The Thinning

Notes from Inside the Veneer

My kid came home from school the other day and told me the Epstein files are lunchroom conversation. Not among teachers (at least that they’re aware of), but among students in the hallways, between classes.

What a crazy thing for a child to be talking about. I mean think about that - children casually discussing whether the people who run the world have been raping and trafficking other children.

My son was telling me this the way he’d tell me about the all-star game and I’m standing in my kitchen trying to figure out what to even say. Because the weight of that - what it means that it’s entered the consciousness of our children - is so heavy. The gap between the world we thought we lived in and the one that actually exists has become so thin that even teenagers can now see through it. And yet, that’s where we are.

Anyone close to me knows that I’ve been railing about our fake reality for the last few years. That the politicians, the entertainers, the captains of industry, the media, and the philanthropists - some of them, most of them (all of them?) - have been looting and pillaging the place. Literally. And now our kids are learning it too

As strange a journey as that’s been, I’ve had time to process this at my own pace. I’ve spent the last few years going super deep on this stuff. Most of my free time has been spent working with my study group (mostly my closest friends, along with a few other researchers) finding source materials, sitting with it, trying to build some kind of framework to grok. Most people haven’t had that luxury. They’re receiving all this information at once, like drinking from a firehose, with no context. Meanwhile, “the news”- which ignored all this for years despite a mountain of evidence - chops it into a hundred partisan takes in real time.

What makes it so overwhelming - and what many people, especially normies, will likely still miss - is that Epstein isn’t a one-off sicko who got caught. Pull that one thread and the whole tapestry unravels. His network touches everything. Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, built a publishing empire through Pergamon Press (interestingly, the biblical name for Satan’s throne) - controlling the textbooks that shaped what generations of students learned about history, science, and the world. Leon Black - who paid Epstein $170 million and has been accused of sexual assault in Epstein’s home - founded Apollo Global Management, the private equity giant that acquired the parent company of Lifetouch, the company that photographs 25 million American schoolchildren every year. Schools are canceling picture day right now because parents are starting to hear about the connection.

It’s endless. The same network reaches into the pharmaceutical architecture that built the Covid response. There’s an email in the files - forwarded directly to Epstein’s personal Gmail in March 2015 - with the subject line “Preparing for pandemics.” It includes a draft agenda for a Geneva meeting and a discussion about how to “officially involve the WHO” through co-branding. The sender (still anonymous, at least for now) signs off: “I hope we can pull this off.” Four years before Covid. Pretty eerie, huh?

Source: Epstein Files, EFTA00654215

Sayer Ji laid out more receipts in an excellent, if not horrifying, X thread last week - offshore vaccine funds, financial instruments papered with legal protections no legitimate advisor would ever need, Gates “specifically requesting” a registered sex offender serve as his science advisor’s representative.

The same fingerprints are all over the tech we use, the shows we watch, the financial systems that decide what’s even possible for the rest of us. And that’s before you even get into what the files reveal about Epstein’s investments in genetics, AI, and reproductive science - shell companies claiming to do “DNA analysis” that have no labs and no scientists, millions of dollars routed to Harvard’s evolutionary dynamics program, and Epstein’s permanent unsupervised access to genetics research facilities. I’ve written about this before and absolutely plan on doing a follow up soon.

The hardest part for most people to understand is that these aren’t separate, unrelated stories. They’re all scaffolding on a larger infrastructure built over decades, maybe longer. The people in those files aren’t peripheral to the systems that run our lives. They are the systems that run our lives and shape our reality.

My buddies and I have a theory that most people are afraid to go full retard. Their mental models can't stretch past what Prussian schooling and Rockefeller medicine taught them to think. They never learned how to consider something without necessarily believing it - and that's by design. You can't sit in no man's land on this. You can't say "well, the pharmaceutical industry is captured but the financial system is fine" or "the intelligence agencies are corrupt but the media is trustworthy."

That’s half-retard-land. Once you see that one part of it is a mirage, intellectual honesty demands you question the whole thing. And when you do, when you actually follow that logic all the way, any reasonable person must conclude that it’s all interwoven. The same people, the same money, the same networks. All of it.

Imagine trying to take all of that in at once. And, whether you believe some or all of what’s being presented, it’s just so much to take in.

•••

I haven’t written in a while. Between family, friends, work - life’s been full. But I’ve also been trying to zoom out. Still paying attention, still tracing the threads, but trying to observe without absorbing (not always successfully). Trying to understand the framework - what happened, what’s happening now, where it’s headed - while still maintaining some semblance of calm and normalcy. That’s harder than it sounds.

My crew has meticulously studied things like MKUltra, institutional capture, consciousness manipulation. The deeper you go, the more you start to see how intertwined it all is. The old joke about a small cabal running the world starts to feel less silly. As ridiculous as that may sound, if you pull back the layers and look, there is a mind-numbing amount of evidence pointing in that very direction. My research suggests that they always have - at least within the so-called history we’ve been taught, which is its own can of worms that I’ll save for another day.

Controlled opposition or useful idiots, and half the time the people themselves don’t know which one they are. The prevalence of mind control among the people talking about mind control is one of the darker ironies of this whole thing. Even within the freedom movement, the paranoia is real, and it’s corrosive. I’m not an insider but I’ve met enough people in this space to see the pattern - everyone suspects everyone else of being an op. Maybe that’s healthy, actually. It keeps us from the complacency that set in while this was all being built.

For what it’s worth, I’m less interested in the heroes and villains - though I do believe they matter - and more in understanding the game itself. One of the hardest things for me to come to terms with is that even the bad guys tell us the truth. These are honorable ghouls we’re dealing with. Some believe it’s part of their weird religion, if you believe in such things. I know I do. Friends who’ve studied this for decades believe they’re compelled to disclose - that by telling us, even obliquely, they believe they’ve gained our implicit consent, and thus they’re absolved of the karmic debt. I’ve written extensively about predictive programming. It’s very real. In fact, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Roger Avery said it plainly on Rogan last week in a way most people in that industry never would.

Over the last few weeks, the files started dropping. Aside from my kids talking about it, my phone started ringing - people who wrote me off five years ago, started hearing about this stuff in more mainstream channels. Now they’re reaching out: “What’s going on?” “What do you think about all this?”

People who spent years with their fingers in their ears are pulling them out - not because they suddenly became brave, but because the evidence has gotten loud enough that ignoring it became harder than facing it. There’s a tentative quality to it, like people testing the ice on a frozen pond. But they’re stepping onto it.

•••

Last year I wrote a piece called Fractured Realities about how identical evidence now produces completely incompatible worldviews. The same event but with different movies playing inside everybody’s head, and every person feels their version of the real one.

I’ve never seen a better example of that than what’s happening right now with the Epstein Files. Ask a hundred people what’s happening and you’ll get a hundred answers.

It’s Trump finally going down.
No… it’s the Democrats finally being exposed.
No… it’s a limited hangout, controlled release.
No… it’s a distraction from the real operation.
No… it’s the Great Awakening.
No… the redactions prove they’re protecting their own.

My Q friends (yes, I have Q friends) tell me these are controlled releases of doses the public can metabolize - slow drips because the full truth would break society. There’s a twisted logic to that I can’t totally dismiss. But I also can’t embrace a framework that requires trusting that the same unseen power structures responsible for the cover-up are now engineering the disclosure out of benevolence. That’s a pretty big ask, in my opinion.

Meanwhile everybody’s so locked into their own reality tunnels that they’re missing it. Something genuinely significant is happening and the usual boxes aren’t big enough to hold it.

This isn’t just an information war, it’s a perception war and the difference matters. The Epstein files just dropped into a population that's already been shattered into a billion different realities - and every single one of those realities feels real to the person experiencing it depending on their upbringing, media diet and cognitive biases. The fragmentation isn't a side effect of the disclosure, it’s the whole point. It is the control mechanism. How can you build a proper coalition to organize against a system when most people can’t even agree on what they're seeing?

•••

Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail should have blown this whole thing open when it was published. Instead, the people who already suspected this stuff got a mountain of proof while polite society waved it away. More recently, Webb’s been making an argument that should stop everyone cold - she calls Palantir the new Epstein.

Her argument is simple: you don’t need hidden cameras and honeypot operations and a guy with a plane and an island when you have access to everyone’s digital life. Search histories, communications, financial transactions, every tweet they replied to or even liked. You don’t need Jeffrey Epstein when you have total digital surveillance. Blackmail doesn’t require a handler anymore. The data is the leverage.

This hypothesis maps to one of the big takeaways from my MKUltra series - the smartphone is the new handler. The device in your pocket monitors your emotional state, anticipates your taste and desires, spoon feeds you targeted content mapped to your predispositions to keep you engaged - and often enraged. What MKUltra achieved through crude chemical intervention and trauma-induced dissociation, social media and smartphones now do during most of our waking hours. The handler didn’t go away; it just got an upgrade that’s far more efficient and leaves less room for human error.

The honeypot and the algorithm are just different generations of the same control system - one runs on leverage over individuals, the other runs on leverage over everyone.

Webb takes it even further. If the smartphone is the handler, Palantir is the agency running the whole operation. It’s a privatized continuation of DARPA’s Total Information Awareness program - so scandalous that Congress defunded it, and then it just... reemerged as a private company with government contracts. Peter Thiel, Palantir’s founder, has extensive documented connections to Epstein. The current Vice President of the United States is Peter Thiel’s protege. Just take a moment to consider the possible implications.

My friend Debbie Lerman has been tracking the military-corporate apparatus that ran Covid through Operation Warp Speed. It's not hiding anymore - it's being celebrated. Tech execs getting military commissions. Half a trillion in AI surveillance built under emergency powers. They stopped pretending it didn't exist. And yet most people don't know or have been so desensitized to it they don't do anything about it.

So think about it this way. What if the Epstein revelations aren’t the system breaking down? What if they’re the old system being made obsolete? Digital is always more efficient. Why pay for the labor when the algorithm does it for free? The old tools are being discarded - either way - but I’m not sure what’s coming in their place.

I think the most important question is: Why are they telling us now?

•••

The possibility I find most fascinating and least provable - that something is shifting. Not the lame politics that sits at the surface layer but something underneath.

Everyone can feel it. Whatever your framework, whatever virtue flag you wave - there’s a frequency change that defies categorization.

But I have to consider the possibility that my friends and I - who sit around connecting dots, recognizing patterns, seeing through the veil - may not be as clever as we would like to think.

As I’ve written about before, Alice Bailey (founder of the Lucifer Trust, who was essential to the formation of the UN) wrote about the “externalization of the hierarchy” almost 70 years ago - hidden structures of power becoming visible because the conditions of the age demanded it. She specified 2025 as the year things would come to light.

Source: Alice Bailey, Externalization of the Hierarchy, page 281

The architects of these systems didn’t hide the plan. They published it. What if the veil was always designed to thin at this particular moment? What if the “awakening” is itself part of the architecture? They always tell us, remember?

The pattern recognition that makes us feel smart might itself be a pattern that was anticipated.

I don’t say that to breed nihilism and I’m certainly not what some would call blackpilled. I say it because intellectual honesty demands it. Whether what’s happening is organic awakening or managed disclosure, I have no clue. But it’s evident institutional trust is collapsing across every domain simultaneously. The engineered reality I’ve been writing about is still running but seemingly losing its grip. Or is it?

•••

The part I can’t resolve, even for myself is… what if the red pill was always part of the movie? What if the community of people “waking up” (myself included) is just the next layer of managed perception? Is this all just The Second Matrix in motion - the trap isn’t the illusion, the trap is the feeling of having escaped it? Are they telling us because we’re figuring it out - or because they’re winning, and disclosure is what winning looks like?

I don’t know. Truly.

•••

What I (think I) know is that the playbook hasn’t changed. The same people horrified by Palantir’s ICE surveillance cheered for vaccine passports - which were leading to the same digital gulag - just a few years earlier. Principles seem to be fungible depending on who’s in charge.

We are now being shown that at the highest levels of government and industry, people have been trafficking, raping, and torturing children. When people realize what “Pizzagate” actually was - not the cartoon version the media used to discredit it, but the real pattern underneath - the ground is going to shift again.

If the evidence is becoming very difficult to dismiss - and it is - then literally every other cause falls by the wayside. Everything else feels frivolous in comparison. And that has to be the point somehow - the division isn’t a side effect of a broken system, it’s the governing infrastructure of a functioning one.

What’s being revealed isn’t just crimes. It’s the failure mode of a civilization that can’t reckon with truth without turning it into content, team identity, or spectacle.

•••

I don’t know what’s happening. Not fully. Nobody does. I actually believe that surety is one of the biggest weaknesses one can have in a perception war.

But I can tell you what I see.

The world feels different than it did just five years ago. The term conspiracy theory has gone from a pejorative to a badge of honor. Imagine living through everything we've lived through and thinking the powerful people in the world don't conspire? Or that as citizens it's not our right - or even duty - to theorize about it? Like most people I'm sure I live inside my own bubble, however, I do think the shift is real.

Maybe the friends who went quiet didn't stop talking to me because they didn't like me anymore. Maybe I was just exhausting and they didn't want to hear it. They weren’t wrong. Still, I kept wondering from their perspective. What would it mean if the crazy stuff I’ve been sharing was right? What would the implications be to them and their lives? That burden was too much for many. Well now, some of them are paying attention. The evidence is simply too overwhelming to look away anymore.

I suspect that shift - from fear to curiosity - is the story. Or at least a story. That’s the consciousness change, happening in real time, in people I know.

I can’t tell you where it leads. Are we watching the old world die so something honest can emerge? Or are we watching a controlled demolition that clears the ground for something worse? I go back and forth on this daily. Hourly, sometimes. These may be the most interesting times in human history, and nobody alive knows which one it is.

Shakespeare (who may have just been Bacon and Dee anyway, haha) told us all the world’s a stage four hundred years ago and we treated it like poetry. Every era gets told. The Truman Show and The Matrix. All the HG Wells books and sci-fi movies. We watched them and thought we were being entertained. Nope, we were being conditioned.

•••

Nowadays, I don’t know where most people get their information. I recognize not everyone has the same lunatic tendencies as I do - visiting the weird nooks and crannies of the internet, poring through old texts and primary source materials. I imagine most people are still getting their information from mainstream media. I have to admit, it’s somewhat validating to see the NYT actually did a piece questioning why Epstein mentioned pizza and grape soda so much in his correspondence. But it also gets my spidey sense tingling.

How would we possibly trust Mockingbird media now, after they blatantly lied about this - and everything else - for as long as I can remember? My bet is citizen journalism is our only hope at finding truth. But then you realize some of the mouthpieces presenting themselves as regular people are anything but. It can be exasperating, mistrusting everyone - especially people who seem like the good guys. This is why we need to learn to verify for ourselves, at least as much as we can. The most sophisticated manipulation doesn’t lie to you. It gives you truth through a lens that makes you feel smart for seeing what others miss. Our timelines feel true because they were perfectly crafted just for us.

So when my son mentioned the Epstein files to me, something in his voice told me he wasn’t scared. He was clear. Clearer than the pundits. Clearer than the commentators. Clearer than me, most days. I don’t know whether to be horrified or totally proud.

Maybe that’s the real story.