The Fog of the Quiet War: First Brief
The Old Playbook Is Dead. This Is Your First Glimpse of the New Map.
You are being lied to, but not loudly.
The markets are still open. The dollar still clears. Your company may still be hiring. Your fund might even be up this quarter.
But the ground is shifting beneath your feet.
Something isn’t right. The world feels fragile, brittle, fogged. Every system is harder to trust. Every institution feels slower, more confused, less competent. What worked ten years ago—hell, even five years ago—feels like it belongs to another country, another age.
You are not imagining it.
You are living through a managed collapse.
I. The Fog Is Real
Startups struggle to hire not because there are no workers, but because the culture is spiritually depleted.
You can’t scale your marketing funnel, because your audience no longer believes anything.
Supply chains break not from a lack of capital, but from an abundance of incompetence, regulation, and fear.
Boardrooms fill with slogans. Workforces fracture over politics. Media feeds spin chaos by the hour. Meanwhile, trust in every core institution—schools, military, courts, finance, medicine—is falling off a cliff.
And yet, the standard response remains: adjust your run rate, raise the next round, tweak the go-to-market strategy, hire a brand consultant.
As if this is just another business cycle. As if what we’re facing is normal.
But it’s not. This is not a rough patch. This is not a phase.
This is not market turbulence. It is civilizational turbulence.
And if you're still operating with the old playbook—you are not just out of position. You're out of time.
II. Regime Fracture Is Now Institutional
A. The Playbook No Longer Works
For decades, we built companies on a shared operating assumption:
That markets self-correct
That growth is the baseline
That America is stable
That you can stay neutral
Founders were told: build value, and the rest will follow. Investors were told: chase returns, and the system will reward you.
But today, every one of those assumptions is false.
You can't rely on growth when fertility collapses. You can't rely on peace when cities burn. You can't rely on trust when every institution is captured. You can't stay neutral when neutrality itself is considered a threat.
You are not building in peacetime anymore. You are building in the fog of quiet war.
B. Institutional Fracture Is Strategic Now
And the data confirms it:
Before the 2024 election Only 28% of Republicans expressed trust in the accuracy of the vote, compared to 84% of Democrats, highlighting a record-high 56-percentage-point gap between the two parties.(Gallup, Oct 2024). Trump won—but the aftershocks remain.
Only 16% trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time
(Pew Research, March 2024).40% of voters believe civil war is likely within the next decade
(YouGov, Oct 2023).1 in 5 Americans say political violence is justified under current conditions
(University of Chicago, 2023).Confidence in the Supreme Court is at its lowest in 50 years
(Gallup, 2023).States are defying federal mandates and floating secessionist rhetoric—not just online, but in law: from border security defiance in Texas, to California’s resistance on federal vaccine policy, to sanctuary jurisdictions rewriting legal compliance.
This isn’t market turbulence. This is regime fracture—now visible at every level of the system.
This is not conjecture. It’s documented. America’s Internal Collapse as a National Security Crisis, published by the Thread and Thunder Institute in April 2025, maps the trajectory in detail—demographic freefall, civic disintegration, and force-readiness collapse. These aren’t isolated failures. They’re converging signals of civilizational unfitness—and they now constitute a direct threat to sovereignty, deterrence, and continuity of government.
As NS Lyons recently observed, this same authoritarian trajectory now defines the entire Western world: France bars its leading opposition candidate. Germany moves to ban its most popular party. Canada jails dissidents for prayer. Romania cancels elections. We are watching democracies hollowed out, their rituals preserved but their essence erased.
Trump’s return triggered sweeping executive action—new tariffs, attempts to dismantle DEI1, the launch of DOGE, end USAID, and others—but these moves, while headline-grabbing, are revealing the deeper truth: the system resists change at the root. The bureaucracy adapts, the ideology persists, and even executive power finds its limits. The fracture is no longer hypothetical—it is institutional.
The presidency can’t break the machine alone. We need congress to act. Good luck. As Fred Watson Jr over at the American Sun points out:
Congress is a beast. You’ve got 435 egos in the House, 100 in the Senate, and everyone’s got their pet projects and concerns about midterms. […] We know Democrats will fight this to show something to their demoralized base. Democrats will challenge every line they can with the Senate parliamentarian.
Numbers are an issue. It is unavoidable since holding the House was a miracle. The House’s razor-thin majority means one or two holdouts can tank the whole thing […]. But Trump’s out there making things happen with executive power while Congress is still thinking it’s 2014.
III. The Quiet War Has Already Begun
This is fifth-generation warfare. Not bullets and bombs, but breakdown and betrayal.
As Imperium Press outlines in its analysis of civilizational conflict, this slow-motion collapse tracks closely with the Maoist three-phase insurgency model: defensive (folkbuilding and narrative control), stalemate (no-go zones and strongholds), and offensive (open sovereignty contest). We are somewhere between Phase I and Phase II now—and drifting fast.
You don’t see it on a battlefield—you feel it in your operations.
You don’t hear a shot—your still stuck arguing about DEI, struck down in name but alive in spirit.
You don’t face a general—you face a swarm of friction, fear, and enforced lies.
It is not a war fought with bullets, but with systems—subverted, starved, and sabotaged. It targets not armies, but arteries. The collapse is engineered across four fronts:
Infrastructure — ports stall, grids strain, housing is unaffordable by design. The material substrate of civilization is left to rot.
Morale — anxiety, burnout, and despair are not bugs, but features. The spirit is softened through exhaustion.
Perception — truth is clouded by design. Censorship is cloaked in safety. Narrative is no longer debated—it is assigned.
Loyalty — the core bonds of a people are fractured. Identity is atomized. Families are broken. Nations are dissolved into mobs.
The goal is not conquest. The goal is submission—achieved by unraveling the things that make a people strong.
Your company may look like it’s fighting a market. It’s not. It’s fighting a regime of decay.
And unless you build for war, your machines will be captured, subverted, or crushed.
As Lt General Michael Flynn, former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and co-author of The Citizen's Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare (with an introduction by General Stanley McChrystal), warned:
“The fight is not over territory—it’s over truth and perception.” This is textbook fifth-generation warfare (5GW)—and Flynn helped define the playbook.
Even Elon Musk and DOGE face obstruction at every turn—just one example of how even the most powerful figures find themselves stalled inside the regime’s inertial grid. This is why sovereign infrastructure, not celebrity, must be our foundation. Vision alone is not enough. We need sovereign infrastructure, hardened by design and loyal by nature.
IV. Capital Is Now Command
In the old world, capital was directional but inert. You could invest in oil, SaaS—or frankly, anything—without ever asking who ruled the rails.
Not anymore.
Every dollar you move now either:
Feeds the regime of decay, or
Forges the systems of renewal
If you allocate blindly, you will fund the collapse by default.
Your social media investment? It’s feeding on adolescent despair—optimizing addiction, eroding identity, and radicalizing culture by algorithm.
That seemingly values-aligned company may have dropped its DEI department under political pressure—but the ideology lives on through backdoor incentives: “lived experience” narratives, identity-based hiring signals, and strategic compliance theater.
That high-growth fintech? It’s an outsourced surveillance node.
That apolitical cloud provider? It will drop your client the moment they speak the truth. Your pharma exposure? It’s not curing collapse—it’s cashing in on it. Better to medicate than heal.
You’re not just holding equity. You’re subsidizing entropy.
Capital is no longer neutral. Capital is now command.
As Tribal War is Coming notes, Western elites are no longer trying to prevent collapse—they’re accelerating it in the hopes of staying ahead of the fire. Controlled demolition has become policy2.
The real fight is beneath politics. It lives in capital, culture, logistics, and code. That means the responsibility—and the opportunity—has already shifted to you.
To the builders. To the funders. To the architects of the machines that will survive the storm. The regime resists. Build anyway.
The collapse metrics are already known. We mapped them in America’s Internal Collapse as a National Security Crisis. That was the diagnosis. This is the battle plan.
Together with America’s Internal Collapse as a National Security Crisis, this briefing forms the foundation of a wartime doctrine for builders. One maps the collapse. The other charts the counteroffensive.
V. What Builders and Backers Must Do Now
You need to discard the old metrics.
What Fails Now:
Brand loyalty means nothing in a world where trust is dead.
Consumers no longer believe the stories brands tell—not when the institutions behind them are exposed as cowardly, captured, or corrupt.Top-line growth means little when the culture is suicidal.
Growth is not victory if it accelerates decay, feeds collapse, or leaves you reigning over rubble. You can scale into oblivion if the society you depend on is demoralized, disoriented, or set on fire.Regulatory compliance means nothing when the regulators are weaponized.
Following the rules doesn’t protect you when the rules shift by the hour—and are enforced according to narrative, not law.
What Wins:
You must now judge every business by one question:
Can it survive the fog—and strike back?
That means evaluating ventures on radically new terms:
Can it produce jobs for the aligned?
Can it grow virally without institutional permission?
Can it withstand financial attacks?
Can it gather intelligence and produce narrative wins?
Can it harden loyalty and punish betrayal?
Can it create geographic strongholds?
Can it scale faster than the regime can react?
This isn't just about surviving the fog. It's about rebuilding pre-political identity—family, clan, tribe, folk—layer by layer, as Imperium Press emphasizes. You cannot harden a nation without first hardening its foundations.
That standard already exists.
It’s called The Quiet War Protocol[next post]—and it’s designed for exactly this moment.
Where even a sitting president, armed with executive orders and flanked by visionaries like Elon Musk, finds his advance stalled by a system built to neutralize momentum, the Protocol offers a wartime standard for building machines that outmaneuver institutional sabotage.
As defense theorist David Betz wrote in Civil War Comes to the West:
“Narrative war is only Phase One. Phase Two will be physical.”
Betz isn’t a pundit. He’s a strategist of hybrid war—and he sees what’s coming:
Infrastructure fragmentation
Sovereignty disputes
Parallel sovereignties taking root
A regime that has lost control of the periphery
This is not a policy disagreement. This is pre-collapse.
Lies That Keep You Weak
“This is just another downturn.” No—it’s demographic collapse, institutional capture, and ideological corrosion.
“DEI is over.” No—the slogans are gone, but the incentives remain. Just look at the 8(a) program, which still moves $30–60 billion per year to minority-owned businesses.3
“Trump can turn it’ll turn around.” No—Trump can provide leadership but he is one man. Winning means having the institutional power to repeal the 8a program, and many others, and for that you need congress to act.
VI. You’ve Been Briefed. Now Build.
If you understand that something has shifted—if you feel the fog but haven’t had the language to name it—this is your map.
If you are a founder, an operator, or an investor who wants to build systems that survive collapse and rebuild the future—this is your call to arms.
Read it. Judge everything by it. Then build what comes next.
This is not just a call for capital—it’s a call for command.
Each aligned investor is not alone. Each builder is not isolated.
Together, you form the war network: sovereign capital, linked by doctrine, aligned by mission.
This map won’t circulate forever.
When the fog clears, it will be too late to claim the ground.
[Part II: The Quiet War Protocol Coming Soon]
(Visible to all. Actionable by few.)
Strength and Fire
To the end.
N
Has this stirred something in you?
DM me—or make your way to the Thread and Thunder Institute.
We are building the Order of Thread and Thunder:
a brotherhood forged to punch back.
Field Briefing Materials
For those who want to go deeper, these are the field manuals we’ve drawn from.
Thread and Thunder Institute. America’s Internal Collapse as a National Security Crisis April 2025.
Imperium Press. Tribal War Is Coming, Parts I, II, III (2025).
NS Lyons. “Managerial Bureaucracy’s Threat to Democracy and Humanity”.
Fred Watson Jr. Trump and the Lazy Congress. American Sun (2025)
David Betz. Civil War Comes to the West (2024).
Michael Flynn The Citizen’s Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare: Introduction to 5GW.
I say attempts to dismantle because DEI is only one face of DEI. You still have laws on the books, like the small business administration’s 8(a) program, which is DEI by another name. The name may change but the ideology persists.
Imperium Press argues that Western elites, faced with rising fragmentation and declining social cohesion, are not attempting to halt collapse—but to manage it by pushing society past the threshold of coordinated rebellion. This “controlled demolition” is meant to prevent mass movements and preserve elite dominance by making the system too fractured to explode. See: Tribal War Is Coming, Part I, Imperium Press, 2025
This figure includes both direct 8(a) set-aside awards (approx. $25B in 2023) and a broader estimate that accounts for extensions, sole-source follow-ons, and vehicles with 8(a) eligibility that do not register under narrow reporting filters. True impact likely exceeds official tallies, we have a forthcoming report. For more, see Judge Glock, A Federal Agency Is Awarding Contracts Based on “Discrimination Essays”, City Journal, Manhattan Institute, 2024.