A localized commercial real estate crash has been spreading through downtown Baltimore City's office market like cancer, with more than $1 billion in property value erased since 2020. The rapid decline of the commercial tax base in the downtown area is colliding with deep structural crises, including violent crime, a continued population collapse (now at a 100-year low), fiscal mess, and the increasing risk that the unhinged left-wing politicians in City Hall will hike taxes on working poor households to offset the shortfall. What you're seeing in Baltimore is a death spiral: capital leaves, residents follow, the tax burden shifts onto those who stay, and the cycle feeds on itself with no clear bottom in sight.
The Baltimore Sun, now owned by conservative David Smith (who also owns Sinclair Broadcasting), and Democrats in the state have become visibly angered that the paper is not producing left-wing propaganda as leftist Gov. Wes Moore's polling data slides. Reports from the paper indicate that between 2020 and fiscal 2026, more than $1 billion in commercial property value has been erased, or about 29% of the city's commercial properties - 4,085 out of 14,027 - saw their assessed values slashed on average by 28.7%.
"The pace of losses has been so sharp that officials have repeatedly issued out-of-cycle reassessments, rather than waiting for Maryland's standard three-year review," The Sun wrote in the report.
Downtown Baltimore is witnessing a troubling trend as businesses continue to close, leaving employees without jobs and residents without essential services.
The latest casualty is the Sheraton Hotel, a key fixture of the Inner Harbor, which has left 69 employees jobless.… pic.twitter.com/PagIL8uW9J
The steepest losses have been concentrated in Downtown, the Inner Harbor, and Downtown West:
Commercial property values in Downtown alone fell $496.3 million in assessed value over the last six years, while the Inner Harbor dropped $363.4 million and Downtown West lost $214.6 million — a combined decline of more than $1.07 billion across those three districts.
Some of the city's most recognizable properties saw steep reductions: 100 Pratt Street E in the Inner Harbor lost $138.9 million in assessed value during that period, while 1 Light Street in Downtown dropped $87.3 million. Several other high-profile properties posted losses exceeding $40 million.
David Bramble, managing partner at MCB Real Estate, told the local paper that the downtown area of Baltimore is "experiencing massive value loss," adding, "If this trend continues unabated, Baltimore will face even more serious financial hardship, impacting all its residents and businesses, from neighborhoods to the waterfront."
The paper noted that city officials and business leaders said downtown's commercial struggles stem not only from crime but also from the era of remote work.
"A lot of these workers are still working from home, at least a few days a week. T. Rowe Price might have a trader who, in 2018, went to the office five days a week. Now he's coming in two or three days a week. As a result, the needed downtown office space is being downsized," said Richard Clinch, executive director for the University of Baltimore's Jacob France Institute.
While remote work is only part of the story, traders, wealth managers, and back-office staff at major financial institutions in the city are all saying the same thing: Baltimore's crime problem has become intolerable and is bad for business.
Related:
Build It, And They Will Come? Not The Case At Baltimore's Harbor East Luxury Tower
Maryland Dem Officials Freak Out At Journalists Ahead Of Exposé On Governor
Two Years Later, No Key Bridge As Maryland Dems Focus On Tampons In Men's Bathrooms
Already starting to emerge:
Baltimore's epic demise is a direct consequence of decades of failed one-party Democratic rule that prioritized left-wing social justice experiments and other left-wing policies over public safety, economic competitiveness, and basic law and order. City leaders sold voters on a progressive utopia, but what they delivered instead was an exodus of residents, capital flight, a recession-like business environment, and years of crime and chaos.
A vice president of finance at a major institution in the city confirmed that failed left-wing leadership at City Hall has accelerated Baltimore's death spiral.
Tyler Durden Sun, 04/26/2026 - 08:45Submitted by Thomas Kolbe,
The Hormuz crisis offers us a profound insight into the real power structures in Germany. Nothing seems able to convince the Berlin monolith to partially shield its citizens from the consequences at gas stations through tax cuts.
It is now unavoidable that the Iran shock will translate into an inflation driver, working its way through economic value chains into consumer prices. These developments almost force a reduction of the tax burden on households and the middle class. It may sound strange to climate socialists, but wealth is created exclusively in the private sector, and certainly not in the state bureaucracy, which is currently profiting from the price surge at gas stations at the expense of citizens and enjoying a small special economic boost.
In March alone, the Finance Minister collected roughly half a billion euros more at gas stations. That makes him the winner of the crisis.
To dispel the impression of a secret profiteer, Klingbeil points to the generally precarious budget situation. In fact, his hands are essentially tied: the Merz-Klingbeil duo is driving the country’s public debt through the roof. Klingbeil is the skywalker among European debt makers. He has begun a catch-up race to place Germany in the top tier of debt states alongside neighboring France, Italy, and Spain. The German public debt ratio currently stands at 63 percent, but the debt spiral is accelerating. This figure will rise dramatically in the coming years.
Anybody should now be clear: The debt party of a state that burns its citizens’ capital in reckless fashion, whether in Ukraine or through the redistribution mechanism of the green transformation, must end. The state is an overfed glutton, extracting ever-higher tax revenues while sinking deeper into the debt spiral.
Yet the burden does not rest solely on debt. The state’s hyperactivity drains scarce resources from the private capital market, raises credit costs, and drives genuinely productive investments abroad. The damage has accumulated for years and is being made worse by the energy cost crisis.
One can only imagine the relief that the private sector needs to restart the prosperity engine and compensate for the ever-growing damage caused by the state bureaucracy. Germany’s plight urgently calls for reforms and an end to the failed eco-socialist transformation project.
In Germany, however, things are a little different. Economic rationality does not dominate. In the land of climate doomsayers and would-be world improvers, as former Economics Minister Robert Habeck once said, „all in“ — and all levers were set towards eco-socialism.
In fact: over 50 billion euros are pumped annually by the German state through the Climate and Transformation Fund (KTF) into the green wonder economy, which during the Hormuz crisis proved not to solve problems but rather to be their obvious cause.
The green wonder economy is leaving deep wounds in public budgets, whose deficits are spiraling out of control – in this year alone, another 180 to 190 billion euros of new debt will likely be recorded. https://www.tichyseinblick.de/daili-es-sentials/staatsverschuldung-rekord/
No one in Berlin is thinking about tax cuts anymore, regardless of how media artists around Chancellor Friedrich Merz try to pacify the public.
Even in the unlikely event of a temporary reduction in the electricity tax or an increase in the commuter allowance, the fundamental extraction mechanism remains unchanged. The CO₂ trading system drained roughly 25 billion euros from the private sector last year. This figure will continue to grow annually. There is no reason for gratitude, even if Berlin returns a few crumbs of citizens’ money here and there — robbed is robbed!
It was the economists at RWI in Essen who calculated the Finance Minister’s crisis dividend for March. They arrived at a sum of 490 million euros.
It is beyond question that the state is acting unethically in this crisis, delaying relief and exploiting citizens’ financial hardship.
The RWI’s call to suspend VAT on fuels is entirely justified, but it was coldly rejected by the Finance Minister. With his characteristic empathy, Klingbeil pointed out that citizens had made savings elsewhere due to high fuel prices. VAT revenue there had decreased, so a reduction at the pump was out of the question.
Klingbeil is instead contemplating a so-called windfall tax, in which, in the spirit of central planners, he could also make gas station operators and oil companies pay in light of their high profits in these weeks.
Budgetary planning games in Germany revolve exclusively around higher levies. Considering a projected new debt of up to 4.5 percent this year — counting the hidden funds of special assets — it is clear that the country no longer represents a healthy state.
The political aim of the Merz-Klingbeil government is the establishment of a massive state apparatus, resting on two pillars: the green artificial economy on one side and the massively expanded military sector on the other. This goes hand in hand with a growing state share, which has long exceeded 50 percent, as well as with rising public debt. The private sector bears the brunt of this, through higher levies or later via rising inflation rates.
Everything follows a clearly defined script. Only the extent of Berlin’s cynicism in the face of these policy consequences sometimes still surprises.
The Environment Minister calls for switching to electric cars amid the fuel price crisis, while the Transport Minister recommends the exhausted citizens switch to the catastrophe train.
In addition, the state-aligned media sector no longer minces words, celebrating high fuel prices as a unique opportunity to enforce the green societal transformation through citizens’ wallets.
To emphasize once again: a reduction in fuel levies is not a political quick fix. It would mark the beginning of a retreat from climate policy and a return to political reason. Energy must be affordable, and the exploitation of domestic energy sources should be central to policy. Achieving this requires a lean state, giving private industry the room for necessary investments. What we are witnessing is the systematic implementation of the opposite of this policy.
In his first year in office, Chancellor Friedrich Merz managed the feat of expanding the public service by a staggering 205,000 new employees. There is no sign of bureaucracy reduction or scaling back the state apparatus.
The economic hemorrhage of the private sector to finance the machinations of the growing hyperstate, including projects like the failed war in Donbass, is unprecedented.
In Berlin, people still believe they can successfully complete the green transformation project. What is shocking is not the ideological blindness or the intellectual modesty that comes with this policy. One should have become accustomed to that since the years of the Merkel era.
Even more striking is the ability of politicians to completely shirk responsibility despite the visible decline of both economy and society. They have succeeded in elegantly severing causality between the green planned economy and the country’s decline, systematically concealing accountability and consequences.
About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a German graduate economist, has worked as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination
Tyler Durden Sun, 04/26/2026 - 08:10The War Zone's Ian Ellis posted on X about a suspicious Chinese vessel operating in the Gulf area, which he described as a "Chinese surveillance ship" with "close ties" to the People's Liberation Army.
According to Ellis, Hai Yang Shi You (285) was moored not long ago, just 10 miles from U.S. assets, raising concerns about Chinese intelligence-gathering activity in the region amid the US-Iran conflict.
Chinese surveillance ship Hai Yang Shi You (285) got underway in the Gulf again, just before the ceasefire was set to expire.
The dual-use survey ship, with close ties to the PLA, rode out the ceasefire at port in Qatar, ~10 miles from U.S. assets forward-deployed at Al Udeid AB.
Chinese surveillance ship Hai Yang Shi You (285) got underway in the Gulf again, just before the ceasefire was set to expire. The dual-use survey ship, with close ties to the PLA, rode out the ceasefire at port in Qatar, ~10 miles from U.S. assets forward-deployed at Al Udeid AB. pic.twitter.com/krirNNa0uL
— Ian Ellis (@ianellisjones) April 24, 2026The latest ship-tracking data from Bloomberg shows that Hai Yang Shi You (285) has transited around the Gulf region, particularly around Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, over the last 60 days.
Ellis wrote in a separate X post that he closely monitors "20 Chinese research and surveillance ships."
The question becomes: What was the Hai Yang Shi You 285 doing just ten miles from U.S. assets forward-deployed at Al Udeid Air Base?
The next question is whether the ship assisted Iran in attacks on the base. These are just basic questions.
Tyler Durden Sun, 04/26/2026 - 07:35Araghchi has responded - saying that he has conveyed Iran's position, waiting to see if The US "is truly serious about diplomacy"
In a sharp reversal, Trump has personally canceled the Witkoff-Kushner trip to Pakistan
Iran denies that FM Abbas Araghchi's trip to Pakistan will include new talks with US, rejecting reports that Trump is sent his negotiating team to restart negotiations.
24/7 shuttle diplomacy (via Al Jazeera): There’' been shuttle diplomacy, and as one diplomat said, it's been relentless diplomacy that has been put forward by Pakistan from all sides.
Iran's military says finger on the trigger: "greater power & readiness than before."
Pakistani mediators are "cautiously optimistic" despite it being clear negotiations have been at a stalemate.
In a sharp reversal first reported by Fox News, President Trump has personally canceled the planned trip of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Pakistan.
Trump told the outlet that he halted the delegation just as they were preparing to leave:
“I’ve told my people a little while ago they were getting ready to leave, and I said, ‘Nope, you’re not making an 18 hour flight to go there. We have all the cards. They can call us anytime they want, but you’re not going to be making any more 18 hour flights to sit around talking about nothing.’”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has reportedly already left Islamabad, Pakistan, following Saturday talks with the country's prime minister.
Update: Araghchi has responded, saying on X that he had a "Very fruitful visit to Pakistan, whose good offices and brotherly efforts to bring back peace to our region we very much value," but adding "Shared Iran's position concerning workable framework to permanently end the war on Iran. Have yet to see if the U.S. is truly serious about diplomacy."
Very fruitful visit to Pakistan, whose good offices and brotherly efforts to bring back peace to our region we very much value.
Shared Iran's position concerning workable framework to permanently end the war on Iran. Have yet to see if the U.S. is truly serious about diplomacy.
So much for that “cautious optimism” that Pakistani officials were citing as a sign of progress. The Pakistan-mediated channel is now in clear stalemate, with the Trump administration signaling it sees no value in further shuttle diplomacy on Iran’s current terms.
* * *
Iran Foreign Ministry Insists 'No Meeting is Planned' Even With US Delegation En RouteNot too much that's new or bombshell happened overnight, with a second round of US-Iran negotiations still in limbo, but with the US delegation led by Witkoff-Kushner said to be departing Saturday or else en route. A small Iranian team has already been there since Friday, engaging the Pakistanis, also amid reports that they will submit a written presentation of their conditions for ceasefire and where things stand from Tehran's point of view.
Iran has denied that Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi's trip to Pakistan will include new talks with Washington, rejecting reports that President Trump is sending envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to actually restart negotiations. So once the US side arrives, it would be interesting to see what happens next. Potentially they could start in separate rooms with messages delivered, and thus the interaction would be indirect.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said in a post on X early Saturday that "no meeting is planned to take place between Iran and the US" during the visit and that Tehran’s positions will instead be conveyed to Pakistan. Araghchi said earlier he is undertaking a "timely tour" of Islamabad, Muscat, and Moscow to "closely coordinate" with partners on bilateral issues and consult on regional developments. Iranian state media said the three-leg trip forms part of Tehran's ongoing diplomatic push to secure an end to US-Israeli aggression.
Iran FM's arrival earlier, via Pakistan PM office/AFP, Getty Images Reports of 'Optimism' amid 'Stalemate' in TalksAt the moment there's no direct contact between Tehran in Washington on the diplomatic front. The Pakistanis have been back at the center of shuttling messages back and forth between US and Iranian officials. Al Jazeera has presented commentary Saturday citing "optimism" but also an ongoing stalemated situation:
So we are still in that stalemate, but Pakistani officials are telling us that their presence here and the Americans coming is an indication that behind-the-scenes diplomacy is working.
There’s been shuttle diplomacy, and as one diplomat said, it’s been relentless diplomacy that has been put forward by Pakistan from all sides.
There’s been, in the last 24 hours, conversations that have been held not just between the Pakistanis and Iranians, but also between the Pakistanis and the Russians – Russia is going to be one more stop when the Iranian foreign minister leaves.
An important overnight headline: Sources close to Pakistan-Iran talks say negotiations are progressing through "Iranian concessions" in exchange for "American flexibility regarding the issue of frozen funds," according to Al Hadath.
And also this: Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Islamabad said Pakistani mediators are "cautiously optimistic" regarding Iran-US talks.
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian:
The enemy is attacking our infrastructure and putting us under siege so that people become dissatisfied.
We currently do not need the people's sacrifice, but we request that people reduce electricity and energy consumption.
For example, at… pic.twitter.com/Nq2A8WMqPC
Iran's military warned the United States it will face the "reaction of Iran’s powerful armed forces" if the blockade of Iranian ports continues, according to Tasnim News Agency.
The Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters said the armed forces possess "greater power and readiness than before to defend sovereignty, territory, and national interests, which the country’s army experienced part of this power and offensive capability during the Third Imposed War."
This is actually consistent with what even Trump predicted - that the ceasefire has been used by Iran to regroup, rearm, and reposition its forces.
Currently the only regional fighting remains in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, despite there technically being a Trump-backed three week Lebanon ceasefire:
Israel is exporting its Gaza model to Lebanon.
Demolition by demolition, the Israeli military is changing the face of southern Lebanon, razing towns and villages to create a buffer zone. Israeli officials say it’s necessary to protect its residents from Hezbollah threats. pic.twitter.com/64qAebvKOl
"We are ready and determined, while monitoring the behavior and movements of enemies in the region and continuing to manage and control the strategic Strait of Hormuz, to inflict even heavier damage on the American Zionist enemies in case of another aggression," the Iranian military statement added.
US Law Set 60-day Limit on Unauthorized Wars, So What Next?CNN reports that "A post-Vietnam law puts a 60-day clock on the use of military force without congressional authorization." Congress has indeed been missing in action, with several efforts of a handful of members on the House and Senate sides having put forth War Powers resolutions, which keep getting defeated. But the 60-day mark comes up on May 1, but it's anyone's guess what happens next.
According to the CNN report, the law lays out a timeline for undeclared wars:
First, 48 hours. The president must notify Congress within 48 hours of introducing the armed forces “into hostilities” and explain the scope, justification and likely duration of the effort.
In his notification to Congress about Iran, Trump, like other presidents, said he committed troops under a president’s inherent authority in the Constitution to “conduct United States foreign relations.”
Second, 60 days. Congress must authorize the use of force within 60 days of receiving that notification or, the law says, the military action must be terminated by the president.
Third, a possible extra 30 days. Trump can extend the 60-day clock for another 30 days if he argues that continued military action is needed to keep service members safe while withdrawing from the war. Trump has said he won’t be rushed into making a bad deal to end the war.
It goes without saying that the longer this drags on, and with an open-ended timeline, the more politically costly it will likely be for Republicans headed into next Fall's midterms.
Tyler Durden Sun, 04/26/2026 - 07:06Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,
And what you can do about it (besides complaining).Palantir dropped a manifesto last weekend. 22 bullet points distilled from Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic, posted to X with the casual framing of “because we get asked a lot.” I haven’t seen a reaction so widespread, unanimously opposed and viscerally aghast since James Damore’s infamous “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”.
The usual suspects lost their shit. Engadget called it “the ramblings of a comic book villain.”
TechCrunch clutched its pearls at the bits about “regressive” cultures and “vacant and hollow pluralism.”
Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins observed, (via Bluesky, of course), that these aren’t philosophical musings floating in the ether: they’re the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it’s advocating.
He’s not wrong, Palantir sells to ICE, DoD, NYPD, and the intelligence community. It may be a manifesto, but it’s also product literature.
Even Alexander Dugin, the Russian “Fourth Political Theory” philosopher, not exactly known for having a libertarian bent, seemed triggered by it, calling it “the plan of the Western techno-fascism” on X, “Pure Satanism” on his Substack.
Palantir manifesto is the plan of the Western techno-fascism. The superiority of the white race based on the technology. No antisemitism, no sacredness, no socialism of old historic fascism. This time pure capitalist, Jews friendly, profane, materialist. Anglo. Posthumanist.
— Alexander Dugin (@AGDugin) April 19, 2026Former Greek FM Yanis Varoufakis called it “evil” and put out his own point-for-point on it – he calls it a refutation, it’s actually more of a rant.
So everybody across the horseshoe is big mad. Fine.
The thing is, none of this should surprise anyone. Let’s now look at why the policy this “manifesto” outlines was always going to arrive, with or without Karp’s prosaic stylings.
Karp Didn’t Invent “The Technate”The merger of corporate power and state apparatus, the “technate” that people are suddenly discovering with horror on a Sunday afternoon, is not a new idea. It’s not even a recent one.
Back in 2013, Eric Schmidt (then Google’s executive chairman) and Jared Cohen (Google Ideas, ex-State Department advisor to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton) published The New Digital Age. The book was blurbed by Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair, and General Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA. That’s an elite-class blurb list for a book that explicitly argued for the intersection of Silicon Valley and state power, the fusion of corporate infrastructure with national security logic, and the reshaping of diplomacy through private platforms.
In 2013 it was called “transformational.” Kissinger gushing that it was, “a searching meditation on technology and world order” (he would go on to co-author The Age of AI with Eric Schmidt that should be every bit as concerning as Karp’s Technological Republic).
Not too long after that, Google’s Sergey Brin and Klaus Schwab held a fireside in Davos where Herr Schwab pontificated that with the advent of AI, since the algos would be able to predict election outcomes with 100% certainty, they may as well pick the winners anyway and we could do away with elections altogether.
Nobody batted an eye. My timeline certainly wasn’t overflowing with rage over it and the people who were calling attention to it were using facing all kinds of headwinds.
In a conversation with Google founder Sergey Brin, founder of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, delights at the thought of a future without elections:
"Digital technologies mainly have an analytical power. Now [we're going] into a predictive power, and your company is very much involved in… pic.twitter.com/9shJlXw3DG
My personal favourite goto clip about all-pervasive corporate surveillance that absolutely nobody gave a shit about, was this one, also via the darlings of Davos:
This is important to understand:#CBDCs will not be "money": in the sense we understand it. They will be social credit scores, capped by your personal carbon footprint quota👇 pic.twitter.com/e6ibVwXM65
— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) October 4, 2024Here we have an ex-Goldman Sachs guy running a Chinese multi-national sermonizing about mass surveillance and personal carbon footprint quotas and my timeline was not filled with angry tweets from elite A-listers calling for the dismantling of Ali Baba.
Here in 2026 it’s the exact same structural narrative, now with Karp’s sharper edges and fewer Davos euphemisms, only this one is being called a fascist manifesto instead of drooled over by media elites.
The only major difference I can see is where Davos/WEF inspired technocracy was globalist, Palantir, Karp, Thiel et al are nationalist. Perhaps, a North American nationalist.
This map is from 1940
(This fits with what I wrote in my last edition of The Bitcoin Capitalist, about the factional rivalry between the intellectual descendants of Samuel Huntington (“The Clash of Civilizations”) vs his former pupil, Francis Fukuyama (“The End of History”) I posted an excerpt here.
Fukuyama thought the entire world would become one big Neo-Liberal circle-jerk.
Huntington said future conflict wouldn’t be between countries, but between cultures. And some cultures were less compatible with how we live here in the West, than others (Palantir’s point #21).
Overall, the project didn’t change. The faction driving it did.
Driving what? The inexorable drive toward post-Democratic technocracy.
Here’s what nobody wants to hear.If you’re reading Karp’s 22 points and feeling a cold prickle of recognition, if you’re realizing that what Palantir is describing is the operational blueprint for the next 40 years, there’s something you have to sit with first:
You put your hand up for this.
In case you wondering what makes a company like Palantir even possible.... (find out why, here 👇) https://t.co/1mOEQ9JkLR pic.twitter.com/aLIjg1Sqw5
— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) April 20, 2026Perhaps not you personally. But collectively, “we”, the Western mass public already ran a dress rehearsal. And we all passed (or flunked) with flying colours.
During the pandemic and in the years immediately after, the political and managerial class was wrong about effectively everything.
The origin of the virus. The (non)-efficacy of lockdowns. The vaccines didn’t work and were in fact, kill-shots for many. The money printing.
The correct response to being that wrong, that publicly, and that unwaveringly, about that much, should have been pitchforks and torches in the streets, if not guillotines.
At the very least, in our enlightened civilization: recall elections, mass firings, inquests and class actions. There should have been a generational reckoning with expertise that got captured by politics, a media cartel that went full agitprop and Chapter-7 bankruptcy for institutional credibility.
That is not what happened.
What happened instead was that people stood on the dots. We wore the masks on the walk from the restaurant door to the table, then took them off to eat, sitting in saran wrap bubbles on the street in the middle of winter.
People snitched on their neighbours. They watched elites throw lavish maskless parties while they got tased by cops at their kids’ soccer games.
In other words: we “followed the science”, even as the science was revised quarterly to match policy because the facts on the ground refused to conform to the narrative.
And now, most people will fight tooth and nail to defend the very system that did this to them.
The pandemic was the trial balloon. The political class, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley watched carefully.
What they learned was this: the population will comply. The population will inform on itself. The population will absorb humiliating, contradictory, demonstrably false directives from authorities, and the dominant social behaviour will be enforcement of those directives on anyone who objects.
The Technate has been an ideation of post-Democratic elites since at least the 1930’s.
It has been moving forward inexorably ever since, but it was probably that event, the pandemic and the populace cucking out at a mass level when the technate became inevitable.
Not because of any single manifesto, book, or CEO. Because a civilization that behaves that way under stress has already told its elites what it will accept.
The Technocracy Is Already HereThe manifesto isn’t about Palantir specifically. It’s the blueprint for what I’ve already been noticing, not just in the US but everywhere, that I’ve been calling State Capitalism.
It’s the fused-lattice model of corporate-state power where the company doesn’t lobby the government, it is part of the governing apparatus, and the government in turn provides the regulatory moat that keeps the company’s competitors out, and to whom they can outsource things that national governments aren’t supposed to be doing.
This is where we’re headed for the next few decades. And it’s where we’re headed precisely because the population demonstrated that it would tolerate it, even while they decried “fascism”.
Ever notice how some people who want to lock you down, censor your speech, cancel you for wrongthink, force an experimental vaccine on you and take away your gas stove think of themselves as “anti-fascists” ?🤔🤡
— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) January 15, 2023 Welcome to the Era of Mass Compliance.Karp’s 22 points are the tidy, sanitized version of what we’ve already said in our “Repricing Sovereignty” piece. The early iterations are already in production. Every ICE deployment, every DoD contract, every integration between federal databases and private analytics, every AI-for-defense procurement cycle, every surveillance-as-a-service rollout is a beam in the Cathedral.
And here’s the part that separates the individuals from the crowd:
If you can’t beat ’em. Own ’em.
Long PLTR. This is straight out of the playbook my premium readers will recognize as “The Post Singularity Stack.” It’s a barbell trade that allocates to State Capitalism on one side, while personally building out sovereign technology on the other.
This isn’t an endorsement of the politics, because frankly, I’m done with politics (“vote harder, mofos”). Politics is a racket to keep the rabble in line.
Stand on the dots. Flap your arms. Good boy.
This will go down in history as the most assinine, ill-conceived campaigns ever produced
Most of these people don't even know what Elbows Up means 🙄
Honestly, it's like a Monty Python skit 😳pic.twitter.com/9MKFCGOHA8
True self-sovereignty can only be acquired individually.
It’s an acknowledgement of the structural reality. We’ve been talking about this for a long time (we call it The Great Bifurcation, and as we always suspected, the branch you wind up in is largely an exercise in self-selection). For the next few decades, The Technate will be the vehicle through which capital will compound, and the only rational response is to own a piece of it. Capital is optionality. Wealth is exit velocity. And by wealth I mean not being economically dependent on The State, not living paycheque to paycheque, and not being one frozen bank account away from being forced into compliance.
There is an ancient Chinese aphorism,
“It is unlucky to remain obstinate in the face of overwhelming odds”.
Being morally aghast while your purchasing power erodes in losing sectors leaves you with neither the moral high ground nor the means to act on it.
The most important points of the manifesto are #5…
And #12:
The people who are panicking at the manifesto are the same people who voted, complied, and shamed their neighbours into the conditions that made it possible. They don’t get to be outraged now.
Some people saw this coming years ago. Some of us even wrote it down.
What happened to many of those people was they got deplatformed, canceled, debanked and generally villainized by the same people who are now screaming about Palantir.
I’m mostly done trying to warn the wider public on where things are going.
Now we’re just buying the ticker.
Get on the mailing list for the follow-up to this (The Pareto Paradox In The Age of Mass Compliance), follow me on X here, or if you want to get a look at The Post Singularity Stack, take the premium trial here ».
Tyler Durden Sun, 04/26/2026 - 07:00