by Brian Shilhavy, Health Impact News:
I have frequently reported in my articles that politicians are not the main people who run the U.S., but that Wall St. billionaires and Silicon Valley billionaires do.
Unlike publicly visible politicians who at least have the illusion of accountability, the billionaires who fund them usually do not.
So it is a rare treat when I find an article like the one that The Information published in their Weekend publication that does just that, and exposes where a lot of the new “Far Right” ideology originates from that many Silicon Valley billionaires subscribe to.
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The article was written by Julia Black, and titled:
The Far-Right Guru Who Has Befriended Silicon Valley’s Extreme Factions
Judging by the comments submitted to the article so far, it appears that this article is sending shock waves among those in Tech.
It is behind a paywall and a subscription is needed (which is well worth it as I find The Information the best source of “alternative” views on Big Tech with very solid journalism), but I will provide some excerpts and highlights here.
Featured in the article is one of Big Tech’s own, J.D. Vance, who recently became Trump’s Vice President choice, and how he has been influenced by Peter Thiel, who for years has followed the teachings of Curtis Yarvin, who believes “democracy” in the U.S. should be replaced by a “monarchy” instead.
Curtis Yarvin has found a place among the most right wing in tech.
In recent weeks, Democrats have relentlessly blistered Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, using a straightforward message: They’re too weird to hold high office.
If Trump and Vance are weird, imagine what the American public might make of Curtis Yarvin, 51, whose far-right thinking has influenced both Vance and, increasingly, members of the Silicon Valley right, including billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Both Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz have invested in Yarvin’s work.
As an intellectual godfather to these conservatives, Yarvin has laid out a philosophy in which he suggests replacing American democracy with a monarchy.
At a recent Palo Alto, Calif., reading of his poetry, he asked his audience to wear “cocktail attire for the new regime.” He has referred to himself and his friends as “dark elves” on a heroic journey to rescue the know-nothing “hobbits” who make up the American populace.
And last summer, Yarvin decided that Vibecamp, an annual Burning Man–style meetup of contrarian techies in rural Maryland, wasn’t contrarian enough. So he threw his own party in Washington that attendees called Vibekampf.
For now, Yarvin has found a place among Silicon Valley’s most ardent conservatives. His presence there matters. He has won the friendship and interest of people who possess great wealth and those in their own deep networks of influence.
By winning their attention, Yarvin has increased the chance that his ideas can spread further and seep deeper into the mainstream. (Source – emphasis mine.)
These new Big Tech “conservatives” use familiar terms with the Right, but with completely different meanings. So while “limited government” is a traditional, conservative and libertarian value, they take it even further by advocating NO government.
What does (Yarvin’s teaching) entail exactly?
He’d like to see American democracy as we know it collapse, with the country electing a president who could then rule as a dictator.
Under his plans, Yarvin has further proposed to seize private assets, replace the free press with state-run media and purge any officials deemed insufficiently loyal to the new regime.
Though he has deliberately maintained a low profile, chances are you’ve caught wind of his ideas: In the 2000s, for instance, Yarvin co-opted the term “red pill” from the “Matrix” movies to describe the political awakening of the new right wing.
While Yarvin has worked to push his ideas on America’s GOP political elite, he has also made inroads among tech’s conservative elite.
His primary conduit has been Thiel, who has introduced Yarvin to others in his circle. In addition, Yarvin has been welcomed into the homes of Marc Andreessen and PayPal co-founder Luke Nosek.
And you can detect distinct traces of Yarvinian thinking in written work like Andreessen’s 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” and “The Network State,” a book by Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase’s former chief technology officer, which envisions a system of new sovereign entities built on decentralized networks.
J.D. Vance is also one of his disciples, and they undoubtedly paid Trump a handsome sum to ensure Vance got picked as the VP.
What might further propel Yarvin’s philosophy is a second Trump presidency, with Trump’s strong reelection campaign already emboldening the GOP intelligentsia and the conservative technorati to speak up about their beliefs.
Moreover, Yarvin already has a relationship with Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance. Thiel introduced them.
Yarvin would only speak to me via email, and when I asked him about Vance, he praised the vice presidential candidate and suggested Vance has more to learn from him: “Seems nice. Kind of a normie still. Not sure if he totally gets it.” (Thiel, Andreessen, Nosek, Srinivasan and Vance did not respond to requests for comment.)
[T]he Yarvin associate perhaps poised to wield the most influence is J.D. Vance.
In 2021, Vance told podcaster Jack Murphy he’d been reading Yarvin’s arguments that “we should basically eliminate the administrative state,” adding that he found himself “sympathetic to that project.”
Vance doubled down on the theory the next year, saying that he would advise Trump to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat…and when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say, the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it,” according to Vanity Fair.
That, of course, sounds a lot like something Yarvin would say. In 2012, Yarvin coined the acronym RAGE: Retire All Government Employees.
Another term these new Big Tech “conservatives” like to use which has a wide appeal to the Right, is dismantling the “Deep State.”
One of Yarvin’s core objectives is dismantling what conservatives like to call the deep state. There’s some irony in that. He was born into a deep state family: His father was a foreign service officer for the U.S. State Department, who brought Yarvin along with him to postings in Cyprus and Portugal.
He started a blog called “Unqualified Reservations” in 2007, using it to develop an ultra-libertarian ideology he named formalism.
In his ideal system, America would eliminate the elites powering the media, academia and the administrative state, allowing the nation to run like a corporation managed by an omnipotent sovereign.
This idea of running America like a corporation began to influence Peter Thiel around that same time (2007-2009). They began to see CEOs of Big Tech as “all-powerful rulers,” even suggesting that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs should have been given “absolute power over the state of California.”
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