Shadow Projection

I've been delving into the connection between Carl Jung's idea of the Shadow and mainstream American culture these days. The Shadow appears pronouncedly in individuals and cultures that are monotheistic, that identify themselves with a one-and-only (jealous) god.

This is the persona in action. But the id, present since infancy, as prior to the persona as the reptile brain is to the cerebrum, is of a mind that knows only selfishness, because it cannot put itself in another's shoes, as it were; it cannot conceive of compassion, cannot be compassionate. It's a soul not yet evolved to the third chakra of ego/power, even, but more like a mass of impulses.

Sometime around 2009, I read Liber Novus, aka the The Red Book by CG Jung. Although I took long notes, now my Jung knowledge from various sources is all mixed together, and I don't recall many specifics, but for the visions that turned out to be World War I premonitions, which I had probably heard about before reading the book (only affordable online). I remember Jung taking a long ethereal journey, meeting a bunch of figures, getting in adventures,

Anyway, Jung's concepts of collective unconscious, Persona v. Shadow, projection of Shadow onto Other, etc. are phenomena that one can witness in oneself, if one can be honest with oneself, and can then easily see in whole cultures.

Then there's the idea that "Antichrist" means simply "Deceiver" (Christ being the Truth), making any pathological liar, in a sense, an antichrist. Then there's the idea that, when the most pathological liar in history, whose first term as president was met in its final year by a plague (Covid-19), is returned to power, fervently supported by a coalition that includes Evangelical Christians, the Klan/nazis, the fossil fuel industry, tech billionaires… Trump plans to host a UFC bout on the White House grounds on July 4, 2026, supposedly in honor of the USA’s 250th birthday. Back in the day, wealthy Romans occasionally hosted small, private gladiatorial shows on their estates, but there’s no record of a caesar hosting one at his official residence—There weren’t enough seats. Although there will be expensive seats at the White House fight, another fortune will be made streaming the bout to hundreds of millions, and Trump will get a big cut. He takes it to a new level, and even makes money off of the bread and circuses.

Then there's daily news and commentary, by a few people I follow on YouTube, that suggest societal breakdown and the emergence of a collective Shadow in symbiosis with an Antichrist figure. In any case, it ain’t good.

LargeManAbroad, a former US Marine, says, "The entire country has become an abject circus, an abattoir of horrors that we experience every day. We are cosplaying out way into the Apocalypse. Honestly, it just feels like we are a threat to everybody. We're a threat to decency. We're certainly a threat to morality. And the fact that we're getting on top of a big fortified hill and just saying ‘Fuck you’ to everybody, ‘listen to us or we're going to bomb you’. At this point I say that this country needs to be burned down. The political parties in our nation that work every day to degrade and destroy the American people, and the world... it's the lesser of two evils at any given time, but it has been a constant decline. It doesn't matter who's in charge--no one stands up to the lobbyists. No one's willing to stand up to the donors, the corporations. So things are just going to get worse."  

And again, "This is what our country has become. Our country has become spectacle; bread & circuses to distract the people from actually knowing what those who they voted into power are doing to them. Another 'Alligator Alcatraz' erected in the Everglades. And more than just that, Stephen Miller has called on Republican governors all over the country to open their own concentration camps, with government officials in South Carolina proudly answering the call, saying, 'We have gators and we have swamps: We are ready'...In Alaska, they're saying, 'We don't have gators, but we have bears'... America is one step away from gulags, and the right couldn’t be any happier…It was never about progress…It’s about making others suffer, because you think that you suffered. It’s about vengeance, not progression…Oppression, tyranny…It commoditizes and monetizes life in the most unhealthy ways, it has even monetized suffering and put it on a hat as merchandise…There has to be some kind of karmic justice that this country has in store for itself for what it’s done to the world over the past century…America will have no shortage of enemies in the days to come. That’s the point—America needs enemies to thrive…it has failed to be a global partner, but is an abusive partner, seeking to victimize others to justify its false pain. More and more concentration camps are popping up all over red states…Americans should be ostracized from the rest of the globe. I see what my country is doing, what it has done. It is making enemies abroad and within…This is why we have forever wars all over the world, why people in the ME scream Death to America, because we are always there, ready to drop a bomb from a drone…Law & Order w/o justice is simply tyranny. The boot that MAGA loves might one day be on their throats. This is a land without justice. The suffering will grow until it gets unbearable and people have had enough.

“All we have now is taxation without representation [like the Founding Fathers. Maybe it’s time for another revolution]. We are subject to unjust rule. The country has been taken from us. We enter a new era of a new America that wraps itself in the rags of the old one, but don’t be fooled—it’s a wolf in rags. Right now, it doesn’t feel like we’ll get it back. At some point, we’re going to have to take it back.”

Lewis Black says, "Some people are dealing with longterm Covid memory loss, which is occurring in younger and younger people. This July 4th, that big beautiful bill, the greatest misnomer...the Christian values that so many people think were behind this country, that make this country great; those Christian values which we don't have to follow and can talk about...Since 9/11, 140K US veterans have killed themselves. Current data shows an average of 17.6 suicides per day; it's the leading cause of death among veterans under 45 years old. 680K children of working veterans are left out of the expanded $2500 child tax credit as a result of Trump's bill..."

Kyle Kulinski of Secular Talk says, "The ‘Imperial Boomerang’ basically means that, eventually, the weapons and tactics used in the destruction of human rights and civil liberties overseas come back to police your domestic population, which is where we are now, in what is effectively a fascist dictatorship, run by a guy who, by the way, tried to overturn the 2020 election and stay in power. Do you think they're not cooking up something for 2028? for 2026?" 

Dr. Russell Razzaque says, “Trump's paranoia and fear of entirely peaceful protesters will lead him to label them as traitors, the enemy within, and he will overreact to them based on his fears and grievances. His overreactions, that are inevitable, will themselves then lead to more protests. This is the cycle the autocrats follow just as surely as dirty waters circles down a drain. There are many examples throughout history--this is exactly how they react. We are increasingly living in the dystopia of his mind.”

Meanwhile, as Jamie Raskin says, “I don’t even use the word ‘hypocrisy’ to describe the GOP. Hypocrisy is the distance between your self-proclaimed ideals and your practice. They don’t have any ideals. Their vice was cruelty, and a desire to dominate and control at all costs. They’re a ‘rule or ruin’ party, so hypocrisy is almost a flattering term to apply to them, because it suggests they have some ideals to portray. They don’t.”

Chris Hedges says, "Hollowed-out liberalism is just about virtue signaling--that's what's woke, you know--chastising, admonishing. Then they actually turn on liberal democratic values...and that's what happened in Weimar. What you had is a liberal class that was bought off, in essence. I mean, you had Cold War liberals used to decimate the radical movements that had actually saved us from fascism in the 1930s. Radical unions frightened the oligarchs like Franklin Delano Roosevelt... you know the militant unions pushed for the 8-hour workday, social security...

"The administration's racism has been on full display...The more things break down, the more money the oligarchs make, whether it's private security, whatever it is; privatize education either through charter schools or Christian schools, or fleecing you through, you know, online education services...The corporatists didn't want Trump; the oligarchs did."

Excerpted conversation between Ken Harbaugh and Kris Goldsmith on MeidasTouch: “Oligarchs like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc have a messianic complex. Musk is looking forward to the day when humans can upload their consciousness to computers, because immortality is his goal. Musk wants human subjects to test brain implants so that, by the time he is elderly, he can upload his consciousness into a brain and fly that consciousness to Mars. That is literally his plan. The point of all his investments and companies, etc., is to go to Mars and live eternally, in a computer, on another planet… These people have not been quiet about this.”

“It seems so spiritually vacuous…”

“Peter Thiel wants to live forever, and he wants the rest of us to be test subjects for government, for medicine, industry, so we can suffer the consequences while he uses the results of successful experiments to promote his own immortality, which he sees as the ultimate human achievement. Not relationship, love, or defense of the planet, but living forever. It's truly weird...Peter Thiel reads the Bible and sees himself in it—as a prophet, on a higher level than the mass of humanity…and he sees Greta Thunberg as the possible Antichrist.”

AI told me that Thiel’s realization of mortality at age three, when his father explained death’s inevitability, using a cowhide rug as an example, profoundly shaped his psyche, fostering pathological narcissism, according to a biographer (Chafkin, 2021). Thiel was a closeted gay man for much of his adult life. Many such conservative men do a lot of damage to themselves and the world.

“If these [oligarchs] had just had parents who gave them love and attention, and taaught them basic morality…” interjects Goldsmith.

AI continues: Thiel’s early awareness of mortality led him to develop contempt for human frailties, driving his combative, anti-liberal worldview, and he embraced a mix of libertarian and authoritarian ideologies. His support for Trump in 2016, including speaking at the Republican National Convention, align with his disruptive vision. Thiel also plans to rule independent fiefdoms, notably through seasteading—floating libertarian communities free from government oversight—and a survivalist estate in New Zealand, where he has gained citizenship.

Over the past few years, several billionaires have announced plans to build their own “charter cities.” There’s even a venture capital firm funding the creation of cities around the world. But so far, most of these plans have seen little tangible progress. Some, like Musk’s planned city of Snailbrook, have run afoul of residents and regulators.

Other billionaire-proposed cities also have yet to be realized. Six years ago, news reports said Bill Gates was planning to build a smart city in Arizona, after an investment firm with ties to the Microsoft co-founder bought 24,000 acres of land in the desert. No new information about the rumored community has surfaced since those first reports.

Another aspiring “utopian” city, Telosa, has an eventual population goal of 5 million. Diapers.com and Jet.com founder Marc Lore announced plans in 2021 for what he envisions as a futuristic and sustainable metropolis in the U.S. desert.

Meanwhile, in California, a group of tech billionaires has spent the past five years buying 55,000 acres around Solano County, northeast of San Francisco, with plans to build a metropolis called California Forever. The group includes former Goldman Sachs trader Jan Sramek, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of late Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Water is a chief concern for these cities since many are planned for the U.S. West, which faces water shortages that are only projected to worsen due to climate change. The billionaires behind these projects could instead support public, nonprofit and cooperative housing in the many North American cities where existing residents struggle to afford homes… One suspects that they are looking beyond the present, to a future when American society is broken into gated communities and lawless spaces between them, and plan to construct their cities to be impregnable; that they will guard and defend their new cities’ citizens, water and other amenities with high-tech walls, AI surveillance drones and robot dogs. The Shadow knows…

Here’s some Shadow: Jeffrey Epstein’s partner and procuress Ghislane Maxwell (now serving a 20-years sentence) had a famous father, Robert Maxwell, born Jan Ludvik Hoch in 1923 in Czechoslovakia. After escaping Nazi persecution during WWII, he joined the British Army, and earned a Military Cross for bravery. Post-war, his fluency in multiple languages and access to Nazi scientific intelligence made him valuable to MI6. He reportedly gathered technical data from Germany, acting as a double agent by cultivating contacts in Eastern Europe. However, MI6 grew wary of his loyalties, suspecting him of being a “Zionist—loyal only to Israel,” as noted in Foreign Office files. His refusal of a formal MI6 role as a “super contact person” hinted at divided allegiances, setting the stage for his deeper involvement with Israel.

By the 1970s, Maxwell’s allegiance shifted decisively to Mossad. According to Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon’s Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy, he became a key operative, facilitating Mossad’s global intelligence operations. A pivotal role was his distribution of the PROMIS software, modified by Mossad with a “back door” to spy on users, including governments in the U.S., Soviet Union, and China. Maxwell’s media empire, including the Daily Mirror, provided cover for these activities, while his investments in Israeli businesses like Maariv and Scitex cemented his ties to the state. Israeli leaders, including Yitzhak Shamir, lauded his covert contributions at his funeral, suggesting a profound Mossad connection. Some, like former operative Ari Ben-Menashe, allege Maxwell’s financial troubles led him to extort Mossad, resulting in his 1991 death—possibly a Mossad assassination—aboard his yacht.

Maxwell’s espionage legacy extended to his daughter, Ghislaine, and her associate, Jeffrey Epstein, who are widely alleged to have run a Mossad-orchestrated blackmail operation. Ben-Menashe claims Maxwell introduced Ghislaine and Epstein to Mossad, leveraging Epstein’s financial networks to target powerful figures. Epstein’s private island and Manhattan townhouse became hubs for luring politicians, celebrities, and elites, where compromising images and videos were allegedly recorded. This operation, purportedly designed to influence nations’ behavior on the world stage, aligns with Mossad’s history of using kompromat to secure geopolitical leverage, manipulate international politics. While Maxwell’s death remains unresolved—officially a heart attack, possibly murder—his and Ghislaine’s ties to Mossad underscore a decades-long saga of espionage and influence.

Trump was best friends with Epstein for about 20 years, until their falling out. After Epstein was arrested, for the second time, on July 6, 2019, emerging from his private plane at Teterboro Airport after a trip to Paris, an active FBI agent said “Epstein will never make it to trial. There are towels on the inside.” Five weeks later, Epstein was dead, hanging from a knotted noose of towels inside his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Surveillance cameras seem to have been reset just before 23:59, and there is no record of what happened in front of them from then until midnight. The multiple coincidences surrounding his end—two security guards posted in sight of his cell falling into a convenient doze, or distracted by online furniture shopping; Epstein’s cellmate, usually a must for a suicide-risk prisoner, being transferred to another facility and not replaced, the confusion around the deleted or compromised surveillance tapes outside the cell—all point to suspicious circumstances, but were finally ruled to be happenstance by the DOJ in 2023.

Trump repeatedly promised his base that he’d release all the Epstein files, until July 9, when Attorney General Pam Bondi, who had earlier said that Epstein’s client list was on her desk, announced that there was no client list. Responding to a reporter’s question on July 10, Trump said, “You’re still talking about this guy? this creep? That is unbelievable.”

Scott Galloway (on Pivot with Kara Swisher): “Republicans and Trump…I think America has decided in some ways that it’s now The Hunger Games. There’s something deep and mendacious and ugly about America right now... The Bill is [among other horrendous things] an enormous tax on future generations. It’s a huge erosion of the social safety net for poor people, such that the most fortunate, the richest among us, continue to aggregate more wealth…

“As you get older, you realize that a lot of your success isn’t your fault…I wouldn’t be here and rich, thanks to subsidized school lunches, Pell grants, and more, going back to the US pushing back on fascism in the 1930s. My mother was a 4-yr-old Jew sleeping in bomb shelters in the London tube….The GOP now is about demonization of immigrants, a refusal to condemn violence against your opponents, and extreme nationalism. Does that sound familiar? [it’s what my mother fled]…”

Swisher: “Many, many people who get the breaks [by, for example, being born into wealth, like a large majority of today’s billionaires] do not realize they are on third base, and feel like they’ve hit a home run.”

Galloway: “Thanks to the Bill, all the ladders for many of us who [started poor and became] successful in the American experience are being pulled up behind us. Rather than keep ~$2B for Pell grants, and create and energy efficient independent future that would create great jobs [and a ton of other things] the Trump administration will spend $40B to expand ICE and jail immigrants.

“We’re funding what is effectively a modern-day Gestapo with wifi, out of Goebbel’s playbook. It’s a surveillance state, light on law. The Gestapo was powerful not because of it’s size. It operated outside the law, no warrants, no oversight. ICE is increasingly mirroring it, expanding digital surveillance, facial recognition, license plate tracking, with minimal judicial review. It’s a civil agency essentially behaving as an intelligence unit. It’s the militarization of bureaucracy—they’ve got drones, tactical teams, armored vehicles. It’s not national security—it’s pageantry and fear. The Gestapo and the SS were famous for turning identity into a crime. They targeted identity, not behavior, backed by rhetoric that framed their victims as animals or invaders. This is about signaling who belongs and who doesn’t, similar to what they were doing to the Jews in Germany in the 1930s. That’s not law enforcement—it’s fascism, and ICE is becoming increasingly unaccountable and untouchable, operating in legal gray zones with no consistent court oversight. The agency keeps getting funded no matter the headlines (which include ‘neglect’, ‘abuse' and ‘forced sterilizations’). Fear is policy. This is total intimidation. The Gestapo made you afraid to speak. ICE makes people afraid to go to court, school, even church. That’s the whole point: fear keeps people quiet…

“In 2025, ICE will have 21K employees. The Gestapo at its peak in 1944 was 32K for an entire continent. Funding for ICE is five times what Nazi Germany spent on its secret police, adjusted for 2024 dollars. We’re going to spend about $11B this year; estimates are that the Gestapo required $2B…You don’t just wake up with Auschwitz; it starts with bureaucracy, badges and silence. And if we don’t challenge these tools now, they’ll be used on us later. Essentially, Trump now has his own private army under his control, and it’s there for intimidation. It’s fear mixed with pageantry.”