Drifting Toward Extinction

DRIFTING TOWARD EXTINCTION

Arn Menconi

Mar 11, 2026

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The Wars Nobody Sees, the Machines Nobody Understands, and the Future Nobody Voted For

By Arn Menconi

Henry Kissinger called him “the most dangerous man in America” and said “he must be stopped at all costs.” Richard Nixon called him a “son-of-a-bitch” and a “traitor” on the White House tapes and ordered his aides to destroy him. The FBI broke into his psychiatrist’s office looking for dirt. They wiretapped him. They tried to put him away for 115 years.

Daniel Ellsberg didn’t flinch. He went on to be arrested 83 times for civil disobedience — protesting Vietnam, nuclear weapons, the Iraq War, government secrecy. He was the Muhammad Ali of whistleblowers: the more they punished him, the harder he fought.

In May of 2015, I spent 10 days at Daniel Ellsberg’s home and interviewed him for 40 hours. He was 84 years old and he was still fighting. He showed me documents. He walked me through classified systems he’d worked on at RAND. He told me stories no journalist had heard. Toward the end of our last session, he said something I have not been able to shake in the eleven years since.

He said the human species was drifting toward extinction — not from a single catastrophe, but from the accumulation of lies told by governments to their own people, compounded by systems too complex for any single citizen to understand, accelerated by technologies that made dissent irrelevant before it could organize.

He wasn’t being dramatic. He was being diagnostic.

That same year, I interviewed Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson — Colin Powell’s former chief of staff — who told me flatly: America is an empire in decline, and like all empires, the greediest get greedier.

I told Daniel something in 2015 that drives my thinking today: political analysts don’t understand how to follow the money. They don’t understand budgets — military or otherwise. The pattern is always the same. The lies are the distraction. The money is the motive.

At the time of this writing — March 11, 2026 — what is unfolding proves both of them right. And it is worse than either imagined.

I. The Wars Nobody Sees

On February 20, 2026, the United States launched “Operation Epic Fury” against Iran. On March 10, Reuters reported that the US and Israel pounded Iran with what both the Pentagon and Iranian officials called the most intense airstrikes of the war — escalating, not winding down. At the time of this writing, the Pentagon has spent over $10 billion. The daily burn rate exceeds $891 million.

But Iran is not the story. Iran is the part of the story you’re allowed to see.

In the 12 months between March 2025 and March 2026, the United States has conducted airstrikes, special operations raids, or naval warfare in seven countries: Iran, Venezuela, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Syria, and Iraq. It has maintained an economic blockade on Cuba that inflicted $7.5 billion in material damage in a single year. In January 2026, US special forces raided Caracas and captured Nicolás Maduro. In Somalia, the US conducted a record 111 airstrikes. In Nigeria, “powerful and deadly” strikes against alleged ISIS camps went nearly unreported.

During the same period, Israel conducted military operations in eight theaters: Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, and Qatar — plus naval operations in the territorial waters of Tunisia and Malta, intercepting aid flotillas in the Mediterranean.

That is 15 combined theaters of war across three continents.

Not one of them was authorized by a congressional declaration of war.

This is bigger than Iran. This is unconstitutional. And it is barely being covered.

Even now, the establishment is catching up to what we have been documenting. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria told Anderson Cooper on March 11 that Israel wants to destroy the Islamic Republic “in every sense” — but that the US has major interests in stability and that an Iran collapsing into civil war would destabilize the entire Middle East. Joe Rogan — the most listened-to podcaster on earth — told his audience that Trump supporters “feel betrayed” and that the war “doesn’t make any sense to me, unless we’re acting on someone else’s interests — particularly Israel’s.” Tucker Carlson called the strikes “absolutely disgusting and evil” and said, “This is a war designed to usher in a new age of man. A new period in history. A new world.”

Senator Chris Murphy, after a two-hour classified briefing at the White House on March 11, tweeted: “I was in a 2 hour briefing today on the Iran War. All the briefings are closed, because Trump can’t defend this war in public. I obviously can’t disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are.”

Retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor — one of the few military analysts with credibility across the political spectrum — has documented day by day how badly things have deteriorated, noting that “we haven’t seen dramatic change from one administration to the next. That’s another serious problem.” Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, on Democracy Now, said Western media outlets are downplaying the extent of the damage in Israel and how successful Iran has been in defending itself.

The War Powers Resolution — the constitutional mechanism designed to prevent exactly this — was brought to a vote. It failed 212-219 in the House and 47-53 in the Senate. Seven votes in the House decided whether the Constitution would apply. Three of the Democrats who crossed over to kill the resolution had received a combined $1.7 million from AIPAC-affiliated donors.

AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — has $100 million allocated for 2026 congressional races. Israel and AIPAC’s stranglehold on US politics is the central mechanism of this war — the means by which a foreign government’s military objectives become American foreign policy without a vote.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted on March 3 that Israel was going to attack Iran regardless. President Trump told the Times of Israel the war would end “mutually” with Netanyahu. “We’ve worked together. We’ve destroyed a country that wanted to destroy Israel.”

Not America. Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu has been pushing for war with Iran for more than 33 years — since at least 1992. The UN watchdog has never confirmed evidence of an active Iranian nuclear weapons program. But the rhetoric served its purpose.

The Human Cost

Before the fiscal math, before the geopolitics — the people.

In Gaza, at the time of this writing, over 50,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023. Entire neighborhoods erased. The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel’s actions plausibly constitute genocide. Hospitals bombed. Schools bombed. UN shelters bombed.

In Iran, 168 schoolgirls were killed in Minab when US Tomahawk cruise missiles — not Israeli munitions — struck their school. Bellingcat geolocated the footage. Over 1,000 Iranians have been killed. Just like Gaza, they are bombing schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings. 700,000 have been displaced in Lebanon — 200,000 of them children.

And then there is the ecocide. Drop Site News reported that Israeli strikes on Iranian oil facilities have produced “black rain” falling on Tehran — toxic hydrocarbons saturating rainwater, causing skin burns and lung damage. Atmospheric scientists warn of a localized “nuclear winter” effect from the burning oil fields.

Daniel Ellsberg wrote about this. His 2017 book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, revealed that Pentagon planners in the 1960s knew that a nuclear exchange would block sunlight for five to ten years — triggering nuclear winter, destroying global agriculture, and potentially killing billions through starvation. The Pentagon knew, and they built the weapons anyway.

His posthumous book, Truth and Consequence — a compilation of unpublished writings spanning 1971 to 2021 — was released in March 2026. Daniel is still speaking to us, from the grave, about exactly what is unfolding.

The United States government can find $891 million a day for war. It pleads poverty when asked to rebuild a bridge.

II. The Real Motive Nobody Is Talking About

Yes, Israel wants Iran destroyed — it’s all over X. Yes, this is an existential war tangled in religious beliefs between Islam, Zionism, and the Christian right. Yes, it’s about oil and trade routes. Yes, it’s about the American Empire in decline, as Wilkerson told me a decade ago.

But none of those explanations are sufficient. The driver — the one thing that makes all the lies, all the distractions, all the escalation make sense — is the transition to asset dollars. The Tokenization Ledger.

This is our moat. None of the progressive media is picking up on this. But I am confident it will be revealed.

In 2010, Michael Lewis published The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine — a #1 New York Times Bestseller that spent 28 weeks on the list, won the 2011 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film. It made the incomprehensible machinery of the 2008 financial collapse legible to ordinary Americans. The core insight: Wall Street had built financial instruments so complex that the people selling them didn’t understand them, the regulators couldn’t evaluate them, and the rating agencies were paid by the banks that created them. The system wasn’t broken. It was performing exactly as designed.

I know this story personally. I have an MBA from the University of Denver. I worked for an S&L out of Chicago during the savings and loan crisis. I witnessed the fraud firsthand. I was deposed. After the S&L crisis, the Department of Justice secured more than 1,000 felony convictions. After the 2008 crash — which was orders of magnitude larger — zero Wall Street executives were prosecuted. The lesson: the bigger the crime, the less the accountability.

Now apply that lens to what is happening right now.

The Regulated Settlement Network — a consortium of the largest US banks — is building a blockchain-based system for tokenizing sovereign assets: Treasury bills, government bonds, real estate, commodities. BlackRock has launched a tokenized Treasury fund. Citibank projects $4-5 trillion in tokenized assets by 2030. The Bank for International Settlements calls its blueprint the “Finternet.”

Here is what this means in plain language: a bet is being made that flirting with World War III will create enough chaos and disruption so that the elites who control the world can make trillions — not billions, trillions — and in the process privatize money, demonetize the dollar, work around existing regulations, and digitize the entire global financial system. The war is the cover story. The transition is the objective.

The financial infrastructure being built to settle US government debt is being merged with the same digital architecture that will process, track, and programmably control every transaction in the economy. The war is being financed on a credit card that is simultaneously being converted into a surveillance instrument.

The asset managers driving this are not neutral parties. BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, and Fidelity — the four largest asset managers on earth — collectively manage over $30 trillion. They are the largest shareholders in virtually every major defense contractor: RTX (Raytheon), Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics. They are also the largest shareholders in the banks building the tokenization infrastructure. And they are lobbying for deregulation that would allow these tokenized assets to flow through systems they control. They don’t just profit from war. They manage the financial architecture that makes war permanent.

Tucker Carlson, of all people, seems to glimpse it. “This is a war designed to usher in a new age of man,” he said. “A new period in history. A new world.” He frames it religiously. I frame it financially. We’re describing the same thing from different angles: the war is not the end. The war is the means.

And the math of that war is already terminal. In 2026, for the first time in American history, the US government is paying more in interest on the national debt — $1.04 trillion — than it spends on the entire national defense budget of $917 billion. The Congressional Budget Office projects interest payments will hit $1.71 trillion by 2030 and will exceed Social Security by 2036. US debt is on track to surpass 106% of GDP by 2030, exceeding the record set after World War II. But in 1946, the war was over. In 2030, 15 fronts will still be burning.

This is the “Death Spiral”: borrow to fund the war, increase the debt, drive up interest payments, consume the budget with debt service, borrow more to fund basic services, repeat. The financial instruments being built to manage that spiral — tokenized assets, programmable money, central bank digital currencies — are the tools that will also manage you. That’s not a side effect. That’s the plan.

The cost asymmetry makes the spiral irreversible. A single SM-6 interceptor costs the US $4 million. A single Iranian Shahed drone costs $20,000. That is a 200-to-1 cost ratio — against the United States. For every dollar adversaries spend on offense, the US and Israel spend $33 to $200 on defense. In a long war, this is not a strategy. It is a bankruptcy filing.

What happens when the supply chains break? When oil prices spike because Iranian crude is off the market? When food prices surge because the Strait of Hormuz is contested? When China, which buys 90% of Iran’s oil, retaliates economically? These are not hypotheticals. These are cascading consequences that every defense analyst in Washington understands and nobody in Congress will say out loud.

Israel’s eight-front war has cost $67 billion in 12 months — 13.5% of its GDP. Moody’s has downgraded Israel’s credit rating to Baa1, its lowest in history. Without the $26 billion supplemental aid package from the US Congress, Israel’s war economy would have collapsed by mid-2025.

American taxpayers are subsidizing a conflict that has expanded to eight nations, paying for the Arrow missiles that protect Tel Aviv while their own roads, schools, and hospitals decay.

III. The Future Nobody Voted For

In 2004, Steve Coll published Ghost Wars — winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the Arthur Ross Award, the Overseas Press Club Award, and the Lionel Gelber Prize. It documented how the CIA’s funding of the Afghan mujahideen created the Taliban, which harbored Al-Qaeda, which attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. Blowback was always the feature, not the bug — because blowback creates the next war, which creates the next budget, which creates the next contract.

In 2014, James Risen published Pay Any Price — a New York Times Bestseller from a journalist who won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for exposing the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping. It documented how the War on Terror became a profit engine — $20 billion in cash flown to Baghdad on C-130s with $11.7 billion unaccounted for.

I worked with CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, the first US government official to confirm the CIA used waterboarding — torture — on prisoners. I helped develop the curriculum for Kiriakou’s International Affairs course for Master’s students at the University of Salamanca in Spain — the oldest university in Europe. For telling the truth, Kiriakou got 30 months in federal prison. The torturers got nothing.

The 2026 war is all of these stories at once — operating at a scale and speed that Lewis, Risen, and Coll could not have anticipated. Because this time, the machine has an accelerant: artificial intelligence.

Palantir’s Maven Smart System — built on Anthropic’s Claude AI — selected 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of Operation Epic Fury. Palantir’s stock hit a $300 billion valuation. Larry Ellison controls CBS, Paramount, HBO, CNN, approximately 15% of TikTok, and Oracle’s classified AI infrastructure, which received Top Secret authorization the same day the first bombs fell on Iran. The man profiting from the war machine also controls the media apparatus that covers it.

And then there are the Epstein Files. In the first week of March 2026 — days into the Iran war — the Department of Justice released a previously withheld batch of Epstein documents, including FBI interview notes with sexual assault allegations against powerful men. As Al Jazeera reported, public interest in the Epstein files plummeted the moment the bombs started falling. People forget that Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, had documented connections to Israeli intelligence. The pattern is always the same: manufacture a crisis, bury the accountability. Powerful men — whether they’re waging illegal wars or operating through intelligence-linked networks — exist in a system designed to ensure they never face consequences.

Both parties are complicit. Democrats vote for the military budget every single time. Colonel Macgregor is right: there is no dramatic change from one administration to the next. Wall Street wants regime change because it opens Iranian markets. Netanyahu wants his 40-year project completed. AIPAC buys the votes. And the urgency? The 2026 midterm elections. A Democratic House could end the blank check. They’re taking everything they can get before the political window closes.

Daniel Ellsberg spent 60 years warning about exactly this convergence. The pattern, he told me, never changes: manufacture the threat, classify the dissent, enrich the contractors, bury the human cost.

But something has changed. The speed. The integration. The automation. The financial instruments that make the debt invisible until it isn’t. The AI that makes the killing faster than the grieving. The media consolidation that makes the coverage indistinguishable from the propaganda. And underneath all of it — the Tokenization Ledger, the quiet infrastructure being built to convert sovereign debt into digital control, to privatize money itself, to create a system where the next crash isn’t an accident but a feature.

Ellsberg called it drifting toward extinction. He wasn’t talking about a mushroom cloud. He was talking about the slow, systemic erosion of every mechanism — democratic, legal, financial, moral — that a civilization uses to stop itself from committing suicide.

And if the nuclear dimension escalates — if Iran’s allies retaliate, if miscalculation leads to a nuclear exchange — then we are talking about extinction in the literal sense. Ellsberg’s Doomsday Machinelaid out the science: even a limited nuclear war would block sunlight for years, collapse global agriculture, and produce famine that could kill billions. We are closer to that precipice than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

What I Am Doing About It

Nobody is telling this story in one place. Not the 15-front war across three continents. Not the genocide in Gaza. Not the Epstein Files buried under bombs. Not the Tokenization Ledger — the real motive that explains why elites would risk World War III for trillions. Not the AI-accelerated war machine that selects targets faster than democracies can vote. Not the ecocide of black rain falling on Tehran. Not the constitutional crisis that sold war powers for $1.7 million. Not the nuclear dimension.

I am trying to tell it. All of it. Now. While it still matters.

I have written an 84-page primer on this war — sourced with 290+ citations, available free at arnmenconi.net. No paywall. No ads.

But the primer is the lead-in. “Drifting Toward Extinction” is the book.

I am not a bystander to this story. I have an MBA from the University of Denver. I worked through the S&L crisis and was deposed as a witness to banking fraud. I ran for the United States Senate against Colorado Senator Michael Bennet in 2016. I served as Eagle County Commissioner. In 2015, I lobbied with CodePink and FCNL — the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the Quaker organization that lobbies for peace — to pressure Senator Bennet to support the Iran Nuclear Deal. The deal that, had it survived, could have prevented this entire war.

I worked with CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou and helped develop the curriculum for his International Affairs course at the University of Salamanca in Spain. I have been arrested seven times for civil disobedience. I spent 40 hours with Daniel Ellsberg. He gave me the framework. He gave me the title.

During the savings and loan crisis, over 1,000 bankers were convicted. After the 2008 crash — which destroyed 8.8 million jobs and required a $700 billion bailout — zero executives went to prison. The lesson is clear: the bigger the crime, the less the accountability. That is the world Ellsberg warned me about. That is the world we are living in.

The primer is free: arnmenconi.net

The book is coming.

This is Part III of "Understanding the Iran War." Part I (the 84-page primer) and Part II ("The War Nobody Voted For") are available at arnmenconi.substack.com.

Arn Menconi is a former Eagle County Commissioner, US Senate candidate (Colorado, 2016), anti-war activist, and the author of the forthcoming “Drifting Toward Extinction” and “Lied to Death: The Daniel Ellsberg Interviews.” He holds an MBA from the University of Denver, has worked with ex-CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou (developing curriculum for his International Affairs course at the University of Salamanca) and lobbied with CodePink and FCNL for the Iran Nuclear Deal, has been arrested seven times for civil disobedience, and has spent a decade investigating the architecture of permanent war. His work is sourced at arnmenconi.net.

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