If you have followed Twin Tree Project for any length of time, you know that my writing tends to live at the intersection of scripture, personal testimony, and the interior life. This post is a departure from that, at least on the surface, and I want to be upfront about that before you read another word.
For some time now, alongside my study of the Bible and my own spiritual formation, two additional areas have quietly become central to the way I understand the world: geopolitics and the science of spirituality. I have read, researched, watched, listened, and sat with these things for years at this point, largely for my own education. I have touched on the science of spirituality a number of times in my posts, but I have wrestled with whether to bring hardcore geopolitical issues into this space, because TTP has always felt like a place set apart from the noise, and I did not want to compromise that.
But we are living in a moment that has shifted something in me. The more I learn, the more I am convinced that too few people have an interest in, or perhaps true access to, the kind of historical and structural information that would help them make sense of what they are watching unfold in real time. I have drafts like this one sitting in my archives, and I have decided that keeping them there is no longer something I can justify.
So consider this a quiet expansion of what you will find here. The foundation has not changed. But the table is getting a little wider.
The Moment the Noise Became Signal
There is a particular kind of awakening that does not announce itself. It does not arrive with fanfare or a single dramatic revelation. It arrives quietly, through a video you almost scrolled past, a voice you did not expect to stop for, a sentence that lands so precisely in the center of what you have been circling that you find yourself replaying it four times just to make sure you heard it correctly.
That is how I found Susan Kokinda.
I had been doing what a lot of people started doing around the summer of 2024 — digging. The assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania was, for me, a turning point. Not politically, exactly. More like epistemologically. Something in me shifted from vague unease to active suspicion that the story I was being handed by mainstream media was not the whole story, or perhaps not even the true one. I had already started watching geopolitical content rather than just local and national news, trying to understand forces larger than a single election cycle. And then one evening, underneath a Morse Report livestream, a video was recommended to me. I clicked it almost by accident.
Susan Kokinda was speaking, and within minutes I knew I was in the presence of someone who had done the deep work. Her tone was grounded. Her knowledge was immense. Her framework was not reactive or partisan. It was historical, structural, and precise. She is a long-time political organizer, having fifty eight years of experience under her belt, and a leader of Promethean Action, a group committed to what she calls the American System of political economy, and she has become one of the most important teachers in my own education about how the world actually works.
This post is my attempt to share what I have learned from her, and from the research I have done since, because I believe, with increasing conviction, that every person who cares about truth, about sovereignty, and about the future of their family and their nation, needs to understand what Susan Kokinda and her colleagues are talking about.
This is not a partisan exercise. This is not conspiracy. This is history, and reality.
The Empire That Never Actually Ended
Most of us were taught that the British Empire ended. That colonialism was dismantled. That the world moved on into an era of independent nations, free markets, and international cooperation. We were taught, in other words, that the story had a satisfying resolution.
That is at best convenient fiction, at worst a blatant lie.
It did not.
What Susan Kokinda articulates, and what serious historians have documented, is that the British Empire did not end. It transformed. The mechanisms of control shifted from overt territorial occupation to something far more sophisticated: the control of financial systems, the management of trade relationships, and the strategic manipulation of nations against one another. What we call globalism today is, in her framework, simply the modern operating system of what was always the British imperial project.¹
To understand this, you have to understand what is known as the Great Game, the 19th century geopolitical strategy by which the British Empire maintained dominance not through brute force alone, but through positioning. The idea was to prevent any rival power from consolidating enough strength to challenge British supremacy, and to do this by keeping potential rivals perpetually engaged with one another. Pit nation against nation. Keep the board unstable. Profit from the chaos.²
This is not ancient history. It is the operating logic of what Kokinda describes as an imperial system that persists today, headquartered not in a palace, but in financial institutions, in think tanks, in the architecture of central banking and so-called free trade. The nouns have changed. The verbs have not.
The American System: What We Were Always Supposed to Be
Here is something that did not make it into my high school history class in any meaningful way: the United States was founded in explicit opposition to the British economic model.
The founders, particularly Alexander Hamilton, articulated what became known as the American System of political economy. It was built on three pillars: protective tariffs to develop domestic manufacturing, a national bank to direct credit toward productive enterprise, and investment in internal infrastructure. The goal was not to enrich financial elites. The goal was to develop the productive capacity of the nation and raise the living standards of ordinary people.³
This vision held that human beings are not animals to be managed by elites, but creative agents whose labor and ingenuity, properly supported, could generate genuine wealth. It is a profoundly different anthropology than the one embedded in the British imperial model, which has always seen the mass of humanity as a resource to be controlled rather than a people to be liberated.
The tension between these two visions, the American System versus the British imperial system, is, in Kokinda’s analysis, the hidden through-line of American history. And it helps explain something that has always puzzled students of history: why so many American presidents who championed economic sovereignty and industrial development met violent ends. Lincoln. McKinley. The pattern is not coincidental, in her view. It is systemic.⁴
Central Banking: Who Controls the Money Controls the Nation
One of the most important things Susan Kokinda teaches, and one of the most important things I have had to unlearn my prior assumptions about, is the nature of central banking.
Most Americans hear “the Federal Reserve” and think: government institution, financial stability, boring but necessary. What Kokinda explains is something quite different. The Federal Reserve is not a federal institution in any meaningful sense. It is a private central bank, created in 1913 through a process that remains one of the more extraordinary legislative maneuvers in American history.⁵
The distinction matters enormously. A national bank, as Hamilton conceived it, is an instrument of the sovereign nation, directed toward developing the productive capacity of the country and the prosperity of its people. A private central bank is an instrument of private financial interests, directed ultimately toward the accumulation and concentration of financial power.
The 2008 financial crisis, in this light, is not a story about a market that got out of control. It is a story about a system that worked exactly as designed, for the people it was designed to serve. Ordinary Americans lost homes, jobs, and savings. The banks that caused the collapse were bailed out with public money and emerged larger and more powerful than before. That is not a malfunction. That is the feature.⁶
Gold’s re-emergence as a topic of serious financial conversation, Kokinda notes, reflects a growing global recognition of this reality. Nations are quietly repositioning. The speculation-heavy financial architecture that has dominated since the mid-twentieth century is showing its age. What Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has pointed toward, in her reading, is a return to something more tethered to physical production and real economic output. Whether that materializes remains to be seen. But the conversation has shifted in ways that would have seemed fringe only a decade ago.
Cartels, Drugs, and the Financial System Nobody Wants You to See
This is perhaps the section most likely to make a reader uncomfortable, which is precisely why it needs to be written.
Susan Kokinda draws a direct historical line between the British Opium Wars of the 19th century and the cartel infrastructure that exists today. The Opium Wars were not, at their core, about drugs. They were about financial control. Britain forced opium trade on China at gunpoint because it needed a mechanism to extract wealth and maintain leverage. The drug was the instrument. The financial extraction was the point.⁷
That logic, she argues, has never gone away. Major financial institutions have been repeatedly documented laundering drug cartel money. The fines they pay, when caught, are calculated as a cost of doing business rather than a deterrent. The reason is structural: the speculative financial system requires enormous flows of liquid capital to sustain itself, and drug money, moving in volume and in cash, serves that function with brutal efficiency.⁸
This reframes the immigration and border debate in a way that most political commentary entirely misses. The open border is not primarily an ideological commitment to compassion, however it is sold. It is infrastructure. It keeps cartel logistics operational, keeps wages suppressed for working-class Americans (a Chamber of Commerce priority for decades), and keeps a financial pipeline flowing that the system depends on. When Trump moves against cartels, he is not simply enforcing immigration law. He is going after the circulatory system of the imperial financial order.
Iran, Ukraine, and the Real War
Most Americans, when they hear “Iran,” hear a foreign policy problem. A rogue regime. A nuclear threat. A religious extremist government that hates us.
All of that may contain elements of truth. But Kokinda’s framework asks us to look at Iran the way a chess player looks at a square on the board: not in isolation, but in terms of what it controls, what it blocks, and who benefits from keeping it in play as a destabilizing force.
Iran has functioned, in the imperial geopolitical system, as a choke point. Its geography, its proxies, its nuclear program, all of these have served as pressure mechanisms that keep the region unstable, that justify military spending and political intervention, and that prevent the kind of sovereign economic development that would actually benefit the people of the Middle East. That instability is not an accident. It is, in the Great Game framework, a managed condition.
What Kokinda sees Trump attempting with Iran is something genuinely different from what most foreign policy analysts recognize. The goal is not regime change in the traditional sense, nor bombing a country into submission or installing a friendly government. It is removing Iran as an imperial choke point, ending the terrorist proxy network, and creating the conditions under which Iran can become a normal, sovereign, economically developing nation. That is not the British great game. That is its opposite.
Ukraine fits the same pattern. The war there did not begin in 2022. Its roots go back through decades of external manipulation of Ukrainian politics, economics, and identity. The ongoing conflict serves the imperial system’s oldest purpose: keeping potential rivals engaged with one another, draining resources, preventing the consolidation of Eurasian development that would fundamentally challenge Anglo-American financial dominance.⁹
Immigration, Wages, and Who the Open Border Actually Serves
This particular piece of the puzzle tends to generate more heat than light in public debate.
The argument most commonly made against border enforcement is humanitarian. People are suffering. They are fleeing violence. Compassion demands we welcome them. These things can be simultaneously true and also incomplete as a full account of what is happening.
What the data and history show is that mass undocumented immigration has a measurable suppressive effect on wages for working-class Americans, particularly in sectors like construction, agriculture, food processing, and service industries. This is not a fringe claim. It is Labor Economics 101, and it has been acknowledged by economists across the political spectrum.¹⁰
The Chamber of Commerce, not exactly a left-wing institution, has been one of the most consistent opponents of serious border enforcement for exactly this reason. Cheap, legally vulnerable labor is profitable. Workers who cannot complain, cannot organize, and cannot leave are workers whose wages can be perpetually compressed.
Kokinda places this within the broader imperial logic: a working class that cannot afford a home on a single income, that is perpetually financially stressed, is a working class that is easier to manage, easier to distract, and less likely to develop the political coherence to challenge the system. This is not paranoia. It is political economy, and it has a very long history.
Why Any of This Matters to Those of Us Who Are Spiritual People
I know some readers are wondering what any of this has to do with faith. The answer, I think, is everything.
Scripture does not call us to be naive about power. Proverbs 4:7 tells us that wisdom is the principal thing, and that getting wisdom, we should get understanding. Romans 13 instructs us to be subject to governing authorities, but that instruction was written by a man who was eventually executed by one of those authorities, and who understood the difference between legitimate governance and imperial domination better than most.
The prophets of the Old Testament were not politically disengaged. They spoke directly to kings. They named injustice in the systems of their day. They understood that the oppression of the poor, the manipulation of markets, the corruption of leadership were not merely social problems. They were spiritual ones.
We are not called to check our minds at the door of our faith. We are called to love the Lord our God with all our heart, and all our soul, and all our mind. That last part matters. Willful ignorance is not humility. It is abdication. And the people of God have never been well-served by abdicating their responsibility to understand the world in which they live.
Closing Thoughts: The Work of Waking Up
I am still learning. I want to be very clear about that. Susan Kokinda is an incredible teacher who has given me a framework, not a finished map, and the territory is vast and complicated and sometimes deliberately obscured. But the framework holds. The more I research independently, the more the historical record confirms what she is describing. The British imperial system did not end. It adapted. And understanding that adaptation is not optional for people who want to engage the present moment with any degree of clarity.
The good news, if there is good news in all of this, is that the framework also reveals what genuine alternatives look like. The American System of political economy, sovereign nations developing their own productive capacity, manufacturing and innovation and the lifting of living standards for ordinary people, that vision has existed as a counter to the imperial model since Hamilton put pen to paper. It has been suppressed, co-opted, and sometimes violently interrupted. But it has never entirely disappeared.
The work of waking up is not comfortable. It requires sitting with the possibility that things you believed were true are incomplete, or were carefully constructed to keep you from asking the next question. But it is necessary work. And you do not have to do it alone.
If you have not yet found Susan Kokinda and Promethean Action, I cannot recommend them highly enough. Start there. And then keep digging.
Maranatha.
Footnotes
¹ The concept of globalism as a continuation of British imperial strategy is developed extensively in the work of historians and political economists associated with the American System tradition. For a contemporary treatment, see the work of Promethean Action and Susan Kokinda’s lectures available through their platform.
² The Great Game is well documented in standard historical scholarship. A foundational text is Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (1990).
³ Hamilton’s American System is outlined in his Report on Manufactures (1791) and his writings on a national bank. Henry Clay later formalized the term and expanded the framework.
⁴ The pattern of violence against American System presidents and leaders is a subject Kokinda addresses directly. Readers interested in the assassination of McKinley and its economic context will find substantial scholarship connecting his tariff policies to powerful financial opposition.
⁵ The legislative history of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 is extensively documented. G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature from Jekyll Island remains one of the most thorough popular treatments of its origins.
⁶ The 2008 bailout and its beneficiaries are a matter of public record. The Special Inspector General for TARP (SIGTARP) produced detailed reports on the distribution of bailout funds.
⁷ The Opium Wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) are standard historical record. Their financial dimensions are well documented in scholarship on British imperial economics.
⁸ Drug money laundering by major financial institutions has been documented in multiple enforcement actions, including the 2012 HSBC settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice.
⁹ The history of external intervention in Ukrainian politics is documented in sources ranging from Victoria Nuland’s publicly available 2014 remarks to scholarship on NATO expansion and its relationship to Russian strategic concerns.
¹⁰ The wage suppression effects of undocumented immigration have been studied extensively. George Borjas of Harvard has published influential, if contested, work on this question. The debate itself is instructive about who funds which side of the research.