The bogus “innovation” rhetoric from Californian billionaires Sacks and Khosla is so thin, it isn’t even a cover. It’s a form of disinformation. What they describe is elites performing harsh extraction.
This is some late 1800s boondoggle language by robber barons. They swindle. They cheat. They hornswoggle. All to take as much as they can and avoid giving.
Stanford the man, who founded the school, literally took huge government payments for services and goods he never delivered. His name is best associated with genocide and fraud. Perhaps so much that we should not be surprised to see the atrocious behavior from graduates of Stanford.
People who’ve captured massive value from some hedge on top of public infrastructure, from publicly educated workforces, and from public legal frameworks are cruelly engineering their affairs to contribute back as little as possible to those systems, or nothing at all.
Google launched on public funding out of Stanford, built on the back of Yahoo—also launched out of Stanford. A university built with huge land grants and public research funding was the genesis. The early search algorithm was developed under a federal taxpayer grant from the NSF. The internet itself was a taxpayer funded DARPA project. California’s public university system, its roads filled with Google buses and Waymo cabs, its courts that enforce contracts and intellectual property—all of it is the substrate that made Google possible. Without taxpayer funding, Silicon Valley, let alone Google, would not have existed.
And the response to being asked for a measly 5% tax to keep the system running is to flee to a state specifically structured as a shelter for robber barons—one whose entire political system has become a preferred destination for Russian blood capital.
Related: Feb 2025 press release about DOJ conviction of elites laundering Russian money through Sunny Isles properties. Florida, it’s where elite money extraction schemes run to hide.
It was not “I disagree with this policy and here’s my counter-proposal.”
Just: no, I don’t share, I grab and run to where the sun don’t shine.
Five percent as public benefit? Five percent to give back to those he has taken so much from, and to help the next Larry Page?
If it were about policy disagreement or preferring a different state’s governance, you’d see some alternative contribution. Instead it’s pure negation: I will pay into no system of representation I don’t control, or into any democratic institution of law, anywhere.
Florida gains nothing because there’s nothing to gain. No state income tax, no wealth tax. Page isn’t relocating his tax burden to a different American community. He’s eliminating it, hiding like an imperialist baron trying to delay the fall of his empire by amassing wealth into a walled island.
Imperialism framing is a precise fit. It’s the same pattern: extract value from a territory, externalize costs onto that territory’s population, use legal structures to ensure the profits flow elsewhere. The only difference is they’re doing it to their own country rather than colonies—though the distinction blurs when you consider which communities bear the costs of underfunded schools and infrastructure. The racial geography of Silicon Valley wealth is not accidental; Palo Alto was built on restrictive covenants, and tech money has only accelerated the displacement patterns that followed.
Page fleeing California to avoid paying taxes is just the individual-scale version of the same logic. His entitlement is breathtaking evidence of mental gymnastics and cruelty. He registers $156 billion in accumulated value and the response to a small public contribution—like what he benefited from—is to run like a Victorian drunk refusing to pay the bar tab because “do you know who I am.”
The question isn’t what Google elites pay, it’s what they’d pay without their long-term anti-social cheat-the-system architectures.
The structure was predation defined: intellectual property licensed to a Dutch subsidiary, which paid royalties to an Irish holding company, which was tax-resident in Bermuda. Profits generated by American engineers, using American infrastructure, research funded by DARPA, educated at public universities, all routed through tiny island shells to avoid contributing back any of it.
What’s next, seasteading for Lebensraum or to colonize Mars and revert humanity to strongman fantasy zones of zero laws, just for one guy’s latest whimsy? Slavery next?
Google intentionally paid an effective rate in the single digits on foreign earnings for years despite a statutory US corporate rate of 35%. The “Double Irish” closing didn’t end the game, just shifted it to different structures. The proposed single digit 5% wealth tax on Page’s $156 billion comes to roughly $7.8 billion. Not much. Would you give an $8 tip on a $160 meal? Imagine being asked for 5%, a whopping 30 point discount under the statutory corporate rate, and then running for the door rather than pay your unsalaried uninsured waiter even a cent.
There’s also the irony that tech elites constantly lobby for H-1B visas, importing workers educated at other countries’ public expense, while refusing to fund the domestic systems that educated their founders. Pulling up the ladder after climbing it is toxic, and very typical of American elites.
“Throwing Down the Ladder by Which They Rose,” Thomas Nast, 1870, for Harper’s Weekly, New York, New York. Anti-immigrant Americans, under the banner of the “Know-Nothing Party” for a nineteenth-century nativist political party, attempt to deny Chinese entry into the United States. The hypocrisy of the descendants of immigrants denying citizenship to immigrants is on full display in this biting political cartoon.
Page claims he’s escaping to freedom, but he’s actually building his own cage of misery. His island-buying will never be liberation, only isolation and exile. The man with $156 billion ends up scared and guarding his rock like a tin-pot dictator because he couldn’t bear to participate in real freedom.
Ryan Evans asks in War on the Rocks why people keep getting Trump wrong. The clear answer is that a “polite” professional-class has squeamishness about being direct. The diplomatic types, like antelopes in a herd, are afraid to be “rude” and responsible for calling out the predator, America’s Hitler.
The reason “smart, seasoned analysts” keep getting Trump wrong isn’t that he’s uniquely unpredictable. Nope. It’s that they refuse to apply the historical framework that actually fits because it would require saying “this is some dumb fascist expansionism” out loud in respectable DC publications.
So instead we get elaborate taxonomies of “incoherence” that are really just refusing to name the obvious coherence that we find unthinkable.
Evans gets close when he says analysts should ask whether an action is “legible to [Trump] as fast, dominant, and containable.” But that’s just describing how expansionist leaders think about initial moves. Hitler thought Czechoslovakia was “containable.” So was Austria. The Sudetenland was framed as crisis response, not invasion.
The whole framework of “Trump doesn’t have a doctrine we can recognize” is itself the problem. Trump does have a doctrine. Same as Peter Thiel. It’s territorial expansionism justified by civilizational/racial hierarchy and manufactured threat narratives. We have a word for this. Several words, actually.
It seems that a Russian citizen on a Turkish vessel has been formally accused of cutting cables between Finland and Estonia.
A Russian citizen from the crew of the Fitburg has been arrested on suspicion of the sabotage incident and has been banned from traveling from Finland. A second individual, an Azerbaijani citizen, was also placed under arrest on Sunday and was also banned from leaving Finland.
On the implausibility of anarchist operational security and the convenience of unsolved attacks with GRU footprints all over the “snow“.
In January 2026, a group calling itself the radical-right-sounding Vulkangruppe claimed responsibility for an arson attack that left 45,000 Berlin households without power during a winter freeze. A huge city without power and heat in freezing temperatures for four days, mobile networks unreliable, and it’s been classified as LOW. German authorities immediately, as if to bypass investigation, blamed an invisible “left-wing extremist” and anarchist movement. The Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for Constitution Protection) dutifully updated its assessment. Politicians condemned eco-terrorism. The investigation begins now, after the political accusations.
This is the fifteenth year of such suspiciously directed investigations. None have produced a single conviction.
At some point in German history, the question for Berlin shifts from “who is this mystery Vulkangruppe?” to “why has no one been caught?” The answer reveals less about German use of anarchism for political purposes than about the architecture of plausible deniability in hybrid warfare. Or dare I say it’s about whether German intelligence is playing dumb, penetrated, or both.
…Nazi scene has crossovers with state officials. A Berlin police superintendent was accused of supplying classified police computer files to members of the far-right via a chat group. When this was discovered, the officer was simply relocated to another force.
The Timeline Problem
Vulkangruppe was launched in 2011. The Verfassungsschutz dates its founding to that year. The first attacks targeted railway infrastructure in Berlin, claimed by groups using volcano names of Iceland as their signature; a branding tactic that has remained remarkably consistent for fifteen years.
2011 definitely was not a random year in Russian politics, Russian infrastructure attacks, or Russian relations with radical-right groups in Germany. Vladimir Putin was preparing his return to the presidency after the Medvedev interregnum, consolidating what would become an increasingly aggressive posture toward the West. The following years saw Crimea’s annexation (2014), the systematisation of hybrid warfare doctrine, and the dramatic expansion of GRU operations across Europe. Putin, who served in the USSR to resurrect fascist groups in West Germany, was back in the saddle. Putin’s KGB Dresden tenure literally had been running Nazi assets undercover as chaos agent multipliers (e.g. building centrally planned and coordinated “anarchy” cells).
Vulkangruppe’s operational tempo tracks these developments with uncomfortable precision:
2011-2013: Initial attacks on rail and communications infrastructure during Putin’s return to power
2014-2017: Relative quiet during the consolidation of Crimea operations
2018: Resumption with power grid attacks as GRU operations intensify across Europe
2020-present: Escalating frequency and impact, paralleling documented GRU sabotage campaigns
Correlation is not causation. But when a group’s operational rhythm mirrors geopolitical strategy rather than ideological momentum, the analytical frame deserves proper caution and reconsideration.
Want more evidence? NTC Vulkan (НТЦ Вулкан) is a Russian company founded by Anton Markov and Alexander Irzhavsky in 2010. Both are graduates of St Petersburg military academy and served in the Russian army, with Markov reaching captain and Irzhavsky reaching major. Vulkan received special licences to work on classified military and state projects from 2011. Putin’s GRU gets a contractor called “Vulkan” cleared for classified work in 2011, and a self-described Vulkangruppe starts burning German infrastructure that same year. The contractor develops tools for infrastructure attacks and information operations, which is exactly what has been executed in Germany under “Vulkan” branding. The sheer coincidence of naming over time is a wonder to behold.
Vulkan was founded 2010 in Russia and has since been implicated in attacks on Western energy infrastructure. Their slogan translates to “Freedom in time and space. Simplicity. Individuality. Power”, which really means a GRU contractor building infrastructure attack tools and cyberweapons for Sandworm.
Year
NTC Vulkan (Moscow)
Vulkangruppe (Berlin)
2010
Founded by St. Petersburg military academy graduates
Tesla idle factory shutdown, asks for government aid
2023
Vulkan Files leak to Western press
—
2024
Attribution public record
Tesla idle factory high-voltage mast, again asks for government aid
Sept 2025
—
Johannisthal: 50,000 households, 60 hours (longest since WWII)
Jan 2026
—
Lichterfelde: 45,000 households, nearly a week outage during expected winter cold streak
Not to state the obvious here but if a genuine anarchist momentum was suspected, it would need to explain an operational gap that perfectly brackets Vulkan’s focus on Ukraine.
The Operational Signature
The Center for Strategic and International Studies documented that Russian attacks in Europe nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024, after quadrupling between 2022 and 2023. The operational signature is now well-established: low-tech methods, high-impact targets, plausible deniability, locally recruited perpetrators, communications severed before primary attacks.
Zero successful prosecutions despite fifteen years of activity
The last point warrants emphasis. German intelligence acknowledges a 2015 “strategy paper” suggesting “a fixed structure.” Linguistic analysis of claim letters indicates a “partly identical circle of authors.” Yet the Verfassungsschutz officially reports: “Personenpotenzial in Berlin: nicht bekannt”—membership potential unknown.
This is NOT a description of anarchist cells. The opposite. Anarchist movements are notoriously penetrable; informants, defectors, and operational mistakes are endemic to decentralised structures. What German authorities describe is the operational security profile of a state intelligence service: compartmentalised, professionally managed, and protected.
The Acquittal Pattern
In 2024, German authorities arrested two suspects in connection with Vulkangruppe activities. The courts (Amtsgericht Tiergarten) found the evidence insufficient and acquitted both on 15 July 2024. The prosecution did not appeal.
This particular pattern of arrest, insufficient evidence, acquittal, no appeal is a well-known characteristic of cases where intelligence equities have complicated prosecution. Either the evidence cannot be presented without compromising sources, or the sources themselves are the complication.
German commentators have begun asking the obvious question: are Vulkangruppe operatives so far inside they also are Verfassungsschutz contacts? The precedent exists. Germany’s domestic intelligence services have a documented history of maintaining informants within extremist organisations who proved difficult to prosecute—the NSU case being the most notorious example.
But there is another possibility, less discussed: that the penetration runs in the opposite direction.
The AfD Intelligence Pipeline
In November 2025, German lawmakers described the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party of operating as a “sleeper cell loyal to Russia.” The accusation centred on the peculiar rush and direction of parliamentary inquiries. A flood of 47 requests within a single year were seeking very detailed information about:
Police drone detection and defence capabilities
Military logistics and procurement schedules
Cybersecurity gaps at federal ministries
Civil protection resources and healthcare facilities
Data centre locations and emergency power supplies
Thuringia’s Interior Minister Georg Maier stated that the AfD appeared to be “working through a checklist from the Kremlin.”
The AFD (Nazi Party) rally in Germany was headlined by the Tesla CEO
The geographic overlap is precise. AfD’s strongholds of Thuringia, Brandenburg, Saxony are the exact same eastern German states where Vulkangruppe concentrates its operations. The Thuringia AfD branch, led by Björn Höcke (whom a German court ruled legally and officially you should call a fascist), has been under surveillance as a “proven right-wing extremist” organisation since 2021.
The information flowing through AfD parliamentary inquiries—infrastructure vulnerabilities, emergency response capabilities, power grid architecture—is precisely the reconnaissance data required for effective infrastructure sabotage.
The Designated and the Undesignated
The European Union, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have all designated The Base (Nazi organisation operated from St. Petersburg by alleged Russian intelligence asset Rinaldo Nazzaro) as a terrorist organisation.
The United States has not.
In December 2025, Nazzaro released audio calling for “acceleration teams” to conduct “targeted attacks on essential infrastructure” in America and Ukraine. Less than three weeks later, a fire at a San Francisco PG&E substation knocked out power to 130,000 customers. The cause remains under investigation by Exponent, the notorious firm whose business model is manufacturing reasonable doubt for corporate clients.
Germany faces an analogous situation. Presumably a Nazi terrorist group like The Base doesn’t need to focus there since Vulkangruppe operates with impunity while authorities insist it represents “left-wing extremism.” Documented Russian intelligence operations, including AfD’s systematic collection of infrastructure data, proceed through legitimate parliamentary channels.
The analytical question is not whether Vulkangruppe members personally hold some political beliefs of anarchy. Some may even wear an anarchist patch. The question is whether those beliefs, and the ideological framing of attack claims, are simply cover for operations serving ideologically different strategic purposes.
The Preparedness Day Parallel
On 22 July 1916, a bomb exploded during San Francisco’s Preparedness Day parade, killing ten people. The attack was never solved. But it was used very specifically to prosecute innocent left-wing organisers Tom Mooney and Warren Billings on fabricated evidence. This served President Wilson’s domestic political agenda, aligned with Germany, while actual German sabotage networks operated freely across American infrastructure.
Source: SFGate
The institutional utility of the attacks plaguing America remaining unsolved was they could be attributed to whoever served the administration’s purposes. The actual perpetrators, very likely connected to German military intelligence operations then active across American industrial targets, remained ghosts.
Wilson knew German agents were bombing American infrastructure. He was briefed by U.S. intelligence the country was under attack. His “neutrality” rhetoric provided cover for foreign sabotage and bombings described at the time as a “Holocaust” of fire in American industrial areas.
Contemporary Germany faces a structural parallel. The unsolved “left-wing extremist” attribution over more than a decade serves multiple functions:
It directs investigative resources away from Russian intelligence networks
It provides political ammunition against climate activism and anti-capitalist movements
It maintains the fiction that infrastructure attacks are domestic rather than foreign
It avoids the policy implications of acknowledging GRU operations on German soil
The attacks continue. The investigations produce nothing. And German citizens lose power in winter while their government debates the extremism of environmentalists.
What Would Evidence Look Like?
Critics will note that this analysis is circumstantial. No intercepted communications, no defector testimony, no documentary proof links Vulkangruppe to Russian intelligence.
This is true. It is also the point.
The absence of evidence after fifteen years of investigation is itself evidence of either spectacular incompetence or structural barriers to discovery. German intelligence services that successfully penetrate genuine anarchist networks, that maintain informants across the extremist spectrum, that coordinate with European partners on Russian hybrid threats, have somehow failed to identify a single member of an organisation conducting repeated attacks on critical infrastructure.
The growing question goes far beyond what would prove Russian involvement. It now is what would disprove the link, and whether German authorities are structured to even ask.
When the AfD gathers infrastructure intelligence through parliamentary inquiries, this is documented and denounced but not prosecuted. When Vulkangruppe attacks infrastructure with professional precision, this is investigated and unsolved. When European partners attribute identical attack signatures to GRU coordination, Germany maintains the anarchist frame.
The pattern suggests not investigative failure but investigative success to protect a conclusion that serves institutional interests.
Putin’s Abusive Attribution
Russia’s hybrid warfare doctrine treats attribution as a weapon. Operations are designed to permit multiple interpretations, allowing target governments to choose comfortable explanations over destabilising truths. A government that acknowledges GRU attacks on its infrastructure must respond. A government that attributes those attacks to domestic extremists can defer, study, and ultimately accommodate.
Vulkangruppe may include recruits from anarchist meetups led to believe they are in a cause. This does not preclude, and may even facilitate, their quick utility to Russian strategic interests. The GRU’s documented recruitment model emphasises “locally recruited perpetrators” who are “often unaware of the strategic intent.” Putin was notorious in the KGB days for politically weaponizing German athletic clubs.
The August 2025 Vulkangruppe pamphlet announced intentions to target “Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs”, which is precisely the kind of misdirection a sophisticated operation would include. The January 2026 attack targeted affluent neighbourhoods to “cut the juice to the ruling class”, using comic-book villain rhetoric that reads as ideological but functions as operational cover.
Fifteen years without an arrest. A strategy paper without identified authors. Parliamentary inquiries mapping infrastructure vulnerabilities. European partners warning of GRU sabotage at “record high” levels. And German authorities rapidly propping up signs that the only pattern to see here is anarchist eco-terrorism.
For historians of WWI Germany, the parallel requires no elaboration. For contemporary analysts, it demands one question: if this is not Russian hybrid warfare, what would Russian hybrid warfare look like? The answer, presumably, would look exactly like this.
The investigations continue, the exact wrong way. Perhaps because a conclusion was written before the evidence was examined.
NOTE: German intelligence services deny investigative failure and maintain that Vulkangruppe represents domestic left-wing extremism. The AfD denies being Nazis and acting on behalf of Russian interests, and characterises all surveillance other than their own as politically motivated. Russian authorities deny everything including conducting sabotage operations anywhere, ever.
US Secretary of State Rubio has defended AfD against extremist designation. FBI Director Patel has deprioritized far-right investigations. The Base remains undesignated in the country it explicitly targets. This transatlantic coordination of non-investigation of GRU footprints in today’s “snow globe” is, presumably, coincidental.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
