☕️ THE GOLDEN AGE ☙ Friday, October 9, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Corporate media saw a bromance. I saw Baron Trump, Tesla's missing trunks, and a $6 billion science blitz that needed no Congress. Welcome to the Golden Age and its unprovable time-traveling theory.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Your mind-bending special edition roundup —which you won’t find in corporate media— includes: half of it is the most ambitious federal science announcement in a generation, and the other half is the wildest conspiracy theory I’ve ever enjoyed far too much; the U.S. government once commissioned a report on whether Nikola Tesla was “real,” and the man who wrote it was Trump’s uncle; a 19th-century children’s book about a boy named Baron Trump; and a historic $6 billion science blitz that needed no Congress, no budget, and ran rings around the filibuster. Plus the president announced the Golden Age has begun.

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Corporate media had no idea how to report it and either ignored it completely or struggled to frame a narrative. Yesterday, the President either poured jet fuel on the wildest conspiracy theory going or just handed out some more awards to his tech buddies. The Hill chose to frame it as the tired Trump-Elon bromance, under the narcolepsy-inducing headline, “Trump’s rekindled alliance with Elon Musk on display at medal ceremony.” Other platforms expressed similar yawning takes. But there was nothing boring about it. Just the opposite.

Billed as the “Science: A New Golden Age Summit,” it was held at the repurposed Institute for Peace —now the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace— which you might recall was actually the Deep State’s ironically named color revolution headquarters until DOGE occupied it in a dramatic midnight takeover operation. At the time, Musk tweeted that the IOP staff had tried to delete the data in an Enron-like shredding bonanza, but his DOGE team recovered the data after a dramatic day-long standoff and a Capitol Police escort.

Even more entertainingly, President Trump installed Revolver News’ Darren Beattie as the IOP’s new president. (Darren and Revolver heroically exposed the Ray Epps fedsurrection operation on January 6th.) Now, instead of undermining defenseless governments around the world, they’re using the DJT-IOP for fancy presidential events. It’s a beautiful building right on the National Mall, and I hope they fumigated it first.

Given the exigencies of time and reader attention, I can only hit the highlights, so I encourage you to read the whole transcript. I’m not kidding. It’s shorter than you’d expect and packed with terrific stuff. Especially if you are a science or tech nerd, also read the companion White House Fact sheet, published yesterday. Thank me in the comments.

Ostensibly, yesterday’s short ‘summit’ had two goals: announce a wide-ranging, $6 billion science initiative, and give top science awards to tech luminaries like NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang and Elon Musk. White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios explained, “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are ushering in a New Golden Age of Science powered by super intelligence, a return to merit, and bold national missions that will inspire Americans for generations to come.”

That alone was thrilling: old-fashioned, can-do American optimism, back from the dead. The new science objectives surpassed the moon landing* in breathtaking ambition. But there was even more happening just below the surface level. (* Results may vary.)

🚀 Trump’s opening remarks sprang off the transcript like a ravenous jaguar. He said the Golden Age has now begun.

Welcome to the Golden Age. It’s not clear what, exactly, the President meant, but the announcement itself is clear. Whatever foundations had to be laid— that work is complete. We have now entered the exhilarating payoff period. Feel free to indulge sky-high expectations.

Then he immediately pivoted to an even more surprising and fascinating discussion: his uncle, Dr. John Trump, who was a top MIT scientist and professor for 52 years, and who led America’s Manhattan-project-style development of radar during World War II, and for whom Donald John Trump would later be named. They played a tribute video that the White House posted on X.

CLIP: White House posts tribute to Dr. John Trump (1:37).

Dr. John Trump was heavily involved in researching high-voltage electricity, which is where this story takes an almost supernatural turn. The man who was arguably America’s greatest scientific mind of all time, Nikola Tesla, died broke in Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel in the middle of World War II (1943). Tesla was never autopsied, inflaming conspiracy theorists’ speculations.

The U.S. government sprang into action, and the Office of Alien Property immediately secured his hotel room. Tesla had often claimed he’d invented “teleforce,” which the media at the time rebranded as a “death ray.” They brought in Dr. Trump to review Tesla’s notes. After spending three days, Dr. Trump concluded there was no death ray or anything particularly useful. Tesla’s late papers, he wrote at the time, were “primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character.”

The story is replete with wild details like up to eighty trunks of additional “unreviewed” Tesla notes that were “found” in the hotel’s basement years later. Of the eighty, twenty trunks disappeared in transit to the Belgrade Museum and remain unaccounted for to this day.

This is where the Time Travel hypothesis surfaces.

🚀 In 1889 and 1893, a New York lawyer named Ingersoll Lockwood published two astonishing children’s books. They were about a rich, precocious boy named Baron Trump who travels through a portal in Russia, guided by “Don Constantino Bartolomeo Strepholofidgeguaneriusfum” —Don— into a high-tech underground empire. In 1896, Lockwood published a political barnburner: 1900; or, The Last President, in which a mob besieged a Fifth Avenue hotel after an outsider won the presidency.

Rod Serling would have rejected it as too crazy for a Twilight Zone episode. And in 2017, people started noticing. If you want a deeper-dive, here’s a 2024 X thread rounding up all the wild Telsa-Trump-Musk conspiracy theories:

🚀 Making things even more mind-bending, it is undisputed that Tesla supposedly dabbled in time travel. In 1895, the great scientist described a strange experience of seeing past, present, and future all at once during a high-voltage accident in his lab. (Now recall that Dr. John Trump also researched high-voltage.) The anecdote about Tesla’s time-traveling claims is widely accepted, though never formally documented— exactly what a time-traveler might arrange. Just saying.

There’s more, such as the mythical Philadelphia Experiment, later made into a major motion picture. The story goes that, nine months after Tesla’s death, the Navy allegedly wrapped a destroyer escort, the USS Eldridge, in electric cables and then either teleported it, sent it back in time, or made it invisible, depending on who you ask. Sailors were supposedly fused to the deck or driven mad. The story has been ceaselessly debunked, and the original witness, Carl Allen, spent years going back and forth, at times claiming it was real, or then recanting, depending on the day.

We might also mention the so-called Mandela Effect, which holds that large numbers of people have started remembering historical events differently, ranging from things like whether Nelson Mandela died in prison, or even more historically significant facts such as whether Mr. Monopoly ever wore a monocle. Some folks speculate that a time-traveler might be out there tweaking the timelines.

The truth is lost in the murky depths of time, space, classified annexes, and single-lens eyewear. Tesla was undoubtedly a top scientific mind, maybe of all time. He invented alternating current, the induction motor, the Tesla coil, a big chunk of radio, and remote-control technology. He also claimed discoveries in his later years that never saw the light of day: his death ray, worldwide wireless power transmission, signals from Mars, and a “dynamic theory of gravity.”

Let’s get crazy. Suppose that, among Tesla’s notes in that New York hotel, Dr. John Trump had found time-traveling instructions, or even just extremely advanced, electricity-based technologies. Well, what then? Could Dr. Trump have, perhaps, decided Tesla’s notes were too potentially powerful even for governments to have? Could he have instead embarked on a private mission to protect the country, even from itself? It would make a great movie.

If any of these wild theories were at all true, you would expect to see some signs. You would expect someone with visibility into future events to acquire wealth and political power, for example. You might expect them to seem to always win. (TAW.)

So it was especially remarkable to see the stage at yesterday’s Golden Age summit shared by the world’s most powerful man and the world’s richest man, whose electric-car company, incidentally, is named after Tesla. Um.

When President Trump introduced Elon Musk for his award yesterday, the president said some very intriguing things. First —contradicting Dr. Trump’s own lukewarm post-review report— the president called Nikola Tesla a “true and great genius” who was “real in every single way.”

Real in every single way? What did he mean by ‘real?’ Who said Tesla wasn’t real? Did Trump mean the death ray? The time traveling? Something else? Or was he just being nice? What did he mean by real in every single way? President Trump didn’t expand on his mysterious thesis.

Look, I realize I’m way off the sanity map here. Even asking these questions is kooky speculation of the first order. But I can’t resist. It’s just too much fun.

So, stick with me for just a moment longer. If a family with visibility into the future saw what was coming and had to choose a brilliant technical manager to build out the companies inventing frontier-shattering, Golden Age-delivering technological leaps like underground diggers and reusable rockets, Elon Musk might have appeared to be the right man for the job.

Behold how President Trump introduced Elon yesterday:

“It always works out well for Elon,” President Trump said. Huh.

Edison was a curious choice for the comparison. Given the context, Trump could easily have called Elon “our modern Tesla.” Edison and Tesla were peers who famously feuded with each other. Unlike Nikola Tesla, Edison wasn’t so much a scientific genius as he was a brilliant marketer and manager. Unlike Tesla, who mostly worked alone, Edison employed teams of scientists to do the technical work, including Tesla for a time.

So when Trump praised Elon as our modern-day Thomas Edison, it was kind of a backhanded compliment. It was like calling a famous chef a modern-day McDonald’s. He was saying Elon isn’t a brilliant scientist or inventor; but that he is brilliant— in a different way. “You’re my friend and all of that,” Trump said, “but you are a very, very special guy.” Two verys.

Is Elon very, very special because of the very, very special role he’s been given? Or short-bus special? I’m just asking.

I’ll bet you never expected this morning’s roundup to probe time-traveling conspiracy theories. To be clear: this is all purely for entertainment value. I’m not arguing anything. Even if there were any truth to it at all, it is unprovable by definition. You can’t beat someone with a time machine.

Look— time travel isn’t even necessary. Even if all Dr. Trump found in the New Yorker Hotel were highly advanced plans for rockets and electric technologies, that would be enough to sustain the theory and match the bizarre facts that we can all see right in front of our noses.

Set all that aside. Let’s return to the regularly scheduled program.

🚀 Besides the titillating hints about secret technologies and clandestine white hat brigades, what they actually announced was nearly as much fun. During the brief program, the President said all these terrific things are in the works:

• Nuclear power in space: NASA and the Energy Department agreed to build Space Reactor-1, “a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars expected to launch in 2028,” and Lunar Reactor-1, “the first fission reactor on the lunar surface,” which Trump called “a permanent American presence on the Moon.” (No dates for that one; jokes about the Moon Landing notwithstanding.)

• AI computing pledges: Eleven companies pledged $2.4 billion in computing credits and tools for the Genesis Mission, the federal AI-for-science program. (Rumored: the quantum computer will be “Exodus,” and the Moon base will be “Numbers.”) Nvidia pledged $1 billion, AMD $500 million, OpenAI $200 million, and Anthropic and Google $150 million each.

• Quantum computing: The Energy Department launched a $215 million competition to build a “fault-tolerant quantum computer,” and Trump set a goal of having one by 2028. (Or, for time travelers, already.)

• Virtual biology: NIH, the Energy Department and Biohub are putting $1.8 billion into simulated “virtual cells” to superpower medical research. It’ll be the first NIH lab that can’t leak. Fauci’s lab beagles expressed enthusiastic support.

• Young scientists: There’s a $100 million PhD fellowship program for four-year accelerated PhDs, a dual superintelligence-engineering doctorate, plus $310 million or more for the X-Labs research consortium. The fact sheet also announced ‘metascience,’ which means applying the scientific method to how the government funds science. In other words, for the first time in history, someone is going to check whether the expensive experiments worked. Get those shrimps back on their treadmills. They’ve had enough rest.

• Young Scholars: The National Science Foundation is reviving its shelved program for grades 3–12, which picks students “on the basis of demonstrated mathematics ability.” It had been “inexplicably abandoned in 1996.” (Because DEI.)

• Policy shifts toward merit: “President Trump has replaced DEI with merit across the Federal R&D enterprise,” the fact sheet announced. Trump said he’d ended DEI in federal science grants, said “we now support only the gold standard in science” —no more studies on making mice transgender— cited the White House Accord on Superintelligence brokered last week, and, for extra energy, mentioned four modular nuclear reactors that started running this year. (In 2023, Germany shuttered its last three reactors. For the climate.)

• Medals: Musk, Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang, and Lisa Su (AMD’s CEO) each received the National Medal of Science, and Michael Dell and Satya Nadella (Microsoft) received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Trump was given his uncle’s 1983 medal in a beautiful frame. “We have an extremely high IQ audience for a change,” Trump noted, then repeated it while looking right at the somnolent reporters in the back: “For a change.” Two of the six winners were college dropouts. Wave goodbye to credentialism.

• Trump Accounts: Trump touted the Dells’ $6.25 billion pledge to fund accounts for 25 million children, and the new program automatically giving all American kids Trump Accounts. Call it a Social Security replacement if you want (Trump didn’t say that, not explicitly.) Einstein is said to have called compound interest the eighth wonder of the world. “They’re going to turn 18 or 21, and they’re going to be rich because of you,” Trump told Michael and Susan Dell.

Of course, the difference between a Trump Account and Social Security is that with a Trump Account, the money is actually in the account, not a leprechaun’s lockbox. And it’s not under the government’s control, which is what really vexes Democrats.

As we have seen with other Trump initiatives, much of the $6 billion in pledges came from private industry, not from Congress. The rest came from money lying around the budget. He needed no bills passed, no budgets, no authorizations. No filibuster. No negotiating pork deals with legislators. He’s just … doing it, through sheer force of will and personality.

Consider this: what Congress never appropriated, a 2027 Democrat House cannot defund.

Washington spent forty years learning how to pass a budget without a vote. Trump figured out how to pass one without Washington. He has redefined Teddy Roosevelt’s bully pulpit. (Or, somebody knew what was going to happen in advance. Either way.)

Welcome to the Golden Age.

Have a fantastic Friday! Get back here tomorrow morning, as we have much news to catch up on. Don’t miss the Weekend Edition, which will be jam-packed with essential news and caffeinated commentary.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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