Giuliano Da Empoli is a 52-year-old astute Italian intellectual who teaches political propaganda at Sciences Po in Paris. He has been an adviser to the Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and has thus seen the machinery of politics from the inside. He is well read and intelligent.
He used his knowledge to write a work of fiction about life inside the Kremlin: The Wizard of the Kremlin, which has now been made into a film. Both books have been published in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German, French and English. Empoli is thus a successful author.
The reason is that he treats the present as a crime novel. Something has happened to our time that is inexplicable, and Empoli has one or more explanations: we are living in a new epoch. It has a parallel in the Renaissance, when princes such as the Borgias amassed wealth, financed art and maximised personality. They were without limits and allowed their surroundings to feel it. They set their own laws and boundaries.
Empoli believes that Trump is the symbol of this change. With him he has the technology giants and their operators: Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos.
The characterisation of Trump is banal. Empoli pretends that we lived in a rule-based order before Trump appeared. That Empoli can sell such a cheap version is indicative either of cynicism and an underestimation of the readers or of cowardice: he does not dare to bell the cat.
He even idealises Davos/WEF and Klaus Schwab. If there is anything that heralds a new epoch, it is Davos as the centre of a globalist elite. Empoli does not use the term.
He calls the Davos people technocrats who stood for competent administration, in contrast to Musk and Zuckerberg who create “ravage”, who smash things. He overlooks that this globalist elite has an objective of subjecting the entire globe to a system in which the peoples are their servants. Irish, Dutch, French and German farmers are protesting against the trade agreement with Latin America, Mercosur, because it will flood the market with cheap goods and deprive them of their livelihood.
He writes positively about Ursula von der Leyen, who appears to have lost her grip long ago.
The serpent in Paradise is Trump & Musk. The tech conquistadors. He himself calls himself an Aztec scribe who sees Cortés coming ashore in shining armour. Are the Aztecs something to identify with?
After having given his support to Jair Bolsonaro, to Milei and Bukele and after having contributed massively to the election of Donald Trump in the United States, Musk has now turned towards Europe. In the United Kingdom, he has allied himself with the party behind Brexit. And in Germany with AfD, the party on the far right.
Musk is the bearer of a new culture.
The conquistadors of technology have set themselves the task of clearing away the old political elites. If they succeed, the entire world we are accustomed to thinking of as the supporting pillar of our democracy – liberals, social democrats, conservatives and progressives – will be swept away.
But this elite has swept itself away. When they were confronted with a phenomenon such as Trump, they did not trust that Hillary would win and allowed Hillary to concoct a wild story that Trump was paid by the Kremlin. They constructed evidence that the media willingly disseminated, including that the Russians had broken into the Democrats’ headquarters and stolen Hillary’s correspondence. One question was never asked: what became of the server at the headquarters? The question was never asked. Everyone assumed that the FBI had examined it. The truth is that the FBI never got to see the server; it was seized by the company CrowdStrike.
Or what about Alpha Bank? Hillary’s campaign leaked that there was a server at the top of Trump Tower that communicated with the Russian Alpha Bank. Much was made of the connection, until the story fell apart.
To be certain, the CIA, FBI, the Department of Justice and the White House mobilised their own apparatus and foreign intelligence. Many know the truth about Russiagate, but choose to play along. Just like Empoli, and the fact that he pretends that Hillary stood for stability and continuity undermines his credibility.
But when the Italian encounters the Woke monster in the flesh at the opening of the Obama Foundation in Chicago, he reacts as an Italian, not as a political fellow traveller.
The guests are not to speak freely with one another, but are guided by a conversation facilitator, Heather. At each table sits a moderator who asks the same questions: “Why am I called what I am called? Who are my people? Who has influenced me most? Who would I like to be? To what extent do I feel that I am part of a community?” Heather attempts to create the right atmosphere and steer the conversation onto the proper track by speaking about her background as a trans person of mixed ethnic origin and about her adoptive family in Chicago.
Empoli’s travelling party has brought a security agent, Rocca, and he does not react as expected to the questions. When the question of who he would like to be arose, he answered “myself”. But this did not go down well.
Empoli says he imagined how such a meeting could transform a person with a practical disposition into a Trump voter within minutes.
That is precisely what has happened to Americans. They turned against Obama. How was he to be re-elected in 2012? Here it was not possible to rely on idealism and hope.
The answer was technology, and Empoli contradicts himself when he castigates the tech conquistadors but admires Google’s coup in the 2012 election.
The head of Google, Eric Schmidt, placed himself at the forefront of mapping all Obama’s voters in a project without precedent. They created a personal profile of all his 66 million voters, Project Narwhal. During the election campaign they sent messages and suggestions tailored to each individual voter based on their interests.
That was the great difference from 2008. Then the internet was used to create enthusiasm. Now it was used in a large intelligence operation based on surveillance. Obama received three and a half million fewer voters in 2012. It was Google that won the election for him.
Where the victory in 2008 was political in nature, that of 2012 is fundamentally a technical phenomenon.
Thus the portrayal of Trump and Musk as predators collapses. On the contrary, it was Obama who was the greatest predator, but he was defeated by the will of the people.
Empoli writes in order to obscure this truth. He mobilises the story of the Borgias to conceal who the real Borgias are: the Obamas, the Clintons, Jeffrey Epstein, John Podesta, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Biden.
They systematised corruption and were willing to go as far as necessary to defend their power. They effectively abandoned the United States’ role as a superpower and handed hegemony over to China. That was treason.
Empoli himself belongs to this family which has destroyed the world order they praise. In order to explain the collapse of the world, they must construct a narrative of the return of predators.
But it is they who have transformed the global world into a jungle.
The French are embittered at having lost their status and take revenge by disparaging Trump. Empoli succumbs to the temptation to portray Trump as a functional illiterate. He never reads a book, never a memorandum from his advisers, much to the irritation of his advisers who put much effort into summaries.
Trump does not deign to cast his eyes upon them, not a page, not half a page, not a single line. He operates exclusively orally, which makes it rather difficult to convey to him the slightest amount of structured knowledge.
Here the arrogance of the well-educated European emerges, who believes he grows by diminishing the American President.
It is soon the only thing that Europeans such as Empoli have left.