The Digital Authoritarian Playbook: A High Fidelity Warning

High Fidelity, HiFi, co-host of Radicalized: Truth Survives, for a no-holds-barred conversation about the dark architecture of this global authoritarian push — and why truth is under siege by this growing Transnational Crime Ring.

From the infiltration of protest to micro targeting in this information war and the role PayPal Mafia members like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk play. HiFi unpacks how today's authoritarian creep didn’t come out of nowhere — it is rooted in white supremacy and class warfare.

RADICALIZED: Truth Survives Podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:02

Welcome to Connections and Conversations, an advocacy arena podcast, working to increase civic engagement and strengthen our communities. Welcome back to another awesome Connections and Conversations episode. I am so happy to be here today with my friend Hi-Fi or Hi Fidelity. We are buddies online. We hang out in a lot of various communities, but I've been excited about this conversation because one of the things that Hi-Fi is very involved in is fighting this information war. So, Hi-Fi, I want to give you an opportunity to say hello and kind of tell the advocacy arena audience how you do that. I know one of the ways is a podcast that you have, and we'll get into that a little bit.

SPEAKER_02: 0:55

Well, thanks for having me, Dee. Especially thanks for inviting me into your space and allowing me to say my piece. I co-host a podcast called Radicalized Truth Survives with Emmy Award-winning journalist Heidi Kuda and Emmy Award-winning game designer Jim Stewartson. And it's kind of crazy how I ended up here because 2020, I was not an activist in any way, shape, or form. I was a computer guy. Like I had my career set, I had my life on track, everything was going great. And then the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting occurred. And I don't really care about Kyle Rittenhouse. I mean, whatever, he's been through the courts, we all know what happened. But what I cared about was the fact that he was raising money online to pay for legal defense. Except what I found out was the fundraiser that I found on a Christian fundraising website was not set up by Rittenhouse or anyone associated with him. It was set up by two dirty lawyers, one named Ellen Wood and one named John M. Pierce. And they had a whole lot of crazy connections to a Russian gangster named Sergei Grishin, to the PayPal Mafia, specifically Joe Lonsdale and Elon Musk. And Ellen Wood was doing the QAnon thing. So I kind of went after them for like, why is there this Russian gangster in your history? Are you laundering money online through this website? And what happened when I started going after them was my employer was attacked. So I lost my career. My marriage was threatened. My wife and children, my wife at the time and my children were threatened. My marriage dissolved. And a lot of people that would be like, okay, I'm done, except I'm Scots-Irish and stubborn and angry. So I went harder after these people. And oddly enough, two years and seven months after I started going after the Russian, he wound up dead back in Moscow. So things are just kind of crazy. That's how I ended up here.

SPEAKER_01: 3:08

Yes, and that's one of the things that I love because I know on your podcast, you guys do a lot of great interviews. And I love being a part of your community because you focus a lot on the geopolitical connections. And a lot of Americans don't get that and they're not able to make the connections. And I know we're in the Substack community and we were just joking. You had made a post and I chimed in and replied, and you were like, Yeah, we we need to talk about this. And I was like, yes, let's. And I I love that many of the folks that you talk to in Europe and and other places are reporters or are in communities that have or countries that have dealt with authoritarianism and the information war, which of course makes what you do so very important. If you were trying to explain to someone who's not really politically engaged, you know, they just kind of glaze the news. How would you kind of explain to them what's happening around this information ecosystem that that we're experiencing now? How would you help them to understand?

SPEAKER_02: 4:34

Well, there's two things that people have to wrap their head around. One, what we are experiencing is not just authoritarianism versus democracy. What we are undergoing currently is a class war. And the rich are utilizing the media, social media, cognitive warfare, and they are turning our friends and neighbors into radicalized terrorists who support the billionaire agenda, which is the MAGA agenda, which is the Donald Trump agenda. It is the white supremacist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic evil that we are seeing play out, especially in the United States right now. I mean, we know the ICE kidnappings, the alligator Auschwitz down in Florida. Well, the basic thing is that we are undergoing class war. The rich have decided that the working class are no longer worth the trouble. They're going to oppress us. They have kept wages stagnant for decades, right? Meanwhile, the 1% in the United States has accumulated more and more wealth. If you look globally, the 1% is accumulating more and more wealth. So, one, we're in a class war. And two, this class war is literally playing out globally. You know, we talk about Russia, and Russia is primarily operating in the Eastern European theater. We know they're at war in Ukraine. We know they are carrying out cognitive warfare against Moldova, Lithuania, Serbia, Poland. Right now, even in, believe it or not, even in Japan, the far right is on the rise, and they're using the same tactics that MAGA did. They're blaming foreigners, they're blaming immigrants, they're using online false amplification to make them appear more powerful than they actually are, and people are being drawn into that. And when people are drawn into that, cognitive warfare affects their brains. Again, social media, media, messaging. Oh, one thing that people need to understand is what are Titushki? And Titushki are the fake actors on the street who cause problems. I think we all remember during the George Floyd protests. Remember the guy who smashed the windows at AutoZone? He was had the all-black umbrella. Well, no, it turned out that he was a white supremacist. And what they do is they infiltrate the movements on the left and they cause chaos. You could call them chaos agents, right? Right. So this is a global class war that ultimately the goal is to kill billions of people. And that may sound kind of crazy, except when you look at what's coming with the climate catastrophe, the collapse of the food chain, billions of people are gonna die. And they're gonna die so petroleum companies can make a dollar, so the rich can get richer and hide in their bunkers when the world falls apart. This has been planned. We're now in World War III, whether people want to acknowledge it or not.

SPEAKER_01: 8:04

Correct. And a lot of it is being planned by, I like to think of, because I'm kind of a history nerd, like the technocrats and technocracy is not a new thing. You know, we just have new technology, but that ideology is playing out right now because these tech bros and they're controlling so many things that are also involving our politics. For example, the connection and the closeness of our current VP with Peter Teal and the PayPal Mafia and Opus Day.

SPEAKER_02: 8:42

You know, so I actually did a podcast with my co-host Heidi on our website, bettydangerous.com, and we go back through 20 years of movements in the technology world that have led us to this point in time where we have this fascist Trump, we have the white supremacist in waiting, JD Vance. And you could say, oh, well, he's not a white supremacist, he's married to an Indian woman. Well, I think we all know about the fetishization of other races by white supremacists, exotic women or people. And most people assume that J.D. Vance is is bisexual or gay, but no, he he has an Indian wife. How could he how could he possibly be those things, right? It's it's diversion, it's deception, it's cognitive warfare. And J.D. Vance has done nothing with his life that Peter Thiel hasn't held his hand through. He's never held a real job. I personally believe that J.D. Vance's book sales were inflated through bulk purchases and other online chiconery. I don't trust J.D. Vance. I don't think J.D. Vance is a good person. And the fact that he's connected to Peter Thiel, who has been for decades attempting to overthrow democracy in the United States. I mean, the man specifically said freedom and democracy are no longer compatible, right? He's also a rape apologist. He denied that rape ever existed back when he wrote a book at Stanford. The man is Peter Thiel is a horrible person. And I generally gauge that by the body count in their past. And we know for a fact that Peter Thiel's side piece caught Russian window cancer in Miami after speaking to some left-wing documentarians. So yeah. Peter Thiel is a shady bastard. He's been working with Opus Dei, which, if you've read Gareth Gore's book, Opus, or you've seen our interview on Radicalized Truth survives with him, Opus Day is currently undergoing, they're on trial in Argentina for human trafficking. There are accusations of money embezzlement causing banks to fail in Spain. There's a lot of serious things going on. And people say, Well, you're attacking Christianity, you're attacking the Catholic Church. Absolutely not. I was I was raised in the Catholic Church. What I'm attacking is a sickness inside the Catholic Church.

SPEAKER_01: 11:21

An extreme version of it. And I love that the new Pope is taking them to task.

SPEAKER_02: 11:28

He's going through the motions, he's pointing the finger, but I have yet to see any serious reform. I have yet to see any excommunication. Well, there was one excommunication, but that was Francis. He excommunicated Cardinal Vegano is now out. Vegano is one you really have to watch. And Raymond Burke is another American cardinal who is a shady, slimy bastard as well. Right. So Leo's going through these motions, but I hope something good, I hope something serious comes out of it.

SPEAKER_00: 12:02

I do too.

SPEAKER_01: 12:02

And we can only hope because he's only been there a short period of time, but he hit the ground running with it. And I was really pleasantly surprised by it. So we understand how that kind of extreme Christianity is playing out and how it's mixing in with our politics, with the technocrats and the white supremacists, like they're all kind of coming together. And there is always, it seems, this kind of common thread of Russia somewhere in there. I know that when we talk about this kind of information warfare that we're experiencing and people not really understanding it, you guys know what you're talking about. You interview a lot of experts and people who understand as well. But the folks in your podcast, yeah, Jim, that was what his profession was, like creating these virtual realities for people so he understands how this kind of programming can work on the human brain.

SPEAKER_00: 13:08

We all deal with it on a daily basis. It is influence.

SPEAKER_02: 13:13

It is changing the way you think a little bit left or right. So if I'm walking down the street and I see you and I say, hey, I love that necklace you're wearing. It's gorgeous. That makes you feel good, right? That's influence. I just exerted influence on you in a positive way. Now, what if I was walking down the street and I saw you and said, you know, you probably shouldn't wear that necklace. It does, it really doesn't match your skin tone, it doesn't match your outfit. You should probably get a new necklace. Well, that's influencing you in a negative way. And people are used to this in their day-to-day interactions. What they're not used to is when their news, the thing that's just supposed to be facts and data telling them about the state of the world, that starts influencing them. How many Fox viewers understand that they are being programmed, or CNN viewers or MSNBC viewers, right? Our 24-7 news cycle has become a weapon of influence that is used against us. Social media. We all thought social media was great. Hey, we can talk to Nana across the country, send her pictures of the grandkids, right? It's wonderful. And then all of a sudden, into our feeds start showing up videos of fights. Well, when you watch a video of fight, the catocholamines in your brain get altered. Adrenaline starts flowing, dopamine starts going. People get addicted to likes and retweets. Hey, look that 4,000 people liked my tweet. So you start getting addicted to that dopamine. You start getting addicted to your screen, and that screen starts to influence you back. And we know this is true because we saw it in 2016 with Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and Palantir.

SPEAKER_00: 14:58

Yes, I hate anything that he has touched. I don't play on his platforms.

SPEAKER_02: 15:03

Facebook only came about because Peter Thiel invested$500,000 of Robert Mercer's money into Facebook. He was the first big outside investor. Okay, so he started building Facebook. And then Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebecca Mercer, along with Steve Bannon, created this company called Cambridge Analytica. And Cambridge Analytica used data from Facebook, Peter Thiel's Facebook, which he got with Robert Mercer's money, to start manipulating people online through Facebook, gathering their data through Facebook, and then targeting them with that data and feeding them influence through Facebook. And then during Cambridge Analytica in the 2015-2016 era, the elections, Palantir, Peter Thiel's other company, worked with Cambridge Analytica to scrape data from Facebook so they could do more of that targeting. Micro-targeting. And Brad Parscale even admitted to this. He said, We specifically targeted the black community in certain places to drive down their voter turnout. Think about that. Donald Trump's campaign guy, Brad Parscale, admitted that they were micro-targeting people online using data science and analytics with data from Peter Thiel's Facebook, Robert Mercer's Cambridge Analytica, and Peter Thiel's Palantir. So when a lot of people go, oh, that wasn't really impactful, that altered the outcome of the election. You know, one of the things that Paul Manafort got in trouble for was handing over polling data to Konstantin Kalimnik, who was a Russian agent. What were they doing with that data? Well, guess what? They were figuring out how to micro-target people online. And in 2016 it worked, and we ended up with Trump phase one. We know in 2020, Trump attempted a coup, which we never held anyone responsible for. The highest level we went for were Proud Boys, right? We didn't go after Flynn, Stone. So we let an attempted coup slide in our country. And in 2024, they did that same crap with the targeting online. Elon Musk bought Twitter. Elon Musk was bribing people to vote for Trump. People don't realize Elon Musk is a problem. They think he's a legitimate businessman. He's not. And now, 2024, we now have Trump phase two, which is looking like it's going to be the end of America.

SPEAKER_01: 17:56

Exactly. And speaking of Elon, like, yeah, he's for real, real. And he is a problem for me because he is playing here in my state now. He left Silicon Valley because they, you know, they got all they could out of that. And now he's here in Tennessee. And what to my surprise, that was the ugly news I got yesterday on my birthday, was that, you know, I after the pod and I did my thing, I came to check news online. And that was one of the first things that I saw. My state representative had posted something on X about a deal that our governor just made with Elon. Now, of course, his XAI is headquartered in Memphis. He's not following any regulations. He just got a permit and he's been operating for a year, and people didn't even know it was coming there until basically it was built. In a few weeks, all these NDAs and things were signed. Boom, it's there, and it's polluting a neighborhood that has already suffered a long history of environmental injustice. So immediately he starts with the turbines exceeding the emissions. People can't breathe in that community. And they're applauding him. And now they've given him permits, and now they're allowing him to do more. And lo and behold, he's not just content to mess around down there in Memphis. Our governor just agreed to let him have full underground access to do a loop from downtown to the airport. No regulations, you know, just ownership in perpetuity of our underground. Now, this is an area that is known for sinkholes and all this other stuff. And now we're in an era where they don't want regulations.

SPEAKER_02: 19:52

Elon Musk's biggest projects are killing brown and black people. That is what he wants to do. To understand Elon Musk, you have to look at his history. And if you look into the history of Elon Musk, his grandfather was a cult leader Nazi who got kicked out of Canada for running a violent white supremacist cult called Technocracy Inc. And then he dragged Elon's mother, Mae Musk, dragged her around Africa for something like 10 years, looking for the Aryan homeland in Africa. Well, no, there is no Aryan homeland, you fucking weirdos. He's following these white supremacist myths and lies. So you have Mae Musk, who's descended from this Joshua Halderman fellow, who's a wacko, and then you have his father, Errol, and Errol admitted a he named his son after a character from Werner Von Braun's book, Mars Project.

SPEAKER_01: 21:04

Which is why he's obsessed, right?

SPEAKER_02: 21:06

Has multiple children with what was once his like stepdaughter slash adopted daughter, who he'd known since she was four. We know that Musk, Musk's father, had part of an apartheid emerald mine, right? You know, we know he was exploiting Africans who probably died in his mind to make him rich. And there's also a really interesting story about Errol flying a plane. He was supposedly flying a plane to Germany or France to sell it. And he stopped in Italy and met a bunch of men with a whole bunch of money in a safe who bought the plane outright. Sorry, that sounds like mob shit to me. Bunch of guys in Italy with a safe full of cash who just want to buy a plane? Weird man. Anyway, so yeah, you you look at his family history, and Elon Musk's whole family history is it's a shit show. And people are lauding this man as a genius. No, Elon Musk is not a genius.

SPEAKER_00: 22:08

He's just a rich guy who was able to buy other people's things.

SPEAKER_02: 22:11

He was a rich guy who was created. He wasn't a rich guy. He had some money, but he wasn't like the billionaire, the richest man in the world that he is now. He was created through myth and he was created through acquisitions. He didn't create Tesla, he bought Tesla. You know, they had some good engineers. He didn't create SpaceX. He basically ripped off NASA with the help of Putin's favorite congressman, Dana Rohrbacher, who wrote an entire bill to hand over the American space program to privatize it for Elon. Elon Musk is not a genius. Elon Musk is a pawn. Elon Musk is a figurehead. He's a figurehead for a transnational organized crime ring that leads to not just Russia. Let's be honest. It's not just Russia. There's Saudi Arabia, there's UAE, there's certain elements inside of Israel, specifically the Lakud Party. And people say, oh, Israel's all wrapped up in this. No, no. There's more nuance to it than that. Because if you just say it's Israel, it's the Jews, well, then you're just falling into anti-Semitic tropes that have been fed to the Western world since, well, in the modern world, since about 1905, when Russia lost the Russo-Japanese War. And that's when they came up with the protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is when, oh, the Jews drink blood, the Jews kill children. And really, even that, I even trace that back. And the root of that antisemitism that Russia was putting out actually goes back to 63, a common era, 63 CE, when the Romans conquered the Greek Empire. In Alexandria, the Romans were going to give both the Greeks and at the time the Israelites, the Jews who lived in northern Africa, they were going to give them citizenship in the Roman Empire because the Israelites, the Jewish people at that time, had fought for the Roman Empire. And citizenship in the Roman Empire was really important. It meant you could not be a slave. It meant you could get education. It meant you could own a business, right? So citizenship was like you have to be a citizen in the Roman Empire to exist. Well, the Greeks freaked out about the fact that these people, it wasn't Israel at the time, the Hebrews, the Jews, they freaked out that they were going to have citizenship too. So they created all these rumors about they drink blood, they kill children, you know, they they worship dark gods, uh they're a cabal of evil. So that's like the first recorded in history anti-Semitism, and everything since then is just a rehash of it. So in Israel, the Lakud Party is analogous to the GOP in America, meaning that they are a far-right conservative party that has been corrupted and co-opted by organized crime because we know Netanyahu has yet to face trial on organized crime corruption charges.

SPEAKER_01: 25:30

Yeah, he's it he and Donald are kind of twins. And I could talk to you for hours, hi bye, and we're gonna start to wrap this up. But I want people to know like where they can find you and you just to offer some thoughts and insights on how people can stay abreast of what's going on, to do what we can to preserve what's left of our democracy to keep it from sinking and disappearing forever and maybe someday get it back. I know that's a lot.

SPEAKER_02: 26:02

Okay. Yeah. Well, you can find myself and my podcast co-host, Radicalized Truth Survives, on YouTube. We post pretty much weekly during the summer. We all take vacations at different times, so we might miss a week here or there. But you can normally find us every Thursday night, 7 p.m. Eastern. We do a live stream on both Twitter and YouTube. We don't suggest Twitter to anyone because Twitter is a white supremacist hellhole currently, run by a Nazi. But you can find Heidi Sigmund Kuder at Betty B-E-T-T-E dangerous.com. You can find my other co-host Jim Stewartson at mindwar.com. And you can find me at deep thoughts with hi-fi.substack.com, or if you look for that bastard hi-fi on a substack, I make people angry. It's what I'm good at.

SPEAKER_01: 26:58

I appreciate it. We're gonna have to do this again, and I am gonna prepare to do a check-in with the Betty Dangerous community shortly.

SPEAKER_02: 27:07

I'm gonna be listening to Dietmar, who is Dietmar Pitchler is actually he runs the disinformation resilience network out of Vienna, Austria.

SPEAKER_01: 27:16

Austria. Okay, yeah. So I'm gonna check in and see what he has to report. But again, I want to thank you for taking a little time out of your day, for hanging out with me, helping our audience get to know you, what you do. And I want to thank you for the work that you do. I know you're gonna keep plugging away at it, and maybe we can come back and have another conversation about it.

SPEAKER_02: 27:38

Before I leave, I'm gonna offer our audience two books that they should read. One is called Nothing Is True, Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerancev. And the other is called The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson. If you want to understand cognitive warfare, information warfare, hybrid warfare, how these things work, those are two excellent books to read.

SPEAKER_01: 28:01

Till next time, my friend. Thank you for listening to Connections and Conversations. This is one of many wonderful interviews that we bring to you to help connect you to a larger community of advocates and change makers across the country. You'll get a glimpse into the various ways people are making an impact in their communities. My hope is that it will inspire you to get engaged in some small way as well. We can't all do everything, but at this moment in history, we can all do something. What are you doing? One of the things you can do is to continue to listen, subscribe, and share this advocacy arena podcast. You can also join and support the growing grassroots advocacy arena community in other ways. Join our weekly live chat hosted on Skype every Monday at 12 p.m. Eastern. Subscribe to our substance to get great articles on important topics and exclusive access to extended interview conversations. And don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel as well. We've got some exciting programming lined up. And keep listening to our regular podcast episodes wherever you get your podcast. And of course, subscribe and give us that all important five star review.