How to Identify the Independent, Pro-Decentralization Team and Keep Conflicts of Interest at Arm’s Length

Claire V.
July 21, 2026

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How to Identify the Independent, Pro-Decentralization Team and Keep Conflicts of Interest at Arm’s Length

By Catherine Austin Fitts

July 21, 2026

“Investigate what is, and not what pleases.”

~ Goethe

How to Identify the Independent, Pro-Decentralization Team and Keep Conflicts of Interest at Arm’s Length

By Catherine Austin Fitts

One of our hallmarks at the Solari Report is the care we take to identify guests, experts, and allies of high integrity. Out of the relatively large pool of potential contributors, one of our principal filters is to try to ascertain whether someone is aligned with what I call, as a shorthand, the “Decentralizing Universe” (DU) versus the “Centralizing Universe” (CU).

People in the DU are loyal to an independent vision that typically is decentralizing—embracing individual freedom and economic activities that are fundamentally productive. Ideally, they have found a way to support themselves independent of large corporations, governments, and foundations. People in the CU, in contrast, are loyal to a leadership that is centralizing power and money at the expense of individual, local, and national sovereignty, and which perpetuates a negative-return-on-investment (“tapeworm”) economy. Typically, their financial incentives create conflicts of interest.

At the root, this is about the divine versus the demonic.

People in the Centralizing Universe

The CU represents a complex ecosystem. Grossly simplified, it comprises three categories of people:

  1. People who lack empathy: This group fully embraces the opportunities to centralize and plunder.
  2. People who are simply willing to be well paid for their work: This group does not look at or embrace the full centralizing vision—by and large, they prefer not to know—but when put to the test, they almost always “go along.”
  3. People who hunger for titles, financial benefits, and social prestige: This third group, often very talented, may talk a good game—they may even say they want to be in the DU—but the financial rewards and social prestige they crave function as powerful incentives to remain in the CU system. These people may work for a prestigious foundation, university, or company, or be bought into the CU by government grants. The people in this group will likely never ever touch the “third rail” or integrate the hidden parts of the economy into their personal understanding of finance and politics.

As the descriptions of the second and third groups indicate, there are plenty of good people in the CU. Some just do not see the power lines clearly—in fact, one of CU leadership’s goals is to attract help from people who do not see or embrace the core centralizing vision. This results in countless instances of “multiple personality disorder” in behavior and allocation of time and resources. If people do not understand the ultimate goals of their funders, investors, and employers, they can easily end up being “not agreement-capable” when you make a deal with them, or they may unexpectedly promote ideas that baffle those who know them.

There are numerous cross-cutting issues that influence the behavior of people in the CU. For example:

  • Some people do what they do because they are captive to a control file (a private record containing secret information or pictures that form the basis for potential threats or blackmail). The higher on the CU ladder a person climbs, the more likely they are to be governed by a control file. For many positions, in fact, a control file is required.
  • There are people who need the money—perhaps they have expensive child care needs, student loans, or disabled family members. The Great Poisoning, including autism and vaccine injury, ends up herding many people back into the CU.
  • Another cross-cutting factor that can influence some people’s behavior is mind control and neurowarfare. This group includes children indoctrinated early in life, including by secret societies or the intelligence agencies. Increasingly, TV and online activities such as video games and porn drive the indoctrination. It appears that electromagnetic targeting may be able to accomplish this as well.
  • Finally, covert operations are a reality. They include legal and financial assassinations and physical assassinations of a person or a member of the person’s family. Many people are simply and understandably afraid.

Whether members of the CU cannot imagine another way, or cannot afford to pick a fight with “city hall,” or are in legal or financial straits (including personal debt traps), almost all will continue to align with the CU professionally, no matter what their personal values are.

This is one reason why it is important to map out a person’s financial incentives—doing so will help you understand where, when, and whether you can align with them. If a person is on the payroll of Harvard (one of the most important private investment syndicates in the world), there are numerous areas they are likely to consider “off-limits.” If you choose to be in partnership with them, an invisible “leash” may rein them back in at the worst possible moment for you. They may not even realize that the leash is there—only learning about it themselves when it gets pulled. I have witnessed this situation scores of times.

Within the CU, there are certain professions where the insistence on loyalty to the CU is particularly strong. Medicine and health care, for example, are significant vectors for implementing two top CU goals: control and depopulation. One rationale for the creation and growth of the psychiatry profession was to shift people’s dissatisfaction with the governance system and its management of society to a narrow focus on individual problems. This is one of many ways that people have been encouraged to become more narcissistic and self-absorbed—narcissists are often easier to manage and control. This also explains the CU’s promotion of an infinite variety of addictions. Whether the addiction is to legal or illegal drugs, alcohol, gambling, video games, sex, porn, or sugar, it typically leads to more self-absorption and an inability to organize effective community-level or political action or to productively engage in independent wealth-building enterprise.

A defining characteristic of many people in the CU is that they are happy to invest their financial resources and make money by following the CU leadership. They do not want to be centrally controlled, but they generally do not connect the dots between where their time and money are going and what is happening in the world. Their attitude is that they are not responsible for the whole if they are only doing their little piece. Most practice profound disassociation.

Ironically, having emotional resistance to centralization can even result in people working harder to please the centralizers, guided by the belief that if they make enough money, they will be able to survive whatever the leadership does in the future—or that if they earn enough “points,” they will have the protection of insiders for themselves and their family. In this negative cycle, the greater the fear, the greater the loyalty to the insiders.

It is worth mentioning that there are some exceptions to the rule. For example, some CU authors, writing on topics that are useful and not controversial, deservedly earn an independent retail audience—and their lack of understanding of the hidden side of the world does not distract from the quality of their offering. Examples might include writers like James Clear (author of Atomic Habits), Edward Tufte (author of Envisioning Information)and Gary Keller (author of The ONE Thing). (If M. Scott Peck were still alive, he would be another good example.) We are also beginning to see successful CU business people, such as Jeffrey Gundlach, who have started to open up and be more honest about what is wrong.

People in the Decentralizing Universe

The people who make up the DU also constitute a complex ecosystem. Often, they are people who were in the CU for some period of time and leave after acquiring skills and personal resources, bringing those resources with them. They include:

  • People who have always been in the DU: This group chose the DU path early on, whether because of their background or training or because they had a particular inclination toward independence and figured out how to create a source of income and way of life that supports their independence. This describes Solari Future Science Series host Ulrike Granögger’s career path with the Academy For Future Science.
  • People who leave the CU early on: Some people start out trying to climb the ladder in the CU and quickly discover they are not willing to go along with some of its requirements. This describes author and scholar Dr. Joseph Farrell, who now joins me each quarter for News Trends & Stories at Solari and writes at his fascinating Giza Death Star website.
  • People who leave well-established careers in the CU: Still another group leaves the CU because they come to realize what is going on and willingly choose to strike out “into the wilderness” on their own. This fact pattern fits many of Solari’s hosts, guests, and allies. Notable examples include John Titus (my Money & Markets co-host), Dutch researcher and investigative journalist Elze van HamelenUSA Watchdog’s Greg Hunter, Dr. Pierre Kory, and cash warrior Susan Luschas. Another example is Solari ally Dr. Mark Skidmore, who has managed to stay in a tenured position but whose integrity has likely flatlined his trajectory up the academic ladder (while surely saving many lives).
  • People rejected by or ejected from the CU because of their ethics: Another group gets rejected by the CU or prevented from climbing the ladder because the CU’s human resources arm realizes that these individuals are exceptionally smart, will quickly figure out the real agenda, and will never go along. (The CU knows how to screen out potential whistleblowers early!)
  • People rejected by or ejected from the CU because of their skill profile: Finally, the CU rejects (or keeps from climbing the ladder) people who do not fit the profile of what the CU presently needs—in other words, they do not fill a slot. As you can imagine, this group is growing in size.

One of the most important groups in the DU are people whose economic independence is supported by a wide base of people who derive value from their work. These people have found a way to be economically successful with a small business, farm, practice, product, or other enterprise that is supported by customers, members, or a wide base of retail supporters, donors, or investors. They maintain a virtuous value circle between themselves and the people who fund them. Small farmer Joel Salatin is a remarkable example of one such entrepreneur.

People who are firmly in the DU share some recognizable qualities:

  1. They have the light of the divine in their hearts.
  2. They have built a financially independent or successful pathway to live and work in the DU, or have brought from the CU or their family the financial resources they need to be independent in the DU—and they use those resources accordingly.
  3. They have a good map of both official reality and reality.
  4. They have a personal commitment to being productive and consistently adding value to others.
  5. They are fearless, but governed by wisdom and discernment.
  6. They are marked by ongoing acts of integrity and generosity.
  7. They love to learn and teach; they generate a high learning metabolism.

In short, successful members of the DU don’t talk a good game—if you study how their money and time work, they live a good game.

Forms of DU Sabotage

Sometimes, there are people in the DU who, because they are fearful of people in the CU, are willing to serve the CU on a project basis—often in exchange for immediate financial rewards. These are not always low-integrity people; they can be someone in local government who has generally high integrity but understands the limits of their power and authority and is not willing to take risks for what they perceive as a likely Pyrrhic victory.

On the low-integrity side, this category could include:

  • The small business owner willing to provide air cover for local drug dealers
  • The local resident willing to put arsenic down a neighbor’s well at the behest of an intermediary working for an intelligence or private security firm
  • People who snitch to law enforcement or tax agencies in exchange for financial rewards

The people who arrive at high view counts on YouTube or get the chance to give a TED Talk are often people who have enjoyed years of CU funding and promotion, whereas people in the DU regularly get throttled on these platforms. For example, it is my understanding that when Greg Hunter was thrown off YouTube, it was an interview with me that constituted his last strike. From 2000 to 2020, my own view counts were regularly cut or videos taken down, while my ability to generate income was aggressively sabotaged. Clients’ checks often disappeared in the mail. During that 20-year period, Solari’s strategy became one of helping people—often one person at a time—and building a base of support so wide and grounded that we could survive the periods of targeting and intense sabotage. I often quote this line from the movie Gladiator: “Before they can kill you, they must kill your name.” The CU invests extraordinary amounts to try to destroy the names of truth tellers such as Unlimited Hangout’s Whitney Webb and eat up their time and resources. At Solari, I anticipate that we will pay professional cybersecurity firms a significant amount of money to try to protect our audience from cybercrime and imposters.

Scholar David A. Hughes has described the phenomenon of “sudden darlings”—people who the CU promotes in order to suck oxygen out of a group in the DU that is gathering steam. After current Solari team members Jeroen van Straaten and Robert Dupper built extraordinary momentum some years ago with groundbreaking Breakthrough Energy and Secret Space Program conferences, someone funded and created two “sudden darlings”—David Wilcox and Corey Goode—and concocted what I nicknamed the “Blue Chicken Op” to promote entertaining stories about secret programs regarding space and the black budget. The op worked, halting the progress and momentum of a group of legitimate researchers and journalists. After the op was no longer needed, the “sudden darlings” fell off the radar. Unfortunately, Wilcox was recently reported to have committed suicide.

John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, is another example. He was a “sudden darling” brought on the scene to provide a modified hangout after the plunder game started being exposed. I had numerous battles with people who wanted me to promote Perkins on the Solari Report or get paired with him on interviews. And this kind of thing happened on numerous other occasions. For a long time, running quality control at the Solari Report was exceptionally difficult, especially when entrainment technology was likely being used to create great enthusiasm around a given “sudden darling” or intelligence op. Looking back, the Solari team has done a remarkably good job of maintaining strong quality control.

Admittedly, one can find many capable and talented people from the CU on YouTube or TED Talks, addressing a wide range of topics that include those of interest to us at Solari. Some of their content can be quite good. The challenge of bringing people like this into the Solari fold, however, is that our network will then assume that because of their association with Solari they are, by definition, people of integrity; they will accept the person’s opinion—or certainly listen to it—not just in the highlighted area of expertise but for a much wider range of topics. This is where conflicts appear—including serious conflicts that inspire the audience to make grave mistakes that can harm family health or finances.

If I do an interview on an alternative media show that is very strong and capable on a particular topic, but that show promotes gold IRA scams—because it makes them money—some of our subscribers and people in our wider audience will assume that they can trust that IRA provider. This dynamic was a major issue during the p(l)andemic, when people who had been pre-pandemic guests on the Solari Report started promoting the Covid shots and we had to put distance between us.

Distance is invariably required when an ally or guest starts recommending actions or strategies that could harm subscribers’ health or lose them money, often because the ally or guest is operating with a false map of the world, such as where they believe the financial markets are and what they believe will happen next. What are their motivations? Some people promote future scenarios to intentionally fool people. Some do it because the audience hungers for certainty. Some do it because they are misinformed or have poor judgment. And some do it as true believers. There are numerous fact patterns, and it can take time to sort out failures of integrity from failures of competence.

Supporting the DU

Though many in the DU are entirely invisible, some can be well known—but they get far less promotion than people of comparable talent in the CU. On the other hand, Thomas Massie, Tucker Carlson, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are examples of people who, when forced out of the CU, have been able to build an even larger audience in the DU. This is a sign that the models are changing, and it signals an opening that is an opportunity for all of us.

With that said, members of the DU who are fearless, get significant things done, and have found a way to maintain economic independence are not as large a group as we would like. It is this group we are trying to nurture with many of the things we do at Solari. Our actions aimed at supporting and strengthening the DU network include:

  • Promoting and reposting DU members’ work
  • Funding projects with them
  • Hiring them or recommending them or their businesses
  • Subscribing to their sites
  • Making them Hero of the Week
  • Helping out or covering for them in emergencies or times of trouble
  • Helping them learn to shift their bank deposits, stocks, bonds, and other assets out of financing their enemies in the CU into more productive companies, activities, and assets

In addition, the Solari Builders initiative is a way to grow this group going forward. We want to take what we and our network have learned about how to succeed in the DU ecosystem and teach it to people who are starting to build families, careers, and businesses. We want them to be able to go faster and avoid many of the pitfalls we have experienced—while recognizing that it is those very pitfalls that helped us build a better map of reality and better risk management tools.

The Story of Gideon

In 2019, I published an interview with Thomas Meyer about the Old Testament story of Gideon—my favorite Bible story. The story highlights the importance of people who integrate the qualities of integrity, faith, and competence. There are a wealth of smart and capable people in the CU who look competent, and perhaps even exceptional, on a particular topic, but if you scratch the surface, you find someone who is financially dependent on the plunder and Great Poisoning agendas and will not buck the people who hold their leash.

Some recently recommended a historian to us as a teacher for the Solari Builders curriculum. Though a fascinating historian, the scholar in question aggressively defended the implementation of genocide and plunder in Gaza and heavily promoted the Covid shots, making it clear that he lacks integrity. From reading his statements on these topics, one can only assume that he is full on in support to the CU leadership. How many people died or were disabled or bankrupted because of his promotion of the shots?

It is much easier to find talented people in the CU than the DU. However, there is a potential litmus test that can be used to flush out a potential lack of integrity. If you learn to investigate and recognize the products, cash flows, businesses, assets, and people who come with a CU “leash,” you can take steps to avoid situations where you might get hiccuped, switch-hit, or bankrupted. It has taken me a lifetime to sort this out, and I am still learning, but my hope is that you can benefit from these observations.


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13 Comments

  1. Re: John Perkins Thank you, excellent guidelines, so important and most importantly, a blessing for us all. Below in the posted article, Love Belongs Where the Power Is, I want to shed another light on John Perkins regarding good he has done for the world. Unless its the word of God – LOVE – all utterings and actions have an opposite in this world. What motivates anyone may have many sides to it, but we cannot know everything when we pass judgment because this is the world of opposites. What has a front, has a back for all of us until we reach the pinnacle of LOVE. Love can emerge from everywhere as shown below in my daughters experience with John Perkins. Thanks for helping me to consider more through your commentary as I always have questions about everything.

    PS The author just took the brave big leap from a well paying corporate position. Catherine’s article is very timely. Also there is a TN cattle and grain farmer with a store in Nashville that is being clobbered by the powers that be after building great sales volume over a number of years and delicious meat products etc. https://www.smokinoaksorganicfarms.com/ They are putting him out of business. Horrifying story behind this. He is in process of creating a membership cooperative with a goal of 250 founding members. He is an intergenerational family farmer that needs support. He knows farmers and what is destroying them. If anyone is interested in the coop he is trying to build I can post the plan.

    Love Belongs Where the Power Is

    Why this publication is turning toward leadership, and toward the harder half of a question I’ve spent years trying to answer.

    SAMANTHA A. THOMAS
    JULY 22, 2026

    For a while now, I’ve been writing here about the inner life. About fear and its disguises, about presence, about what it takes to come home to yourself. I believe in that work. I’ve lived it, these last few years more than I expected to, and I’ve watched it change people, including me.

    But I’ve come to think it’s only half of the question, and the easier half. Love is permitted in private. We’re allowed to speak of it in our families, our friendships, our own healing. Carry it into a boardroom, a cabinet meeting, or a budget review, and it starts to sound naïve, or worse, unprofessional. Somewhere we made an unspoken bargain: love may govern the personal, where we all agree it belongs, and stay out of the powerful, where we’ve decided it doesn’t apply.

    That bargain is convenient, and it is wrong. Not because the personal matters less than we think, but because it matters more. Love begins there. It’s the ground everything else grows from, which is exactly why it can’t stop at the edge of our private lives. What we practice at home doesn’t stay home. It travels into every room we’re given power over.

    The places we’ve agreed to keep love out of are precisely the places where how we treat people scales. A leader’s definition of success becomes the incentive a thousand people organize their lives around. What a culture tolerates becomes what a generation of employees learns to expect. A policy is a moral choice wearing the clothes of a procedure. These aren’t neutral machines. They’re a few people’s convictions, made durable and multiplied. Which means the question of whether we act with care, or without it, doesn’t shrink as power grows. It scales with it.

    This is also where love stops being sentiment and starts being difficult. It’s easy to feel warmly toward people who cost you nothing. It’s hard to define success in a way that refuses to use up the people who produce it. It’s hard to tell a true thing to someone with the power to punish you for it, and harder to hear one when you’re the one holding the power. Love, in this setting, isn’t softness. It’s the discipline of keeping people’s full reality in view while you decide, especially when leaving it out would be cheaper. Understood that way, it asks more of leaders, not less.

    None of this is new, and I didn’t arrive at it alone. The Love Summit began more than a decade ago, during my years leading Dream Change, the non-profit organization founded by John Perkins. We held the first gathering at Wieden+Kennedy in 2015 and the second at LPK in 2017. More than 450 leaders took part, across industries and countries, executives and public officials and founders and researchers. They didn’t come to talk about feelings. They came carrying real institutional weight, and they had noticed the same thing I had, that the hardest problems in front of them weren’t technical, and that no strategy resolved the human ones underneath.

    When I left Dream Change in 2018, John and the organization entrusted the vision to me to carry forward. I also went looking for firmer ground beneath the idea, and wrote my graduate dissertation at University College London on love as a social ethic.
    So the inner work was never a detour. Soon after London, the pandemic scattered my plans, and I left early and started over, unexpectedly, in Nashville.

    The years since have been the most humbling and clarifying of my life, and I think I needed to live far more of this work before I was ready to lead it again. You can’t use power well while at war with yourself, and the leaders who do the most damage are often the ones who never felt safe, and who are still, without realizing it, arranging the world so they never have to. The personal essays were part of that reckoning. But reckoning is preparation, and preparation is not the destination.

    This is the turn I’m making here.

    From now on I’ll be writing mostly toward the harder half: love inside leadership, business, and governance. What it means to hold power with care rather than perform it. How organizations drift from their founding convictions, and what it takes to notice before the drift becomes the culture. Where our institutions run on extraction, and what building from wholeness would actually require. And what all of this asks of us now, while artificial intelligence takes over more of how we decide and relate, and leaves the most human questions exactly where they were.

    And I won’t only be writing. I’ve never believed these questions get answered from an armchair, so I’m going to the people already living them. Over the coming months I’ll be recording conversations with leaders across business, government, activism, and the arts, people wrestling with these questions inside real institutions, and publishing them here. Honest exchanges built around a single question about love, leadership, or the systems we’re shaping.

    These are the beginning of a growing library, and the foundation of the next Love Summit, which I’ve spent the past year rebuilding into something larger and built to last. The essays are me thinking out loud. The conversations are all of us thinking together.
    Some of you came here for the more personal writing, and I want to be honest that this will feel different. I’m not disowning those essays. They’ll stay, and now and then I’ll still write one. But the front door is changing. If you came for the inner life alone, some of what follows may not be for you, and I understand if you step away. If you carry responsibility for other people, and you’ve felt the gap between what you’re achieving and what you’re building, I think you’ll find more here than you did before.
    This is the question underneath everything I’ve written, said plainly at last. Love belongs where the power is. That’s where I’m going to follow it.

    If it’s your question too, you’re in the right place. This is where I’ll think it through in the open, one essay and one conversation at a time. You can find the fuller vision for the Love Summit at justchooselove.com. I’d be glad to have you with us for what comes next.
    Just Choose Love by Samantha A Thomas is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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    © 2026 Samantha Thomas
    PO Box 293277, Nashville, TN 37229
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  2. Wow.

    This article is, literally, the best I have read in…years…longer?.

    It speaks to me. The Harvard thing. The TED Talks. Everything. Up and down the line, on essentially every point, I found myself nodding in agreement.

    Thank you for this!

  3. Thank you Catherine for posting your thoughts! This is a wonderful article. I subscribe because I learn wisdom from you everyday. Thank you for this!

  4. Oh, most important, I pass that wisdom on to family, neighbors, clients. Sometimes it is not welcome but it does not matter. I stand tall and ignore the critics!

  5. Very nice guidance article.
    I was just in a hot debate this morning on a thread in a separate forum about capex, debt, and risk management. In brief, I gave them an abundance of stories of how doing business with just your trusted small group of vetted counterparties yields results compared to some sort of attempt at doing business with some large business who sends out three different incompetent service techs that cause a bigger problem.
    Capex is better than renting if you can get the skills together and commitment to maintain/repair/prepare. Debt is a “just don’t do it” scenario. Plain and simple.

    I’m currently involved in a project where I’m taking over a large campus from a much larger team because the board of directors has finally realized that competency matters and incompetency costs more money.
    This is all about risk management, scenario planning, and using the right metrics to decide who to do business with.

  6. Thank you so much for all the hard work you put into this excellent article, Catherine! I read it simultaneously on my Kindle and the website so I could click all the links. Your tagline is helping us live a free, inspired life. Articles like this, rich with substance and concrete examples, are instantly actionable. I’m so grateful you wrote it.

  7. The highlight of the article!!!!

    People who are firmly in the DU share some recognizable qualities:

    They have the light of the Divine in their hearts.
    They have built a financially independent or successful pathway to live and work in the DU, or have brought from the CU or their family the financial resources they need to be independent in the DU—and they use those resources accordingly.
    They have a good map of both official reality and reality.
    They have a personal commitment to being productive and consistently adding value to others.
    They are fearless, but governed by wisdom and discernment.
    They are marked by ongoing acts of integrity and generosity.
    They love to learn and teach; they generate a high learning metabolism.
    In short, successful members of the DU don’t talk a good game—if you study how their money and time work, they live a good game.

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