This week, the people who build the world’s most powerful technology sat down with the governments of the twenty largest economies to decide how it should be controlled.

Guess who did most of the talking.

Jensen Huang came in person. So did Sam Altman. Elon Musk dialed in and told the room the EU’s AI rules were a mistake.

The event was the G20 Innovation Ministerial, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Together, the G20 represents roughly 85% of global GDP and around two-thirds of the world’s population.

The US delegation arrived with a name for what it wanted: the Carolina Principles. Let the industry move fast. Don’t let regulators get ahead of a technology nobody fully understands, least of all, you’d hope, the people selling it.

Europe was pushing for more regulations and USA was pushing for deregulation.

Here’s the part that is worrying. A Bentley University-Gallup poll taken around the same summit found only 9% of Americans think AI is a net positive in their life. 39% think the harm outweighs the good.

The public thinks this is dangerous. The room deciding how fast it moves anyway is the industry itself, plus the officials it’s lobbying.

If that sounds unprecedented, a technology so new and so powerful that the people building it end up writing the rules for it, it isn’t.

We ran this exact experiment a century ago. Different industry, same kind of room, same argument. It ended so badly that history gave the industry a name still used as an insult today.

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• How an entire industry made sure it stayed inside the room while it happened

• The Senate investigation that uncovered what that industry was actually doing behind closed doors during the disarmament talks

• The one time, decades later, a different industry got written out of the room entirely, in the same city, and what it took to make that happen

• The mechanism behind both stories, and the one specific thing to watch for at the next G20 to know which way this is going

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Here’s a rule worth learning once and keeping for life:

the moment any powerful institution starts grading people on loyalty instead of performance, pay attention, because that grading system never stays where it started.

Six Army officers were set to make one-star general this year.

Then Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth pulled their names off the list.

No crime. No accusation of anything. Their offense: they used to work for two generals Hegseth already got rid of.

And here’s the thing. Those two generals weren’t fired for anything they did wrong either.

Gen. CQ Brown, the Joint Chiefs chairman, got fired for what Hegseth called a “woke” agenda, before Hegseth had even taken office. Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to run the Navy, got fired the same week with no explanation at all. When Army chief Gen. Randy George’s turn came in April, an official close to the decision said Hegseth just wanted “someone who will implement his and Trump’s vision for the Army.”

Not someone more capable. Someone who’d say yes.

So now it’s two layers deep. Officers get pushed out for insufficient alignment. Then the people who reported to those officers get pushed out too, for the same reason, minus even having a boss to blame.

45 officers pulled from promotion lists this year. More than half of them women or Black. The Army hasn’t had a Senate-confirmed chief of staff since April.

This isn’t new. A country has run this exact experiment before, at a much bigger scale, and it didn’t just go badly. It got people killed, by the hundreds of thousands, within a few years.

Inside this one:

• The dictator who purged his own military’s top command for loyalty, not competence

• What happened the very next time that military had to actually fight a war

• Why an army built on alignment instead of skill loses before the first shot is fired

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The U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July. Yet, the unemployment rate went down.

Not a typo. The labor force shrank by 264,000 people that month, and it’s now been frozen near 158 million for 21 straight months, the longest streak on record.

Ask why, and the Treasury Secretary gives you an answer on live television: “After the deportations that we’ve seen... and the closing of the border, this unfettered migration, we don’t need to produce as many jobs.”

Read that again.

A shrinking economy, sold to you as a win, because the people missing from it were foreign.

And we have obediently accepted the governments version!

A bad number becomes an immigration story. An economic problem becomes a story about the people who supposedly made the economy’s problems necessary.

This isn’t new. It’s one of the oldest tactic governments have when they need somewhere else for the blame to land.

Different decade. Different crisis. Different Other.

Three times in American history, it went all the way from rhetoric to law. Here’s what each one cost, in numbers.

1. A depression put half a coast out of work, and the government found a smaller group to blame than the men who caused it.

2. A bomb landed on the U.S. Attorney General’s own doorstep. Followed by 3,000 arrests in a single night, hundreds deported without trial, an uprising he promised the country that never came.

3. A president announced he’d removed a million people in one summer. The real number was a fraction of that, and at least 88 people paid for the theater with their lives. Seventy years later, a different president is copying his number exactly.

All three worked, for a while. And the same move is being run again right now, on a bigger population than any of these men ever had.

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• All three historical instances: who got blamed, who profited, etc

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Monday, the Supreme Court split 6 to 3 and handed Trump a win on mail-in voting. Twenty-three states just had their injunction lifted. The order sets up a federal list of who’s allowed a mail ballot, and tells the Postal Service to only deliver to names on it.

Same week, a report landed. Fifteen tactics, all aimed at the midterms. Purging voter rolls. Firing election commissioners. Someone floating the idea of National Guard troops at polling places. Officials getting leaned on not to certify results they don’t like.

And everywhere I look, people are calling this unprecedented. A brand new playbook, running wide open, first time in American history.

It’s not. It’s not even the worst version of this we’ve had.

The worst version didn’t need soldiers. Didn’t need a single ballot box dumped in a river. It needed a form. A question, asked out loud, on the spot, by a guy with a badge who got to decide, personally, whether your answer counted.

And it worked. It worked so well the Supreme Court let it run for three quarters of a century without blinking.

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• The state, the convention, and the exact wording they used so the rule never had to say the quiet part

• The registration number that fell 99% in eight years, and why no court touched it for 75 years

• What finally broke the pattern, and how long it actually took

• The one tactic in this week’s 15-point list that has no paperwork disguise on it at all

• Where the historical parallel genuinely breaks down, and why that gap matters

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A new round of sanctions. A new threat. A new escalation. A government insisting that what it’s doing is the measured alternative to something worse.

The language changes. The technology changes. The actors change.

The underlying political problem often doesn’t.

On August 20, the United States imposed fresh sanctions on Hezbollah and signalled that more economic pressure on Iran was coming. Meanwhile, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains severely disrupted and the military confrontation in the region continues.

Washington’s message is familiar: economic pressure is the responsible alternative to another strike.

And perhaps it is.

But that sentence contains an assumption that is much less secure than it sounds:

that the country applying the pressure and the country receiving it agree on what the pressure means.

They don’t have to.

That is where history becomes useful.

Because there have been moments when a government believed it was applying economic pressure to make war less likely, while the government on the receiving end understood the same pressure as evidence that its strategic options were disappearing.

And there have been other moments when economic pressure wasn’t an alternative to war at all — it was simply another way of fighting one that had already begun.

Those distinctions matter.

Not because history gives us a formula for predicting what Iran will do next. It doesn’t.

But because it gives us something more useful: a way of recognising political mechanisms while they’re happening.

This is one of them.

Inside this one:

• A historical case where “pressure instead of war” didn’t stay that simple

• The very different case where economic pressure was already part of the war

• What that distinction might tell us about Iran right now

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The Power Behind the Power

We like to imagine the presidency as the most powerful seat on Earth. One person, one office, the “leader of the free world.” But history keeps handing us a quieter, uncomfortable truth: the presidency has always been shaped, constrained, and occasionally overruled by forces that never appear on a ballot.

No moment illustrates this better than November 22, 1963…

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Everywhere you look, someone is in their wellness era.

Cold plunges. Magnesium before bed. Seed oils are out this week, cortisol is the enemy, and half your feed is now about gut health, sleep scores, and the supplements that will finally fix you.

It looks like a health craze. Americans spend around $35 billion a year on it, 41% say they identify with the “Make America Healthy Again” mood, and the market is expected to more than triple by 2030.

The boom itself, though, has almost nothing to do with health.

Eating well and moving your body are good things. But this sudden national surge doesn’t track how sick we are.

It tracks how powerless we feel.

These booms don’t arrive in the calm, confident years. They arrive when the world feels out of control, and people reach for the one thing they can still run themselves. Their own body.

And it has happened before…

Every time at a genuinely frightening moment, and every time the people living through it were sure they had simply found health.

Once, a whole nation was told it had caught a brand-new disease and everyone was prescribed “rest”.

Once, a country watched its money turn to paper and its government dissolve, and answered by sending millions of its people into the woods or hiking.

Once, a superpower lost a war and its faith in almost everything, and instead of marching, it started to run. In circles. For fun.

Three moments, three cures, one thing sitting underneath all of them. Name that thing and you will not look at your own feed the same way again.

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• The four times whole societies turned inward and reached for the clean body, and the single thing every one of them had in common

• Why a collapsing European nation stripped down and fled to the forest, and what it was really chasing

• The one question that tells you what any wellness boom is really measuring

• Where today’s surge fits, and what it quietly says about the ground under your feet

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This fall the FDA cleared the new COVID shots only for people 65 and older, plus younger adults with an underlying condition. The blanket recommendation is gone. The panel that used to sign off on these vaccines has been rebuilt from scratch with mRNA skeptics. And when the announcements landed, most of the country answered with a shrug.

Commentators keep calling this moment unprecedented: a health establishment losing the public’s faith all at once, pushed along by misinformation and a few loud contrarians. Most of the argument is about who poisoned the well.

But the well was poisoned a long time ago, and we can name the year…

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Days after the 2024 election, the president-elect got on a call with a foreign leader whose country was at war. The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, wandered into the room and joined in. Nobody had elected him. Nobody asked him to leave.

We are told we live in a democracy. We live in a democracy written by money.

Every few years you vote. But the names on your ballot were chosen long before they reached you, by the corporations and billionaires who paid to put them there.

And when your pick wins, the debt gets paid. Every law is, in the end, a receipt.

Elon Musk, spent close to $290 million to elect a president, then walked into the government to run part of it. The man who would be regulated became the regulator. Behind him, Silicon Valley poured $394 million into the race, and the crypto industry alone outspent oil and the banks.

These are the people your government is supposed to protect you from, and they bought their way to the front of the line before a single law was written.

So when the rules for your data, your job, your kids’ minds get written, who do you think they’ll be written for?

The rest of the world is already acting: Britain, France, Australia and China are passing laws to pull big tech off their children. America pulled the companies into the room instead.

None of this is new. Corporations buying the government to keep their grip on us is the oldest move there is.

In that deal, we are not the customer. We are the currency.

And it has happened before, in the open, with a body count.

Two stories. Neither broke a single law, which is the whole horror of them.

1. The government’s own scientists proved a product was killing people, and Washington shielded it anyway, for 45 more years.

   The killed more than 20 million people.

2. The richest men in the country paid to quietly remove one rule.

   The rule written to protect ordinary people. What it unleashed erased trillions and took millions of homes, and most of the victims never knew the rule was gone until the money was.

Both were legal. Both were paid for. And the same machine is running a third time right now, aimed straight at your children.

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• Both stories in full: What was spent, who signed it off, and the cost tragic cost to the American people.

• How a product the government knew was lethal stayed legal, and barely touched, for 45 years, and what it cost in lives.

• The wall the richest men in America paid to tear down, and the $17 trillion it cost the public when it fell.

• How taxpayer money paid the bonuses of Wallstreet executives

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The most powerful tool most of us have ever touched is free.

Artificial intelligence.

Not a trial, not a teaser, but the good version, right now, in your browser, ready to write your emails, answer your questions, do your thinking for you.

The most expensive product ever built, and it costs you nothing.

We’ve quietly decided this is normal. It isn’t.

So ask the obvious question. The companies giving this away are burning something like seventeen billion dollars a year to do it. 95% of the people using it have never paid a cent.

Who sets fire to seventeen billion dollars to hand strangers a gift?

Nobody. Nobody in the history of money has ever done that out of kindness. When someone gives you something free at that scale, the free thing isn’t the product.

You are.

Most people brace for the wrong ending. They picture the day the ads arrive, or the day a price tag finally shows up. Both are coming. But a price is the least of it. A price you can see, argue with, and refuse.

The real cost isn’t on any invoice. Nobody quotes it to you up front. You pay it in instalments, without noticing, until the day you reach for something you were sure you still had and find the shelf bare.

The strange part is how old this trick is. It’s the same one, run over and over, and it barely bothers to change costume.

The powerful have flooded a market with “free” and sat back to wait before. Two moments come to mind. Both are among the darkest stories in the history of money.

One killed children, under the cover of a gift. Not a metaphor. Real infants, on more than one continent, dead behind a thing a company was proud to hand out for nothing.

The other left a whole region of ruined men, a monopoly that swallowed the country, and a court case they still teach in law school.

Neither was an accident. Both ran the same three moves. And that same sequence, move for move, is being run on you right now.

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• Both stories in full. What they did, how the trap was built, and the exact moment it snapped shut on people who thought they were getting a good deal.

• How a free sample became a death sentence

• How cheapness was used as a weapon

• The three-move trap hiding inside every “free,” and how to tell which move you’re living in

By the end, you won’t read the word “free” the same way again.

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Look at your own party and tell me you recognize everyone standing on it.

The Republican Party now wins the working class. The union guys, the folks without a degree, a growing share of Black and Latino men.

The Democratic Party is now the home of college professors, suburban professionals, and a chunk of the affluent.

Say those two sentences to someone in 1995 and they’d assume you had them backwards.

The numbers are not subtle. In 2024, exit polls had voters without a college degree breaking for Trump by fourteen points, and college graduates breaking the other way.

That education gap ran about seven points in 2020 and thirteen in 2024, and it is still widening. Different surveys land on different exact margins, but they all point the same way.

And the drift is long. By one ANES measure, working-class identification with the Democratic Party has slid from around 65 percent in the early 1970s to 42 percent in 2024. (That measure defines the working class as voters without a degree in the bottom two-thirds of income.)

If you are a Democrat, this feels like your party abandoned the people it was built to protect.

If you are a Republican, it feels like a hostile takeover by people who used to sneer at you.

Both sides are experiencing it as betrayal.

It isn’t betrayal. Your party didn’t leave you, and it wasn’t stolen. It’s doing what American parties have always done, and there is a pattern to it that makes the whole confusing mess suddenly legible.

Parties don’t have members. They have coalitions.

Here’s the thing we forget. A political party isn’t a fixed set of people with fixed beliefs.

It’s a temporary alliance, stapled together to win a majority around whatever the biggest fight of the era happens to be.

Change the fight, and the alliance comes apart.

For about fifty years the biggest fight was economic. Roughly, how much should government tax the rich and protect workers.

On that axis, the working class was Democratic and the country-club set was Republican. It stayed that way long enough that we mistook a temporary arrangement for a law of nature.

Then the axis moved.

The clearest new fault line is education, and it’s really a stand-in for a whole bundle underneath. Culture, immigration, trust in institutions, how you feel about the pace of social change.

College versus no college is the easy shorthand. Income hasn’t vanished, but it is no longer the line that sorts people.

Political scientists call this the diploma divide, and the research is blunt about the mechanism. The more our elections turn on culture, the more the education gap grows and the old income gap shrinks.

So once the fight stops being mainly about money and starts being about culture and status, the working class and the professional class swap houses. Nothing mysterious is going on. The board rotated and everyone slid to a new seat.

And this is the part that should feel familiar, because we have watched the board rotate before.

Each of those eras was overdetermined, tangled up with war, money, migration, religion. The point isn’t that one issue caused everything. It’s that one issue came to organize everything else.

Four times the organizing fight changed. Four times the coalitions tore up and reassembled. And every single time, the people living through it were convinced their party was dying.

Which is the real question, the one worth sitting with.

Is this a realignment, a durable new majority like 1932 that defines the next forty years? Or a dealignment, where the old loyalties dissolve but nothing stable takes their place?

Those two words point at very different futures. And telling them apart is the whole game.

Keep reading to understand…

• why it keeps happening,

• The signal that tells you which future we’re actually walking into. A new order that locks in for forty years, or years of chaos where nobody can build anything.

Subscribe and keep reading…

I hope this adds intellectual value and perspective to every headline you read.

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Look at your own party and tell me you recognize everyone standing on it.

The Republican Party now wins the working class. The union guys, the folks without a degree, a growing share of Black and Latino men.

The Democratic Party is now the home of college professors, suburban professionals, and a chunk of the affluent.

Say those two sentences to someone in 1995 and they’d assume you had them backwards.

The numbers are not subtle. In 2024, exit polls had voters without a college degree breaking for Trump by fourteen points, and college graduates breaking the other way.

That education gap ran about seven points in 2020 and thirteen in 2024, and it is still widening. Different surveys land on different exact margins, but they all point the same way.

And the drift is long. By one ANES measure, working-class identification with the Democratic Party has slid from around 65 percent in the early 1970s to 42 percent in 2024. (That measure defines the working class as voters without a degree in the bottom two-thirds of income.)

If you are a Democrat, this feels like your party abandoned the people it was built to protect.

If you are a Republican, it feels like a hostile takeover by people who used to sneer at you.

Both sides are experiencing it as betrayal.

It isn’t betrayal. Your party didn’t leave you, and it wasn’t stolen. It’s doing what American parties have always done, and there is a pattern to it that makes the whole confusing mess suddenly legible.

Parties don’t have members. They have coalitions.

Here’s the thing we forget. A political party isn’t a fixed set of people with fixed beliefs.

It’s a temporary alliance, stapled together to win a majority around whatever the biggest fight of the era happens to be.

Change the fight, and the alliance comes apart.

For about fifty years the biggest fight was economic. Roughly, how much should government tax the rich and protect workers.

On that axis, the working class was Democratic and the country-club set was Republican. It stayed that way long enough that we mistook a temporary arrangement for a law of nature.

Then the axis moved.

The clearest new fault line is education, and it’s really a stand-in for a whole bundle underneath. Culture, immigration, trust in institutions, how you feel about the pace of social change.

College versus no college is the easy shorthand. Income hasn’t vanished, but it is no longer the line that sorts people.

Political scientists call this the diploma divide, and the research is blunt about the mechanism. The more our elections turn on culture, the more the education gap grows and the old income gap shrinks.

So once the fight stops being mainly about money and starts being about culture and status, the working class and the professional class swap houses. Nothing mysterious is going on. The board rotated and everyone slid to a new seat.

And this is the part that should feel familiar, because we have watched the board rotate before.

Each of those eras was overdetermined, tangled up with war, money, migration, religion. The point isn’t that one issue caused everything. It’s that one issue came to organize everything else.

Four times the organizing fight changed. Four times the coalitions tore up and reassembled. And every single time, the people living through it were convinced their party was dying.

Which is the real question, the one worth sitting with.

Is this a realignment, a durable new majority like 1932 that defines the next forty years? Or a dealignment, where the old loyalties dissolve but nothing stable takes their place?

Those two words point at very different futures. And telling them apart is the whole game.

Keep reading to understand…

• why it keeps happening,

• The signal that tells you which future we’re actually walking into. A new order that locks in for forty years, or years of chaos where nobody can build anything.

Subscribe and keep reading…

I hope this adds intellectual value and perspective to every headline you read.

Read more

The House just passed the new defence budget. $1.15 trillion.

It barely scraped through, 216 to 212

Inside that bill is Section 219. Nobody’s talking about it. “$1.15 trillion defence bill” is already a big enough headline.

But that’s the point. The stuff that actually changes how a country works rarely shows up as a headline. It shows up as a paragraph buried in a document too long for anyone to fully read.

So what does Section 219 do? It sets up a permanent office inside the Pentagon. Its whole job is linking American and Israeli weapons research, development, and supply chains.

Not a one-off deal.

A standing structure, built to keep pulling the two militaries closer, indefinitely.

Continue Reading

Inside this investigation:

• The clause hidden inside the $1.15 trillion bill

• The alliance system that led to WWI - AND how history repeats itself

• Why permanent military offices almost never shrink

• Who actually benefits financially

• What history suggests happens next

Thomas Massie (one of the only Republicans voting against it) tried to strip it out. He called it lopsided in Israel’s favour.

He said tying our military supply chains to another country like this is a bad idea. The vote to remove it never made it to the floor.

It got blocked. The section stayed in.

Follow the money first

None of this happens in a vacuum. The US has sent Israel over $350 billion since 1948, most of it military.

Right now we send $3.3 billion a year, plus $500 million for missile defense. Almost all of it has to be spent buying American weapons, so it flows straight back to US contractors.

Since late 2023, Congress added another $16 billion on top. There’s currently $39 billion in active weapons deals between the two countries.

This is one of the steadiest flows of money to any foreign military anywhere. Section 219 doesn’t just keep that flow going. It locks it into the machinery of government, permanently.

Why this should worry you, whatever you think about Israel

Here’s the history that matters. It has nothing to do with picking a side today.

Before WWI, Europe’s major powers built a web of defence agreements. Each one made sense on its own, at the time.

Nobody planned a continent-wide war. But by 1914, so many countries were locked into so many obligations that a local crisis in the Balkans didn’t stay local. One commitment triggered the next, and the next. Countries with no stake in the original argument got dragged in anyway.

Not because people voted for that war. Because years earlier, quietly, the choice had already been made for them.

That’s the real risk with Section 219. Once you build a permanent office whose whole job is deepening military ties with another country, bare in mind a country who has only ever been interested in having an ongoing War. This drags us into all the wars they are currently in but also any they fancy in the future.

Whoever runs the Pentagon next will inherit a structure built for integration, contractors dependent on it, a bureaucracy that justifies itself by deepening the tie further.

What started as a policy Congress could revisit every year turns into infrastructure nobody’s really in charge of.

Nobody voted for the war the alliance system eventually produced. The decision that mattered happened years earlier, in paperwork almost nobody read.

Why this newsletter exists

This is exactly the kind of thing worth catching early.

This isn't news.

It's pattern recognition, and once you have it, you can't stop seeing it.

Most people are reacting to headlines.

You're going to be the person in the room who already knew how this ends, because you've read the version of this story from a hundred years ago.

That's not a small edge. That's a different way of thinking entirely, and it's what every future post here is built to sharpen.

The war in 1914 wasn’t caused by one treaty. It happened because by the time the crisis hit, there was nobody left who could simply say no.

Right now you hear it everywhere. Tariffs are an aberration.

Nobody says it quite that bluntly, but it’s the mood of almost every take. A clumsy, backward tool. The thing a country grabs when its politics go sideways.

On the policy itself, I’ll admit I’m a skeptic too. Today’s tariffs behave a lot like a national sales tax, and a sales tax is felt most by the people with the least cushion. Most Americans think they’re pushing up prices, and most Americans are probably right.

So if you want to argue they’re a raw deal for ordinary people, I’ll hold your coat.

But here is the part that bothers me. The case against tariffs almost always arrives dressed in bad history. We have always been a free-trade nation, the story goes. That claim isn’t an opinion you can debate. It’s simply wrong.

For most of American history, tariffs were not the aberration. They were the whole game.

The tariff paid for the country

Start with a fact that sounds invented. For most of the 1800s, tariffs were how the federal government paid for itself. No income tax, no payroll tax. When Washington needed money for the army or its debts, it taxed the goods coming in at the border.

The first real law the new Congress passed, in 1789, was a tariff, and Washington signed it. Rates ran between five and fifteen percent. By the eve of the Civil War the average had climbed toward sixty.

This was not a fringe idea pushed by cranks. It was the financial foundation of the entire country. To be anti-tariff in 1840 didn’t make you a sharp free-market thinker. It made you the person with no answer to one basic question. How do you propose we pay for the government?

And it stayed that way for a century and a half.

A hundred and fifty years where protection was the norm, and free trade was the underdog you had to fight for.

Which raises the real question. When did it flip? When did free trade stop being a fringe stance and start to feel like gravity? Because once you see when it happened, and why, the tariffs in this week’s headlines look like something very different.

Continue to read what this means for the tariffs in today’s headlines, is on the other side.

Subscribe and keep reading….

I hope this adds intellectual value and perspective behind every headline you read…

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This week, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard declared the Strait of Hormuz closed, fired on a Cyprus-flagged container ship, and disabled two tankers it called “rogue supertankers.” The US answered with its fourth straight day of strikes and reimposed a naval blockade of Iranian ports.

Oil jumped nearly 10% in a single session. Commercial traffic through the Strait - normally around 110 ships a day - has collapsed to a fraction of that.

If you’ve been reading the headlines and thinking this is a new and unprecedented kind of crisis, I want to introduce you to some ships that burned forty years ago, in the exact same stretch of water, for almost exactly the same reasons.

It’s called the Tanker War. Almost nobody under 50 has heard of it. And it is, tactic for tactic, the closest blueprint we have for what’s happening in the Gulf today - including how it might end.

Inside…

• Part One: The war inside a war you didn’t know happened

• Part Two: How “protecting shipping” became “at war with Iran”

• Part Three: How wars like this actually end

• Part Four: What this pattern actually predicts

Part One: The war inside a war you didn’t know happened

From 1984 to 1988, during the Iran-Iraq War, both countries ran out of easy ways to hurt each other on land.

So they moved the fight to the water. Iraq started it, attacking tankers carrying Iranian oil to cut off Tehran’s income.

Iran retaliated by attacking tankers belonging to Iraq’s Gulf allies - Kuwait and Saudi Arabia - reasoning that if it couldn’t hit Iraq directly, it would hit the money propping Iraq up.

Over four years, more than 450 commercial ships were attacked. Tankers burned in open water with some regularity. Insurance premiums for Gulf shipping spiked.

And crucially - a regional war that had nothing to do with the United States pulled America directly in, because so much of the world’s oil moved through that one 21-mile-wide channel

Kuwait, watching its tankers get hit, asked Washington for help.

The US agreed to “reflag” Kuwaiti tankers under the American flag and escort them with the Navy - Operation Earnest Will, the largest convoy operation since World War II.

It was sold to the American public as a narrow, defensive mission. It did not stay narrow for long.

Sounds familiar?

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On July 9, Trump fired the last three people running the Election Assistance Commission.

Two of them got an email.

One got a phone call.

Everybody covered it as an election story, because, well, the agency has the word “election” right there in the name.

But that’s not really the story.

The real story happened eleven days earlier, and it had nothing to do with voting.

On June 29, the Supreme Court ruled, 6 to 3, that the president can fire the people who run independent federal agencies whenever he feels like it.

For any reason.

Or no reason at all.

Now, to see why that’s a big deal, you kind of have to know what these agencies are, and honestly most people don’t, so hang with me for a second.

The FTC. The FCC. The SEC. The labor board. The Federal Reserve, sort of.

These are the referees.

They regulate the biggest, richest, most powerful players in the country, and for ninety years the deal was simple: the president gets to appoint them, but he can’t fire them just for telling him no.

That firewall came from a 1935 case called Humphrey’s Executor.

It was also about a president trying to fire an FTC commissioner he didn’t like.

That president was FDR.

The reason the firewall existed is almost embarrassingly obvious once you say it out loud.

Some jobs only work if the person doing them isn’t afraid of getting fired.

A regulator who’s terrified of the boss isn’t a regulator. He’s an intern with a fancy title.

So take the firewall away, and you don’t have independent watchdogs anymore.

You have employees.

And employees who’d like to keep their jobs have a funny habit of agreeing with whoever signs the checks.

If you want proof that’s how it works, look at why these commissioners got fired in the first place.

For more than a year, they’d been telling Trump no.

He’d ordered them to add a proof-of-citizenship requirement to the national voter registration form, basically the thing he couldn’t get through Congress, and they wouldn’t do it.

Courts had already blocked most of that order anyway, saying it went further than a president is allowed to go.

So they said no, and they had the law on their side.

Ten days after the Supreme Court handed him the power to fire them, they were gone.

That’s the whole story in one move: the people whose job was to tell him no, fired for telling him no.

Here’s the part that should actually bug you.

The EAC is tiny.

Nobody outside of election-nerd group chats could have named a single one of its commissioners a week ago.

And that’s exactly why it’s the perfect place to start.

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Now it belongs to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

Here’s how that happened.

In 2021, Kushner and Ivanka were on a yacht off the Albanian coast. They met with Prime Minister Edi Rama. At the time, foreign nationals weren’t permitted to buy Albanian land outright - the law simply didn’t allow it.

Then the law changed - coincidentally?

In 2024, Albania reclassified Sazan Island, lowering its environmental protections and stripping back the safeguards that had kept it off-limits for development. That same year, Kushner posted renderings online showing what a luxury resort on the island could look like.

Ivanka Trump has publicly described the project as a luxury resort intended for high-end tourism; however, those public statements are not legally binding commitments, and any future change in the property's use would depend on the project's ownership.

On December 30th, 2024 - weeks after Trump’s re-election - Albania designated the Sazan project a "Strategic Investment." The designation did more than approve a resort, it unlocked expedited government approvals and other legal incentives designed to accelerate development. Within weeks, the project had preliminary approval, and by January 2025, the deal was finalized.

The numbers tell their own story. Before the reclassification, the land had been valued at around €5.5 million. After it, the deal was reportedly worth upwards of €122 million. A protected ecosystem, rewritten into a resort site, appreciated more than twenty-fold in the process.

Not everyone in Albania went quietly. Starting in late May 2026, a wave of protests - nicknamed the “Flamingo Revolution” after the birds native to the area - brought thousands of people into the streets of Tirana. Daily demonstrations. Public anger at a government seen as selling off protected land to serve a politically connected American family. The government pushed the deal through anyway.

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The whole arrangement is now reportedly under anti-corruption investigation, examining money laundering and the unusual speed with which protections were dismantled to accommodate one buyer.

None of this required anyone to break a law. That’s the part worth sitting with. The law itself was the thing that moved.

This is not a new story, it’s an old one.

Islands, Wealth, and the Illusion of Escape

Buying an island isn’t really about real estate. It’s about stepping outside the rules everyone else lives by.

For centuries, the ultra-wealthy have chased this fantasy: your own land, surrounded by water, with no neighbors to answer to. No zoning board. No public eye. Just total control.

The appeal breaks down fast. Privacy - no paparazzi, no chance encounters. Tax perks - island jurisdictions often come with major financial advantages. And control - an island is a closed world where the owner makes every rule.

But that same isolation has a dark side.

Jeffrey Epstein bought Little Saint James in 1998 for about $8 million, he would go on to call it “Little St. Jeff’s,” and make it his primary legal residence. We only now know, it became a base for trafficking - victims flown in by private helicopter, staff who depended on him and stayed silent, and an island so remote that almost no one was watching.

Epstein wasn’t above the law out there. U.S. law still applied. What he bought wasn’t immunity - it was distance. And for years, that distance was enough.

His case is extreme. But it shows what islands really offer the powerful: privacy so total it can hide almost anything. Jared’s island taps the same fantasy - money buying not just land, but freedom from the rules that bind everyone else.

Whether that’s paradise or something darker depends on what they do with it.

The lesson here is when the ultra-wealthy want something they get it, even if that means changing the law of a foreign country.

What confuses me is why the Albanian president was so desperate to help them with this deal, when tens of thousands of Albanians have took to the streets to protest. From a country with a mere population of 2.4 million?

That’s the thing to watch for, not just in Albania, but everywhere. When a piece of legislation changes suddenly, right around the time someone very wealthy needed it to change, that’s not a coincidence to wave away. It’s history, doing what history always does: repeating the shape of the thing, even when the names are different.

I started this newsletter, because I kept noticing that we treat every political moment like it’s happening for the first time, when so often, it isn’t.

We watch a crisis unfold and call it unprecedented.

We see a new movement and think it’s never existed before.

Except, thats not quite accurate - we just need to take one look at history to understand this.

Have we never had an ‘outsider’ promising to fix a broken system?

Take Mussolini’s rise in 1920s Italy. He positioned himself against an ineffective political establishment whilst he promised strength and order where there’d only previously been chaos.

The specifics were unique to that moment, but the shape of it, the appeal, the mechanics of how it built support or how the propaganda worked, look remarkably familiar today.

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We treat politics like it’s constantly evolving and changing. But the fundamental tactics don’t really change, except they’re dressed up differently for each era.

The strategies used to move empires centuries ago are one and the same as the ones moving governments right now.

It is absolutely crucial you start seeing that pattern. You will recognise what’s actually happening instead of just reacting to what you’re told is happening.

That’s what this is about.

We look at the past not because it’s interesting trivia, but because it’s the clearest lens we have for understanding the present and anticipating the future. Every political tactic has a precedent.

This isn’t going to tell you what to think.

It’s about building the tools to think clearly for ourselves and to look at a headline and discern the deeper current beneath it.

That’s is the point of this newsletter.

I want to give you real historical depth and intellectual substance, and the kind of understanding that changes how you engage with everything happening in politics today.

Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.