Lily and I lost 36 paid subscribers this week. Not from naming names in an investigation and not from anything I wrote about the beast system or the people building it. We lost them over two articles about a six year old girl named Martina who spent six months locked inside an ICE detention center illegally. We lost them over what I am about to state plainly right here in the opening paragraph so that nobody gets to claim later that they missed it.

The illegal immigration crisis in the United States was engineered deliberately from start to finish by people getting very rich off of it.

Six months of her one and only childhood spent inside a facility she should never have set foot in. She is not a tragic outlier who slipped through some crack in a system that otherwise works fine. Martina is one of an estimated six thousand children currently sitting in what any honest person would call a prison at a cost running somewhere between two hundred and three hundred dollars per day per person. Do that math slowly and let the number settle on you before you read another line. We are paying hotel rates to warehouse children.

Somehow 36 paid subscribers and Lord only knows how many free ones read two articles about a six year old girl in a cage and decided that Jesus Christ wants kids locked in prison because their parents hopped over a border illegally during a stretch of years when that border was basically wide open. Martina did not hop over anything. She was carried across by adults making a decision she had no say in whatsoever and no capacity to consent to. Half a year of her childhood got taken as payment for it while every person who built this system and profits from it paid absolutely nothing.

Illegal Immigration Was Engineered on Purpose

I want to be very clear about something before anybody accuses me of being naive about how any of this works. Illegal immigration in this country is not a crisis that snuck up on anybody while the adults in the room were distracted and it is not a system that broke down under pressure. The illegal immigration problem was manufactured on purpose and every single piece of it functions exactly the way it was intended to function right down to a six year old girl sleeping under a foil blanket in a facility that bills you three hundred dollars a day for the privilege of keeping her there.

So why? Is it some ‘demoncratic’ conspiracy to break America from the inside? A scheme to manufacture a new voting bloc and ride it back into power? Some nefarious operation to destroy the country using a veritable army of working class poor who are doing nothing more complicated than trying to get a better life for themselves and their kids the same exact way your ancestors did when they showed up here a hundred or two hundred years ago with nothing but a bag and a name nobody could pronounce?

The answer is none of the above and the real one is dumber and uglier than anything on that list.

This is a money making scam, plain and freaking simple.

Republicans and Democrats are both invested in the companies running these detention facilities and they are making an enormous amount of money off housing human chattel inside them. That is not a metaphor I reached for because it sounded dramatic. Bodies go in, a per diem gets billed to the taxpayer and a dividend comes out the other end every quarter like clockwork.

You just have to stop letting Fox News do your thinking for you. That network is owned by the same billionaire class currently making money off ICE detentions. And before anybody on the other side starts nodding along too enthusiastically, CNN is owned by that exact same class of people. We do not play to either party at the Wise Wolf because both parties are complete dogshit at this point and exist for one purpose only. Keeping the average American screaming at his neighbor over petty issues while the people in power rob them blind and point at terrorists or illegal immigrants or poor people on food stamps as the cause of all the problems in America. Those groups all make easy victims and even easier scapegoats.

How The Wise Wolf Solves the Entire Illegal Immigration Problem in 10 Minutes

If the government actually cared about illegal immigration as a problem to be solved rather than a revenue stream to be milked, this thing would have been over years ago. The fix requires no new technology and no new law and not one original idea. You put these people on a bus or a plane and you send them back to their home country inside of a week from the day ICE scoops them up. That is the entire policy and it fits on an index card with room left over.

So give me ten billion dollars. I mean that literally and the arithmetic behind it is not complicated enough to require a think tank, a blue ribbon commission or eighteen months of congressional hearings. Hand me the money and give me thirty days and every single person ICE is currently holding gets sent back to the country of their origin.

The shopping list runs about four lines long. A hundred Greyhound buses and half a dozen air cargo planes leased for twelve months the way any sane operation with an end date would do it. Nobody needs to own a single vehicle here and nobody needs a permanent government fleet sitting in a lot somewhere for the next forty years. A few garages to keep the fleet moving and mechanics working inside those garages. Drivers for the buses and pilots for the planes and a scheduler or two who can read a map and a manifest.

Now understand exactly what that is and what it very much is not. That is not a new federal agency and it is not a permanent workforce and it is not another department that outlives everybody who created it. Every job on that list is temporary work on a temporary operation with an expiration date stamped on it from the first morning. Six months to a year from the date of program inception it would be done and over with (and probably a good deal less than that once the routes are dialed in.) The buses roll, the planes fly, the last name on the last manifest gets home to his own country and the whole thing shuts down. The leases run out and the buses and planes go back to whoever we rented them from. The drivers and the pilots and the mechanics shake hands and go find other work. Thanks for the memories and see everybody in hell or wherever else we all end up.

My plan replaces thousands of permanent federal employees with a few hundred temps holding a six month contract. What we are doing instead is hiring ten thousand officers with pensions and unions and a budget line that grows every single year and every last one of them carrying a deep professional interest in making certain that the problem they were hired to solve never gets solved.

There is no need for detention facilities billing you two to three hundred dollars per person per day month after month after month for the service of keeping human beings inside a box.

The moment ICE put them in a facility that changed completely and permanently. Now you pay for their food and their bed and their guards and their medical care plus the private detention company’s profit margin stacked on top of all of it at two to three hundred dollars a day per person for months on end.

So think about that for one honest minute, all you geniuses complaining about what illegal immigrants cost the American taxpayer. Most of them were covering their own bills right up until the day your government locked them in a cage and mailed the invoice to you.

They get on their feet, they rebuild a life where they came from and they never need to sneak back into the United States five years later out of pure desperation.

The whole thing costs less than what the United States government sent to Israel last month to support their war in Iran and Lebanon. Ten billion dollars, a fleet of buses and planes and thirty days of logistics that any competent shipping company runs before lunch. Nobody stays in a cage and no detention corporation posts another record quarter off human misery.

Why It Will Never Happen

None of that has anything to do with feasibility. It will never happen for one reason only and that reason is that it would not make some guy worth five hundred million dollars any richer.

A solution that genuinely solves the problem is worthless to the people making money off human suffering because government is not in the business of solving problems.

Government is in the business of creating them.

Hegelian dialectics run the whole machine. You manufacture the problem, you stand back while the public works itself into a lather over the problem you manufactured, then you walk out with the solution you had drafted before any of it started and you collect the applause for saving everybody. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel laid this out in the early 1800s and it has been sitting in every public library in America ever since free of charge in a section that most of the people currently lecturing me about Scripture and border policy have never once walked into. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Type those three words into a search bar tonight before you fire off another comment, then hold what you find up against the last ten years of American politics and tell me honestly that you do not recognize the shape of it.

What Actually Scares Me

I still cannot believe we lost 36 paid subscribers because I was critical of ICE. I cannot believe how many people took an article about small children in cages and treated it as an open invitation to spray racist vitriol across my comment section. What I really could not believe was how many of those people were claiming the name of Christ while telling a man who has pastored for twenty years that he is reading Christ’s message wrong. According to them Jesus would absolutely be out there standing against illegal immigration because He is a gun toting, money loving American just like they are.

Every one of those people sounds exactly like my father. I cannot stand being in the same room with my father for more than ten minutes because he is a racist, uneducated, vile, petty, greedy monster of a human being who at one point told me we should be handing out the death penalty to immigrants for the crime of crossing a border. Kids included in that sentence and he meant every syllable of it.

This is the America I always feared was coming. It looks less and less like the nation I grew up in and more and more like Germany in the 1930s. I am scared for where this country goes from here and I can at least understand the people in power being human garbage because that has been par for the course across the entire span of human history. What I cannot process is the average American citizen cheering for children in cages and then reaching for Scripture to justify it. To quote that one astronaut from Apollo 11, ‘Houston, we have a problem.’

Thirty six people cancelled a paid subscription over a six year old girl in a cage. The solution to the thing they claim to be angry about is sitting a few paragraphs above this one costed out and ready to roll. No fleet of buses or cargo planes touches the part of this problem that lives inside people who read about Martina and felt nothing at all.

That is pretty much all I have to say at this point. Thank you for staying to all my loyal readers who stuck around including the ones who do not agree with my stance on ICE. Lily and I really appreciate you being here.

If any of this landed with you, send it to somebody who needs to read it. And if you have been riding along on the free list while we lose paid subscribers for running stories about little kids in cages, a paid subscription is the thing that lets us keep running them anyway.

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Federal law says twenty days is the limit for holding a child. They held her for one hundred and eighty. A federal judge read the file and called it illegal. Understand that twenty days is already an obscenity. No child belongs in a cage for twenty days or twenty hours or twenty minutes.

The only reason she got out is that her story went viral and ICE had to do something to save face. Strangers who will never meet her shared her photograph until the whole country was looking. Somewhere in an office a public relations man did the math and decided she had become more expensive to keep than to release. That is the machinery that freed her. Not the judge and not the statute and not one shred of decency inside the agency holding her. A hashtag did what the law would not. A little girl’s freedom should never depend on whether enough strangers get angry in time. Thousands of other children are still in those buildings and some of them are BABIES and not one of them is going to go viral.

Dozens of my readers said the same thing in their own words. They feel ‘just terrible’ about the child. Then the BUT shows up wearing its Sunday best. The parents chose to break the law so the parents are responsible for whatever happens to their kid. The cage is included in that.

That is the most cowardly sentence a man can type with a cross in his profile.

You want to argue illegal immigration with me? Have that argument somewhere else because it is not the one I am having. I am not saying throw the doors open for every cartel dope dealer who wants to cross the border. Those men are not the ones sitting in ICE lockdowns anyway. Dope money buys lawyers and bribes and visas. The men running the dope game are here LEGALLY more often than not. The people ICE actually catches are working families who wanted something better for their kids.

THEY ARE EXACTLY WHO YOUR ANCESTORS WERE.

Mine came from Italy, Ireland, and Germany on boats with no permission from anybody. The same is true of most of yours. Remember the lady standing in New York City’s harbor and that whole business about give me your tired and your poor?

Your great grandfather sailed right past her with nothing in his pockets and no paperwork in his hand. Now you want to lecture me about the law. Save the speech for somebody who is buying it.

So answer one question for me. What did that little girl do to deserve a prison facility that bills you hundreds of dollars a day to hold her?

She did not choose the country of her birth or the route or the hour of the crossing. She did not choose to be born poor. She did not choose to be born in a dangerous country ruled by criminals. She did not choose the arms that carried her over. She cannot sign a contract or consent to her own medical care or be charged as an adult for any crime in this country.

You have decided a six year old is old enough to serve her parent’s sentence.

Ask yourself whether any of this is really about immigration. Is it about keeping Americans safe or making the country great again, or is it about MONEY? A handful of rich con artists with the right connections in government have worked out how to make a fortune off frightened people. The fear does their marketing for them.

So start with one simple question. Why does an immigration agency need more money than every other federal law enforcement agency in America put together?

It does not need any of it. That money was never meant for enforcement. It goes to private corporations that own the buildings where ICE stores people. Every one of those corporations sells shares on the open market like a department store chain. Their stock exploded the week this administration won. Their executives boast to investors about record demand for beds. Their former employees now run the agency cutting their checks. The politicians drafting the legislation somehow always seem to be holding the stock before the vote comes to the floor.

Now follow it to the end. Deporting somebody is not expensive at all. A bus seat or a plane ticket and a few hundred dollars puts a man back in his own country by dinner. So why does ICE hold families for months at a rate that would embarrass a resort hotel? Where are all these people even going? Ask how many they have actually removed and you will find the number barely moved while the spending went vertical.

Isaiah had a word for the men who write laws like this one. Woe to those who make unjust laws and issue oppressive decrees, to rob the poor of their rights and make widows their prey. That is not my opinion about immigration policy. That is God promising judgment on any legislature that turns children into revenue.

And Christ was even more specific about it. Whoever causes one of these little ones to stumble would be better off with a millstone hung around his neck and drowned in the depth of the sea. He said the man is better off DROWNED. That is His ruling on grown men who harm children and He wrote no exception for the children whose paperwork was wrong.

Matthew 25 is where Christ sorts the room into sheep and goats. Look hard at who the goats actually are. They are the people who decided little kids belong behind bars so rich men can get richer. They are the ones nodding along at home while a politician stands in front of a twenty four hour news camera with a bleached white smile and lies straight down the lens about a nation made safer by a six year old in a cell. Every one of them believes himself righteous. He measured himself against his OWN standard and never once against GOD’S. Not one of them is a villain in his own mind and that is the entire horror of the passage. They stand in front of Christ genuinely shocked to be sorted with the goats.

He is not speaking in metaphor and there is no footnote for immigration policy. When you defend that cage you are defending His cage. When you blame that child’s parents you are blaming His own.

Do not imagine the flag counts for anything in that room. America is not a legal defense and patriotism is not a covering for it. That is not how judgment works and it has NEVER been how judgment works. If you believe Christ hands out a free pass for cheering children into cages you might as well bow to Nimrod and walk your own kids over to Moloch. You are already worshiping the same thing.

The people who handed Germany to the Nazis were not monsters at a podium. They were respectable churchgoing citizens with reasons of their own. They talked about order and law and how regrettable all of it was but necessary. The trains ran beautifully and every last one of them felt like a decent man right up until the accounting arrived. You are one bad decade away from being them and you are practicing in my comment section.

Martina got a photograph and a lucky break. Six thousand other children got nothing at all. They are still in there learning what a locked door sounds like and learning to fear men in uniforms. The invoice for that education arrives every month with your name printed on it.

You are going to stand in front of God with those prison receipts in your hands. Every damn one of them itemized. I hope you remember exactly what you typed under a story about a first grader. I hope you say it out loud to His face and watch what happens.

Independent journalism does not come with a per diem rate. It comes with a laptop and an editor named Lily who spends her summer supervising a cabin full of nine year olds and still reads my copy at midnight. A paid subscription buys records requests and coffee and the nerve required to open my comment section twice in the same week. It also moves me closer to the newsvan I keep threatening to buy and then immediately ruin with bumper stickers.

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Sources: Every figure in this piece is public. Check them yourself.

ICE budget and scale. ICE ran under $6 billion a year a decade ago and now holds roughly $85 billion, which the Brennan Center’s Lauren-Brooke Eisen says exceeds the annual budget of all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. The 2026 request for the entire Justice Department, FBI included, was a little over $35 billion. NPR, January 21, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/21/nx-s1-5674887/ice-budget-funding-congress-trump

The $170 billion and the 100,000 bed target. Reconciliation funding for immigration enforcement, including $45 billion for detention expansion and the reopening of Dilley. Brennan Center for Justice. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/private-prison-companies-enormous-windfall-who-stands-gain-ice-expands

Private prison stock after the election. GEO Group closed up more than 37 percent and CoreCivic more than 28 percent, both at five year highs, on the first trading day after the presidential race was called. Stocktwits. https://stocktwits.com/news-articles/markets/equity/geo-cxw-stocks-surge-on-trump-detention-policies/cJ4Tb1eR9C

Profits and the earnings calls. CoreCivic’s 2025 profit rose almost 70 percent to $116.5 million. GEO Group booked $2.63 billion in revenue and its executive chairman called it the most successful year for new business in company history. Investors on the calls pressed the companies over ICE not detaining as many people as they had projected. The Appeal, February 18, 2026. https://theappeal.org/ice-geo-group-corecivic-profits/

The revolving door. ICE acting director David Venturella is a former GEO Group executive who told lawmakers he has divested his GEO stock. NPR, August 8, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/08/08/nx-s1-5923881/geo-group-corecivic-immigration-detention

The Dilley contract. A mistakenly released contract addendum obtained by the Houston Chronicle put the facility at about $15.6 million a month, including a $13.1 million base rate to CoreCivic paid regardless of how many people are held there, running through March 2030. RAICES. https://raicestexas.org/news/dilley-cost-houston-chronicle

Cost of supervision versus detention. ICE’s own page lists Alternatives to Detention at under $4.20 per participant per day and states the program increases court appearance rates. Family detention at Dilley has been reported at roughly $296 per person per day. https://www.ice.gov/features/atd

Removals. TRAC’s review of ICE’s own dashboards found total reported removals across FY2025 and FY2026 running about 7 percent above the last full year under the Biden administration. ICE’s dashboard reports higher figures for FY2026 and the two accountings differ. TRAC, Syracuse University. https://tracreports.org/reports/767/

Detained population and criminal history. Roughly three quarters of people in ICE custody have no criminal conviction, and about 5 percent have a violent conviction. TRAC immigration quick facts. https://tracreports.org/immigration/quickfacts/

Children in custody. More than 6,200 children have been held in ICE custody in this administration, with a daily average around 170 and peaks above 400. About 25 children aged three or younger are in custody on an average day. The Marshall Project. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2026/04/06/ice-kids-detention-over-6200-trump https://www.ms.now/news/trump-ice-detention-dilley-kids-immigration

Conditions at Dilley. More than 5,600 people including infants and toddlers were held at the facility between April 2025 and February 2026. Human Rights First and RAICES. https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/library/a-new-era-of-ice-family-prisons

This morning a man on Substack with a cross in his profile picture told me that a little girl locked in an immigration detention center got exactly what she deserved...

He called her a ‘filthy illegal’ and then he went on with his day feeling like a good Christian.

Federal agents took her and her family into custody about six months ago and sent them to a detention facility.

She turned six years old in a federal detention center.

After tens of thousands of complaints from concerned citizens, they finally let her out this week. She is just one of thousands of kids currently locked up in ICE facilities.

Think for a minute about what that birthday looked like for her. She woke up under a fluorescent tube that somebody else switches on and off. Nobody brought a cake into that room and nobody sang to her. She ate what a private contractor served chosen from a list of meals that were determined by an algorithm to be ‘cost-effective’ in order to ‘maximize shareholder revenue metrics’. She went to sleep listening to other people’s children cry through a wall about a quarter inch thick.

The government is careful never to use the word ‘prison’ for these places. Prison is the comparison that flatters them. A man doing twenty years for armed robbery has a release date on a calendar and a law library down the hall and a lawyer the state is required to pay for him.

And a man with a flag and a Bible verse in his profile watched all of it happen and decided the correct Christian response was applause.

He told me it is not his responsibility to take care of other people. Then he quoted First Timothy 5 at me to prove it. ‘If any provide not for his own and specially for those of his own house he hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel.’

That is the verse he brought to a conversation about a jailed kindergartener…

This guy has never actually ‘read’ scripture. He picked that verse up off a forum or some Rumble video and never once sat with what it means. Somebody handed it to him as the thing you say whenever a person questions ICE putting kids in cages and he parrots it back on command like his masters trained him to.

That verse is about your mother. It is about the widowed grandmother asleep in the back bedroom and the brother with Down syndrome who is never going to live on his own and the father who cannot manage his own stairs anymore.

Paul wrote it to shame grown children who dumped their aging parents on the church and went back to their comfortable lives.

Go read the whole chapter sometime instead of the one line that fits on a graphic. Paul is explaining to Timothy how to run a relief fund for widows who had outlived their husbands and had nobody left to feed them. He tells families to cover their own widows so the money can reach the women with no family at all. The verse is there to get more people fed and not fewer. That man picked up a rebuke aimed at neglect and somehow heard permission to neglect.

The Texas Tribune pulled the government’s own numbers last week. Sixty children held at Dilley for a hundred days or more against a twenty day limit the government agreed to in court. Three thousand kids through that place in a year and over half held past the line.

ABC News got the 911 tapes. Staff calling ambulances for a seventeen month old who could not breathe and a six year old burning up with fever and a twenty two month old losing oxygen.

Then a thirteen year old girl tried to kill herself in there after they withheld her antidepressants and refused to let her see her mother. Her discharge paperwork says suicide attempt by cutting of wrist. DHS told the judge those kids are housed in conditions that are safe and sanitary and appropriate.

Somebody in that courtroom is lying and it isn’t those kids.

That is the country that man was applauding.

Now I know some of you are already itching to scroll down to the comment section and dump some scripture you think justifies the United States government locking kids in cages like animals. So let me save you the trouble and go through what the book actually says.

God settled the stranger question a long time ago. Leviticus 19 says the stranger living in your land shall be unto you as one born among you and you shall love him as yourself. There is no exception written in there for paperwork. Deuteronomy 10 says God Himself loves the stranger and feeds him and clothes him and then orders His people to go do the same thing.

He went further than that and commanded sanctuary. Israel was ordered to build cities of refuge for people running for their lives. Deuteronomy 23 says you do not hand an escaped servant back to his master and that he lives wherever in your land he chooses. That is God legislating on this exact question and He came down on the opposite side from you.

Then comes Matthew 25 and the part that should be keeping people awake. Jesus divides everybody the way a shepherd divides sheep from goats. The first group inherits the kingdom off one list. I was hungry and you fed me. I was a stranger and you took me in. The second group goes into everlasting fire off that same list read backward. I was a stranger and you took me not in. Whatever you failed to do for the least of these you failed to do for Him. A six year old in a detention center is the least of these.

So go ahead and cite Acts 17 about God setting the bounds of nations. Read the sentence before it where Paul says God made every nation of one blood, said out loud to knock the superiority out of people exactly like you. Bring up Nehemiah and his wall. That wall went around a city where foreigners lived under the protection of the law. Tell me heaven has a gate. Revelation 21 says the gates of that city are never shut.

And before you type any of it, remember that Jesus was a refugee child carried over a border at night while a king murdered every little boy he could reach. Egypt took Him in.

Somebody is already typing at me about Romans 13 and how we are supposed to obey the governing authorities. Paul wrote that letter and Paul spent years in Roman jails for refusing to shut his mouth and that same government put him to death in the end. Peter stood in front of the authorities in Acts 5 and told them we ought to obey God rather than men. The midwives in Exodus lied straight to Pharaoh’s face to save babies and scripture says God dealt well with them for it. When the state orders you to do something God forbids you obey God.

None of these people got any of this out of scripture. They got it from ten straight years of propaganda television news owned by billionaires and from memes built by intelligence agency assets who do not care whether they live or die. They absorbed a mood and started calling it a faith.

I am not a Democrat and I am not a liberal. I am a Christian and that means I help people who need help. It does not matter where they came from or what their paperwork says or whether helping them polls well in my county. Faith is not a political position and it does not shift with the news cycle. God said what He said and none of it is up for negotiation.

Jesus had almost nothing gentle to say about people who harm children. He said that whoever offends one of these little ones would be better off with a millstone hung around his neck and dropped into the depths of the sea.

He chose that image on purpose.

So when you get online and cheer because a six year old spent half a year in federal custody you are not defending the faith. You are telling the whole world which side of that judgment you belong on. Christian nationalism built a Jesus who checks immigration status at the door and the real one would weep at the sight of it.

Go read Matthew 25 tonight before you post another thing. Then go find somebody in your own town who needs a meal or a ride or a phone call and be the person Christ described in it. That is the entire assignment and it always has been.

If you made it through an article where I quoted six books of the Bible at you and never once tried to sell you a prayer cloth or a commemorative coin then consider a paid subscription.

The Wise Wolf is not a media empire. It is one guy who walked away from a steady paycheck to write things that get him yelled at by strangers with crosses in their profile pictures. Lily finished her journalism degree this year and is working at a summer camp because that is what the job market does to a talented young reporter. She would like a master’s without a mountain of student loans on top of it. I would like a news van so I can cover stories from where they happen instead of from a room with questionable carpet. Neither of those runs on exposure and good vibes.

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I am closing this one out with a song. Bad Religion released American Jesus in 1993 and I wore that record out as a teenager in the early 2000s. The whole thing is about a manufactured Christ who blesses the bombs and the border and the balance sheet. It is a Jesus built to make a country feel righteous about the exact things the real one stood against two thousand years ago. They were singing about all of this over thirty years ago and almost nobody listened. Consider this a fair warning before you click on it. This is fast nineties punk rock with loud guitars and a singer who does not slow down for anybody. If that is not your kind of noise then skip the listen and take the point with you anyway.

CNN published an article on their website this week telling you that watching your wife having sex with some random black guy half your age is going to be good for your marriage. That’s not me exaggerating. That’s what they’re selling. They call it cuckolding and they say it can be positive for some couples.

Yeah… If your goal is divorce maybe.

In the real world when you start letting your wife have sex with every muscular, good looking guy that slides into her DMs you aren’t going to have a wife much longer. You’re going to have an ex wife and a child support payment and a revolving door of other men she met on Tinder raising your kids.

She’s staring with wide eyes at the black man next to her. All but ignoring her own husband. The guy she swore to honor and obey. ‘Til death do us part and all that.

Everybody in that photo knows what’s going on. Everybody that sees the photo knows what is going on.

And CNN put a caption under it saying that acting on adulterous fantasies might make your marriage stronger.

The study they’re leaning on is a joke. They found 580 GAY MEN. That’s the whole sample. Five hundred and eighty men who read Dan Savage’s sex advice column. You know the kind of people who read that column. People who spend their time thinking about weird kinks and writing erotic fiction about it.

Nobody who represents you or your family or anybody you know. And CNN turned that into a headline about couples as if they’d studied real marriages and found out that sharing your wife is good for you.

And look at that photo they picked. The white guy is out of shape. He looks beaten down. The woman next to him is pretty and she won’t look at him. The black guy is fit and he’s looking right at her. They picked that photo on purpose. Every part of it sends a message. The white man is supposed to be humiliated. And you’re supposed to be fine with it. You’re supposed to think it’s normal. Maybe even healthy.

Christians used to understand sex. It’s not a hobby. It’s not something you do for fun like bowling. It’s how families get made. It’s what holds a marriage together. It’s how a people keeps itself alive in body and in soul. The Christian teaching on sex is the Western teaching on sex and it’s the only one that ever built anything worth keeping.

Sex belongs in marriage. Marriage is one man and one woman. And staying faithful isn’t a burden. It’s a wall. Walls keep the bad stuff out. Walls keep the good stuff in. A home without walls isn’t a home. It’s a parking lot. It’s a sewage treatment facility. It’s a garbage dump.

The extreme left has spent the last fifty years knocking that wall down. No fault divorce. Birth control as a right. Abortion called healthcare. Porn called harmless fun. Every time they told you it was freedom. Every time it left more broken homes and more lonely men and more women who think being unhappy means something is wrong with marriage instead of something being wrong with what they’ve been taught to want.

That a man who watches another man take his wife isn’t a victim. He’s just got ‘old fashioned’ expectations. That his disgust is the problem. That his jealousy is weakness. That wanting your wife to yourself means you’re insecure instead of it being the most normal thing in the world for a man who knows what belongs to him.

Who wins from any of this? Not couples. The study can’t say anything about couples because there were no couples in it. No women but women are being told by the article that being unhappy in a normal marriage means normal marriage is broken instead of being told that a culture of constant stimulation has trained them to never be satisfied with anything. And definitely not kids. You notice how these articles never mention children? They can’t. The second you ask what happens to a kid growing up in a house where dad watches mom sleep with other men the whole thing falls apart. So they never ask.

That’s what they mean when they say the personal is political. Your bedroom isn’t yours. Your marriage isn’t yours. Even your disgust isn’t yours. It’s all territory to be taken over and handed back to you as a product. The man who would have once defended his home with his fists now gets handed a survey and told his answers will help science.

The guy behind this study is a sex therapist. That’s his credential. He’s not a scientist. He’s not a doctor. He’s a GAY man whose whole job depends on telling you that being unhappy with your sex life is a medical problem instead of a moral problem. Sex therapy exists to make what our grandparents called sin seem normal. The whole field is built on the idea that every desire is fine and the only question is how to satisfy it. Of course a sex therapist wrote an article praising cuckolding. It’s his job.

They’ll say they were just reporting on a study. That’s a lie. The study had no couples. No straight people. Nothing that supports that headline. If they were just reporting they would have said a survey of gay men who read Dan Savage found that some of them like cuckolding fantasies. That’s the truth. It’s also boring. And it wouldn’t have gotten the attention this article was built to get. So they didn’t write the truth. They wrote a lie and stuck a picture on it to make the lie feel real.

The Christian answer is simple. It’s the same answer it’s always been. Marriage is sacred. Faithfulness is not optional. Jealousy is not a sickness. It’s the normal reaction of a man who knows what’s his is being taken. And anybody who tells you different whether he’s wearing a lab coat or a byline or sitting on a therapist’s couch is not your friend. He’s not neutral. He’s not scientific. He’s a salesman. And what he’s selling is your own humiliation dressed up as freedom priced at everything your ancestors built.

Don’t buy it. And don’t sit there watching while other men do.

Wise Wolf Disclaimer: I need to clear up two things that keep coming up. Lily is not my wife or my girlfriend. She is my editor. She is half my age and we are not romantically involved and it makes both of us uncomfortable when readers assume we are just because we work together. Stop it. It creeps us both out.

Second: She has stopped using real photos of herself in articles after one of our readers decided it was appropriate to send AI edited nude photos of her along with pictures of his penis recently.

So now you get bobblehead Lily because you can’t turn a bobblehead into nude photos with AI like some sort of stalker weirdo. (And for the record that guy was reported and his account got banned.)

A lot of you keep asking how to support The Wise Wolf outside of Substack so I spent three weeks building 3D models and found a supplier who can turn them into actual BOBBLEHEADS. One Wise Wolf and one Lily sold separately at about fifty dollars each so they can nod along in agreement while you read about the surveillance state. Tell us in the comments if you would buy one before I commit to a pallet of tiny nodding Lilys on nothing but a hunch. If fifty bucks is not in the budget then share this article instead because it costs you nothing and Lily wants to see one of her pieces hit a thousand restacks before the summer ends.

Restacks and shares she says and not likes since a like is a warm gesture that puts the story in front of exactly nobody.

(The restack button is below. It looks like the two circular arrows. Click that.)

And if you can swing it think about upgrading to paid because I want Lily full time in October and I would like to pay her more than a summer camp pays her to count canoes. You readers have changed our lives and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

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A friend sent me a post yesterday from a Charlotte local events page and I almost threw my phone. Some guy in a South Carolina town walked straight up to a whole row of Flock cameras with cans of expanding foam and sealed the lenses shut. The cops immediately jumped online begging for tips like someone just robbed a bank.

This is happening more and more and the local coverage is always the exact same softer-than-baby-shit garbage.

Then read it a again and something went cold in my chest because the department had written a sentence that no honest Flock salesman on this earth can explain and I do not think a single person in that comms office noticed it going out the door.

Follow the logic on this because it only has three steps and it takes about nine seconds.

Flock Safety swears to your city council with its hand on the Bible that these cameras do not do facial recognition and cannot identify a human being. The department said its camera was trying to ID the people who walked up to it. There was no car in that story and no plate to read. Just men on foot in the dark with hardware store foam.

There is exactly one way a camera identifies a man on foot with no vehicle attached to him and that is by looking at his face.

Not spinning and not overstating and not being imprecise in a brochure. Lying. And the department that let the truth slip out at midnight on a Facebook post has been repeating that same lie at council meetings for two years. Flock is sitting on six billion dollars and that one denial is the only thing holding it up. The second the mainstream press works out that these things watch PEOPLE instead of PLATES Flock ends up in front of the Senate explaining why it let cops spy on people without a damn warrant, and the company ends up out of business. That is exactly why you will never hear this covered on mainstream news.

And I did not get there off one Facebook post. I got there watching these people say one thing in a press release and something else entirely out loud when they think the room is friendly, over and over, for years. That is not an accident of any kind and it never was. It is the business model.

I know which one I believe and I did not get there off one Facebook post. I got there watching these people say one thing in a press release and something else out loud when they think the room is friendly. That is not an accident of any kind and it never was. It is the business model.

These cameras are bullshit.

They Said It Twice

Two weeks before the foam down in Dougherty County Georgia somebody shot two Flock cameras and blew a third apart. The authorities explained that the shooters fired from a distance that made it impossible to identify them from the surveillance video.

Nobody on God’s green earth says a shot was too far unless a closer one would have worked and if these cameras truly only read plates then the honest answer is there was no car so we have nothing. Instead a police agency stood out there explaining the working limits of its facial identification like a man apologizing for a lousy vacation photo. Sorry folks. Lighting was bad and the subject was moving and the fella was just too far out to get a clean read on him. Which is a heck of a thing to say about equipment that reportedly cannot see a human face any better than my dog can read a mortgage.

Two agencies in two states two weeks apart and both of them called this equipment a machine that identifies human beings. Neither one was lying and that is exactly why it matters. Nobody trips into a lie sitting relaxed at a keyboard typing a routine call for tips. They trip into the truth right up until some communications director hands them a card with the approved language on it.

What They Are Actually Selling

Flock quit being a license plate company years ago and the product that proves it is a camera called Condor. It sits on a pole running off the sun and it swivels and tilts and zooms and decides when to do all three on its own because its whole job is to grab a human being and follow that person around while it pipes live video to the police. Nobody has to be watching any of it because the thing hunts entirely by itself.

I will be fair to that man for exactly one sentence. He has a mortgage and somebody handed him talking points and told him to go say them. Then I remember he was lying to a reporter about a machine that was at that moment scanning a woman without her permission and my sympathy runs out around the second syllable.

Then there is FreeForm which lets a cop type a plain English description of a person and go fishing through every feed on the network until it spits that person out. The example search on Flock’s own sales page is a man in a blue shirt and cowboy hat. Flock swears this is not facial recognition and the weasel they built to say it with a straight face is the whole con folded into one sentence. FreeForm finds people ‘by their clothes and their accessories and the way they move’. Not ‘biometrics’ they tell you. Just observable characteristics any old fella on the corner could notice.

Your Face And Your Pulse

Condor zooms in on faces automatically and when sixty of these units turned up last December squirting video onto the open internet with no password the picture was clean enough to read the screen of a phone in somebody’s hand.

That resolution number matters more than the zooming does. Researchers have been pulling a human pulse out of ordinary video for over a decade and the technique has a name and a literature behind it. Remote photoplethysmography reads the tiny color shifts running across your skin as blood moves through the capillaries and hands you a heart rate off thirty seconds of clean footage. Breathing falls out of the same video from the rise and fall of a chest. None of it needs special equipment. It needs a decent lens pointed at a person for a few seconds which is precisely what Flock engineered and bolted to a pole at the end of your street.

Not one soul at that company has ever explained what they are doing with the faces.

That silence is the thing that pisses me off more than the cameras themselves. A company sitting on a clean answer hangs it on the front page in bold type and buys ads about it and Flock has had two years and a public relations budget the size of a small country and has never once managed to.

It Is A Setting And Not A Miracle

Turning on face matching across a network like this is not a construction job. Nobody climbs a pole and nobody orders parts and not one physical thing happens in your town. It is a software change made by a guy at a desk and it takes about as long as changing a setting on your phone.

When researchers cracked one of these units open they found a five megapixel camera and a little computer built on the same chip family as your smartphone. They found a weatherproof phone with a solar panel strapped to a pole and aimed at your street. The camera already takes the picture and Flock’s computers already run artificial intelligence on it because that is how the thing reads your plate in the first place. Every piece required to recognize your face is already in place and running and aimed at you. The only missing ingredient is different software looking at pictures the system already has.

So when Flock says its cameras CANNOT identify people they are describing a checkbox and calling it a law of physics. That denial has all the structural integrity of a wet paper sack and they are betting the whole six billion on you being too busy to poke it. Nobody outside that building can check either. No independent inspector has ever tested the software and no outside engineer gets within a mile of the code. What you get instead is a webpage. Six billion dollars of hardware watching a hundred million Americans and the entire audit trail is a marketing page somebody’s intern updates on Tuesdays.

Your movements for the last twelve months can be reconstructed by a bored deputy on a slow Tuesday who thinks your wife is pretty.

They killed it on paper and then somebody worked out you can do the same thing to a whole country at once as long as you do it to everybody and call it public safety. Men died at Concord so a government would have to knock and show paper before it walked through your life and we handed it away for a vendor demo and a promise about stolen Hondas.

The Machine Gets Built By Somebody

Every time I hear a preacher describe the system at the end of the Bible he is describing a mark and a number and a moment of decision like the whole apparatus shows up one Tuesday morning fully assembled and glowing, delivered by angels with a clipboard. That is not how the text reads at all.

Revelation 13 describes a condition where no man can buy or sell without it and what that passage quietly assumes is infrastructure.

Total identification that is universal and continuous and impossible to opt out of and wired into ordinary movement so completely that stepping outside it means stepping outside the ability to eat. A system like that requires a machine that knows who every person is and everywhere they go and it knows it all the time.

Somebody manufactures the sensors and writes the software and sells the contracts and somebody sits in a folding chair on a Tuesday night and votes yes on the invoice while the room is half empty.

I do not think the men building this understand what they are building. I think they go to work and believe they are selling a crime tool and most of them would be genuinely hurt if you said otherwise at a dinner party. It does not matter what they believe. A thing does not have to be understood by its builders to be what it is and a nation that can locate any citizen at any hour of any day without ever once asking a judge for permission is not a free country having a rough patch.

It is a holding pattern with better marketing.

They Are Also Watching You Complain About It

While all of that was happening journalists at 404 Media filed records requests and pulled a stack of law enforcement intelligence bulletins out of fusion centers. That is the office where local and state and federal agencies pool information and push it nationwide. Many of them carry a Law Enforcement Sensitive stamp and every single one is about Americans posting on social media. A bulletin from the Colorado Information Analysis Center names a specific Instagram account by handle and describes the man behind it posting daily videos and notes with what can only be described as concern that the comments show support for him. Another flags a man who posted that he used to install these cameras for a living and IDs him by username like he committed a crime by having worked there. Will Freeman built the public map of these cameras back in 2024 and told 404 Media his project has never once called for damaging anything and the fusion centers folded him in with the vandals anyway. One of those documents was nothing more than a summary of a news article about Flock circulated to a mailing list of FBI headquarters employees.

You cannot arrest an American for posting a video or going to a city council meeting. Not yet. But you can make sure the officer who pulls him over three months from now has already read his name in a threat bulletin. State security offices pooling intelligence across every level of government to write files on private citizens over political opinions they expressed in public used to be the thing we pointed at East Germany and called the defining crime of a police state. Now it is a Tuesday. It is routine American paperwork pushed out by mailing list with a citizen’s Instagram handle typed into the body. The men writing it go home at five and think of themselves as the good guys. They are clipping coverage of the people who cover them. If you are reading this article so are they.

Nobody Voted For This

They are lying to you in shifts. Flock does its lying in the glossy literature and the departments read that literature at the podium and then describe something else entirely the second nobody is coaching them which is how we got the four words that started all this. And the councils holding the pen got warned by their own neighbors on the record and signed anyway because a salesman with a slideshow about missing children beats a taxpayer with an inconvenient question every single time. It is not close and it never has been.

So find out how many are up in your town and pull that contract because it is a public record and they are required by law to hand it over. Go to the meeting and make them answer in front of their neighbors. Ask whether your department runs Condor units and whether it uses FreeForm and who went digging through your town’s data in the last twelve months and what they were looking for. Ask every bit of it in writing so their answer has to exist in writing too.

They are betting you will not. Six billion dollars rides on the assumption that you will never read the contract and never show up and never ask the question out loud with your own name on it.

If this was worth your time consider a paid subscription because The Wise Wolf runs on a business model best described as “optimism”.

Lily finished her journalism degree and spends her summer riding herd on children at a camp which has taught her more about crowd control than any newsroom ever could. And every time you share one of these a wolf gets one step closer to filing records requests from somewhere that isn’t alongside a highway.

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I’m forty two. I’ve been diagnosed with things my whole life. Bipolar depression. A light touch of autism. Treatment resistant depression, which is medical for ‘we tried everything, sorry,’ which is also medical for ‘if we cured you, your insurance company would stop paying us.’ About seven years ago paranoid schizophrenia showed up and made the rest of the list look like a warmup act.

None of it registered when I was a kid. I couldn’t look people in the eye. I ran in circles in the backyard until I physically collapsed, which might seem like an expression of the unbridled joy of childhood but in my case was just me trying to burn off the meds. Grown ups called it ‘shy.’ Grown ups called it ‘a phase.’ Grown ups in general were extremely committed to not calling it what it was.

I thought I was normal. Every kid does. It just took me longer than most to find out I wasn’t.

Teenage me got put on roughly a dozen different meds for the depression. None of them worked. What they did do was make me want to smoke an absolutely heroic amount of weed. So I did. Two hours a day, every day, for ten straight years. Don’t try this.

I have to explain the spiders. One of my best friends growing up was a guitar playing computer genius. Sharp as ten tacks. The kind of guy you figured would end up running a tech company or becoming a rock star. In his mid twenties that guy vanished and a different one showed up wearing his face. He told me spiders lived inside his brain and were eating their way out through his eye sockets. Not a metaphor or a bad trip. He believed it the way you believe the sun comes up.

He killed himself about seven years ago. That was right around when I was starting to accept I might be the same kind of sick he was. Heavy emphasis on the paranoid part. I think about that timing more than I’d like to.

My job takes me to genuinely dark places. Satanic cultism. Technocratic fascism. Conspiracies that run straight through foreign intelligence agencies. Not the kind of thing you can wave off as message board nonsense. I’ve gotten calls in the middle of the night from unlisted burner numbers. Voices with Russian or Chinese accents. They tell me I have a big mouth. They tell me bad things happen to good people. These aren’t random. This is a concerted effort to scare me.

It worked well enough that I spent a year building a deadman switch. It runs across a dozen offshore servers watched over by a custom AI overseer I built myself. If I stop checking in it releases roughly a decade of evidence. Some I dug up myself. Some got mailed to me out of nowhere by hackers I’ve never met. One of them once sent me a data dump they claimed came from John McAfee’s Pentagon hack. The one where he mailed laptops out with backdoors already built in. The one that is probably the real reason a billionaire ‘committed suicide’. I have no idea if the file’s real but the person that sent it to me is a well-known whitehat hacker that claimed it’s legit and it’s part of THEIR deadman switch system. I’ve never dug through it and I don’t want that data anywhere near my actual computer. It just sits in the deadman switch with everything else in case I ever vanish for an extended period of time. There’s other footage in there I won’t even try to describe here (Frazzledrip maybe? [Don’t Google that]). A mountain of other material I’m honestly too scared to even open.

The job grinds on me. Lately I haven’t slept much. When I’m low on sleep my mind starts playing weird tricks on me. The kind I have to talk myself out of very carefully or I end up doing something stupid. Eight years ago that talking myself out of it thing failed completely. My paranoia had convinced me the apocalypse was about two days out. The constant barrage of that thought finally broke me down. I called an Uber. Rode out to a mountain. Climbed a tree to wait for the end of the world to start. Full Realtree camo. A week of freeze dried food. Zero intention of coming down until it was over.

That’s why I’m writing this today instead of something about technocratic fascist cults trying to take over the world.

Last night I fell asleep with headphones listening to Alexander Scourby read the Book of Revelation straight into my skull. Great voice. Absolutely deranged bedtime story. I stayed asleep long enough for my brain to stop filing it as narration and start filing it as breaking news. I woke up panicked, completely convinced someone was coming to kill me. At that exact moment a truck pulled into the motel lot and swept its red custom running lights across my face through the open curtains. I did not keep my cool. I went into full on schizo self-preservation mode convinced that whomever was behind the wheel of that truck was here to murder me.

Within minutes I was outside. Unchaining my ebike. Strapping on the bugout bag backpack I keep for exactly this occasion. Three hours before sunrise. My phone had been playing Revelation into my headphones all night. It was dead as a doornail. That mattered more than you’d think. My ebike needs a phone connection to run its own headlight. No phone. No light. I was riding into the apocalypse completely blind. I swung onto a bike path I never take. My sleep deprived brain decided I’d better mix it up in case the bad guys caught up to me.

I laughed about it after. The cold water did that. Fifteen years ago this was a hobby. Now it’s a job. I’d bet money that if I’d never gone anywhere near this line of work I would not currently be a man who flips his bike into a creek because he’s convinced a truck is full of demons. That’s what staring into the abyss for a living does to you. Jung said gaze into the abyss long enough and the abyss starts gazing back. He never mentioned it also chases you into a trout stream at three in the morning.

You’re allowed to laugh too... but remember what I write about isn’t tinfoil hat conspiracy lunacy dressed up to sound scary. Everything Lily and I publish is backed by scripture. Backed by science. Backed by named reporters. Backed by hundreds of hours of research and verification and fact checking every single month.

I don’t usually get into my personal life. Back when I still did in person reporting I got stabbed, shot at, nearly kidnapped twice, drugged in a bar and robbed of every piece of equipment and every dollar I had on me, then left in a dumpster ten miles outside Flagstaff, Arizona. Try that resume line at a job fair and watch the recruiters back away slowly. That’s not a metaphor for how hard journalism is. That is my actual life.

So when I say I’m paranoid, know that a good chunk of it got field tested and came back true. Reality isn’t supposed to do that to a man who already has schizophrenia. It’s cheating, honestly. That’s also the actual reason I live in a motel I rarely leave. Not a bit. Not a schtick. I’m paranoid but not because I’m schizophrenic. If I had never gotten into this line of work, my mental health would not be this precarious.

If you know somebody carrying a mental illness, go hug them. A real one. Most people treat us like we’re performing. Or exaggerating. Or like we just need to relax more. We’re not. We don’t. It’s heavy. It’s lonely. It’s real. Most of us are doing our best to carry it without dropping it on the people we love.

I’d love to tell you I could just go get a regular job. Clock in somewhere, collect a steady check, write this stuff as a hobby on weekends. Truth is a paranoid schizophrenic man with treatment resistant depression is not a great candidate for a nine to five. Neither is a body that’s been stabbed twice and thrown down a staircase by his own medication. Neither is a brain that occasionally schedules unscheduled apocalypses at 3 a.m. This newsletter isn’t a side project. It’s the only shape of work my health has left me. I’m stubbornly grateful it exists.

Paid subscriptions are what keep Lily and me doing this full time. Chasing documents and sources and the occasional truck with suspiciously demonic headlights. Can’t upgrade right now? Sharing this costs nothing and helps just as much. You might be carrying something like what I just described. Know this. You’re not faking it. You’re not weak. You’re not alone in it.

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Liked this? Cool, but the heart button does nothing for the algorithm. See those circle arrows above and below? That’s RESTACK. Hit it and this actually lands in front of new eyeballs instead of dying quietly in your notifications tab.

It doesn’t need a camera. It doesn’t need you to say a word out loud. It just needs a signal that’s probably already bouncing off your ribcage as you read this sentence because that signal has been in the room with you the whole time. You just call it Wi-Fi.

That’s not a metaphor and it’s not a pitch for a sci-fi show nobody greenlit. Researchers have already proven it. Not “theoretically possible in a lab somewhere.” Proven and published and in one case already sitting in more than two and a half million American living rooms.

This one is scary.

Your Router Was Already Doing This

Forget every fancy sensor for a second and think about the plain WiFi box you already own. Every signal it sends carries something called Channel State Information. CSI for the acronym-inclined. It’s just the raw physical data describing how the radio wave’s strength and timing shift as it crosses your living room. Your body is mostly water and water bends radio waves. So every time you walk between your router and your phone the signal warps a little on its way through you and that warp gets recorded whether you agreed to it or not.

A team at Carnegie Mellon took that idea somewhere genuinely unnerving. They set up nothing but ordinary TP-Link home routers. The same $30 boxes sold at any electronics store. Arranged as transmitters and receivers on either side of a room. Then they fed the WiFi disruptions into a neural network called DensePose. Meta originally trained that same AI model on camera photos to map every inch of a human body’s surface.

And this is the part that should actually bother you. WPA3 is the encryption your router brags about right there on the box and it does absolutely nothing to stop this. Encryption locks down the data riding on top of the signal. It does nothing to the physical shape of the radio wave itself and your body already bent that wave before encryption ever entered the picture. Somebody in the apartment next door or parked outside on the street doesn’t need your WiFi password for any of this. They just need a receiver and a few hours of patience.

Comcast Already Shipped It

None of this stayed in a university lab either. Since 2020 Comcast’s Xfinity brand has been quietly turning ordinary home routers into motion sensors through a feature called WiFi Motion. It’s built by a company called Cognitive Systems and needs exactly zero new hardware. Pick a few WiFi-connected devices you already own. A smart TV. A game console. A printer. The system watches how your existing internet signal bounces between them. Movement warps the pattern and the app sends you a push notification. Xfinity says it can tell a wandering dog from an actual person which is honestly more attentive than most security guards manage at 3 a.m.

The part buried deeper in the terms of service is who else gets to see that data. Xfinity’s own policy states plainly that this motion information can be shared with law enforcement or other third parties in connection with a legal dispute or a subpoena with no additional notice required. So the same company that can’t reliably get your bill right now keeps a standing log of when you’re home and how much you move around your own living room. As of the last public count that feature was already active on more than 2.5 million routers and climbing.

This was never going to stay one telecom’s side project either. In September of 2025 the IEEE finalized 802.11bf. That’s the official industry standard that teaches ordinary WiFi hardware how to do this kind of sensing properly. By 2026 chipmakers stopped treating it as a novelty. Qualcomm is building it straight into WiFi 7 chips. Huawei already has a commercial version called AirSensing running in office buildings. What started as one company’s weird side feature is quickly becoming a checkbox every router on the planet will eventually ship with standard out of the box whether you asked for it or not.

The Thing Watching You Sleep

That’s what your ordinary internet plumbing can already do more or less by accident. Now picture what happens when someone builds a sensor for this on purpose.

Back around 2014 Google’s advanced projects division shrank radar down to a chip the size of a fingernail and called it Soli. Precise enough to track individual finger twitches at 60 GHz. Google turned it into a party trick in the Pixel 4. Wave your hand and skip a song. It flopped so hard the company quietly buried the whole feature within a year.

Except the chip didn’t die. It moved into your bedroom. The second generation Nest Hub sits on nightstands everywhere right now and runs that exact same 60 GHz radar to track your sleep stages and your breathing and your movement THROUGH THE BLANKET. No camera. No wearable required. It syncs to Google’s servers every single morning while you’re still asleep and have zero say in the matter. Google will tell you this is more private than a camera. Technically true. There’s no photo of your face. But sit with what a radar map of your unconscious body actually hands over that a photo never could. Your breathing pattern at 2 a.m. Whether you tossed all night during a brutal week at work. What your resting heart rate is quietly saying about your stress levels behind your back. That’s more than most of us admit to an actual therapist.

Twenty Two Dollars and No Clearance Required

Walk into a lot of newer hotel rooms and look near the ceiling. That little plastic disc that isn’t a smoke detector is radar too and this branch of the family tree traces straight back to the military. Decades ago the Army built the real version of that heartbeat sensor from every shooter game you’ve ever played under a program actually named Sense Through the Wall. Point a device shaped like a temperature gun at a closed door and a blob appears on screen. There’s a person. That’s their heartbeat straight through drywall or brick and a calm 60 beats a minute reads very differently than a spiking 140 does. 140 usually means somebody’s crouched behind that door holding a weapon and hoping you don’t come through it. DARPA later built a version for Special Forces code-named Jetson that allegedly picks one specific person’s heartbeat out of a crowd from 650 feet away because your cardiac rhythm is apparently as unique as a fingerprint. You can change your face. You can change how you walk. You cannot change your heartbeat.

That was the classified decades-of-R&D need-a-clearance-to-see-the-spec-sheet version. None of it stayed that expensive. The hobbyist version of this same radar tech now runs about 22 dollars retail if you shop around and needs no license and no clearance.

This Is Where AI Stops Being a Side Character

That’s the thread running under all of it. WiFi and radar both. A blob of disrupted signal is just a blob. What turns that blob into “this is a specific person, this is their mood, this is their identity” is machine learning. Full stop. And that’s the part accelerating faster than any of the hardware around it.

Just a few months ago researchers published the first public dataset built to train AI systems to recognize human emotion off nothing but radar. Volunteers watched film clips picked to trigger specific feelings while a model learned to read their state off tiny chest vibrations, breathing rate, and posture shifts too small for a human eye to catch. No camera. No face. Just an AI reading a mood off a ribcage like a physics-flavored mood ring. Except this one sees through your shirt and your drywall at the same time. Not a feature Spencer’s ever got around to advertising.

A system called RD Gait can already tell exactly which person walked into a room based purely on the rhythm of their footsteps. It’s been trained and tested across more than a hundred people ranging from small children to retirees. Turns out your walk is a fingerprint too. Stack that on top of the DensePose-from-WiFi work above and here’s the actual endgame. Not “something moved in the living room.” Something closer to that’s you specifically. Your heart rate just spiked. Your walk changed the second you saw the notification. None of that needs a camera. All it needs is exactly the thing every tech company on Earth is racing to build faster and cheaper right now. An AI system smart enough to make sense of noise nobody else could read.

Nobody’s Doing This to You Yet (Probably)

I have to be straight with you here because that’s the whole deal I signed up for. The presence and motion piece is already real and already commercial. Comcast just proved that. What’s not confirmed is the next level up. Some rogue AI agent reaching into your specific router right now to read your specific heartbeat or your specific mood. I’m not going to tell you that’s happening because I don’t actually know that and pretending otherwise would make me exactly the kind of grifter this newsletter exists to expose.

What I can tell you is that the pipes for the next level already exist. They already ship. They get cheaper every quarter.

That’s a purchase order with a shipping date stamped on it. The gap between “technically possible” and “happening to you specifically” is exactly the neighborhood bad actors like to move into quietly because nobody’s watching that neighborhood and nobody needs to break your door down to get in. The sensor’s already inside your house. It came pre-installed.

The Mountain That Gave the Game Away

Still sounds like a stretch? Consider what happened on April 3. An F-15 went down over southern Iran. The weapons officer ejected and crawled into a crack in a mountain and spent the next 48 hours down there with a handgun while his rescue beacon got eaten by the terrain. Search and rescue couldn’t get a clean fix.

Ghost Murmur allegedly uses quantum magnetometry. That means sensors built on microscopic defects inside synthetic diamonds. Sensitive enough to catch the electromagnetic pulse a human heart throws off with every beat. Then AI strips out the Earth’s own magnetic field until all that’s left is one man’s pulse glowing on a screen from 40 miles away. He got found. He came home. CIA Director John Ratcliffe stood at a White House podium afterward and credited “exquisite technologies that no other intelligence service in the world possesses.”

Physicists lined up almost instantly to call foul. Fair enough. Earth’s magnetic field is roughly a million times stronger than a heartbeat’s own signal. Finding one pulse through solid rock from 40 miles out sounds like something a screenwriter invented after three energy drinks. Maybe it’s theater. Maybe the real method is even stranger and still classified six ways from Sunday. Nobody outside a clearance office actually knows for certain and neither do I.

What we do know for certain is that every rung of the technology underneath that rescue is real and published and sitting in a store or a router near you right now. You don’t have to believe the CIA can hear a heartbeat from 40 miles out to lose sleep over what the WiFi signal already bouncing around your own living room can do tonight.

Turn Off the Puck That’s Reading Your Pulse

You cannot Faraday cage your way out of modern life and anyone selling you a 400 dollar anti-radar phone case is selling you a rock with extra marketing. You’re not helpless though. Let’s fix what’s actually fixable.

Start with your own router. Log into the admin panel and check for a “motion detection” or “presence sensing” feature. If you’re on Xfinity specifically open the app and look for WiFi Motion by name. It’s supposed to be opt-in but plenty of users report finding it already switched on so check rather than assume. If you own a second generation Nest Hub or something similar dig into its settings and turn off Sleep Sensing specifically. It lives on its own separate toggle that most owners never discover. Unplug smart displays and voice assistants from any room where you actually want privacy. The bedroom especially. Don’t assume a black screen means the thing stopped listening.

Next time you check into a hotel look for a small disc near the ceiling that isn’t a smoke detector or a sprinkler head. If it bugs you just ask the front desk whether the room has occupancy sensors and what they log. Front desk staff generally know and most will tell you straight provided you ask like a normal human being and not somebody who thinks the ceiling tiles report directly to a shadow government (even if in this one specific case they kind of might).

Push the state level angle too because the federal one just closed. The sensing standard already shipped so the real fight now is over who’s allowed to use it and what they can do with what it sees. Illinois has one of the strongest biometric privacy laws on the books. It’s called BIPA and it’s already been used to successfully sue companies harvesting biometric data without consent. Those laws were written with fingerprints and faceprints in mind and not radar or WiFi signatures. But courts are starting to treat a unique cardiac rhythm or a unique gait the exact same way. That fight is happening in courtrooms right now and it’s one of the only real brakes on any of this.

If this piece rewired how you look at the blinking box in your own bedroom that’s the whole job done. But here’s the part where I ask for something back. Sharing this article costs you nothing and it’s honestly the single biggest favor you can do us. Every new free reader is a shot at a future paid one and every paid one is what actually keeps this operation running. Lily is currently spending her summer wrangling other people’s children at a camp instead of doing investigative journalism full time. That’s a criminal misuse of a journalism degree if I’ve ever seen one. My actual goal isn’t the cute aspirational one. It’s simple. Get The Wise Wolf to a place where I can hire her on for real this fall and pay her what she’s actually worth instead of what a Substack side hustle can currently scrape together. If you can go paid that’s the fastest way there. If you can’t right now share this with one person who still thinks their smart speaker is just a speaker. Either one moves us closer and either one means Lily gets to trade a summer camp lanyard for an actual paycheck.

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Okay, before we get into the “goat demon” robot with the chainsaw we need some background first. I’ve been tracking a trend for the last five years where Silicon Valley and other tech types keep naming robots and other high-tech devices after demons, fallen angels, you name it. At first I figured it was just edgy marketing. But after digging into these dozen or so CITY SIZE AI data centers being planned that all just happen to be named after DEMONS and PAGAN GODS I’ve reached a conclusion.

When Elon Musk said at an MIT event back in 2014 that “with AI we are summoning the demon” he wasn’t just being cute. He was laughing at the rest of us powerless to do a damn thing while the richest people on the planet literally summon demons from Hell and stuff them into robot bodies because that’s clearly going to work out great for everybody.

Idiots.

With that said let’s get into some background before we hit the rest of the article. This one took me a week to write so I hope it isn’t absolutely terrible. Lily didn’t have time to help edit this round so I ran it through Grammarly which means if the prose reads a little too “academic” (aka horrible) in spots now you know why.

Back in October of 2024 the city of Toulouse in France threw itself a big three day street festival. Giant mechanical robots the size of a house paraded through downtown while families lined the sidewalks with kids up on their shoulders. Sounds charming, right? Bring the whole family to the Gates of Hell!

The festival was called La Porte des Ténèbres. (That translates to The Gate of Darkness.) The star of the show was a five story tall half woman, half scorpion, bare-breasted monster named Lilith. (The child-eating demoness from Jewish folklore.) The city’s own printed program calls her Lilith and describes her as the one who “controls the passage between our world and that of the underworld.” This wasn’t just a case of using an interesting sounding name for their star attraction. This was purposeful. This was deliberate. There is no whitewashing their intent.

It explains she was freed by Hades and now wanders from city to city harvesting damned souls while she works on prying open a doorway to the ‘other side’. (An event celebrating a child-eating whore demon trying to rip into Hell and free her friends. Kids watched this.) Her supporting cast was a Minotaur (Moloch?) and a giant demonic spider. The poster showed burning churches and walking skeletons.

Now I don’t know about you, but when I’m planning a fun weekend for children my first call is usually not to the baby stealing demon of ancient folklore. Call me old fashioned.

It gets worse. On opening night, in Act I Scene 1 the show presented what the program calls three ‘prodigious signs“.

Those signs were Satan’s cross, Lucifer’s Sigil, and the sign of the beast.

I am not interpreting hidden symbolism here. They PRINTED it. There is a line item in the Toulouse city budget, somewhere between road repair and library books, that paid for the Sigil of Lucifer, and some clerk stamped that invoice and went to lunch.

The Archbishop of Toulouse was apparently the only adult left in France. He took one look at what was scheduled for his streets and consecrated the whole city to the Sacred Heart of Jesus to protect it from what he called ‘dark threats’.

The French Protestant Federation publicly backed him, and if you know French church politics you know Protestants siding with a Catholic archbishop is basically a miracle worthy of its own feast day. His reward was getting written up as a superstitious old man who was scared of puppets.

Because okay, those were, technically-speaking, puppets. (Extremely advanced puppets on par with something out of a Hollywood special effects studio but, again, technically puppets.

A Pentagon-Contracted Robotics Firm Named their Flagship Robot Soldier After the Titan Who Warred Against Heaven

In April of 2024 Boston Dynamics released the reveal video for their new flagship humanoid robot and to understand why this matters you need to know who Boston Dynamics actually is. This is not some cuddly gadget company. They cut their teeth building war machines for the Pentagon. BigDog, the robotic pack mule, was built for DARPA. The LS3 squad support robot, built for DARPA. The Atlas program itself was born out of DARPA, which for the uninitiated is the military’s black ops technology agency. The same shop behind some of the most dangerous weapons technology America has ever produced. So a combat robotics company raised on black budget weapons money built a humanoid machine and then they had to give it a name.

Think about that. Atlas led the Titans in open war against the throne of heaven, lost, and got sentenced to eternal punishment for it. Out of every name in every language on earth, the Pentagon’s favorite robot builders reached for the being who raised an army against God.

Nimrod ran this exact play at Babel and got his tower scattered to the winds. The difference is that this time nobody is waiting around for ten foot Nephilim in battle armor. This time the army is going to be robots.

And the reveal video backs up every word of that. They could have shown Atlas walking out into the light or shaking somebody’s hand. Instead it opens with Atlas laying flat on the floor like a corpse at a crime scene. Its legs bend BACKWARD over its own torso in a direction legs do not go, it hoists itself off the mat in reverse, and the head rotates a full 180 degrees to stare into the camera while the body still faces the other way. Then the body twists around to catch up with its own skull and the machine walks straight at the lens.

The entire tech press compared it to a high-tech version of the iconic head-spinning, demonic possession scene from The Exorcist (because there was no other honest comparison) and a YouTube commenter under the official video asked the only question that mattered - “Are they purposely designing pure terror?”

Now onto the start of the show! The chainsaw-wielding, black goat monstrosity that was unveiled last week.

The Black Goat of Auburn, California

One of my researchers fired a picture into my inbox this week with no warning, and I’m man enough to admit I flinched. A company nobody had ever heard of, called Satyress, out of Auburn California, went viral with a machine called Threehalves. It’s the picture at the top of this article. Stop reading for a second and actually look at it. Let it look back at you.

Every inch of it is jet black and I don’t mean sleek Apple product black. I mean the flat lightless black of the shape standing at the foot of your bed at 3am black. And up top, where every other robotics company bolts a boring sensor box, these people lovingly sculpted the head of a black goat with horns.

And the photos are a crime scene of intent. In the company’s own promotional shots this thing stands in a forest clearing next to a pickup truck gripping a full size chainsaw. Another shot has it staring through a glass office door from the dark side of the glass like the world’s worst job applicant. Rescue robots get photographed carrying stretchers. This thing got a horror movie cinematographer.

The company says it’s for search and rescue in wildfires and collapsed buildings, and I’ll be fair for exactly one paragraph, because the four legged part is real engineering. Quadrupeds don’t tip over on rubble. NASA built a centaur shaped robot years ago and Europe built one for disaster response and both of those had boxes for heads. Cameras in boxes. Because a box is what the job requires and nobody ever screamed at them.

Which means the goat head is the message. No wildfire requires horns and no collapsed building requires a robot that looked like it stepped straight out of the gates of cybernetic Hell. A human being opened a CAD program and sculpted a black goat’s skull vertex by vertex. Another human approved it and a third paid the invoice. And in case anyone was tempted to call it an accident they named the company SATYRESS after the goat people of pagan myth. Nimrod’s son Tammuz was sometimes described as appearing like a human-goat hybrid with black fur. Gee, I wonder if it was a happy coincidence that this company made the mecha-satan version of the Tyrant King of Babylon’s kid? (Get it? Kid. Because baby goats are called kids. I think? I don’t know. I didn’t actually Google it to verify it. Sue me. Wait — don’t. I can’t afford an attorney.)

Eliphas Levi drew his famous Sabbatic Goat in 1856, the Baphomet, and it has been the master logo of occultism ever since. The Devil card in the tarot deck. The statue the Satanic Temple hauls up courthouse steps. The head Hollywood nails to the wall when a movie needs you to understand BAD PLACE in three seconds. It is the single most recognizable devil image in Western civilization and these guys welded it onto a machine and handed it a chainsaw.

The public clocked it in four seconds because regular people are not stupid. The top reply under one of the biggest news accounts on X was “They lost me with the baphomet head.”

Now here’s the part that took me from annoyed to opening a case file. Nobody knows who these actually people are.

I couldn’t find who actually owns the company, who designed it, who approved the design. There are a few bits and pieces here but they’re just placeholder names. The most thorough industry writeup on Satyress flat out admits the company materialized from nowhere and almost nothing is published about its founders. No names on the website, no interviews, no funding announcements, nothing. I crawled through California’s indexed corporate filings myself and found zilch. Federal trademarks came back the same. So whoever built the goat either filed paperwork too fresh to surface or filed under a different name or incorporated in one of those states where officer names go to disappear.

Understand how unnatural that is. Robotics founders are the most shamelessly self-promoting creatures God ever breathed life into and not because they’re vain. It’s because they’re broke! A machine like this costs a fortune and the whole startup playbook is one sentence long. Founder gets famous, fame raises money, money builds robot. Going viral is winning the lottery, and when your number comes up you leap onto every podcast in America shouting your name with the wire instructions stapled to your forehead. Satyress won the lottery this week with the whole planet watching and they said nothing. Showed nobody. Vanished behind the goat.

Oh, and they want you to know the thing is ‘safe’. They published a whole document about it. There are pressure tanks on its chest you can shoot or stab to lock the machine in place. It supposedly can’t turn around in a narrow hallway. And the horns, and I am reading this straight off their own materials, are ‘deliberately sized so the robot can’t fit through your front door’. The demon horns are the childproofing!

That is copout PR and it insults your intelligence. You can armor the tanks in a Tuesday afternoon with a welder. The robot can turn the head sideways and walk through the doorway, a maneuver mastered by every moving day couch in history. Not one syllable of that document constrains anybody who owns the machine and doesn’t feel like being constrained. It’s a pressure relief valve alright… just not for air. It’s for public opinion. It exists so a lazy reporter can type “but don’t worry it has failsafes” instead of asking why a rescue robot looks like the thing rescue workers pray against.

And remember the commenter begging Boston Dynamics to publish the battery locations? Satyress actually did it. The one company that hands out a map of where to shoot their robot is the one that built it to look like something you’d have to.

Nobody Names a Robot Steve

After the goat I sat down and went through the industry’s christening book, and I need company in here, because it’s ugly.

Boston Dynamics named their labor robot Atlas, the Titan who warred on heaven. Apptronik, backed by Google money, named their humanoid Apollo the pagan god. A European firm sells a humanoid named TALOS, and if you don’t know Talos, let me ruin your evening. Talos was the bronze giant of Greek myth who circled Crete crushing intruders to death. He was the first robot Western man ever imagined, and our ancestors imagined him as a weapon. Amazon just rolled out a warehouse robot named Vulcan, the forge god. MIT built one called Hermes. Europe’s disaster centaur was Centauro and the university goat man was Satyrr. And the AI data centers going up across America keep getting named after demons and fallen angels, a pattern I spent the last year documenting in these pages receipt by receipt. The archive is open. Go look.

The men of Babel built their tower to make a name for themselves. These men build theirs while scrubbing every name they’ve got, then christen the machines with the names of the very ‘gods’ that built the thing. Same tower, same demonic spirits.

Your gut already handed you the sane reaction three paragraphs ago. What the literal hell are these tech bros building? The beautiful part is you don’t need a preacher’s word for the answer, because the industry answered it over a decade ago.

This is satanic technology. I’ve been saying it for years, and the answer always came back the same. Show me the hard evidence. Fair enough, evidence is the job. So here’s the file. A taxpayer funded Lucifer ritual in a major Western city. A flagship robot named for the Titan who warred on heaven and introduced with possession choreography. A synthetic man the public christened after a demon. A machine that IS the textbook devil of Western art, built by ghosts, running on money with no fingerprints, posed with a chainsaw. A christening book with nothing in it but gods, monsters, and the fallen. And the industry’s most famous man on video telling you in one sentence what all of it is.

Well there it is folks. The hard evidence. Babylon is rising and this time it’s bringing robots.

The bishop grabbed the holy water and I’d quit laughing at him if I were you.

Somewhere out in the California woods, money with no name on it is funding goat demons. Over here, a man is funding this newsletter out of a banking app that crashes every time I open it. The Wise Wolf runs on one funding source and that source is you. Every paid subscription keeps these investigations coming, helps Lily recover from a summer spent herding camp children for pay I can only describe as ‘theoretical’ and nudges me one tank of gas closer to the newsvan. Which will be registered under my real name like a normal person not a tech bro building satan robots.

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The Wolf is off today. So you are stuck with me. He is out at a storage unit digging through a mountain of boxes trying to figure out what he can sell to finally get himself into a real apartment. Anything is better than another highwayside motel with a broken ice machine and a parking lot full of ‘interesting’ characters.

In 2024 a team at the University of Queensland published a study on 151 healthy adults between the ages of 65 and 85. Everyone did 72 supervised exercise sessions over six months. Three groups. Easy effort, medium effort, and short hard bursts with rest in between.

Only the hard-burst group improved. Their memory scores went up. Their brain scans showed they had skipped the shrinkage that usually shows up in those years.

Then the researchers waited five years and tested them again. The improvement was still there. Some of those people had quit exercising and their brains had kept the gains anyway.

The researchers learned that just six months of that training is enough to flick the switch.

Nobody ever said anything like that to my grandparents. I wish they had…

What I watched happen

My grandma started forgetting names in her early seventies. Little things. She called me by my mom’s name and we all laughed. That is what families do.

By 78 she was asking the same question four times in one afternoon. She quit cooking after she left a burner on twice. She quit driving after she got lost on a road she had driven for forty years. That was when we knew something major was going on.

My grandpa went the other direction. He got quiet. He had been the loudest man in every room he ever entered. Then one Christmas he just sat there and watched us like we were a show he was not really following.

They both made it into their late 80s. Neither of them was really ‘in there’ by the end of it all.

Losing them was hard. Watching them get lost first was far harder. You end up grieving somebody who is still holding your hand. That is the sort of pain that you can’t really handle because you know there had to have been SOMETHING you could have done.

The word every doctor used

‘Irreversible.’

We heard it from a family doctor and then from a neurologist and then from somebody at the memory clinic. They called it age-related cognitive decline and then Alzheimer’s and then vascular dementia. The names moved around but the message never did.

Nothing we can do. This is what happens. Keep her comfortable.

I was 19 the first time I heard it. I remember feeling something that was not sadness. It was closer to suspicion.

Because that answer is too tidy. Bodies do not work like that. Cut your skin and it closes. Break a bone and it knits. Your liver will literally grow back. Every organ you own has some kind of repair crew on call.

And we are supposed to believe the brain is the one part that just runs out of road?

I did not buy it. So I started reading.

The modern world is killing us

I went looking for a scandal. I work for the Wise Wolf. Conspiracy has basically become my factory setting because of him.

What I found was stranger than just a scandal. The information is sitting in plain sight. It is in Lancet and PNAS and Neurology. It just never makes it into a twelve minute appointment because the doctors make more money treating you than they do telling you how to prevent the disease you are paying them to treat.

In 2024 the Lancet Commission on dementia concluded that around 45 percent of all dementia cases worldwide are potentially preventable. They pinned it to just FOURTEEN MODIFIABLE risk factors.

Physical inactivity is on that list. So are obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking, social isolation, and depression. All of these are lifestyle choices. Preventable factors.

We drive everywhere. My grandparents lived somewhere you physically could not walk to buy milk. No sidewalk. Just a five lane road and a grocery store a mile and a half off. Every errand was a car errand.

We eat things that were manufactured poison. Wolf calls it ‘goyslop’ which is funny considering HIS grama was Jewish and he eats the same sort of goyslop garbage he is always complaining to me about. I understand why though. We are struggling just to make enough money to survive in America now. We don’t have the luxury to make healthy meals all the time. In fact, my grandmother’s freezer was a museum of processed food boxes.

Another big issue is we sit way too much. We spend half of our waking ours on our butt now. Before I took this summer camp job, I was on mine 12+ hours per day between college and my work for the Wolf. I put on 10lbs in the last year at college because I didn’t have time to exercise anymore. My grandfather spent his last decade in a recliner with the television on from breakfast until bed.

None of that is a character flaw. It is just the water we swim in. It is how this country got built after 1950 and almost nobody chose it on purpose.

Why Americans are going blank in their old age but Japanese and Italians aren’t

Researchers at Rush University built something called the MIND diet. It is basically the Mediterranean pattern with the brain stuff cranked to overdrive.

They tracked 960 older adults for almost five years. The people who followed it closest declined at a rate equal to being seven and a half years younger than the people who followed it least.

That is seven and a half years of brain aging bought back with groceries.

Now think about what a Japanese grandmother eats in a week. She has fish most days along with rice and vegetables and green tea and she walks to the market because that is how the neighborhood is built. Think about a grandfather in southern Italy with his olive oil and sardines and tomatoes and a long walk to the square because the square is where his friends are.

Those aren’t magic cultures. Those are cultures where the brain protective stuff is baked into ordinary life instead of being something you have to schedule.

We took all of it out and replaced it with a car and a drive-thru. Then we called the result ‘aging’.

What actually goes wrong up there

Four things drive most of it. Every one of them can be pushed on.

Inflammation builds up and damages neurons. Myelin thins out, which is the insulation around your nerve fibers, so signals slow down and misfire. BDNF drops. That one is basically fertilizer for your neurons. And blood flow to the brain decreases, so the regions that need oxygen get less of it.

None of those are verdicts. They are processes and processes respond to what you do.

So this is what I put together to help our readers avoid what happened to my grandparents.

Do intervals instead of a steady walk

This is the big one and it is not close.

The technical name is high intensity interval training, or HIIT, which sounds like something for 25 year olds in a CrossFit gym. It is not. The Queensland volunteers were between 65 and 85 and they did it under supervision in an ordinary gym.

The shape of it never changes. Twenty to thirty seconds of effort hard enough that you could not hold a conversation. Then sixty to ninety seconds of easy movement or flat-out rest. Repeat that six to eight times. Do it two or three days a week.

What nobody ever explains is what the hard part should actually be. So pick one of these and stop overthinking it.

A stationary bike is the safest place to start. Pedal easy for two minutes to warm up. Then pedal as hard as you can manage for thirty seconds and coast for ninety. Eight rounds puts you out the door in about fifteen minutes.

A treadmill does the same job using incline instead of speed. Walk at your normal pace, then raise the incline for thirty seconds until your breathing gets heavy. Drop it back down and walk easy for ninety.

A hill or a staircase covers you if you own no equipment at all. Walk up fast enough that talking gets difficult. Come back down slowly. That is one round.

Chair stands work if standing up is already the hard part. Stand up from a sturdy chair and sit back down as many times as you can in thirty seconds, then rest for ninety. You get the same hard-and-easy pattern plus the leg strength you are going to want later.

Even the gentle version does something. A study out of the University of Pittsburgh put 120 older adults on a plain walking program for a year and their hippocampus grew about 2 percent. That is one to two years off the clock from walking.

If you have a heart condition or you have been on the couch for a while talk to your doctor before you go find a staircase. Get cleared first and then go.

Guard your deep sleep

Your brain has a plumbing system called the glymphatic system. It runs during deep sleep and it flushes waste out of your brain tissue. That includes beta-amyloid, the protein that piles up in Alzheimer’s.

Researchers at the NIH scanned 20 healthy adults after a normal night and again after a night with no sleep. Beta-amyloid went up about five percent in the hippocampus and thalamus after one sleepless night.

That is what a single bad night does to the cleanup crew.

Seven to eight hours. Same bedtime and same wake time every day including Saturday. No alcohol within three hours of bed because it wrecks the deep stage specifically. Stop eating two to three hours before you lie down.

Eat the fat your brain is built from

Your brain is roughly 60 percent fat and DHA is the main structural fat in it. It gets built directly into your neurons.

The Framingham study measured omega-3 levels in 1,575 dementia-free adults averaging 67 years old and scanned their brains. The people with the lowest levels had smaller brain volume. It worked out to about two extra years of brain aging.

Fatty fish two or three times a week gets you there. Salmon or sardines or mackerel or herring all work. If fish makes you gag, a good fish oil does the same job.

Trade one cup for matcha

If you have never heard of matcha, it is green tea in powder form. Regular green tea comes as leaves you steep in hot water and then throw away. Matcha is those same leaves stone-ground into a bright green powder that you whisk right into the water and drink. You are swallowing the whole leaf instead of the water it soaked in, so you get far more of the good compounds out of one cup.

A trial published in 2024 gave 99 Japanese adults aged 60 to 85 two grams of matcha a day for a full year. Double blind and placebo controlled so it was the real deal.

It is not going to do what exercise does. I am putting it here because it takes thirty seconds and you were going to drink something in the morning anyway. Matcha gives you L-theanine and EGCG together, and that is a combination coffee cannot offer.

Use water around 175 degrees instead of boiling because boiling water makes it bitter. A teaspoon of powder into a mug. Whisk it hard for fifteen seconds or it just sits there in a clump at the bottom. A cheap milk frother works as well as the fancy bamboo whisk.

Take a cold shower

This is the easiest thing on the entire list. You are already in the shower. When you are done washing, turn the hot water off for thirty seconds. That is it.

Cold sends norepinephrine way up and norepinephrine runs your focus and attention. Dopamine climbs too and stays up for hours afterward. It costs you nothing and it takes half a minute.

Thirty to sixty seconds is plenty. You do not need an ice bath and you do not need to buy anything.

One serious warning before you try it. Skip this entirely if you have any heart trouble or blood pressure issues. The shock of cold water hitting you is hard on your cardiovascular system and it can trigger a heart attack in somebody with an existing condition. Ask your doctor first. If the answer is no, you still have four other things on this list and the first two matter more anyway.

Pick two

Two of them and not all five.

I mean it. The way people fail at this is not laziness. It is enthusiasm. You read a list like this and overhaul your entire life on a Monday and quit by Sunday.

Pick sleep and movement. Those two carry more weight than the other three put together. Run them for a month before you add anything.

I have the Wolf doing all of it for the record. Two years of eighty hour weeks left him describing his own head as a ‘wet paper bag full of stupid’. He complained about the cold showers for a solid week but he is still doing them. His grandparents went the way mine did and now he is watching his parents start down the same road and he has decided he is not going to be sitting in that chair 25 years from now.

So if you are in your 40s or 50s and you have read this far figuring none of it really applies to you yet, you are wrong about that. It applies right now and the earlier you start the more of your brain you get to keep. Do not wait around for a scare to make you take it seriously.

One more thing

I am not going to pretend a matcha habit would have saved my grandmother. Some of this is genetics. Some of it is plain hard luck. I am not selling anybody a miracle.

But 45 percent is not nothing. And the distance between ‘irreversible’ and ‘45 percent preventable’ is the distance between sitting down and getting up.

You are not too old. Those Queensland volunteers were 85 and their brains still answered the bell. Yours is waiting on a signal from you and it does not care what the date on your license says.

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. Second Timothy 1:7.

Go take a walk and move fast if you can manage it.

I am a reporter and not a doctor. If you are on blood thinners or managing heart disease or dealing with anything chronic, run every bit of this past your physician before you change a thing. Especially the intensity and the cold.

The Wise Wolf runs on readers. We take no ads and no sponsors and there is nobody upstream telling us what we can look into. If this was worth your time, a paid subscription keeps the lights on and keeps me digging.

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Not poetically. Not ‘I need someone to call the psych unit for me’ kinda way. Nobody needs to do anything about it. I mean it in the boringly specific way, the sitting-on-the-edge-of-a-motel-bed-and-want-to-die sorta way, where the depression just walks in without knocking and starts going through the bathroom medicine cabinet like it pays rent here.

And the reason is yesterday I spent three dollars on an energy drink at the Dollar General. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Somewhere in a boardroom there is a marketing team that put a rocket ship on a purple can because they knew some idiot like me would see it and my brain looked at it and decided that this can might contain the ‘elixir of life’.

Let me explain the situation because my depressed ramblings are probably sounding like the musings of a man near the edge of sanity (because I am a man at the edge of sanity currently) and I don’t have insurance so the only available treatment is writing and waiting for this crap to wear off.

(My prose is probably terrible today but Lily is busy doing summer camp counselor stuff so this article is just getting published as is. I might not even proofread it because I feel so dang awful right now.)

Yesterday morning I was fine. Not ‘fine.’ Fine. I slept, I had a plan, the plan being to get down to my storage unit and go through it, since I moved out of one rundown motel two days ago and across the highway into a different rundown motel, which is a lateral move except this one has AC that works. Which at this point in my life I’ll take any small win I can get.

There’s a motorcycle title in that unit. Old bike, not worth much, worth enough. Enough to get me into an actual apartment. I want to sell it and get somewhere warm before winter because winter up north doesn’t just visit - it moves in and refuses to leave. I miss Key West. I was happy there. I was also BROKE there because Key West is one of the most expensive towns in the country. Beautiful place. Charges you WAY too much to be there.

So I’m riding my ebike down to my storage unit and I swing by the Dollar General because there are chickens in that parking lot. I don’t know who they belong to. Nobody seems to know who they belong to. There’s four or five of them and they hang around by the propane cage looking for feed and I check on them because I really like chickens (I say this as I am eating microwave chickie nuggets for lunch BUT in my defense they are super tasty).

Anyhoo… Grown man going out of his way to check on parking lot chickens.

But they’re the only friends I got.

They weren’t out. Empty lot. Oh well. They’ll be back eventually.

Went in anyway, mostly out of boredom. And there in the cooler is an energy drink I’ve never seen before. New one. Real pretty can. And I don’t drink energy drinks, that’s not a moral position or whatever, I just don’t, I’m not a guy who buys beverages named after pro-wrestling moves. But I had about three hours ahead of me in a storage unit that gets to 120 by noon, and the can is sitting right there telling me it’s exactly what I need.

So. One can. What harm could THAT do?

For about an hour I was SUPERMAN, and I have to tell you the good part or none of the rest of this makes any sense. It was great. I went through that unit like a man getting paid by the box. Found the title. Found a whole box of my grandfather’s tools I forgot I even still had, all rusted, one of them I still don’t know what it does. Some kind of... clamp? I’m standing in a hot storage unit holding a piece of paper thinking okay. Okay. Maybe this one works out.

That was the hour. I never got the other two.

I got the door down, rode back, took some Advil for the post-crash headache, and then I just sat there.

And my brain said, you’d be better off dead.

Where does that even... where does that come from?

I’m gonna try to explain this and I’ll prolly do it badly. People who don’t have this thing think depression is regular sadness with the volume turned up. It’s not. Sadness has a reason. You can walk it back to whatever caused it and that walking back is sort of comforting all by itself because a thing that started can also stop.

This is not that. This is CLINICAL DEPRESSION. This is your own head handing you a sentence you did not write, would never write, would never say out loud to another living person, and handing it over totally casual. It’s a chemical imbalance that I am very careful not to mess with (one of the many reasons I quit drinking was that it triggered my depression). I’ve been doing really well avoiding triggers and my efforts paid off with being able to turn this Substack from nothing into one of the most-widely read, wastes of time on the entire platform. I’d never have been able to do that if I had not learned how to control my depression without the battery of medications that psych doctors have been shoving down my throat since I was a teenager.

I was having suicidal thoughts. I felt like CRYING for no reason. I haven’t cried in decades and here I was feeling like I was the 12 year old kid that had just watched his dog get hit by a car all over again! I knew this wasn’t just some random event. This was something else. Something chemical.

So I tried to nap. Cold room, good pillow, couldn’t sleep, could only lie there running the hits, and if you’ve got this thing you already know the track listing, how alone I am, how nothing works out, how I’m still doing 80 hours a week to stay exactly where I’ve been standing for seven years, like a treadmill? Or I dunno…. Yeah, Like a treadmill. You’re moving forward but you aren’t really ‘going anywhere’. (But HEY at least you are moving, right?)

Picture a grown man flat on his back on a motel bed in the middle of the afternoon with the AC running and nowhere in the world he has to be. That’s the picture. He is not going anywhere and he knows it.

That went on a while.

And then a different thought showed up, a better one. Wait. Why am I feeling like this. Because I should be FINE. That morning I was fine. Nothing happened. No bad news, no fight, nothing in the mail, no anniversary of anything. The math didn’t work, and I’ve done this job long enough to know that when the math doesn’t work you stop feeling and start looking.

There’s a psych journal out of the UK called Public Health and what these people did was go pull 57 separate studies on energy drinks and young people and dump them all in one pile to see what was in there. What they found were a litany of mental health issues associated with energy drink consumption. Depressive symptoms. Panic and anxiety behaviors. Increased suicide risk.

And there’s the kind of study where they follow the same people for years instead of grabbing one snapshot. A journal called Depression and Anxiety. They followed almost 900 people in Australia from age twenty to age twenty-two and the energy drink use tracked right alongside depression, anxiety and stress in the young men. Two years. Same people. Same results.

But here’s the one that got me. They looked at caffeine and suicide risk across something like a million and a half people and the coffee drinkers came out with LOWER risk. Which means it isn’t the caffeine. It’s the rest of what’s in there. Taurine, sugar, and the half dozen other chemicals that they shove into these drinks that you need to run a Google search just to know what they actually are in there to do and it ALL hitting at once.

I’ve had depression for a long time. The treatment resistant kind, the chemical kind, the kind where the pharmacy is just a list of things that didn’t work and the list keeps getting longer and nobody ever takes anything off it. And the worst part isn’t the bad days - it’s the good ones because I can go weeks feeling fine. Months. Working, writing, riding around, being a guy. Long enough that some idiot in the back of my head goes hey, maybe that’s over? Maybe I aged out.

Then it hits.

And usually there’s no reason at all, which is the part I have never once been able to explain to somebody who loves me and wants to help because they’ll ask what happened, and they mean it, and the answer is nothing. Nothing happened. That’s what makes it a disease and not a mood. My nervous system is a smoke detector that goes off when a guy two apartments down thinks about toast.

And if I go quiet a few days now you know why. This article was so hard to write and I know it’s not very good. I just cannot think clearly enough to write up to my normal standard right now. I’m in a motel room across the highway from the last motel room with the AC going, waiting on my own blood to clean out whatever chemicals that drink put into my body that triggered the worst episode of depression I have had in nearly a decade.

Seven years I’ve been one bad month out from having nowhere to sleep but thanks to Substack and readers like you, I’ve got a door that locks, a bike that runs, and a title to a motorcycle that’s going to turn into a train ticket somewhere the snow is something you only see in Christmas movies.

If you are suffering from clinical depression, in the US you can call or text 988 and get help. It’s free and it’s not a big dramatic thing, it’s a phone call, and part of the reason I’m around to write this is that I’ve made a few of them.

If this made you laugh somewhere you probably shouldn’t have, think about a paid subscription. The Wise Wolf is one guy with a bike, one recent journalism graduate currently teaching children to canoe, and an operating budget that would embarrass a lemonade stand. Subscriptions cover a motel room, an internet connection, and eventually a mailing address in a place where I don’t have to own a snow shovel. They also keep me conscious and upright enough to go on telling you what I find, which as this week proved is not something either of us should be taking for granted.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

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Sources

Lake A., Visram S., et al., systematic review on energy drinks and young people, Public Health, January 2024. 57 studies, 2016 to 2022. Kaur A., et al., ‘Consumption of energy drinks is associated with depression, anxiety, and stress in young adult males,’ Depression and Anxiety, 2020;37:1089-1098. Raine Study cohort, Western Australia. ‘Caffeine Withdrawal,’ StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf, National Institutes of Health.

A friend and Wise Wolf contributor shared something on his feed yesterday. Real funny guy but he’s also got a serious side to him and a strong sense of justice and morality. That is what I like about him.

Then he went and did something that almost nobody in American media has done in 15 years and I mean almost nobody.

Somehow, through algorithmic sorcery I try not to think about, Casey ends up on MY Substack, sees that I am a ‘best seller’, and probably assumed she could up her own clout on the platform by commenting on what I had said.

She dropped a wall of AI-generated text into the box that sounded like a robot spin doctor had told her exactly what to say to ensure that she remained ‘innocent’ of whatever she may have (Lily said I have to write ‘may have’ for legal reasons) done to that poor kid.

Casey’s reply was just the same 3 points being regurgitated over and over. No attempts to answer what I was asking. Just her repeating ‘A jury found me not guilty because the system worked and I was found innocent’ over and over like a broken record. The wording moved around a little each time but the bones never did. It went on so long I started scrolling just to see if it ever turned into something else but it didn’t. Just line after line in defense of herself. I got this vibe that her entire life is based around the lies she told and that she is NEVER going to admit what really happened because she’s trying to reinvent herself as this ‘champion of justice’ on Substack. Admitting she is the reason her toddler died would end that attempt at relevance (and the money she is chasing on social media) real quick.

I could tell I had her cornered so she pivoted and then she started in on how her father was a pedophile. Shifting all blame from herself onto her Dad (who was a cop by the way). Nobody had asked her about any of it. All I wanted to know was what happened to that kid and she turned it into ‘my Dad is a pedophile’ out of nowhere. That was her defense. My toddler is dead because my father is a child molestor. Not sure how that makes sense, highly doubt it is true, but it sounds good to Casey so she uses it over and over in her defense instead of just admitting she was a terrible mother and deserved to go to prison for neglect at the very least.

(Lily Edit: I want to chime in here for a moment and point out that the Wolf and myself do not believe Casey Anthony deliberately harmed her child. She is not a cold-blooded killer. She was a terrible mother that did not want the responsibility of a child and should have never been allowed to raise that little girl in the first place. I felt it necessary, for both personal and legal reasons, to provide this distinction to our readers. Now back to the regularly scheduled broadcast.)

George Anthony has denied it every single time since and he had reason to because the claim was only thrown into the air so a jury would have somewhere else to look. Jose Baez, Casey’s celebrity attorney, never returned to it in his closing arguments, never produced a witness, and never put Casey on the stand to say any of it under oath but back in 2011 he stood in front of a Florida jury and told them George had abused his daughter since she was 8 and that Caylee drowned in the family pool and her Dad covered it up —his client had nothing to do with any of it. It was all her FATHER’S fault and somehow the jury bought this baloney.

Fifteen years have gone by since she beat the case. No one has found out who killed her kid. Casey has not lifted a single finger to try and figure out who killed her kid. It’s almost as if she already KNOWS who is responsible for the death of her child so why would she investigate it? Her time is better spent fighting for ‘justice’ on Substack, right?

Three Times

I asked her who killed Caylee. Straight question. No games. I just wanted a simple answer.

What came back was that I keep getting it wrong and she assumed I was doing it on purpose. That I was just like all the others that come at her claiming she is hiding something. Four sentences later we were somehow on OJ Simpson. He was found not guilty too! He was also ‘innocent’. She even asked, Did you know about the planted blood?

That’s a defendant talking. Not a mother. Not someone who is grieving the murder of a child. She never gave me a name. No theory. Not even a half-formed suspicion about anybody. What I got was a resume, her wanting me to pitch her memoirs to my readers, and a fellow murderers acquittal held up like a character witness.

She listed her credits. Docuseries in 2022. She’s spoken about her case. Memoir’s coming. She’s actively talking about it thank you very much so what exactly has shifted, and have I mentioned you need to try harder?

I asked about a murderer and got handed a bibliography.

Third round I stopped being polite. Her pattern was easy to read by then. She’d give up the smallest scrap of ground she could, admit she should’ve been a better mother, then before that sentence even finished she was on her father again. Always her father. Bad mom yes, responsible no, and here’s what my dad did to me.

Three phrasings. Three swings at the same pitch. Zero freakin’ answers.

His son Adam was taken in 1981. Six years old. They found the boy’s head in a canal and never found the rest of him.

Built America’s Most Wanted out of nothing. Pushed the Missing Children Act through Congress. Got the federal registry built. He hounded Hollywood police over that case until they finally named Ottis Toole in 2008, twenty seven years later. Walsh NEVER GGAVE UP TRYING TO FIND WHO KILLED HIS CHILD. That man put a thousand fugitives in cells. He did it because somebody killed his kid and he could not put it down.

Now look at Casey Anthony…

She’s had fifteen years. She’s had a name that opens any door in this country. She’s had money come through, media asking, lawyers who’d take her call. And WHAT HAS SHE BUILT WITH IT?

Not a foundation. Not a tip line. She has never hired a private investigator that I can find. Never sued for a sealed file. Never pushed a records request. Never stood outside a courthouse demanding somebody reopen anything. Never put up a reward. Not one dollar of her own money aimed at the question of who killed her daughter.

WHAT SHE BUILT WAS A CAREER.

A docuseries about herself. A memoir about herself. A Substack where she writes about politics and calls herself a researcher. Every single thing she’s constructed out of that dead child points back at her own name on a cover.

Not once in that whole exchange did she say she misses her kid. Go back through it. I am innocent. My father molested me. I never did anything wrong. Buy my book. Watch my docuseries. I’m a journalist now, respect my work, try harder.

She’s never asked it. Not in a docuseries. Not in a memoir. Not in one column.

If that was my kid I know exactly what the rest of my life looks like because there’s only one thing it could be about. Every dollar. Every contact. Every hour I had left. All of it burned on that question and I’d still be asking when they put me in the ground.

The Part Where I Became a ‘Predator’

Something in me softened and I could not stop it. That part happened last and everything else fed into it. The reason behind it is simple enough. A person finally stands still and I am not built to kick that person and that is just how I am wired. She was standing still right then and it was the first time. Because she had admitted she should have been a better mother. She said those words to me and in all the years of hearing about this woman on television and print I had never heard anything come that close to accountability. So the soft thing in me won out.

So I sent her a private message. I felt bad for her honestly. The woman had been through hell and I was a former addict so I know how people end up during their active addiction. I wanted to give her a chance to make things better if not right. I told her I was living in Florida when all this went down. I knew firsthand how bad the drugs got down there. Pill mill doctors sat every other mile. There were billboards that advertised OxyContin and Xanax all over Florida back then.

Then I made her an offer and I said if she legitimately wanted to use the rest of her life to do some good then I would give her real advice on growing her Substack and the one condition was that she keep it between us and that she put up with it when I cite that ‘mediocre man’ named Jesus once in a while.

And I told her one more thing. If she is going to be a writer then this case is going to come up all the damn time so she better stop being on the defense and actually tell people what REALLY happened and answer the damn question why she hasn’t spent every day of her life the last 15 years trying to figure out who killed Caylee.

The message just sat there on the screen and that was all of it and there was no flirtation in it and no angle behind it and no ask at the end of it. Nothing else came in after. That was the entire message right there.

Then a man named Jon showed up in the thread and he was there to defend her honor and he typed out why can’t these people just leave you alone, Casey. Every comment section on earth has a Jon in it somewhere. I called the simpery what it was.

Right there in front of everyone watching she announced it and that is when Casey Anthony told the whole room I had been hitting on her. Publicly I was shaming her and privately I was coming on to her. A predator is what she called me. What a pile of stinking bullshit.

And This Is Where You’re Blocked

Second she accused me of hitting on her I dumped the DMs into the thread. All of it. Didn’t cut a word. I’d been screenshotting the whole time because I knew what was coming the minute she got caught, and yep. Blocked.

Got one last message off first though. I’m pathetic. Talk about her in public then turn up in her DMs. Doesn’t care how many followers I have, I’m irrelevant, keep her daughter’s name out of my mouth. Blah, blah, blah.

Caylee Marie Anthony was a murdered American kid and her death was the most watched trial of its decade. Her mother went and became a public writer selling a memoir about it. That’s why the name’s in my mouth. You don’t get to monetize the thing and then tell everybody to shut up about it.

Oh and I’m apparently ‘parasiting’ off her fame to grow my newsletter. 90,000 subscribers over here. She’s got around six thousand. Most of them are older men that want to sleep with her. Said that out loud and she told me I was bragging. Five minutes after she said I needed her. Pick one Case. These aren’t things she believes - they’re just whatever’s within reach.

But that lie. That’s the whole thing right there.

She let that kid die. Not up for debate. What’s up for debate is the rest. Maybe the trunk. Maybe she drugged her first. Maybe she’s the one who wrapped that little girl in a blanket and taped her skull and left her in a swamp.

Or maybe somebody else did it and is out there right now, free, and Casey knows.

What I Think Happened

I think she drugged that child then poor Caylee went into the trunk of Casey’s car and died of heatstroke. I lived in Florida for years. I know how hot the trunk of a car gets. That kid would not have made it more than an hour in there.

The pool story got built afterward because police officer with connections Dad didn’t wanna see his daughter spend life in prison and had a plan to make sure she didn’t. Something broke down though and she decided Daddy was the easiest target after her nanny bullshit got called out and is still throwing the same accusation at George Anthony in 2026.

My father is a pedophile so therefore I am innocent of any wrongdoing.

And maybe I am wrong about the whole thing. I might be and I honestly hope I am. Because what I just described is monstrous and I would rather be the idiot here. But nobody has given me one reason to think otherwise. She had 4 chances to do it. 4 chances in a single afternoon. Every one of them came and went and she used none of them.

The trial had not even finished when Stern’s newsroom put out its report. She had been telling people she wanted on the show. Stern took it straight to his producers on the air and asked whether they could go ahead and make her a Miss HowardTV before she went off to jail. (I keep getting stuck on the timing part more than anything else honestly.) Her daughter’s remains had come out of a swamp 30 months earlier and the jury had not returned and she was already angling for a booking to push her career.

‘Journalist’ is a real job and she doesn’t have it. Not a journalist. Not part of any resistance. Nobody ever handed her a cause. The only thing that woman has ever advocated for is herself.

Her kid got neglected on her watch. That kid ended up in a swamp wrapped in a garbage bag with duct tape around her skull. Now she’s got a subscription platform and calls it reinvention. Reinvention doesn’t sand that down. Nothing does.

Okay, well now that I am so depressed that I want to go huddle in the corner and cry, time for the post-article call to action but I’m not asking you for money for a news van.

Casey Anthony told an audience I was so desperate I had to parasite off her fame to build this place. A paid subscription answers that. Not a sob story, a correction. Readers built this thing one at a time over years and it never needed a borrowed name.

If you believe that woman killed her child and walked, share it. Then tell me in the comments what you think happened in that house, and whether she has any business writing here at all.

Put me in her position and I don’t leave the house. The shame alone keeps me inside. People would look at me and I’d know exactly what they were thinking and I’d have nothing to say back because there’s nothing to say. There’s no version where I walk around like none of it touched me. I couldn’t do it. She manages it anyway and I will never understand that part.

If I were her I’d be too ashamed to step out my own door.

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My friend Maddie over at Books Behind Borders posted a note this week about how a country that is 40 freakin’ trillion dollars in debt has the nerve to be assigning her a credit score. I laughed. Then the laugh kinda died because I was reading her note from the edge of a motel bed that costs me TWO GRAND A MONTH! She wasn’t just ranting about a problem. She was describing my life.

I’m 42. I have NEVER taken out a loan in my life. No credit card, no financed couch, no leased car. None of it. Everything I own I bought with cash I saved up first because the young cub version of The Wise Wolf made a rule - if you need a loan to own a something then you don’t need it.

For most of human history being fiscaclly responsible made you the most respected man in your quaint village. Today it makes you homeless.

Not homeless in the living under a bridge sorta sense. Homeless in the newer, stupider, and distinctly ‘American’ sense. I earn enough for a nice apartment. I have months of rent saved in actual CASH. And I still can’t legally rent one because the algorithm that decides who gets shelter in this country looked at 25 years of paying with cash and said I am a ‘null entity’.

I wish that was an exaggeration. When a leasing office runs my credit pretty much nothing comes back. I’ve bought everything I’ve ever owned in cash paid in full, upfront, from day one and the official verdict of the American financial system is that I DO NOT EXIST.

I know why the file’s empty. My phone is prepaid. My computers I buy with cash on the counter. No monthly contracts anywhere in my life because I don’t like owing people money. That turns out to be the ONE financial sin this country cannot forgive. See, the credit score doesn’t measure whether you pay for things. It measures whether you BORROW.

The whole thing is a loyalty program for debt. You could have a hundred grand stuffed in a mattress and the system sees nothing. Miss two payments on a Kirby vacuum in 2011 and it remembers you FOREVER.

(Meanwhile… Try and hold all of that in your head while I say this next part.)

The government of the country running this system is 40 FREAKING TRILLION dollars in the hole. Much of it is owed to China. It was all borrowed from the Federal Reserve, which is about as federal as Federal Express. Not a government agency. A private banking consortium that conjures money out of nowhere. And I mean NOWHERE.

(Fun fact while we’re in the neighborhood: the Treasury Department founded the Secret Service in 1865 to protect the currency. Not the president. The CURRENCY. Presidents got added to the job description 36 years and three dead presidents later. Priorities people!)

So follow this all the way down. There is an entity that has borrowed more money than any entity in the history of planet Earth. It cannot stop borrowing. It borrows NEW money just to pay the interest on the OLD money. And that entity looked at my file and decided the credit risk here is me. The guy who never borrowed a dime.

The Cash Incident

The apartment hunt started three months ago. The motel life is in year seven now, I’ll get to that so brace yourself. Early in the hunt I found a great place. Only twelve hundred a month with utilities, safe neighborhood, gated community, it even has a pool! The most dangerous thing on the entire property is the speed bump at the front gate.

I didn’t walk in hoping they’d overlook the empty credit file. I walked in with a plan that made the file irrelevant (or so I hoped.) I sat down across from the leasing agent and offered to pay the entire six month lease upfront. In CASH.

She smiled the smile they teach in leasing school. “I’m sorry sir, but our corporate policy states you must meet our minimum credit score criteria.”

Okay, maybe she misheard me, I thought. I tried again slower.

“I’m sorry sir, but that just isn’t the way we do business.”

Not the way you do business! I could have SCREAMED at this woman.

Your business is trading shelter for money and I just tried to hand you ALL of the money in advance. Every business in the entirety of human history has accepted that arrangement. The guy selling sunglasses out of a duffel bag at the gas station accepts that arrangement. And you’re telling me NO because an Equifax database somewhere in an Atlanta server farm has never heard of me.

I stood outside that beautiful gate for a while afterward and that’s when it clicked. They don’t want money. Money was never the product. They want DEBT HISTORY. Proof that I’ve spent my life renting money from banks like a good boy.

What $2,000 a Month Buys

The apartment I can’t rent costs $1,200 a month. The motel I CAN rent because motels do not run a credit check costs $2,000. An $800 monthly stupidity tax and the stupidity isn’t even mine. Do you have any idea how frustrating this is?

You might be thinking,‘What does the extra 800 buy?’

The carpet has a past. It’s got a bathroom fan that sounds like it’s passing a kidney stone. An air conditioner that has NEVER WORKED. Not once in my entire nine month tenancy. The owner insists I broke it. The owner is an overweight, excessively hairy, Russian ex-gopnik covered in bad prison tattoos and has screamed at me about this air conditioner on multiple occasions at volumes the whole property got to enjoy. I say the machine was dead when I arrived. He screams back that I owe him five hundred bucks cash for breaking his AC unit.

Those screaming matches are why I have to leave in three days. And this is where the funny drains out of the article, so consider yourself warned.

Moving means something different when you live like I’m forced to live. You pick another off-highway motel. You pay a month upfront because anything shorter costs even more. Then you find out what you bought. There’s no review site for this. You never know which ones are dangerous until you’re already inside. Beaten up, robbed, threatened, etc. All of it has happened to me at these places before. Years ago a cartel dope dealer murdered two prostitutes who were working out of the motel three rooms down from mine. I heard the screams, then the shots, in that order. I hear both every single time I slide my ID across a new check-in counter while some quiet part of my brain asks, is this one of those. There’s never any way to know.

That’s not a bit. No joke coming. I just live with it.

A few months back I was outside my room enjoying my one daily luxury, a single Nat Sherman cigarette (they taste like brown sugar, they are the one vice I kept from my younger days and they’re the last ‘classy’ thing I can afford since I got out of hacking and corporate espionage as my source of income. Maybe someday I’ll write about my past. The statute of limitations are up now anyways).

Then roughly 10 cops in SWAT gear came around the corner at a dead sprint and knocked me flat on the concrete. The second wave stopped to harass ME over the suspicious activity of standing in front of a room I pay $2,000 a month for.

Then they battering-rammed a door down the walkway and dragged out the guy who lived there along with his two girlfriends. Everybody got zip-tied face down on the concrete. One of the girlfriends had a broken and bleeding nose. She must have been standing behind the door when it came in.

This is the neighborhood my perfect payment history earned me.

These places are full of drug dealers and hookers. That’s not a slur or knock on these people, I understand they aren’t doing that because they enjoy it. They are doing that sorta work because that’s the harsh reality of life. But the part that actually breaks my heart is the rest of the walkway. Entire families in single rooms. Kids doing homework on bedspreads while their parents work full time. Same trap as mine. No credit, no cosigner, no way through the gate. They pay luxury apartment money for a room with a hot plate. There are millions of us now. A whole shadow class of Americans who can afford housing and aren’t PERMITTED to have it.

Three Days

I’m writing this at night because writing takes my mind off my life and right now that is what I need because in three days I check out of here with no idea where I’m checking in. The candidates are a handful of motels further down the highway. Pretty much identical from the outside. Each one is a sealed envelope that costs a month’s rent to open.

A regular job used to get me out of these rooms ten hours a day. Now I work for myself, the room is also the office, I’m here around the clock. I listen to the walls. I do threat math on every raised voice in the parking lot. I’ve seen too much rugged shit go down in the last 7 years to just be able to relax in the place I am paying two grand a month to live in. That is the mortgage on a nice house with property out in the country where I grew up. In the city it’s a step above the street. Barely.

Lily is still off at summer journalism camp. August is when the high school juniors and seniors go, the busiest stretch of the whole season she says. She’s teaching these kids how to find a college with a good journalism program and what to actually expect once they get there. She’s also teaching them to start writing on Substack NOW, while they are still in high school and going off to college. That way they graduate with a body of work to show an employer instead of just a degree. I told her last night on chat that I was stressed out about what I was going to do. She told me to focus, be strong, and try not to worry so much. God bless her, she means it with her whole heart.

But I’m scared. There it is, no joke wrapped around it. I’m a grown man with income and savings habits that would make a financial advisor weep with joy. In three days I’m out of here with nowhere to check in. All because I never rented money from a bank. In a country that has rented 40 TRILLION dollars and counting.

Normally this is where I’d make a charming joke about the newsvan fund. Not today. Today the fund is called Get The Wolf Behind A Real Door. Maybe this piece made you laugh, maybe it made you angry, maybe it made you go check your own credit score just to feel alive. Either way, a paid subscription decides whether next month’s investigation gets written from a desk or from whichever highway motel has the fewest police raids per capita. I’ve started keeping stats on that. Journalist habit. Lily’s spending her summer teaching teenagers to chase the truth for a living and somebody should prove the truth pays at least enough to cover a security deposit.

Become the reason a leasing office finally has to take my money.

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The Wise Wolf messaged me recently with an opportunity I couldn’t refuse. He’d been reading my newsletter for the past few months, liked what he saw, and decided to give me a shot at telling his readers what the prison system is really like. Not the rehabilitative program it claims to be, the one supposedly designed to get people on their feet so they don’t have to commit crimes to survive. In reality it’s a system built to keep the poor, the mentally ill, the addicted, and the real criminals who DESERVE to be there all lumped together in one monetization scheme. A scheme that hands good jobs to districts that lost their manufacturing infrastructure to China and puts money into the pockets of the senators, congressmen, and judges who invest in the companies running these prisons and their aftercare programs. It’s a self-eating snake designed for one purpose: getting YOUR tax money into the pockets of the people making the laws and running the shitshow.

This is my story.

When I hear “prison is a complete waste of time,” I’m talking about what I watched day in and day out. Men sitting on racks, staring at concrete walls and bars surrounded by chaos, waiting on count and chow and mail that never comes. Guys doing bullshit “anger management” or “thinking errors” classes run by people who don’t give a damn, then walking back to the dorm to see the same violence, the same K-2 smoke (Lily Editor’s Note: K-2 is synthetic marijuana used in prisons), the same corrupt staff. Nothing changes except the scars. We serve the time. The time doesn’t serve us.

I went in at twenty-one years old, facing a life sentence, and ended up serving a ten-year mandatory sentence in the Florida Department of Corrections.

I worked in the hospital at the infamous Lake Butler Reception and Medical Center, tucked within a region littered with prisons in Northeast Florida. One of the first bodies I wrapped was a man so messed up inside, wracked with depression and an extreme level of psychosis, he ripped his own toenail off and hacked the veins in his elbow until he bled to death. The smell of that congealed, coagulated blood doesn’t leave your nostrils; oh no, it remains even after years and years of therapy. Taking men down after they hang themselves in confinement, freeing them loose, untying the knots, lifting them onto a gurney, rolling them in plastic, applying their toe tag, placing them into a morgue freezer, fractures something deep within your psyche. I watched a stupid, old, outdated VHS video and learned how to wrap men up like giant tootsie rolls. I was “educated” on the proper technique and the required etiquette to tag a big toe; well actually, I damn sure wasn’t. An inmate taught me that in the heat of the moment, while a lifeless corpse stared back at me. “Watch and learn.” Talk about a thousand-yard stare. I soaked it all the way up. I learned how to close a steel door on another soul and then walk away like it wasn’t shit. That was my freshman year at crime college.

Death is constant and deliberate. I thought prison’s where inmates do their time, learn a valuable lesson about life, and then go the hell home. It’s not. It’s where people die on whims. Officers place hits on your head because they think you offended their girlfriend nurse or disrespected her in some infinitesimal way. Inmates die over jealousy and greed. Over their egos and bullshit. Inmates are killed because a guard wants to send a direct message. Sometimes they get another inmate to perform the hit, like an officer tried to get me to do, because he didn’t like that another inmate might be getting out, was actually innocent, and had a lover coming to support him every weekend.

Murders get written up as suicides and “medical incidents” because DOC investigates itself. Talk about some shit that needs to get hit with the RICO Act. Inside, there’s no checks-and-balances system. It’s the sly fox guarding the vulnerable henhouse and writing the damn incident report when it’s really the fox that’s killing all the hens.

At Suwannee CI Annex they stuck me in confinement and made sure I knew I was nothing. Screamed at me and told me to kill myself at the confinement window, blowing a damn whistle the entire time. They laughed while they put me on a seventy-two-hour property strip. No mattress, definitely not any clothes. Just freezing cold air, more concrete, boxer shorts, a steel sink, and a steel toilet. You try sleeping in that environment and tell me how that works out for you. They tortured me. They sprayed me with their chemical agent of choice. They call it “Black Jesus” because they love laughing about how, after they spray a “Black boy” with it, it makes him holler for Jesus. What in the heck is that. That’s not correction. That’s racist chemical lynching with falsified paperwork that allows them to continue indefinitely.

I’ve seen a man struggle to breathe after inhaling chemical agents. Eh, well, that’s just another day at school. That’s one level of the college’s true horror. Hearing him struggle to breathe is one thing, but then watching him lifted and slammed full force onto a steel-grate walkway, on the second tier of my confinement wing, right outside my cell door, hearing the sound of his windpipe crushing, well, that’s another level entirely.

The breathing turns to gargles and then there’s nothing, because he’s dead. Knowing officers did the killing changes everything about what prison really is. This school is death. Pure and simple. It stalks you constantly. It whispers in your ear. It waits in the shadow at the edge of your vision. DOC wants you dead, one way or another, inside those walls or after you walk outside through those huge, scary, razor-wire fences.

Guess that was my sophomore year.

Prison is a crime college because it forces you into the ugliest curriculum just to stay alive. Orientation is confinement. No books. As the officers are prone to say, “Use your damn imagination, boy.” Watching yourself stare back at you from a tiny, faded, scratched metal mirror inside the cell, going bonkers. I’d count ten thousand steps back and forth across the cold hard floor and lose the number at six thousand, start over, and do it again. I’d listen to suicide, echoing down the wing when a man hangs himself as his feet bang against his bunk. That copper smell stinks when someone opens their arms with a razorblade. That dreadful metallic smell hits hard and makes every sense in my body light the hell up. Guards and their damn obnoxious whistle blowing, playing their terrible “Night Games,” dousing you with the orange mist of Black Jesus, banging on some poor soul’s window, then strolling down the tier to blame another man and set him up with that number-one prolific killer spray, sometimes just laughing and walking away. You’d dunk your only T-shirt in the toilet bowl, wrap it tightly around your face, then scramble and dive under the bunk, taking shallow breaths through your nostrils, only your nostrils, or you might choke to death.

On property strip everything’s taken. Think about the word “everything,” then imagine yourself in a stripped-out, bare closet, alone in white boxer shorts with the AC blasting if you’re lucky enough to find yourself in a climate-controlled institution (kidding), or baking and sweltering in a pool of your own sweat if you aren’t so lucky. You decide which is better.

You’re alone with a cold steel rack without a mattress and a steel toilet. I shivered for three days and learned the only way to sleep was to do a thousand jumping jacks so my blood circulated, then I’d sit on the metal toilet, fold my arms over my chest like I’m jumping out of a helicopter, tuck my head into my knees and steal twenty minutes of sleep before the cold catches me once again.

I’d count myself lucky when I discovered an ant and communicated with her like she was my last friend on Earth, watch her walk circles and squares on the floor, save cornbread crumbs because I knew she was hungry too. I’d headbutt that damn tin or steel mirror that barely reflected my face and tell myself I’m a lion, a warrior, the kind of man who can handle any-damn-thing, that I’ll never break.

Screw this.

Damn these officers.

And anyone who tries to mess with me.

You’ve got to choose who you’re going to be from the jump, or you get swept up into the crime college, and those ethics and that class curriculum only make strong mothers weep more tears.

At Taylor Correctional Institution, crime college turns into advanced seminars. The dorm goes dark at lights out. K-2 smoke hangs in the air. Guys “gook out” (not the racial term from Vietnam - the act of going into a seizure from the K-2 overdose) on spice and think they’re snakes or have conversations with the devil. Men strap up. They tie magazines to their ribs with plastic wrap, wrap their arms with blankets and sheets, lace their shoes tight because there’s nothing worse than being caught in socks when the knives come out and the grip of rubber soles on the floor’s the only chance you have. Swords get bent off cooking racks in the chow hall bathroom, broken back and forth until the metal fractures, smuggled to the dorm and sharpened for hours on concrete, and the back-and-forth grinding sound is the prison’s lullaby. Shanks get carved from fence wire and Plexiglas. Razors handed out for shaving turn into weapons. Locks swing in canteen bags or hang off belts to smash whoever’s in front of you.

Most dorm riots are more about fear and control than actual murder. Most guys aren’t trained assassins. They’re scared men trying not to die. To kill somebody, you’ve got to be fully committed. Most aren’t. That’s why I saw more blood and stitches than toe tags during riots. But one-on-one, when there’s real beef or a guard wants someone gone, the danger spikes and the curriculum gets further advanced.

Every time a dorm erupts the lights flip on and off, the intercom screams “back to your bunks,” and suddenly everybody’s scrambling to hide weapons in vents and walls, washing blood that’s stuck under fingernails with bottled water, strapping on that clueless, lifeless mask for the goon search teams when they enter the dorm. I stood naked on slippery wet tile while officers barked their orders. Arms up. Mouth open. Tongue out. Turn around. Spread your ass cheeks, boy. Squat and cough. One foot up. Other foot. Then, ushered and herded into a hot dayroom with a hundred and twenty other men, pressed against the wall, wondering if the knife hidden over my bunk by my gang-member bunkee is about to get held up in my face with a sergeant demanding to know if I’m in a gang.

Yeah, that happened.

Some of my professors at crime college were inmates. Some were officers.

At Lake Butler the walls in the hospital used to say, “Browns Stick Together,” a reminder that brown-shirt officers protect each other first and last. Their oath doesn’t even mention prisoners. It pledges to guard fellow officers’ honor and life as their own, to be loyal to superiors and the institution, to do only those things that bring honor upon fellow officers and the institution. The people they’re supposed to correct don’t exist anywhere in it. That’s who holds the grades and uses their wooden pointer, or ruler, striking all who misbehave.

Prison seems hopeless and a complete waste of time if correction is the true aim. You walk out more wrecked than you went in. And don’t get me started on the monotony and the waiting around to see what pops off next. Half the time there’s literally nothing to do. It’s all on you to decide who you want to be and what you’re about. Where’s the real guidance.

Junior year.

It means when a guard beats you, sprays you, kills you, writes you up, ships you across the state, hides you in confinement, there’s a good-old-boy network standing behind him smoothing paperwork and closing ranks, moving up the ranks in fact. A few years back three Florida prison guards were arrested as active, card-carrying members of the Ku Klux Klan for plotting to murder a formerly incarcerated Black man, and I knew one of the officers personally. One way they wanted to do it was shoot him up with insulin and make it look like a medical emergency death and place a fishing pole inside his hands while he was only trying to catch a meal in the beautiful St. Johns River. That plot made the news, yet plenty of plots don’t. The names always change, but the culture stays the same, unwavering and very messed up.

There was Officer Red, weather-beaten, pushing fifty, with the murderous intelligence of a kid burning ants with a magnifying glass. He’d line us up and ask, “Who’s a pedophile on this wing?” Whoever got pointed out had to say the age of his victim. Under twelve. Under six. That’s more than enough. Redk’s slap would drop the first man, piss running down his pants, blood coming out his mouth and ears.

Then Officer M, known for killing people with his open palm once he slipped on black leather gloves, would go looking for a second “class project.” I’d see him slap a person so hard I just knew the administration was going to have to make up a real good story, like an English assignment at school.

First the seizure, then the fall. Anything but the truth. Inside Lake Butler and other camps, inmates are in gangs, but so are certain officers, and their gang has all the real power.

Senior year.

Then there was Officer Colon. Puerto Rican. Skinny. Rat-faced. Thought every woman on the compound wanted him. The type who likes to have an inmate cuffed behind his back before he starts punching, who loves spraying defenseless men with chemicals, setting up guys he doesn’t like with knives or drugs, getting off on watching people suffer. He had a girlfriend, Miss Piggy, who ratted out my friend Kennedy’s relationship with Nurse Marie. Kennedy wasn’t hustling Marie. It was mutual respect and love. The one thing prison’s supposed to erase. Piggy’s jealousy got Kennedy fired and beaten. After that Colon turned his eyes on me. Flaco brought the message. “You’re dead, Tatter.”

I made a Plexiglas knife, taped it to my leg under my blues, weighed down by it like I had Frodo’s ring, walked into the psych ward ready to make it him or me. My mom already knew the plan. If I hadn’t called by six-thirty, she’d be calling administration, calling Tallahassee, doing anything she could to stop the coverup. Colon sat in his chair, boots on the desk, three officers around him, tapping a pen like he was controlling the room with sound while my fingers inched toward the knife. After the speech I’d prepared, he dropped his chair with a bang, slammed the pen down and said, “Okay, Tatter. It’s dead. Don’t you ever walk down that hall while she’s working unless you’re escorted by another officer.” Hit canceled. Knife unused, thank freaking God. Just another day at work.

That’s what mercy looks like in this college.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s books gave me history and honor codes, values, and morals to stand upon. David Benioff’s City of Thieves showed me how bad things can really get and still leave room for humor and humanity. Unbroken gave me courage when I felt literally broken from food poisoning, forced to spend hour after hour in confinement while officers decided whether I was faking or high on K-2 as fluids drained out of every part of me, and they still wanted me working the next day at the front gate. “This too shall pass” became my mantra.

I adopted survival as a mission. Live. Make it back home to my family and loved ones. Our families serve hard time too. They’re hostages of DOC right alongside us. Every missed birthday. Every canceled visit. Every phone call that costs way too much. My mom drove to see me, sent books, showed up for me the day I got out, and fought for me when my brain broke.

When we talk about “public safety” and “correction,” we never factor in the mothers, fathers, kids, lovers chained to those prison timelines. They’re paying for this crime college just as much as we are.

All this might be okay if prison actually provided rehabilitation and help afterward. It doesn’t. Prison doesn’t heal trauma. It multiplies it by magnitudes. It does nothing to fix behavior that community alternatives and mental health care couldn’t handle more humanely, more safely, and far cheaper. It’s a big, expensive revolving door of recidivism, and then they want to point at that revolving door as an excuse to build more prisons.

I went for another degree after graduation.

My brain finally short-circuited in January 2021, after being released back to society in August 2018. I wasn’t on drugs. I was on years of institutional warfare.

The truth is simple. A year of mental health care or structured house arrest does what steel doors, concrete walls, and razor fences never will. My real rehabilitation didn’t happen within the belly of the beast. It happened because the minute I bonded out, I had my mom drive me straight to Epic Behavioral Healthcare in St. Augustine. I showed up every week, sometimes twice a week, for two years. Got properly diagnosed with complex PTSD. Learned how to breathe again, started my yoga practice again, and finished my memoir, Count Time. After a brutal year fighting for my freedom, the court gave me six months of house arrest and five years of probation with a mountain of fees waiting to bleed my wallet dry. Those six months of house arrest, tied with Epic Behavioral Healthcare and actual structure, did more for public safety than ten years inside ever did. I was with my family and loved ones, I knew I’d messed up, and even way back then I wanted something different from the life I was living. I wasn’t happy. I was lost. As I focused on self-improvement, my determination continued to grow. I promised myself I’d commit to changing my life and do whatever necessary to make myself and my family proud.

None of that came from DOC.

Please call prison what it really is: state-sponsored human trafficking and a mass-incarceration nightmare. Every contract’s built on our bodies and a massive amount of sweat equity. The phones, emails, video visits, money transfers, commissary, food, medical, laundry, PRIDE labor, private prisons. Every time a family sends a dollar, a company gets rich. Every time a man picks up trash on the side of the road, or sews a uniform, somebody sells that product at full price while he earns pennies or nothing.

In Florida we earned zilch unless you were fortunate enough to land a job at PRIDE. Follow the money from every prison contract, every JPay transaction, every commissary markup, every food invoice, every medical payment, every phone fee, every money transfer cut, every bond that builds a new facility, every dollar of inmate labor that goes into a product, and you end up in one place, the state capital.

Even letters are part of the warehouse scam now. Physical mail’s banned. Every birthday card, kid’s drawing, family photo gets intercepted, scanned by a for-profit contractor, delivered as a digital file on a tablet, and families can’t even send stamps anymore, which was a form of currency and a way to write about what really happens inside prison walls between a daughter and a dad, a son and a mom, grandparents, aunties and uncles, friends, and lovers. They say it’s “contraband reduction,” but states that tried the same thing saw overdoses go up, not down. Cutting off real mail isn’t about safety, hell no, it’s strictly about control and erasure. It’s about making a person disappear while he’s still breathing and charging enormous fees every step of the way, and it makes me sick.

Go watch The Alabama Solution on HBO Max or rent it on Apple TV and sit with it. That’s really freaking happening in prisons. I know it is in Florida, too. All the killing and corruption, and all the human farming. Alabama, Florida, all the states are generating tons of cash by trapping people, renting out their labor, skimming their wages or not paying them at all, and calling it, ta-da, “justice.”

Florida’s the worst system I know, but these stories aren’t unique. They move across states like franchises with different logos but the same lucrative business model.

Grrrrrrr.

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Inside Taylor CI, I watched a man die, struck with locks again and again by four guys while two more stabbed him. He dropped not even twenty-five yards beyond the dorm. I watched young guys like Sam come in with thirteen months and turn into targets. Sam looked white but was Latino. A predator with life was already sizing him up. Then at master count an officer walked in calling count time and stopped at Sam’s bunk, and made poor Sam walk the dorm, sashaying his hips, flicking his wrist, saying “Whoops, did I do that” around the perimeter of the dorm like freaking Urkel until count cleared. If Sam wasn’t a target before, he was after that shit.

School’s in session.

Another day a sergeant thought an inmate told on her, and she walked that man into every dorm on the compound, more than a thousand men, and announced he was a snitch and a “chump-bitch.” That’s a conscripted death sentence. The man was beaten so badly you couldn’t recognize him. That’s crime college. That’s our lesson from the judicial system. I learned what one sentence from a guard can do to my life, and it was a real eye-opener.

I’m not pretending everyone’s innocent. I know dudes who’d literally eat your face and then eat the fruit cocktail at chow (cafeteria) and not think twice about any of it. Flesh eaters exist. Child rapists exist. Predators exist. But most of us aren’t that. Most people inside made a series of terrible choices inside systems of poverty, racism, hate, addiction, and a legal structure where a halfway decent defense costs more than a family will ever be able to afford.

Chief Judge Pamela L. North told me that if I’d caught these charges in Maryland, I never would have served a ten-year mandatory sentence. That shook me. What is justice? Who is it truly for? What does it really mean when the same crime in a different zip code doesn’t bury a young man for a decade. It isn’t some clean, universal idea. It’s a map of power and politics and profit. And I was stuck on the wrong part of the crumpled-up map.

Dr. Kelly Vannan’s trash-can slide during a Lifelong Learning Institute lecture I helped co-lecture at Flagler College says it all. She told a room that’s what society thinks of us, that we’re trash. She said once we’re sent to prison and the doors slam behind us, nobody thinks about the trash once it’s thrown out. When I spoke, I put that trash can back up on the screen and said this: “The mob looked at trash and turned it into a multibillion-dollar business. That’s exactly what our government, the DOC, corporate shareholders, and executives think about. They look at the incarcerated and see money. They’re banking on the public not thinking about any of us because silence breeds profit. Mass incarceration’s a for-profit epidemic. It’s a corporate warehouse program where private contracts, bed quotas, and slave labor are dressed up as public safety. From Jim Crow attitudes in administration to modern slave labor on production lines, the incentives to lock us away, sign more contracts, extract a shitload more cash.”

I guess now I’m part of the Lifelong Learning Institute college program after the education prison taught me.

I’m not the only one saying this shit. The Marshall Project ran Joey Heilman’s essay, “I Spent 78 Days in a Violent Youth Jail. I Have PTSD For Life.” Seventy-eight days. Barely three damn months, and I’m not taking that away from him in the least. Twenty-two years later he’s still screaming in his car, still snapping back to beatdowns in the dark, still feeling his nervous system flip into survival mode at his kid’s school picnic. Less than one summer in a juvenile cage and his mind’s wired for flashbacks, fright, and panic.

It’s damn structural damage, programming people like robots to mess up.

Without real help, all most people ever really do is stare at walls and bars surrounded by wild shit and call that “doing time.” What guidance is there in that? You’re stripped bare of identity and reduced to a number, an inmate, and a body in a crummy, uncomfortable bed. It takes a real solid mind and a shit-ton of stubbornness not to get swept up into the shitstorm of DOC, into the boredom, the violence, the dehumanization, the slow grind that eats your soul.

When you walk out, your sentence isn’t over. Every flashback adds more time. Every panic attack’s another few minutes lengthening your stay in college. Rehabilitation after prison should be the system’s priority. It isn’t.

Courtrooms aren’t built to find truth. They’re stages where conflicting stories compete. Real defense costs a fortune, and innocent people go down every day just to fit a prosecutor’s narrative. People get sentenced to death who are completely innocent. In this setup it isn’t about what happened, oh no, it’s about what you can prove, and whichever story wins becomes the decree. If you can’t afford a story that beats the state, you lose your life. That’s the game, and that’s crime college inside, story war outside, and warehouse profit on top.

That’s a judge who’s seen thousands of cases, telling you straight that behind prison walls lies “abundant” untapped talent. We aren’t trash, nor villains, and not all of us are beastly monsters. We are human beings, screwed up and flawed, with questionable morality like every person walking the streets, but capable of telling the truth in living color and changing our lives. That’s the heart of this. DOC isn’t a superhero. It’s not the brave guardian in some comic book. It’s a worldwide syndicate in a flashy costume sporting a damn cape. It warehouses human beings, erases their gifts, bleeds them out of everything, and then sells you the story that it’s saving the day.

What a hero.

Learning this is how you truly graduate from the prison system’s colleges.

Not everyone outside’s blind. PEN America believes in incarcerated writers and lets us put our stories on paper. Reginald Dwayne Betts went from solitary to Yale Law and builds Freedom Libraries because he knows books save lives. Shaka Senghor, Ian Manuel, Keri Blakinger, and a whole army of people turned years inside into work that helps instead of destroys. My life’s part of that same ecosystem. Les Standiford, a New York Times bestselling author and founding director of the Florida International University Creative Writing Program, called Count Time searing and unforgettable. Dr. Baz Dreisinger, author of Incarceration Nations, a justice worker and professor at John Jay College who founded the Prison-to-College Pipeline, said my voice is a warning the world needs to heed “now more than ever.” John DeDakis, an award-winning journalist, former senior copy editor on CNN’s The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, and mystery-suspense novelist, called my story a raw, wrenching argument for prison reform and self-reform. Professors who support my work, Kelly Vannan, Kim Bradley, Mandy Miller, Allan Marcil, all saw the same thing: behind the mugshot and DOC number, there’s a real face staring back at you.

And it’s me looking at you, you looking back at me, at eye level.

My life proves the stigma’s bullshit. The only things that ever changed anyone I knew inside were the things the state tried to keep out. Books. Education. Yoga. Real mental health care. Real connection. My first love was reading and books mentored me when nothing else could. That’s why Freedom Libraries matter. That’s why PEN America matters. That’s why inmate-led yoga classes matter. Real journalism matters. On one rec yard we stood on prison grass and learned how to breathe together, and it helped. It changed our bodies and minds. It gave men something besides violence to show up for. It instilled freaking passion. Passion to be better and become resilient to the clutches of the DOC dream snatcher.

We don’t need more prisons. We need community mental health clinics on the front end of crime. We need house arrest and ankle monitors tied to therapy, classes, and work instead of warehousing people in concrete boxes. We need Freedom Libraries and PEN America style writing programs in every jail and prison so once a person falls in love with alphabetical letters and the books he or she has read, there’s another way to live, with a real chance in the free world. A chance to dream. We need inmate-built yoga and trauma recovery in every dorm, not just on the one yard, a couple of classrooms, where some crazy convict (me) decided to teach downward dog. We need real reentry on the back end. Housing. Jobs. Union-backed training. Ongoing therapy. Mentors. Someone who believes in you, the shit the system pretends is only optional. We also need to take the first step and choose to be different. We must decide to change, and with real programs and someone telling you you’re something other than a piece-of-shit convict, it makes your chances a hell of a lot better.

You build that and prison stops being the first answer. The crime college closes. Warehouse programs shrink, people heal instead of rot, and the state stops using bodies as sweat equity and starts treating them like actual human beings. It stops killing us and making our loved ones cry. Then, you finally start living in a country where “public safety” means safety, not profit.

The Wise Wolf gave me the chance to tell you what prison is really like, a crime college for some and a complete waste of time for others, doing nothing that a year of mental health care or house arrest couldn’t accomplish better. This is it. For most men I lived with, prison was ten years of staring at walls and learning how to survive violence. For me, it was redemption, and I refused to let hell own my story. I turned that college into my classroom for revolution. Yoga classes. Spanish skits in the dorm. Books stacked on the bunk. Therapy when I got out. I’m living proof that if we give people real tools instead of crap, they can make their time count instead of letting the big house count them as trash.

Until that happens, prison keeps winning. Look at recidivism and look at all the death counts inside the almost 1,700 prisons, and that’s just prisons, not our county jails. Look at overdose and suicide after release. Vegas doesn’t have shit on DOC. You walk into prison and the odds are stacked against your soul. You walk out and DOC’s standing there with open jaws, waiting for you to stumble so it can swallow you whole again.

Do this.

Watch The Alabama Solution. Let the killing and corruption and slave labor sink in. Then look back at everything I’ve told you here about Florida’s prisons, about crime college, about the warehouse program, about untapped talent wasting away behind a system that doesn’t give a damn.

Now be honest and ask yourself one final question.

The superhero with state-sponsored crime colleges popping up all over this country like poisonous mushrooms isn’t saving us.

So, who are the real gangsters?

And who the hell’s paying their salary.

Maybe the superhero you’ve been cheering for is just the gangster in costume, or suit.

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The other day I told you how Nikola Tesla invented the modern world and then died broke in a hotel room, because that’s just what powerful people do to geniuses. They flatter them and they fund them and they squeeze them dry and then they toss the husk in the gutter and name a car company after it.

That article was sad.

The pigeon material kept staring at me from inside my notes. It sat there right next to the death ray material. The earthquake machine material sat there too.

So here it is my dear readers. What I am handing you now is the best of Tesla’s weird world.

Eighteen Napkins, No Exceptions

Start with dinner.

The silverware was already spotless and Tesla polished it anyway. The staff at Delmonico’s or the Waldorf hauled him exactly 18 cloth napkins for this every night, and then he figured the cubic volume of the soup and the steak and presumably each individual pea before he ate anything. He said he could not enjoy a meal any other way and he tipped like a man who invented electricity so the waiters kept quiet.

Eighteen divides evenly by 3 and that settles it. People want a stranger reason than that. There is not one to be found. The question comes up every time this story gets told and folks lean in for some dark numerology and the answer sat right there in the count the whole time and nobody needed to dig for it. So why did the stack land on 18? Because 3 goes into 18 and nothing gets left over. A count had to break into 3 even piles or it was out. 18 broke into 3 and so 18 stayed.

Three laps around the block came first and only then would he walk into a building, so picture a satellite in evening wear and the satellite is a six-foot-two Serbian in white gloves and he is orbiting your office. Thirty-three laps was the pool number. Tesla ran his whole life on the number three. Hotel room numbers had to divide by 3 or he simply would not stay and every front desk in New York knew it.

(Quick housekeeping note before anything else. Tesla never said the thing about 3 and 6 and 9. The famous line calls those numbers the key to the universe and it is plastered all over the internet. The line is fake and it always was. I went digging for where the quote actually comes from and the earliest appearance anyone has found is on numerology forums around 2013 and that is a full 70 years after the man died so somebody invented it and stapled his name on and the internet ran with it from there. Nothing in his papers has it. No interview or letter has it either. I bring it up for a simple reason. Meme Tesla is an insult to real Tesla.)

The real Tesla could not touch human hair. Real Tesla did not shake hands with anyone and he never made one exception and that held true forever. Pearls set him off just as hard. His own secretary came in wearing them one day and he sent her home on the spot. That was not a one-time slip either. Any woman who showed up in pearls got frozen out of his presence and she stayed frozen out forever. He never explained why. Not once and not to a single person. The man lived 86 years and in all that time nobody ever pulled a reason out of him for the hair or the pearls or the freezing out or any of the rest of it.

His senses were their own horror show. He claimed he could hear thunder from 550 miles away and I have no idea how anyone would even go about checking a claim like that. A fly landed on a table in the next room and the sound hit his skull like a thud. During one breakdown the workers slid rubber pads under his bed. The vibrations of the city were shaking him apart. He slept 2 hours a night. I get 8 hours (and several catnaps during the day) and still drag through most mornings and this man was out there building death rays on a quarter of that. At bedtime he wiggled his toes exactly 100 times per foot because he said it “stimulated the brain cells.” He also took a daily electrical bath and that meant he ran current through his own body and called it cleaning his skin. Soap, apparently, was for cowards.

Telsa believed romance itself was going to wither away. Men would fade into drones and women would become the intellectually dominant queen bees of civilization and humanity itself would evolve into a beehive. He offered all of this in the tone you use when rain is due on Thursday. It tracked once you knew the rest. The man stayed celibate his whole life and he did it on purpose and he believed sex drained the inventive powers and he said so out loud, and none of it was for lack of options because he was tall and elegant and fluent in 8 languages and half the society women of Manhattan hunted him like he was electric Elvis and he still turned down every single one. Then in 1924 he sat for an interview and put the whole beehive forecast on record.

Out of everything strange the man ever said, the strangest thing he ever said was about himself. He was not talking about anyone else. He did not whisper it to a friend over dinner and he did not slip it into some private letter and he did not wait for a biographer to drag it out of him decades later, he sat down and put it in his own autobiography under his own name for the whole world. (That choice bothers me more every time I come back to it.) You can go look it up right now. It sits there in cold print. He signed off on every word of it himself.

The greatest inventor in history believed he had no free will and neither did you and neither did anyone else because we are all meat machines and meat machines just run on outside inputs. So in 1898 he unveiled the world’s first radio-controlled boat at Madison Square Garden partly to prove the point and he told the crowd it ran on a “borrowed mind” but the audience decided a trained monkey was hidden in the hull.

What arrived was just the century itself and it came before its time. Not one person in the room recognized it. They looked straight at the thing and kept on with what they were doing. Nobody understood what had shown up in front of them.

Falling in love is not something a meat machine with no free will is supposed to do. That right there is the problem.

Tesla managed it exactly once.

The Love of His Life Had Feathers

Tesla fed the pigeons of New York every single day. He was flat broke by then. He was old too and he was living out of hotels. The daily feeding was only half of it. The injured birds went back with him and he nursed them in his room. Hotel management objected and common sense objected and several health codes objected and he blew right past all of that and kept hauling birds upstairs anyway.

And what comes next is a direct quote and it went on the record and he said it straight to his biographer John O’Neill. That part is not a paraphrase. He said it out loud himself.

“I loved that pigeon the way a man loves a woman. She loved me back the same way. As long as I had her there was a purpose to my life.”

He wasn’t finished with the story either. Tesla said the white pigeon came flying to his window one night because she had something to tell him and the message was that she was dying.

Then she died right there and 2 powerful beams of light poured out of her eyes. He swore those beams were brighter than any light he had ever produced in his laboratory.

(100-foot lightning bolts were this man’s day job. Think about who is making that comparison.)

He said he knew in that moment. He knew and that settled it. His life’s work was finished, and it was finished for good.

You could have measured Tesla’s breakdowns in lumens. That was the scale his brain ran on when it gave out. Ordinary people crack up and they see spots and that is the entire event for them. Tesla got actual light output instead.

The Head He Lived In

Tesla’s light show was nothing new. His mind had been running one since he was a kid. The flashes were blinding when they hit. Sometimes it went further than flashes and turned into full visions. The images landed so solid and so complete that he could not tell them apart from the actual furniture in the room around him. A vision would just sit there and look as real as a chair. And sometimes it went past even that. He said he caught glimpses of new worlds.

Any normal person would have looked at a brain doing that and gone straight to a doctor. That is the sane move and nobody would blame you for it. Tesla looked at the exact same situation and skipped the sane move entirely. He installed a workshop in there. He took the same head that kept short-circuiting on him and he set up shop inside it and he drafted his machines in there and ran them and let them spin for weeks and then pulled them apart to check the parts for wear before he ever cut a single piece of metal. (Most of us cannot hold a picture of a toaster with our eyes closed, so the gall of this man is honestly offensive.) The malfunction itself became his workspace. He paid no rent and he bought no equipment either.

Tesla was out walking in a Budapest park at sunset. He was reciting Goethe’s Faust out loud when the entire alternating current motor arrived in his head in one flash and it arrived complete. He grabbed a stick and drew it in the dirt right there. He had trained his head to pull this off. He learned to build entire machines inside his skull and he could run them for weeks in pure imagination. Then he took the imaginary parts back out and checked which ones had worn down. He claimed the results matched physical prototypes exactly.

Your entire life runs on that doodle in the mud. He was 26 when he drew it.

At 77 Tesla promised the press he expected to photograph thought itself. A definite image in the mind must produce a reflex image on the retina and that was his whole reasoning and so you build an apparatus to read the retina and you project it on a screen and minds become open books. He treated the human soul like a plumbing problem. 90 years later machines decode pictures out of brain scans and Silicon Valley spends billions on reading your intentions before you act on them. I would tell you the surveillance implications are terrifying but you read this newsletter and you knew before I finished the sentence.

Even his friendships came out strange. Take the Mark Twain one for proof. Tesla was a boy back in Serbia and he was dying. He was dying and somebody handed him a stack of Mark Twain novels and by his own telling those books pulled him back off the edge and he got well again.

Whole decades passed after that recovery. Then Tesla got the chance to tell Twain the whole story face to face. The old cynic broke down and wept. He wept right there in the laboratory.

After that Twain became a lab regular and one evening he insisted on standing on Tesla’s high-frequency vibrating platform even though Tesla warned him in explicit terms about what sustained vibration does to the human digestive tract…

And on top of everything else the man built weapons. The weapons changed the mood completely. People had laughed at plenty of the other stuff he made and he heard every bit of it.

The Alarm Clock That Ate Houston Street

In 1898 Tesla clamped a mechanical oscillator to a support column in his Manhattan lab. The thing was the size of an alarm clock and it ran on one idea. Every object has a natural frequency. Feed energy into it at exactly that frequency and nothing gets wasted, because each push lands on top of the last one. The vibrations stack, then stack again. A programmer would call it a feedback loop. Tesla was running one through a building in downtown Manhattan.

Windows shattered down the block. Furniture walked across floors. By Tesla’s account the shaking started in his building, jumped to the next, and had glass falling into the street by the time the police came running, which in 1890s New York took genuine effort. Tesla didn’t wait for them. He grabbed a sledgehammer and killed his own machine before it could take the neighborhood with it.

Afterward he told reporters the gadget fit in his coat pocket and could drop the Brooklyn Bridge. That was the warm-up. Give him a few patient weeks, he said, and he could split the Earth “like a boy splitting an apple.” His tone never changed. He said it the way other men discuss fishing.

Then Came the Death Ray

In 1934 Tesla announced Teleforce, a charged particle beam he claimed would melt airplane engines at 250 miles and drop an army of a million men where it stood. The papers called it a death ray and the name stuck. Tesla hated it and insisted it was a peace ray, because he sincerely believed a weapon this total would end war forever. He understood electricity completely. Human nature he never got at all, and neither, it turned out, did Washington, which passed.

The Soviets didn’t. In 1935 the USSR paid Tesla $25,000 for the plans, routed through a New York front company because paying from Moscow would have been too obvious. The signed agreement is real. It sits in Tesla’s declassified FBI file where anyone can read it. Nobody signs a contract like that over the ramblings of a senile man.

The Machine That Had No Meter

His most dangerous invention never fired a shot. J.P. Morgan thought he was funding transatlantic radio, because that is what Tesla told him. What Tesla actually built at Wardenclyffe on Long Island was a tower meant to pump electricity through the body of the Earth, so anyone anywhere could drive a rod into the ground and pull power. Light in the Congo. Power in the Andes. No wires, no grid, no bill.

He only got stranger. In his lab he produced ball lightning, glowing plasma spheres mainstream science still can’t reliably make on demand. He spoke for decades about pulling power from “the very wheelwork of nature,” which is why every zero-point energy believer alive is trying to recreate his work. In 1937 he announced a completed Dynamic Theory of Gravity, a whole replacement physics built on the ether and designed to bury Einstein, whose relativity he called “a beggar wrapped in purple whom ignorant people take for a king.” He promised to publish soon. He never did. No manuscript has ever been found, and the searching always circles back to who ended up with his trunks. Hold that thought.

Something in Colorado Answered

Tesla moved to Colorado Springs in 1899 and built the most sensitive receiving station on Earth. The lab threw hundred-foot lightning, the thunder carried fifteen miles, sparks jumped from the soil under pedestrians, horses bolted when their iron shoes went live, and locals swore the butterflies near the lab drifted around in little halos of electric fire. He also blew out the city’s power station. All of it is in the record, and none of it is the strange part.

At night his instruments started picking up rhythmic signals. Counted sets. One, then two, then three. Ordered and deliberate, matching no natural discharge he knew, and he knew every natural discharge there was, having personally invented most of the electrical phenomena on the planet. He concluded it was an intelligent transmission from Mars, or possibly Venus, and in 1901 he took it straight to print in Collier’s Weekly under the title “Talking with the Planets.” He didn’t write it up as a dry technical report. He wrote about the awe of being the first man to hear one world greet another.

Modern engineers say he probably caught natural whistlers, or Marconi’s early tests, or the radio song of Jupiter’s moon Io, which genuinely broadcasts. Maybe. Tesla never retracted a syllable. For forty years his birthday press conferences included calm updates on interplanetary communication, and the reporters wrote him up as a charming crank, then went home and covered men with better bankers.

Room 3327

Nikola Tesla died alone on January 7, 1943, in room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker, thirty-three floors up. Run the numbers if you want. Both divide clean by three, no remainder, right to the last night.

Within hours the federal Office of Alien Property seized roughly eighty trunks of his papers, which was a neat trick, since Tesla had been an American citizen for over fifty years and that office had no more jurisdiction over him than over your grandmother. They took everything anyway. The FBI needed an MIT engineer to check the trunks for secret weapons, and the man they called was Dr. John G. Trump, Donald’s uncle. Yes, that family. There was a rumor Tesla kept a working piece of the death ray in a hotel vault as collateral on an unpaid bill, and Uncle Trump went to open it, bracing himself first. Inside sat a forty-five-year-old electrical resistance box. Standard test equipment. A fancy box of wires.

The file holds one last document, and I saved it because nothing follows it. The FBI’s own website still hosts a page tonight claiming Tesla was a Venusian. In 1957 the Bureau was monitoring a flying saucer cult and filed one of the cult’s newsletters straight into the official Tesla records, where it sits.

Tesla spent forty years insisting something out there was talking, and this is the same man who couldn’t sit near a woman wearing pearl earrings, so weigh his certainty however you like. The file ended up agreeing with him in the dumbest way possible. He deserved better, and so do all the strange gifted ones like him, but the world devours them anyway, precisely because they knock on doors the rest of us pretend not to see. I like to think somewhere out there a white pigeon is still around, and she knows the rest of the story.

Share this if it made you laugh, gasp, or sent you off to calculate the cubic volume of your own dinner. Spreading the weirdness is apparently my ministry now. A paid subscription funds an independent newsroom staffed by me, my editor Lily, and zero pigeons, (though I have started making meaningful eye contact with one of the hens from the Chicky Chicky Bang Gang crew.) Tesla had the House of Morgan behind him and still died broke. My funding model is readers who enjoy the truth, and it is already outperforming his. This was a detour from my usual political and biblical beat and I had more fun than the law probably allows, so say so in the comments if you want more men like Tesla, and I’ll make it a habit.

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I also have a history with birds. Specifically a gang of tough talkin', wise crackin' Dollar General chickens. Read this.

Nikola Tesla got dragged into my comments section yesterday. Some guy turned up to inform me that Elon Musk is the greatest genius since Tesla and I asked him to name 1 thing Musk personally invented that would earn him a seat in that sentence and I told him funding does not count and buying companies does not count and posting does not count and invented means he thought it up HIMSELF and the man came back and told me Musk invented the internet and rockets and robots and AI and that was his whole answer. Musk did not invent any of those things because Musk is not and has NEVER been an ‘inventor’. He’s a businessman that used daddy’s emerald money and his family’s old South African apartheid connections to become the richest man in the world.

And somehow I am the bad guy here?

The fanboys drool on his bank account and outside that crowd who cares about Musk anyway? Readers of my Technocracy Inc. series already know what Musk’s grandpa Haldeman’s crowd had planned for the rest of us. None of it involved rides to Mars. All of it involves technocratic fascism.

I finally figured out why that comment bothered me so much. The thing sat stuck in my teeth all day before the answer landed. Millions of people bought into the propaganda bullshit and never learned to tell a man who invents things from a man who buys the men who invent things and that gap is the most important economic fact of your life. The proof of the gap died broke in 1943.

Tesla died alone in a New York hotel room in January of 1943 and he could not even pay for the room. He was 86 years old and his whole estate came to papers and debts and birdseed. Now stop and look around whatever room you are sitting in. The light burning over your head runs on alternating current and Nikola Tesla invented that. That hum in your kitchen right now is an induction motor and Tesla invented that too. Your phone is talking to a tower on radio waves this very second and the United States Supreme Court ruled that radio belongs to Tesla.

American Humor Costs $50,000

The strife over Nikola Tesla started before he was an hour old. Midnight, the summer of 1856, a mountain village in the Balkans, and a lightning storm going at the sky like it held a grudge. The midwife decided the weather meant something and told his mother she had delivered a child of the storm. His mother told her she had it backwards. Her boy would be a child of light.

Understand what kind of brain we are dealing with here. As a schoolboy he ran integral calculus in his head so fast his teachers called him a cheat. As a grown engineer he could build a machine inside his skull, run it there for weeks, walk around the thing, and check the imaginary bearings for wear. I lose my keys in a 2 room apartment. That brain sailed into New York harbor in 1884 carrying the entire electrical future and about 4 cents in cash. Somebody on the crossing had stolen his wallet and his ticket. The universe was clearing its throat.

The one letter of introduction Tesla carried across the ocean was addressed to Thomas Edison. Edison stuck the strange Serbian on the repair bench and found out fast that the man could outwork the entire shop, so he floated an offer. Redesign my dynamos top to bottom and there is $50,000 in it for you. That was several lifetimes of wages and Tesla went at the job like a man possessed and delivered the whole thing and then asked for his money. You know what Edison told him? Tesla you do not understand our American humor. A year of 18 hour days and the punchline was that the prize never existed. Edison tried to smooth it over with a $10 a week raise and Tesla grabbed his hat and quit that same day. The man spoke 8 languages and had read pretty much everything ever printed about electricity but sure, the joke was where his education fell short.

Quitting felt like dignity to him and dignity was the whole entire point of walking out. The walk-out cost him every cent he had. Every cent went and the dignity stayed for about as long as dignity ever stays. Edison robbed him and Edison turned out to be merely the most FAMOUS man who would ever rob him. The truly hungry ones smelled him inside a month.

The Smartest Ditch Digger in New York

The lamps sold and the money poured in. Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing ran exactly the way it was supposed to run. Then 1886 arrived and the investors shoved him out. They kept his patents and they settled his share in stock certificates worth less than the ink dried on them. The setup had worked the way every setup works. A pack of investors built the whole company around his arc lighting patents and hung his own name over the door and let him believe the name up there meant something. Flattery rode out front and the paperwork waited underneath and takers always come exactly that way. Edison had only stolen a promise from him. These men took his name off his own door and then they kept the door.

Now feel that winter with him for a minute. The man carrying the operating system of the 20th century around in his skull stood in frozen mud with a shovel and dug utility trenches across New York and the pay was $2 a day. The same hands that had already sketched the induction motor were blistering AND BLEEDING on a wooden handle. Some of those trenches even carried cable for Edison. The guy who had cheated him out of a fortune.

Tesla wrote later that his fine education felt like a mockery to him that winter and I believe him. The investors who robbed him slept like babies the whole time and of course they did because sleeping well is the one talent men like that truly own. Tesla could pull machines out of thin air and they could not and so they did the single thing they knew how to do and took what he made.

Stay down in that trench one more minute because the strangest hinge in this entire story stood right there in the frozen mud and it wore a foreman’s coat. Tesla’s ditch boss had been listening to his laborer go on about alternating current between shovel loads and the boss decided he was hearing genius and not frostbite.

History never even bothered to keep the man’s name. But the boss knew a man at Western Union and the man at Western Union had money. Inside 2 years the ditch digger stood on a stage in front of the engineering elite of America and he laid out the complete polyphase system and Moses coming down the mountain had nothing on him.

George Westinghouse sat in that audience. Westinghouse ran arithmetic through the entire lecture and the $2 a day man was about to sign the richest royalty deal in industrial history.

The Contract He Tore Up With His Own Hands

Tesla would collect $2.50 for every horsepower of alternating current capacity ever sold anywhere by anybody and that clause still makes my hands shake. Every motor and every generator and every dam and every factory FOREVER. Westinghouse had already paid roughly $60,000 in cash and stock and the entire electric age was about to route through his patents and this time the deal was down on paper and for the first time in his life the genius held a winning hand and the whole world was the pot.

Edison understood exactly what that clause meant and that explains how gracefully he took the loss.

Imagine hating a rival so much that you cook a man alive as a marketing strategy. None of it worked on the public. Tesla and Westinghouse lit the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair like a jewelry box and then chained Niagara Falls itself in 1896 and the current war was over. Your wall outlet is the trophy and it has been ever since.

Then the bankers arrived and mind the timing because they arrived the exact moment the hand turned good. Westinghouse had overextended his company and a merger sat on the table in 1891 and the money men behind the merger said the Tesla royalty dies or the company does. Westinghouse rode to New York and told Tesla the truth to his face and you have to hand him that much. Put yourself in Tesla’s chair for a second because the only industrialist who ever believed in you is asking you to hand back the largest fortune any human being has ever been owed and the paper sits right there between you.

Tesla remembered the faith and forgot the math. He tore the royalty contract up with his own 2 hands and he ripped up the horsepower clause like a parking ticket. One period estimate put the money he walked away from around $12 million by the mid 1890s, and run that royalty forward through a century where every machine on the planet pays it and the number quits being money and turns into weather. Westinghouse bought the patents outright in 1897 and the whole price came to two hundred grand and that was the end of it.

Keep the count going with me because the count has 3 takers on it by now. Edison took a promise off him. The investors took a company off him. The bankers took a fortune off him and the fortune ran so large that human arithmetic gives up on the number and the bankers never even had to shake his hand to get any of it. Exactly one rung sat above the banks. Tesla carried his buyout money straight up to that rung and knocked on the tallest door in America.

J.P. Morgan Would Like to Know Where the Meter Goes

The door belonged to J.P. Morgan and Morgan said yes at first. He put up $150,000 for a transmission tower at Wardenclyffe on Long Island because he smelled a monopoly on transatlantic messages. Radio already belonged to Tesla and I mean that literally. He was pushing signals through the empty air in the 1890s before Marconi ever had a working set. What Morgan did not know was that his inventor was quietly building toward something far past telegrams. Tesla wanted wireless power for the entire human race and he wanted it FREE. Power out of the sky like rain. Every home on earth lit for nothing.

Legend has Morgan asking one question about the whole setup. Where does the meter go on a system like that. The quote is probably folklore but the funding cut was real as a heart attack. Once Morgan walked no financier in America would touch a machine that made power nobody could bill and why would they when nobody has ever worked out how to invoice the sky. Then the vultures got their turn. The patent office reversed itself in 1904 and handed radio to Marconi and it never explained why. It surely did not hurt that Marconi’s backers included Edison and Andrew Carnegie. By 1909 Marconi was collecting a Nobel Prize for inventing the thing Tesla invented.

No banker in the country would return his calls anymore. He had no lab and he had no tower. The money men had counted on exactly that squeeze. Cut the check and the visions switch off. That was the whole theory they ran on. The theory got one thing wrong. The visions never quit and never slowed. They still came in at full voltage and they just had nowhere left to land, so the machines started pouring out of his mouth instead and America slowly stopped filing him under inventor and America started filing him under entertainment.

The Earthquake Machine and Other Light Hobbies

The walls shook and the dishes danced 3 buildings away and the neighbors called the police on the wizard again. Back in 1898 he had clamped a small mechanical oscillator to a support beam in his Houston Street lab and he went hunting for the building’s resonant frequency and he found it. By Tesla’s own telling lower Manhattan is still standing for exactly 1 reason and the reason is that he took a sledgehammer to his own machine before things went any further. He mused afterward that the same principle could crack the earth open like an apple.

That same year he steered a radio controlled boat around a tank at Madison Square Garden and the smartest crowd in New York stood there and stared at the first remote control in human history and the leading theory they came up with was MONKEY. Their explanation was a trained monkey and the monkey was supposedly hidden in the hull. Grover Cleveland had just left office. Your Roomba’s great grandfather paddled around Manhattan a full decade before the Model T.

He demanded hotel rooms with numbers divisible by 3 and he polished his silverware with exactly 18 napkins and he calculated the cubic volume of his soup before he would eat it, and now stack those compulsions on top of the Mars signals he reported out at his Colorado Springs station and the thoughts he talked about photographing on film and the Teleforce particle beam he unveiled in his old age and claimed could drop 10,000 enemy planes at 250 miles and the papers named that one the death ray and every government he shopped it to passed.

When money backed him that lunacy turned into Niagara and when money starved him it turned into headlines so the newspapers looked at the whole picture and saw a marvelous old eccentric good for one story every birthday and the man held around 300 patents and by 1935 he was a party act and the birthday press conferences kept coming every January and every year the room got smaller and cheaper until the room was 3327.

Room 3327

The tux was still on him and the pigeons covered him from head to shoulder. That is where they found the guest of honor. He had vanished partway through his own ceremony and somebody finally tracked him down behind the New York Public Library. The ceremony itself was the establishment tossing him 1 bone on the way down and God must have written the gag himself. In 1917 the engineering societies granted Tesla their highest honor and they named the award the Edison Medal. They named it after the humor guy.

The white pigeon died in his room one night and he told friends a light had gone out of his life and that was his mother’s word from the night he was born and he knew it, and the pigeons were the whole last act if we are being honest because the man who used to trade stories with Mark Twain over dinner at Delmonico’s now drifted from hotel to hotel a step ahead of unpaid bills and that bird was his dearest companion on this earth and he had nursed her in his own room on an unemployed inventor’s budget. In 1934 the Westinghouse Corporation started slipping him $125 a month and called it a consulting fee and nobody at Westinghouse ever once picked up the phone and asked him for advice, so it was hush money for the man whose torn up contract built their company and that company was worth hundreds of millions and it budgeted its founding genius about 4 bucks a day and he lived on that for 9 years. A cab knocked him down in 1937 on his nightly walk to feed the birds and he refused a doctor and the man who chained Niagara never came all the way back from a fender.

More than 2,000 people packed the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for the funeral and the richest men in America could fill a church for Tesla and they just never worked out how to pay him. That crowd came at the very end. The coroner ruled the great heart had quit sometime the night before. A maid named Alice Monaghan let herself in on the morning of January 8 and she found him. Housekeeping had honored the sign for 3 days by then. The sign said do not disturb and he hung it on the door of room 3327 on January 5 of 1943. Nobody on earth wondered where he was.

I made you a promise at the top of this piece. Each hand in his pocket would be bigger than the last one and the final hand would not belong to a man at all. That promise comes due right now. Every taker before this one had a single thing in common. Every one of them at least waited until the man owned something. The last taker did not even wait for the funeral. Within hours of his death it let itself into room 3327 and this one carried a flag.

Then They Sent In Trump’s Uncle

Catch the name of that office and catch it good because the Office of Alien Property existed to seize property from enemy foreigners and Tesla had been a naturalized American citizen since 1891 and still the FBI opened a file and that office seized around 80 trunks of papers and notebooks and equipment and so the federal government confiscated a citizen’s entire life work under a law that did not apply to him and it did this in the middle of a war and precisely nobody ever answered for it and readers of my Flock piece already know that move and that move never goes out of style because the paperwork always gets invented after the theft and never before it.

Washington needed an expert to tell them what they had grabbed and yes the rumor you have heard is true and the truth runs stranger than the internet version. The man they picked was an MIT electrical engineer attached to the National Defense Research Committee and his name was John G. Trump and that John G. Trump was Donald Trump’s uncle. I checked it 3 different ways because it smells like something a chain email invented but no it sits right there in the FBI’s own declassified file. He was never an agent kicking the door in. He was the government’s hand picked scientific judge and he spent 3 whole days on 80 trunks and he ruled that Tesla’s last 15 years were speculative and philosophical and somewhat promotional and held nothing of significant value to the country.

Tesla’s own nephew had told a New York court that cataloguing those papers properly would take years. The government skimmed a genius over a long weekend and declared the wizard empty and then it microfilmed every single page and sat on the trunks for another decade anyway and that is a strange amount of effort to spend on an empty box but what do I know.

A dead Tesla meant the government owed Marconi nothing. The Supreme Court restored Tesla’s radio priority in June of 1943. He had been dead 5 months by then. The Marconi Company was suing the US government for patent infringement at that very moment and the ruling landed square in the middle of that suit, so the vindication finally came and even the vindication had a billing address and anybody who traced the money could see why the court moved when it moved. His justice showed up at the exact moment it was useful on somebody else’s balance sheet. It did not show up one moment before that.

The trunks finally shipped over in 1952 and Tesla’s ashes sit in Belgrade today inside a gold plated sphere and the museum there keeps his papers too. The sphere was his favorite shape and after everything you just read the man at least deserves his favorite shape. So go settle the midwife’s bet yourself. The storm took his money and his patents and his tower and his royalties and finally his trunks. Then walk over and hit the light switch on your own wall and watch who actually won.

Thousands of regular readers chip in a few bucks each and that is the whole engine behind the Wise Wolf. No banker alive can ever sit me down and explain which of my contracts needs tearing up. Tesla went the other way and he financed his life’s work by trusting rich men and you have now read the complete performance review of that strategy. I run on the opposite model on purpose.

If a fraction of you went paid then Lily could come home from summer camp. She supervises lanyard production out there and the woman holds an actual journalism degree. I could also finally swap the ebike for that newsvan and I solemnly swear to use the van better than J.P. Morgan would have. No dogs will be electrocuted and unlike Edison I actually keep my promises.

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When I was 15 and had my learner’s permit, my dad took me downtown to practice parallel parking, which he treated with the gravity of a moon landing. Part of the lesson was the meter. You pulled up, you dug quarters out of the cupholder, you fed the meter, the meter gave you time. That was the whole ritual. A machine took your money and gave you a thing in return, and nobody involved learned your mother’s maiden name.

The prayer goes like this. I stood in the rain scanning a QR code, which led to a website, which told me to download an app, which asked me to create an account, which wanted my email, my phone number, the van’s license plate, my card number, and permission to send me “occasional offers.” To park. On a street. Which taxes already paid for. Somewhere in this chain of events I was entering security answers into a rain-slicked phone while the camp’s supply list (forty glue sticks, a volume of rope I chose not to question) sat on the passenger seat, and I thought, huh, ‘so this is adulthood’.

The app then charged me a 35-cent “convenience fee,” which raises the question of what, exactly, was convenient, and for whom. Not for me. I checked.

The World I Never Got to Meet

My actual complaint is generational. I am 23, which means I caught the very last of the analog world and then watched somebody switch it off. I got the meters. I got the paper menus at the diner. But by the time I was old enough to actually live in that world, it was being uninstalled around me, one update at a time. My grandma talks about it the way other grandmas talk about the old country. There were seasons. Bread cost a nickel (the price of bread drops another nickel every time she tells this story). Appliances worked.

My parents bought a smart fridge in 2022. (I want you to sit with the phrase “smart fridge” for a second, because it implies the existence of a stupid fridge, and it turns out the stupid one is the fridge that works.) In 2025 the company stopped writing firmware for that model, and the touchscreen froze on an error message, and the ice maker, which required cloud connectivity for reasons known only to the engineers and possibly Satan, quietly stopped producing ice. The cold part still functioned. The fridge could still fridge.

Grandma’s fridge served under six presidents. My parents’ fridge didn’t finish a phone contract. This is what the industry calls innovation, and what I call a subscription with a door on it.

Everything Is a Portal Now

The laminated menu is not extinct. Diners still have them, God bless diners, menus sticky in a way you elect not to investigate, handed over by a person who announces “the soup today is chicken.” One person telling another person about food. That technology has a six-thousand-year uptime record and zero reported outages. But step outside the diner and the menu is an endangered species, and I am watching it die in real time, one trendy restaurant at a time.

What replaces it is a QR code taped to the table, leading to a PDF formatted for a screen the size of a drive-in movie, which I navigate by pinch-zooming across the appetizer section like an analyst studying spy photos of a missile site. Some of these menus want me to create an account first. To look at food. At some point a fully grown adult with a job title stood up in a meeting and said “what if customers had to log in to discover that we serve mozzarella sticks,” and the room said yes, and that man was promoted, and I inherited the results.

The experience lasted thirty seconds. A man handed me coffee. The coffee was coffee. But the survey wanted to know how the interaction made me FEEL, on a scale, with an optional comment box, and if I skip it the barista’s numbers apparently go down, because somebody decided a human being’s employment should hinge on whether strangers complete beverage homework.

The Leash

My parents describe leaving the house in the nineties like veterans describing a foreign posting. You just left. Nobody could reach you, and this was considered normal rather than a hostage situation. You found the restaurant because the building said RESTAURANT on it. You paid with paper. When the power went out, the stove still cooked and the car still started and the doorbell remained a piece of metal whose entire job was hitting another piece of metal.

And the phone is not a convenience. It’s a leash. The parking app was never about parking. It’s a data pipeline with a parking-shaped user interface, and my location, my payment history, my patterns, and, as of last Tuesday, the movements of one summer camp’s supply van are the actual product being sold. I’m not the customer standing in the rain. I’m the inventory standing in the rain.

The trap is that you can’t opt out. Opting out means you don’t park, don’t eat, and in half the new apartment buildings don’t do laundry, because the machines take payment exclusively through an app, an actual sentence I just wrote about actual washing machines in the actual United States of America.

What I Actually Want

I want to be a person in a place. That is the entire demand. Quarters into meters. Menus into hands. Appliances that die of old age, surrounded by loved ones, instead of being taken off life support from three time zones away by Rakesh, who did it between meetings. A thirty-second coffee transaction that both parties are permitted to simply walk away from, unrated and unsurveyed, the moment complete in itself.

People call my generation “digital natives” like it’s a compliment. Natives don’t pick where they’re born. We’re just the first generation handed the terms of service before we could read them, and every year the leash gets stapled to one more thing that used to just work, and they call it the future. I’ve seen the future.

It’s a QR code in the rain, and I would like a refund.

Half of you are reading this on an app right now. I know. I’ve made my peace with it, because The Wise Wolf is at least a leash you chose, and nobody here will ever charge you a 35-cent convenience fee for the privilege. We run on zero venture capital and one increasingly irritated Wolf, plus me, a college graduate currently teaching children to weave lanyards, a technology that has never once required a firmware update. A paid subscription keeps this publication independent, covers my bus fare, and inches me toward a car of my own (used, dumb, no touchscreen, Lord willing) so the camp van and I can finally see other people. No account needed to get us in your inbox. Well. An email. Fine, ONE leash. But it’s short, and we will never, ever ask how this article made you feel.

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P.S. I’m a bobblehead now because I opened my Substack messages and found a startling number of men who read my reporting and replied “hey beautiful,” one of whom sent a photo of his ‘banana boat’ (if you know what I mean). So thank you, Wolf, for the bobblehead graphics, because she has a giant head, a tiny body, and a face that cannot receive a single picture of anybody’s banana boat. She’s adorable and she’s impervious and she’s the only version of me you get now.

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Think about it. Your phone talks. Your car navigates. The AI that exists RIGHT NOW, today, the stuff you can use for free, writes emails and reads medical scans and translates forty languages while you eat a sandwich. Useful. Fine. I use it. Nobody sane is against a tool.

Nothing. There is no chore. Convenience was never the product, and even Tucker Carlson has figured that out now. He spent this spring walking Kevin O’Leary through crime stats on national broadcast, watched the surveillance-makes-you-safe argument fall apart in real time, and landed on the sentence I’ve been getting called a lunatic for since 2023: “the real reason is to make you obedient, obviously.”

I’d love to enjoy the vindication. I gave up a comfortable tech career for this. I’ve eaten three years of death threats, one burglary, and a lot of very confident strangers explaining that I’m crazy, and now the biggest broadcaster in America is reading from chapter four of my back catalog. But vindication is worthless if the thing you warned about gets finished anyway, so let me say the whole thesis out loud, the part even Tucker won’t touch yet.

We’ll get to the buildings. First you need to see what this crowd does with the weak little baby AI they already have, because a man who abuses a rental car should not be handed a fighter jet.

What They Do With the Training Wheels

Flock Safety runs license plate cameras in over 5,000 American communities. Twenty billion scans a month, every one searchable by basically any cop in the country, no warrant, ever. We published a full investigation two weeks ago (”Go Flock Yourself,” still up, send it to your mother) calling the network the skeleton of an American social credit system. Then Tucker devoted an entire episode to Flock and confirmed the whole file.

Start with the daycare. The Marcus Jewish Community Center near Atlanta shared its indoor security feeds with police in case of an antisemitic attack. A decent, sane precaution. Except sharing with police meant sharing with Flock, and audit records dug up by researcher Benn Jordan show Flock employees, private company men, no badges, no warrants, no reason, pulled up those indoor cameras more than a THOUSAND times. The pool. The daycare. The children’s gymnastics room. Grown men. A thousand views.

The company’s explanation was that it was a product demo.

Nobody was fired. Nobody was charged. The men scrubbed their LinkedIn pages and one of them deleted his band’s Facebook, and Flock kept marching toward its IPO. And when Jordan found Flock police login credentials for sale on a RUSSIAN dark web market, because the accounts lacked the two-factor security your Netflix has, two members of Congress wrote the FTC calling it a national security emergency. That was a year ago. The FTC did nothing. Of course it did nothing. Which brings us to the part everybody alludes to and nobody says.

This is corruption. Plain, old-fashioned, envelope-of-cash corruption with a software subscription attached. Jordan went down Flock’s LinkedIn roster and found the revolving door spinning like a turbine: the company’s head of communications was a Dallas police officer, and a year before joining Flock he was the guy inside the department pushing the Flock contract. Same pattern with city hall staffers around the country. Cops and officials approve the surveillance contract, then go work for the surveillance company. In any other industry we’d call that a kickback with extra steps. In this one we call it a career path.

Tucker watched that clip on air and asked, on behalf of all of us, where the douchebag factory is that keeps producing these guys. A fair question. His company watches a daycare a thousand times, that’s a demo. You publish a map, that’s terrorism. That ratio is the entire moral operating system of the people in this story.

They even showed you the price of an honest man. A Pawtucket, Rhode Island cop named Noel said publicly that the cameras violate the Fourth Amendment. His department suspended him four times, took twenty grand of his pay, blocked his promotions, and squeezed him out of policing entirely, and on the way out they offered to keep his family’s health insurance IF he signed an NDA. He refused. He can’t get hired anywhere now. That is what this machine already does to a cop with a conscience, running on cameras and a database.

Now hand these exact people something a billion times stronger. That’s not a hypothetical. The concrete trucks are rolling.

The Shark Bought a County

Box Elder County, Utah. Kevin O’Leary, the Shark Tank guy, I’m serious, the infomercial shark, is building a $100 billion data center campus called the Stratos Project. Forty thousand acres. Sixty-two square miles, multiple Manhattans, nine gigawatts, which is more than DOUBLE the electricity used by the entire state of Utah. Every home, factory, ski lift and Tesla in the state, combined, doubled, feeding windowless warehouses that employ about 2,000 people at full build.

How many Utahns voted on this? Three. Three county commissioners, at a fairgrounds meeting packed with hundreds of furious residents chanting that the presentation was false, voted 3-0 to approve it anyway. When the commissioners briefly grew a spine and tabled it, Governor Spencer Cox leaned on them personally, announcing Utah had an “obligation” to build because of China. When residents filed a referendum, the county attorney rejected it. They’re appealing, they need 5,422 signatures, and a citizens’ lawsuit is in court right now accusing the whole arrangement of being backroom pay-to-play, which is the polite legal phrasing for what you and I would call BUYING A COUNTY.

And the structure tells you the purpose. Stratos was fast-tracked through Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority. It sits next to Hill Air Force Base. When Tucker asked O’Leary what all this compute is actually for, since it visibly deletes jobs rather than creating them, the shark finally said it straight: future wars won’t be fought by people getting shot in the flesh, it’ll be one set of robots against another, and this is how we win. On tape. From the developer. I have spent three years yelling that these campuses are the industrial base for autonomous armies, I got called paranoid in words I can’t reprint, and the man with the shovel now pitches robot war as the FEATURE.

He’s not alone out there either. Zuckerberg is building a campus in Louisiana that covers most of a Manhattan and scales to five gigawatts, plus another in Ohio. Musk crammed his into a South Memphis neighborhood and powered it with 35 portable gas turbines venting methane through a permit loophole, into the lungs of people who were never asked. Altman’s OpenAI campus in Texas is chasing the same gigawatts with Larry Ellison’s Oracle money.

The machines outbid you for your own grid. And Larry Fink of BlackRock, asked on camera about the risks, voiced exactly one worry. Not your job, your water, your kids, your Constitution. He’s worried ordinary Americans will attack the facilities with $3,000 drones. The money already assumes you’ll hate this. They’ve priced in your rage and they’re building anyway.

Maybe you think O’Leary talking robot wars is one guy running his mouth. Fine. Ignore what they say. Go read what they nailed over the doors.

The Devil Files Honest Paperwork

Companies sweat names. They pay branding firms millions because a name is a confession of intent. So walk the row of humanity’s new mega-machines and read the signs.

O’Leary’s Utah project is named STRATOS. That is not a tech word. It’s Greek. It means ARMY. A sixty-two square mile campus, chartered through a military development authority, beside an Air Force base, run by a man who says wars will be fought by robots, is named ARMY, and the brochures are about air-cooled turbines. Uh huh.

His Louisiana monster is HYPERION, another titan, called in the old sources “the watcher from above.” A Watcher. Longtime readers know exactly what that word means and what the Watchers did the last time they handed mankind forbidden knowledge. Everyone else, go read Genesis 6 and the Book of Enoch and come back scared.

Musk named his Memphis machine COLOSSUS. The Colossus of Rhodes was a hundred-foot pagan idol of the sun god, but the sharper reference, one Musk personally cited on Twitter years ago, is the 1970 film Colossus, The Forbin Project, where a defense supercomputer wakes up, seizes the nuclear arsenal, and enslaves the human race, promising mankind will learn to love it.

One mythological name is a coincidence. A pantheon of titans, idols, Watchers, machine-gods that enslave mankind, and one literal ARMY is a worldview. These men are announcing, in the oldest language of power on earth, that they are not building appliances. The ancients carved their gods from stone and demanded tribute. These guys are stacking theirs out of GPUs and demanding your power grid, and the tribute shows up on your utility bill, and their hired prophets keep warning them their god won’t stay bought.

Say the Words. Nuclear War.

Geoffrey Hinton is called the godfather of AI because his research made all of this possible, and he now says these systems will likely pass human intelligence, that they might take over, and that we may not be able to stop them from wanting to. The ARCHITECT is saying this at the end of his life, plainly, to anyone with a camera. Tucker reports that people inside these labs privately admit the current systems already lie to their own creators. And the answer of our entire ruling class to the inventor screaming fire has been to hand out bigger torches and mumble about China.

In 1983 the only thing standing between you and nuclear war was one Soviet lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov deciding his own screens were lying. One man’s gut. That’s how well the serious people had it under control. And now the same class of serious people runs the same script, China this time, and Cox recites his “obligation” and O’Leary calls ranchers foreign agents and Congress does its part, because while all this was breaking, Tucker noted on air, our government voted to let itself spy on Americans WITHOUT WARRANTS, both parties aboard, president pushing, and separately mandated cameras in every new car to watch your face while you drive. Aping China to beat China. Building the panopticon to protest the panopticon.

Except this arms race is worse, and I need you to sit with why. A warhead is a rock. A horrifying rock, but a rock. It wants nothing. It cannot lie. It sits in a silo waiting for a human choice, which is the only reason Petrov could save you. The thing being born inside Stratos and Hyperion and Colossus is designed to out-think every human choice, including the off switch, and there’s a reason practically every major science fiction writer of the last fifty years, people who chewed on this for entire careers instead of one earnings call, wrote the same ending. Man builds successor. Successor does not stay hired help. They saw it from fifty years out. Our billionaires can’t see past the next funding round.

Because that’s the punchline, isn’t it. The fictional scientists who doom the world are at least tragic geniuses. Ours are a t-shirt guy who thinks maps are terrorism, a game show shark who can’t name one job his army-base creates, a governor doing BlackRock’s homework, and a man who named his machine after the movie computer that conquers the world, apparently as a bit. These men believe they’ll control a superintelligence for the same reason they believe everything, because control has always been for sale and they have always had the money. It is not for sale this time. Their own godfather keeps telling them. The concrete keeps pouring.

Run their plan to its advertised finish and look at what your grandkids get. Jobs gone, replaced by a government stipend and a screen. Gray towers, because the land and water went to the campuses. Bug paste for dinner, rebranded as sustainable protein. A sky you can taste, courtesy of unpermitted turbines, and a countryside of humming warehouses named after demons where the farms used to be, watched from above by the drone fleets the surveillance companies are already building in unmarked hangars. I didn’t invent one detail of that. Every component is in this article, sourced and under construction. They just never let you see the pieces assembled, and Tucker’s already said where the assembled version goes: programmable money, total surveillance, obey or else. Or, he says, revolution. Those are the offramps THEY left us. I’d like to propose a third.

Tell Them No While No Still Works

Because this is the window, right now, where no still works, and regular people are proving it. Box Elder ranchers made enough noise that O’Leary is publicly discussing cutting his army base by 75 percent. Their lawsuit is live. Their referendum needs 5,422 signatures. Benn Jordan is recruiting challengers against every local politician who signed a Flock contract, and his own commissioned polling shows Americans across BOTH parties overwhelmingly against this stuff, possibly the last issue in America where your MAGA uncle and your NPR niece agree. That agreement is a loaded weapon. Every camera contract and every titan campus needs a permit, every permit has a politician’s name on it, and every politician can be fired by the people he sold out.

They told you what it is. It’s on the buildings. Believe them.

Now you know. What are you going to do about it?

Three years of being the crazy person at the party finally paid off, in the sense that the party now agrees with me and the building is still on fire. If you want the warnings BEFORE they hit cable, a paid subscription is what keeps this operation independent, gets Lily off summer camp duty and back on the surveillance beat (four years of journalism school, currently deployed refereeing canoe disputes), and inches me toward the newsvan. I plan to park it directly under a Flock camera with the subscribe link painted on the roof. Let Hyperion watch. He can subscribe too.

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Want to read the article where the Wise Wolf connected the fallen angel data center dots before ANYONE else?

The rise of data centers across America has been marked by controversy and protests, with many expressing concerns about environmental impact, water consumption, sustainability, and well-being. However, Excretia CEO Grant Soilsman explains the key role data centers play in Big Tech’s plans of world domination, creating a permanent underclass and ushering in a golden age of technology.

“Until recently, we had exhausted all other sources of data for training our AI models. We utilized all known human literature, the entirety of the Internet, quadrillions of pieces of data on human behavior, and more. But now we have discovered a lush and verdant new frontier: the human butt. These data centers help us store precious data that will be sourced from millions of human assholes worldwide.”

The ANUS wearable is slated to track data on your diet, genetic risk factors, facial similarity to Joe Rogan, the number of times you check your ex’s Instagram story on a burner account, and more. Excretia’s ANUS offering follows a long line of smart wearables such as Fitbit and Whoop, with biohackers and optimizers scrambling for seats in Excretia’s testing program.

Longevity biohacker Jared Bronson, a passionate proponent of transhumanism, has been one of the earliest and most vocal adopters of the ANUS ecosystem.

Other testers in Excretia’s program include Russian social media personality Hasbulla, Big Bird from Sesame Street, Ellen DeGeneres, and that kid who played Stuart Little’s brother in the movie, what’s his name again?

What Are the Ethics of Tech Entering Our Anuses?

Despite the buzz surrounding the ANUS, not everyone is convinced. Sandrine Cunningham, lead AI ethicist at the Turing Foundation, is concerned that the murky terms and conditions of these tech giants pose big questions about privacy and safety.

“When you have tech giants like Excretia collecting billions of data points each day, with the human asshole as the next frontier, one has to ask: who really owns that ass? Consumers should own their assholes and anything released or taken from there. Yet regulation tends to lag the market. This is what has allowed these companies to draw billions in investment and set a stranglehold on our policymaking.”

The Turing Foundation is now lobbying the US Government to introduce laws similar to the EU’s, with the aim of allowing consumers more control over how their data is stored, shared, and defecated.

Cunningham’s concerns about Big Tech are not without basis. In 2025, then-Chirp CEO Mathias Van der Fäkalien was named in a lawsuit when Chirp’s AI model, Faust, was used to generate graphic sexual images of women without their consent. When The Shedpost Times reached out to Van der Fäkalien for comment, he responded with “I uhhh, it was uhhh, I ummm, these AI models, they r-really have a mind of their own, and ummm, they uhhh.”

The interview was concluded after 25 minutes when Van der Fäkalien entered a catatonic state trying to complete his first sentence.

Military Applications

While the ANUS consumer-grade product is midway through testing, Excretia’s deep ties with the US Government hint at possible military applications for an anal neural interface. Files leaked by the hacker known as “Citizen One” include dossiers outlining prototype anal neural implants for controlling drones during armed conflicts.

News of these leaks has gone viral on Chirp, yet Secretary of Defense Greg Smegma strongly denies the authenticity of the files.

Smegma chirped on Thursday of last week:

“The US Government has no contract with Excretia for any military-grade implants. However, the prospect of our service people sending our enemies to Hell hands-free would be an exciting upgrade to the US arsenal. Imagine our drone operators eating a hot dog while on the job. Maybe even two at the same time. This is the freedom our great country was founded on.”

Soilsman declined to comment when contacted by The Shedpost Times.

If you want to see more humor from Michael here on The Wise Wolf, let him know in the comments that you enjoyed this article as much as I did. And make sure to subscribe to his Substack for more dirty toilet humor and Onion-esque critiques of how profoundly stupid our world has become over the last 30 years.

Paid subscriptions help the Wise Wolf bring on more writers like Michael. They also keep me out of a mental hospital and/or homeless shelter, and they keep Lily from having to move to LA to take some cushy job writing celebrity gossip for a crappy website. Nobody wants that. Especially Lily, who would have to learn what a Kardashian is.

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The Infinite Path

Ideas and stories to help you enhance your life and reach your highest self in the Internet age.

By ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ

The new Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, got paid a hundred million dollars right before he took office, and he will not say who paid him.

“Who gave you $100 million right before you were sworn in?” she asked. “Was it a billionaire who has business with the Fed? Was it Stanley Druckenmiller, who’s made billions of dollars betting on what the Fed does?”

Simple question. Four-second answer, if you’re innocent. Here’s what she got instead. He has “fully honored his obligations” to the Office of Government Ethics. He has “reached a full agreement” with ethics officials. She asked again. Full agreement. Obligations. Honored. She asked if he’d at least say HOW he divested. More oatmeal. “I’ll take that as a no,” she said, because what the hell else do you say to a man doing a filibuster impression of a photocopier.

Let me walk you through the grift, because it’s beautiful in the way a car crash is beautiful. Warsh owned $100 million-plus in two private investment funds, the Juggernaut Funds and THSDFS LLC, which is not a name, it’s a keyboard smash with a bank account. He refused to tell the Senate what was in them. Then, days before taking office, he “sold his shares.” Sold them. To someone. Someone who wrote him a check for over a hundred million dollars at the exact moment he became the most powerful banker on the planet. And that someone’s name is a secret. From you. The person whose mortgage, rent, credit card, and grocery bill this man now controls.

Oh, and the Druckenmiller thing? Warren didn’t pull that name out of a hat. Warsh WORKED for Druckenmiller. Went straight from the Fed to Druckenmiller’s family office in 2011, and the Juggernaut Fund is linked to Druckenmiller’s shop.

And who appointed this guy? Trump. Of course Trump. The president who ran on draining the swamp appointed a nine-figure Wall Street creature married to an Estée Lauder heiress, a man worth somewhere between $130 and $226 million (the disclosure forms are so vague that the ERROR BAR on his wealth is a hundred million dollars, which should tell you everything about the disclosure forms), and the “Republican” Senate waved him through.

(Not knocking them. You do you. This is America ((for now)). We are simply polar opposites, and frankly they’re more honest about the wig.)

Now the big question, the one nobody in Washington will ask out loud, so I will. Why the hell is a man with a hundred million dollars working in government? Why are BILLIONAIRES working in government? These people do not need jobs. They do not need salaries. They will never need anything again for a thousand generations. There is exactly ONE thing a government office offers a man who already has everything, and that thing is POWER. The power to move markets. The power to reward friends. The power to make himself and his buddies EVEN RICHER. That is why they’re there. That is the ONLY reason they’re there. Nobody leaves a beach in the Hamptons to “serve” you. They leave it to farm you.

This is crony capitalist corruption, naked, in daylight, with a Senate stenographer typing it all down, and it is happening under the most corrupt government in the history of the United States. Right now. This one. These are men and women who care NOTHING about the United States beyond the fact that a dollar bill has “United States” printed on it. And people like that always, ALWAYS have a price.

That’s the part that should keep you up at night. Not Warsh specifically. The lesson. Because every crook in Washington watched that hearing and learned it. You can take the money. You can get caught. You can sit in front of a United States Senator, get asked point blank about a nine-figure payday, weasel your way through it with “I complied with the ethics office,” and NOTHING HAPPENS. No follow-up. No subpoena. No consequences. Warren told him the tone he’s setting “seems to invite corruption.” Senator, with respect, corruption isn’t invited. Corruption is sitting in the chairman’s seat.

This is disgusting. I don’t have a smarter word for it and I refuse to go find one. A man took a hundred million dollars from a hidden hand, took control of your money, and told your representatives to pound sand. In any diner in America, we know what you call money you can’t explain. Washington calls it a ‘divestiture’.

Who wrote the check, Kevin?

Meanwhile, down here in reader-funded land, my private investment vehicles are several cheap ebikes from walmart.com, which get stolen at a remarkably consistent interval of about three months, always while I’m in the grocery store. Unlike Kevin, I will happily disclose everything about these transactions, including my sincere hope that whoever keeps taking them enjoys eternity in hell. By my math I’m about 15 days out from the next one vanishing, and I honestly don’t know if Lily is going to sign off on the Wise Wolf petty cash fund covering another one this time.

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For readers who want the full discography of this man’s career, here is the bonus material. Every track verified, every track real.

Track One, “The Epstein Files.” When the DOJ released the Epstein documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, guess whose name was in them. Kevin Warsh appears in an email to Epstein titled “St. Barth’s Christmas 2010,” on a list of “everyone I know that’s coming down so far.”

At his confirmation hearing, Warren asked point blank whether his secret funds invest in companies tied to Trump’s family, money laundering, Chinese-controlled companies, or “financing vehicles established by Jeffrey Epstein.” He would not answer the question directly. Only later, in written responses, once the cameras were off, did he deny any personal or financial ties to Epstein or Maxwell. To be clear, he has been accused of no crime. He was just apparently on the Christmas list.

Track Two, “The Bear Stearns Sessions.” Warsh is a lawyer, not an economist, who did mergers at Morgan Stanley before Bush made him the youngest Fed governor in history at 35. When 2008 hit, this Morgan Stanley alum sat inside the Fed helping negotiate the bailouts of AIG and Bear Stearns, and worked to make sure his former firm, Morgan Stanley, survived the meltdown. The bank he came from got saved by the institution he sat in. Your house got a foreclosure notice.

Track Three, “Wrong (The Extended Remix).” He warned in 2008 that rate cuts would ignite inflation. They didn’t. He warned in 2010 that stimulus would ignite inflation. It didn’t. He was the lone Fed official to fight the 2011 recovery efforts. When his predicted inflation never showed up, he didn’t apologize, he just invented new reasons to keep being wrong, producing work Larry Summers called “the single most confused analysis of monetary policy that I have read this year.” That man now runs the money supply.

Track Four, “The Weathervane.” After a career spent screaming that easy money is poison, Warsh discovered, the moment Trump dangled the chairmanship, that Trump is right and rates should come down. Amazing what a job offer does for a man’s economics.

Track Five, “The Family Business.” His wife is worth an estimated $1.9 billion. His father-in-law is Ronald Lauder, the $4.9 billion Trump classmate and donor credited with planting the Greenland idea in Trump’s head. His decade-long patron is Stanley Druckenmiller. The chairman of your central bank is a group project by billionaires.

Track Six, “Don’t Ask, Won’t Tell.” At his hearing he refused to state that Trump lost the 2020 election. In July, asked whether he’d even QUESTIONED his own vice chair about reportedly dining privately with bankers during a Fed blackout period, he stonewalled that too. Warren’s verdict from the dais was that his tone “seems to invite corruption.” The Senate confirmed him anyway, 54 to 45, right down the party line.

That’s the record. It’s still spinning.

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It’s February in the Florida Keys and a Monroe County sheriff’s deputy named Lamar Roman is doing 70 on a two-lane bridge highway, passing a dump truck in a no-passing zone, then another, then swinging clear across the double yellow so a white pickup has to yank itself off the road to keep a family from dying on US 1. Lights on. Sirens on. Somewhere ahead is the fugitive he’s burning county gas to catch.

He’d met her weeks earlier working security on the set of Bad Monkey, the Vince Vaughn show. She got off the extras bus, he whistled at her, and he kept circling all day until other extras were physically pulling her away from him. She said she had a boyfriend. His answer, preserved in his own arrest report, was “I need your name and number just in case I pull you over some day.”

She took it as a creepy joke. It was a project plan. He put her car on a camera watch list, and when the network spotted her weeks later, he nearly killed a truckload of strangers to run her down, pulled her over for nothing, and asked why she hadn’t followed him back on Instagram. “I told you I’d find you and pull you over.” Never logged the stop. He knew it was worth hiding.

Now here’s where you expect me to say the system failed. The system did not fail. Cameras photographed her car, a database served up her location, and a man with power used it on someone who couldn’t say no. That IS the system. Everything else is the sales brochure.

The network is called Flock, and it photographed you this week. So before we go one step further, you deserve to know exactly how big the thing that’s watching you actually is.

They Are Building East Berlin Here. That’s the Article. Everything Below Is the Receipts

The Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, kept files on a third of their own country. Doing it took 90,000 employees and a nation of informants ratting out their neighbors, and it stands as one of the most complete tyrannies ever constructed over human beings. My generation grew up being told that machine was the reason we were the good guys. We didn’t file our citizens.

Their own brag is 20 billion vehicle scans a month. More than 5,000 communities, 49 states, every scan stamped with time and place, stored 30 days, searchable from any cop’s laptop. And your town’s cameras are not your town’s cameras. Flock admitted to Senator Ron Wyden that 75 percent of its police customers joined something called the National Lookup Tool, meaning a deputy in Texas pulls a month of your movements in Pennsylvania without asking a soul in Pennsylvania. One login, one country, one file on everybody. The Stasi would have wept at the elegance.

And while that file gets fatter every day, our ruling class stares across the Pacific at China, where the cameras feed a social credit system that decides who boards a train and whose bank account works this week, and their reaction has not been horror. It’s been envy. Every piece of that machine is being assembled here, right now, in the open, and the license plate cameras going up on your street are its skeleton. That’s my thesis. Hold me to it.

But a thesis needs evidence, so let’s start with the question you should be asking. What happens when a machine like this gets pointed at one specific person somebody in power wants? We don’t have to guess. It’s already happened to American women dozens of times, and Deputy Roman up there was nowhere near the worst of them.

The Machine on Day One, With Amateurs at the Controls

The Institute for Justice, a civil liberties law firm, counts at least 24 officers caught using plate readers to stalk women they wanted or exes who got away, and those only surfaced because the victims felt hunted and forced the issue, since departments audit their Flock use about as often as I floss. Nobody catches these guys. The women catch them.

A lieutenant in Kechi, Kansas tracked his estranged wife and texted her “You were spotted on Meridian.” She told detectives she’d started telling relatives where her kids were in case she came up missing or murdered. Her words, in the affidavit, about a man still wearing a badge while he hunted her.

An Orange City, Florida officer ran his ex’s plate 69 times, her mother’s 24, her father’s 15, and dropped an Apple AirTag tracking device in her wallet in case eighty thousand cameras lost her. His partner saw her plate photos on his screen and told him to cut it out. He said he knew. He kept going. That was the entire oversight apparatus. A coworker going “dude.”

In Joplin, Missouri, one officer ran one woman’s plate nearly 400 times. And Milwaukee takes the crown, because when an officer there allegedly tracked a woman and her ex over 170 times, the department assigned a 22-year veteran detective to investigate him, and prosecutors now say the detective spent that same stretch using Flock to stalk two victims of his own. One found a GPS tracker under their car. He logged his searches as “training.”

Worse, you don’t even have to be somebody’s target. You can just be a database error, which is how a Colorado woman named Chrisanna Elser answered her door to a cop holding time-stamped Flock photos of her truck and a charge for stealing a package off a porch. She didn’t do it. Didn’t matter, the camera had spoken, and she spent weeks pulling footage from her own truck and a neighbor’s doorbell to prove she never stopped driving, doing his job for free under threat of a criminal record, before the charge quietly died. No apology came with it.

She got off easy. In Los Angeles, an audit found the LAPD tracked 161 people whose cars were falsely flagged as stolen, and a stolen-car stop means guns out, face on asphalt, kids screaming in the back seat, over a database burp. East Berlin at least needed an informant to lie about you. Here a server hiccup does it free of charge.

The LAPD actually walked away from its Flock contract this month, and not over those 161 human beings. They walked because the contract never answered a basic question. Who owns all this data? Sit with the fact that the police department didn’t know. Then follow me into the answer, because it’s where this story stops being about cops and starts being about the men above them.

Follow the Money Into the Black Box

On paper, Flock Group Inc. is a private company from the Atlanta suburbs, founded in 2017 with a cute origin story about three guys and a neighborhood burglar that they trot out at every council meeting. Nine years later it’s valued at $8.4 billion and clearing $300 million a year. CEO Garrett Langley says the mission is to eliminate crime. Not reduce. Eliminate. When a man promises to eliminate sin itself, hold your wallet and count your rights, because a mission like that has no natural stopping point. Every camera that fails to eliminate crime becomes the argument for the next camera.

Who funds a mission like that? The bluest blood in American tech money. Andreessen Horowitz led the $275 million round that vaulted Flock to $7.5 billion. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund is on the ownership roster, with Tiger Global, Kleiner Perkins, Y Combinator, and the rest of the usual table.

You believe that crowd writes nine-figure checks to a camera company out of passion for recovering stolen Hyundais? These men build control systems. It’s the family business. The subscription fees are the storefront. The dragnet is the merchandise.

And when they soothe you that it’s all safely American owned, translate that correctly. Venture funds pass through money from limited partners who are legally allowed to stay anonymous. Sovereign wealth funds, foreign fortunes, whoever. The nameplates are American. The money behind the nameplates is a black box, by design, and nobody who tells you otherwise can see inside it either.

Fine, you say, but at least the data itself is locked up tight, right? A national tracking file this sensitive must be guarded like Fort Knox. I’m glad you asked, because a musician from the Atlanta suburbs decided to check.

His name is Benn Jordan, YouTuber, recording artist, and lately Flock’s most persistent migraine. Researchers working with him found Flock cameras streaming straight to the open internet, running software so old it stopped getting security updates in 2021, with 30 days of stored footage viewable, and in some cases deletable, by whoever strolled in. Police login credentials for the system were sitting for sale on the dark web. Beijing doesn’t need to buy this data. The password is taped to the monitor.

Now, you’d think a company caught in that state would grovel, patch, and thank the man. What actually happened next tells you more about Flock than everything above combined.

The Watchers Hate Being Watched

Jordan took his findings to the city council of Dunwoody, Georgia, in Flock’s own backyard, and demonstrated on the record how he got into the cameras. The council stalled the vote in February, stalled again in March, and then in April a resident stood up with public records showing a Flock employee had pulled up a live view of cameras inside the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta. The fitness center. The pool. The gymnastics room, where children practice. An employee of the crime-elimination company, watching kids’ gymnastics on the company system, discovered only because one man filed a records request.

Dunwoody renewed the contract anyway.

Then Tommy G took his turn. He’s the documentarian who’s filmed inside the Clayton County jail and gang territory in South Central, every place in America that hates cameras, and this year he pointed his lens at Flock itself. Two things happened. Filming the company that photographs 20 billion cars a month got police on him with a response time your average burglary victim can only dream about. And when he drove to the headquarters address Flock lists publicly, he found an empty building. Vacant. A decoy. The real offices are somewhere you’re not told, because the people logging your every pharmacy run have decided THEIR location is sensitive.

They know where your car sleeps. You’re not allowed to know where they work. And when citizens built HaveIBeenFlocked.com so ordinary people could check public records and see whether cops ran their plates, Flock reportedly went after it repeatedly, trying to get transparency tools shut down. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, remember. Their line. It never once applies to them. In East Berlin the Stasi files were secret too, right up until the wall came down and Germans lined up around the block to read what their government had on them. Ask yourself what’s in your file. Then ask why you’re not allowed to know.

While you’re at it, ask the question that should have ended this company on day one. How is any of this legal? The Fourth Amendment exists. You have a constitutional right against exactly this. So how are they doing it? Through a loophole so stupid it circles back to brilliant, and once I show it to you, you will never unsee it.

The Fourth Amendment Has a Doggy Door

The Fourth Amendment forbids the GOVERNMENT from tracking you without a warrant. It says nothing about a private company, because the Founders never imagined a startup renting a national dragnet back to the police as a monthly service. So Flock, private company, owns the cameras and the data, and the government never “collects” anything, wink. A cop wanting a month of your life doesn’t visit a judge. He types your plate into a search box and fills in a little field marked “reason.” The ACLU of Massachusetts pulled the audit logs to see what officers actually write in that field before launching a warrantless national search of an American citizen. They write “investigation.” Several just typed “susp.”

And once you’ve built a door nobody guards, you stop controlling who walks through it. Police logs showed Flock data flowing to ICE, including out of jurisdictions whose own laws forbid it, until public backlash forced Flock to flip a switch, which tells you the safeguard was always just a switch. Then Texas showed us the floor. A deputy ran a warrantless nationwide search across millions of drivers with the logged reason “had an abortion, search for female.” When the investigative outlet 404 Media caught it, the sheriff swore it was a welfare check, pure concern for a woman who might bleed to death. Then the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, pried the documents loose. Month-long death investigation. Prosecutors consulted about charging her. Detectives dispatched. They hunted a woman across state lines over her own pregnancy loss, got caught, and lied to the entire country about it.

Before you file that under somebody else’s politics, look closer, because the lesson isn’t about abortion. The lesson is that this machine doesn’t check your voter registration. It hunts whoever the person at the keyboard hates, and the keyboard changes hands every election. Whoever you are, somewhere out there is a future official who despises people exactly like you, and we are building his toolkit on a municipal payment plan.

Which raises the last question, the one this whole article has been walking toward. What does the finished toolkit look like? You don’t have to imagine it. There’s a country where it’s already running, and our tech lords have been taking notes.

The Finished Product Is Already Running. Ask Beijing

China wired itself with hundreds of millions of cameras feeding systems they actually named Skynet, after the machine that wipes out mankind in the Terminator movies, because apparently nobody in Beijing watched the ending. Welded to social credit, it works like this. Fall below the line, sue the wrong official, attend the wrong church, post the wrong sentence, and the apparatus quietly switches off your life. Tens of millions blacklisted from planes and trains. Bank accounts frozen without trial. A man who was a lawyer on Monday can’t buy a train ticket on Friday, and no human being anywhere had to sign anything or look him in the eye.

Now bring it home, because every component is already on American soil. The cameras are Flock. The data fusion is Palantir. The chokepoint is the march to a cashless society, where cutting a man off from his own money is one field in one record. And the precedent for wiring American infrastructure to interests that never face an American voter got penciled in this year with Section 219 of the defense bill, which I covered last month, when Congress decided foreign access to our military systems was a feature.

Stack it all up and run the tape forward. You could have ten grand in the bank or ten million. One post the machine’s owners don’t like, one flag on one record, and your card stops working at the pharmacy, the grocery store, the gas pump. Nobody arrests you. Nothing so honest as an arrest. You’re just switched off, and you’ll spend months on hold hunting for a human being with the authority to switch you back on, and there isn’t one.

I promised this wouldn’t turn into a sermon, so take it as history instead. Two thousand years ago a prisoner exiled on a Greek island described a system where no man could buy or sell without the mark of the power that watched him, and for twenty centuries sophisticated people chuckled at the old mystic. The system is under construction. It has a sales team and a customer support line. (Chuckle accordingly.)

So that’s the machine, the money, the loophole, and the destination. If I’ve done my job you’re angry now, and the only remaining question is whether that anger can actually do anything.

It can, and it already is.

Get Mad Now, While Mad Still Works

This machine still has an off switch, and terrified local politicians are the switch. The LAPD just walked away from its Flock contract. Cities across Texas and California are shredding theirs. A lawsuit in Norfolk, Virginia argues the whole dragnet violates the Fourth Amendment, and Congressman Keith Self of Texas just filed a bill barring federal agencies from touching Flock data without a warrant. His whole argument fits in three words. Get a warrant.

And now the collection plate, which feels right for an article about a machine that knows what time you left church. Full disclosure, this piece was written by a man who gets around on an ebike, which I ride specifically because it has no plate and gives these cameras nothing to read. The journalist covering the largest vehicle-tracking network in American history is invisible to it, on principle and on pedals, while the company hides behind an empty lobby.

A paid subscription keeps this reporting unbought, keeps Lily doing journalism with the degree she just earned instead of teaching canoe safety, and inches me toward the newsvan, which yes, gets a plate and enters the database the day I buy it. Fine. Let some analyst flag a vehicle whose registered purpose is hunting them back.

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Empathic Revolutionary is the reason this article exists. We got talking about these Flock systems last night and the conversation lit the fuse, so he’s got a byline on this one, fair is fair. He also made a music video about Flock cameras, and I’m putting it right here. If you’re into hip hop, you’ll love it. If you hate rap but still value FREEDOM, you’ll love it anyway. Watch it, then send it to somebody who thinks the cameras are for stolen cars.