Transcription
So I felt like a boot off the throat. Like, every morning I wake up happier than the day before because all of these forms of repression that I just had gotten used to, Hallelujah, disappeared.
So far up their own woke asses, if those people stay in control, I think that the Republicans could have an electoral majority as far as the eye can see. It's really the dawn of a new crypto era. The future is going to be amazing. More than any other sector, the tech industry invested in this election. Crypto accounts for more than half the corporate spend, with no other industry coming close.
It's not unusual for industry to use their money to buy influence, and at a superficial glance, that's all the tech VC world wants. They want lower taxes and friendly regulation. They want the head of the Federal Trade Commission out. They want the tech industry to be responsive to the Future Commodities Trading Commission, not the Securities Exchange Commission.
Except that's not all they want. Behind the money and influence flowing into the Trump campaign is a set of bizarre beliefs and a dark agenda. I'm not just MAGA; I'm dark Gothic MAGA. You see, the tech bros of Silicon Valley believe that the American Empire is on the verge of collapse. Silicon Valley wants to speed this up but use the coming administration to create safe landing zones for them and their cash, where they can also run their own governments.
And what is so annoying about this is it makes me sound crazy. It makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist. But I'm talking about crazy people. I am talking about the guy who wants to colonize Mars. I am talking about the guy who said he gave up on democracy in 2009.
These tech bros justify their point of view because they believe that that's the natural place in society: the courageous geniuses on the new frontier. I'm not speculating; these men say it. They say it on podcasts, at conferences, in interviews, and in blog posts. Some are quiet; some are very, very loud. But they all are on board.
And I think that if we want to increase freedom, we want to increase the number of countries. If you want to replace the elite that you have today, what you need to do is you need to have a better elite. And there's a way to do this; it's been done before. We get kind of money and property right, and that's a strong foundation for building a world that we all want to live in.
We're seeing some breakdown of those in the real world in the United States lately. I'm definitely very interested in ways that you can sort of tokenize real estate and actual physical land to create better forms of society and governance. I do think America is in slow decline right now.
I would like us to all in crypto think about how we actually go create physical places in the world to preserve freedom over the long term. I think that's ultimately crypto's destiny. The people of Mars will be more enlightened and will not fight amongst each other too much.
It's basically tech libertarian futurism—an ideology around technology, including technology enhancing human freedom. I am trying to fix government in the US. The point was, like, let's have a new government. Where do we sort of go from the wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds?
We're far too far on the side that you can describe as collectivist, centralized, Borg-like, conformist, and also generally just simply incorrect. I think that what Elon’s doing is showing a path to fighting back. The left elite is going to be kicking and screaming the whole way.
One of the more normal billionaires had this to say about this particular group of men that I'm talking about: "What's happened in Silicon Valley is insane, right? It's not so much a support thing; it's more like a takeover thing, trying to put themselves in a position to have as much control as possible."
They want Trump to be the CEO of the United States of America, and they want to be the board of directors that makes him listen to them. Now, this hypothetical board includes a couple of power players that I think are worth keeping an eye on, namely Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Brian Armstrong, Mark Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and David Sacks.
In this video, I'm going to try and lay out what I think these people are doing behind the scenes. If you do want to dive further into this topic, I recommend looking at the work of Balaji. I have linked his blog below; this is his beat, and he's amazing at it.
This man is named Balaji San, like Beyoncé. He tends to only go by his first name. Balaji is highly involved in the tech scene, and while not a billionaire himself, he is friends with a lot of them. He's a former partner of Andreessen Horowitz. He is the former CTO of Brian Armstrong's Coinbase.
Thiel actually recommended Balaji to be the head of the FDA during the first Trump administration. Balaji wrote a book; it's called "The Network State: How to Start Your Own Country." In that book, he talks about how to break nation-states apart into smaller territories, which can then be run like corporations.
What I mean by Silicon Valley's ultimate exit basically means build an opt-in society ultimately outside the US, run by technology. And this is actually where the valley is going. You see, like many in the industry, Balaji is a disruptor. He is interested in disrupting the current idea of nationhood through the creation of a network of sovereign tech-run territories protected by military-grade security.
Balaji wasn't the first person to come up with this idea, not even in the tech scene, but he was the first person to present it in a more palatable way. The idea actually comes from someone named Curtis Yarvin in "Patchwork." Yarvin wrote the basic idea of Patchwork: as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the resident opinions.
Patchwork is a reboot of the current system in order to install a new operating system. Yes, Yarvin is a software developer with a company named Bit, invested in by Peter Thiel. He refers to these small territories as patches, but he's flexible about how they might run—maybe like a corporate urban space or a city-state like Athens.
These corporate dictatorships would use all-seeing surveillance to protect their citizens and enforce their laws. There would be biometric IDs. If you're poor, you will have to move to another patch, or the poor could be ground up and used as biodiesel or locked into a virtual reality prison.
Now, Yarvin said he was joking about the biodiesel thing, but not about the prison thing. So I'm not sure if he was joking about the biodiesel, which gives us an understanding of why Balaji had to come up with a more appealing way to present this idea.
Balaji has less about dictatorship and mass incarceration and more about freedom and opportunity. A lot of people in the industry acknowledge that Balaji's ideas are a little out there. This is Balaji, yeah, yeah, this is Balaji. And I would dismiss them too if those same people weren't actively funding them. Millions of dollars are being funneled into these projects as we speak.
This is the website for Praxis, a network state funded by Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen, Balaji, and Sam Altman through their shared capital fund, Promis, which is dedicated to funding the creation of network cities. The website for Praxis says, "As local communities dissolve and nation-states stumble, network states will ascend. The next global superpower will be a network state. The next America will be on-chain."
The stated goal of Praxis is to build a corporate government with a global footprint. It will have territories all over the world; crypto will be its currency. The modern global system wants the greatest power in the history of man, which has become a brittle, jerry-rigged contraption incapable of carrying out the most basic functions.
As these governing institutions continue to degrade, people will come to realize that no one is truly on their side. As nation-states falter, network states become inevitable. I should mention that Promis Capital is funding the creation of other network states, many of which are further along than Praxis.
Some examples are Prospera in Honduras, Afropolitan, Itana, and small farm cities in Africa, Metropolis in Palau, and I think Young Drunk City is planned for South Asia. On Promis's website, they claim, "Decades of research on economic development has shown that the primary determinant of prosperity is the quality of a country's laws and the integrity of its courts, administrators, and other legal institutions. When institutions are outmoded, corrupted, or failing, the result is untold human suffering. Yet upgrading national institutions is notoriously difficult. Our solution: build the cities of tomorrow."
Right now, they are creating cloud communities, virtual nations. Once they have access to land, they will get their citizens to migrate to that city. Have a look at the pledge that you sign when you join Praxis, which you can join right now, by the way.
Promis isn't actually Peter Thiel's first flirtation with exiting democracy either. In 2009, he funded the Seasteading Institute. I want to say something on why I think seasteading is not just possible or desirable, but why it is actually necessary. The Seasteading Institute envisioned building these floating cities in the ocean outside of government's jurisdiction, where billionaires could live and create as they saw fit.
This idea kind of ran out of steam because nobody wants to live at sea, especially not billionaires, which means they need land. But how do we get from a nation-state to a network state? This is actually related to a fundamental concept in political science: the concept of voice versus exit.
If a company or a country is in decline, you can try voice, or you can try exit. Voice is basically changing the system from within, whereas exit is leaving to create a new system, a new startup, or to join a competitor. Sometimes there's another way that Balaji also talks about how this could possibly happen. He calls it tech Zionism.
Right? You know what I'm really calling for is something like tech Zionism—a movement supported by a global network to take back territory in the city, floor by floor, street by street, block by block, policeman by policeman. You have a foothold of private property, and you have a group membership of great tribe membership and private property. You also issue t-shirts.
The tribal ends; it's like a virtual reality filter. Every single thing can be tagged as gray or blue in the city. I mean, like literally. So gray is the future; red is the past; blue is the present. So blue stands against both the past and the future. They're against both the self-driving cars, and they don't want to go back to the '50s. They prefer OnlyFans, Me Too, BLM, Ukraine.
The hard part is to take control of the streets. How can you fence off a street and make clear that it's under gray control? Take total control of your neighborhood, push out all blues, tell them they're as unwelcome as just as blues. Ethnically cleanse me out of San Francisco, like push out all blues.
Who has lost some territory in the cloud? They still control the land. Once gray starts taking back control of the land, they're really going to howl as they start losing. They're going to whistle for backup from California and eventually DC.
Okay, they're going to try to get executive orders or things like that, which means you're going to need to have sympathizers at the level of California and DC who will side with you enough to block those actions. Number one. And or number two, you actually get to the level of a sanctuary city. You say, "I dare you."
Keep in mind actions like this are already being attempted in places like Solano County, where they're trying to build California forever, or the actions that Gary Tan is taking in San Francisco. But the people in these areas are putting up a fight, and it's costly, and it's slowing everything down.
Fortunately, Trump is talking about something called Freedom Cities—the creation of new cities on federal land. Almost one-third of the land mass of the United States is owned by the federal government, with just a very, very small portion of that land, just a fraction, one-half of one percent. Would you believe that we should hold a contest to charter up to 10 new cities and award them to the best proposals for development?
These Freedom Cities will reopen the frontier and reignite American imagination. I wonder where he got that idea. This is where JD Vance comes in. JD Vance is seen as a mild-mannered, well-spoken success story populist who was born into tough circumstances in Appalachia but managed to pull himself up by his bootstraps, graduate from Yale Law, become a bestselling author, become a tech venture capitalist, only to give all of that up for public service.
When he was officially tapped on the shoulder for the vice presidential nomination, many of his former colleagues celebrated. Elon Musk, David Sacks, Mark Andreessen, and Balaji all tweeted their congratulations. After all, it was a strange choice for Donald Trump, especially compared to Mike Pence.
But when it comes to JD Vance, a lot of people make strange choices. Peter Thiel invested $15 million in his campaign to become senator—the largest single donation to a Senate campaign in his history. JD Vance is an extension of Peter Thiel. That doesn't mean that he is beholden to him, but it does mean that Peter Thiel has had such a huge influence on JD Vance's life that you cannot understand him without first understanding who Peter Thiel is.
"I'm Peter Thiel. I build companies, and I support people who are building new things." I would say Peter Thiel is the most honest representation of what Silicon Valley is today. Worth up to $9 billion, extremely well-connected, he started off as a member of the PayPal Mafia—the guys who invented PayPal.
They originally intended for that to be a libertarian alternative to the US dollar. When it wasn't that and they sold out, he used the money that he made from PayPal to invest in other companies, including being the first outside investor in Facebook. Today, he has invested in a huge portion of the tech industry, including companies like Sam Altman's OpenAI.
He's also a big deal in the tech defense sector. He owns Palantir, which is surveillance software that is basically omnipresent in the US government. It's used by the CIA, FBI, ICE, Homeland Security, various police forces. Palantir is also used by private companies such as Cambridge Analytica.
In 2009, Thiel wrote a manifesto called "The Education of a Libertarian." In this manifesto, he disavows electoral politics and democracy because he doesn't trust the people with big decisions. And he's come to believe that democracy and freedom are inherently incompatible.
Over time, he has talked extensively about finding areas where great men can make choices as they see fit, unbridled by the law. Thiel gave the Trump campaign $1.25 million. What Trump represents isn't crazy, and it's not going away. He points toward a new Republican Party.
He points even beyond the remaking of one party to a new American politics. And in return, he got an office in Trump Tower, where he had the president's ear and suggested candidates for his administration. Some of his selections didn't make the cut, like Balaji, but some did.
Michael Kratos was put in as the Chief Technology Officer of the United States of America, a position I did not know existed. And Michael Anton was put on the National Security Council. Michael Anton wrote a very concerning essay called "The Flight 93 Election," which I have linked below, and it is very enlightening about who Peter Thiel thinks belongs on the National Security Council.
And remember Curtis Yarvin, who we were talking about before? He is often referred to as Thiel's in-house philosopher. Thiel has not only invested in a number of Yarvin's businesses, but he keeps Yarvin in his inner circle. Yarvin watched the 2016 election from Peter Thiel's house, where they celebrated with champagne Thiel's successful investment in the Trump campaign.
And while Peter Thiel may not be as explicit in his beliefs as someone like Balaji or Elon or even Mark Andreessen, Yarvin assured Milo Yiannopoulos over email that Peter Thiel was fully enlightened; he just plays it very carefully. People in the new circles refer to Yarvin as Lord Yarvin or the Prophet.
This isn't someone on the fringe of the movement; this is someone who is respected, just like Peter Thiel. JD Vance is an avid reader and friend of Curtis Yarvin. There's this guy Curtis Yarvin who's written about some of these things. Vance not only name-checks Curtis Yarvin, but he often uses his language and repeats his ideas.
You actually popularized the term "red pill" in the political context, is that right? Yeah, that's actually true. Is this concept of red-pilling? Yarvin writes a lot of strange things, but one thing I'm particularly interested in is the blueprint he wrote for Donald Trump. It's called "The Butterfly Revolution." It's quite radical and another thing that would be easy to dismiss.
But here's a clip of Yarvin talking about why he thinks it would be successful today. "K, uh, 2024 are incredibly frivolous, incredibly ironic. It is the most ironic society in history. Like, imagine people trying to cope with a film like 'The Matrix' or 'Inception' in like 1960. Total frame-breaking of this kind in some ways is actually easier than the sort of incremental political logic that people have employed in the past.
They can sort of more easily imagine, 'Oh man, it's all The Truman Show.' In fact, they mostly believe that it's all The Truman Show; they just don't understand the implications of that."
Something I find concerning is the many ways that "The Butterfly Revolution" perfectly aligns with Project 2025. Not a huge amount of the tech bros in Silicon Valley are religious, but that doesn't really stop these kinds of groups from working together. Definitionally, both of these movements are fascistic.
Fascism has never been a fully coherent ideology; that's one of the things that gives fascism its strength—its ability to bring together groups from different movements, all of whom see fascism as a viable mechanism to achieving their own program. And that's why some people say that fascism is always hyphenated. So it's always going to be tech fascism and Christian fascism. But these people can work together, and they do.
One of the things that evangelicals and libertarians should agree on is that the political order is not divinely ordained. Amen. Project 2025 has similar stated goals to the tech industry, in particular the dismantling of the administrative state and the return of self-governance to the people.
Project 2025 is made up of four pillars, and pillar four is the playbook. It is a transition plan for the president's eyes only, which will be rolled out upon the president's utterance of "So help me God." We don't know what's in this playbook, but given the alignment of talking points and key figures being involved in both, it wouldn't surprise me if it was similar to "The Butterfly Revolution," and I think that's worth investigating.
"The Butterfly Revolution," step one: campaign on autocracy. He says, "You're not going to be a dictator, are you?" I said, "No, no, no, other than day one." Yarvin says that Donald Trump should run on his autocratic ambition, but he should frame it as destroying an inefficient and unworkable system.
"We are in a late Republican period. If we're going to push back against it, we have to get pretty, pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with. We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."
Step two: purge the bureaucracy. Curtis Yarvin refers to this as "RAGE." RAGE stands for "Retire All Government Employees," and he has clearly influenced some very important people. "I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state."
And we know that Donald Trump would be open to RAGE because it sounds a lot like Schedule F, an executive order issued by Donald Trump in October of 2020. Schedule F would have essentially stripped protections from civil servants who didn't show enough loyalty to the president of the day, which is why Joe Biden rescinded this order the second he came into office in January of 2021.
But Trump has said he plans to reinstate it. "First, I will immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats, and I will wield that power very aggressively."
But how could you accomplish that so quickly? I mean, you need civil servants. "Don't worry; Project 2025 is already on it." Pillar two of Project 2025 could be considered MAGA LinkedIn. This platform is designed to pre-screen candidates for their loyalty and streamline the appointments process.
We talk about conservative warriors, but we want people who've been canceled, who've kind of, you know, figuratively given blood for the movement. You can join it right now. Then pair that with pillar three, which is an online education platform known as the Presidential Administration Academy, and you have preemptively educated all future employees on what is expected of them from the conservative administration.
Step three: ignore the courts. According to Yarvin, the president should simply state that he believes Marbury v. Madison was decided incorrectly, declare a state of emergency, and that way Supreme Court rulings would be merely advisory.
"When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, 'The Chief Justice has made his ruling; now let him enforce it.'" But thanks to recent Supreme Court decisions, he may not even need to do that. The high court has just issued one of its most consequential rulings in recent decades—a decision that not only affects the 2024 race for president but also the future of the presidency itself.
Trump v. United States has laid the groundwork to ensure that Donald Trump can ignore the court. Now the president has absolute immunity for core official acts and presumptive immunity for all other official acts—a distinction that has not been clarified by the court, with only a few examples being provided and absolutely no guardrails to stop the misuse of this decision being put in place.
Today's decision almost certainly means that there are virtually no limits to what a president can do because the power of the office will no longer be constrained by the law, even including the Supreme Court of the United States. The only limits will be self-imposed by the president alone.
Step four: co-opt Congress. Yarvin suggests that Trump handpick candidates for every single seat, with the sole criterion being personal loyalty to him. Because you can't have a parliamentary dictatorship if you don't have Congress. And while it seems like a big task, Yarvin assures us you only need a couple of billion dollars.
I know some people with a few billion dollars. While Peter Thiel may have decided to sit this election cycle out, Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen, and Brian Armstrong have not. "We got to get the congressman elected, and we got to get the senators elected because we can take the Senate pretty easily. And I think with our little secret, we're going to do really well with the House."
Right? Our little secret is having a big impact. He and I have a secret; we'll tell you what it is when the race is over. Step five: centralize police and government powers. In this declared state of emergency, Yarvin suggests that Trump take direct control over all law enforcement agencies, federalize the National Guard, and effectively create a national police force that absorbs local bodies.
"I think that actually the support of the democratic public is a cipher. I think that actually all you need is command of the police." This is so that a centralized police state can be created to back the power grab. And I'd say there's no way this could happen if Donald Trump hadn't tried to do it before.
We know that he sent the National Guard during the George Floyd protests and then was insistent on having the National Guard go in and do their work. "It was like a miracle; it just everything stopped." And we know that he wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act. "Your state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them."
Now, there are of course protections within the law, Posse Comitatus, to stop a president from doing this, but Donald Trump has found a loophole before. I'm sure he'll find one again, especially in a state of emergency where he has absolute immunity for core official acts.
Step six: shut down elite media and academic institutions. Yarvin has explicitly said that you cannot have a New York Times or a Harvard past April. He has a popular theory that true power in America is held by something he calls "the Cathedral," a term that should alert you whenever you hear it.
The Cathedral is made up of elite media and academic institutions that, according to Yarvin, set the bounds of acceptable political discourse and distort reality to conform with their ideological beliefs. The Cathedral is essentially performing the functions that a Ministry of Truth would perform in a classic Orwellian environment, and it's performing the functions that a religion would in a classic theocracy.
Therefore, existing media and academic institutions need to be dismantled. Vance has been quite vocal about his disdain for academic institutions despite graduating from Yale and often repeats Yarvin's ideas in his own words. "So much of what we want to do in this movement in this country, I think, are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions, specifically the universities, which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity.
That provides research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country. And so I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country."
Trump has said that if elected, he will reclaim the universities from the Marxist maniacs and lunatics who currently control them. "How will he do this? When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics. We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges."
In his agenda 47, Trump has proposed a law to monitor universities for civil rights violations. "I will advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment." That means he could essentially put an institution like Harvard out of business overnight.
Elon Musk spends a significant portion of his time trying to undermine existing media in favor of his own platform, X. Trump has absolutely no problem getting rid of legacy media. He has repeatedly talked about the government's licensing of broadcast airwaves and about 15 times threatened to revoke licenses of existing stations.
"And it's frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write, and people should look into it." Step seven: turn out your people. Get your people out in the street to show their support for you anytime a government agency tries to obstruct you.
Yarvin says it should be like the post-Soviet revolutions. It should be masses of people; it should be joyful. And we know that Donald Trump has no problem in asking people to physically show their support for him. "We're going to walk down to the Capitol because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength."
Once this Butterfly Revolution has taken place and the presidency looks more like a CEO or a king, the court of tech geniuses will have a much more realistic shot at getting what they want. One thing I can tell you about these Silicon Valley tech bros is that they are long-term thinkers. They are planning for years and years and years into the future.
In case you needed more evidence that Silicon Valley and Project 2025 are in bed together, there is this strange tech conference called Reboot. In September, at the last Reboot conference, which is all about creating a new reality, there was a special secret guest speaker. That secret guest speaker ended up being Kevin Roberts, who gave a speech titled "Tech and the American Republic."
The point of trying to put Vance in the VP position wasn't just to have him one heartbeat away from an old and ailing president; it was to introduce him to the world as the new blueprint of the Republican Party. To provide a strong option for a post-MAGA Republican Party—a party that will co-opt the government to destroy the country in order to allow self-described great men to install themselves as many kings.