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Decoder Ring for the 15 Dictator Tactics in One White House Press Release

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The White House published its official summary of the 2026 State of the Union address on February 25th.

To no one’s surprise it reads like North Korea. It is a silly propaganda operation, like a full buffet of military-grade influence techniques.

As a historian of this stuff I assure you that every line in the document maps to a known information warfare tactic. Most of them are catalogued in military doctrine manuals from RAND, NATO StratCom, and the old Soviet active measures playbook.

None of this is subtle.

None of it is new.

The only thing novel is that the .gov domain has been captured by people who type like they only have thumbs.

Here is the secret decoder ring you should be able to find in any box of Cheerios.

Loyalty Enumeration

What They Published How It Works Who Did It Before
1. The entire “Democrats refused to applaud” list structure Documenting who failed to perform sufficient enthusiasm for the leader transforms a press release into a denunciation register. The content of the speech becomes secondary to cataloguing the reactions of potential enemies. Stalin’s Pravda tracked applause levels at Party Congresses. Mao’s Hundred Flowers campaign invited criticism, then used responses as a purge list. Ceausescu’s final speech was structured identically.

Dehumanization Lexicon

What They Published How It Works Who Did It Before
2. “Savage criminal illegal aliens — killers, rapists, gang members, and traffickers,” “illegal alien monster,” “invasion” Categorical dehumanization collapses an entire population into threat archetypes. Once a group is linguistically recategorized as subhuman, any action against them reads as self-defense rather than aggression. Nazi Ungeziefer (vermin) and Untermenschen. Rwandan Hutu Power radio used inyenzi (cockroaches). Ottoman authorities framed Armenians as existential threats. Khmer Rouge called targets “parasites.”

Firehose of Falsehood

What They Published How It Works Who Did It Before
3. Over 47 claims in a single document: “ending eight wars,” “total victory over terrorists,” “single largest drop in the murder rate in 125 years,” soaring 401(k)s, secure border, falling crime Volume overwhelms verification. Each claim would require independent fact-checking, but the sheer density ensures no single lie gets adequate scrutiny. Documented by RAND as a core Russian information warfare technique. The goal is not persuasion but exhaustion. Russian IRA operations 2014-2020. Goebbels’ principle of the Big Lie scaled through repetition. Iraqi Information Minister “Baghdad Bob” during the 2003 invasion. Erdogan’s post-coup media blitz in 2016.

Atrocity Propaganda

What They Published How It Works Who Did It Before
4. “The grieving families of innocent American women and children murdered by criminal illegal aliens — including the mother of Iryna Zarutska” Showcase individual victims of the target group to generalize criminality across an entire population. The named victim creates emotional specificity; the category does the political work. Individual tragedy becomes collective indictment. The Nazis published Der Stürmer with a regular feature on crimes allegedly committed by Jews. The British WWI Bryce Report fabricated Belgian atrocity stories. Willie Horton was the American domestic version.

Blood Libel / Ethnic Financial Crime

What They Published How It Works Who Did It Before
5. “Ending widespread fraud schemes — like the $19 billion Somali fraud scandal that burdened Minnesota taxpayers” Attach an outrageous financial crime to a specific ethnic community as a collective. Position the native population as victims. The dollar figure gives false precision. Whether a kernel of fraud exists is irrelevant — the function is to weld an ethnic identity to criminality in public memory. Medieval blood libel against Jews. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Chinese Exclusion Act propaganda about wage theft. Japanese internment justified partly through claims of economic sabotage.

Child Protection Pretext

What They Published How It Works Who Did It Before
6. “Protecting minor children from the horrors of irreversible sex changes” Position the state as rescuer of children from a demonized minority. “Protect the children” is the single most reliable authoritarian mobilization frame because it makes opposition impossible to articulate without appearing to endorse harm to minors. Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” (1977). UK Section 28 (1988). Putin’s “gay propaganda” law (2013). QAnon’s child trafficking mythology. Nazi campaign against “degenerate” influences on youth.

War Buried in Consumer Metrics

What They Published How It Works Who Did It Before
7. Military invasion of Venezuela listed between gas prices and tax cuts Normalization through sequencing. Embedding an act of war inside a consumer satisfaction list makes conquest read as just another deliverable. By the time the reader scrolls past “No Tax on Tips,” the overthrow of a sovereign government is just another bullet point. Mussolini buried the invasion of Ethiopia inside domestic economic messaging. Bush administration embedded Iraq escalation inside State of the Union laundry lists. Israel’s settlement expansion reported alongside economic indicators.

Sovereignty Laundering

What They Published How It Works Who Did It Before
8. “The decisive military action that brought indicted narcoterrorist Nicolás Maduro to justice, crippling drug cartels and liberating our hemisphere” Reframe military invasion of a sovereign nation as law enforcement. “Indicted” provides the legal costume. “Narcoterrorist” merges drug policy with war on terror framing. “Liberating our hemisphere” recycles Monroe Doctrine language to present aggression as regional stewardship. Panama 1989 (Noriega). Grenada 1983. Iraq 2003 framed as “liberation.” Soviet “fraternal assistance” for Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Afghanistan 1979.

Credit Claiming / Post Hoc Fallacy

What They Published How It Works Who Did It Before
9. “Inflation finally subsiding,” gas prices dropping, stock market surging, crime falling Claim credit for trends that precede your administration or result from factors beyond executive control. Economic indicators move on multi-year cycles; presenting inherited momentum as personal achievement is a universal autocratic move. Mussolini and the trains. Stalin and industrialization (achieved through mass death). Putin claiming credit for oil-price-driven GDP growth in the 2000s. Xi claiming poverty reduction that was already trending.

Phantom Threat / Voter Fraud Myth

What They Published How It Works Who Did It Before
10. “Protecting the integrity of our elections by preventing illegal aliens from undermining our democracy” Manufacture a nonexistent threat to justify voter suppression infrastructure. Noncitizen voting is statistically negligible, but asserting its existence creates the pretext for purging voter rolls and restricting access. The “protection” is the weapon. Jim Crow literacy tests framed as “election integrity.” Hungary’s Orbán used “Soros-funded” migration to justify election law changes. Putin frames managed elections as defense against Western interference.

Militarism as Nostalgia

What They Published How It Works Who Did It Before
11. “A World War II hero who helped liberate the largest internment camp in the Philippines,” “Warrior Dividends,” law enforcement “respected once again” Wrap current militarism in the unimpeachable moral authority of WWII. Conflating a genuine hero’s story with contemporary military adventurism transfers legitimacy from a justified war to unjustified ones. “Warrior Dividends” monetizes the mythology. Reagan’s WWII references to justify Cold War escalation. Putin’s “Great Patriotic War” cult used to legitimize the Ukraine invasion. Mussolini invoking Rome. Every authoritarian regime attaches itself to prior military glory to launder current aggression.

Unfalsifiable Victory Claims

What They Published How It Works Who Did It Before
12. “Ending eight wars,” “total victory over terrorists abroad,” “peace through unmatched American strength” Declare victory in conflicts the audience cannot independently verify. Which eight wars? Total victory where? These claims exist in a verification vacuum — they cannot be checked in real time, and by the time anyone tries, the news cycle has moved on. Nixon’s “peace with honor” in Vietnam. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished.” Soviet claims of victory in Afghanistan. The forever war’s perpetual “turning the corner.”

Populist Bribery

What They Published How It Works Who Did It Before
13. “No Tax on Tips, No Tax on Overtime, No Tax on Social Security,” “Trump Accounts” for newborns, banning corporations from buying single-family homes Scatter enough consumer-facing promises to create personal financial stakes in regime loyalty. Each item targets a specific demographic. The policies need not be real or enacted — the announcement itself is the product. Perón’s aguinaldo (mandatory bonus). Chavez’s Bolivarian missions. Erdogan’s pre-election handouts. Putin’s pension increases timed to elections. Bread and circuses, updated for the 401(k) era.

Sacred Calendar

What They Published How It Works Who Did It Before
14. “National Day of Patriotic Devotion, 2026” in the related articles Sacralizing the regime through mandatory civic ritual. Creating regime-specific holidays displaces existing civic traditions and establishes the leader’s calendar as the national temporal framework. Mussolini’s Fascist calendar (Year I of the Fascist Era). Franco’s “Day of the Race.” Nazi Nationalfeiertag. North Korea’s Juche calendar. Turkmenistan’s Ruhnama Day.

Enemy Media Designation

What They Published How It Works Who Did It Before
15. “Media Offenders” page linked in site navigation Official government designation of press outlets as enemies of the state, maintained as a permanent institutional feature rather than rhetorical flourish. Converts press criticism from democratic function to act of disloyalty. Nazi Lügenpresse (lying press). Stalin’s purges of journalists. Erdogan’s mass closure of media outlets post-2016. Orbán’s systematic acquisition of independent Hungarian media. Duterte’s shutdown of ABS-CBN.

The Architecture, Not the Ingredients

Any single tactic on this list normally would be dismissed as deranged political hyperbole, excessive partisan messaging, or rhetorical overreach that causes conflict. That is exactly how military intelligence sets up a disinformation buffet to work. The effect does not depend on any individual dish, because it serves them all simultaneously on official White House china. As Trump observers monitor the house, those who digest are in trouble, and those who resist are even more in danger.

Scene from a recent movie about Hitler pressing women into tasting his food for posion, based on the book: “Nazis Wore Red”

Military information operations doctrine distinguishes between content and architecture. Content is all the individual claims. Architecture is the system that connects the content. This document’s does three things at once with a known authoritarian architecture: it establishes a loyalty test (who applauded), it designates enemies both domestic (Democrats, media) and foreign (immigrants, Somalis, Venezuela), and it buries an act of war inside a consumer rewards program.

That triple function of loyalty enforcement, enemy designation, and normalization of violence does something far beyond an actual press release. It is an operations order, which comes along with news that mass political prisons are being rushed at high cost to begin spraying “war power” authorized pesticides on people. Using a .gov domain and a blog post tells you how far and informal a normalization of military dictatorship has already progressed.

Every technique in this document was field-tested by a regime that did not survive its own ambitions. The historical record is not ambiguous about where such a military intelligence buffet leads.

The only question is whether Americans recognize the price of swallowing it, before their bill is due.

Security

Epstein Files: Trump Hit 13-year Old Girl in Head When She Bit His Penis

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Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. His DOJ released three million pages.

And then, as NPR documented, it surgically withheld over 50 pages of FBI interviews.

With who?

With a woman who told agents that around 1983, when she was 13, Epstein introduced her to Trump. And that Trump forced her head down to his exposed penis, and when she bit down, he punched her in the head and threw her out.

The FBI interviewed this woman four times. Only the first interview made the public database, which means the one that doesn’t mention Trump.

A second woman similarly described being taken to Mar-a-Lago as a 13-year-old Epstein victim, where Epstein told Trump, “This is a good one, huh.”

That interview was published January 30, quietly pulled from the database, then restored February 19 after journalists noticed the gambit.

Rep. Robert Garcia has reviewed unredacted evidence logs at the DOJ and confirmed the files were illegally withheld.

Confirmed files. Illegally withheld.

The DOJ’s response has been to launch deranged lunatic rants like North Korea, claiming any criticism of Trump is “radical.” This is what institutional capture looks like in practice: you pass a transparency law, release a mountain of paper, and bury the pages that matter, to attack anyone who counts the serial numbers as the threat or conspiracy theorist.

Trump told reporters last week the files “totally exonerated” him. The files do the opposite, which is exactly why his stuffed crony DOJ doesn’t want anyone to hear the testimony about 13-year old girls.

Security

Peter Thiel Caught Spying on Kids: Discord Backdoor Brews Shitstorm

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Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund backs a controversial company called Persona Identities. Persona provides “age verification” to consumer platforms including Discord, OpenAI, Roblox, LinkedIn, and Lime.

Researchers have exposed Persona’s entire frontend architecture, with nearly 2,500 files at 53MB, sitting open on a FedRAMP government endpoint tagged with codenames from active intelligence programs. Fortune has the details, and the researchers published their findings on Twitter.

Yeah. FedRAMP. Thiel exposed, again.

The files show Thiel’s Persona version of surveillance runs 269 distinct verification checks on users. These include expected facial recognition against watchlists, but also screening against lists of politically exposed persons, and adverse media categorization across 14 categories including terrorism and espionage. The system assigns risk and similarity scores to every person.

EVERY person.

He has deployed a biometric surveillance pipeline, connected to Palantir money and dubious motives, through consumer products It’s a thin front to government intelligence infrastructure.

And he has it running right now on platforms used by hundreds of millions of people, to manipulate children by tricking them into believing they are just proving their age, unaware it’s literally Big Brother.

Discord Deployed, Not a Test

Earlier this month Discord defaulted all accounts to teen-safety settings.

ALL on by DEFAULT.

The announcement forced users into a binary: verify age using the Persona gate or lose platform access.

Discord hosts roughly 200 million monthly active users. Its population includes political organizers, activist communities, open source developers, security researchers, journalists and their sources, student groups, and gaming communities that overlap heavily with military-age males.

Thiel was targeting precisely the populations his private intelligence services would want to enumerate and categorize, as a Palantir-adjacent system.

Discord users specifically chose to join as a pseudonymous platform. They use handles, avatars, anonymous identities. Persona maps real biometric identity onto those pseudonymous accounts.

Before Thiel slammed in Persona, a Discord user was a handle. After the Thiel Persona gate was in place, that handle is linked to a face, a government ID, a watchlist status, a politically-exposed-person score, an adverse media categorization across terrorism and espionage categories.

The pseudonymity that made Discord attractive to its users is exactly what made it valuable to Thiel’s extremist ACTS 17 congregations as a collection target. The operation was to de-anonymize the precise population that specifically chose anonymity as protection from Thiel.

The Constitutional Bypass

The Fourth Amendment constrains what the government can compel from citizens. The political and legal cost of requiring 300 million people to submit biometrics to a federal database would be astronomical.

Thiel routed around American legal rights entirely. A private company provides “age verification” to platforms people already use. Users submit biometrics to Discord, not directly to the government. Persona processes the data as a private service provider.

The fact that data landed on FedRAMP government endpoints tagged with intelligence program codenames gives away the corruption. At no point does the state compel anything from anyone, because the surveillance becomes the product. The Third Party Doctrine that information voluntarily given to a third party loses Fourth Amendment protection does the rest.

This is obviously a laundering mechanism to undermine constitutional constraints on state power. The private sector collects what the state cannot legally demand. Commercial authorization frameworks move the data to government infrastructure. The child safety language is disinformation to make opposition politically suicidal.

The Franchise Model

The Thiel portfolio has to be seen as a vertically integrated surveillance supply chain to understand his documented upbringing as a Nazi.

Compulsion Thiel backs politicians — Vance, Trump — who support age verification mandates. Bipartisan cover is guaranteed because child safety is politically inarguable. These mandates create legal pressure for civilians to submit biometrics through consumer products they already use.
Collection Persona embeds in platforms where billions of users live. Age verification framing makes biometric submission feel routine and protective. Users submit to Discord or Roblox, not to the government. Every parent who consents on behalf of a minor is enrolling a child in a system whose back end they cannot see.
Processing Persona’s 269 checks are a civilian threat assessment engine. Watchlist matching, politically exposed persons screening, adverse media categorization, risk scoring. This is intelligence-grade analysis running on people who think they are confirming a birthday.
Bridging FedRAMP authorization formalizes the government channel. Persona CEO Rick Song frames this as “workforce security.” The infrastructure is bidirectional. Once civilian biometrics sit on government-authorized endpoints tagged with intelligence program codenames, the distinction between “workforce verification” and “population surveillance” is a configuration setting.
Action Palantir correlates identity data with intelligence streams. Anduril operationalizes it for defense and border enforcement. The supply chain runs from a teenager’s selfie on Discord to an actionable targeting package.

Each platform is an independent collection node. Each has its own justification. Each feeds the same backend. Each can be severed independently if exposed without disrupting the others.

Discord got burned and got cut off.

Persona continues operating through OpenAI, Roblox, LinkedIn, and Lime.

The Rollback Story

Last year, hackers accessed 70,000 government IDs collected through Discord’s previous verification vendor, 5CA. Discord’s response to that breach was to switch vendors — to Persona, which has deeper capability and a direct pipeline to government infrastructure. The breach provided cover for upgrading the collection system.

When researchers published that Persona’s architecture was sitting on government endpoints, the cleanup began immediately. Discord cuts ties. Both companies coordinate messaging to say the partnership lasted “less than a month.” Song tells Fortune the exposed files are just “uncompressed frontend” and that internally this was not considered a major vulnerability. He posted screenshots of an email exchange with the researcher, claiming the implication of connections between Persona, Palantir, and ICE has led to threats against company employees.

The data that flowed during that month already flowed. The biometrics already hit the government endpoint. The watchlist checks already ran. The 269 verification checks already executed against every user who submitted. Dissolving the partnership does not un-run those checks.

A since-deleted version of Discord’s FAQ on age verification contradicts the company’s claims about data retention, stating information would be “temporarily stored for up to 7 days.”

Discord amended its universal age-verification announcement to say verification would be “optional” — unless users want access to age-restricted servers and channels, which means most of the platform’s actual functionality. This is compulsion through architecture rather than law.

A CEO Knows

Song was attacked for lacking a profile photo on his own LinkedIn page — the same LinkedIn whose identity verification Persona handles. His response: “It’s dystopian that we want people to facedox themselves to everyone to be real online.”

The CEO of a facial recognition verification company argues against making faces publicly visible — while his product links faces to identity databases, intelligence watchlists, and government endpoints for hundreds of millions of people. He knows linking faces to identity databases is dangerous. He built a system that does it at population scale. His defense is that he personally should not have to participate.

That is hierarchy, stated plainly. The system makes identity transparent downward and opaque upward.

Recognition Time

In 2009, Peter Thiel wrote that freedom and democracy are incompatible. He was describing a design constraint. Democracy creates legal barriers to population-scale surveillance. Market mechanisms achieve what democratic governance prohibits.

Age verification mandates are spreading across state legislatures. Persona is embedded in platforms used by hundreds of millions of people. FedRAMP authorization formalizes the government pipeline. The administration dismantling institutional checks — inspectors general fired, DOGE gutting federal agencies, loyalty tests replacing competence — is the same administration receiving the output of this biometric collection network.

The 269 checks exist now. The watchlist screening exists now. The politically exposed persons matching exists now. The adverse media categorization across terrorism and espionage categories exists now. The intelligence program codenames exist for a reason that Discord isn’t disclosing. The question is whether anyone treats this Thiel story as the emergency it already is.

History, Security

Epstein Connection to Khmer Loot Reveals Blood on MoMA Hands

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Looting vulnerable populations and laundering their assets through institutional prestige has a long, documented history.

Look at how Prussia strip-mined the Ottoman territory and built their Pergamon museum around the loot. Look at how the Nazis then systematized that art theft across occupied Europe. The hunt for all the stolen works continues eight decades later.

Don’t look too hard in the estates around the Wannsee.

Powerful actors extract cultural wealth from people in crisis, then use institutional credibility to convert stolen goods into legitimate collections.

Enter Epstein.

Leon Black paid a convicted sex trafficker over $150 million for “financial advice” on looting. That trafficker’s files contain an inventory of Black’s $27.7 million collection of Southeast Asian antiquities, which happen to be objects extracted from Cambodian sites during conflicts that killed roughly two million people.

The supply chain for these objects runs through mass violence, displacement, and exploitation of vulnerable populations.

It brings to light Douglas Latchford’s network, which depended on local labor operating under coercion or desperation in conflict zones to loot these sites. Trafficking in looted cultural property produced by conditions indistinguishable from trafficking in persons. Latchford published one of Black’s pieces in a book, corresponded about selling bronzes to Black, and when an Australian museum canceled a purchase over insufficient provenance, redirected the same piece toward Black. He was indicted for fraud and conspiracy in trafficking Cambodian artifacts. His family returned the collection to Cambodia. The Metropolitan Museum returned 14 sculptures. The US government returned 30 objects.

Black still has his, somehow.

Epstein’s files contain the inventory of these looted acquisitions. I mean Epstein had operational visibility into Black’s holdings. The same Epstein whose own operation depended on exploiting vulnerable people. The financial plumbing connects both trafficking streams together. The wealth extracted through cultural looting in conflict zones, is managed by an operation funded through sexual exploitation.

The Epstein network actively gatekept women out of professional advancement while trafficking girls. Same dehumanization, different expression. Hatred as doctrine underlies the trafficking to make it possible. Trafficking humans by definition is the act of regarding some as lesser, if not inhuman.

The same files show Epstein explicitly ordered women excluded from elite scientific conferences he funded. “The women are all weak, and a distraction,” he wrote to literary agent John Brockman. Larry Summers joked about women’s IQ. A Yale computer scientist described a female undergrad to Epstein as a “v small good-looking blonde.” The network that looted Cambodian antiquities and trafficked underage girls also systematically excluded women from professional advancement. The dehumanization is the operating system.

Looting, trafficking, gatekeeping.

Black’s spokesperson offers the standard laundering fallacy: looting was done “through a well-regarded and highly reputable art dealer.”

Yeah, we get it. Trump and Epstein were well-regarded. Latchford was reputable too right up until his indictment. An Australian museum canceling a purchase for insufficient provenance, followed by Latchford redirecting that piece to Black, shows conscious avoidance that normally triggers trafficking statutes.

The “reputation” defense works the same in every laundering operation from 1880s Berlin to 1940s Paris to 2013 New York. Buy through a middleman to claim distance from the act. Hire a hit man to say you didn’t do the hit.

Black “cooperated” with a DOJ inquiry five years ago. And then? Somehow he remains a MoMA trustee, a known Epstein associate who now shows up flaunting the files.

…art insiders were wide-eyed to see Black, as well as fellow Epstein pal Glenn Dubin, stride into a private party, apparently hosted by the [MoMA] institution itself…. Black…stepped down as chairman of the museum in 2021 after protest from artists and workers over his connections to Epstein. On Tuesday, a rep for Black told us, “Mr. Black was proud to be at the dinner….” Both Black and Dubin have galleries in MoMA named after them.

The Nazis looted art and trafficked underage girls, building their white man’s empire atop mass suffering. The Epstein network does the same. Black represents how an institutional playbook for elites converts mass atrocity into cultural capital even today.