It's hard to say what's going on, but it's pretty clear to me that the entire world is in clusterfuck mode.
It doesn't have to be staged to be completely absurd.
We've been building on top of this absurdity for decades.

It's like herding cats at the moment.
Everyone can see that the system is broken, and everyone is scrambling.
We are in power consolidation mode.

I don't see a grand master plan.
I see a complete failure of capitalism and centralization: a completely broken clusterfuck.
How could the failure of centralization/scaling lead so some grand master plan executed perfectly and in secret worldwide?