FT Alphaville has spent some of this week marvelling at the audacity of the White House Gift Shop (a privately owned entity that’s entirely unaffiliated with the actual White House) to be pre-selling a commemorative series of coins dubbed: “PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP DEFEATS COVID WITH ICONS OF HIS ENTIRE FIRST TERM!”
The coins’ artistic merits are described thusly on the gift shop’s website:
. . . a new commemorative that vividly shows President Trump’s historic presidential candidacy win, itself, from his descent on the elevator in Trump Tower, against a veritable army of superb Republican presidential candidates confluent with taunts, jeers, sneers by Media naysayers—to present day with design motifs of President Trump’s ascendance over and personal defeat of the deadly COVID pandemic virus.
The series creator and designer is one Anthony Gianni, who happens to be both the CEO of the gift shop but also (according to his LinkedIn) someone who “guides a unique team in the research and development of supercomputer systems for neural network mapping, simulation and AI models for use in neuroscience research as well as synergistic intelligence and defence systems modelling.”
Intriguing. Yes?
We then found the following tweet bearing some gratuitous imagery of Donald J. Trump fighting off coronavirus that began circulating on Nov 2, which may or may not be related:
While we cannot confirm that the depiction is definitely related to the giftshop series, we couldn’t help but clock its stylistic similarity to some of the artistic visualisation often found in the cryptocurrency realm, especially the HODL coins.
Could there be more to Donald Trump and crypto than first meets the eye?
What we do know is that the Donald famously disappointed crypto lovers when he disparaged bitcoin back in July 2019, noting:
But thanks to Emily Dreyfuss, a journalist at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change project, who was published in the New York Times on Thursday, we now know that Trump’s iconoclastic tweeting and/or use and abuse of typos may be part of an elaborate strategy to backchannel secret messages to his most loyal fans.
Of course, the idea Trump is possibly working in tandem with the mysterious “Q”, who drops esoteric messages on message boards such as 8kun in a bid to reveal the reach and scale of the deep state, has long been at the heart of the Qanon conspiracy theory.
That theory states that Trump’s tweets are being used as proofs that the messages being put out by Q are really linked to insiders with special or advanced knowledge of things to come. That the system links to the seediest ends of the “free speech” internet, however, has done little for Qanon’s credibility with the mainstream press. Qanon followers have, instead, been labelled as deluded and potentially dangerous extremists who can’t help seeing connections where there are none, and who may also be preparing for a coup.
The retort from the Qanon followers is that the presence of Q on such sites is not an endorsement of the extremist content. Rather, the backchannel system was established there precisely because it was the only way to guarantee resilience in the face of censorship by major platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
Either way, there is no escaping the fact that The New York Times, by seeing fit to publish an opinion piece pandering to the delusional idea that DJT is smart enough to use secret codes in his Tweetstorms, has inadvertently also confirmed the worst of the Qanon fears.
DoNALd TrUMp really is speaking in Code.
So is it conceivable that Donald might secretly be a crypto blockchain bro too?
Well, there’s a cute but desperate theory also doing the rounds that the current election capitulation is actually all just Kayfabe — a sort of Sun-Tzu “art of war” diversion. In “reality” the STOP THE COUNT mess was entirely pre-engineered and Donald outwitted everyone by secretly watermarking ballot papers and tying them to the immutable power of the blockchain. So every illegal ballot is fully traceable and detectable. Yes really.
Here’s the vid where Steve Pieczenik, a former state department guy, explains how the elaborate sting operation was set up and how it will prove the true scale of the rigging at hand.
What can we say? Clearly the Donald has not been reading Alphaville. Even if the theory wasn’t bunkum, which of course it is, there’s the longstanding problem that blockchain can’t and never has been able to control for the garbage-in and garbage-out problem.
Pieczenik also neglects to mention that if blockchain was indeed used to trace every single ballot, it would be a major breach of voter secrecy rules. In the best-case scenario, Trump would just be replacing one illegal act with another illegal one.
What’s more, there’s no one in the official coinspace that gives the theory credence.
Adding fuel to the conspiracy fire, however, was an interesting side development that got buried as a result of the election debacle. The US attorney’s office in San Francisco has now revealed it was behind the $1bn in bitcoin that was transferred unexpectedly on Nov 4. The sum — linked to the 2013 Silk Road bust — had previously sat unmoved in a mysterious wallet since 2015.
How and to what degree that will be linked to the debacle is still unknown. What we can be sure of is that until waters settle and power is properly transferred, the consensus-reality of conspiracyland will be ablaze with all sorts of bonkers possibilities.
Related links:
Did An Alternate Reality Game Gone Wrong Predict The Rise of QAnon? – Schism Project