They’re Not Even Trying Anymore

Once you see, you can't unsee

I started writing this a few months ago, but never got around to actually polish, proofread, and re-proofread it. With a bit more time in the lull of the Christmas period I finally got it done. Here it is. Enjoy!

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“They”, the globalists, the institutions, … “They” aren’t even trying anymore. The lies have become so brazen, so obvious, so contemptuous of our intelligence that it feels deliberate. Like they’re daring us to notice. Like they want us to see through it.

COVID showed us. Remember those rules? Masks. They work! Oh no wait? They don’t. Actually they do, but only certain ones. Stay six feet apart - Fauci later admitted that number was just made up, no science behind it. Two weeks to flatten the curve. Then two months. Then indefinitely. Small businesses must close to stop the spread. But Walmart stays open because... well, because. You can’t visit your dying grandmother, but mass protests are fine if they’re for approved causes. Digital IDs to contain a virus.

And the most ludicrous? They weren’t even following their own rules. California’s governor dining maskless at French Laundry with lobbyists while restaurants across the state shuttered. UK officials throwing parties in Downing Street while citizens got fined for sitting on park benches. The people making the rules, the ones telling us the science was settled, didn’t believe a word of it.

They lied to our faces. With consequences. Real ones. Businesses destroyed. Kids’ development stunted. Communities atomized. People died alone because families couldn’t visit hospitals. And the rule-makers? They were fine. They were always fine.

That’s not incompetence. That’s not mistakes. That’s contempt.

Then you start looking around and realize the COVID lies weren’t an exception. They were the pattern made visible. Remember when suggesting COVID might have leaked from a lab got you banned from social media? Labeled a conspiracy theorist, deplatformed, fact-checked into oblivion? Now it’s openly discussed as the most plausible origin. No apology for the censorship. No acknowledgment that the “conspiracy theorists” were right. Just a quiet shift in acceptable discourse.

For two solid years, every Western media outlet assured us Russia was collapsing. Out of missiles by March. Out of tanks by summer. The Ukrainian counteroffensive would break through any day. Victory was inevitable, just keep sending weapons and money. We watched this narrative pumped daily, amplified, repeated until it became “truth.”

Then suddenly - overnight - Ukraine is retreating. Russia has more armor and personnel than when they started. The narrative flips without apology, without explanation, without anyone being held accountable for two years of obviously false reporting. They just memory-hole it and move to the next talking point.

The pattern isn’t new. Remember Iraq? Weapons of mass destruction. Mobile biological weapons labs. Aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuges. Colin Powell at the UN holding up that vial, making the case for war. Every intelligence agency confirmed it. Every news outlet amplified it. Dissent was unpatriotic. We invaded, destroyed the country, and found… Exactly nothing. No WMDs. No nuclear program. No mobile labs. Just lies used to justify a war that killed hundreds of thousands and destabilized an entire region. Anyone apologize? Anyone held accountable? No. They just moved on to the next war.

Libya was a “humanitarian intervention” to prevent genocide. Gaddafi was bombing his own people, they said. Had to stop him. So we did. NATO bombed Libya back to the stone age, killed Gaddafi, and left behind a failed state with open-air slave markets. Literal slave markets in 2025. Mission accomplished. And the genocide we were preventing? The evidence for it was questionable at best, fabricated at worst. But by the time anyone could verify, the bombs had already fallen.

Yugoslavia. Syria. Always the same script - humanitarian crisis, chemical weapons, brutal dictator, we have to intervene. Years later, the narratives fall apart under scrutiny. The chemical weapons evidence was sketchy. The humanitarian interventions created humanitarian disasters. But the cycle continues.

And now Venezuela. Right now. The USS Gerald R. Ford carrier group deployed to the Caribbean, the largest projection of U.S. military power in the hemisphere since Panama in 1989. They’re calling it “counternarcotics” operations. Already striking vessels, already building the case. The script is identical - corrupt regime, humanitarian crisis, drugs, need for intervention. Venezuelan opposition won the 2024 election in a landslide, but Maduro stayed in power. So now the familiar machinery spins up - sanctions, pressure, military positioning, regime change.

Maybe this time it’s justified. Maybe Maduro really is everything they say. Maybe this intervention will be different. But how many times do we watch this pattern before we stop believing the setup?

They lied about Iraq. They lied about Libya. They lied about Syria. They lied about Yugoslavia. They lied about Ukraine. Why would Venezuela be any different? And more importantly - why does no one get held accountable when the lies are exposed? Why do the same people who sold us the Iraq War still have platforms, still get quoted as experts, still shape policy?

Or take climate change. Just this week, Nature - one of the most prestigious scientific journals - retracted a major 2024 study that predicted catastrophic economic collapse from climate change. The paper claimed climate damage would cost $38 trillion annually by 2049, a 19% drop in global income by 2050. It was cited by the World Bank, the OECD, central banks worldwide. Used to justify massive policy shifts and spending programs. Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes - they all amplified it.

Turns out? The entire study was skewed by flawed economic data from Uzbekistan in the 1990s. When corrected, the catastrophic predictions dropped dramatically. The researchers now say their core message still holds, just with different numbers. But the damage is done - policy was already shaped, billions allocated, narratives embedded. And this isn’t the first climate study with “issues.” It’s a pattern of exaggerated predictions used to drive policy, then quietly revised when the apocalypse doesn’t materialize.

Why lie about something so easily disprovable? Why make predictions that will be proven false within months? Unless they don’t care if you notice. Unless the point is to make you stop trusting them.

Or take free speech - does that even exist anymore? Biden imprisoned nonviolent people for walking through the Capitol and called it the greatest threat to democracy since the Civil War. Meanwhile, the UK jails more people for tweets than China does. China. The government held up as the dystopian nightmare is putting fewer people in prison for speech than a Western democracy.

And it’s not just state-level censorship. The Twitter Files revealed what many suspected - direct coordination between federal agencies and social media platforms to suppress speech. The FBI flagging accounts. The CDC demanding posts be removed. Politicians pressuring platforms to silence dissent. Not illegal speech. Not credible threats. Just opinions contradicting official narratives. They called it “combating misinformation” while they were the ones spreading it. Hunter Biden’s laptop was labeled Russian disinformation by intelligence officials and suppressed weeks before an election. True story. Vaccine concerns were censored even when discussing documented side effects. The lab leak theory got you banned. All later proven true or at minimum legitimate topics for discussion. But the censorship happened when it mattered.

The money lies might be the most insulting because they’re so provable. Central banks printed more in two years than the previous two decades combined. Inflation is transitory, they said. It’s only 2%, they said. We watched grocery prices double, gas double, housing become unaffordable. So they changed how they calculate CPI. Excluded food and energy from “core inflation.” Changed the methodology. Told us we were better off than we felt while our purchasing power evaporated.

And while they were telling us gold was a barbarous relic and inflation was under control, what were central banks doing? Buying gold at record pace. Their words say one thing. Their actions say another.

Every. Single. Time.

But something happens when you see through one institutional lie. You can’t stop seeing through the others. It’s not paranoia - it’s pattern recognition. And once the pattern becomes clear, you start searching. Not for more lies, but for truth. For something real. For people who see what you see.

But here’s what nobody tells you about taking the red pill: it’s not a clean break from comfortable illusion to clear-eyed truth. It’s messy. Confusing. Disorienting.

You start questioning everything, and I mean everything. If they lied about COVID, what about other health guidance? If they lied about Russia, what about other wars? If the money is fake, what’s real? You go down rabbit holes. Some lead somewhere. Others dead end. You waste time on theories that sound plausible but fall apart under scrutiny. You trust people who turn out to be grifters. You dismiss information that later proves accurate.

The search for truth is work. Hard work. You’re essentially rebuilding your entire framework for understanding the world, and you’re doing it without institutional support. Actually worse - with institutional opposition. Every step away from the narrative gets you labeled. Every question gets you marginalized. Friends think you’ve gone crazy. Family worries about you. Professional opportunities close.

And the information landscape is deliberately polluted. For every genuine insight, there are ten deliberate misdirections. Controlled opposition exists. Psyops are real. Some “alternative” voices are there specifically to discredit legitimate questions by association. The people who want you confused and divided are very good at their jobs.

So you learn discernment the hard way. You get burned. You believe things that turn out false. You share information that makes you look foolish. You realize some of the people you trusted were playing you. It’s humbling. Sometimes humiliating.

But here’s what makes it all worth it in the end: you become more true to yourself. Not because you’ve found all the answers - you haven’t, and anyone claiming they have is lying. But because you’re no longer outsourcing your thinking to institutions that demonstrably don’t have your interests at heart. You’re taking responsibility for your own understanding. Your own health. Your own financial future. Your own judgment.

It’s like that scene in The Matrix when Morpheus explains why they don’t usually free minds after a certain age - people who’ve been plugged in their whole lives have trouble accepting that the world they knew was fake. The adjustment is brutal. But Neo takes the red pill anyway because living in comfortable illusion becomes intolerable once you know it’s an illusion.

Or think about Atlas Shrugged - the productive people quietly withdrawing from a system that wants to exploit them. Not with drama or violence, just... opting out. Building their own systems. Refusing to continue propping up institutions that hold them in contempt. That’s what’s happening here. We’re not trying to fix the system or convince it to reform. We’re just quietly withdrawing our support and building alternatives.

This is how we found each other. Not through ideology or politics or some manifesto. Through that messy, confusing process of searching. We saw the same contradictions. Asked the same uncomfortable questions. Got called the same names - conspiracy theorist, tinfoil hat, extremist. Those labels are weapons, tools to enforce compliance. They mean: stop noticing, stop asking, stop thinking. Just trust the experts.

But we couldn’t anymore. The foundation had cracked. And once you’re on the other side of that crack, you recognize others who made the journey. Not because we agree on everything - we don’t. But because we share the experience of questioning, searching, being willing to be wrong, being willing to look foolish, being willing to lose status in exchange for something more valuable.

Truth. Or at least the honest pursuit of it.

What’s interesting is how this awakening manifests across different domains. Some of us started questioning health authorities after watching the COVID response. Why were doctors who questioned the narrative censored? Why were treatments dismissed without study? Why did “follow the science” mean “don’t ask questions”?

Then you start looking deeper. The food pyramid that made everyone fat was created by agricultural interests, not nutritional science. Dietary guidelines that demonized fat and pushed carbs - written by committees with ties to grain producers. The obesity and diabetes epidemics that followed weren’t accidents. Decades of official nutrition advice that made people sicker while enriching food manufacturers. And when doctors or researchers questioned it, they were marginalized, defunded, labeled quacks.

We started researching ourselves, taking responsibility for our own health decisions, refusing to outsource our sovereignty to institutions that had proven themselves captured by pharmaceutical and agricultural interests.

Others came through the money angle. Watched inflation destroy savings while being told it wasn’t happening. Noticed that the Fed’s “solutions” always seemed to benefit banks while ordinary people’s purchasing power evaporated. Started understanding that fiat currency is just a promise, and promises are only valuable when the promiser is trustworthy. Started looking for alternatives - first Bitcoin, then precious metals, then anything that couldn’t be printed away by decree.

Others were free speech absolutists who watched the definition of “misinformation” become “anything contradicting official narratives” - even when those narratives later proved false. Watched platforms and governments coordinate censorship. Saw people punished not for lies but for truth that arrived too early, before institutions were ready to admit it.

Privacy advocates watched the surveillance state expand under the guise of safety. Saw every crisis used as justification for more monitoring, more control, more data collection. Understood that privacy isn’t about having something to hide - it’s about not letting others decide what you should hide.

Different entry points. Same destination. Because these aren’t separate issues - they’re manifestations of the same problem. Institutions that claim authority they haven’t earned, demand compliance they don’t deserve, make promises they can’t keep. Once you see it in one domain, you see it everywhere.

Nicole Shanahan’s story illustrates this perfectly. Here’s someone who lived at the apex of institutional power. Married to Google’s co-founder. Distributing hundreds of millions through elite philanthropic networks. Access to the highest circles of Silicon Valley influence. Every door open, every connection available.

Then her daughter was diagnosed with autism. Suddenly she needed real answers, real treatments, real doctors. And she discovered that Google - the company her husband created, the company claiming to organize the world’s information - was actively censoring the medical information she needed to help her child. The doctors she needed to consult were being deplatformed. The treatments she wanted to explore were being labeled misinformation. The system she’d been part of, that she’d trusted, was directly harming her ability to help her daughter.

That’s when it becomes personal. When their lies don’t just offend your intelligence but actively hurt someone you love. You can’t unsee that. You can’t go back to trusting them.

She described the elite philanthropic world as a closed loop. The same advisors guiding all the major donors. The same NGOs receiving the funding. The same conferences setting the agenda. Everyone believing they were doing good while money circulated through institutional intermediaries and communities stayed in crisis. She called herself a “useful idiot” for frameworks she didn’t fully understand. Questioned whether anything she funded actually helped anyone or just perpetuated systems that needed problems to continue existing.

And here’s the crucial part - she was willing to say it publicly. Willing to lose the status, the social standing, the acceptance that comes with being part of that world. Because truth mattered more. Because once you see, you can’t pretend you don’t.

We make smaller versions of that choice constantly. Stack silver and friends think you’re paranoid. Question official narratives and you lose social credibility. Point out institutional lies and you get labeled. But we do it anyway. Not because we enjoy being outsiders, but because the alternative - pretending we don’t see what we see - becomes impossible.

What’s remarkable is how international this recognition is. We’re finding each other across continents, languages and cultures. Not because we’re coordinating but because truth has a universal shape.

People in China buying gold not because they follow Western financial analysis, but because they understand capital controls and watched their government freeze accounts. They know what it means when your money needs permission to move. People in India accumulating silver not from price speculation, but from generational memory of currency crises. They’ve seen what happens when governments lie about money. People in Russia dumping dollars after sanctions revealed that that currency isn’t neutral money - it’s a weapon that can be turned off when you displease the issuer.

We recognize each other instantly. Not through symbols or coded language, but through shared understanding. Through the quiet acknowledgment that we see what we see, regardless of what we are told to believe.

This is how real communities form. Not through marketing or recruitment, but through convergence. We didn’t coordinate our views on health sovereignty, sound money, free speech, and privacy. We arrived at them independently through the same process of questioning institutions and following the implications. Truth has a shape. Lies have a pattern. Once you see the pattern, you naturally gravitate toward others who see it too.

What connects the health sovereignty advocate with the sound money believer with the free speech defender with the privacy advocate? We’re all searching for things that can’t be manipulated by institutional decree. Your body is yours - not subject to mandates or conditional on compliance. Your thoughts are yours - not requiring approval or moderation. Your wealth should be yours - not devalued by printing presses or frozen by bureaucratic fiat. Your communications are yours - not to be monitored without cause.

These aren’t radical positions. They’re baseline human dignity. But defending them has somehow become controversial. That tells you everything about the institutions doing the labeling.

Every time they lie brazenly, more people cross that threshold. The lies are accelerating, becoming more obvious, more insulting. Maybe they’re losing control and can’t maintain the facade anymore. Maybe there’s some logic where breaking institutional trust serves a purpose we don’t understand. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. The result is the same - more people waking up, starting to search, finding us.

And here’s what I want you to know if you just arrived: you’re not crazy. You’re not paranoid. You’re not alone.

What you’re feeling right now - that disorientation when you realize they’ve been lying, that anger at the contempt they showed for your intelligence, that uncertainty about what’s real anymore - we’ve all felt it. Every. Single. One of us. That moment when the foundation cracks and you don’t know what to trust anymore. That fear that maybe you’re the one who’s wrong, that maybe everyone else sees something you’re missing.

We remember.

We’ve been there.

The journey ahead isn’t easy. I won’t lie to you about that. You’re going to make mistakes. Believe things that aren’t true. Dismiss things that are. Get taken in by grifters. Waste time down dead-end rabbit holes. It’s part of the process. It’s how you build your own discernment instead of outsourcing it to institutions.

But here’s what comes after that difficult middle part: clarity. Not perfect knowledge - nobody has that. But something more valuable: the confidence to trust your own judgment. The ability to look at information and evaluate it yourself rather than waiting for institutions to tell you what to think. The freedom that comes from taking responsibility for your own understanding.

You’ll find that you sleep better at night. Not because the world suddenly makes sense - it doesn’t - but because you’re being honest with yourself. You’re living in alignment with what you actually see and think and believe, not what you’re supposed to see and think and believe. There’s a peace in that. A groundedness. You become more yourself.

And you’ll find us. This community isn’t organized. There’s no leader, no manifesto, no membership card. We’re just people scattered across the world who made the same journey you’re on. We’re in different countries, speak different languages, come from different backgrounds. But we recognize each other instantly because we’ve all been through that process of questioning, searching, being willing to be wrong in pursuit of being more true to ourselves.

Some of us are stacking metals because we don’t trust fiat promises. Others are researching our own health protocols because we don’t trust captured regulators. Some are building censorship-resistant communication systems. Others are creating parallel economic structures. We’re defending free speech, protecting privacy, pursuing sound money, reclaiming health sovereignty. Different priorities, same underlying principle: verification over trust. Sovereignty over dependence. Truth over comfort.

We’ll help you navigate this. Share what we’ve learned. Point out the grifters we fell for so you don’t have to. Explain the frameworks that helped us make sense of things. Compare notes on what’s signal and what’s noise. You don’t have to figure this out alone. The journey is hard, but it’s harder when you think you’re the only one taking it.

The institutions won’t reform. The lies will continue, probably escalate. But we’re not waiting for their permission anymore. We’ve already opted out. We’re building parallel systems, protecting ourselves with things they can’t print or censor or control, and finding each other despite all their efforts to keep us fragmented and isolated.

You made it here. That’s the hardest part - having the courage to question, to search, to be willing to see what’s actually there instead of what you’re told is there. The rest is just work, and you don’t have to do it alone.

Welcome.

We’ve been expecting you.

And we’re glad you’re here.