Iran War 3.0: Where Did This All Go Wrong?

    Alastair Crooke is probably one of the best and most authoritative commenter around right now. The world is teetering on the edge. Will the Iran War 3.0 become the black swan pushing it over?   

by Alastair Crooke

When the US Navy, in co-ordination with Qatar and Oman, tried to slip a convoy of four vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, via Omani waters, last Tuesday night – rather than pass via Iran’s officially approved route – Trump may have imagined (or been told) that with the massive funeral for the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei under way, that Iran would not react as the US Navy attempted to force open an American corridor. Trump however, misread the Iranian jibe – Hormuz is its “atomic weapon.” Iran will not relinquish it.

Trump insists – in clear contradiction to the terms set out in paragraph five of the MoU – that Iran has no right to interfere with any ship trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz. Iran nonetheless is acting within the terms of the agreed de-escalation framework, and has warned repeatedly that it would strike any vessel circumventing the Iranian control mechanism.

Iran responded directly to Trump’s challenge to Iranian control of the Strait by striking two vessels with missiles and a third with an armed drone. A forth Qatari-owned tanker, laden with liquefied natural gas, was set ablaze, forcing its crew to abandon the stricken vessel.

These Iranian ripostes provoked Trump to order American air strikes against Iranian targets; to reimpose sanctions on the Islamic Republic’s oil exports; and to revoke the MoU framework he had signed with what he called the “Iranian scum” – thus ending the ceasefire. “We hit them hard last night,” Trump said at the NATO summit in Ankara. “We will probably hit them hard again tonight.”

Trump did hit Iran again Wednesday night – even though Iran had not attacked another vessel seeking to by-pass the Iranian corridor. In response, Iran launched ballistic missiles and drones at US bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE and Muwaffaq Al-Salti airbase in Jordan.

Vice-President Vance is saying to Iran, “If you try to close the Strait of Hormuz, the American military will respond. It’s that simple” – i.e. Iran either keeps the Strait fully open to all, or the US will keep hitting it, as it did on Tuesday night.

Iran insists that it is the US that has violated the MoU and (via the spokesman for Iran’s Parliamentary National Security Committee) warns that further attacks by the US on Iran will be met by a comprehensive all-out surprise offensive by Iran – and potentially by other options too, such as an Iranian withdrawal from the NPT, changing the country’s nuclear doctrine, and closing the Bab al-Mandab Strait alongside the Strait of Hormuz.

So, Vice-President Vance is saying if Iran restricts Hormuz (i.e. it stays open to friendly states’ vessels) the US will escalate. And Iran is responding to this threat by warning that it will escalate militarily – two strikes for every one American strike – and that they may also turn to new doctrines of warfare.

Essentially, Trump has plunged into an escalatory trap, seemingly in part out of pique at his collapsing polls at home. He did, however, directly put himself in this situation by trying to “act cute” during the Khamenei funeral pre-occupations in order to try to gain a “quick win.”

How long will this escalatory episode last? Certainly, it will not lead to the opening of the Strait; nor bring a return of the status quo ante that preceded the war. As long as Iran maintains its ability to exert control over Hormuz, there is no basis to assume that the situation will return to what it was.

On the contrary, and more likely, the crisis will accelerate the onset of looming global economic crisis that could last until the economic pain becomes acute, as the drawdown on sour crude continues – and as the effects on the real economy in the West become visible.

With shortages of munitions and the drawdown on air assets from the Middle East already beginning, Trump probably lacks the wherewithal to go full “Iran War 3.0.”

The timeline to this new bout of low-intensity tit-for-tat therefore, is likely dictated by refinery inventories in the US; but also by the extent of the “hurt” being experienced by Trump back home in the context of his fading political prospects, but also by his dislike for any personal humiliation.

Where did this all go wrong? Possibly the crux of it derives from the moment that Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Sayyed Mojtaba, issued his statement that he had held a different view on the MoU to that of the negotiating team, but had agreed to proceed with it after receiving an assurance from the Iranian President that he would ensure and take into account Iran’s overarching principles in respect to relations with the US.

The Supreme Leader Mujtaba Khamenei’s statement put on notice both the US – and the Iranian negotiators – that Iran’s approval of the MoU was no open mandate, but rather closely tied to the 10 principles originally enunciated by the new Supreme Leader.

At some point, the Iranian leadership seemingly came to the conclusion that Iran was being played by the US; that the MoU was a deception –

…and that the entirety of events since the announcement of the MoU reflected a US strategy based on the view that in the previous round of the war against Iran – [that the US and Israel] failed to achieve their objectives – necessitating a halt to the confrontation, albeit temporarily, in order to regroup and prepare “more thoroughly” for a new round when the right conditions arise.

This led to the Iranian reassessment that the Hormuz and Lebanon components constituted the vital leverage to engage in a new war as the West ramps up pressure as a holding strategy – whilst the US and Israel prepare for the next round of war.

The interim US strategy is no change to US-Israeli objectives, but rather an adjustment to their operational mechanisms to provide for certain compromises that Washington considers necessary (i.e. closer working with Turkey and via Erdogan to engage Syria’s Jolani) to reshuffle the Lebanon deck, and then to “assess how the cards lie,” as Vance outlined.

It is not certain that this new US policy will work. The world is changing rapidly. Their expected triumph of Israel over the Middle East has resulted in failure. Trump’s MoU ploy to open Hormuz likely will fail, too.

The connected war on Russia and the siege of China are faltering too – and Israel’s (until now unassailable) hold over the US is in question too. A senior US democrat, Rahm Emanuel, and potential 2028 US Democratic presidential candidate, spoke in Israel yesterday; he warned in no uncertain terms that Israel “has lost the world’s support, become a ‘regional pariah,’ [and that its] alliance with the US is ‘at a crossroads’.”

And finally, a “black swan” now can be observed swimming in increasingly sunlit waters – Eric Katz writing in Notus writes that, “a draft report inside the US Treasury Department is set to warn of the risks posed by the artificial intelligence market, likening key aspects of it to the dotcom bubble that upended the US economy when it burst in the early 2000s.”

Treasury analysts wrote –

Career Treasury analysts found that AI firms are more deeply entrenched in the US economy than their dotcom predecessors and pose significant risk to the entire system if financial conditions change, productivity goals are missed or various choke points stymie growth.

A downturn in the AI market would send shockwaves throughout the entire economic ecosystem.

A market downturn in the US – exacerbated by an energy crisis – could spell disaster for Trump’s midterm hopes.

WE ARE IN AN ENERGY WORLD WAR

   This is the third important post today where we examine the fundamental factors shaping our world currently. After the end of privacy and the consequences of the Covid lock-downs, here's the energy war. 

   When the global supply chain starts breaking down, the monetary system falters and the everything bubble pops, we will move into a hot war. There is literally no alternative at this stage.   

by Matt Bracken

It’s time to realize that we are in an Energy World War, so I just put together this new war map.

I wrote a Substack titled “The Great Energy World War” about this last April, and it has aged well.

https://steelcutter.substack.com/p/the-great-energy-world-war

The asterisked text in the bottom right is critical. We are entering a new and extremely dangerous era of proxy warfare, where principal antagonists use a compliant vassal state as a launching pad to strike their enemies with missiles and drones.

A vassal state like Ukraine serves as a cutout or fig leaf to avoid a direct kinetic conflict between the principals. This fig leaf is wearing thin, as Russia is openly threatening the NATO nations providing deep-strike missiles and drones to Ukraine with direct attack.

Russia is also “returning the favor” by providing Iran with ISR support, allowing Iranian missiles and drones to rapidly attack mobile U.S. military targets in the Persian Gulf region.

It’s only a matter of time until a U.S. Navy warship is struck by an Iranian missile and sunk. In comparative historical terms, it’s 1914, on the eve of world war. In 2026, the current Energy World War may exploded into a Kinetic World War.

Do Trump and our other national leaders understand that they are juggling flaming torches in a gunpowder factory on roller skates? Do they understand the global downside risk of escalating this war of choice?

Another free Substack I wrote last year before the so-called 12-Day War:
“If we go to war against Iran, the world economy will crash”
https://steelcutter.substack.com/p/if-we-go-to-

The Lockdown Disaster Must Not Be Forgiven

   Over the last 60 years, five events should be remembered: 

   - The assassination of JFK when the last independent US president was reigned in by the system in 1963.  

   - The end of the link between the dollar and gold in 1971, when officially the USD became a FIAT (fiduciary) currency with no intrinsic value.  

   - Reaganomics in 1983 when financial retrain was jettisoned and public debt started going through the roof.    

   - 9/11 when suddenly we were all potential terrorists in 2001. 

   - And finally the 2020 Covid lock-downs when the economy and individual freedoms were compromised to fight a man-made pandemic, coordinated worldwide and amplified by the medias.  

   The world we live in today is mostly built from these main pillars so now is the time to review this last event as its consequences six years later are still with us.    

by Ian Miller via The Brownstone Institute,

Six years since “15 Days to Slow the Spread", data shows why our policies didn't work...

That policy has to have been one of the most disastrous in world history, created by “experts” who took all established pre-pandemic planning documents and tossed them out the window at the first opportunity.

It was a policy based on inaccurate reports out of China, which claimed that their lockdowns effectively stamped out transmission of Covid-19 within a matter of days.

It was a policy that ignored solid research – from established epidemiologists like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya – which found that the coronavirus had already spread much more widely than previously realized.

It must be noted forever that lockdowns and the associated mask mandates, vaccine passports, and school closures continued in some places for several years. The ramifications of those wretched policies will be quite literally endless. It’s not an exaggeration to say that lockdowns, our policies, and responses have quite literally changed the course of world history.

One would think that there would definitely be a concerted effort to understand whether such policies were effective or not. Whether approaching respiratory viruses with authoritarian crackdowns on businesses and schools was necessary to save lives.

Yet six years later, there’s unfortunately very little interest in examining those questions. And when you understand the data from Sweden, you will see exactly why.

Study on Swedish Approach to Covid Shows Lockdowns Didn’t Work

A study published in PubMed examined the Swedish approach to Covid policy, relative to its European counterparts, primarily because Sweden did not rely on lockdowns in response to the pandemic, but instead used “voluntary and sustainable mitigation recommendations,” the study says.

Despite a “majority of Swedes” supporting those policies, “this approach faced rapid and continuous criticism.”

That criticism came primarily from public health figures such as, surprise, surprise, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who criticized Sweden repeatedly for going against the herd.

“You’ve compared us to Sweden, and there are a lot of differences,” he said during a Senate Committee hearing in September 2020. “But compare Sweden’s death rate to other comparable Scandinavian countries. It’s worse. So I don’t think it’s appropriate to compare Sweden with us.”

“If you look at Sweden, they are in some trouble,” Fauci claimed on Good Morning America in late 2020. “They are starting to see that their death rate is much higher than the surrounding countries of Norway, Denmark, and Finland…They’re starting to see now that they’re having to rethink some of the things they did.”

This was, of course, not true. They did not “rethink” their strategy of light touch recommendations over lockdowns. And comparing Sweden exclusively to its neighbors is an absurd misdirection that no other country was subjected to. But Fauci, obviously never one for honesty or intellectual integrity, represented many public health figures who were anxious to see Sweden fail.

Yet as this research shows, reality was precisely the opposite.

The study explains that Sweden received criticism for “not legally enforcing mask-wearing in public spaces,” as well as keeping schools open and “being too permissive” with its policies. All the things that we were told were necessary to stop Covid and save lives. The researchers tested these statements using excess mortality data and stringency indices to compare Sweden across the whole of Europe, not just its neighbors.

They chose excess mortality because, unlike Covid specific measurements, it’s less subject to bias, differences in testing, and counting, and individual definitions of Covid-caused outcomes. It also accounts for deaths that “could potentially be indirectly attributed to the negative effects of strict lockdown measures and the overall strain on healthcare systems, leading to reduced access to healthcare for other diseases, among other factors.”

Turns out that what they discovered was that Sweden vastly outperformed the rest of Europe from 2020-2022, with outcomes that were remarkably similar to the other Nordic countries.

“Among 42 European countries, the cumulative excess all-cause mortality from January 2020 to December 2022 ranged from 46 (Luxembourg) to 1,080 (Bulgaria) deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, with a median of 351/100,000,” they write. “In Sweden, the excess mortality rate of 158/100,000 was among the lowest, ranked 37th among 42 countries, and not very different from other Nordic countries: Norway (129), Denmark (97), and Finland (228).”

So why did Sweden underperform in 2020 relative to their neighbors? Likely due, as the study explains, to “mortality displacement due to low all-cause mortality in 2019,” as well as “poorly organized older adult care structures.”

What does this mean? Essentially, there were significantly fewer deaths from all causes in Sweden in 2019, meaning there were more extremely elderly people alive in 2020 that were susceptible to severe outcomes from Covid. This is reflected in the massive age gradient with Covid-associated deaths. In Sweden, “~40% of the COVID-19-associated deaths were among patients in nursing homes,” the study says, “and 67% of all COVID-19 deaths were among individuals above 80 years of age, representing 10% of all deaths in that age group.”

For younger age groups, Covid was mostly a non-issue. “COVID-19 deaths below 50 years of age represented only 1.2% of all COVID deaths, including 21 individuals below 20 years of age, mostly with underlying co-morbidities, representing 1% of all deaths in that age group.”

Effectively, Covid ravaged extremely elderly people, while those under 50, despite the lack of mask mandates and lockdowns, saw very limited impact.

Sweden’s Lack of Lockdowns Led to Better Outcomes

Equally important, they examined the “stringency index” for countries across Europe, then made a data table comparing that stringency to excess mortality from 2020-2022. Effectively, how strict were a country’s policies, and how much did that matter to reducing excess mortality?

Turns out, there’s a definitive, resounding answer which this chart demonstrates perfectly. Countries are plotted based on their stringency index, the x-axis, and excess mortality, the y-axis. The line demonstrates the trend in mortality rates, and there’s virtually no relationship between the severity of policy and preventing excess mortality.

The R-squared, effectively the relationship between stringency index and excess mortality, is just 0.14. The closer to 1, the more related stringency is to outcomes. This is 0.14.

Countries like Italy and Spain were some of the strictest when it came to lockdowns and mandates, yet ranked near the top in excess mortality rates. The UK, Portugal, the Netherlands and others were significantly more stringent and also had demonstrably worse outcomes. Denmark was the second least strict country and had the best outcomes, at least in this examination.

What does this tell us? Well, put simply, Fauci was wrong. Sweden did not underperform relative to its neighbors. It did significantly better than the rest of Europe, and of course, the United States. Lockdowns and stringency were not related, whatsoever, to reducing excess mortality. They never mandated masks, one of his chief policy recommendations, and outperformed other countries like Germany which imposed N95-level mandates for months on end.

This is a clear repudiation of the lockdown model. Which is precisely why Sweden’s example is deliberately being ignored today.

Because learning the actual results of these historically bad policies requires humility, accountability, and honesty, all qualities that many in public health are truly incapable of possessing.

Why Digital ID Is The Hill To Die On: The Authentication Layer

    As we've been warning for years now, a digital prison is being built in Western countries. Once this is done, there will be no exit, except lying flat, just as the Chinese who are already experiencing it. It will be to protect children, women, minorities, whatever. I will protect nothing but will ensnare you in a system with no way out. The trick is implementing the plan slowly, methodically so that the frogs do not jump out before they're cooked. They tried to go too fast with Covid, some people pushed back, they learned. Here's the details of what's going on:   

Joshua Stylman via Substack,

A friend and I got into it recently. He’s smart, freedom-minded, and totally gets the danger of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). Expiring money, programmable control, carbon budgets - he sees most of the expanding tyranny clearly. And yet he dismisses Digital ID as a distraction. When I try to make the case that digital ID is the gateway to the gulag in the metaverse, he demands I name ONE thing Digital ID gives the government that they can’t already do.

My answer: it enables CBDC.

Of course, governments have already encroached on our privacy and freedoms in ways our forefathers couldn’t have imagined. But even with the creeping surveillance state, the government can’t fully implement programmable currency without authenticated identity on every transaction. They’re components of the same beast. Digital ID is the authentication layer while CBDC is the currency that runs on top of it.

Stop Digital ID and you prevent CBDC from being built at any scale that matters.

The institutions driving this, the usual suspects including the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the United Nations, are quite explicit about their intentions. Their own documentation spells it out: digital identity is a requirement for centralized digital currency. And in case the documents aren’t clear enough, Agustín Carstens, the former GM of the BIS couldn’t have been more explicit about their goals:

“A key difference with the CBDC is that central banks will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that.”

Perhaps we should take these institutions at their word?

When Enforcement Goes on Autopilot

What my friend is missing isn’t really about capability. The game has never been about what the government can do. It’s about the cost of doing it.

Right now, controlling what you buy, where you go, what you read - all of that requires boots on the ground. Investigations, warrants, real people making decisions. The friction is the protection.

Digital ID eliminates that friction entirely. What was once selective tyranny becomes universal tyranny. Code restricts transactions based on compliance status. No human oversight required.

Here’s an easy way to think about it: police can break into your home right now. Most people don’t lose sleep over that. Would they feel the same about automated drones entering every home simultaneously based on AI-triggered criteria? The capability itself isn’t the threat… the automation at scale is.

And for anyone thinking “the government already has my Social Security number and my phone tracks my GPS” - you’re missing the difference. Right now those systems are siloed - your bank doesn’t know what your doctor said, your DMV doesn’t know your browser history, etc. Digital ID is the interoperability layer - one key someone else controls - and can revoke. Five keys for five doors means losing one is manageable. One master key for everything means someone else decides whether you get in at all.

In 2021, getting into my own taproom legally required a vaccine card. New York City had rolled out some half-baked digital pass, but for the most part it was still paper back then. Still, it was obvious where this was headed. When I started warning friends, co-workers, the guy in the coffee shop - really, anyone who’d listen - that this was a dry run for digital identity infrastructure, that the compliance checkpoint they’d just accepted would eventually become programmable and permanent, most thought I was insane.

After getting tired of long emails and late-night rants, I started publicly documenting what I thought was coming. It was painfully obvious that centralized digital money meant rations, expiring savings, compliance-based access to daily life. A sort of digital cage. A few people in my life perked up, but most still scoffed.

Fast forward a few years and what’s being rolled out right now is exactly what I described - except ultimately, this system won’t just cover vaccines, it will define and govern all acceptable behavior.

So when I hear smart people wave away Digital ID because “the government can already track you,” it’s maddening. You're stuck on what they can already do. They're building something entirely new. It’s like watching speed cameras being installed on every block and saying “well, they could already give me a ticket.” Sure, one decision at a time. Now imagine no human involved on any blocks, ever. The marginal cost drops to zero and the decision isn’t made by a person but by a line of code.

That’s a profoundly different category of power entirely. And after what we all lived through in 2021 - watching our neighbors accept a digital pass as the price of participation without blinking - we saw the compliance muscle is already trained. Covid was the Milgram experiment, the Stanford Prison experiment, and the Asch conformity test rolled into one and our species failed all three. The only thing missing then was the infrastructure at societal scale.

Photo Credit

The Cover Story May Change. The Agenda Doesn’t.

Most Americans assume they’re exempt from this kind of thing. A few years ago, the majority of people I knew had no idea there were massive protests happening all over the world. It was partly because our media couldn’t be bothered to cover it, but also because we’re that insulated. And maybe that’s by design - because America was built on individual liberty in a way most countries weren’t, and that cultural resistance is exactly why they’re normalizing the infrastructure everywhere else first, then importing it here as “international best practice.” And we’ll sleepwalk right into it.

Make no mistake: if America accepts the authentication layer, the rest of the world loses its last permission structure to resist.

Not to beat a dead horse, but we watched a trial run during Covid.

That’s why paying attention to what’s happening abroad isn’t paranoid, it may give us signal for what’s coming.

The UK’s Online Safety Act 2023 mandates age verification for social media platforms using “ID checks, AI, or age assurance technologies.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer is fast-tracking implementation - writing clauses into the children’s wellbeing bill to “enforce a ban quickly.” Leaked Cabinet Office meetings revealed ministers discussing Digital ID for every baby at birth registration. A parliamentary petition against mandatory Digital ID gathered nearly 3 million signatures. They’re building it anyway. Just a few days ago, Apple rolled out age verification for all UK users - ID scans or credit card checks to access certain features.

Brits tried to route around it with VPNs: usage more than doubled - from 650,000 daily users to over 1.4 million, according to a UK government report. The government’s response? Not to reconsider the ruling but to start discussing restrictions on VPNs. The ratchet only turns one way. Mandate identity verification. When people evade it, they restrict the evasion tools. Each “solution” requires more control.

One of my best friends, a police sergeant who lost his job after 24 years without missing a single day (the Cal Ripken of the NYPD), for refusing to comply with vax mandates - told me years ago that whenever we’re being told something is being done for our safety, alarm bells should ring. He was right. Remember “nobody’s safe until everybody’s safe”?

The cover story is always about protection. Protect the children, protect women from online misogyny. Lately it’s been all about protecting us from antisemitism and protecting us from Islamophobia. Scroll the news on any given day and both are being amplified in the same cycle.

It should go without saying - my intention isn’t to diminish anyone’s real feelings. Just last week I wrote about this at length in The Enemy Is Not Each Other. The fear is real, and the people experiencing it aren’t wrong to feel it. My argument is that the infrastructure being built to address those feelings is the cage. Every emotional trigger - real or not - becomes the justification for another identity checkpoint.

Australia passed its own age verification law. Kids are already bypassing it with fake birthdays and unregulated apps. Of course, this law won’t protect kids in any meaningful way, but it sure does build a new gatekeeper.

In Africa, Gates Foundation-funded biometric ID systems are rolling out under the banner of financial inclusion. The cover story changes by region - in this case, aid vs. protection. TikTok requires a government ID in Europe. Discord requires facial age estimation globally. As Fenigson put it: “It’s exactly the same. The only difference is that in the West, they just have to make more excuses so that people can swallow it easily.”

And America?

California signed AB 1043 into law - effective January 1, 2027, every operating system provider in the state must implement age verification. Not a bill. Signed law. Operating System-level identity verification baked into every device.

And that’s exactly what Mark Zuckerberg proposed under oath during his congressional testimony on child safety. His “fix” was astonishing: have Apple and Google verify the identity of every smartphone user at the OS level, for every app. “Doing it at the level of the phone is just a lot cleaner,” he said. In plain terms: he deflects Meta’s legal liability while two companies already under antitrust scrutiny get deputized as identity gatekeepers for the entire internet.

Congress is writing the laws, while the tech CEOs are designing the system. Worth noting: just last week, a jury found Meta - and YouTube - negligent for harm to children in a landmark lawsuit, and in a separate case, Meta was ordered to pay $375 million for misleading users on child safety. So, the company that just lost two massive lawsuits for harming kids is now advising Congress on how to build the identity infrastructure for the entire internet. What could go wrong?

A bipartisan “Kids on Social Media Act” is moving through Congress. Florida introduced an App Store accountability bill that would force Apple and Google to verify the ages of all users and collect identifying data.

As Derrick Broze pointed out, the White House’s own National Policy Framework for AI, released in March 2026, leads with “Protecting Children” and calls on Congress to establish age-assurance requirements for AI platforms. The language is soft. The infrastructure it enables is the same. This isn’t a partisan project. Both “sides” are building it.

And in March 2026, more than 400 computer scientists from around the world signed an open letter warning that age-verification mandates enable censorship, centralized power, and loss of privacy - and that the systems could cause more harm than good. They’re describing the authentication layer. They just don’t call it that.

It's Not Just Governments

You actually don’t need government mandates when corporations normalize biometric collection on their own. And increasingly, you don’t need to choose - the mandates are converging with initiatives from Big Tech and Big Banking, all built on the same infrastructure.

I’ve been making this point to friends who have insisted CBDC was off the table once the President said he wouldn’t build it. Sure, the US government might not - but what about JPMorgan Chase? Through public-private partnerships, private institutions can be steered into building the exact infrastructure the government just promised not to touch. What’s the word for that again?

In November 2025, Apple launched Digital ID in Apple Wallet enabling the ability for people to scan their passports, take selfies, complete “facial and head movements” for verification - and then their identities live on their phone. It has TSA acceptance at 250+ airports and can be used as driver’s licenses in 12 states and growing. Apple’s press release promises “additional Digital ID acceptance use cases to come in the future.” The scope is unlimited by design.

Recently, Discord announced “teen-by-default settings” rolling out globally to its 200 million users. To access age-restricted content or modify safety settings, users must complete “age assurance” - facial age estimation or government ID submission, of course. Discord launched this in the UK and Australia first, delayed the global rollout after backlash - not because they reconsidered their plan, but because users pushed back on implementation. It’s still coming, even if the timeline shifted.

The framing is always the same:

Apple: “security and privacy.” Discord: “teen safety.” Zuckerberg: “protecting kids.”

I’ve watched this play out in my own life. Friends who laughed at the idea of a social credit score in 2020 are now paying for Clear and TSA PreCheck - voluntarily handing over biometrics for the privilege of skipping a line. I don’t recall a public discussion about the ethical ramifications of this. It just became normal. That’s the compliance muscle doing its job.

And here’s the punchline: the databases don’t stay separate. They get sold, merged, subpoenaed, hacked. Discord’s age verification system already leaked 70,000 government IDs in a single breach. Unlike a password, you can’t reset your face. Once the infrastructure exists, there’s no doubt “if” it will connect to government systems - just “when.”

I’d argue there may be a second motive here that nobody in Congress bothered to examine during Zuckerberg’s testimony. As a student of online advertising for 30 years, I find this one fascinating: In a move that actually helped users for once, Apple blocked third-party tracking, letting users opt out of being followed across apps - which most did. Advertisers have been flying blind ever since, operating on educated guesses about who you are. Remember, Zuckerberg’s proposal puts identity verification right back at that same OS-level.

Identity verification at the operating system level fixes the ad industry’s problem overnight. Your real identity, confirmed at the device level, is attached to everything you do on the device. That means every data broker, every advertiser, every platform that currently operates on probabilistic identity matching gets handed a verified identity graph - courtesy of federal law. Lovely.

Zuck is hardly proposing a solution to surveillance capitalism... he’s proposing its next infrastructure upgrade. The kicker is that he’s asking Congress to mandate it.

And for anyone who thinks there’s a freedom-friendly version of this, look at Sam Altman’s Worldcoin, now rebranded as “World.” As an aside, I can’t think of a better name for this character than Alt-Man.

Worldcoin’s pitch is “Proof of Human” - a decentralized, privacy-preserving answer to AI-generated fakes. Legendary tech investor Marc Andreessen is endorsing it. On paper, it could even sound libertarian. The mechanism is iris scanning. You stare into a corporate-owned orb, it captures your biometric data, and you get a cryptographic ID that proves you’re human. They say the image isn’t stored - just a mathematical hash. But a unique identifier derived from your body is a biometric, regardless of what format it’s saved in.

Thirty-three million people have already scanned. The app now stores government-issued IDs too. And the recruitment started in the Global South - the same places MOSIP (a Gates Foundation-funded digital ID platform) is being installed. The entry point is AI safety. The infrastructure is the same.

But Who’s Building It?

Anyone in my orbit knows I’ve been yelling about the danger of CBDC for the last few years. Once they understood the components - programmable money, expiration dates on savings, control over what you buy and when - some people got it right away. But, most just brushed it off. As per usual, convenience for privacy. No big deal.

Now you’ve seen the infrastructure being installed across every continent and every sector. But who designed this? Gee, I wonder.

A few months ago, Bill Gates went on camera and told us. The stack: digital identity systems combined with digital financial switches. He named the components - MOSIP for identity, Mojaloop for payments. Called them both “necessary tools” for the future they’re building. Not two separate things. One integrated system.

Perhaps most disturbingly, the blueprint for this plan predates the crisis that normalized it. Texts from the recently released Epstein files show private discussions about digital identity infrastructure going back to as early as 2017. The correspondent? Dr. Melanie Walker - neurotechnology adviser to Gates, World Bank director, Gates Foundation deputy director, WHO adviser, and co-chair of the WEF’s Global Future Council on Neurotechnology. She was texting Jeffrey Epstein about creating “a new type of social security number, used for all types of identity, with health as a single use case.” Sayer Ji has documented the full DARPA connection in detail.

The strategy: “Start with health.” The vision: “The magic is to make all the systems communicate.”

In those same texts, Walker mentions that DARPA’s Geoff Ling and Raj Shah (USAID, now Rockefeller) both recommended her for Surgeon General. She tells Epstein that the heads of MGH, Cleveland Clinic, Hopkins, and Mayo are “all working together” - and that she told them about him. Epstein’s response? “Are they doing digital idea already? Do they have a lead or a strategy?”

This was 2017. Three years before vaccine passports made ‘showing your papers’ a daily reality for billions. The plan being deployed now was being privately discussed by people embedded in the Gates, World Bank, and DARPA networks years before any public health crisis made it politically viable.

Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, published their framework for global digital platform regulation in January 2024. Whitney Webb has documented how the WEF’s Partnership Against Cybercrime pushes the same framework from the cybersecurity angle - tying every person’s internet access to a digital ID. The logic is simple: manufacture consent through crisis. The entry points consistently multiply and the destination never changes, no matter who is in power.

Remember what I said about international best practices? Well, the White House is promoting the SAVE Act - framed as election security - by pointing to India and Brazil’s biometric voter databases as the standard America should meet. Naturally, the bill lists REAL ID as the first accepted proof of citizenship. The entry point here may be voting, however, the infrastructure remains the same.

Hiding In Plain Sight

Christine Lagarde announced the European Central Bank’s timeline: pilot in 2027, full rollout by 2029. That’s not speculation, it’s their stated plan. And it’s not some long-term dystopian vision - we’re at the crossroads right now.

She’s not hiding the model. As Efrat Fenigson noted: “Christine Lagarde and the ECB say that China is the blueprint for their digital euro. They’re copying the ECNY, the Chinese central bank digital currency.” And what does China’s system require? Authenticated identity on every transaction. The blueprint is the authentication layer. It always was.

The West used to be the antidote. Now it’s copying the surveillance state’s homework.

There is no CBDC without Digital ID - not at any meaningful scale, not with enforcement features, not as a system of control. Every transaction requires authenticated identity. Every rule requires someone to apply it to. The authentication layer isn’t a convenience feature - it’s the control mechanism.

And yes, theoretically privacy-preserving alternatives exist. But stuff like zero-knowledge proofs and decentralized ID aren't what's being built, funded, or legislated. In fact, quite the opposite. What's being rolled out is centralized, biometric, and state-adjacent.

Once built, it doesn’t get unbuilt. When in human history have those in power gained a capability and voluntarily given it back?

Anyone who has been paying attention over the last few years understands what I’m outlining isn’t science fiction. Canada famously froze bank accounts of truckers who protested vaccine mandates, as well as those who donated to their cause. China’s social credit system already restricts travel for people with low scores. PayPal published a policy allowing fines for “misinformation” - at their sole discretion - and only retracted it after backlash, claiming it was an error. The fine mechanism for intolerance stayed, naturally.

Those were manual, clumsy, one-off interventions that required human decisions, but imagine all of that happening automatically, instantly, attached to everything - your electric car, your kid’s ability to go to school, even your ability to buy a morning coffee.

Nobody targets you, nobody makes a decision, the transaction just doesn’t go through.

And there’s no one to appeal to, because there was no person involved in the first place.

If you want to see what the full stack looks like deployed on cleared ground with no legacy systems, there’s already a working model. The Substack writer esc - for my money, one of the more important voices around right now - has been documenting Gaza’s reconstruction in extraordinary detail. The GREAT Trust plan issues digital tokens to Palestinian landowners in exchange for land rights - ownership converted into conditional access on a programmable ledger. Kushner presented AI-powered smart cities at Davos: six to eight planned cities where, according to the trust’s own slides, all services and economy will be run through ID-based AI-powered digital systems. E-wallets have already been distributed to over 245,000 recipients - before the reconstruction has even formally begun. No cash. No anonymity. No interaction outside the system.

The architecture I’m describing in this essay isn’t theoretical. Gaza appears to be the laboratory. Unless it’s stopped, I suspect we can expect strategic deployment all over the world in the coming months and years.

What You Can Do

The system requires your participation to work. The catch is that this may also be its biggest weakness. It only becomes a cage when adoption is near-universal. In other words, when opting out means you can’t participate in daily life. When cash still works, and analog alternatives survive, resistance may be inconvenient but still livable. That’s why they need you to volunteer.

Don’t give it.

Use your passport to fly, pay cash wherever you can. Most importantly resist Real ID compliance at all costs. They’re trying to eliminate friction so the more we can slow them down by adding it, the harder their plan becomes to implement.

For the detailed practical playbook - how to navigate banking, travel, and daily life outside the system - I’d point you to the work Catherine Austin Fitts and the Solari team have been doing for years. They’ve been busy mapping the resistance infrastructure while most normies are still debating whether any of this was real.

If we value the ability to live outside the reach of a technocratic government - one that takes elements of cancel culture, ESG, and surveillance and parlays them into a programmable monetary system controlled by the state - this is the hill to die on. Not because we’ll win every battle after - I’m pretty sure we won’t. However, losing this one makes everything else exponentially harder. Once the authentication layer is everywhere, every other control mechanism merely becomes a software update.

The cage isn’t locked. Not yet.

My friend still thinks Digital ID is a distraction. I’m not sure I’ve convinced him yet. But I’m also not sure he’ll have the luxury of being wrong about this much longer.

Don’t help them build it.

Complete DARK WEB Explained: Crime, Cybersecurity & the Hidden Internet (Video - 54mn)

   Beyond the myth, here's a great overview of the Dark Web. Not as dark as it looks once you shine a light on it. If you've ever used Thor, then you know the entrance. Silk Road, you know how deep it goes.   

   Eventually, as the laws become more and more restrictive, most of the web will become "dark" which in practical terms means changing from centralized to distributed. 

Complete DARK WEB Explained: Crime, Cybersecurity & the Hidden Internet

The Hidden Machine Keeping the Dollar Alive Is Breaking (Video - 22mn)

   It is breaking, no doubts but it is not completely broken yet, and when it finally breaks, nothing good will happen until a new system is put in place which could take decades, not years. 

   In between, expect the current mess to get worse, with local islands of stability shrinking while the global supply chain sputter. In this respect, America remains in a strong position as a continent-country but the dollar not so much. 

   The video is informative and well built. Worth the 20mn to understand the deeper cranks of the international financial mechanism currently in place. Why it cannot easily be replaced and why nevertheless it is falling apart. 

The Hidden Machine Keeping the Dollar Alive Is Breaking

NATO's Last Stand? (Revised)

   Fascinating. True or not on the US side, Europe is toast! 

   PS: I am not at all convinced about the "smart" part of the US strategy. Some elements seem to be, others are simply hubris and over-reach. Conversely, on the European side, absolutely nothing seems "smart". The best advice would probably be to stop digging while they can but we are probably long past that point. The "investment" in Ukraine is already so large that once the "project" fails, both NATO and the EU soon after may go belly up.  

by Matthew Andersson via AmericanThinker.com,

Critics may be misreading the recent NATO summit.  

It looks to them as if the U.S. is unilaterally siding with Europe against Russia.  

President Trump is smarter: he knows who has the winning hand, and his direct communications with his peers, Xi and Putin, are not always public. 

President Trump's earliest critical instincts toward the EU and NATO still hold. While the U.S. is currently extending them some diplomatic courtesy and limited support, Europe is ultimately surrounded on all sides by powers that make it irrelevant in global influence terms.  Europe has put itself into this predicament, due to its own domestic economic decline from bad policy choices.  It is using war as a way to revive its fortunes.  Its odds are long. 

The EU is surrounded economically by the U.S. to the west; by Russia and China to the east, by a vast Arctic territory to the north that it cannot control, and by India and a rising Middle East power, Israel, to the south. Europe has no strategic maneuvering room. It has limited prospects to reemerge as a serious power, and NATO is long past relevancy, and solvency.  

Since his first term, President Trump has been right about Russia, and NATO.  

Being “right” means understanding Russia’s long-term economic and trade importance, and appreciating its military prowess. Along with China and the U.S., it makes up the superpower triad. Being right also means he understands that the days are numbered for the EU and NATO, and that the world has changed without them.

After the Anchorage meeting with President Trump, President Putin invited his counterpart to Moscow: Trump's guarded reply was a reminder that productive relations may be welcome by both leaders, but each is also operating in and surrounded by a complex defense and foreign affairs tradition that doesn’t trust the other side.  Some have called this the “crucible of belief,” and past experience is hard to overcome. Change will happen slowly. 

Europe is part of that shared Eurasian landmass, and its security, but “Europe” is not a unified, single country.  Even within its own limited Western sphere, it has been a region constantly engaged in rivalry and war.  There was a period after Napoleon — roughly a hundred years — where relative peace was enjoyed.  But the 20th century has been just the opposite: a nearly unbroken chain of war — regional, revolutionary, world, and cold — and now, a new 21st century war is increasingly seen as inevitable.

There are many political, social, and institutional explanations, but economic decline is at the heart of why the EU is determined to provoke Russia (and why it is pleading before the U.S.).

If Germany, France and the U.K. were strongly led, however, with robust domestic industrial growth, controlled borders via immigration, and with less external energy dependence, if not facing domestic energy bankruptcy, such a conflict would not be necessary, or given any serious consideration. 

In recent history, one only has to review Angela Merkel’s disastrous “green energy” policy, deindustrialization, open borders, and the idling of German nuclear power, as a strong explanation.  She fell completely for naive progressive ideology which asserts that oil no longer matters.  

But for President Trump, the U.S. was going down the same path.

France and the U.K. are just as bad in their string of weak leaders, uncontrolled borders, domestic violence from cultures foreign to their own, and deindustrialization and outsourcing. It is little wonder that Europe’s “leaders” are now economically trapped, and are turning to war as a desperate form of economic recovery.

NATO’s putative head, Mark Rutte, was recently in the White House, pitching for war and U.S. financial backing, with slides and charts that looked more like a failed business recovery plan.  The old saying “be careful what you ask for” may be relevant, as NATO is functioning as a proxy for Western Europe, and looking to the U.S. as its pre-bankruptcy sponsor.  President Trump has seen this before.

There are obviously many other interests and players driving this strategy, but German-French-British decline may be the largest factor. Scandinavia is somewhat immune, especially Norway with its natural resources and capital, but it is susceptible to European political and policy contamination. 

Economic historian Walt Rostow, a White House national security advisor to U.S. presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, provided a powerful economic model that goes a long way to partly explain why Eurasia, and Europe, have always been unstable and in conflict.  His “The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto,” maps how countries grow in relative stages of maturity.

But it also predicts how countries will turn to war when those stages are challenged, interrupted, or allowed through poor leadership, or state interference, to stagnate or backslide. Europe has slid backwards from an advanced industrial and colonial power, to an effective open border welfare state, led by a weak political class with no plans, ideas, commitment, or national loyalties.

Russia’s Kremlin has recently announced that its Special Military Operation in Ukraine has been converted to formal war.  While predicting its development is problematic, Russia's power advantage is so overwhelming that NATO can only been seen as engaging in effective suicide.  Given Europe’s cultural tendency to existentialist gloom, perhaps it is understandable.

When war finally stops, as it must, it usually results in new borders, relationships, alliances, and deals being formed.  NATO and Europe seem to be counting on the chaos of war as a path out of their own weakness.

The U.S. may lend some technical military support to them as a simple matter of arms sales, but this may be their own self-inflicted, poisoned chalice. 

And in the end, the U.S., Russia, and China will simply resume their global dominance and power alliance. The EU will likely collapse or shrink; NATO will finally be decommissioned, and the old Atlantic Alliance will bypass Europe and align economically with Eurasia’s east and south — because that is where the power is.  

That is what the stages of growth predict.

The EU is also going to be further eclipsed commercially and militarily and by a rising Israel-dominated Middle East, because they know what they want, they have a plan, and they know how to fight.  European bureaucrats like Rutte, Macron, Merz, and von der Leyen do not, and face an interesting fate when they finally realize that this battle is likely their last political stand.

The citizens of Europe may be relieved.