Last week at the bottom of Monday’s post, I asked you guys to drop sociology questions in the comments for the next poll.
Almost nobody left a question. And when I thought about why, I realized that was 100% on me.
Nobody gets home from a ten-hour shift on a Monday night wanting a college homework assignment in the comment box. What actually gets this community fired up isn’t abstract homework—it’s dragging a named corporate predator out of the shadows and putting their entire career rap sheet on the autopsy table.
If you were here back in July and October of last year, you remember when we launched Operation First Strike with our dossiers on “Backdoor” Dalia Blass at BlackRock and “King” Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase.
The whole doctrine behind Operation First Strike is The Shepherd vs. The Sheepdog:
The Sheepdogs are the trap. Politicians, cable news hosts, and viral outrage actors are paid to bark at the flock all day, keep you terrified, and soak up your anger. And the dirty secret is that Sheepdogs are completely disposable. When you spend two years screaming at a politician on television, the billionaire who bought that politician doesn’t care—when that politician wears out, they just write a check and hire a new Sheepdog.
The Shepherds are the real targets. Above the politicians sit the unelected private equity kings, asset-manager executives, mega-bank CEOs, and revolving-door regulators who write legal loopholes inside the government on Tuesday and walk across the street into a $10 million-a-year corporate C-suite job on Wednesday.
Politicians want your attention. Shepherds need anonymity. They only win as long as 99% of the country never learns their names.
So starting this week, we are bringing back Operation First Strike as our Shepherd Bounty Board—with two upgrades:
Every Shepherd gets a permanent two-word nickname that spoils their billion-dollar PR scam on sight.
The weekly poll now lives permanently at verticalwar.com/poll.
Why the Poll Moved to verticalwar.com/poll
Substack’s built-in poll box only gives you four tiny buttons with zero room to see who these people actually are—and since the whole trick of a Shepherd is hiding their name from the public, voting blind defeats the entire point.
Over at verticalwar.com/poll, we built a dedicated Shepherd Bounty Board connected directly to our Shepherd Encyclopedia:
Cast your vote in one click right at the top of the page.
Inspect the preliminary dossiers before you vote: Right underneath the ballot, you can click into the case file for each of the four suspects (plus our completed dossiers on “Backdoor” Dalia Blass and “King” Jamie Dimon) so you can see their exact three-step career evolution before locking in your target.
👉 Click Here to Open the Shepherd Bounty Board & Cast Your Vote at verticalwar.com/poll
Meet This Week’s 4 Suspects on the Ballot
(Rika, Yoko, Panty, and Stocking already have the scalpels laid out on the table—you pick which ghoul gets the full Friday investigation):
“Slumlord Jon” Jonathan Gray — President & COO of Blackstone ($1 Trillion+ AUM)
While everybody yells at Larry Fink on television, Jonathan Gray quietly runs the physical squeeze on your neighborhood.
Act I: Built Invitation Homes after the 2008 crash, using cheap Wall Street credit to buy up 80,000+ single-family starter homes and turn young families into permanent renters (resulting in a $48 million FTC settlement in 2024 for junk fees and illegal eviction practices).
Act II: Scaled stealth private equity roll-ups of local veterinary clinics and dental offices while keeping the local family names on the sign outside.
Act III: Now spearheading $70 billion+ in AI data-center rollouts (QTS / AirTrunk) that dump massive electric grid upgrade costs straight onto working families’ monthly utility bills.
Read Preliminary Dossier | Vote for “Slumlord Jon” at verticalwar.com/poll
“Dr. Denied” Dr. Patrick Conway — CEO of Optum (UnitedHealth Group’s $250B Arm)
A literal pediatrician who helped write the federal payment rules from the inside, then walked through the revolving door to run the biggest corporate doctor monopoly in America.
Act I: Helped design the federal “Value-Based Care” and Medicare Advantage payment architecture inside the government at CMS (2011–2017).
Act II: Walked out the revolving door to become CEO of UnitedHealth Group’s Optum, which has quietly bought up over 90,000 American physicians (10% of all doctors in the United States).
Act III: Oversaw the deployment of the nH Predict AI claim-denial machine (exposed for a 90% reversal rate when patients actually appeal) used to kick elderly patients out of rehabilitation beds early.
Read Preliminary Dossier | Vote for “Dr. Denied” at verticalwar.com/poll
“Cover-Up Jay” Jay Clayton — Ex-SEC Chair, Ex-Apollo Chairman & Sitting SDNY U.S. Attorney
Remember “Backdoor” Dalia Blass? Meet the boss who hired her—and somehow pulled off an even wilder revolving-door triple jump.
Act I: Elite Wall Street defense lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell who became Chairman of the SEC (2017–2020), hiring Dalia Blass and clearing the regulatory runway for the giant asset managers.
Act II: Walked out of the SEC to become Chairman of the Board at Apollo Global Management right after Apollo co-founder Leon Black got caught paying Jeffrey Epstein $158 million for “tax and estate advice.”
Act III: Just revolved back into the federal government to sit as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY)—the exact Manhattan prosecutor’s office guarding the Wall Street and Epstein files.
Read Preliminary Dossier | Vote for “Cover-Up Jay” at verticalwar.com/poll
“Psycho-Hair” Alex Karp — Co-Founder & CEO of Palantir Technologies
Goes on podcasts with mad-scientist hair pretending to be a quirky progressive European philosopher who loves the working class—while building the domestic surveillance panopticon.
Act I: Pitching himself as a “socialist” philosophy PhD while turning public tax dollars into a private billionaire fortress.
Act II: Seeded by the CIA’s venture arm (In-Q-Tel) after the Pentagon killed the NSA’s warrantless ThinThread program, fusing commercial data brokers with federal intelligence dragnets.
Act III: Now wiring Palantir directly into hospital billing and wage-garnishment chains (HCA, Cleveland Clinic), corporate HR surveillance, and local police databases.
Read Preliminary Dossier | Vote for “Psycho-Hair” Karp at verticalwar.com/poll
Cast Your Vote & Drop Next Week’s Target in the Comments
Lock in your vote for this Friday’s target right here: https://verticalwar.com/poll
Nominate next week’s Shepherd in the comments below: You never have to write an essay question in the comments again. Just drop the name of any billionaire Shepherd, crooked regulator, private equity boss, or corporate parasite you want us to investigate—and throw in your own two-word nickname for them if you’ve got a good one. We’ll build next Monday’s Bounty Board straight from your hit list.
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Fund the fight, and I’ll build the tools to win it.
