LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

• Unexpected Correspondence: a suspicious seven-page document claiming to be a last will and testament arrived via snail mail at a las vegas courthouse and an attorney office years after the death of the zappos executive.
• Dubious Origin: the discovery of the papers was allegedly facilitated by an individual who claimed they were found among a deceased relative's belongings in pakistan.
• Historical Parallels: court observers have drawn cynical comparisons between this incident and the forty fraudulent claims that emerged following the death of howard hughes.
• Forensic Scrutiny: officials have commissioned expensive laboratory testing on the physical document, including chemical ink analysis and handwriting forensics, to determine if the claims are fabricated.
• Family Opposition: the deceased's relatives have publicly labeled the document a scam, forcing a legal showdown in which a court-appointed special master is currently overseeing evidence.
• Coercive Clauses: the contested document contains a punitive no-contest provision designed to disinherit the family members entirely if they dare to challenge its dubious validity in court.
• Elusive Witnesses: despite the gravity of the potential inheritance, no individuals who purportedly witnessed the signing have come forward, and the primary messenger has conveniently disappeared.
• Bureaucratic Delay: the ongoing legal circus continues to consume time and resources while experts analyze paper and ink, mirroring the lengthy and expensive litigation surrounding previous high-profile estate frauds.

Emil Lendof/WSJ, Getty Images

By

Angel Au-Yeung

June 29, 2026 5:30 am ET

BPC > Try for full article text (no need to report issue for external site): | archive.today | archive.li

When tech executive Tony Hsieh died at age 46 in a tragic 2020 fire after battling drug abuse, it was believed he had left behind a fortune valued at hundreds of millions of dollars and no will.

But last March, seven typed pages, apparently containing the former Zappos chief executive’s final wishes, surfaced via snail mail to the Las Vegas courthouse.

Copies of the purported will, dated March 2015, were also sent to the offices of a Las Vegas trust attorney named Robert Armstrong. A man who identified himself as Kashif Singh soon called Armstrong’s offices. 

Singh said he found the will in his dead grandfather’s belongings. The office of Armstrong, who said he never met Hsieh and yet was named a co-executor for Hsieh’s estate in the surprise will, received another befuddling document: a death certificate of Singh’s grandfather. It was from Balochistan, a province in Pakistan. 

With over a year of mounting mystery and no real answers, the court approved forensic testing of the purported will, which began in the first week of June, kicking off the next phase in an already tortured legal battle for the future of Hsieh’s estate. 

The peculiar details in his contested fortune hark back to another strange will from 50 years ago, involving yet another Las Vegas-based entrepreneur, known more now for his oddities than his accomplishments: Howard Hughes.

In 1976, three weeks after the death of the reclusive billionaire, a handwritten document claiming to be Hughes’s will appeared at the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City.

Roughly 40 purported wills emerged after the death of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Dubbed the “Mormon Will,” it was one of roughly 40 purported wills that emerged after Hughes’s death, and hundreds of people came forward to claim some of his vast fortune. The Mormon Will, however, received the most thorough scrutiny, enduring a seven-month jury trial and dueling testimonies by forensic experts until it was eventually declared a forgery.

“The scenario for this particular document is almost identical to what happened with Hughes,” said Albert H. Lyter III, a forensic chemist who was asked by the courts in the 1970s to examine and testify on the Mormon will. 

The mystery will for Hsieh could face a similar legal process. Comparisons between Hsieh and Hughes have already been made in Las Vegas court by Judge Gloria Sturman. 

A lot is at stake for the family. The Hsieh will included a “no contest” clause directed at Hsieh’s parents and two younger brothers. If even one of them challenged the document, they would all get nothing. Hsieh’s father, Richard Hsieh, has demanded a jury trial.

Hsieh’s family declared the will a “scam” in December and asked the courts to invalidate the document, but the court in May appointed a “special master” to oversee forensic testing. The family has also hired their own forensic experts.

If the findings between the two teams of experts are at odds, that would mirror the trial for the Hughes Mormon Will.

A forged will and a brothel

The Mormon Will appeared one day in 1976 on a desk at the headquarters of the Utah church. It divided up Hughes’s estimated $2.5 billion estate to a few medical, educational and social groups, family members, employees and the church.

But perhaps the most bizarre directive in the will: that one-sixteenth of Hughes’s estate, or $156 million, go to Melvin Dummar, a gas-station operator in Utah.

Melvin Dummar, a gas-station operator in Utah, claimed he had a reward in the Hughes Mormon Will. AP

Dummar claimed in court it was his reward after he found Hughes near a brothel one night, face down, and gave him a ride to Las Vegas. 

He initially claimed he didn’t know about the will at all. But after questioning by Hughes’s family lawyers, Dummar revealed he hadn’t only lied about not knowing about the will, he actually dropped the document off at the church’s headquarters.

Lyter, who was in his 20s at the time, was one of several experts asked to testify on the will’s authenticity. He worked in a unit of the Internal Revenue Service and often looked at documents for tax-fraud cases.

His expertise was in ink analysis, which involved a series of physical and chemical procedures to determine the make and model of ink used.

“At the time, there was nobody in the private sector that would’ve been appropriate to do the ink analysis,” the 75-year-old said.

In testimony for Nevada and Texas courts, he shared findings that the ink used was consistent with the document’s purported date, supporting the authenticity of the will. 

Other forensic experts, particularly in handwriting analysis, concluded that the will didn’t match Hughes’s strokes, recalled Lyter. A jury eventually declared the will a forgery.

A ‘time of the essence’ test

<a href="http://Zappos.com" rel="nofollow">Zappos.com</a> CEO Tony Hsieh speaking at a convention in Las Vegas in 2014. Charley Gallay/Getty Images

In May, a Las Vegas judge appointed forensic expert Gerry LaPorte as the “special master” to oversee forensic testing of the Hsieh will. LaPorte, who runs his own private practice, is also currently the laboratory director for a federal investigations unit.

LaPorte has worked on a number of high-profile cases as a forensics expert. He has examined threat letters sent to past U.S. presidents including George W. Bush and Barack Obama. A judge for the Southern District of New York requested he examine the authenticity of a diary belonging to an unnamed victim of Jeffrey Epstein. 

Probate cases are far from unusual for LaPorte. “I have probably five active cases right now involving wills,” he said. LaPorte was unable to speak on the specifics of his work on the Hsieh case, but much of his forensic testing process has been outlined in court filings.

He and his team shipped roughly 150 pounds worth of forensic equipment, boxed in Pelican cases, from his Virginia laboratory to Las Vegas for an on-site examination of the Hsieh will at the courthouse, which took place in early June. 

The main forensic test conducted was around ink analysis, including on the signatures. Ink analysis work “is a ‘time of the essence’ test since the ink used for the signatures on the 2015 Will could be in an active drying process if they were applied within the two years,” wrote LaPorte. 

Other tests that could eventually be conducted on the purported will include handwriting analysis of the signatures as well as fingerprints and DNA scans of the document.  

In the room with LaPorte was Larry Stewart, a forensic expert hired by Hsieh’s family, who also conducted his own examinations of the document.

Stewart, who declined to be interviewed, was the former lab director and chief forensic scientist at the U.S. Secret Service. He now runs his own private practice.

Stewart has worked on a number of famous cases, including the Unabomber and the reinvestigations of the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy. 

Forensic expert Larry Stewart, pictured in New York in 2004, was hired by Hsieh’s family. Zack Seckler/AP

Perhaps most infamously, in 2004, Stewart was accused of lying during his expert testimony in Martha Stewart’s trial related to sales of ImClone Systems stock. Larry Stewart was found not guilty of perjury. The next year, he stepped down from government service.

According to LaPorte’s written recommendation to the court, he and his team will issue a comprehensive written report by July 24. Afterward, the Hsieh family’s experts will be able to respond.

If LaPorte’s findings support the veracity of the purported will, the already protracted legal battle will continue on. 

Meanwhile, none of the witnesses who signed the document have come forward to the court, and Singh—the man who allegedly sent the mystery will and called Armstrong’s law firm offices—appears to have vanished.

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Angel Au-Yeung is a finance and technology reporter for The Wall Street Journal in San Francisco. She covers business leaders, startups and Silicon Valley culture. She has won several national awards for her work, including investigations into a Russian billionaire's ownership of dating app Bumble, the final months of the late former CEO of Zappos Tony Hsieh and the downfall of crypto-trading firm FTX.

She is the co-author of "Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley," which was named one of the best business books of 2023 by the Financial Times and described by the New Yorker as "mandatory reading for anyone who is interested in big tech."

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

• Orbital Maneuvers: six russian satellites utilized fuel-intensive propulsion sequences to adjust their paths toward a finnish-operated imaging spacecraft.
• Proximity Concerns: observation data indicates these russian assets achieved a distance as close as thirteen kilometers from a commercial target used for defense.
• Strategic Intent: western analysts speculate these movements facilitate potential inspection, signal interference, or physical kinetic action against satellites supporting ukraine.
• Resource Expenditure: the deliberate use of significant propellant for these orbital plane changes is described as behavior deviating from routine communication or reconnaissance missions.
• Escalating Patterns: reliance on rendezvous and proximity operations represents an expansion of past russian military activity from geostationary orbits into low earth orbit.
• Infrastructure Friction: official russian rhetoric has previously identified commercial western space assets as legitimate targets due to their function in supporting military operations.
• Technological Parity: industry reports suggest russian military space capabilities currently match or exceed those of western powers, despite challenges in other domestic sectors.
• Security Surveillance: experts advocate for incorporating onboard sensors into private satellites to mitigate reliance on ground-based tracking for threat detection.

Six mysterious Russian satellites launched earlier this year have been creeping toward an observation spacecraft used by Ukraine.

Experts worry the complex maneuvers may be a prelude to an attempt to destroy the satellite or disrupt its operations.

Something about the way in which Russia placed into orbit a batch of its Kosmos satellites in late April of this year piqued Greg Gillinger’s interest. Gillinger, the Senior Vice President at space intelligence company Integrity ISR, thought it was strange when Russia used its Soyuz rocket to drop off the first of the satellites at an altitude of 550 kilometers, then dispatched the rest to a different orbital plane using the Volga space tug.

The satellites, numbered 2609 to 2614, weigh about 600 kilograms each. But that’s about as much as Western analysts know about them. For Gillinger, the effort Russia put into fine-tuning its orbits raises alarms.

The orbital plane is an imaginary disc tilted toward Earth’s equator, on which a satellite orbits. Changing orbital planes, once in space, is difficult and demands a lot of fuel, Gillinger said. The availability of fuel limits the useful lifetime of a satellite. Most operators perform fuel-hungry maneuvers with caution. Launching satellites with the intention to perform such maneuvers requires big fuel tanks, which reduce the usable payload mass a rocket can send into space.

Gillinger, who previously served as the chief of Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) at the Combined Space Operations Center of the U.S. Air Force, said that monitoring space launches is simply something he is in the habit of doing. In the weeks following the April Kosmos launch, he kept a close eye on data tracking the six satellites. This data was made available by the U.S. military.

It didn’t take long to confirm that the satellites had an unusual mission.

The original orbital plane the satellites were placed into was already very close to that of two satellites of the Finnish Earth-observing constellation ICEYE. By mid-May, several of the Kosmos satellites were firing their thrusters, burning precious fuel, to align even more closely with the ICEYE duo.

“My assumption is that you don’t do this by accident,” said Gillinger. “It requires an enormous amount of energy to change orbital inclination. It’s not typical to see reconnaissance satellites or communication satellites or other types of satellites do anything like this.”

As they circle Earth, the Kosmos satellites now, thanks to this orbital alignment, regularly pass the ICEYE X36 satellite at a distance that causes concerns. On May 29th, Gillinger said, the distance between the Kosmos 2614 and ICEYE X36 shrank to only 13 kilometers.

Gillinger says that although the Russian sextet doesn’t “do anything dangerous or alarming” at the moment. The close approaches suggest that Russia may want to cause some harm to the ICEYE satellites or disrupt their operations.

“It’s a behavior we haven’t seen before,” Gillinger said. “It could be something as easy as an inspection mission. We don’t know. They might even want to interfere with the ICEYE satellite kinetically or non-kinetically.”

Kinetic interference refers to the use of physical force to destroy a target. In the space context, a kinetic attack could involve an intentional collision or the use of robotic grabbers to knock out a satellite. Non-kinetic interference could involve signal jamming or blinding the satellite’s sensors with laser light.

That Russia should be interested in ICEYE comes as no surprise to experts. The Finnish constellation is the world’s largest fitted with synthetic aperture radar instruments (SAR), which observe Earth’s surface through clouds and in the dark. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, ICEYE has been a key supporter of the Ukrainian defense effort. The embattled country even purchased priority access to the constellation’s images using money collected in a crowdfunding campaign.

“You have some curious in-orbit developments that aren’t normal, paired with a satellite that has been actively supporting Ukraine for years,” remarked Gillinger.

In fact, Russian officials have previously publicly expressed their discontent with Western satellite operators aiding Ukraine. In October 2022, about eight months after the invasion, Konstantin Vorontsov, the deputy director of the Russian foreign ministry’s department for non-proliferation and arms control, told the United Nations assembly that such “quasi-civilian infrastructure may become a legitimate target for retaliation.” He also described the role of commercial satellites in the defense effort as “an extremely dangerous trend.”

ICEYE declined to comment on the situation.

Space situational awareness software company COMSPOC confirmed its experts, too, had observed the close approach between Kosmos 2614 and ICEYE-X36 on May 29. Although they estimated the distance of the closest approach at 43 kilometers.

“What makes this maneuver particularly noteworthy is that the deployment pattern and subsequent orbit plane changes are highly unusual,” a COMSPOC spokesperson told Supercluster in an email.

The company said it would continue observing the situation.

Victoria Samson, the Chief Director for Space Security and Stability at the Secure World Foundation, said that although the Kosmos satellites are not the first Russian spacecraft to sneak up on Western spacecraft in orbit, the incident is a step-up from earlier Russian threats.

“This type of RPO (rendezvous and proximity operations) is not unusual for Russia,” Samson told Supercluster in an email. “Their Luch and Luch 2 satellites have gotten co-planar [orbiting in the same plane] with numerous US intelligence satellites. But this is the first time, as far as I know, that Russian satellites have gotten co-planar with a commercial satellite in low Earth orbit.”

Samson is a co-author of the Secure World Foundation’s Global Counterspace Capabilities Report published in June 2025. The report revealed that although Russia’s civilian space program may have been in decline for years, the Eastern European power’s military space technology is very much on par with that of China and, in many aspects, exceeds the capabilities possessed by the United States and Europe.

In fact, Russia’s maneuvers in orbit have been causing a stir among Western space security experts for more than a decade. The Luch satellite, mentioned by Samson, has been zooming around the geostationary ring — the orbital region at the altitude of 36,000 kilometers, where many telecommunications and spy satellites reside — since 2014. During those years, Luch has repeatedly positioned itself close to various Western spacecraft. Its sibling satellite, Luch 2, has been performing similar maneuvers since 2023.

European authorities think the Luchs may have been eavesdropping on European commercial and state-owned communications satellites and might even be trying to disrupt their transmissions using on-board jammers.

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Before Kosmos 2609 to 2614, other satellites from the Kosmos family have conducted suspicious exercises in low Earth orbit. In addition to the ICEYE SAR constellation, the low Earth orbit, at altitudes of up to 2,000 kilometers, is home to internet-beaming mega-constellations such as SpaceX’s Starlink and other Earth-observing fleets capable of imaging Earth’s surface in detail. Many of these systems have been aiding Ukraine’s defence efforts against Russia.

The maneuvers, performed regularly since 2015, have demonstrated Russia’s ability to approach other satellites in Low Earth orbit, and, in some cases, suggested that Russia possesses technology to enable satellites to fly at a close distance in a coordinated manner.

Russia has been secretive about the purpose of these tests.

The Secure World Foundation states that while these technologies could be used for satellite servicing and inspection, they could also enable Russia to either disrupt Western satellite services by jamming their signal at close distance or even cause physical damage.

Gillinger said the ICEYE incident sends a signal to Western commercial satellite operators and governments to rethink their approach to space situational awareness. Simply monitoring objects in space using telescopes and radars on Earth may no longer suffice.

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“We might want to start thinking about equipping satellites with their own space awareness capabilities,” he said. “If you really want to be certain what’s going on around your satellites, having an onboard capability to see the surrounding area will become more important. If the ICEYE X36 satellite had a small space awareness sensor suite on board, the operators would be able to observe the Kosmos satellite and determine whether they should be maneuvering."

Space security experts have been sounding the alarm for years about emerging threats in the space environment. Last year, China sent ripples through the space world by performing close-proximity maneuvers described as satellite dogfighting. U.S. military sources said at that time that five Chinese satellites had been moving around each other “in synchronicity and with control” in a way reminiscent of the acrobatic chases performed during the Second World War between German and British fighter aircraft.

In January this year, Germany’s State Secretary for Defence Jens Plötner said that European satellites experience interference from Russia and China “on an almost daily basis,” according to Euronews.

Space security researchers are warning about the susceptibility of space technology to cyber attacks. The space around Earth is full of older satellites built without cyber protections, and although no satellite hack has been verifiably reported to date, researchers have discovered multiple vulnerabilities in widely used onboard software.

The invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was preceded by a cyber attack on terminals of American satellite operator Viasat, which was at that time frequently used by Ukrainian forces.

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

• Health Crisis: vitamin a deficiency causes blindness in hundreds of thousands of children annually with high mortality rates following vision loss
• Preventative Measures: fortification of staple foods is a common practice in developed nations to address widespread nutrient deficiencies
• Technological Innovation: golden rice was developed by scientists to provide beta carotene through rice consumption to improve health outcomes for the poor
• Licensing Strategy: the technology was offered for free to smallholder farmers to ensure cost effective access for low income populations
• Regulatory Hurdles: organized opposition led by environmental groups prevented the commercial distribution of golden rice for two decades
• Estimated Impact: long term regulatory delays are associated with over one hundred thousand child deaths and millions of lost healthy life years
• Market Disparity: novel genetically modified products such as designer pineapples encounter fewer barriers than foods developed for humanitarian purposes
• Future Developments: emerging nations are increasingly prioritizing biotechnology for local crop improvements to mitigate agricultural challenges and health risks

Every year, vitamin A deficiency blinds 250,000 to 500,000 children. Half of them die within a year of losing their sight.

One third of children worldwide are deficient, roughly half of children in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia1. Deficiency weakens the immune system, so children are more likely to die from common infections like diarrhea or measles.

Rich countries solved this kind of problem by adding nutrients to staple foods. The United States adds iodine to most salt, and folic acid to flour to prevent birth defects.

Rice is a critical staple among the world’s poor, so scientists improved rice. They added beta-carotene, the thing that makes carrots orange and that the body turns into vitamin A. The new rice cooks and tastes the same, but it’s yellow. They called it Golden Rice and licensed it for free to any farmer earning under $10,000 a year.

It has been ready since the mid-2000s. Today it grows nowhere.

The reason is that it is a GMO. Environmental groups, led by Greenpeace, fought it in country after country for two decades.

As far as I can tell, no one has calculated the cost of that delay. I’ve spent the last few weeks doing so. My rough estimate is that the delay has killed about 106,000 children and left another 210,000 to 425,000 blind.2 Measured in healthy years of life lost, that is somewhere between 7 and 12 million.3 (My full calculations are here. I will update these figures as I receive feedback.)

That works out to roughly fourteen children dying every single day, for twenty years, from a nutrient we already know how to add to food.

If a new disease were killing fourteen children a day, it would have an internationally-recognized name and a task force. Golden Rice got villified as one word instead: GMO.

“GMO”

Often, that word scares people. But we eat GMOs all the time. They are in about 70 percent of packaged American food, 96 percent of US soybeans, and 92 percent of US corn. Billions of people have eaten them every day for thirty years. No one has been harmed.

Golden Rice was different in one small way. Most GMO crops are changed in how they grow, so the part you eat is ordinary. In Golden Rice, the part you eat is the part that changed. That made it feel new.

Greenpeace framed it as dangerous, saying corporations were secretly behind it. They falsely claimed it was unproven and that it was unclear whether children could absorb the vitamin. Activists tore up test fields and filed lawsuits to block approval. Over a hundred Nobel laureates signed a letter asking Greenpeace to stop.

While Golden Rice sat blocked, other new GMO foods reached store shelves. One of them is a pink pineapple. It sells for about $10 in stores and up to $50 online. It uses the same chemistry as Golden Rice, run in the opposite direction. Golden Rice turns on the pathway that makes the vitamin children need. The pineapple turns it off, so the fruit stays a pretty pink.

The lifesaving technology is in the Western world, growing a nicer pineapple for parties.

Source: Del Monte’s East Coast vendor TropicalFruitBox.com

I’m grateful for this pineapple. The pineapple has a company behind it that can afford to fight critics and build a market around modified foods. Golden Rice only had scientists and charities. It was a cheap crop for poor people, with no profit margin to help it defend itself.

In 2021, the Philippines became the first country to approve Golden Rice. Three years later, a court there revoked the approval after Greenpeace and a group of farmers sued.

Blocking a new crop is cheap. A single lawsuit claiming there is no scientific consensus on its safety can freeze it for years, even when consensus exists. Approving it is expensive because a government must be willing to spend political capital on people who cannot pay it back. Golden Rice’s beneficiaries were poor, scattered, and far from anyone in charge.

When one of these children dies, the cause is recorded as measles, diarrhea, or poverty, never as the campaign that kept the cure out of the field. A plane crash kills a few hundred people and leads to grounding fleets immediately. This killed more than a hundred thousand children over twenty years, with no wreckage to photograph and no single day it happened on.

That may be starting to change: the Global South is engineering crops of its own now, aimed at preventing harm, like pests and crop failure, rather than high margins or novelty. One is a cassava richer in iron and zinc. The more of these that become normal, the harder it gets to keep blocking the one that should have come first.

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1

As of 2013 WHO data.

2

I estimated this by adding up the countries with high vitamin A deficiency, high rice consumption, and reliance on domestically grown rice. I projected how long it would take Golden Rice to reach about 70 percent adoption.

As of 2023, vitamin A supplementation programs reach three in four children who need them. This estimate counts only the children they don’t protect. India, the biggest contributor to the figure, reaches only about 60 percent of its children.

3

The closest estimate I found was a 2014 peer-reviewed study finding that India lost 1.4 million healthy years in a single decade.

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

• Academic Obsession: a student prioritizes chemistry as a core identity feature while attempting to force enthusiasm upon an indifferent public through outreach programs.
• Outreach Participation: the chemistry group organized a booth at a public festival to showcase material chemistry through amateur demonstrations.
• Pigment Application: body paint was formulated by mixing powdered turmeric into a white base to create temporary yellow decorative designs.
• Accidental Discovery: the yellow pigment vanished after brief exposure to sunlight, prompting a trivial investigation into the underlying causes of the fading.
• Curcuminoid Properties: scientific literature is referenced to highlight the structural attributes and purported biological benefits of common kitchen additives.
• Photodegradation Mechanism: ultraviolet light triggers the breakdown of complex molecular structures when exposed to ambient environment factors like air and sun.
• Structural Transformation: the complex curcumin molecule splinters into simpler fragments like vanillin, which inherently alters its light-absorbing and reflective capabilities.
• Instructional Utility: the simple phenomenon of dye degradation is promoted as a profound insight for organizing household spice storage in dark cabinets.

In European history, there is a pattern: every 50 or 75 years or so, the international order of its time, the institutions and the ideas, gradually drift out of alignment with reality. If you go back to the institutions built in the rubble of 1945 and as the Cold War was beginning, you have the UN, Nato, the WTO, the IMF etc — and now they all seem played-out and exhausted.

The EU — the European Economic Community, as it was — is one of those institutions. In the years before the referendum, I made several arguments in favor of leaving. I said, if you look around, what do you see? You see a mix of stagnation, anti-technology, anti-growth, anti-future, bureaucracy — bureaucracy dedicated to Leninist bureaucratic centralism in Brussels, where everything will improve if everything is uniformly controlled by the Commission. But they’ve got low growth, high debt, nightmare pension systems, nightmare demographics, and immigration that is out of control and fueling the rise of extremist parties.

If you look at what’s happening technologically, increasingly it’s China and California which are dominating, and Europe is not in the game. Again, that was regarded as a very eccentric argument to make 10 years ago, but now it’s an obvious, very mainstream thing. 

I also argued that the regime in Britain is knackered and is failing, and the institutions are knackered, and they’re not going to be able to cope with the world that’s coming. That was an extremely niche view in 2015, regarded, generally speaking, as crazy. Now, of course, you can go on Twitter today, and you can see the vast majority of Westminster is now having to face up to the reality that the old parties are knackered, old Whitehall is knackered, the old media ecosystem is knackered, the universities have lost huge credibility, etc. etc. 

Also obvious is that Britain now has huge problems. In all sorts of ways we have not done what the Vote Leave plan was — and what we started doing in 2019 and 2020 — because the Tories stopped it all. But is the answer to that to say, “Oh yeah, we need the bureaucratic centralism of the European Commission, we need more EU AI acts, we need more of that kind of regulation, that’s the future”? Does anyone in their right mind really think that? 

So how does Westminster respond to this now? Westminster doesn’t want to face all the technology issues, never has done. Our political elites and Whitehall elites, for complicated reasons from the Sixties and Seventies, very deliberately and explicitly stepped back from thinking about frontier technology. 

So now people don’t want to look at those questions. Their response now is: instead of looking at all the very, very obvious big things like our totally farcical procurement system, totally farcical planning system, totally farcical energy, totally farcical housing, totally farcical MoD, totally farcical welfare, a Westminster and Whitehall that is pathological about on technology and doesn’t want to take it seriously — the answer to those problems is to rejoin the EU. 

Why? Because the old people from the old system are determined not to face reality, determined not to face the future. They just want to retreat to their comfort zone, which is having more stupid culture wars about Brexit, because that’s where they’re happy. They’re pretending that rejoining the single market is somehow a great thing, when you can barely even see the single market in the data. If you look at the Draghi report, which of course also is basically ignored in London because it’s super bad for the EU, you have a perfect example of the actual EU technocracy itself recently writing about how basically a lot of Europe is deluded on the single market. Westminster doesn’t want to face any of those problems either.

Go back to the Eighties and look at the newspapers at the time and the news at the time. There’s obviously a lot of bitter arguments, but the political class is actually engaged with the real issues of the British economy. That is actually what dominates the news, and you have a whole set of people reading things and arguing about them and making complicated arguments in public about what we have to do on privatization, you name it. 

You look at the 10 years since Brexit and it’s basically characterized by Westminster being absolutely pathologically determined not to face any of these core problems in any kind of coherent way. It’s a constant soap opera, and both sides — both sides in the sense of the kind of inside-Westminster Left and Right — have been much happier arguing about all the trans madness in 2020. The Guardian, the Telegraph, Labour and the Tories were happier arguing about that and arguing about Brexit than they were about dealing with any of these other actual core problems.

And Whitehall doesn’t care about these problems. Whitehall cares about preserving existing power and existing institutions and existing budgets, and it cares, most importantly, about itself retaining control over its own personnel caste system. That is its actual priority, and everything will always be sacrificed to that, as you saw in Covid, as you could see in Ukraine, as you can see on everything.

So now you’ve got stagnant growth, you’ve got completely pathological institutions that actually need real-terms increases in money just to stand still, and you’ve got political parties and senior civil servants completely dedicated to not changing how anything works. 

If you put those three things together, you’ve got what we can see all around us, which is every part of the system now failing, and those failings interacting with each other in various ways. So you’ve got a shitshow in that you can’t deport people, and you’re scraping crazy Afghans off the street and putting them in prison, but then that means you’ve got to let all these people out, and then that means you’ve got X, and then that means you’ve got Y, and then that means the budgets for these things are all knackered as well. So all these things are now starting to ping into each other. You haven’t just got one defunct bureaucracy, with internal silos going haywire, you’ve also got, horizontally, them all smashing into each other and breaking — and no one has authority to deal with the interactions between all these different parts of the system.

But in all sorts of ways, Britain is actually the best-placed country in the West. In practical terms, it is much easier to do real regime change in Britain than it is in America or anywhere in Europe, because of our unwritten constitution and the weird way in which the powers of the Prime Minister actually work. So, unlike Trump, the Prime Minister can go in today and say, “Fired, fired, fired, fired, fired. This government department is closed, and I’m creating a new one.” The civil service has to do it, and the courts can’t stop it, or even judicially review these things. In no other Western country is that possible. 

That is why you see two things happening on the Left now: one, the plan to change the electoral system to PR (proportional representation), and then, secondly, discussions about how you encode protections for the civil service to make it extremely difficult to actually do what I’m talking about. What they’re thinking is — and it’s actually logical from their point of view — that if you pass certain kinds of legislation defending the current Whitehall system, and then you do PR, you make it extremely hard for anybody coming in to actually change anything. You completely embed the current catastrophic situation, which is what they want to do.

What they’re terrified of is Nigel Farage doing some kind of Doge-type thing and saying, “Right, I’m going to bring in 20 hotshots, fire all the permanent secretaries, put them in charge of this, use the actual powers of the PM, close departments, open them, fire people, and then pass a whole series of primary legislation, repeal the Human Rights Act, repeal the Equalities Act, reform how judicial review works, bin the Climate Change Act.” You go through 15 things, you whack them all in year one with primary legislation.

If you have an actual serious list of these things, the right way to do it would be that you draft all this legislation in opposition, you make the case in the election, in the manifesto, you win on the Thursday, and on Monday morning, these bills start hammering through into parliament. And you also make clear to the House of Lords that if anyone thinks that they can fuck around, we’re going straight at the King, we’ll appoint 600 new peers, and it’ll be blitzkrieg on you guys.

You smash that through in primary legislation, so you have that combination of primary legislation changing fundamentals, and you actually use the constitutional powers of the PM, as I’ve discussed, and the whole thing starts to shift. That’s what they are terrified of — correctly from their point of view — in Whitehall, in Labour, in the Inner Temple, etc. etc. And that’s why you start to see this mix of “Rejoin the EU”, PR, censorship, and embedding legislation to protect the civil service. They’re thinking that if they can bring off some combination of those things, then they can get to the state they want to, which is that they don’t have to worry about elections anymore. And they’ve convinced themselves that everyone who doesn’t agree with them now is fascist. Go back to pre-referendum: mainstream people in the system in Westminster hated me, thought I was crazy, stupid, wrong, but they didn’t say I was actually a fascist who should be in jail. Now, their argument about people like me is that we’re actually fascists who should be in jail and shouldn’t be allowed to actually participate in democratic politics.

So almost all the positive things that we could have changed after Brexit, Westminster, the Tories and Labour have been adamant in refusing to do. But just because of inertia, we haven’t adopted various of the EU regulations, and therefore we haven’t shot ourselves in both feet the way that Brussels has. As the old system fails, something new is being born — but for the moment, it is unclear exactly what.

***

This essay was adapted from Dominic Cummings’ interview on the Anglofuturism podcast.

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

• Nepotistic Leadership: state efforts are centered around katerina tikhonova, whose expertise in dance and mathematics is being leveraged to oversee elite academic ai initiatives.
• State Indoctrination: authorities are force feeding ideological constraints by requiring models to adhere strictly to ambiguous russian spiritual and moral values.
• Brain Drain: a mass exodus of technical talent following the invasion of ukraine has severely crippled the nation’s internal research and development capacity.
• Hardware Deficit: the country remains decades behind in semiconductor production, relying desperately on illicit gray market imports that face increasing international scrutiny.
• Military Integration: artificial intelligence development is inextricably linked to the defense and security apparatus, leaving little room for genuine civilian innovation.
• Sovereignty Delusion: officials promote a fantasy of technological self-sufficiency while lacking both the domestic hardware infrastructure and the computing power to execute it.
• Limited Access: elite resources like the msu supercomputer are gated behind state-controlled circles, preventing the broader collaboration necessary for scientific advancement.
• Chinese Dependency: reliance on chinese hardware is a precarious strategy, as foreign suppliers prioritize their own domestic demand for chips over russian needs.