A Herd of Goats

America doesn't lack a scapegoat. It has a surplus — and the sins never leave the camp.

The Great Goat Escape

²¹ And Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins. And he shall put them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a man who is in readiness. ²² The goat shall bear all their iniquities on itself to a remote area, and he shall let the goat go free in the wilderness.

Leviticus 16:21-22

While the wandering Semite tribes were camped at the base of Mount Sinai, Moses instituted a plan to solve the collective sin problem of the wayward Israelites. The “escape goat” reflected the goat's function: it was not killed by the priest but was sent away alive into the wilderness, symbolically carrying the sins of the people away from the community. The Israelites "escaped" their sins by appointing someone (some goat) to bear the blame for others.

This consolidation of sin by one goat, one priesthood, one congregation, and collective sins driven into one wilderness is efficient as long as there is an exclusive arrangement. If three priests load three different goats with three different sin-lists and drive them into three wildernesses, no one experiences atonement, because atonement requires the whole community to agree that the sins went out with that goat. Competing scapegoats don't divide the atonement among themselves — they cancel it entirely. Blame that isn't consolidated provides no absolution, no atonement and the goats run wild.

In a rheopolitical age, goats are no longer merely psychological symbols. They identify the supposed blockage in the global flow. Every faction names a different obstruction to circulation. The four factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class have no shortage of scapegoats. In fact there is a surplus, a herd of goats, dispersed in all directions, and the sins never leave the camp.

Gramsci’s Goat

In Gramscian terms, the hegemon uses mass culture and media to transform legitimate economic and social grievances (caused by the system itself) into psychological or cultural problems. By scapegoating specific groups, usually minorities, immigrants, or dissidents, the ruling elite deflects blame away from the structural failures of capitalism or their own leadership. Unlike the biblical ritual which removes sin to purify the community, the Gramscian scapegoat is used to preserve a corrupt order. It is a tool of passive revolution, where the elite absorb or deflect revolutionary energy to maintain dominance without addressing the root causes of the crisis.

A state or ruling class that has full cultural authority and material legitimacy has no need of goats because it delivers safety, security and prosperity — the trains run on time and the possibility of upward mobility exists. It may perform a goat ritual as needed because it holds a monopoly on blame, but it can function without resorting to the goat-blaming game. A decaying hegemon with some cultural authority but fading legitimacy needs a goat to blame for its failures. Although it maintains a voice in the media and academia — it can still sing in Yarvin’s Cathedral, but the trains are late, the cost of living is high, and the youth horizon is bleak.

(We will discuss the youth horizon in a forthcoming chapter. For now, it is defined as the future outlook of a society’s young people, especially the young intelligentsia: Do they see prosperity on the horizon?)

The ability to maintain a scapegoat isn't an aberration of ruling class power, it’s one of its key elements: only a ruling class that still holds cultural authority can say "this is the source of our woes" and everyone nods in agreement. A unified ruling class can either consolidate blame or dispense with scapegoats entirely, because it can deliver legitimacy via material prosperity instead.

A unified hegemon only needs one explanation for social failure. A fractured ruling class requires multiple explanations because each faction must redirect blame away from itself and toward its rivals. The number of competing scapegoats measures the fragmentation of elite legitimacy. The equation is legitimacy is inversely proportional to the number of scapegoats.

Exceptionalism Meets Decline

The American Empire is in decline, the rules-based order has ruptured and three of the four factions are rooted in the faltering Empire — a hegemon struggling with its cultural authority and failing to provide material legitimacy. America’s exceptionalism took root in the Puritan’s City on a Hill theology — John Winthrop’s sermon in 1630 framed the New England settlement as a divinely chosen model for the world. America’s civil religion cannot easily explain decline. Therefore decline requires an enemy.

The Nazis provided the Jews as a source for all of Germany’s woes. Germany in 1933 is what happens when one faction wins the ritual outright — one goat is blamed — a resolution the fractured American elite cannot achieve: immigrants are to blame, Jews are to blame, the deep state is to blame. The Democrats blame the Republicans and the Republicans blame the Democrats — all Americans are pointing fingers.

The conspiratorial commentariat points the finger inwards. A significant percentage of Americans could not fathom that nineteen Saudi Arabians with box cutters could take down the Twin Towers, so a suitable explanation was achieved with a conspiracy theory of controlled demolition. The CIA, Mossad and the nefarious cabal were to blame.

Similarly, during COVID, the factional war revealed itself: One congregation loaded up the scapegoat with the unvaccinated, the maskless, the superspreader — “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” passports, firings, exclusion from restaurants and family tables. The other congregation loaded up Fauci, Bill Gates, the lab, the pharma companies, the public-health establishment itself. Two priesthoods, two goats, two wildernesses — running in parallel, each side serving as the other side’s goat.

Load Your Own Goat

However, it is not just the American ruling class who are fractured and producing goats. One size goat fits all is not possible with the civil war within the Transnational Capitalist Class — the four factions are each adamant in their rhetoric of blame.

Imperial Nationalists transfer the sins of the nation onto the heads of immigrants. ICE is fully funded and militarized, rounding up the sinners and shipping them off to detention centers (in the wilderness) for deportation to their home countries. This is literal and metaphorical scapegoating.

The State Capitalists, primarily China, blame the imperial West, specifically the USA who are creeping inside China and fomenting color revolutions. In May 2026, China’s Ministry of State Security explicitly blamed "hostile foreign forces" (didui shili) for funding influencers and promoting the "lying flat" movement among Chinese youth, whose youth horizon is bleak. “Young people are China’s future and have also become a primary target for ideological infiltration by hostile anti-China forces abroad,” claimed the press release.

As Russia faces GDP contraction, high inflation, and a budget crisis in 2026, the Kremlin attributes these issues to "unfriendly" Western sanctions and alleged sabotage by foreign intelligence services. State media narratives claim that Western countries are deliberately destabilizing the global economy to hurt Russia, thereby deflecting blame from domestic mismanagement, excessive military spending, and the structural flaws of a war economy.

“There is a war going on, this is a real war. Do you know why it’s a war? Because it all started as a special military operation. It continues as a war because behind Kyiv stand Berlin, Paris, The Hague, Oslo, and, unfortunately, Washington,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with VGTRK correspondent Pavel Zarubin on July 5, 2026.

The Davos World Economic Forum continues to publish threat reports that list disinformation, populism itself as existential threats. According to the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2026, misinformation, disinformation and societal polarization are among the most severe short-term threats to global stability, driven largely by the rise of populism and AI-enabled narrative attacks. Its number one threat, however is “geoeconomic confrontation”, a euphemism for the weaponization of economic tools such as sanctions and export controls by the Trump administration.

The Munich Security Report 2026, titled Under Destruction, identifies U.S. President Donald Trump as the most prominent “demolition man” actively dismantling the post-1945 international order. The report characterizes the current global era as one of “wrecking-ball politics,” where leaders prioritize the destruction of existing institutions over reform, leading to “a world shaped by transactional deals rather than principled cooperation.”

Silicon Valley’s Stampede of Goats

Silicon Valley offers up a plethora of goats, a veritable stampede. Balaji Srinivasan, the Network State visionary identifies the "Paper Belt"— the alliance of Washington D.C. (regulation), Boston (higher education), Los Angeles (entertainment), and New York City (media/finance) — as the primary internal drag on America. He blames China for dismantling America's industrial base and manufacturing supply chain, leaving the U.S. militarily and economically vulnerable. He further argues the Internet and crypto have destroyed the revenue models of legacy media and finance. Simultaneously, he argues the populist right has turned against immigration and globalism, cutting off the flow of talent (H-1B visas) that built Silicon Valley.

Patri Friedman, grandson of Milton Friedman, and founder of the Seasteading Institute blames “government monopoly”, “folk activism” as well as zoning, regulation and the education system.

Anduril weapons manufacturer Palmer Luckey scapegoats “Davos elites”, globalists and Silicon Valley elites who have captured “the Uniparty” or “mono-party” to serve the corporatocracy.

Peter Thiel, Palantir founder, identifies universities as the root cause of American stagnation. He argues that elite institutions like Stanford and Harvard have become "bubbles" of political correctness and conformity that suppress independent thought and innovation, including the brainwashing of Silicon Valley. Thiel views the federal government as a "senile, central-left regime" paralyzed by rules and regulations.

Ironically, Thiel’s philosophical mentor is René Girard, the man who wrote the book on the scapegoat mechanism, which is how a society operates to prevent total self-destruction, by spontaneously and unanimously redirecting accumulated violence onto a single individual or minority group — the scapegoat. The man who learned from Girard that societies survive by unanimously designating scapegoats now participates in a stampede where designating goats is never unanimous.

Curtis Yarvin, house philosopher of Silicon Valley blames elite universities, mainstream media, and democracy itself which he sees as an inefficient, "malignant" system that inevitably leads to chaos and mob rule.

Seen from above, a herd of goats is a necessary narrative. Seen from below, a herd of goats is elite fracture with no unified cultural hegemony, no shared theodicy, and no material legitimacy to present to the disconnected, extracted and mortgaged classes who increasingly view the TCC as a money-hoarding parasitical class.

Invisible Killer Goats

The conspiratorial commentariat are similarly chaotic and incoherent, although they are unanimous on the theory that there is a secret herd hiding in the wilderness, preying on mankind. They not only blame the goats — they insist they are invisible killer goats.

However, they are radically splintered over the question of what kind of goats they are — Vatican, Jews, aliens, communists, freemasons, WEF, deep state or all of the above. Interchangeable killer goats is evidence of a speculative theory hardening into dogma. Interchangeability proves the blank slot precedes the evidence — the conspiracist does not reason from evidence to the Freemasons; he or she inherits a conspiracy demanding a cabal and auditions candidates.

For a deep dive:

Hats Off to the Conspiratorial Commentariat

The factions presented in this book are not interchangeable. Each faction is anchored in a specific set of physical and institutional assets, things that exist in the real world, own or operate infrastructure, employ people, and can be pointed to — rather than in an ideology, a mood, or a Bilderberg attendee list.

We cannot swap out the Imperial Nationalists for Davos because Davos's underlying layer is the settlement and rule-making machinery — SWIFT, Basel, central banks, asset managers, the regulatory apparatus of market access. The Imperial Nationalists' layer is the hard power state — the defense contractors, overseas bases, the security services, the carrier groups. Silicon Valley's is the compute stack — data centers, chips, platforms, launch capacity. The State Capitalists' is the party-state fusion — SOEs, CIPS, the industrial base, the Belt and Road infrastructure.

In each case the faction is its asset base before it is its worldview; the worldview is downstream of what the assets need. Each faction’s model of capitalism is combined with its material ability to deny the others. That's why the faction test works the way it does — denial capacity requires something material to deny with.

In contrast, the cabal of the conspiracist’s dark imagination has no underlying layer. It isn't defined by controlling ports or clearing systems or fabs; it's defined purely by intention — a malevolent will floating free of any particular machinery. That is why the occupant of the slot can rotate from Jesuits to Jews to lizards to the WEF without the theory needing revision: pure agents are interchangeable because there's nothing underneath them that would have to match.

Everybody’s Got a Goat

Left-wing scholars generally view the Transnational Capitalist Class as a unified blob of Western elites. The TCC itself becomes the scapegoat to blame for its sins of capitalism, but the capitalist goat needs to be unified to serve as the enemy. William Robinson argues that global capitalism is no longer driven by competing national capital and imperialism, but by a unified transnational elite that controls the Transnational State (TNS) apparatus through international financial organizations such as the IMF, World Bank and WTO.

The left target fascism and its operating arm of racism as the ultimate evil. This is itself a theodicy to explain the existence of evil — a single malevolent group with a unifying fascist ideology that causes global crises and manipulates these crises for its own advantage.

Robinson is aware of the scapegoating tactics of the Imperial Nationalists: “Trump’s global business empire could not flourish without capitalist globalization... His electoral promise to deport 10 millions undocumented immigrants... is, on the one hand, an attempt to convert the immigrant population into a scapegoat for the crisis and to channel the fear and insecurity among the (majority white) working class against the immigrant community rather than against the system … What 20th and 21st century fascism share is the need that the fascist mobilization has for scapegoats. The fascist project seeks to channel that social anxiety ... towards scapegoating communities.”

Yet Robinson, Sklair et al are scapegoating the TCC itself. Everybody’s got a goat.

The Clown Effect

A fractured ruling class produces a herd of goats. Blame is dispersed in every direction and the elite — with no remaining strategy except endless goat rituals —gradually exhausts its cultural authority and material legitimacy. This produces the clown effect. The population no longer views its rulers with fear, admiration, or respect, but with mockery. Politics ceases to resemble statecraft and begins to resemble theatre. The governing class becomes a travelling circus performing for an increasingly cynical audience.

Ridicule becomes the dominant political language of a society that has lost faith in its institutions. Memes replace manifestos. Satire replaces persuasion. Every speech becomes a punchline before it becomes a policy. Influencers, comedians, dissidents, politicians, activists, and anonymous users all compete to produce the next viral humiliation. The objective is no longer to persuade one’s opponents but to make them appear ridiculous. Laughter becomes a weapon in the struggle for legitimacy.

Even the ruling class joins the performance. At the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, Elon Musk joked about Donald Trump’s proposed “Board of Peace,” saying, "I heard about the formation of the peace summit, and I was like, is that p-i-e-c-e? You know, a little piece of Greenland, a little piece of Venezuela." Around the same time, Iranian creators produced AI-generated Lego animations lampooning the American government and Trump in particular. The targets differ, but the political function is identical: authority is converted into comedy.

This ridicule is not merely entertainment. It is a symptom of declining hegemony. A confident and secure ruling class can absorb ridicule; a fractured one is defined by ridicule. A fractured ruling class cannot speak with one voice. Each faction attempts to discredit the others, and in doing so erodes confidence in the elite as a whole. Every joke that wounds a rival also diminishes the collective prestige of the ruling class itself.

The clown effect therefore signals something deeper than polarization. It marks the collapse of a shared political theatre in which rulers could still command deference. When no faction possesses sufficient cultural authority to define reality, every faction becomes fair game for ridicule. The public no longer sees competing statesmen offering rival visions of the future; it sees competing clowns chasing each other in a circus.

In a rheopolitical age, memes move faster than legislation. Ridicule spreads through the same global communication infrastructure that carries finance, intelligence, and commerce. Political legitimacy itself has become another flow. Once a ruler becomes a meme, authority begins to circulate away from them.

Counter-elites and Counter-goats

Peter Turchin argues that elite overproduction — where more credentialed aspirants exist than available positions of power — creates a surplus of frustrated elites who become counter-elites. These counter-elites do not necessarily represent the poor but rather ambitious individuals blocked from traditional status who mobilize popular resentment and mass grievances as a weapon to challenge the established ruling class.

This dynamic leads to intense intra-elite competition, where rival factions of counter-elites form opposing coalitions by appealing to different segments of the disgruntled populace. Rather than a unified revolution, this results in deep political polarization and disintegration, as various counter-elite groups compete to harness different forms of popular anger to seize power.

Convergence, and ultimately coordination, is what happens when one faction wins; permanent finger-pointing and scapegoating is what it looks like when no one can. The four factions are counter-elites of the now defunct rules-based order. They load up counter-goats to blame for the rupture.

A vast herd of counter-goats stampeding in all directions is evidence of counter-elite confusion and chaos. Everyone is guilty of sins. A multitude of priests load multiple goats. The congregation itself is splintered and sect-divided. Sins are not atoned for, redemption doesn’t come. All are lost in a permanent state of capitalist sinfulness.

In previous centuries, revolution meant capturing the palace. Today every faction loads a different goat because none controls the valves of the global system. No faction can seize the valves while the others hold their own — so the goats multiply without end. The proliferation of scapegoats is therefore not merely a symptom of political polarization. It is evidence that no faction has achieved rheopolitical supremacy.

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About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Globalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.

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Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The New Grand Chessboard

CHAPTER 11: The War Inside the Panopticon

(COMMENTARY) Hats Off to the Conspiratorial Commentariat

(COMMENTARY) Musk’s Trillion Dollar Coronation Inside the Cathedral

CHAPTER 12: The Blackwell B200 Kill Switch

CHAPTER 13: The Layered Global Map

CHAPTER 14: The Transnational Broker Class

CHAPTER 15: How to Rule the World and Why Nobody Can

(COMMENTARY) Conspiratorial Answers to Evil

CHAPTER 16: Rheopolitics: The Power to Deny

CHAPTER 17: Mortgaged, Extracted, Disconnected

CHAPTER 18: Permanent Planetary Turbulence

CHAPTER 19: Two Wings of the Same Imperial Nationalist Bird