The Point: Trump Sees Opportunity

Donald Trump is threatening to ethnically cleanse Gaza and turn the Palestinian territory into a Network State.

The Back Story: Trump’s Sick Gaza Fantasy

It seemed as if nothing could eclipse Trump’s openly corrupt decision to accept a $400 million bribe from the government of Qatar (in the form of a plane) during his trip to the Middle East. But then Trump managed to propose something even more shocking and vile.

On May 15, Trump said he wants to seize Gaza and create a so-called “freedom zone,” which seems to be his name for a Network State.

“I have concepts for Gaza that I think are very good. Make it a freedom zone,” said Trump. “Let the United States get involved and make it just a freedom zone. I’d be proud to have the United States have it, take it, make it a freedom zone.”

Trump went on to suggest that Gaza is open for the taking since Israel has already destroyed most of it.

“I have aerial shots where, I mean, there’s practically no building standing,” he said. “It’s not like you’re trying to save something. There’s no building. People are living under the rubble of buildings that collapsed, which is not acceptable.”

His proposal for a new city in Gaza came amid media reports that he is considering a plan to remove one million Palestinians from Gaza and ship them to Libya.

This is not the first time Trump has fantasized about stealing Gaza. He also floated the idea in February.

“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip,” Trump said during a White House press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Feb. 6. “We’ll own it … We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal … the Riviera of the Middle East.”

“I do see a long-term ownership position,” he said.

Though it sounded like one of Trump’s trial balloon provocations, a White House official assured the press that it’s not a “bluff.”

“The president is absolutely serious,” one White House official told the New York Postin February.

At the time, Trump shared an AI-generated video that showed a dystopian, futuristic Gaza. It featured a Trump Gaza casino, a golden statue of Trump himself, and multiple shots of dollar bills raining from the sky.

Analysis: Trump and the New Digital Colonialism

Trump’s fixation on taking Gaza, like his obsession with acquiring Greenland, reveals an alignment with the Network State ideology. But even as the president openly pines to create these strange new territories, the mainstream press still refuses to make the connection.

Given the general media blackout on this subject, I will push in the opposite direction.

Trump is clearly enamored with the Network State idea, perhaps for a simple reason: real estate. Stripped to its basics, the Network State — which seeks to create a new class of privately-owned cities around the world — is digital colonialism. It’s about seizing land and creating valuable real estate, places where the wealthy can evade democracy and laws, and live like kings.

Trump is a real estate baron who wants to be a king. And it sure seems as if he’s embracing his own version of the Network State ideology as a tool to further his power and profit. He’s already selling off public lands and planning to build ten new “freedom cities” in the United States. Now, he is developing the idea into a plank of foreign policy, using bully diplomacy to push for land acquisition.

Trump’s Gaza plan fuses necropolitics with venture capital. Flatten a place, declare it “free,” and then auction it to the highest bidder. This is the Network State dream in its most ghoulish incarnation: a tech fascist casino built atop the disaster capitalism of genocide and mass displacement.

Trump sees the destruction of Gaza as a business opportunity. The same instincts that drove him to hawk steaks, casinos, and mail-order diplomas are now shaping his global policy. Gaza is just the latest dystopian canvas for Trump’s imperial real estate fantasy — a scorched-earth startup zone.

To me, it’s clear that Trump has bought into the Network State ideology. I don’t think it’s because he has read Curtis Yarvin or Balaji Srinivasan. Instead, I believe Trump sees it as a way to get paid and amass power. That also explains why he fully embraced crypto after previously describing it (accurately) as a “scam.” Now, he and his family are profiting from the scam. The Trump family’s net worth has increased by an estimated $2.9 billion in a few short months thanks to crypto.

So, it makes perfect sense that Trump would also seek his piece of the Network State scheme. It’s colonialism with crypto gloss, and an innovative mechanism for corruption and bribery. The Network State ideology also offers the ideal justification for authoritarian strongmen and billionaires to claim territory and sovereignty under the guise of “freedom.”

Trump’s key Silicon Valley allies, including Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, are longtime supporters of these ideas. They even funded a company, Pronomos Capital, which plans to invest in Network State cities all over the world.

When Trump speaks of creating new democracy-free zones in the U.S., Greenland, or Gaza, he’s articulating the next frontier of tech fascism. And why not? In all his grotesque simplicity, Trump is the perfect CEO for the world they seek to build.

Regardless of whether Trump is serious about stealing Gaza, he is clearly working to normalize the idea of creating new democracy-free corporate zones. This is the Network State.

But don’t take my word for it. Earlier this month, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey gave a statement to Pirate Wires in which he proposed a new “Liberty City” at the site of the U.S. military base in Guantanamo, Cuba. (Pirate Wires is a website owned by Peter Thiel deputy Mike Solana.)

Luckey described his idea for the new city as a “gilded megafortress broadcasting capitalism’s bounty,” a “tropical brain-drain machine that accelerates regime collapse in Havana.” He framed it as the “Singapore of the Caribbean.”

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, an openly devout Network State supporter, shared the piece on Twitter.

“We need more special economic zones in the U.S.,” wrote Armstrong, commenting on Luckey’s essay. “We should designate ~10 or so like this across different pieces of federal land, each with its own exemption from federal and state law. One for bio, one for drones/aviation, one for crypto, one for robotics, one for mining, etc. See what happens without so much regulation within a small sandbox.”

“@ProsperaGlobal can help with this,” he added, naming the Network State project in Honduras that is currently suing the Honduran government for nearly $11 billion.

Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase’s former chief technology officer and author of The Network State: How to Start a New Country, then boosted Armstrong’s tweet —driving home the Network State connection.

Anduril, a drone manufacturer, is a major U.S. military contractor. Coinbase, which has become a major player in politics, appears to be on the cusp of getting pro-crypto legislation passed in Washington. Yet, to my knowledge, no major news outlet mentioned this bizarre proposal to build a Network State in Cuba.

Of course, Luckey and Armstrong may not need to leave U.S. shores to make this idea a reality. Trump has already proposed the creation of ten so-called “freedom cities” on federal land.

Conclusion: Normalizing the Network State

Trump is marketing the core idea of the Network State. The essence: privatized sovereignty, justified by the language of innovation and freedom, but enforced through capital and control. Tech fascism with gold-plated crypto casinos.

Perhaps Hunter S. Thompson got it right when he wrote that “Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.”

Trump may not articulate the Network State ideology in theoretical terms, but he embodies its instincts. He is the perfect figurehead for a vision of the future where authoritarianism is draped in the banners of tech and entrepreneurship, and where destruction becomes opportunity rather than tragedy.

The signs are increasingly clear. What remains to be seen is whether the political and media establishment will take them seriously — before they become reality.

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Source:

• Gil Durán, Trump, Gaza, and the Network State: Tech Colonialism Rises, The Nerd Reich, 17 May 2025

Related Material:

• Gil Durán, Trump’s weird ‘Freedom Cities’ and the Network State cult, The Nerd Reich, 3 August 2024
• Caroline Haskins and Victoria Eliot, ‘Startup Nation’ Groups Say They’re Meeting Trump Officials to Push for Deregulated ‘Freedom Cities’, WIRED, 7 March 2025
• Gil Durán, Network State Pushes Corporate Dystopia Cities in Congress, The Nerd Reich, 8 March 2025

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The New Dark Age

The genocide in Gaza is not an anomaly. It illustrates something fundamental about human nature and is a terrifying harbinger of where the world is headed.

Chris Hedges

17 May 2025

CAIRO, Egypt — It is 200 miles from where I am in Cairo to the Rafah border crossing into Gaza. Parked in the arid sands in the northern Sinai of Egypt are 2,000 trucks filled with sacks of flour, water tanks, canned food, medical supplies, tarps and fuel. The trucks idle under the scorching sun with temperatures climbing into the high 90s. 

A few miles away in Gaza, dozens of men, women and children, living in crude tents or damaged buildings amid the rubble, are being butchered daily from bullets, bombs, missile strikes, tank shells, infectious diseases and that most ancient weapon of siege warfare — starvation. One in five people are facing starvation after nearly three months of Israel’s blockade of food and humanitarian aid.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has launched a new offensive that is killing upwards of 100 people a day, has declared that nothing will impede this final assault, named Operation Gideon’s Chariots. 

There will be “no way,” Israel will stop the war, he announced, even if the remaining Israeli hostages are returned. Israel is “destroying more and more houses” in Gaza. The Palestinians “have nowhere to return.”

“[The] only inevitable outcome will be the wish of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip,” he told lawmakers at a leaked closed-door meeting. “But our main problem is finding countries to take them in.”

The nine-mile border between Egypt and Gaza has become the dividing line between the Global South and the Global North, the demarcation between a world of savage industrial violence and the desperate struggle by those cast aside by the wealthiest nations. It marks the end of a world where humanitarian law, conventions that protect civilians or the most basic and fundamental rights matter. It ushers in a Hobbesian nightmare where the strong crucify the weak, where no atrocity, including genocide, is precluded, where the white race in the Global North reverts to the unrestrained, atavistic savagery and domination that defines colonialism and our centuries long history of pillage and exploitation. We are tumbling backwards in time to our origins, origins that never left us, but origins that were masked by empty promises of democracy, justice and human rights.

The Nazis are the convenient scapegoats for our shared European and American heritage of mass slaughter, as if the genocides we carried out in the Americas, Africa and India did not take place, unimportant footnotes in our collective history.

In fact, genocide is the currency of Western domination.

Between 1490 and 1890, European colonization, including acts of genocide, was responsible for killing as many as 100 million indigenous people, according to the historian David E. Stannard. Since 1950 there have been nearly two dozen genocides, including those in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Rwanda.  

The genocide in Gaza is part of a pattern. It is the harbinger of genocides to come, especially as the climate breaks down and hundreds of millions are forced to flee to escape droughts, wildfires, flooding, declining crop yields, failed states and mass death. It is a blood-soaked message from us to the rest of the world: We have everything and if you try and take it away from us, we will kill you. 

Gaza puts to rest the lie of human progress, the myth that we are evolving morally. Only the tools change. Where once we clubbed victims to death, or chopped them to pieces with broadswords, today we drop 2,000-pound bombs on refugee camps, spray families with bullets from militarized drones or pulverize them with tank shells, heavy artillery and missiles.

The 19th century socialist Louis-Auguste Blanqui, unlike nearly all of his contemporaries, dismissed the belief central to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, that human history is a linear progression toward equality and greater morality. He warned that this absurd positivism is perpetrated by oppressors to disempower the oppressed. 

“All atrocities of the victor, the long series of his attacks are coldly transformed into constant, inevitable evolution, like that of nature… But the sequence of human things is not inevitable like that of the universe. It can be changed at any moment.” Blanqui warned.

Scientific and technological advancement, rather than an example of progress, could “become a terrible weapon in the hands of Capital against Work and Thought.”

“For humanity” Blanqui wrote, “is never stationary. It either advances or goes back. Its progressive march leads it to equality. Its regressive march goes back through every stage of privilege to human slavery, the final word of the right to property.” Further, he wrote, “I am not amongst those who claim that progress can be taken for granted, that humanity cannot go backwards.” 

Human history is defined by long periods of cultural barrenness and brutal repression. The fall of the Roman Empire led to immiseration and repression throughout Europe during the Dark Ages, roughly from the sixth through the 13th century. There was a loss of technical knowledge, including how to build and maintain aqueducts. Cultural and intellectual impoverishment led to collective amnesia. The ideas of ancient scholars and artists were blotted out. There was no rebirth until the 14th century and the Renaissance, a development made possible largely by the cultural flourishing of Islam, which, through translating Aristotle into Arabic and other intellectual accomplishments, kept the wisdom of the past from disappearing.

Blanqui knew history’s tragic reverses. He took part in a series of French revolts, including an attempted armed insurrection in May 1839, the 1848 uprising and the Paris Commune — a socialist uprising that controlled France’s capital from March 18 until May 28 in 1871. Workers in cities such as Marseilles and Lyon attempted, but failed, to organize similar communes before the Paris Commune was militarily crushed.

We are entering a new dark age. This dark age uses the modern tools of mass surveillance, facial recognition, artificial intelligence, drones, militarized police, the revoking of due process and civil liberties to inflict the arbitrary rule, incessant wars, insecurity, anarchy and terror that were the common denominators of the Dark Ages. 

To trust in the fairy tale of human progress to save us is to become passive before despotic power. Only resistance, defined by mass mobilization, by disrupting the exercise of power, especially against genocide, can save us.

Campaigns of mass killing unleash the feral qualities that lie latent in all humans. The ordered society, with its laws, etiquette, police, prisons and regulations, all forms of coercion, keeps these latent qualities in check. Remove these impediments and humans become, as we see with the Israelis in Gaza, murderous, predatory animals, reveling in the intoxication of destruction, including of women and children. I wish this was conjecture. It is not. It is what I witnessed in every war I covered. Almost no one is immune.

The Belgian monarch King Leopold in the late 19th century occupied the Congo in the name of Western civilization and anti-slavery, but plundered the country, resulting in the death — by disease, starvation and murder — of some 10 million Congolese.

Joseph Conrad captured this dichotomy between who we are and who we say we are in his novel “Heart of Darkness” and his short story “An Outpost of Progress.”

In “An Outpost of Progress,” he tells the story of two European traders, Carlier and Kayerts, who are sent to the Congo. These traders claim to be in Africa to implant European civilization. The boredom, the stifling routine, and most importantly the lack of all outside constraints, turns the two men into beasts. They trade slaves for ivory. They fight over dwindling food and supplies. Kayerts finally murders his unarmed companion Carlier.

“They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals,” Conrad wrote of Kayerts and Carlier, “whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one’s kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one’s thoughts, of one’s sensations — to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike.”

The genocide in Gaza has imploded the subterfuges we use to fool ourselves and attempt to fool others. It mocks every virtue we claim to uphold, including the right of freedom of expression. It is a testament to our hypocrisy, cruelty and racism. We cannot, having provided billions of dollars in weapons and persecuted those who decry the genocide, make moral claims anymore that will be taken seriously. Our language, from now on, will be the language of violence, the language of genocide, the monstrous howling of the new dark age, one where absolute power, unchecked greed and unmitigated savagery stalks the earth.

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Source:

• Chris Hedges, The New Dark Age, 17 May 2025

Chris Hedges in Contra Trump:

• Unless we ourselves are The Barbarians …
• T2 – A Feature, Not a Bug
• Death Wish — Promises Made, Promises Kept
• One Hundred Days of the Trump Restoration

In the Chris Hedges Report:

• Trump’s Useful Idiots, 26 May 2025

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