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In July of 1917 as the fires of WWI raged across Europe, the Russian city of Petrograd was facing its own special turmoil in the form of a large scale Bolshevik insurgency. Up to 500,000 protesters, agitators and provocateurs had entered the city from across the country, many of them armed. They took over large swaths of the metropolis, hijacked private vehicles and confiscated private buildings.

Some soviet leaders including Vladimir Lenin called the event “premature” and did not publicly endorse it, which may have been a calculated attempt to avoid direct blowback. The official historical explanation is that the insurrection had taken on a life of its own, but the stage had been set and the communist agitators got exactly what they wanted, what their strategy demanded:

Human sacrifice.

Clashes with government authorities led to hundreds of protester deaths and a handful of police casualties. The Russian government surged military forces into the region to arrest Bolshevik captains and the movement had to pull back. In the end, though, the primary goal of the insurgents had been achieved. Whether spontaneous or planned, the point of the communist methodology is always to trigger government violence which can then be used to create public sympathy and bolster the revolution.

The majority of “normies” don’t need to join the revolution, they just have to be convinced to stay out of the way. And that’s largely what happened a few months later in October of 1917 when the Red Terror began. What followed was five years of civil war.

The communists, who had long claimed to be innocent victims of the Tsarist “imperialism”, went on a murder spree as soon as they solidified their political power. Their ideological opponents were systematically rounded up and eliminated. There are no exact numbers on how many killings occurred because records were destroyed, but estimates suggest the revolutionaries and secret police arrested and executed around 1 million political dissidents in the first few years of communist rule.

This genocide, though, would pale in comparison to the 10 million deaths caused by the Russian Civil War. Not to mention the imprisonment and mass murder of millions of Christians by the atheist regime over the course of the next couple decades.

History rarely “repeats” but our modern political dynamic rings rather familiar. Many of the tactics used by the leftists in Russia in the early 20th Century are being used today in the US. In fact, I would argue they are almost exactly the same and that a Bolshevik-style revolution is happening right now.

Interestingly, the Bolsheviks were a tiny minority within the Russian population. At their peak in 1917 they had only 400,000 "official" members. They were supported politically by an estimated 23% of the population, but that is still a small movement compared to the 150 million Russian citizens trying to live their lives from day to day.

Had Russian conservatives (nationalists, Christians and defenders of private property rights) stood up and acted en masse to stop the Bolsheviks early in 1917, their society could have avoided the full scale murder that would befall them from 1918 onward. They might not have aligned perfectly with their existing government, but the communist alternative was so much worse.

Instead, the conservatives waited until agents of the Cheka were at their doorstep, and by that time it was too late to effectively fight back. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn depressingly noted in his book “The Gulag Archipelago”, the majority of Russians stood against Soviet rule but they did not have the courage to take up arms when it mattered most. And so, a minority of militant communists were able to dominate a nation of hundreds of millions. As Solzhenitsyn warned:

“We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

The communists, of course, did not achieve such success alone. As scholar Antony Sutton outlined with ample evidence in his book “Wall Street And The Bolshevik Revolution”, they enjoyed the financial and logistical backing of various global elites (from the Rockefellers to the Morgans to the Harrimans) through the course of the revolution and after their rise to power.

The purpose? To create the model for an atheist and relativistic authoritarian state. A system that the globalists intend to one day use to take over the entire world.

Their plan relies heavily on a lack of action by patriots. It could be a weakness, but the leftists have good reason to feel emboldened lately.

Civil War 2.0 has, in fact, already kicked off in the form of a well funded far-left insurrection much like what happened in 1917 Russia.

The lack of conservative organization in response has been less than impressive, and I’m here to give a warning: We are approaching the point of no return.

Activists are funded by a massive shell game of NGOs hidden behind other NGOs. They are coordinated by hidden online discord servers. They receive their orders and share information in the field through encrypted Signal chats. They are trained in agitation and disruption by anonymous online meet-ups run by covert activist coordinators.  They have engaged in violent attacks on ICE agents on hundreds if not thousands of occasions and few of them are ever prosecuted. This is not the behavior of a grassroots protest movement, this is the behavior of an army of covert operatives with special protections.

It’s important to understand that the “protests” are actually a highly coordinated guerrilla campaign – These are not sincere citizens exercising their civil rights.  For now their stated motivation is to stop deportations of illegal migrants, but this is just an excuse for their insurgency.  If ICE stopped operations tomorrow, the paid activists would simply fabricate another rationale for tearing the country apart.  Placating them will accomplish nothing.

They are hostile combatants trying to assert dominance and grow their numbers through posturing. Their goal is the destruction of the western world. This cannot be allowed.

The clear solution would be for the government to shut down hostile NGOs, however, these institutions are protected by corporate personhood and have the same constitutional rights as individual citizens. The process of investigating them and prosecuting them takes time – time we don’t have.

Even if Trump utilized the Insurrection Act and deployed the military, there are not enough troops to lock down more than a handful of US cities. Those people hoping that martial law will resolve the issue are kidding themselves. By extension, leftists stand to gain greater support: Martial law would represent proof to the rest of the world that the administration is indeed “fascist.”

The course of the war will not depend on government intervention, so don’t hold your breath waiting for effective enforcement. The reality is, most activist arrests end with them right back out on the street anyway. Their support apparatus has to be permanently removed, or THEY have to be permanently removed from the equation.

Everything will be decided by regular conservatives. If they organize in large numbers, if they create a funding apparatus to move people and supplies around the country quickly, and if they form proper leadership and training guidelines, then there might be a chance for peace simply by presenting a formidable deterrent. If not, at least the means to put down the insurgency will be available.

If conservatives stay at home and refuse to protect any piece of territory beyond their front gate, they will lose everything. It’s inevitable. The side that wants to win will always have an edge over the side that “just wants to be left alone.”

Protests will continue to spread to other cities using the same model we have seen recently in Minneapolis. NGOs will try to provoke more activist deaths at the hands of federal agents. The more the activists go unchecked by the general public the more emboldened they will become and the more their numbers will grow in the assumption that they are the majority.

In the event that the protests are stalled but the organizations are not crushed, activists will revert to assassinations and Weather Underground-style terror attacks until they demoralize the populace and gather strength again. The bottom line? If the political left is not made to truly FEAR consequences, they will not stop until they get their own Red Terror purge.

The end result is not going to be “balkanization.” That idea might have worked during the pandemic, but at this stage it’s far too late for a national divorce. The leftists will never allow conservatives to live in peace in red states. Letting blue cities rule over entire states of mostly red counties would only legitimize progressive extremists and hurt the conservative cause. This fight is for the entire country, not pieces of it.

It’s also not going to be a war of “factions”. This is prepper SHTF theory nonsense. The lines could not be more defined. The “false left/right paradigm” is a dead remnant of the Ron Paul era. It no longer exists, at least not where the bottom of the pyramid is concerned. The vast majority of progressives and Democrats are onboard with woke extremism. They’re onboard with the purge. They are loyal soldiers of globalism. Unity with them means enslavement.

Leftists, globalists and their allies are not going to discern between MAGA, libertarians and centrists. They will ultimately treat everyone as an enemy worthy of elimination.

They’re also not going to divide and in-fight the way some conservatives predict, at least not until they’ve gotten rid of us first.

In the end, the fate of the US and western civilization stands on the precarious shoulders of a conservative movement that has the means to fight, but not necessarily the will. They are forever waiting for the perfect Hollywood scenario in which they can defend themselves in good conscience in a fair fight where they are the clear and undeniable “good guy.” They are forever waiting for the perfect moment to rise up – A moment that will never come.

Patriots have also planned and trained for decades under the pretenses that conservatives would be the insurgents, not the counter-insurgency. Counter-insurgency is much more difficult and requires far more resources. But guess what? You don’t always get to choose the wars you fight. Sometimes the war chooses you and you have to adapt.

There are certainly individuals who will do what they can. I will be among them as will many of the people I know.

But the great question, the great unknown, the unpredictable factor is whether or not average Americans will step off their porches in large numbers and send a clear message that they will no longer tolerate the chaos.

*  *  *

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Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

As the Trump administration's Department of Energy moves to wipe out over $83 billion in "Green New Scam" loans and conditional commitments approved in the final months of the Biden administration, a new analysis reveals that not only did the rush to spend accelerate right after Biden's disastrous June 27, 2024 debate with now-President Donald Trump, senior Biden officials landed roles at organizations that received agency funding. In some cases, money was steered to NGOs that the officials worked for before joining the government - where they then returned following the cash bonanza. 

Following the debate where Biden revealed how cooked he is, nonprofit watchdog Democracy Restored found that billions of dollars began rushing out the door to over a dozen environmental and climate-focused NGOs, including that Alliance for Sustainable Energy, Climate United Fund, the Ocean Conservancy, the Nature Conservancy, and Rocky Mountain Institute, according to Just the News. 

Using data from USASpending.gov, Democracy Resorted found that federal agencies had obligated more than $600 million in taxpayer money to these organizations since July 1, 2024. The obligations began to drop the day after the election. Obligations to these same organizations since Nov. 5, 2024 fell to $246 million. 

While various agencies were providing millions in support to these organizations, high-level officials within the agencies either went to work for them after Trump took office, or they had previously worked for them prior to assuming key roles at the agencies under Biden. -JTN

Using data from USASpending.gov, Democracy Restored found that federal agencies obligated more than $600 million to environmental and climate-focused nonprofits beginning July 1, 2024 — including the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, Climate United Fund, Ocean Conservancy, Nature Conservancy, and Rocky Mountain Institute.

That flow of taxpayer cash slowed dramatically after the election. Since Nov. 5, 2024, obligations to the same organizations dropped to $246 million, according to the watchdog group.

At the same time, Democracy Restored identified a pattern that raised eyebrows: senior federal officials moving into roles at organizations that received agency funding — or having previously worked for them before holding key government posts.

I think the money being shoveled out after President Biden’s debate and the apparent revolving door of appointees going to recipients of these federal funds raises many questions about the timing of the money, the impact of special interests in the Biden administration and the general ethics surrounding this behavior," said Houston Keene, director of Democracy Restored, in comments to Just the News.

Loan office under fire

Scrutiny has focused on the Department of Energy’s Loans Programs Office, now renamed the Office of Energy Dominancy Financing.

In August 2024, the DOE awarded the World Resources Institute a $1 million grant aimed at supporting school bus fleet electrification training and collaboration.

Two former senior DOE officials are now senior fellows at the institute: Jigar Shah, who served as director of the Loans Programs Office, and Jennifer Wilcox, who was principal deputy assistant secretary at the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.

Shah’s tenure has drawn particular attention. The Washington Free Beacon reported in May that the Loans Programs Office approved a loan to Plug Power, a New York-based green hydrogen company, in May 2024.

According to the repoprt Shah’s private equity firm previously invested $100 million in Plug Power, and the company once described the firm as a “longstanding partner.” Shah told the Beacon that he did not work directly on Plug Power’s loan and said the company applied before he joined the office.

An Office of Inspector General audit released in December found that 20% of Loans Programs Office employees reviewed had a potential conflict of interest - or the appearance of impaired impartiality - while performing their duties.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright testified in May that the office issued roughly $40 billion in loans over the prior 15 years, but that figure ballooned to $100 billion in just the final 76 days of the Biden administration. Wright said those rushed loan agreements lacked safeguards traditionally required by the DOE.

The revolving door keeps spinning

Democracy Restored’s review identified other examples of officials cycling between government agencies and nonprofit recipients.

Renee Stone, formerly in senior leadership roles at NOAA, now serves as vice president of climate for the Audubon Society. During the Biden administration, Audubon received nearly $4 million across three grants for habitat restoration projects.

Monica Medina, another former NOAA official, is now a distinguished fellow at Conservation International, which received a $9 million grant in 2023 for an ecosystem restoration project in Hawaii.

Chetan Hebbale, once a policy adviser in the White House, later joined the Nature Conservancy as a climate and conservation finance policy adviser. The organization received more than $6 million in federal funding during Biden’s term.

Federal ethics law restricts certain post-government actions by former senior officials, but it does not prohibit them from accepting employment with private or nonprofit organizations — even those that received government funding.

Keene emphasized that there is no evidence any of these individuals directly worked on the grants in question, but said the relationships warrant closer examination.

Offshore wind ties raise questions

The Biden administration’s aggressive push for 30 gigawatts of offshore wind also drew scrutiny.

Oceans Conservancy, a vocal supporter of offshore wind expansion, received nearly $6 million in two grants from NOAA during the Biden years. The group has also received support from Orsted, a major offshore wind developer.

Susan Ruffo, who previously served as managing director of international initiatives at Oceans Conservancy, later worked for NOAA and other federal agencies.

“I think it says a lot about the stewardship of tax dollars under the Biden administration,” Keene said. “If you were an organization that agreed with the administration politically, they weren’t afraid to cut you a check. That’s a problem for the taxpayer.”

Just hours after Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) rebuffed Bill and Hillary Clinton's attorney's last-ditch conditional offer, the former president and former secretary of state appear to have acquiesced and agreed to key demands from the Republican-led House Oversight Committee to testify about Jeffrey Epstein in a closed-door deposition.

The initial correspondence, obtained by CNN, revealed that the Clintons’ team has been in search of an off-ramp for days.

Attorneys for Bill and Hillary have been in discussion with the Republican-led committee multiple times since lawmakers from both parties voted in January to hold the Clintons in contempt for refusing to appear for in-person depositions as part of the panel’s investigation into Epstein.

“It has been nearly six months since your clients first received the Committee’s subpoena, more than three months since the original date of their depositions, and nearly three weeks since they failed to appear for their depositions commensurate with the Committee’s lawful subpoenas,” Comer wrote.

“Your clients’ desire for special treatment is both frustrating and an affront to the American people’s desire for transparency.”

As CNN reports, according to the letter dated January 31, the Clintons’ lawyers laid out the terms under which the former president would sit for a voluntary, transcribed interview.

He would sit for four hours in New York City for an interview limited to the scope of the Epstein probe, they said.

Lawmakers from both parties and their staff could ask questions, and the lawyers said both the Clintons and the committee could have their own transcriber present, according to the letter.

Comer rejected the offer from the Clintons’ attorneys as “unreasonable” and said he could not accept such terms.

He could not agree, he said, to changing the interview from a sworn deposition to a voluntary interview, and rejected the way in which the attorneys sought to limit the interview’s scope. 

“But given that he has already failed to appear for a deposition and has refused for several months to provide the Committee with in-person testimony, the Committee cannot simply have faith that President Clinton will not refuse to answer questions at a transcribed interview, resulting in the Committee being right back where it is today,” the Kentucky Republican wrote.

By rejecting the Clintons’ initial offer, Comer had all but ensured that the House would hold a final vote this week on the contempt resolutions.

“Your clients’ desire for special treatment is both frustrating and an affront to the American people’s desire for transparency,” Mr. Comer wrote in a letter to the Clintons’ lawyers on Monday that was also obtained by The New York Times.

Indeed, as The NYTimes reports, after some Democrats on the panel joined Republicans in a vote to recommend charging them with criminal contempt, an extraordinary first step in referring them to the Justice Department for prosecution, the Clintons ultimately waved the white flag and agreed to fully comply with Mr. Comer’s demands.

In an email sent to Mr. Comer on Monday evening, attorneys for the Clintons said their clients would “appear for depositions on mutually agreeable dates” and asked that the House not move forward with a contempt vote, which had been slated for Wednesday.

However, it was not immediately clear Monday evening whether Comer would accept the Clintons' terms and, subsequently, whether the contempt votes would still take place.

Comer said:

"The Clintons' counsel has said they agree to terms, but those terms lack clarity yet again and they have provided no dates for their depositions. The only reason they have said they agree to terms is because the House has moved forward with contempt."

"I will clarify the terms they are agreeing to and then discuss next steps with my committee members," Comer said in a statement.

For Mr. Clinton to testify in the Epstein investigation would be nearly unprecedented.

No former president has appeared before Congress since 1983, when President Gerald R. Ford did so to discuss the celebration of the 1987 bicentennial of the enactment of the Constitution.

When Mr. Trump was subpoenaed in 2022 by the select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, after he had left office, he sued the panel to try to block it. The panel ultimately withdrew the subpoena.

It was a victory for the Republican chairman, shifting the focus of his panel’s Epstein investigation onto prominent Democrats who once associated with the disgraced financier and his longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Confirming earlier reports, late on Monday Elon Musk said SpaceX has acquired xAI, a deal that combines his powerful rocket-and-satellite business with his artificial-intelligence startup that is facing steep competition. SpaceX confirmed the deal Monday, posting a memo Musk sent out about the arrangement on its website. 

The deal gives SpaceX a valuation of $1 trillion, and xAI a value of $250 billion, Bloomberg added citing sources. The combined company’s valuation of $1.25 trillion was announced to employees in a memo on Monday.

“SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform,

The deal brings together two of the largest closely held companies in the world. XAI raised funds at a $230 billion valuation in January, while SpaceX was set to go ahead with a share sale in December at a valuation of about $800 billion. Additionally, the combination will bring together a mature and dominant company in SpaceX, with one that is in a nascent stage. Musk’s xAI is also facing formidable competition from OpenAI, Anthropic and others to build large language models and big businesses around AI technology.

Terms of the offering including price and valuation weren’t disclosed in the statement on SpaceX’s website. 

The company is still expecting to hold an initial public offering later this year, one of the people said. SpaceX had been planning an IPO that could raise as much as $50 billion, Bloomberg News reported earlier.

In his memo, Musk also said global electricity demand for AI can’t be met with data centers on the ground, and that space-based technology will be the only way to scale up AI over the long term (something we discussed in December, sharing several stock picks which have since more than doubled). 

He pitched using solar power from space as a transformative option to ramp up computing resources needed for AI. The executive has been frequently discussing orbital data centers at events and on X.

Polymarket odds of a deal being formalized by June 30 initially came out around 20% on Jan 30 when the first reports of a combination emerged. They then spiked earlier today after the Bloomberg report, and are now trading at 100%. 

*ELON MUSK'S SPACEX CONFIRMS MERGER WITH XAI IN COMPANY MEMO

And we have lift off as odds hit 98%. Congrats to those who bought. https://t.co/k2lqtGyOAR pic.twitter.com/JK6uCEeZ8X

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 2, 2026

On Friday, SpaceX said in a regulatory filing that it wants to deploy an orbital AI network with up to one million satellites over time. The company will need to secure regulatory permission to deploy that fleet. Even if it gets it, which will be problematic to say the least under any Democratic regime, it is unclear just how SpaceX will provide physical service for the airborne data centers. 

It will also need to demonstrate further progress with Starship, a powerful two-stage rocket the company has been testing in flight since 2023. Starship hasn’t yet deployed an operational payload during the test missions, and SpaceX has grappled with setbacks during the development campaign. 

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported SpaceX and xAI were planning the tie-up, and other news organizations reported on discussions about the deal. 

The deal further entangles Musk’s various business ventures. The billionaire acquired Twitter in late 2022, renamed it X, then merged the site with his artificial intelligence startup xAI in a $33 billion deal. XAI, which also operates chatbot Grok, is an expensive operation, burning around $1 billion a month in service of its stated ambition to gain “a deeper understanding of our universe.” A merger with SpaceX will pool capital and talent, while providing access to computing power. 

SpaceX stands out as arguably Elon's most successful and consistent business. The company, the only American one that can routinely send astronauts to and from the International Space Station, is a key rocket launch provider for both NASA and the US Department of Defense, which the White House has moved to rename the Department of War. The increasing revenue it’s generating from the Starlink network of more than 9,000 satellites is even more significant, now outpacing launch sales and presenting a potential source of funding for xAI’s capital-intensive business.