Dear Matt and Walter,

I enjoy your work, separately and as a team, and heartily approve of what you’re trying to accomplish in the face of all this creeping totalitarianism. 

That said, I suspect that I suffer from a more jaundiced, paranoid and generally misanthropic mindset than either of you fine, upstanding gentlemen. I have occasionally, while listening to your routinely illuminating “America This Week” productions, found myself bristling weakly at what my more pessimistic side would characterize as a “nice guy” tendency in each of you to relax into the homey, parochial haze of a 20th-century Anglo-Americo-centric aesthete’s vision of politics, power, economics, culture, propaganda, intelligence/security, and journalism. These occasional minor hiccups in my fawning hero worship occur most often during your discussions attempting to theoretically identify a “higher” source for the perceptibly obvious increase in surveillance and censorship/information control afflicting the American media landscape in this millennium. 

Not that anyone will lose sleep over it, but while I totally agree with your analysis and reporting as to WHAT is happening, I reluctantly have to demur from both of your oft stated conclusions as to WHY this is happening, and WHO might be in the driver’s seat. Both of you cite the establishment and growth of an iconoclastic, unruly Internet and U.S. neoliberal officialdom’s negative reaction to that and to Wikileaks and Snowden revelations as key events. Matt, based on your recent work, you tend to focus on Trump derangement syndrome as an additional root cause of the current state of affairs. Walter, you point to the apparent dominance of the U.S. Democratic Party establishment in organizing efforts to muzzle dissent. 

While all of the above is true as far as it goes, I’d like to introduce and build upon the notion that an ongoing effort of planetary gamesmanship and domination has been successfully waged by a small, extranational, multigenerational cabal of Western European puppetmasters since the zenith of the British Empire in the early 1800s. Today’s hyper-balkanization of the American electorate into ever smaller, more myopic, more malleable “silos” is only the latest iteration of a centuries-old rubric perfected by the masters of British intelligence to divide and conquer that empire’s far-flung colonies, as well as its few possessions, including America, that managed to wrest themselves away from the Crown’s influence for a few brief minutes. In Asia, to induce ethnic and religious factions to set up camp against each other rather than rise up en masse like the Mongols of old, the British carved competing states out of the defeated Ottoman Empire, keeping the oil riches for themselves. They partitioned India into two powerful, antagonistic, nuclear-armed neighbors. They aided and abetted the creation of the state of Israel, a permanent militarized thorn in the side of any Arab contingent in the Middle East, along with a crack intelligence outfit, the Mossad, modeled after their own matchless secret service. And so on, in regions around the globe, often by setting up proxy conflicts. 

They did similar things in this hemisphere. Contrary to carefully constructed popular belief, the British Empire did not expire in the mid-20th century, replaced by a “free” consortium of Western-leaning powers, led by the all-powerful United States of America. British bankers, industrialists, power brokers and its intelligence firmament, directly following the War of 1812, wormed their way into the nascent American economic and political system, capitalizing on perceived north/south divisions, fomenting civil unrest and backing the industrially blessed North in the resulting conflict. America and Britain together, under a single controlling cohort taking advantage of the newer nation’s vast natural resources and unfettered human energy, abetted by a blizzard of British  financing, morphed over two carefully choreographed world wars into the planet-dominating extranational economic and political power consortium that holds sway today and continues to divide and conquer with impunity, both within and between most if not all nations. 

Including ours. 

Did it ever occur to either of you that the vaunted left/right divide in the USA, standing pat over the past 20 years at exactly 50% per side, might be a painstakingly created and micromanaged construct? That the Maine, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, the JFK assassination, Watergate, 9/11, the “Arab Spring,” COVID-19, the Capitol insurrection, the Hamas atrocities … and every president, including Barack Obama AND Donald J. Trump, may have all been foreseen and green-lighted, if not actually planned for and executed/recruited, by this “higher” cabal of super-Machiavellian, now computer and AI-assisted empire-builders? I mean, look at the upshot of every one of these events, and how each has led in one direction only. More control, in fewer hands. A richer elite. Less freedom, worldwide. Uncooperative nations, ethnicities and political/economic systems losing. A return to a feudal system, this time global. The rise of a small army of multibillionaire industrialists responsible for vast projects designed to further link, surveil, feed, capture and cage every human being on the planet and bring them into the matrix. Each of these lucky chosen industrialists, along with every politician and national leader, is compromised and captured in a web as well, manipulated by whatever personal weakness makes them vulnerable. Fear for themselves and their loved ones, a propensity for teenage girls or other dark longings, a criminal past, it doesn’t matter. Every weakness can be hooked to a marionette string. Jeffrey Epstein’s list and video stash. A midnight phone call. 

Meanwhile, the centers of the project: Britain and the USA and the world power capitals of London, New York and Washington, remain preternaturally safe, protected by the most proactive and vigilant global security matrix that has ever existed. It may not be perfect, but every year it’s getting stronger. The fact that we have not been decimated by our legions of enemies as their cities and populations are laid waste by us and our many proxies is testament to the system’s increasing efficacy over the last 120 years. That this system is being trained of late on our own restive population is just part of the long-term plan. 

Like I said, I’m way more jaundiced, paranoid and misanthropic than either of you, and probably three times as full of shit. I’m also older, at 71, with infinitely less “reach” and much less of a chance of having the IRS come knocking or a black helicopter landing on my lawn to whisk me away to Guantanamo. 

In addition, I’m not plotting anything based on my wild musings, and never will. I’m just a crazy old dude with an easily surveillable iPhone, shit-talking into the ether. 

Right?

Anyway, please carry on, and feel free to pay no attention. 

Yours,

Biff