By Catherine Austin Fitts

In 2025, high-quality movies were few and far between, and it was slim pickings to find something worth elevating as Solari’s Movie of the Year. Instead, I have reached back to a 2024 action-thriller: The Beekeeper. In terms of filmmaking, The Beekeeper and its violent action sequences are B-grade at best, but I consider the movie worth watching because of what it communicates about the fraud machinery that is targeting so many people throughout the online world.

It is important to understand the sophistication of this machinery, which benefits from access to the best corporate equipment and telecommunications infrastructure, and can deploy finely tuned marketing techniques that likely include entrainment technology and other forms of neurowarfare. Moreover, the fraud enjoys the support of the banking and political industries—the fact of the matter is that it could not operate without their permission. It is probable that the fraud machinery ultimately is owned and operated by rich and powerful interests that are perfectly content to either build and run such operations themselves or to enjoy the cash flows while pretending they do not know what is happening.

Watching The Beekeeper and its depiction of high-level phishing scams helps the audience appreciate what we are up against—whether with respect to the nature of cybercrime or the many groups that profit from and give such fraud air cover—and underscores the damage that it can do.

If you read or listen to author and investigative journalist Bob Sullivan—including my 2024 interview with him about sophisticated cybercrime—he provides countless stories and examples of “ripoffs, cybercrime, corporate misbehavior, [and] 21st century headaches.” If you then watch The Beekeeper, it adds an emotional element.

In the movie, the hero is a former military operative turned “Beekeeper,” part of a covert organization dedicated to safeguarding the world. I don’t know if governments actually employ “beekeepers” to deal with political corruption. What I do know is that the enormous corruption we live with is levying a heavy tax—a tax that, combined with inflation, is becoming unbearable. Movies like The Beekeeper appeal to audiences because they tap into our longing for a return of justice. When we see none in the real world, we seek stories of justice—even if in vigilante form—in fiction.

Some reviewers panned The Beekeeper for not going far enough in its critique of corruption:

“[P]olitically and philosophically the movie wimps out in the end … by reassuring us that the problem isn’t systemic corruption … but a few bad apples doing bad stuff without their well-meaning boss’s knowledge or approval…. They tell us that the problem is not systemic and purposeful corruption embedded in the marrow of our institutions, but anomalous people whose removal will restore things to their natural state of nobility.”

The fact that The Beekeeper’s “bad apples” reach the highest levels of governance is nevertheless quite telling—and offers some interesting parallels to real-life political grifters.