The Second American Revolution Will Be Digitized

“My hope is that the stablecoin market will grow or diminish on the merits of their benefits to consumers and the broader economy.”

– Christopher Waller

December 10, 2025 — We’re not sure which is more embarrassing: watching the Democratic establishment deploy lawfare and a host of luxury beliefs to try to destroy their political opponent — or watching the same crowd of pundits and media personalities scramble to salvage their reputations after it all collapsed in real time.

What we’re not embarrassed by is how the American monetary system — stubborn, self-correcting, and allergic to moral grandstanding — handed us a gift 17 years in the making.

That gift wasn’t a partisan victory. It is apolitical money: the seed of a new revolution emerging in code. Karl Marx, himself, jotting notes down in his Manuscripts of 1844, marveled at the political emancipation granted to individuals by the founding documents of the United States.

Marx’s later work, Das Kapital, sought to bring about economic emancipation by violence in the streets, if necessary.

And as you’ll see, technological innovation and a stable regulatory environment are going to be a much more civilized way to bring about economic freedom than the revolution advocated by the Antifa nutcases on the streets of Portland think. It won’t happen in the streets at all.

You’ll also see the numbers, the opportunities, are truly staggering.

A Revolution of Preservation

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the United States, it’s worth recalling that our first Revolution wasn’t waged to destroy an order — it was fought to preserve one.

Political philosopher Russell Kirk called it “a revolution not made but prevented.” The colonists sought not chaos but continuity — the defense of their “chartered rights as Englishmen,” not the birth of an entirely new world. Kirk wrote:

“The American Revolution was a preventive movement, intended to preserve an old constitutional structure. The French Revolution meant the destruction of the fabric of society.”

The difference, Kirk argued, was moral. The American Revolution was rooted in ordered liberty; the French in ideological frenzy. The first produced a Constitution; the second, a guillotine.

Two and a half centuries later, the argument continues — only now, the battlefield is financial. Who controls access to money? Who defines legitimacy? Can a citizen’s ability to transact depend on their politics?

Luxury Beliefs and the New Moral Economy

In the Biden years, luxury beliefs replaced logic. “Defund.” “Decarbonize.” “Debank.”

Virtue was measured not in outcomes, but in hashtags. The upper class could afford such moral theater; the middle class, as always, paid the price.

When January 6 arrived, it provided a pretext for Washington’s elite to enforce those beliefs through the economy itself.

Shopify deleted Trump campaign stores. Stripe froze donations. Twitter silenced the sitting president. Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank severed ties.

They referred to it as “risk management.” But everyone knew what it meant: moral compliance required. The mass of “deplorables” as Hilary Clinton referred to the growing MAGA crowd in 2016, need not apply.

“Money,” for the first time in American life, became subject to a kind of social credit score. Your right to transact depended on the mood of your banker — or worse, your followers.

Russiagate, Emails, and the Anti-Trump Enterprise

The evolution of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), as coined by the conservative analyst Charles Krauthammer, was a more virulent form of the Bush derangement Krauthammer observed in 2003. TDS didn’t evolve in a vacuum. It was the culmination of nearly a decade of institutional panic.

First came Russiagate, the sprawling political psychodrama that consumed Washington for years. A sitting president was accused — loudly and endlessly — of being a foreign agent.

Every committee, think tank, and TV anchor in town dined out on it. The narrative was built, inflated, and eventually deflated, but not before it rewired the country’s nervous system around a single premise: that Donald Trump was a cosmic error, a glitch in the moral order that had to be erased.

Then came the Hillary Clinton email scandal, that low-tech prelude to the high-tech deplatforming era. The lesson Washington took from it was simple: control the narrative or be devoured by it. The press learned to curate reality; Silicon Valley learned to curate speech.

By the time Trump’s first term ended in 2021, Trump Derangement Syndrome had become both a diagnosis and a business model.

Entire media networks depended on the outrage. Political consultants, lobbyists, and NGOs grew fat on “resistance” funding. Bureaucrats polished their résumés by “saving democracy” from the electorate.

You don’t have to believe in conspiracies to marvel at the sheer scale of the enterprise. A network of agencies, law firms, advocacy groups, and “nonpartisan” institutions all humming in unison toward one goal: to contain, humiliate, or erase a man who refused to follow their script.

What began as political warfare metastasized into lawfare — a permanent apparatus of selective prosecution and bureaucratic sabotage.

If Russiagate was the opening act, deplatforming was the finale. The message to the rest of America was clear: step out of line, and any of your digital accounts — social or financial — can vanish overnight.

That’s not exactly the “democracy” or even the Republic the signers of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution had in mind. It was more like a morality administration with a badge and a password. As we’re all painfully aware, especially during the pandemic, it went far beyond the White House.

Addison Wiggin
Grey Swan Investment Fraternity

P.S. This piece first appeared in our November Grey Swan Bulletin. Part II comes tomorrow, looking further at how the Trump family was debanked. Stay tuned…

We’re beginning to review our 2025 Grey Swan forecasts and planning out our best new ideas for 2026 this week. We have no scheduled a Grey Swan Live! for this week. Next week, we’ll be back at it with a sneak preview of what we expect in 2026 and solid moves you can make before year-end.

If you have requests for new guests you’d like to see join us for Grey Swan Live!, or have any questions for our guests, send them here.

“My hope is that the stablecoin market will grow or diminish on the merits of their benefits to consumers and the broader economy.”

– Christopher Waller

What we’re not embarrassed by is how the American monetary system — stubborn, self-correcting, and allergic to moral grandstanding — handed us a gift 17 years in the making.

Marx’s later work, Das Kapital, sought to bring about economic emancipation by violence in the streets, if necessary.

You’ll also see the numbers, the opportunities, are truly staggering.

A Revolution of Preservation

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the United States, it’s worth recalling that our first Revolution wasn’t waged to destroy an order — it was fought to preserve one.

“The American Revolution was a preventive movement, intended to preserve an old constitutional structure. The French Revolution meant the destruction of the fabric of society.”

The difference, Kirk argued, was moral. The American Revolution was rooted in ordered liberty; the French in ideological frenzy. The first produced a Constitution; the second, a guillotine.

Luxury Beliefs and the New Moral Economy

In the Biden years, luxury beliefs replaced logic. “Defund.” “Decarbonize.” “Debank.”

Virtue was measured not in outcomes, but in hashtags. The upper class could afford such moral theater; the middle class, as always, paid the price.

When January 6 arrived, it provided a pretext for Washington’s elite to enforce those beliefs through the economy itself.

Shopify deleted Trump campaign stores. Stripe froze donations. Twitter silenced the sitting president. Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank severed ties.

“Money,” for the first time in American life, became subject to a kind of social credit score. Your right to transact depended on the mood of your banker — or worse, your followers.

Russiagate, Emails, and the Anti-Trump Enterprise

First came Russiagate, the sprawling political psychodrama that consumed Washington for years. A sitting president was accused — loudly and endlessly — of being a foreign agent.

By the time Trump’s first term ended in 2021, Trump Derangement Syndrome had become both a diagnosis and a business model.

What began as political warfare metastasized into lawfare — a permanent apparatus of selective prosecution and bureaucratic sabotage.

Addison Wiggin
Grey Swan Investment Fraternity

P.S. This piece first appeared in our November Grey Swan Bulletin. Part II comes tomorrow, looking further at how the Trump family was debanked. Stay tuned…

If you have requests for new guests you’d like to see join us for Grey Swan Live!, or have any questions for our guests, send them here.

Trump and Powell are no buddies. They’ve been fighting over rate cuts all year—Trump demanding more, Powell holding back. Even after cutting twice, Trump called him “grossly incompetent” and said he’d “love to fire” him. The tension has been building for months.

And Trump now seems ready to install someone who shares his appetite for lower rates and easier money.

Trump has been dropping hints for weeks—saying on November 18, “I think I already know my choice,” and then doubling down last Sunday aboard Air Force One with, “I know who I am going to pick… we’ll be announcing it.”

He was referring to one Kevin Hassett, who—according to a recent Bloomberg report—has emerged as the overwhelming favorite to become the next Fed chair.

Here we sit — investors, analysts, retirees, accountants, even a few masochistic economists — gathered beneath the leafless monetary tree, rehearsing our lines as we wait for Jerome Powell to step onstage and tell us what the future means.

Spoiler: he can’t. But that does not stop us from waiting.

Tomorrow, he is expected to deliver the December rate cut. Polymarket odds sit at 96% for a dainty 25-point cut.

Trump, Navarro and Lutnick pine for 50 points.

And somewhere in the wings smiles Kevin Hassett — at 74% odds this morning, the presumed Powell successor — watching the last few snowflakes fall before his cue arrives.

With U.S. stocks trading at about 24 times forward earnings, plans for capital growth have to go off without a hitch. Given the billions of dollars in commitments by AI companies, financing to the hilt on debt, the most realistic outcome is a hitch.

On a valuation basis, global markets will likely show better returns than U.S. stocks in 2026.

America leads the world in innovation. A U.S. tech stock will naturally fetch a higher price than, say, a German brewery. But value matters, too.

As copper flowed into the United States, LME inventories thinned and backwardation steepened. Higher U.S. pricing, tariff protection, and lower political risk made American warehouses the most attractive destination for metal. Each new shipment strengthened the spread.

The arbitrage, once triggered, became self-reinforcing. Traders were not participating in theory; they were responding to the physical incentives in front of them.

The United States had quietly become the marginal buyer of the world’s most important industrial metal. China, long the gravitational center of global copper demand, found itself on the outside.