Wizard's Weekly Wrap-Up: Beaches, Bullets & Bureaucratic Blackouts at the Vanity Fair
As Trump Runs from and Rages Against the Truth, It Rises Anyway: The Week That Was December 14-20, 2025
This week played out as a spectacle of denial: power running, papering over cracks, and discovering too late that the truth doesn’t flee - it advances, breaking through every barricade built to contain it.
The week opened with gunfire tearing through civilian life on opposite sides of the world. At Brown University in Rhode Island, students huddled under desks as shots echoed through lecture halls. At Bondi Beach in Sydney, families gathered for a Hanukkah celebration pressed themselves into the sand, hoping bullets would pass overhead. Two mass shootings, two democracies, and yet, the responses could not have diverged more sharply.
In the United States, leaders reached for thoughts and prayers before briskly returning to business as usual, while in Australia, the first public civilian mass shooting in decades triggered immediate action: tighter gun controls, renewed buy-back programs, accelerated work on a national firearms register, caps on ownership, and moves to close long-standing loopholes between state systems. It was the same violence, and the same grief, but two radically different ideas of responsibility.
In the U.S., the suspected Brown University shooter was found dead after a five-day manhunt. Authorities now believe the Portuguese national also murdered MIT professor Nuno F. G. Loureiro at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, two days after the Brown attack. Within hours, the Trump administration suspended the Diversity Immigrant Visa (green-card lottery) program, citing the suspect’s immigration status, despite the program having existed for decades and no evidence that it played a role in the attack.
As the world was still absorbing the mass shootings, another shockwave hit when acclaimed director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found stabbed to death in their Los Angeles home. Grief curdled into outrage almost instantly when Donald Trump seized on the moment to attack Reiner’s politics, and the horror deepened when police arrested the Reiners’ son, Nick, on murder charges, turning a national tragedy into an even darker family nightmare.
Vanity Fair then dumped a blistering profile of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and the administration’s inner circle, so savage it managed to be both humiliating and historically consequential at the same time. As pressure mounted on multiple fronts, Trump lashed out in every direction at once, taking to social media to ordered a total blockade of sanctioned Venezuelan oil tankers and demanding that Venezuela return assets he claimed were “stolen” from the United States, including oil and land. Legal experts were quick to point out that no such theft has been documented. The demand landed like a tantrum with naval backing, but Trump didn’t care - he just seized another Venezuelan-linked oil tanker, escalating the already tense standoff with Caracas.
At the same time, Trump escalated his war on the press, filing a $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC over a Panorama documentary that aired ahead of the 2024 election that his lawyers claim deceptively edited clips of his January 6 speech to suggest he incited violence at the Capitol - a charge the BBC apologised for in part, but continues to contest in court. The suit faces steep legal hurdles, yet it has already triggered resignations of senior BBC executives and drawn international scrutiny.
Special Counsel Jack Smith appeared before the House Judiciary Committee and stated - under oath - that his investigation developed “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 election and block the lawful transfer of power. A New York Times article recounting a phone call Trump made in late 2020 pressing David Ralston, then speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, to hold a special session to overturn Trump’s loss in the election, reinforced Smith’s testimony.
As if daring the week to get heavier, the Trump administration rolled out sweeping regulations aimed at effectively eliminating access to gender-affirming care for transgender minors, and international outrage followed when Secretary of State Marco Rubio sanctioned two judges from the International Criminal Court involved in investigations of alleged Israeli war crimes. The ICC called it a “flagrant attack on judicial independence” that sets a dangerous precedent for global justice.
The administration argued in court that construction on Trump’s planned White House ballroom must continue for “national security” reasons - though they gave no indication of what those reasons were - and a federal judge allowed work to proceed, with further hearings scheduled for January. Meanwhile, news leaked that the administration plans to dramatically expand denaturalization efforts in 2026, an escalation that alarmed civil liberties advocates and signalled just how far the immigration purge is intended to go.
Perhaps sensing the narrative (and his popularity) slipping away, Trump forced his way into prime time with a rare White House address, where he ranted at the nation and against reality for twenty minutes like a drunk old man at the back of a bus. Not content with that, Trump unveiled the “Patriot Games” - a four-day national athletic competition featuring one male and one female high-school athlete from each state and territory. Marketed as a celebration of youth and patriotism, it sounded suspiciously like The Hunger Games. May the odds, apparently, be ever in our favour.
As the wreckage accumulated, Trump turned inward to legacy-building, adding bronze plaques to his recently installed “Presidential Walk of Fame” at the White House with inscriptions under portraits of past presidents labelling Barack Obama as “one of the most divisive political figures in American history” and Joe Biden “by far, the worst President in American history.” Trump’s own plaque, meanwhile, praised his economy and promised “the best is yet to come.” The inscriptions were reportedly written or dictated by Trump himself - a monument not to history, but to narcissism.
In another surreal flourish, Trump’s hand-picked board at the Kennedy Center voted to rename the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts to include Trump’s name. Taken together, it all reads like a man trying desperately to outrun consequence by making noise faster than accountability can catch him.
In response, lawmakers on Capitol Hill spent the week attempting to put some guardrails back on the presidency. The U.S. Senate passed a $901 billion National Defense Authorization Act with a provision buried in the bill allowing Congress to withhold up to a quarter of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget unless he hands over unedited footage of at least one of the recently disputed U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean, along with the legal authorizations behind them.
In the House, however, a War Powers resolution that would have forced Trump to seek congressional approval before escalating military action against Venezuela went down, the defeat effectively greenlighting continued unilateral strikes, underscoring how thin Congress’s remaining control over presidential war powers has become.
Oversight faltered again in the Senate, where a resolution aimed at blocking RFK Jr.’s move to eliminate longstanding public comment requirements at HHS failed when Republicans blocked its consideration. In a rare flash of rebellion, though, Democrats - joined by four Republicans - secured the signatures needed to force a vote on extending health-care subsidies for three more years. Discharge petitions almost never succeed; this month alone, House Speaker Mike Johnson has faced two, and this year marks the first time in nearly a century that four discharge petitions have made it this far. Even then, Republican leadership still managed to prevent a floor vote, laying bare just how dysfunctional the chamber’s internal politics have become.
In a quiet but telling signal of which way the wind is blowing, Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis announced she will not seek reelection in 2026. Elise Stefanik - once elected as a moderate before hitching her rise to Trump - also bowed out, abandoning not only a potential run for New York governor, but any attempt to return to the House at all. It seem that even staunch loyalists are looking for the door.
In the Pacific, the United States announced a record $10 billion arms package for Taiwan - its largest ever. Beijing condemned the deal, but Taipei, unsurprisingly, welcomed the support, framing it as essential to deterrence and regional stability. Peace, once again, is being “secured” by shipping more weapons into a live fault line.
In Britain, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer issued a final ultimatum to Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, demanding he release the proceeds from his 2022 sale of Chelsea Football Club for humanitarian aid to Ukraine, as agreed when the sale was approved.
At this week’s EU summit, leaders openly warned that Europe must prepare for the possibility of large-scale conflict with Russia without American backing, as Trump’s America drifts from NATO commitments. Leaders called for sharp increases in defence spending, military readiness, and direct support for Ukraine whilst engaging in bitter debate over the hundreds of billions in Russian central bank assets frozen after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Several EU capitals pushed to seize the funds directly, but the plan stalled largely due to Belgium, which holds most of the assets and fears retaliation and lawsuits. The compromise was a €90 billion interest-free loan to Ukraine over two years.
Outside the summit halls in Brussels, the pressure spilled into the streets as thousands of angry farmers descended on EU headquarters, blocking roads with tractors, pelting riot police with potatoes, and setting fires in protests against trade deals, subsidy cuts, and environmental regulations that farmers say are strangling them at home while opening the gates to cheap imports abroad.
Back in the U.S., Democrats turned the knife inward, refusing to release its findings after commissioning a sweeping internal review of the 2024 election. DNC Chair Ken Martin claimed publication would be “counterproductive” to the party’s forward momentum, but party critics argued the real reason is the report likely names names, assigns blame, and threatens entrenched power.
In lighter news, this week Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” became the longest‑running No. 1 song in Billboard Hot 100 history, spending a cumulative 20 weeks at the top of the chart, and Kylie Minogue became the first female artist in history to score #1 singles in four different decades in the UK.
In much heavier news, by week’s end, the deadline set by Congress under the Epstein Files Transparency Act arrived, requiring the Department of Justice to release all remaining unclassified records related to Jeffrey Epstein. House Speaker Mike Johnson promptly sent members of Congress home for the holiday, conveniently ensuring there would be no lawmakers around to react when the DOJ failed to comply, instead dumping hundreds of pages so aggressively redacted they were almost entirely black.
It was a data dump with the truth surgically removed - the cover-up may be the clearest confession yet. To make it even clearer, minutes after the redacted files dropped, Trump launched air strikes on Syria. Talk about a distraction.
You’re not mad if everything feels stretched to breaking point right now. Yes, the pressure keeps spiking. Yes, familiar structures are failing. Yes, the noise is louder than ever. No, you’re not losing your grip - you’re just paying attention.
What we’re witnessing right now isn’t random chaos - it’s exposure. A system shedding the identities, myths, and power structures that can no longer hold. The lights are coming on, not to reveal a neat resolution, but to show us what we were really standing on all along.
For months, the skies have been signalling a time of “truth revealed,” and many imagined that meant a clean, triumphant moment where villains would be exposed, justice delivered, and order would be restored. But revelation isn’t a victory lap. It’s the shock of switching on the lights and realising the palace we thought we lived in is a sewer. This is the rot the world has been built on, and none of it survives inspection.
What comes next is the reckoning with that rot. This is the death of the illusion we constructed to avoid seeing ourselves clearly. The mask slipping. The identity collapsing. Not just politically or culturally, but collectively. And to move through what comes next, we’ll need steadiness, not spectacle - courage, not cruelty - and an anchor deeper than fear as the old order loses its grip.
If you want to understand what this moment really means, and how to move through it without hardening or losing yourself, then read on, dear friend.
Let’s make meaning of the madness,
Trace the architecture beneath the chaos,
And walk forward with eyes open,
Toward the clarity that only comes after collapse.
**The cosmic insights shared here are mapped to the real movements of the heavens during the past week. If you want to know more about planetary pattern recognition, read about it here**
The (Ego) Death of the King
At the start of December, under the light of the Gemini Full Moon, Donald Trump moved through one of the most consequential transits of his life.
On paper, it read like a death - and many astrologers interpreted it that way - but that was too literal, too blunt for what was actually unfolding. This was not necessarily a physical ending. It was something more precise, and far more dangerous for a man whose power has always lived in story and spectacle: a psychological unravelling. An erosion of narrative control. The collapse of the identity that had carried him this far. A demolition of image, story, and status - the mask cracking under its own weight.
From there, the month of December for him has basically been one long, televised ego death.
It opened with the “murder at sea” revelations, as reports emerged that Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a second strike on a disabled boat in the Caribbean, killing survivors who were already in the water – a textbook war crime. The White House denied the second strike ever happened, then quietly admitted it did, then tried to blame a decorated admiral instead, pushing the line that the bombings were necessary to stop the flow of drugs into America - a claim Trump undercut immediately by pardoning former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, convicted for helping move massive amounts of cocaine into the U.S.
Trump promised to release the bombing footage, then didn’t, turning his fire on the press instead and going after multiple female reporters in vile, verbal attacks. As Congress edged toward subpoenas over the boat strike and Team Trump insisted the president can blow up whatever he wants without checking with anyone, Trump seized a Venezuelan oil tanker like a pirate, and then threatened the International Criminal Court with sanctions unless it rewrote its own treaty to guarantee he and his circle would never be prosecuted for its antics on the high seas.
Then, like a man who knew the walls were closing in, Trump began imploding in public, going on a late-night social media bender - more than 150 posts in an hour, a firehose of rage and conspiracy - then turning up at a cabinet meeting looking exhausted and bandaged, bragging about a “perfect” MRI on a part of his body he couldn’t identify, and repeatedly nodding off in public events like a man whose body and story were both running on fumes.
His carefully crafted “strongman” image kept colliding with reality: he tried, twice, to criminally charge New York Attorney General Letitia James, only for a federal judge and then a grand jury to shut it down, exposing the whole thing as a revenge stunt against the woman who successfully prosecuted him. Same thing happened when he went after former FBI Director James Comey. His handpicked acting U.S. Attorney, Alina Habba, was ruled unlawfully appointed and forced out, and Trump was caught on a hot mic whining that he “can’t appoint anybody” because his nominees keep expiring without Senate confirmation.
The emperor still stood at the podium, but with fewer and fewer clothes.
Big business started peeling away as Costco sued him over his reckless tariffs, and JPMorgan refused to touch his fantasy ballroom project, leaving a literal hole in the East Wing and a metaphorical one in his “master builder” mythology. Then Congress dumped new Epstein-linked material, including damning photos of condoms printed with Trump’s face, and his months of trying to suppress the files began to look more than ever like a major cover-up.
The people themselves started to abandon ship: Democrats flipped a Georgia House district Trump won by 12 points last year and took Miami’s mayoralty for the first time in three decades. His approval rating slid to 36%, and his newly announced surveillance wish list for foreign tourists landed like a bomb as U.S. tourism nosedived, making America the only major country whose visitor numbers are shrinking.
Then the world turned its back when his White House released a National Security Strategy drenched in civilisational cosplay and white-nationalist nostalgia. The Kremlin loved it, but Europe called it the end of the post-war order, and even the Pope publicly warned Trump was trying to break the U.S.–Europe bond. You know things are bad when even the Pope calls you out. In Guatemala, they literally burned Trump in effigy as “the devil” in an annual ritual to torch the year’s darkness - thousands watched on as the sitting U.S. president went up in symbolic smoke.
Trump’s response was to hit the road for a series of rallies, each one smaller, weirder, and sadder than the last. The man who used to command stadiums of fevered fans was reduced to speaking to small halls of a couple of hundred people, ranting that the tanking economy wasn’t really tanking, or if it was it must be all Joe Biden’s fault (still), and that people don’t need to buy their children pencils or dolls, or something or other. After railing against reality at his sad little rallies, he went home to continue his tantrum online like a sulky nine-year-old sent to bed without dessert.
In just two weeks since that fateful Full Moon signed his ego’s death certificate, Trump has revealed himself - unequivocally - to be a war criminal, a pirate, a misogynist, a verbal abuser, a sexual deviant, a liar, a braggart, a crook, a swindler, and wholly unfit to hold the office of president as he thrashes about like a wounded animal, raging against his identity death.
If the last fortnight was the mask slipping, then this week was the mask peeling off entirely, like the end of a Scooby-Doo episode where the villain is revealed, declaring “I would have got away with it if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!”
When news broke this week of the murder of Hollywood legend Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, Trump did exactly what a collapsing ego does and made it all about himself. A private family tragedy became just another mirror for his own grievance and self-mythology as he tweeted that Reiner had died seemingly because of his "incurable Trump derangement syndrome.”
Reiner’s death was a brutal act of violence that had absolutely nothing to do with Trump, but he dragged it into his orbit anyway, and the response was swift and universal - as one White House figure was anonymously quoted as saying “Trump’s our of his f**king mind.” And indeed, he well may be, or at the very least, out of his identity - the man whose entire power once came from commanding the story this week was left hijacking other people’s grief just to feel like the story still belongs to him. It would be sad if it wasn’t so desperately serious.
When this kind of collapse happens to Grandpa, most families just quietly take away his car keys and look into full-time care, but when Grandpa is the President of the United States, he still keeps his fingers on the nuclear codes, his thumb on all the scales, and his foot on the neck of the entire world.
Desperate to project strength as his ego continues to unravel, Trump revelled in having his hand-picked loyalists rename The Kennedy Center in his honour - his name hoisted beside that of a fallen president who, for all his flaws, carried a gravity and public service Trump could never emulate. It is hard to imagine a clearer sign of a man confronting his own erasure than this kind of frantic legacy play: the attempt to etch one’s name alongside a great one in the hope that some of the stature might rub off.
Despite claims by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt that the board had "voted unanimously" to rename the building, Ohio Representative Joyce Beatty, who serves as an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center board, alleged that she and other opponents were muted on the conference call where the vote took place. "For the record. This was not unanimous. I was muted on the call and not allowed to speak or voice my opposition to this move," Beatty wrote in a post online. "Also for the record, this was not on the agenda. This was not consensus. This was censorship"
This is not confidence, but anxiety dressed up as monument-building. A last-ditch effort to fix a name in stone when the story itself is slipping away. True legacies don’t need to be carved in advance; they endure because others insist on remembering them. This move carries the opposite energy - that of someone who knows, somewhere beneath the bravado, that the moment the machinery stops, the name will be quietly removed from the walls he so carefully emblazoned it on.
Then midweek, he forced his way into prime time for an 18-minute “end-of-year” national address on the economy that quickly devolved into a Scrooge style “Bah! Humbug” monologue: Christmas trees behind him, opinion polls collapsing in front of him, and a stream of blame hurled at Biden, immigrants, “woke radicals” and past trade deals. He falsely claimed prices were “falling very fast” even as the latest data showed inflation still running hot, flogged a $1,776 “warrior dividend” as proof of his generosity while quietly repurposing money from elsewhere in the budget, and delivered it all in the tone of a man demanding applause rather than offering solutions. He all but screamed it down the television, red in the face (a noticable change from the usual orange). It didn’t play like leadership; it played like an ego trying to shout down its own irrelevance.
And while Trump’s identity crumbled fast and he busied himself with blustering into the camera, trying to outshout and outrun the death of his ego, the people around him started scrambling to save their own reflections in his collapsing myth. How very Pluto in Aquarius for things to collapse from the top down - first Trump’s ego starts disintegrating, and then all those who hitched their wagon to his start to evaporate too.
For a man who built his myth on vanity and surrounded himself with others who did too, it seems fitting that his and their public unravelling culminated this week in the pages of Vanity Fair.
Vanity Fair, Vanity Chief
This week’s edition of Vanity Fair arrived with a glossy two-part profile of Susie Wiles - Trump’s White House chief of staff - framed as an “eye of the hurricane” look at power in his second term, but what it ultimately revealed was not mastery of chaos, but the quiet panic of people trying to outpace a collapsing story.
This wasn’t a casual sit-down that wandered off the rails. It was a deliberate, debated decision inside the White House to let Chris Whipple - the self-appointed historian of chiefs of staff - spend nearly a year interviewing Wiles across eleven sessions. In Washington terms, that isn’t press. That’s legacy construction.
Whipple isn’t a hit-man; he’s a canoniser. He’s the writer you speak to when you want to be remembered as serious, indispensable, the adult in the room. This was Susie Wiles attempting to lift herself out of Trump’s chaos and into the historical record just as that chaos was becoming impossible to manage. She isn’t a chief of staff in the traditional sense; she’s a chief administrator of disorder, and as Trump has begun flailing publicly - his power waning, his popularity terminal, his grip on reality visibly loosening - Wiles has begun losing ground inside the White House. Not gaining authority, but bleeding relevance, tethered to a man sliding toward political oblivion. And so she made a gamble that looked logical on paper but fatal in practice: step forward, polish the myth, and remind everyone she was essential. Vanity Fair was supposed to be her stateswoman moment, but instead, it became an ode to identity collapse.
Wiles described Trump as having a “high-functioning alcoholic personality.” She labelled J.D. Vance a long-time conspiracy theorist. She joked about Elon Musk microdosing and called him “an odd duck.” None of this shocked anyone inside the West Wing, but once printed, it detonated, and when she tried to deny it, Whipple produced tape, and that’s when the panic showed.
Within hours, Wiles did something she almost never does: she went public, issuing a furious denial and calling the piece a “disingenuously framed hit job.” This wasn’t controlled exposure. It was damage control.
Astrologically, the timing of the Vanity Fair spread could not have screamed “ego test” any louder if it tried. The woman famous for staying in the shadows stepped into the spotlight exactly as Trump’s myth was imploding, attempting to extract herself from the wreckage by curating competence under cosmic conditions that don’t reward self-mythology, only test judgment. In the same month Trump was visibly stumbling through his own ego death, Susie Wiles stepped into the frame to project the the illusion of calm co-ordination. The cosmos didn’t interrupt, it simply recorded the ego collapse in real time.
When the piece dropped, Wiles was under heavy cosmic pressure on her identity. Her chart showed peak overreach energy - inflation of self, inflation of story - exactly the kind of weather that tempts someone to say yes to a glossy centre-spread at precisely the wrong moment. Her transits showed illusion versus reality and stability versus rupture, and she chose that exact cocktail to tell her version of events to Vanity Fair. No wonder it went as it did.
The sky was forcing a reckoning between perceived importance and actual responsibility. The karmic markers were signalling that this wasn’t a branding exercise at all - this was record-keeping. Alignment choices made here weren’t just PR; they were being logged. She went to Vanity Fair to protect her legacy under a sky that said, very clearly: this is not a legacy piece - this is evidence.
Zoom out further and the symbolism tightens again. With Pluto moving slowly through Aquarius and Saturn and Neptune marching toward their historic meeting in Aries next year, this moment stops being personal and becomes archetypal. People trying to curate the legacy of their public persona when the illusion of identity is already collapsing. People insisting they have “no ego” while the sky quietly schedules the audit.
Susie Wiles thought she was future-proofing her story, but the sky read it as Exhibit A in a global trial of ego that’s only just beginning.
The Man Behind the Mask
As Trump crashed out and Susie Wiles and the rest of the White House scrambled to manage the fallout of their own ego implosion, the week ended with a blunt institutional test: the deadline set by Congress under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, requiring the Department of Justice to release all remaining unclassified records related to Jeffrey Epstein.
What arrived barely resembled compliance. The DOJ released some files - but not all - and those that did appear were so aggressively redacted they bordered on parody: hundreds of thousands of pages reduced to solid black. Entire documents vanished behind ink. The scale of omission was equally revealing. Todd Blanche told Congress in a recent letter that the Southern District of New York gave over 3.6 million records related to Jeffrey Epstein but what was dropped was just a fraction of that. The FBI is believed to hold more than 300 gigabytes of Epstein-related material, but the DOJ released roughly two. That’s just 1% of what they have, raising question about what’s in the remaining 99% the DOJ is still sitting on.
What emerged was not transparency, but selective opacity. Media outlets reported that the redactions went far beyond protecting victims, extending to the names of “politically exposed individuals and government officials.” The Epstein grand-jury material alone amounted to 119 fully blacked-out pages. Republican Representative Thomas Massie called the release a “gross failure to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law.”
“The files implicate billionaires and friends of his & political donors that he’s trying to protect,” Massie explained when asked why Trump and his administration would be withholding or redacting most of the files. ”Epstein also had close ties to our intelligence agencies & Israel’s intelligence agencies.”
It also appeared to be a data dump designed to expose enemies while insulating the president himself. Searches for “Clinton” returned 109 hits. Searches for “Trump” returned just two - despite extensive reporting, including by the New York Times, documenting Trump and Epstein as close associates who socialised together and shared an interest in young women. A publicly available photograph depicting Bill Clinton with Michael Jackson and Diana Ross standing with Jackson’s young children at a fundraiser was inserted into the files, only the children’s faces were redacted to falsely imply they were victims.
Despite the obfuscation, fragments of truth escaped the blackout. One of the few unredacted passages recounts a 14-year-old girl alleging she was introduced to Trump at Mar-a-Lago by Epstein, who elbowed him and joked, “This is a good one, right?” According to the record, Trump nodded, smiled, and laughed. That such an allegation appears in the files - yet there is no record of Trump ever being interviewed - obliterates the claim that the DOJ is operating independently of presidential influence.
Shockingly, the night after the files were dropped, at least 16 documents and photos were deleted from the DOJ site where the files were released, including a photo of Trump, with no explanation from the DOJ or the administration.
Even worse, one Epstein survivor who reported Jeffrey Epstein to the FBI in 2009 formally placed the Department of Justice on notice after it publicly released her name without redaction. The DOJ insists her own FBI file cannot yet be disclosed to her due to privacy concerns, yet it released her identity to the public without hesitation, inflicting fresh harm on the very person the law was meant to protect.
Epstein survivor Jess Michaels put it plainly: “I’m feeling strangely validated. Because in plain sight, and even with an act of Congress, we’re seeing the same delays, negligence, corruption, and incompetence we’ve been warning about. They’ve proved our point.”
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned the release as a deliberate cover-up to protect the powerful, calling for accountability from Attorney General Pam Bondi and senior DOJ officials. Representative Ro Khanna confirmed he and Massie are now weighing impeachment, inherent contempt, and obstruction-of-justice referrals.
The effort to suppress these files says more than their contents ever could. When institutions go to this length to bury evidence, it is because what lies beneath is reputationally catastrophic. The ink may still obscure the details, but the outline is unmistakable: the most powerful man in the world appears entangled in the largest political and criminal cover-up of the modern era.
What made the timing impossible to ignore was that this exposure landed on a day when the pressure on Trump’s public identity was already peaking in his chart. December 19 marked a rare convergence associated with authority stress, reputational fracture, and accountability - the kind of timing that historically coincides with moments when carefully managed personas give way under external scrutiny. This wasn’t chaos arriving at random; it was consequence arriving on cosmic schedule. The mask didn’t slip because of the files. The files landed because the mask could no longer hold.
Trump can engrave his name on as many buildings as he likes, but it won’t cover the truth. The emperor has no clothes, and now, everyone can see it.
Our Global Identity Crisis
The identity collapse playing out in Washington has been playing out all over the world. This isn’t just a political breakdown - it’s a global identity crisis, unfolding as the symbols, stories, and structures that we’ve put around us to remind us who we think we are all begin to fail.
Across countries and cultures, it feels as though reality itself is softening at the edges. Things that once felt solid are no longer holding. The ground is shifting beneath our feet as we scramble for footing, and though it might feel like the end of the world, what’s actually ending is the illusion of separateness. The belief that I am apart from you, that we are insulated from one another, and that harm can be contained. This is the death of ego on a massive scale.
As the collapse unfolds, an ancient truth rises into remembrance: we are not separate, and never were. Whatever we do to another echoes and returns. Violence, denial, indifference: none of it remains local for long. You cannot harm another without harming yourself. Point your finger outward, and sooner or later it circles back, until the finger is pointing right back at you. It’s like a boomerang - it always comes back - so it’s fitting that evidence of the global identity collapse this week played out most clearly on the sandy shores of Australia.
As the week began, hundreds of people were gathered on the sands of Bondi Beach in Sydney for a Hanukkah celebration when the sound of gunfire ripped through the air. Two men opened fire on the crowd while parents shielded children, and strangers pulled strangers to safety. By the end of the ordeal, one gunman was dead, the other was in custody, sixteen people were killed, more than forty were injured, and an entire nation was left stunned by the reality that even in a country defined by restraint, distance, and a long collective memory of choosing not to become something harsher, the world could still break through the fence.
The initial reaction was unmistakably Australian: shock, grief, and an almost instinctive reach for solidarity. Blood donation centres filled within hours. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese laid flowers at Bondi Beach and convened the National Cabinet to review already strict gun laws almost immediately, flagging tougher controls and a renewed national buy-back. He urged Australians to place a candle in their windows as a sign of collective mourning and resolve - a symbol, he said, that “light will triumph over darkness.”
“An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian,” Albanese said. “We stand with you. We embrace you. And we reaffirm tonight that you have every right to be proud of who you are and what you believe. Australia will never submit to division, violence or hatred. We will come through together.”
Footage spread rapidly of Ahmed Al Ahmed, a 43-year-old local fruit shop owner, walking calmly toward one of the gunmen during the ordeal and wrestling the weapon from his hands. Ahmed was shot and wounded in the process but survived, and a GoFundMe set up in his name raised more than $2 million by week’s end. Calls poured in for him to receive every civilian honour available, and while Ahmed himself rejected the word “hero,” Australia, unsurprisingly, did not.
Around him, the country told itself a story it desperately needed to hear: this is who we are. Not fear, not hatred, not paralysis, but people who step forward. People who give blood. People who disarm killers with their bare hands. People who paddle out into the ocean together days after an atrocity to reclaim a beach soaked in grief and declare that this still belongs to all of us.
As international leaders offered statements of condemnation and support, memorials filled the shoreline. Swimmers and surfers formed human chains in the water, and for a brief window, Bondi was not a symbol of fracture, but a symbol of shared humanity.
For a rare, fragile moment, the country moved as one body. But that window did not stay open for long, because grief, when left unguarded, can morph with fear to become something much darker.
Gun Control to Identity Control
Within hours, the story of Bondi began to shift - not through reflection or investigation, but through capture. What had been a question of violence and prevention quietly mutated into a question of identity. The focus drifted from how to stop the next act of violence to who should be watched, restricted, silenced, or excluded in its name.
Fear began doing what fear always does: protecting the self by inventing an enemy. It did what the ego loves - it started pointing the finger.
When Australian police and counter-terrorism authorities identified the shooters as a father and son who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State ideology, and confirmed Islamic State flags were found in their vehicle, sections of the public and political class moved quickly to frame the tragedy through a singular lens: terrorism as proof of a broader cultural threat.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu moved just as quickly to internationalise that frame, accusing the Australian government of “doing nothing to stop the spread of antisemitism” and claiming that Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state had “poured fuel on the antisemitic fire.” The Australian government rejected the claim outright, but the frame had already been introduced, and on home soil, others were quick to run with it.
Leader of right-wing One Nation party Pauline Hanson appeared at the Bondi memorial and, with breathtaking speed, turned collective grief into personal brand management. She called for hate preachers to be “rounded up,” resurrected her long-running obsession with migration, and lamented that Australia no longer resembled “the country I grew up in.” Phones rose around her as a man in a MAGA cap leaned in for selfies. “We love you, Pauline. You’re the only one who speaks the truth.”
Just metres away, volunteers from Turbans 4 Australia - Sikh Australians - quietly handed out food, fruit, and water to anyone who needed it. “If she had her way,” one volunteer said softly, “I wouldn’t be allowed to be here.”
Sydney Muslim leaders declared that they would refuse to perform Islamic funeral rites or receive the bodies of the Bondi terrorists as they condemned the event as a “barbaric and criminal act”. Prominent voice for the Sydney Islamic community Dr Jamal Rifi said “we don’t see them [the offenders] as inside the fold of Islam or as Muslims….What they have done is not condoned by any of us and it is killing innocent civilians. We know it is a verse in our book, killing an innocent civilian is the same as killing all humanity.”
A poignant sign at the Bondi memorial simply read “It was a monster, not a Muslim. We are one human race.”
The contrast could not have been sharper. A nation donating blood, pulling strangers from danger, and honouring a Muslim man who disarmed a shooter, while others insisted the problem was “those kinds of people.” The logic buckled under its own weight. The enemy was “them,” except when it wasn’t - except when “they” were the ones bleeding, rescuing, or saving lives. Then the categories blurred. Then the narrative strained.
And that’s how identity panic works.
It sorts humanity into flavours. It decides which grief counts, which fear is legitimate, which hatred must be stamped out, and which can be tolerated, excused, or quietly redirected. It whispers that safety comes not from shared values, but from tighter borders around belonging.
Despite clear data from Australian police showing that violent crime is far more likely to be committed by Australian-born offenders than immigrants, the persistant (but fervently challenged) narrative this week suggested Australians would be safer by keeping certain people out. The facts didn’t support that conclusion - only the feelings did - but that didn’t stop the debate from accelerating.
The conversation moved quickly: from gun control, to extremism, to Muslims themselves. In a country where Islam is the second-largest religion after Christianity, the question quietly shifted from what Australia stands for - peace and safety for all - to who it should stand against.
Identity Panic Becomes Policy
In the days following Bondi, the identity panic began hardening into policy.
Anthony Albanese flagged the most significant tightening of gun laws since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996: a national buy-back to remove hundreds of thousands of firearms, accelerated work on a national firearms register, caps on gun ownership, and moves to close loopholes between state systems. These measures were broadly welcomed, sitting squarely within Australia’s long, uncomfortable, but ultimately effective relationship with gun reform.
But at the same time, under intense domestic and international pressure, the government moved to signal action on antisemitism and extremist rhetoric. New and strengthened federal hate-speech offences were announced, alongside expanded powers to cancel or refuse visas for individuals who use Australian platforms to incite violence. The government committed to adopting recommendations from a report by its special envoy, including the formal adoption of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism - a move praised by some Jewish organisations and deeply criticised by civil liberties groups, Muslim leaders, and Jewish critics of Israel alike.
The reaction exposed just how volatile the terrain had become. For one flank, the response did not go far enough, with demands coming thick and fast for citizenship stripping, visa bans, and defunding of institutions accused of harbouring “antisemitism,” as if that form of discrimination was more unacceptable than racism or sexism or Islamaphobia. From the other flank came warnings that trauma was being weaponised into a law-and-order crackdown that risked criminalising protest, especially pro-Palestinian speech, and collapsing the distinction between hatred of Jews and criticism of a state.
So Bondi, in the span of days, travelled a long way. What began as a mass shooting became a test of national identity. What began as collective grief became a debate over whose identity deserved protection, whose speech required policing, and who now carried the burden of suspicion. By end of week, the whole thing started looking like a national jellybean sorting contest, where some flavours would receive special protection, while others would not.
Under these skies, as the collective ego comes under pressure, it reaches instinctively for labels. It clings to identity as a life raft, even as that very grasp threatens to tear the social fabric further apart. Bondi did not just expose violence - it exposed the speed with which fear can turn tragedy into an ideological sorting machine, and how quickly “us” and “them” reappear when the illusion of separation is threatened.
That is the reckoning now unfolding. The ego is only panicking because it is built on fear, and that frequency is no longer stable. As it weakens, everything constructed on top of it begins to crack: identities, hierarchies, borders, moral shortcuts.
When we can feel one another deeply, violence becomes unimaginable. To harm another becomes unbearable, because it is felt immediately as self-harm. That is the deeper shift currently underway - not naive, not sentimental, but structural.
The armour we’ve relied on for thousands of years is thinning and for some, that feels like danger, while for others, it feels like relief. Either way, it is happening. This is the letting go of a frequency that no longer serves, and on the other side of that collapse is not chaos, but a form of peace we’ve forgotten how to recognise - one that arrives not through control, but through remembrance.
We are living through the return of an ancient truth: that none of us is separate. Whatever we do to another moves through the whole. In the end, it always comes back to us, because in the end, all is one.
The Comet of Truth
As this week closed, the interstellar comet known as 3I/ATLAS made its closest pass to Earth - a visitor from another solar system, older than our Sun, travelling on a one-way trajectory through our neighbourhood, never to return. It was not a threat. It didn’t blaze across the sky or trigger sirens. In fact, as it passed, most people didn’t notice it at all, and yet, its timing was uncanny, passing as it did the same day Congress demanded the release of the full unredacted Epstein files, a demand that the DOJ roundly defied.
3I/ATLAS was first identified in early July - the same week Donald Trump abruptly announced there would be no further releases of the Epstein files, igniting a six-month scandal as he scrambled to bury what he had promised to reveal, racing against the clock to stall the inevitable collapse of his identity. As the interstellar visitor quietly slipped into our solar system, a very loud effort unfolded on Earth to suppress rising truth. Legal obstacles appeared, procedural excuses multiplied, and the United States lurched into its longest-ever government shutdown, seemingly to delay exposure - all while this object from beyond our solar system began its long, silent approach toward the Sun: the heart of our planetary system, the source of light by which all masks are eventually seen.
When astronomers first observed 3I/ATLAS entering our solar system, it appeared as a glowing red mass, moving through the heavens with uncanny precision, threading planetary lanes like a needle through silk. As it approached the Sun in September, it appeared to change colour from red to green. While some speculated wildly about alien craft, others, more mystically inclined, wondered whether this visitor carried symbolic weight - a consciousness passing through to amplify what was already stirring.
When 3I/ATLAS swung around the Sun in late October, the Sun responded violently - a storm of flares, light, and magnetism hurled directly into its path. The eruptions were immense. Had they been Earth-facing, they would have crippled satellites and drowned electronics. And yet the wanderer survived - not dimmed, but brighter; not scattered, but intact.
As the comet emerged from behind the Sun, astronomers noted another change - this time from green to blue. In scientific terms, blue signals ionization, but in symbolic terms, blue has always been associated with voice, clarity, and truth. To many watching closely, it felt as though this traveller was tracing a progression: from grounding to empathy, from empathy to expression - from feeling to revelation. Like it was moving up the chakras.
And so 3I/ATLAS became known, in some circles, as the comet of truth. Not as an agent of change, but as a witness. That it would make its closest pass to Earth this week - as uncomfortable truths cut through institutions, narratives, and power structures at a devastating pace - felt more like correspondence than coincidence. Though the DOJ dodged releasing the full unredacted Epstein files, what they did was confirm a deeper truth - that they’re engaged in a major cover-up, protecting powerful men, and whatever is in those files must be worse than any of us can imagine.
Throughout history, moments when power attempts to suppress reality are often mirrored by moments when the cosmos seems to lean closer, not to interfere, but to record. Comets have long arrived at the fall of kings - not as executioners, but as witnesses - and this one, as it passed, seemed to underline something unmistakable: the effort now required to keep truth buried has become louder than the truth itself. The mask is no longer seamless. The refusal is now part of the record.
This pattern is everywhere.
At Bondi, fear tried to convert grief into identity control.
In Washington, power tried to turn exposure into silence.
Globally, institutions tightened their grip even as their authority thinned.
Across the world, identities, relationships, and long-held roles are cracking.
This is what the ego does at the end. It reaches for control when coherence fails. It clings to identity when truth threatens to dissolve the story. 3I/ATLAS sailing past at this moment is a quiet reminder: nothing hidden stays hidden forever.
Not from history.
Not from the public.
And not, it seems, from the sky.
Into the New Frequency
The arrival of the comet of truth now seems to be guiding us into what comes next. First, we walk through the ego death so we can prepare for the rise of the heart.
This is the necessary sequence: the mask must fall before the truth can breathe. The structures built on separation - the illusion of me versus you, us versus them, this versus that - must crumble before the deeper coherence can re-emerge. What’s happening now isn’t just a collapse of empires or institutions. It’s a collapse of the illusion of separateness.
The final days of December will bring solidification. Markets will react. Political systems will recalibrate. Exposure fallout will widen. Weather and geological unrest will intensify. And people, on every continent, will make irreversible decisions. This is not destruction. It is the scaffolding of a new world preparing to take shape.
By New Year’s Eve, it will become unmistakably clear that 2026 is not just “the next year,” but the threshold of a new era. This is the hinge-point between ages - a century-turning ignition where the myth of endless growth gives way to the truth of radical transformation. The age of division is dying. The era of coherence is calling.
2026 marks the beginning of a hundred-year return from mind-dominance to heart coherence - the original human frequency we abandoned millennia ago. For thousands of years, we have been stumbling in the dark, led by the mind, severed from the soul, forging futures without the lamp of the heart. Now, the spark returns. 2026 is the strike of the match as the lost frequency begins to rise again.
The turning point arrives in February, when Saturn meets Neptune in Aries - an ultra-rare conjunction on the exact first degree of the zodiac. Saturn is structure. Neptune is spirit. Aries is ignition. This is the uncarved block. The blank page. The cosmic reset of creation itself. This alignment hasn’t occurred at this coordinate in nearly 6,000 years. The last time we stood at such a crossroads, civilizations were forming, hierarchies were hardening, and the human nervous system began to orient around fear, survival, and separation. That cycle is now ending, and in 2026, a new one begins - one that shifts us from unconscious programming to conscious participation.
The first quarter of the year will serve as an integrity test. Whatever has been built on distortion will crack and whatever is built on truth will anchor. As February approaches, the kind of performative falseness that figures like Trump built empires on will begin to fizzle as the spell breaks and the rug is pulled. Those still trying to operate from the old frequency of fear-based power - Trump, his Project 2025 architects, his sycophant enablers in the White House, Netanyahu, and others who weaponised identity in place of integrity - will all face rupture, not necessarily overnight, but unmistakably. February will mark their end as one world falls and another begins to rise.
In late April, Uranus enters Gemini for the first time in nearly a century, switching on a new planetary frequency. Communications, consciousness, technology, and perception will begin shifting from linear to quantum. Breakthroughs will emerge that render today’s systems - and many of our mental models - outdated. These won’t just be upgrades; they’ll be structural rewirings.
Then, the ignition will intensify as May and June bring stacked awakenings when Uranus clashes with the lunar nodes and Sedna joins the mix. These are tectonic realignments, vibrational rather than visible, but no less irreversible.
In July, it all blooms. Uranus, Pluto, and Neptune align near the same degree, forming a once-in-eras configuration that expands consciousness and unlocks heart-led leadership. At that point, the difference between mind and heart will no longer be metaphor - it will be the new architecture of reality. We’ll have to tune to it - we’ll have to allow our hearts to find it, but the rhythm will be there. The new dance will begin.
In 2026, humanity starts returning to coherence, not as a concept, but as a felt experience. We will begin, slowly but undeniably, moving toward emotional transparency, compassion, embodied intuition, telepathic connection, and a reverence for the living world. Not because governments demand it or crises force it, but because the signal of the heart will grow louder than the noise, and eventually, louder than the mind.
This transformation will not be dictated from above, but will emerge from within. It will be felt in the body, chosen in the breath, spoken in the way we begin to look at one another again - as kin, not competition. Not separate, but the same.
This is not the end of the world. It is the end of the era that taught us to survive it, and the beginning of the one that teaches us how to live. And it won’t begin with a bang, but with coherence. With a quiet returning. A soft recognition. A sync - like two tuning forks finding each other across the room. A pulse of resonance rising through the static.
The future is not something we build with our hands alone. It’s something we tune to and anchor in our hearts. And it is already starting, this week, as the light of the comet passes, the sky resets, and the signal of the new world begins to hum beneath our feet.
Collective Self Love, Not Harm
As Trump lurches toward his own collapse, dragging institutions and enablers with him; as wars grind on across the globe and gunmen open fire on innocent civillians - the reflex everywhere is the same. We point the finger. We decide who deserves our hatred. We look for somewhere to aim the pain.
What’s hardest to remember in moments like this is the simplest truth: the one causing harm, the one receiving harm, and the one watching it unfold are not as separate as we like to believe. At the deepest level, what we direct outward does not stay there. It moves through the whole.
The temptation is to meet cruelty with cruelty, to believe that hating the architects of harm will somehow neutralise it. But hatred doesn’t dissolve darkness - it multiplies it. A closed heart is a closed heart, no matter who you closed it to, and a closed heart does not protect us; it only spreads the very condition we claim to oppose. An unlit lamp does not drive out night, it only ensures its darkness.
When we hear the stories of those murdered on the sand at Bondi or in the halls of Brown University, the instinct is to lash out - first at the men who pulled the trigger, then at anyone who resembles them, then at entire communities. But responding with the same energy that fired the gun does not end violence. It only extends its reach. Hate is still hate, no matter who wields it or where we choose to send it.
The world that is rising is not one where harm is answered with more harm. It is one where such retaliation becomes unthinkable because of the pain it would inflict - not just on others, but on the whole we belong to. And that world does not arrive through control, punishment, or fear - it arrives through refusal.
Refusal to dim our light.
Refusal to close our hearts.
Refusal to let fear decide who we become.
This is not weakness, but coherence, and it’s the only thing that breaks the cycle.
But coherence does not mean inaction. There must be responses to violence, injustice, corruption, and cruelty. Responsibility matters. Boundaries matter. Consequences matter. But consequence is not the same as retaliation. Justice is not the same as vengeance. One seeks to stabilise the system; the other seeks to satisfy the wound. Balance can be restored, and the means of harm removed, without villainising one another or exacting revenge.
The world that’s coming is not one where those who harm others are harmed in return. It is one where harm is met with responsibility, restraint, and repair - because we understand that escalating pain only deepens the fracture.
When we remember that the aggressor is not some alien other - but part of the same human field - the response changes. Not because we excuse harm, but because we stop feeding it. We choose to protect the whole rather than poison it.
This is the way of the world as we once knew it, in the time before time.
The memory of it lives in our bones.
And now, we are being asked to remember.
We are connected by golden threads of light - tethered heart to heart by invisible cords through which love and understanding once flowed freely. These threads lay dormant for an age, without the frequency to carry the current, without the language to translate the heartbeat into words.
Now, they are being re-lit.
Warmed by the Sun.
Reanimated by the awakening of the heart.
We will hear one another again.
We will feel one another again.
Our heart centres are coming back online and that is where we must anchor - in the steady beat of the collective heart, as connection is reforged, as coherence returns, and at last, all things remember themselves as one.
See you next Sunday, friends. Until then, have COURAGE, and stay kind, stay fierce, and stay human.
PS: - If you want support letting what’s falling fall, come join me in the Daily Lighthouse. I’ll be there, each day with you, or if you prefer it in an audio listening format, head over to the Resonance Room
We are connected by golden threads of light - my entire heart, body and mind resonate. Once again you have outlined the past week in a clear and understandable manner - filled with hope. Thank you again.
Truly comprehensive view of what’s going on. I’ve been reading your posts with appreciation for a while, and subscribed today based on yet another succinct yet heart-felt and hopeful analysis! Thank you for your work Wiz!