How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Occult

How Dominion's sale, the AI bubble, and ecological collapse reveal the occult logic behind America's authoritarian acceleration

Today I want to explore the underlying reasons the U.S. is moving so rapidly in the direction of becoming a full-scale military dictatorship, how this meshes with an understanding that encompasses the evolution of consciousness in some deeper way, and, also, what forces could interrupt this takeover. But before I get there, there is this:

In the blizzard of destruction and misdirection that we’re facing daily now, perhaps the most important story from last week received little mass media attention: The voting company, Dominion, which handles the voting technology in 27 states, just sold to a former Republican election official. Axios reports:

Liberty Vote purchased Canada-based Dominion for an undisclosed sum, according to a person familiar with the transaction. Liberty is a new company owned by Scott Leiendecker, who in 2011 created a software program focused on enabling election workers to verify voters and check them in at polling locations…

Matt Blunt, who was then Missouri’s Republican secretary of state, appointed Leiendecker to a role investigating St. Louis’ elections administration after the 2000 election. As governor, Blunt later appointed Leiendecker to be St. Louis’ Republican election director. Ed Martin, a loyal Trump surrogate, was St. Louis’ Board of Elections’ chair when Leiendecker was the city’s election director.” As interim U.S. attorney for D.C. in Trump’s current administration, Martin demoted prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases, pursued critics of Elon Musk’s DOGE operation, and threatened Wikipedia over what he called biased “propaganda.”

Leiendecker told Axios in a statement that his company is “committed to delivering election technology that prioritizes paper-based transparency, security and simplicity so that voters can be assured that every ballot is filled-in accurately and fairly counted.”

“Liberty Vote signals a new chapter for American elections — one where trust is rebuilt from the ground up,” he said. A Liberty representative said the organization will engage in a “top-down” review of Dominion’s equipment ahead of next year’s midterm elections, and that it would “rebuild or retire” machines as needed.

I don’t know why, but reading that most of the U.S. voting system is now controlled by partisan Right Wing operatives (from a party that no longer believes in Democracy or elections) doesn’t exactly fill me with a sense of trust in the future security of our voting system. To be honest, I already didn’t trust that our voting system gave us the correct results in 2024. All of the swing states seemed won by a suspicious, near identical margin, while many people mysteriously split their vote, choosing Democratic candidates on the bottom of the ticket while voting for Trump at the top. Statistically, this seemed improbable (however, a quick inquiry with Chat-GPT disputes these claims). I have mentioned that the Right Wing playbook is “DARVO” - “Defend, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.” Trump publicly attacked the validity of Dominion voting systems after his 2020 loss. Now most of the country’s voting machinery is in Republican hands.

This also needs to be integrated in the strategies “we, the people,” employ in any future efforts to thwart totalitarian takeover and establish authentic participatory democracy. As Illinois Governor Pritzker and California Governor Newsom have noted, one reason for the military invasion into “blue” cities could be preparation to steal or obstruct future elections. But even that is just play-acting, kayfabe, if they have locked up the voting technology behind the scenes.

Still, the mass of popular sentiment matters. If Trump or the next MAGA candidate has lost popular support and stands to be resoundingly defeated, it will be very difficult for the Right to obscure that reality, no matter how they slice and dice it. At some point, masses of people will be extremely pissed.

A big question, at the moment, is whether the AI stock market bubble is about to burst. Perhaps Friday’s 800 point drop in the Stock Market was the start of this? We might wonder what the consequences of that would be?

Other financial indicators in the U.S. are tanking as Trump’s tariffs paralyze the middle class and bankrupt the nation’s farmers. Young people struggle to find jobs — let alone meaningful work. According to an article in Fortune Magazine, “70% of Gen Z are so anxious about money that they can’t sleep—they’re dealing with it by bed rotting and watching TV instead of budgeting.” No amount of “budgeting” will help, however, if you have mounting student debt and no employment prospects in an economy where prices are skyrocketing while AI eats the job market.

The rapid growth of AI stocks over the past two years has created a classic speculative bubble, similar in some ways to the expansion before the DotCom crash. Companies — including Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI — have absorbed vast sums of capital, becoming, as The Wall Street Journal noted, “the primary engines of the market’s rise.” One suspicious bubble-like element is that these companies trade billions of dollars “among themselves, creating a feedback loop of inflated valuations.”

According to analysts, trillions in investment may yield only tens or hundreds of millions in profit. Much of the hardware behind this spending could “age out in as little as four years.” In other words, companies burn through vast piles of cash on infrastructure that may become obsolete before it pays off, while investors chase hype cycles, ignoring fundamentals. AI-related stocks currently account for around 1/3rd of the U.S. equity market’s value, including basically all of its recent growth. Since the 2008 financial crash, banks and investment firms have developed a number of mechanisms to shield themselves from market corrections. Many people in the U.S. are small-scale investors who do not have those protections. Reductions in interest rates since 2008 forced more ordinary people into the stock market, where they can get fleeced.

Essentially, there are only a few ways that AI can generate profits. One way is to make existing companies more efficient, which means they require fewer workers, saving money. Another way is to develop new stuff — companies, medical techniques, products, etcetera. Most of the AI profits today skew toward cost savings and rent extraction, with genuinely generative gains concentrated in a much smaller set of use cases. Meanwhile, AI is reducing the need for workers in many areas, including entry-level jobs and now taxi drivers and truck drivers.

Why Is the US Becoming a Full-scale Military Dictatorship?

This ongoing AI takeover is, I submit, one major reason the Trump regime and its allies in industry want to rapidly transition the U.S. into a full-scale military dictatorship. A few days ago, Bernie Sanders released this video on the devastating potential consequences of AI for the U.S. job market. It is staggering. Sanders says:

As the ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, I just released a report finding that AI, automation, and robotics could replace nearly 100 million jobs in America over the next decade, including 40% of registered nurses, 47% of truck drivers, 64% of accountants, 65% of teaching assistants, and 89% % of fast food workers among many other occupations. And as bad as that may seem, I’m afraid it could be an underestimate.

In June, the CEO of Ford, Jim Farley, predicted that AI could eliminate “literally half of all white collar jobs in the US” within the next decade. Elon Musk said this year that as a result of AI and robotics, quote, “Probably none of us will have a job. If you want a job, that’s kind of like a hobby. You can do a job. But otherwise, AI and robotics will provide any goods and services you want.” Earlier this year, Bill Gates predicted that humans, “won’t be needed for most things,” such as manufacturing products, delivering packages, or growing food over the next decade due to AI.

Sanders proposes — reasonably — that we need to make sure that the rise of AI and robotics benefits our whole society rather than further concentrating the power of billionaires. Of course, this is the opposite of what the Trump regime is currently doing.

According to Sanders, we can use AI to restructure the economy around a model of shared prosperity. This includes shortening the work week to 32 hours without reducing pay, so workers benefit from rising productivity. Employees need more democratic power and oversight, allowing them to elect nearly half of corporate boards. Wealth can be redistributed through profit-sharing and employee ownership. Finally, instead of rewarding corporations for automation, a “robot tax” can fund programs to support displaced workers. Such measures would align technological progress with human well-being and economic justice.

Unfortunately, the Trump regime is charging forward in the opposite direction, seeking further consolidation of economic, political, and military power, and pursuing what appears to be a Nazi eugenics agenda (instead of retraining fired workers, you can just incarcerate or eliminate them). Along with issues around AI leading to a rapid pauperization of the working and middle classes (which will then require military force to quell the inevitable rebellions), there is also the impact of accelerating global warming. Of course, Trump denies global warming is real, while attacking climate science and expunging the copious evidence of global warming from government websites and databases.

It seems likely, however, that behind the scenes, Trump and his cronies know very well that global warming is real and rapidly accelerating, along with depletions of natural resources (like the rare metals that China is now withholding from us). They anticipate the unpredictable impacts of climate change — droughts, floods, hurricanes, and so on — will contribute to mass civil unrest in the near future. Most likely, they have gamed this out, to some extent.

Mass AI unemployment, resource shortages, and climate change are among the factors leading them to seek “full spectrum dominance” now (including the media and the Internet along with military and politics), before it becomes too difficult to maintain any control of a large, volatile, and heavily armed populace, roaming across a vast country. This also explains the new focus on “antifa,” or basically any sentiment they disagree with, which they now associate with the potential for “pre-crime,” as in the film Minority Report.

While the situation in the U.S. is increasingly frightening and crazy, I am not at all sure that the Trump regime, and their “deep state” supporters, will be able to pull it off, in the end. But this also depends on what kind of information people choose to focus on and if we can figure out new modes of collaboration. Authoritarianism feeds on people’s ignorance, cynicism, and detachment. As of now, there is a lot of that to go around!

As for the evolution of consciousness, I have a deeper, niggling thought… So much of what has happened in the U.S. over the last decades seems — to me, anyway, as an occultist who studies prophetic traditions — to reveal an occult dimension. I feel as if I am watching the self-organization of a type of entity, perhaps the being that Rudolf Steiner called Ahriman, comprised of rational, empirical, soulless thinking. The many synchronicities are so markéd, whether it was Al Gore and the 2000 “hanging chads,” the bizarre confluence around 9/11, the way the Supreme Court fell into the hands of Opus Dei, or even the bizarre assassination attempt (real? Staged?) where Trump’s ear was grazed.

As an analytic idealist who believes consciousness is the underlying reality and sees invisible “powers and principalities” lurking behind the scenes, orchestrating human history like a Shakespearian spectacle, it feels like all of this points toward some kind of approaching culmination. If we already knew the ending of the story, it would be boring. I don’t know about you, but right now, I am on the edge of my seat.

At the moment, we know there is a very legitimate possibility for humanity’s collective evolution, where AI emancipates us from labor and drudgery (please read Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism for details). And we know this potential is being obstructed by those seeking control, “power over” instead of “power with.” It is possible that the old system needed to be razed to the ground before we can reinvent it

Where it goes from here, nobody knows.