It's a Game of Thralls
And a Case Study of a Counter-Intelligence Operation
I don't frequently do this. I just don't do it. I get a million faxes like this, but I want you to understand how serious it is. … “It is clear the Zionists who own ABC have declared war on the people, having chosen Donaldson and Jennings to be their generals to lead the charge. They have chosen the public media, which they dominate, to launch a campaign of slander and half-truth.” … “By destroying their economy, we remove the ammunition for their media cannons and remove the fuel for their gigantic media engine. It is clear that Donaldson, Jennings, and ABC … must pay the price for their actions, and they must be added to the growing list of treasonous individuals who would bring our great nation to its collective knees.”
emphasis added
Art Bell Open Lines show, 1996, https://fourble.co.uk/podcast/artbellsomew
Anyone remember Art Bell? He’s a legendary talk radio host who featured conspiracy, paranormal and high weirdness content. Anyone remember his “Open Lines” call-ins? Fans, randos, prankers and nutters calling in with the most outlandish stories for the credulous. Feds too. I remember hearing accounts of box cars manufactured with shackles built in. That was maybe 1996? Lots of stories like that. Civil war talk too.
Candace Owens is a genius. I wasn’t paying attention to her low signal-to-noise content so I missed it.
She’s set herself up as an Agony Aunt of conspiratainment media. She has incentivized her audience to go out and find clues about the Charlie Kirk killing and then email their findings to her as tips. The hope for her adherents is, I assume, that one day they will submit a “clue” worthy enough for her to present it on her show. To her audience of millions. A thrill of a lifetime, right?
Turns out she’s the Art Bell of the Woke Reich? Does anyone besides me see a problem with that model?
[Hey! You can let her know stuff—she invites it: tips@candaceowens.com]
You know what else this sounds like? Wikileaks. And that is very instructive.
Let me show you:
GLENN GREENWALD
You can’t understand Wikileaks without Glenn Greenwald and Greenwald without Wikileaks.
Wikileaks was founded in October 2006, with a focus on soliciting and publishing leaks from oppressive regimes outside of western nations. A couple of years later I became aware of the organisation as a result of the Anonymous War on Scientology. WikiLeaks had published a collection of “top secret” Scientology documents—still a useful archive, here: https://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Scientology
[BTW, what lead up to and what followed the Anonymous War on Scientology are very important but little known developments in memetic warfare. One day I will get to that.]
The theory behind Wikileaks is actually very straightforward and well-explained in an essay by Assange from 2006, which he summarised on his blog iq.org, thus:
The non linear effects of leaks on unjust systems of governance
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.
Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.
Only revealed injustice can be answered; for man to do anything intelligent he has to know what’s actually going on.
Which just shows that Assange was thinking deeply about practical ways to counter high level corruption—Epstein Class level corruption, one could say. Simple. Facilitate leaks from within the conspirator’s circle and their ability to conspire diminishes. Very neat.
Not everyone was down with it though:
Since I’ve been in office, my attitude has been zero tolerance for these kinds of leaks and speculation,” Obama said in June 2012. “Now we have mechanisms in place where, if we can root out folks who have leaked, they will suffer consequences. In some case, it’s criminal. These are criminal acts when they release information like this.
~Barak Obama
In 2010 WikiLeaks came to my attention again when they published a trove of US diplomatic cables (Cablegate) that revealed not only widespread corruption within and between North African regimes and Hillary Clinton’s State Department, but that Clinton had ordered staff to collect DNA, fingerprints, and credit card numbers from UN leadership. Reading through the cables myself, what I found really striking was the casual, sneering contempt that Hillary’s diplomatic staff expressed for their client Heads-of-State and other world leaders.
Just imagine that for a second.
Hillary has lost trust, and must resign: Clinton is done for, says Jack Shafer at Slate. Foreign diplomats will never trust her again, and even those who forgive her will forever see her as “the symbol of an overreaching United States.” Though it’s not surprising that this kind of activity goes on, proof that the Secretary of State actively sanctions it is deeply humiliating for the U.S. The only way to help “other nations... save face will be to give them Clinton’s scalp.”
But Hillary didn’t resign. She prepared to run for the presidency in 2016.
This disclosure is not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community — the alliances and partnerships, the conversations and negotiations, that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity.
~Hillary Clinton, Press Conference, November 29, 2010
https://2009-2017.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2010/11/152078.htm
Looking back, that is the year that I mark as the beginning of the end of our normal social arrangements in the West. It was those cables. The USA took a massive hit. 2010.
THE ARAB SPRING
Another thing that Cablegate revealed was that in the case of an internal coup, the US would support the insurrectionists against their allies, the Arab leaders.
Within months rebellion broke out all over the region. Tunisians, Egyptians, Syrians, Yemenis, Libyans and more, turned against their leaders. The entire region destabilized. The region is, of course, still unstable.
According to Assange, WikiLeaks pumped out the leaked cables “as fast as we could” into the fracas, in order to support Arab peoples in unshackling themselves from the yoke of Western control:
because many of [their citizens] already knew what was going on in great and grotesque detail, but rather so that it would not be possible for the West to stand up and support the (authoritarian leaders).
The worst outcome must be Libya which went from being a rather remarkable, prosperous North African nation, to what it is now 15 years later, still a failed state with a slave trade.
A few years later, Wikileaks stuck it to Hillary again with the release of the Podesta emails. That was just four weeks before the 2016 election. If you remember, the emails revealed how creepy the DNC leadership was, with their pervy art collections and Instagrams full of jokes about sexy children. Pizzagate.
There is much more evidence of actual child (as in little children) trafficking in the scene around Hillary, John Podesta, James Alefantis, Huma Abdin (now married to that Weiner guy) and long-time associate of Hillary’s, Laura Silsby, than there is with Epstein. Yet Pizzagate is discredited while Establishment politicians and pundits yowl about the Epstein files.
Meanwhile, you won’t see this reported in the legacy media:
Today an attorney for the government told me that I would soon be getting confirmation that several hundred pages of documents related to Seth Rich were found in a previously-hidden room at FBI headquarters. You may recall that on July 30, 2025, Fox News Digital reported that newly-installed FBI Director Kash Patel and his leadership team had located an unmapped / sealed area within the J. Edgar Hoover Building’s SCIF.
emphasis added
https://joehoft.com/update-new-information-seth-rich-documents-fbis-possession/
Seth Rich, who leaked Podesta’s emails to Wikileaks and who was murdered shortly afterwards.
GETTING ALL THE DUCKS IN A ROW
Julian
In April 2010 Assange had stepped up to become the face of Wikileaks in order to present the Collateral Murder video. Then a few months later he scooted over from Iceland to Sweden with plans to establish a more permanent base for WikiLeaks. Within a couple of weeks he had been accused of sexual assault and by the end of September he was in London attempting to work with Establishment journalists on the Afghan War Diary and Iraq War logs while he resisted extradition back to Sweden, with the ultimate threat of being Guantanamo’d or renditioned to a Black Ops site or shipped to the USA to stand trial for espionage. Of course several political figures were openly calling for him to be killed, including Hillary who sniped, “Can’t we just drone this guy?”
So while Assange was pinned down by ginned-up sex charges and being wildly smeared in the press, the Snowden Op launched in the background.
Glenn
Greenwald had become a darling of Left punditry with his sharp critiques of anti-Liberal incursions in government policies, policing and privacy, post the implementation of the Patriot Act after 9/11, but it was during the financial crisis of 2008 and the energising Occupy Wall Street movement that he really shone.
Greenwald used his influential Salon column to write in support of the protest and enumerate Establishment transgressions against ordinary people who had been leveled by the crisis.
Greenwald was a go-to commentator on MSNBC during this period, and a frequent guest on other cable news outlets.
Edward
Snowden had been employed as a civilian at premier military contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, assigned to an NSA contract. (Already a fishy arrangement.) Booz Allen Hamilton is a major private arm of the Pentagon. It provides intelligence, technology, and cybersecurity services to various states and governments. It also rather surprisingly provides consulting and mentoring support to the Clinton Foundation and has sponsored Clinton Global Initiative events.
But before that he was a CIA agent, and, as he has said himself, a “trained spy“:
I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word, in that I lived and worked undercover overseas — pretending to work in a job that I’m not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine.
Snowden’s resume is janky—which is what you would expect from a spy with a made-up background assigned to a counter-intelligence op. And Booz Allan Hamilton “hired” him anyway.
Then in May 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong with a large cache of classified NSA documents to meet Glenn Greenwald and award-winning political documentary filmmaker, Laura Poitras. Establishment journalists from The Washington Post and The Guardian were present to vet Snowden and be the first to review the leaked documents and report on them.
What followed was a rash of head-patting of the team in the mainstream media. The language used was significant. They were lauded by the Establishment for their “careful, responsible” handling of the leak—explicitly in contrast to Assange/WikiLeaks’ widely condemned supposed recklessness. The comparison remains a common theme in discussions of press freedom and national security leaks.
Thus the op was grounded: The institutionally approved way to handle leaks vs the very, very discreditable way that Wikileaks did it with their sex offending, megalomaniac leader, Assange.
Snap Shuts
October 2013, billionaire Pierre Omidyar pledged $250 million to fund Greenwald in a new journalistic leak-handling venture with Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill, cleverly called The Intercept. Its official mission was to publish and contextualize documents from Snowden’s leaks—and any others that showed up in their inbox.
Our short-term mission is limited but critically important: to provide a platform and an editorial structure in which to aggressively report on the disclosures provided to us by our source, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. We decided to launch now because we believe we have a vital and urgent obligation to this story, to these documents, and to the public.
Matt Taibbi was on board right away, but only lasted a couple of months. He quit and returned to Rolling Stone saying (paraphrasing) “That isn’t a newsroom.”
In 2015 Laura Poitras won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Citizenfour, about Snowden.
In February 2016, The Intercept won a National Magazine Award for the contributions of hactivist affiliate, Arab Spring revolutionary and jailbird journalist, Barrett Brown. [Whom Jasun will be speaking with again this week.]
In 2016 and 2017, The Intercept won quite a few more prestigious awards.
In 2016, Reality Winner (yes, that’s her name), employee of the military contractor Pluribus International, leaked an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 US election to The Intercept. The Intercept journalists Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito mishandled source protection protocols and “inadvertently” identified her to the NSA. She was arrested, charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, convicted and jailed.
That same year staff reporter Juan Thompson (graduate of prestigious Vassar) was fired for fabricating quotes and attributions in his articles. Most egregiously he affixed a fictional racist motivation to the Charleston church shooter, Dylann Roof.
NSA whistle-blower John Kiriakou and Guantanamo Bay detention camp whistle-blower Joseph Hickman both accused journalist Matthew Cole of outing them to authorities.
In 2019, The Intercept changed their editorial priorities and ended their mission of reporting from the Snowden archive, laying off dedicated staff. Barrett Brown burned his National Magazine Award in protest.
A few months later, in 2020, Glenn Greenwald resigned from The Intercept. He had been one of three co-founding editors from 2014 to 2020.
Over the years, The Intercept received additional funding from Soros’ Open Society Foundation, the controversial dark money Tides Foundation that funds the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative, Sam Bankman-Fried (of all people!) and millions more from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the preferred philanthropic option for Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Reed Hastings etc.
The Intercept had launched in 2014 with two highly anticipated reports from the Snowden leaks. One was a story authored by Greenwald and Scahill about how the NSA used unreliable electronic surveillance and metadata to identify targets for lethal drone strikes.
The other is was a photo essay of aerial images of NSA headquarters and other intelligence facilities.
How to say NSA is soo-oo over because Palantir just walked in the door?
For newbs, Palantir Technologies is “one of the largest and most embedded US government contractors in data analytics, AI, and surveillance, with particularly strong reach in defense, intelligence, and federal agencies.” It was founded by Paypal Mafia boss Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, who both appear to be insane. Peter Thiel was a student of Rene Girard, mentioned in my previous essay about Candace Owens and mimetic violence, here.
THE 1% SOLUTION
At the time that Greenwald left The Intercept only about 1% of the Snowden archive had been published. Though estimates range as low as 0.2% and Greenwald insists that the figure is roughly 5%.
I mean, WTF!!!???!
So, where is Wikileaks? Where is Assange?
Who cares.
Of course, now we find out that that Pulitzer-winning, man-of-the-people, Greenwald, is a degenerate servant of the Epstein class.
The Deep Dark WebState?
In reviewing this material, the one thing that I’m left with is how weird it is that Greenwald showed up the way he did in that HB Gary hack.
Was the hack itself a set-up? The information in it about the proposal of a team of private intelligence firms including DoD contractor, Palantir to smear and discredit Wikileaks supporters for Bank of America was sensational. Of course, it turned out that LulzSec lead hacker Sabu (Hector Monsegur) was an FBI informant. That would mean that those a-holes are a whole lot cleverer than we thought. Anyway, they are.
The American Courtier Class
Glenn Greenwald, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Nick Fuentes, etc, all apparent dissidents of the podcast media sphere. These people appear to be dangerous to the Establishment, sure. They have (apparently) millions of disgruntled followers to whom they spin narratives of betrayal and institutional corruption. They attack the current administration and its supporters, its foreign policy, domestic policy and undermine its legitimacy. They share the same messaging and talking points.
… And certainly I've been friends with Megyn for a long time, and I think she respects my views. I used to go on her show. I was the first guest on her show, by the way. So I've been on from the beginning. Long before she really started focusing on these issues, I think most people before October 7th who weren't already thinking about Israel as such a menace to the world and our support for it is so unjustifiable and evil, basically just ingested the Israel propaganda that both parties more or less supported.
emphasis added
~Ana Kasparian, The Young Turks, Jun 13 2026
You get what I am getting at. They look like dissidents and their audiences feel like they’re resisting some great corruption, but …
Interesting stuff.
Btw back when a dismaying number of influencers (including Claire Lehman) appeared eager to move on from Epstein a few months ago, shortly after Trump's "witchhunt" bitching, Taibbi dedicated an entire post to how unfair it was to Epstein that a judge allowed people to testify against him after he was dead.
People do have a right to confront their accusers, and while it is impossible to prosecute a dead man, that doesn't mean the investigation into his network should stop.
If all it takes to bury an investigation is a murder...
To date, I don't believe Epstein's Arizona ranch has been searched. Although the state of Arizona has shown some interest, if it has happened, I haven't heard about it.
Over a year ago, Kash Patel told Joe Rogan that there was an Epstein suicide tape, that he had seen it, and it would be shared for all to see. That hasn't happened yet.
Worse, the existence of a suicide video completely contradicts the government's previous claim that the video cameras (all two of them) malfunctioned, while the temporary prison guards were asleep.
Those guards were charged but after a couple years the charges were dropped.
This is all off the top of my head, and to the best of my knowledge.
I'm curious who we can trust, and am sure we can count them on one hand. And with the advent of regurgitative ai content, we can no longer trust any media that's vulnerable (!) to digitalization, so...
We're epistemologically screwed, it seems.
Good post.