UN response to Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire's January 1994 "Genocide Fax," instructing UNAMIR to take no reconnaissance or other action pending guidance from UN Headquarters.
Source: National Security Archive / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Everything in this series is documented. Every claim has a source. The truth is disturbing enough.

Two Requests

Twice in the last decade, the United Nations has asked the world for something. Not conquest. Not command. Something quieter, and in some ways harder to refuse: trust. Reorganize around our framework, the UN said in 2015. Fifteen years, seventeen goals, every nation on earth pulling in the same direction. Ten years later, in the middle of a pandemic whose institutional response had already cost the WHO a great deal of public trust, the UN asked again, this time through its health arm, for something with real legal teeth attached.

The first request came wrapped in idealism. The second came wrapped in treaty language. Between them sits a single fax machine in Kigali, and one unanswered message that still shadows every new promise.

Rwanda: The Fax They Buried

In October 1993, the UN deployed a peacekeeping mission to Rwanda called UNAMIR, twenty-five hundred soldiers, sent to oversee a fragile peace agreement between the Rwandan government and Tutsi rebels. The force was commanded by a Canadian lieutenant general named Roméo Dallaire.

On January 11, 1994, Dallaire sent a cable to UN Headquarters that has since become known as the Genocide Fax. An informant inside the extremist Hutu Power movement had come to him with a warning: militias were being armed and trained, Tutsis in Kigali were being registered, and in the informant’s own words, relayed by Dallaire, his men could kill up to a thousand Tutsis in twenty minutes. Dallaire asked for permission to raid the weapons caches his informant had identified.

The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations said no. The raid, they told him, exceeded UNAMIR’s mandate. The head of that department at the time was Kofi Annan, a man who would go on to become the UN’s Secretary-General four years later.

Dallaire didn’t stop. He sent five more warnings over the following two months, January 22, February 3, February 15, February 27, March 13, pleading for a broader mandate and more troops. He was turned down every time.

On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying Rwanda’s president was shot down. The genocide began within hours. Extremist militias, the same ones Dallaire had been warning about since January, armed with machetes, began slaughtering Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the streets.

Rwandan customs records examined by human rights investigators show that between January 1993 and March 1994, the same window as Dallaire’s warnings, import licenses were issued for roughly 581,000 kilograms of machetes, a sharp increase over prior years. Businessman Félicien Kabuga, later indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for genocide, was among the largest documented importers, accounting for tens of tons personally. Some of these shipments, including at least one traced to Kabuga, moved from Chinese manufacturers through the Kenyan port of Mombasa before reaching Rwanda. This is what a thousand deaths in twenty minutes actually required. Not sophistication. Just supply.

Here is where the UN’s actual response, as opposed to its stated principles, becomes impossible to soften. Within days of the killing starting, the Security Council did not reinforce Dallaire’s force. It voted to cut its authorized ceiling from twenty-five hundred soldiers down to two hundred and seventy. On April 21, ten Belgian peacekeepers were tortured and killed after being ordered to hand over their weapons. In the fourth week of the genocide, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali ordered a full withdrawal of all UN troops from Rwanda.

Dallaire refused. He called it an immoral order. He stayed, along with roughly two hundred and fifty personnel, close to that reduced ceiling, and did what a skeleton crew with no mandate and no weapons to spare could do. History credits that remnant force with saving thousands of lives that would otherwise have been lost, Tutsi and moderate Hutu alike, sheltered, hidden, and protected by soldiers who’d been told to leave and didn’t. Whatever else this story is, it isn’t a story where every person wearing a blue helmet failed. Dallaire didn’t. His fax didn’t fail either. It was the machine above him that failed to answer it.

Roughly eight hundred thousand people were killed over the next hundred days.

In 1999, Kofi Annan, by then Secretary-General, commissioned an independent inquiry into the UN’s conduct during the genocide. Sit with that fact before you read what it found: the same man who headed the department that refused Dallaire’s raid request in 1994 was, five years later, the one who ordered his own institution investigated for it. The report, when it came, did not spare him or the UN. It concluded that the UN and its member states failed Rwanda in deplorable ways, ignoring evidence that genocide was planned, refusing to act once it was underway, and finally abandoning the Rwandan people when they most needed protection. It found, specifically, that Dallaire’s January cable had reached Annan’s desk and was never shared with the Security Council. It never received the follow-up a warning like that deserved.

Military assessments since have estimated that a reinforced peacekeeping presence of around five thousand troops, twice what UNAMIR had at its peak and roughly twenty times what remained after the Security Council’s cut, could have stopped the worst of the killing. The UN had the smaller number on the ground already. It chose to shrink it.

This is the same body, structurally, that would go on seventeen years later to ask the entire world to reorganize its policy priorities around a shared framework, and thirty-one years later to ask for a legally binding health treaty. The fax and the framework aren’t the same thing. But they were written by the same hand, and one of them is documented proof of what that hand does when the stakes are highest and the mandate is thin.

Agenda 2030: The Ask

On September 25, 2015, all 193 UN member states unanimously adopted General Assembly Resolution A/RES/70/1, formally titled “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” It laid out seventeen Sustainable Development Goals and 169 underlying targets, covering everything from poverty and hunger to climate, gender equality, and institutional governance, all meant to be achieved by the year 2030.

The document’s language is careful, and worth reading closely rather than taking secondhand. The resolution explicitly states that it applies to all countries while taking into account different national realities, capacities, and levels of development, and respecting national policies and priorities. It commits to respecting national policy space for states. By its own text, the Agenda claims no binding authority over any nation’s sovereignty. It asks. It doesn’t order.

What it does ask for is substantial: a voluntary realignment of national priorities, backed by a financing structure, an annual review process through the High-Level Political Forum, and Voluntary National Reviews that nearly every member state has now submitted at least once. Whether a review process without legal teeth still produces real pressure to conform is a fair question, and not one the resolution’s text answers either way. Nations that fall behind get named in public forums. Nations that comply get held up as models. That’s not sovereignty overridden. It’s a different kind of leverage than a treaty carries.

The Agenda’s reach extends past economics and infrastructure into gender equality targets, educational transformation, and what the document itself calls values-based programming, intended to apply universally, across every culture, every tradition, every faith. That’s a genuinely different kind of ask than a poverty target or an infrastructure goal, since it touches on questions nations, and the people within them, have historically answered for themselves. It’s also worth noting what “universally” actually means among this particular membership. Independent monitors flagged roughly thirty UN member states this year alone for restricting the practice of faith, through imprisonment, violence, or discriminatory law. A call for shared values across every faith carries different weight depending on whether it’s addressed to a nation that protects its citizens’ freedom to hold that faith in the first place, or one that doesn’t.

Eleven years in, the record on all of this is now public, and it’s worth reading in the UN’s own words rather than anyone’s characterization of them. On July 7, 2026, the UN released its official progress report on the Agenda it adopted in 2015. Of the 139 SDG targets with usable trend data, only 36 percent are on track or making moderate progress. Nearly half are advancing only marginally or not at all. Fifteen percent have regressed below where they stood in 2015, meaning the world is now further from those targets than when the Agenda began. An independent academic tracker, the Sustainable Development Report published weeks earlier by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, put it more bluntly: only 16 percent of targets are projected to be met by the 2030 deadline. That same report identified the United States as having moved into what it called active opposition to the sustainable development paradigm, ranking the U.S. last of all 193 member states on commitment to UN-based multilateralism.

The global extreme poverty rate sits at 10 percent in 2026, barely three points below where it stood in 2015, nowhere near the Agenda’s stated goal of eradication. Official development assistance, the funding meant to carry all of this, fell by 23.1 percent in 2025 alone, the largest annual decline ever recorded. The financing gap needed to close the distance now stands at roughly four trillion dollars a year.

An institution asked the world, eleven years ago, to reorganize national priorities, funding, and in some respects cultural values around a shared, globalized framework. With four years left on its own timeline, that same institution’s own numbers show most of the world falling not buying in, and in some cases moving backward. Whether that gap is a warning about voluntary ambition outpacing voluntary compliance, or evidence the ambition itself was mismatched to what nations would actually commit to, the four years remaining on the Agenda’s own clock will be the test.

The Pandemic Agreement: The Ask Expands

On May 20, 2025, the 78th World Health Assembly formally adopted, by consensus, the world’s first Pandemic Agreement. It’s only the second legally binding health treaty in the WHO’s seventy-seven-year history, the first being the 2003 Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. That alone should tell you how rare and significant a step this was.

The sovereignty question here gets misrepresented constantly, in both directions, so it’s worth reading the actual clause rather than anyone’s characterization of it. The Agreement’s own text states that nothing in it shall be interpreted as providing the WHO’s Secretariat, including its Director-General, any authority to direct, order, alter, or otherwise prescribe the domestic law or policies of any party, or to mandate that parties take specific actions such as banning travelers, imposing vaccination mandates, or implementing lockdowns. That sentence is in the treaty. If a piece claims this document hands the WHO command authority over sovereign nations, that piece is wrong.

Here’s what’s true and worth your attention instead. The Agreement’s real operational core, the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing system, the part that would define binding terms like affordable pricing and a twenty percent allocation of pandemic-related products, wasn’t finished when the treaty was adopted. It was deferred to a separate annex, still being negotiated as of this year, with the Agreement structured so it can’t even open for signature until that annex exists. Member states signed onto a framework before its most consequential terms were written.

And the sovereignty concern, while overstated by some, wasn’t invented from nothing. The United States did not participate in the final round of negotiations, following its January 2025 announcement withdrawing from the WHO entirely, and won’t be bound by the pact regardless of what the annex eventually says. Eleven other countries abstained. A peer-reviewed analysis published through WHO-affiliated literature itself attributes the American non-participation specifically to concerns over the binding nature of technology transfer provisions, sovereignty, intellectual property obligations, and financial commitments, concerns serious enough that one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical-producing nations walked away from the table entirely. If I were writing from opinion, I’d count it a mercy, but I promised myself and my readers just the facts, just what the paper trail proves.

So: an institution whose own track record you’ve just read asked, a decade ago, for the world to trust it with a voluntary framework it is now publicly failing to meet. It has just asked again, this time for a binding legal instrument whose central mechanism doesn’t exist yet, and one of the most consequential nations on earth didn’t feel that trust was warranted enough to stay in the room.

Oil-for-Food: What Happens With the Money

If Rwanda shows what the UN does when lives are on the line and Agenda 2030 shows what it does with an unenforceable promise, Oil-for-Food shows what happens when the UN is actually handed money to manage.

The Oil-for-Food Program ran from 1996 to 2003, a sixty-four billion dollar humanitarian operation letting Iraq sell oil under UN sanctions to buy food and medicine for its own people. In April 2004, following reports of massive fraud, Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed an Independent Inquiry Committee chaired by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, alongside South African Justice Richard Goldstone and Swiss law professor Mark Pieth, to investigate.

Their final report, released in October 2005, found that more than 2,200 companies and individuals, roughly half of everyone participating in the program, paid kickbacks and illegal surcharges, letting Saddam Hussein pocket 1.8 billion dollars at the direct expense of the Iraqi civilians the program was built to feed. Kickbacks flowed from entities in sixty-six countries. Illegal surcharges came from forty. Volcker found conclusive evidence that Benon Sevan, the UN official actually running the program day to day, had placed himself in an irreconcilable conflict of interest by personally participating in the selection of oil purchasers, a direct violation of UN rules.

Annan himself wasn’t cleared of everything. The Committee found no evidence he’d personally influenced a 1998 contract awarded to the company employing his own son, Kojo, but Annan told the Security Council he accepted full responsibility for his own failures and regretted his lack of diligence in pursuing investigations into alleged misdeeds happening under his watch. Separately, Volcker’s investigators discovered that Annan’s chief of staff had approved the destruction of his chronological office files right around the time the inquiry began, which Volcker termed an unfortunate incident without formally accusing anyone of concealment.

Interim findings from the investigation had already produced criminal indictments in the United States, Switzerland, and France before the final report was even published. It remains, by most accounts, the largest financial scandal in the UN’s history.

Peacekeeper Abuse: A Pattern That Hasn’t Stopped

The UN’s own reckoning with this problem goes back to 2005, when a report commissioned in the wake of the Congo scandal, known as the Zeid Report, found peacekeepers engaged in the exchange of sex for money, food, or jobs, and recommended a comprehensive accountability strategy. That’s the UN documenting its own problem in writing, two decades ago, before most of what follows had even happened yet.

The reason this problem persists decade after decade isn’t a mystery, and it isn’t rogue individuals slipping through the cracks. It’s written into the paperwork. Status of Mission and Status of Forces Agreements between the UN and host countries, alongside separate Contribution Agreements between the UN and troop-contributing nations, both reserve full legal jurisdiction over a peacekeeper’s misconduct to that peacekeeper’s own home country. The UN can investigate. It can repatriate. It cannot prosecute. Everything that follows is what that gap has produced in practice.

The Congo mission, first called MONUC, saw allegations surface publicly in 2004: over 150 cases of sexual assault, including 68 cases of rape, alongside prostitution, child pornography, and children fathered and abandoned by peacekeeping personnel. Human Rights Watch investigators interviewed girls as young as thirteen who’d been raped by MONUC soldiers, and others between twelve and fifteen engaged in what’s clinically termed survival sex, trading their bodies for food, money, or protection in a war zone where they had few other options. The UN’s own after-action review of the mission found something worse than isolated misconduct: a management culture, both civilian and military, that had encouraged the abuse by refusing to take it seriously, ignoring reports, and standing by as staff who tried to report abuse were harassed and ridiculed for it. Between September 2001 and January 2004, despite a code of conduct that had existed since 2002, MONUC’s own security branch investigated a grand total of sixteen cases.

The numbers didn’t shrink as the years passed. MONUC faced 181 abuse allegations between 2007 and 2010. Its successor mission, MONUSCO, faced 224 between 2010 and 2021. In the Central African Republic, at least ninety-eight girls reported being sexually abused by peacekeepers from Burundi and Gabon in 2014 and 2015, in incidents that included forced acts of bestiality. The UN identified forty-one troops accused.

The jurisdictional gap is exactly why, when 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers were found in 2007 to have run a child sex ring in Haiti abusing at least nine confirmed children over three years, 114 of them were sent home, and not one of them ever served a day in jail. Former Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon himself called this pattern a cancer inside the UN system. Those are his words about his own organization.

This isn’t history you have to reach back decades to find. A UN report released this past April details new sexual abuse investigations tied to the Kenya-led security mission currently operating in Haiti, including a case involving a twelve-year-old child. A UN human rights official responded to the findings by saying four cases is four too many, and calling for independent investigation, prosecution, and real transparency. As of this writing, that call is still being answered, or not, in real time.

The Paper Trail Continues

I keep coming back to the fax. Twenty minutes, the informant told Dallaire. That’s how long it would take to kill a thousand people, and the men with that plan wrote it down, said it out loud, handed it to a general who believed them enough to warn New York five separate times.

New York had a mandate that said no.

That’s the story underneath every part of this piece, whether the subject is a genocide, a corruption scheme, a pattern of abuse spanning three continents, or a resolution asking every nation on earth to trust a fifteen-year plan. An institution’s stated intentions and an institution’s demonstrated conduct are two different documents, and only one of them tells you what actually happens when the moment arrives. Agenda 2030 says it respects national sovereignty, and by its own text, it does. The Pandemic Agreement says the same, and by its own text, it does too. Neither document is the thing to be afraid of.

What’s worth sitting with is the space between what an institution asks permission for and what it does with the authority it’s already been given. Rwanda had a mandate. It was thin, and it was honored to the letter, and eight hundred thousand people paid for that letter being followed instead of a warning being heeded. Oil-for-Food had oversight structures on paper. Peacekeeping missions have had a zero-tolerance policy on paper since before most of the worst abuses even happened. Agenda 2030 has a sovereignty clause, true by its own text, and a compliance apparatus that raises real questions about what that clause is worth in practice.

Paper isn’t the problem. It never has been. The problem is what happens after the paper is signed, and that’s not a question any resolution can answer in advance. It’s only a question the record can answer after the fact. Rwanda answered it in the worst way imaginable. Agenda 2030’s own numbers are still being written, four years out from its deadline, and what they say about the distance between what an institution asks for and what it actually delivers is something every reader of this piece is equipped to judge for themselves.

The paper trail continues

I do not have a paywall for my work, and I never will. I simply want to expose, through paper trails and documented evidence, the corruption among people and entities holding a great amount of power and influence. I am the wife of a Veteran who serves this Republic, and the greater good for our world, to this day. I do not contribute to our household income, because I left the school system —both public and private— and chose to teach my own children at home rather than be an educator teaching in a classroom within parameters that I believe harm our future generation rather than equip. I add the donate link below, only for your consideration to support even a dollar, if you desire. Yet, your reading my work and sharing truth with just one person is priceless, and I value that action more than any donation.

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Sources

Rwanda

• Roméo Dallaire’s January 11, 1994 cable to UN Headquarters (”the Genocide Fax”)

• Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda (the Carlsson Report), commissioned by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, December 1999

• UN Security Council records on UNAMIR troop reductions, April 1994

• Contemporary reporting on the killing of ten Belgian peacekeepers, April 21, 1994

• Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, Human Rights Watch / Fédération Internationale des Ligues des Droits de l’Homme, 1999

• National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide (CNLG), Genocide Planification report, January 2021

• Pierre Galand and Michel Chossudovsky, report on the role of international financial institutions and creditors in the Rwandan genocide, 1996 (source of the Rwandan customs import data on machetes)

• International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, indictment of Félicien Kabuga

Agenda 2030

• UN General Assembly Resolution A/RES/70/1, “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” adopted September 25, 2015

• The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2026, United Nations, released July 7, 2026

• Sustainable Development Report 2026, UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, released June 23, 2026

The Pandemic Agreement

• WHO Pandemic Agreement, adopted by consensus at the 78th World Health Assembly, May 20, 2025

• Reporting on U.S. nonparticipation following its January 2025 withdrawal from the WHO

• Peer-reviewed implementation analysis, WHO-affiliated literature, on member state objections to the Agreement’s binding provisions

Oil-for-Food

• Independent Inquiry Committee (Volcker Committee) final report, October 2005

• Kofi Annan’s statements to the UN Security Council on the Committee’s findings

• Contemporary reporting on related criminal indictments in the United States, Switzerland, and France

Peacekeeper Abuse

• A Comprehensive Strategy to Eliminate Future Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (the Zeid Report), 2005

• UN Office of Internal Oversight Services investigation findings on MONUC, Congo, 2004-2005

• Human Rights Watch investigative reporting on sexual abuse and exploitation by MONUC personnel

• Associated Press investigation of UN sexual abuse and exploitation data, 2017

• Reporting on the 2007 Sri Lankan peacekeeper case in Haiti

• Reporting on 2014-2015 Central African Republic abuse allegations involving Burundian and Gabonese peacekeepers

• UN report on sexual abuse allegations tied to the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission in Haiti, April 2026

Religious Freedom Context

• U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2026 Annual Report

The World Economic Forum doesn’t hide what it is. It publishes, announces, sends out press releases about it, and posts the videos on its own website.

What it counts on is that most people are too busy working and too distracted, doomscrolling from mental exhaustion, to ever read the press releases. There’s an entire body of research on those thirty-second TikTok videos and what happens to your brain during that dopamine loop.

I read the press releases and I hope more people will do the same. We ought to pay attention to the agencies shaping the world we live in and our children will inherit.

Before we go further, let me say something directly to the skeptic in the room, because I know you’re there and I respect you for it. The entirety of The Paper Trail is written through the lens of a skeptic. I set my own intuition and conclusions aside. I demand proof. I gather evidence. I hold myself to the same standard I hold every institution or person I write about.

A list this long, connecting this many names to a single organization, can sound like exactly the kind of thing your most conspiracy-minded cousin forwards at Thanksgiving. So let me be clear: not everyone on this list shares an ideology. Not everyone trained by this program emerged from it as an agent of anything. What the documentation lists isn’t a unified conspiracy, but a unified pipeline. One organization with a private selection process for a multi-year training program feeding people into the positions that shape your daily life before you ever had a chance to vote for or against them.

No theory, it’s just what Klaus Schwab said out loud in his own words.

I’m not writing this to tell you the World Economic Forum, or anyone connected to it, is evil. I’m showing you what’s documented: the reach of one unelected organization, and a string of names and events tied to it that have already raised more than an eyebrow on their own, without my help. What that adds up to is yours to decide.

The World Economic Forum was founded in 1971 by a German professor named Klaus Schwab as a non-profit foundation under Swiss law, headquartered in Cologny, just outside Geneva, and supervised by the Swiss federal government. It hosts an annual meeting in Davos, a ski resort in the Swiss Alps, where heads of state, central bankers, CEOs of the world’s largest corporations, media figures, celebrities, and representatives of international organizations gather each January to discuss the state of the world.

No one elected them to do this.

The World Economic Forum is a private organization, because it’s an NGO. Quite clever, eh? Its members aren’t chosen by voters. Its agenda isn’t approved by any legislature, nor do its recommendations carry any legal authority. And yet the people who implement policy in the governments, banks, media organizations, and international institutions that shape your daily life attend its meetings, participate in its programs, and in many cases were trained by it before they ever held public office.

But the World Economic Forum didn’t emerge out of thin air, and its roots tell you something important about what it was always meant to be.

In the 1960s, Schwab studied at Harvard under Professor Henry Kissinger, with whom he formed what has been described as a lifelong friendship. Kissinger at that time was directing the Harvard International Seminar, a program it was later revealed had been funded by the Central Intelligence Agency to the tune of $135,000. The CIA funding was exposed the year Schwab left Harvard. Kissinger recruited Schwab and introduced him to John Kenneth Galbraith and Herman Kahn, both connected to the Council on Foreign Relations. The founding panel that shaped what would become the WEF included Melvin Conant of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and a representative of a research center funded by Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie money.

Kissinger first spoke at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in 1980, declaring the world had entered an age of global interdependence. He appeared at Davos as recently as 2022, in conversation with Schwab, discussing the war in Ukraine and the reshaping of the global order. His profile remains on the WEF’s own website to this day.

The Rockefeller Foundation is currently listed as a formal WEF partner, described on the WEF’s site as working across health, food, power, and economic mobility.

So: a CIA-funded Harvard program produced the founder. Rockefeller money was present at the creation. Kissinger spoke at Davos from 1980 until his death. And the Rockefeller Foundation is a current documented partner.

The organization Klaus Schwab built didn’t emerge from European idealism, but from the American national security and financial establishment of the Cold War era, carrying those roots into the twenty-first century while presenting itself to the world as a neutral Swiss philanthropy.

Schwab understood exactly what he was building. In a 2017 interview, he said the Forum takes pride in how its Young Global Leaders program lets it, in his own words, “penetrate the global cabinets of countries.” Penetrate. His word, on record, and published.

He said it more than once, and more than one way. At a public reception for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Schwab told the room that more than half of Trudeau’s cabinet were, in his words, “actually Young Global Leaders.”

More than half of a sitting prime minister’s cabinet. Trained by a private Swiss foundation before they ever held public office. Named by its own founder, on the record.

The Young Global Leaders program, formerly called Global Leaders for Tomorrow when it was founded in 1992, isn’t a public conference. It’s a private, multi-year instructional seminar. Candidates are screened without their knowledge before being invited to apply. They’re nominated by existing alumni, serve six-year terms, and are subject to veto during the selection process.

Over 1,400 people have completed the program. They come from more than 120 countries. And the list of their names is the most important document in this installment.

Read it slowly.

Heads of government and senior officials trained by the World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders program:

Vladimir Putin. Emmanuel Macron. Justin Trudeau. Angela Merkel. Jacinda Ardern. Sanna Marin. Tony Blair. Boris Johnson. Alexander De Croo, Prime Minister of Belgium. Mamuka Bakhtadze, former Prime Minister of Georgia. Carlos Alvarado Quesada, President of Costa Rica. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is listed as an unspecified WEF member.

Media figures trained by the program:

George Stephanopoulos. Anderson Cooper (son of Gloria Vanderbilt). Van Jones. Sanjay Gupta. Leana Wen. Maria Bartiromo. Bret Stephens. Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Pause on Leana Wen for one moment. She was recruited to the Young Global Leaders program because of her role as a professor of health policy. Years later, when CNN needed a COVID expert to appear on camera and tell the American public what to think about a pandemic, it chose Leana Wen out of every health policy academic in the country.

She’d already been trained.

Business and finance figures connected to the WEF:

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, sits on the WEF board. Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, is a WEF Agenda Contributor. Jeff Bezos is a WEF Agenda Contributor. George Soros is a WEF Agenda Contributor. He’s delivered speeches from the Davos stage itself. The Open Society Foundations doesn’t write checks to the World Economic Forum. It doesn’t need to. The two organizations fund many of the same groups across more than a hundred countries, pointed in the same direction, each without a single vote ever being cast. If you read the previous installment of The Paper Trail, you already know who George Soros is. What this piece shows you is that he wasn’t operating alone. He was operating in the same room.

Bill Gates was selected as a Young Global Leader in 1993, decades before Event 201, decades before the Gates Foundation became the largest co-sponsor of pandemic preparedness exercises on earth. Mark Zuckerberg. Jeff Bezos. Peter Thiel. Sam Altman, the architect of OpenAI. The men who built the platforms that decide what you see, what you buy, and increasingly, what you’re permitted to say, were trained inside the same program before any of those platforms existed at scale.

American politicians across the political spectrum:

Pete Buttigieg. Gavin Newsom. Nikki Haley. Dan Crenshaw. Adam Kinzinger. Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s closest aide for over two decades. This isn’t a partisan list. The program doesn’t appear to care which party trains the next generation of American leadership, only that it does.

Celebrities and cultural figures:

Leonardo DiCaprio, recruited to the Young Global Leaders program in 2008, addressed the United Nations on climate change in 2014. Bono, Young Global Leaders program, 1993. Ashton Kutcher. Charlize Theron. Wyclef Jean. Priyanka Chopra. Chris Tucker. Roger Federer. Megan Rapinoe. Tony Hawk. Yo-Yo Ma, who also sits on the WEF board.

These aren’t people who attended a conference. They were trained. In a private, multi-year program, nominated by people who’d already been through the same program. Klaus Schwab called it penetration into all important areas of the world. It appears the goal was well met, even exceeded.

The WEF has a strong theme around globalization. Davos meetings and initiatives routinely focus on sustaining and evolving globalization, and the WEF even posted on its own website, this sentence before eventually deleting it: “You will own nothing. And you will be happy.”

Deleted things have screenshots. The internet remembers.

In 2020, Klaus Schwab published a book called COVID-19: The Great Reset. In it he described what the post-pandemic world should look like: a restructured global economy, redesigned social contracts, transformed institutions of government. He wrote that the pandemic represented, in his own words, “a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.”

The same year that people were following arrows on grocery store floors. The same year that two empty hospital ships sat in American harbors while nursing home directors were ordered to admit COVID-positive patients. The same year that the Event 201 recommendation to suppress counter messages was being implemented across every major social media platform.

Klaus Schwab saw that year as a rare window of opportunity.

Now we arrive at the thread that connects the World Economic Forum to the first installment in The Paper Trail series.

Jeffrey Epstein called himself the Davos concierge. That’s his own word for himself, documented in emails released by the United States Department of Justice. For years, before and after his 2008 conviction on charges including procuring a child for prostitution, Epstein used the lure of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting to broker meetings between his contacts and the billionaires and government officials who gathered there. He promised access. He delivered introductions. He operated in the margins of the most powerful private gathering on earth.

DOJ documents and emails from Epstein’s Yahoo account show him arranging meetings at Davos between senior European politicians and financial executives. In January 2008, while under investigation for crimes against children, he connected an Emirati billionaire to the European competition commissioner. In 2010 he arranged meetings between the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and a senior JP Morgan executive.

In 2013 he wrote to Larry Summers, former US Secretary of the Treasury, suggesting they coordinate a meeting at Davos.

Borge Brende, President and Chief Executive Officer of the World Economic Forum since 2017 and former Norwegian foreign minister, had attended at least three business dinners at Epstein’s Manhattan home. He’d exchanged emails and text messages with him. After one dinner, he emailed Epstein to say the conversation had given him plenty to think about, and closed by calling him, in his words, “a brilliant host.”

Epstein replied that both he and a guest were, in his words, “very impressed with you.”

In another exchange Brende wrote just four words: “Missing you Sir. —Borge.”

On February 26, 2026, following an independent investigation and the release of those documents, Borge Brende resigned as President and CEO of the World Economic Forum.

Klaus Schwab had already resigned the year before, in April 2025, after anonymous whistleblowers alleged misconduct including mistreating employees and misusing organizational funds. The WEF board’s own investigation, concluded that August, found no evidence of material wrongdoing by Schwab. It did note minor irregularities stemming from blurred lines between personal contributions and Forum operations.

The founder of the organization that penetrates global cabinets resigned amid a whistleblower investigation that ultimately cleared him. His successor resigned after DOJ documents showed him corresponding warmly with a convicted child sex offender.

The organization continues.

Trained Young Global Leaders continue to hold the positions they were placed in before most voters knew the program existed. None of them were chosen by the people they now govern, inform, or sell to. They were chosen by an organization in Geneva.

I read the press releases.

I followed the thread.

It started with a hotel in Manhattan on a Friday morning in October 2019, where fifteen people gathered to design the communications architecture for a pandemic that began thirty days later. It ran through the nursing homes of New York, where people died alone while governors signed directives and then falsified the counts. It ran through a cow pasture in Georgia where someone carved instructions for the post-apocalyptic management of the human race into granite and hid their name. It ran through twenty-five centuries of censorship, from the censor of Rome to the checkbook of George Soros, a man who fancied himself a god and spent thirty-two billion dollars on the proof.

And it runs here.

To a private organization born from a CIA-funded Harvard program, carrying Rockefeller and Kissinger DNA from its first days, registered under Swiss law, meeting annually in a ski resort, training the people who run the governments and the banks and the newsrooms and the health agencies of one hundred and twenty countries, in a program most voters have never heard of, selected without the candidates’ knowledge, nominated by people who were already in the program, serving six-year terms with no public oversight and no democratic accountability of any kind.

The CEO wrote missing you sir to a convicted child sex offender and resigned when the documents came out.

And somewhere in the margin of all of it, a man who called himself the Davos concierge was brokering access to the world’s most powerful people from the margins of the most powerful private gathering on earth, before and after his conviction for procuring a child for prostitution, until the day he died by suicide in a federal jail cell while facing sex trafficking charges.

The pattern isn’t hidden. It never was.

It’s published on their websites and in their press releases. It’s in the DOJ documents. It is in Schwab’s own book. It’s in the resignation letters of the men who ran the organization until the files came out.

I didn’t need aa gift or any special insight to find any of this. I only needed to read what they’d already published.

And so, now, have you.

The paper trail continues.

Buy Momma Jess a Coffee

Sources

1. World Economic Forum. About page and founding history. weforum.org

2. Klaus Schwab interview, 2017. Quote: “penetrate the global cabinets of countries.”

3. Klaus Schwab. Public remarks at reception for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Quote: “actually Young Global Leaders.” Documented via Door to Freedom and multiple secondary sources citing WEF/Trudeau footage.

4. Young Global Leaders, Wikipedia. Program founded 1992 as Global Leaders for Tomorrow. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Global_Leaders

5. World Economic Forum. From Entrepreneurs to Scientists: Meet the 2022 Class of Young Global Leaders. Press release, April 20, 2022. weforum.org

6. World Economic Forum. Meet the Young Global Leaders Class of 2025. Press release, April 15, 2025. weforum.org

7. Human Events. Who Are the World Economic Forum’s ‘Young Global Leaders?’ The Names May Surprise You. November 10, 2022. humanevents.com

8. Swiss Policy Research. The WEF Young Global Leaders. Comprehensive alumni documentation. swprs.org/wef-young-global-leaders

9. Door to Freedom. The Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum. doortofreedom.org

10. Wikispooks. WEF/Young Global Leaders documentation, including Schwab penetration quote with citation.

11. World Economic Forum. “You will own nothing and you will be happy,” original WEF publication, subsequently deleted. Archived via Wayback Machine.

12. Schwab, Klaus and Malleret, Thierry. COVID-19: The Great Reset. Forum Publishing, 2020.

13. Henry A. Kissinger. World Economic Forum profile page. weforum.org/people/henry-a-kissinger

14. World Economic Forum. Kissinger: The challenges facing the world right now. Davos 2022 session. weforum.org/stories/2022/05/kissinger-these-are-the-main-geopolitical-challenges-facing-the-world-right-now

15. Shukla, Ashish. The man who runs the World Economic Forum you know nothing about. Medium. Documentation of Kissinger-Schwab Harvard relationship and CIA-funded seminar. ashishshukla-92505.medium.com

16. Truth In News. Henry Kissinger Was The REAL WEF Creator. Documentation of founding panel including Rockefeller Standard Oil and Rockefeller/Ford/Carnegie-funded research center. thinkaboutit.online

17. Dartmouth News. Kissinger Enjoyed Close Ties With Nelson Rockefeller. November 2023. home.dartmouth.edu

18. Rockefeller Foundation. World Economic Forum partner page. weforum.org/organizations/the-rockefeller-foundation

19. Oxford Academic / Socio-Economic Review. Rise and fall of private advocacy forums. Documentation of Rockefeller connections to WEF founding era. academic.oup.com/ser

20. George Soros. World Economic Forum Agenda Contributor profile. weforum.org/stories/authors/georgesoros

21. Foreign Policy. Philanthropist George Soros delivers speech on sidelines of World Economic Forum in Davos, January 24, 2019. foreignpolicy.com

22. Bloomberg. Jeffrey Epstein Davos Emails Reveal His Use of WEF to Broker Elite Meetings. February 17, 2026. bloomberg.com

23. SWI swissinfo.ch. Davos ‘Concierge’ Jeffrey Epstein Used WEF to Broker Elite Meetings. February 17, 2026. swissinfo.ch

24. The Hill. WEF CEO Brende Epstein emails dinners probe. February 6, 2026. thehill.com

25. Al Jazeera. World Economic Forum head Borge Brende quits after Epstein links revealed. February 26, 2026. aljazeera.com

26. Fox News. World Economic Forum faces fresh scrutiny as Epstein ties revive past scandals, criticism. March 14, 2026. foxnews.com

27. US Department of Justice. Epstein files document release, 2026. Source of Brende-Epstein correspondence and Davos networking emails.

28. Berndpulch.org. The Davos Connection: WEF Elite and the Epstein Index. Epstein Index Project, forensic data initiative. February 27, 2026.

29. Federal Bureau of Prisons / Office of Inspector General. Official finding: Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide while in federal custody, August 10, 2019, while facing federal sex trafficking charges.

30. World Economic Forum. News release: Board of Trustees concludes investigation into whistleblower allegations against Klaus Schwab, finds no evidence of material wrongdoing. August 15, 2025. weforum.org/press/2025/08/news-release

31. CNN Business. WEF CEO Børge Brende steps down as the Epstein files claim another top executive. Confirms Schwab stepped down as chair in April 2025, cleared by August 2025 investigation. February 26, 2026. cnn.com

I was standing in my living room with a baby on my hip.

It had already been a year of things I didn’t have words for. In February, I watched the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, stand behind President Trump on the floor of Congress and tear his speech in half. On live television. Behind his back. While the chamber cheered or groaned depending on which side of an aisle they occupied that had become something closer to a trench.

By spring we were following arrows on grocery store floors. Masking, some even masked alone in their cars. Keeping six feet of federally recommended distance from other human beings while being assured this was temporary, two weeks, just until we flattened the curve.

By summer Minnesota was burning.

Not a metaphor. Actual fire. The Third Police Precinct. Buildings. Businesses. The life’s work of people who had nothing to do with anything people were burning the city over. And in Seattle, something that officials called an autonomous zone had materialized in the middle of a major American city — a city within a city, ungoverned and celebrated in some quarters as a form of civic expression while the people who actually lived there described something closer to occupation.

A member of the United States Congress, Maxine Waters, told her supporters to confront people in restaurants, in gas stations, in department stores, and make sure they knew they were not welcome anywhere.

The jab was coming. The people who knew something about it were not being encouraged to share what they knew. The message, stripped of its careful language, was this: shut up and take it.

I want to be honest about the timeline. Those years — 2020, 2021, the months that bled into each other without seam — collapsed into something that did not feel like time passing so much as a sustained detonation. The sequence of events gets lost in the blur of it. What doesn’t get lost is the feeling.

The feeling that it was not random.

Chaos does not have a direction. What I was watching had a direction.

His name is George Soros.

You have heard it. Maybe you’ve dismissed it. You may have even been told that saying it out loud is itself a form of bigotry, that the name has become a vessel for antisemitic conspiracy theories and that reasonable people do not traffic in it.

I am going to ask you to set that framing aside for a few minutes. Not because the concern about antisemitism is illegitimate. It is not illegitimate. It is, in fact, a concern George Soros himself has activated deliberately, because the most effective way to insulate a documented record from scrutiny is to make the scrutiny itself the story.

What I am going to show you truly is a paper trail.

It begins in Budapest, in 1944, when a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy named György Schwartz was hidden by his father inside a false identity. His father, a lawyer named Tivadar, had changed the family name to Soros years earlier to avoid the growing tide of antisemitism in Hungary. When the Nazis occupied Budapest, Tivadar arranged for György to pose as the Christian godson of a Hungarian government official named Baumbach. The arrangement kept the boy alive.

Baumbach’s job was to take inventory of Jewish properties being confiscated by the state. György went with him and helped with the inventory. His own father recorded it in his diary.

In December 1998, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, correspondent Steve Kroft asked George Soros — György, now an American billionaire — about that time.

Kroft said: my understanding is that you went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.

Soros said: yes, that’s right. Yes.

Kroft asked: was it difficult?

Soros said: not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t see the connection. But it was — it created no problem at all.

Kroft asked: no sense of guilt?

Soros said: no.

Kroft pressed further. He asked whether Soros had ever thought: I’m Jewish, and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.

Soros said: well, of course I could be on the other side, or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was — well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets. That if I weren’t there — of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would be taking it away, anyhow.

In a funny way. Just like markets.

Somebody else would have taken it anyway.

He didn’t offer that as a confession, but as a justification. The logic of a man who had already decided that the social consequences of what he does are not his concern — applied backward, at fourteen, to the confiscation of his own people’s property.

The same logic he would carry forward for the next eighty years.

You will decide what to make of that. What I will show you is what he did with the decades that followed. And what he said, in his own published words, about who he believed himself to be and what he believed the world should become.

In 1987, George Soros published a book called The Alchemy of Finance. In it he wrote this:

I have always harboured an exaggerated view of my self-importance. To put it bluntly, I fancied myself as some kind of god or an economic reformer like Keynes, or even better, like Einstein. My sense of reality was strong enough to make me realise that these expectations were excessive, and I kept them hidden as a guilty secret.

Six years later, in 1993, he told The Independent of London that the guilty secret had become something else entirely.

It is sort of a disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, he said. But I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.

In 1987 he called it excessive. A guilty secret. Something he kept hidden because reality had not yet caught up with the fantasy. By 1993 he had begun to live it out. And he felt comfortable.

What changed between 1987 and 1993 was not his ambition. What changed was his resources. In September 1992 George Soros shorted the British pound, a single speculative trade that forced the United Kingdom out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, cost the British treasury an estimated three billion pounds in a single day, and made Soros approximately one billion dollars in profit.

He broke the Bank of England. One man. One trade. One day.

He was asked in the same 60 Minutes interview about being blamed for the financial collapse of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan and Russia.

He said: all of the above.

He was also asked, in that same interview, about the social consequences of his financial operations.

I am basically there to make money. I cannot and do not look at the social consequences of what I do.

That sentence is from his own mouth. On camera. In 1998.

Now read what he published.

The sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions.

That is from The Crisis of Global Capitalism, 1998.

We need a new international authority that transcends the sovereignty of states to promote an open society.

That is from The Washington Post, 1999.

The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.

That is from The Atlantic, 2003.

Hijacking fully fueled airliners and using them as suicide bombs was an audacious idea, and its execution could not have been more spectacular.

That is also from The Atlantic, December 2003, describing the September 11 attacks.

These are not things written about George Soros. These are things written by George Soros. In his own books. In his own name. Published and available to anyone who wants to read them.

The sovereignty of states must be subordinated. The United States is the main obstacle. The execution of September 11 could not have been more spectacular.

Now look at what he built.

In 1984, George Soros signed a contract with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. It was the founding document of what would become the Open Society Foundations.

The name came from a book. Karl Popper’s 1945 work The Open Society and Its Enemies argued that free societies require active defense against forces that would close them. Soros read it and built an empire around it. By 2025 that empire had distributed more than $32 billion across more than 120 countries.

The New York Times described it as a sprawling political and philanthropic empire that seeks to advance a liberal, democratic agenda around the globe.

That is the New York Times, owned and controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family since 1896 is certainly not a conservative publication. The newspaper of record describes one man’s private philanthropic network as an empire with a political agenda spanning the globe.

Here is what that empire built in the United States alone.

Beginning in 2015, George Soros began funding district attorney races. Not senate races or presidential campaigns. District attorneys — the men and women who decide, in every county in America, what gets charged, what gets prosecuted, and what gets set aside.

His operation worked through a network of pop-up political action committees established by his longtime treasurer Whitney Tymas. The PACs were created specifically for targeted races. They injected hundreds of thousands of dollars — sometimes millions — into local elections that had never seen that kind of money. Then they dissolved. The candidates won. The PACs disappeared. The money was untraceable to the casual observer but fully documented in campaign finance records available to anyone who looked.

Researchers at the Capital Research Center tracked more than $29 million in documented Soros funding across DA races in at least 30 states between 2016 and 2022.

The names of the recipients are on the record.

Kim Foxx in Cook County, Illinois — Chicago — boosted into office with $2 million in Soros money. Under Foxx, Chicago recorded its largest spike in homicides in more than thirty years. Her office dropped charges against thirty percent of felony defendants during 2020.

Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, supported by more than $2 million funneled through the Pennsylvania Justice and Public Safety PAC. Under Krasner, Philadelphia became the murder capital of the United States among the country’s ten largest cities in 2021. Aggravated assault with a firearm increased eighteen percent. Violent crime overall rose five percent in a single year.

George Gascon in Los Angeles, the beneficiary of nearly $6 million in Soros-connected spending. Murders in Los Angeles climbed from 258 in 2019 to 397 in 2021 — a fifty-five percent increase.

Alvin Bragg in Manhattan. Kim Gardner in St. Louis. Rachael Rollins in Boston. The list runs across thirty states, from the cities you know to the counties you have never heard of.

What all of them shared was a philosophy purchased with the same checkbook. Reduce incarceration. Stop prosecuting quality of life crimes. End cash bail. Treat the criminal justice system as the problem rather than the solution.

And if you asked what institution had the power to reshape the criminal justice system of the most powerful nation on earth without passing a single law or winning a single national election, the answer was sitting in a Manhattan office building with $32 billion and a network of pop-up PACs that dissolved after they had done their work.

Now look at who stood up to celebrate him.

In 1995, George Soros told PBS: I do now have great access in the Clinton administration. There is no question about this. We actually work together as a team.

In 2004, at the Take Back America conference in Washington, Hillary Clinton took the stage to introduce him. She sang his praises. She affirmed a close relationship. She described what he was building as something worth celebrating. The event is preserved on C-SPAN.

By 2016, Soros had donated nearly $11 million to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and three main super PACs. His foundation had given up to $6 million to the Clinton Foundation.

Meanwhile, sovereign governments around the world were reaching a different conclusion about the team.

In 2015, Russia formally declared Open Society Foundations an undesirable organization and banned it from operating on Russian territory. The official statement said the activities of Open Society Foundations represent a threat to the foundations of the constitutional system of the Russian Federation and the security of the state.

In 2016, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs placed Open Society on a watchlist, forbidding it from extending financial assistance to any NGO or individual without prior government permission.

In 2017, Pakistan ordered the foundation to cease operations.

In 2018, Hungary passed what it called the Stop Soros laws, criminalizing the act of aiding undocumented immigrants seeking asylum. Open Society closed its Budapest office and moved to Berlin. Viktor Orbán, who was born in the same country as Soros, called it foreign interference in domestic affairs.

In 2018, Turkey announced the closure of Open Society operations.

During the second presidency of Donald Trump, federal prosecutors were directed to investigate Open Society Foundations.

Russia. India. Pakistan. Hungary. Turkey. The United States.

These are not ideologically aligned governments. They don’t agree on much. What they agreed on — through their own separate processes, in their own separate languages, for their own separately stated reasons — is that one man’s network of privately funded organizations had gone beyond philanthropy into something that threatened the sovereignty of the state.

George Soros wrote in 1998 that the sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international institutions.

Several states declined the invitation.

In 2023, George Soros transferred control of Open Society Foundations to his son Alexander. Thirty-two billion dollars. One hundred and twenty countries. A network of prosecutors, media organizations, civil society groups, and political action committees built over four decades — passed to the next generation like an inheritance.

No election. No accountability. No vote. Because that is precisely what a non-governmental organization is — non-governmental, by definition, unaccountable by design, and in this case, actively shaping the government the rest of us have to live under.

I was standing in my living room with a baby on my hip, watching a country come apart, and feeling something I did not yet have words for.

I have the words now.

What I was watching was not spontaneous. The burning cities had prosecutors who had been purchased in advance. The arrows on the grocery store floors and the mandate to take a jab that no one was permitted to question were products of the same institutional machinery I had been documenting for months — the Event 201 recommendation to flood media with approved information and suppress everything else, the financial incentives that paid hospitals to code everything as COVID, the PCR methodology revised without explanation on inauguration day.

And underneath all of it, funding the organizations that trained the activists, backed the prosecutors, shaped the media narrative, and worked — in the words of the New York Times — to advance a liberal democratic agenda around the globe, was one man.

A man who said in 1987 that he fancied himself a god and kept it as a guilty secret.

A man who said in 1993 that he had begun to live it out and felt comfortable.

A man who said in 1998 that the sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international institutions.

A man who said in 2003 that the United States is the main obstacle to a stable world order.

A man who said on national television that the confiscation of his fellow Jews’ property created no problem at all and that he felt no guilt.

A man who said he cannot and does not look at the social consequences of what he does.

He has been looking at them. For forty years. He has been funding them. He has been building the infrastructure that makes them possible and then stepping back while the pop-up PACs dissolve and the prosecutors take their seats and the sovereign governments that noticed what was happening get labeled authoritarian for noticing.

George Soros didn’t burn Minneapolis. He didn’t write the Event 201 recommendation. He didn’t sign the nursing home directive or falsify the death counts or send the hospital ships that sat empty in the harbor.

He funded the network of organizations and prosecutors and political operations that reshaped the institutional landscape of this country while most people were following arrows on grocery store floors and trying to figure out why their city was on fire.

The baby on my hip is older now. She will inherit whatever we allow to be built while we are not looking.

I am looking.

The man who fancied himself a god donated $32 billion to make his fantasy real, transferred it to his son so it would outlast him, and said on camera that he feels no guilt and sees no problem.

He was not hiding anymore.

And neither are we.

The paper trail continues.

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Sources

1. CBS News: Nancy Pelosi tears up copy of Trump’s State of the Union address. February 4, 2020. C-SPAN preserved footage. c-span.org

2. Minneapolis Third Police Precinct fire, May 28, 2020. Associated Press and Reuters documented reporting.

3. Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ/CHOP), Seattle. Established June 8, 2020. Seattle Times and AP documentation.

4. Representative Maxine Waters. Statement at Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, April 17, 2021. Congressional Record and C-SPAN footage.

5. Kaufman, Michael T. Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire. Knopf, 2002.

6. CBS 60 Minutes. Steve Kroft interview with George Soros. December 20, 1998. Full transcript available via CBS News archives.

7. Soros, Tivadar. Masquerade: The Incredible True Story of How George Soros’ Father Outsmarted the Gestapo. Arcade Publishing, 2001.

8. Soros, George. The Alchemy of Finance. Simon & Schuster, 1987. Republished 2003.

9. The Independent (London). Profile: George Soros: God of All He Surveys. June 3, 1993.

10. Bank of England Black Wednesday documentation, September 16, 1992. HM Treasury records.

11. CBS 60 Minutes. Steve Kroft interview with George Soros. December 20, 1998. Exchange on social consequences of financial speculation.

12. Soros, George. The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered. PublicAffairs, 1998. Quote: sovereignty of states must be subordinated.

13. Soros, George. The Washington Post op-ed, 1999. Quote: new international authority that transcends sovereignty of states.

14. Soros, George. The Bubble of American Supremacy. The Atlantic, December 2003. Quote: main obstacle to stable world order is the United States.

15. Soros, George. The Bubble of American Supremacy. The Atlantic, December 2003. Quote: execution could not have been more spectacular.

16. Open Society Foundations founding document. Contract between Soros Foundation/New York City and Hungarian Academy of Sciences. May 28, 1984.

17. Open Society Foundations. Reported expenditures exceeding $24.2 billion since establishment. opensocietyfoundations.org

18. New York Times description of Open Society Foundations as sprawling political and philanthropic empire. Referenced in multiple NYT profiles.

19. Capital Research Center. Living Room Pundit’s Guide to Soros District Attorneys. Parker Thayer. January 2022. capitalresearch.org

20. Capital Research Center / Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. Justice for Sale: How George Soros Put Radical Prosecutors in Power. June 2022. policedefense.org

21. Fox News. George Soros-backed district attorney candidates sweep elections. Joe Schoffstall. November 2022.

22. Washington Times. George Soros-funded DAs oversee big cities with skyrocketing crime. August 2020.

23. Campaign finance records: Pennsylvania Justice and Public Safety PAC. Larry Krasner 2017 DA race. State campaign finance filings.

24. Campaign finance records: Soros funding of George Gascon, Los Angeles DA race 2020. California campaign finance filings.

25. Chicago homicide statistics 2020-2021. Chicago Police Department annual reports.

26. Philadelphia homicide statistics 2021. Philadelphia Police Department. Philadelphia became murder capital among 10 largest US cities.

27. Los Angeles homicide statistics 2019-2021. LAPD annual crime reports.

28. George Soros. PBS interview, 1995. Quote: I do now have great access in the Clinton administration. We actually work together as a team.

29. Hillary Clinton introduces George Soros at Take Back America Conference, 2004. C-SPAN archived footage. c-span.org/clip/5154643

30. Washington Times. Hillary Clinton embraces George Soros radical vision. October 20, 2016. Campaign finance analysis: $11 million to Clinton campaign and super PACs.

31. Clinton Foundation IRS Form 990 filings: Open Society Foundations contributions up to $6 million.

32. Russia prosecutor general’s office. Declaration of Open Society Foundations as undesirable organization. November 2015. Reuters documented report.

33. India Ministry of Home Affairs. Open Society Foundations placed on watchlist. 2016. Official government notification.

34. Pakistan government order to Open Society Foundations to cease operations. December 2017. Reuters.

35. Hungary Stop Soros legislation. Passed June 2018. Hungarian Parliament official records.

36. Open Society Foundations announcement of Budapest office closure, relocation to Berlin. May 2018. opensocietyfoundations.org

37. Turkey: Open Society Foundations announced closure of Istanbul and Ankara offices. November 2018.

38. Trump administration direction to federal prosecutors to investigate Open Society Foundations. 2025. Documented in multiple press reports.

39. Open Society Foundations. George Soros transfers leadership to son Alexander Soros, 2023. Announcement: opensocietyfoundations.org

40. Alexander Soros announced layoffs of 40 percent of international staff and significant changes to operating model. 2023.

The truth is stranger, and harder to digest, than fiction.

I can’t help it if I was a well-informed child. I grew up surrounded by adults who enjoyed politics, history, and debates. Reading the newspaper from beginning to end was one of my favorite hobbies, too. Not that the news always handed the public the truth, but I liked to be in the know.

I did not expect to get in trouble for telling the truth. That was my first mistake. The assumption that truth and safety occupied the same space, that a raised hand and a respectful voice were sufficient armor for an inconvenient fact.

Third grade. Ms. Richardson’s classroom. We were doing a math lesson with paper money, the kind that comes in a Monopoly box, pastel colors and obviously pretend. For whatever reason, and decades later I am grateful for whatever reason it was, I raised my hand and waited to be called on.

When she called on me I said: “did you know that the money we get from the bank is just like Monopoly money? It isn’t worth anything. We don’t even have gold anymore!”

My name went on the blackboard. A checkmark beside it. I would miss recess.

I had never had my name on that board. My face burned the way only an eight year old’s face can burn — total, consuming, the awful humiliation of being made an example of in front of every person whose opinion matters to you. I sat with that burning through the rest of the lesson and through the walk to the door while my classmates filed out into the sunlight.

And then, sitting on the red clay hill watching my friends play, the embarrassment finished burning and left something harder behind.

I was ticked off. As much as an eight year old girl can be ticked off.

Because I had raised my hand. I had waited. I had been respectful. And what I said was true. Richard Nixon had taken the United States off the gold standard in 1971, before I was born. The dollar in my mother’s purse was backed by nothing but the government’s word and the public’s willingness to believe it. I had not invented this. I had learned it. And I had connected it to the bright pretend bills spread across my desk and said so out loud.

Ms. Richardson did not tell me I was wrong or why she put my name on the board. Perhaps it was that I interrupted the lesson. Or perhaps I was opening a can of worms that would become inconvenient to explain to my peers.

For the record, Ms. Richardson, wherever you may be: I was right.

I have never forgotten my name on that board, with a checkmark might I add. Because what happened in that classroom was not a teacher correcting a mistaken child. It was an institution encoding its first lesson, the one that comes before reading and arithmetic and everything else, the one that underlies all the others:

Some truths are not welcome.

Learn which ones. Keep the others to yourself.

I did not learn that lesson.

The truth has a way of insisting. It sits in you like a splinter, working its way out regardless of what you decide about it. And eventually you stop deciding and start writing.

What Ms. Richardson’s classroom taught me, what I did not understand until I was old enough and had the resources to trace the pattern backward across twenty-five centuries, is that the checkmark on the board is not a modern invention. It is not a product of political polarization or social media or the particular anxieties of our moment.

It is an ancient tool in the archive of human power.

And it has always worked exactly the same way.

They gave it a name in Rome.

In 443 BC, the Roman Republic created an official government position called the censor. The word itself, from the Latin censere, meaning to judge, tells you everything about what the office was designed to do. The censor conducted the census, managed public morality, and maintained the lists of citizens in good standing. He decided who belonged and who didn’t, what was acceptable and what wasn’t.

The Romans did not invent the impulse. They just gave it a title and a salary.

In 213 BC, the first emperor of a unified China, Qin Shi Huang, ordered the burning of every book in his kingdom. Every book, with the exception of works on agriculture, astronomy, medicine, and divination — knowledge that served the state. Everything else, the philosophy, the history, the poetry, the record of every dynasty that had come before his, went into the fire. Scholars who refused to comply, who hid texts or continued to teach from memory, were buried alive. The historical record suggests 460 of them.

The goal was precise and stated without apology: history would begin with the Qin dynasty. Everything before it would cease to exist. The past was not to be remembered. It was to be replaced.

He was not the last ruler to understand that controlling the past is the most efficient way to control the future.

In 399 BC, a philosopher named Socrates was brought before an Athenian jury on charges of corrupting the youth and acknowledging unorthodox divinities. He had spent his life asking questions in public in search of truth and wisdom. The jury found him guilty and the sentence was death. He drank the hemlock without apology and without recanting.

What Socrates had done, in the language of every institution that has ever silenced an inconvenient voice, was this: he questioned the narrative in search of the truth.

In 8 AD, the Roman poet Ovid was banished from Rome by Emperor Augustus for writing poetry that undermined the emperor’s agenda of moral reform. Ovid’s offense was not that his poetry was false. His offense was that it was inconvenient. Augustus was building a Rome of restored virtue and traditional values. Ovid was writing about love in ways that complicated the project. He was exiled to a remote outpost on the Black Sea, where he spent the rest of his life writing letters home that were never answered.

He died in exile, still writing, never recanting. His books survived him by two thousand years and are available today on your phone for free.

In the first century AD, the Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca was exiled and his works banned by Emperor Nero. Seneca wrote of his situation with the precision of a man who understood exactly what had happened to him:

I am forbidden to enter Rome and to approach the emperor’s ear, for fear lest some truth escape my lips.

For fear lest some truth escape my lips.

He named it clearly and without drama, in a sentence that could have been written yesterday by any one of the doctors who lost hospital privileges in 2020 for questioning a ventilator protocol.

The tools change. The fear does not.

The tools of censorship changed over time, but the goal remained the same.

In 1559, Pope Paul IV established the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Index of Prohibited Books. The Index told Catholics which books they were forbidden to read under pain of mortal sin. Its targets included works of science, philosophy, theology, and literature that the Church considered dangerous to faith and to order.

Galileo, Copernicus, Hobbes, Hume, John Milton, Daniel Defoe, and Voltaire were on it. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables remained on it from 1864 until 1959 because the Church was wary of political revolution and the dangerous idea that liberty, equality, and civic brotherhood were worth fighting for.

The Index was enforced until 1966. Within the living memory of people reading these words right now.

In 1597, Queen Elizabeth I discovered that Shakespeare’s Richard II contained a scene in which a king was deposed from his throne. She ordered it removed from every copy of the play. It did not reappear in print until 1608, after she was dead. A sitting monarch had reached into a work of literature and removed the part she found inconvenient.

In 1933, the part that was found inconvenient was an entire category of human thought.

On the night of May 10, 1933, Nazi students and officials carried books into the public squares of Berlin and dozens of other German cities and set them on fire. Thousands of volumes, reduced to ash in public, by firelight, in front of crowds.

A German poet named Heinrich Heine had written in 1820, more than a hundred years before the fires: where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too.

He was right. Within a decade the same regime that burned the books was burning the people.

Josef Stalin, with the full resources of the Soviet state, altered photographs to remove the faces of people who had fallen out of favor. Colleagues who had stood beside him in images that documented history were erased. Rome had called it damnatio memoriae — the damning of memory. Stalin called it necessary. The effect was the same: the past was adjusted to match the present’s requirements.

The photographs still exist, before and after, side by side in archives anyone can search today.

Each decade brought a new tool, a new justification, and a new category of inconvenient people whose voices needed managing or information controlled.

In 1956, the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a program it called COINTELPRO, short for Counter Intelligence Program. Congressional investigations later found that COINTELPRO was responsible for at least 204 burglaries by FBI agents, the use of 1,300 informants, the theft of 12,600 documents, and more than 20,000 illegal actions against American citizens. Not foreign agents. American citizens. On American soil. By their own government.

The most documented target was Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1963, COINTELPRO director William C. Sullivan wrote a memo concluding that King was the most dangerous Negro in the future of this nation. He wrote that it may be unrealistic to limit their actions against King to legalistic proofs that would stand up in court or before Congressional Committees.

Read that sentence carefully. A senior FBI official wrote, in an internal government document, that the law and the Constitution were obstacles to what he intended to do to a man whose crime was organizing nonviolent protests for basic civil rights.

The Bureau wiretapped King’s phones. It bugged his hotel rooms. It harassed publications that wrote favorably about him. It attempted to provoke IRS investigations against him. It sent him a tape to prove he had participated in orgies with prostitutes.

And then it sent him a letter.

The letter, delivered in November 1964, was anonymous. It told King he was done and there was only one way out. It urged him to commit suicide before the tape was released to the media.

COINTELPRO was not fully exposed until 1971, when an activist group broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole classified documents that were sent to newspapers and members of Congress. The Senate’s Church Committee held hearings five years later. Congressional committees concluded that COINTELPRO operations exceeded statutory limits on FBI activity and violated constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and association.

As of January 2026, the COINTELPRO Full Disclosure Act has been introduced in Congress. The full record has still not been released to the public. Fifty years later.

COINTELPRO was the government silencing inconvenient voices. What the Church Committee uncovered next was something more sophisticated, and more disturbing.

The CIA was not merely suppressing the truth. It was manufacturing a replacement.

The Church Committee’s 1976 report confirmed that the CIA had maintained secret relationships with at least fifty American journalists. Carl Bernstein’s landmark 1977 Rolling Stone investigation expanded that number dramatically — more than 400 US press members had secretly carried out assignments for the CIA, including journalists at the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS, and Time magazine.

The Church Committee’s published findings stated directly: the CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets. Senator Church estimated the cost of this misinformation apparatus at $265 million per year to American taxpayers.

The declassified CIA Family Jewels documents confirmed what the Church Committee had uncovered. Memos showed discussions of specific journalists, editorial decisions influenced by agency preferences, and deliberate coordination between intelligence officials and media figures. These were not allegations. These were the agency’s own records.

In February 1976, CIA Director George H.W. Bush announced a new policy: effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any US news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station. He then added that the CIA would continue to welcome the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists.

The paid relationships were over, but the welcome mat remained.

The censor had completed its evolution. It no longer needed to silence inconvenient voices. It had learned to replace them.

While the CIA was placing assets in American newsrooms, the United States Public Health Service was conducting a study in Macon County, Alabama.

In 1932, the USPHS — the federal agency that today houses the CDC, the FDA, the NIH, and the office of the Surgeon General — began the Tuskegee Syphilis Study as an experiment to understand the effects of untreated syphilis in black men. The study involved 600 black men in Macon County, Alabama. The study leaders did not tell the men the truth about the purposes, risks, or benefits of the study.

They told them they were being treated for bad blood. They were not being treated at all.

Although effective treatments to reduce the severity of the disease had existed since the 1920s, and penicillin for the treatment of syphilis was widespread as of 1945, the study investigators withheld treatment and continued to examine the untreated progression of the disease. More than 100 died as a result.

By the end of the study in 1972, only 74 of the test subjects were still alive. Of the original 399 men, 28 had died of syphilis, 100 died of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis.

The study ran for forty years. It was not a secret within the medical establishment. It was an open secret: known, discussed, and protected from public disclosure by the institutional silence of the people who could have ended it.

Peter Buxtun was born in Prague in 1937. His family fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and came to America in 1939. He grew up, attended the University of Oregon, served as a combat medic in the US Army, and eventually went to work as a venereal disease investigator for the United States Public Health Service in San Francisco.

In the early 1960s he walked into the coffee room of his clinic and overheard a colleague talking about a study in Alabama.

He later said: I didn’t want to believe it. This was the Public Health Service. We didn’t do things like that.

But they did. And Buxtun knew it immediately, because a man who held the history of the Nazis conducting medical experiments on prisoners in Germany recognized what he was hearing. He filed an official protest in 1966. He was summoned to Atlanta and chewed out by agency officials for his impertinence. He filed another protest in 1968. It was ignored. He left the Public Health Service, went to law school, and spent years unable to let it go.

In 1972 he gave documents to an Associated Press reporter. Those documents made their way to investigative journalist Jean Heller, who later said of the moment she read them: revulsion. I literally didn’t want the story to be true because I could not believe that that could go on in this country.

On July 25, 1972, the Washington Star published the expose. The following day it appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Congressional hearings followed. A class-action lawsuit produced a ten million dollar settlement. The study was shut down. Forty years after it began.

Peter Buxtun died on May 18, 2024, of Alzheimer’s disease in Rocklin, California. He was 86. The men he tried to save were long gone.

The institution that chewed him out for his impertinence still sets American public health policy.

Now consider what happened in 2020 when a COVID vaccine was developed and health authorities expressed frustration that black Americans were hesitant to receive it. The hesitancy was labeled a misinformation problem. It was studied, analyzed, and managed as a public health communication failure.

It was not a misinformation problem. It was a memory.

The same government that had told 600 black men in Alabama they were being treated when they were being observed — that had withheld a known cure while men died, while wives were infected, while children were born into the consequence of institutional deception — was now asking those same communities to trust its assurances about a new medical intervention developed in record time.

The Event 201 recommendation called for flooding media with fast, accurate, and consistent information and suppressing counter messages. It did not call for acknowledging that the institution delivering those messages had spent forty years lying to the people it was now asking to comply.

That omission isn’t an oversight. It’s the mechanism.

In 1971, the same year COINTELPRO was exposed, a defense analyst named Daniel Ellsberg leaked a classified 47-volume Pentagon study to the New York Times. The study, commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, documented what four successive presidential administrations had actually known and done in Vietnam, and how systematically they had lied about it to Congress and to the American people.

The Nixon administration obtained a court order forcing the Times to stop publishing. It was the first time in American history that the federal government had used prior restraint to stop a newspaper from printing the news. The Washington Post began publishing the same documents. The government sued them too. Within two weeks, fifteen newspapers were publishing portions of the Pentagon Papers and the government was suing all of them.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the press.

The administration then charged Ellsberg under the Espionage Act — not for passing information to a foreign enemy, but for informing the American public about their own government’s conduct. It was the first time a source for a journalist had been charged under that law. The charges were eventually dismissed after it emerged that the Nixon White House had ordered the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in an attempt to find damaging personal information. The same people who burglarized the psychiatrist’s office later burglarized the Watergate complex. The president of the United States resigned.

One act of suppression. One chain of consequences.

In 1977, the 95th Congress opened hearings into the CIA’s top secret mind control research program, code named MK Ultra. The program had run for decades. Its existence was not in dispute. When a survivor attempted to testify before the Congressional Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence Oversight in 1995, the National Security Act was invoked to censor that testimony. The official record was closed. The testimony was published as a book instead because the official channels had been deliberately shut.

In the months before March 2003, a body of intelligence assessments was presented to the American public as settled fact. Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The evidence was solid. The case was beyond dispute.

What was not presented to the public: the International Atomic Energy Agency had already delivered a judgment, a full month before the invasion, that the aluminum tube claims at the center of the nuclear argument were incorrect. A document cited as evidence of Iraqi deception was later revealed to be plagiarized from a graduate student’s dissertation describing Iraq’s weapons programs in 1990 — not 2003. Senate Intelligence Committee investigators later confirmed that senior officials had cherry-picked raw intelligence to support a political position that had already been decided.

The United States invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003.

No weapons of mass destruction were found.

David Kay, the man appointed to lead the postwar weapons search, testified before the United States Senate on January 29, 2004: we were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2004 report confirmed that analysts had overstated the certainty of their conclusions and that the intelligence had been shaped to fit a conclusion that preceded it.

Hundreds of thousands of people died on the basis of information that the record shows was managed, shaped, and presented without the inconvenient parts. A full installment on 9/11 and on January 6 will be published at a later date not yet determined. Each deserves their own piece.

In 2021, the primary system the United States government uses to track adverse events following vaccination — the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, known as VAERS — began receiving reports of myocarditis following COVID-19 mRNA vaccination. The numbers were not ambiguous. Peer-reviewed research confirmed that in 2021 there was a dramatic increase in myocarditis reports linked to the COVID-19 vaccine, far higher than reports from all other vaccines combined over the previous thirty years. The signal was strongest in young males.

The response wasn’t an investigation. The response was discrediting. Studies analyzing VAERS data were dismissed as unreliable. Physicians who raised concerns publicly found themselves facing the same professional consequences that had greeted doctors who questioned ventilator protocols in 2020. The data existed. It was inconvenient. And it was managed.

In September 2016, federal investigators discovered a laptop belonging to former congressman Anthony Weiner containing hundreds of thousands of emails connected to the closed investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information. Among the files was a folder labeled life insurance.

In November 2016, FBI Headquarters blocked the Clinton Foundation investigative team from accessing the laptop’s contents. Deputy Director Andrew McCabe recommended the material be routed to a different team. Senate Judiciary Committee records later confirmed that after the investigation was reopened in 2017, prosecutors were provided with documents that omitted information about FBI and DOJ leadership’s interference.

The life insurance folder has never been publicly disclosed as of the date of this article.

On October 18, 2019, fifteen people gathered in a luxury hotel in Manhattan and recommended that governments partner with social media companies to flood media with fast, accurate, and consistent information — and that counter messages be suppressed including through the use of technology.

They called the counter messages misinformation.

They published the recommendation in January 2020.

By spring of that year, posts were being removed. Accounts were being suspended. Doctors were losing privileges. A Nobel Prize winner’s concerns about PCR methodology were dismissed without engagement. A laboratory origin hypothesis supported by credentialed scientists was labeled a conspiracy theory and quietly deleted from platforms used by billions of people.

The bonfire was still burning. It had just moved indoors.

Ms. Richardson put my name on the board in third grade because I said something true that complicated the lesson she was trying to teach. She did not tell me I was wrong. She could not tell me I was wrong. She simply made clear that the truth I had offered was not welcome in that room.

Qin Shi Huang burned the books because they complicated the dynasty he was trying to build. He did not argue with Confucius. He buried the people who taught him.

The scale is different. The mechanism is identical.

Some truths are not welcome here.

That lesson has been taught in every language, in every century, by every institution that has ever held enough power to enforce it. It has been taught with hemlock and exile and bonfires and blacklists and anonymous letters urging men to kill themselves and cherry-picked intelligence that sent soldiers to die and checkmarks on blackboards and the quiet removal of posts from platforms in the middle of the night.

It has never, in twenty-five centuries of trying, permanently worked.

Socrates is still being read. Galileo’s observations still govern our understanding of the solar system. Les Misérables is still in print. The burned books were rebuilt from memory by the scholars who survived. The altered photographs exist in archives beside the originals. The Pentagon Papers are in every university library. The laboratory origin hypothesis is now an active area of scientific inquiry acknowledged by the FBI, the Department of Energy, and the Senate. The COINTELPRO files are being demanded in Congress fifty years after the program ended.

And a third grade girl who missed recess for telling the truth is sitting down to write it all out again.

The truth has a way of insisting.

The paper trail continues.

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Sources

1. Livy, History of Rome. On the office of censor, 443 BC. Translated J.C. Yardley. Harvard University Press.

2. Dirk Rohmann, “Book Burning as Conflict Management in the Roman Empire (213 BC-200 CE).” Ancient Society 43 (2013).

3. Frederick H. Cramer, “Book Burning and Censorship in Ancient Rome.” Journal of the History of Ideas 6.2 (1945): 157-196.

4. Plato, Apology. On the trial and death of Socrates, 399 BC. Primary source.

5. Ovid, Tristia. Letters from exile, 8 AD. Primary source.

6. Seneca, Letters from a Stoic. Trans. R.M. Basore. Primary source.

7. Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Pope Paul IV, 1559. Last issued 1948, abolished 1966.

8. Catholic Church records: Index Librorum Prohibitorum entries for Galileo, Copernicus, Hobbes, Hume, Milton, Defoe, Voltaire, Hugo.

9. Shakespeare, Richard II. First folio documentation of the deposition scene removal by order of Queen Elizabeth I, 1597.

10. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Documentation of Nazi book burnings, May 10, 1933. ushmm.org

11. Heinrich Heine, Almansor: A Tragedy (1820). Original publication of the book-burning prophecy.

12. David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia. Metropolitan Books, 1997.

13. Executive Order 11615, President Richard M. Nixon, August 15, 1971: Suspension of convertibility of the dollar to gold.

14. FBI COINTELPRO Records. Vault.FBI.gov. Released under FOIA. vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro

15. U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee). Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans. Senate Report No. 94-755, Book II. 1976.

16. FBI-King Suicide Letter. Discovered during Church Committee hearings, 1975. National Archives and Records Administration.

17. Sullivan, William C. Internal FBI Memo on Martin Luther King Jr., 1963. Declassified and published in Church Committee records.

18. Federal court findings: COINTELPRO responsible for 204 burglaries, 1,300 informants, 12,600 stolen documents, 20,000 illegal actions. Cited in Church Committee Report, 1976.

19. Congresswoman Summer Lee. Press Release: COINTELPRO Full Disclosure Act introduced January 22, 2026. summerlee.house.gov

20. U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations (Church Committee). Final Report, Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence. April 1976. U.S. Government Publishing Office.

21. Bernstein, Carl. “The CIA and the Media.” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.

22. CIA Family Jewels Documents. Declassified and released June 2007. Available at CIA.gov reading room.

23. CIA Director George H.W. Bush. Public statement on new journalist relationship policy, February 1976.

24. United States Public Health Service, Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, 1932-1972. National Archives and Records Administration.

25. Buxtun, Peter. Official protest letter to Chief of Venereal Disease Branch, CDC, 1966. Documented in Reverby, Susan. Tuskegee’s Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

26. Associated Press, Jean Heller. “Syphilis Victims in U.S. Study Went Untreated for 40 Years.” July 25, 1972. Washington Star; reprinted New York Times July 26, 1972.

27. NAACP v. United States. $10 million out-of-court settlement, 1974.

28. President William J. Clinton. Formal apology to Tuskegee study survivors. White House ceremony, May 16, 1997.

29. Peter Buxtun obituary. Died May 18, 2024, Rocklin, California. Alzheimer’s disease. Age 86. Reported by AP, NPR, Washington Post, July 2024.

30. Ellsberg, Daniel. Pentagon Papers leaked to New York Times, June 13, 1971. National Security Archive, George Washington University. nsarchive.gwu.edu

31. New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). U.S. Supreme Court, decided June 30, 1971.

32. U.S. Department of Justice. Charges against Daniel Ellsberg under Espionage Act of 1917, 1971. Dismissed May 1973.

33. Freedom of the Press Foundation: The Pentagon Papers documentation. freedom.press

34. U.S. Senate, 95th Congress. Hearings on CIA MK Ultra program, August 3, 1977. Congressional Record.

35. National Security Act of 1947, invoked to suppress congressional testimony, 1995. Documented in O’Brien, Cathy and Phillips, Mark. TRANCE Formation of America. Reality Marketing, 1995.

36. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Report on Pre-War Intelligence Assessments on Iraq. Released July 9, 2004.

37. International Atomic Energy Agency. Interim judgment on aluminum tube claims, February 2003.

38. Kay, David. Testimony before the U.S. Senate, January 29, 2004: “We were almost all wrong.”

39. Arms Control Association. Intelligence and Arms Control Experts Analyze Powell’s UN Speech. February 2004. armscontrol.org

40. Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Event 201 Joint Statement, January 17, 2020. centerforhealthsecurity.org

41. Event 201 Recommendation 7: Communications. Published October 18, 2019. centerforhealthsecurity.org

42. Facebook policy change announcement, May 2021: Removal of policy prohibiting posts suggesting COVID-19 was man-made.

43. Office of the Director of National Intelligence: Declassified COVID-19 Origins Assessment, 2023.

44. U.S. Senate report on COVID-19 origins, October 2022: Laboratory leak as most likely origin.

45. FBI Director Christopher Wray, public statement on COVID-19 origin assessment, February 2023.

46. U.S. Department of Energy assessment: COVID-19 most likely originated from laboratory leak, February 2023.

47. Peer-reviewed findings: myocarditis reports in 2021 exceeded all other vaccines combined over previous 30 years. Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine, 2024. onlinelibrary.wiley.com

48. Lai et al. “Risk of myocarditis after three doses of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in the United States, 2020-2022.” Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine, 2024.

49. CDC MMWR: Reports of myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination, particularly among young male vaccine recipients, April 2021. cdc.gov

50. U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York. Search warrant for Anthony Weiner laptop, September 26, 2016.

51. Senate Judiciary Committee. New Records Reveal DOJ’s Yearslong Efforts to Shut Down Investigation into Clinton Foundation. judiciary.senate.gov

52. U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Senator Ron Johnson letter to DOJ regarding Weiner laptop investigation. hsgac.senate.gov

The state of Georgia is known for a number of interesting things along the state’s history. Peaches, for sure, although peanuts remain the number one crop. The birthplace of Coca-Cola and countless musicians shaping culture – Ray Charles, Alan Jackson, and my personal favorite, The Allman Brothers Band – just to name a few. Georgia is home to a number of spectacular geographical miracles like Amicalola Falls, Tallulah Gorge, and the Okefenokee Swamp. The Chattahoochee river is the dividing line between Georgia and Alabama, and has been turned into a whitewater rafting adventure. I’m from the area and I know that we call the River the black death and the drowning machine for a reason. As much as I love to look at her and the wonder of her underwater vortex surface, I know good and well if that current snatches you under, you ain’t coming back up.

I lived in Georgia for more than forty years before I broke the age old rule and moved across the River to Sweet Home Alabama.

I was born in Georgia when Ronald Reagan was in the White House and the Cold War still felt like it might end the world. I was there through the nineties, through September 2001, through every election and every crisis and every ordinary humid day that makes up a life lived in one place for a very long time. I know a good bit about the state and the history.

I never once heard of the Georgia Guidestones.

Not from a neighbor. Not from a history teacher. Not from a news broadcast or a road sign or a conversation at a church potluck. Ninety miles east of Atlanta, in a cow pasture in Elbert County, stood a granite monument nineteen feet tall, weighing nearly 120 Tons, inscribed with instructions for the future of the human race in eight modern languages and four ancient ones. It had been there since 1980. It drew 20,000 visitors a year by the time it was destroyed in 2022.

I found out about it while researching The Paper Trail.

That little detail matters more than it might seem. I had already been writing about population control, about forced sterilization programs, forced abortion policies, pandemics, wars, about the documented machinery by which powerful institutions have decided, in various eras and various languages, that there are too many of the wrong kinds of people on the earth. I had already been sitting with that material when I came across a granite monument in my home state that said, in plain English, chiseled into stone meant to outlast civilization itself:

Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.

The current world population is eight billion people.

Someone built a monument in Georgia during my lifetime to say that number needs to come down by roughly 93 percent. And they built it anonymously, which means they either expected no consequences or they knew exactly what consequences to avoid.

Both possibilities are worth considering.

In June of 1979, a man walked into the offices of the Elberton Granite Finishing Company in Elbert County, Georgia.

He gave his name as R.C. Christian. It was not his name.

He told Joe Fendley, the company’s president, that he represented a small group of loyal people who had been secretly planning a granite monument for twenty years. He said they believed civilization was heading toward catastrophe — social, nuclear, or economic — and they wanted to leave instructions for whatever remained of humanity on the other side of it. He had specifications, a scale model, and knew exactly what he wanted.

Fendley thought he was a nut.

He responded the way a reasonable businessman responds to someone he wants to get rid of: he quoted a price several times higher than anything the company had previously undertaken, a number designed to send the man back out the door he came in through.

R.C. Christian accepted it without hesitation.

Fendley passed him to the local banker, Wyatt Martin, reasoning that if Christian could actually produce the funds, the project might be worth taking seriously. Martin met with Christian and told him he would need to provide his real name for the financial arrangements to proceed.

Christian provided it. He also had Martin sign a non-disclosure agreement and made him promise to destroy all the paperwork once the project was complete. Martin agreed. He kept Christian’s secret for the rest of his life. He took it to his grave.

From that point forward, Christian communicated with Martin only by mail. The letters came from cities all over the country and never from the same place twice.

The monument was completed in nine months. It was unveiled on March 22, 1980, before an audience of between 200 and 400 people, depending on the account. A congressman was present. A message was read on behalf of the sponsors: ‘we believe our precepts are sound and they must stand on their own merits’.

The name of the group was never disclosed and the identity of R.C. Christian was never confirmed. A documentary filmmaker in 2015 claimed to have found him, a man named Herbert Kersten, with alleged ties to eugenics organizations and Rosicrucian philosophy. Though the claim was never proven, the pseudonym itself is widely understood as a reference to Christian Rosenkreutz, the legendary founder of the Rosicrucian order — a secretive mystical brotherhood whose origins trace to fifteenth century Germany.

Whether that connection is intentional or coincidental, no one alive can say with certainty.

What can be said is this: someone spent the equivalent of $400,000 in today’s dollars to chisel a message into granite designed to outlast human civilization, then made absolutely certain no one would ever know who they were.

That’s not quite the behavior of a person with nothing to hide. Its also not the behavior of a person who expected to face consequences. In other words, it just don’t add up.

And the behavior of a person who was very confident about what was coming.

The monument was built from stone quarried at a place called Pyramid Quarry.

Three miles west of Elberton, where workers had to dig more than one hundred feet into the earth to find slabs of granite large enough for what R.C. Christian had in mind. Pyramid Blue Granite. From Pyramid Quarry. For a monument built to outlast civilization.

You are welcome to decide what you make of that.

The structure itself stood nineteen feet and three inches tall, made from six granite slabs weighing a combined 237,746 pounds — nearly one hundred twenty tons of stone. Four outer slabs arranged in a paddlewheel configuration. A center column called the Gnomen Stone (like a sun-dial). A capstone connecting them all. The astronomical specifications were so precise that the Elberton Granite Finishing Company had to bring in an astronomer from the University of Georgia to execute them.

Here is what those specifications required.

A hole drilled through the center column at an angle, precisely calibrated so that the North Star could be seen through it at any hour of any night, in any season, regardless of the time of year. A slot carved through the same pillar aligned with the rising sun on the solstices and equinoxes — the four hinge points of the ancient calendar used by every major civilization that predates our own. A 7/8 inch aperture in the capstone positioned so that at noon each day a beam of sunlight passed through it and illuminated the exact day of the year on the center stone below. The four outer stones oriented to mark the limits of the 18.6-year lunar declination cycle.

This isn’t the same type of thing as elaborately decorating a house in high-cotton. This is a functioning astronomical observatory built into a granite monument in a cow pasture in Elbert County, Georgia, using the same principles that governed the construction of Stonehenge, the Egyptian temples at Karnak, and the Mayan calendar complexes at Chichen Itza. The comparison to Stonehenge was made immediately and has never been disputed. What those ancient structures shared, beyond their astronomical precision, was this: they were built by people who understood that knowledge encoded in stone outlasts knowledge encoded in any other medium. They were built to be read by whoever came after.

R.C. Christian understood this and his specifications prove it.

The site itself was not chosen at random. Christian selected the highest point in Elbert County, commanding unobstructed views to the east and the west, essential for the solstice and equinox alignments. What he may or may not have known, and what the New Georgia Encyclopedia records without commentary, is that the Cherokee people had a name for that area long before any granite company operated near it. They called it Al-yeh-li A lo-Hee.

The center of the world.

As detailed as Mr. R.C. and his fellow friends were, I have a gut feeling he knew this quite well and chose it on purpose.

The capstone that sat atop the monument carried its message in four languages. Not the eight modern languages of the inscriptions below — English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian — but four ancient ones. Babylonian cuneiform. Classical Greek. Sanskrit. Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Let these be guidestones to an Age of Reason.

The choice of those four languages cannot be incidental. Babylonian cuneiform is among the oldest writing systems on earth, developed in Mesopotamia, the cradle of recorded civilization. Sanskrit is the sacred language of the Vedic tradition, the root of the oldest continuously practiced religious texts in human history. Classical Greek is the language of philosophy, of Plato and Aristotle, of the intellectual foundations of Western thought. Egyptian hieroglyphics are the language of a civilization that built structures of such astronomical precision that modern engineers still study them.

These are not languages chosen for reach. Arabic reaches more people than Sanskrit. Latin reaches more scholars than Babylonian cuneiform. These four were chosen for what they represent — the oldest, deepest streams of human knowledge, all of them rooted in astronomy, sacred geometry, and the measurement of time.

Someone who chose those four languages knew exactly what they were doing.

Now consider the name on the monument. R.C. Christian. A pseudonym, admitted freely and from the beginning. The initials R.C. have a documented history that predates this monument by several centuries. The Rosicrucian Order, a secretive philosophical brotherhood whose origins trace to late medieval Germany, established foundational rules for its members. The fifth rule stated that the letters R.C. should be their seal, their mark, and their character from that time forward. The sixth rule specified that the Fraternity should remain unknown to the world for one hundred years.

Two anonymous manifestos published in Germany, Fama Fraternitatis RC and Confessio Fraternitatis, outlined the society’s interests and intentions while maintaining the complete secrecy of its membership. Anonymous documents, published without attribution, outlining a philosophy intended to guide humanity toward a new age of reason.

The Georgia Guidestones were anonymous, published in granite, outlining a philosophy intended to guide humanity toward an age of reason.

The Rosicrucian order sought, in its own stated terms, to prepare a new phase of religion for a coming age. It was explicitly opposed to Catholicism. It held a doctrine built on esoteric truths of ancient Egypt, Babylon, and the Druids — concealed from ordinary people — that provided insight into nature, the physical universe, and the spiritual realm. It was linked historically to the Knights Templar before it and the Freemasons after.

None of this proves R.C. Christian was a Rosicrucian or a Mason. What it proves is that whoever he was, he used their initials, their methods, their languages, their timeline, and their stated purpose and then built it into one hundred and twenty tons of stone quarried from a place called Pyramid Quarry on land the Cherokee called the center of the world.

You are, again, welcome to decide what you make of that.

Here is what was written on the stone.

In English. In Spanish. In Swahili. In Hindi. In Hebrew. In Arabic. In Chinese. In Russian. The same ten lines, repeated in each language, facing outward in every direction, meant to be read by whoever survived.

One.

Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.

The current population of the earth is eight billion people. The number carved in stone calls for a world of five hundred million. That is a reduction of ninety-three percent. Whoever survives the catastrophe — the social, nuclear, or economic calamity R.C. Christian believed was coming — inherits a world with room for one in every sixteen people alive today.

Two.

Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.

The word for the managed improvement of human reproduction through selective breeding has been in use since 1883. It is eugenics. The Guidestones do not use that word. They don’t even need to.

Three.

Unite humanity with a living new language.

A single global language. Not the preservation of existing languages — a living new one. Designed. Implemented. Universal. Antithetical to Genesis 11, when God specifically confused the people’s languages due to their unholy acts.

Four.

Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.

Faith is listed here alongside passion and tradition as a thing to be ruled — governed, managed, subordinated to reason. Not protected. Not preserved. Ruled.

Five.

Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.

Six.

Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.

A world court. A single international body with authority to resolve conflicts between nations. Not a suggestion. A principle carved in stone and addressed to the survivors of civilization’s collapse, as the foundational structure of whatever comes next.

Seven.

Avoid petty laws and useless officials.

Eight.

Balance personal rights with social duties.

Of all ten principles carved into the stone, this one might be the most dangerous precisely because it sounds the most reasonable. It has the cadence of civics. It reads like something that belongs in a school textbook or a UN declaration, and in fact language nearly identical to it appears in both. Not alarming and not provoking.

But read it again, and ask the question it never answers.

Who decides when the balance tips? The individual is not the arbiter of this balance, by definition, because the individual is one half of the equation and the social duty is the other. Someone external to you must determine when your personal right has exceeded its permitted weight. Someone with the authority to enforce the correction.

Nine.

Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.

Ten.

Be not a cancer on the earth — leave room for nature — leave room for nature.

The last line is the only one repeated. It appears twice on the stone. Be not a cancer on the earth. The word chosen for humanity’s relationship to the planet is cancer. Not steward. Not inhabitant. Not creature. Cancer.

These ten principles covered, in the monument’s own stated terms, four areas: governance and the establishment of a world government. Population and reproduction control. The environment and humanity’s relationship to nature. And spirituality.

A world government. Controlled reproduction. Managed population. Faith subordinated to reason.

That is what was written on the stone.

Now set it beside what was written in New York in 2015.

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted unanimously by all member states, describes itself as a plan of action for people, planet, and prosperity. It calls for universal goals applicable to every country on earth. It calls for global partnership, collective action on population and environment, and governance structures that transcend national boundaries. It establishes 17 goals and 169 targets to be implemented by the same international institutions the Guidestones called a world court.

The Guidestones said: let all nations resolve external disputes in a world court. The 2030 Agenda established the UN High-Level Political Forum as the central global platform for review and accountability of every signatory nation’s progress toward the goals.

The Guidestones said: guide reproduction wisely. The 2030 Agenda includes targets on reproductive health, population planning, and what it calls sustainable consumption — meaning how many resources each human life is permitted to use.

The Guidestones said: rule passion and faith with tempered reason. The 2030 Agenda commits all signatory nations to gender equality targets, educational transformation, and values-based programming to be implemented universally — across every culture, every tradition, every faith.

The Guidestones were carved in 1980 by an anonymous group that had been planning for twenty years.

The 2030 Agenda was adopted in 2015 by every government on earth.

The language isn’t identical, but I will leave the conclusion to you.

On July 6, 2022, at approximately four in the morning, someone detonated an explosive device at the Georgia Guidestones.

CCTV footage captured the detonation. A vehicle was recorded leaving the scene. The explosion destroyed the Swahili and Hindi language slab and damaged the capstone — the stone that carried the message in Babylonian cuneiform, Classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Egyptian hieroglyphics. The one that said: let these be guidestones to an age of reason.

Later that same day, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrived with a backhoe and demolished what remained. Within hours of the bombing, the stones that had stood for forty-two years were rubble.

The GBI investigation produced no arrest and no suspect was named publicly. The case remains open.

Here is what else the demolition produced: when county officials dug six feet beneath the explanatory tablet — the stone that had announced, in plain English, that a time capsule had been placed six feet below this spot — they found nothing. No capsule. No contents. No record of what was to be opened, or when, or by whom. The fields on the stone reserved for those dates had been left blank from the beginning. Whoever built the Guidestones either never buried the capsule or removed it before anyone could look.

Something was always meant to be there. Whatever it was, it was gone.

Now consider the timing.

In the spring of 2022, a Republican candidate for governor of Georgia named Kandiss Taylor made the destruction of the Georgia Guidestones a centerpiece of her campaign. She called them satanic. She said she would tear them down. She lost the primary in May. The stones were bombed in July.

No connection between Taylor’s campaign and the bombing has been established. The GBI said it was investigating and has not announced a conclusion.

The mayor of Elberton announced plans to reconstruct the monument exactly as it was. The city council voted instead to return the land to its previous owner and donate the remains to the Elberton Granite Association. As of the writing of this installment, no reconstruction has taken place.

Whatever message was meant to outlast civilization lasted forty-two years when someone or some people decided this thing has to go.

More than forty years living in Georgia and I found out about them while following a paper trail that had already taken me through a luxury hotel in Manhattan, a directive signed on March 25, 2020, a nursing home death count that was falsified for political reasons, two empty hospital ships, and a financial incentive structure that paid thirty-nine thousand dollars to put a dying person on a ventilator.

The Guidestones did not cause any of that. They preceded it.

They were built in 1980 by a group of people who believed civilization was heading toward catastrophe and wanted to leave instructions for what should come after. Population under five hundred million. Reproduction guided wisely. Faith ruled by reason. A world court. A living new language.

By 2015 those instructions had been adopted, in different language and with different branding, by every government on earth.

By 2020 a global crisis had demonstrated, in real time, how efficiently the machinery for managing populations, suppressing inconvenient information, and consolidating institutional authority could be activated — and how precisely it followed recommendations that had been written and published before the crisis began.

By 2022 the stones were gone.

I don’t know who built them. I don’t know who destroyed them. I don’t know whether the catastrophe R.C. Christian believed was coming has already happened or is still ahead of us.

What I know is what the record shows.

Someone wrote instructions for the world after the end of the world, carved them into stone, and hid their name.

Someone else came in the dark with explosives and made sure the stones couldn’t be read anymore.

Both of them knew something the rest of us were not supposed to.

The paper trail continues.

Buy Momma Jess a Coffee

Sources

1. New Georgia Encyclopedia: Georgia Guidestones. Last modified July 11, 2022. georgiaencyclopedia.org

2. Wikipedia: Georgia Guidestones. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones

3. Wired Magazine: “American Stonehenge: Monumental Instructions for the Post-Apocalypse.” 2009.

4. All That’s Interesting: “The Georgia Guidestones, The Granite Monument Built To Be A Solar Calendar — And A Post-Apocalyptic Guide.”

5. Elbert County Chamber of Commerce: Georgia Guidestones history and construction documentation.

6. Georgia Bureau of Investigation: Press releases on the July 6, 2022 bombing and demolition.

7. United Nations: Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Resolution 70/1, adopted September 25, 2015. sdgs.un.org

8. United Nations: The 17 Sustainable Development Goals. sdgs.un.org/goals

9. Rosicrucian Order (AMORC): Fama Fraternitatis RC and Confessio Fraternitatis — documented historical manifestos, 17th century Germany.

10. Crystal Links: Georgia Guidestones documentation. crystalinks.com/gaguidestones.html

11. Elberton Star: Report on excavation revealing no time capsule beneath the explanatory tablet, July 2022.

12. AtlasObscura: Georgia Guidestones entry. atlasobscura.com

13. Compact Histories: “The Mystery of the Georgia Guidestones.” compacthistories.com

14. R.C. Christian (pseudonym): Common Sense Renewed. 1986. (Published statement of authorship of the Guidestones inscriptions.)

I had known Anna long enough to know that if our eyes met while I was preaching, it was finished. Something in her receives the Holy Spirit the way a field receives rain, openly, completely, and if I looked at her when the Spirit was moving I would cry my way through the rest of whatever I was trying to say. It happened often. She was that kind of soul-sister.

The first day we were allowed to worship together again, I was standing at the door of the church wearing a mask and dispensing hand sanitizer, a substance I knew was doing no one any good, into hands belonging to people who were desperate simply to be in the same room with God and each other. I stood there because I loved my ministry. People had been begging to come back. This was the price of the door being open, so I paid it, hating every moment of bowing to what I knew was not right.

Then I saw Anna’s kind blue eyes, filled to the brim, behind a masked face.

I set the hand sanitizer down.

Can we hug, I asked.

She nodded.

When we embraced, our entire bodies shuddered. The weight of everything that had been taken, every ordinary moment of human contact that had been legislated away, came out of both of us at once. We held each other and we sobbed.

She was the first non-relative I had hugged in six months. I will never forget that moment.

My second-born daughter had purchased her prom dress two weeks before the world shut down. It was gorgeous. It hung in her closet through the spring while the date came and went without ceremony, without a gymnasium, without a single photograph in a backyard with friends. Just a dress and a date on the calendar that passed like any other day.

She was homeschooled, so her education continued. What didn’t continue was everything else. When graduation came, we sat on the couch together with a bowl of popcorn and watched the ceremony on television. Names and pictures flashed across the screen one by one. Congratulations, Hayley. You just graduated.

That was it. That was the ceremony. A screen and a couch and popcorn because there was nothing else available to us.

After a few weeks, by April, the cabin fever became something physical. Like a pressure in the walls. We decided one afternoon to simply take a drive, not to go anywhere or accomplish anything, just to move through the world like human beings for an hour. What we drove through looked like the end of life. Empty streets. Closed storefronts. A ghost town made of a place we had known our whole lives.

And we were tense. Genuinely, physically tense. Afraid of being pulled over for driving down a public road in America. Afraid that the act of not being locked inside our house might be enough to bring consequences down on us.

That fear was not entirely irrational. It was the logical response to what was being communicated from every official channel available: stay home, stay safe, and do not ask questions about either instruction.

We were healthy and alive. And afraid to drive.

I was working for a church during this time. Of course, we were completely closed for months. The leadership decided to manage its congregation on what I can only describe as a traffic light spectrum. Greens were those of us — like me — who opposed the lockdown, the masks, all of it, and were ready to return to normal life. Yellows were cautious. Reds were the ones who would have stationed guards at the entrance of every public place if given the authority. The Reds held quite a bit of authority as it turned out.

A church. A body of believers gathered around the premise that all people stand equally before God. It color-coded its members by their willingness to be afraid.

I was green. Green meant problem.

The suppression of counter-messages that the Event 201 recommendation called for did not operate only at the level of social media platforms and hospital privileges. It operated in churches across America. It operated on ordinary people who asked reasonable questions and paid for asking them.

The liquor stores stayed open, though.

Now let’s talk about the people who couldn’t drive anywhere. The ones who couldn’t leave at all. The ones who had pressed their own hands against their own windows and watched the world go quiet outside. The ones whose families stood in parking lots and held up handwritten signs because there was no other way to be seen by the people they loved.

While my daughter’s prom dress hung in her closet, while my family drove through ghost towns afraid of being arrested for moving, the governors of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and California were signing directives that would send COVID-positive patients into the buildings where the most vulnerable people in America lived and could not leave.

In New York, the order came on March 25, 2020.

It was addressed to nursing home administrators, directors of nursing, and hospital discharge planners. It stated, in the language of the New York State Department of Health, that all nursing homes must comply with the expedited receipt of residents returning from hospitals. It stated that no resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to a nursing home solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. It stated that nursing homes were prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.

Read that again.

They were prohibited from testing a person before their entry into nursing homes full of fragile people.

More than 9,000 COVID-positive patients were sent into hundreds of New York nursing homes under that order. More than 6,000 of those were new admissions, not returning residents. The order remained in effect until May 10, 2020.

The day after Cuomo signed it, a prominent national coalition of long-term care professionals publicly denounced it. They warned, in their own published statement, that it wasn’t consistent with science or patient safety principles. They called it a short-term and short-sighted solution that would only add to the surge.

Howard Zucker, New York’s Health Commissioner, later testified under oath that he had no knowledge of those warnings. State Senator Tom O’Mara, who questioned him directly, said he did not believe him then and did not believe him after.

By June 7, 2020, the data was already inside the building.

An internal email to Commissioner Zucker that day contained charts showing that nursing homes which had admitted COVID-positive patients under the March 25 order were dying at a rate of 8.1 percent. Homes that had admitted no such patients were dying at a rate of 4.1 percent. Half.

They had the numbers and then they wrote a report that said something different.

On July 6, 2020, the New York State Department of Health released its official findings. The report concluded that the March 25 admission policy was not a significant factor in nursing home fatalities. Andrew Cuomo held a press conference. He said the criticism of nursing home deaths had no basis in fact. He said it was pure politics and it was ugly politics.

Someone inside his own administration had already written, in an internal email, that the mandatory admittance policy was going to be a great debacle in the history books. The same email asked: don’t you see how bad this is? Or do we admit error and give up?

In January 2021, New York Attorney General Letitia James released her own investigation. She found that Cuomo had understated COVID-19 deaths in state nursing homes by as much as fifty percent.

Then came the admission that explains everything else.

Melissa DeRosa, secretary to the governor, privately told Democratic lawmakers what had happened. She said the administration had frozen. She said they were not sure if what they were going to give to the Department of Justice was going to be used against them politically.

The deaths were real, the cover was political, and the data was buried because it was inconvenient to the people who had generated it.

Fauci, in July 2020, while the cover-up was active and the true death toll was still hidden, publicly called New York’s COVID response a model. He said they did it correctly.

New York had 14,450 deaths across 698 long-term care facilities. Twenty-one deaths per facility. Arizona, which never issued a must-admit order, had 2,505 deaths across 1,000 facilities. Two and a half deaths per facility. Same country. Same virus. Same year. Different decision.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held a hearing in 2023 titled Like Fire Through Dry Grass. Witnesses testified that it was known from the early data and science that COVID-19 would be lethal in elderly care facilities. Witnesses testified that state officials prioritized personal political gain over the health of elderly Americans. In October 2024, the subcommittee referred Cuomo to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution. A criminal investigation was opened in 2025.

Meanwhile the Navy had sent two hospital ships.

The USNS Comfort, a 1,000-bed vessel with a 1,200-member crew, arrived in New York Harbor on March 30, 2020. The USNS Mercy, its sister ship, docked in Los Angeles the same week. They were deployed, at enormous cost, as relief valves for hospitals overwhelmed by the surge. The justification for the nursing home directives, in every state that issued them, was that hospitals needed to free up beds. The crisis demanded it. There was no choice.

The Comfort left New York on May 2, 2020. It had treated 182 patients.

The Mercy left Los Angeles on May 15. It had treated 77.

At the height of the crisis, the two ships combined had fewer than 20 patients on board. The head of New York’s largest hospital system called it a joke. He said it was pretty ridiculous. He asked what the purpose was.

The ships sat empty in the harbors of the two hardest-hit cities in America while COVID-positive patients, untested, were being sent by order of law into buildings full of people who could not leave.

Now, follow the money.

Under the CARES Act, signed into law March 27, 2020, the federal government paid hospitals a 20% bonus on the entire Medicare bill for every patient designated as a COVID case. A standard pneumonia admission without COVID generated approximately $7,700. With a COVID designation, that same admission generated over $9,200. A patient requiring ventilator support without COVID generated approximately $40,000. With COVID, the enhanced rate applied on top.

Dr. Scott Jensen, a physician and Minnesota state senator, stated it clearly in April 2020: thirteen thousand dollars for a COVID admission. Thirty-nine thousand dollars if the patient went on a ventilator. Three times as much.

The federal government also created a separate Provider Relief Fund, ultimately totaling $186.5 billion, distributed to hospitals in proportion to their prior Medicare business. A Kaiser Health News analysis found that hospitals in states barely touched by the pandemic received the equivalent of approximately $300,000 per reported COVID case. The Foundation for Economic Education wrote, in April 2020, that the economic incentive to add COVID-19 to diagnostic lists and death certificates was clear and did not require any conspiracy.

Hospitals that didn’t use their COVID relief funds according to federal terms were required to return them, with interest. The government reserved the right to pursue collection.

Hospitals were also paid a separate bonus for administering remdesivir, an antiviral drug costing $3,200 per treatment course that the World Health Organization reviewed and recommended against, finding no survival benefit. The FDA’s own prescribing information mandates liver monitoring because the drug is known to cause hepatotoxicity. Studies raised documented concerns about kidney injury, particularly in elderly and vulnerable patients, precisely the population filling those hospital beds.

Every positive test meant money. Every admission meant more. Every ventilator meant more still. And anyone who asked whether the coding was accurate, whether the protocols were appropriate, whether a dying person might have benefited from something other than what the reimbursement structure incentivized, that person was asking questions that the Event 201 recommendation had already classified as a problem to be managed.

Now notice what disappeared.

In the 2019-2020 flu season, according to the CDC’s own published data, approximately 38 million Americans were sickened by influenza. Twenty-two thousand died.

In the 2020-2021 flu season, 700 Americans died of influenza. Of 931,726 flu tests reported to the CDC, 0.2 percent were positive. In prior flu seasons the peak positive rate ran between 26 and 30 percent. One child died of influenza in the United States that year. In prior years the range was roughly 40 to 200 children.

The CDC attributed the disappearance to masking and social distancing.

Perhaps. But the same masking and distancing did not prevent hundreds of thousands of COVID deaths, according to the official count. And the official count was generated by the same diagnostic and coding infrastructure that paid thirteen thousand dollars for a positive admission and thirty-nine thousand for a ventilator.

I will ask you to simply draw your own conclusions. The numbers are the CDC’s.

And here is the question I won’t stop asking: was it coronavirus — or was it a really tough flu season? I don’t have enough proof to share an answer. I know what the incentive structure paid for. I know what virus vanished from the diagnostic record the moment COVID arrived. And I know that the people best positioned to answer that question were the same people writing the reports to say the nursing home deaths weren’t their fault.

Reflecting back to my hug with my friend Anna, the way we stood there in the wreckage of whatever we had just released and I felt, underneath the relief, something harder settling into place inside me.

We had been played.

Not manipulated in any ordinary sense. Not misled by a bureaucratic mistake or a model that turned out to be wrong or a well-intentioned policy that failed in execution. Played. Deliberately. By people who had gathered in a luxury hotel in Manhattan on a Friday morning in October 2019 and spent three and a half hours designing exactly this — the fear, the silence, the compliance, the suppression of every question that might have interrupted the sequence.

While we were isolated in our homes, performing our compliance, the nursing homes were filling. With untested, COVID-positive patients, sent by order, into buildings full of people who could not leave, whose families had been told to stay away for safety, who died in rooms where the window was the last border between them and everyone they loved.

The ships sat empty in the harbors.

The money moved.

The flu disappeared.

And I am asking for the truth. Because some people never got to ask.

Buy Momma Jess a Coffee

Sources

1. New York State Department of Health Advisory, March 25, 2020: “Hospital Discharges and Admissions to Nursing Homes”

2. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, September 2024: Internal Cuomo Administration Documents (Empire Center for Public Policy coverage)

3. New York Attorney General Letitia James, Report on Nursing Home Deaths, January 2021

4. ProPublica, “Fire Through Dry Grass,” July 2020

5. House Select Subcommittee Hearing, “Like Fire Through Dry Grass,” October 2023

6. Department of Justice Press Release, August 26, 2020: Data Requests to Governors of NY, NJ, PA, MI

7. USNI News: USNS Comfort and USNS Mercy patient counts, May 2020

8. Washington Examiner, April 3, 2020: “It’s a joke” — Michael Dowling, Northwell Health

9. CARES Act, Section 3710: 20% Medicare add-on for COVID-19 patients

10. Kaiser Health News analysis of Provider Relief Fund distribution

11. Dr. Scott Jensen, Minnesota State Senator, Fox News interview, April 8, 2020

12. Foundation for Economic Education, April 2020: COVID-19 diagnostic coding incentives

13. HHS Provider Relief Fund: Total $186.5 billion distributed; HRSA repayment terms

14. WHO review of remdesivir: No survival benefit finding

15. FDA prescribing information for remdesivir: hepatotoxicity monitoring requirement

16. CDC FluView data, 2019-2020 season: 38 million cases, 22,000 deaths

17. CDC FluView data, 2020-2021 season: 700 deaths, 0.2% positive test rate

18. CDC MMWR, September 2020: “Decreased Influenza Activity During the COVID-19 Pandemic”

19. Fox News, February 2021: Fauci praises New York response: “They did it correctly”

20. WITF/PA Post, June 2020: Pennsylvania nursing home directive, March 18, 2020

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. — Marcus Aurelius

Before the Game Became Real

My momma called me in February 2020.

Have you heard about this China virus, she said. I’m scared.

I told her the truth as I understood it then and as the documented record has since confirmed.

I am not afraid of the virus, I said. I am afraid how people are going to react. People are going to panic.

I’m not even sure if she fully understood what I meant. Most people didn’t yet. The machinery that runs on human fear is quieter than a pathogen and far more patient. It doesn’t need to kill you. It only needs you frightened enough to stop asking questions.

By March, most had stopped asking questions.

By April, the questions themselves had become dangerous — socially, professionally, in some places legally. Any person who asked whether the models were accurate, whether the protocols made sense, whether the fear was proportionate to the actual risk was not engaging in reasonable inquiry. They were a threat. They were selfish. They were the reason people were dying.

That wasn’t an accident. It certainly wasn’t the organic emergence of public sentiment in a crisis.

It was a documented recommendation carried out with remarkable precision.

Let me show you where it came from.

On October 18, 2019, fifteen people gathered by invitation at The Pierre, a luxury hotel in Manhattan. It was a Friday morning. The exercise began at 8:45 a.m. and ran until 12:30 p.m., three and a half hours, after which the participants went home.

The exercise was called Event 201.

It was hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The participants were senior representatives from multinational corporations, international banks, global public health organizations, and government agencies. Among them was Dr. George Gao, Director-General of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The scenario they were given was this: a novel coronavirus — they called it CAPS, Coronavirus Associated Pulmonary Syndrome — had emerged from pigs in Brazil. It was spreading rapidly. It transmitted easily between people through respiratory droplets. Communities with mild symptoms were unknowingly carrying it across borders. There was no cure. A vaccine was at least a year away.

In the simulation, CAPS infected people globally within six months. By the eighteen month mark it had killed sixty five million people and triggered a global financial crisis.

The participants spent three and a half hours on a Friday morning in October working through what institutions should do “if” something like this happened.

Thirty days later, on November 17, 2019, the first documented case of what would be called COVID-19 appeared in Wuhan, China.

Event 201 was not a secret. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security published it on their website. The World Economic Forum issued a press release. The sessions were recorded and made available. The participants were named. The recommendations that emerged from the exercise were published in a joint statement on January 17, 2020, the same month the world began to understand that something was spreading in China.

This is important. The exercise was not hidden. Hiding it would have been unnecessary and counterproductive. What matters isn’t that it was concealed but what it recommended, and how precisely those recommendations shaped what happened next.

The Event 201 recommendations covered seven areas. Corporate capabilities and public-private partnerships, international stockpiles of medical countermeasures, maintaining global travel and trade, surge manufacturing of vaccines and therapeutics, business engagement in pandemic preparedness, reducing economic impacts of outbreaks, and the seventh:

Communications.

The seventh recommendation is key.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation jointly recommended, in their own published language, that governments and the private sector should assign greater priority to developing methods to combat mis- and disinformation prior to the next pandemic response. They recommended that governments partner with traditional and social media companies to develop approaches to countering misinformation. They recommended developing the ability to flood media with fast, accurate, and consistent information.

And then this: media companies should commit to ensuring that authoritative messages are prioritized and that counter messages are suppressed including through the use of technology.

That sentence was written on October 18, 2019.

It was published in a joint statement on January 17, 2020 — the same month the world began to understand that something was spreading in Wuhan.

By spring of 2020, social media platforms were removing content that contradicted WHO guidance. By summer, doctors who questioned ventilator protocols were losing hospital privileges. By fall, the laboratory origin hypothesis, the possibility that the virus had emerged not from a wet market but from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a biosafety level four research facility eleven kilometers from the market, had been labeled a conspiracy theory by major platforms and quietly removed from circulation.

In May 2021, Facebook changed its policy and announced it would no longer remove posts suggesting COVID-19 was man-made or manufactured. The platform offered no explanation for why the information it had suppressed for more than a year was now permissible.

No one who had been silenced received an apology.

The recommendation had called for the suppression of false messages. But, the laboratory origin hypothesis was not false. It remains an active and unresolved area of scientific inquiry. What it was, in 2020, was inconvenient to the ones controlling the narrative. It was not the only inconvenient thing suppressed.

The PCR testing methodology used to diagnose COVID-19 at scale carried problems that credentialed scientists raised from the beginning. The cycle threshold, the number of amplification cycles used to detect viral material, was set at levels that many scientists argued produced significant numbers of false positives. Kary Mullis, who invented PCR and won the Nobel Prize for doing so, had stated before his death in 2019 that the test was not designed as a diagnostic tool and that cycle threshold settings could be manipulated to find almost anything in almost anyone.

On January 20, 2021, the day of the presidential inauguration, the WHO quietly revised its PCR guidance, recommending lower cycle thresholds and noting that results needed to be interpreted alongside clinical symptoms. This revision was not announced with the urgency of the original guidance. No one explained why the standard had changed nor accounted for what the previous standard had produced.

The case counts that shut schools and closed businesses and kept families from the bedsides of dying people were generated by a methodology that was revised without explanation the moment the political moment shifted.

There is a word for the suppression of inconvenient information in the language of public health and crisis management. The word they chose, in their own published recommendation, was misinformation.

That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s a documented timeline.

Now look at who was in the room.

Among the fifteen players at Event 201 was Avril Haines, then a private citizen and former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In January 2021, President Biden nominated her as Director of National Intelligence, the nation’s highest intelligence position. She was confirmed by the Senate and took office while the pandemic response she had helped model was still shaping policy across the country.

Among the fifteen players was Matthew Harrington, global chief operating officer of Edelman — one of the largest public communications firms on earth, whose annual Trust Barometer shapes how institutions understand and manage public perception globally.

Among the fifteen players was Dr. George Fu Gao, Director General of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention — the man who would be responsible for China’s initial reporting on the outbreak that began in his country thirty days after he left that hotel in Manhattan.

Among the fifteen players was a Vice President from Johnson and Johnson, a company that would receive emergency use authorization for a COVID-19 vaccine in February 2021 and generate billions of dollars in revenue from that authorization.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did not send a player to sit at the table. It built the table. Along with Johns Hopkins and the World Economic Forum, the Foundation co-hosted Event 201, co-authored its recommendations, and co-signed the joint statement published in January 2020. The Foundation's global health portfolio, spanning vaccine development, distribution infrastructure, and public health policy across more than a hundred countries, positioned it to benefit directly from the pandemic response its own recommendations helped architect. Between 2020 and 2022, the Foundation committed more than two billion dollars to COVID-19 response efforts including vaccine development and distribution. The companies and organizations it funded were central to the response it had helped design.

These are not accusations. These are names attached to roles, present in a room, on a date, with recommendations they put their institutions’ names on and published for the world to read.

The paper trail doesn’t tell you what to conclude.

It simply shows you who was at the table before the game became real.

My momma has not fully awakened. She is suspicious now in a way she wasn’t before 2020, but the fear is still there. It lives in her the way learned responses live in the body long after the original threat has passed. She texted me recently, worried about an ebola outbreak. She had seen it on the news.

I told her “fake news” and to watch what happened next.

The headline came. The fear spiked. The coverage intensified for a news cycle, just long enough to feel like the beginning of something, and then it receded. As quickly as it came. Quietly and without explanation. Without the all-clear that should logically follow an all-hands alarm.

It left because enough of us are no longer available to be moved or controlled by it.

That’s not a small thing. It’s a wonderful shift. The result of people who looked at what happened in 2020 and made a decision, not a political or ideological decision, but a deeply human one — that they would not surrender their capacity for independent thought to an institution that had already demonstrated, in its own published recommendations, that it considered that capacity a problem to be managed.

The machinery that runs on human fear requires a one specific ingredient that can’t be manufactured or stockpiled or distributed by any public-private partnership no matter how well funded.

It requires your willingness to be afraid.

My momma called me in February 2020 and told me she was scared. I told her I was not afraid of the virus. I was afraid of a people in panic.

What I know, and what the record now confirms, is that the panic was not a byproduct of the crisis.

It was the product.

The next installment will show you what was done with it.

Buy Momma Jess a Coffee

Sources

Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Event 201 Pandemic Tabletop Exercise. October 18, 2019. centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/tabletop-exercises/event-201-pandemic-tabletop-exercise

Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Public-Private Cooperation for Pandemic Preparedness and Response: A Call to Action. January 17, 2020.

World Economic Forum. Live Simulation Exercise to Prepare Public and Private Leaders for Pandemic Response. Press release, October 15, 2019.

Event 201 Player Biographies. Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. centerforhealthsecurity.org

Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Avril Haines confirmation and appointment, January 2021. dni.gov

Facebook. Policy update on COVID-19 origin claims. May 2021. Reported by multiple outlets including Reuters and The Verge.

World Health Organization. Statement on novel coronavirus, January 30, 2020. who.int

South China Morning Post. First confirmed COVID-19 case traced to November 17, 2019. Reported March 13, 2020.

The Woman Who Ran the Machine

Her father survived the Holocaust, built a media empire, served in Parliament, and was suspected by three different intelligence services of working for all of them simultaneously.

Robert Maxwell was a Czechoslovakian-born British publishing magnate who died in November 1991, falling from his yacht into the Atlantic Ocean under circumstances that were never fully explained. What followed his death was the collapse of everything he had built. His publishing empire was discovered to be hollow at its center. He had secretly siphoned approximately 1.2 billion dollars from two of his flagship public companies and employee pension funds. Two of his children were charged with fraud. The family lost its social standing in Britain almost overnight.

His youngest daughter was left with Oxford credentials, fluency in multiple languages, a Rolodex that crossed continents, and the practiced ease of someone who had spent a lifetime moving among the most powerful people in the world.

She also arrived in New York with nothing left to lose.

Jeffrey Epstein was waiting.

There is something in the documented record that the federal indictment could not capture and that a sentencing guideline has no category for.

Ghislaine Maxwell was ferocious in her devotion to Jeffrey Epstein. Not merely complicit or present. Ferocious. The testimony of household staff, the organizational precision documented in federal filings, the rules imposed on everyone around her — all of it points to a woman who calibrated every detail of another person’s comfort and pleasure with an intensity that went beyond partnership or even loyalty. She managed Epstein the way someone manages a thing they are terrified of losing.

I am not saying this in her defense. I am saying it because it is the most complete picture of what she was.

She had learned this from someone.

Robert Maxwell was the kind of man whose approval was never fully available. He built an empire on secrecy and demanded everything from the people around him, and when he died it was discovered that he had taken from the people who trusted him everything they had and left behind a wreckage his children were expected to survive. Ghislaine was his youngest. The last one still auditioning when the curtain came down.

She spent the next thirty years devoted to a man who had the same hunger her father had. The same appetite for power, for access, for the pleasure of having things other people couldn’t have. Epstein was hollow at his center too. The money and connections were real. What was not real was the possibility that a woman could ever do enough to fill what was empty in him.

She tried anyway. With a ferocity that destroyed the lives of girls who had nothing to do with what Robert Maxwell had done to his daughter.

That is not an excuse. It is the full weight of what a damaged person can become when no one stops them and everyone looks away.

Maxwell and Epstein’s association began earlier than most people assume. Their connection dated to the 1980s, before her father’s death, not after it. She had been sharing her social network with Epstein for years.

After their romantic relationship ended in the 1990s they remained close. Epstein described Maxwell as his best friend. The friendship was also a business arrangement. What Maxwell brought to the operation was irreplaceable: access, legitimacy, and a social fluency that Epstein, for all his money, could never fully manufacture on his own.

Between 1994 and 2004, Maxwell coordinated, facilitated, and contributed to Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of women and underage girls. Those are not the words of a prosecutor or a journalist. They are the words of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, written in its published opinion affirming her conviction.

The operation had a structure. Maxwell recruited. She groomed. She normalized. She was present.

She was not a passive bystander who looked away. The federal record is explicit on this point.

What the Federal Record Shows

Court testimony from Juan Alessi, the former house manager of Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion who worked there from 1995 to 2002, detailed Maxwell’s role in the household. From the day she arrived, he testified, she immediately took over as lady of the house. She imposed strict rules on staff. She took photographs constantly, keeping an album of images on her desk.

The Department of Justice documented Maxwell’s grooming methods in federal filings. She would take young girls on shopping trips. She paid for travel and education opportunities. She discussed their personal lives with them. She was present during their initial interactions with Epstein, providing the assurance and comfort of an adult woman who seemed not only to approve of what was happening but to invite it.

She discussed sexual topics in front of victims. She undressed in front of them. She normalized what was coming by making herself familiar first.

I have spent a long time with the primary source material in this case. The files. The testimony. The depositions. And the detail that has never left me is not from a legal document. It is from a girl’s diary.

Virginia Giuffre wrote about her confusion over why Maxwell — the woman she had come to trust, the woman who had paid attention to her and taken her places and seemed to care about her — was allowing this to happen. Allowing it. That word. As if Maxwell were a passive presence in the room rather than the architect of it.

That confusion is the most precise documentation of what grooming actually does. It doesn’t make victims complicit. It makes them unable to locate the betrayal until it is too late. Because the betrayal is wearing the face of someone they believed was on their side.

Of course, Maxwell understood this. She built it deliberately. The shopping trips and the conversations and the photographs on her desk and the practiced warmth of a woman of the world who seemed to find these girls worthy of her attention — all of it was architecture. All of it was the machine running exactly as designed.

The Verdict

On December 29, 2021, following a one-month jury trial in the Southern District of New York, Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty on five of six counts.

The convictions: conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts. Conspiracy to transport minors to participate in illegal sex acts. Transporting a minor to participate in illegal sex acts. Sex trafficking conspiracy. Sex trafficking of a minor.

Five counts. Convicted on all five.

Federal prosecutors sought a sentence between 30 and 55 years, citing the number of victims and what they called Maxwell’s utter lack of remorse. They described her in sentencing filings as a calculating, sophisticated, and dangerous criminal who preyed on vulnerable young girls and groomed them for sexual abuse. Her practice of targeting vulnerable victims, they wrote, reflected her view that struggling young girls could be treated like disposable objects.

On June 28, 2022, Maxwell stood before the court in shackles and spoke. She addressed the victims briefly. She said she was sorry for the pain they had experienced. But, I have listened to her deposition tapes. I didn’t feel an ounce of remorse from Maxwell over her actions.

Then, on that 28th day in June, she told the victims: Jeffrey Epstein should have been here before all of you.

Even then. Even standing in shackles before the women whose childhoods she had helped destroy. She pointed toward Epstein.

Judge Alison Nathan sentenced Maxwell to 240 months in federal prison. Twenty years. She was also fined $750,000, the maximum allowable under law. The federal Probation Department had described the crimes as heinous and predatory in nature.

Every Door Closed

Maxwell did not accept the verdict.

She appealed on multiple grounds. She argued that the 2007 Non-Prosecution Agreement negotiated in Florida should have barred her prosecution entirely, that the indictment violated the statute of limitations, and that juror misconduct during voir dire entitled her to a new trial.

Every argument failed.

On September 17, 2024, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld Maxwell’s five felony convictions and her twenty year sentence in a published opinion. The court ruled that the NPA bound only the Southern District of Florida, not federal prosecutors in New York. The same document that had protected Epstein from federal prosecution in 2008 could not protect Maxwell sixteen years later.

She petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States.

On October 6, 2025, the Supreme Court declined to hear her case, without comment, leaving her conviction and twenty year sentence intact.

Every door closed. Every appeal exhausted. The conviction stands.

Ghislaine Maxwell is currently serving her sentence at FCI Tallahassee in Florida. Her earliest possible release date, accounting for good behavior, is in the late 2030s. She will be in her seventies.

What the Federal Case Did Not Answer

Here is what the documented record does not resolve.

The federal case against Maxwell covered the years 1994 to 2004. Ten years. But Epstein’s operation did not stop in 2004. Victim testimony and the Virgin Islands civil suit document activity continuing as recently as 2018. Maxwell’s conviction addressed one decade of a much longer pattern.

The indictment named four victims. Thirty six women were identified in Julie K. Brown’s investigation alone. The full scope of what Maxwell coordinated, facilitated, and contributed to remains incompletely prosecuted.

The Non-Prosecution Agreement that Acosta negotiated in 2007 extended immunity to unnamed co-conspirators. Those names have never been made fully public. Maxwell was convicted. But the document that protected others from the same fate remains in effect for those still unnamed within it.

The client list that prosecutors described has never been released in full. The flight logs showed names. The deposition testimony named names. The civil suits named names. The full accounting of who participated, who knew, and who was protected has not been made public.

The fact that the girls trusted her is heartbreaking. Trusting someone can be an undoing in the most terrible form, if evil lives within the trustee.

Some of them may have even initially loved her the way young girls love a woman who seems to see them, who takes them places and asks about their lives and moves through the world with the kind of confidence that makes you feel safe just standing near it.

Maxwell was that woman to them at first. Polished. Credentialed. Connected. She arrived in their lives like something rare and generous, like someone who had chosen them specifically out of everything available to her. For girls without enough protection, that choosing felt like grace. Almost every victim testimony includes a notion that the victim thought Ghislaine wanted to help them.

It was the oldest trick in the world dressed in the finest clothes.

She is in prison, rightly so. The men who wore the finest clothes are not.

That accounting belongs in a future installment.

Buy Momma Jess a Coffee

Sources

United States v. Maxwell, No. 20-cr-330 (S.D.N.Y. 2021). Federal indictment, trial record, and sentencing filings.

United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Opinion affirming conviction, September 17, 2024.

Supreme Court of the United States. Order declining certiorari, October 6, 2025.

Alessi, Juan. Trial testimony, United States v. Maxwell, December 2021.

Farmer, Annie. Trial testimony, United States v. Maxwell, December 2021.

Department of Justice. Sentencing memorandum, United States v. Maxwell, 2022.

Brown, Julie K. Perversion of Justice. Dey Street Books, 2021.

Giuffre, Virginia. Civil deposition testimony. Various federal filings.

Virgin Islands Department of Justice. Civil suit against Epstein estate, 2022.

Non-Prosecution Agreement, United States v. Epstein, Southern District of Florida, 2007.

What the Government Signed

Installment One of The Paper Trail: The documented record of how Jeffrey Epstein

was protected, location by location, by the institutions built to stop him.

On September 24, 2007, a document was signed in Southern Florida that should have never existed. It was called a Non-Prosecution Agreement. What it actually was, was a rescue. A federal lifeline extended to a man the FBI had already built a case against. A case that, by every legal standard, should have ended in federal charges, a trial, and a sentence measured in decades.

Instead, Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to two state-level prostitution charges. He served 13 months in a county jail and was permitted to leave six days a week on work release. The victims were not told. Not notified, consulted, or warned that the federal government had quietly folded its hand while they were still waiting for justice. That silence was not an oversight.

A federal judge ruled in 2019 that it was a violation of the Crime Victims Rights Act. That ruling is public record. The man who signed that agreement was Alexander Acosta, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. He would later become the United States Secretary of Labor. He resigned that post in July 2019. Not because of a political scandal. Not because of policy failure. Because a Miami Herald reporter named Julie K. Brown refused to let a sealed document stay buried.

The document existed. The signatures were real. The protection it provided was extensive. And someone made sure the victims never knew.

* * *

The Non-Prosecution Agreement was not a short document hastily assembled. It was fifty three pages. It was negotiated over months between Acosta’s office and Epstein’s legal team, which included prominent defense attorneys Alan Dershowitz and Jay Lefkowitz. The negotiation itself was conducted in secret, away from the victims, away from the public, and away from the prosecutors who had spent years building the federal case.

What the agreement contained was extraordinary even by the standards of generous plea arrangements. Epstein would face no federal charges. His named associates would face no federal charges. But the provision that has drawn the most scrutiny is the one extending immunity to unnamed co-conspirators. People whose identities were not listed. People the document protected without ever acknowledging publicly that they existed.

Read that again slowly.

The United States government granted immunity to unnamed individuals in connection with one of the most extensive sex trafficking investigations the FBI had ever built. And then sealed the document so the victims could not read it.

Courtney Wild was fourteen years old when Epstein began abusing her. She was one of the victims who fought in federal court for the right to simply be informed. To be told what had been decided on her behalf. That fight took years. Judge Kenneth Marra ruled in her favor in 2019, finding that prosecutors had violated the Crime Victims Rights Act by concealing the agreement from victims like her.

The government had an obligation to tell her. They chose not to.

* * *

The terms of Epstein’s work release designated his Palm Beach office as his approved destination. Six days a week he left the county jail. Six days a week he was, by legal arrangement, supposed to be conducting legitimate business. The Palm Beach Sheriff’s office was responsible for monitoring that compliance. What that monitoring actually looked like became its own documented scandal. A subsequent investigation raised serious questions about whether the terms of his work release were adequately enforced. Whether anyone was genuinely tracking where Jeffrey Epstein went and what he did on those six days every week for thirteen months.

The investigation into the Sheriff’s office is public record.

Victim accounts, documented in legal filings by victims’ attorney Bradley Edwards, allege that the abuse did not stop during this period. These are not anonymous claims. They are statements made by named individuals in federal legal proceedings. They are part of the documented record of this case.

What is not in dispute is this: a man the FBI had identified as a serial predator who had abused dozens of minors was granted the privilege of leaving his jail cell six days a week. The agency responsible for ensuring he complied with the terms of that arrangement failed to do so adequately by its own documented record.

Thirteen months. Six days a week. Inadequate monitoring. Victim accounts alleging continued abuse.

The Non-Prosecution Agreement did not just protect Epstein from the past. There is documented reason to believe it created conditions that allowed the present to continue.

* * *

The Non-Prosecution Agreement might have stayed buried permanently. Epstein served his arrangement, registered as a sex offender, and returned to his life largely intact. His properties. His foundations. His social connections. His aircraft.

The Senate confirmation process required Acosta to answer for his record. Under oath, on congressional record. Senators questioned him directly about the Epstein plea deal. About the secrecy. About the victims who were never notified.

Acosta’s defense was striking. He claimed that federal prosecution had been uncertain. That the case might not have held up. That the arrangement had secured at least some accountability where none might otherwise have existed. Career federal prosecutors who had worked the case disagreed. Publicly. On record.

FBI agents who built the original case have stated in documented interviews that the federal case was solid. That the evidence was there. That the decision to stand down came from above the investigators who had done the work.

Acosta was confirmed. He took office.

Then Julie K. Brown published her investigation in November 2018.

By July 2019 Acosta was standing in a White House driveway announcing his resignation. He said he did not want the Epstein case to be a distraction. He did not dispute Brown’s reporting.

The victims are still waiting for a full accounting of every name that document protected.

* * *

9 East 71st Street, Manhattan

The townhouse at 9 East 71st Street sits between Fifth and Madison Avenues on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It is known formally as the Herbert N. Straus House. Seven floors, twenty eight thousand square feet. One of the largest private residences in Manhattan.

Les Wexner bought it in 1989 for approximately 13 million dollars. Wexner was the founder of L Brands, the retail empire behind Victoria’s Secret, Bath and Body Works, and Abercrombie & Fitch. He renovated the property extensively. In 1991, Wexner granted Epstein power of attorney over his finances, a role that gave Epstein nearly limitless control over one of the largest private fortunes in America. That power of attorney allowed Epstein to hire people, sign checks, buy and sell properties, borrow money, and do anything else of a legally binding nature on Wexner’s behalf.

In 1998, Wexner sold the townhouse to Epstein for 20 million dollars. What happened next is documented in property records. In 2011, Epstein transferred the mansion to Maple Inc., a U.S. Virgin Islands entity, for zero dollars in recorded consideration. Epstein signed the transaction documents for both sides: as representative of the seller, and as representative of the buyer. There was no independent party on either end. One person, two signatures, and one of Manhattan’s most valuable residential properties moved offshore without a dollar changing hands.

The property was valued by New York City at approximately 56 million dollars in 2019. It was not just a residence. Victim testimony entered into federal court proceedings and documented in Julie K. Brown”s investigation identifies this address specifically. It is where girls were brought and abused. Where the pattern documented by the FBI played out across years. Where staff worked and where prominent visitors came and went. When federal authorities searched the property following Epstein’s 2019 arrest, they found a collection of material believed to contain images of children. This is a documented finding from a federal search of the premises.

The townhouse eventually sold in 2021 for approximately 51 million dollars. Funds from the sale were transferred to the Epstein Victims Compensation Program. The identity of the buyer was not disclosed.

In February 2026, Representative Ro Khanna revealed that the FBI had once listed Les Wexner as a potential Epstein co-conspirator. That disclosure is part of the congressional record. Wexner has not been charged with any crime.

* * *

Little St. James, U.S. Virgin Islands

If the Manhattan townhouse was where Jeffrey Epstein operated in plain sight, Little St. James was where he disappeared entirely from oversight.

Epstein purchased Little St. James in April 1998 through a company called L.S.J. LLC for 7.95 million dollars. The island sits approximately one mile southeast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Roughly seventy acres. Accessible only by helicopter or private boat.

He called it Little St. Jeff’s.

The seclusion was not incidental. The U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General stated directly that the island’s isolation was designed to make it difficult for government officials to monitor Epstein’s behavior, and even harder for the young girls brought there to escape.

Over two decades Epstein developed the island extensively. A main residence. Guest houses. Additional structures. By 2019 it was valued at approximately 63.8 million dollars. In 2016 he purchased the neighboring Great St. James Island, 162 acres, for 22.5 million dollars.

He made Little St. James his primary legal residence. That decision carried significant tax advantages under U.S. Virgin Islands law. A predator operating a trafficking network had arranged his legal domicile on a private island accessible only by aircraft or boat.

The Virgin Islands Attorney General’s civil suit alleged that over two decades Epstein transported young women and girls to his private Caribbean islands by helicopter and boat and subjected them to sexual abuse. The alleged activity occurred as recently as 2018. The suit alleged victims as young as eleven years old. These allegations are contained in a civil enforcement action filed by the government of the United States Virgin Islands under that territory’s human trafficking statutes.

One victim statement contained in DOJ files states: “One day I was in severe distress and afraid. I tried to escape Epstein and the others by trying to swim off Little St. James. After spending the day being raped, bullied, and belittled, Epstein and Maxwell, brought me back as if nothing happened.”

That statement is in the federal record.

In a separate documented incident, a fifteen year old who was forced into sexual acts with Epstein attempted to escape by swimming off the island. Epstein’s crew assembled a search team, found her, and took her passport.

Two days after Epstein’s death in August 2019, the FBI executed search warrants on Little St. James. Agents arrived by helicopter and boat. Documents, electronic devices, and physical evidence were seized from multiple structures on the property.

In November 2022 the Virgin Islands reached a settlement with the Epstein estate for 105 million dollars in cash plus half the proceeds from the planned sale of the island.

JPMorgan Chase separately settled related claims with the U.S. Virgin Islands for 75 million dollars in 2023.

A major American bank. Seventy five million dollars. Settled.

That line will be addressed in full in a later installment.

* * *

Zorro Ranch, New Mexico

Zorro Ranch sits thirty miles south of Santa Fe in the high desert of New Mexico. Seven thousand six hundred acres. A 26,700 square foot hilltop mansion. Guest houses. A pool. A firehouse. Heated garages. A private airstrip with a hangar and a helipad.

Epstein purchased it in 1993 from Bruce King, a three-time Democratic Governor of

New Mexico. He was never charged with a single crime related to what happened there. Multiple victims have alleged abuse at Zorro Ranch. Virginia Giuffre provided photographs of herself at the property in legal filings. Annie Farmer and a victim identified in court proceedings only as Jane both testified about abuse they experienced at the ranch during Ghislaine Maxwell’s federal sex trafficking trial. That trial ended in a conviction. Their testimony is federal court record.

Chauntae Davis told CBS News in 2019 that she was raped at Zorro Ranch at least twice.

The ranch’s former manager told the FBI that Epstein flew in guests and masseuses to the property and hired local massage therapists to work there. That account appears in the Epstein files.

Federal document files place Epstein engaged in sex with underage girls on a daily basis during his stays at the ranch, and identify Ghislaine Maxwell as present during multiple visits, actively recruiting victims there.

* * *

The documented victim testimony from Zorro Ranch is federal court record. It was entered into evidence at Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial in December 2021. Maxwell was convicted.

Annie Farmer testified using her real name, the only accuser in the Maxwell trial to do so. She told jurors she was sixteen years old in 1996 when she accepted an invitation to Zorro Ranch, believing Epstein and Maxwell wanted to help fund her education. When she arrived, she had been told there would be many other people at the ranch.

There were not.

During what was framed as a massage, Maxwell fondled her breasts. Epstein climbed into her bed without her permission. Farmer testified that she felt frozen. She knew she was in an isolated location with powerful adults and she did not know how to respond. Throughout her testimony Farmer read aloud from her teenage diary. She said she knew the ranch was isolated and she felt she could not speak out or fight back. “I thought I just needed to get through this and I would be fine”, she told the jury, her voice breaking.

She was sixteen. She was alone. And she was right that she just needed to survive the weekend.

A victim identified in court proceedings only as Jane testified she was fourteen years old when Maxwell and Epstein recruited her. She was flown to Zorro Ranch and forced to participate in what she described as orgies. Her testimony is part of the federal record that convicted Ghislaine Maxwell.

Federal document files place Epstein engaged in sex with underage girls on a daily basis during his stays at the ranch, and identify Maxwell as present during multiple visits, actively recruiting victims there.

These are not rumors. They are the evidentiary foundation of a federal conviction.

* * *

Yet no one was ever charged with a crime specifically related to Zorro Ranch. The property operated for more than two decades. Victims came forward. Tips were filed. Investigations were opened and then quietly closed. The New Mexico Department of

Justice’s first criminal investigation ended in 2019 at the request of federal authorities, who said the state’s investigation could overlap with the federal prosecution. Epstein died that same year. The federal prosecution ended with him. And Zorro Ranch remained unsearched.

In 2019, two separate communications were sent to authorities raising alarms about Zorro Ranch. Both were documented. Both were filed. Neither resulted in a search of the property.

The first was an anonymous email received by Albuquerque radio host Eddy Aragon alleging that two foreign girls had been buried in the hills outside the ranch on orders of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The sender claimed the girls died by strangulation. Aragon forwarded the email to the FBI.

The second was a communication from a retired New Mexico State Police officer who had patrolled the area around Zorro Ranch for fifteen years. He described a barn on the property with a garage door configured as a sally port and a chimney, and stated his concern that the property could potentially have an incinerator concealed within the barn. He told the FBI there had been a lot of high-profile people seen frequently at the ranch.

The FBI received both communications in 2019. In the months that followed, federal agents searched Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, his Palm Beach mansion, and Little St. James. They deliberately excluded Zorro Ranch.

The ranch was not searched for the first time until March 2026. Six years later.

What compelled that search was not a change in investigative priorities. It was the forced public release of documents the government had spent years fighting to keep sealed, released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act signed into law in November 2025. The tips had been buried in those files. When the files became public, the tips became undeniable.

Physical evidence recovered during the March 2026 search has not been publicly described. The New Mexico Attorney General”s office has stated it will not comment on the active investigation.

A New Mexico legislative truth commission has been established with subpoena power over fourteen state and federal agencies. A state prosecutor serving on the commission stated publicly: “this commission will build a complete documented public record. We will name who was responsible and we will do so with the evidentiary rigor that survivors deserve.”

That investigation is ongoing as this is written.

The anonymous tip may prove to be false. Tips sometimes are. But a documented tip alleging that two girls were buried on a property where federal victims testified to daily abuse was received by the FBI in 2019. The FBI searched every other Epstein property. They did not search the ranch. That is not allegation. That is the documented record.

And someone needs to explain it.

* * *

SOURCES

Non-Prosecution Agreement (2007): U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, filed and

unsealed 2019

Crime Victims Rights Act ruling: Judge Kenneth Marra, U.S. District Court, S.D. Florida, 2019

Miami Herald: “Perversion of Justice”; investigative series, Julie K. Brown, November 2018

Ghislaine Maxwell trial transcript: U.S. District Court, S.D. New York, December 2021; Maxwell convicted on five counts including sex trafficking of a minor

Virginia Islands AG civil suit: USVI v. Epstein Estate, filed January 2020; settled November 2022 for $105 million

JPMorgan Chase settlement: $75 million, U.S. Virgin Islands, 2023 (Reuters)

Victim statement re: Little St. James escape: DOJ Epstein file release, January 2026

15-year-old passport incident: USVI AG civil complaint, court record

Property records: NYC property valuation records; USVI property records; New Mexico property records

Les Wexner power of attorney: documented 1991, revoked 2007; congressional testimony and Epstein file releases 2025-2026

Wexner as potential co-conspirator: Rep. Ro Khanna, House Oversight Committee, February 2026

FBI tips re: Zorro Ranch: Epstein Files Transparency Act document release, January 2026; World Socialist Web Site reporting, March 2026

First search of Zorro Ranch: New Mexico AG Raul Torrez, March 2026

New Mexico truth commission: NM House vote 62-0, February 16, 2026; subpoenas issued June 2026

Annie Farmer testimony: Maxwell trial, December 10, 2021 (CBS News, Reuters, Al Jazeera court reporting)

Acosta Senate confirmation hearings: U.S. Senate HELP Committee, 2017, congressional record

Acosta resignation: July 12, 2019, White House press statement

Epstein Files Transparency Act: signed November 19, 2025

Next installment: Ghislaine Maxwell. The conviction. The sentence. The questions that remain.

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