Why 'Signalgate' Marks Our (Official) Descent into End Times Ideology
The Trump administration's disregard for the rule of law is a clear indicator that we have entered the liminal realm of end-times ideology.
For years, there has been a growing convergence between various end times belief systems. Whether one is talking about the return of Christ, nuclear war, financial collapse, the transition to the Noosphere, or the technological singularity, these belief systems share a common appeal: one day, perhaps some day soon, the old rules will no longer apply. The gatekeepers will become redundant, and the world cleansed of them by fire; the true believers, who had previously been outcast, apostate, and ridiculed, will inherit the earth and ascend into new positions of glory and power. It's a story as old as humanity — but lately, they're all converging into one dangerous meta-narrative that's actually upending the global order.
Recent revelations that various Trump administration officials used Signal, a secure messaging app running on consumer cellular phones, to coordinate war plans has sent shockwaves through Washington and the rest of the world as people try to make sense of what it means. But few have grasped this hard fact: it marks a clear, incontrovertible, and public departure of the US security state from the reality-based world into the imaginary world of end-times ideology. In this world, laws requiring use of secure government systems and retention of records not only no longer apply, they are actively detrimental to the project. These people are not executing on behalf of the government; they are executing against it.
This transition, which has been brewing for years, and of which we have seen glimpses of in the past (Watergate, Iran Contra, Trump 1.0, et al) has been most obviously on display in the political realm. Trump and Musk both have cultivated cults around themselves, and we have become inured to the idea that politics is in part about converting cultish devotion into electoral outcomes.
But when it comes to actually governing, many in Washington still believed that institutional guardrails and other checks and balances would keep the machinery of government moving without major disruption. Since January, many have treated Musk and DOGE as if they were an isolated aberration. Signalgate indicates uncontrolled metastasis and a full takeover of government by an end-times cult.
In the 1960's, an internecine battle was fought between conservative stalwart William F. Buckley, Jr., and Robert Welch, leader of the paranoid anticommunist John Birch Society. Buckley became famous for his cheeky, erudite, (and egghead-ishly annoying) command "Don't immanentize the eschaton!" as a rebuke to the Birchers, and various Christian groups.
The warning was simple: you are not so special as to be here for the end times, or the final battle, or to bring about paradise here on earth. Carry your conservative values, certainly, but use them to defend institutions and the rule of law. And you still have to go to work (or school) on Monday — Jesus isn't coming back this week, or next.
Entering The Liminal Realm of the Eschaton
Now that we have crossed over into this new reality, where the old rules not only no longer apply but are seemingly forgotten and deliberately discarded, what might we expect, exactly? No one really knows.
We might think of this as a liminal space — one clearly characterized by transition, where aspects of old regimes remain as eerie reminders of the past, and elements of the new emerge in ways that are unexpected. Perhaps most disturbingly, no one can predict what might happen because there is no way to know whether old or new rules apply at any given moment.
Adding to the confusion is the fact that so few people have studied the belief systems driving the transition. So while there are a great many people well-schooled in the ways of the old regime, those who have studied the new regime are either too few or too eccentric to inform public discourse meaningfully at this stage. This makes way-finding all but impossible for a majority of the public.
It is crucial that we deal with this, as the end times crowd now has control of the levers of power, and is in a position to actually bring about the world they believe they now inhabit. And they have no plan other than blind faith: they hope (and indeed believe) that we are on the brink of a major transition into something beautiful.
Their job is to simply bring it about by removing all of the barriers that have held it back previously — democracy, woke ideology, institutions, laws, the Constitution, the Federal Reserve, liberal Popes, Islam — whatever it might be. They don't know what happens after that.
The Confluence of End Times Ideas
This all might be easier to counter if there was just one ideology in play, but there are several converging at once. Regular readers of America 2.0 know that we have been documenting these parallel forces and how they are pulling us towards a moment of reckoning. Those forces include:
- Russia's war in Ukraine: Russia sees this war as a broader conflict with the entire Western world.
- Project Russia: Kremlin books that outline a detailed rationale for the eventual and inevitable fall of the godless West, as a byproduct of 'decadent' democracy and capitalism.
- Threat of Nuclear Annihilation: Belief that all earthly conflict is destined to ultimately erupt into nuclear conflict.
- Fiat Currency vs. Cryptocurrency + Gold: Russia and Christian Nationalists see the dollar as fundamentally corrupt and would prefer to replace it with gold and crypto, to curb American dollar hegemony.
- Network State Movement: Movement to break down nation states into a disaggregated bundle of 'startups' and through that process birth new countries, competing as fiefdoms for the 'business' of citizens who can exercise 'exit' rights to choose between them.
- White Supremacy and Nazi ideology: Belief that a return to traditional ideology will lead to racially pure ethnostates and elimination of harmful races, religions, and ideologies. See also Kali Yuga and the Yuga cycle, a cyclical theory of history from Hinduism borrowed by the Nazis.
- US Debt Ceiling and Default: The idea that US sovereign debt is a "sin" that requires an eventual reckoning, vs. the more pragmatic view that it represents investment through the monetary supply that has not yet been taxed out.
- Deep State vs. MAGA/DOGE: Envisions dismantling the government as a solution to an ever-growing and bureaucratic "nanny state."
- Theosophy and the Return of 'Maitreya': The idea that Maitreya, the final Buddah, will return to Earth to impart wisdom and help establish Shambhala as paradise on earth.
- Teilhard, Vernadsky, and the Noosphere: The theory that the Earth would evolve into a higher level of consciousness and develop a Noosphere, a manifestation of that global consciousness.
- Libertarian Exit (Galt's Gulch): The idea that anti-state libertarians will exit from society, thus remaking it; Ayn Rand borrowed this idea in Atlas Shrugged as "Galt's Gulch."
- Woke vs. Traditionalism: A biblical conflict between worldviews to secure the final victory of traditional culture.
- Thalassocracy vs. Tellurocracy: Prominent in the writing of Aleksandr Dugin, a civilizational conflict between seafaring and agricultural societies.
- Battle of Gog vs. Magog: Another Dugin fetish, lifted from the Book of Revelation — the end times battle between the forces of Christ and the Antichrist.
- TESCREAL ideologies: the technological destiny of mankind as seen through Transhumanism, the Singularity, and our transition into a spacefaring species.
- Wikileaks vs. Five Eyes: Application of cyberlibertarian dogma to the practice of intelligence, and the assertion that 'leaking' is preferable to secrecy.
- 'Anonymous' vs. Organized Protest: Posits that anonymous, unaccountable, hive-mind emergent organization is preferable to explicit, accountable organized protest.
- Charismatic Christianity vs. Secular Society: Assertion that loosely defined notions of generic "Christian" faith carry more value than secular "Godless" ways of being.
- Hegelian synthesis: Hegel's idea that thesis and antithesis would, through dialectics, give way to synthesis, an evolution towards a new kind of understanding.
- Seven Mountains Dominionism: Belief that charismatic Christians will eventually capture the "seven mountains" needed to control society, culture, and government.
- UFO cults and "disclosure": Belief that truth about alien species and UFOs will be disclosed, altering humanity's perception permanently.
- Opus Dei: Catholic cult intent on obtaining full control of the Church and other organs of power, including government.
- Fourth Turning: Widely debunked pseudohistorical theory popularized by William Strauss & Neil Howe (and promoted by Steve Bannon) that asserts that civilization is governed by a fixed generational pattern, and that a "Fourth Turning" (period of chaos) is imminent.
- Israel and Armageddon: Dispensational belief among some Evangelical Christians that events in Israel and Palestine will bring about Armageddon, the return of Christ, and the final rapture.
In common across all of these is prophecy about some future time when the foretold will be realized. The ideologues who have captured our government believe that future is happening now — and it's impossible to overstate the danger we are in. They believe they have permission to follow their own rules — which they are making up on the fly.
A key problem with prophecy is the well-studied fact that it tends to be self-fulfilling. Indeed, that often seems to be its primary purpose: to bring about its realization. We have departed from the logic of institutions and the rule of law and are accelerating into the world of prophecy and blind faith.
Those still nominally supportive of the American conservative cause despite its clear and total break with reality need to decide how far they are willing to go along with the designs and desires of what is clearly an end-times death cult. ■
