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John Ʌ Konrad V

@johnkonrad

Jan 26

Here’s the ICE watch training video @camhigby found. Let’s deconstruct the first few minutes.

Lead by Eric Ward, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left NGO with nearly a billion-dollar endowment.

His academic work is in “Stochastic terrorism,” which is “using hostile public rhetoric, repeated and amplified across media and communication platforms.”

Literally, his expertise is manipulating minds.

He’s not an expert on peaceful protests. He’s not an operational guy. His background is in psychological warfare.

Participants were told “for their safety” they must “have training,” but this training isn’t about situational awareness, first aid, or practical defense against pepper spray.

It’s, in fact, teaching you how to mentally prepare to escalate violence.

Let’s look at his tactic.

First, a meditation session. Why? To get you “out of your brain” and in “touch with feelings.”

He then explicitly tells everyone to tune out everything but their feelings.

Next… the four thousand people here are being asked to confront armed federal agents.

What is the natural reaction for anyone confronting armed men?

Nervousness. I love the police; my father-in-law was an NYPD officer, but my heart beats faster when I’m pulled over by my local PD.

He’s telling them to listen to that “heat behind the eyes, tremble in your hands,” which is fine, but then he is lying.

He’s telling you to interpret that natural panic when facing authority as moral superiority and your “conscious.”

Next, he has to dehumanize opponents and set the stage for “us vs. them,” but this is tricky because almost every American knows a Republican.

So he says “I want to be clear who they are,” and he gets very specific so the picture of your MAGA uncle or priest doesn’t enter your mind.

Then he states the obvious, which everyone (even MAGA) will agree on:

“Renee Good should be alive.
Alex Pretti should be alive.”

I agree with that statement, but the question is who’s responsible for their deaths.

IMHO, the person most responsible is Eric Ward, but of course, he’s not going to blame himself.

Then he says, “The people who died at the hands of ICE snd border patrol should be alive.”

What people?

He doesn’t say. It’s not about the people; it’s about drawing a straight line from Renee and Alex to ICE.

Then he says,

“Let’s tell the truth.”

Which any kindergartener knows is followed by lies, but his listeners are in a trance from the breathing exercise.

Listen to the sing-song nature of how he speaks. It’s literally hypnosis. Hypnosis for the BIG whopper lie:

“Federal law enforcement is not here to keep us safe.”

Really, Eric? Maybe you can make an argument that some federal law enforcement isn’t here to keep us safe… but you didn’t specify.

You didn’t exclude organizations like the US Coast Guard, which is federal immigration law enforcement and does keep us safe.

Why? Because he needs to paint with broad strokes in case other agencies are called in.

Nad now the stage is set to dehumanize: “Federal law enforcement is killing people, beating people…”

And the worst lie: “Detaining people like disposable objects.”

Once you are hypnotized. Once you trust your feelings over facts. Once you know those feelings make you morally superior. Once you know ICE thinks you are “disposable garbage,” then you are prepared to act with violence!

Just trust your feelings and don’t look at the massive endowment the Southern Poverty Law Center has to fund physiological operatives trained in Marxist theory like Eric Ward.

https://twitter.com/camhigby/status/2015577597288091940

Link to the full video:

https://twitter.com/camhigby/status/2015577597288091940

Ward’s Wikipedia page…

Read 5 tweets

John Ʌ Konrad V

@johnkonrad

Jan 24

And the Top 4 priorities of the new Department of War National defense strategy are…. 🧵

#1 Defend the Homeland

#2 Deter China

Read 6 tweets

John Ʌ Konrad V

@johnkonrad

Jan 22

https://twitter.com/datarepublican/status/2014405606187073649

DR has been doing an excellent job, but some context is missing, specifically around the three real purposes of Davos.

Collusion
Proof of life
Narrative testing

Let me explain 🧵

https://twitter.com/datarepublican/status/2014405606187073649

Note: I’ve never attended, but I have close friends who do, and I’ve reported for decades from similar off-the-record gatherings hosted by billionaires in the shipping and industrial sectors. Davos isn’t unique. It’s just the most visible version.

PRIMARY PURPOSE: COLLUSION

Before the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, collusion wasn’t illegal—it was normal. Industry leaders met openly, wrote letters, and signed agreements to divide markets, suppress wages, avoid taxes, and eliminate competition.

This coordination was enforced by bankers. If you didn’t play along, you didn’t get financing.

We’re taught that J.P. Morgan personally orchestrated this system for profit, but when he died, his estate was under $80 million. Immense by modern standards, yes—but a fraction of Rockefeller or Carnegie. Morgan wasn’t the ultimate beneficiary. He was an agent, largely acting on behalf of private families in London.

When Theodore Roosevelt doubled down on antitrust enforcement, that model broke. The British elite needed a replacement. Cecil Rhodes’ answer was the Round Table—a secret society designed to coordinate power indirectly. But secrecy is fragile. It gets exposed.

So they adapted.

Instead of secret societies, they created trade organizations—the precursors to modern NGOs. Each industry got one. Media was invited to public sessions to provide cover, while real decisions were made in private, behind closed doors. “Transparency” without access.

But that only solved coordination within industries. How do you collude across industries?

You capture the pipeline.

Elite universities became the sorting mechanism. Promising candidates were identified early—often via scholarships like Rhodes—and routed into industry, finance, government, or think tanks.

Instead of industries negotiating directly, coordination was outsourced to think tanks. Institutions like Chatham House published “best practices” and “future trends.” Anyone could read them—but only those trained at elite schools truly understood what they meant or how to implement them.

This system accelerated during the Roosevelt and Taft years and culminated in the election of an academic—Woodrow Wilson. The public trusted academics. That trust proved invaluable.

The result?
•Tariffs killed via the 16th Amendment
•Monetary policy handed to banking interests via the Federal Reserve Act
•State power weakened through the 17th Amendment
•And, ultimately, U.S. entry into WWI

At its most basic level, that’s what Davos is today. Anyone can attend if they have money. The collusion happens elsewhere.

Read 10 tweets

John Ʌ Konrad V

@johnkonrad

Jan 10

https://twitter.com/datarepublican/status/2009953358581485759

Can we pause the Greenland noise for one second and admit the obvious?

Denmark isn’t sovereign anymore it’s in lockstep with @Maersk.

The UN @IMOHQ is run by NGOs.

Maersk and the UN @IMOHQ are in lockstep with China.

Here’s the history 🧵

https://twitter.com/datarepublican/status/2009953358581485759

In practice, its government moves in near-lockstep with @Maersk—the world’s largest logistics empire.

Not officially.
Not on paper.
But in outcomes, incentives, and red lines.

Here’s how we got here.

Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940.

The King stayed. He became a symbol of quiet national continuity.

But Denmark had no army to celebrate. No Normandy. No Stalingrad.

What it did have was a merchant fleet at sea, one of the largest in the world, which joined the Allied cause. Danish sailors carried fuel, food, and munitions under Allied control while their homeland was under German occupation.

They were 💯 critical to allies success.

Over a thousand Danish merchant sailors died while serving with the Allies

Those sailors became Denmark’s war heroes.

And that mattered.

It meant that after the war, shipping companies that fought with the allies had enormous political legitimacy in Denmark in a way the U.S. Merchant Marine never did in America.

Read 36 tweets

John Ʌ Konrad V

@johnkonrad

Jan 8

https://twitter.com/drewharwell/status/2009070183797936402

Oh Drew, I’m thrilled you asked.

If any of my followers want to explain this to him directly, please jump in. I’ve officially run out of crayons.

Otherwise, I’m happy to walk through exactly how ya’ll at WaPo engineer hit pieces🧵

https://twitter.com/drewharwell/status/2009070183797936402

Foe those unfamiliar here’s the hir piece Drew Wrote about me, a licenses ship captain and MARITIME journalist , who was invited to go with @SecWar on a shipyard tour

washingtonpost.com/business/2026/…

First let’s define “hit piece” so we are all clear

I’ll even give you the biased Wikipedia version

Read 26 tweets

John Ʌ Konrad V

@johnkonrad

Jan 7

https://x.com/johnkonrad/status/2009009090820030475

I like this a lot. Some sections are demanding, you have to reread them, but that’s not a flaw. It forces the reader to slow down. And sometimes hard is not only good, it’s necessary.

What many people miss is that linear systems are incredibly efficient but only under very specific conditions: rule-based order, geopolitical stability, and a high degree of trust and safety.

Linear systems excel at things like this: start a business, raise X capital, optimize for Y, expand into Z markets. Capital flows easily because there are few externalities. You don’t worry much about supply-chain collapse, interest-rate shocks, reputational risk from social media swings, or geopolitical sabotage. The system absorbs those risks for you.

For decades, the job of government was to simplify everything:
•One monetary system (the dollar)
•One diplomatic framework (the UN)
•Fewer barriers to trade
•Low interest rates
•Free trade
•Colorblind governance (no DEI sorting)
•Outsourcing complexity to NGOs

This was a very good thing.

The ultimate expression of this logic is a one-world, highly integrated system. From a pure efficiency standpoint, that is also a very good thing.

The catch is simple but fatal: everyone has to agree and act with some degree of honesty.

The reason we ended up with a “uniparty” consensus is that a global linear system made business extraordinarily efficient and reduced many traditional security risks. Conservatives liked it because it boosted growth and stability. Liberals liked it because it freed up capital and cognitive bandwidth for social priorities.

That alignment wasn’t sinister, it was rational.

To make it work, however, you need powerful international institutions capable of managing complexity. Organizations like the IMO, alongside dozens of NGOs, effectively regulate 90% of global trade. For a long time, that worked and it worked well.

“But John, I thought you were MAGA?”

Yes and what I just described is the system we had in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We came remarkably close to a near-optimal arrangement.

But a perfect system depends on trust. And trust broke.

Russia and China refused to play by the rules. Both became aggressively extractive. China hollowed out global manufacturing for themselves. Russia stripped natural resources. And NGOs, operating inside a high-trust, low-scrutiny environment, captured everything else.

Consolidated power plus high trust is an open invitation to fraud.

So now we’re stuck in the worst possible configuration: a system optimized for efficiency, but hemorrhaging value through corruption. The most honest, rule-following participants are being drained to subsidize the least honest ones.

That brings us to the present bifurcation.

We have two choices:
1.Double down on consolidation and linearization, squeezing out even more efficiency so we can do better despite the fraud (liberals)
2.Accept complexity, abandon false simplicity, and actively intervene to repair what’s broken (MAGA)

But this isn’t just MAGA vs liberals.

It’s linear thinkers vs non-linear thinkers.

The skill set required to streamline a functioning system is completely different from the skill set required to diagnose and repair a failing one.

And at the root of all of this is education.

Our education system has spent decades selecting for linear thinkers—because that’s what worked. The formula was clear: honors track, X hours of study, Y tutors, Z credentials. Choose the right majors, follow the prescribed career ladder, earn the right degrees. The path wasn’t easy, but it was linear—and it rewarded intelligence and discipline.

In a well-managed linear system, you don’t need to think broadly. If something matters, the system tells you. If CNN isn’t talking about it, keep your head down and stay on the track.

That model no longer works. 1/2

https://x.com/johnkonrad/status/2009009090820030475

Today, we need people who can hold multiple competing ideas in their heads at once—people who can reason across systems, not just within them, so they can repair the system and end fraud while it’s still running. Those people were liabilities in a smoothly operating machine, so we sidelined them.

That’s why a single-lens worldview, what DR describes, became dominant. The people elevated into leadership across NGOs, international institutions, and finance are highly linear thinkers who need everything reduced to BLUFs and flowcharts.

But here’s the contradiction: we no longer have a linear system.

It’s impossible to go back without repairing the system. The fraud is too great.

And since roughly 2015, instead of adapting to the fraud, liberals pushed harder for linearity—forcing more people into increasingly brittle efficiency tracks—while parallel ideologies (DEI, ESG, Marxist frameworks) taught others how to exploit the growing fraud inside the system.

The result isn’t progress or equity.

It’s systemic failure hiding behind the language of efficiency.

And now the people with the power under a linear system (like the person at CNN who is intelligent and put in the hard work to go to x school, follow y career path, and follow z type stories) are pissed off because they did everything they were told to do and they achieved the pinnacle of the system but they have zero power.

While those who were tossed out of the system (I had to leave the navy and follow a very non-traditional career to succeed) are running circles around them because we think nonlinearly and can jump around with a wrench fixing problems.

And here’s the reason why they are getting SO ANGRY at us. Because they cannot see what we see.

It’s not that they are dumb, it’s that they have been trained and selected for a very tunnel vision worldview.

And we are angry because we have no credentials or traditional power combined with a very wide field of view.

We can see all the problems very clearly and multitask…. While they can only focus on one problem in predefined buckets: in this case, that bucket is Maduro.

P. S. BOTH take work.

It takes a lot of work to get into Harvard and follow the formula to Senator or CEO. You have to read all the right books and climb the singular path.

It also takes a lot of work to read what DR is saying and my long text and map it to the world around you. You have to read a wide diversity of books and climb many difficult paths.

Work is just the prerequisite.

Problem is all the work the ivy league CEO or “top military journalist” has become useless in the last 10 years because of all the fraud while the work of the much smaller subset like Dr or Elon or me have become wildly more valuable.

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