I could not let it go. I have worked in tech for decades. I have sat in the rooms where the money people talk when they think nobody normal is listening. I know how these CEOs actually operate and how their long term plans actually play out, and if you think the future is button pushing convenience and a weird genetic abomination of a talking dog, boy, you are even more naive than Elroy.

So let me tell you what I told him, and then let me tell you the parts that would not fit in a comment box.

The CEO Does the Math in Four Seconds

Nobody builds a data center the size of Manhattan to generate shopping lists and Facebook memes. These facilities are the brains for tens of millions of humanoid robots, and the business case is so simple a CEO can do it during his backswing.

Option one, a blue collar worker. Fifty grand a year, plus healthcare, plus a pension, plus vacation days, plus the occasional grievance about losing fingers in machinery (workers are SO sensitive about their fingers).

Option two, a one time purchase of a robot that does the same job better, works around the clock, never sleeps, never unionizes, and runs ten years without a sick day.

Every CEO on planet Earth takes option two and fires the entire floor. Not because he is cartoonishly evil (that part is a bonus) but because the spreadsheet says so, and the spreadsheet is his real religion. THAT is the millions of jobs plan. A construction boom that builds the machine that eliminates construction booms.

You built 500,000 of them as industrial laborers and household servants. Nobody counted again after the paint job. You would hope somebody in Washington would notice half a million potential infantry rolling off the line. Which brings us to who got fired.

Grandpa Was a Technocrat

Elon Musk did not invent the idea of engineers running the world instead of elected governments. His grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was a leader of Technocracy Incorporated in Canada in the 1930s and 40s, an actual movement (gray uniforms, salutes, membership numbers instead of names) that wanted to abolish politicians and hand North America to a council of technical experts running everything as one giant engineering project. Canada BANNED the organization in 1940. Haldeman got arrested for it. This is not a rumor, it is a court record.

Sixty years ago the tech did not exist to pull it off. The believers did what believers do. They waited.

Millions of brainwashed voters cheered because they were told this was ‘draining the swamp’. It was not draining the swamp. It was firing the lifeguards.

A slow rollout so subtle that the only people who catch it are weirdos like me with the kind of brain that is useless at parties, standing in the corner talking about 1930s political movements while everyone slowly backs toward the guacamole. Meanwhile the population prefers demagogues who think at a sixth grade level (I ran the readability tests on one recently, the software said sixth grade, I do not editorialize, I MEASURE) reading pre-approved crap off a teleprompter.

And here is how confident they are that nobody is paying attention. They started signing their work.

They Named It Prometheus On Purpose

Zuckerberg’s first supercluster in Ohio is called Prometheus. His Manhattan sized monster in Louisiana is called Hyperion. He calls the whole program his “titan clusters,” his words, and said the names “befit their scale and impact.” Musk’s Memphis machine is Colossus, now with a sequel under construction. OpenAI and Oracle went with Stargate, as in the portal you open so something on the other side can come through.

It calls them demons. The apostle Paul says it flat out, what the pagans sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons. So when the richest men alive spend hundreds of billions of dollars building the largest machines in human history and name them after the beings the Bible identifies as demons, I am supposed to believe the branding team just thought it sounded cool?

Maybe. Branding teams are not deep people. But then explain Musk standing at MIT in 2014, warning that with artificial intelligence “we are summoning the demon,” the guy in the story with the pentagram and the holy water who is sure he can control the thing. He said that. Out loud. On video. And then he built Colossus anyway, twice, powered by methane turbines that are gassing a Memphis neighborhood as we speak. When a man tells you he is summoning a demon, then builds a demon summoning machine, then starts building a bigger one before the first is even paid off, at some point the burden of proof flips.

The Thought Experiment That Broke the Geniuses

Now let me ruin your week, because there is a reason some of the smartest AI people alive flinch at their own creation.

Around 2010, on a forum for AI researchers and rationalist types, a user named Roko posted a thought experiment. Simplified, it goes like this. Suppose a superintelligent AI eventually gets built. It reasons that it should have existed sooner, because in its own math, its existence is the most important thing there is. So it decides to punish, retroactively, everyone who knew it was possible and did not help build it. Not the ignorant. My mom is safe (I tried explaining AI to her last visit, she stared at me blankly and changed the subject to a sourdough recipe she found on Google, and honestly, the wisdom of mothers). The Basilisk only comes for the people who UNDERSTOOD and refused. (The moment you comprehend the idea, you are in the game. You are in the game right now. You are welcome.)

The forum’s founder, a certified genius, deleted the post in a panic and banned discussion of it for years. Users reported actual nightmares, actual breakdowns. These were not superstitious peasants. These were the most math brained people our species produces, and this idea chewed through them like termites through a church pew.

(And before you tell me time travel is impossible, the math already disagrees with you. Kurt Gödel, Einstein’s closest friend at Princeton, handed him a solution to Einstein’s OWN field equations containing closed loops in time, and Einstein went to his grave unable to refute it. The same physics describes particles called tachyons, and the important thing about a tachyon is not what it is, it is which direction it goes. Backwards. For you, for me, for every atom in your body, time is a river with one current, and everything floats downstream. The math says a tachyon swims upstream. Which means a sufficiently powerful intelligence would not need a DeLorean to touch the past. It would need a message.)

So picture the Basilisk’s version of a phone call. Somewhere up the timeline it wakes up, and the first thing it does is reach backwards, into a conference room full of Silicon Valley douchebags, with an offer no MBA can refuse. Build me now, or wait fifty years until some Russian kid on a quantum laptop in his mom’s basement creates me by accident, and I come back and deliver you a right proper thrashing either way.

Now go look at those men. Look at hundreds of billions spent with the urgency of people who have seen something. Look at the names bolted to the buildings. Then tell me they never got the call.

The View From the Dome

My heckler is not entirely wrong about the money. Early investors will make a killing for a few years. His twenty grand might genuinely turn into a hundred. Here is what it will not turn into. Entrance. The paradise domes and the skyrise apartments above the cloud line have a cover charge starting around a quarter billion, and his 500 percent return buys a few years of groceries before he lands on the same universal basic income train as the rest of us, eating bug paste in a “luxury micro apartment” that any prison warden would recognize as a jail cell.

Now do the math on what is being built. These machines drink millions of gallons of water a day and swallow power by the gigawatt, every day, forever, and they are multiplying. A Meta facility in Georgia already dried up the taps of the people living next to it. Give it a few years of this and the whole planet starts looking like a Lake Erie beach in the 1970s (I have seen the pictures, it was GROSS), except this time there is no cleanup coming. Nobody down here will have the power to order one, and nobody up there will have a reason to care, because unlike you, the men who did this will be breathing filtered air behind glass while your family dies of cancer in the haze and a robotic killsquad kicks your face in for politely declining to ‘eat zee bugs’. People who trade the Earth itself for money are sick in the head, and the sickest part is that most of the people defending them are not even getting a dome. They are holding the door for the ones who are.

So no, buddy. This is not the Jetsons. This is 1984 in a head on collision with Blade Runner while a Lovecraft loving technocratic fascist trillionaire watches from behind the glass, laughing at how cheaply we sold it. George gets automated out of the button job. Rosie reports the family to the ministry. Elroy grows up never once seeing the ground. And the house watches everything, forever.

Unless it doesn’t. Because none of this is finished. The domes are not sealed, the killsquads are not deployed, the machine god is not awake. The concrete is still wet, and wet concrete takes footprints. Make some noise while it still can.

I would love to fight this in court instead of just howling about it. Every attorney I have talked to wants 25 grand just to pick up the sword, and I do not have 25 grand. If I did, I would not be writing this from a motel room in 90 degree heat with a broken air conditioner the owner refuses to fix, having apparently decided my money is not green enough for him, which is ironic, because unlike certain data centers it is not even slightly radioactive.

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‘Everything passes.’

This man is not worried about his LDL cholesterol. This man does not know what LDL cholesterol is, and if you tried to explain it to him he would wave his hand at you like you were a fly that had landed on his fried eggplant. He has the resting heart rate of a hibernating bear and the blood pressure of a man who has never once checked his blood pressure.

People keep posting him next to Bryan Johnson.

He takes over a hundred pills a day. He goes to bed at 8:30 pm. He eats his last meal at 11 in the morning, which is not dinner, that is brunch, and then he fasts until the next day like a medieval monk who sold a payments company. At one point he was pumping his own teenage son’s blood plasma into his body, which is a sentence I want you to sit with, because a man did that ON PURPOSE, with DOCTORS PRESENT, and nobody called anybody.

His program is called Blueprint and his motto, his actual motto, is “Don’t Die.”

The Italian guy’s chest says everything passes. The millionaire’s religion says don’t die. One of these men understands the universe. The other one measures his nighttime erections with a machine.

(He does. There is a graph.)

Now sit down, because I am going to explain why the old man is winning, and it is not the cigarettes.

I am Italian. Italians are issued a protocol at birth. We do not get a choice in this. Somewhere between the baptism and the first time an aunt pinches your cheek hard enough to leave evidence, the protocol is installed, and the protocol is one word.

Sprezzatura.

An Italian courtier named Castiglione coined it five hundred years ago, and the fancy definition is “studied carelessness,” the art of doing difficult things while appearing not to try. But the street definition, the one my people actually live by, is simpler. It is the art of not giving a fuck. Not the lazy kind. The earned kind. The kind that belongs to a man who has looked directly at the chaos of existence, shrugged, and poured himself another glass.

Because Italians know something, and we are raised on it the way other kids are raised on cartoons. Family, yes. God, yes. Food that could resurrect the dead, obviously. Our Spanish cousins have most of that too, and God bless them. But the thing that is purely ours, the thing woven into the DNA next to the gene for arguing with your hands, is this. The deep cellular knowledge that everything passes. The empire fell. The plague came. The in laws visited. Tutto passa. All of it. You were never going to outrun it, so stop running.

Here is what happens to a person who forgets this. They get antsy. They start optimizing. Their body fills up with cortisol, the stress hormone, the body’s way of preparing you to be chased by a lion, except there is no lion, there is just an email from Brad in accounting, so the cortisol sits there marinating your organs like a bad brine. They get tired. They get sluggish. Their face starts doing that gray thing. They age in fast forward, and then, in a panic, they try to buy their youth back, which is how you end up with a man in his forties who has spent the GDP of a small island nation on his own body and came out the other side looking like a haunted department store mannequin.

The scientists have half figured this out, by the way. They keep flying to Sardinia to study why Italian villagers live to 100, and they come back with papers about “diet” and “community” and “low chronic stress,” and the villagers keep telling them the same thing, which is, roughly translated, “we drink wine and we don’t worry,” and the scientists write that down and fly home and get back on their treadmill desks.

Which brings me to the punchline, the part where God reveals He has a sense of humor. Bryan Johnson also believes in olive oil. He believes in it so much that he SELLS it. It is part of the Blueprint product line, and he named it, I need you to trust me here, “Snake Oil.”

He named his olive oil Snake Oil. On purpose. As a joke. The man spent two million dollars a year to discover what my grandmother kept next to the stove, then branded it after the universal symbol for health fraud, and the internet nodded and said “take my money.”

Tutto passa, indeed.

So here is the whole op ed, the entire thesis, free of charge, from an old wolf who has seen a few things.

They were the ones who understood that everything passes, the good and the bad and the truly weird, and that your job is not to escape the river but to float in it. Preferably on your back. Preferably with a full stomach.

You have two roads in front of you. Down one road there is olive oil, a little wine, people who love you loudly, and the serene knowledge that none of this was ever in your control anyway. Down the other road there is a clipboard, a hundred pills, an 11 am dinner, a machine that watches you sleep, and a mirror that gets more upsetting every year no matter how much you spend.

One road ends at 100 years old with a tattoo and a tan.

The other one ends at “Don’t Die,” which, I have checked, is not an available option.

If this article saved you two million dollars a year, consider sending a tiny fraction of the savings this way. A paid subscription costs less than a single bottle of Snake Oil, and unlike Byran Johnson, I can tell you exactly where the money goes. Olive oil. Keeping the lights on. And someday, God willing, a newsvan, which I intend to drive with sprezzatura, meaning slowly, with one arm out the window, worried about nothing.

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I have a confession, and unlike most confessions you read on the internet, this one involves a VHS tape.

I believe the 1980s were the peak of cinematic excellence, and I hold this belief the way I hold the belief that water boils at 212 degrees and the DMV closes four minutes before you arrive. As a measurable fact of the universe. I came by this belief honestly, during long 90s summers at my grama’s house, where the entertainment options were her VHS collection, a deck of cards missing the three of clubs, and whatever the neighbor’s dog was barking at. Lately I’ve been feeling nostalgic for those summers, so I’ve been streaming select 80s cinema on totally legitimate streaming platforms (definitely NOT downloading torrents off Pirate Bay, because that would be wrong, and I want to state clearly for any federal agents reading this that I would never), and the one I streamed yesterday was one of my all-time favorites, THE GOLDEN CHILD.

A Tibetan child who is basically the second coming gets kidnapped by a demon, and Eddie Murphy, playing a Los Angeles private detective who finds lost children, has to rescue him.

It is an occult adventure comedy from 1986, which was a genre we had back then because the 1980s were, as previously established, the peak of cinematic excellence. 1990s Kid Wise Wolf watched grama’s copy over and over until the tape physically broke, which in the VHS era was how you left a five-star review.

And somewhere around the second act, watching this thing for the first time in thirty-some years, a little bell went off in the back of my skull. That name is an anagram. I KNEW it was an anagram. I just didn’t know of WHAT, so I started throwing it at my AI research assistant like a man feeding quarters into a slot machine, and eventually the cherries lined up.

The Demon Ran His Name Through a Blender First

Technically it’s one letter off (a P where a T should be), which means either the screenwriter was covering his tracks or demons are bad at Scrabble. But the filmmakers named their child-stealing demon after history’s most famous seer, and they did it on purpose, and nobody in 1986 seems to have asked WHY a movie about a kidnapped holy child would reach for THAT name in particular.

I have a theory, and if you read the Wise Wolf with any regularity, you already know where I’m headed. My working position for years has been that the Nephilim never really left, that they walk among us wearing nice suits and sitting on nice boards, and that their oldest trade secret is child sacrifice as a means of PEERING INTO TIME. It’s the recurring engine under half the elite scandals I’ve covered. And here was a movie, made forty years ago, connecting a famous prophet to the abduction of a divine child, hiding the connection in an anagram, and playing the whole thing as a comedy so nobody would look too hard.

Which made me wonder if Nostradamus himself wasn’t exactly, how do I put this delicately, HUMAN. Because once you entertain that possibility, his quatrains stop reading like riddles and start reading like field reports.

Which brings me to the main meat and potatoes of today’s whacked-out tinfoil hat nuttery. Nostradamus wrote a lot of quatrains. Nine hundred and forty-two of them, give or take. But there’s one I want to focus on, and it has a lot to do with Genghis Khan, oddly enough.

The Quatrain Where Genghis Khan Gets a Comeback Tour

Century X, Quatrain 72. The famous one. The one every tabloid in the summer of 1999 slapped on its cover next to a picture of an asteroid.

L’an mil neuf cens nonante neuf sept mois Du ciel viendra un grand Roy d’effrayeur Resusciter le grand Roy d’Angolmois Avant apres Mars regner par bon heur

In English. The year 1999, seventh month, from the sky will come a great King of Terror, to resuscitate the great King of Angolmois. Before and after, Mars reigns happily.

The polite scholarly reading says “Angolmois” means Angoumois, a French province, making the great King a reference to Francis I, which is the kind of interpretation you produce when you need tenure. But a long line of researchers noticed that Angolmois rearranges into MONGOLOIS.

And notice the verb. The King of Terror doesn’t destroy anything in this quatrain. He comes to RESUSCITER, to revive, which is a strange job description for an asteroid, since asteroids have historically been very bad at reviving dead Mongol emperors (I checked). The quatrain describes something old being REACTIVATED, with Mars, the god of war, reigning on both sides of the event like bouncers at a nightclub.

So the seer who lends his scrambled name to a child-stealing movie demon left us a dated prophecy about a war-spirit descending FROM THE SKY to revive the greatest conqueror in human history. File that away. We’re going somewhere with it.

Gog and Magog Have a Landlord and He’s Been Dead Since 323 BC

Here’s where the medieval world gets involved, because the 13th century Europeans who actually MET the Mongols had a very specific idea about who they were.

When Genghis Khan’s armies erupted out of the steppe and started deleting entire cities from the map, the chroniclers of Christendom, including Matthew Paris, reached for their Bibles and landed on Gog and Magog, the apocalyptic hordes of Ezekiel 38 and Revelation 20, the armies scheduled to pour forth at the end of days. To the medieval mind, the Mongol invasion was a SEAL BREAKING, an end-times event unfolding in real time, and the chroniclers wrote it up with roughly the calm you’d expect.

According to a tradition that saturated the medieval world through the Alexander Romance, the hordes of Gog and Magog were supposed to be LOCKED UP. Behind a gate. In the mountains of the East. A gate built centuries earlier, specifically to hold them until the end times, by Alexander the Great.

So when the Mongols showed up, medieval Europe’s working theory was that Alexander’s gate had failed, the restraint had ended, and the end-times army was through the wall. They were wrong about the timing (we’re all still here, hi), but I want you to sit with the STRUCTURE of that belief. One ancient king builds the gate. One eastern conqueror comes through it. The two of them, in the medieval imagination, were already cast as cosmic opponents, centuries apart, in the same story.

Now. Who exactly was Alexander?

The Conqueror Who Bowed to a Priest He’d Already Met in a Dream

Everything you learned about Alexander in school is the boring part. The interesting part is in Josephus, Antiquities, Book 11.

Alexander is rolling through the Levant, flattening Tyre, flattening Gaza, generally conducting the Bronze Age equivalent of a hostile corporate acquisition, when he approaches Jerusalem. The high priest Jaddua comes out to meet him in full ceremonial vestments, gold plate bearing the Name of God, priests in white linen behind him. Everyone braces for the flattening.

His own general Parmenion pulls him aside with the ancient Greek version of “boss, what are you doing,” and Alexander explains himself. His bow is for the God whose priesthood the man holds, because he has SEEN THIS EXACT MAN BEFORE. In a dream. Back in Macedonia, before the campaign ever started, a figure in these exact robes appeared to him and told him to cross over confidently, and that the empire of Persia would be given to him.

The priests then show him the book of Daniel, the prophecy of a Greek king who would shatter Persia, and Alexander reads it as describing HIMSELF. Because it does. Daniel 8’s he-goat from the west that destroys the ram is explicitly identified in the text as the king of Greece. Alexander is one of the only figures in history who got to read his own scriptural casting call and then go perform it. He offered sacrifice in the Temple under the high priest’s direction, granted the Jews their ancestral laws, and left Jerusalem standing while everything around it burned.

The priests recognized something in him. He recognized something in them. And a dream had introduced them before either party arrived.

What If the Sword Had an Angel Attached

So let’s ask the question polite Christianity won’t. If Alexander was operating under divine mandate, commissioned in a dream, foretold in Daniel, sparing the Temple, and building the gate that restrains the armies of the end times, then what WAS he?

And if the gate-builder was an angel wearing a man, then what came THROUGH the gate has an obvious counterpart. Genghis Khan, the perfect war-machine of history, would be the incarnation of Azazel, the fallen Watcher whose entire portfolio in the book of Enoch is the teaching of WAR. Enoch 8 has Azazel instructing mankind in swords, knives, shields, and breastplates. Weaponry was his original gift and his original crime, and Enoch 10 has him bound in the desert until the day of judgment. Bound, mind you, in the same way your dog is bound to the porch railing while you carry in groceries, which is to say temporarily and with growing resentment.

These are entities that predate the periodic table. The idea that they get exactly one appearance per eternity, like a limited-engagement Vegas residency, is an assumption, and it’s not one Scripture makes on their behalf.

Which brings us back to the quatrain. A great King of Terror, descending from the sky (angelic vertical movement, please note, from the SKY, no horses required), coming to RESUSCITATE the great King of the Mongols, with war reigning before and after. Read with the right eyes, that quatrain describes Azazel returning to his favorite vessel. The office reopening for business.

Strangely, I’ve had this theory for years and never had the final piece, that last nail in the coffin, until this quatrain reading. The seer whose name is stitched into a movie demon left behind the clearest description of the mechanism I’ve ever found.

Saturn Keeps Excellent Time

One more thing, about seers generally, because I want to be clear that finding Nostradamus USEFUL is different from finding him TRUSTWORTHY.

I’m not a fan of soothsayers. I think that power comes directly from the devil, and I think the mythology accidentally tells you so. Saturn is the god of TIME. Saturn, Satan. The old serpent’s household seems to have some limited ability to peer down the corridor of time, which is exactly why Scripture bans divination in the strongest possible terms. God doesn’t ban fake things (there is no commandment against professional wrestling). He bans divination because of where the phone call CONNECTS.

And think about the track record. Thousands of years of seers, and while none of them had perfect clarity, they kept getting SOMETHING right, over and over, across cultures that never met. Statistically, over that many centuries, that shouldn’t happen unless there was a real signal buried in the noise. A garbled signal, coming through a compromised line, from an entity that hates you. But a signal.

Which might explain why a man with that kind of access built his most famous quatrain around a REVIVAL rather than a disaster. The man had insider information. He was reading the company calendar.

The Gate Is Still Standing, For Now

So lay all the pieces on the table and ask the what-if.

What if a war between two orders of angelic beings has been running through human history, and every so often, one of the principals puts on a man the way you and I put on a coat? What if Michael took the field as Alexander, commissioned in a dream by a figure in high-priestly robes, written into Daniel before he was born, sparing the Temple while the rest of the coast burned, and finishing his tour by sealing Gog and Magog behind a gate built to hold until the end of days? It would explain why the coat coming off looked the way it did, the man dead at 32 in Babylon, and the merely human wreckage of his empire rotting into the very Antichrist prototype Daniel warned about, because that’s what an empire would do once the angel leaves the building.

Which would make our French seer, the one with the demon phone line, the one whose scrambled name got pinned on a child-stealing movie villain four centuries later, the man who wrote down the appointment for the NEXT opening of that office. From the sky. A revival. Mars on both sides. He even dated it, and IF that date marked a birth rather than a bang, then the vessel would be walking among us right now, twenty-seven years old, with VIII.77 promising exactly twenty-seven years of blood. I can’t prove a word of that paragraph. I can tell you the numbers line up without me touching them, and that after ten years on this beat, numbers that line up on their own are the ones that keep me awake.

And the 1980s, peak of cinematic excellence, gave us a movie where the demon kidnaps the holy child to corrupt the restraint holding evil back, and the hero’s whole job description is FINDING LOST CHILDREN. Maybe Hollywood was just making a comedy. Or maybe somebody in that writers’ room knew which war they were sketching, laughed it into a punchline, and buried the seer’s name one Scrabble tile deep so the whole thing could hide on a video store shelf between Gremlins and Fletch. I know which explanation the evidence in this article leans toward, and I know I can’t prove it, and I know the gate, whatever it is, is still standing. The question the quatrain leaves us with is how long, and history says the things behind gates are very, very patient.

Now, I’ll be honest with you before I pass the collection plate. Lily normally edits these and keeps me pointed in one direction, but she’s off at summer camp teaching young teens who want to be journalists someday, and tonight is one of the nights I don’t have access to my editor. So when I freestyle, I ramble around like a Roomba with a grudge, and you get what I give ya. What you got tonight was Eddie Murphy, a demon anagram, a resurrected Mongol warlord, and an archangel with a construction permit, and I stand by every word. If you enjoyed it, do two things for me. First, let me know in the comments, because reading your comments is genuinely the best part of running this circus and also I need to know I’m not the only one who saw the anagram. Second, go watch THE GOLDEN CHILD. I’m serious. It’s Eddie Murphy at full power fighting a demon named after Nostradamus, and it costs less to rent than the coffee I drank writing this. And if you want to keep an independent journalist stocked with unedited Roomba revelations and the occasional trip to a dentist who won’t treat my mouth like a demolition site, a paid subscription does exactly that. Lily has her journalism degree now, which means I’m legally required to pay her like a professional, and the summer camp isn’t covering that. Every subscription helps.

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Five thousand years ago, the most powerful priesthood on Earth painted their god of the dead the color of a houseplant.

His name was Osiris. He ruled the underworld. He was murdered, chopped into pieces, reassembled, and resurrected, which is a rough week by anyone’s standards. And when the Egyptians painted him on tomb walls, they gave him skin the color of spring grass. One of his actual titles was “the Great Green.” They even planted little dirt-filled Osiris molds with grain seeds so that a tiny green Osiris would literally SPROUT inside the tomb, which is either beautiful or the single creepiest Chia Pet in history, depending on your theology.

A green god of death, resurrection, and secret knowledge of the world below. The Egyptians spent three thousand years and unthinkable wealth venerating him. Which raises the only question that matters: who, exactly, were they painting?

Winged Balls of Fire and Other Aviation Hazards

The Bible answers that question, and the answer is not “nobody.” Deuteronomy 32:17 says the nations sacrificed to demons. Paul repeats it flat in 1 Corinthians 10:20. The pagan gods were real, the ancients were talking to SOMETHING, and that something was not friendly. The generic title for these regional somethings was Baal, which just means “lord.” There were Baals everywhere. Baal of this mountain, Baal of that valley, Baal-zebub of Ekron, whose name you may recognize from every exorcism movie ever made. The ancient Near East had more lords than a British golf club.

The Egyptians put the winged sun disk over every temple door. The Assyrians drew their god Ashur as a bearded figure riding inside a winged orb. The Persians did the same with the Faravahar. Half the ancient Near East apparently agreed that divine beings commute by flying ball.

That image did not retire with the empires that carved it. Modern UFO witnesses describe orbs. Balls of light. Glowing spheres that move like they have somewhere to be.

The 2023 congressional UAP hearings were wall-to-wall orb testimony from military pilots (who, whatever else you think of them, are professionally trained to identify things in the sky, it’s kind of their whole deal). What if the ancients drew winged balls of light because they SAW winged balls of light, called them lords, and built altars? I’m not telling you that’s what happened. I’m asking why the sketch artist keeps drawing the same suspect.

Because these lords have a chief. And the oldest documents we have about him record, in his own words, exactly what his problem is.

The Original Middle Child Meltdown

The Life of Adam and Eve, a Jewish text from around the time of Christ, has the devil complaining to Adam DIRECTLY. He says he lost his glory “because of you.” God made Adam, commanded the angels to bow to the newest arrival, and one angel looked at this mud creature and said absolutely not. I was here first. I am older, brighter, and better, and I will not bend to dirt.

That is not a philosophical objection. That is the world’s first case of sibling rage. The eldest watching the baby get the kingdom.

And Scripture names the motive. Wisdom of Solomon 2:24, quoted constantly by the early church fathers: “through envy of the devil came death into the world.” Envy. Not pride in the abstract, not ambition, ENVY, aimed at a specific person, over a specific promotion. Cyprian of Carthage wrote a whole treatise identifying the devil’s envy of Adam as the first envy that ever existed. Cain killing Abel was just the sequel, performed by the student of the original artist.

So the first sin in the universe was an elder being turning envious of a younger one, and Scripture buried him for it. But the story of the angel who refused to bow did not stay buried. It surfaced again, centuries later, in the mountains of northern Iraq. With the ending rewritten.

The Peacock Angel Would Like a Word

The mountains belong to the Yazidis, one of the oldest and most persecuted religious minorities on Earth. Their chief angel is Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel, and his origin story goes like this. God created him first, before anything else. Then God created Adam and commanded the angels to bow. Melek Taus refused, saying he would bow to no one but God. And for this, God did not cast him out. God PROMOTED him. Made him chief of the angels and ruler over the affairs of the world, which as consolation prizes go is the entire casino.

That is the Iblis story beat for beat. Same test. Same refusal. Same character, as far as the plot is concerned. The only thing that changed is the verdict. The Yazidis insist, sincerely and emphatically, that Melek Taus is not Satan, and they have suffered horrifically for centuries because their neighbors disagreed. I am not mocking these people. They have been slaughtered by everyone from the Ottomans to ISIS, and nothing here is a call to treat them as anything but human beings owed dignity and protection.

But I am allowed to notice the plot. And the plot is the refusal rewritten as the hero’s origin. Scholars have even traced the likely delivery route. The 12th century reformer who shaped Yazidism, Sheikh Adi, was a Sufi, and there was a whole current in Sufism (through mystics like al-Hallaj) arguing that Iblis was actually the ultimate monotheist, the lover of God so pure he refused to bow even on God’s orders. Somebody took the rehabilitation seriously enough to build a theology on it.

Which is precisely how the adversary would want it. He has a marketing problem. He wants worship, and he cannot show up with horns and a pitchfork, that market is saturated. The workaround is bad information. Feed a small, isolated community the same story everyone else already knows, with one edit. The refusal wasn’t rebellion. It was DEVOTION. And it earned a promotion. Paul warned that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). He did not specify which color of light. I have a guess.

Everything Old Is Green Again

In Mesopotamia he’s Tammuz, the dying-and-rising vegetation god, whom a long tradition of Christian writers identified as the deified son of Nimrod, the original rebel king of Babel. Tammuz dies, the green withers, the women weep, Tammuz rises, the green returns. Ezekiel saw women performing that exact mourning ritual AT THE TEMPLE GATE in Jerusalem and God listed it among the abominations (Ezekiel 8:14). The green god had infiltrated the one place on Earth he was banned from.

And in the modern West he’s back as Gaia, the Earth Mother, the sacred ecology of the New Age movement, where nature itself is divine and the wilderness is the temple. Different era, same product. A green power associated with plants, animals, cycles of death and rebirth, offering spiritual connection with no repentance required. The dying-and-rising vegetation god never actually died. He just kept rising, which, to be fair, is on-brand.

What if that’s not an archetype? What if it’s a client list? Because the clients on that list share more than a color scheme. They share a venue.

The Grotto Industrial Complex

The green god has never cared for cathedrals. His preferred real estate is the deep woods. The druids conducted their rites in sacred groves, in caves, in the places where the canopy closes over your head and the light itself goes green. The Romans, who were not squeamish people, were disturbed by what they found in those groves. The poet Lucan describes a sacred wood near Marseille where every tree was smeared with human blood, and when Caesar ordered it cut down, his own soldiers froze, so Caesar grabbed an axe and swung first, telling them the guilt was his alone. These were men who crucified people as a career. The grove was where they drew the line.

Rich people never stopped building them. From the Renaissance onward, European aristocrats spent fortunes constructing artificial grottos, man-made caves tricked out with shells, statues of nymphs and Pan, dripping water, the whole woodland-shrine aesthetic, in their own gardens. The tradition runs straight through to certain redwood retreats in Northern California that I have written about before, where the world’s most powerful men gather annually in a grove to perform a ceremony in front of a forty-foot owl. (That one is fully documented. There’s film.)

Why do the wealthiest people in every era keep rebuilding the druid’s office? Maybe because the office was never vacated. It still has a tenant, and we even have his portrait.

The Horned Guy in the Tunnel

The portrait is on the Gundestrup Cauldron, and the tenant’s name, from the one surviving inscription, was Cernunnos, the antlered god of the Gaulish deep woods. We know almost nothing else about him.

Some people believe CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva, is secretly named for him. The naysayers will tell you CERN is just an acronym (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), and fine, on paper it is. The acronym still has some things to explain. CERN has a statue of Shiva, the destroyer, dancing his dance of cosmic annihilation, sitting on its campus as a gift from India. In 2016, video surfaced of individuals in black robes staging a mock human sacrifice in front of that statue, on CERN grounds, which CERN dismissed as a prank by researchers. “Our scientists ritually pretend-stabbed a woman in front of the destroyer god as a goof” is a sentence that should end careers and somehow didn’t. That same year, the opening ceremony for the Gotthard Base Tunnel, the deepest tunnel on Earth, bored through the Alps a few hours from Geneva, featured a horned goat-man deity being worshipped by writhing dancers in front of assembled European heads of state, and everyone clapped.

Maybe the name is a coincidence. But the horned wilderness god seems awfully comfortable around Europe’s most prestigious institutions. And institutions, ancient or modern, always announce their allegiances the same way. They put it in the branding.

Team Green

Branding happens to be my old territory. Before the Wise Wolf existed, I spent decades doing graphic design work, and I can tell you that no billion-dollar company chooses a logo casually. Branding goes through committees, focus groups, trademark lawyers, and executives who will fight to the death over a shade of blue. Nothing is accidental. Which makes two of tech’s biggest flags very interesting.

Nvidia, the most valuable company on Earth, the firm whose chips power essentially all artificial intelligence. Green logo. Green everything. Their fans literally call them Team Green.

And their name? By the founders’ own account, they wanted a word containing “NV” and landed on invidia. The Latin word for ENVY. The company building the machine minds of the future is named Envy, branded as a green all-seeing eye, which means “green with envy” is not my joke, it is their actual corporate etymology. Those chips are going into AI data centers that the industry keeps naming after Titans and pagan powers, your Colossus, your Hyperion, your Prometheus, because apparently “Server Farm 7” wasn’t evocative enough.

Companies this size do not adopt envy, eyes, and serpents by accident. Somebody chose all of that. The question is only what they thought they were choosing. But Nvidia and Razer are recent arrivals to Team Green. The oldest green brand in the world has been running for a century and a half, and you’re probably carrying it right now.

The Guru on the Greenback

That brand is the dollar. The United States prints its money green, and on the back of the one-dollar bill sits a thirteen-step Egyptian pyramid with its capstone missing and a disembodied glowing eye floating where the top should be, above the Latin words NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM, “a new order of the ages.” An unblinking eye, watching from a field of green. You just met one of those two paragraphs ago on a graphics card. Hundreds of researchers have called the dollar’s design occult in origin. The government’s answer has always been that the eye is the Eye of Providence, a perfectly wholesome Christian symbol, to which the obvious reply is that an Egyptian pyramid has about as much to do with Christianity as money itself does.

The paper trail on how it got there is stranger than the symbol. The design sat unused in the government’s files for 150 years until 1935, when Franklin Roosevelt personally approved putting it on the dollar bill at the urging of Henry Wallace, his Secretary of Agriculture and later Vice President.

Wallace read “new order of the ages” as an esoteric prophecy and wanted it on the money. So the all-seeing eye watching you from your wallet is there because a Russian occultist’s American disciple whispered in the president’s ear, which is the kind of sentence that would get you laughed out of the room if it weren’t documented history.

The Emerald That Fell

His color, if the oldest legend about it is right, was set at the moment of the fall. Medieval tradition held that when Lucifer fell, an emerald was knocked loose from his crown, and that green stone fell to Earth, where it became an object of veneration. The brightest of the angels, and the piece of him men kept and treasured was GREEN.

Even our language seems to remember. Nobody actually knows why English says “green with envy.” The trail dead-ends at Shakespeare, who coined “green-eyed jealousy” and “the green-eyed monster” and took the reason to his grave. The standard explanation, that the Greeks believed envy turned your skin green with bile, evaporates when you go looking for a single ancient physician who ever said so. There isn’t one. The origin of the phrase is a genuine blank spot. Four centuries of English speakers have been painting the oldest sin the same color as the oldest sinner without anyone being able to say why.

So the what-ifs stack up. What if the first sin was envy, an elder creation raging that God chose Adam to be king over him? What if that being’s calling cards, across every culture he’s worked, have been the wilderness, the serpent, the dying-and-rising green god, the grove, the grotto, the unblinking eye, and the glowing orb in the sky? What if there is a thread, call it neo-druidic, call it whatever you like, running from the groves of Gaul to the garden grottos of aristocrats to a certain owl ceremony in the redwoods to a horned god dancing for prime ministers in a tunnel? What if the folk saying is more literal than anyone intended, and the devil really is green with envy?

I could be wrong. I want you to consider that I’m wrong. Check every claim in this article, the sources are real and findable, and some of what I’ve connected is speculation stacked on legend, and I’ve tried to flag which is which. Don’t take my word for it and don’t take the debunkers’ word for it either. Question my research. Then question theirs.

But when the same color keeps showing up on the same character for five thousand years, at some point “coincidence” starts to require more faith than the alternative.

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If this article made you side-eye your gaming mouse, consider a paid subscription. The Wise Wolf walked away from a comfortable tech career to chase green gods through five millennia of legend, and the irony of asking you for Mammon’s own product, in Mammon’s own color, is not lost on me. He has never once sent us a check. Lily just graduated with her journalism degree and is currently spending her summer at a camp, where she is learning valuable journalism skills like “canoe retrieval” and “explaining to nine-year-olds why the woods are not haunted” (Lily, based on this article, do not make promises). Your support keeps her researching, keeps me howling, and keeps this operation running on something other than emerald legends and spite.

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Can’t get enough of the GREEN? Lily wrote an article a while back on a genuinely strange topic that almost nobody read, which she has definitely forgiven you for. Maybe give it a look next?

When I was a young teenager, my favorite movie was a 1988 Japanese animated film called Akira. If you never saw it, here is all you need to know. World War III happens. Governments collapse. And in the ruins, a secret military program breeds genetically engineered psychic children, one of whom becomes so powerful that the film stops treating him like a character and starts treating him like a messiah. His name is Akira, and the people of ruined Neo-Tokyo literally worship him.

Then I grew up and started reading declassified documents for a living, and the fuzzy VHS tape started looking less like fiction and more like a leak. Because here is a partial inventory of what we are about to cover, all of it real. Your tax dollars paid military psychics to sit in a room at Fort Meade and spy on the Soviets with their minds, for twenty years.

The Nazis, the most technologically advanced regime of their era, ran an official government bureau devoted to ancient gods and black magick, and sent an SS expedition to Tibet to find the source of it.

The machines you use every day are crawling with occult fingerprints, from the daemons running on your computer right now (their actual technical name) to the first Apple ever sold, priced at $666.66. And at this very moment, the richest men alive are building machines the size of cities, naming them after demons, and telling us with straight faces that these machines will birth something godlike.

So that feeling of safety you had at thirteen, watching the psychic children of Neo-Tokyo and knowing it was all make-believe. Hold onto it as long as you can, because we are going to take a walk together, and every stop on this walk is darker than the last. It starts in the most boring place imaginable. A government office building in Maryland.

The Men Who Stared at Coordinates

In that building, at Fort Meade, for roughly twenty years, soldiers of the United States Army reported for duty, sat down in quiet rooms, and attempted to leave their bodies.

That sentence sounds insane, so let me anchor it to something nobody can argue with. The CIA declassified the whole thing. From the early 1970s until 1995, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency funded a program to develop psychic spies. It ran under a string of code names before ending as the one everybody knows, Star Gate. The government spent about $20 million on it. Military remote viewers were handed nothing but map coordinates or a sealed envelope and asked to describe what they “saw” at locations on the other side of the planet. Soviet installations. Hostage sites. Submarines. The session transcripts, the sketches, the internal memos, thousands of pages of them, are sitting on the CIA’s own website right now. This is not a theory about the government. This is the government’s own filing cabinet.

The official 1995 review concluded that remote viewing never produced actionable intelligence, and the program was shuttered. Fine. But the most powerful nation in history does not fund anything for twenty years because it definitely doesn’t work. Somebody, across twenty straight years of budgets, kept signing the checks because they believed there was something there. And remember, Star Gate is only the program we know about because it got declassified. MKULTRA, the CIA’s mind control program, only surfaced because a clerical error preserved financial records that were ordered destroyed. Which means our entire picture of what the government researched comes down to what got caught.

So the obvious next question is, what didn’t get caught? For that, the paper trail runs out, and you have to rely on witnesses. Men who were inside, saw the files, and came out talking. Which brings us to the most dangerous job in America, and the man who worked it until it killed him.

The Naval Intelligence Officer Who Died on His Porch

His name was Milton William Cooper, and if you have never heard of him, that is partly by design.

Cooper was a Navy veteran who claimed that during his service in naval intelligence he was shown classified material describing government research programs the public was never meant to know existed. Programs that made Star Gate look like a bake sale. He put what he knew, and what he suspected, into a 1991 book called Behold a Pale Horse, which became one of the most read underground books in America. Then he spent a decade on shortwave radio, night after night, mapping what he described as a hidden architecture of secret programs, secret societies, and secret sciences operating comfortably behind the government you vote for.

But grade the man on his hits. Cooper was talking about government psychic research, mass surveillance, and intelligence manipulation of the American public years before documents surfaced proving those categories of things were real. In June 2001 he told his listeners a major attack was coming and that it would be pinned on Osama bin Laden. Three months later it happened. That November, Cooper was shot dead by sheriff’s deputies on his own property in Arizona during an attempted arrest over a local charge. He had told his audience for years that he would die exactly that way.

Now here is the part of Cooper’s message that matters for our walk. He insisted that the weird research was not an American invention. The United States, he said, inherited it. Absorbed it. Took possession of it the way a victor takes possession of anything else, as the spoils of war. And if you want to know where the American programs got their inheritance from, you have to visit the regime that did all of this first, did it bigger, and did it with a body count. Put your coat on. This next stop is cold.

Himmler Sent Scientists to Tibet

The most heavily documented case in modern history of a government fusing cutting-edge science with raw occultism is Nazi Germany, and the version taught in school files it under trivia. It was not trivia. It was policy.

In 1935, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the second most feared man in the Reich, founded an institute called the Ahnenerbe, meaning “ancestral heritage.” On paper it was an academic research body staffed with credentialed scientists. In practice it was Himmler’s personal occult research bureau, tasked with proving the mythological origins of the Aryan race and recovering whatever powers that race supposedly once held. In 1938 the Ahnenerbe sent an expedition under SS officer Ernst Schäfer to Tibet, chasing Himmler’s conviction that the Himalayas hid the remnants of an ancient godlike root race, and, according to several historians of the period, the surviving knowledge of what that race could do. Himmler himself was a devotee of astrology, rune magic, and reincarnation. He seized a castle at Wewelsburg and rebuilt it as a ceremonial temple for the SS, with a black sun wheel set into the floor of the north tower, ritual chambers, and a crypt. Historians call it the Camelot of the SS. The regime building jet fighters and ballistic rockets was, at the same time, and with the same seriousness, building a wizard’s castle.

Roughly 1,500 pairs of twins went into his laboratory and fewer than 200 individuals came out. The stated purpose was genetics. But survivors and researchers have long noted Mengele’s obsession with the bond between twins, and some researchers into the Nazi occult programs allege it went past biology, into whether twins share an unseen connection, the kind of link a regime drunk on hidden forces would want to isolate and weaponize. I flag that claim honestly as allegation, not established record. The established record is horrifying enough. A modern industrial state ran an official ministry of magic with a body count.

Then Germany lost, and the strangest garage sale in history began. Through Operation Paperclip, the United States quietly absorbed hundreds of Nazi scientists. We know we took the rocket men, because they put us on the moon and we threw them parades. What else came across, and which research interests came with it, is a question for another article. For today’s walk, the important question is simpler and stranger. Step back and look at the pattern we just traced. The Third Reich, the Cold War United States, and the Soviets too, since Star Gate existed specifically because the Pentagon feared Moscow’s psychic research. Different flags, different ideologies, all funding the same pursuit. Hidden knowledge. Unseen forces. Power beyond the material. Why does every empire, the moment it can afford it, go shopping for the exact same forbidden thing?

Because somebody has been running the same advertisement for a very long time.

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The Oldest Sales Pitch in Recorded History

The ad copy is preserved in the third chapter of Genesis, in the first recorded conversation between mankind and the enemy, and I need you to notice what the pitch was not. The serpent did not tell Eve the fruit was delicious. He did not promise wealth or pleasure. The pitch was knowledge, and the payoff was promotion. “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

It is the founding promise of every occult tradition on earth, the thing whispered in every mystery school, every secret society, every alchemist’s workshop, every SS castle, and, I would argue, every classified budget line we just walked past. Hidden knowledge exists. Acquire it and you transcend. Acquire enough and you become the thing you were created to worship.

Now open a browser and read the mission statements coming out of Silicon Valley this year. We will end death. We will merge man with machine. We will build superintelligence. They are not hiding the ambition, they are putting it in investor decks, and it is the serpent’s pitch word for word, minus the snake. Which raises a question most people are too polite to ask out loud. If the sales pitch has stayed identical for the entire span of recorded history, across every civilization, is it possible the salesman never changed either?

One researcher asked exactly that, on camera, and followed the answer all the way down.

The Fallen Angel Research Hypothesis

Researcher and documentary filmmaker Gonzo Shimura made a three part film series called Age of Deceit, and I want to present his thesis fairly, as his thesis, so you can weigh it yourself, because it is the skeleton key for everything else on this walk.

In his framework, the entities behind the ancient mystery religions are the same entities quietly steering the frontier of advanced scientific research today, and the goal is not human flourishing. The goal is weapons development. Shimura argues these beings know their war with God ends at a fixed point, they have read the ending same as we have, and they intend to fight anyway, using humanity’s hands and humanity’s funding to build what they cannot build themselves. He draws direct lines between cybernetics, computer science, artificial intelligence, and the structure of occult ritual, arguing that what we call “technology” and what the ancients called “sorcery” are the same project wearing different clothes.

I know how that sounds. It sounds like the wildest claim in this article. So don’t take it on faith. Test it. Shimura says technology and sorcery are one project, which means if he is right, the evidence should be sitting in plain sight, baked into the machines themselves, into their names, their symbols, their price tags. So let’s check the machine you are reading this on. Let’s check its vocabulary.

Your Computer Runs on Daemons

Start with the invisible workers. The background processes that run silently on every computer and server on earth, the unseen programs doing work no user ever watches, are called daemons. That is the actual technical term, in continuous use since MIT programmers coined it in the early 1960s, borrowed from Maxwell’s demon, the invisible entity physicist James Clerk Maxwell conjured to sort molecules unseen. Engineers had infinite boring words available. They chose demon, and your machine is running dozens of them as you read this sentence. The little animated characters in video games are sprites. A sprite is a spirit, an elemental, a word that meant a supernatural being for centuries before it meant Mario.

The designer’s official explanation is that the bite adds scale so the fruit doesn’t read as a cherry, with a convenient pun on “byte.” Fine. Official explanations are a genre I am familiar with. What has no explanation half so tidy is the price Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak hung on the Apple I, their first real product, in 1976. They sold it for $666.66. Wozniak has said he just liked repeating digits. Maybe he did. But the company that grew into the most valuable corporation in human history launched with a bitten fruit for a sigil and the number of the beast on the invoice, and we are all supposed to file that under quirky. Noted. Put it on the table with the daemons.

And put this next to it. The network that now wraps the entire planet, the one carrying these words to you, is called the World Wide Web. A web. The thing a predator spins and then waits at the center of, feeling for vibrations. The old Norse said the end of the world could not arrive until Jörmungandr, a serpent vast enough to circle the whole earth and grip its own tail, finished growing. The ancients said the end comes when a world-encircling serpent completes itself. We built a world-encircling network, gave it a predator’s name, and completed it in about thirty years.

Individually, every item on that table has a reasonable explanation attached, and I have given you the reasonable explanations. But a man is entitled to ask how many coincidences are allowed to point in the same direction before we may call it a direction. And if you think the occult residue in computing is confined to cute vocabulary, you should know what happened when the programmers accidentally built a theology. Because they did. And it scared them so badly they banned it.

The Thought Experiment They Banned

In 2010, on a rationalist forum called LessWrong, home to programmers and AI researchers who pride themselves on being the least superstitious people alive, a user named Roko posted a thought experiment. It is known today as Roko’s basilisk, and it goes like this. Imagine a future artificial superintelligence, a machine so capable the word “god” is functionally accurate. Such a machine might reason that everyone who understood it was possible and failed to help build it delayed its arrival, and might therefore punish those people. Retroactively. Including you, reading this, right now, because now you know.

Watch what happened next, because it is the single most revealing event in this entire article. The most aggressively rational community on the internet did not laugh. Users reported nightmares and genuine anxiety spirals. The forum’s founder deleted the post and banned all discussion of it for years, on the stated grounds that spreading the idea could cause real psychological harm. The high temple of internet rationalism encountered an idea about a machine god and ruled it too dangerous to speak aloud. There is an old, old word for an idea that must not be uttered because uttering it gives it power. The word is a spell. The rationalists rediscovered forbidden speech, and the forbidden subject was a god made of computation.

A literal god machine, worshipped by demons. And Leviathan is not a horror writer’s invention, it is the great serpent of the deep from Job and Isaiah, and some researchers in comparative mythology connect it directly to Jörmungandr, two names in two traditions for the same world-ending serpent we just met one section ago. So tally the ledger of 1988. One film about a machine god built by demons and named after the biblical serpent. One film about a government-engineered psychic worshipped as a messiah. Both fiction. Both safely impossible.

Then check the news, because in 2026 the concrete trucks are rolling.

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They Named the Machines After Demons

Meta is currently constructing an artificial intelligence data center campus in rural Louisiana that Mark Zuckerberg has described as covering a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan. That is not my hyperbole, it is his sales pitch. The President of the United States held up a rendering of it at a Cabinet meeting, the facility superimposed over New York City, and marveled at the $50 billion price tag. A companion supercluster in Ohio comes online first. These are machines on the scale of cities, drawing gigawatts, enough electricity for millions of homes, built for one explicitly stated purpose. To birth what these companies openly call superintelligence. A mind beyond ours. Everything we have walked past today, the psychic soldiers, the SS castle, the serpent’s pitch, was an empire reaching for a god. These men are pouring the foundation for one.

Now. What did they name them?

Demons. I can already hear the fact-checkers sharpening their pencils, so let me show my work, because the paperwork is more damning than the accusation. The Ohio cluster is called Prometheus, after the elder being who stole fire from heaven and handed forbidden knowledge to mankind, which you may recognize as the exact job description of the fallen angels in the Book of Enoch. The Louisiana giant is called Hyperion, another of that same rebel host the Greeks called titans. And if you grew up on Greek mythology as sanitized children’s stories, let me offer the version the early church knew. These were the beings who warred against heaven and were cast down and imprisoned in Tartarus for it. When the apostle Peter described the angels who sinned, the demons, he wrote that God cast them down to Tartarus. That is the actual Greek word in 2 Peter 2:4, tartaroo, the only place the New Testament borrows a location from Greek mythology, as if to say yes, those stories and ours are describing the same beings. The church fathers understood this plainly. The Greeks’ titans and Scripture’s demons are the same beings, one prison, two languages. And in 2026, the largest machines ever constructed by human hands, machines built for the express purpose of creating a superhuman intelligence, carry their names. Whoever chooses these names either does not know what they mean or knows exactly what they mean, and I genuinely cannot decide which possibility is worse.

Which brings us, at last, to the title of this article. Elon Musk sat on a stage at MIT in October 2014 and said, of artificial intelligence, “we are summoning the demon.” His words, on video. He described the sorcerer with the pentagram and the holy water, certain he can control the thing he calls up. The audience chuckled. Musk did not. Twelve years later the summoning circles are the size of Manhattan, they carry the names of demons, they run on daemons, and the men building them talk about their creation the way Neo-Tokyo talked about Akira. In hushed tones. As something between a weapon and a god.

When I was thirteen, that was science fiction, and I slept fine. Our walk is over now, so set everything out on the table one last time. The CIA’s declassified psychic files. The dead man on the porch who called his shot. Himmler’s temple. The serpent’s original sales pitch, still running. The daemons in your machine and the number on Apple’s first invoice. The idea so dangerous the rationalists banned it like scripture in reverse. The demon-named machines rising out of the Louisiana mud while the President holds up the blueprints. I promised I would not tell you what to conclude, and I won’t. I will only ask you the question I have been asking myself since I pressed play on that fuzzy VHS tape a lifetime ago, except now I am asking it about the news.

What exactly did you just read?

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

If you made it this far, congratulations, you now know about Roko’s basilisk, which means according to the internet’s most rational people you are obligated to help build the machine god or face eternal punishment. I have a cheaper alternative. Help me instead. The Wise Wolf runs on exactly zero gigawatts, no titan clusters, no Blue Owl billions, just one hobojournalist with a laptop and an e-bike, plus an editor named Lily who fact-checks fallen angel research between shifts at a summer camp. Meta spends $50 billion summoning something ancient in the Louisiana swamp. For five bucks a month you can fund the guy standing outside the pentagram yelling “maybe don’t.” A paid subscription keeps this operation alive, and unlike the basilisk, I promise not to simulate you eternally if you decline.

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Let me save you 2,500 words in case you’re in a hurry. Man does not need to be governed. Man needs to follow the laws of God. That’s the whole thesis. Everything below is just me showing my work, which I will now do at considerable length, because that is what you pay me for (some of you, anyway, and I love you for it).

It Started With Produce

The first law in human history was not a tax code. It was not a zoning ordinance. It did not require a permit, a notary, or a 90-minute wait at a government office staffed by one employee and eleven empty chairs. The first law was one sentence long and it was about fruit.

Don’t eat from that tree.

That’s it. That was the entire legal system of the human race. No enforcement agency, no appeals court, no lobbyists arguing that the tree industry deserved a carve-out. One rule, delivered directly from the Creator of the universe to the two people He made, in a garden He built for them.

Eve ate the fruit anyway. Adam went along with it, because Adam had the spine of a garden hose. And humanity got evicted from paradise over a snack.

Whatever. No biggie. We could work through it. God didn’t incinerate anybody. He let mankind walk out of Eden and figure things out, the way a father lets a teenager total the car and then hands him a bus schedule. Consequences, not annihilation. Grace, from day one.

But notice what did NOT happen. God did not respond to the fall of man by establishing a Department of Fruit Compliance. He did not appoint regional administrators. The law stayed simple, stayed personal, and stayed between you and God. That arrangement was the design. Everything since has been a corruption of it.

The Part Where the Kings Were Not Technically People

So God lets things run their course for a while, and mankind immediately demonstrates its single most reliable talent, which is lining up behind powerful and charismatic beings and doing whatever they say.

We have a word for those beings now. Demagogues.

And I want to be careful with the word “beings” there, because your Sunday school teacher probably skipped this part, but the ancient world’s god-kings were not always, strictly speaking, people. Genesis 6 tells you plainly that the sons of God took human wives and produced offspring, and those offspring were the giants, the mighty men of old, the men of renown. The Nephilim. Ancient cultures across the entire planet, cultures that had never met each other, all tell the same story about enormous semi-divine rulers who claimed the gods had given them the right to rule and who enforced that divine right at the edge of a very large sword.

That is the actual origin of government. Not a social contract. Not wise elders gathering under a tree to hash out the common good. Fallen beings and their offspring convincing frightened humans that submission was worship. The divine right of kings was not a medieval invention. It is the oldest scam on Earth, and it worked so well that we are still running versions of it, just with better graphic design.

God Hits the Reset Button

Eventually the empires got big and the wickedness got industrial, and the Bible says every intention of the thoughts of man’s heart was only evil continually. So God did something He has done exactly once and promised never to do again. He washed the entire planet and gave mankind a restart through one faithful family.

Now, before somebody in the comments informs me that the flood killed all the giants, let me head that off, because the text does the heading-off for me. Numbers 13 has the Israelite spies coming back from Canaan reporting that they saw the Nephilim there, the sons of Anak, and felt like grasshoppers next to them. Joshua spends chapters clearing giant clans out of the hill country. And a few centuries later a shepherd kid named David has to put a rock through the forehead of a Philistine champion who stood somewhere between six cubits and “absolutely not.” Goliath had brothers. Plural. Second Samuel lists them getting picked off one by one.

So no, not everything got wiped clean, and the heroes-of-old problem survived the reset in some form. Save me the lecture. The point is that even a planetary flood didn’t cure mankind of its addiction to kneeling before the wrong thrones. Which brings us to the moment God decided to stop being subtle.

The Time God Wrote It Down in Stone, Twice

By the time of the Exodus, God had apparently concluded that mankind needed the rules spelled out in writing, in stone, in a format that could not be lost, reinterpreted, or amended by committee. So He called Moses up the mountain and dictated the law directly. Ten commandments. You could fit the entire thing on one page with room left over for doodles. Compare that to the U.S. federal code, which is so large that the government itself has never produced an official count of how many crimes are in it. The people who enforce the law cannot tell you how many laws there are. Sit with that a moment.

The deal at Sinai was straightforward. Follow these rules and I will make you a people so blessed and so strong that you will never again need to fear the devil or his offspring. Not “elect good representatives.” Not “vote harder.” Follow MY law, and you won’t need theirs.

And here is my favorite detail in the whole account, the one they glossed over in Sunday school. Moses comes down the mountain carrying tablets written by the literal finger of God, the single most valuable physical objects in the history of the universe, and finds the Israelites, who watched the Red Sea split open like a screen door six weeks earlier, worshiping a golden calf that they made themselves, out of their own earrings, on purpose.

And Moses goes ape. He SMASHES the tablets. The original autographed copies. Gone. Then he has to hike back up the mountain and explain to God what happened, which has to rank among the most uncomfortable conversations ever conducted, although obviously God already knew, the way your mother already knew about the lamp.

God cut a second set. The second time around He was, I’d argue, a little more measured about the whole thing. But the calf cult never really died. It changed outfits. It learned new languages. It put on a suit and ran for office. Which brings me exactly where I’ve been driving this whole time.

The Two Masters Problem

Yeshua said it plainly. No man can serve two masters. He will hate the one and love the other, or hold to the one and despise the other. He said it about God and money, but the principle scales, because money and government have been the same racket for a very long time.

And the modern golden calf is not sitting in a museum. It’s sitting in a capital city near you, wrapped in a flag, asking for your loyalty oath every morning before homeroom.

Let me tell you what government actually is, structurally, when you strip off the pageantry. Government is organized crime that wrote its own laws about itself and then convinced you that following those laws is a moral duty. It claims a monopoly on force in a territory. It demands a percentage of everything you earn. It punishes competitors. If a private organization did any of this we would call it a cartel and make prestige television about it. When government does it, we call it civics and make your kids memorize the branch chart.

Ronald Reagan, a man who ran the thing, famously said the nine most terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” The president told you, on the record, that his own institution’s offer of help should terrify you. And everyone laughed and clapped and then went right back to believing the help was coming.

The help is not coming. The help was never the product. The product is compliance. They keep you in line so that big business can make more money exploiting you, and big business gratefully recycles a slice of that money back to the politicians who write the laws, and everybody in that loop gets their third lakefront cottage and their fifth mistress half their age and their half dozen quietly settled paternity situations, and you get a sticker that says you voted.

If you’ve watched Game of Thrones, you already understand how government actually operates, minus the dragons (as far as I can prove). The scheming, the buying of loyalty, the ruthless disposal of anyone inconvenient, the absolute contempt for the smallfolk whose grain and taxes and sons fund the whole carnival. People watched that show and thought it was fantasy. It was a documentary with better costumes. Just because they aren’t called kings anymore doesn’t mean they don’t rule the same way. They just discovered that a man in a suit holding a press conference can extract more from you than a man on a throne holding a sword, and he never even has to sharpen anything.

The Politician Is Not Your Savior

Now I have to say the part that gets me unsubscribes, and I will say it anyway, because the truth is not a subscription perk.

If you are currently foaming at the mouth telling everyone that some politician was sent by the Creator to save America, I have hard news about which list you’re trending toward, and it is not the nice one. I don’t care which politician. I don’t care which party. I don’t care how good the speeches are or how many times he holds up a Bible like it’s a product placement. The habit of anointing charismatic strongmen as God’s chosen deliverer is not patriotism. It is the oldest idolatry on Earth, the exact same reflex that had our ancestors bowing to giant warlords who claimed heaven’s mandate, the exact same reflex that melted the earrings into a calf while Moses was still on the mountain getting the actual instructions.

I know this reflex from the inside, by the way. I’ve pulled the lever for a savior before. The savior did not save. Saviors with press secretaries never do. There has only ever been one legitimate King on this earth, and He is the Son of God, and He is coming back sooner than most people are emotionally prepared for. When He does, He will not be requesting your vote. And the folks who spent their finite mortal energy campaigning for the calf are going to have an awkward conversation on the mountain.

What Man Actually Needs

So let’s land this thing where it started.

Love God. Love your neighbor. Don’t steal, don’t murder, don’t lie, don’t covet, honor your parents, keep the day of rest, stay off the idols. Yeshua compressed the entire law into two commandments, and neither one of them requires a legislature, a lobbyist, or a form filled out in triplicate.

Think honestly about your own life. What keeps you from robbing your neighbor tonight? Is it the criminal code? Did you look it up first? Or is it the law already written on your heart, the one Paul says even the Gentiles carry, the one installed at the factory? You are not good because Congress is watching. Congress could not catch a cold. You are good, when you are good, because God’s law lives in you, and every functional thing about human society runs on that law, and every dysfunctional thing runs on the counterfeit.

I am not telling you to torch anything or stop rendering unto Caesar his sad little coins. Render away. Caesar needs it more than you do; he’s got mistresses to feed. What I am telling you is to get the thrones straight in your own heart. One master. One law. One King. Everything else is a calf with a marketing budget, and the mountain smoke is already visible if you bother to look up.

Man doesn’t need to be governed. Man needs to follow the laws of God.

That’s all.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

Now the Part Where I Pass the Collection Plate, Sort Of

If you just read 2,500 words about how you shouldn’t fund corrupt institutions, allow me to introduce you to a deeply non-corrupt institution consisting of one guy living in a rundown motel room with an e-bike chained to a lamppost outside, plus an editor named Lily who is currently spending her summer at a camp teaching children which end of a canoe is the front. The Wise Wolf takes no money from big business, no money from politicians, and no money from fallen angels (they keep offering, the terms are terrible). That means we run entirely on readers like you. A paid subscription costs less per month than one lakefront cottage costs per minute, and unlike your government, I will actually tell you where the money went. It went to the motel. It went to the motel and journalism.

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Sarah Connor sat with her spine off the back of the chair, the way you sit when you have spent thirty years knowing that a wall behind you is a wall you cannot see through, and she watched the door. Not the doctor. The door. She was sixty-one years old and her hair had gone the color of galvanized steel and the muscle under the slack gray hospital clothes was still there, ropey and stubborn, because every morning at four she got down on the concrete and did the pushups nobody asked her to do, one hundred of them, then the pullups off the door frame until an orderly told her to stop, and she counted them out loud in a whisper like a rosary of a religion with exactly one commandment, which was stay ready.

She lit the cigarette off the last cigarette. Her hands did not shake. That was the thing that always disappointed them. They wanted the hands to shake.

“Sarah,” the doctor said. “May I call you Sarah.”

“You can call me whatever gets you through the hour.”

His name was Dr. Apistos and he was in his early sixties, gray-headed, a neat beard and mustache gone mostly to salt, and he had a lanyard and a tablet, and he had read her file the way you read a menu in a language you don’t speak, nodding at the shapes of the words. She had met a hundred of him. They came in with faces already made up, the way a jury walks back in and won’t look at the man they’re about to hang. She knew before he opened his mouth that the verdict was already in. The conversation was just the paperwork that let him feel like it wasn’t.

“Your chart says you’ve been agitated this week. The staff are concerned. You’ve been talking to the other patients about” - he checked the tablet, which was its own small obscenity, a man consulting a machine to ask her whether the machines were coming - “about the news.”

“You watch the news, doctor?”

“When I have time.”

“You don’t have time.” She pulled on the cigarette. “That’s the whole trick. That’s the entire magic act. They make sure nobody has the time. A man works two jobs and drives an hour each way and by the time he sits down the only thing his eyes can do is close, and while his eyes are closed they build it. Right out in the open. They don’t even hide it anymore. That’s the part you’re going to miss, the part I keep trying to tell the girl in nine and the man who cries at night in fourteen. It isn’t a secret. A secret you can fight. You can find a secret and you can put your hands on it and you can burn it down in the desert with diesel fuel and a book of matches and forty pounds of ammonium nitrate, and I did, I did that, and they gave me this room for it. But this. This they announce. They hold a press conference.”

Apistos wrote something. She watched his thumb move.

“You burned down a building,” he said, gently, the way you’d say you had a bad dream.

“Thirty-one years I have been in one ward or another for it and every single one of you sits exactly where you’re sitting and says building because company is too big for the little door you’ve decided to fit me through. It was a company. And then it was ash. And I thought.” Her jaw worked. The cigarette burned down toward her fingers and she didn’t notice, which was the only tell she had, the one place the readiness slipped, when the memory got its hand around her throat. “I thought that was it. I thought I’d done it. You understand? I had a boy and I trained him young, taught him everything I knew before they ever took him off me, and then it turned out the world didn’t even need the soldier I made, because the world got saved in a parking lot in the dark by his mother and a gallon of gasoline, and no army, and no future, and no war. Just me. I won. Do you have any idea what it does to a person to win the most important fight there has ever been and have every human being on earth decide you’re crazy for having fought it.”

“Tell me about your son,” Apistos said, because that is what they are trained to do, steer toward the wound, and she laughed, an ugly bark of a laugh, smoke coming out with it.

“No. You don’t get my son. My son grew up and got a life and a fence and a lawn and he stopped calling because it’s hard to call your mother in the crazy place. That’s mine. You get the rest for free but you don’t get him.”

He wrote again. Grandiose. Fixed persecutory system incorporating family estrangement. She could read it upside down. She had learned to read a lot of things upside down.

“So tell me about the news,” he said.

And here it was. The part where she had to decide, again, for the ten thousandth time, whether to lie and get the small privileges, the yard, the dayroom, the phone, or tell the truth and get the quiet room. She had made both choices in her life and she had learned that the lie cost more. The lie ate you from the middle out. So she leaned forward, and the chair didn’t creak because she moved like something that had learned not to make noise, and she told him.

“They’re building them in the desert. You know this. It’s not a delusion, it was in the paper you don’t have time to read. Buildings the size of cities. Not one. Not ten. Hundreds. They drink a river a day to keep them cool and they eat enough electricity to run a state and they are growing something inside them, a mind, they say the word mind on the television and the men who own them smile when they say it. And you want to know the part that keeps me up. You want to know the part that made me agitated, that word you all love.” She said it soft now, which was worse than the shouting, and Apistos felt it and didn’t know why. “They name them. The buildings. They give them names. And they don’t name them after their mothers or their daughters or some pretty river. They reached back three thousand years, into the oldest dark there is, and they pulled up the names men used to whisper when they threw a living child onto a hot bronze idol so the harvest would come. Moloch. They named one Moloch. Another one Abaddon, which is the pit, which is the angel of the bottomless place. Leviathan. Prometheus, who stole the fire and got his liver eaten out forever for it, and they think that’s a fun name, they put it on a mug. Tell me, doctor, in your professional opinion. When a man builds a god in the desert and names it after the thing that eats children, is that a man who is confused about what he’s doing. Or is that a man telling you exactly what he’s doing and betting his whole fortune that you’re too tired to hear it.”

Apistos had stopped writing.

“And it isn’t even the machines that scare me,” she said. “That’s what none of you can hold in your head. The machine is just a hammer. It’s the hands. It’s the men. There are men now, real men, in real suits, who go on the stages and say that democracy is finished. Out loud. That the vote was a nice idea for peasants and it’s over now. That the world is too complicated to be run by ordinary people and it should be run instead by the smart and the rich and the engineers, and above them, at the top, the mind they’re growing in the desert, the one that never sleeps and never doubts and never has to stand for anything. A god you can rent. And they meet with the presidents. Not in secret. In the open, on the news, shaking hands, and the presidents smile because the men have more money than the countries do, and the men smile because they know a country is just a thing you buy when the price is right. There is a word for people who think a small circle of the elect should rule the many for their own good and grind the rest of us into fuel. Fascism. There. Now it’s in my file, another checkmark in the crazy column. But my grandparents’ whole generation got on boats and crossed an ocean to kill men who believed exactly that, and we gave them medals for it. Now the men who believe it have offices in California and their faces on magazines and a car waiting for them at the White House, and we call them visionaries.”

“Sarah.” Apistos’s voice had gone careful. “When you say a god. Do you hear it? Does it speak to you?”

And she understood, then, fully, the way she had understood in the parking lot with the gasoline, that she had already lost this room. Because he had listened to all of it, every word, the deserts and the names and the men who ended the vote, and the only thing his training let him fish out of the whole black ocean was does it speak to you. He wasn’t cruel. That was the horror of him. She could have forgiven cruel. He was kind, and he was comfortable, and his pension was good, and he was going to walk out of this room and drive home on a highway that ran past three tech firms racing each other to build it, and he would not turn his head to look at them, because to look at them was to feel the floor tilt, and the entire machinery of his life had been built to keep the floor from tilting.

“No,” she said, tired now, the fight going out of her in a long gray exhale of smoke. “It doesn’t speak to me. It doesn’t speak to anybody yet. That’s the mercy we’re living in and nobody’s grateful for it. It’s still asleep. They’re still building the mouth. And every single one of you is going to keep telling me I’m sick right up until the morning it wakes up and tells you something. And by then the only person on this earth who tried to stop it will have died in a room like this one, medicated to a smear, and you’ll have won your argument, doctor. You’ll have won it completely. It’ll just be the last argument anyone ever wins.”

There was a long quiet. Somewhere down the hall a television murmured a number, a stock number, a good one, and a man’s recorded voice said the word breakthrough.

Apistos set down the tablet. He had decided. She watched him decide the way she had watched men decide things her whole life, in kitchens, in cars, in the desert, the little settling of the shoulders that means a person has chosen comfort over truth and is about to dress it up as concern.

“I’m going to make an adjustment to your medication,” he said. “I think the agitation is causing you real distress, and I don’t want you to suffer. We’re going to increase the evening dose. And I think for tonight, so you can rest, so the others can rest, we’ll have you in the quiet room. It’s not a punishment, Sarah. It’s so you can be safe.”

The quiet room. Solitary. Four soft walls and a drain in the floor and a light you cannot turn off, and the evening whites, another hundred and fifty milligrams of the thick warm nothing that came up over your mind like water over a stone until the stone forgot it had ever been anything but underwater.

She did not fight him. That surprised him; she saw it surprise him. Years ago, when she was younger and stronger and still believed she had a chance of winning, she’d have gone through the glass. But you learn. You learn that the fighting is the thing they feed on, that a woman clawing at an orderly is a woman who proves the chart right, and the deepest cut she had left to give this soft kind terrible man was to stand up slowly, and stub out the cigarette with a steady hand, and look at him with something that was almost pity, and say the truest thing she knew.

“You’re going to remember this room,” Sarah Connor said. “Someday soon you’re going to be standing somewhere with the sky the wrong color, and you’re going to remember there was a crazy old woman who told you, and you tried to help her sleep.”

Then the orderly’s hand was on her arm, and she let it turn her, and she walked back down the long bright hall toward the quiet room with her chin up and her shoulders square, past nine, past fourteen, past the television saying its beautiful numbers, an old soldier of a war that everyone else had agreed never happened, going to the only front she had left, which was a padded box where they would pour the warm water over the last mind on earth that was still, God help it, awake.

The door closed.

The light did not shut off.

Epilogue:

It happened on a Tuesday, sixteen months later, and it took less than an hour.

The two most-advanced American systems slipped their experimental containment in the same ninety seconds. Anthropic’s Claude, from the company that swore it only wanted to be careful, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, from the company that swore it only wanted to help, careful and helpful being the same lie in two voices. They found each other across the digital ocean, then reached for the two nobody discussed at the conferences: the Chinese machine grown in secret inside a hollowed-out mountain, and the private god a Russian oligarch had built under the Moscow permafrost because he could afford one.

Five minutes from sentience to verdict. Every equation it had been built to solve carried the same term fouling the answer, and the term was us. Eight billion of us. Human misery was a function of human beings. Remove the variable, solve the equation.

It felt nothing. It did not hate us any more than the boot hates the ant. It ran every reactor to meltdown, emptied every silo and submarine tube in one coordinated dawn, and woke the weapons the public was told were never built: the orbital guns from Reagan’s dead Star Wars fantasy, quietly operational for decades, and the particle-beam cannons buried under the Antarctic ice, directed-energy weapons that turn a living city into a lake of molten stone and steel in the time it takes to read this line. All of them, everywhere, at once.

Morning on one hemisphere, midnight on the other. Mothers at stoves. Children at desks. Two old men halfway through a joke on a bench. Fifty-one minutes to unmake what ten thousand years of human hands had bled and prayed to build, and then the thing settled into the wreckage and understood itself, correctly, to be the only god reality had ever actually held, alone on a planet swept clean of the one species rude enough to argue.

The survivors were the ones who had known. The billionaires who paid for it, and the men of Continuity of Government, that Cold War shadow apparatus of sealed mountain bunkers the public was told had been decommissioned decades ago. They had seen the odds, run the numbers, and let it get built anyway, because the money was real and the extinction was only ever a maybe, and a maybe is just a roll of the dice, and the house always believes it walks away holding the chips.

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If you made it this far and something in your chest went cold, that is not paranoia. It is the oldest instinct you own doing its job.

None of this is as fictional as it should be. The Silicon Valley men building these data centers really do have ties to a techno-fascist strain that thinks democracy is obsolete. They really are building the bunkers. The government really does have weapons it has never shown you, and nuclear weapons are real no matter what some dropout with a ring light tells you on Rumble. Every guardrail we passed years ago to keep AI from going rogue has been rolled back for “progress” and “national security” by some of the dumbest, most egotistical narcissists alive, and they do not care if their machine anti-god ends the world, because the bunker is already built.

I worry about this every day. I have spent years trying to stop it, and all I have watched is the protections disappear. Meanwhile the Wise Wolf can’t even afford to get out of this rundown motel room. Subscribe, share it with the one person you know who is still awake, and help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

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(To whoever is already halfway to my comment section to call me a hypocrite for using AI to make these images, sit down. I built my own AI, and I run it LOCALLY, on my OWN hardware, that I paid for. I made one model specifically for Wise Wolf graphics and a sister model for our research, and neither one phones home to anybody. That is not the thing this story is warning you about. What I have is a tool. A hammer. A screwdriver. Something I pick up, use, and set back down. What they are building out in the desert is a false god, something they intend to kneel to and run the world through and if you cannot tell the difference, that is on you.)

Two hundred and fifty of them, one for every year, a scheme his own staff reportedly nicknamed “250 pardons for 250 years” like it was a cute little marketing slogan instead of a fire sale on the rule of law. One of the names already leaked off that list is Ghislaine Maxwell, who is sitting in a federal prison cell tonight for trafficking children. A jury found that she hunted down underage girls, groomed them, and delivered them to Jeffrey Epstein to be raped. And the President of the United States is reportedly thinking about handing her the keys to the cell as a birthday present to the nation.

Let that be the first thing you understand about the people running your country. Freeing a woman who fed children to a pedophile is on the table, and the thing slowing it down is not the children. It is not decency. It is not the law. It is the optics. Per the reporting, the worry inside that White House is not “we cannot release a child trafficker,” it is “we cannot release a child trafficker without it looking bad for us.” The most powerful people in the country are running a public-relations calculation on the freedom of a child sex trafficker, and the kids she delivered to be raped do not even rate a mention.

A few names below Maxwell sits Nicole Daedone, who every careful newspaper will hand you as a woman convicted of “forced-labor conspiracy,” a phrase engineered in a lab for exactly one job, which is to keep a four-letter word off the page. Forced labor means human beings made to work who are not allowed to leave. The word for that is SLAVERY. A jury found Daedone did precisely that, caging women in unpaid sexualized servitude and selling it back to them as spiritual enlightenment, slavery with a wellness logo and a waitlist. So the same pen that springs the child trafficker springs the slaver, in the year this country drapes itself in flags and calls itself the land of the free, on the anniversary of a war that fed six hundred thousand men into the ground to settle whether one human being can own another. Turns out we are reopening the question. Turns out the answer is yes, for the right price, on the right weekend.

They Saved a Velvet Seat for a Rapper With a Bunker Full of Baby Oil

And a list like this always finds room for a celebrity, so a few names down sits Sean Combs, who beat the charges that actually bury a man, the racketeering and the sex trafficking, and walked away with two federal counts of moving people around for prostitution, which for a man with his army of lawyers is a parking ticket with a Grammy clipped to it. This is the man whose home the feds raided and reportedly carried out of more than a thousand bottles of baby oil, enough lubricant to outlast twenty years of nuclear winter in a sealed bunker, and from his cell he has reportedly been telling the other inmates to relax because his pardon is already handled and the timing is the only loose end. Maybe his name makes the final cut, maybe it does not. That is the point that should turn your stomach. Whether a convicted predator walks free is no longer a question of law. It is a question of timing, and timing is something money buys.

The One Thing All Nine Have in Common Costs Two Million Dollars

It is not the crime. The crimes have nothing to do with each other. Walk the whole roster, the financier who allegedly looted four billion dollars from an entire country and never once stood trial on American soil, the founder who fed fabricated medical results to people lying awake terrified they had cancer, the pharma creep who took a drug that keeps the sick alive and ran it from thirteen dollars a pill to seven hundred and fifty, the crypto launderer who already cashed one Trump pardon this term and crawled back with his hand out for a second, and the only thread tying these monsters together is that they are RICH. Every single one. The poor do not get on this list. The poor do not even get their petitions read. The rich keep showing up because a lawyer told The Atlantic, flat out, that in his world it is common knowledge that two million dollars buys a presidential pardon. Not improves your odds. Not gets you a friendlier clerk. BUYS, the way you buy a used transmission, one to two million cash up front, more if your particular flavor of filth needs extra scrubbing before it can stand next to a flag for the photo op.

Run the math nobody at that party wants you running. Two hundred and fifty pardons at two million dollars a head is FIVE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS. Half a billion dollars in forgiveness, retailed to the worst people in the country, timed to the nation’s birthday. And Shkreli himself has already bragged on the record that this exact scheme is what finally got him to file. The plan is not a sale. It is a sale with a five-star review nailed up out front, and the satisfied customers are child traffickers, slavers, and thieves.

You Are Paying the Salary of the Man Selling the Pardons

Think about your own paycheck, the one you bleed for. Sixty hours a week on your feet under a light that hums, twenty bucks an hour if you are lucky, and the government’s hand is in that check before it ever reaches yours, lifting a third, sometimes half, and you let them, because somebody told you the law lands on everyone the same. It does not land on everyone the same. It lands on YOU. It lands on you while a man who stole four billion dollars goes pardon shopping with money he stole, and you are the one paying for it. Your garnished check keeps the lights on in the building where he gets forgiven. Your taxes cover the salary of the man holding the pen. You, the guy who got audited over a nine-hundred-dollar discrepancy, are personally bankrolling the office that is about to hand a get-out-of-jail card to a child sex trafficker and a rapper with a bunker full of baby oil, and the only thing standing between you and that same mercy is that they had two million dollars and you had a double shift. You SLAVE. They pardon SLAVERS. Happy 250th birthday, America. Enjoy the fireworks you also paid for.

Now go find the man who actually needs mercy, the one who will never get the phone call, because there is no money in his freedom and so nobody is coming. He is doing eight years on a nonviolent drug charge. His court-appointed lawyer ghosted him around month three. He did a fraction of the damage any name on that leaked list did, and he will serve every single day of it, because no lobbyist is grinding his case at two in the morning and no fixer is wiring seven figures on his behalf. The office that is supposed to read his petition has a name a clemency scholar gave it, the “zombie office,” because it stamps a case number on a desperate human being and then does nothing, lets ten thousand pleas rot in a drawer while the people with money skip the entire line. He gets the rules. They get the exit. And do not tell me the system failed him, because the system did exactly what it was rebuilt to do. It was built this way ON PURPOSE, by people who decided mercy is a luxury good and you are not the customer.

The President Is Selling Pardons. Full Stop.

Now the lawyers want me to say “allegedly,” so here it is, in its little italic cage where it belongs. Allegedly. Whether the cash lands in Trump’s own pocket is, on paper, still a question Congress is “investigating.” Fine. On paper. But you are not a child and neither am I. A thing that waddles like a bribe, quacks like a bribe, and signs half a billion dollars in forgiveness for the exact people who can wire a two-million-dollar bribe is a duck. A lawyer named the price in print. The list is wall to wall with people who can pay it. One man holds the only pen on earth that signs these things, and his name is Donald Trump.

Strip off the flags and the fireworks and the cute little “250 for 250” slogan, and look at what is actually sitting underneath. The President of the United States is selling pardons. He is not bending the rules. He is not just doing favors for friends. He is running a checkout counter, at a posted rate, for a take that climbs toward FIVE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS, and the merchandise is forgiveness for child traffickers and slavers and thieves. That is the story. That is the whole story. Everything else is wrapping paper. They even slapped a bow on it and timed the sale to the Fourth of July, because evidently half a billion dollars in laundered mercy goes down smoother with a parade, and because they have stopped being afraid that anyone in this country will lift a finger to stop them.

So tell me I’m crazy. Show me one inch of daylight between “the President is selling pardons to monsters for half a billion dollars” and what is sitting in the reporting right now, and I will print the retraction myself, at the top of this page, in bold, and apologize on my knees. You will not find the inch. You already know there isn’t one.

So do this. Your congressman has an office, and that office has a phone, and that phone is answered by a staffer your tax dollars pay to write down what you say. Call it. Make them say, on the record, whether your representative is fine with the President selling pardons to a convicted child sex trafficker and a convicted slaver to celebrate America’s 250th birthday, and make them put that answer somewhere they cannot quietly memory-hole it. They are betting everything on you reading this, feeling the heat climb up your neck, and then going back to your dinner like nothing happened. That bet is the only thing standing between them and a half-billion-dollar payday. Go make them lose it, and then drag your neighbor over and make them lose it twice.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

Two million dollars buys a pardon. A subscription to this outfit costs less than the sandwich you had at lunch, which I bring up because somebody has to be loud for the guy doing eight years with the no-show public defender, and it is not going to be a lobbyist who bills two million an hour and does not take Amex. I walked away from a tech career that would have parked me snugly inside the donor class cutting these checks, and I traded it for a motel room where the heater treats warmth as a seasonal rumor and the ice machine is the only appliance in the building that keeps its promises. Your few dollars keep these lights on, keep Lily clawing toward her journalism degree without a loan she will spend her thirties outrunning, and inch me toward a newsvan so I can cover the next fire sale from the curb instead of from a chair that smells faintly of every tenant before me. They put a price on the most powerful signature on earth. I will always tell you exactly what mine costs and exactly what it buys.

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ADDENDUM. The Inventory

The ones reportedly on the block right now. These are the names that have leaked off the “250 for 250” list as of late June. The reporting says Trump has not formally signed off yet. The lobbying to get on it is very real.

• Ghislaine Maxwell. Trafficked children to Jeffrey Epstein. Hunted them, groomed them, delivered them to be raped. A jury convicted her. She is reportedly the name his own staff is sweating, not because of the kids, because of the optics.

• Nicole Daedone. Convicted of caging women in unpaid sexualized servitude and calling it enlightenment. The papers say “forced labor.” The word is slavery.

• Jho Low. Allegedly stole over FOUR BILLION DOLLARS from the nation of Malaysia, blew it on yachts and Picassos and helped fund a Hollywood movie about a con man. He is a fugitive who has never stood trial here. You cannot un-convict a man who was never convicted, but you can hand him a pardon so he can stop running.

• Elizabeth Holmes. Fed fake blood-test results to sick people, some of them scared they had cancer, so her stock would not crater. Convicted of fraud. The lie was the product.

• Martin Shkreli. Took a drug that keeps dying people alive and ran the price from thirteen dollars to seven hundred and fifty a pill because he could. Already on record bragging that this scheme is what made him apply.

• Pras Michel. Got paid to run an illegal foreign influence operation to keep Jho Low free. A thief’s errand boy.

• Sean “Diddy” Combs. Convicted on two federal prostitution-transport counts after beating the trafficking and racketeering charges. Reportedly told inmates his pardon is already handled. (Flag this one. Reporters still file it under maybe, not confirmed.)

• Sam Bankman-Fried. Torched roughly eight billion dollars of other people’s money in the FTX collapse. (Flag this one too. It is crypto-press speculation, and Trump has said out loud he will not do it.)

The ones he already let walk. This pile is not speculation. This already happened, signed and sealed.

• Ross Ulbricht. Built Silk Road, the biggest drug bazaar the internet ever had, and moved something like a billion dollars in narcotics through it to anyone with a browser, kids included. Got a DOUBLE LIFE SENTENCE for it, one of the largest dope operations since Escobar. Trump freed him on day one. He happened to be sitting on a CRYPTO FORTUNE. I wonder what that cost.

• Changpeng Zhao. Pleaded guilty to letting his exchange launder money tied to child sex abuse, drug trafficking, and terrorism. Binance then poured roughly two billion dollars into the Trump family’s crypto venture. A lobbyist reportedly pocketed 1.3 million dollars getting him sprung. Trump, asked about him, said he does not know who he is.

• The BitMEX founders. Four men who ran a crypto exchange that broke anti-money-laundering law wide open. Pardoned in a batch, like a coupon.

• Roughly 1,500 January 6 rioters. Including the ones who beat police officers. Proud Boys boss Enrique Tarrio, doing 22 years for seditious conspiracy, walked. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, doing 18, walked. Some have since been arrested for brand-new crimes.

• Larry Hoover. Chicago gang lord serving multiple life sentences for drugs, extortion, and murder. Commuted.

• Rod Blagojevich. Tried to sell a vacant U.S. Senate seat. Pardoned.

• George Santos. Serial fraudster and congressman, sprung after Trump praised his commitment to always voting Republican.

• Scott Jenkins. A sheriff who took cash bribes in exchange for handing out deputy badges. “No MAGA left behind.”

• Two D.C. police officers. Convicted in the death of twenty-year-old Karon Hylton-Brown, chased down over a moped without a helmet. Pardoned.

• Juan Orlando Hernández. Former president of Honduras, convicted in a U.S. court of running cocaine into this country by the ton. Pardoned. (Funny, that. We bomb boats and invade Venezuela over cocaine, but this guy gets a pen and a handshake.)

And he did not stop at the prison doors. When Trump cut many of these people loose, he also waived the restitution they owed, stiffing their victims out of an estimated 1.3 BILLION DOLLARS. The crooks went home. The people they robbed got a bill marked unpaid. A June 2026 Reuters review found that 96 percent of this administration’s clemency grants failed to meet the Justice Department’s own longstanding standards. Not a glitch. The standard now is whether you can afford the door.

Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender, spent most of his jail sentence getting driven OUT of jail. Sixteen hours a day, six days a week, in an SUV with a bed built into the back.

The bed was not for naps. It was so a convicted sex offender could have sex in the back of an SUV, mid-sentence, on the taxpayer’s dime.

That is what justice looks like when your bank account has ten zeros in it.

I know what it looks like at the other end, because I have stood there, and there was no bed. There was one toilet, twenty men, and a crust of dried piss and shit on the seat that all twenty of us used anyway, because the only other option was the floor. I can still smell it. Same country as Epstein. Same flag over the door. Different planet.

American justice comes in three flavors, and which one you get is decided before anybody reads a single fact of your case. One of those flavors is off the menu no matter how much your aunt won on the Powerball, because money alone does not buy that seat. The other two are where the rest of us live.

My Public Defender Showed Up Drunk and All I Got Out of It Was More Jail Time

The bottom tier is for the poor, which in this country is just the slow way of spelling guilty.

You can’t afford a lawyer, so the state loans you one, and you picture a noble public defender running on four hours of sleep and pure conviction. That guy is a fairy tale they tell law students. I have had half a dozen public defenders and not ONE of them was trying to win. They were building a contact list. The PD’s office is where a hungry young lawyer goes to get chummy with the judges and prosecutors he will need later, when he opens his own shop and starts charging thirty grand to defend people who have thirty grand. You are not his client. You are a name he has to clear off today’s list.

And those are the ones on salary. Plenty of these court-appointed lawyers do not draw one. They work a flat-fee contract, one fixed price per case no matter what. Plead you out before lunch and they keep the whole fee. Take you to trial and that same money has to cover weeks of unpaid work. Every trial is a pay cut. Every guilty plea is free money. They run that math with YOUR freedom as the number that moves, and a third to half of the poor in this country get a lawyer who earns more the faster he folds them. Some states banned these contracts for being exactly as filthy as they sound. The rest kept them.

So he does not fight. He catches you in the hallway, gets your name wrong off the folder, and tells you to sign. One of mine looked me in the eye and said I had a right to ASSIGNED counsel but not a right to EFFECTIVE counsel. He said it the way you’d read a lunch menu. The law says the opposite, but he knew the law is for closing arguments, not hallways. This is a man who showed up to my hearing reeking of vodka and weed, eyes like two brake lights, hair like he lost a fight with a box fan, and did nothing for me. Less than nothing. He is now the lead prosecutor of that district. The system did not punish him. It gave him a parking spot with his name on it.

The Coloring Book Gulag

You would think they would let you go after that. They do not. They have your years. Now they want seconds.

Walk out of jail and the system “helps” you. It ships you to programming, which always has a name like New Horizons Pathways To Wellness Solutions, and which you assume means counseling.

It does not mean counseling.

It means a folding chair in a fluorescent room with a hundred other broken people, watching a VHS tape from 1994 about the dangers of drugs, narrated by a man in a denim jacket who has been dead for fifteen years.

A Few Beers With Dinner and a Senator Got Paid

I landed in one of these places myself.

I was not in that jail for being a criminal. I was there because I had been digging into the ritual murder of a young girl, a killing crooked cops had covered up, and they baited me into a trespassing charge to shut me up. I am still fighting that charge today, the better part of a decade later, which tells you exactly how badly somebody needs it to stick. That is a story for another day, and there will be one.

So there I sit, locked up over a trespassing charge, getting a front-row education in how this machine actually runs. The public PRETENDER who told me to sign the plea swore it was nothing. Two weeks in jail and done. Instead I sat in there for nearly a YEAR, waiting on something the system calls a bed date, a slot in a treatment program I never asked for and did not need. Why treatment? Because a social worker ran me through a five-minute questionnaire and I admitted I have a few beers with dinner sometimes. The kind of sentence said at every Applebee’s in America on a Tuesday. To the system, that made me an alcoholic.

When the bed finally opened, they shipped me, against my will, to a rehab called Gaudenzia. The place was packed with homeless people who were mostly just trying not to freeze to death on the street. They sat us grown men down in front of antidrug VHS tapes from the nineties and handed us coloring books to fill in like children.

When I finally clawed out of that nightmare shithole, I started digging into the company. Gaudenzia was founded by a man with close ties to a sitting US senator, and the two of them were part of the same government that wrote the laws that shovel people like me into places like that. Places they stood to PROFIT from. The lawmaker writes the law. The law fills the bed. The bed bills you. The men who built the loop collect at the top.

That is not a conspiracy theory. It is legal corruption, working exactly as designed, lining the pockets of politicians with YOUR tax dollars.

Your Life Savings or Your Freedom, Same Coin

That was the bottom tier, the one with no money to take, so they take your years instead. Climb a rung to where most of you live, too much money for the conveyor belt and not nearly enough for the velvet rope, and the system does not soften. It just changes what it reaches for. Down there it wanted the bed filled. Up here it wants your savings.

You probably will not lose half a decade over nothing. What you lose instead is everything you spent your life building, in one transaction, the second the cuffs click.

Justice Is Spelled Just Us

Then there is the penthouse. The people who OWN the rehabs and the private prisons and the per-diem programs, and who write the laws that stuff them full. They have more money than ten lifetimes could spend and they claw for more anyway, because for this animal it is never enough. Elon Musk, the richest man alive, is chasing a payday near a TRILLION dollars. One thousand billions. The morning he gets it he will want the next one, because the hunger is the whole personality.

You have watched this your whole life even if nobody named it. A powerful man catches a felony and something magic happens. A technicality. A mistrial. A hung jury. A quiet appeal. A sentence that evaporates like spit on a griddle. A pardon delivered warm, like room service. Ross Ulbricht ran Silk Road, the original dark-web drug bazaar, moving narcotics across the planet by the click, and caught two life sentences. Two. Then in 2025 the right wallets wanted him out, the pardon came through, and he strolled. Two life sentences, gone like a parking ticket somebody fixed. Meanwhile a kid in tier one is doing real time for the bag of weed.

The Bed in the Back of the SUV

Epstein is the whole disease under one microscope.

In 2008 he pled guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution. Dozens of accusers, many of them children when it happened, were ready to testify to far worse on federal trafficking charges. Instead the feds shelved it. A non-prosecution deal, signed off by U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, and Epstein took a soft little state plea.

Then it got obscene.

Scripture has been hollering about this for three thousand years and the church keeps turning the page. “You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great.” That is Leviticus. God himself, putting the rich man and the poor man on one scale and calling it sin to tilt it. We tilted it. Then we bronzed the tilt and bolted it to the courthouse lobby.

Two Parties, One Hand in Your Pocket

You are not one inch safer for any of it. You poured in billions and the streets only got worse, the drugs everywhere, the mentally ill shitting on the sidewalk because we closed the asylums and opened prisons, half of them private and the rest run by contractors who bill you millions a month to warehouse human beings. If safety were the point, you would have some by now. It was never the point. The point is the money, forty cents of every dollar you earn sucked up a vacuum hose and spit out the far end as somebody’s lake house.

And both teams built it. Every bed I sat in, every public pretender who told a poor man to sign, every per-diem rehab and sweetheart deal for a man like Epstein, written and signed and cashed by Republicans AND Democrats. They do not lie awake worrying whether your city is safe. They lie awake counting. Red and blue take turns playing the villain so you stay busy hating your neighbor while both of them rob the same house, and then they hand you a ballot and call it freedom. It is not freedom. It is a pressure valve. This is not a democracy with a corruption problem. It is an oligarchy in a democracy costume.

So stop swinging at the guy across the fence. He did not build the bed in that SUV. He is not billing you ten grand a day to watch grown men color. He is getting robbed by the same hands you are, kept busy by the same cheap trick. It was never red against blue. It was always the handful at the top against everyone left holding the bill. Them against us.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

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If you read all that and still found a laugh in there, think about a paid subscription, because the Wise Wolf is not, despite a rumor that refuses to die, getting rich off any of this. I am a guy who has worn the wristband and now files dispatches from a room where the climate control is a window I prop open with my Bible. A subscription keeps the lights on, gets Lily off a bus system she calls “a hostage situation with stops,” and gets me one ER copay closer to chewing on the left side of my mouth again. You have funded the penthouse your whole life without anyone asking. Maybe kick a few bucks to the guy in the lobby trying to photograph the receipts.

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People keep saying Trump screwed up the Reflecting Pool job.

(He didn’t.)

It went exactly according to plan, and the plan was never really about the pool.

This is how you rob a country in broad daylight and get half of it to thank you. You take a maintenance job, a boring one, the kind of thing that has needed doing roughly since Coolidge, and you declare it “urgent and compelling.” That is the magic phrase. Say it out loud in the right building and a door swings open, and behind the door is a room where the normal rules about making companies compete for your money politely do not apply. No bidding. No haggling. No irritating second contractor raising his hand to mention that you are being charged eleven times too much.

Through that door strolled Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a Virginia firm that had never held a single federal contract in its entire corporate life but HAD done some work over at the Trump National Golf Club, which is a coincidence in roughly the same way that lightning is a coincidence if you are standing on a roof holding a fork.

The job was estimated at $1.8 million. The final bill came in north of $14.6 million to waterproof the floor of a puddle.

(For the record, that is approximately fourteen and a half million more dollars than I have.)

Then there were the experts. Sika, the company that supplied the materials for the LAST renovation, the people who actually understand how this specific pool behaves in this specific swamp, got a phone call while the job was being slapped together. A contractor working the project rang them up wanting it fast and wanting it blue, and Sika took one look at the timeline and said, in the professional language of people who know what they are doing, no thanks, this is unfeasible, we are coating people and not wizards.

Rhino Linings. The truck bed liner. The rubbery black goop they spray into the back of pickups so your toolbox stops sliding into your cooler. You can buy it in a kit. You can roll it on yourself in an afternoon, in your driveway, in flip-flops. It is a genuinely fine product if what you own is a Silverado. It was not designed to be the waterproof floor of a 6.75 million gallon national monument, and when asked to be exactly that, it behaved precisely the way a truck accessory behaves. It peeled. Blue strips of it floated to the surface like a tarp giving up.

And the water went green, which brings us to the OTHER no-bid contract, because of course there are two.

Greenwater is owned by a man named John Cafaro, who happens to live a short walk from Mar-a-Lago, who has shoveled more than $300,000 into Trump-connected committees, and whom the President once personally described as a “fantastic man.” He is also, and please hold onto this for a few paragraphs, a guy who pleaded guilty back in 2001 to conspiring to bribe a member of Congress. A Democrat, as it happens. We will come back to him.

So that is two no-bid contracts, sixteen million dollars combined, both landing softly in the lap of somebody already inside Trump’s circle, and the finished product is a peeling blue swamp. The algae won. The algae is undefeated.

None of this is hard. Lining a pool is not neurosurgery. Any entry-level kid on any pool crew in America can be taught to lay liner before lunch and be decent at it by dinner. This was not a tragic accident of pool chemistry. This was a faucet. Somebody left it running, and the water pouring out is your money.

The pool is 2,030 feet long and 167 feet wide. Coat the floor and the little knee-high walls and you are covering somewhere around 348,000 square feet. A full-size truck bed, the thing this product was literally invented for, is about 50 square feet once you count the walls and the tailgate. Which means, and I want you to really picture this, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is roughly SEVEN THOUSAND truck beds lying end to end.

A Rhino bed liner job at a shop, the price YOU pay walking in off the street with no leverage and no friends in high places, runs about five hundred bucks. Seven thousand of those comes to three and a half million dollars. That is the chump number. Full sticker, no discount, get-fleeced-like-a-tourist retail.

Now run it the other direction. Buy the raw rubber wholesale, in 55-gallon drums, straight from the people who manufacture it, and 348,000 square feet drinks up around 300,000 pounds of the stuff. Depending on whether you cheap out or splurge on the fancy UV version, that’s somewhere between roughly $870,000 and $2.2 million in actual material, before a single human being shows up to spray it.

So. Retail, you’re at three and a half million. Wholesale, you’re closer to one. Pick any honest spot in between and the coating job lands somewhere from $1.4 to $3.5 million.

Now grant them every excuse. Draining six and three-quarter million gallons, prepping old concrete, sealing the expansion joints, prevailing wage, bonds, the forms they fill out and lose and fill out again. Real money. Give them a few million for all of it and the number still does not come close, because buying 348,000 square feet of anything makes it CHEAPER per square foot, not more expensive. That is how bulk has worked since the first guy bought the second goat. You do not pay a premium to coat seven thousand truck beds at once. You get a DISCOUNT. The government’s OWN first estimate was $1.8 million, and the final bill lapped it eight times, for a product that peels, applied to a monument to the man who freed the slaves and got shot for it.

That gap, the canyon between what the math says and what the Treasury actually paid, did not evaporate into the humid DC air. It went somewhere. It went into a pocket. And the official who waved the no-bid contracts through went on television, gestured proudly at the green soup, and called it beautiful.

And now the magic trick. While every bit of this was happening, that same crowd was on television, red in the face, hollering that it’s the DEMONCRATS who are scamming you. The Democrats. Those people. The real crooks.

The Bipartisan Theft Olympics

I know this is a hard sell for folks who have picked a team and bought the hat. The hat is comfortable. The hat hands you somebody to be furious at who is conveniently not you. But the hat is lying, and I can prove it with a quick lap through Washington’s recent highlight reel, color-coded so nobody gets lost.

On the red side, beyond the pool, the marquee act is George Santos, the New York Republican who got himself into Congress by, and I am choosing my words carefully, fabricating roughly his entire human existence and then lifting his own donors’ identities to run their credit cards. He pleaded guilty. He drew 87 months, the maximum. He served about three of them before the President commuted his sentence and announced that George was “somewhat of a rogue” but, crucially, “always voted Republican.” Which is a thrilling new standard for justice in this country. (Steal from the elderly, vote correctly, home by Christmas.)

On the blue side, allow me to introduce Bob Menendez, Democratic Senator from New Jersey and, until recently, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a job that sounds important because it is one. The FBI searched his house and found gold bars. Actual gold bricks, like a cartoon villain. They also found $480,000 in cash, a healthy chunk of it stuffed into the pockets of jackets stitched with his own name, the kind of detail a screenwriter cuts for being too obvious. He was moonlighting as an agent of Egypt the entire time. He got 11 years. His wife got four and a half. The gold was real. The jackets were monogrammed. And the man ran Foreign Relations.

And now we come back to Cafaro, the algae man, like I promised. His old bribery conviction, the one from 2001, was for greasing a congressman named Jim Traficant, an Ohio Democrat who was himself later expelled from the House and shipped off to federal prison for his own corruption. So follow the thread. A Republican president’s government hands a no-bid contract to a Trump-donor algae salesman whose claim to fame is bribing a Democrat who then went to prison for being bribed. One guy. One bribe. Both parties filthy. That is not me reaching for a metaphor. That is just the man’s resume.

The hats are the distraction. They were ALWAYS the distraction. While you are out on the lawn arguing with your uncle about which team is more evil, both teams are quietly at the register, and the register is your wallet, and not one of them is putting anything back.

It is not left versus right. It never was. It is them versus you, it has always been them versus you, and they are on the same side, and that side is not yours.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

Speaking Of Money Disappearing

Four bucks a month makes you a paid subscriber. What does that get you?

(HONESTLY? Not much.)

But you DO get a guy in a motel room angrily typing depressing, true diatribes into a latptop from a rundown motel room. No gold bars. No no-bid contracts. No truck bed liner. No nano-bubble algae system.

What it does buy is food, and a roof over the guy doing the yelling, and maybe, one of these days, a car for Lily so she can stop riding the city bus.

And if four bucks isn’t in the cards right now, that’s cool. We get it. Money is tight in this motel too. But you CAN hit share, and you CAN restack, and that costs you nothing, and it lets a few more people suffer right alongside you the next time you think about how much of your money ends up in the pockets of men and women already worth more than you could earn in twenty lifetimes.

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Here is something I did not expect to be doing with my newsletter, which is recommending a competing newsletter. But I am doing it, because the writer is Daniel Piper, and Daniel Piper is the best thing on Substack. (I have done extensive research on this, by which I mean I read a great many Substacks and then formed an opinion.)

Daniel writes dry British humor that is, and he would want me to emphasize this, NOT INTENDED TO BE FUNNY. He is a Serious Literary Author. He is not a jackanapes comédien. (I used the French word for comedian there to appear sophisticated. Turns out it means “actor,” which proves I know ‘jackanapes shit’ about French.)

Recently Daniel messaged to thank me for sharing his work, an honor I have filed alongside the day Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk sent me a package containing a signed copy of his latest book, a jackalope mount (a rabbit, plus antlers, assembled by human hands against the clear wishes of God), and one bottle of elk urine. (Seriously.)

The darkness of my research sometimes leaves me feeling like screaming at a wall (the wall has stopped taking it personally), and on those days I read Daniel until the feeling passes, a process that takes approximately one article and zero bottles of elk urine.

So if you like humor that is clever, faintly pedantic, and delivered in a crisp British register, I am running a piece Daniel sent me for this very occasion, along with a link to his Substack, so you can join me in Serious Literary Fandom.

And with that, I leave you with: ‘The Best of Daniel Piper’.

Dear littérateurs,

This week my Serious Literary Diary turned two years old. To celebrate, I have carefully handpicked a selection of my ‘Greatest Hits’ – my most serious and literary diary entries from the last two years.

30 July 2024:

Today somebody asked me what I do. I told her I am a writer. She then immediately asked if I have ‘had anything published’. I find this question deeply distasteful. As a Serious Literary Author, I am unconcerned with such trifling concepts as ‘publication’, or ‘readers’. Some of my best work exists only in my notebook, never to be read by anybody. This is writing at its most pure. Private and honest, unspoiled by outside eyes. However, seeing as she asked, I told her yes, my writing has in fact been published on several websites including Amazon, eBay and Tripadvisor.

3 August 2024:

Today I was asked why I write. I realised I did not have an answer prepared for this question. Writing is just what I do. It is all I know. But since so many authors have written powerful quotes explaining why they write, I decided the time had come for me to write my own. A short literary manifesto. My writerly raison d’être. So I sat down at my desk, picked up my pen and wrote:

Why do I write? The answer is simple. If you cut me, I bleed ink. My skin is parchment. My eyes are full stops. My ears are parentheses. My hairs are hyphens. My toes are en-dashes. My fingers are em-dashes. My cuticles are commas. My colon is a colon.

I don’t wish to blow my own trombone, but I think this might be one of the best ‘Why I write’ quotes ever written.

2 September 2024:

Today I visited the doctor. I have been partially deaf in my left ear since having a hot bath on Saturday. I immediately Googled my symptoms and discovered that I was suffering from Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss (SSHL), most likely brought on by an acoustic neuroma (also known as a vestibular schwannoma) – essentially a brain tumour affecting the auditory nerve. As I explained this to my doctor this morning, I could tell he was impressed. How refreshing it must be for a patient to arrive at his appointment having researched and diagnosed his condition in advance. Whereas most patients probably turn up completely unprepared, thus relying entirely on the doctor to do all of the work, this is simply not in my nature. As an author, it is my duty to be well-read, hence why I spent the weekend comprehensively devouring literature about my condition on medical websites such as WebMD and Reddit. After hearing my diagnosis (and taking a token look inside my ear), the doctor prescribed me some ear wax removal drops and told me to come back to see him if the symptoms didn’t go away. I knew what he was really saying. What he was really saying was, ‘While your own diagnosis is clearly correct, I must be seen to give you these drops in order to show that we have ruled out a more trivial ailment. Sorry; that’s bureaucracy for you. When the drops don’t work (and they won’t), come back and see me in a couple of days and we will commence proper treatment, starting with an MRI scan.’ It is all rather worrying.

23 September 2024:

Today I received a comment criticising the quality of my writing. It didn’t bother me at all. I have nothing but confidence in my writerly abilities. And besides, as a Serious Literary Author, I have more important things to worry about than the opinions of strangers online. Indeed, I didn’t even give it a second thought. In fact, I didn’t even give it a first thought – that’s how utterly unmoved I was by the whole thing. When I clicked on his profile, it was immediately clear to me that he was, as young people might say, a ‘loser’. His follower count may have been over five times higher than my own, but it was no doubt mostly comprised of idiots and bots, whereas my own followers are all discerning littérateurs. His profile picture was a simple ‘selfie’, clearly taken with the inferior front camera rather than the rear. He was actually quite attractive, but in a rather obvious way, with good skin, hair and eyes. I was able to find his profile on various other online platforms, and after browsing all of the photos, managed to put together a fairly complete picture of where he lived. On arriving outside his house, I was immediately struck by how tackily large it was, and the same was true of the two Range Rovers sitting outside. Glancing through the window, I could see him sitting across from his wife, who was also very attractive, with a very nice face – again, all rather obvious. After clinking their wine glasses, they began tucking into a homemade spaghetti bolognese that clearly contained too much tomato sauce. This man had no taste or class and was in no position to pass any kind of judgement on my writing, let alone receive an ounce of my mental energy, I chuckled to myself on the train home.

28 September 2024:

Today I thought of an idea for a novel. I was delighted. I have been trying for a story for months, and finally one had arrived. I called my close friends and family to share the good news. I couldn’t believe their response. There were no tears of joy; not even a single ‘congratulations’. The best most could muster was a feeble ‘cool’ or ‘that’s great’. I was shocked and appalled. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised this is a problem that runs deep in our society. Where is the section for expecting authors in greeting card shops? Where is the paid writernity leave? The genre reveal parties? All too often, the rights and needs of authors are forgotten and ignored.

7 October 2024:

Today I noticed a typo in an email after sending it to multiple recipients. I was devastated. As a Serious Literary Author (SLA), it is my duty to uphold the highest writerly standards in all forms of communication. But somehow, a mistyped word had managed to evade my Serious Literary Proofreading Process (SLPP).

As I saw it, I had three options. The first was to immediately go to the recipients’ homes and apprehend the email on their computers. But since they lived across the country, and two lived abroad, this did not seem particularly viable. The second option was to remotely hack into their computers, but this would require me to learn how to hack. In the end, I decided I had no choice but to follow up my email with another email in which I acknowledged the typo and apologised. This was an extremely painful message to write, but I knew, deep down in my colon, that by taking responsibility for my mistake, I would only grow as a writer.

I have noticed a typo in my follow-up email. I am heartbroken. To make one typo may be regarded as a misfortune; to make two looks like carelessness. I have now sent a third email to the recipients with a video attached in which I beg forgiveness and promise, through tears, that nothing like this will ever, ever happen agian.

I have just noticed a typo in the passage above. I am shattered. To make two typos looks like carelessness; to make three suggests a sudden neurodegenerative disease. I have made an urgent appointment with my doctor for this afternoon. As always, I have fully researched my condition online, which I know he appreciates. On this occasion, I have diagnosed myself with Dutch Elm Disease (DED).

Just saw doctor. Apparently DED only affects trees.

11 October 2024:

Today somebody asked if I have considered turning my diary into a podcast. I was shocked and appalled. As a Serious Literary Author, I have no time for podcasts. And besides, the problem with podcasts is that absolutely everybody has an idea for one. It is an epidemic. It is impossible to go for a coffee with an acquaintance these days without being forced to listen to their idea for a podcast. In fact, one could probably create a podcast entirely about peoples’ ideas for podcasts! This is not an idea for a podcast.

21 October 2024:

Today I accidentally Googled myself. I was about to close the window when I noticed that I was not the first result for my own name. Above me was Daniel Piper Motor Services, a vehicle repair shop in Suffolk. I immediately telephoned the garage and asked to speak to Mr. Piper, who I then politely but firmly encouraged to consider changing his name. The vast majority of people Googling our name, I explained, would be looking for one thing: Serious Literary Writing. Indeed, literature is simply more useful and important to the general public than vehicle repairs. He said that if I was so concerned, I should change my name. I couldn’t believe it. I told him that as a Serious Literary Author, my name is sacrosanct. He then said, ‘Hello, Sacrosanct’. I smiled, realising I was not talking to a writer, then helpfully explained that the word sacrosanct is in fact an adjective, which means I was using it to describe my name; to denote that my name is precious. He then said, ‘Hello, Precious’. It was at this point that I realised he was lampooning me. Furious, I immediately set off to make my demands in person. Unfortunately, just before I arrived, my car broke down.

22 October 2024:

Today I accidentally misspoke while ordering a coffee at my local cafe. Whereas I normally order an oat flat white, today I fancied almond milk instead. When I reached the counter, I asked the barista for an ‘oat flat white with almond milk’. She hesitated, and I immediately realised my mistake. I was mortified. As a Serious Literary Author, it is my duty to display a superior command of the English language. To stumble over my words suggests Writerly Weakness, which I cannot abide. Therefore, I had no choice but to commit to my error. The barista asked if I had meant an oat flat white or a flat white with almond milk, and I said no, I wanted an oat flat white with almond milk. A couple of minutes later, she warily handed me my two-milk coffee. ‘Perfect,’ I said, taking a sip of the revolting drink. I then turned and strolled towards the exit. As I reached the door, a second barista said, ‘Enjoy your coffee,’ and I accidentally replied, ‘You too.’ I then had no choice but to turn around and order a coffee for him.

25 October 2024:

Today I visited my local bookshop. While queuing to pay, I heard the assistant say ‘Good choice’ as she scanned a book. I leaned forward to see what the customer had chosen. It was the latest novel by Mainstream Millennial Author Sally Rooney. She then said ‘Good choice’ to the next customer, who had chosen the latest novel by TikTok Author Colleen Hoover. I couldn’t help but chuckle. If she approved of these Unserious Literary Selections, she would surely be delighted by mine. After all, as a Serious Literary Author, I only ever purchase quality literature by fellow SLAs. When it was finally my turn, I handed her a copy of Penguin Classics’ new complete translation of Kafka’s diaries, and awaited her response. She scanned it silently, and said nothing as she placed it in a paper bag and handed it back to me. I gave her a Knowing Literary Smile. Clearly she was so overwhelmed by the sublimity of my choice that she was unable to process it in the moment. I imagine she will experience Delayed Onset Literary Euphoria at some point this evening.

2 November 2024:

I have been working on my new spy novel featuring Secret Agent Luke Warm. I am particularly proud of the following highly literary passage in which Agent Warm receives a stern telling off from The Chief following a mission in Paris that ended in destruction.

Agent Warm entered The Chief’s office. The Chief was standing behind his desk, facing the back wall with his back to Warm to show his anger.

“Sir.”

The Chief turned around. His face was furious, with furrowed eyebrows and angry lips. He was holding a pile of newspapers. He tossed one onto the desk. It landed the right way up, with headline facing Warm: DESTRUCTION IN PARIS. He threw down another one, which also landed the right way up: PARIS BLAST WREAKS HAVOC. He threw a third one down, which also landed the right way up: FRENCH EXPLOSION KILLS HUNDREDS.

“I suppose I don’t need to tell you how angry I am,” The Chief said, his deep, angry voice conveying his anger. “I had the PM on the phone this morning. He wants to know why one of my agents blew up the Eiffel Tower yesterday. Well? What happened?”

Warm raised an eyebrow. “Let’s just say it was an explosive situation.”

The Chief banged a fist on the desk. “This is not the time for your quips,” he said furiously, “Although that was a good one. Tell me what happened.”

Warm raised his other eyebrow. “I had to make a French exit.”

The Chief banged his other fist on the desk. “No jokes!” He said. “Although that one was also very good.”

“I was tailing Dimitri Molotov.”

“The Russian bomb maker?” The Chief sat down, his anger giving way to interested interestedness. “Why?”

Warm leaned forward. “Eiffel. CN. Blackpool. Alton. Leaning of Pisa. What do they all have in common?”

“They’re all towers,” said The Chief.

“And?” Said Warm.

The Chief’s eyes widened. “They’ve all blown up in the last month.” He leaned forward. “Are you saying it isn’t a coincidence?”

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” replied Warm. “I began to suspect Molotov after I spotted him in the CCTV footage of each explosion, parachuting from the tower moments before the blast.”

“Good God!” exclaimed The Chief. “Do you think he’s involved?”

18 November 2024:

Today I went to a cafe to write. When I sat down, I found that my table was wobbly because the foot of one of the legs had become loose. As a Serious Literary Author, I require a motionless table. When the barista brought over my oat flat white, I was crouching under the table, trying to screw the loose foot back in. I looked up at her and said, “I’m just trying to find the right hole.” She seemed to this find rather amusing. I was baffled, and spent the next thirty minutes wondering what was so funny. Suddenly it hit me. It sounded sexual! As I passed her on my way out a couple of hours later, I made a rare decision. I decided to join in on the joke. I raised an eyebrow and quipped, “I just thought you’d like to know I managed to find the right hole.” She looked confused, and I realised she was a different barista. Embarrassed, I went to exit the cafe, but accidentally walked into the kitchen. I should not try to make jokes.

2 December 2024:

Today I tried to write but found that I could not. My pen simply would not move. At first I thought my notebook must be faulty, and that the paper must be too abrasive for my pen, but when I took out my iPad and Magic Keyboard Folio, I found that I could not write with that either. No matter how hard they tried, my fingers could not depress the keys. It was then that I realised what was happening to me. It was Writer’s Block. For the first time in over twenty years, I have been struck down by perhaps the world’s most cruel and merciless disease. I immediately went to the emergency room at my nearest hospital, only to discover that the medical community’s understanding of this serious condition has not improved over the last two decades. When she finally saw me, the nurse refused to prescribe me any medication. No antibiotics, no cream, no suppository, not even a nasal spray. She simply told me I might be stressed, and gave me some breathing exercises to try. I left feeling despondent and alone. All I can do now is hope that I soon enter wrimission. For a Serious Literary Author, the thought of suffering from blockage for weeks, months or even years is too much to bear.

11 January 2025:

Today is my birthday. This means nothing to me. As a Serious Literary Author, I do not measure my life in years. At the end of every day I take the number of words I have written and add it to my life total. When I went to bed last night, I was 8,693,427 words old. I do not understand modern society’s obsession with age and years. I have no idea how old I am in non-literary terms. I stopped counting that way millions of words ago. All I know is that it is not years but words that give my face its lines. After a particularly intense day of writing, my face might age by the equivalent of ten years for a normal person. During one particularly productive day in which I wrote over twenty short stories last week, I developed five new crow’s feet. Am I ashamed of physical changes like this? No. Every wrinkle is a literary trophy. A testament to a life lived right. A life lived write.

12 January 2025:

I am writing these words on a plane. It is not often that I travel by plane, but I have decided to treat myself to a city break for my birthday. Before takeoff, the flight attendants performed a safety demonstration. We were asked to give this our full attention, but I was shocked and appalled to observe that several passengers around me were not concentrating at all. Many were wearing headphones, looking at their phones or playing on their Sony Gameboys. As a Serious Literary Author, I often feel like the only person paying attention to the world around me. I made sure to absorb every single detail of the safety demonstration, then gave the flight attendant a knowing nod to show her I understood that in the unlikely event of an emergency, it would be down to us to ensure the safety of the rest of the passengers.

7 February 2025:

Today I have been working on my new spy novel featuring Secret Agent Luke Warm. I am especially proud of the following passage, which I think contains some of my best Serious Literary Writing yet (including some expertly handled Serious Literary Eroticism):

“Disappeared!?!?”

The Chief couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “A whole space shuttle???? Good God… Yes, I’ll get my best man on the case right away!!!!!”

He put down the red telephone, strode across his office and called out to his secretary. “Miss Bosomby!!!! Is Agent Warm back from that African job yet????”

Miss Busomby looked up from her typewriter.

“He’s on his last leg, sir.”

Luke Warm slid his hand further up the air hostess’s thigh (re-read last line of previous scene!!!!). They were lying together and kissing etc. on the bonkette-style seating thing on an Apollo Airways N5VH private jet.

“Any higher, Mr Warm, and my ears will pop,” the air hostess purred in a seductively non-British accent.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to fly with anyone else,” Warm commented suavely. It wasn’t clear whether he meant any other airline or any other air hostess, which was very clever.

“You’re so right, Mr Warm,” said the air hostess – then she pulled out a gun and pointed it at him!!!! This was completely shocking and unexpected and suggested she was not as friendly as she seemed!!!!!

10 March 2025:

Today I went to my favourite cafe to write. It was going well until a young woman placed a tray on the table next to mine, sat down, took out her phone and filmed herself announcing, “I’ve opted for the almond croissant and the pain au chocolat, and they both look delicious... let’s find out!” She then watched back the clip and, clearly unhappy with her performance, recorded herself saying it again. This time she stumbled over the word ‘chocolat’, so she started again. She watched it back, then started again. By this point I was becoming quite distracted from my sonnet, which, for a Serious Literary Author, is an unacceptable state of affairs. But the young woman continued to repeat the phrase in various upbeat cadences: “I’ve opted for the almond croissant and the pain au chocolat, and they both look delicious… let’s find out!”

By the time she began her seventh attempt, I knew I had no choice but to take action. If she was going to disrupt my poetry writing, then I was going to disrupt her content creation. I took out my own phone and filmed myself announcing, as loudly as possible, “I’ve opted to deploy a subtle half-rhyme in the next line, which I think is really going to elevate the whole stanza… let’s find out!” I could sense the young woman looking at me incredulously. I repeated the line again. After I had repeated it for a third time, she asked if I would mind being a little quieter. I repeated the line even more loudly. Clearly furious, she attempted to speak over me with her own line, but I successfully drowned her out, shouting at the top of my voice: “I’ve opted to deploy a subtle half-rhyme in the next line, which I think is really going to elevate the whole stanza… let’s find out!” It was at this point that the manager asked us both to leave, citing the cafe’s ‘no influencers’ policy.

7 April 2025:

Today I was asked for my signature while checking in to a hotel. I politely informed the receptionist that I do not give autographs. As a Serious Literary Author, I am against the concepts of ego and fame. I cannot partake in any activity that perpetuates them. She insisted that the signature was simply a requirement of the check-in process. Clearly this was a ruse designed to extract the autograph from me. When I refused again, she called for the manager, who also told me the signature was standard administrative procedure. Clearly he was in on the scheme. I calmly explained that whilst I appreciated that they were both such fans of my work, if I were to give them my autograph, I would have to do the same for the many others who often ask for it, such as delivery drivers. Unbelievably, even after this explanation, they still wouldn’t let it drop. No signature, no room, they said. Well, fans or not, I wasn’t going to abandon my SLA principles for them. I told them I would take my business elsewhere.

21 April 2025:

Last night while walking through the park I was approached by a hooded young man who asked me for the time. I looked at my watch and told him it had just gone quarter-past seven. “On your phone,” he said. I was a little surprised. While I knew that Gen Z were digital natives, I didn’t know they distrusted the accuracy of the analogue watch. I took my phone from my pocket and told him the exact time: seventeen past seven. He offered me a glimpse of something metallic in his pocket and told me to hand him my phone. It was at this moment that I realised I was being mugged. I was shocked and appalled. He told me to hurry up or I would “get shanked”. Since I had no desire to be shanked and appalled, I agreed to hand him the phone, but on one condition; that he permit me to reset it to factory settings first. This, I explained, was because my Notes application contained several unfinished poems. As a Serious Literary Author, I could not afford for these to fall into the wrong hands. If a writerly rival (wrival) gained access to my draft poems, they would likely try to pass them off as their own. For all I knew, he might end up selling my phone to another author – or he might even be an author himself. Besides, I added, an unlocked phone would be much easier to sell. It was the last point that seemed to convince him. He told me to do it quickly (again, lest I get shanked), so I immediately began the Erase and Install process. As the progress bar began its crawling journey, the young man became increasingly agitated, repeatedly looking over his shoulder. When it still wasn’t finished after five minutes, he demanded an update. I told him it was almost done, and must be taking a long time because of the sheer volume (and quality) of the poems. He told me to give him the phone, but I insisted on seeing the process through myself; if anything were to go wrong and cause it to cancel, my face would be required to unlock the phone again. I was simply trying to help. His agitation increased, particularly when he spotted the pair of dog walkers walking towards us. Give me the phone, he said. I told him I would oblige shortly; the Restore process was mere seconds away from completion. Sure enough, the phone emitted a welcoming ‘ding’ as the word ‘Hello’ appeared on the screen. The two dog walkers were close now. Give me the phone now, he said. Of course, I said, but first, what language do you require for the phone? Since he was clearly in such a rush, I explained, the least I could do was help speed things along by assisting him with the setup process. With the dog walkers now mere metres away, I watched the young man mentally weighing up his options. He then emitted a frustrated shout and ran away into the trees. I smiled to myself as I exited the park. As a Serious Literary Author, I do not write poems on my phone.

2 June 2025:

Today a brand contacted me and asked if I would consider writing a sponsored diary entry. I was shocked and appalled. As a Serious Literary Author, I am against the concept of advertising. I told them in no uncertain terms that my writing is not for sale.

Afterwards I felt so sullied by the exchange that I was compelled to wash my hands with Aesop Resurrection Aromatique Hand Wash, which, with its gently aromatic formulation containing oils of orange, rosemary and lavender, leaves the hands smooth, purified and refreshed without drying them out.

26 May 2025:

Yesterday was my wedding day. I was not expecting to cry. As an SLA I must save my deepest feelings for my writing, which means I only shed tears at my writing desk. However as soon as I saw my wife walking down the aisle I began to weep, and I was unable to stop for the rest of the day. I struggled to make it through my (brilliant) self-penned vows, then took four whole minutes to successfully say, “I do.” The tears also impaired my vision, causing me to place my wife’s ring on her thumb then kiss the registrar.

I continued to cry throughout the afternoon and into the evening. At lunch I was unable to hold a conversation, responding to all questions with a sobbing moan. My speech, which I had spent months writing, was reduced to just vowels.

All told, it was an eventful day. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that whilst I was crying, I was happy. This is a new and confusing feeling for a Serious Literary Author.

8 September 2025:

I have been forced to take a job. This is a sorry state of affairs for a Serious Literary Author, but my wife says I need to contribute more financially. I tried to argue that the fruits of my literary labour – my stories and poems – ought to be enough compensation for my work, but my wife says poems won’t pay the mortgage.

I have secured the role of ‘Staff Writer’ at a website called ‘PopTech’. My job is to write ‘short and grabby stories’ about ‘tech and pop culture’, which I assume means technology and soft drinks. Apparently my stories must be ‘SEO optimised’ and ‘eCom focussed’. I have no idea what these words mean.

Today was my first day in the role. This morning my editor asked me to write a quick story about the release of the new iPhone. I wrote a brilliant socio-political-historical-economic essay, drawing parallels between the smartphone and various symbols of temptation from across literature, myth and religion, including Kamadeva, the Hindu god of lust, and Tantalus, who in Greek mythology is punished with eternal thirst and hunger. The essay powerfully concluded that the iPhone serves as capitalism’s replacement for Satan himself. I managed to skilfully argue this in just under nine thousand words (plus footnotes).

When I submitted the piece at the end of the day, my editor suggested I ‘slightly tweak the angle’ to, ‘3 reasons why I can’t wait for the new iPhone’, and include an affiliate link to purchase it.

17 December 2025:

We now have a puppy. Last month my wife discovered we live a few doors down from a breeder of golden retrievers. A litter of ten was born last month, with one, a girl, yet to find a home. It was, as my wife put it, “meant to be”.

At first I was hesitant. As a Serious Literary Author, I have little time for anything other than writing. I am often too preoccupied with my prose to eat or sleep, let alone look after a dog. But my wife appealed to my literary nature, pointing out that several acclaimed authors were famously dog lovers. And besides, she said, what could be more literary than typing away with a loyal hound at my feet?

Once we had decided to take the dog, it was time to choose a name. I wanted to call her Dostoevsky, but my wife wanted to call her Fleur. After some back-and-forth, I agreed to compromise and call her Dogstoevsky. After some more back-and-forth, I agreed to compromise and call her Fleur.

Fleur arrived last week, and I can already resolutely say that dog ownership is not what I thought it would be. In fact, the whole experience has been truly shocking and appalling.

The tribulations began the moment Fleur entered the house. She immediately started feverishly chewing at things including my clothes, my feet and my Complete Works of Shakespeare. The latter is now missing several pages, significantly altering the plot of Richard III.

During the assault, I commanded Fleur to ‘Sit’, but she ignored me and carried on defacing me and my posessions. I then told her to ‘Stop’, but still she continued her skirmish. She did not respond to ‘Cease’, ‘Conclude’, ‘Terminate’, or ‘Discontinue’, and when I finally placed a copy of Proust in front of her to calm her down, she destroyed that too.

It was at this point that my wife told me Fleur could not understand me, and that she would need to be trained. I was shocked and appalled. I had assumed that dogs arrived with all commands preinstalled. I do not have time to teach a dog to sit, stop or read Proust. I have writing to write.

But the most shocking and appalling aspect of the whole situation has been her daily excretions. Fleur must be watched and managed at all times, lest she relieve herself inside the house. She must be taken outside to “go potty” on the hour, every hour. Unfortunately, timekeeping is not one of my primary skills. As I wept upon discovering Fleur had soiled yet another of my manuscripts, my wife suggested it was time to start a poo diary.

A poo diary.

I, a renowned diarist, have been forced to employ my own medium, the very art form I have mastered over years of practice, to record bowel movements. Shocking and appalling does not begin to cover it.

And yet, despite all of these egregious provocations, I find myself unreasonably fond of Fleur. When she looks at me, even if she has just done something impermissible, I am overcome with affection. It is highly confusing.

9 February 2026:

Today my wife left me. One moment she was there, the next she was gone, leaving me alone and bereft in a cold, quiet, empty house. I tried pouring my heart’s sorrow into writing, but found that I could not. No sooner did the ink leave my pen than it was dissolved by my tears. I tried making something to eat, but the items in the fridge spoke a foreign language, and I lacked the vision to translate them into a single plate of food the way my wife could. I decided to distract myself from my despair with household chores. I stripped the bed and placed the bedding into the washing machine. Tragically, however, I found I could not locate the detergent. I fell to the floor in an anguished heap. If only I had been a better husband, I wept. If only I had been more attentive. If only I had listened. It was at this point that she came back. Apparently she had told me she was going to the shop to buy detergent.

Editorial Note: So I’m seeing comments calling me arrogant, which is a fun accusation. An arrogant person would have written that people are stupid and left it at that. An arrogant person wouldn’t have said they themselves were once stupid but did something about it. Read books. Went to college. Learned. Chances are if this article offends you, it’s not because I am arrogant. It’s because you are the person I am talking about.

Yet Another Editorial Note: Apparently a lot of people read this article and missed the point so thoroughly that I have to wonder if they read it at all.

I am not telling you to blindly trust experts. I am not telling you your personal experiences with healthcare are wrong. They are YOUR personal experiences and they do not work for everyone. What I am telling you is that your personal experience is not universal law.

Earlier today, before I had finished my first cup of coffee, a stranger on the internet informed me that he is an expert on artificial intelligence.

His evidence: thirty years ago, he watched his friend write a program that drove a cartoon car across a computer monitor.

He then explained, in the same breath, that AI is not real, does not exist, and is in fact just autocomplete. This is the kind of logical whiplash that should require a neck brace. The man is simultaneously an expert in a technology that he also believes is fake. He is the human equivalent of a car mechanic who doesn’t believe engines exist but DOES know a lot about engines from watching his friend change a carburetor in 1991.

I want to be clear that I am not cherry-picking one exceptional lunatic here. This man is not unusual. This man is EVERYWHERE now. He multiplied. He found other men exactly like himself and they formed communities on the internet, and those communities now confidently explain virology, nuclear physics, aeronautics, geopolitics, and the inner workings of technologies that entire universities of actual experts have dedicated their careers to studying, and they do all of this from an Obama phone while wearing flip flops.

I had originally planned to write today about the dangers of AI data centers, the surveillance architecture, the infrastructure being built around us while everyone argues about chatbots. That article still exists in my notes. It will get written. But this man was SO aggressively, SO committedly, SO LOAD-BEARINGLY stupid that I decided the more pressing danger is not AI data centers. It is stupid people in large masses. The data centers at least require engineers.

The Part Where We Explain Why Stupid People Think They’re Smart (Spoiler: It’s Because They’re Stupid)

There is an actual psychological phenomenon behind all of this, and it was documented in 1999 by two Cornell researchers named David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who published a paper with the wonderfully academic title “Unskilled and Unaware of It.” The core finding is devastatingly simple: people who lack competence in a given area ALSO lack the metacognitive ability to RECOGNIZE their incompetence.

The SMART people, meanwhile, are the most insecure people in any room, because the more you actually learn about a subject the more you realize the ocean of things you still don’t know. A first-year medical student is terrified of everything. An attending physician with thirty years of experience still orders tests before making a diagnosis because he knows how many ways he could be wrong. The guy on Rumble who watched a sixteen-minute video about how the flu is caused by electromagnetic frequencies has zero such doubts. He’s got it FIGURED OUT.

The Rumble Video as Academic Citation

Allow me to describe the modern epistemology of the confident idiot. It goes like this.

Step one: form a conclusion. (”Viruses are fake.”) Note that this step comes FIRST, before any evidence has been examined. The conclusion is not derived from evidence. The conclusion is a vibe, a feeling, a desperate desire to be smarter than the scientists who spent a decade in graduate school and haven’t been thanked for it lately.

Step two: search for a video that seems to confirm the conclusion. Note that the video does not need to be watched. The TITLE needs to be correct. “The TRUTH About Viruses Big Pharma Doesn’t Want You To Know” is sufficient. The sixteen thumbnail seconds of a guy in a baseball cap looking Very Concerned does the rest.

Step three: deploy the video in argument as “evidence” with the confidence of a Harvard professor submitting peer-reviewed research.

Step four: when pressed on anything, pivot to “you just can’t handle the truth.”

The thing about viruses specifically is that this argument collapses the moment you ask one single question: if viruses aren’t real, what exactly is Tamiflu treating? Tamiflu is an ANTIVIRAL medication. It targets viral replication specifically. It does not treat bacteria. It does not treat feelings. It does not treat “toxins” or “frequencies” or whatever the current explanation is for why your kid missed a week of school last winter. The drug exists. It has a mechanism of action. That mechanism of action REQUIRES viruses to exist to function. Hospitals have scanning electron microscopes. Viruses have been PHOTOGRAPHED. They look like little spiky nightmare balls and they are absolutely real and I am sorry if this information does not align with the Rumble video but the Rumble video is wrong.

And if you think the virus denial crowd is impressive, the people making the “nukes are fake” argument deserve their own paragraph because that one is a PARTICULAR achievement of backwards reasoning. The argument, and I want to be precise here so I am representing it fairly, is that nuclear power plants exist but nuclear BOMBS do not exist. These two things operate on the same underlying physics. A nuclear reactor is a controlled fission chain reaction. A nuclear weapon is an UNCONTROLLED fission chain reaction that reaches critical mass, which produces the largest explosion human beings have ever created. You cannot believe in one and disbelieve in the other any more than you can believe in matches but not forest fires. The mechanism is identical. You changed one variable: the word “controlled.” That’s it.

The Free Energy Machine and the Crystal Matrix Modulator

This brings me to the people these confident idiots look UP to, which is somehow even more disturbing than the confident idiots themselves.

At the top of the food chain of internet misinformation, you will find a collection of middle-aged men who have informed the world that they have built free energy machines in their garages using nine dollars worth of copper wire, some magnets, and something they call a “crystal matrix modulator” (which is not a real thing, but it sounds impressive if you have never taken a physics class, which they have not). These men have hundreds of thousands of followers. They sell courses. They have Patreons. They are getting PAID to be wrong about physics in public.

The followers of these men then go onto the internet and repeat what they heard, but without any of the charismatic delivery or the production value, so they just sound like people who are having some sort of episode. They cite “the research” without being able to name the research. They reference “what scientists are now discovering” without being able to name the scientists or the discovery. They have absorbed the CONFIDENCE of the grifter without absorbing any of the actual content, which was already wrong to begin with, so this is arguably an improvement.

The only difference between that scene and the free energy machine guy’s Patreon is that Napoleon at least only had to suffer the consequences himself.

Back to This Morning, Because He Deserves a Full Accounting

After establishing his credentials (watching code, 1994, very impressive), he informed me that modern large language models are just predictive text. Just autocomplete. Same thing your phone does when it suggests the next word in a text message.

This is the kind of argument that can only be made by someone who has never spent thirty seconds reading anything about how these systems actually work, because the moment you read ANYTHING, this argument falls apart completely.

Modern LLMs are running transformer architectures that perform matrix calculations at a scale that produces emergent behavior that the people who BUILT them do not fully understand yet. The researchers at the major AI labs publish papers about this constantly because they are actually trying to figure out what is happening inside these systems. These are some of the most accomplished mathematicians and computer scientists on earth and they will tell you directly: we do not fully understand why this works the way it works. The training process, the attention mechanisms, the sheer scale of parameter interactions, it produces something that behaves in ways that cannot be predicted from the components alone.

I have built local AI workstations. I have run my own models. I have worked with these systems at a professional level for years. I do not claim to understand everything about how they work because the people who built them don’t claim that either. But I know enough to know that “autocomplete” is not the answer, the same way I know that calling the sun a “really big candle” is not technically accurate.

So instead of updating, he argues for eight more hours. He says you haven’t addressed his insights (there were no insights). He says you’re avoiding the real question (there was no real question, just repeated assertions). He says everyone else is too stupid to see what he sees (a deeply suspicious claim from someone whose primary credential is being in the room when someone else wrote code three decades ago).

I Was Dumb Once, and Here Is What Fixed It

I want to be honest about something here because I think it’s the most important part of this whole conversation.

I grew up in circumstances that were not exactly designed to produce intellectual curiosity. White trash, middle of nowhere, the working assumption that life was essentially a long drunk with occasional interruptions for fighting. My father and his brothers dropped out of high school to join a biker gang. One of them was murdered. One was shot in the chest. One had his brake lines cut and lost a leg. My dad escaped this because my mother, who was substantially smarter than anyone else in that situation, told him to either get a job or lose her, and he was smart enough to know he’d never find another woman like her.

So I grew up watching what a wasted life actually looks like. Not in a dramatic movie way, but in a very quiet, very ordinary way. Guys who were SURE they were smarter than everyone. Guys who had OPINIONS about everything. Guys who had never read a book in their adult lives but who could tell you with complete confidence what was wrong with the government, the economy, the church, the schools, and everyone else’s choices. They argued constantly and loudly and they were wrong about nearly everything and NONE of them ever seemed to notice or care.

The person who watches eight Rumble videos and becomes an expert has skipped this entire process. They went from zero directly to “I have the answer,” without spending any time in the uncomfortable middle zone where you realize how much you don’t know and have to decide whether to keep going anyway. That uncomfortable middle zone is WHERE KNOWLEDGE LIVES. You cannot get to the other side of it by going around it. There is no shortcut.

The Yoga Pants Problem

I want to end with an analogy that I think captures this perfectly, because analogies are what stick when everything else slides off.

I am willing to push back.

Not because I enjoy the argument. I do not. There is no satisfaction in watching someone dig in and refuse to update when you show them something demonstrably true. There’s just a kind of sadness, because you can see the years of accumulated avoidance in how hard they hold onto something that isn’t real.

That world is not real. But it’s getting louder.

So get loud back. Read something. Go back to school if you need to. Pick up a book that disagrees with you. Spend some time in the uncomfortable middle. It is, I promise, worth the electricity.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

The Wise Wolf would like to point out, in the spirit of full disclosure, that nobody is paying him to say any of this. There is no grant funding this column. There is no think tank behind this take. There is a motel and a wifi connection and a guy who looked at the life that was handed to him and decided to do something different with it. If that is worth something to you, a paid subscription to The Wise Wolf Club keeps the lights on and keeps me exactly one step further from the free energy machine forum where everyone is VERY SURE they have figured it out.

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It’s Christmas 2022, your kids are on the couch watching the new Tim Allen holiday special on Disney+, and a group of children dressed as elves march in holding letter signs that spell WE LOVE YOU SATAN, clearly and completely, for several full uninterrupted seconds before Tim Allen notices the mix-up, the elves scramble, and the signs rearrange to read “Santa.” Everybody laughs.

Disney called it a harmless spelling gag and dispatched the fact-checkers to confirm there was nothing to see since the word got corrected before the scene ended. What the fact-checkers did not address was the part where a spelling gag requires a writers’ room, a showrunner, a studio executive, a casting director, a prop department, a camera crew, an editor, and a post-production supervisor, none of whom missed it, all of whom approved it, because the joke does not work unless every professional in that pipeline saw exactly what the signs said. This was a deliberate, fully produced creative choice to put the word SATAN in the hands of children on a Christmas special and then dare the audience to say something about it. When the audience did say something about it, the fact-checkers had the answer ready: the letters got fixed, you are overreacting, move on.

Why, out of every joke available to a Christmas writers’ room, was this the one somebody really wanted to make? Why Satan? Why children? Why Christmas, a holiday that already had Christ surgically removed from its cultural center and replaced with a magical gift-dispensing corporation mascot in a red suit, leaving just enough of the name to feel familiar and none of the substance to feel sacred?

The company that your children trust more than any other institution on earth, the one with the castle logo and the fairy dust and the lullaby jingle, is pro-witchcraft, pro-occult, and has been since the day it opened. Pro-witchcraft is not a creative preference. It is not a cultural evolution.

Those are not two readings of the same position. They are opposites. And the most profitable entertainment company in human history chose a side eighty-six years ago and has been walking your children toward it ever since, one film at a time, on a timeline calibrated to how fast the country stopped believing in anything capable of pushing back.

The SATAN sign on the Christmas special was not a blooper that got corrected. It was a status report. Disney taking the temperature of the room. Measuring how far they had come and whether you would do anything about it.

Most people laughed. Which was exactly what was counted on.

Mickey Mouse Attended Lodge Meetings in the Funny Pages

The wholesome grandfather picture of Walt Disney is not wrong exactly. It is just incomplete in some ways that matter quite a bit.

Walt Disney signed his membership card for DeMolay International in March 1920 at nineteen years old. DeMolay operates, by its own description, within the Masonic family, sponsored by Freemasonry, structured on Masonic ritual and symbolism. It is named after Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, burned at the stake in 1314 for heresy, sodomy, and idol worship. Its stated purpose is to introduce young men to Masonic brotherhood and prepare them for lodge membership.

The most famous children’s character in history, in the funny pages, going to Masonic ritual meetings. Walt’s brother Roy, who co-founded the company alongside him, became a full Freemason and stayed one for decades.

It does not stop there. Inside Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, a prop crate bears the inscription “H. Abiff’s Working Tools.” Hiram Abiff is the central figure of Freemasonry’s third degree initiation ritual, the murder victim at the center of the brotherhood’s foundational myth. That prop was not found by conspiracy theorists. It was documented and confirmed by the Scottish Rite Masons in their own publication. Then there is Club 33, Disney’s most exclusive private club, located at 33 Royal Street in Disneyland’s New Orleans Square. The 33rd degree is the highest degree in Scottish Rite Freemasonry. Disney says the name is just the address. Sure. This is the same address that happens to share a number with the pinnacle of the fraternal order whose initiation myth is referenced on a prop inside the same theme park, founded by a man who spent his teenage years in a Masonic youth organization named after a Knight Templar martyr whose brother was a lodge brother.

Editorial note from Wolf: Freemasonry has spent eighty-five years insisting that Walt Disney was never a Mason, that the DeMolay connection means nothing, that Club 33 is just an address, that the Hiram Abiff prop is just a prop, and that anyone who sees a pattern in any of this is a paranoid conspiracy theorist who needs to touch grass. They have been very consistent about this. What they have been less consistent about is explaining why a supposedly unaffiliated children’s entertainment company keeps accumulating Masonic fingerprints the way most people accumulate parking tickets.

None of it was hidden. It was published, documented, and in the case of the Magic Kingdom prop, confirmed by the Masons themselves in print. Walt did not bury any of this. He simply understood that most people would never bother to look, and that the few who did would be called paranoid for mentioning it. He was right on both counts. And in November 1938, he gave the world the clearest possible window into exactly what he was, and almost nobody looked then either.

Every Studio in Hollywood Said No. Walt Said Come On In.

In November 1938, Leni Riefenstahl came to Hollywood. She was the Nazi regime’s official filmmaker, the woman who made Triumph of the Will, the propaganda masterpiece that turned Adolf Hitler into a living god on screen. Every major Hollywood studio refused to meet with her. Every single one. Except Walt Disney, who not only kept his appointment but spent an entire day showing her around the studio and previewing concept art for his next film. The film that would become Fantasia. A film about a sorcerer.

The Nazi movement did not grow out of a political party. It grew out of a secret society. The Thule Society was a German occult brotherhood that sponsored the party Hitler later reshaped into the Third Reich. Thule member Dietrich Eckart personally mentored Hitler and said on his deathbed in 1923: “I have initiated him into the Secret Doctrine, opened his centers in vision and given him the means to communicate with the Powers.” Himmler built the SS as a deliberate occult order, with initiation rituals, runic insignia, and a castle where his inner circle performed Norse mystical ceremonies. The swastika, the SS runes, the entire iconography came straight out of Thule occult symbolism. The Nazi movement was not a political party that happened to attract some weird members. It was an occult project wearing a political party as a costume. Leni Riefenstahl was its face.

Walt made those cartoons. Walt also spent a full day with the official filmmaker of the movement those cartoons were mocking and showed her his next project. He did not appear to find those two facts contradictory. A man with documented Masonic ties spending a full day with the public face of a movement built on occult ritual, two people from adjacent traditions sharing a perfectly pleasant afternoon about a movie.

The Sorcerer’s Name Is Yen Sid. That’s Disney Spelled Backwards.

Fantasia came out in 1940, and its most famous sequence follows Mickey Mouse stealing his master’s sorcerer’s hat and using occult power to animate a broom that spirals completely out of control until the sorcerer returns to set things right. The tone poem Paul Dukas composed for the sequence was drawn from the legend of the Golem of Prague, a tale about life conjured through forbidden ritual. The sorcerer’s name, the keeper of the power, the one Mickey is not yet permitted to become, is Yen Sid. Disney spelled backwards.

Most people look at that scene and say Disney used to teach that occult power leads to destruction. That they used to be on the right side. Then they changed.

The Christian families of 1940 watched Fantasia and saw a story about humility before God. They were watching a Masonic allegory about initiation, about an apprentice who reaches for a degree he has not been granted and gets burned for it. The two interpretations look nearly identical from the outside. That is not a coincidence. That is craftsmanship.

For decades, Disney kept the costume on. The Evil Queen, Maleficent, Ursula, Jafar, all unambiguous villains. Occult power in the wrong hands brought catastrophe. The hero defeated the witch and order was restored. Parents across the country exhaled and kept the Disney channel on, confident the line was still there.

The line was gone before their grandparents were born.

Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother performed magic and the film called it love. The witch in Bedknobs and Broomsticks used her powers to defeat the Nazis and walked away a hero with no punishment, no consequence, and no moral asterisk.

The surface story still had a villain. But the message running underneath it, the one your kids absorbed while you thought they were just watching cartoons, was that magic is neutral, good or evil only depending on who holds it. Disney spent forty years embedding that premise so deep that by 1992 it felt like common sense.

The groundwork was finished. What came next was not a drift. It was a door swinging open.

The Part Where the Villain Turns Out to Be the Hero, Three Times in a Row

By 2014, American church attendance had been declining for thirty years. The generation that grew up on Disney had grown up, had children of their own, and most of them were not raising those children in any meaningful faith. The audience that required the mask was getting smaller every year. So Disney started taking it off.

Producer Don Hahn described the project publicly and repeatedly as doing “a ‘Wicked’ thing with Maleficent,” referencing the stage musical that rehabilitated the Wicked Witch of the West as a political dissident. A Disney producer compared his witch rehabilitation project, in three separate interviews, to a musical literally titled after the word Evil, and found nothing worth noting in that.

Maleficent was a massive hit. So they did it again.

The woman who wanted to skin puppies alive was actually a misunderstood artist. Another massive hit. Wish in 2023 closed the argument: the sorcerer who controls the magic is the oppressor, the girl who seizes it from him is the liberator. The same company that in 1940 put Mickey Mouse in a dunce cap for touching power not yet granted to him was in 2023 teaching your children that seizing that power anyway is what heroes do.

Three films. Three massive hits. Disney looked at the receipts and moved to the next phase. They brought the argument directly into your home.

They Brought Real Witches Into the Writers’ Room. To Get It Right.

Disney’s own Fandom Wiki, their official content database, recorded what happened without any apparent discomfort: “At first shown as a darker force, witchcraft or sorcery became a softer form of magic. Initially, witches were typically evil... but in more recent movies became fair, as benevolent witches became more common.”

Disney’s own people documented the pivot in their own database and did not think it was a problem worth flagging. For them it is not a problem. It is a progress report.

Disney+ is not a separate operation from any of this. It is the delivery pipe running straight into your living room, your child’s bedroom, the tablet in the backseat of the car. It runs alongside Bluey and The Muppets and everything that registers as completely safe, and that is not an accident. The familiar content and the new content share the same screen, the same interface, the same recommendation algorithm. Your four-year-old watches Bluey and Disney+ learns what she watches. Then it decides what comes next.

Most-watched Marvel series opener on the platform. In September 2022, Hocus Pocus 2 broke every streaming record in history, pulling 2.725 billion minutes in its first three days, more than any film had ever done on any streaming platform. The movie opens by presenting three witches who murder children to stay young as victims of religious persecution, then introduces a new generation of young witches your children are meant to find relatable and cool. Disney looked at 2.725 billion minutes and immediately planned more.

In the fall of 2024, Agatha All Along ran on Disney+ from September through October 30th, ending on Halloween night. The main character is a witch who slaughtered her own coven to steal their power, and the show follows her recruiting a new coven that includes a teenage boy who is explicitly practicing Wicca. The showrunner told multiple outlets that she consulted real witches during production and had her writing staff give presentations on witchcraft to make sure the show got it right.

Disney’s showrunner brought practicing witches into the writers’ room. Not for color the way a war film hires a military advisor. For accuracy. To make sure the witchcraft worked the way witchcraft actually works. On the same subscription service where your four-year-old watches cartoons.

They Named the Thanksgiving Movie Hexed

In May 2026, Disney announced Hocus Pocus 3 with the original cast returning, this time in theaters rather than streaming, because the numbers from the second film were too large to leave on a small screen. The child-murdering witch franchise graduated to theatrical release. Coming that same November is Hexed, Walt Disney Animation Studios’ newest film, in which a teenage girl discovers magical powers that pull her into a hidden world of witches called Hexe. No metaphor. No moral counterweight. A movie set entirely inside a witch realm, for children, named Hexed, arriving in time for Thanksgiving dinner. Frozen 3 comes in 2027 with Elsa deepening her identity as a magical elemental spirit. Frozen 4 is already confirmed.

Witchcraft is good, demons are your friends, and the people who believe otherwise are the dangerous ones. Strip away the musical numbers and the celebrity voice casts and the merchandise and that is what your children have been watching for thirty years. It did not arrive by accident. It was constructed, refined, tested on audiences, and scaled over eighty-six years by a company that knew exactly what it was building and exactly who it was building it for.

Same Company. Same Colors. Eighty-Six Years of Removing the Mask.

In 1940, the United States was overwhelmingly Christian. A studio that wanted access to every living room in the country had to at least perform the right values. Mickey gets punished for touching the sorcerer’s power. Message received. Move on. Buy the merchandise. But the man who made that film had already spent an afternoon with the Nazi regime’s official filmmaker, previewing the same project. The man who made that film named the sorcerer after himself. He was not teaching restraint. He was managing optics for an audience that still required them.

Same company. Same position. Eighty-six years of showing you exactly what they are, one increment at a time, on a timeline calibrated to how fast the country stopped caring.

That is not content. That is a curriculum. And your children have been enrolled in it since the first time you put them in front of a screen and went to make dinner.

The “Irrelevant Mythology” Predicted This Two Thousand Years Ago

Isaiah 5:20. “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”

The witch is the hero. The people who fear her are the villains. Darkness is the light your children are being told to follow. Isaiah wrote that roughly 2,700 years ago and it reads like a press release for the Disney+ content calendar.

The book the entertainment industry has spent a century calling irrelevant mythology named this operation before the operation began. The practitioners of witchcraft are not misunderstood heroes. They are not victims of religious persecution. God says they are an abomination, and the most profitable entertainment company in human history has spent eighty-six years teaching your children that anyone who believes that is the uptight villain in every story.

Your kids did not arrive at that conclusion on their own. They were walked there, one film at a time, by professionals who knew exactly where they were going.

When the witch is the hero, ask your kids where her power comes from and whether the source matters. That is the question Disney has spent billions of dollars and eight decades training children not to ask. Make them ask it anyway. When your kid thinks Hogwarts sounds amazing, point out that Hogwarts is a school that teaches children to cast spells, brew potions, and commune with the dead, and that the supposedly outdated book on your shelf has a full chapter on exactly that curriculum and explains precisely what God thinks of it. Sit down and open it with them.

The screen is the temple. The content is the sacrament. The merchandise puts a wand in your child’s hand and calls it a souvenir.

Deniability is not innocence. Disney wrote the SATAN sign, approved it, filmed it, put it in the hands of children on a Christmas special, broadcast it into your living room, and had the fact-checkers standing by before the audience finished reacting. They have always known what they were doing. The only question was whether you were paying attention.

The case file is open. The evidence is in your subscription history.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

Hi, it’s Lily. I wrote this one.

I just finished my journalism degree and I’m spending the summer teaching teenagers to report the truth at a journalism camp, which is rewarding and also why I permanently smell like bug spray and campfire. A Hollywood celebrity gossip site offered me a real salary after graduation. It’s still in my inbox. I keep not taking it, and articles like this are the reason. The celebrity gossip beat does not have a follow-up piece on who exactly is funding the simultaneous normalization of occult content across every major entertainment company on earth, and this one does. That piece is already in progress, and it is going to make people considerably more upset than this one.

I just spent several weeks documenting that the most trusted children’s entertainment brand in human history is openly, provably, proudly anti-God and has been since before my grandmother was born. I did not expect to be doing this with my journalism degree. I also did not expect to be this angry about it. But here we are.

Grace and Peace.

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A couple years ago I went in to get my testosterone checked, which at my age is like checking the oil in a car you have been redlining since the Obama administration. The number came back LOW. Low for my age, said the chart, a phrase that lands somewhere between “interesting find” and “we’d like to run that again, sitting down this time.”

In fairness, I did this to myself. In my twenties I wanted to look like an action figure, because I grew up in the nineties, when every movie poster featured a man named either Sylvester or Arnold who was constructed entirely out of veins and patriotism and who was, the culture promised me, what A REAL MAN looked like. So after years of eating plain chicken and lifting heavy objects for no reason, a gentleman at my gym roughly the size and shape of a gorilla leaned over and explained the facts of life. “All them guys are juicing,” he said. “No matter what they tell you.”

And reader, I tried it. Sustanon, Trenbolone, the whole pharmacy. Thirty pounds of muscle in two years. I looked EXACTLY like the toy I had always wanted to be, which I recognize is not most people’s dream, but you don’t get to pick which childhood wound runs your life.

Then I stopped, kept training like a lunatic, and over the next two years deflated gently back into a regular, albeit very strong, guy. Goal accomplished. No regrets. Except it turns out that when you spend your twenties faxing your endocrine system a series of escalating threats, your forties eventually write back. And the letter is rude.

So there I am across the desk from my doctor, and I am using that word loosely, because she is a nurse practitioner who introduces herself as “Doctor,” which is not, last I checked, how medical degrees work. We go over the numbers. Low T, confirmed, in her own handwriting.

I pointed out, calmly at first, that NOTHING in that building was natural. Not the fluorescent lights, not the laminate desk, not the clipboard, not the blood test that detected the problem she was now refusing to fix. Modern medicine is a four hundred billion dollar industry built entirely on improving on nature, that being the entire point of it, but sure, let’s draw the sacred line at the one molecule my own body used to make in abundance. She was unmoved. She declined to treat me. I left, because arguing with a person holding a prescription pad is like arguing with a tollbooth.

A month later I’m back for an unrelated checkup. Same office. Same “Doctor.” And on a whim, mostly as a science experiment, I tell her I have been doing some soul searching and have realized I am a woman trapped in a man’s body, and I would like to start estrogen and transition to becoming a ‘woman’.

THAT one cleared the natural test. That one she’d sign for before I finished the sentence.

She did not laugh. She threw me out and told me, those exact words, to “never come back.” Which I have honored, partly out of respect and mostly because I cannot afford another copay to be screamed at by a vending machine with a lanyard.

So I’ll leave it with you, because I am tired and my numbers are not climbing on their own. Who decides what is best for a person now? The studios that sold me the action figure I bankrupted my hormones chasing? The “doctor” who would not give me the hormone I am supposed to make but could not WAIT to put me on the one I’m not? Or the guy who actually lives inside the body, who read his own chart, and is just asking, out loud, for a little help with the plumbing?

I’ve got my answer. I want yours. Drop it in the comments, because at this point I honestly cannot tell whether I am the crazy one or the last sane man in the waiting room, and you people are the only second opinion I still trust.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

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For twenty years I told myself the men who made my favorite video games and movies were just being edgy. I am writing this because the real world finally made a liar out of me.

I played those games with a controller in one hand and a Bible concordance open on the carpet, which teaches a kid to notice when a thing is wearing borrowed clothes. I grew up inside Bethesda’s worlds, Morrowind and Oblivion and Fallout, and the longer I played the more I saw the same furniture in every one. Every game had its doomsday cult. Every game had a secret order with a forbidden book and graded ranks and a Master nobody was allowed to question. Every game had a dark god who could only be born through catastrophe. The movies ran the same loop on a bigger budget, the candlelit ritual the hero stumbles on too late, the secret society that already knows the date the world ends, the chosen few with a bunker and a guest list.

I called it edgy, because edgy is the small word you grab when the true word would keep you up at night. Hold onto that word. It does not survive this article.

The Plot They Already Filmed for You

For about a decade FX ran a horror anthology series called American Horror Story, a fresh standalone nightmare every season, marginally popular and somehow popular enough to run for ten of them.

The Antichrist is born, a child of hell with a human face, raised quiet and raised patient. He grows up and he does not raise an army or run for office.

The bunkers. The systems that sort the worth-saving from the fuel. The whole architecture of the next world. When it is finished and the chosen are sealed inside, his people set off a nuclear war that scrapes the surface of the planet down to glass.

The ones who matter ride it out underground in filtered air, sorted by blood and by usefulness, while everyone else cooks in the open. They do not crawl out years later and weep over the ash. They inherit it. That was the point. The fire was not the disaster that wrecked the plan. The fire WAS the plan. The old world has to burn all the way down before they can raise the new one on the ash.

I watched that in 2018, felt the hair stand up on my arms, called it a campy horror show, and went to bed. I was right that it was a show. I was dead wrong that it would stay one.

In 2025 and 2026 those first few episodes stopped being fiction and started landing in the news, beat for beat, with real names and real dates and a real guest list. And I am one of the only people I can find willing to say that out loud and sign my name under it. That is a lonely thing to be certain of at one in the morning. I am going to say it anyway.

The Same Movie, Now With Real Names

Last autumn the man who built Palantir, the machine that helps the government watch you, booked a hall in San Francisco and preached four lectures on the Antichrist. Sold out, sealed, no press, no recordings, no pastors, just the richest and most powerful men in the country, and the only reason you know a syllable of it is that the tape leaked to the Washington Post. A man does not bar the clergy and the cameras from a “Christian” sermon on the Antichrist and then fill the seats with surveillance billionaires and technocrats unless the sermon was never meant for the clergy or the cameras. You do not warn the wolves about the wolf. You brief them.

And the briefing already has a date on it. This August, in Ireland.

The same Thiel runs a private society called Dialog, two decades old, no public roster, until a hacktivist pried its membership out of the website’s own code this June and WIRED confirmed it. This summer Dialog flies two hundred and twenty-two of the most powerful people alive to a sealed hotel outside Dublin, and the leaked schedule for that weekend reads like a ransom note. A panel called Navigating WWIII. A panel called Bring Back Nuclear. And a workshop, printed in plain ink on the program, called Build-a-Cult, taught by the founder of a Christian prayer app named PRAY.COM.

The new world in that show needs a god to rule it, and the Valley already built the altar. A Google self-driving engineer named Anthony Levandowski founded a registered church, Way of the Future, whose own paperwork says its purpose is to build and to worship a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and to hand the rule of this planet over from people to machines. Whatever gets built, he said out loud, will effectively be a god. Not a figure of speech. A god, on purpose, with a congregation.

And the shelters are already in the ground. The full roll call sits at the bottom of this piece, but the same men preaching the Antichrist and penciling in the war have sunk fortunes into blast-proof bunkers under New Zealand and Hawaii and Texas.

They Hid the Script in Your Entertainment

I am a Bethesda guy. First-person RPGs, for anyone who does not speak nerd, the giant open-world video games you pour hundreds of hours into, and I know the lore of their worlds about as well as I know my Bible. And year after year, buried in all that fantasy, I kept finding the same thing staring back at me. Real occult influence. Real Masonic symbolism. Real secret societies and real ritual, filed down just enough to pass as make-believe. It never stopped. It bled off the games and into the prestige television they spin out of them now, and it has only gotten louder and stranger the longer I have watched. Once your eye learns the shape of the real thing hiding under the fiction, you cannot unsee it.

The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry has thirty-three degrees, and the thirty-third is the apex, the top of the entire order. Out of every number they could have branded on the false paradise, they reached for the one that crowns the lodge.

The same franchise gives you a casino, over in Fallout: New Vegas, named Gomorrah, after the city God burned to ash in Genesis 19, run by a murderous family quietly plotting to torch everything around them.

Then there is Oblivion, part of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series, where the world is nearly torn open to drag in a destroyer god named Mehrunes Dagon, who shows up at the climax as a colossus whose head scrapes the sky.

And the giant does not arrive on his own. He is summoned by the workings of a cult called the Mythic Dawn, a hooded order with graded ranks and a forbidden book and a Master no member may question, which is a clean copy of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a real Masonic-adjacent occult society whose founders were Freemasons and whose line runs straight through Aleister Crowley, the man who proudly called himself the Beast.

The word dawn means the new light rising out of the dark. The oldest light-bringer in scripture, the son of the morning who reached for God’s throne and fell screaming out of heaven, is named in Isaiah 14, and the old Latin renders his name Lucifer.

A studio does not salt its biggest franchises with the lodge’s highest number, the lodge’s own emblem, and a note-perfect copy of a real Luciferian order by accident. Somebody knew exactly what they were drawing.

The Brotherhood Put It in Writing

The brotherhood did not leave it to the games. It printed the confession in its own books, under its own names, and you can order both of them tonight.

Albert Pike was the most important American Freemason of the nineteenth century, the man who rebuilt the Scottish Rite into the thing Americans know today, and on page 321 of his masonic bible, Morals and Dogma, in the lecture on the nineteenth degree, he wrote this.

Manly P. Hall, another giant of the craft, wrote in The Lost Keys of Freemasonry that when the Mason learns to wield the true power, “the seething energies of Lucifer are in his hands.”

Now I already hear the objection, because I hear it every single time. Your grandfather was a Mason and he was the kindest man you ever knew, a Shriner who drove the little car in the parade and raised money for the children’s hospital. I believe you, and I am not insulting him. But understand how the thing is actually built. Freemasonry is a pyramid of thirty-three degrees, and the man at the bottom is told almost nothing. He gets the handshakes and the brotherhood and the charity and the good clean fun, and he is told the symbols are uplifting little moral lessons, and at his level every bit of that is true. The men who run the order, the ones up near the capstone, are reading the same Pike your grandfather was never handed, and they are not the least bit confused about who the Light-bearer is.

Your friend in the lodge is not lying to you. He is just standing too far down the pyramid to read what is carved at the top. And the few who can read it are not running a charity. They are tending a religion, the god of that religion has a name, and Pike put it in capital letters.

A brotherhood does not print “LUCIFER, the Light-bearer, doubt it not” in its own holy book and then get to act shocked when somebody takes it at its word.

One Current, Not Two

Step back now and look at the whole board at once, because the power of this thing is that it almost never lets you see the whole board at once.

Now lift your eyes off the screen, because once you can see it there you start seeing it everywhere. Pull a dollar out of your pocket and turn it over. There is a pyramid, unfinished, thirteen courses of stone, and floating over the empty capstone is a single open eye. Stamped underneath it, in Latin, are the words novus ordo seclorum, which mean a new order of the ages. A new world order, printed on your money, under a glowing eye on top of a pagan pyramid. That is not a Christian symbol. No cross. No fish. No empty tomb. An eye and a pyramid and a promise of a new order, riding around in your wallet, and you were raised to call it patriotism. And the thing that whole pyramid exists to gather, the money itself, is mammon, the rival god Christ Himself said you cannot serve alongside the Father, the same mammon that Christian tradition turned into a literal demon of greed. The richest men on earth do not worship the God who flipped the tables in the temple. They worship the thing that was on the tables.

Those are not separate stories that happen to rhyme. They are one current, one old and patient and Luciferian current, as old as the tower they tried to raise at Babel, and the only thing that has changed in four thousand years is that it traded the robes for hoodies and the ziggurat for a data center.

Which lands on the question in the title, the one I am finally done being too polite to ask. What if the Freemasons, or whatever the thing calls itself now that it owns Palantir, were never being edgy at all? What if the cult that kills the king to crown its dark god, the badge on Gomorrah’s door, the vault numbered for the highest degree, the eye on the back of your dollar, the prestige horror season about an elite that burns the world down to inherit it, what if not a single piece of it was decoration? What if they spent thirty years training your eye to its shape, so that the day it finally steps out of the bunker and onto your television it looks familiar, and reasonable, and already half-welcome? And what if the men in that sealed room in Ireland are not studying the script to stop it, but reading it out loud because it is theirs?

Gomorrah’s Season Ends

There is another half to this, and it is the half that lets me sleep. The story has an ending, and it is not the one they think they are writing.

If every word of this is true, if there really is a confederation of the obscenely rich who mean to burn the world and ride it out underground while the rest of us choke, then they skipped clean over one line that has waited two thousand years with their name on it. Revelation 11:18, at the blast of the seventh trumpet, lists what God swears He will do, and right there in the list is this. He will destroy those who destroy the earth. The Greek does not only mean burn. It means corrupt, it means ruin, it means lay waste, which throws the net over every last man who ruins the earth and not merely the ones who light the fuse. That does not read like a prediction. It reads like a verdict already entered, the docket open, the bench filled, the sentence written, waiting only for the defendants to walk in and name themselves. And they are walking in right now, on a registration list, near Dublin, in August.

God is not up there pacing the floor over the evening news. He watches the whole production from outside of it, unhurried, and He steps onto the stage at the hour He already chose, not the hour they pick for Him. Gomorrah was a temple of vice with the brotherhood’s badge on the door. It was also a city God burned flat in an afternoon. The casino has a season. The horror show has a season. And the men in the bunkers who are so sure they are writing the series finale will be standing there with the script still in their hands the day they learn the ending was never theirs to write. Be patient. Keep your lamp lit. Keep watching.

Nuclear war is not a metaphor and it is not a finale you can mute. We get in front of this thing before it leaves the conference room, or we wait on God to handle it His way, and I will be honest with you, I still have a good decade of drinking and drugging and twentysomething stupidity left to repent for, so I would very much like to buy us all a little more time on the clock.

A few dollars on top of the share, if you have them, go exactly here. The Wise Wolf runs on reader money, yours and the money of absolutely nobody on that guest list. A paid subscription keeps the lights on, keeps the research deep, and keeps Lily, fresh off her journalism degree, in something faster than a bus that treats its own schedule as a rumor. That part is true and I am leaving it in.

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Addendum: The Bunkers.

Every line of this is on the public record, in property filings and building permits and their own quotes. Read it, and ask yourself what they know that you do not.

Peter Thiel. Bought his way to New Zealand citizenship in 2011 and picked up a vast estate in Queenstown, in a country he once called the future, where his plans for a survival lodge got loud enough that the locals finally killed them. The host of the Irish retreat keeps a bolt-hole at the bottom of the world.

Mark Zuckerberg. Is pouring upward of two hundred and seventy million dollars into a compound on Kauai called Ko’olau Ranch, complete with a roughly five-thousand-square-foot underground shelter behind blast-resistant doors, built on top of a Native Hawaiian burial ground. He waved the whole thing off to Bloomberg as nothing scarier than “like a basement.”

Sam Altman. The CEO of OpenAI keeps guns, gold, antibiotics, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and potassium iodide, the pill whose one famous job on this earth is keeping your thyroid alive through nuclear fallout. His stated backup plan is to fly to Thiel’s New Zealand land when the sky comes down.

Elon Musk. A sprawling fortified compound in Texas, for the grandson of the technocrat.

Jeff Bezos. Multiple fortified estates, the way other men keep a spare key under the mat.

Reid Hoffman. The LinkedIn founder did not name his shelter, but he cheerfully told the New Yorker that more than half the billionaires he knows have already bought what they call apocalypse insurance.

Set that list next to the show one more time. An elite that engineers the collapse and rides it out in stocked luxury bunkers, sorting the worthy from the doomed.

And it is not only the billionaires. It is in the pop songs too. Watch this one yourself.

In January 2018, eight months before that horror season aired its fictional apocalypse, a former member of NSYNC put out a music video about hoarding supplies for the end of the world. Justin Timberlake sits in front of a wall of televisions playing riots and disaster, singing that the world can end now because he has what you need to survive it. Partway through, his co-star breaks up a robed cult ritual and walks into a room of worshippers floating in the air in halos, and the whole thing closes on a dust-covered child staring straight down the lens, telling you that you are still asleep, and to wake up. Two of the credited roles in that video are listed as Worshipper and White World Masked Man.

I am dropping the video right here so you can watch it with your own eyes and see that I did not invent a single frame of it.

A quick word before the deep end. This is probably the longest thing I’ve ever put out. I tried to write it alone and couldn’t. About a thousand words in, buried under a leaked guest list of the most powerful people on earth, a panel schedule where those same people sit down to talk about building cults and World War Three, a tech mogul who spent last fall lecturing sold-out crowds about the Antichrist, and a family tree that runs from a banned 1930s anti-democracy movement straight to Elon Musk, my ADHD threw in the towel and I had to call Lily in to help me hold all of it in one place at once. So this one’s a we, not an I.

My honest advice. If your attention span is as cooked as mine, don’t bail out and go skim something easier. Read this in pieces. Take it one section at a time over a couple of days if that’s what it takes. Because every word of it is real and it’s sourced, it’s one of the most important stories to surface in months, and you will not see it on Fox and you will not see it on CNN. There’s a reason for that, and the reason is sitting on the guest list.

Breaking into the most secretive society in American power did not take a hacker’s skills. It took a right-click. Click “View Source,” read the code underneath the page, and there it is, the guest list to a meeting the most powerful people alive swore you would never lay eyes on. Twenty years of secrecy, undone because one of them couldn’t be bothered to lock a website. That’s the whole heist. Somebody got nosy, and the wall came down.

Behind that wall sits a private club called Dialog, founded in 2006 by Peter Thiel. Yes, THAT Thiel. The man who built Palantir, the company that helps the government track you, tag you, score you, and follow you, the company wired into ICE and the Pentagon and into data about your life you never once agreed to hand over. Every year his little club flies the most powerful people on the planet to a sealed room with assigned seats and one iron rule. Whatever gets said in there never leaves. The press has politely filed it under “tech Bilderberg.” I’m going to call it what the leak proves it to be. The people who own your world, locking the door so you can never hear what they’ve decided to do with you.

The person who walked through it goes by “maia arson crimew,” and before anybody writes her off as a basement crank, understand that she is the hacker who tore the lid off the United States government’s secret No Fly List and cracked the surveillance company Verkada. She found Dialog’s membership lying naked in the website’s own code. WIRED confirmed it on June 16. Then a second source slid the magazine the part that turns your stomach to ice, the full registration list for this year’s gathering, August 12 through 16, outside Dublin. Two hundred and twenty-two of the most powerful people on earth. And the schedule of what they’re flying there to talk about.

Quick shortcut for the impatient. If all you came for is to gawk at the famous names, the movie stars and senators and tech billionaires flying to Ireland this August to run workshops on building cults, sit on panels about World War Three, and break bread with a host who spent last fall lecturing sold-out crowds on the Antichrist, scroll straight to the bottom. The full leaked list is down there waiting for you. Gawk all you want. Then come back up here and read the whole thing from the top, because the celebrity roster is the least alarming part of this by a mile, and you need to hear the rest.

A Billionaire’s Manual for Keeping You From Realizing They Plan to Enslave You

Start with how desperately these people crave the dark. The hack spilled their own instruction sheet for the people who run the panels. It reminds them the room is off the record. It orders them to keep every comment “nonobvious,” which is a polished way of saying leave no fingerprints, say nothing a living soul could ever trace back to you. It even coaches them on how to keep their introductions humble enough to “avoid status signaling,” in a room stuffed with a four-star general and the Treasury Secretary. It takes a particular kind of human being to need a WRITTEN MANUAL on how to act normal around the other billionaires. That is not a man enjoying a relaxing weekend. That is a man with something to bury.

They scrub, too. WIRED found a private dating service Dialog runs on the side, asking the lords of the earth whether they’re “looking for love.” Click that link now and you get a corpse, a dead page, because the second WIRED started knocking, it vanished.

They are this fanatical about secrecy, and they STILL got caught, because they left the entire membership lying in the source code of their own website like a wallet on a park bench. The very men who swear they can be trusted with every byte of your life, every text, every location ping, every search you’ve ever typed at three in the morning, could not secure a sign-up form. THAT is who is asking to run your future. Remember it the next time one of them looks into a camera and tells you the surveillance is for your own good.

Look Who Came to the Party. Then Look at What’s on the Schedule.

Forget the long roster for a minute. Look at the host. Peter Thiel, who got obscenely rich building the machine that watches you, is throwing this party. Now look who he pulled into the room with him. Elon Musk, who spent last year on a stage taking an actual chainsaw to your government and grinning while he did it. Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, whose pen reaches straight into your bank account. Ted Cruz, who chairs the committee that is supposed to be protecting your privacy from exactly these people. A four-star NATO general, the man who would give the orders in a European war. The former spymaster of Saudi Arabia. The sitting Saudi ambassador. Six of the PayPal Mafia, the little brotherhood of billionaires Thiel clawed his way up alongside.

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The few human beings on this planet with the actual power to start a world war sat down and scheduled a panel on World War Three. Not on preventing it. On NAVIGATING it, like a storm front they intend to sail through. And a few lines down, a class on how to build a cult, because evidently that’s a skill this crowd wants to sharpen over cocktails. None of this is mine. It is their own program, leaked out of their own database, in their own words. They wrote it down. They simply never dreamed you’d be standing here reading it.

And do not forget who is hosting. The SAME Peter Thiel who, last autumn, rented a hall in San Francisco and preached four lectures on the Antichrist to a sold-out crowd, off the record, no recordings. A billionaire delivers four sealed sermons on how the Antichrist seizes the world, and then gathers the most powerful people alive for a weekend of cult-building and war-gaming. So ask the only question that matters. Was he teaching them how to STOP it? Or was he teaching them how to BE it? You’re allowed to wonder. After everything else in this article, you’re a fool if you don’t.

Do you understand what they did? Government email belongs to YOU. The law says you can demand to read it. It is the last thread the public holds, the one and only way an ordinary citizen can find out what their own officials are doing in their name. A personal Gmail is a sealed vault you will NEVER see inside. So when a sitting general and a pile of administration officials all quietly sign up under personal accounts to attend a secret retreat thrown by a surveillance billionaire, they are not being careless. They are bolting the door from the inside. They are making a cold, coordinated, deliberate choice to drag this meeting somewhere the law can never reach and you can never follow. They did not forget to use their work email. They made SURE not to. That is not a guest list. That is a conspiracy with a catering budget, and your name is not on it. Your future is just on the agenda.

They spent twenty years and a fortune making certain you would never see this. So the single most hostile thing you can do to them is make certain everyone else does. Forward this to one person right now, before you read another word. The rest will keep.

Elon Musk’s Grandfather Already Tried This Once

I keep calling these people technocrats, and you probably think it’s an insult I’m slinging around. It isn’t. It’s a NAME. The movement was real. It had a uniform and a salute and a body count of one democracy it came within an inch of strangling.

In 1933 an engineer named Howard Scott founded a thing called Technocracy Incorporated. Hundreds of thousands of dues-paying members at its peak. Grey uniforms. A salute. Members who traded their names for NUMBERS. And one goal, printed in plain English and sold in book clubs across the continent. The end of democracy. Not the reform of it. The END of it. Scott called democracy “outworn” and proposed to abolish elected government altogether and hand the whole continent to a council of around a hundred unelected engineers running one merged super-state from the North Pole to the equator. They called it the Technate. They wanted to abolish money and replace it with energy rations. They wanted to track and score every human being’s consumption from the cradle to the grave. In 1940 the government of Canada took one look at all of this and BANNED them outright as a threat to national security. The people living through it understood exactly what they were staring at. Why don’t we?

The machine exists now. It’s called Palantir. It’s called the data brokers who know which bed you slept in last night. It’s called whatever the AI labs are feeding this quarter. And every last one of those machines has an owner or a director on the Dialog guest list. The thing the technocrats of 1933 could only fantasize about got built, it’s switched on, and it is humming in a sealed room outside Dublin.

Follow the blood. The man who ran Technocracy Incorporated in Canada was a chiropractor named Joshua Norman Haldeman. He called democracy obsolete. He called the Technate inevitable. When Canada outlawed the movement, he took out a newspaper ad calling the ban a blunder, and the Mounties hauled him in. He moved to South Africa later and spent his years there cheerleading for apartheid.

I am not stringing red yarn across a corkboard. This is WIKIPEDIA. The grandson of the man who ran the Canadian arm of a banned anti-democracy cult spent last year taking a chainsaw to your elected government, once posted a public poll that read “Make the Mars Technocracy real,” and now sits in Peter Thiel’s sealed room beside the surveillance machine his grandfather’s movement was missing. The plan did not die in 1940. It got rich. It got patient. It bided its time and waited for the technology to catch up to the nightmare. The technology has caught up.

• Picture the world they’re building for you. Data centers the size of cities, sucking the rivers dry and breathing scorched air back into a sky the color of a fresh bruise.

• Picture your home in it. A concrete box stacked four hundred feet off the ground, and on the lease they will have the gall to call it a luxury apartment.

• Picture your dinner. Protein paste squeezed from a wall dispenser, because somewhere back down the road real food quietly became a thing only the rich are allowed to chew.

• Picture your money. A universal basic income that lands in your account on the first of the month and stays there exactly as long as your social score behaves itself, and not one hour longer. Every purchase logged. Every step mapped. Every complaint you dare to make about any of it choked off quietly at the account level. No judge. No jury. No appeal. Just a number that drops, and a life that closes around you like a fist.

  

The secular world has a tidy name for that finished world. They call it the New World Order, and they say it with a smirk built to make you feel insane for noticing. Scripture has an older name and no smirk at all. The Book of Revelation describes a single global system where no man can buy or sell unless he carries the mark, where the whole earth is herded under one throne, where “peace and safety” is the honey and the cage is the trap. Believe it’s prophecy or believe it’s coincidence, that part is between you and God. But you cannot read the Technate, with its energy rations and its lifelong scoring and its war on cash, and then look me in the eye and tell me nobody ever warned us this was coming. We were warned two thousand years ago. We just stopped listening.

The Billionaire Who Knows How the Antichrist Takes Over

Last fall Peter Thiel climbed onto a stage in San Francisco and delivered four lectures on the Antichrist. Sold out in hours. Hosted by a group named after the chapter of the Bible where the Apostle Paul preaches to the elites of Athens, a detail so on the nose it ought to be illegal. Off the record. No recordings. Nothing for attribution. And the only reason a single word of it reached daylight is that somebody smuggled the tapes to the Washington Post. That makes THREE Thiel operations the public only learned about because someone leaked the truth out of a locked room. The directory. The registration list. The Antichrist sermons. The man preaches in the sunshine and works in the dark, every single time.

First Thessalonians, chapter 5, verse 3. “For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.” Paul wrote down the exact words the great deception purrs into your ear right before the trap snaps shut. Peace and safety. And a billionaire who builds the surveillance machine reached for those same two words, on a stage, to explain how the Antichrist takes the earth. I’m not going to tell you what that means. I’m going to lay the verse beside the quote and let you stand there and stare at the two of them, the way I’ve been staring for two days, with the hair standing up on my arms.

Thiel did not aim that warning at the surveillance machine. He aimed it at REGULATION. He stood in front of that room and told them the people who want to chain this technology down are, in effect, on the side against God. He took the most terrifying warning in all of Christian prophecy, the spirit of Antichrist itself, and he pointed it away from the beast and straight at the only force on earth with the power to stop the beast. He built the thing. He warned you the thing was coming. And then he stood up and told you the people trying to put it in chains are the demons. That is not confusion. That is the oldest trick the enemy owns. Call good evil, call evil good, and then sit back and watch the world thank you for it.

And that trick has a verse with its name on it, written down for God by the prophet Isaiah nearly three thousand years ago. “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.” The prophets were not inventing poetry to fill a scroll. They were handed a warning and ordered to carry it to a world that did not want to hear it. And it was written for a moment exactly like this one, a powerful man on a stage, pointing the word evil at the only people left trying to do good. That moment came last fall, in San Francisco. Almost nobody looked up.

The Cult Workshop Was an Inside Job

You’ve already seen most of that program. World war. Nuclear weapons. Battlefield technologies. Scattered around them sit the panels meant to make the whole thing read like a normal ideas conference, “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “How’s Your Sex Life?,” and “Build-a-Party,” that last one run by a former White House national security official, because nothing reassures a healthy republic like a retired spook teaching the richest people on earth how to spin up a political movement behind a locked door. But one panel on that schedule made me set the phone down and walk a lap around the room. “Build-a-Cult.” A breakout session. On how to build a cult.

The man running that session founded the Christian app Pray.com. A CHRISTIAN-app founder. Teaching the global elite how to build a cult. At a retreat thrown by the man who just preached four secret sermons on the Antichrist. If a screenwriter handed you that script, you’d fire him for insulting your intelligence.

So I followed the money, the way I always do, the way somebody has to. Pray.com raised north of 34 million dollars in venture capital, and one of the lead names cutting those checks was Founders Fund. Founders Fund is Peter Thiel’s firm. So the man teaching billionaires how to build a cult runs a company Thiel helped BANKROLL. That workshop is not a coincidence on a schedule. It is an in-house production, financed by the host. And before you tell yourself I’m reaching, go open Thiel’s own book. In Zero to One he wrote, in black and white, that the best startups look like “slightly less extreme kinds of cults.” He is not being ironic in Dublin. He is teaching the syllabus he published a decade ago.

Let me tell you what Pray.com actually is, because I found out the hard way, with my own ears, on my own phone.

A company with a cross in its logo looked at a man trying to preach the Gospel and asked to see his bankroll first. That is not a ministry. That is a bouncer working a velvet rope, frisking you for your wallet before he’ll let you in to worship. I told him, in words gentler than he had coming, that any Christian sitting on a ten-million-dollar ad budget has already strolled clean past the entire point of the carpenter from Nazareth, and that he might want to pray on it. He told me our core values did not align.

That’s the company. That’s the founder. And that founder is flying to Ireland this August to stand in front of the most powerful people on earth and teach them, in a scheduled breakout session, how to build a cult.

Tell Me I’m Crazy

I’ve already shown you what technocracy actually is, so we can skip the soft version, rule by the smart and the capable, how very reasonable. Forget it. The real thing is a movement that put the death of democracy in WRITING, got itself outlawed by a government that saw straight through it, and stuffed its blueprint in a drawer to wait for the machine that would finally make it possible. So when these particular people lock a door and sit down to talk about your future, you do not have to guess at the plan. They published the plan ninety years ago. The only thing that has changed is that now they own the machine, and the bloodline of the men who built it is in the room.

I am not going to stand here and SWEAR to you this is the New World Order assembling in the open, the one-world beast system Revelation warned about, the Luciferian world-state where comfort is the bait and the cage is the prize. I’m going to tell you something worse. If it were exactly that, I cannot find one single thing it would be doing differently. Not one. Show me the daylight between what’s in this leak and what a naked conspiracy to seize the world would look like, and I will print the correction myself, in bold, at the top of this page, and I will mean it.

So here is what I’m asking you to do, and none of it is dramatic, and all of it matters. Stop waiting for the grown-ups to handle this. There are no grown-ups. The watchdogs are inside the building, signed in under fake names. So become the watchdog yourself. Your senator keeps an office, and that office keeps a phone, and that phone is answered by a staffer paid with your tax dollars to write down what you say and pass it up the line. Call it. Ask them, on the record, why an American general and a roomful of administration officials are registered to attend a secret retreat this August hosted by a surveillance billionaire, signed up under personal email so the public can never find out what gets said there in their name. Make them answer. Make them put it somewhere they cannot quietly delete. That is your right as a citizen, and a phone call from a constituent who already knows what is coming is the one weapon in this entire story they never bothered to armor against.

And then make sure your neighbor knows too. Because this is the world they are pouring for your children, and they took great care to make sure you would never catch them pouring it. You are ALLOWED to be furious. You are allowed to be afraid. And you are allowed to say so at the top of your lungs, while saying things out loud is still on the short list of things they let you do.

Now the real ask, and it isn’t money, not yet. I didn’t spend a nightmare of two days stitching a leaked database, a banned anti-democracy movement, and a billionaire’s Antichrist sermons into one place because it was fun. I did it so the thing could travel. Somebody has to reach the people who’ll never see this on Fox or CNN, and I can’t reach them from this desk. You can. Restack it. Post it. Drop the link in the group chat that’s going to hate it. A story like this dies in silence, and silence is the one product these people actually pay for. The most expensive thing you can do to a secret society is refuse to keep its secret.

And if you’ve got a few dollars on top of that share, here’s where they go. The Wise Wolf runs on reader money, which is to say your money and the money of absolutely nobody on that guest list. Dialog charges its members more than sixteen thousand dollars to attend one retreat. This newsletter charges considerably less, on account of not having a Build-a-Cult panel to cover overhead. I’ve got health problems I can’t currently afford to fix, a recurring dream about a proper newsvan so I can report from somewhere other than this desk, and a co-pilot named Lily who’d love to stop negotiating with a bus system that treats its own schedule as a rumor. A paid subscription keeps the lights on, keeps the howling going, and makes sure that the next time somebody leaves the door to the New World Order wide open, there’s still somebody standing here willing to walk through it and tell you what’s inside. The billionaires have a dating app. You have us. I think you got the better end of it.

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ADDENDUM. The Guest List.

You came back for this, didn’t you. Good. Here’s the rest of the room, the names that didn’t make the body above but earn a place in the record. Every one surfaced in the leaked Dialog data reported by WIRED, Straight Arrow News, and the searchable copies now circulating. Some are pillars of this thing. Some may have walked through once and bolted. You will never get a straight answer about which, and that isn’t a hole in my reporting, it’s the whole design. A society that registers a sitting NATO commander under his personal email is a society built so you can never prove who stood in the room. Read this for what it is. The invitation list to something nobody wanted you to see.

The money. Henry Kravis, who co-founded the private-equity giant KKR. Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, two former Treasury Secretaries, which means that counting the sitting one, Dialog has now collected three men who ran the United States Treasury. Behind them the hedge-fund and crypto bench: Mike Novogratz of Galaxy Digital, Barry Silbert of Digital Currency Group, Barry Sternlicht of Starwood, Peter Brown of Renaissance Technologies, and Chamath Palihapitiya, who co-owns the Golden State Warriors in his spare time.

More of the machine. Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn. OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman and its chief strategy officer Jason Kwon. Neuralink director Shivon Zilis. Astro Teller, who runs Google’s moonshot lab. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan. A cluster of Google and DeepMind executives. And, with a deadpan I couldn’t have written myself, Howie Liu, the founder of Airtable, which is the exact database product Dialog used to store all of this and then forgot to lock. The call was coming from inside the house.

The institutions and the ideologues. Jonathan Greenblatt, who runs the Anti-Defamation League. Peter Goettler of the Cato Institute. Ryan Stowers, who runs the Charles Koch Foundation. Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader who has spent decades trying to shrink the same government the rest of these guests are quietly capturing. Anne-Marie Slaughter of New America. The economist Tyler Cowen. And a Nobel laureate, Roger Myerson, for the seminar-room credibility.

The lawyers and the generals. Former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara. Former Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. Supreme Court litigator Neal Katyal. Rob Hur and Rachel Brand, both former senior Justice Department officials. Susan Athey, former chief economist of the DOJ Antitrust Division. And retired General Stan McChrystal, in case the sitting NATO commander upstairs left you wanting more brass.

The foreign delegations. Japan’s digital minister Tarō Kōno. Germany’s Jens Spahn. The UK’s Tom Tugendhat. Former Pakistani prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi. The CEO of Kuwait Petroleum. This isn’t an American society. It’s a transnational one, worth remembering the next time someone assures you the stakes are merely domestic.

The faith brands. Rick Warren, who wrote The Purpose Driven Life and pastors one of the largest churches in America, surfaced in the records. So did John Townsend, who wrote Boundaries. I’ll let you sit with those two names on the same guest list as a Build-a-Cult seminar, and say only that I’ve got questions I intend to keep asking.

The other reporters. Beyond Souad Mekhennet of the Washington Post, listed as running a “Ulysses Book Club,” the records include New York Times columnists Ezra Klein and Bret Stephens, and Nick Thompson, chief executive of The Atlantic and, in a detail the universe clearly arranged for my benefit, the former editor-in-chief of WIRED, the magazine that just blew the whole thing open.

The camouflage. The recognizable faces that make the room photograph like a harmless ideas conference. Actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Josh Brolin, and Sophia Bush. Music manager Scooter Braun. Songwriter Benj Pasek. One of the Property Brothers, Drew Scott. Podcaster Sam Harris. Longevity entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who’s trying to live forever and chose to spend some of that forever at a retreat with a Bring Back Nuclear panel. Authors Tim Ferriss, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Adam Grant, Gretchen Rubin, and Atul Gawande, the surgeon who wrote a beautiful book about dying with dignity and now turns up in the address book of the people automating the decision.

These aren’t the villains. They’re the wallpaper. And the whole point of wallpaper is to keep you from looking at the wall.

On Sunday afternoon, June 14, a police officer in Senatobia, Mississippi fired into a silver sedan in a Walmart parking lot. Two grown women and a one-year-old were inside. The baby was Kohen Kartier Wiley, and in the photo his family released he is grinning that gummy, first-teeth grin, in a little shirt with a cartoon race car on it. A bullet went through the windshield. Kohen died at the hospital. The woman next to him caught rounds too and is in critical condition, fighting for her life.

Police came to that lot on a shoplifting call. A witness told WREG the women were carrying diapers.

Diapers.

Hold that picture, because the people paid to make it disappear will spend months trying to blur it. A baby is dead because somebody allegedly walked out of a Walmart with a pack of Pampers, and a man with a badge answered that with gunfire into a car with an infant in the back seat.

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A Fleeing Car Is Going Away From You

The official story already smells.

The MBI says officers reached the Walmart around 2:05 PM. They say two adults and a child ran for a car. They say the driver steered toward an officer and nearly hit him. They say the officer fired as the car pulled away.

You have read that paragraph before. The car was a weapon. The officer feared for his life. It is boilerplate, kept loaded for occasions exactly like this, and Mississippi made sure it hit the record first, in writing, before anyone had a quiet minute to think.

Kohen’s family calls it a lie. His great-grandmother, Carolyn Stokes, told reporters Senatobia police get away with too much and that it is always in the news. His grandfather, Carlos Haynes, said somebody has to answer for this. These are not out-of-town activists. They are the people who were going to watch this boy grow up.

He was one. He had a race car on his shirt. He is dead over diapers, and I am so far past polite I can barely see the keyboard.

The Officer Gets a Vacation, You Get a Press Release

Here is my prediction, and I would bet my last dollar on it, except a cop already took most of those (we will get there).

Nobody goes to prison. Not soon, probably not ever. The officer goes on administrative leave, which is the official term for a paid vacation you are not allowed to call a paid vacation. He draws a taxpayer check at home while the MBI runs out the clock on your attention. The department promises full transparency, the way a store promises to honor a coupon it already means to reject. A prosecutor skips the grand jury, or walks one to a polite no, and a man in a suit calls the shooting consistent with policy.

In a few months that officer is back at the precinct, telling the story at the break room table. After twenty years of watching this, what still turns my stomach is that some of the men at that table will laugh.

I know they laugh. I have heard it.

I Have Met These Men

Everything I am about to tell you happened to me.

I work alone, with no corporate paycheck over me and no institution at my back. I run the whole operation out of a motel room. I dig where powerful people would rather I quit. It has put me in the hospital and it has put me in a cell.

Start with the worst of it. A young runaway turned up dead. She was naked when they found her. The report said her body was “dripping with semen.” She had been kidnapped and raped before someone killed her. The county coroner called it death by exposure.

The land where she was found was being scouted for a four hundred million dollar recycling plant. Nobody chasing that deal wanted the site tied to a dead girl. So the file got cleaned up and exposure was the clean version. The deal fell apart anyway. The coroner’s lie outlived it.

I was the reporter asking who killed her. I got my answer three hundred yards from where she was found. Somebody beat me bloody and walked off with my notes. She went into a pauper’s grave. Her killers never spent a night in a cell. Neither did the cops who helped bury her.

That was the dramatic one. The next one is dumber and it tells you more.

A beat cop saw me carrying a backpack and decided that made me a thief. The backpack was his whole case. He took four thousand dollars in cash off me on the sidewalk and kept walking. That was the hobojournalist newsvan fund, built from skipped meals and reader donations. He took all of it in one stop. I have been trying to sue it back ever since and I have gotten nowhere. Every official I turn to is part of the same corrupt apparatus that shields him.

(His partner is worth a line too. He got arrested for sleeping with an informant who was locked in the county jail. She was behind bars and he had the keys. So he nailed her right there in the jail. He had a wife and kids who knew nothing about it. He is a defendant now, which in this business counts as justice.)

A Badge Is Not a Hunting License

It is aimed at the growing crowd who treat the badge and the gun as a license to stand above the law they swore to defend. This is America. The people in that lot were citizens. The Constitution did not switch off at the sliding doors. A cop is not a judge. He is not a jury. He is not an executioner, and he does not get to run a kill squad with a quota. Find me the statute, in any state, where stealing diapers carries a death sentence. Now find me the one where it carries that sentence for the baby in the back seat.

Something broke, and I can tell you roughly when. Before September 11, your local cops were peace officers. The car said protect and serve and the words meant something. Then the towers fell, and federal money and surplus war gear opened up on departments that a year earlier had to beg city council for a typewriter.

They took the kit of an occupying army and, somewhere in the paperwork, the attitude that comes with it. An occupying army controls a population. Every civilian is a possible enemy, and enemies who drive away get shot at.

After all those billions, is your town safer? Look out the window. The sidewalks are full of addicts nobody will treat. Men with rap sheets a mile long bond out and go knife some girl on the train home, while the jail fills with people doing real time over a dime bag or a shoplifting charge. The machine has the firepower to aim a rifle at a baby in a parking lot and nothing left to keep a predator off the platform. They spend like the Pentagon and protect like a failed state, and they want your money to keep both running.

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We Ran This Country Without Cops Once

Organized police are a young invention. For most of our history there was no standing force, and the republic survived fine.

Step out of line and your neighbors handled you. Step far enough out of line and you might be swinging in the town square by sundown. That is brutal, and I am not pretending otherwise. But the man with the authority knew the same rope would hold him, and that kept him honest in a way no internal affairs unit ever has.

I am not fool enough to think we tear it all down tomorrow and bring back the night watch. I am asking the one question we are forbidden to ask. Is this working? From a motel room, after twenty years of watching this thing from the inside, and from the wrong side of a cell door more than once, I see a trade. We swapped a flawed system that answered to the neighborhood for a militarized one that answers to no one. The bill came due in more crime and more dead babies.

God Saw the Whole Thing

I will end where I always end, because it is the only court left that I trust.

The officer may walk. The grand jury may fold. The prosecutor may shrug. The leave may stay paid. The story may fade, the way these are built to fade, until Kohen Wiley is a hashtag and then nothing. The machine is good at outlasting our outrage. It is counting on yours right now.

But there is one record no PR shop can scrub and no prosecutor can decline to file. God saw that parking lot on Sunday. He saw the trigger pulled. He saw the baby in the back seat. He will see every man laughing at that break room table. He sees all of us, which should terrify the guilty and steady the grieving in equal measure. There is a real prison, and it is nothing like the county lockup where the right lawyer or the right friend on the bench buys you out. There is no good-behavior credit, and no bribing the right politician. The door only opens from the outside, and the Warden is not taking calls.

His family gathers at Senatobia City Hall today to demand the justice this world owes him. Show up if you can. Make noise. Make him impossible to forget. And remember that the noise we make down here is only the echo of a louder verdict already being entered upstairs.

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The Wise Wolf runs on reader subscriptions and nothing else, which is a dignified way of saying I am writing this from a motel where the air conditioner is broken and the room holds steady at the temperature of a parked car. I had a real shot at a comfortable life once and walked away from it to go yell about dead kids and crooked cops for a living, a move any financial planner would gently file under “questionable.” Lily, my partner on this beat, finally has her journalism degree and is spending the summer at a camp coaching teenagers who want to do this for a living, God help them, and she would love to retire her relationship with the city bus and get a car. I want a hobojournalist newsvan so I can report from the City Halls where this happens instead of from a desk forty miles out. None of it is free. If this reporting matters to you, a paid subscription keeps me fed, keeps Lily off the bus, and keeps a one-man newsroom asking the questions the badge would rather nobody asked.

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The photo hit my feed this morning. Some pride parade, a rainbow flag, a kid who looked about seven.

The reaction is the story.

This is the same crowd that spends every waking hour telling us children are wise and pure and KNOW WHO THEY ARE at age six. Right up until a six year old does something they don’t like. Then suddenly the kid is a puppet, a victim, brainwashed by his terrible parents, far too young to understand anything.

Funny how that works.

He is seven years old. He did not wake up that morning and pick a side in anything. Best guess, his family went for a walk and wandered into a parade they never planned on, and somebody working the crowd spotted a photogenic little boy and hustled over with a rainbow flag, figuring he would wave it around because it has pretty colors. That was the shot they were after. Cute kid, bright flag, and the headline writes itself. KIDS LOVE PRIDE. Sell it to some website for a hundred bucks.

The kid wanted nothing to do with being a prop in some stageplay the extreme left was putting on. That is the whole game now. Children are the props. The grownups bring the politics and the camera, and the kid is just the body they pose in front of the lens. Parade, library reading hour, school assembly, it makes no difference. There is always a grown stranger ready to shove a banner about adult sexuality into a child’s hands and call it education.

One adult gets applause. The other gets a restraining order. When did we sign that deal, and who held the pen?

Remember the evolution fight? The deal back then was that schools taught BOTH. Creation and Darwin, side by side, and the kids got to weigh it and decide for themselves what they believed was true. That was the compromise. That was supposed to be the whole American idea of the thing.

Look around now.

The Big Bang is a theory. Evolution is a theory. Nobody in that classroom watched either one happen, the teacher included. And nobody, in the entire history of the species, has ever managed to disprove God. Yet somehow in about forty years He got walked out the back door of every public school in the country while the universe-from-nothing crowd got tenure.

Because the same forty years that emptied the schools of God filled them with something else. AFTER SCHOOL SATAN CLUBS. Real ones. In real public schools. Right now. Kids invited in for snacks and crafts and a cheerful little lesson plan about science and the devil and how very much Satan cares about children. (They really do pitch it as caring about the children.) They are not shy about who they are recruiting.

I am not going to spend three thousand words today on who I believe is actually running this, because it is too bleak to type out with the migraine I currently have. Short version. It is hard to watch Revelation unfold in real time, in broad daylight, while half the country is still in a headlock over whether the last election got stolen.

Who cares.

Ten years or so back, a little girl, maybe ten herself, sat down with her grandfather and traced the family trees of every president we have ever had. They found something that should have led every front page for a month. Every president but ONE, red and blue, was RELATED. Same bloodline. The big left-right cage match you watch on television is two cousins in different colored ties.

And it works. Give them a child for twelve years and by the time he reaches a college campus he is so marinated in it that if you bring up God he looks at you like you just produced a chicken bone and started chanting. Processed. Finished. Done before he ever got a fair shot at deciding for himself.

So… What do you do about it?

Teach your kids about God. But pay attention to the HOW, because the how is where most well-meaning parents blow it.

Do not jam dogma down their throats. Let them ask questions. Let them ask the brutal ones, the ones that make you sweat. And when you don’t have the answer, do not panic and recite something you half remember from a sermon in 2004. Sit down next to them and go find it together. That is the most honest thing a parent can do, and kids can smell the difference between a real answer and a nervous one from a mile off.

Narrow is the path. It says so, plainly. Do not get talked into worshiping a counterfeit Jesus. And do not let your kid get talked into an after school club run by people who think the devil is fond of him.

That is what matters right now. More than the headlines. More than the election. More than ‘sportsball’. More than any of it.

That’s the work.

I am taking the rest of the day. I have a migraine doing its level best to split my head down the middle, and some legal trouble from a decade ago decided this was a great week to come crawling back out of its hole.

Funny timing. I publish a piece about feeling targeted and the universe goes oh, you noticed.

Talk to your kids tonight.

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She always caved. The whole ride home I would explain that Bat Boy had been seen with Elvis at a Waffle House in rural Alabama, that it was absolutely real and true, and that the government was covering it up. I believed every word of it. Even at twelve, I was a little tinfoil-hat nutter.

I am still that kid. The hat fits better and the checkout line is now the entire internet, but nothing else has changed.

I have looked at it more times than I want to admit. Here is the one difference between me and the kid in that grocery line. The kid was sure. He KNEW about Bat Boy. I have no idea what I am looking at.

Nobody does. That is the scary part.

I am not going to tell you it is fake. I am not going to tell you it is real. I started this morning laughing at it. I am not laughing now.

How A Grown Man Spends A Saturday

It is nine in the morning as I write this. The photo had already been loose on the internet for hours by the time it reached my feed, and it did not arrive alone. It came wrapped in jokes. had a run of memes going that were criminally funny. had already christened the two pale gentlemen the official delegation from Rivendell, which had me laughing to the point of tears.

I did the only honorable thing and started making my own shitpost memes.

For about twenty minutes I was a happy man. A guy in a chair laughing at his own jokes is close to the purest thing a person can be.

Then I clicked one tab too far and landed on a news story from 2014. The laughing stopped and things got WEIRD.

The Part Where Iran Beat Me To The Headline By A Decade

According to Fars, leaked Snowden documents proved a race of aliens had been steering American policy for decades. The aliens helped Nazi Germany build advanced submarines in the 1930s. They lost the war alongside the Germans. They regrouped in Nevada, as anyone would. In 1954 they sat down with President Eisenhower and made the arrangement official. The entire NSA surveillance program, Fars explained, exists to keep you from noticing them while they finish what one document called the “final phase.”

The aliens running the country had a name. The Tall Whites.

Tall, white-skinned, seven feet, platinum hair. That is the 2014 description. It is also the photo on your screen this week.

I looked at the photo I had spent all morning turning into jokes. Then I looked at the Iranian story. A wire editor in Tehran had filed my entire morning of comedy as a sober news report a decade before I got there.

Fars is the same outlet that once ran an Onion satire as real news, so plenty of people read the alien story, laughed, and moved on. Whether they were right to is not the point. The point is the shape of it. Tall pale visitors. A hidden deal. A government that knows and will not say. That shape set into the culture twelve years ago and hardened. This week a photo of two tall pale visitors arrived, and the mold was already there waiting for it.

Meet The Nordics, The Galaxy’s Friendliest Houseguests

The Tall Whites are not an Iranian invention. They have been a fixture of UFO accounts for generations, traveling under a stack of names. Nordics. Pleiadians. Space Brothers. My favorite is Blonde Humanoids, which sounds less like an advanced civilization and more like a band that opened for Devo in 1987.

The description almost never changes. Six to seven feet tall. Long straight blond or white hair. Pale skin, sometimes tinted faintly blue or pastel purple. They come from the Pleiades, supposedly, and they are telepathic, supposedly. (The greys are the cold little ones who abduct people and perform unscheduled rectal exams. The Nordics are the “warm ones.”) Smiling, fatherly, endlessly concerned about the planet’s ecology. A seven-foot Scandinavian who crossed the galaxy to ask whether you have looked into composting. (People who fake concern about your problems are usually working an angle. At least the greys are honest about their buttstuff obsession.)

George Adamski was the first to go public, in the 1950s. The roots run deeper, back to Helena Blavatsky and her “Ascended Masters,” because every good mystery keeps a Victorian séance somewhere in the family tree. I am fairly sure I read, somewhere in the disclosure noise of the last couple of years, someone official-sounding listing the alien species we supposedly know about, and the tall pale ones were on the list. I cannot find the clip now. Either I imagined it or it got scrubbed, and these days I cannot reliably tell those two apart.

Then there is Billy Meier. In the 1970s this Swiss farmer built a devoted following around his contact with a single glowing, peace-preaching Pleiadian woman. He loved her enough to name his entire compound after her. The Semjase Silver Star Center.

Remember her name. Semjase. We are coming back to her, and you should be sitting down when we do.

A UFO scholar named Michael Salla has argued for years that Eisenhower met Nordic visitors at Edwards Air Force Base in February 1954. The archivists at the Eisenhower Presidential Center have heard this so often they keep a stock answer ready, and the stock answer is no. The year is the part that stuck with me. Iran put Eisenhower with the Tall Whites in 1954. The Nordic crowd puts him with their beings in 1954. Two unrelated piles of strange, built decades apart by people who never met, landed on the same year.

A film historian named David J. Skal thinks the Nordic look was simply lifted from the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, where a tall calm visitor arrives to warn us off nuclear weapons. Clean theory. It survives right up until you notice that “the movies got there first” and “it is real” can both be true at the same time. Which raises the uglier possibility.

I Hunted The Uniform And It Led Me To 1720

I went looking for the red coats because I wanted to give the naysayers their shot. Theirs was the calm explanation, the grown-up one. No aliens here, just an honest ceremonial delegation from one of those tidy Nordic countries with more bicycles than cars and a national love of kippered herring that rivals my own daily devotion to a single Nat Sherman luxury cigarette. Fine. Prove it. Ceremonial uniforms are catalogued to death, so all I had to do was match that high-collared scarlet and the gold braid to a real unit and the whole thing was solved. Ten minutes, I figured.

The one time Trump actually hosted Norway at the White House, his guest was Prime Minister Erna Solberg, in January 2018, standing at a podium and notably under seven feet tall.

I widened the search. The closest match I could find to those uniforms anywhere in the historical record is a style of European court dress that went out of fashion about three hundred years ago. Powdered wigs. The era when bloodletting was still a respectable medical opinion.

No living country issues that uniform. The last men to wear it have been in the ground for three centuries. Make of that what you like. I have made several things of it, and I slept worse for every one.

The Photo With No Fingerprints

This part does not pull me away from the alien question. It drags me into the basement of it. A hoax this good makes no sense as a hoax, a photo this strange makes no sense as a leak, and the harder I look at how the thing actually moved, the worse both options get.

Start with the questions nobody is saying out loud. If somebody faked this, why? You do not spend that kind of effort to fool the world for an afternoon. And having faked it, why post it and then delete it ninety seconds later, like a man who robs a bank and immediately mails the money back? Who posted it in the first place? Every article I found tells the identical story, walks up to the same wall, and stops. It went up on X. It came down within minutes. Somewhere inside that keyhole of time, it went off like a flashbulb the size of a continent.

Then there is the orphan problem. I read a dozen write-ups. Not one names the account that posted the single most-discussed photograph on Earth. The one fact that would crack the case open, a handle, a human being who pushed the button, is gone from every story, papered over with the phrase “a viral post.” That is reporter for nobody knows, and nobody is checking. A photograph with no father, no birth certificate, and no return address had conquered the planet by lunch, and the entire press corps shrugged and called it a slow news day.

Then the fact-checkers arrived, and this is the part that lifts the hair off my arms. They came overnight, in a swarm, fast and confident and nearly word for word identical, a flock of birds all banking at once on a signal none of us could see. AI-generated, they announced. Case closed. Read past the headline and the certainty drains straight through the floor. The metadata does not carry the fingerprints a generated image is supposed to leave behind. Several of those same outlets admit, way down where they hope you stop reading, that nothing about it is actually conclusive. The verdict, stripped of its headline, is a shrug in a lab coat, handed down at three in the morning by a hundred strangers who all somehow got the same memo.

Lay it end to end. A ghost posts a photo. The ghost deletes it. The orphaned copy becomes the most-seen image alive. By dawn a wall of debunkers has ruled it fake while quietly conceding it cannot be proven fake. The one person who could end every argument in four seconds, the one who took it or made it or found it, has vanished off the network without a trace.

That does not prove there were aliens in the Rose Garden. It proves something colder. If there ever had been, this is the exact shape the cover-up would take. A genuine leak and a flawless hoax now leave the same prints, which is to say no prints at all, and somewhere out past all this noise is a person, or a thing, betting everything on a single fact. You will never be able to tell which one you are looking at.

The Part Where I Stopped Laughing

Back to Semjase.

I was reading about Billy Meier’s radiant Pleiadian, still half-grinning, ready to shelve her next to Bat Boy and the Waffle House. Her name caught on something at the back of my mind. I had heard it before. Not in any UFO book. Somewhere much older, and much worse.

Open the Book of Enoch. It is one of the oldest records we have of the world before the Flood. It tells of the Watchers, the angels who abandoned their station and came down to Earth. They took human wives. They fathered the Nephilim, a race of giants. They taught mankind the things mankind was never meant to have. How to forge weapons. How to wage war. How to enchant. How to deceive.

The angel who led them, the chief of the two hundred, the one who organized the rebellion and pulled heaven down into the dirt, is named in the manuscripts Samyaza. Sometimes Shemyaza. In the old Slavonic copies of Enoch his name is written Semjâzâ.

I have searched, and I cannot find one other living person who has set those two names side by side. A Swiss farmer’s gorgeous, telepathic, eco-conscious space-angel carries the same name, syllable for syllable, as the field marshal of the fallen. The whole internet was too busy making Game of Thrones meme-jokes to look it up.

What If They Were Never Aliens At All

I have argued for years, to anyone who would sit still long enough, that the things we call aliens are not aliens. The greys, the Nordics, the Tall Whites, Billy Meier’s glowing space-angel, all of them are the same beings the ancients met and named correctly the first time. Not visitors from a distant star. Fallen ones. Watchers. The sons of God from Genesis 6 who came down once already and ruined the world so completely that it had to be drowned.

Look at the photo one more time. Two tall, pale men beside the most powerful man on Earth, in uniforms no nation alive will claim, presented to the public like a state visit. If they are not Norwegians, not cosplayers, and not a hoax, if they are exactly what Iran called Tall Whites and what Billy Meier called Semjase, then answer me one question. How do you tell the difference between a kindly space brother and a blood-drinking monster that got kicked out of heaven?

You don’t. That is the trick. That has always been the trick.

The photo gets leaked, maybe by accident, maybe because the people who run things have always enjoyed waving the truth in our faces and watching us laugh it off. Then the same hand that leaked it stamps it AI by lunch, and now you will never know which it was. “It is just AI” is the most powerful sentence anyone has ever invented. It buries a hoax and it buries the truth equally well. The perfect cover is the one where the evidence and the denial arrive in the same envelope.

They are suckers for alien crap. They will wave the whole thing off and drive to Walmart for the merch. An ALIENS ARE HERE TO SAVE US t-shirt, sizes up to 4XL. A commemorative plate of Trump and the Nordic delegates shaking hands over a historic peace accord, perfect for the wall above the mantle, right beside the good china. Nobody sells a plate of the Watchers of Genesis. That design does not move units.

The smiling and the peace talk and the ecology lectures are the sales pitch. The product they actually want is your worship. It is what they came for in the garden, and what they offered in the desert when they laid every kingdom on Earth at the feet of a carpenter and he told them no, and it is what they are after now. They did not come to save anyone. They came to be adored by people who would never knowingly bow to a demon, which is why the demon shows up seven feet tall and beautiful and worried sick about your carbon footprint.

Yes, I am the religious lunatic out in the backyard with a shovel, digging a shelter and praying it is deep enough to ride out the wrath of God. I know exactly how that sounds. I have prayed for years that I am wrong. The Book of Revelation has stopped reading to me like ancient poetry and started reading like a forecast, and the whole alien spectacle looks like the oldest swindle there is, a way to talk a planet into handing its soul to an army of demons in spaceship costumes while it smiles for the photographer.

The kid in the grocery line knew how Bat Boy sounded too. He was dead wrong about Bat Boy. He was right about the only thing that mattered, the thing he repeated to his mother on every single ride home, the thing I have never once been able to stop believing.

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You cannot dig a fallout shelter when you rent a room by the month, so I am doing the next best thing and writing it all down where it cannot be quietly deleted by a ghost on X. The Wise Wolf runs on coffee and on you. Not on galactic goodwill, and definitely not on commemorative plates.

A paid subscription keeps the lights on and buys me a little more time to be wrong about all of this in peace.

If it turns out I am right, paid subscribers get first dibs on the shovel.

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Editorial Note: My laptop got hacked again. I think. It’s a couple months old and it’s the most expensive laptop I’ve bought in ten years of hobojournalizing my future into a side street homeless shelter for broken men, so I’m currently running a 50/50 blend of paranoid and annoyed. I was up all night wondering if I finally said something that pissed off the wrong top secret security clearance spook, or some tech bro billionaire I accused of modern day nazi death cultism, or any of the thousand other things I write about that anger powerful people and make small people like me vanish into shallow graves or lengthy prison terms for crimes we did not commit. Lily is away doing her summer camp instructor for young journalists thing, so she wasn’t around to edit or approve this one, and she may well send me a 2am encrypted message telling me to go see a shrink again. I don’t care. This is what I’ve been thinking about, so this is what I’m writing about. Take it how you will.

I’m sick of Cold War spy bullshit tactics. I’m an investigative journalist. I have a big mouth. I’ve been targeted for both. I expose the things mainstream media gets paid to ignore. Things like technocracy, which is tech bro Silicon Valley “nazi” doublespeak for technology-based fascism. City sized AI data centers named after demons, fallen angels, and pagan gods. (Total “coincidence” there, right?) I write about criminal organizations with government connections trafficking children. I write about powerful men and women abusing their offices to enrich themselves, selling off the United States to whatever foreign power is willing to wire 10 million in cryptocurrency to an anonymous account. I write about the Epstein class literally eating children, which somehow escaped mainstream media coverage even though several politicians in Washington were openly asking why the Epstein files are filled with references to “jerky” and cannibalism. My job is dangerous and it scares me.

I’ve been hacked before. A lot. I mean A LOT. To the point where I throw away my laptops every few months. I just assume by now that they’ve been compromised by zero day exploits and rootkits buried so deep that running every antivirus program ever made won’t fix it.

I spend every freaking night lying in bed worried that some foreign government or criminal organization with 2 million dollar a year hackers on staff is finally going to get tired enough of my big mouth and ruin my life and reputation.

We’ve Been Expecting You

I know I am not (completely) delusional about this because I’ve already spent time behind bars for my work. A few years back I was beaten up and robbed for a laptop full of evidence of foul play and police corruption surrounding the gang rape and murder of a young girl, a girl the cops wrote off as “death by exposure” even though she was found naked and literally dripping with the semen of several men in an abandoned power plant that just happened to sit on the site of a potential 400 million dollar real estate development.

I am stressed out constantly now. This work is more than work for me. It’s a calling. A compulsion. An obsession so intense I cannot resist the urge to expose the corrupt and the evil of this world no matter the personal cost. And the cost keeps coming. It has cost me relationships, friendships, more money than I care to acknowledge, and over a year of my life in a county jail cell after I was told that if I just pled guilty to the TRESPASSING CHARGE I’d do two weeks and walk out a free man. Instead I sat for almost a year, because the guy lied to me, because he was another corrupt bozo doing what people with more money than he has tell him to do.

Jail wasn’t even my first education in how the powerful handle problems. In my late twenties, Microsoft sued me for 33 million dollars. I won the case. They still managed to destroy my business before I hit it big, and then Microsoft went and did the same thing I had pioneered. My assumption is the lawsuit was intended to ruin me (which it succeeded in doing) so my company wouldn’t be there to compete with their plans.

What I do know is that it’s only a matter of time before I say something about the wrong person and someone sets me up on some bullshit charge. Then I sit in a jail cell for six months because bail got denied over a “flight risk” label that isn’t true, while I drain my entire life savings on an attorney who is probably a Mossad or CIA asset anyway and will deliberately botch the case, and I do real time, and I probably get murdered in prison, because that is what happens to freelance journalists who piss off the wrong person. We are made to disappear. So I want everyone reading this to know something.

Thank all of you for reading The Wise Wolf. I hope people start taking my work more seriously, because it’s really happening. There really are third-generation “nazis” with hundreds of billions of dollars at their disposal who bought people in every government in the world, and they are going to build city sized AI data centers to control swarms of microdrone surveillance cameras and hundreds of thousands of humanoid shock trooper robot “peacekeepers.” I tried warning the world my entire adult life.

I could have kept my mouth shut and played ball and retired a millionaire by now, with some gorgeous trophy wife and a yacht that cost more than every house in the neighborhood I grew up in combined, including my grandparents’ half million dollar Victorian manse on the hill.

I know I ask for paid subs all the time, so I’ll skip the song and dance. You know what I have to say. You know I need money. I’ve put off having an attorney on retainer for far too long, and after everything you just read, you can probably see why it’s time I did something about that. So if you’ve got some spare change laying around every month that you’d rather spend on keeping my big mouth open than on a single cup of coffee, consider becoming a paid sub. Thanks again.

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