The Prestige ✨

Why would a bunch of IQ-obsessed eugenist billionaires back Trump, a bankrupt idiot? Because he's a great distraction. Possibly the best distraction in the history of distractions.

The tariff maths is just so stupid that it can only be: misdirection.

Here is Peter Navarro – architect of Trump’s tariff scheme — and convicted idiot.

“Vietnam sells us $15 for every $1 we sell them”

But wait?

He’s forgotten some words.

“Vietnam sells is $15 of stuff, worth $15, for every $1 of stuff, worth $1, we sell them”

— which is a ZERO SUM GAME.

Who’s winning here?

Vietnam isn’t making a $14 profit … or 14x profit … or 1,400% profit on its relationship with the USA.

The US is: buying stuff of value … for what it’s worth.

I might just as well tariff my pub.

They sell me $15 of beer for every $0 of beer I sell them.

I’M BEING RIPPED OFF … aren’t I?

Here comes the magic… 🪄

Okay … so we’re all agreed. The logic behind the tariff hikes is not logic at all. It’s all so utterly banal that, for the world to make any sense, there has to be something else going on.

Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts.

The first part is called "The Pledge".
The magician shows you something ordinary:
a deck of cards, a bird or a man.

He shows you this object.
Perhaps he asks you to inspect it…
to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal.

But of course... it probably isn't.

The second act is called "The Turn".
The magician takes the ordinary something…
and makes it do something extraordinary.

Now you're looking for the secret...
but you won't find it,
because of course you're not really looking.
You don't really want to know.
You want to be fooled.

But you wouldn't clap yet.
Because making something disappear isn't enough;
you have to bring it back.

That's why every magic trick has a third act,
the hardest part,
the part we call "The Prestige".

― Christopher Priest, The Prestige

So what’s really going on here?

Let’s break it down:

The Pledge

The world is ripping us off, we want to make America great, re-establish American industry, recalibrate the dollar … whatever. There are lots of pledges the administration is making … and much like the bird or the coin … they’re just for show.

The Turn

Anyone who’s been watching the news over the past few weeks knows that, whatever the pledge… someone is getting filthy rich from the tariff about-face.

On Tuesday, the whole administration – particularly Karoline Leavitt, the White House Press Secretary – were adamant that the tariffs would say, despite global markets having plummeted…

Nevertheless someone knew things were about to change because a huge volume of trades, betting the market would rise, were placed on Wednesday…

… and just moments later, Trump posted this …

… and then Leavitt and others announced that tariffs would be “paused” sending markets through the stratosphere.

The S&P had its biggest jump since 2008. The NASDAQ: it’s biggest climb in 24 years.

Trump even bragged openly about how much his friends made yesterday…

But wait! … that’s not the trick …

Fiddling the market was just The Turn …

The Prestige

While everyone’s looking at tariffs and trade, there’s something else going on in America. While all of the papers are talking tariffs. While congressional hearings talk insider-trading, while reporters interview AOC about MAGA profiteering … while we talk penguins and retaliation from China …

… there’s something else going unreported. Well. Nearly.

While the world is getting sea-sick just watching the markets rise and fall … Elon Musk’s team of crack 20-year-olds is up to something far, far more nefarious that stealing people’s pensions (or 401k’s as the Americans seem to call them).

They are stealing data.

They are ransacking the government, firing staff, closing down federal offices … and all the while, they are sucking up trillions upon trillions of datapoints – data on every person living and working in America.

Where you live, what taxes you pay, where you and your parents went to school, how successful you are at gambling, who won in your divorce and why you got divorced, who you know abroad, what kind of porn you like, why you got arrested, where you’ve ever worked …

… and there’s every suggestion that they plan to mobilise this data rapidly.

Yesterday, the Department for Homeland Security announced they will start screening immigrants' social media for signs of un-American sentiment … including those already resident in the US.

The day before, Leavitt, extolled the virtues of Trump’s free thinking when she suggested the administration would love to deport born-and-bred Americans to the El Salvadorian gulag where so many – often seemingly innocent – Venezuelans have been summarily sent to die in the past few weeks.

What she actually said was that this would be restricted to criminals … which would seem fine until one understands two things…

First: America has 1.8 million people in prison … the largest prison population in the world … so the scope for deporting “only criminals” is already astonishing.

Second: the definition of what is criminal changes. For instance, the Texans are already trying to criminalise transgender identity as some kind of federal fraud.

Leavitt and The White House seem aligned with this specific change. On Tuesday she stated that she will not, as a matter of policy, correspond with reporters who simply include pronouns in their email signatures, telling the New York Times that such people “ignore scientific realities and therefore ignore facts”.

To be clear on the “scientific realities” … the incidence of genetically intersex births in the human population is the same as the incidence of red hair. It’s not common, but it’s hardly that uncommon: ~135 million people … equivalent to ½ the US population.

Where does this leave us?

It’s a perfect storm.

An executive which, based on the Trump vs USA 2024 Supreme Court believes the president — and his orders — are beyond the reach of the law.

A judicial enforcement willing to round-up and summarily deport innocent people against court orders.

A president openly considering deporting citizens to off-shore torture-centres for “criminal” behaviour.

An open drive amongst state legislatures to criminalise personal choice and a federal crackdown on peaceful protest.

…

And all of that is before we get to the prestige above …

The DHS’ announcement that it will start scanning the social media accounts of visa applicants (both those abroad and those already living in the United States) should be taken in the context of the technological coup going on under the headlines.

They have yet to announce who is going to get the contract to run this scanning service — but you can make an educated guess.

The whole point of Musk’s “DOGE” effort is to strip the public sector of its capacity. The defence tech sector is no different. In fact, only last week, the director of the NSA was fired, seemingly at the behest of a far-right friend of Trump, and will no-doubt be replaced with someone more compliant. Compliant, I suspect, to award the contract to someone like Palantir or Clearview.

Palantir is in the business of AI-analysis of public data. Sound familiar?

In the UK, they have already sucked up all of our NHS data and are now trying to get into our police databases and even our prison data to do such things as “calculate reoffending rates”. In the US, in 2019, during the first Trump term, Palantir were involved in the rounding up of hundreds of migrant workers by ICE.

Clearview is in the business of AI-stalking via CCTV. Globally.

In fact, Clearview has been taken to court or fined by the British, Dutch an Australian governments for their total disregard for personal privacy or domestic privacy legislation… but they don’t care and don’t bear any responsibility because they sit outside each jurisdiction.

More recently, Clearview has been working with the FBI and ICE in their efforts to round up migrants.

But. Clearview’s ambition's don’t stop there. Clearview’s founder Ton-That is about as extreme as they come. A eugenist, obsessed with IQ and racial-purity, Ton-That’s Clearview is not just a security company — it’s an ideological engine of change — designed not only to target immigrants but also people of colour and the political left.

I could fill this newsletter for years just focusing on Palantir and Clearview but we don’t have time. There is however one last thing to say…

… where do you think the money came from to build Palantir & Clearview?

Yes, you guessed it: Peter Thiel.

Square One: PayPal.

So we’re back to square one.

Behind all the bluster of tariffs and market manipulation, there’s something far more sinister brewing.

The PayPal Mafia — a group of white South Africans¹ including Peter Thiel (who believes, amongst other things, that women shouldn’t vote and the welfare system shouldn’t exist), Elon Musk (who I’m assuming we’ve all heard of) along with David Sacks, now leading Trump fundraiser … and Ken Howery who is picked to be Trump’s ambassador to Greenland and lead Thiel & Musk’s efforts to create a new “network state” on the island — has taken over the United States of America.

And no-one’s paying attention …

… because they’ve put Trump out, front and centre, to play the crowd.

Trump … was never running the show.

Peter Thiel has been pulling his strings since 2015 … tested his tech on Britain’s 2016 Brexit referendum, via Cambridge Analytica, before hoisting Trump into the White House later that year.

And when Trump goes, Thiel’s protégé, former employee — JD Vance — will be the drop-in “CEO-dictator” that the prophet to all these weirdos, Curtis Yarvin, has advocated for publicly for years.

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We are 80 days into the second Trump presidency.

There are 1,380 days to go.

America is less than 5% into this storm … and there is already little left of most major federal institutions, the presumption of innocence, due-process, freedom of expression, data-privacy or the right to protest.

Meanwhile, a handful of greasy billionaires are working tirelessly to turn America into a pure, white, high-IQ apartheid state … where women are subservient vassals, destined only to solve the greatest crisis facing humanity: the falling birthrate.

If you consider what these loons have achieved in 80 days … just imagine where they will get through in another 1,380. There will be nothing recognisable left.

Meanwhile, stay entertained, distracted or distraught if you must.

But remember that Trump — let alone Navarro, a man so stupid, the only expert he could find to corroborate his inanity was Ron Vara, an anagram of his own name — is just the side show.

Trump is PT Barnum. All show. No truth. No clue, really. The man is clearly an idiot — and a bunch of high-IQ obsessed eugenists will not have backed him ’cos they think he’s smart…!

And in the end: whatever he does never amounts to more than a pledge and a turn.

It’s all he’s capable of.

If you want to know what’s really going to happen…

… look for the prestige.

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1. Thiel was born in Germany but grew up in South Africa in the 70’s in an area still warm to the memory of Hitler. Musk’s maternal grandparents, according to his father, were Nazi sympathisers who migrated to South Africa from Canada to support the apartheid regime.