The fear supply chain, from script to checkout

Fear in the United States isn’t a mood. It’s a monetization strategy.

The product is panic. The customer is the public. The warranty is void.

And just like any modern enterprise, it comes with quarterly goals, CRM pipelines, and a PR strategy strong enough to convert lies into facts. Whole sectors of its employees wake up each morning with one burning question: with what can we outrage and terrify people today…and how quickly can we convert that adrenaline into cash.

A lurid prevarication becomes a meme. The meme becomes a countdown clock to civilizational collapse. The clock justifies emergency measures, which translate into mandates, procurement, audience growth, and recurring revenue.

The result is a vertically integrated fear economy: politicians frame the nightmare, media packages it, platforms amplify it, influencers retail it, and a flotilla of vendors bills taxpayers for “solutions” that mostly produce optics.

And then there is the entire secondary economy of cross-selling gold, silver, crypto, guns, shoes, watches, stocks, Christmas ornaments, hats, flags, and banners. This isn’t a boutique shop: it’s a sprawling mall with food courts, merch tables, and a loyalty program.

So many people and their entities are cashing in: from dynastic heirs to content mills to the nonprofits. They all have discovered that outrage, anger, and hatred are renewable resources. And the machine runs so well because every link in the chain gets paid well to keep it running.

Why fear trumps facts

Fear is fast. It shortens decision time, flattens complexity, and offers instant belonging via shared enemies. In a country with grotesque inequality, runaway tech, and brittle institutions, people crave control. The fear economy rents out that feeling.

Power dynamics seal the deal. Fear centralizes authority. A public held at “urgent” tolerates perpetual emergency, which routes power to executive offices, security agencies, platform gatekeepers, and crisis contractors. Keep people convinced it’s always midnight, and they stop demanding daylight procedures that check power. Meanwhile, recurring revenue streams — subscriptions, contracts, donor lists — make panic a dependable asset class. Empirical work shows the information environment is primed for this; exposure to moral-emotional and sensational coverage changes diffusion and perceptions in measurable ways.¹ ²

What fear sells, aisle by aisle

Fear offers what reality won’t guarantee: certainty, shortcuts, and a tribe.

Every election is sold as the last free one; every opponent becomes civilization’s undertaker. The loop is alarm, donate, vote, repeat. Governing turns into set design for crisis television. Real results matter less than the profitable optics of “fighting.”

The ad economy rewards engagement. Nothing engages like peril.

Local news loops crime. National outlets run countdown clocks to doom. Recommendation engines elevate content that triggers moral anger and fear because those emotions keep the users scrolling and buying. Probability is irrelevant. Click-through is king.¹

“Situational awareness” systems sell cameras, dashboards, and data brokerage to convert neighborhoods into blinking threat maps. Corporate security and government contractors normalize permanent suspicion with slick interfaces.

Every social shock becomes a sales event, then the new baseline. Fear gets merchandised as self-reliance with endless accessories, training, and influencer culture.

Schools buy fortifications, panic buttons, and bullet-resistant décor. Not buying prevention looks reckless in court or headlines. While vendors equate vigilance with love, children rehearse catastrophe as “drills.” The tax payer gets invoiced.

Contamination and aging anxieties make it easy to monetize supplements, detoxes, boutique tests, and longevity scheme. The narrative is constant: invisible threats everywhere, salvation in two days with FREE SHIPPING. Evidence is optional; great storytelling is what it takes. See the new informercial on Facebook.

Fear becomes zoning. Gated communities and restrictive rules promise safety through exclusion. Climate risk is priced as premiums for the well-off and redlines for the rest. The market’s answer to danger is a wall.

Detention beds, ankle monitors, predictive policing, and drone towers fuse bureaucracy with shareholder value. Neighborhoods and migrant flows become “segments” labeled “high risk,” convenient for selling tools to manage them. When politics narrates “invasion,” the detention-and-surveillance complex reads it as stock price guidance and investment opportunity.¹¹–¹⁴

These aren’t isolated stalls at a grim carnival; they are a supply chain. Media primes the audience, politics converts panic into mandate, tech operationalizes it at scale, and finance securitizes the cash flows. Installed one “temporary” measure at a time, the system now runs in the background and never gets uninstalled.

The dread factory: standard operating procedures

The toolkit is depressingly consistent. Start with a real issue, amputate context, market it as trend, then as destiny. Anecdotes replace data. Graphs without baselines do the heavy lifting. Accuracy isn’t the goal — momentum is.

Lurid clips beat a century of statistics. Repetition hardens the sensational into the plausible. People remember images, and the relentless repetition beats them into exhaustion.

Attach fear to virtue. A zoning tweak becomes “save the children,” an immigration rule becomes “defend civilization.” Compromise looks like betrayal. Newsrooms and platforms chase velocity and virality because careers ride on analytics dashboards. Calm loses to adrenaline; those are the stories that get greenlit in the editorial offices.

Tactical fonts, uniforms, pulsing maps, red-black palettes highlight the performance seriousness. Intrusion gets sold as competence.

Institutions buy products less because they work and more because not buying looks negligent after tragedy. “We did something” doubles as PR and legal shield, which vendors price in.

Suspicion, chilled speech, profiling, and evaporating trust don’t touch quarterly earnings. They just become the new weather pattern everyone lives with.

The invoice for this “security theater”

All this adrenaline has a price tag. Money flows to exciting and photogenic fortifications and away from boring prevention. Panic buttons instead of counselors; armored doors instead of after-school programs; bigger police budgets to mop up what cheaper social policy would have prevented.

Communities reorganize around threat identities. Cross-group trust collapses. You don’t deliberate with opponents: you quarantine them. Daily life becomes permanently legible to companies and the state. Your data trail turns into a ration card for credit, jobs, and mobility. Self-censorship spreads because no one knows who is watching or why.

A populace marinated in alarms is exhausted. Children rehearse catastrophe. Adults rename hypervigilance “responsibility.” Creativity suffocates under cortisol. Every dollar for this theater is a dollar not spent on real issues: housing, mental health, clean water, safe streets, resilient infrastructure.

The respectable middle that keeps it running

It’s easy to blame the loudest demagogues. The dignified middle scales the machine: risk officers who buy optics, lawyers who fortify CYA, school boards that approve spending because “we have to do something,” editors welded to analytics. Everyone knows the incentives are broken; everyone rides them anyway because opting out is career suicide. And nobody wants to lose their career, their allotted space in the system. Personal values become subsumed to those of the employer.

Platforms claim they “reflect user preferences” while manipulating the attention landscape. Newsrooms claim public service while chasing the outrageous and photogenic. Politicians denounce division while fundraising from it.

Meanwhile, the fear entrepreneurs — with Trump setting the vibe, Vance keeping the grievance warm, Musk’s platform juicing distribution, and outrage media packaging it for daylight consumption — keep cashing in, day after day.

Politicians are the Chief Panic Officers

Donald Trump rebranded national life as “American carnage,” then built a political machine that creates crisis and “emergencies” as a default. It isn’t just rhetoric; it’s equity. Political crisis as a lifestyle brand keeps the valuation narrative hot. His net worth — and that of his children — continues to surge, a tidy demonstration that apocalypse is a growth market.¹² Net worth: about $7.3 billion as of mid-September 2025.³ When governance is staged as continuous emergency, attention, donations, and property-adjacent income tend to cooperate. Mar-a-Lago doubled its initiation fee to $200,000 right after the 2016 win,⁴ and the Secret Service spent at least $1.4 million at Trump properties during his first term.⁵ Today the initiation fee is $1 million.

His children are doing well too. Itʻs hard to keep up with their activity.

• Donald Trump Jr. → Rumble money + crypto halo. He did sign a seven-figure, multiyear deal with Rumble for Triggered; that was announced back in 2023 and still underpins his audience machine.¹ The platform’s pitch remains “cancel-proof” distribution for outrage programming, which pairs beautifully with crypto-friendly politics now centered in the party platform.² ³
• Eric Trump → crypto as brand and business. Recent coverage has him publicly arguing that crypto can “save the US dollar,” framed around the market debut of American Bitcoin, a miner/accumulator tied to the family orbit and built via a Gryphon Digital Mining deal.⁴ ⁵ Early reporting says it launched holding a few thousand BTC and is pitching a MicroStrategy-style “mine and buy more” strategy.⁵
• Family crypto ventures → fresh capital and tokens. The family-backed World Liberty Financial kept expanding through summer 2025: a UAE fund reportedly bought $100 million of WLFI tokens; there are also reports of a $1.5 billion “crypto treasury” arrangement with ALT5 and related moves around a family-branded stablecoin.⁶ ⁷ Mainstream outlets have noted how these ventures concentrate upside inside the family ecosystem while the administration talks up crypto.⁸
• Politics as marketing → money boomerangs to family venues. Post-election tallies show GOP committees steering hundreds of thousands to Trump properties again in 2025, led by the RNC. This isn’t new, just larger.⁹ ¹⁰
• Lara Trump → fundraising + legal-bill ambiguity. In February–March 2024, she said the RNC needed $500 million for the general and didn’t rule out paying Donald Trump’s legal bills; later, she publicly said the RNC wouldn’t pay them. Reporting also flagged a six-figure RNC compensation package once she became co-chair.¹¹ ¹² ¹³ ¹⁴
• Bitcoin/crypto policy: where the oxygen comes from: Executive action. On March 6, 2025, the White House issued an Executive Order to establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile. The reserve consolidates seized BTC across agencies, bars routine sales, and instructs Treasury/Commerce to explore budget-neutral accumulation strategies.¹⁵ The companion fact sheet hits the “digital gold” talking points and claims past BTC sales cost taxpayers billions.¹⁶ Reuters and others cast it as a “digital Fort Knox” posture.¹⁷
• Platform and personnel. The RNC’s 2024 platform explicitly embraced crypto and bitcoin mining.² ³ Treasury messaging in July 2025 doubled down on making the U.S. the “crypto capital,” inviting builders and signaling friendlier oversight.¹⁸
• Legislative theater meets market signaling. A Bitcoin Strategic Reserve Act got airtime at a D.C. roundtable on Sept. 16, 2025 with industry heavies (Saylor, Riot, CleanSpark, et al.), pitched at up to 1 million BTC over five years if Congress buys in.¹⁹ Even without new law, the EO, platform, and podium talk already move capital and cozy up to miners, exchanges, and surveillance/AI vendors.

• Why this matters (and how the incentives rhyme). Attention feeds lists; lists feed money; money feeds policy; policy feeds crypto valuations. Don Jr.’s Rumble check builds the audience that builds the lists that keep the fundraising taps open. The same political megaphone recruits capital for crypto-branded vehicles and miners.¹ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷ The party enterprise stays in the family orbit. Lara runs the donor machine; committees book the family’s venues; the White House blesses bitcoin; family-linked crypto brands soak up attention and capital. None of this alleges illegality. It simply shows aligned revenue streams.⁹ ¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹² ¹³ ¹⁴ ¹⁵–¹⁹

If you’re waiting for the plot twist where public service and private upside don’t overlap, stop waiting.

J. D. Vance doesn’t just monetize attention; he keeps equity in the upside. The vice president profits handsomely from using his bully pulpit to promote the policy of fear.

His certified OGE filing shows retained carried-interest rights in Narya Capital Fund I and related vehicles, entitling him to a defined slice of the carry waterfall even while in office.⁽¹⁾ Outside money helped build the launchpad: Peter Thiel’s giving to Vance-aligned outside spending in 2022 was roughly $15 million, and his single-candidate super PAC, Protect Ohio Values, pulled in about $20 million that cycle.⁽²⁾⁽³⁾ After his nomination, inbound LP interest reportedly jumped and Narya extended its fundraising deadline.⁽⁴⁾ The outrage engine keeps the funnel warm: the Springfield “eating pets” panic was publicly debunked by local officials and fact-checkers, but the clip economy had already done its work.⁽⁵⁾

The incentives line up neatly with the corporate scoreboard. Attention is currency; outrage is a list-builder. Lists become donors and leverage. Leverage keeps policy oxygen flowing, which helps the venture brand: more deal flow, richer terms. Retained carry means macro policy that fattens defense, border tech, and “AI for government” isn’t abstract; it can be remunerative if portfolio or adjacent holdings benefit.⁽¹⁾ Procurement follows footage: border theater and “crime wave” loops turn into appropriations, RFPs, and renewals that lift familiar tickers and vendors in detention, surveillance, and policing tech. Recent examples include ICE and DHS contracts and vehicles touching Palantir (case management and “ImmigrationOS”), Axon (body-worn camera IDIQs), and private detention expansions at CoreCivic and GEO.⁽⁶⁾⁽⁷⁾⁽⁸⁾⁽⁹⁾

Vance’s disclosure also shows up to about $1.265 million in venture fund stakes through 2024, per watchdog tallies based on his certified filing. Lawful, yes. Also an incentive structure humming alongside the podium.⁽¹⁰⁾ Business press estimates put his personal assets comfortably in the millions, buoyed by book royalties and investments, with the post-nomination profile doing what it always does for a politician-turned-VC brand: more deal flow, better terms, louder rooms.⁽¹¹⁾⁽¹²⁾

Portfolio and network aren’t cat-video cute. Narya-linked and allied investments have included defense- and culture-war-adjacent names like True Anomaly, Strive, and Rumble.⁽¹³⁾ The fear economy is the flywheel: incendiary claims build audience; audience builds lists; lists become recurring small-dollar and gala money; the political clout boosts the venture brand; and carry accrues if the right companies ride the wave. It’s tidy. That’s the point.

Greg Abbott turned the border into a TV set: floating razor buoys, spectacle standoffs, litigation as stagecraft. Whether the measures work is secondary; they look decisive on camera and convert attention into mandate.⁶ ⁷ ⁸

The cabinet: working the levers for personal rewards

None of the below alleges illegal conduct. It maps exposures, disclosures, and the kind of “policy → procurement → profit” alignment that thrives in a fear-first agenda.

Marco Rubio, Secretary of State. The policy posture is maximum hawk, maximum emergency. His OGE report shows modest personal holdings, but his institutional incentives are clear: a State Department framed around permanent threat expands surveillance, sanctions, and security partnerships that keep the crisis thermostat high. The passport-revocation flap tells you the temperature of the legal envelope being tested.

Pam Bondi, Attorney General. Ethics paperwork is on file; the controversy list is longer. When the nation’s top prosecutor publicly confuses “hate speech” with chargeable crimes, the chilling effect is the feature. Fear-driven law-and-order posturing boosts DOJ muscularity, expands sensitive investigations, and rewards “do something” theatrics that play well on TV and in donor rooms.

Kristi Noem, Homeland Security. DHS is the policy-to-revenue superhighway for the panic economy: detention contracts, data platforms, aerial surveillance, and “situational awareness” procurement. The department’s own comms trumpet a “delivered” border crackdown; the corporate earnings above show who monetizes that delivery.

Howard Lutnick, Commerce. He comes from Cantor Fitzgerald, a sprawling finance and markets shop. His OGE periodic transaction filing and oversight letters underscore the conflict-management gymnastics required to wall off his private interests from Commerce decisions that touch AI, data, satellites, telecom, and trade — all core to the fear economy’s hardware and capital flows. The ethics office says he’s in compliance; watchdogs still want receipts on waivers and divestments. The point isn’t criminality; it’s that fear-inflated “national security” umbrellas conveniently cover sectors in which his world has deep stakes.

Brooke Rollins, Agriculture. Her disclosures show she earned about $1 million at the America First Policy Institute pre-Cabinet. USDA under hardline “security” rhetoric turns into a vehicle for surveillance-tech pilots, farm-labor crackdowns, and disaster privatization optics. That aligns with a donor-policy complex that rewards culture-war governance over extension-service competence.

Pete Hegseth, Defense. Arrived with a lucrative media and speaking portfolio — millions in 2023–24 income per disclosures — and now presides over a Pentagon rebrand that literally toys with “Department of War.” A government that narrates midnight will always buy more night-vision. That’s oxygen for primes and venture-backed “dual-use” startups.

Scott Bessent, Treasury. The nation’s CFO is grappling with ethics-agreement timing and divestment extensions. Treasury isn’t a frontline panic agency, but label anything “sanctions,” “illicit finance,” or “critical minerals security” and watch markets move. When the fear dial turns, the money pipes Treasury controls become policy weapons, and every connected sector prices it in.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Health. He isn’t in billionaire cosplay, but he’s firmly in the “fear pays” upper-middle class: public estimates put his net worth somewhere around $15–30 million, built on a mix of environmental-law winnings, aggressive book royalties (his Fauci polemic reportedly sold past the million-copy mark), and steady speaking fees; his nonprofit megaphone, Children’s Health Defense, hauled in tens of millions during the pandemic years and paid him a tidy six-figure salary before he stepped back, which tells you the outrage newsletter economy clears payroll just fine; his 2024 run proved the brand converts, with roughly $60-plus million raised by the campaign and another $50-ish million through a super PAC (not personal income, but proof of monetizable attention); and his disclosures show recent seven-figure earnings from legal work, publishing, and licensing even as he positions himself as the scourge of “Big” everything; net out the noise and you’ve got a diversified, media-amplified revenue stack — not Musk money, not Trump towers, but plenty of cushion for a professional entrepreneur of alarm who knows how to turn skepticism into audience and audience into cash.³⁰

Platforms and billionaires: the algorithm as accelerator

Here are the actual players and how their machines turn attention, fear, and “innovation theater” into money and policy leverage. Same pattern every time: scale the audience, rent the pipes, shape the rules, and let the cash comp the ideology. In 2024 the online political ad tally hit at least $1.9B across Meta, Google, Snap, and X with a record ~$11.1B across all media.²⁴ ²⁵ These pipes take a fee whether you’re selling hope, dread, or a doomsday protein shake.

Elon Musk. Sits atop a global anxiety machine with X. Trust-and-safety capacity was slashed after the 2022 takeover, while virality kept its foot on the gas;¹⁶ ¹⁷ multiple independent studies and regulators have flagged spikes in hate speech and moderation gaps as engagement rose.¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰ His personal fortune remained, shall we say, not pitiable.²¹

Jeff Bezos. The Amazon flywheel now has a retail-media turbo. Amazon’s ad revenue cleared $56.2B in 2024 and hit $15.7B in Q2-2025 alone, thanks to DSP, CTV, Prime Video ads, and first-party shopper data.¹ ² ³ Prime Video’s ad tier is forecast to approach $806M in 2025 by itself.⁴ Meanwhile, Bezos’s space stack is not hobby money: New Glenn reached orbit on Jan. 16, 2025, and Project Kuiper began full-scale deployment in April 2025, with >100 satellites in orbit and service targeted in five countries by early 2026.⁵ ⁶ ⁷ ⁸ Translate: ad pipes tax commerce; rockets and LEO internet extend the platform’s choke points.

Mark Zuckerberg. Meta is the ultimate attention-yield farm. It shipped Llama 3.1 and an AI Studio to mass-produce creator “AIs,” juicing impressions that Meta then sells back to advertisers; Q2-2025 ads were up ~21% YoY.⁹ ¹⁰ ¹¹ On politics, Meta requires disclosure labels for AI-altered political ads and keeps refreshing those rules, but the macro point stands: the platform books fees whether the creative is uplift or panic.¹² ¹³

Alphabet/YouTube. The world’s TV remote. YouTube continues to tweak moderation rules in the “public interest” while defending free-expression optics, and it still captures a massive slice of political and persuasion spend in every cycle.¹⁴ ¹⁵ ¹⁶ The CEO, Neal Mohan, decides how creators get paid and how the line on misinformation moves, which is another way of saying Google can throttle or amplify politics at scale.¹⁷

Larry Ellison. Oracle rode the 2025 AI data-center wave so hard that Ellison briefly leapfrogged Musk for the top spot.¹⁸ He’s now also floated as an investor in the evolving TikTok U.S. deal, which would keep the app operating domestically under a U.S. board while ByteDance retains a minority stake and Oracle hosts the infrastructure. The arrangement has been framed as the compliance spine for a court-blessed sale-or-ban law.¹⁹ ²⁰ ²¹ If you’re counting incentives: more U.S. TikTok means more cloud, more ad auctions, more data gravity near Oracle.

Murdoch orbit. Reuters reports Lachlan Murdoch in the same prospective TikTok investor group, which neatly aligns Fox’s distribution muscles with a still-huge youth attention funnel.²⁰ ²¹ Again, ideology is optional; throughput isn’t.

Peter Thiel and Alex Karp (Palantir). Founder control isn’t a vibe, it’s a security interest. Palantir’s Class F voting trust cements founder veto power while federal budgets for analytics/AI swell on the back of border-security and crime-wave theatrics.²² ²³ Yes, the fear dial maps to revenue. That is the business model.

Outrage media: anxiety as a subscription service

Turning Point USA / Charlie Kirk. Posthumous hagiography aside, the filings and reporting point to tens of millions in annual revenue, with Kirk’s disclosed comp in the high six figures in recent 990s and affiliated orgs. The product is identity confirmation and live-event spectacle that doubles as donor acquisition. The model prints because panic converts better than policy.

The Daily Wire. Reported $200+ million in annual revenue and $22 million from commerce in 2023 alone. Verticalized grievance: podcasts feed merch feed kids’ content feed subscriptions. If fear didn’t juice the funnel, they wouldn’t keep buying razors named after culture-war memes. Content is acquisition funnel; panic is the growth hack.²² ²³

Alex Jones. Even in bankruptcy he tried to keep a seven-figure salary, later pitching a ~$520k compromise. That’s not a moral defense; it’s proof that monetized panic is so profitable the business expects comp while the legal house is on fire.²⁴ ²⁵

Steve Bannon’s War Room converts headlines into mobilization scripts and donor energy. Even after deplatforming, ad-tech workarounds and cross-distribution kept the monetization flowing.²⁰ ²¹ The cadence is simple: apocalypse by lunchtime, fundraising by dinner.

Beneficiaries: The tech-based surveillance—detention—incarceration complex

Policy theater has bodies attached. While the stock charts celebrate buybacks, the headcount skews predictably

The fear economy’s back office is stocked with detention, surveillance, and compliance vendors that scale when panic rules. ICE detention facilities are filled largely with people without criminal convictions; capacity numbers and “surge” funding drive occupancy and length of stay. The producers of that fear talk about “bad hombres.” The balance sheet cashes per-diem checks.

U.S. incarceration places nearly 2 million behind bars across systems on a given day; Black jail rate over 3.5x the white rate; Native incarceration far above national averages. Fear governance lands hardest on the same communities every cycle.

Who profits?

CoreCivic (CXW) and GEO Group (GEO) make this plain in investor materials: federal detention demand, especially ICE, remains a material revenue driver.²⁶–³¹ When politics narrates “invasion,” these tickers see a dramatic upside. CoreCivic’s Q2 2025 reported $176.9 million in ICE revenue (up 17% YoY). GEO not only posted solid results, it authorized a $300 million share repurchase. Recent quarters reported upward guidance on enforcement exposure. You don’t need to like the policy to read the signal: more beds, longer stays, better guidance, cash to buy back stock.

Palantir (PLTR). Q2 2025: U.S. government revenue up 53% YoY to $426 million. The line items here are the predictable ones when fear writes budgets: intel fusion, border analytics, watchlisting, “AI for command and control.” Procurement inertia does the rest.

Axon (AXON). Q2 2025: $669 million revenue, ARR up 39% to $1.2 billion. That’s tasers, body cams, and cloud “real-time ops” dashboards. Panic is the battering ram that gets councils to buy now and audit never.

This isn’t a smoking gun; it’s a working market. Panic is the input; power and profit are the outputs. The rest is marketing. If you build a media-political ecosystem that rewards attention spikes and moral alarm, you will get a lot of attention spikes and moral alarm — plus a ledger full of subscriptions, contracts, donor files, and stock buybacks to prove it. Opting out isn’t just hard; it’s disincentivized. Which is precisely the point.

1. William J. Brady, Julian A. Wills, John T. Jost, Joshua A. Tucker, and Jay J. Van Bavel, “Emotion Shapes the Diffusion of Moralized Content in Social Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 28 (2017): 7313–18.

2. Mika Näsi et al., “Crime News Consumption and Fear of Violence,” Crime & Delinquency (2021).

3. “Forbes Real-Time Billionaires: Donald Trump,” Forbes, accessed September 16, 2025.

4. Drew Harwell, “At Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, the Price for Joining the ‘Winter White House’ Has Doubled,” Washington Post, January 25, 2017.

5. David A. Fahrenthold et al., “Secret Service Has Spent At Least $1.4 Million at Trump Properties,” Washington Post, August 27, 2020.

6. Jon Herskovitz, “Court Orders Texas to Move Rio Grande Buoys,” Reuters, 2024.

7. —

8. —

9. —

10. —

11. CoreCivic, “Q2 2025 Results,” press release, August 2025.

12. The GEO Group, “Share Repurchase Authorization Increased to $300 Million,” press release, 2025.

13. Palantir Technologies, “Q2 2025 Results: U.S. Government Revenue Up 53% to $426M,” shareholder letter/press release, August 2025.

14. Axon Enterprise, “Q2 2025 Results: Revenue $669M; ARR $1.2B,” investor release, 2025.

15. The White House, “Establishment of the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and United States Digital Asset Stockpile,” Executive Order, March 6, 2025.

16. The White House, “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Establishes the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile,” March 6, 2025.

17. Reuters, “Trump Administration Views Bitcoin Reserve as ‘Digital Fort Knox’,” March 7, 2025.

18. U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Secretary Bessent Remarks at the Launch of ‘Bringing Crypto Innovation Home’,” July 31, 2025.

19. “Strategy CEO, Crypto Advocates Meet at Bitcoin Reserve Roundtable,” Investor’s Business Daily, September 16, 2025.

20. Sheila Dang et al., “Twitter Lays Off Staff; 50% Cuts After Takeover,” Reuters, November 5, 2022.

21. “Forbes Real-Time Billionaires: Elon Musk,” Forbes, accessed September 2025.

22. Palantir Technologies Inc., 2025 Proxy Statement, April 24, 2025 (Class F voting trust).

23. Palantir Technologies Inc., Quarterly Report, March 31, 2025 (founder voting structure).

24. Brennan Center for Justice; OpenSecrets; Wesleyan Media Project, “Online Political Ad Spending in 2024,” July 2, 2025; and AdImpact, “Cycle in Review 2023–2024,” December 20, 2024.

25. AdImpact, “Cycle in Review 2023–2024,” December 20, 2024.

26. Turning Point USA and affiliates, IRS Form 990s and organizational filings; ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer.

27. TRAC Immigration, “Most ICE Detainees Have No Criminal Convictions,” 2024–2025.

28. Prison Policy Initiative, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2024.”

29. “Commerce Chief Howard Lutnick’s Financial Links Under Scrutiny,” The Guardian, May 14, 2025.

30. Children’s Health Defense and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., financial and IRS filings (various years).

31. “The Massive Progressive Dark-Money Group You’ve Never Heard Of,” Politico, 2021.