I’m starting what I’m calling a “counternarrative series” as a way of stress-testing the stories that quickly harden into “received wisdom” online — and, in doing so, create a kind of mob mentality that produces a chilling effect around questioning them.
Anyone who does is quickly dismissed or ridiculed with lines like “oh, of course, it’s all 4D chess, right?”
The idea is simple: take the dominant narrative, run it through a kind of de-groupthink filter, and see if a different version of reality emerges.
At the moment, that mostly means filtering against three key assumptions: 1) the Americans may not be totally insane, 2) unrestricted warfare aimed at destroying the liberal world is real, and 3) there may indeed be an American plan.
Many will instinctively dismiss this as cope. That reaction is understandable. But we’ve seen this pattern before. During Covid, a powerful groupthink took hold, and only later did more critical or alternative perspectives begin to re-enter mainstream discussion — some of which are now close to received wisdom. The point is not that the counter-narrative is always right, but that it is always necessary to consider it, and definitely not to silence it.
That is the role of a platform like The Blind Spot: not to assert definitive truth, but to interrogate consensus. To ask whether the story everyone agrees on might be missing something important.
NARRATIVE 1: “This whole war is just an excuse to lock us down again and take away our civil liberties.”
Cited evidence: The IEA has published a list of recommended actions to reduce demand.
Narrative consequence: Mass non-compliance with recommendations and the encouragement of an every man for himself mentality, triggering social unrest and anarchy.
Cui bono? The enemies of a liberal order and strong men authoritarians who can triumph in the chaos.
Counter-narrative: The instinct to rebuke calls for voluntary restraint — whether framed as “lockdowns” or “rationing” — is emanating from a failure to distinguish between fundamentally different types of crises. Not all emergencies are created equal, and treating them as interchangeable leads to shallow conclusions.
The Covid pandemic was, in many ways, a known unknown. We understood the general nature of viral spread, but the scale of its impact, the lethality across demographics, and the broader societal consequences were uncertain. Policymaking during that time was driven by projections and models — attempts to anticipate outcomes in the face of incomplete information. Lockdowns, rightly or wrongly, were justified as precautionary responses to a hypothetical worst-case scenario.
The current situation being discussed is categorically different. It is a known known. We already understand the mechanics and consequences of energy shortages. If fuel fails to reach certain regions within a defined timeframe, the outcomes are not speculative — they are predictable and historically documented. Food distribution halts. Cooking becomes impossible. Critical infrastructure fails. Vulnerable populations suffer first, but the effects cascade rapidly across all age groups. This is not theory; it is logistics.
Because of this, the ethical framework changes. In a “known unknown” scenario, debates revolve around risk tolerance and uncertainty. In a “known known” scenario, the debate shifts to responsibility and coordination. Voluntary self-restraint — reducing consumption, accepting discomfort, prioritizing shared survival — is not an abstract moral gesture. It is a direct intervention in a system whose breaking points are already understood.
There is also a geopolitical dimension that is easy to overlook. Narratives that encourage people to dismiss or mock voluntary rationing do not exist in a vacuum. States and actors that benefit from instability within liberal democracies have clear incentives to amplify messages that undermine coordination and collective action. If populations can be nudged toward non-compliance — toward an “every man for himself” mindset — the result is not resilience but fragmentation. Supply shocks become crises, and crises become political breakdowns. In that sense, ridicule is not just harmless commentary; it can function, intentionally or not, as a force multiplier for those who would prefer disorder to cooperation.
Currently, many people are hearing “voluntary lockdown” and recalling the perceived excesses or failures of pandemic policy. But that comparison obscures the key distinction: one situation was driven by uncertain projections, the other by clear, measurable constraints.
There is also a reversal in public trust dynamics. During Covid, the dominant narrative encouraged deference to authority — governments and institutions were assumed to possess superior knowledge. Now, skepticism toward those same authorities is fashionable, sometimes reflexively so. While healthy skepticism has its place, dismissing guidance outright — especially when it aligns with known physical and economic realities — can be counterproductive.
Ultimately, the question is not whether voluntary restraint feels like past policies people disliked. The question is whether the underlying conditions justify collective action. When the consequences of inaction are already known — when supply chains, energy flows, and survival thresholds are measurable — cooperation becomes less about ideology and more about pragmatism.
In that light, ridiculing voluntary measures is less a sign of critical thinking and more a category error: mistaking a predictable systems crisis for an uncertain one, and responding accordingly.
NARRATIVE 2: “Trump is manipulating markets so that his family and friends can benefit from insider trading.”
Cited evidence: Stock and oil futures surged just minutes before Trump’s post about Iran.
Narrative consequence: Markets start discounting what Trump says. As the “lie effect” gets priced in, markets begin to respond more intensively to “Trump enemy” news than to Trump administration news.
Cui bono? Those seeking to cut off funds to Trump administration insiders.
Counter-narrative: A counter-narrative worth considering is that this framing — Trump as a self-enriching market manipulator — mistakes the mechanism for the purpose. It assumes the goal is personal profit, when the reality may be closer to something far more systemic: the use of financial markets as instruments of statecraft and covert financing.
For years, there has been a quiet shift in how states and networks fund operations. Where illicit activity once relied more heavily on drug trade or traditional black channels, there is a growing argument that modern “black ops” are increasingly financed through financial markets — via information asymmetry, narrative timing, and strategic signalling.
In that context, it’s possible that market-moving statements and obvious pre-positioning may be tools of statecraft.
The key concept here is finance: structures — often hedge funds or adjacent vehicles — that operate both as profit-seeking entities and as extensions of geopolitical strategy or unofficial organs of the state. These “state capitalism” models are not new. Variants of them have existed for decades, spanning multiple countries and political systems.
At the Weekend of Mistakes this past Saturday, former BP executive turned advisor to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Nick Butler — whose own market-sensitive communications were forwarded by Peter Mandelson to Jeffrey Epstein — emphasized this point in a session on “the new age of state capitalism”.
He noted that until his time at BP, he had not realised “quite how close the relationship was” between the oil major and the government. But he was also of the opinion that similar relationships were reflected in many other countries and many other companies around the world.
“I think that in the rubric, there’s a sense of surprise about state captors. I think it is entirely natural, and I think that there is a mutual relationship of mutual benefit between the two,” he said. “It may not always be as transparent as it should be, but I think it’s there. The companies need the rule of law. They need policy support, and in some cases, as with Chinese state companies, that extends to political support and even military support.”
Ultimately, he added: “It is a competition between countries expressed through the private sector.”
What may be changing now, however, is not the existence of the relationship, but its visibility.
“I don’t think what Trump is doing is at all exceptional,” Butler went on. “Every President has done it in different ways. It’s perhaps a bit more visible now because he is rather more clearly commercial and thinks that he’s still operating in the New York property market. But I find nothing surprising in anything that he’s done.”
Filtered through this perspective, the relationship between political communication and self-enrichment looks very different. It presents the possibility that crude manipulation is intended to cultivate a “fog of war” environment — where statements can simultaneously obscure strategy, signal to aligned actors, and create opportunities for capital to be raised by those with prior knowledge of what is signal and what is noise, sometimes in service of state objectives.
If that framing holds, then financial actors — particularly hedge funds — start to look less like peripheral players and more like strategic assets. Control and influence over them may now be as critical to national security as control over oil majors like BP was during the World Wars.
This logic becomes easier to grasp when you consider that Russia and China have long operated this way, fusing state power with finance and corporate actors. If that is the competitive landscape, it follows that the United States would have had to develop its own equivalents.
What is changing now is not the existence of these systems, but their visibility. Occasionally, they surface — briefly — through events that don’t quite fit their official framing.
This became more evident than usual in August 2024 when it was revealed that among those swapped in a massive, multinational prisoner swap between the United States, Russia and other nations, was a wealthy young Russian entrepreneur named Vladislav Klyushin.
Klyushin had been held in the U.S. for his role in what a CNBC investigation described as “one of the most damaging insider trading schemes in Wall Street history” — a scheme that relied on hacked corporate data, with links back to actors connected to the Kremlin.
CNBC described the affair as illustrating the “dangerous underworld of the global financial system.”
Here, markets are just another sphere for the great powers to demonstrate their strength and undermine their rivals.
The Kremlin sees America’s capital markets as one the country’s key strengths, and therefore a prime target for attack.
“It’s a war right now happening between Russia and the West. Finances and banks and financial sector itself is just one of the battlefields,” said a former high ranking member of the Russian FSB intelligence service. CNBC granted him anonymity to describe these crimes in detail because he fears for his safety.
What we may be seeing now in the Trumpian “grift” is these relationships becoming more explicit — a kind of “revelation of the method” that exposes dynamics previously kept in the shadows.
That shift matters. An overt stake in a strategic company, or a deliberately market-moving statement, may appear conflicted — but it is arguably more transparent than the older model, where influence was diffuse, deniable, and largely invisible to the public.
Seen through this lens, what is often assumed to be insider trading for personal gain may instead reflect something more structural: markets themselves becoming part of the operational environment, capable of enabling off-the-books financing for highly classified statecraft agendas.
In that case, the “Trump is enriching himself” reduces a potentially global, systemic shift in how power is exercised into a familiar story about individual corruption, when in reality, Trump may simply be doing what he has always done best: fulfilling the role of a front man.
That doesn’t mean self-interest isn’t involved. But it does suggest the line between self-interest and patriotism may be thinner — and more entangled — than many assume.
A more unsettling possibility is that we are watching the financialisation of conflict itself — where markets are not just reflecting events, but are actively used to fund, signal, and shape them.
If that’s true, then the story is not about one politician gaming the system.
It’s about the system itself evolving into something very different — and only now becoming visible.
