“The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
– Steve Bannon to Michael Lewis, 2018
March 18, 2025 — “With Trump, ‘Chaos’ is the Point,” reads a headline from an online listserv I have belonged to since the old days of the Daily Reckoning. It’s true. Listservs pre-date social media. But this one’s useful to find out what the old timers are still chatting about.
In last Friday’s essay, we set out to describe an alternative “why” for the Trump administration’s controlled demolition of the bureaucratic state.
Likewise, what shocks they’re likely to cause to individual investors in the short term – most notably baby boomers and Gen X investors preparing for retirement.
Today, from within our own ranks, we found an alternative explanation of the “how” the controlled demolition is being carried out in real-time.
Grey Swan contributor John Robb, a former Air Force counterterrorism officer and Yale graduate, is a military analyst and entrepreneur known for his work on networked warfare and decentralized systems.
His 2007 book Brave New War explores how loosely connected groups can challenge nation-states using open-source warfare.
As a tech entrepreneur, he co-founded Gomez and led UserLand Software, helping pioneer blogging and RSS technology.
Through his blog, Global Guerrillas and platforms like Substack, he continues to analyze modern conflicts, resilience, and the role of networked societies.
In today’s excerpt from a book Mr. Robb is working on, he provides some insight on how the Trump administration has unseated not just the Democratic party’s version of the status quo, but is dismantling 80 years of post-World War II bureaucratic inertia. Enjoy ~ Addison
Blitzing DC
A networked organization is now in control of Washington, DC. Here’s how networked organizations evolved, from insurgency to protests to political parties to governance.
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John Robb, |
Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign shattered traditional American politics by launching a networked insurgency unlike any before. Instead of conventional political conflict, Trump waged a digital war fought through social networks—Twitter as its command center and Facebook as its staging ground. This wasn’t a war of guns but of viral media: posts, videos, comments, and memes weaponized to exploit rigid political hierarchies and slow establishment reactions. The result was an unprecedented victory, leaving traditional gatekeepers—political elites and mainstream media—baffled and incapacitated.
Packetized Media
A form of media that breaks down information into small, independent, and transmissible units (or “packets”) such as posts, short videos, or images. Unlike traditional media (e.g., books, movies), packetized media is granular, dynamic, and flows through digital networks, allowing individuals to select and assemble these packets into personalized patterns or narratives. Packetized media is a major shift in social communication that is rewiring our minds and society to conform to it.
Yet, networked warfare didn’t begin in Trump’s America; it emerged earlier, far from Washington, in the chaos of the Iraq War. During the early 2000s, traditional military analyses failed against an insurgency that defied conventional explanation. Over seventy distinct Iraqi insurgent groups—driven by diverse motives such as religious zeal, tribal loyalty, or economic despair—operated together with astonishing adaptability. Though fragmented, they became a networked insurgency unified around a single goal: expelling American forces. As a former special operator and an Internet analyst, I noticed that their decentralized structure resembled online open-source networks I’d analyzed earlier.
Open Source Network
A network of people working on a common project, with the promise of the project uniting them. Each contributor, has their own reason for participating in the project and their own vision of what finishing the project would look like. They might be enemies in real life, but for the purposes of this project, they are co-participants. Without any barriers to participation (like ideology, religion, etc.), mass mobilization is possible. These networks are very adaptable and innovative. Innovations in open source networks use a try it out and see if it works method of development. If an innovation works, it’s copied by the rest of the network.
These insurgents communicated using simple yet effective channels — tapping into improvements in the speed of information flow, from cell phones to online to rapid news cycles — spreading innovative tactics rapidly using newly emergent capabilities. For example; if an IED attack was successful, its success was immediately shared via SMS or news coverage, prompting rapid incremental improvements that are widely adopted. This phenomenon, known as stigmergy, allowed dispersed groups to spontaneously align and amplify their tactics without centralized leadership. Each attack acted as a beacon, triggering similar strikes and innovations elsewhere. The result was an insurgency resilient to disruption and nearly impossible to predict or dismantle.
The success of the insurgency in holding the world’s only superpower at bay for years, was prophetic. The principles of decentralization, rapid innovation, and networked media as a force multiplier didn’t remain confined to conflict zones. They leaped into global political arenas, transforming protests, elections, and governance itself. Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign was the first American political insurgency to fully exploit this networked warfare approach, effectively turning social media into a weapon that outpaced the establishment’s outdated strategies and slower reactions.
In John Robb’s own words: “a poorly constructed AI rendering of my network ideas.” (Source: Global Guerillas)
From the Battlefields to Digital Streets
The decentralized network warfare witnessed in Iraq soon evolved beyond insurgent battles, spreading into urban squares and digital spaces worldwide. By the early 2010s, open-source networks had transformed into powerful tools of mass mobilization, fueling protests that shook entrenched regimes and global elites.
The Arab Spring of 2010 was sparked by a single emotional event: the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi. Captured by cellphone footage, this image ignited online empathy, quickly mobilizing millions who toppled dictators from Tunisia to Egypt. In Colombia, the No Mas FARC movement leveraged similar network dynamics, using viral social media campaigns to demand peace after decades of guerrilla warfare. Meanwhile, Occupy Wall Street harnessed live streams and tweets to mobilize against economic inequality, rapidly scaling from a local protest into a decentralized global movement.
These uprisings shared a crucial feature: they were leaderless and spontaneous, operating through “fictive kinship,” a term describing online emotional bonds formed between strangers around shared outrage and empathy. Images and videos acted as triggers, instantly unifying disparate actors around a common cause. Each viral event—a Tunisian vendor’s self-immolation or a police crackdown in Cairo—functioned as an emotional trigger, pulling people together in collective action without centralized coordination. A single tweet from Tahrir Square (“Tanks rolling in; we need the world to see this!”) could summon thousands to protest within hours, turning digital sparks into political wildfires.
Empathy Trigger
An empathy trigger is content, typically a powerful image or video shared on social media, that evokes a strong, involuntary empathetic response, connecting viewers to victims and mobilizing them for action by creating a sense of fictive kinship (a strong relationship akin to those in an extended family) and tribal cohesion.
By 2016, this dynamic had evolved again, moving from the streets to American politics. Donald Trump’s campaign weaponized online open-source networks, using packetized media—tweets, memes, and viral videos—to wage a decentralized war on Washington’s entrenched establishment. The very elements that had worked in a real-world insurgency became central to his campaign: rapid innovation, resistance to counter-pressure (due to decentralization) from the establishment, and digital maneuver warfare, deployed with devastating effect against an unprepared political elite.
Network Maneuver Warfare
A method of warfare where a networked organization exploits the mental (psychological) dimension of conflict to disorient, disrupt, and overload opponents while enhancing their own psychological cohesion. It uses rapid, adaptive maneuvers—such as a barrage of memes, tweets, or deceptive bots—to leverage ambiguity, novelty, and speed, overwhelming the opposition’s ability to think clearly.
Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign a new evolution of network warfare — shifting from street insurgencies into a sophisticated online political insurgency defined by speed, disruption, and overwhelming adaptability. The insurgency seeking to put Trump into the White House was a textbook example of maneuver warfare principles — rapidly shifting narratives, novel initiatives, and deceptive feints to disrupting and overload the psychology of the establishment (first the Republican party, then the Democrat party and the establishment media), making it impossible for them to make decisions.
When the Access Hollywood tape scandal erupted in October 2016—featuring Trump’s crude remarks—political commentators rushed to declare his campaign finished. But unlike traditional politicians, Trump wasn’t trying to maintain moral authority or conventional appeal. Getting him into the White House, where he could disrupt the establishment, was the promise that united the insurgency. As a result, instead trying to defend him, his insurgency ignored it and counter attacked by weaponizing controversy itself, quickly dismissing Trump’s remarks as mere “locker-room talk,” and redirecting outrage towards Hillary Clinton’s scandals.
While decentralized, Trump’s insurgency used social networks to synchronize their effort, trying out new narratives, seeing what worked, and then copying the successes. Within hours of an attack, online operatives generated effective counter-narratives faster than mainstream media could respond and pulled the focus of the discussion into new territory. They capitalized on speed, overwhelming opponents through sheer volume and rapid shifts between topics—maneuver warfare adapted to the digital era.
Regards,
John Robb,
Global Guerillas and Grey Swan
P.S. From Addison: ‘Much-needed course correction may bring pain but…: Samir Arora says Trump’s measures will avert financial collapse.
This headline was forwarded to us this morning. It’s on the front page of Business Today in India. Samir Arora credits his understanding of the Trump Master Playbook to reading Empire of Debt.
From the article:
The realization came, he said, after he recently revisited ‘Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis’, a book he first read around 15-20 years ago. Pulling it off his shelf once again, he found its warnings about America’s debt-fueled empire strikingly relevant today, “20 years after publication”.
He noted that Trump’s efforts—demanding financial contributions from allies, focusing on domestic priorities, and reducing unnecessary military engagements—mirror the book’s arguments on the perils of overextending an empire.
If we haven’t given you ample opportunity, the publisher at Wiley is giving us a hard time about books that remain on the shelf. You can review the post-pandemic 3rd edition of Empire of Debt, right here.
P.P.S. Our friend Robert, from Houston, is not ordinarily a nay-sayer about the ideas we publish. Yesterday, however, Bill’s piece Real Money Tells the Tale seems to have rubbed him the wrong way:
Mr. Bonner, it is not 1980 again — more like “Mourning in America.”
DOGE is not the National Taxpayers Union. If history repeats,
the first time is Tragedy, the second: Farce.Are you not paying attention? Elon has clearly said he will move fast and break things. The Don approves. Neither has become successful by listening to others. More likely, they take protests as a sign they are doing their “Right Thing.”
Fixing the IRS is a thankless job, had it been otherwise it would have been done long ago. Do you think anything is new? Ditto Balancing the Budget. Clinton only got one by accident and excessive incompetence at spending. Certainly no virtue.
In our view, Robert is expressing a healthy amount of skepticism. The media’s narrative is confusing. And not at all representative of what’s actually happening in the wilds of the swamp just 32 miles from where we sit today.
But he’s also reminding us of the historical perspective, summed up: “yeah, yeah, we’ve seen this movie before.”
So what do you do?
As the French soldiers said in the trenches of World War I: “sauve qui peut!”
Please send your own thoughts here: addison@greyswanfraternity.com
