Hats Off to the Conspiratorial Commentariat

Jun 11, 2026

I. The COVID Migration

The pandemic accelerated a shift toward independent journalism and newsletter platforms like Substack, which saw its active writers and revenue double in the first three months of the outbreak. With legacy media suffering over 30,000 job cuts in the U.S. in 2020, journalists sought financial and editorial freedom by bypassing traditional algorithms and editors to build direct reader relationships.

As mainstream platforms began de-platforming accounts violating health and safety guidelines, Substack emerged as a primary sanctuary for these voices due to its minimalist content moderation stance. The pandemic acted as a “turbocharger” for conspiracy ecosystems, with figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leveraging the crisis to expand their reach. Kennedy’s organization, Children’s Health Defense, saw its website traffic explode from 119,000 visits in late 2019 to nearly 4.7 million at its peak in 2021. While not exclusively on Substack, this surge mirrored the broader trend of conspiracy content finding fertile ground in independent newsletter formats.

Prominent conspiracy theorists and anti-vaccine advocates, including Joseph Mercola, Mike Adams and Alex Berenson moved their operations to Substack. The Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated that in 2022, the top five anti-vaccine authors on the platform generated approximately $2.5 million annually in revenue for the site.

Substack faced further criticism from the Atlantic in November 2023, claiming Substack had a “nazi problem” by allowing its platform to be used by white nationalists, Nazis, and antisemites. In an open letter, more than 100 Substack creators threatened to leave the platformand asked Substack's leadership if “Is platforming Nazis part of your vision of success?”

However, none of the critics of the conspiratorial commentariat addressed the central issues that were amplified during COVID: the unprecedented transfer of wealth to the billionaire class and the creeping totalitarianism promoted through increasing digital surveillance, data collection and social media censorship and emergent global digital authoritarianism.

The conspiratorial commentariat is not paranoid about the central facts — a transnational capitalist class does exist, it is a small percentage of the world’s population and it operates through a vast multitude of organizations, such as Davos, Bilderberg, the CFR, the UN, IMF, World Bank, and many other orgs, societies, NGOs and foundations.

Hats off to the conspiratorial commentariat. While the legacy press was shedding 30,000 jobs and looking the other way, the commentariat built something out of nothing — a live information war waged from laptops and newsletters, funded by readers instead of advertisers, run on stamina and conviction. They did the work. They followed the money when the salaried press wouldn't, sat through the hearings no one covered, read the filings and the foundation reports and the Davos agendas line by line.

And they were right about the thing that matters most: the people have no say. The ruling class is deaf to the people, indifferent to the wreckage of its own policies, and accountable to no electorate. That is not paranoia. That is also the finding of one of the most cited studies in modern political science, and the commentariat reached it on their own, from the outside, without the credentials or the grant money. They earned the right to be taken seriously. This chapter takes them seriously enough to offer a public debate.

Gilens and Page (2014) published a study that argued “economic elites and business interest groups exert strong influence on US government policy while average citizens have virtually no influence at all.” This influential study, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, argued that economic elites and business interest groups have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens have little or no independent influence.

The study tested four theories of American politics using data on 1,779 policy issues from 1981 to 2002, finding support for Economic Elite Domination and Biased Pluralism. The authors concluded that the United States functions as a “democracy by coincidence,” where policy outcomes align with public preference only when those preferences happen to coincide with the views of the wealthy.

The conspiratorial commentariat have inferred that because the public doesn’t decide → therefore a unified body does. And secondly, because the Transnational Capitalist Class is such a small group, a mere few thousand individuals, there must be a coordinated agenda. After all, they get together at Davos every year, and appear to share a similar unanimous worldview, so that too, proves coordination.

However, the conspiracy theorists are under-reading their own evidence, and they have stopped one step short of finding conclusions and analysis that cuts closer to the bone.

II. Class or Cabal?

Conspiracy requires a unitary will. There must be a philosophical center where intentions form, an organization through which they travel, and a regimented army of agents that carries out the directives and promotes the dogma. Remove any of the three and the cabal dissolves into something else.

If there is a coordinated plan, then there must be a planner; an agenda presupposes an author; the outcome is the intention, realized. This is what the conspiratorial theory is at the root — a claim about agency. Somewhere, someone meant for this to happen, then made it happen, and the world is the shape of their planning. Famous conspiracist, G. Edward Griffin reiterated this in his book, The Creature from Jekyll Island, “Almost all of history is an unbroken trail of one conspiracy after another. Conspiracies are the norm, not the exception.”

A cult and a club are softer versions of the same theory. A cult needs a leader, a doctrine and dogmas, and the submission of its members to both. Commentators like David Icke claim the ruling class is a cult. In his 1999 work The Biggest Secret, he describes tall, blood-drinking, shape-shifting reptilian humanoids from the Alpha Draconis star system, who hide in underground bases and plot the destruction of humanity.

Theories like this have done enormous damage to the credibility of the conspiratorial commentariat.

Cults are defined as high-control groups led by a charismatic, authoritarian leader who demands absolute loyalty and claims exclusive access to truth. What absolute truth are the billionaire class advocating other than market realism and the unrestricted flow of capital?

When the coordination looks regimented, it’s a cabal; when it looks like dogma, it’s a cult; when it looks merely exclusive, then it’s a club. What stays the same is the underlying assumption underneath all three: there must be a who.

Conspiracy theory is the ultimate detective story: a vast multitude of facts, a labyrinth of history, nasty villains and the smoking gun — whatever bad thing happens, it must be the cabal, because the cabal is the root of all evil, the ultimate Satan, the bogeyman hiding under every bed.

A class requires none of this. It is not a body that acts; it is a social position governed by wealth that many bodies occupy. What unites a class, especially the billionaire class, is not a plan but its relationship to capital, to the means by which wealth is acquired and held. The Transnational Capitalist Class is characterized by unprecedented economic influence, political power, and asset concentration.

The billionaire class represents the top 0.001% of the population.

Two billionaires who have never met, who would never return each other’s calls, who are trying to ruin one another, can at the same time both oppose a wealth tax, both prefer weak labor law, both want money to move across borders faster than regulation can follow. Not because they are coordinated, but because they are in the same financial boat.

The conspiracist sees the billionaires all doing similar things and believes it is coordination. Shared behavior is what a class produces — automatically, without a memo, without a meeting. That it looks authored is an illusion of scale. The pattern is real. The conspiracy is not.

III. The Club That Was Never a Cabal

Sooner or later, anyone arguing about secret world government points out the Club of Rome, one of the conspiratorial commentariat’s favorite proofs.

The line that is invariably quoted — the real enemy is humanity itself — comes from The First Global Revolution, a 1991 report by Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, issued, openly, by a New York trade publisher. It was a follow up to the Limits to Growth, written two decades before in 1972.

The full quote:

“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself."

In full, the passage floats pollution, warming, water, and famine as a “common enemy” around which humanity might unite, and then, in the very next breath, warns that to cast them as the enemy is to mistake symptoms for causes. It is a caution against manufacturing a scapegoat. It is not declaring war on humanity, it is stating that “only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome.”

Then look at what the Club of Rome actually is, because the name is doing unearned work. It is a club. Founded in 1968, its members are former heads of state, retired officials, scientists, diplomats — a roster, a threshold, a letterhead. It convenes. It commissions. It publishes. And it has never possessed the power to compel a single government to do a single thing, though it does indeed have influence. Soft power is not hard power. In the absence of a reward, whether monetary, position or status, all that is left to compel someone to do something is blackmail or bribery.

This is exactly what a club is and exactly what a cabal is not. A cabal needs a command center. If we consider mafia style organized crime rings, the organizational structure is very clear, evident and impossible to hide.

The richest irony is reserved for the document’s own thesis. The First Global Revolution describes a world being driven into an unknown — upheaval no institution commands and no committee can steer. "The new global revolution is coming into being amid social, economic, technological, and cultural earthquakes that have set in motion humanity's journey into a vast unknown."

That is not the voice of a hand on the rudder. It is the voice of passengers describing the storm. The people accused of secretly piloting the ship are on record saying no one is piloting it.

The Club of Rome is not a piece of a unified plan. Although it has overlap with Davos and the World Economic Forum, its current Vice-President Alvarez Pereira is critical of the WEF: “Klaus Schwab decided to go in another direction, which I am sorry to say, is a lot about self indulgence about the richest and most powerful people on Earth, to feel that they are doing something, and to be talking about it.”

A cabal, like an organized criminal syndicate, has a center that can adjudicate. When its members disagree, someone settles it. A class has no such authority. There is no sovereign power or judge or court system over the billionaires to rule on their disputes, which is exactly why those disputes do not resolve — they grind and clash and the billionaires fight publicly.

This is the difference between a class and a cabal — or a cult, or a club. A class shares a structural position without a chain of command. Convergent interest is not a meeting.

IV. The class-size

There are approximately 3,428 billionaires according to Forbes, or 4020 according to Hurun. The politically consequential movers and shakers are closer to 300–500. The same fact cuts both ways:

The dismissive liberal may claim ”it’s all markets, chaos and randomness, there is no cabal,” but the reality is that the class is real, small, knowable and their names are published every year in Forbes — while conspiracist sees an omnipotent hidden hand: but it’s 300–500 publicly observable people who file disclosures, give speeches, feud in the open, and cannot agree on anything.

Entrance to the class requires extreme wealth; what the credentials reveal is something subtler. Among influential Americans — Fortune 500 chief executives, senior editors, top scientists — Ivy League alumni are overrepresented by a factor of roughly sixty: about 36 percent of that tier, drawn from well under one percent of the adult population. The pattern repeats transnationally with different letterheads — Oxford and the grandes écoles in Europe, Tsinghua among China's party-state elite.

The conspiracist looks at this and asks how they could all think alike without coordinating. But that has the causation backwards. They think alike because they were educated alike — the same economics departments, the same case studies, the same internships and fellowships and dinner circuits, year after year, cohort after cohort. The shared worldview that looks like the product of a conspiracy is the product of a curriculum. You don't need a conspiracy to explain why people stamped by the same educational machine come out the same shape.

V. Everything is right out in the open

Several hundred visible billionaires cannot hide either and they aren’t even trying. The national leaders of 195 nations meet every year at the United Nations. Nobody is hiding.

The so-called secret rulers of the world maintain websites, agendas, attendee lists, a journal. WEF, Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission, CFR, Chatham House all publish. The conspiracist must explain why the invisible hand has a press office which can be reached by email: public.affairs@weforum.org

The WEF does not want a world government — and cannot enforce one. It advocates multi-stakeholder governance and positions itself as facilitator, not sovereign. Without force, or the threat of force, there is no government at all. A government must have a police force and military to ensure safety and security. The WEF cannot do that nor have they ever advocated for hard power.

Instead, it actively promotes a model of multi-stakeholder governance, which critics argue effectively shifts global decision-making power from democratic nation-states to corporations and unelected elites. This is not to make any claims that this is a good thing, because it is not.

A world government would force the class to submit its interests to a regulating body. The current condition — no one able to stop them, minimal restraint on personal freedom — is more to their liking, not less. They prefer the anarchy at the top because it allows them to live above the law. They don’t want to be regulated, taxed or constrained in any way.

The Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns are the perfect example of this. The push to create Network States is the desire to live and work tax-free without state control.

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

Richard Revelstoke

May 13

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VI. Nobody is in Charge

What global mastermind can predict the outcome with any certainty?

The global cabal theories rely on the premise that it is easy to manipulate the world, yet the exact opposite is true. Even a perfectly coordinated cabal, operating in total openness with no need to hide, could not produce the outcomes it is accused of engineering — because the system is too complex for anyone to steer.

The current Iran War is a perfect example. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz benefits no one. If this is an event orchestrated by global elites, they are all losing. Trump and Netanyahu are losing. International trade is losing. Iran is losing. Oil companies are losing. While the U.S. gained in oil revenue, the direct military cost of the conflict has effectively negated the financial windfall.

Powerful nations cannot predict or control the outcomes of their actions, let alone predict the secondary consequences. In reality, human history is driven more by chaos and unintended consequences than by perfectly executed secret plans.

Global cabal theories are fundamentally unbelievable because they assume perfect coordination and absolute secrecy across millions of people. Humans are notoriously bad at keeping massive secrets, or even small secrets. The vast architecture needed to control the complex geopolitical and technological forces at play would be a daunting task even if a global cabal was managing world affairs publicly.

VII. The Great (Failed) Reset

In June 2020, the World Economic Forum launched the Great Reset — a program for remaking post-pandemic capitalism around stakeholder capitalism and green infrastructure, announced by name, with a book, (books), a website, and a Davos summit meant to consecrate it. To the commentariat, it was the mask slipping at last: the plan, in writing, at last admitted publicly.

And then the plan tanked. The branding drew fire within weeks, the summit never convened under the name — the scheduled 2021 Great Reset summit was postponed, and then cancelled.

Inside a year the Forum was conceding the point in its own promotional video — the slogan, it admitted, hadn’t gone down well.

“…a great reset that sounds more like buzzword bingo masking some nefarious plans for world domination hands up this kind of slogan hasn’t gone down well, but all we really want to say is that we all have an opportunity to build a better world, and it’s not surprising that people who’ve been disenfranchised by a broken system and pushed even further by the pandemic will suspect global leaders of conspiracy, but the world’s not that simple.”

By 2022 the phrase was scrubbed from Davos entirely and replaced with themes about fragmentation and turning points; by 2026 the Forum’s own risk reporting had pivoted to geo-economic confrontation and a multipolar world — a world it no longer pretends to be resetting.

The underlying policies did not vanish. Stakeholder capitalism, digital identity, the rhetoric of a Fourth Industrial Revolution — all survived under quieter names. The aims persisted. But watch what the episode actually demonstrates. A cabal executing a plan does not publish a retraction of its own branding. It does not put its hands up and surrender. The Great Reset was a faction’s full blown bid for hegemony — the Davos faction naming its terms in the single year it believed, “the pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, re-imagine and reset our world” — and the bid failed: against the other factions, who had no reason to submit, and against the public whose consent it required, and never won.

What the commentariat reads as a plan still unfolding in the dark is a defeat conducted in broad daylight.

VIII. Conspiracy is the Bogeyman Theory

The conspiratorial commentariat answers the problem of evil by locating a responsible agent, a bogeyman. If a hidden them is doing this on purpose, the world is legible — there is something to fight, someone to blame, a plan that could be exposed and stopped.

The Bogeyman Theory: What We Got Wrong About the Nazis

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Faction analysis offers the harder picture: no one is sailing the ship, there is anarchy at the top and the factions pull the drifting ship in all directions at once.

This is genuinely more frightening than any conspiracy.

Apocalypse with a church: The religious right—particularly movements aligned with Christian nationalism and biblical literalism—has a profound and growing influence on conspiracy theories, acting as both a primary incubator and a major amplifier for them. This influence is most prominent in the United States and Canada, where religious anxieties are frequently merged with populist politics. A.k.a: MAGA

End times eschatology is the gasoline on the commentariat’s fire. By framing political and cultural conflicts as literal "good vs evil" or “Democrats vs Republicans” or “MAGA vs the Globalists” they portray political battles against unseen spiritual forces as fulfillment, or anticipated fulfillment, of Biblical prophecies.

Apocalypse without a church: The New Age / wellness strand has no Beast, no Satan, no Revelation — and arrives at the same destination — don’t engage the political arena because the system will collapse. The anticipated new world rises from the ashes; the fifth dimension solves what politics cannot. The New Agers believe we are on the cusp of an evolution of consciousness and humankind will soon collectively vibrate on the fifth dimension and magically create a nouveau hippie Utopia.

Both wings share the apocalypse but it resolves into opposite politics. The wellness New Age strand exits the system — the collapse will do the work, the fifth dimension will sort it out. The militant MAGA strand does the reverse: the end-times reading is a call to arms, not a permission to rest. But it sends its soldiers against a spiritual abstraction — the Beast, the globalist, the Antichrist — rather than the thing in front of them. One apocalypse demobilizes; the other mobilizes against a phantom. Neither one fights the actual war.

The conspiratorial commentariat thrives because they are looking for a simple, comforting narrative to explain our chaotic world. Real conspiracies do exist, but a grand global cabal conspiracy fails logically because history is incredibly messy — modern history, especially, is a vast labyrinth of unscripted simultaneous events. It is not an unbroken string of intentional actions by secret societies.

Complex events such as pandemics, wars, or the details of ancient history are difficult to understand and often lack clear, neat answers. The conspiratorial commentariat attempts to decipher world events in a way that appeals to the human desire for order by claiming a small, sinister group is pulling all the strings. Believing these theories offers psychological comfort because it suggests that someone is in charge and understands what is happening, which is preferable to no one is in charge and no one understands what is happening.

IX. Interchangeable Masks

The commentariat’s worldview denies billionaires their autonomy — free agents reduced to automatons and puppets of bigger billionaires. This assumes that billionaires are pliable, yes men who are easily manipulated or compliant. The exact reverse is true — billionaires are ruthless, driven and not yes men. They are domineering, wilful and don’t conform to traditional rules.

How do you control an egomaniac?

There is a long list of suggested culprits who are the hidden hand behind the scenes, pulling the strings of virtually everyone. The short list:

Jews/Mossad/Khazarian Mafia
Aliens/Reptilians/Lizard People
Vatican/Jesuits/Black Pope
Venetians/Black Nobility
British Empire/Tavistock/Fabian Society
Lucifer/Nephilim/Fallen angels/Anti-Christ
WEF/UN/WHO/Agenda 2030
Kissinger/Soros/Schwab/Gates/Fauci
Rothschild/Rockefeller
Bankers/BIS/Federal Reserve
Knights Templar/Round Table
Democrats/Socialists/Communists
Illuminati/Freemasons
Committee of 300
Pedophiles/adrenochrome harvesters
The Cathedral

These are interchangeable masks. The complete lack of agreement within the commentariat is further evidence that the cabal is so invisible that no one knows who they are, but all claim absolute authority that they have identified the source.

Scholars who study the power elite credit the elite with functioning minds and autonomy. The commentariat does not — its worldview is deterministic, fatalistic, at the edge of nihilism. But that fatalism is not a character flaw, and the relentless doom posting on Substack is not a pose. It is what happens when people perceive a real catastrophe and are looking at the wrong map. The dread is earned; only its object is misplaced. There is reason for doom.

The mainstream media and national leaders do not give the conspiratorial commentariat enough credit and they also underestimate the power of a vocal, motivated minority. However, the cabal theory makes the commentariat feel powerless: an omnipotent hidden hand they can never defeat. However the transnational capitalist class is real, visible, named, mortal, and at war with itself — which means it can lose.

The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Richard Revelstoke

Apr 29

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X. It Can’t be Capitalism

The exemption list is more revealing than the blame list — because what or who can never be guilty tells you what the theory is for.

The pattern: the bogeyman is always a parasite on a sacred host, never the host itself. America is never to blame — only the Deep State occupying it. Christianity is never to blame — only the Vatican that betrayed it, the Jesuits who infiltrated it, the churches that went apostate. Capitalism is never to blame — only the bankers who corrupted it, the crony monopolists that perverted it, the globalists who hijacked it.

It has to be communism, not capitalism, because capitalism is on the exemption list by definition. When capitalism produces the dystopia, the dystopia gets relabeled. When China does capitalism, it’s still communism.

Billionaires as a class are exempt because the good billionaires are exempt — only specific billionaires are guilty, and the sorting is tribal: Soros and Gates are the cabal; Trump and Musk and Thiel are insurgents fighting the globalists.

This leads us to the root of the problem and the core of the debate: NATIONALISM.

Nationalism is sacred. Globalism is profane. An abomination. The Beast and the Kali Yuga. America is the chosen nation. Everyone else is non-chosen.

This is the master exemption, the one beneath all the others, because the nation is the believer’s first sacred membership and the one he will defend to the end. Every other entry on the blame list is finally a way of naming what threatens the nation from outside it or above it — the globalist, the supranational body, the foreign creditor, the rootless financier, or China. “Globalism” is just the word for everything that crosses the border, and in the conspiratorial cosmology whatever crosses the border is, by definition, the enemy. Nation sacred, globe profane. The map has only two countries — Us and Them.

However, the capitalist civil war has four combatants, and one of them is the nationalist faction — the tariff hawks, the nationalists, the hard-power men: a faction of transnational capitalism like the other three, with its own accumulation strategy in defense, energy, industrial base, and protected domestic markets. But it does not look like a faction to the people inside it. It looks like the nation itself, defending itself. That is the Imperial Nationalist faction’s grift — its capital interests are invisible to its own supporters, because those interests wear a flag. And so Trump, JD Vance and Hegseth are filed not as a capitalist bloc executing a strategy, but as freedom fighters rescuing the sacred host from the profane invader. The commentariat is enlisted in the war and believes it is a bystander. It is standing in the middle of the battlefield, holding a flag, convinced the flag is neutral ground.

This is why the exemption list is not a quirk of the genre but the reason the genre cannot see straight. Half the war is rendered invisible by the act of loving one side of it. You cannot map a conflict you have already sorted into demons and angels, and you certainly cannot recognize your own army as one of the armies.

Which is why “it’s communism, not capitalism” is an honest mistake, and a revealing one. They have seen the State Capitalist faction, and the surveillance grid, and the open contempt for civil rights, and they have reached for the only word their tradition ever gave them for all of it. Some of the commentariat opt for “technocracy” or “techno-feudalism” but they avoid “capitalism” like the plague.

Because it can’t be capitalism.

What they are looking at is capitalism in a specific factional form. It’s a form they don’t like, but to give up “communism” is to admit there is something horribly wrong with capitalism.

And it can’t be capitalism because it can’t be America, because it can’t be Western civilization or Christianity or Republicans or Democrats. It has to be the other.

Most of us hold some version of the bogeyman theory of evil — that the world's suffering has guilty culprits, and removing the culprits would remove the suffering. Conspiracy theory is only its most elaborate form.

The wellness-left runs the identical machine with the nouns swapped: the body, nature, Mother Earth are the sacred hosts; Big Pharma, Monsanto, the toxins are the parasites. It rests on the single axiom that empowers the whole apparatus: the thing I am, cannot be the cause. Everything else is built on top of that. Conspiracy theory, like every Bogeyman Theory, is a machine for moving guilt outward — away from the self, and away from everything the self belongs to.

Every conspiracy theory is an alibi for something the believer loves.

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 Institutionalists, 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.