The Octopus

Presented at an event in the Midlands, UK, on Friday 26th August 2022.

This rather messy looking diagram is what I have dubbed The Octopus. It is my attempt at gaining an understanding of how The Regime operates. Here’s a slightly less messy version. I believe that getting this right is of paramount importance because a true understanding of the power structure is the first step towards bringing about a circulation of elites. This has several similarities with the model put forward by Curtis Yarvin, who has no doubt influenced my thinking, but it also differs in some very crucial respects. I will tease out exactly how in a moment. First, I will outline some core assumptions that went into producing this. Second, I will flesh out some general observations necessary to understand this model. Third, I will go through each of the eight tentacles of the Octopus and outline the important differences from Yarvin’s model.

To begin, however, let us remind ourselves of seven key lessons from elite theory as distilled in my best-selling book The Populist Delusion – still available from all good book retailers! I take these seven ideas as given but just for those who need a refresher:

• Mosca’s Law: the organised 100 will always defeat the disorganised 1000. This central principle of power is important to keep in mind at all times because it demonstrates that the anarchic idea of ‘bottom-up’ power is simply impossible. In addition, as dissidents, it tells us exactly what the name of the game needs to be: greater organisation than your rivals. 100 organised dissidents should also outmanoeuvre 1000 disorganised journalists, for example.

• ‘Who says organisation, says oligarchy’. This is, of course, from Robert Michels. It is not only a distillation of Mosca’s Law, but also a reminder that power simply cannot operate without coordination.

• There is no genuine separation of powers. This is generally taken from Bertrand de Jouvenel and Carl Schmitt but is also implicit in James Burnham’s recognition of the managerial class. The logic of power is always towards absolutism. Powers can be theoretically separate, but if the people sitting in each of the respective offices are of the same stripe and belief system – if they are political friends, in other words – it will not matter. See also the Supreme Court telling the State of Texas and almost twenty other states that they ‘have no standing’.

• There are no neutral institutions. This should be obvious to everyone at this stage, it also follows naturally from the conclusions of Schmitt.

• Rule of law is a myth: power is always ‘decisionist’. This is Schmitt’s exception. See also the FBI raiding Donald Trump’s home while refusing to investigate an entire laundry list of alleged elite crimes. Decisionism always triumphs over the theoretical rule of law.

• Power seeks to eliminate rival castles. This is de Jouvenel and it explains at a stroke why we have practically no institutions on our side whatsoever. The Regime has taken over or destroyed all of them.

• Finally, the topic of my talk at the event last year which some of you may remember: culture is downstream from law. What people call ‘woke’ today is simply the enforcement of civil rights law. Christopher Caldwell has written excellently on this topic in The Age of Entitlement. But also recall the case of Starbucks being sued because they had the temerity to call the police on two homeless black men who would not leave the store despite not buying anything. The legendary FrameGames Radio has excellent videos on this topic which I’m sure you can still find somewhere in the ether.

To these seven basic ideas, I must also foreground two other theses for which I have argued elsewhere. First, against the ‘hidden hand’ conspiracy frame. We do not need to invent mystical third-parties, we can see how power functions right before our eyes. This is because power does not want to be hidden, it wants to display itself. The display of power is a source of power and control. Leftists of all stripes know this because they are made to read Michel Foucault at university. There is also always the practical need to demonstrate hierarchy. I will give you an example shortly. My second thesis is against pure ‘emergent phenomenon’ explanations. This is, in fact, a hidden form of the populist delusion. Bottom-up and anarchistic explanations of power, markets, society and so on, are inherently liberal and more importantly wrong. But, theoretically, even if this were not the case, it just so happens that this Regime centrally coordinates and disciplines those who resist orders. If this was obscured in 2010, events over the past few years should have made these things perfectly clear to everyone today in 2022. Let me give a recent example of each of these in practice. Do you remember when Whoopi Goldberg was told off like a naughty schoolgirl and then shown mercy by the ADL President Jonathan Greenblatt in front of millions of people on ABC? This was a classic Machiavellian display of power. Machiavelli famously notes that it is better to be cruel than merciful as a rule because the people will remember the acts of mercy if cruelty is the norm. However, the Prince should delegate the acts of cruelty to his underlings while he should be front and centre for the acts of mercy. That is why we were treated to Jonathan Greenblatt on television. But this display of power was doing more than simply disciplining Whoopi Goldberg, it was reminding everyone of the hierarchy. The fat black multimillionaire TV woman might have a lot of status in the system, but she is below the ADL to whom she must beg and grovel for mercy. And the ADL want you to see this or else it would not be on prime-time television. Also, make no mistake, that regardless of what television executives and producers might want, if Jonathan Greenblatt wants to go on prime-time television, he will go on prime-time television.

We saw how the Regime centrally coordinates recently when a diktat was released – through the central messaging system also known as The AP – that the meaning of the word ‘recession’ has now changed. I hate to be so tired as to draw on Orwell, but it is difficult not to think of the orders Winston Smith would receive through those pipes in The Ministry of Truth. What was interesting to watch is how many journalists had already run with the story that we are in a recession and then publicly apologised and walked back what they had said. I guess that was an emergent phenomenon too. All of this said, there is some necessary complexity to note. First, there are emergent behaviours at the level of individuals in the non-governing elite who work as Louis Althusser might say, “by themselves”, but the “tempo”, the incentive structure, the law, is set top-down. Second, there are dialectical relationships in the system which serve to make hierarchy difficult to trace. However, most of the time activists who appear to be resisting power are in fact the agents of power being used to manufacture consent. If you disagree with this, you are saying you believe that Greta Thunberg was an organic phenomenon and that Black Lives Matter really was a bottom-up protest movement speaking truth to power. If you believe that then you’re at the wrong event.

Before I talk you through The Octopus, I must also make some general observations about The Regime which will complicate the picture further. It is worth asking the most fundamental question of all: who are the ruling class? Who are the elites? Who exactly are we up against? Ask ten different dissidents this question and they will give you ten different answers. Here is mine.

There are, I believe, three competing factions within the Ruling Class. Broadly we can call these the Neocons embodied in the American Military-Industrial Complex, the Techno-Globalists as symbolised by the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwaab, and, finally, the Third Worldists, as embodied by George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. I think it is worth talking through their competing aims, goals and methods of operation. The ultimate aim of the Neocons is to remake the world in America’s image, in other words to subordinate every tradition and culture under the Lesbian Stiletto heel of liberal democracy so that everyone can enjoy unlimited anal sex and a never-ending cavalcade of black people on television. Meanwhile, the Techno-Globalists, are much more practically focused, on things like energy and food and technology, and their ultimate aim is to establish a global governance structure or even formal government. And, finally, the Third Worldists simply want to equalise the relative standings of the West and the third world. In my view, the real struggle is between the Neocons and the Techno-Globalists, while the Third Worldists typically represent a distraction for the left and right to squabble over. Very generally, the response to Covid saw Techno-Globalists grow their power while the war between Russia and Ukraine has seen Neocons claw a lot of power back. Of course there are many elites, for example, The Dark Lord, Tony Blair, who have a foot firmly in both camps. But eventually, the Techno-Globalists will have to see the NeoCons as a rival castle. Neocons seek to maintain American and Israeli hegemony, while the Techno-Globalists are more genuinely universalist. Neocons use the instruments of American power while Techno-Globalists use the instruments of trans-national power such as the UN, the WHO, Climate Change protocols, and so on. The Neocon powerbase is what you might call the Washington Swamp backed generally by organised Jewish groups and wonk think tanks, while the Techno-Globalist powerbase is corporate backed generally by a nebulous cluster of NGOs. NeoCons typically exercise power through the state, while Techno-Globalists typically exercise it through corporate compliance culture. I mention this because while we might point to general tendencies in the Regime hierarchy, we must recognise that these rival factions operate differently.

Another general observation is that once you recognise these basic factions, it informs what is and is not allowed within Regime discourse. And therefore, it can show you what is and is not containment from the absolute point of view of power which cares only about maintaining itself. Some of you may remember this tongue-in-cheek table I made outlining what is and is not ‘allowable’ dissent. While this may seem shocking, anti-trans, anti-CRT and anti-abortion are not particularly edgy stances and they come with financial and professional rewards within The Regime. As you slide down this scale you see the topics that are total no-go zones within The Regime. We need not dwell on them other than to point out that this scale is some indication of what The Regime holds truly sacred and what it feels it can and cannot contain.

Alright, let us now finally get to the Octopus. As you can see, it has eight tentacles. The Chest is the beating heart: the financial system and especially the central banks, the investment banks, and massive asset management firms such as Blackrock and Vanguard which between them manage almost $20 trillion. Old-fashioned dissidents called this the money-power. The relationship between a firm like BlackRock and the US Treasury department nominally in charge of the Fed is basically formalised at this point. In 2016, the CEO Larry Fink donated something like $22 million to the Clinton campaign and had a team of former BlackRock staffers ready to move in. When Trump won, it made almost no difference as it was widely reported that US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was in daily contact with Fink who, through the ETFs, which are now on the Fed balance sheet via BlackRock, controls a large part of the US economy. When Biden later did get in, he installed Janet Yellen, who has an even closer relationship with Fink than Mnuchin did, as the new US Treasury Secretary. BlackRock and Vanguard are an interesting case study of James Burnham’s managerial thesis. First, BlackRock and Vanguard have no declared owners – they are simply owned by the millions of people who have their assets managed by them. If you know your Burnham, this means that the disorganised mass of shareholders is ruled over by the organised managerial elites as embodied in Larry Fink who manage those assets. Thus, the severance of ownership and control. However, note that BlackRock and Vanguard are listed as four to eight percent minority shareholders in just about every major multinational organisation. This is important because, such is their enormous power, BlackRock and Vanguard can crash the price of any publicly listed company. Not to labour the point but here are the top thirty companies where BlackRock are either the number 1 or number 2 owner. Where BlackRock are number 2, The Vanguard Group is number 1 and vice versa. BlackRock is not only the largest institutional investor in the world, through its Aladdin software, which is used by all other investors, it essentially controls the general flow of the index itself. Aladdin is not a neutral platform, it makes suggestions on what to invest in and what not to, and naturally ESG principles are part of its algorithm. Thus, BlackRock and Vanguard have functional leverage over, for example, Microsoft. Therefore, it really behoves someone like Bill Gates, or frankly, anyone who oversees Microsoft (I believe Gates is no longer involved in day-to-day operations), to share the same values as these crucial investors. When Larry Fink sends his quarterly ‘Letter to the CEOs’, it is practically like a set of orders from a Soviet commissar. Thus, the compliance culture of corporations is downstream from the institutional pressure that massive asset management firms like Blackrock can push on them. It is not coming from woke Harvard graduates who are simply the product of this power structure, it is coming from the top. The corporations thus disciplined can funnel their vast resources to Foundations who fund NGO groups. You all know my favourite example. Bill Gates has been the principal financial backer of Tony Blair, one of the world’s most powerful men, since practically the second he left 10 Downing Street in 2007. The Tony Blair Institute, the model of the modern NGO, makes Blair far more powerful than whoever the current Prime Minister happens to be – not that it matters since they are all versions of Blair in any case. Of the three frontrunners in the recent Tory leadership race, Penny Mordaunt wrote a book explicitly praised by Blair, Rishi Sunak was dubbed by the media ‘the heir to Blair’ while Blair himself has explicitly allied with Liz Truss who quoted him at the start of her recent campaign speech. The alliance between The Chest and The Network sits above what I call The Crown, which is to say the official government. We all know democracy is a terrible system. Politicians have a very short-term planning horizon, and their eye is always on polls and the current news cycle. This means that in terms of actually governing, actually running things, they are extremely lazy. When it comes to policy, they essentially outsource it to NGOs. In pure elite theory terms, the NGOs are organised while the government is disorganised. The government ‘needs’ a policy, for example, on the pandemic, or climate change, or whatever else, and it just so happens that The Tony Blair Institute has a 200-page policy proposal ready to go and rubber stamped and so NGO policy proposal becomes official government policy. The MPs probably did not even read it.

In this way, what is already decided is handed to The Bench, which is to say the judiciary and law enforcement, and to The Chamber, which is to say the permanent civil service, to enact and enforce. Remember, culture is downstream from law, which means that the media and its manufacturing of consent, only get the memo after this process has already taken place. Once the nudge unit, which is located somewhere in The Chamber, sets to work, then you’ll see the media outlets walk in almost lock-step compliance with whatever has already been decided. In fact, interestingly, the media will often cover these things as if they have not already been decided. As a case in point, this sinister paper published in October 2019 prefigures the current push for plant-based burgers and Beyond Meat and so on by three years; the media articles championing these things not only postdate this article, but also, they are part of the explicit campaign it outlines. This hasn’t come from Harvard or Yale; it was BlackRock-defined ESG investment strategy and World Economic Forum policy before it was a policy proposal from an NGO before it became official government policy, before it became media headline. If you’re not paying close enough attention, it looks like the media memed this into existence, but in fact the media are just acting as the mouthpiece for decisions that have already been taken. Who wrote this paper? Dr Richard Carmichael is a professor at Imperial College London, but he works typically on climate change projects that are funded by grant money. Who funds him? Well, his two main sources of revenue are: the UK government and something called the Grantham Foundation which was setup in 1997 by the billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham, who was something of a prototype Larry Fink. Note how this is not just a bunch of stuff being organically produced by crazy left-wing professors, it is actively incentivised, themes for research are set, top-down. Academics are simply the paid shills of the regime, used to generate arguments to justify what has already been decided. Whatever arguments they generate are then mainstreamed by the media. Thus, if we had to plot a rough flow of power, it would look something like this. Just in passing, The Church represents the captured rival castles of enemies for the Regime. The Church is disciplined by law and forced to become the skinsuit for the ruling class and its ideology, subordinating Christ to George Floyd and the Pride flag and whatever else the current thing happens to be. Anyway, long-time readers of Yarvin, and indeed Yarvin himself, surely cannot help but notice that what he called The Cathedral, The Head and The Mouth circled here, are fairly low down the pecking order. In Yarvin’s system, and here are some graphics to remind ourselves, The Head and Mouth, or in his terms, The Brain and Voice, are at the top. The vestiges of corporate power are said only to be ‘leaks’. He is correct that ‘The Show’ is mostly an illusion, liberal democracy’s method of obscuring the actual mechanisms of power and to generate scapegoats for it so that those who really wield it never face accountability, but I think we cannot ignore the lines of funding and the extent to which The Chest uses the Network to exert power and influence. I’m sure you’ve seen this table before, but the marked increase in focus on race and racism in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the Occupy Wall Street movement is marked. The left is not in control, it has been utterly humiliated and tamed by the regime. Where once the left represented a threat to capital, as Marx might put it, now the left literally cheers on multinational corporations and sticks up for The Walt Disney Company in the name of the right to sexualise children. They have been totally and utterly contained. The brief resurgence of Old Labour under Corbyn was buried and destroyed by accusations of antisemitism. Corbyn was promptly replaced by yet another Blair cipher, Keir Starmer. The Cathedral has a habit of jumping to the tune of the neoliberal centre which just so happens to align explicitly with the interests of The Chest. This map is a starting point for thinking seriously about the totality of the problem. In my view, the real issue here is that focusing on any of the six tentacles below The Chest and The Network is a bit like focusing on summoned minions being conjured by an end boss. If any power is won in any part of the system, it is useless for our purposes unless it is directed at breaking the power of the Chest and, its conduit, the Network. It could be done. For example, using the power of The Crown, you might create viable state-backed alternatives to Visa, Mastercard, investment banks or even asset management firms to break their monopoly. A national bank which guarantees that you can have an account would help to combat people being treated like Alex Jones or Laura Towler who have simply been cut off from their bank accounts as a form of financial deplatforming. The situation in Russia is one to look at in terms of the potential for a national government to set up alternatives to the power structure of the Chest, especially in the area of daily transactions. I am not intending to black pill anyone, but rather to clarify what really needs to be done. If I had to make a prediction, I still think that at some point The Regime must put the woke genie back in the bottle in order to cement its control and contain genuine dissident energy. When that happens, the threat from populists will be dissipated overnight and people can go Back to Fresh Prince without being reminded that they are racists every day. White boys can then sign up once more to die in their wars. I expect this to be the final victory of the Regime over the Dissident Right. I continue to be shocked every day that they are being so slow about it, but there are a lot of signs that it is happening: through DeSantis in Florida and, if you pay attention, through Liz Truss here. When this happens, I fully expect to see interest and energy in dissident politics evaporate almost overnight.