Tales from the Crypt

Hooked by the Label, Blind to the Machine: How the "Common Man" Got Sold Back to Himself

(To audience. Of TFTC by Marty Bent:) It genuinely floors me how an audience that prides itself on being red-pilled, skeptical "freaks" can watch a cypherpunk dispatch rebrand itself as Truth for the Commoner and immediately fall for the oldest sleight of hand in populist media. Whenever a platform promises to hand down "truth" to the "common man," it isn't offering liberation; it is manufacturing a persona for you to inhabit and monetizing the exact anxieties required to keep you trapped inside it. What surprises me most isn't that media operators run this play - it's the complete lack of nuance and self-awareness from an audience that can't see the mechanisms being used against them in real time.

(There were good old TFTC days of critical thought and inviting interesting voices to the podcast. I miss circa 2020 Matt Odell. Maybe he’s still cool, but Marty’s really turned quite… racist.)

In The Dissertation as Orthopraxy, Paul-Alexander Arthur Pissarro points to experimental findings on hypnotic induction showing that identical suggestions produce drastically different results depending on what the procedure is called: a conventional induction introduced as a control produces less than half the depth it gets under its own name, while white noise labeled as "hypnosis" works just as well as the real thing. As Pissarro puts it, "The ceremony does not produce the capacity. It relocates its authorship".

That is the exact induction ceremony happening when Tales from the Crypt rebrands into Truth for the Commoner. The label doesn't make you an independent thinker; it relocates your agency directly into a commercial and ideological funnel. Look at the anatomy of the November 6, 2026 issue ("The Politics of the 'Same Oppressor'") and ask yourself how anyone misses the architecture:

• Step 1: Prime with existential racial panic. The issue opens by pairing a resurfaced clip of Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu's December 2024 interview with Jose Antonio Vargas alongside a rage-bait Subway Takes street interview about weddings and babies, warning readers that these views are steeped in "murderous envy" aimed at white families and invoke "the playbook of the Bolsheviks and Mao".
• Step 2: Channel real economic despair into partisan prescriptions. Mid-way through, the piece pivots to actual material pain: Pennsylvania workers facing squeezed hours, an Ohio father who voted Republican watching his college-educated son move back into his childhood bedroom unable to find a job, and Bitcoin miner IREN watching its mining revenue drop from $67 million to $28 million while its AI Cloud revenue surged from $71 million to $200 million.
• Step 3: Close the commercial conversion funnel. Once you are sufficiently terrified of Bolsheviks and economic obsolescence, the bottom of the page reveals what the "commoner" is actually being sold: applications to have your business rebuilt with AI agents, paid membership in the "TFTC Roundtable" for "company-brain workflows," an MCP server integration to "Plug your agent into TFTC," and a sponsored webinar pitching "Simple Mining: The Purest AI Trade".

You enter the newsletter terrified of Maoist street-interview guests and exit as a lead-generation prospect for AI-agent consulting and data-center power arbitrage. Great sales funnel Marty.

Pumping "Political Crude Oil" While Missing the Actual Diagnosis

The lack of self-awareness gets even louder when the newsletter quotes The Refined Populist asking what that Republican-voting Ohio father with the unemployed graduate son is supposed to be grateful for while politicians tell him the economy is booming. Without realizing it, the author introduces the exact protagonist of data scientist Joshua Doss's October 17, 2026 keynote address, The Problem With White Leftists Nobody Wants to Discuss - while completely inverting the cause of his suffering.

(“They wanna make Ohio a State“ -Don Jr)

Doss tells the story of a 65-year-old white working-class man named Leroy Johnson in a cowboy hat and plaid shirt who was accidentally seated in a Georgia focus group meant for Black men under 35 (I could be misremembering). Once the conversation turned to the dignity of work, the divide between Leroy and the Black participants vanished. Leroy described how billionaires and corporations had rigged the rules against his family for generations - noting that whenever the rich hold their wealth in stocks, the law says you can't tax unrealized gains, yet when the middle class holds its wealth in houses, property tax laws tax unrealized gains every year.

By buying into culture-war panic instead of structural reality, the Commoner audience misses three foundational truths that Doss lays out:

1. Predatory extraction is beta-tested on Black and brown communities before scaling to white families. In the run-up to the 2008 crash, Wall Street engineered subprime, adjustable-rate, and exotic hybrid loans targeted at segregated neighborhoods; by 2006, over half of African-American mortgages were subprime. While Black and Latino households lost roughly 50% of their wealth between 2005 and 2009, pundits dismissed the alarm bells as a cultural flaw in Black financial literacy. Once Wall Street proved the extraction model worked, it scaled those exact instruments into white working-class neighborhoods, wiping out 40% of the average American household's net worth. Capitalism uses race as a blindfold to soft-launch its most aggressive extraction where the country cares least, before raining that terror on everyone else.
2. The "Psychological Wage of Whiteness" gets refined into "Political Crude Oil." Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois, Doss explains that the white working class was sold emotional stock in a company called "Security" - an implicit guarantee that even if they didn't get the most money or dignity, they would always get more than Black and brown people. When factories close, wages flatline, and the opioid crisis hits, white workers suffer a doubled injury: material ruin compounded by the betrayal of their supposed immunity. Demagogues pump that curdled grievance out of the ground as "political crude oil," villainizing neighbors so the Ohio father never looks at the architects of the machine.
3. The anti-collectivist posture is pure projection. In the Houston Chronicle, Gene Wu's actual remarks addressed how "model minority" tropes pit Asian Americans against Black Americans - pointing out that in the Harvard affirmative action lawsuit, Asian students were losing seats not to Black students, but to wealthy white legacy and donor admissions, and arguing that minority communities shared a political adversary in Texas's ruling partisan apparatus. Even after admitting in his own text that Wu was referring to Republicans, the newsletter author strips away the institutional critique, centers his own racial biology ("I am a white man married to a white woman with three blond-haired, blue-eyed white sons"), and demands a Republican platform of "law and order" and "technological advancement".

Cheering for the Architects of the Biometric Panopticon

That call for state-backed "law and order" and "technological advancement" is where the irony becomes almost painful. While populist readers are busy hyperventilating over Subway Takes clips, the very billionaire-political coalition they treat as benign is erecting a full-spectrum biometric and media panopticon in plain sight.

As documented by DER KERN (They're Building a Machine to Make You Behave) and The Drey Dossier (Theranos isn't about Elizabeth Holmes.), the actual machinery of control isn't hiding in a college caucus - it's running on public tax dollars and bipartisan billionaire infrastructure:

• The Un-Boycottable Database Wall: UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood openly told former Prime Minister Tony Blair that her ultimate vision was to use AI and technology to achieve Jeremy Bentham's panopticon - "that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times" - alongside the largest live facial-recognition rollout across England and Wales. At the center of this architecture sits Larry Ellison's Oracle, founded in 1977 on a CIA contract to link all records on a person via a single identifier. Today, Oracle's un-boycottable databases underpin the CIA, Pentagon, NSA, major global banks, the UK's NHS, an underground data center in Jerusalem supervised by Israeli intelligence, and a quarter of U.S. hospitals. After building an identity graph profiling 5 billion people in Oracle Data Cloud, Oracle bought medical-records giant Cerner for $28.3 billion in 2022, while Ellison pledged at least $257 million to the Tony Blair Institute, which promptly lobbied the UK government to unify fragmented NHS health records into a single AI data platform.
• Closing the Watchtower and Buying the Loudspeaker: Bentham's original panopticon included one crucial safeguard against totalitarianism: the central inspection tower had to remain open to the public so citizens could watch the guards. The Ellisons enclosed the tower and bought the media instead. After Paramount paid $16 million to settle Donald Trump's 60 Minutes lawsuit and CBS abruptly canceled Stephen Colbert's The Late Show, the Trump administration cleared the $8 billion Skydance-Paramount merger led by Larry Ellison's son, David Ellison. David Ellison installed Bari Weiss as Editor-in-Chief of CBS News, launched a $110 to $111 billion hostile takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery (parent of CNN and HBO), and joined the billionaire consortium taking over TikTok's U.S. operations - where Oracle controls security and retrains the algorithm after bipartisan lawmakers and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu singled out TikTok as the "number one" information-warfare purchase.
• From Theranos's "Health Shield" to Project Stargate: For years, the public treated Theranos as a morality play about a girl in a black turtleneck because John Carreyrou's Bad Blood functioned as a distraction ritual - naming Elizabeth Holmes roughly 591 times while naming just one patient, burying until Chapter 23 that Carreyrou's own boss, News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch, was Theranos's largest investor ($125 million) and top restitution recipient ($452 million awarded to investors, zero to patients), and glossing over what happened to the blood data from 1.5 million tests after Theranos lawyers handed prosecutors an encrypted database without the key and dismantled the servers. In reality, Holmes's Pentagon war-cabinet board - including former Defense Secretary William Perry, who oversaw the Cold War remote-viewing and human-experimentation program also named "Stargate" - and Ellison's close mentor Joshua Lederberg (who co-invested with Ellison and Masayoshi Son's SBI in Israeli gene-mining firm Quark Biotech) wanted a real-time biological surveillance network. Holmes's September 11, 2003 microneedle patent for defense departments and her 2009 "Health Shield" patent for transmitting real-time blood data to a central government monitoring site never died. When Theranos ran out of cash in December 2017, its patents went to Fortress Investment Group - the exact month Masayoshi Son's SoftBank bought Fortress - and moved through Labrador Diagnostics and Golden Diagnostics just as SoftBank agreed to sell roughly 68% of Fortress to Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, co-founder of MGX. Labrador refiled the Health Shield patent two weeks before Oracle bought Cerner, Oracle Health cited Health Shield as prior art in its own continuous monitoring patent, and on January 21, 2025, Larry Ellison stood at the White House alongside OpenAI's Sam Altman and SoftBank's Masayoshi Son - backed by Oracle, SoftBank, and MGX - to announce the $500 billion Project Stargate: colossal AI data centers built to read electronic health records and analyze blood fragments.

Look Don't Trust, Verify - Including the Newsletter

Look at the whole board for a second. Your tax dollars funded the intelligence and health contracts that built a private surveillance empire; that empire bought the newsrooms, captured the social algorithms, and consolidated the medical databases and blood-monitoring patents required to predict and police human behavior. And the community that was supposed to be the immune response to all of it is cheering the architects on.

That's the part I can't get past, and it's why I drifted away. Bitcoin was born out of the exact crash Doss describes. Satoshi stamped the genesis block with a Times headline about a chancellor on the brink of a second bailout for banks - a timestamped receipt for the extraction machine that hollowed out Black neighborhoods first and Leroy's right after. The original plot was never "number go up." It was money no one could print out from under you, payments no one could freeze, privacy as the precondition of an open society. Free money was supposed to mean free people: the remittance worker, the unbanked, the dissident, the Ohio father and the Black men in that Georgia focus group, all at once. A tool for everyone the system had decided it could squeeze.

Somewhere along the way, the community stopped pointing that critique up and started pointing it sideways. The cypherpunks wrote manifestos against the surveillance state; their heirs now ask it for more "law and order." They spent a decade warning that central banks and captured media would socialize losses and manufacture consent, then lined up behind the billionaire-political coalition doing precisely that - because the coalition said the right things about immigrants and Maoists. A shared economic grievance that could have built solidarity across race got refined into the same political crude oil Doss warns about, and Bitcoin media is running the pump.

TFTC is the case study. At its best it was a room where you could hear voices you couldn't hear anywhere else and argue with them. Now its contribution is a conversion funnel: take real pain, tag it with a racial enemy, and route the reader to an AI-agent consultancy and a mining webinar. And look at what its own mining story actually says. IREN's mining revenue is collapsing while its AI cloud revenue nearly triples. The machines that were supposed to secure money no one can surveil are being retooled into compute for the same data-center buildout Ellison stood at the White House to announce. The freedom engine is becoming the panopticon's power supply, and the newsletter is selling it as "the purest AI trade."

"Don't trust, verify" used to be the whole ethos. It was supposed to apply to the Fed, to the banks, and to anyone selling you the truth - especially the ones who print it under a label promising it's for the commoner. I didn't leave because the protocol failed. I left because the room stopped verifying anything that flattered it. Until this community can see how easily its grievances are harvested and sold back to it, it isn't fighting the system. It's mining for it - and paying for the subscription.