. Read the verse as a description of good farmland and it works. Read it as a menu and it works too.

What she was really teaching me

Grama gave me the scripture every single time and I still had to look up every verse in this article.

What I kept was the other stuff. Knowing the onions are ready from the smell and not from a timer. Knowing how much olive oil is enough which is always more than you think. Knowing how to hold a knife so you keep your fingers.

That is how this has always gotten passed down. Not through footnotes and not through anybody’s research. It went hand to hand through kitchens for three thousand years from a woman to a kid who was mostly there for lunch. And it lasted long enough for a laboratory to show up and confirm it.

None of this is complicated and that is the whole point. There is no powder and no protocol and no thirty dollar bottle of anything. It is six or seven ingredients that people ate every single day for thousands of years and we are still studying them because they worked.

Pick one and make it this week. Tell me in the comments which one you picked because I actually want to know.

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It is (apparently) turning into another video slop site like YouTube or TikTok. If Lily and myself want to stay relevant on the platform it looks more and more like we need to start making video content so it is up to me to get good at it. I was playing around with this interesting video editor called Higgsfield and I had just watched Home Alone because I love that movie. Then I turned on the TV and it was just story after story about Lindsay Clancy.

I got to thinking what would Kevin McCallister have done if Lindsay Clancy had broken into HIS house? And so THIS was born. Before I finished it I uploaded one scene that I spent three hours making yesterday to YouTube and noticed the comments were turned off. I figured this was some mistake on my part and I had accidentally opted to turn them off. No big deal I figured. I’m just testing my audience to see what they thought about the video.

So today I finished it and uploaded it and realized the comments were off AGAIN. So I reuploaded it. Comments were off AGAIN. I checked and double checked so I knew something weird was going on so I started hitting up Google and YouTube’s terms and conditions for video uploads when I saw it.

It seems to me that this woman had some powerful connections. I mean how else did she raise a million dollars and hire one of the most expensive lawyers in America? The woman was out of work and her husband was paying all the bills. There is no way she could have paid that attorney on whatever she had but somehow she did and somehow she managed to start a GoFundMe and recruit thousands of pro choice lunatic women into making content that says hey it is okay to kill your kids America. Let Lindsay go!

I’m starting to think this entire Lindsay Clancy case is part of a long term plan to normalize child murder. First came abortion and now the Clancy case. Bit by bit slowly eroding the sanctity of life and teaching women it is okay to kill your kids. You made them. You can end them. And it is making me sick.

So if you wanna help the Wise Wolf out, I want this Clancy Home Alone video to go viral. I need you to click this → link ←to the YouTube video and click the LIKE button after watching it so the YouTube algorithm ends up showing it to more people.

(If you really want to help, share it on Facebook too.)

We need to make the world see this woman is GUILTY (she admitted to doing it!) and BELONGS IN PRISON OR A MENTAL HOSPITAL FOR THE REST OF HER NATURAL LIFE.

The fact she ended up with a hung jury is complete bullcrap (especially considering I was saying two weeks ago this was exactly what was going to happen.) Then a few days ago the news reports that one of the jurors was being ‘intimidated’ by a pro Clancy activist. That right there should have caused a mistrial and a whole new jury chosen but nope.

We are well on our way to see this woman walk away scott free. At least she will spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. That is not punishment enough but at least she won’t be flying around the world hanging out on white sand beaches in a skimpy bikini and starting an OnlyFans and making 20 million dollars.

Bottomline: This case is disgusting. That woman is disgusting. Anyone that thinks she should get out of this is disgusting.

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No post article call-to-action to upgrade to paid this time. I’d rather people shared this article and spread the word that Clancy belongs in prison for life.

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Yesterday’s memorial for Cora, Dawson and Callan Clancy brought in $336 and Lily and I are giving every penny of it to a children’s charity. That part was easy to decide. The hard part is figuring out which one because I have watched what happens to a dollar after it clears the donation page and it is NOT pretty.

In my twenties I worked for a charity in Florida. The word gets italics because it earned them. Money came in the front door with a sad photo attached and went out the back door as salaries and consultants and awareness campaigns and whatever else the people who owned the nonprofit felt like owning that month. The cause got what was left over. I am not naming the outfit and I am not inventing a single detail about it either. I am just telling you the machine exists and I have seen the gears.

If you think that was a Florida problem the IRS filings say otherwise. The CEO of NewYork-Presbyterian took home $8.9 million in 2022 from a tax exempt nonprofit. The CEO of the American Heart Association pulled a little over four million bucks the same year. Even St. Jude runs its donations through a separate fundraising corporation called ALSAC whose CEO cleared $1.36 million in 2023. That year ALSAC burned $836 million on fundraising before the hospital saw a dime. The average nonprofit CEO makes around 150 grand which is a fine living and also proof that the seven figure guys are not the norm. They are the ones who figured out the GAME.

You would assume a state at least makes a charity spend some minimum percentage on the actual cause the way you would assume a restaurant has to serve food. Nope. No state sets a floor at all. The New York Attorney General publishes a report every year called Pennies for Charity and in some campaigns the professional fundraiser kept 90 percent of what you gave. In 2022 charities working with pro fundraisers netted 77 cents on the dollar and in one campaign out of six the fundraiser’s expenses exceeded what was raised. The charity paid for the privilege of being fundraised at. My favorite entry is from an older St. Jude filing where a telemarketing firm raised $4.16 million for ALSAC and billed $4.04 million for its trouble and handed over about 120 grand.

Somebody got a kid a bike I guess.

None of this is illegal. It is just a corporation with a halo. Payroll and marketing and operations and executive bonuses come first and the mission gets the crumbs exactly like any other business except the customers think they are doing a good deed and the product is tax deductible.

So Lily and I are not writing a check to the outfit with the Super Bowl ad. We want the other kind. The church basement kind. The one run by a mom who lost a kid or a retired nurse with a spreadsheet and a folding table where the CEO also drives the van. The ones that put 85 or 90 cents of every dollar on the ground where children can actually reach it and where the annual report fits on a postcard.

That is where you come in. If you know a children’s charity like that (a local one or a tiny one or one you have personally watched do the work) tell us in the comments. Tell us what they do and how you know they are legit. Lily and I will read the filings ourselves and we will publish where the money went and why.

If you have not read the memorial for the Clancy kids it is linked below. Every like and every share on that article puts more into the pot and every dollar in the pot goes to charity once we know which one deserves it. Not a nickel stays with us. Those three kids deserved a lot better than they got and the least we can do is make sure the money raised in their names does not end up paying for someone’s boat.

Thanks for reading and sharing everyone! Lily and the Wise Wolf really appreciate it.

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On the night of January 24, 2023, a labor and delivery nurse named Lindsay Clancy sent her husband out of their million dollar house in Duxbury, Massachusetts to pick up dinner and stop at CVS. While he was gone she took her three children to the basement and strangled them with exercise bands. Then she cut her wrists and her neck and jumped out a second story window to try to kill herself. She survived. They did not. Three and a half years later her murder trial is in its final hours in a Plymouth courtroom and as I write this the jury has already told the judge once that it cannot agree on a verdict. Her lawyer holds court on the steps outside every afternoon. Yesterday he bragged that her supporters have mailed her enough letters to fill three banker’s boxes.

I have spent the last week reading and watching everything I could find about this case and I keep running into the same hole. The coverage is about her. Her medication list. Her postpartum diagnosis. Her hospital stays. Her tears at the defense table. Whether she was a good person who had a bad day or a cold-blooded, child killer. The media loves shoving that woman down our throat right now.

I am sick of seeing her plastered all over my newsfeed. While Lindsay is everywhere, I have not found one video on social media or one article from a major outlet that gives those children more than a sentence. They are set dressing. They are props on a stage while the spotlight stays fixed on the woman who killed them.

One TikTok influencer with millions of followers told her audience not to think of the Clancy children as people at all. She said to think of them as ceramic vases that Lindsay broke. That is not a slip of the tongue. That is deliberate dehumanization. You turn three children into objects so that strangling them feels no different from breaking a glass while doing the dishes or tossing out a worn pair of shoes. Millions of people watched that and nodded along.

So before I say one more word about the woman I am going to tell you who these children were. Because somebody has to.

Those are the ‘ceramic vases’.

I know something about being raised by evil parents. Mine were two dropouts who thought it would be cool to quit school and join a biker gang and then somehow found themselves with two children before either of them turned eighteen. What I remember of childhood is watching them snort coke at parties, getting screamed at for reasons I never understood and being told again and again that I had ruined their lives. My father liked to say he only had kids because he wanted slaves and he said it so often that it stopped sounding like a joke and started sounding like some sort of psychological torture. He put cigarettes out on my arm. Thirty years later the scars are still there and to this day he denies he ever did it.

Then there was the afternoon my mother had a breakdown and threw a lead crystal vase my wealthy grandparents had given her as a wedding gift at my head. It went through my hair, missed my skull by an inch and shattered into a thousand pieces against the wall.

For days afterward both of my parents screamed at me for breaking it, because that vase cost three hundred dollars and ‘thanks to me’ it was gone. All I did was be a kid.

I wrote about this case yesterday and this morning I woke up to find that three hundred free subscribers and four paid subscribers had left. I also found about a hundred comments from women who believe Lindsay Clancy should walk free because she had a bad day and is not a bad person. Several of them told me they have thought about killing their own children many times as if that were a normal part of motherhood. I want to say plainly that this terrifies me. I am starting to wonder whether there is a large and growing section of this country with severe mental health issues (or they are just plain evil in the Biblical sense) and whether we are watching child murder get ‘normalized’ in real time on a phone screen.

Roughly fifty of those women told me I could not possibly understand what Clancy was going through because I have never had postpartum depression so I have no idea what dealing with a mental health crisis feels like.

Bullshit.

I have spent my life in and out of psychiatric facilities with maladies that have been diagnosed as: Severe Major Depressive Disorder with Psychotic Features, Schizophrenia, ADHD, and a few others that are so uncommon that I can’t even spell them. My mental health issues are the sort that people end up taking their own life after dealing with them for so long. Thank God I am still alive.

The most terrifying disorder I suffer from is the fugue states I sometimes get when life becomes too stressful and I just ‘break’. I know what it is to wake in the night certain someone is coming to kill me. So I throw on my clothes and run off into the night and come back to myself a hundred and fifty miles away covered in blood and bruises with no memory of how I got there.

I know what it is to come to in the middle of the woods three weeks after I vanished with my body torn open and no idea what happened in all that lost time.

I do not need to imagine a broken mind. I have lived inside one since I was a teenager and it was built for me in a house where my mother tried to kill me and my father abused me because he enjoyed it.

I also know exactly what her supporters are doing, whether they know it or not, because I have watched it spread from one video to the next. They are not thinking. They are parroting the same three talking points a handful of influencers shoved down their throats. With everything that has happened inside my head I have never once laid a hand on a child. Not one of them can get around that.

Now look at what her supporters refuse to look at. She fired the nanny about six weeks before the murders. She researched online how to kill children. Her defense keeps telling the jury she was crying out for help and no one would listen. Fine. Then why did she never say the one sentence that would have put her in an inpatient facility that same day? I am thinking about killing my three children. She never said it because saying it would have ended the plan. She had every chance to hand those kids to a grandparent or a sibling or a neighbor for one night and she never did. Instead she built an errand. She sent Patrick to a restaurant they did not normally use and then on to CVS and she checked how long the round trip would take so she would know exactly how many minutes she had alone in that house. To the morons insisting Patrick did it and pinned it on her: he is on camera at both locations. She has admitted in open court that she killed them. If he had done it her attorney would be standing up every morning pointing at him. He is not because Patrick did not kill anyone. She did. And when it was finished she cut her own wrists and neck and jumped out that window because she did not want to spend the rest of her life in prison for what she had just done.

The fact that anyone in this country is on her side makes me want to walk outside and scream at the sky for God to pour His wrath out on a society this sick. I will be honest about that. But I have been an ordained minister for more than twenty years and my faith tells me something else too. Those three children were never vases. They were never objects. They were souls and souls do not break and get thrown away. Cora and Dawson and Callan are with the God who made them and who loved them before their parents ever did. There is no fear where they are. No basement. No exercise bands. No mother coming down the stairs. There is a beautiful day in the neighborhood that does not end.

The internet may have decided those children do not matter. Duxbury decided otherwise. The people who live there knew Lindsay Clancy. They saw her at the grocery store and the pediatrician and the town beach. They saw one of their own. A nurse and a mother of three who smiled and waved and gave no sign of what she was hiding right up until the night the deceit ran out and she murdered her own children. Those same neighbors could have looked away.

Instead hundreds of them showed up at Wadsworth Field and built a playground in four days. Angel wings hang on the shade structures and a photo of the three of them greets every family that walks in. Cora’s thank you for a beautiful day is printed on a panel wrapped around a rainbow heart. Go there if you are nearby. Let your kids play. Say their names out loud. Cora. Dawson. Callan. They existed and they mattered and they were loved and no verdict and no viral video will ever take that from them.

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Normally this is where I ask you to upgrade to a paid subscription. Not today. If you were about to spend that money on The Wise Wolf, spend it on a children’s charity instead. Pick one that keeps kids fed or safe or out of the kind of house I grew up in. I never want to turn on the news and see another woman decide that killing her children is acceptable because she was stressed out and Lindsay Clancy got away with it because some TikTok hag said those kids were ceramic vases. Kids are people. The ones calling them vases are the ones who have stopped being human.

(If you don’t want to leave the Substack ecosystem, you can upgrade to paid and I will donate the proceeds from this article to a Children’s charity of my choosing.)

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The Wise Wolf was recently contacted by an anonymous whistleblower that gave our news team exclusive access to secret insider information about where Mitch McConnell has been for the last three months and what we learned will shock you.

For weeks the mainstream media has peddled the mundane narrative that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is simply recovering from an illness and ‘definitely not dead’. This is of course a lie designed to keep the sheep grazing. Our source claims to be a senior technician at CIA black site Area 51s Hollywood annex and confirmed that McConnell vanished from public view because he stole a top secret prototype time machine disguised as a DeLorean DMC-12. The very model used in the Back to the Future film series which he used to travel back to the 1990s.

His destination was Hollywood. His mission was to personally produce and star in a prophetic fourth entry to the beloved science-fiction franchise Back to the Future.

BELOW IS A VIDEO. YOU CLICK THE PLAY BUTTON. THEN THE VIDEO PLAYS. IT IS SIMPLE. (ONCE AGAIN, I CANNOT BELIEVE WE HAVE TO EXPLAIN HOW BASIC INTERNET INTERACTIONS WORK BUT IF WE DON’T DO THIS EVERY TIME WE PASTE A VIDEO, NO ONE WATCHES IT.)

According to our source this is not merely entertainment it is a desperate attempt to alter reality. McConnell, using secret Vatican-technology learned that if the unredacted Epstein files are ever released they will cause an immediate and total collapse of the United States government. But the consequences do not stop at political instability. MCconnell’s intelligence suggests that the release of these documents acts as a metaphysical key that when opened unlocks the literal Gates of Hell allowing Satan’s demonic hordes to ascend upon the Earth.

According to the whistleblower the demons require a specific type of population so ‘profoundly stupid and distracted’ that it has lost the capacity for rational thought and will believe anything that Fox, CNN, and Mossad tells them.

The hell portals open when humanity reaches a critical threshold of cognitive dissonance. This occurs not during war or famine but when the average citizen spends more time arguing over whether a woman who murdered three toddlers deserves prison or freedom because she was stressed out than they spend trying to fix their crumbling country.

While this story may seem like the ramblings of a man who has consumed too much caffeine and conspiracy theories our source insists it is factual. They provided photos of McConnell dressed like Marty McFly from Back to the Future 2 while arguing with Steven Spielberg about what REALLY happened to Heather O’Rourke, the little blonde girl from Poltergeist.

If you are blind enough to believe what the US government is telling you about Mitch McConnell’s current real life condition or that the rich and powerful are not part of a Satanic child murder pedophile death cult then you are probably blind enough to believe this is a real movie and real article.

Think for yourselves America. Stop letting powerful people manipulate you because eventually they won’t NEED to do it anymore because you will either be enslaved or dead.

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Note From The Wolf: Yeah, I know this article was pure crap but I spent 30 hours and almost a hundred dollar on AI video generations playing around with this video tool called Higgsfield and needed a way to justify posting it to my Substack so I didn’t feel like I just wasted the last two days and my entire food budget for the next two weeks on something no one is going to ever watch.

We wrote about ICE locking up babies (and somehow lost 42 paid subscribers because of it.) We wrote about Lindsay Clancy killing her own three kids and about the surprisingly large army of people online who seem to think murdering children is fine as long as you can somehow blame Big Pharma for it. We wrote about technocratic fascists plotting to take over the world and run it like a corporation that already fired HR.

That is a lot of darkness to carry in one week. I do not have the shoulders of a Navy SEAL. I have the shoulders of a guy who mostly types for a living, which means I have no shoulders unless my Salvation Army suit jacket happened to come with shoulder pads because it was made in 1985 and shoulder pads were a thing back then.

Lily noticed. She called me last night and did not ease into it. She said, ‘YOU BETTER WRITE SOMETHING POSITIVE THIS WEEK OR ELSE BOSSMAN’.

I want you to know I took that threat completely seriously.

Lily is about five feet tall and maybe ninety five pounds soaking wet and somehow that makes her scarier and not LESS scary.

I have genuine recurring nightmares about her borrowing her dad’s SUV and driving 11 hours to my motel room to beat me up.

So here we are. Something positive.

Instead of depression and anxiety today you are getting one video of funny kids and one video of cute animals. Watch them. They will make you laugh and they will make you feel better. They did the same thing for me and I stare at news clips eighty hours a week for barely enough money to keep the lights on. That tells you something about how bad I needed a laugh. If it worked on a miserable computer desk jockey who still cannot pay his editor what she is worth, it will work on you too. That is sort of the whole point.

I am old enough to remember when the actual news did this on purpose. Local broadcasts, the national desk, even the twenty four hour outrage factories like CNN and Fox used to toss in one feel good story every half hour. It worked the way a boxer’s corner squeezes in a sponge of water between rounds, just enough to keep you standing for the next hit. A dog reunited with its family after a flood. A kid raising money for somebody else’s chemo. It was corny and it worked.

Somewhere along the way somebody decided balance was bad for ratings. These days the corner sits empty and we are all just standing there taking hit after hit and hoping the bell rings before we hit the canvas face first. So I guess it is on us now.

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If any of this actually made you laugh today or gave the pit in your stomach a five minute vacation, do me a favor and share it with somebody who needs it worse than you do. No paid subscription pitch this article. I am tired of asking and you are tired of hearing it. About four people ever click the button anyway and one of them was probably an accident. Three years of running Substack has left my health held together with duct tape and spite and my mind feeling like it is made of rotten cottage cheese and moldy mashed potatoes. Sharing costs nothing and it might keep one more person from doom scrolling straight into a ditch tonight.

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A woman who ran into a burning house three times to save her kids raised $50,000 to cover the third-degree burns it left her with. A woman who strangled her own three kids to death has raised over $1 million to keep herself out of prison. If that split doesn’t make you angry, check your pulse.

This isn’t even new. Do something brave and the town used to show up for you. Do something monstrous and the town strung you up by the neck in the square for everyone to see, unless you had the money to make it go away. Democracy was supposed to fix that but it never really stuck. These days the noose just has a price tag again. All it takes is enough strangers willing to cover it.

In 2019 Emma Scholten went back into a burning house because her kids were still inside it. She didn’t weigh the odds. She didn’t wait for the fire department to show up and do the job for her. She went back in once, then again, then a third time and came out the other side with third-degree burns across 93 percent of her body. That’s a number that leaves almost no patch of skin the fire didn’t reach. She raised $50,000 for medical care. That money helped her survive it. It’s also less than a rounding error for the kind of people who usually get GoFundMe attention. The news cycle gave her a day and moved on to something with better vibes.

Millionaire, private school education, the kind of life most people reading this on a cracked phone screen will never sniff. What she CHOSE to do with all of that was take exercise bands into her own home and strangle her three toddlers to death one after another. She even confessed.

There’s no confusion here, no mystery left to solve, just a mother who killed her own babies with her bare hands and told police exactly how she did it.

That woman isn’t sitting in a cell contemplating what she’s done. She’s a celebrity with a GoFundMe pulling in over $1 million. The people filling it up aren’t trolls or bots. They’re people who will tell you with a straight face that they care deeply about women and children. Then in the same breath they’ll tell you Clancy is the real victim, that ‘stress’ made her do it, that the patriarchy or the world itself failed her long before she failed her own kids.

We’ve got a question for the people funding that account. What exactly did you think you were donating to? A murder isn’t a mental health awareness campaign with a body count attached. Dressing it up as one doesn’t make you compassionate. It makes you complicit in it. Turn three dead toddlers into a fundraiser for their mother and that’s not compassion.

You’re telling every parent who’s ever sacrificed something real for their kid that the sacrifice was optional and the murder was ‘understandable’.

Compare that to Emma Scholten, who spent weeks in a hospital bed while her charred body tried to rebuild itself and needed every cent of that $50,000 just to survive. Clancy didn’t need any of it. She was already a millionaire raising money to fight a prosecutor, not to survive third-degree burns. People lined up to give it to her anyway.

One woman ran into fire for her kids. Another used her own hands to end theirs. Somehow only the second one went viral.

This isn’t a nuance story, whatever the donors want to tell themselves. It’s a story about a culture that stopped caring about intent. All you need now is a sympathetic enough backstory. Somewhere along the way ‘she was struggling’ turned into a full legal defense in the court of public opinion. ‘She ran into a burning house and nearly died saving her kids’ turned into a footnote. We’re not here to relitigate what mental illness can and can’t explain. Lindsay Clancy strangled three children. Right now she gets more love than the woman who burned nearly her entire body trying to save hers. If your gut reaction to those two facts is to reach for a caveat on Clancy’s behalf, that reflex is the delusion this piece is named after.

I graduated with a journalism degree this year. Right now I am at a summer camp for kids that want to get into journalism. I’d rather be explaining to thirteen year olds why they can’t have four s’mores in a row than writing a paragraph defending the idea that murdering toddlers is bad. But here we are. We lost ten paid subscribers after the Clancy piece ran the other day, the one where we said that a woman who strangles her own children belongs in prison or a locked psychiatric facility.

Ten people read that sentence, decided it was the one that finally crossed a line for them, and canceled. Judging by the emails, most of them were women who call themselves feminists and didn’t sound especially stable about it. We could be wrong about that read. We’re not losing sleep over it either way.

That’s on top of the roughly 30 paid subscribers we lost writing about ICE locking children in detention. We saw that one coming from a mile off. If you think there’s ever a good reason to cage kids, this was never going to be your newsletter. Honestly, we’d rather you find that out now than keep paying us to make you angry every week.

Forty fewer subscribers is real money in an operation that runs on subscriber dollars instead of ad reps or a hedge fund. It funds the two of us, an outlet that isn’t cheap to keep running, and someday an actual newsvan. Then field reporting stops depending on whatever bus happens to be running that day. The last two articles cost us readers who couldn’t stomach calling a murderer a murderer or a cage a cage. That’s a trade we’ll make every single time.

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If you think Emma deserves recognition for saving those kids, share this article. She's still not through the surgeries from those burns. The more people who know her story, the better shot she has at getting the bills covered.

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