Pay close attention to the technocrats behind the curtain

Your vision of stereotypical MAGA is probably a lot like mine: People who have more dogs than teeth, drive pickups with gun racks, are immensely proud of their Confederate flag tattoos, and have a bunch of misspelled lawn signs telling the government to get its goddamn hands off their social security checks.

But the Trump supporters you need to worry about, the ones who – unlike the fans of dogs, guns, and pickup trucks – will actually benefit from the second coming of that narcissistic sociopath, aren't like that at all.

They are rich, white, powerful technocrats. Titans of Silicon Valley, wildly successful founders and deep-pocketed venture capitalists. People like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Ben Horowitz, and Curtis Yarvin, to name a few. 

If you totaled up their net worth, these six extraordinarily pale guys would represent the 48th largest economy in the world, landing them between Finland and Iraq. [1] All made their money investing in tech startups, much of it from social media companies that have morphed into the world's most efficient distribution platforms for mis- and disinformation. 

ICYMI: Misinformation is the point

If you're in the tech universe, you've probably heard of most of these guys. Otherwise, not so much. I would bet at least half my readers have not heard of any but Musk. But the guy very few people have heard of (including yours truly, until very recently) is possibly the most dangerous of the lot. 

Curtis Yarvin is a blogger and self described "monarchist" who provides the intellectual underpinnings to the Greed-is-Good/Death to All Peasants mindset that drives these technocrats. In 2022 both Vanity Fair and Vox published profiles of Yarvin, who blogged for many years under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug [2] until he was outed. Per Vox:

In many thousand words’ worth of blog posts over the past 15 years, computer programmer and tech startup founder Curtis Yarvin has laid out a critique of American democracy: arguing that it’s liberals in elite academic institutions, media outlets, and the permanent bureaucracy who hold true power in this declining country, while the US executive branch has become weak, incompetent, and captured.

But he stands out among right-wing commentators for being probably the single person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the US government could be toppled and replaced — “rebooted” or “reset,” as he likes to say — with a monarch, CEO, or dictator at the helm. Yarvin argues that a creative and visionary leader — a “startup guy,” like, he says, Napoleon or Lenin was — should seize absolute power, dismantle the old regime, and build something new in its place.

So: Killing tens of thousands of innocent Europeans, driving millions more out of their homes, upsetting the balance of power for half a century, and then deciding to invade Russia in the winter? Sounds like a Silicon Valley Startup Guy to me.

Yarvin/Moldbug is credited with influencing the thinking of the 2024 version of Sarah Palin, JD Vance, which is why Yarvin is suddenly in the news again. He's also apparently the person who convinced Elon Musk to buy (and destroy) Twitter.

Allow me to quote the always on-point Kara Swisher:

One of Yarvin's 'startup guy' ideas is to fire all federal employees and replace them with bootlicking lackeys who will do whatever their fearless leader wants, which is — surprise! — a foundational premise of Project 2025, the Republican blueprint for fascism we need to be talking about 24/7 for the next four months. [3]

ICYMI: It's time to get serious about saving our country

Yarvin has called for a "full reboot" of the US Government, an event he calls "The Butterfly Revolution":

We can only do this by giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization—with roughly the powers that the Allied occupation authorities held in Japan and Germany in the fall of 1945.... What Trump is going to do is to build this regime-in-exile or occupation authority as a private and (needless to say) peaceful institution—a larva. 

Trump in 2017 took office; he took about 0.01% of power. If Trump in 2021 wants to have more than 0.001% of power—his enemies have gotten stronger, too—the only way he can do it is to take 100%. To take it all at once—completely legally. 

Royalist pains in the ass

Yarvin is not the only one longing to return to the days of King George III. Peter Thiel famously wrote in a 2009 essay that he "no longer believe(s) that freedom and democracy are compatible." Thiel, who emerged from the same Paypal mafia that produced Musk and Sacks (and who made most of his money as an early investor in Facebook), is a co-founder of Palantir Technologies. 

If a Bond villain had his own private spy agency, it would look a lot like Palantir. Per Google Search Labs AI:

Palantir helps government agencies use surveillance and big data technology to identify and target people in conflict zones, at borders, or for policing. For example, Palantir has designed systems for US immigration authorities to surveil and target immigrants, and to manage mass immigration raids. Palantir's predictive policing tools are also used by law enforcement agencies and Israeli security forces....Palantir's software tools help users recognize connections between pieces of data and predict a surveillance subject's future behavior. For example, Bloomberg reported that Palantir has worked with JPMorgan to assist the bank with employee monitoring. 

Nothing scary about that, right?

Imagine the billions in government contracts Palantir will receive if all goes as planned. Imagine who it will be paid to surveil.

All of these freedom-living libertarians spent their formative years reading Atlas Shrugged while masturbating. None are as smart as they think they are, but all would happily watch as the rest of us are marched into re-education camps, or worse. 

ICYMI: We’re living in the golden age of a**holes

And of course, they're voting with their very large wallets. Andreessen, Horowitz, and Musk have all announced they're intending to bankroll the Trump campaign via dark money PACs that have no upward limit on contributions. (Thanks loads, Citizens United.) David Sacks just spoke at the Republican National Convention. They are in the thick of everything.

Swallow the money

Here's my point: Don't be scared, don't get depressed, don't wallow in despair. Get angry. Educate yourselves about who's really going to benefit from Trump II and then share that knowledge. If you know anyone who is (amazingly) still on the fence about whom to vote for, let them know who'll really be running the country for the next three decades. 

It's time to treat these morally bankrupt billionaires like the walking anal suppositories they really are. It's not their country to do with as they please. It belongs to all the people, not just those who were in the right place at the right time and fell face first into a pile of cash.

And to anyone who's still with me, sorry for yet another downer newsblogletterpost. (I'm on a streak, and not a good one.) May I offer this brief video of adorable malamute puppies as a palette cleanser?

What do you do to stay sane in these troubling times? Share your thoughts in the comments or email me: [email protected].

[1] At $252 billion, Musk is the biggest of the big kahunas here thanks to his (grossly overvalued) Tesla stock, but all except Yarvin are members of the billionaires club. 

[2] Only a guy who could never get a date in high school would come up with a pseudonym like Mencius Moldbug. If he hadn't made money from tech startups he'd probably still be a virgin.

[3] It may look like a Serious Policy Document, but Project 2025 is The Handmaid's Tale meets 1984 as implemented by Darth Vader.  It's the Death Star for democracy.