Distraction From Distraction

February 22, 2026 | Distraction From Distraction

John Rubino

John Rubino is a former Wall Street financial analyst and author or co-author of five books, including The Money Bubble: What to Do Before It Pops and Clean Money: Picking Winners in the Green-Tech Boom. He founded the popular financial website DollarCollapse.com in 2004, sold it in 2022, and now publishes John Rubino’s Substack newsletter.

First came the Epstein files, which seem to implicate half of the West’s ruling class in bafflingly monstrous crimes. Then, perhaps to distract us from those crimes, came the announcement that the US is about to invade Iran, home of a major oil supply route and lots of missiles.

Then, perhaps to distract us from Epstein and Iran, there’s this:

Trump says he’ll ask DOD to release files on ‘UFOs,’ ‘alien and extraterrestrial life’
(The Hill) – President Trump on Thursday said he will direct the Department of Defense and other agencies to release its files about UFOs and “alien and extraterrestrial life” to the public.
“Based on the tremendous interest shown,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later described Trump’s announcement as “OUT OF THIS WORLD NEWS” in a post on the social platform X.
The president’s own post came hours after he blasted former President Obama for allegedly revealing classified information about whether alien life exists. Trump said Obama was “not supposed to be doing that” before telling Fox News’s Peter Doocy that the president doesn’t “know if they’re real or not.”
“I may get him out of trouble by declassifying,” Trump later told Doocy in their interview.
The president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump said Trump has a prepared speech detailing extraterrestrial life and spaceships.
“I’ve heard kind of around, I think my father-in-law has actually said it, that there is some speech that he has, that I guess at the right time, I don’t know when the right time is, he’s going to break out and talk about and it has to do with maybe some sort of extraterrestrial life,” Lara Trump said on the “Pod Force One” podcast.
The subject of extraterrestrial life and UAP has captivated lawmakers and the public for years, with the House Oversight Committee holding a hearing with former military intelligence officer and whistleblower David Grusch in 2023.
Grusch claimed that the Pentagon and other agencies have built a “multi-decade” program to reverse engineer nonhuman technology retrieved from crash sites. He claimed he was part of one of these retrieval programs. The Pentagon denies his claims.
In 2022, a House Intelligence subcommittee held the first congressional hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years, where lawmakers heard from officials who were overseeing a Pentagon task force investigating UAP.

Evaporating Trust Horizon

Each of these events is being met with increasing credulity, as many now automatically assume that:

1) They’re all lies.

2) They’re purposeful lies, which is to say propaganda aimed at cowing or confusing the masses to neutralize dissent.

This is flipping the narrative in hilarious ways:

Honest Money

It seems the only thing that’s not lying is gold, which signals a society collapsing under the weight of rampant corruption. So ignore the obvious propaganda and keep stacking. The truth, when finally revealed, will not be good for fake money.

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