The New American Revolution

America's 249 Year Pluto Transit Brings Crisis and Opportunity

The United States is currently having its 250-year Pluto return.

I think it is clear that what we are seeing politically right now is nothing we know: It is neither familiar nor normal. It can’t, in fact, be normalized: This is an actual, honest to God, coup d’etat. Let’s call it what it is: The New American Revolution. I’ve been studying and reflecting carefully over the last few weeks, trying to understand this new “hyper object” as it comes into focus.

As in previous revolutions, the new ruling elite isn’t interested in working with the old establishment, a sizable contingent made up of professional politicians, esteemed academics, civil servants, legal experts, Wall Street financiers, mainstream media pundits, and the like. Instead, they intend to dismantle and abolish it, to replace it entirely with their people. In this case, the new elite includes a controlling group of super-wealthy tech magnates and their political agents; a small group of young engineers trained to hack the government and install AI agents to automate government services; plus White supremacists, Christian fanatics and Opus Dei members like Russell Vought. There are also assorted hangers-on willing to slavishly follow their orders, in media, law, politics, finance and other fields and institutions.

This is an exciting, perilous time! We haven’t had revolution in the U.S. for 250 years. We are having one now — and, amazingly, many people don’t even know it yet. Also, astonishingly, this revolution is happening exactly at our country’s Pluto Return, a 248-year astrological cycle associated with the breakdown of old structures and the creation of new ones. The current revolution is happening in a much different way than other revolutions or revolutions we know about from the past. So far, it is being waged without insurgencies, guillotines, tanks, firing squads, and so on. However those things could make an appearance at some point.

This revolution or coup is being executed by our tech broligarchs — Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, and other accomplices (like Erik Prince from Blackwater) — who have forged an “unholy alliance” with Christian Nationalists, old guard Libertarians, and White Supremacists, all joining forces behind the brilliant septuagenarian con artist, Donald Trump. The Christian Nationalists plan to turn the US into a white, patriarchal ethnostate where women have no reproductive or political freedom. Despite their Antisemitism, they strategically support Israel because Israel, as a religious ethnostate, has shown the model — ruthlessly repressing its indigenous and minority population — that they want to follow here.

This revolution is taking place, initially, on the level of software and code, which is fascinating to realize. Musk and Thiel — both brought up in South Africa during apartheid — started PayPal together. This made them massively wealthy. They learned the best way to make staggering amounts of wealth is to tithe all payments and monetary exchanges via a payment platform. It is therefore not surprising that Musk and his boys hacked the US Treasury payment system as one of their first targets.

This is an incredibly radical and bold move! It is hard for most people to even appreciate how radical this is — I find I am still struggling to grasp its full portent. The Treasury payment system is the operating system for the entire government — for the whole country, more or less. The US Treasury oversees the issuance of money, Treasury Bonds, and so on, and handles the payroll of two million federal workers. Musk (a 53-year-old man who lies about his prowess at video games and gets angry when this lie is revealed) is trying to take the US Treasury payment system over, without any oversight or legislative process, and despite having no security clearance. He may already have done so.

On a meta-level, as both software and social engineers understand — and as AI makes evident as it decodes patterns in every arena — any human society runs on code: Pattern and program. Culture is code. Language is code. Religion is code.

As 20th century totalitarian regimes discovered, civilizational systems can be rewritten, fairly quickly, to produce entirely different outputs — just as a computer operating system can be upgraded or outmoded. For instance, young people growing up in North Korea apparently believe King Jong Un to be a kind of God, a super human. Most never question this, unless something happens to shatter the illusion. Trump, of course, calls the dictator a “smart guy.” This is absolutely non-ironic: He would like the same level of fealty and devotion.

I intend to go into this at much greater depth in future essays: It was one of my core realizations while writing How Soon Is Now. According to the Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri, the most important form of production in post-industrial society is not any material object: It is “subjectivity,” in itself. The education system and the media play a huge role in “producing subjectivity” on a mass, collective scale. This requires continuous re-imprinting.

As we lurch toward despotism or worse, we must realize that human subjectivity — personality, awareness, identity — can, in fact, be manipulated, controlled, reprogrammed. The purpose of the new American Revolution is not only to overthrow the Constitution and the representative form of Government that made America the most successful country in the world for the last century: The goal is to remake “subjectivity” itself, according to particular ideologies and control systems.