Wizard's Weekly Wrap-Up: Vanity Vessels, File Dumps, Shattered Myths & the Slow Drowning of the Lie
Creepy Clauses, Toxic Tides, Vanishing Trust & Courtroom Karma: The Week That Was December 21-27, 2025
This week the lies got louder, the masks slipped lower, secrets leaked everywhere, and the Earth - tired of playing silent witness - flooded highways, shook foundations, and flushed out the rot. Chaos wore a tailored suit and a crucifix, grinning for the cameras even as the ground gave way beneath its polished shoes.
The week began with Trump unveiling two new “Trump-class” battleships - floating golden campaign ads complete with his face on the deck that looked like they were stolen from a Bond villain’s yacht club - before he took a detour from naval cosplay to complain that Americans were still talking about the Epstein files. “A lot of people are very angry,” he sniffed, “that pictures are being released of other people that really had nothing to do with Epstein, but they’re in a picture with him because he was at a party, and you ruined a reputation of somebody.”
One of those “nothing to do with Epstein” people was Bill Clinton, who promptly lit a rhetorical match under Trump’s chair, demanding the Department of Justice release “the full and complete record the public demands and deserves.” Clinton didn’t just call Trump’s bluff - he dragged him and Attorney General Pam Bondi into the spotlight and dropped a subpoena-shaped anvil right on their heads.
What the DOJ initially released as required by the Epstein Files Act was redacted to hell, except, bizarrely, for survivor names, which were sometimes the only thing left visible. As evidence of the administrations incompetence and lack of care, it was eventually discovered that redactions could be bypassed by simply copying and pasting from the PDF. That’s right - the cover-up was so slapdash, it came with a built-in undo button.
Somewhere between the redacted mess and digital shrug sat a handwritten note allegedly from Epstein to fellow convicted predator Larry Nassar that claimed “Our president shares our love of young, nubile girls.” It was quickly declared a fake by the FBI - the handwriting didn’t match, the postmark came days after Epstein’s death, and the return address belonged to a different prison entirely. Far from clarifying anything, the sloppy release just created more confusion and chaos.
There was also an unverified 2020 FBI tip from a woman who claimed she’d been trafficked as a minor, subjected to extreme abuse, and witnessed her newborn child murdered and dumped in Lake Michigan, with Donald Trump allegedly present at some events. Unsubstantiated, yes, but it’s in the files, raising legitimate questions as to why Trump was never thoroughly investigated.
But buried among the blacked out files were some genuine receipts. Despite Trump repeatedly insisting he was “never on Epstein’s plane,” flight logs show he boarded at least eight times between 1993 and 1996, including one trip where the only passengers were Trump, Epstein, and an unidentified 20-year-old. His name appears more than 100 times in the documents, alongside Ghislaine Maxwell and other “frequent flyers.”
In July this year, the DOJ said they “did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties,” and that statement now appears to have been a lie, as internal emails reveal prosecutors were actively planning to charge ten co-conspirators until someone mysteriously pulled the plug. One prosecutor even cursed the FBI’s digital forensics team in an email, saying the Bureau’s failure to properly process Epstein’s seized devices was “completely f***ing us on this.”
Meanwhile, across the pond, British police are asking the FBI for more information after another unverified tip alleged child abuse at gatherings attended by no-longer-Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell - potentially on royal property. The UK says it’s “assessing” whether to follow up, which is code for they’re trying to figure out if this bomb is live. The request cames after Epstein’s files revealed a 2001 email believed to be from Andrew - sent from Balmoral and signed simply “A” - asking Maxwell if she’d found him any “new inappropriate friends.” She replied she’d only found “appropriate” ones and he responded that he was “distraught.” Because nothing says royal leisure like shopping for girls via email from a castle.
Out of the blue on Christmas Eve, the DOJ announced that it had just discovered another million Epstein-related documents. Because who among us hasn’t misplaced a million pages of elite sex trafficking evidence around the office? Chuck Schumer was not impressed, calling it a “massive cover-up” and Senate Democrats are now asking hard questions, demanding answers to questions like why Epstein’s lawyer and accountant - who handled shady wire transfers, arranged fake marriages, and are now executors of Epstein’s $100 million estate - were never questioned by authorities.
House Oversight is drafting subpoenas for Epstein’s network and prepping impeachment articles and a contempt resolution against Pam Bondi over the bungled release of the files. It’s no longer a question of whether there’s a cover-up, but how many names it’s protecting. As Timothy Snyder put it: “There must be something else. Something verging on the unimaginable.”
Representative Melanie Stansbury confirmed that perjury, contempt of Congress, and obstruction are already evident in the files and directly accused Trump, Bondi, and FBI Director Kash Patel of shielding names and lying to Congress. “There is a very powerful person at the top who doesn’t want these stories out,” she warned, saying that the stalled release of files was “a cover-up involving the United States government, the justice system, rich and powerful individuals, a cover-up potentially involving foreign countries and foreign actors.”
She went on to say, “There has been a systemic failure of the justice system for decades. A systemic failure to hold people who are powerful and have money to account. And that has allowed not just hundreds, but potentially thousands of women, not only in the United States, but around the world, to be bought, sold, and trafficked, not only by Jeffrey Epstein, but by his associates and his rich and powerful friends.”
While the DOJ’s now-White-House-controlled X account tried to call the revelations pouring out of the files “unfounded and false,” Trump had a full-blown Christmas tantrum online, ranting about “sleazebags” who once loved Epstein, accusing Democrats of framing him, name-dropping Ghislaine Maxwell, and warning this could be America’s “last Merry Christmas.” The screed read like a nervous breakdown in real time, as Trump blamed Democrats for the DOJ’s sudden discovery of a million more pages of Epstein files, calling it “just another Witch Hunt,” and demanding names be released to “embarrass them.” As Adam Kinzinger responded: “I love the smell of panic in the evening. Smells like…..victory.”
The slow, corrosive drip of the Epstein files is doing what indictments, insurrections, and impeachments couldn’t: it’s breaking Republican loyalty. Trump is disintegrating mentally and physically, while the GOP fractures around him, with party insiders desperately grabbing for whatever remains before the bottom fully falls out.
Nowhere was the crack-up more spectacular than at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest this week, where Erika Kirk - widow of the late Charlie Kirk - made her entrance in yet another blaze of pyrotechnics and promptly endorsed J.D. Vance for 2028, while Team Trump was busy handing out Trump 2028 hats and consulting Alan Dershowitz about whether he could legally serve a third term. (Spoiler: still no.)
What followed was less a political convention and more a right-wing WrestleMania, as Ben Shapiro came out swinging, torching Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Steve Bannon as “frauds and grifters” for their slow-motion slide toward the Nazi-adjacent edge of the pool. And if that weren’t enough, Ted Cruz has taken to openly sniping at Vance, adding a side of petty to an already overcooked stew.
Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation is bleeding staff after its president defended Tucker Carlson’s soft-shoe with white supremacist Nick Fuentes - prompting a quiet exodus to Mike Pence’s new think tank, founded in the aftermath of the MAGA mob’s “Hang Mike Pence” chants on January 6. That same tank is now quietly floating itself as the anti-Trump ark of the Republican future: no strongmen, no tariffs, no rigged maps - just haunted-eyed technocrats and constitutional nostalgia. Even in Indiana - Pence’s home turf - local Republicans slapped Trump’s hand away on redistricting. Clearly, the magic is gone and the emperor’s power is waning.
MAGA, once a movement, is now a malfunction, with less than half of Republicans strongly approving of Trump, and only a third saying they think he’s doing a good job with inflation and the economy. But Trump doesn’t seem concerned. He’s busy designing a new ballroom reportedly four times the size of the White House - he recently told Jesse Watters: “I’m building a monument to myself, because no one else will.” Never mind the economy - the man’s got golden drapes to choose.
Elsewhere this week, CBS lit its own credibility on fire by yanking a 60 Minutes expose just hours before airtime - a damning report on the Trump administration’s covert deportation of over 200 migrants to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. The segment featured firsthand accounts of torture and abuse, and had passed all legal and editorial checks, but new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss pulled it anyway, citing “lack of administration comment,” despite the fact that Trump officials refused to go on record. Weiss insisted it wasn’t censorship, just “accountability,” and absolutely nothing to do with CBS’s new Trump-aligned owner Larry Ellison, who’s currently trying to butter up the president to bless his Warner Bros buyout. Nor was it related, surely, to the the FCC Commissioner announcing CBS would soon be monitored for “bias” by someone who reports directly to the President. Totally normal stuff.
According to the New York Times, Trump has been privately boasting that Larry Ellison personally promised to nudge the network into a more MAGA-friendly lane. So there you have it: reality TV star becomes president, buys the newsroom, censors the truth, and gets a loyalty monitor to fact-check the facts. Welcome to 2025.
Reporter Sharyn Alfonsi didn’t mince words, calling the move “a political decision” and warning it gave the White House an effective veto over journalism. Her story didn’t vanish, though. It leaked in Canada and went viral, unleashing the very storm the network tried to avoid - a blockbuster confirmation that the U.S. government had quietly deported migrants to torture sites while a once-respected news outlet helped mop up the blood.
In a rare win for actual law, a federal judge ordered the U.S. government to either bring back or finally grant hearings to the Venezuelan men it deported to El Salvador without due process. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court handed Trump another legal slap, ruling that his deployment of National Guard troops to Chicago was, in all likelihood, illegal. And Justice Kavanaugh, in an attempt to walk back his own September ruling that effectively greenlit ICE racial profiling, insisted this week that no, no, officers mustn’t do that. But the damage is done. The genie’s out, the dog’s off the leash, and the toothpaste - sorry Brett - isn’t going back in the tube, no matter how many footnotes you attach to your regrets.
FBI Director Kash Patel demanded over $1 million in taxpayer funds for a personal fleet of armored BMWs, because nothing says “law and order” like German luxury sedans on the public dime. Meanwhile, Trump accused The New York Times of being a national security threat, called Stephen Colbert a “dead man walking,” and urged CBS to “put him to sleep,” and his administration also announced that, come January, it will begin garnishing wages from student loan borrowers in default - just in time for the holidays. Trump threatened (again) to invade Greenland, and tried to seize yet another oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, only this time, the tanker got away and has been on the run for four days, prompting the world’s least sexy high seas chase.
In what was supposed to be a heartwarming Christmas Eve tradition, Trump and Melania joined the NORAD Santa Tracker call-in event to chat with children about Santa’s journey, but between sleigh bells and static, Trump began mixing holiday cheer with partisan paranoia, telling kids the 2024 election was stolen and suggesting Santa might need a background check. “We want to make sure he’s not infiltrated,” Trump said, in case Santa Claus had become some kind of socialist sleeper cell. “Santa loves Oklahoma like I do,” he added helpfully. “Oklahoma was very good to me in the election.” Somewhere between the conspiracy and the campaign stump speech, Melania cut him off mid-ramble, but it didn’t help. Trump ended up telling one child caller, “You sound beautiful and cute. How old are you?” The child replied, “I am eight.” Cue the collective shudder.
Trump’s debut as host of the Kennedy Center Honors drew the lowest TV audience in the history of the broadcast - about 2.65 million viewers, roughly 35 % fewer than last year. The slump came after Trump slapped his name onto the Kennedy Center itself, a move that prompted Representative Joyce Beatty, an ex officio trustee of the institution, to file suit arguing the rebranding is illegal. As artists continue to withdraw from scheduled performances in protest, Trump has floated a solution of his own: replacing the theater’s armrests with marble. Because when audiences are fleeing and performers are pulling out, what the people really want is cold, hard stone where their elbows should go.
On Christmas Day, the Trump administration went full Christian nationalist cosplay, pumping out a string of government-sanctioned Jesus posts across multiple departments, as if the Constitution never happened. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared, “The joyous message of Christmas is the hope of Eternal Life through Christ.” The Labor Department chimed in with, “Joy to the World. Let Earth Receive Her King.” Homeland Security offered: “Merry Christmas, America. We are blessed to share a nation and a Savior.” And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote: “Today we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. May His light bring peace, hope, and joy to you and your families.”
The posts sent a clear message that this administration sees America not as a nation of laws, but as a kingdom under Christ (so long as He votes red). Critics were quick to point out the hypocrisy of holy messaging from an administration that drowns shipwrecked migrants in the Caribbean and disappears civilians to undisclosed detention sites overseas. After all, nothing says peace on Earth like torture, extrajudicial imprisonment, and state-sponsored drowning.
Almost in reply, Pope Leo said in his Christmas sermon that the story of Jesus being born in a stable because there was no room at an inn should remind Christians that refusing to help the poor and strangers today is tantamount to rejecting God himself. “There is no room for God if there is no room for the human person. To refuse one is to refuse the other.” Touche.
Not to be outdone, Trump posted a grotesque holiday message on Christmas night, announcing he had just ordered airstrikes in northwest Nigeria. “Tonight, at my direction… the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum,” he wrote, claiming the targets had been “viciously killing… innocent Christians… at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries!” He closed with: “MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more.”
The religious framing wasn’t subtle and neither was the right-wing applause. “I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Christmas,” cheered far-right activist Laura Loomer, “than by avenging the death of Christians through the justified mass killing of Islamic terrorists.” But the facts, as ever, were more complicated than the holy war cosplay suggests.
Nigeria’s own foreign minister said the operation wasn’t about religion - it was about security. Though the U.S. far right has spent years portraying Nigeria as a hotbed of Islamic persecution, most analysts agree the region’s violence is largely about land, water, and criminal gangs that terrorize both Christians and Muslims. Even CNN confirmed that Nigerian president Bola Tinubu had greenlit the strike as a counterinsurgency move, not a religious crusade. Yet for Trump’s base, “saving the Christians” plays. As Anne Applebaum dryly put it: “Not sure I understand why the Trump administration cares about Christians in Nigeria and not Christians in Ukraine.” But then again, Ukraine never offered him a holy war he could sell in a campaign ad.
California, ever the drama queen of American geography, began 2025 on fire and ended it underwater as this week, Southern California’s highways vanished beneath floodwaters, stranding holiday travellers for miles. Flash flooding turned hillsides into rivers of mud, swallowing homes whole. But amidst the chaos, a glimmer: California also became the first U.S. state to manufacture and sell its own insulin, priced at just $11 a pen. Actual life-saving medicine, for less than a burrito. Imagine that. And up north, a federal judge blocked ICE from arresting immigrants who show up for court - a rare moment of sanity in a system built to punish presence.
Elsewhere in the American experiment: the FDA recalled yet another 83,000 bags of potentially radioactive shrimp (just in time for the holidays), and former Special Counsel Jack Smith urged Jim Jordan to release the videotapes of his recent testimony - the one where he calmly explained why Donald Trump should be prosecuted and convicted.
Globally, Istanbul police foiled an apparent ISIS plot, arresting over 100 suspects in a coordinated anti-terror raid. In Gaza, a Palestinian electrician was released after 11 months of Israeli detention without charges, and described the beatings he endured during his imprisonment. Meanwhile, scientists, not content with just one slow-rolling apocalypse, warned that Bird Flu may be gearing up to spark a human pandemic by 2026. Because of course it is.
And in Russia, things took a fresh dive into the surreal when police detained 70 members of a so-called “radical sect” for the high crime of praying for Ukranian President Zelensky’s health, just days before Russian drones struck a residential building in Kyiv. One of Putin’s most serious escalations in months, and a reminder that, yes, the war is still raging, and yes, the authoritarian playbook still includes religious suppression, aerial bombardment, and PR-censorship with a side of paranoia.
The year isn’t ending quietly - it’s careening toward the finish line in a blur of chaos, confusion, and crackling endings, which feels just about right, given that 2025 has been one of the most chaotic years in living memory - not just noisy, but foundationally unstable - a year where everything that once felt fixed began to wobble, and some of it, blessedly, began to fall.
And yet, as we stand on the threshold of 2026, the skies whisper what the headlines won’t: that we are not just watching collapse - we are witnessing clearance. A making of space. The ground is shifting because it must, to make room for something truer to rise.
Sometimes the best way to chart the path forward is to look back and see where we’ve been, because the best way forward is to remember what we forgot. Not every journey takes us from here to there - some bring us back to what we lost. And this, dear reader, is one of those moments. Humanity is on the return loop of a very long round trip, and the train is finally pulling into the station - one coded not in time, but in frequency. A frequency we once lived by, and are finally remembering how to hear.
So if you’re feeling disoriented, take heart - that’s the first sign the spell is breaking. And 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 Legend of the Lie
“Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it”
So wrote Jonathan Swift in The Examiner back in 1710. The Irish-born satirist, Anglican clergyman, and author of Gulliver’s Travels, had a front-row seat to the brutal theatre of early modern politics, when pamphlets flew faster than facts, and public opinion was a battlefield shaped less by evidence than by outrage. Swift’s line wasn’t just clever; it was clinical. A diagnosis of a media ecosystem already warped by speed, tribal loyalty, and emotional shortcuts, where whatever felt right spread faster than what was.
Three hundred years later, Swift’s quip still holds, though now we quote it with a digital upgrade: “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has tied its shoelaces.” Only the velocity has changed. Where once ideas rode on ink and horse, now they hitch a ride on algorithms. Lies sprint, while truth limps and discernment arrives out of breath, waving receipts and hoping someone’s still listening.
This didn’t begin with newspapers, nor with Swift. For as long as humans have organized themselves into stories, we’ve been living behind a veil of fast-moving falsehoods - truth-shaped enough to pass, convenient enough to keep, and sticky enough to spread. They weren’t always malicious - sometimes they were aspirational - but they became the scaffolding on which entire civilizations were built.
Because where truth was slow, complex, and inconvenient, lies were nimble - easy to digest, easy to share, and spectacularly useful for holding power together. When the truth disrupted, falsehoods soothed. When the truth demanded change, mythic narratives offered belonging. It was easier to organise around illusion than complexity, and so, we did.
If something looked right, sounded authoritative, bore the right symbols, or was repeated often enough by those in charge, it became real enough. That was the unspoken agreement. Truth, in this framework, was less about accuracy and more about alignment. It wasn’t something you discovered. It was something you performed.
This was never deception in the clumsy sense - it was theatre. A civilizational operating system made of pageantry, repetition, and ritual, designed not to reflect reality, but to hold it together.
The Age of Distortion
To find a time when humanity was tuned to the actual frequency of truth, we have to go back - way back - not just pre-internet or pre-industry, but pre-symbol. Back to the early human societies that our history books barely remember. Back when truth wasn’t argued, proven, or performed - it was lived.
Before there were states, scriptures, or spreadsheets, life was ruled by feedback. The world didn’t care what you claimed, only what worked. If there was food, you ate. If there was danger, you ran. If a ritual brought rain or healing, it endured. If it didn’t, it was abandoned. Truth wasn’t a proposition - it was a survival mechanism. A precise correspondence between action and consequence.
In those early days, meaning was inseparable from experience. A symbol didn’t point to something - it was the thing. There was no room for abstraction to float free of the real. Coherence wasn’t a virtue. It was oxygen.
But then we got clever.
Agriculture bred surplus. Surplus enabled hierarchy. Hierarchy invited abstraction. With distance came distortion. Symbols wandered further from their roots. Authority replaced feedback. Representation replaced embodiment. And slowly, a new world took shape - one where appearances could stand in for reality, and performance could impersonate truth.
Civilization scaled, and with it, the theatre of truth expanded. Kings didn’t just rule - they wore truth. Priests chanted it. Scribes etched it in stone and sang it from scrolls. Legitimacy no longer required coherence - it required costumes. Pharaohs crowned themselves sons of gods and sealed their divinity in gold and granite. Medieval popes donned embroidered mitres and issued bulls that bent empires to the will of heaven. The crown, the robe, the temple, the altar - none of these were ornaments. They were instruments of illusion. Technologies of truth-by-design.
Soon, paper replaced prayer. Bureaucracy replaced belief. Stamps, signatures, and seals became our new sacraments. If a document was filed correctly, it was true, no matter how wildly it contradicted lived experience. The performance of order became more important than the reality of it. In Salem, girls cried “witch,” magistrates nodded, scribes inked their names, and the gallows filled - truth conjured by paperwork, not proof. Centuries later, the same spell echoed through McCarthy-era America, where accusation alone became evidence, and a name typed on a list was enough to end a life or career. Hysteria codified, fear notarised, and in both cases, the lie held, not because it was real, but because it was filed.
This is how modern states were built: on declarations that made things real by asserting them. Borders, contracts, citizenship, property - all of them rooted in paperwork that told the world what ought to be, not what was.
America itself was a nation founded on radiant promises of liberty and equality, even as it shackled millions, erased others, and excluded the rest. But the performance was persuasive enough to stick. The idea sang louder than the contradiction, and so, it held, not because it was true, but because it was performed well enough to feel true.
That’s the trick. It wasn’t truth holding the system together - it was presentation.
How Distortion Learned to Sing
National anthems became one of the most elegant tools in the architecture of performed truth, not written to describe reality, but to declare it into being. These weren’t songs of reflection; they were spells of coherence. Set to music and sung across generations, they embedded aspiration as fact and identity as destiny. Entire nations taught their citizens to chant belief into their bones, even if the verses bore no resemblance to lived experience. It was, quite literally, the use of frequency to transmit distortion.
These songs weren’t truth embodied, but performed. To sing them was to make them feel real. To repeat them was to stabilise the illusion. And to question them was to tug at the seams of the national myth, so we didn’t. Whole societies - sometimes whole civilizations - were held together by beautiful lies. Not always cruel ones. Often noble, even poetic. But lies nonetheless - declarations layered like wallpaper over the structural cracks, as if singing louder might drown out the inconvenient sound of reality knocking at the door.
And for a long while, it worked, until along came the gods of mass media. Photography, radio, cinema, television, advertising - at first, serving the illusion and scaling the spectacle, allowing lies to be lit, edited, directed, and dubbed so coherence could be manufactured and mass-produced. What started as tools of unity became tools of persuasion, and then - very quickly - tools of control. Testimony gave way to image, evidence to repetition, and verification to vibe.
Now, a war could be televised and made to look noble. A lie could be repeated until it echoed like fact. A myth could be shot in soft focus, backed by swelling strings, and sold as memory. Vietnam’s body counts, Reagan’s shining city, 9/11’s stage-managed aftermath, the clean war that never was in Iraq - all of it sculpted not to reflect reality, but to choreograph it.
By the turn of the century, performance had fully outpaced substance. Narrative could outrun reality, and power no longer flowed to the wise or the steady - it flowed to the compelling. In this new ecosystem, charisma was currency, repetition was proof, identity replaced integrity, and truth became little more than theatre.
And out of that theatre walked Donald Trump.
He didn’t disrupt the system - he embodied it. He wasn’t a break from the norm - he was the final product. The living proof that in an age built on spectacle, all you had to do was play the part.
The Rise of Donald Trump
Donald Trump made his debut not in politics, but in the myth-making capital of 1980s New York, where perception was product. He took his father’s modest but reliable construction business in Queens and rebranded it into something louder, shinier, and taller - literally - with the creation of Trump Tower. Marketed as a monument to luxury and success, the building shimmered with gold, glass, and bravado, but behind the gloss, it was all smoke and mirrors: cheap fittings, fake finishes, inflated rhetoric. A gilded shell. A shrine to the idea that if it looked rich, it was.
Substance was never the point. The buildings were just props. What Trump was really constructing was an image - slapping his name in giant letters across the skyline like a branding iron on reality itself. His projects were routinely overhyped, his debts buried, his contractors unpaid. Failures were reframed as triumphs. Deals collapsed, lawsuits stacked, and reputations curdled. By the late ’90s, the illusion was fraying. His casinos had tanked. His finances were in ruins. In New York business circles, he wasn’t feared - he was laughed at. A punchline with a gold-plated ego.
Then television intervened.
In the early 2000s, producer Mark Burnett - riding high on Survivor - was looking to create a new reality format built around authority, drama, and elimination. He needed a businessman who looked the part, and when all the real titans of industry said no, Trump said yes, and just like that, a character was born.
The Apprentice didn’t just feature Trump - it resurrected him. When producers toured Trump Tower to scout the boardroom for filming, they found it was falling apart, so they built a fake one for the show. Trump couldn’t follow a script, so editors sculpted coherence from hours of chaotic rambling - the kind we now see daily in the Oval Office, but which back then was carefully trimmed to sound slightly less deranged. The end product wasn’t a man but a myth. Decisive. Commanding. Infallible. “America’s businessman.” A fantasy in a suit, beamed into millions of homes like a gospel of success.
It would be easy to call this a lie, but what it really was, was performed coherence. Television doesn’t ask if something is true, only if it holds attention, and Trump - marinated in spectacle - understood the law of the age that attention is truth. What holds the gaze becomes real. What repeats becomes credible. What performs well replaces what actually is.
He mastered that logic. Ratings became evidence. Visibility became legitimacy. Recognition became power. For over a decade, he surfed that feedback loop to cultural relevance until, inevitably, there was only one stage left: the presidency.
Trump didn’t run for office out of duty or belief. He ran to stay visible. He brought with him the full playbook of reality television: conflict, catchphrases, cliffhangers, cartoon villains, and manufactured outrage. Millions were already primed, not for a leader, but for a character they thought they knew. It didn’t matter that none of it was real. In a culture trained to mistake compelling for true, that was more than enough.
He wasn’t a politician. He was a production. A persona stitched together from contradiction, projection, and repetition. He didn’t break the system - he completed it. Trump was not a glitch in the matrix - he was the matrix. The perfect avatar of a culture where reality had been outsourced to performance.
Politics became the next season. The Oval Office became another set. Cabinet members were cast members. Press briefings became episodes. And the public - willingly or not - became the audience. And once that shift took hold, sincerity became optional. Integrity became aesthetic. Consistency stopped being required. The question was no longer: Is it true? But simply: Does it play?
Trump didn’t invent this world. He was its most honest artefact. A man made of illusion, animated by distortion, lifted to power by a feedback loop of falsehoods. He didn’t subvert the age - he embodied it.
And now, that age - finally - is coming to an end.
The Performance Pandemic
Every system has a saturation point. With the rise of the internet and digital networks in the early 21st century, information became abundant, instantaneous, and permanent. Suddenly, everyone could broadcast, everything could be recorded, and nothing - literally, nothing - truly disappeared.
But when everyone can perform, performance loses its power. When everything is archived, contradictions pile up. When narratives collide in real time, coherence starts to matter more than polish. The same conditions that once allowed spectacle to dominate began, slowly and irreversibly, to turn against it.
That’s when the phrase “my truth” arrived - an early tremor in the cultural field. A tell. A signal that we no longer shared a common story of what truth even was. Instead, we began improvising our own - each person staging their version, because we’d never learned to experience truth as anything other than performance. If truth had always been something you presented, then of course everyone would start presenting their own, and now that everyone had their own platform, they had the means to do so.
But truth was never meant to be a show. It isn’t a costume or a script or a declaration. Truth is something you tune to. It resonates. It holds. It survives contact with reality.
Only a lie needs constant documentation, defence, repetition, and display. Truth doesn’t need to announce itself. It doesn’t campaign. It just persists.
Trump hit the wall of that reality during the Covid pandemic - the first crisis in his lifetime that couldn’t be distracted, redirected, or spun. For years, he had dominated attention by overwhelming the field: burying facts beneath noise, substituting volume for coherence, and replacing discomfort with spectacle. But a virus doesn’t care about ratings. It doesn’t respond to branding and it does not vanish because someone says it will.
As the death toll mounted and hospitals overflowed, the theatre began to collapse. Trump couldn’t “spin” ventilators into existence. He couldn’t meme his way past the morgues. Claiming the virus might disappear “like magic,” or be neutralised with bleach or light, only exposed the limits of his performative power. By the time half a million Americans were dead, the gap between narrative and reality had become unbridgeable.
And it wasn’t just Trump who hit the wall. Institutions did too.
Science urged masks, vaccines, and caution, but trust had long been eroded by decades of over-promising, under-delivering, and performing certainty where there was none. People had been trained by the system to expect spectacle - to expect answers that were clear, clean, and total - but reality wasn’t offering that. It never had.
So when lived experience didn’t match the promise of protection, doubt rushed in. Not critical thinking - doubt. Fragmentation. Competing truths. Colliding realities. A culture unsure how to tell the difference between evidence and assertion, between what feels true and what is.
This was the moment the age of distortion began to eat itself as the very tools that once helped appearance outrun reality became too powerful, too exposed, and too saturated that the illusion couldn’t hold. The performance began to buckle. The spell weakened. The seams showed. And in the cracks, something began to stir - not a hunger for better stories, but a deeper demand, not for performance but for coherence.
After the Distortion
The five years since the pandemic haven’t felt like recovery. They’ve felt like degeneration. A blind, desperate scramble for coherence in a world that was never taught how to recognise it.
Some wanted to believe Biden or Merrick Garland could save the world, only to discover they came with either sharp edges or dull tools, or both. Others pinned their hopes on Kamala, projecting change onto a candidate already weighed down by political baggage and an impossible brief. And then, of course, there were those who decided that the best man to root out institutional corruption was a convicted felon, and sent Donald Trump back to the White House, promising he’d finally release the Epstein files, which was all good and well until it became increasingly clear that he is the Epstein files.
This isn’t a rebuilding era. Not yet. It’s the slow-motion collapse of illusion. The breakdown of lies that once worked but now fall flat. Some call this the “post-truth” era, but that’s not quite right. That phrase assumes we once had truth and somehow lost it.
What we’re entering right now isn’t post-truth - it’s post-distortion. A time when lies can no longer hold their shape and don’t travel as far. When performances don’t land the way they used to. A time when hollow words echo louder, because the scaffolding beneath them has started to rot.
This Christmas gave us a collective checkpoint - a shared moment of pause, a seasonal touchstone for the strange place we’re in. It felt a little empty, didn’t it? A little hollow. Like we were all going through the motions. The tree was up, the lights were twinkling, the presents were wrapped, but when it came time to deck the halls and feel the magic, it was like the magic forgot to show up.
But the magic isn’t what’s gone - the distortion is. And in its absence, we start to see what Christmas really is: a ritual performance of peace, love, and joy. A beautiful one, but one that no longer feels true unless it’s backed by something real. Without embodiment, the ritual rings hollow.
And it’s not just Christmas. We’re noticing it everywhere now.
The wedding that feels more like a photoshoot than a vow. The apology that’s been media-trained to death. The leader who speaks of unity while holding a script written by pollsters. The graduation speech, the product launch, the state funeral. The talking heads on television, or the ones on your phone asking you endlessly to like and subscribe. All ritual. All performance. All losing their spark when the spirit that once animated them no longer shows up.
Because something in the frequency has changed, and we’re no longer satisfied with appearances that don’t land. The pageantry isn’t enough. The gestures aren’t working. Not unless they’re real. Not unless they’re lived.
That’s where we are now: in the in-between. The performance still exists, but the spell is rapidly wearing off.
As we step into 2026, this will only sharpen.
The age where reality could be managed by appearance alone is ending. Performance can no longer hold the weight. It leaks energy. It demands constant reinforcement, escalation, denial. It eats itself. It frays.
What’s ending is not deception - it’s deception’s efficiency.
And what’s rising in its place is not purity or perfection - it’s coherence.
The Return of Truth
Truth, in this emerging era, won’t shout. It won’t posture or plead. It won’t need to dominate the stage, go viral, or win the argument. It will simply hold - over time, through pressure, and under scrutiny.
Truth, in this deeper sense, is quiet. It’s steady and unshakable. It aligns word and action. It remains whole when tested, and consistent even when no one is watching. It does not collapse under scrutiny, because it was never propped up by illusion in the first place.
This is the frequency we’re slowly learning to tune to now, and will have to master in the coming years. Not appearances or persuasion. Not perfect arguments or polished optics.
Resonance.
Because truth doesn’t perform.
It doesn’t need to be declared to exist.
It doesn’t need to be sold to be real.
It’s something you feel in your bones.
It’s not thought in the mind - it’s known in the heart.
And as we grow increasingly dissatisfied with the mere appearance of integrity, we are beginning - tentatively, often painfully - to demand that it be lived. This is the great shift of our time: from a species that leads with the mind to one that listens with the heart.
And the heart knows.
It doesn’t need applause.
It doesn’t need proof.
It simply knows what rings true.
But that doesn’t mean we’re stepping into some golden age of clarity. Quite the opposite. Things will very likely get messier before they get cleaner, because many will keep looking for meaning where they always found it - in the show, in the script, in the spectacle - and come up empty.
They’ll feel the hollowness but won’t know why.
They’ll feel lost, not because truth is gone, but because it’s moved.
From the headline to the body.
From the platform to the pulse.
From the narrative to the knowing.
Disillusionment will come in waves. A deep, aching grief for stories that no longer hold. Many will wonder what the point of living is, as the scaffolding of meaning collapses around them. But that fracture is the beginning of alignment. And that grief is sacred. It is the shedding of what was never real.
Because as the rules of legitimacy shift, claims will have to work, not just persuade. Systems will have to function, not just look convincing. Narratives will have to survive contact with reality, and many of them won’t. They’ll collapse under the weight of what they promised, and that collapse will be painful. It will tear through institutions, identities, and ideologies, but it will also clear space for something actually real.
Because the turbulence of this moment isn’t chaos for its own sake. It’s the friction of transition. The recalibration of a species. The body remembering how to tune to something true. A shift from a civilization organised around performance to one increasingly constrained and clarified by coherence.
From a world where appearance could stand in for reality to a world where reality pushes back. From a world that demanded we think our way to truth to one where we can finally feel it.
2026: The Return of Coherence
If the past few years have marked the slow unravelling of distortion, then 2026 is the year that unraveling becomes impossible to ignore. Not because truth suddenly “wins,” but because the old mechanics stop working as the scaffolding that once allowed appearance to masquerade as reality begins to buckle under its own weight.
2026 doesn’t mark the triumphant arrival of truth - it’s not a moral victory lap. It’s something more structural. More unforgiving. It marks the return of feedback - the tightening of the link between action and consequence. A return of gravity. A reassertion of cost. A world where coherence becomes expensive to fake and impossible to outsource.
This is why institutions and individuals built on spectacle will begin to wobble - not because they’re uniquely wicked, but because they were built for a frequency that no longer holds. They were optimised for a system where repetition could substitute for reality, where confidence could override contradiction, and where volume could drown out dissonance. But that system is fading. That world is thinning. And what replaces it isn’t utopia. It’s friction.
In the years ahead, claims will have to hold longer. Stories will have to survive contact with time. Authority will rely less on confidence and more on consistency. Systems that can’t align their words with their outcomes will begin to hemorrhage credibility, energy, and coherence.
This is why the coming period may feel strangely hollow. The performances will still run, but the power will have leaked out. The rituals will still repeat, but they won’t transmit meaning. The slogans will still circulate, but they won’t convince. The theatre will continue, but the spell will be broken.
That hollow feeling isn’t decay - it’s withdrawal. The fading of a frequency that’s held human organisation together for centuries. And what begins to rise in its place will be quieter and harder to fake. Slower to earn but far more enduring.
Truth, in this next age, won’t announce itself on the evening news. It won’t arrive with applause. It won’t seduce or overwhelm. It will simply hold.
It will survive scrutiny.
It will align across time.
It will survive contact with reality.
This is what 2026 gestures toward - not enlightenment or purity, but a re-weighting of the world. A shift from performance to coherence. From appearance to alignment. From stories that persuade to structures that work.
The age of distortion doesn’t end with an explosion. It ends with exhaustion. And in that exhaustion, something older - something quieter - begins to return.
The Art of Letting the Old World Fall
The exhaustion we’re all feeling right now isn’t just the tiredness of a long week. It’s the weariness that comes from holding things together long past their natural life. From bracing against change and from trying to keep structures upright that no longer want to stand.
Many of us feel this without fully knowing why. It’s a strain behind the eyes. The quiet pressure of carrying responsibility for outcomes that were never truly ours to manage. Like we’re standing in a river, arms outstretched, trying to hold the current back.
But we were never meant to hold the river.
So much of what is collapsing now is not being taken from us - it’s simply finishing. What is falling has reached the end of its usefulness. Systems built on distortion cannot be propped up forever, and stories that no longer match reality eventually lose their grip. Forms that once held life begin to loosen when they can no longer carry its weight.
This is not failure - it is release.
And we must all learn how to let go.
There is grief in this, of course. The ache of loosening our hold. The feeling of resistance to what is. The sting of realising that something we invested in, believed in, relied on, and identified with, cannot come with us any further. Grief rises when we’re both fighting reality and feeling it, and it deserves space and gentleness. It deserves to move through the body - not be pushed away, or covered with forced optimism. But grief is not meant to be a permanent residence. At some point, the grip softens and the hands open, not because we’ve given up, but because we’re finally ready.
Ready to stop propping up what’s already falling.
Ready to stop carrying what no longer belongs to us.
Because what is true does not need to be defended into existence. It doesn’t require willpower to hold and it doesn’t need to be strained for. What is true just is. It endures, it adapts and it stays coherent even as the forms around it change.
What is false, by contrast, can only survive through effort - through denial, repetition, and performance, and that effort is exhausting. It drains us and keeps us braced against life instead of moving with it.
The invitation of this moment is not to fight harder, but to soften intelligently. To let what is ending end and simply allow the river to flow. To trust that letting go is not abandonment - it’s alignment.
We do not have to carry the old world forward on our backs, and we are not required to keep broken structures alive out of loyalty or fear. We are allowed to grieve what is passing, and we are allowed - when we are ready - to release it.
Because nothing real is being lost - only what was never meant to last.
And what comes next does not need to be forced. It will arrive the way truth always does - quietly, steadily and with a feeling of rightness we don’t have to argue ourselves into believing.
As we step into a new year - one that will bring real and unprecedented change - may we hold everything a little more lightly and a little more lovingly.
We are not walking toward collapse.
We are walking toward a long-awaited return.
A return to coherence.
A return to alignment.
A return to something humanity has been reaching for,
in one form or another, for centuries.
What begins in 2026 is not a sudden transformation, but a turning of the key - the ignition of a longer journey. The shift will unfold in small, human increments over decades, not in a single dramatic moment, but next year marks the pivot: the moment the engine catches, the direction changes and movement begins again.
Yes, much is falling away, but much is also being given back. We may mourn that what is false cannot come with us, but may we also remember that nothing true can ever be lost. May we meet this passage with open hands and open hearts, willing to release what has run its course, and ready to receive what is returning. May we walk forward boldly with our hearts wide open, hand in hand, as we cross this bridge between one world and the next.
We are not being asked to brace ourselves against what is ending.
We are being invited to make room for what is coming.
See you next Sunday, friends - in fact, see you next year! 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
Whomp!!! A clear overview of what has happened, what is now and where we are heading. Truth. The truth has been manipulated, produced and rearranged for centuries of manipulation for power. Your tracing of this platform from the beginnings of civilization to present time clearly reveals how we arrived where we are. It’s apparent change is constant but learning is optional. Yet, this time around, there is only one option, and it is truth. It’s not a quick fix and your weekly recaps help because the background from centuries of deception clarify the collapse. May we allow our hearts vibration to carry us through. Thanks for helping me breathe through this process. It’s surely a LOT:-)
This resonates. I'm ever so grateful to my dear friend for sending me your transmission 4-5 months ago. Every paragraph, every sentence and each word is felt in my entire being. The place you hold in this time clearly is no accident nor coincidence. Those of us who are blessed to read your weekly newsletter can embody and reflect such truths. Thank you 💜