1. HAIL MARS! WHO IS CRAZY HERE? 36 articles

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In addition to being highly intelligent, signature nerds with programming as a hobby and a huge appetite for making money, our tech billionaires have one more thing in common. They are big fans of Ayn Rand.

Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen and Larry Page have all declared their admiration for Ayn Rand’s books, which they read at a young age and were inspired by and have since recommended. And what applies to the bosses, of course, also applies to the sub-nerds in Silicon Valley. Vanity Fair magazine even wrote that the long-deceased Ayn Rand is probably “the most influential figure in the industry.”

Elon Musk, who has often shared Rand quotes on social media, has said that he sees similarities between Howard Roark (from Rand’s book The Fountainhead) and John Galt (from Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged) and his own vision as an entrepreneur or ‘builder’, as Rand called his heroes.

And Steve Jobs from Apple has said that the hero of Atlas Shrugged has been one of his “guides in life”. In other words, here we have a key to understanding where the tech billionaires are taking us.

Howard Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead from 1943, (Danish: Only the Strong Are Free), is an innovative architect whose progressive ideas are constantly frustrated by regulations, bureaucratic officials, unimaginative colleagues and mediocre collaborators. So when a developer violates Roark’s integrity and freedom as an architect and allows himself to make changes to his great visionary housing project for the working class poor, he blows up the whole thing with dynamite to the great joy of the readers and is subsequently acquitted in court, to the great satisfaction of the readers.

That was all that was missing.

The moral is clear:

Clear the way for bureaucracy, regulations, and the clutches of unimaginative mediocrity—with dynamite if necessary—and free the innovators from all restraints; only then will society flourish.

The philosophy is called libertarianism, and even without Howard Roark's example, most tech billionaires would probably be libertarians and insist that their tech companies be freed from all restraints and regulations.

Like fire, capitalism burns best when unleashed.



The tech giants' declared mortal enemy has been the EU Commission, which, led by Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, has for 10 years filed one compensation case after another against Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta for illegal user registration, tax evasion and monopoly formation.

Margrethe's proudest moment was when she was able to send Apple a bill for 100 billion kroner, but after numerous law firms and lobbyists had been by, it was of course annulled by the EU Court of Justice due to lack of sufficient evidence.

But the Commission learned from Vestager's failure and fought back hard by adopting the EU's Digital Markets Act in 2024, which makes it illegal for tech giants to exploit their monopoly position, and the Digital Services Act, which is intended to ensure a safe online environment for consumers and businesses in the EU and, through clear rules, requires tech giants to ensure that EU citizens are not exposed to content, hate speech and disinformation via their platforms and social media.

For good measure, an AI Regulation was adopted at the same time, which is the world's first legislation on artificial intelligence. The regulation, which will enter into force next year, is intended to ensure that AI systems are safe, ethical and reliable before they are unleashed in the European community, and that of course did not make things better.

Clasped and challenged on his freedom by petty bureaucrats in this malignant way, Rand's freedom hero Howard Roark would have reached for his sticks of dynamite, and so did our tech billionaires.

Although most had previously belonged to the losing president's Democratic camp, they quickly rallied behind newly elected Donald Trump, who himself said in an interview that he identified with Howard Roark, whom he called a hero. So the day after his inauguration, Trump declared war on the EU in a memorandum that promised tough punitive tariffs against countries that hindered the global competitiveness of American corporations.

The American tech sector was specifically mentioned as a victim of "overseas blackmail and unfair fines and penalties." And when Vice President Vance was able to lecture Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at an international meeting that European laws were "burdensome international rules" that stifled innovation and created unnecessary obstacles for large American corporations, Howard Roark would have nodded proudly.

But of course there was also regulation at home

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Instead of blowing up the clinging and oppressive rule system like the terrorist Howard Roark, the alternative – as all frustrated teenagers will know – is to turn your back on society and sign out.

This was the choice of John Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand's 1957 book Atlas Shrugged (Danish: And the World Shrank). When, like another Gulliver, he had grown tired of carrying around the demanding Lilliputians, he shook them off and went his own way with the other innovative business leaders who, in protest against the stifling state coercion and collectivism, had abandoned their command posts in the economy and gone on strike. After which, without the great captains at the helm, society naturally capsized with disastrous consequences for the Lilliputians.

If this was the motive for revenge – 'so they can learn it' – then the wet dream followed, when John Galt, like another Moses, led the great business leaders, inventors and artists into the promised land. In the novel, a secret valley – Galt’s Gulch – deep in the mountains of Colorado, where the freedom-loving loners could realize their ideal society under the leadership of the wise John Galt. Namely, a society without coercion and rules that force the inhabitants to act against their own whims and personal interests. A place where they can work for their own profit and joy without sacrificing their values ​​or goals for others.

The story of John Galt and the ideal society where the best minds rule was no less popular with nerds than the story of Howard Roark, who would not accept any social ties. Peter Thiel has called Atlas Shrugged one of the books that has influenced him the most. Elon Musk has often referred to and recommended Atlas Shrugged, and pointed out his own similarity to John Galt. Apple’s Steve Jobs has even called Atlas Shrugged a clue in his life. And to stay on the domestic side, the owner of the online bank Saxo, the multimillionaire Lars Sejr Christensen, had the Danish edition reprinted in 10,000 copies for distribution to the top of Danish politics and business at his own expense.

But the vision is of course not new. It is as old as Plato and his state, where the philosophers were made kings. It is the same vision that Wernher von Braun unfolded in his Mars novel, where the technologically superior Martians had developed an ideal society under the leadership of the wise Elon. Undoubtedly, it is also the vision behind Elon Musk's dream of building a new society on Mars.

But as Plato discovered when, as an advisor to the tyrant Dionysus the Second, he tried to introduce his ideal society in Sicily, the project is just as difficult to implement in the real world as flying people to Mars. But of course, you can always start small.

That's what Peter Thiel did, who, like his partner Elon Musk, had become a multimillionaire after selling PayPal. Inspired by the vision in Atlas Shrugged, Thiel invested in a venture called the Seasteading Institute, which, like American pioneers of the past, wanted to build a community of homesteads.

This time, not on land, but floating on the ocean outside the national territorial border, so that the residents, freed from laws, regulations and moral conventions, could choose their own government and, together with like-minded people, live out their libertarian dreams and ideals. Such an ‘ocean state’ would be free from welfare and minimum wage and have looser building requirements and fewer gun restrictions, declared an expectant Peter Thiel.

Unfortunately, the joy of anticipation was, as usual, the greatest. Just as a promising contract had been signed with the government of French Polynesia, the bitcoin crash in 2017 put the project on hold, and it has not yet been resumed.



(to be continued)

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At this point in our study, one could easily get the idea that our tech billionaires must be psychopaths, coldly and cynically disregarding their fellow human beings. I don't know if half-brains can technically be psychopaths, but maybe they can. And maybe our friends are too. But that's not the impression I've gotten myself after spending a lot of quality time with them at - podcast host Lex Fridman on YouTube

The son of a Russian plasma physicist who was brought to the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lex became a computer engineer and robotics researcher. A study he did of Tesla's autopilot led to Elon Musk flying him in for an interview, and that was the young man's luck. The Artificial Intelligence Podcast, which Lex had started the year before, suddenly increased its viewership significantly, changed its name to The Lex Fridman Podcast, and today has over 3.6 million subscribers, including myself.

A self-proclaimed geek with programming as a hobby, Lex conducts in-depth, hour-long conversations in his podcast with prominent figures in artificial intelligence, technology, science and philosophy, many of whom are quite clearly self-proclaimed geeks, and it is here that I have met all the tech billionaires, Elon Musk three times – podcast #252, #400 and #438.

The conversations have always been interesting and with such great intellectual depth that you often have not been able to follow. They have also often been concerned and searching and revolve around existential themes such as the meaning of life and the future of humanity. If you have plenty of time, it is recommended to visit Lex Fridman, it is both educational and interesting.

(And if you are into that kind of thing, it does not make it any less interesting that Lex, with his close connections to all the top people in the industry, is very likely not only an intelligent person but also an intelligence asset).

Judging from the talks I've attended, it's been practically impossible to get a bad impression of Lex and his guests, even if I've tried. But there's something. A touch of naivety. It's as if you can clearly feel the child inside. Which not only endows them with a child's intelligent curiosity and enthusiastic exploration, but also with a child's innocence and naivety. We'll come back to this later in the study, but anyone who has seen Elon Musk jumping around on stage like an excited child over and over again will probably understand what I mean.

But even in the paradise of childish innocence, there are of course snakes.



(To be continued.)

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A programmer from an early age and enrolled at the age of 12 in the Johns Hopkins University study of children with extraordinary mathematical gifts, he followed the pattern. Studies in computer science followed, but like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and many of the other signature nerds, he never completed his university education, choosing instead to seek his fortune in the tech companies of Silicon Valley, where of course he also, as the pattern dictates, started his own IT startup. However, inventing and making money was too banal for Curtis Yarvin. He thought thoughts, and it was like the blogger Mencius Moldbug that he would win his place in history.

Every good crime story needs its Professor Moriarty, Lex Luthor or Joker, and Curtis Yarvin qualifies as the dark genius of our history. As the self-proclaimed godfather of those who have taken the red pill from the movie Matrix and not the mind-numbing blue one, he knew the unbearable truth about society and used it as a weapon to shake the innocent. He thought forbidden thoughts, and was the naughty boy that the others were not allowed to play with.

Which of course made him enormously fascinating to the geeks in Silicon Valley, where many could not help but shudder with delight at Mencius Moldbug's provocative rudeness when he broke one taboo after another. Because when someone in politically hyper-correct California declares that democracy has played out its role and should be replaced by a monarchy, or defends slavery in the past with the argument that it comes more naturally to some races to be slaves, or claims that whites have a higher IQ than blacks, then it is of course dog farts from BonBon to the tenth power.

But there were of course some who saw more in Yarvin's taboo-breaking than just naughty dog ​​farts. Not least the people in the PayPal mafia felt strongly attracted to Yarvin's black thoughts.

The PayPal mafia is a name that Fortune Magazine has given to the people who founded and developed PayPal, four of whom came from a childhood in Apartheid South Africa, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks and Roelof Botha, which perhaps explains some of the fascination with Yarvin.

The term mafia is well chosen because the members of the group, like a band of brothers, have subsequently stuck together and supported each other with experience sharing and investments, while each of them developed some of the most successful tech companies in Silicon Valley, Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube and Palantir Technologies, to name just a few.

If the PayPal mafia has spun its strong web over Silicon Valley in this way, then Peter Thiel is the spider at the center of the web, and Peter himself seems to have been a bit of a darkened soul.

In the magazine Baffler, you can read that German-born Peter spent his early years lonely and serious in a South African uranium mining town, where his father was a chemical engineer and the black workers died like flies from radiation, and things didn't get any better when the family returned to San Francisco. "Slender, haughty and subtly feminine, he was bullied and mocked, and had to seek refuge in competitive chess, high grades and rereading The Lord of the Rings. Reserved and unpopular, Thiel fought with his surroundings and made his plans, convinced of his own superiority."



In any case, since he invested venture capital in Curtis Yarvin's tech startup, Peter Thiel has felt a certain community with the young man. Both are super intelligent, of course, like all the signature geeks, but also more broadly educated and more culturally enlightened than most of their peers. “In the bright and superficial Silicon Valley,” writes The New York Review, “Thiel stands out by having retained the intellectual intensity of a student nerd, a quality that has made him the object of curiosity, admiration and ridicule.” Yarvin is also a nerd, spending $500 a month on books, he has said.

And they both shared the same great enthusiasm for Tolkien's fairy tale universe.

For example, Peter Thiel named his tech group Palantir after the Sin Stones - Palantíri - in The Lord of the Rings; the stones that allow the user to see over great distances and discover what is happening elsewhere; an appropriate name, since Palantir, with a market value of around $211 billion today, is one of the world's largest providers of surveillance technology, with customers from police forces and intelligence agencies all over the world.

And Thiel's venture capital firm, which invests primarily in technology startups in the financial sector, he named the Valar after a group of god-like beings who, in Tolkien's world, act as protectors and guides to lesser beings such as elves, humans, dwarves and other races. You get the point.

But if Peter has become the spider in the middle, the Baffler article might be right when it writes: “His study of Tolkien would prove fatal. The author’s images of Mordor—a technological civilization bent on absolute power—enchanted him. Spurred on by fantasy novels, he slowly became aware of the role he wanted to take on in the world. He wanted to play the villain.”

Or perhaps the more hopeful assessment in the New York Review is correct: “Thiel and his Silicon Valley circle may simply be able to imagine a future that would never occur to other people because they have refused to leave the stage of youthful wonder that life forces most people to grow out of… He wants to live forever, to be able to escape to outer space or an oceanic city-state and play chess against a robot that can debate Tolkien, because those were the fantasies that filled his childhood imagination.” And that’s beautiful.

If you are fascinated by Peter Thiel, you can read more here

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In Curtis Yarvin's world, it is the elves who have ruled the roost since the 20th century. By elves, the mischievous blogger meant the moneyed elite, the managerial elite, and the professional elite, who, as he wrote, have a wonderful recruitment system called college that ensures new members for the elven aristocracy.

Most of our signature nerds were like Yarvin dropouts and had a very ambivalent relationship with university. Perhaps that is why Peter Thiel offered highly gifted computer guys $100,000 if they dropped out of college and took a job in Silicon Valley.

Which, incidentally, brings to mind the curious fact that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, son of one of Europe's richest men and himself with Asperger's syndrome, repeatedly tried to persuade his best students at Cambridge to drop out of school and get a manual job.

Because the elves must constantly fear that the far more numerous hobbits - those in the boat who row; the people; the working class – for understandable reasons, will come after them with haymakers and kill them, democracy was introduced at an earlier point in history as a kind of protection. But in America in the twenty-first century, there is no longer anything that can meaningfully be called democracy, explains Yarvin.

Under Barack Obama, society has degenerated into a corrupt oligarchy, where power lies with connected networks of academics, media elites and government bureaucrats, which Yarvin calls the Cathedral. Although most Americans have taken the blue pills and continue to believe in free elections and popular rule as the source of political power and legitimacy, it is the Cathedral that has the real power, including the critical power to determine what is true and what is false, he says.

However, there is a group who are themselves elves, but no longer believe in the official state ideology and reject the so-called progressive worldview. Dark elves – Yarvin calls them – and considers himself their philosophical oracle. But what is their vision for the future - besides seizing power, of course?

In short, the dark elves' goal is to take a leap into the future by turning back time to better times, when kings and aristocrats ruled, when hobbits knew their natural place, and when brave entrepreneurs with royal authority could set out and found colonies far from home.

In doing so, they want to create a new era of enlightenment. Or rather, a dark era of enlightenment, the Dark Enlightenment, as the movement's philosopher, Curtis Yarvin, calls it. A dark enlightenment, befitting the reactionary, dark elves, who are described unkindly by a journalist in The Baffler magazine:
“They oppose universal suffrage, egalitarianism, and pluralism. Some are atheists, while others practice obscure orthodox beliefs, but most are young white men embittered by ‘political correctness.’

As far as I can tell, their ideal society is most like Blade Runner, but without all the Asians filling the streets. Neo-reactionaries like to see themselves as heroes in another sci-fi movie, in fact they sometimes boast that they have been ‘redpilled,’ like Keanu Reeves’ character in The Matrix – a film Yarvin considers ‘brilliant.’”

But the desired return to the ancien régime of old must of course be in an ultra-modern hyper-tech version upgraded with artificial intelligence and all the glories of Silicon Valley and organized on the model of a Silicon Valley tech startup with a CEO as authoritative leader or dictator. Because, as Yarvin said, the United States suffers from “chronic kinglessness”; what is needed is “a national CEO or, what is called, a dictator,” so “if Americans want to change their regime, they have to overcome their dictator phobia.”

But if the dream were to become more than just adventure and role-playing, such an upheaval would undeniably seem a bit difficult. But if you couldn’t bring down the whole building at once like Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, then perhaps you could, like her John Galt, start small and just move out.

Either by using the ballot to create free zones or free cities with particularly lenient rules within the nation’s borders, as former Thiel employee Garry Tan, now himself a tech investor and entrepreneurial mentor, is trying to do as the spearhead of a tech-funded campaign to gain control of the city government in San Francisco.

Or as Peter Thiel himself planned with his floating small communities, already mentioned in chapter 12, which were moved outside the territorial borders of the nation and thus outside the law and justice of society.

Or you could simply build your own free city in a completely different country, as Peter Thiel, together with another tech billionaire Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape with the famous JavaScript, did with the city of Próspera. Founded as a free zone on the Honduran island of Roatan, the free city's purpose was to offer low taxes; health, education and police as privatized services; less regulation and more freedom to, for example, experiment with driverless cars and biotechnology.



Construction started in 2021, but there is already a “Bitcoin Center” with a café and an academy that can train people in the use of bitcoin, a luxury resort with a golf course, scuba school, luxury apartments and a dormitory for young tech and crypto professionals. For $25,000, gene therapy injections are offered that slow down aging, and another company offers “subdermal implantation services and a variety of cybernetic upgrades,” because, as the company’s ad says, “We help people become self-sovereign cyborgs.”

The latter service requires presence, but otherwise you can obtain e-residency if you’d rather wait to move in. E-residency, first invented by Estonia in 2014, gives global entrepreneurs online access to the country’s services and digital offerings without having to live there.

Finally, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that Honduras regretted approving the free economic zone on Roatan, which of course quickly turned out to be pushing farmers off their land and depleting their water resources. The zone had been passed under the military dictatorship with a lot of muscle power, protesters were abducted, raped, and even murdered. So when a civilian government came to power again, the permit was withdrawn.

But, but, but. The previous government had entered into a so-called ISDS, investor-state dispute settlement, which gives foreign investors the right to bring disputes before an arbitration court consisting only of lawyers, whose decisions cannot be appealed.

When the military dictatorship had given Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and the other investors a 50-year contract for the free zone, they believed that the cancellation was a disagreement and sued Honduras for over $10 billion, which is twice the annual state budget of the poor and debt-ridden country. The case has not been decided yet, but Hondurans naturally fear the worst.

windows user: Hold down Ctrl, when clicking: https://www.wired.com/story/a-lawsuit-f ... -honduras/

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Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel's dream of breaking up nation-states into small self-governing units controlled by autocrats and capitalist corporations is quite a throwback to the good old days.

Before a gigantic centralization created the large centralized nation-states, Europe consisted of a network of small principalities led by autocrats mixed with city-states led by merchants and trading companies, and the city-state model had spread as small colonies far from the homeland.

Just as Marseille, Naples and Istanbul were founded by Greek merchants as trading posts in antiquity, present-day New York was founded as a trading post by merchants in the Dutch Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie, New Orleans was founded as a trading post by merchants in the French Compagnie des Indes Occidentales, Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were developed as trading posts by merchants in the English East-India Company, Jakarta was founded as a trading post by merchants in the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, and Montreal was founded as a trading post by merchants in the French Compagnie des Cent-Associés.

Denmark was of course also involved. The merchants of the West India-Guinea Company founded Fort Christiansborg, which is today located in a district of Ghana's capital Accra, and the towns of Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas and Christiansted on the island of St. Croix in the Caribbean.

Just as the values ​​– and energy – that flowed from the colonies gilded Copenhagen and the Danish Golden Age, the flow of innovative innovations such as the limited liability company and the stock exchange created an economic breakthrough in Europe and, by extension, the Dutch Renaissance and the French and British Enlightenment.

If one therefore wanted to reboot society and create a new economic breakthrough and a new Enlightenment, it is clear that it was tempting to look back to the golden age with its network of merchant cities, colonial company states, free zones and charter cities. Yes, that must of course be the great desire of every innovative entrepreneur and business owner.

In Denmark, for example, it was the great desire of the entrepreneur and wealthy man Lars Kolind, CEO of the hearing aid group Oticon. When he was elected to the Danish Parliament for the chaos pilot Uffe Elbæk's socially experimental party, Alternativet, he proposed that Funen be designated as a free zone with more lenient taxes and fewer regulations to promote free initiative and innovation.

In Janteloven's Denmark, where many still perceive equality as an ideal, and where few are able to think outside the box, the proposal had little chance. Or perhaps Kolind was just too early. It now seems that the winds have started to blow in the direction of the free cities again. In any case, the American organization Free State Foundation speaks of a renaissance:

“After a decline in the free city in the age of the nation-state over the past two or three centuries, we are now witnessing a renaissance of the concept. Modern free cities can be seen as the heirs to the vibrant Italian city-states, the Hanseatic League of Northern Europe, and other autonomous cities of antiquity. At the same time, they incorporate groundbreaking technological and institutional innovations that make them uniquely suited to the challenges of the 21st century.”

“And this is where [Silicon] Valley is headed right now,” writes tech founder Balaji Srinivasan in his book The Network State.

“Basalt means: Build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the US, governed by technology,” adds the multimillionaire from Coinbase and venture capitalist at Marc Andreessen. Google founder Larry Page agrees, wanting to set aside a part of the world for unregulated experimentation, and Andreessen predicts that “the world will see an explosion of countries in the coming years—doubled, tripled, quadrupled countries.”

Sure, but if the rollout of this uber-liberal vision were to be done by private initiative alone, piece by piece, it would still be a long time before freedom was won and entrepreneurs were set free. It would be much better, of course, if decentralization could be accomplished in one fell swoop from the very top, although it is perhaps hard to expect the head of the system to want to chop off his own head.



But he who dares nothing, gains nothing, Justine Tunney must have thought. The former Occupy Wallstreet activist, now a software engineer at Google, therefore transformed Curtis Yarvin's core ideas into a three-point citizens' proposal, which she posted on the White House website in March 2014:

1. Fire all public employees with full retirement.

2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.

3. Appoint [Google chairman] Eric Schmidt as America's CEO.

“The time has come for the American regime to politely step back from history and do what is best for America,” she declared. “The tech industry can provide good governance and prevent further American decline.”

According to the rules, the citizens' proposal had to be considered if it obtained 100,000 signatures. When the Guardian newspaper wrote about it, it had obtained 2, and everyone was laughing their heads off at the silly proposal.

Justine Tunney, wasn't she the one who called herself a "champagne transarchist"? Ha, ha, ha!

Yes, ha, ha, ha. But would they have laughed too if they had known that Curtis Yarvin had followed the presidential election night in 2016, when Trump surprisingly won, with Peter Theil in Peter Theil's house?

(To be continued)

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Among the guests at Donald Trump's inauguration as president in January of this year, one could meet both old donors such as the casino mogul's widow Miriam Adelson, whose large campaign contributions over the years have ensured Israel a free hand for annexation and genocide, and new donors such as tech billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel, who had previously been Democrats but now spat heavily into Trump's war chest.

One could also meet Curtis Yarvin, whom Politco called an "unofficial guest of honor" because of his "outsized influence on the Trumpian right wing."

But what was the dark elf philosopher doing there? Well, the explanation is as follows.

With an ideal society that brings to mind the Matrix and Mordor, the dark elves are of course also antagonists to the hobbits, as all elites must be. Of course, the hobbits do not expect anything good from the dark elves either. They know this very well, and like all elves they therefore fear that the hobbits will wake up and come after them with scythes and planks.

The fact that they are in principle opposite parties does not rule out that the dark elves can join forces with the hobbits to achieve their goals, so that with united strength they can overthrow the now ruling social elite of neoliberal and so-called progressive Davos globalists in a perfect storm.

Since the hobbits are the many, it may even be possible to do so by peaceful means and the ballot box. All that is needed is to find a political leader in whom both the dark elves and the hobbits can recognize themselves. A man of the elite and at the same time a man of the people.

Also a dramatic artist who, like Bob Dylan, Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, has THE VOICE. The voice that, like a pinhole mirror, captures the hope and pain of an entire generation and with hypnotic and redemptive power sends it back to the senders as a sweeping echo chamber with the promise of resurrection and salvation - [wauw ].

You don't find such a phenomenon every day. But, oh, great miracle, some would say God's providence, and Adolf, Winston and Bob would probably have agreed in their own case, here he suddenly appeared with orange hair and all in the form of the construction bully and TV celebrity Donald Trump.



Billionaire and himself part of the elite, but also the vulgar black sheep that the elite - phew! - would not recognize. A man who reached out for his rightful place in the sun, but was beaten back with a heavy hand again and again, and thus as a victim was easy to identify with for hard-pressed hobbits who could easily hear that 'Drain the Swamp' and 'Make America Great Again' were far more than just technical measures, a war cry and a promise of redress and revenge.

In short, the classic tyrant that the MAGA people needed against the real tyranny of the oligarchs and the ruling class. And then he had THE VOICE, repetitive, chanting and hypnotic, which millions apparently never tired of listening to.

But with that, he was also exactly the priceless phenomenon that both Curtis Yarvin and his dark elves and Peter Theil and his PayPal mafia needed.

Theil had otherwise given up on Trump after his first term as president, which was disappointing to say the least - “Couldn’t make even the most basic parts of government work… I think that part was maybe worse than even my lowest expectations.”

Theil didn’t pick losers, but now he gave the orange man another chance. After all, phenomena don’t grow on trees, so never mind if Trump was also a dim-witted foghorn and an easily influenced narcissist; it might actually be an advantage if you were sitting at the table yourself.
And that’s why the tech billionaires from Silicon Valley flocked to Trump on his big day, and why Yarvin snuck in.

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Donald Trump's big day was, of course, also J.D. Vance's big day, as the junior senator from Ohio was installed on the same day as Donald Trump's vice president, and thus president if Donald passed away or became demented, and at least with a good chance of becoming the next president when Donald's office expires in January 2029.

Here too, however, we see Peter Theil's hand. Vance is also a man with a foot in each camp and thus, like Trump, has the phenomenon signature as described in Chapter 17. But where Donald Trump is a real natural phenomenon, Vance is an artificial phenomenon designed by Peter Thiel.

Today, he goes by just JD everywhere, but as a child in hillbillyland in the Appalachian mountains of Ohio, he was called the more rhythmic name Jay-dot-Dee; as anyone who's seen the movie Death Trip with Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds knows, the banjo-playing hillbillies are just more musical.

Due to its geographical isolation, the Appalachia region was always relatively poor, but it became completely crazy when the many coal mines began to close, because the demand for coal for energy supply and steel production decreased in line with the green transition and the deindustrialization of the United States by the Chinese. Most people were thus usually jobless, poor and on welfare, and little Jay-dot-Dee's situation was not improved by the fact that his mother was a drug addict. So imagine if he hadn't had his beloved Grandma...

In short, it was all very elegiac, as you can read in Vance's autobiography Hillbilly Elegy, or see in the film of the same name on Netflix with Glenn Close in the role of Best.

After a schooling that, as one might expect, was characterized by absences, chaos and turbulence, after high school Vance chose the same way out of the mountains as countless other young boys before him: the US Marine Corps. The Corps first fattened up and slimmed down the overweight boy and then sent him to Iraq, which upon repatriation entitled him to paid training after the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill that supported veterans of recent conflicts.

Vance took the opportunity and chose to take a bachelor's degree in Political Science and Philosophy at Ohio State University, where he both discovered that he had a good head and got such good grades that he could continue his education at the prestigious Yale Law School, where Bill and Hillary had met.

Here, Vance not only succeeded in becoming a juris doctor, but also, with the help of good mentors, opened up his understanding of the world and cultural horizons. It was a mentor who – perhaps for therapeutic purposes – encouraged him to write Hillbilly Elegy.

It was at Yale that Vance first met Peter Thiel, who was always on the lookout for promising recruits for his empire when he toured universities with his lectures. Now he caught sight of JD, had perhaps inquired beforehand.

In his lecture, Thiel had told the young law students that a well-paid life on the climbing frame of the corporate career, which they all naturally aimed for, would condemn them to a life of meaninglessness when there were so many real problems in society that required solving and new thinking.
Vance has since said that Thiel's lecture was "the significant moment" of his time at Yale, and when he didn't know what else to do, he became a junior investor in Thiel's venture capital firm Mithril, named after a super-light and infinitely strong metal in Tolkien.

After his apprenticeship with Thiel, other companies followed, and when, a few years later, Vance got the opportunity to make large investments himself in Thiel's Naraya Capital, named after a ring in The Lord of the Rings, where Marc Andreessen and Google CEO Eric Schmidt were also investors, he got such good portfolios that he soon became a multimillionaire.



Where Donald, despite his mob-like behavior, had never been anything other than a spoiled rich man's son, JD was now BOTH a true hillbilly from the dark side of society AND a businessman and multi-millionaire from the sunny side of society, it couldn't get any better.

The Marine Corps and Iraq thing was also a bonus; before he became their commander-in-chief, a heel spur, for example, had kept Donald miles away from the armed forces. Donald's age, my American classmates were sent to Vietnam, but never him.

If the first stage of the rocket had been to find new leaders with one leg deeply rooted in the elite milieu and the other in the American heartland, people who could think like elves and talk like hobbits, as Yarvin said, then Vance had succeeded and the second stage could begin.

The second step was to run Vance for the US Senate, but first he had to win the Republican primary in Ohio. This was a bit of a challenge as Vance had previously spoken very negatively about Donald Trump; America's Hitler, Vance had called him, which was not appreciated by the Republican voters.

But Peter Thiel, according to The San Francisco Standard, had already taken Vance down to Trump's luxury resort Mar-a-Lago in Florida before the lineup to shake things up, and when the tech investor then pumped an unheard-of $15 million into Vance's Senate campaign, and his Paypal friend David Sacks sprang up, JD not only won the primary election, but also the Senate seat. The rocket's third stage could now launch.

The third step was to have Trump choose Vance as his vice presidential running mate. Trump had long been tight-lipped, enjoying the attention and drawing out the tension, so even on the very night Trump had been shot in Pennsylvania, Elon Musk, David Sacks and Tucker Carlson were on the phone at Mar-a-Lago in a lobbying campaign to persuade Trump to pick Vance. Which then happened two days later. But by then, according to the sources, it had already been decided a long time ago, because the old man's beloved son Don Junior, was friends with JD and had easily convinced his father.

Now all that was needed was to get the spaceship into orbit, which, as you know, succeeded when Donald Trump and JD Vance won the presidential election in 2024 with an overwhelming majority. All that remained was to decide where the ship should fly to.

[admin]

I remember a song from the good 1970s, the chorus of which was "In the parlament, A.P. Møller's (Maersk's) men sit and carry out A.P. Møller's politics." Today it could be used about the new American administration, but only if it were the men of the PayPal mafia. In any case, many of the network's lieutenants and soldiers have been given posts around the Trump administration, and then Peter Thiel's protégé, JD Vance has become vice president.

The don himself, Peter Thiel, has chosen to stay in the background, but his two old partners and most important capos, David Sacks and Elon Musk, have been given prominent positions. Sacks has become the czar of AI and cryptocurrency, responsible for accelerating the spread of artificial intelligence and bitcoin, both dear to the mafia.

Musk has, as already discussed in Chapter 11, become head of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, with the task of maximizing the government's efficiency and productivity by slimming or eliminating government programs, institutions and departments and eliminating waste, abuse and fraud, whereby many billions can be saved on the government budget.

And the money is needed, because the huge tax breaks for the big corporations that Trump introduced the last time he was president expire this year, and both he and Silicon Valley are strongly interested in them being extended and preferably also made bigger.

But Elon Musk's role seems to have evolved into much more than just piggybacking. With his enormous intellectual capacity and inexhaustible energy, he seemed to have become Trump's right-hand man, consigliere, moral support and enforcer, and has almost moved into the White House, where he can be seen almost daily in the Oval Room next to Donald Trump. When it's his parents' day - Musk fights for custody - with 4-year-old X Æ A-12 on his shoulder or on the lap of the president.

However, it would be wrong to say that the PayPal mafia and Silicon Valley have completely taken over the US government. Trump is pursuing the MAGA goals that won him the White House, and they don't always align with Silicon Valley's interests.

The cornerstone of Trump's election campaign was a total stop and rollback of immigration, which created fear and horror in Silicon Valley, which is a major consumer of skilled, young programmers imported from India and the surrounding area, which they bring in on an H-1B visa, which allows highly skilled workers in specialized occupations to live and work in the United States with a non-immigrant status.

"The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the US is far too low," explains Elon Musk on X. "If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be."

Which of course created a furore with Steve Bannon and the MAGA people, who believed that the tech groups should train Americans for the task, and already feared that the groups' enthusiastic rollout of artificial intelligence and robots only promised the American workers further unemployment.

The gap that thus opened between Trump's MAGA hobbits and his elitist tech-elves now became potentially so dangerous for the entire project that Vice President JD Vance - as "a proud member of both tribes," as he said - eventually had to step in and pour oil on the waters.

The conflict between the "techno-optimists" and the doubting MAGA populists was misguided, he said. Innovation in Silicon Valley and American reindustrialization of the rust belt would go hand in hand and create a "great American industrial renaissance", where innovation would increase worker productivity, create large wage increases and transform the rust belt into the steel belt.



That's what many chose to believe for the time being. But not Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist for Donald Trump, himself an elf, and the right-wing nationalist leader of the MAGA movement, whom the previous administration managed to jail for contempt of Congress. Bannon fears, not without reason, that the Silicon Valley gang is taking power out of the hands of MAGA.

Bannon does not trust JD Vance, and dreams of extending Donald Trump's presidency beyond the four years, and preferably for life, so that Vance does not come. Asked directly in an interview on NewsNation if he and the MAGA movement are working to keep Trump in the White House after 2028, even if it will be against the Constitution, he replied: "We are working on it."

According to Bannon, Trump is a "once in a century" leader who should remain in power. "We have him now. He is at the top and I fully support him continuing." And when the reporters asked the president himself, Donald didn't seem to disagree, so it must be good.

[admin]

Of course, most of the time, Silicon Valley and MAGA agreed with the government's policy. Elon Musk's DOGE campaign, already mentioned in chapter 12, which like a chainsaw cut down federal institutions and programs fell perfectly in line with both Yarvin's and Theil's program of deregulation and firing all public employees and the project of Trump and the Maga people to drain the swamp.

But of course, traditional stakeholders such as the military-industrial complex were not easily bypassed.
The championship that the American team was supposed to win, according to Musk, was of course the victory over China, which had technologically become the equal of the Americans, but how that should happen was not always agreed upon.

Elon Musk had long argued against the US's new planned sixth-generation fighter aircraft having to have a human crew, when intelligent drones and robots could do it both cheaper and better on the modern super-technological battlefield. Would you win or what?

So when Trump decided on Boeing's F-47 with a pilot the other day, he had to send his head-shaking prodigy over to the Pentagon so that the generals could explain to the geek that you can't be a general for drones and robots, because then you'd be reduced to a mechanical engineer. Without uniforms and parades, soldiers and sailors, the will to defend the general population would also be weakened.

But probably so important that the Minister of Defense could explain to the obviously politically naive Elon why the system's many mouths demand that Boeing be constantly fed with lucrative contracts.

Phew, they must have thought in the Pentagon, it's good that Elon fights so hard against waste, corruption and fraud, but does it have to be all the time? Now, with his rocket, he has just saved the astronauts who were stranded in space on the ninth month, so can't he just relax a bit?

But alas no, the visit to the Pentagon also resulted in an outcry. Now Elon Musk has been in the Pentagon to also plan the war against China, said the criticism on social media. Should that man decide it all!?

No, no, no, the defense minister wrote back desperately, it was just an "informal meeting about innovation, efficiency and smarter production."

Yes, yes, all beginnings are difficult, but then at least there was full agreement on Trump's decree against men's participation in women's sports and the rollback of the 'communist' woke ideology.

If one had to choose a year for the start of the woke ideology, it would be 1987, when students and activists at Stanford in California demanded a reassessment of the university's standard course in Western Civilization. The course, which had traditionally been a staple of the Stanford curriculum, focused heavily on the works of European, predominantly white male authors, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Shakespeare, Dickens, and the like. The protesters argued that it excluded the voices of women, people of color and other marginalized groups and thus did not reflect the diversity of human experience.



The criticism resulted in the fight song "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!", which became symbolic of the movement, which quickly spread to other universities in the United States.

Peter Thiel, who started at Stanford in 1985, and David Sacks, who started in 1990, didn't care for the song. Perhaps because they were white South African males and excelled academically, they did not appreciate the radical reforms of the curriculum and grade requirements that, as a result of the protest demonstrations, were introduced by the university to promote inclusion.

When the two had finished their studies, they therefore wrote the book 'The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford' together. The book attacked identity politics and political correctness and warned that if the universities opted out of a merit criterion in favor of an identity political one, America's scientific leadership position would be in danger.

South African Elon Musk agreed with his two friends, but he was now also personally hard hit. In 2004, he had twin boys Griffin and Xavier, where Xavier was born "a bit autistic and gay", so dad used to choose clothes for him, as Musk has said. But then things went sour in the family, so when Xavier turned eighteen, she changed her name and gender and became Vivian Jenna Wilson, and a despairing Elon had to explain to the always hard-hitting killer rabbit, Jordan Peterson, that his child had been "killed by that woke mind virus".

But not only that, Vivian became a left-wing activist with over a million followers on social media, and not only did she begin publicly criticizing Musk for his stance on LGBTQ+, she also waged a family vendetta against her father, who she said was only looking for attention and called "a pathetic man-child." Musk, as usual, retorted at X and so it went back and forth for the general entertainment of their followers. Alas, alas, it is not easy to be a parent today.