Divine Power

Since I wrote it, I have been thinking of how to follow up my (unfortunately) eerily prescient 2023 post, The Defenestration of Twitter. In the post, I referenced project REDMAP and how its success indicated “how woefully unprepared we are to deal with foreign influence operations” in the United States of America.

As we sit here three years later, my predictions, dire as they were, were not sufficiently pessimistic. Greedy cowards funded by murderous tyrants denigrate and destroy the livelihoods of Americans and foreigners alike. Dictators openly suck the wealth and life blood from their people and hide it in nefarious banks, phony currencies, pyramid schemes, pump and dump scams, and money laundering real estate transactions—amid widespread confusion about who precisely is in charge of which country.

Gilbert Achcar titled his new book Gaza Catastrophe: The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective. I recommend listening to the entire interview with Achcar on the 30 April 2026 episode of Democracy Now, but here is a key segment (emphasis mine):

It is absolutely obvious to me that for Donald Trump, for Kushner, Jared Kushner, for Steve Witkoff, the Gulf monarchies are much more important than whatever Israel can represent. I mean, that’s where their economic interests are. That’s where they have billions of dollars of joint investments and the rest. And therefore, I mean, of course, the United States has used the Israeli military, who was only very happy to oblige in this joint war on Iran, but you could see, everyone could see, how when Donald Trump decided that he had to stop, he did not even consult Netanyahu, although he, Netanyahu, has been on his side from day one.

Many honest, brave souls have fought and resisted this destruction of everything that keeps us safe, everything that we hold dear. To those who continue to summon the tenacity to persevere no matter the odds, I express deepest sympathies and total solidarity.

To those who would harm not just their neighbors, but their own families, children, grandchildren, and all generations to come, I can only express grave concern for how your self-loathing and self-sabotage exponentially harm all of us. With that said, it is important to convey that feeling pity or concern does not condone judgement.

In judging the deluded as they fulfill their negative self-image, we delude ourselves into the false notion that our own most mindless, irresponsible moments would pass muster under such stringent criteria. Even when we think we reserve our harshest judgements for ourselves, our aversion to the qualities we most dislike in ourselves falls most heavily on others, since their qualifying circumstances and mixed feelings are opaque to us. Moreover, even genocidal and ecocidal forms of mass harm are not new phenomena, unnatural as they may be. This portion of the transcript of David Sirota’s 22 May appearance on Democracy Now gets right to the root of it:

DAVID SIROTA: […] we see this over and over again, where the Trump administration is weaponizing its power over mergers to try to get what it wants in the media space. And I think that’s a — I wouldn’t call that a new level of corruption. We saw the Nixon administration, quite famously, back in the day, try to weaponize its merger approval process on behalf of its allies and its donors, as well. But it is a resurrected tactic from the Nixon era that is a kind of corruption that’s outside of, frankly, the traditional kinds of corruption that we’ve gotten used to. I mean, traditional corruption that we talk about in Master Plan and we document in Master Plan is about legalizing campaign contributions. This is actually weaponizing, as you mentioned, lawsuits where Trump is trying to extract money from various large corporations, using the merger approval process potentially as a tool to extract those settlements and extract financial remuneration to Donald Trump himself.

And I think, ultimately, as it affects the media situation, it creates a chilling effect, right? I mean, everybody who is currently working in media, certainly for big corporations that may have business before the Trump administration, everybody knows that they, in what they’re doing, whether it’s reporting or commentary or anything else, that they may get crosswise with Donald Trump, and the corporate boss may not like that, because the corporate boss may have business with the Trump administration. So, I think beyond just a sort of heavy-handed censorship problem, you have a potential self-censorship problem. And I think that’s actually, arguably, the point from the Trump administration and people like Brendan Carr, to send a chilling effect message to the entire media and the entire political discourse.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David, meanwhile, six Democratic senators sent a letter to the chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr, demanding that he conduct a rigorous and thorough review of Paramount’s reliance on foreign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to pay for almost $110 billion to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. In the past, the federal government has really been strict about the limits of foreign ownership or investment in American media companies. What’s happening here in terms of the foreign — foreign control regulations of the FCC?

DAVID SIROTA: Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question. There’s reporting that says that the FCC may approve up to a 49-and-a-half percent ownership, or even ultimately up to 100% ownership, foreign ownership, of the new merged Paramount-Warner Bros. corporation, if the merger goes through.¹ They’re asking, essentially, the FCC to waive long-standing ownership laws. And to be clear, let’s remember, Brendan Carr of the FCC wrote parts of the Project 2025 document, the document setting the agenda for Trump’s second term, in which Carr said that he wanted to get rid of ownership caps.

Now, obviously, this conflicts with the whole notion of America first that you hear Trump talking all about, where we are potentially going to have the largest or among the largest media conglomerates in the country — in the world, but operating in our country, affecting the democratic discourse, that is in part or up to potentially fully owned by foreign sovereign wealth funds, controlled in part by foreign governments. I mean, it kind of boggles the mind about what that means for our democracy, right? Because media corporations, as distinct from, you know, a corporation that just makes a physical product — media corporations have a disproportionate impact on the democratic — small-D democratic — and election discourse. Now, in the future, you may have a situation where foreign governments via sovereign wealth funds have a disproportionate power to affect the way we conduct our United States, American democracy.

– David Sirota on the 22 May 2026 episode of Democracy Now
Sirota is editor-in-chief of The Lever and host of the Master Plan podcast.

There is a direct line from:

Nixon and Kissinger’s² asserted impunity
To Ford, Cheney (over and over again, plus Halliburton)
Regan, Bush Sr. (Carlyle Group), and Jr. (Blackwater, Enron)
And now Trump (far too much corruption to even list in a parenthetical).

Until we accept and reckon with the full unvarnished truth of our history and our refusal to live up to our so-called principles, we will continue to repeat magnified fractals of these mistakes.

This is one of those moments when we must face the ugly to earn back the beauty. If we are to rise above this self-induced polycrisis, the only way out is in.

In the foreword to Chandra Easton’s Embodying Tara, Venerable Khenpo Tsewang Rinpoche who co-founded the Padmasambhava Buddhist Center urges us to:

[…] understand and connect with Tara, and to benefit from her practice, particularly now when so many challenges are happening in the world and signs of degeneration are manifesting. Connecting with Mother Tara is one of the most powerful ways to bring peace and harmony to individuals and the world.

Inspired by a talk by Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal, I composed a poem.

calmly relax

behold dharmakāya धर्मकाय

stable peaceful clarity

sharp focused reflection

firm • gentle • clear

Fearful, violent, greedy demons within our own souls propel destruction of our fragile home planet and allow desecrations to continue taking place. Yet “demons” were once daemons who signify “the experience of divine power” within us all. Ancient Himalayan teachings find expression in modern practices.

We are never too far from our past or our future to learn and arise together.

Let us become something more than what we have been.

We are all states of being in the process of becoming

I am all of us
You are all of us
They are all of us

All becoming one
All becoming bliss
All becoming free

We heal ourselves in order to help each other free ourselves

We free ourselves in order to help each other heal ourselves

All becoming free
All becoming bliss
All becoming one