For a printable PDF, click here.

This story was essentially proven in reverse: In March 2023, a tech billionaire named Peter Thiel started a bank run that led to the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. I was suspicious, and investigated the question, “Did this bank just collapse on purpose?”

After digging through ties to cryptocurrency, lies in the media, and several very suspicious start-ups associated with Thiel and other elites in his orbit, I eventually uncovered that these people were engaging in Ponzi schemes - not just once or twice, but likely hundreds of times.

Realizing that many of the biggest names in cryptocurrency built their careers on Ponzi schemes, the next discovery was that crypto itself was our first decentralized Ponzi scheme, with countless companies getting in on the theft.

As the list of perpetrators grew and grew, it eventually revealed a totalitarian con: Our most ‘elite’ universities built the crypto Ponzi; the biggest names in venture capital were financing the Ponzi; major news outlets all promoted the Ponzi; and prominent members of both political parties were fully complicit.

The big breakthrough around propaganda came via The Simpsons. I had proof that Harvard University was a massive organized crime front, and I recalled that many, many Simpsons writers went to Harvard. If The Simpsons is propaganda for the mafia, I asked myself, what is the point of it?

Well, it tells us we have no choice but to slave away for evil billionaires; that the American Dream is dying because we’re too oafish, divided, and morally decayed; and that we are easily conned by monorail Ponzi schemes.

“Ay caramba!” I thought! The Simpsons brainwashed us! And if a show as popular as The Simpsons was doing it, it probably wasn’t the only one. From there, we just need some historical knowledge and critical thought to realize that we’ve been given this sort of messaging in all directions.

The other big breakthrough came when I was posting these essays on Reddit, which is owned by many of the financiers of the crypto super-Ponzi. Over and over again, I received the same types of comments that would attack my credibility without engaging with any of the evidence I was surfacing. They were practicing fear, uncertainty, and doubt. As I dug into their other comments, I found them repeatedly sowing partisanship, mocking others, and promoting products, just as a secret fascist government would want them to. This repetition from so many accounts revealed that they were coordinated trolls, poisoning our discourse and making us think they were acting in good faith.

Once we understand the totalitarian scope of the propaganda, we get to rewrite history.

Booklet Footnotes:

1. For the best account of historical fascism I’ve read, I recommend Fascism and Social Revolution by R. Palme Dutt - the full text is available here. Written during Hitler’s rise to power in 1935, Dutt knew precisely what atrocities the world was headed for. The last chapter is a wonderful stand-alone essay.

2. Notably, Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter was a participant in the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program of brainwashing and psychological torture, according to this declassified CIA document. And when we know the big story (that we’re in a totalitarian doomsday cult), we recognize that the name “Grateful Dead” is a perfect name for a cult leader band: The fans not realizing they were the grateful dead all along. Likewise, the band’s iconic stealie logo evokes death and brainwashing.

3. In the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the U.S. government faked that they had been attacked by North Vietnamese ships, all propaganda to draw us into the Vietnam War. As admiral of one of the ships of the staged incident, Jim Morrison’s father was complicit in the lie, which is damning evidence against Jim Morrison himself once we recognize the signs of fascist messaging. For more on the role the CIA played in shaping The Doors and other bands of the era, see Weird Scenes from Laurel Canyon by David McGowan. Full PDF available here

4. I bet you never noticed how often The Beatles evoke violent imagery: Maxwell’s Silver Hammer is a happy, cheery song about a violent serial killer. A Day in the Life depicts a gruesome death. Rocky Raccoon, Bungalow Bill, Piggies, Tomorrow Never Knows all evoke death and violence. The words Happiness is a Warm Gun speak for themselves. They also made The Butcher Cover: The album cover depicts the cheery bandmates strewn with decapitated baby dolls and raw meat. We also find our secret fascist themes in songs like Eleanor Rigby (Look at how lonely and isolated we are), Taxman (Fear the taxman), Yesterday (Turn to nostalgia because life is getting worse), and in their promotion of the nonsense “Paul is dead” conspiracy (Get the public to chase conspiracies to hide that fact they’re being ruled by financial criminals).

5. For the best book on the Manson Family Murders, see CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill, which reveals numerous cover-ups and CIA agents connected to Manson and his cult. When we realize the scope of the con, we understand why Manson said the Beatles’ White Album was secretly promoting a race war: Because both parties were in on it.

6. When we realize that the secret fascists long planned to use new technology like computers and smart phones to pump us full of misinformation, we realize that Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was ‘predicting’ a future that was already planned out.

7. For more examples of secret fascist bands, we’ve got Devo, which is short for “devolution” and means that society is becoming too morally decayed. Like the Grateful Dead, their iconic energy dome hats evoke brainwashing. Rage Against the Machine, with members out of Harvard University, is an example of controlled opposition: they promote far-left ideas, but they exist to incite anger and division while they tell their fans of the capitalist machine too powerful to stop.

8. Not only did Bush Sr. become director of the CIA in 1976; a leaked cable revealed that he had been secretly working for them for decades, with evidence that he was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. For a comprehensive look at the Bush family’s century-long connections to fascism and organized crime, see Family of Secrets by Russ Baker.

9. I’m not the first to reach the conclusion that our politicians perform kayfabe as professional wrestlers do in order to divide and misdirect the public. David McGowan describes this well in Understanding the F-Word: American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion. For a common propaganda tactic used to create ‘post-truth America’, see On Bullshit by Princeton philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt: They mix up truth and lies so thoroughly in order to divide, deceive, and undermine honest discourse.

10. There are countless popular social media accounts that churn out meme after meme promoting fascist interests. While many tweets and memes are made in good faith, aggregators like Shitheadsteve, Millennial_Misery, are endless streams of content telling us to laugh at our hopeless circumstances. Painbewilin is just thousands of variations on the joke that we are depressed and suicidal. Parody news pages like The Onion provide the same role as comedy news: They tell us how bad our circumstances are, but that we should just sit back and laugh at the problems we are powerless to stop. Pages like Project_Knowledge promote nonsense conspiracy theories and pretend they are true, all to misdirect us from the fact that we’re being conned.

11. Fake futuristic science makes for good Ponzi schemes because the con artists can position themselves as experts, promise an amazing technological breakthrough to keep victims from selling, have a justification when the Ponzi collapses (the tech didn’t get there), and repeat with some other new fake-futurist technology.

    The start-up that broke the case on Ponzi schemes was Clinkle out of Stanford: The biggest names in Silicon Valley were backing this mysterious, unproven technology, but the company collapsed without delivering on their promises. The story was nearly identical to Theranos, also out of Stanford. But these weren’t actual Ponzi schemes, since their billionaire investors were in on it - they were laundering money, “losing” it through offshore banks and into networks of organized crime when the companies fell through.

    When Elon Musk says his company Neuralink has made a nanotechnology brain-computer interface without evidence, he is doing a Ponzi scheme. When Peter Thiel promotes a manmade island in the middle of the ocean for The Seasteading Institute, it’s a Ponzi scheme. When Bill Gates backs a mining company that claims to have discovered a motherlode of copper in Zambia, which investors will never see, it’s a Ponzi scheme. The proof exists in repetition and stock charts: Over and over again, the biggest names from Silicon Valley promised fantastical new start-ups, their stocks go way, way up before collapsing completely, and the elite backers somehow keep getting richer.

    When we know the owners of some of the biggest companies on the planet are engaging in Ponzi schemes, we recognize that the same way-up-way-down stock chart of individual Ponzi schemes was also found across the whole market in the Dot Com Bubble and the Great Recession, which clues us into the fact that these recessions were the inevitable outcome of running so many Ponzi factories.

    For a couple Ponzi factories out of our most elite universities, we have Stanford’s StartX.com, and Harvard’s Launch Lab X, both with numerous science and bio-med startups promising fantastical new technology.

12. The proof of cryptocurrency as a Ponzi scheme is very technical and complex, but it shares many common traits of Ponzi schemes on its face: It involves complicated and mysterious technology; promoters tell buyers to “hold on for dear life,” and that it will be worth millions some day; and it is an unregistered security that uses offshore banks.

    Although the public is told that the blockchain allows for full transparency, the perpetrators invested in technology that would allow them to secretly move assets from public to private blockchains, and to use high-frequency trading to move huge quantities of assets behind the scenes. There are staggering volume anomalies around Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency, that we can trace to particular venture capital investments, which I’ve covered in more detail here.

    The revelation that cryptocurrency will collapse the world economy comes from recognizing that the same people who were building and investing in the crypto Ponzi also owned many of our biggest companies, and they were using them to pipe out the stolen cash. I’ve got a write-up on PayPal here as an illustrative example, and show how Meta funneled billions in stolen cash through Credit Suisse before it collapsed via their Libra cryptocurrency here.

    Many of the companies engaging in the theft now have mass layoffs. For a simple exercise, when a company reports mass layoffs, just search Google News with their name and the word “blockchain.” That’s because the companies have less money than they are supposed to, since they used the blockchain to funnel stolen money out of crypto exchanges, through their companies, and into their own pockets. The following companies have all recently announced layoffs, according to this article, and all invested in the blockchain:

• Mattel: Launched a blockchain-based marketplace for NFTs in April 2023.

• Cisco: Announced the use of blockchain for network security in February 2020.

• Nike: Announced a blockchain-based product traceability system in June 2023.

• Estee Lauder: Used the blockchain for sustainable sourcing of materials in October 2020.

• Levi Straus: Partnered with Harvard University to track worker well-being on the blockchain in January 2019.

• Macy’s: Hosted galleries of blockchain-based NFT collections for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in November 2022.

To highlight the bipartisan support for this rampant theft: Donald Trump has close familial ties to the industry: Among the well-heeled crypto investors is Thrive Capital, a tech VC firm run by Trump’s nephew-in-law, Josh Kushner. Thrive received money from Peter Thiel for their first institutional fund in 2011, and Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner sat on Thrive’s board and investment committees.

On the left side of the aisle, we get our most damning evidence from the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), an arm of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s nonprofit Clinton Foundation. First are ties to known criminals: Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes attended a CGI panel discussion in 2015, and Bill Clinton joined Sam Bankman-Fried as a paid speaker at Crypto Bahamas in 2022.

Then, we take a close look at some of the more than 200 participants at CGI’s 2022 annual meeting. The list includes government officials, executives, members of global non-profits, heads of state, and Sam Bankman-Fried himself. If we Google these people and organizations along with the word “cryptocurrency” or “blockchain,” we learn that nearly all of them have clear ties to cryptocurrency, which I’ve written up here.