“The Hour of the Predators” by Giuliano da Empoli, published in 2025, is a politically incisive and sadly enlightening essay on the current transformations of Western democracies.
Sadly enlightening because it helps us understand the constant absurdity that agitates the world we live in today – what I shall call Absurdistan.
Giuliano da Empoli, who served as political advisor to Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, ended his political engagement in order to teach comparative politics, create the Volta think tank, and write with sharp insight about the contemporary world. With “The Hour of the Predators”, he delivers an impressionistic analysis – filled with delectable anecdotes and pointed reflections – on the elites who govern Absurdistan.
The rulers of Absurdistan come in two types: the Lawyers and the Borgians.
The Lawyers (the name is no coincidence, given how many lawyers have become heads of State in the US and Europe) thrived in a tangible, physical world whose arenas were governed by respect for rules.
But in a world undergoing profound transformation – we are, after all, living through a Digital Revolution, and I intentionally capitalize it just as I would the Industrial Revolution – the Lawyers, too respectful of rules and perhaps too cowardly, chose not to choose, hoping to avoid war. Having renounced actual governance, the Lawyers – undeniably intelligent people – fell back on political objectives of little significance.
The result has been disastrous.
The Lawyers failed to understand that the war they sought at all costs to avoid no longer had anything to do with armed conflict, because war today is atypical: constant, multiform, and protean. From their naïveté, they earned only hybrid war and dishonor.
Hybrid war, because, as already explained here, war now takes on countless forms.
Dishonor, because the objectives on which the Lawyers fell back, overwhelmed by a system that no longer functions (the infamous hypernormalization), may have been noble in origin, but repeated to the point of exhaustion, they have become ridiculous.
Wokeness is the best example: a (likewise protean) concept whose historical foundations are undeniable since its aim is social justice – yet in all its excesses, wokeism has flooded a public space that thirsts for concrete solutions to far more urgent problems. Let’s remember that the peoples of Western democracies are barely managing to survive materially.
Consequently, wokeism has become a godsend for the Borgians, who have delighted in mocking it.
The Borgians, for their part, are one step ahead: they are the new conquistadors of the modern age – here to gorge on everything and wreck everything.
A few years ago, they were scorned and seen as outsiders no one would have bet on. Their virulent opposition to the established order should normally have confined them to an ultra-minority role, but Brexit happened – thanks to in part to Farage – and the situation has now reversed: the Borgians dominate the global political stage. Because it is a stage, indeed.
The Borgians are here to take everything that can be taken; they are predators, and the public interest is utterly foreign to them.
They do not respect the rules. Rules, in their eyes, ceased to exist long ago – back in the days of Humanists, social justice, and legitimacy. Family members are appointed to key positions regardless of competence (Trump & co), and opponents are “invited” to a palace where they will be tortured before pledging allegiance to the Borgia of the day (MBS).
The Borgians respect only force, because only force leads to power. Trump condones the attack on the US Capitol, Bukele distorts the spirit of El Salvador’s Constitution to seek a presidential term that was normally forbidden to him, and Bolsonaro brandishes his chainsaw live on camera to posture against environmental concerns over the Amazon rainforest.
The Borgians understand perfectly that war is permanent, multiform, and protean – and that it no longer takes place on battlefields. Their weapon is action. And the more outrageous the action, the better, since the objective is the shock, diversion and distraction of the masses – one could fill an entire book with Trump’s ridiculous tweets. The violence of the Borgians’ words and the brutality of their behavior resonate with the muted violence of the lower classes, who lost faith in traditional political leaders long ago.
If Elon Musk was, for a time, appointed to head the newly created DOGE and was able, manu militari, to fire several hundred thousand American civil servants overnight by email – if ICE could violently raid the homes of undocumented people who nonetheless paid taxes, removing them from American soil – and if no one did anything concrete to oppose this, it is because this brutality resonates everywhere. Those who are offended… are offended, but do nothing.
In this new Borgian political paradigm, what is needed is a stage to occupy.
The Borgians have understood that outrageousness thrives best in arenas devoid of physical substance, borders, or rules: social media.
Thus, disinformation and digital technologies play a central role in Borgian strategy, explaining their Faustian pact with the tech lords – who are also here to enrich themselves.
The latter fund the Borgians because they are multibillionaires and can negotiate the absence of regulation that allows them to do whatever they want. Just look at Trump’s second inauguration ceremony in January 2025, with Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg lined up behind the new President of the United States. It was terrifying and utterly unlike the first 2017 inauguration, when one still sensed a subtle fragility stemming from a slightly questionable legitimacy – the assertive demeanor of Melania Trump at the second ceremony says everything about this shift in tone.
And yet, we do know the democratic harm caused by social media – because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. We do know the harm caused by AI, an authoritarian technology that gathers data to turn it into an instrument of power – but nothing will be done to regulate such power. The time of regulation has passed, long passed; the tech lords have won.
And in any case, if existing platforms aren’t enough, one can simply create another where no dissent is possible – Truth Social, Trump’s platform, is the best example.
The alliance of the Borgians and the tech lords is lethal to democracy and social cohesion. The Borgian, by nature, relentlessly identifies subjects that are mildly divisive, amplifies them on social media, fractures debate with extreme opinions repeated endlessly – and the whole thing leads to the intended result: division.
Do people realize this? It is unclear. Social media claim to reflect the real world and this is why most users post texts, photos, or videos about their everyday lives, but the truth is that software programmers abandoned their initial function to become programmers of human behavior, using personal data voluntarily provided by users and algorithms to shape opinions.
We are living in a permanent coup that we did not see coming, a kleptocracy with authoritarian tendencies that is spreading through political institutions, politically aligned media, social media, and even our “discussions” with conversational agents that likewise shape users’ opinions.
It is time for the Lawyers to wake up, to be less naïve, less cowardly, and far more combative. Some have already awakened in the US, notably Zohran Mamdani, who won the New York mayoral election in November 2025, and Gavin Newsom, Governor of California. Both have decided to beat Trump at his own game: social media. They manage to produce videos tailored for these platforms – funny, incisive, and without excess.
Generally speaking, it is time to think differently and to do things differently.
The truth is that a society without rules descends into total anarchy, and that is the reason why the field cannot be left to the Borgians.
Editor’s note. Here I am in a snow-covered Paris, muted and utterly silent. As the US have kidnapped Nicolás Maduro and his wife in Caracas, I walk past the National Assembly and the Senate which, together as Parliament, have the authority to declare war or to control a posteriori a military intervention decided by the President of the French Republic. What a time to be alive.
January 9, 2026
