it's really funny that even people who support luigi mangione have like fully bought into the propaganda being pushed that he's the one who did it when he hasn't been convicted of shit and is extremely likely just some guy the nypd and eric adams could reasonably pass off as the person who did it to save face. That huge fucking perp walk (that shouldn't have even been legal to do) was to plant the idea in the public's mind that yeah, obviously this guy did it, why would they be doing this if he wasnt, and you all fell for it without even thinking about it.
You can support the actions of the person who did it while also believing the fact that the famously corrupt NYPD who completely fumbled around for days, posted multiple pictures of different people in similar clothing claiming they were the same suspect, and then out of nowhere said they knew with 100% certainty who did it and already had him in custody, might be lying and simply selected some dude to take the fall.
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You might be more than one. You might be different ones at different times. đŤśđ˝đŤśđ˝ you might not be one of these. There are more roles đŞđ˝ but this is an amazing intro.
You canât just like the idea and envision yourself in one of these roles you have to figure out how to be about it âĽď¸đŤśđ˝
Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trumpâs second term and youâll see something very different than what he wants you to see.
The article is under the cut because paywalls suck
This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on âThe Ezra Klein Show.â You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBSâs âFrontlineâ in 2019:
Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because theyâre dumb and theyâre lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. âŚ
All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. Theyâll bite on one, and weâll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never â will never be able to recover. But weâve got to start with muzzle velocity. So itâs got to start, and itâs got to hammer, and itâs got to â
Michael Kirk:Â What was the word?
Bannon:Â Muzzle velocity.
Muzzle velocity. Bannonâs insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media â be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media â if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next â no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.
Donald Trumpâs first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannonâs strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasnât in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trumpâs country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, itâs over.
Or so he wants you to think. In Trumpâs first term, we were told: Donât normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Donât believe him.
Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.
Donât believe him. Trump has real powers â but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trumpâs transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassinâs bullet â as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trumpâs soul â but it was an act that was within his power.
But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge â a Reagan appointee â who told Trumpâs lawyers, âI have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.â A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.
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What Bannon wanted â what the Trump administration wants â is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If youâre always consumed by the next outrage, you canât look closely at the last one. The impression of Trumpâs power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Donât believe him.
You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.
But Trumpâs odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the courtâs ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budgetâs order to freeze spending suggests they donât. Bravado aside, Trumpâs political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trumpâs approval rating at 47 percent â about 10 points beneath Joe Bidenâs in January 2021.
There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trumpâs aim is to bring the civil service to heel â to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends â he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.
But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.
That is the tension at the heart of Trumpâs whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.
The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that theyâre ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. Weâve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials â âit didnât go through the proper approval process,â an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a presidentâs second term is embarrassing.
But itâs not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the âdeep stateâ it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: âFork in the Road.â Musk wants you to know it was him.
The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: âTake the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.â The Washington Post reported that the email âblindsidedâ many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.
I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?
The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Muskâs takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.
What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself â that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Donât believe them.
I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.
But he didnât. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.
There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: âThis non âbuyoutâ really seems to have backfired. Iâll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.â As I write this, itâs been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.
In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isnât building support; heâs losing it. Trump isnât fracturing his opposition; heâs uniting it.
This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And thereâs only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.
Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part â a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.
The first two weeks of Trumpâs presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isnât true. Donât believe him.
You can listen to this conversation by following âThe Ezra Klein Showâ on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
âThat is the tension at the heart of Trumpâs whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.â
These are people that believe perception and PR are everything, so they're trying to create the perception that they can destroy and remake government without consequences or constraints. And for a while people were stunned and overwhelmed by the ugliness of it all.
But now people are moving. Many, many lawsuits have been filed and the people are starting to claim their power.
Don't despair and don't give up. We're not done yet.
My mother is all into homesteading and off-grid living videos right now. Every time I check up on her, this is what she wants to talk about.
It gives her a sense of peace and purpose I guess. Which is good, sheâs been struggling to find that with her injuries and condition. Sheâs learning skills, and feeling prepared for âthe worstâ. Like I canât get her to stop watching conspiracy theory bullshit on YouTube so at least this kind of content alleviates some of the anxiety the other content amplifies, because she feels like she can do something now to secure her safety later.
But to get through these conversations, I have to tell myselfâ hey, if natural disaster comes our way, some of this might be useful. But I know sheâs not just thinking a big storm or natural disaster. Sheâs preparing for the collapse of society. And I donât know how to break it to her that we wouldnât survive that. You can make long lasting candles with crisco? Cool. Where you going to by crisco when society collapses? Youâll stock up now? Ok cool. What will you do when it runs out? Honestly, before it runs out, what will you do when people with guns come to take your various stockpiled supplies?
If we hit a point where society collapses, weâre done for. Food, medicine, etc. we canât survive without society, without a world where people are working together trying to help each other out.
So, Iâll go through with this shit in the name of natural disaster preparedness, and because it helps her. But thatâs as far as Iâm willing to put energy into it. I refuse to prepare for, bet on, or hope for the collapse of society. Iâd rather spend my energy trying to prevent society collapsing, what little part I can play in that. Iâd rather spend my energy supporting people in my community. Iâd rather work and build towards a better future, not prepare for the worst.
OP, if your mother is physically able to do the following, I strongly suggest it:
Get her into a fibercraft. Sewing, knit, crochet. Because hereâs the thing:
At first, you can pitch it as âweâre all still gonna need clothes and these idiots with their doomsday bunkers canât even thread a needle.â But after awhileâlet this take a bit of time, not so long that she gets bored but long enough that sheâs like âIâve DONE this alreadyââintroduce her to a slightly more advanced concept. She was practicing on circle skirts? Check out how to make darts. Crochet blankets? There are SO MANY cool stitches.
And then when the craft has a decent grip as a hobbyâŚ.THEN you introduce her to a crafting social group.
One of the best ways to stop people falling down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole is to make sure they have active and diverse community, and being able to make tangible things has been shown to have a positive influence on mental health. If cost is a concern, I literally have spare crochet hooks I could send you to get her started and all Iâd ask for them is cost of postage, which is like. Maybe three bucks. You can even find halfway decent yarn at the dollar store now. Itâs not amazingly high quality, but itâs good enough for practice and learning.
I cannot recommend the above enough. My dad is a prepper and was falling in with a militia. Like the white supremacy militias.
So I started casually mentioning i wanted to do Search and Rescue- knowing my father is incredibly competitive and will try and out do me.
I was all "but we can't rely on the government to find people!"
Now he has been on 6 different tours in the US. He is a field commander and the most successful in state history.
He independently made a partnership with a Black and Missing coalition and partners with them on searches for Black Ohio and.
He called me the other day so proud he has " a Trans and a nonbinary whatever that is" on his search team. So is he perfect? No. But now he isn't toting a gun around and threatening people.
He's getting better. Sure he built a secret bunker in the basement. But he's recovered multiple bodies and reunited people with loved ones.
Sure we still can't have a conversation without him divulging into some bigoted speak here and there.
But he's been lead in recovering teens trafficked from our state and successfully recovered them in Georgia in 10 hours.
Sure he isn't perfect. But he didn't fall completely and maybe he will become even better on his own.
The secret is: is they aren't going to become themselves again but you can help them not crumble completely. You can still have your parent even if they are a bit.. ahhhh.... hurtful. But they aren't hurting anyone and that's the important part.
The common thread is community. A lot of older people are desperately lonely and seeking something to be part of - and alt right conspiracy weirdos are welcoming them with open arms. Give people an alternative community (fiber arts, search and rescue, etc) and often this will not save them, but it will really help.
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He has given gifts to the other inmates for Christmas using the donations people sent his commissary account.
He appears to have attempted to communicate through flashing his cell lights to show his supporters outside that he could hear them cheering for him (this exact light flashing is what inmates at the previous prison did to communicate to the news that they were in support of Luigi, so he may have learned it from them and taken this form of light communication with him to MDC.)
It is rumored he is paying for the other inmates' healthcare using donations to his commissary account.
Inmates who shared time with him at the Penn prison say he 'gave them a voice' when they 'had never had one before' (in reference to the collective shouting 'Free Luigi' the inmates did.
He is writing back to supporters and is alleged to have informed one supporter that he is warm, taken care of, and will be okay. He does not want people to stay up at night worrying about him.
There's a lot of good comments and tags in the notes, but this one is very important, I feel like it deserves some emphasis.
Part of how authoritarianism works is telling you that you can't stop it. And you can't stop it by yourself. But it wants to stop the train of thought there and let you fall into despair.
You need to remember the next part: you don't have to stop it by yourself.
You're not alone. Take care of your community and let your community take care of you. Supporting each other is so vital.
As we see a barrage of evil executive orders come in, they are not immediately enforceable and will takes months or years to implement.
Thatâs still not great, but donât let these pile up to the point of hopelessness. Take a breath, and look community leaders who will fight it every step of the way.
Reminder that when Trump was in office before a LOT of his orders got overturned or held up in lower courts for long enough that they became irrelevant. It also does not mean they WILL be enforced. Stand with your community where you can. The fight is not over. Do not obey in advance.
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I don't really think it's fair to dismiss the idea that that guy might have been framed for killing the CEO as like an unfounded conspiracy theory when NYPD has a proven history of planting/fabricating evidence on people. in 2011 there was a massive investigation of the NYPD and hundreds of cases against people were dismissed after a former police officer testified that they literally have a name for planting evidence on people: flaking. you cannot be out here acting like considering the possibility that cops who do this shit under normal circumstances might possibly also do it when they're under intense global pressure and scrutiny is the same as republicans thinking democrats run a secret pedophile ring in the basement of a pizza restaurant
also it's kinda weird that some of you are treating the concept of presumption of innocence like a crazy leftist conspiracy instead of like. a fundamental right of the accused
even if you think him being innocent is unlikely, you should at least be able to understand why automatically treating him as if he is guilty just because the cops say so is a bad thing
In the first comic, which is from the Warriorâs point of view, the Warrior has defeated the Monster, who jeers that there will always be another Monster to fight. The Monster dissolves into mist, leaving another tiny, baby Monster in its place. The Warrior picks up this helpless new baby Monster and carries it away. They will try again and do better this time.
In the second comic, which is from the Monsterâs point of view, the Monster says that this has to happen; it canât come with the Warrior, and there will always be another. It tells the Warrior to use what they have learned to fight. It wants to die knowing that the Warrior has hope for the future. It dissolves into mist, and the exhausted Warrior collapses. The new baby Monster comes and brings the Warrior some water in a leaf. Because we are reading this in the Monsterâs voice, we realize that it is a new Monster, but also somehow, magically, the same. We also see that the Monster is not inherently evil. It is only very strong, and inevitable.
The third comic is a dialogue between the Monster and the Warrior. The Warrior is exhausted and horrifically wounded. The Monster is also horribly maimed. They are both dying. The Warrior doesnât want to fight anymore. The Monster tells them to rest and heal. The Warrior hands over their amulet, and we see the Monsterâs paw become a hand just before they both dissolve into mist. It clears, revealing that the Monster has turned into a beautiful humanoid, who says they will take care of the new baby monster the Warrior has turned into. The two have changed roles. The Warrior takes up the former Warriorâs gear and strides into the new year with the new baby Monster riding on their shoulders.
It is a beautiful, ruthless, hopeful metaphor about keeping up the good fight, year after year, even when we are worn down, and how we can still face the new year with hope and light, no matter how painful the last one was, and how it is okay to rest if we canât fight.
a whole bunch of gazan mutual aid projects and nonprofits. if the decision of which individual fundraiser to give to feels too daunting, or if you just want to help as many people as possible in one go, these are great initiatives to support.
care for gaza - focuses on providing food and essential supplies. donate here or here.
connecting humanity - securing internet access via donations of virtual sim cards (esims). if you can't afford a whole plan yourself, crips for esims is a communal pool that will use your donation to purchase and maintain esims
gaza soup kitchen - provides food, medical care, and classes for children. also has a gofundme
glia gaza medical support initiative - provides medical care through field clinics and tents at hospitals. donations can also be sent through their website.
ele elna elak - provides clean water, food, clothing, and shelter. they also have a gofundme
life for gaza - raising money for the gaza municipality to repair water and waste management infrastructure
taawon - partners with local civil organizations to provide food, water, medical care, shelter, and basic supplies
the sameer project - running various initiatives providing tents, medical care, and necessities. they have their own encampment project focused on sheltering families with children, sick and disabled members, or members in need of perinatal care
islamic relief worldwide's gaza emergency appeal - provides food, water, hygiene kits, medical supplies, and psychological support
baitulmaal - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, shelter, and medical supplies
gaza mutual aid fund - distributes food, hygiene products, water, and other essential supplies, including financial support. run by @/el-shab-hussein's amazing friend Mona. updates can be found on her instagram.
hygiene kits for gaza - provides hygiene supplies including menstrual products, wipes, and toothbrushes/toothpaste
anera - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, hygiene supplies, medicine, blankets and mattresses, and psychological care
palestine children's relief fund - provides supplies and support with a focus on children. also has an initiative for lebanon
dahnoun mutual aid - provides water, food, tents, baby supplies, financial support, and other necessities. updates can be found through their instagram
certainly this is not an exhaustive list, so please feel free to add on other projects or organizations that i didn't include. and as always, please take the time to donate if you can and share. it truly makes all the difference.
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I grew up in Connecticut, not too far from Greenwich and all those super expensive places. And it was really formative; as to how I saw class and economics.
It's back on my mind lately - with politics being what it is.
I used to dumpster dive behind the malls around Greenwich, in the early 2000s, before they installed trash compactors that crush everything inside. And the waste, from designer brands, was insane. All sorts of luxury fashion, spray painted orange or slashed to destroy it, and thrown in the trash. Well, I was a grungy bitch who had paint thinner, and a needle and thread. So I pulled out anything I could find made of real leather. (Because, luxury or not, pleather and fake fur are trash IMO)
Even the designer shit made its way back to the trash; them shoes hurt and I was too young and dumb to know how much they would have sold for.
Anyway - it really painted a picture of a group of people too afraid to let their status indicators fall into the hands of someone poorer. And ironically, made me see designer goods as trashy shit, because I couldn't shake the feeling of "That looks like some crap you'd find in the dumpster" when I see it.
As I got older; I started to see that the predominant way the ultra rich reacted to me was fear and discomfort. Not that I was doing anything wrong (or not tooooo much :) ) - other than being in their spaces with a non-normative look.
Who are you even talking about?
I think the idea of the 1% as the exploitative class is all wrong; it's a misdirection. Look at this graph of the average person's wealth per percentile. (source) (And just to frame this graph; this is just talking about the US, one of the richest countries.)
The top 10%, middle 40%, and bottom 50% all blend together into one line, that is so negligible that none appear to even diverge from the X axis. I'm an engineer and I'm solidly in the middle 40% for reference.
The 1% is the orange line, sliiiightly above. People like successful small business owners, dentists and doctors, etc... They have a chance of landing here.
The purple line is the top 0.1 %, and the 0.01 is magenta. They have the kind of money you can only get by being in the owning class, and gatekeeping access to resources IMO.
And their wealth is increasing exponentially. (hi compound interest. you make it real easy to turn money into more money, if you start with a lot)
Billionaires aren't even plotted on this graph; they're rarer than 0.01% of the population.
It seems like even references to the top 0.1% often get scrubbed from the internet; see this since-deleted article for an example.
So what's the big secret?
Rich people are really fucking scared of us. They know they're the country's biggest minority, and are utterly terrified of the rest of us noticing they exist.
No, not even afraid of us doing anything. Just speaking of their existence or looking at them is enough to freak them the hell out.
The word "Exclusive" is thrown about a lot; and to be blunt about what it really means? You need a certain level of wealth (or highly invasive background checks, for staff) to gain access to an exclusive space.
I think that exclusivity is often seen as snobbishness. But as someone who grew up very close to it, and yet outside of it; I think I saw it for what it was - fear.
I'd often pull up to 'exclusive' towns because fuck it, I like the beach, I like nice things, and I'm creative enough to find a way around quite a few barriers to entry. (Or, lacking creativity, sporty enough to just leg or bike it in to places that were designed to be car-centric and access-controlled.)
And my being working class, and being there terrified them. I grew up in a hunting community, and the biggest secret of the ultra rich? They're used to going unseen. If you do see them, they look at you with the eyes of a prey animal. Real deer-in headlights ass looks.
How do you even find these exclusive places?
Look for a void. Look for the places on Google maps that are unlisted. Look for the areas on Google maps that have no street-view. Their presence is exposed by their silence.
None of this crowd have social media, or at least not under their real names. Their homes aren't registered under their real names, they're registered to trusts or businesses. Often, many layers of them, to obscure their presence.
Look for where you can't easily get to. Look for hostile infrastructure, and look for a way over it. Look at how highways are used to red-line neighborhoods and render areas inaccessible.
Look for where private jets land. Then look for how the 'help' gets to work. Look for golf courses, grab a drink at their bar.
And if you go, and you want to freak out a 0.01%er?
All you gotta do it look at them.
Gonna make this super clear; not advocating for violence or breaking and entering. I am advocating for going to fancy places even if you aren't rich, and enjoying a peaceful day of people watching. It's fun, and it's informative. And credit where credit's due; the food slaps.
this is how I found out there were a ton of these "exclusive places" nestled all around my home town: google street view
few years ago I was trying to find a road my highschool teacher took us on to the top of a hill over looking my town. I kept trying to find a way but every road that lead up there seemed to terminate and become an "invisible road" that OP mentioned
turns out? All of that up there in the hills had turned into high class ranch getaways and fancy spas, it didn't look like it from satellite view but doing little digging told the truth
And even more wild? So theres this tiny road down below by my old house, one that I literally walked/drove by throughout my childhood, this tiny obscure fork right? All my life I'd just walk past it because it was at the end of a sort of corridor houses at the end of a really rural foresty road, and it was marked but two ancient stone pillars (theres lotsa that stuff around there) with really old wood signs saying keep out and private road right? And theres plenty of those around, so who cares right?
So surprise google street view don't go down it right? But the satellite imagery shows that its just a narrow road that should just take you out to the middle of nowhere? Out away from any towns or amenities? Seemly just a few ranches?
NO. Turns out that furtive pygmy of a fork in the road leads to a bunch of exclusive getaway joints that don't even have websites that normies can access, but I found enough forum posts about people who had driven out there on a lark and found out they were gated rich people ranches out there with security that won't even let you drive up to the gate unless you have authorization
That and posts from people who had gone up there to do plumbing work or electrician stuff and had an escort with them the whole time to make sure they do their job and leave immediately
fucking wild man, these places really are just right around the corner, like the op said, look for the silence!