Rectenwald and Thornton argue the US is being steered toward a monetary reset and central bank digital currency, with Trump serving as a “Trojan horse” and the war with Iran precipitating a global oil and export crisis that will drive higher inflation. They contend CBDC is “programmable money” that would let the state cap purchases (like diesel), enforce digital identity, and impose totalitarian control, warning that a future president could bribe voters with $5,000 free CBDC accounts during an economic crisis. Their prescribed defense is Rectenwald’s nine-point “grand refusal” plan—refusing digital ID and CBDC, using cash and barter, and shifting wealth into gold, silver, and hard assets.
CBDC as programmable control: Both argue stablecoins (floated via the Genius Act) and CBDC are “programmable money” enabling the government to shut off spending on specific goods, and note HR6644, the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, temporarily bans CBDC only until December 2030—a date they call suspicious given it aligns with UN Agenda 2030.
The $5,000 bribe scenario: Thornton contends a future administration campaigning during an economic crisis could offer every American $5,000 in free CBDC to gain adoption, then attach requirements (paycheck deposits, tax payments) to trap citizens, comparing it to how the income tax was sold as applying only to a small number of wealthy people at under 10%.
AI data centers as surveillance: Rectenwald claims AI’s real revenue comes from government military and surveillance contracts—citing Palantir’s “panopticon”—and warns government AI contracts create “official AI dogma” and a state-corporate monopoly; Thornton argues trillions in AI investment will underperform and go bust due to Fed-suppressed interest rates.
“Inclusion” as totalitarian tell: Rectenwald argues that whenever the World Economic Forum invokes “inclusion” or banking the roughly one billion unbanked, people should “run for the hills,” comparing CBDC-driven financial inclusion to joining a prison to get the free meal.
Hard-asset opt-out: Thornton advises reducing dollar-denominated balances and shifting into physical assets, gold, silver, and commodity-linked equities like ExxonMobil over Tesla; Rectenwald recommends holding only six months of fiat and treating resistance as “acts of refusal,” noting the government’s long “war on cash” (killing the penny, capping bills at $100).
Kirshner argues that Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue and the “Thucydides Trap” are routinely decontextualized, and that the real lesson of the Peloponnesian War is that great powers are undone not by rival rivals but by their own hubris and restlessness—epitomized by Athens’ catastrophic Sicilian expedition. He maps this onto the US, contending the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the 2008 financial crisis, and the current Iran campaign are all expressions of imperial hubris that hollowed out American society. He calls the second Trump administration the most overtly corrupt in US history—a “personalist kleptocracy” whose torching of alliances and renunciation of institutional checks reflects a deeper social failure that will outlast Trump himself.
Misuse of the Melian Dialogue: Kirshner argues Graham Allison’s Destined for War rests on two decontextualized sentences and calls it “not a very good book,” contending Thucydides invented the Melian Dialogue not to teach that the strong do what they will, but to link Athenian arrogance at Milos to its comeuppance in Sicily.
Hubris as the grand lesson: He identifies the Sicilian campaign—occupying roughly a quarter of the book—as the central setpiece, arguing great powers are destroyed by arrogance rather than by shifts in the balance of power, and framing prudence (not pacifism) as the true realist virtue.
American Sicilian expeditions: Kirshner argues the two long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan plus the 2008 global financial crisis (rooted in imposed financial liberalization) were hubristic overreach that contributed to the “hollowing out” of American society across two decades.
IR theory’s failure to explain Trump: As a self-described “card-carrying realist,” he says current US behavior is not realism and fits no off-the-shelf theory, better explained as a “personalist kleptocracy” where Middle East entanglement serves personal business interests—citing selling cryptocurrency from the White House for a billion dollars.
Institutional collapse and alliance damage: Kirshner argues Congress and the Supreme Court have renounced their co-equal prerogatives (invoking Watergate, Goldwater, and LBJ as contrasts), and warns that torching alliances raises doubts in East Asia about whether the US would “show up” against China, damage he says will not easily be undone.
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