Strings Attached

Rise of the Puppet Empire.

Here’s a news flash:

Ukraine is a puppet state.

So is Afghanistan. So is North Korea. So is Taiwan. So are all states that stand on the borders between empires. Throw a dart.

This has always been the case, and always will be. If we ever expand into the stars, there will be puppet systems and planets: shadowy hinterlands that blur the moral, cultural and legal edges of interstellar powers. You don’t need to read great treatises on power to grasp this principle, or even play a single game of Risk. In terms of imperial statecraft, it’s akin to a thermodynamic law. Every empire needs at least one puppet close to hand (and the more the merrier).

The sovereignty of a puppet state is an illusion. Those who staff its governments, bureaucracies, banks and major corporations are not what they seem to be. What little agency they possess is used to fill their pockets. Their actual job is to serve the foreign empire’s wishes, typically in the form of facilitating and covering up its crimes.

The scope of these crimes depends on what you dare to dream. The puppet state is essentially a laboratory of evil, its cauldrons bubbling over with every kind of scam and bloody deed imaginable. They are all money laundries, of course. But they are also factories of blackmail and extortion rackets, and trading outposts for a Dark Silk Road that traffics in drugs, cash, weapons and human flesh. Some of these crimes transcend the mundane. There are literal laboratories there as well, within which even the laws of Nature can be bent or mutilated at the empire’s whim, and with plausible deniability should these midnight labors ever be revealed.

The latter quality is also the puppet state’s most important function. It primarily serves not as a shield against tanks and missiles, but against accountability and prosecution. They are like shadowy netherworlds, where an empire can have its dirty work done with minimum legal and political exposure.

Note that to say “Ukraine” is a corrupt state isn’t the same as saying that its people are corrupt, or that even a significant minority of them are. That’s where the trouble starts; both the Ukrainians and Russians dying in this imperial proxy war believe they are dying for noble reasons — national sovereignty on the one hand, and fraternal liberation from Nazis on the other. A portion on each side also likely sees larger angles to the conflict, including stuff like the threat of NATO encroachment, the control of energy resources/markets and other geopolitical concerns.

“But we already know,” some of us might complain. “We knew from the smoke of Burisma, and from the fire of Hunter’s laptop. Yet they still wear the T-shirts and lapel pins, they still #hashtag and tweet, denying the criminal coverup that’s happening in broad daylight.”

Is this true?

Yes and no. I’ve spoken to several people who support the war, including ones who are beloved to me. Those who understand the edge-of-empire rule claim that, yes, what’s happening there is all very obvious, but it’s better that Ukraine be our puppet, and their oligarchs our oligarchs, than Mother Russia’s. This isn’t an illogical way to look at the world.

The category also includes supporters who refer to the past crimes of Soviet Russia in the region, many of which were indeed hideously evil. And while the prosecution of ancestral crimes and blood libels is morally repugnant, to declare past crimes unimportant makes the opposite error. The dead must retain some voice at the table, else their silence will incentivize future crimes. And even if we were to admit that both Ukraine and Russia are run by corrupt and criminal regimes, that doesn’t mean it’s never a good strategy to pick a side in their fight. So this is also not an illogical way to look at it.

However, it also isn’t the best way to look at it, not least because the grand designs of evil that are implemented in puppet states have a tendency to backfire. In particular, the blackmail and extortion mills are something that cannot be fully contained. Exploiting the asymmetry of the relationship in the other direction is too tempting for the puppets, especially when their masters appear to be weak, disorganized, deranged or desperate.

What’s happening in Ukraine right now could be understood in terms of a confluence of many dangers, including the dangers of managing puppet states. For example, our previous U.S. president was impeached for having a chat with a dangerous puppet named Zelenskyy, with regards to some dangerous financial information he might be sitting on. The fringes of empires are also marketplaces for such information, which trade politically damaging secrets in addition to everything else.

Because of this threat, a puppeteer must ensure that the puppet doesn’t suddenly come to life and turn the tables on them. That’s why puppets must remain well fed at all times. Their pockets must always be filled to bursting, their yachts and lairs decked out with hookers and blow. If not, they could potentially spill a whole lot of beans. They might even spill a bean that shatters some critical illusion, for those imperial citizens who unwittingly support both the foreign crime syndicate and its domestic masters. If and when that happens, it may not be just Ukraine’s T-shirts and flags which are set ablaze.

But these are merely the game’s smaller, finer angles. What we’re ultimately seeing is two empires fighting over who gets to rule the evil laboratory and pull the puppet’s strings. Again: this isn’t some deep, dark secret I’m unearthing. It is elemental. It stands to reason. It’s something you should already know.

But as a thought experiment, let’s imagine there also exists such a thing as a “puppet empire.” Much like her own puppets, she is being used as a laboratory of crime by unseen masters who transcend all modern illusions of national sovereignty.

What would it be like to live in such an empire?

---

Suppose that, like so many imperial citizens, you live by the comforting lies you are constantly fed by the Deep — or shall we say, the Actual — State and its corporate propaganda organs. When the latter points in some vague direction and shouts “freedom fighters” and in another and shouts “evildoers,” you can hardly wait to hop on social media and retail all the fictions of your empire’s latest noble crusade.

Maybe you even buy the merch. You purchase a T-shirt that reads I Stand With Ukraine, then pose with it in pictures and videos. You use it as a prop for your moral vanity; as an amulet to guard against Putin’s horde of idiots and traitors; as a beacon shining through the black chaos of world events, which swirl beyond your ability to comprehend or control. You can only perceive the world through the empire’s carefully focused lens, and dismiss anything outside the frame as “misinformation” or “conspiracy theory.”

For the rest of us, life would look eerily similar to that of our counterparts in the puppet state, albeit with more jokes and fewer rocket attacks. That is to say, we would be a captive audience to the darkest comedy imaginable, which the Bud Abbotts of The News™ narrate with a perfectly straight face.

The stories themselves would feature an ever more outrageous bestiary of gremlins, mutants and circus clowns. When they aren’t busy sniffing kids, stealing airport luggage, smuggling fentanyl and launching sidewinders at balloons, this cast of horror movie rejects is said to rule over us. And not just us, mind you, but the whole of the American Empire and its puppets. They are the stars of our media narratives, which simultaneously pretend the empire doesn’t exist and that it is all-knowing and all-powerful. The more surreal and bizarre the latest monster, the more they marvel at his/her/zir fancy new duds.

In keeping with this wacky casting, these new imperial stories of ours have become almost perfectly stupid. There are several possible explanations for this, but I suspect the simplest is that they are designed to be exactly that. They are strategically retarded, because the story they weave behind the scenes serves the larger goals of our puppet empire’s masters.

Let’s examine one of these more recent “developing stories,” first through the eyes of the imperial faithful, then translated into a rational human tongue.

---

CNN reports. You decide.

Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old airman with the Massachusetts Air National Guard, made his first appearance in federal court in Boston Friday morning following his arrest by the FBI in North Dighton, Massachusetts, on Thursday.

According to charging documents, Teixeira held a top secret security clearance and allegedly began posting information about the documents online around December 2022, and photos of documents in January.

(…)

Teixeira has held a Top Secret clearance since 2021, according to the affidavit unsealed Friday. He also “maintained sensitive compartmented access (SCI) to other highly classified programs,” the affidavit says. Many of the leaked documents posted on the online server Discord were marked Top Secret.

At least one of the documents he allegedly posted was accessible to him by virtue of his employment with the Air National Guard, the affidavit says.

(…)

Four Discord users active in a different Discord chatroom where the documents later appeared told CNN the documents began circulating on Thug Shaker. Another user who was in the Thug Shaker chatroom told CNN they saw the original posts of classified documents but declined to speak further about them.

Discord, which is not named in the affidavit but was previously identified by CNN, gave the FBI information on Wednesday about the account that had allegedly been posting the documents.

Teixeira used his real name and home address in North Dighton, Massachusetts, for the billing information associated with his Discord account, the affidavit says.

---

Translation #1:

A 21-year-old National Guard reservist defeated every countermeasure of the U.S. military, intelligence and national security apparatus. Then, for reasons unknown, he decided to post his monumental findings about an illegally and incompetently prosecuted war in a children’s video game chatroom.

This part-time airman has held Top Secret security clearance status since 2021. In other words, since before he was of legal drinking age, he had access to all the same shit Hillary Clinton kept on her private bathroom server.

We are told that the contents of these leaked documents 1) both are and aren’t significant, and 2) both are and aren’t true. The fallout from their leakage can be anything from “nothingburger” to “Shitstorm Armageddon.” More money must be spent to figure that out, and more sent to Zelenskyy just in case it’s, like, bad and stuff.

The Chinese Spy Balloon could not be reached for comment, as its remains are floating somewhere in the Pacific.

Back to you, Wolf.

Now, there are two ways to interpret this amazing tale of espionage.

• Disbelieve it, in every ludicrous detail.

• Believe it, in every ludicrous detail.

Either way, the leadership of the Actual State becomes subject to ruthless mockery. They have been exposed as either laughably mendacious, laughably incompetent, or both. There exists no other sane interpretation. You can’t even pretend one exists, no matter how hard you #hashtag.

But that still leaves us with a bit of a mystery on our hands: To what end?

Imagine for a moment that every public admission of buffoonery and humiliating failure is delivered to you by a puppet on a string. Despite their official titles and nominal “power,” these people are so deeply compromised that they will literally say and do anything their puppeteer commands.

When enough imperial officials are individually compromised, the atmosphere inside the Actual State will eventually turn into a surreal hybrid of Twenty Questions and Simon Says. No one knows for sure what their colleague’s deep dark secrets are, but can easily guess the leverage exists by the strangeness of their words and actions.

They can also tell when a puppet is being punished, either for a minor failure or as a simple reminder of who calls the shots. In the Soviet Union, it was called prorabotka. In Mao’s China, it was a 批斗大会 or “struggle session.” You must wear the dunce cap, or bark like a dog. You will never be fired for this, no matter how embarrassing your confession. In fact, you will fail upwards, because it’s proof of your continued loyalty.

That is why a “news report” about some random reservist singlehandedly defeating the entire U.S. military gets printed. This simply would not occur in an empire without strings attached. No, not even in the Soviet Union, or in any incarnation of China since Mao. No empire in human history has ever openly confessed to such a humiliating depth of incompetence, even if the tale was remotely true. The same can be said of all the weapons and personnel left behind in Afghanistan. So are stories about billions in “missing” Ukrainian arms shipments and invincible spy balloons. Such confessions aren’t merely anathema to real empires. They signal the death of them. And yet, the same people who copped to these “blunders” are still “in charge.”

Which leads us to Translation #2:

You’re all a bunch of ignorant rubes!

And we can prove it!

The second translation isn’t exactly true. It’s not so much that all uncritical consumers of such obvious bullshit are gullible. To fall for the trick isn’t so much a matter of intellect. It may in fact pertain to certain techniques that supply the phrase “under the spell” with fresh meaning. I suspect that’s why, much like the watch at the end of the hypnotist’s chain, the pendulum of credulousness swings. From right to left, from Trump to Biden, from Afghanistan to Ukraine.

But in the aftermath of COVID-19, even many of those who glimpsed the strings will continue to play along. They’ll pay lip service, and pretend not to see. And if you pretend hard enough, you really won’t see. Imaginations are funny that way.

I suspect what some of them are really doing is reminding themselves not to care. That’s because they also sense that something even more horrifying and powerful lurks behind this buffoonery. They realize the notion that anyone in the USG or its palace guard press would voluntarily say or do such ridiculous things is a non-starter, and that someone, somewhere must be ordering them to constantly beclown themselves.

And hovering in the shadows and fog are the wraiths of people like Epstein and Maxwell. They are not the engineers but the end-level assets, chess pieces who were ultimately sacrificed in order to save the larger game. Men like Hamid Karzai and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, too, and a lengthy list of other puppets that have either been discarded back into the attic’s toybox or soon will be. To teams Red and Blue, they are just names on the back of jerseys. Sometimes they’re even less than that. They will be forgotten tomorrow. Some already have been.

It has always been this way. The average imperial subject is credulous by default, and easily seduced by the relative state of luxury that envelopes him. In the 21st century, that spell has become several orders of magnitude stronger than it’s ever been. Ponder for a moment that to be “poor” in America includes free food and shelter, indoor plumbing, access to basic education and at least a dozen other creature comforts and technologies that weren’t even available to kings and queens a couple of generations ago.

Indeed, nearly all imperial subjects wield powers that would’ve been considered godlike in every other human century, summoning sounds and images from the ether into gadgets that fit inside one hand. They could easily use those powers to know what’s really happening in Ukraine and elsewhere. They could have easily seen through the COVID frauds as well. They could have, and still can, read all about Klaus Schwab, the WEF, The Great Reset, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. BioNtech, Event 201 and more that would reveal quite a bit about who and what pulls their empire’s strings. But they would prefer not to know. Or if they do, they’d prefer not to say.

That’s because they intuit, in some place beneath language, another ironclad rule of empire: to point out that the emperor isn’t just stark nude, but is in fact wearing Satanic robes and gorging himself on human blood, is recognized as both the most dangerous and least practical thing one could do. They fear it would deal them into a game they don’t think they’re equipped to play, let alone to win.

In other words, they see through the illusion of the American Empire. They see the strings attached to it, and fear whichever entities may be strong enough to pull them. So instead of pointing those out, they train themselves to never care. They submit to the prime hallucination that our empire’s hidden masters are too strong to be defeated, without ever posing the obvious question: “If they’re so fucking strong, then why do they hide?”

In fact, “I can’t change it, so I don’t care,” has practically become their national anthem, or the call-and-response liturgy of their imperial church. An argument about the nature of an event and its obvious crookedness can only proceed so far before they retreat to that ultimate motte of I-Don’t-Care-ism.

Ukraine is the Mordor of financial, industrial and political corruption you say?

Firstly, you are wrong, because (Politician X) said so.

Secondly, Putin! (and also something-something Trump!)

Thirdly, yes, fine, they are obviously lying about the whole thing. But why should I care? And what could I do if I did?

I suspect nothing short of a divine epiphany can penetrate this ultimate imperial armor. The USG could ship a trillion more dollars to a foreign comedian, and not one eyebrow will be raised. We can be hurled by our puppet-leaders into WWIII — which appeared to be the reality even before the “leak” seemed to prove it — and the response from them will be crickets.

That’s because Ukraine is not the only puppet state, and Zelenskyy and Putin not the only criminals. Because there are even puppet empires now, in our age of miraculous progress. The United States and its Euro-vassals have also become laboratories of evil. The never ending stream of comedy is my proof.

Crossdressing beer-saboteur (left) meets brain-damaged pervert (right).

Clown World is the logical result of transnational puppetry, employing the most extreme version of carrot-and-stick persuasion to pull the strings. By this I mean the unholy marriage of blackmail, extortion and deadly threats with the promise of untold wealth and the fulfillment of every wicked fantasy.

As one consequence of this, grown men and women are converted into children standing beside broken cookie jars, telling outlandish lies about what happened.

“Bigfoot broke into the house… no, a whole family of Bigfeet… and they were riding dinosaurs… and the dinosaurs had security clearance… and… and… and…”

Just as these clowns pull the strings on Zelenskyy and his ilk, their own strings are likewise pulled from afar. All that’s required is the right kind of leverage, and a critical mass of imperials to scream “Who cares?”

A painting from Jeffery Epstein’s trophy room

How can we possibly break a spell that strong?

First, we must answer their questions honestly, about why they should care and what they should do.

You should care because giving a shit about a heinous crime is the prerequisite for acting against it.

You should act because it’s in all of our best interests to prevent these criminal schemes, which will inevitably destroy everything you hold dear.

This is true even if what “you hold dear” is as mundane as enjoying simple creature comforts like running water and electricity, and a currency that hasn’t been reduced to the value of used toilet paper. It’s true if you want your children to go on to have careers and families of their own, and to not stand in breadlines, or get drafted into the meatgrinders of endless foreign wars.

And the most important action everyone can do, immediately and repeatedly, is something no other creature on Earth can do:

You can speak.

Not only can you speak, but you can do so to hundreds, thousands and even millions of souls simultaneously, thanks to all those magical gadgets at your fingertips.

And here’s the paradox:

The more you have to lose, the more weight your words will carry.

I know. You fear painting a target on yourself, and perhaps even one on those you love. But all of your success in life will have been for nothing if these psychopathic liars drag us all into WWIII. It will vanish regardless. You may think your trade is important enough for you keep some measure of your current lifestyle. You are wrong. No one will be left intact enough to pay you.

If you want to save that lifestyle in the long run, you must use your weighty words to tell the truth, at each and every opportunity. At work and at home, at parties and other social gatherings, on every social media toy in your toybox.

Every time you see these puppets tell an insane lie, you must call it what it is and openly mock it. You must declare yourself Spartacus, so that others will do that too, until there are too many of us to oppose or contain.

---

P.S. If you found any of this valuable (and can spare any change), consider dropping a tip in the cup for ya boy. I’ll try to figure out something I can give you back. Thanks in advance.