Here is a dangerous theory in a dangerous landscape…
First, some facts, then some fiction. I’ve been meaning to publish some fiction for a while now. This is your chance to tell me to go for it or to go home with my stories.
Why fiction?
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
— Albert Camus
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
— Stephen King (Danse Macabre)
“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”
— Pablo Picasso
The stakes could not be higher. Anyone commenting on geopolitics right now may well be risking their rights as a citizen of their nation and possibly inciting character assassination, losing their television show or job or worse. The warzone is already effectively extended to civilians. We just keep thinking war happens on a battlefield with tanks. But shadow banning, which continues in spite of a changed political landscape, is now about using a metaphorical silencer to strike a blow to the throat of anyone with a contrary voice. Real bullets are also hitting such voices where it counts, in the throat. But, Charlie Kirk is not the only victim of the silencing. Now, passports can be revoked based on what you say. One can be arrested for using words like “muppet”. Political assassinations, or attempts, seem ridiculously easy to pull off. Let’s be clear. The battlefield now extends to civilians, and civilians are bringing the battlefield to their leaders as well through protests en masse (in the streets and online) and through individual actions. So, anyone attempting to make sense of the current geopolitical and cultural landscape must proceed with extreme care. That accounts for my abundance of caution.
It is possible that the stories of what’s unfolding simply cannot be told with facts but can only be portrayed or perceived through fiction. Fiction is camouflage.
First, the facts:
The stakes could not be higher. We are on a knife-edge, teetering between the possibility of a peace deal among the superpowers and within them. President Trump is trying to navigate a deal with China and Russia, which seems to be spurring his internal and external opponents to more aggressively stoke and encourage the wars in both Ukraine and Gaza. Some want these to metastasize into broader regional or global conflict. It is ever more challenging to identify who the provocateurs are. Every institution speaks of “5th Columnists” now, implying that the opposition is deeply embedded on the inside of the organizations they seek to undermine. The famous line comes from General Emilio Mola, one of the Nationalist commanders during the Spanish Civil War (1936). While advancing on Madrid in October 1936, Mola said: “I have four columns of troops advancing on Madrid, and a fifth column inside the city.” That “fifth column” was his shorthand for the Nationalist sympathizers who were already living inside Madrid and who, he expected, would rise up and sabotage the Republican defense from within the city.
This 5th Column phenomenon is one factor causing, secrecy, symbolism and paranoia to embrace ever more tightly. One hears code words and sees coded language that is meant to convey meaning to those in the know. There’s the Head of the FBI referring to Valhalla, and there’s the photo of the supposed Charlie Kirk sniper standing next to a desktop showing Goat Island in New Zealand. This happens to be the location of a Danish Camp called Vallahalla. It also happens that the FBI Director just went to visit New Zealand to open the very first international branch of the FBI, a stand-alone attaché in Wellington, Aotearoa (New Zealand). The ostensible purpose is to fight Chinese cybercrime. Why New Zealand? This is an interesting question, especially since a number of key players who straddle the realms of tech and politics also have New Zealand citizenship (or right of abode) and an abode (or allegedly, a bunker) there. Peter Thiel obviously springs to mind, but so does Google’s Larry Page.
Remember too that I recently wrote here on Substack about New Zealand because it also happens to be the location of both Erebor and Erewhon. Erebor is the name of Peter Thiel’s new venture with Palmer Luckey that aims to create an entirely new crypto/tokenization-based financing path for new ventures. Call it a whole new investment banking regime. Erebor refers to The Lonely Mountain in J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels, which is home to great treasures and beauty to hobbits and dwarves alike. Of course, all the recent Peter Jackson films of Tolkien works were made in New Zealand. Also, the first novel about AI, written by Samuel Taylor Butler in 1871, is called Erewhon, (an anagram of nowhere), which describes another mountain top as a place in which AI and machines are prohibited because they have wreaked havoc with the society in the past. While Butler’s Erewhon is a fictional place, it was clearly inspired by Butler’s many years spent living in, you guessed it, New Zealand. He established a sheep station in Mesopotamia NZ between 1860-1865. The two stories represent the extreme possible outcomes of our relentless march towards ever more powerful technologies. Erewhon describes a distant mountain range where the land and people have been ravaged by AI (mechanical consciousness) and machines. The lessons are kept in their sacred “Book of the Machines,” and no tech whatsoever is allowed in, not even a watch.
In contrast, Erebor is all about tech being the key to civilizational salvation. It is the key to achieving what Silicon Valley calls “The Dark Enlightenment,” which means a world where algorithms and AI distribute assets and resources rather than corrupt and inane politicians. Interestingly, Theil is the key architect behind both Vice President JD Vance and Palantir (both of which have Tolkien origin stories). Theil’s Palantir provides the kind of surveillance and communications that should, in theory, make the Kirk assassination very difficult to pull off. Palantir is named after the three magical and indestructible dark crystal balls called Palantíri which are made by the Elves of Valinor in Tolkien’s (brilliant) novel, The Silmarillion. They show versions of the future and allow communication through all the stones in the world, giving the viewer a feeling of omniscience and power. But, actions affect outcomes. Free will exists, So, the stones are useful but not definitive in predicting the future, especially because they act more like mirrors that project inner truths rather than external reality. Even more interesting is the fact that Thiel has chosen this moment to deliver a series of lectures on the Anti-Christ (see here). Palantíri can deceive even the evil Sauron. Note that the Lowell Astronomical Observatory makes use of a Precision Array of Large-Aperture New Telescopes for Image Reconstruction, a Palantir. The Lowell is led by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO). By the way, speaking of secrets, I know all this partly because my mother worked very closely with Tolkien and CS Lewis at Oxford in the late 1950s because she had a fluent command of their favored secret language – Middle English – and was a scholar of medieval French poetry, the Shakespearian folios (and later did volunteer work at The Folger Library in Washington DC which holds those folios, while my Dad was busy negotiating super-secret geopolitical and technology deals, including the nuclear deal that brought the Cuban Missile Crisis to an end, for President’s Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford).
As a potentially important aside, I was at the Air Force Academy giving a lecture last week to the cadets and senior staff of the Air Force and Space Force. I was asking them how they are preparing for a world that could go either way, war or peace. Fund managers are complaining they can’t get any certainty these days. Imagine how the Air Force and Space Command Guardians are feeling every day as they try to be prepared for all possibilities. I was privileged to be there and cognizant of the work my father did with the Strategic Air Command, our nuclear delivery force, in the early 1960s. His story has important and relevant lessons for us today because there have been attempts to question it and efforts to erase it.