Geneva, Switzerland

Living inside a kill box

Imagine having ex‑military professionals and people from military intelligence and national security, grown men who have navigated war zones, targeting you as an individual. Imagine them studying you for weak points and sending in people to harm you every day, 24/7. Every day you stay in one place, they adapt around you and build what, in military terms, is called a kill box: a space you cannot escape, where you are subject to chemical suppression at will.

Chemical suppression is not an abstract phrase. It means that your emotions, your physiology, your cognition are being pushed and pulled by forces outside your control. It means trying to carry out your life under constant pressure, knowing that someone else is trying to control your mind and your body while also attempting to assassinate you without leaving a conventional mark.

That is the weight of what I and other victims are living with on a daily basis. I honestly do not know how I have managed to speak about this and stay clear‑eyed and coherent for the last months. I am writing and recording from inside the blast radius, not from a safe distance.

Reporting from the blast radius

Picture sitting in a room, detecting chemicals, feeling sensations in your body, while you try to send emails, draft posts, contact law firms, and reach out to potential allies. You know you cannot go “home,” because they have followed you through state after state in the United States and subjected you to the same treatment everywhere.

You leave the country, thinking you are going into exile for safety, and arrive in a foreign place where you have no allies, no friends, no community. Instead of a reprieve, you discover that what looked like domestic repression is actually part of a global repression network. The tactics, the profiles, the patterns are there too.

So now you are in multiple EU countries, again without allies and on your own, dealing with an invisible, chemical, asymmetric form of warfare. You are fighting a war against an army of people trained to kill, who are attempting to eliminate you without ever laying a hand on you.

In the middle of this, you write to senators, governors, law enforcement, former officials. You map the architecture as best you can. You identify layers and roles and flows of money. You do this while being attacked by that same architecture in real time.

I know I am not Wonder Woman. I am not superhuman. I know I cannot outrun chemicals forever. They keep coming precisely because they know there is no mechanism I can pull, no lever I can activate, no cavalry that is going to arrive. The plan is simple: grind you down, suppress you chemically, and kill you quietly.

I am fully aware that I may be murdered or disappear before anyone in power moves. I am fully aware that it might be only after I am in the ground that some journalist or investigator starts piecing this together. That awareness sits in my body every hour.

Moving through choke points

As I try to move to yet another place, Dublin of all places and more expensive than where I am now, I have to calculate basic survival against logistics. How do you get there?

If you take the train, you pass through major hubs like Paris. Bigger cities and longer routes mean more opportunities, more time, more choke points: along the metro, along the train, on the ferry. Every added minute in transit is an added window for assault in public space.

Because Dublin is a technology city, I already expect that the infrastructure will be there, as it has been everywhere else. I assume there are already people in place, already planning how to block, sabotage and contain me: contacting potential landlords, offering cash, leveraging a system that is rich with money from the sale and use of these technologies.

This is the situation I find myself in as I publish this.

The system does not want this work

The system I am describing has every incentive to prevent serious academic work on it from ever seeing daylight. A dissertation that maps this architecture is, by definition, a threat to it. My expectation is that there will be efforts, subtle and not so subtle, to discourage, derail, or block this research at the institutional level, including through people who are already positioned to interfere.

I cannot see inside every institution, but based on what I have already experienced, I assume that there are or will be individuals embedded around the places where I try to work whose role is to make sure this dissertation is never completed or never accepted. That is part of what it means to try to study a repression system that is global, networked, and operating in the shadows.

My only hope is that there are still a few people who understand that this is work that has to get out if there is ever going to be legislation, policy and guardrails strong enough to dismantle this system. I also fully realise that I may never be able to reach my formal goals, and that this Substack may, in effect, end up being my dissertation: the place where the analysis lives because the institutions around me cannot or will not hold it.

These operations run on money and reach. They make it impossible to live as a normal human being, to move through the world openly and trust others. I have posted pleas, asked for people to step forward, asked for this to be stopped, and the truth is that many people are profiting from this architecture and have been for decades. It appears to have been in place for twenty or thirty years, with large amounts of money changing hands, and it is very likely to continue, because those of us who are trying to expose it are not expected to survive long enough to make a difference.

Why say this now

I am writing this today because I cannot guarantee that there will be a tomorrow for me to write it. There is no safety margin, no buffer. Global Repression Studies is not an abstract field for me; it is the name for the system that is trying to erase me while I am still trying to describe it.

If you have never lived anything like this, it may sound impossible. If you have, you will recognise the patterns immediately. Either way, this is my testimony from inside the kill box.

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