“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Karl Rove.
My first impression of 2026 is that the news cycle’s velocity has been cranked up to Warp 9 and that this is partly intentional. What was once called “World Events” is simply whatever Donald Trump vomits onto his Truth Social platform.
Back in the mists of ancient history, during the Christmas holidays three weeks ago, I was paying attention to the odd behaviour of the silver markets. Essentially, the price of silver has been suppressed for years by Western financial institutions for their own nefarious purposes: to cripple a potential competitor to the dollar, and because those same institutions had been promising clients silver they didn’t have.
Western vaults were pitifully short on shiny metal, and the dirty secret was getting out. Moreover, China had been hoovering up the world’s silver supply for years, and on January 1st was set to block it from leaving their country on the basis that it was a strategic material. Silver is not merely a precious metal; it is used in solar panels, smartphones, AI data centres and pretty much every gadget and device en vogue in the 2020s.
Thus, a critical component of the modern world was drying up, and the price began to surge. Elon Musk tweeted:
This is not good. Silver is needed in many industrial processes.
Particularly, his own industries.
What, exactly, would happen if the highest-profile and curiously nepotistic tech corporations gradually began to run out of the lifeblood of so many of their investments and components?
It didn’t really seem to matter because the sight of America’s USS Iwo Jima and USS Gerald Ford looming in the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela, and the subsequent kidnapping of President Maduro by Delta Force, were infinitely more attention-grabbing than a few lines on some graphs.
What was called “Operation Resolve” seemed to be designed with maximum social media virality baked into it. In the make-shift Mar-a-Lago war room, the Twitter X featured prominently as a backdrop.
In the regime change that wasn’t, the news was being both monitored and created simultaneously.
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