TR 677 - Beware of the Snare (Part 3): Is there a Baby in the Bath Water?

Let’s do this…

In the interest of time, I’m going to skip the introduction and truncate the recap. Suffice it to say there is a new narrative making the rounds, suggesting that Trump, Musk, and DOGE are facilitating an “authoritarian transformation” on behalf of the “tech elite” for the purpose of gaining total control over the whole of society.

I’ve called b******t and tackled this narrative head on in the last two reports:

I’m going to move forward today, making two assumptions: 1) that you are up to speed on the source materials (the origins of this new narrative); and 2) that you’ve been following along and have either read or listened to both of the last two reports.

We’ve covered a lot of ground and discussed a lot of details, drilling down on the language used, the obvious omissions, and what I believe to be the underlying intent of a pair of articles written by Erik Wikstrom.

On February 15th, Wikstrom wrote an article titled, “Checkmate: The Triumph of Technocracy — How Trump, Elon & the Tech Elite are paving the way for a Brave New World - And what it means for all of us.”

In just over a week, he has over 200 likes and comments:

Which is REALLY impressive, given that he only launched his Substack two weeks ago:

It turns out there are many Erik Wikstroms in the world, and some of them are PhDs, CPAs, and college professors — all of whom have a long and well documented online presence — which is why it struck me as odd to find this Erik Wikstrom’s substack sitting at #2 in the search results, linking to none other than his one-week-old article suggesting that Trump, Musk, and DOGE are facilitating an “authoritarian transformation” on behalf of the tech elite:

What a fascinating coincidence.

How does this guy seemingly come out of nowhere and skyrocket to the top of the search results with a two-week-old Substack? How does he get so much traction and engagement so quickly? Like I side yesterday, I smell a rat.

It’s also very curious to me that Wikstrom has gotten so much traction having only written three articles on Substack in English — plus his very first article, which was written in Swedish. Yet another curious coincidence, is it not?

It seems only fair to point out that I have been writing on Substack consistently since November 2022, publishing over 750 posts (including 677 Torch Reports), and my traction at this point is still nowhere near Wikstrom’s:

Maybe he’s just a much better writer than I am.

Maybe he’s great and I suck.

Maybe.

Or, maybe, like I said yesterday—maybe, just maybe—this guy is affiliated with, or working on behalf of, one of the groups that are feeling most threatened by DOGE.

The timing of his launch, the target audience and sophistication of the propaganda, the instant traction, the mysterious nature of the man himself, the occult symbolism in his profile picture, shooting to the top of the search results, his first post being in Swedish, all of it, seems to smack of something suspicious, doesn’t it?

But let’s not get lost in the weeds here.

I’ve said from the beginning that Wikstrom’s writing is thorough, and that it contains many elements of truth. I’ve used words like “provocative” and “seductive” to describe his style. I’ve gone line-by-line through sections of his essay, demonstrating how solid truths are being couched in false premise, which is classic misdirection.

He’s connecting “very real dots,” I said yesterday — nodding to the fact, again, that much of what he says is true — but he’s connecting them in an intentionally misleading way. Think about ho