Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

Hitler survived assassination attempts. We know what that led to. Reagan & Thatcher survived assassination attempts. They gave us neoliberalism. Trump survived. He's chosen JD Vance as his running mate. If elected, America will become a dystopian free-market kleptocracy.

The 0.01% is gearing up to all but destroy US democracy.

Leading the charge & donating tens of millions of dollars to Trump's campaign are Silicon Valley's libertarian Tech billionaire extremists, led by Peter Thiel & Elon Musk - two of the most dangerous men on earth.

What's unfolding right now is like something from a dystopian sci-fi novel.

Except it's not fiction - it's real.

And it's a fucking nightmare assault on truth, fairness, equality, minorities, women's right, the environment & humanity, which democracy will struggle to survive.

Ultrarich Silicon Valley leaders, who oppose regulation & taxation, have moved politically to the Right. Trump has seduced the libertarian-leaning entrepreneurs & venture capitalists with pledges to protect free speech & support the crypto industry.

archive.ph/AH8FY

Vance is a venture capitalist who has been groomed & funded to become Trump's running mate by dangerous libertarian extremist billionaire Peter Thiel - co-founder of Palantir.

Farage describes him as his 'friend'.

If you don't know who he is, read this:

https://x.com/docrussjackson/status/1475127556152205313

In November 2023, Palantir secured a £330m #NHS data contract, despite Thiel saying at Oxford University debating society in January 2023: “Highways create traffic jams, welfare creates poverty, schools make people dumb & the #NHS makes people sick.”

theguardian.com/technology/202…

He also said the British public’s affection for the #NHS was a case of “Stockholm syndrome” – the term for hostages who feel a bond with their captors.

Palantir was previously & controversially awarded smaller #NHS contracts.

bylinetimes.com/2020/04/22/pal…

#NHS England's former artificial intelligence chief, Indra Joshi, was recruited by Palantir in 2022.

Palantir's UK head, Louis Moseley, was quoted saying Palantir's strategy for entry into the British health industry was to "Buy our way in"!

https://x.com/docrussjackson/status/1471979226714755080

Since 2021, @StefSimanowitz has been meticulously recording & commenting upon the takeover of British people's private #NHS health data by a US company known for working closely with intelligence agencies & military organisations around the world.

https://x.com/StefSimanowitz/status/1471796744455397379

The entire global libertarian Right - including Thiel, Musk, Farage, Trump, Truss, the #HeritageFoundation, #ALEC, the #ATLAS network, #TuftonStreet think tanks, & the billionaire-owned UK & US 'news' media - all oppose DEI, ESG, & much else...

https://x.com/docrussjackson/status/1656580643206119424

Musk & Thiel hate diversity initiatives - Thiel calls them “very evil & very silly”.

With sociopaths like Musk & Thiel buying political influence, it's no wonder social media & western democracies have growing misogyny, racism & extremism problems.

https://x.com/docrussjackson/status/1812950760621240651

At the Miami Bitcoin 2022 conference, Thiel called Environmental, Social & Governance investment (ESG) a “hate factory for naming enemies” that was being used by incumbents to squash upstarts.

Quick primer on ESG & why the libertarian Right HATES it:

https://x.com/docrussjackson/status/1788857702166258012

Thiel said “Woke companies are quasi-controlled by the Govt in a way that bitcoin never will be”, & likened ESG to the Chinese Communist party.

The Libertarian Right push crypto as they hate Govt, regulation, transparency, accountability, & democracy.

archive.ph/vsh8h

Thiel has been described by Haydn Belfield of Cambridge Uni's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, as an Ayn Rand libertarian. On ideological grounds, Thiel doesn’t believe that government action can help, & he thinks regulation makes things worse.

vox.com/future-perfect…

Back to JD Vance & his links to Thiel. In a new article, Paul Bradley Carr, who has written about Silicon Valley for 25 years asks: 'What should we make of Donald Trump’s choice of JD Vance as his running mate?'

He provides fascinating/terrifying context:
sfstandard.com/opinion/2024/0…

Given Vance’s background as a tech investor and close ally of some of the industry’s least savoury culture warriors, it is worth taking a few minutes away from the chaos and hair-tearing to consider what the decision could mean for Silicon Valley & for the US more generally.

Carr says there are two versions of Silicon Valley: on one hand, the "traditionally nerdy HP-ish, Googly, Facebooky one", & on the other hand, "the more recent dirtbag iteration typified by Bitcoin grifters, eyeball-scanning AI weirdos and killer-drone-wielding sociopaths."

if you prefer the first version, both Trump & Vance have promised lower taxes for the ultrarich & criticized “big tech” for censoring conservative voices - Vance has explicitly called for removing the Section 230 legal protections that allow big social networks to operate.

But if you’re a fan of that second version of Silicon Valley—the one that loves to boost crypto, supports deregulation, and autonomously kill people—then the prospect of Vance in the White House could be all your Christmases come at once.

That’s because Vance isn’t just a friend of Silicon Valley’s worst billionaires; he is their creation.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor turned digital defence contractor, enabled his entire political career.

While at Yale, Vance attended a talk by Thiel about technological stagnation & the decline of American elites: “He saw these two trends … as connected.”

Thiel "longs for a world in which great men are free to work their will on society, unconstrained by Govt or regulation."

Thiel also opposes “redistributionist economics” which he says "would impinge on their (elites') wealth & power—or any obligation, really, to the rest of humanity."

theweek.com/economy/101841…

Vance: “If technological innovation were actually driving real prosperity, our elites wouldn’t feel increasingly competitive with one another over a dwindling number of prestigious outcomes.”

Vance has called Thiel’s talk “the most significant moment” of his time at Yale.

It was Thiel who, in 2017, hired Vance to work at his Mithril Capital firm (Mithril is a metal featured in “The Hobbit”) and later invested heavily in Vance’s fund Narya Capital (Narya is a ring in “The Lord of the Rings”).

techcrunch.com/2024/07/15/tru…

Thiel then donated more than $15 million to Vance’s Senate campaign and personally escorted Vance to Mar-a-Lago to patch over his former “Never Trump” stance.

businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-do…

Before Thiel announced in November 2023 that he was 'taking a break from democracy' 🤥, he introduced Vance to David Sacks, his old PayPal Mafia colleague.

Sacks promptly donated $1 million to a pro-Vance Super PAC and hosted a fundraiser for him.

archive.ph/1Nz71#selectio…

Sacks and Vance later worked together to organize Trump’s only San Francisco campaign fundraising event, aimed at nudging the candidate to further embrace and deregulate cryptocurrency.

Thiel has reportedly made more than $1.8 billion from Bitcoin and other currencies.

Of course, this wouldn’t be the first time Thiel and his cronies have tried to buy an outsize role in Trump’s legislative agenda: Thiel rescued Trump’s 2016 campaign with a $1.25 million donation a week after the “Access Hollywood” tape, in the apparent hope of gaining influence.

While the first Trump administration gave Thiel & his techie friends a bunch of tax cuts & photo ops, Thiel is not going to make the same mistake twice.

Whereas last time he simply donated money to Trump’s White House bid, this time, in Vance, he has donated an entire candidate.

If elected, Vance will have a broad mandate to give his former boss Thiel whatever he wants. Trump has made clear he intends to spend much of a second term chasing petty grievances, locking up his opponents, destroying NATO, & introducing #Project2025.

https://x.com/docrussjackson/status/1812779276179001555

So, just as Bush was happy to let former Halliburton executive Dick Cheney plan America’s wars, so Vance will be able to set the White House’s tech policy to suit his Silicon Valley paymasters – a tech policy that coincidentally might involve a lot of new military spending.

Thiel positions himself as a pacifist, but he is perhaps best known today as co-founder of surveillance tech company Palantir (named after a crystal ball in—what else?—“The Lord of the Rings”) - the company makes intelligence-gathering tools for the CIA & the NSA (see above)

Even more fun, Palantir, as well as holding British people's extremely valuable health data, it builds software that directs drones and artillery strikes to shorten the “kill chain” in war zones around the world.

theregister.com/2024/05/30/pal…

Thiel is also a major investor in Anduril, founded by his protégé Palmer Luckey. Anduril (a sword in “The Lord of the Rings”) makes drones that can kill people without needing a human controller, & works with the UK Home Office to identify migrants crossing the English Channel.

Like quite a few other billionaires, Thiel has long had a bolt-hole that he could escape to in case of apocalyptic societal collapse: in 2015, he bought a 193-acre plot of land on the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand for a reported $13.5 million.

wwnorton.com/books/survival…

In this episode of the YANSS podcast, Rushkoff discusses his book, which was inspired by his invitation to consult a group of the world’s richest men on how to spend their money now to survive an apocalypse they fear is coming within their lifetimes. 😬

youarenotsosmart.com/2022/09/18/yan…

With Vance as Thiel’s inside man, a second Trump administration would be a further boon for those companies and other portfolio investments, such as OpenAI, & Elon Musk's Neuralink & SpaceX.

But this may be the least of concerned citizens worries...

Following the horrifying assassination attempt at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally, it was Vance who—almost immediately, before anything was known about the (Republican) shooter—issued an ironically grotesque statement blaming the Biden campaign’s rhetoric.

msn.com/en-us/news/pol…

Trump makes no secret of his position on the Constitution (it should be “terminated”) & spying on US citizens (he encouraged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails).

Vance has pledged allegiance to Trump’s lawbreaking, boasting he would have voted to overturn the 2020 election.

Vance and Trump are also proud adherents of the libertarian mantra of “laws for thee, but not for me”: Vance’s proposal to gut Section 230 protections specifically exempts small companies like his own Rumble platform.

techtransparencyproject.org/articles/j.d.-…

Again, the hypocrisy apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: Thiel is an avowed libertarian who builds surveillance tech for the government and allegedly was an FBI informant, sharing information on “political corruption” and “Silicon Valley intrigue.”

archive.ph/dwG5A

In the past, you’d have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe that a US president and vice president might consider using tech made by their donors’ companies to surveil and smear political enemies.

But when it comes to Trump, you’d have to be an idiot to believe they wouldn’t.

And it's not just enemies like Clinton & President Biden. It's any of the groups that Trump, Vance & their supporters have sworn to take on, including women, liberals, judges, jurors, journalists, the FBI, executives at social networks that aren’t Rumble, immigrants, librarians..

Carr ended his article with some advice: "If, as is statistically likely, you are a member of one or more of those groups, you might want to think about spending the next four years or so completely off the grid."

Let's end with more insights into Trump's running mate, JD Vance.

Vance was baptized into the Catholic church in 2019. At the time, he credited his conversion to his exposure — via Thiel — to the writings of French philosopher René Girard, whom Thiel studied under at Stanford University, & who gave ideas to the 'post-Leftists' & a 'New Right'.

Girard, enormously influential to Thiel, Vance & the 'New Right', is most famous for his theory of “mimetic desire”: that human beings imitate the desires of their peers, ultimately giving rise to rivalries and violent conflicts that are resolved by “scapegoating” a common enemy.

Girard spent his entire life preaching the deadly dangers of mimetic desire, this Satanic force that must be contained at all costs.

harpers.org/archive/2023/1…

Girard's most prominent student seems to have come away with the impression that this mimetic desire is powerful stuff—& a fortune can be made by letting it rip. Thiel took a warning sign & turned it into a manual. His investment in the New Right seems to be along the same lines.

The New Right coalesced as part of a backlash against perceived 'woke excesses' of the recent past—but railing against wokeness is always faintly embarrassing. Aren’t there bigger problems out there than rainbow lanyards, woke scones, or DEI initiatives? Not for Girardians.

To Girardians, these cultural questions are encoded into every syllable of our history, & Girard provides a structure in which conservatives—not a group usually known for their sympathy for the oppressed—can construe themselves as the real victims.

https://x.com/docrussjackson/status/1803088484783010196

They see themselves as having been victimized by progressive pieties, cancelled & exiled by digital cults.

But this sounds just like the 'whiny woke snowflakes' they criticise - Girard gives it an authoritative gloss, turning THEIR victimhood into a universal objective process.

This is a dangerous way to think—as Girard himself came to realize. In his later works, he pointed out that the old structure of collective violence was perfectly capable of operating through the new doctrine of concern for victims.

The crime our scapegoats are now often charged with is that of scapegoating.

Girard outlines an apocalypse: “You can foresee the shape of what the Anti-Christ is going to be in the future: a super-victimary machine that will keep on sacrificing in the name of the victim.”

One of Girard’s better insights is that people do not hate each other because of our differences—we hate each other because we are all exactly the same: we imitate our rivals & make rivals of those we imitate.

ALL OF US relentlessly insult & degrade our perceived enemies.

When you notice that all your political enemies keep acting like rank hypocrites, this is what’s really going on.

So it makes sense that this new form of right-wing politics, which borrows so liberally from the leftist tradition, is also so negatively fixated on the left itself.

Leftism, according to much of the New Right, is a purely Satanic doctrine, based on nothing but groupthink & greed & a hatred for life itself (pretty much what many on the Left think the Right is).

But is this also the New Right’s great weakness: that it only exists as a mirror?

Millennial socialism still at least notionally holds that online quarrels were much, much less important than labour struggles—but the New Right is unashamedly obsessed with meme wars. Theirs is a discursive stance with almost no relation to the actual contours of politics.

It’s stuck in a life-or-death struggle against a mainstream sacrificial fervour that no longer really exists. That Girardian moment has passed.

Their attempts to produce new 'wokeist' scapegoats increasingly tend to be met with an exhausted indifference.

Those Republicans & Conservatives still campaigning on a platform of total cultural warfare are having a difficult time in the polls.

In other words, Girard’s entry into the canon comes just as he’s stopped being so relevant. His most startling insights are also slightly mad:

That politics is human sacrifice by other means. That art and culture were born from torture. That the cruellest episodes in history occurred because your innermost desires are not really so internal, and everything about you is taken from someone else.

There's a lot that we still don’t know about Vance, but it's clear what kind of leader he aspires to be: de Gaulle was prepared to transform his country’s entire constitutional system to preserve what he believed to be the essence of France. So is Vance.

politico.com/news/magazine/…

A friend of Vance’s from Yale has said “He is thoroughgoingly illiberal in his instincts... He is sceptical of the political project of enlightenment liberalism, like, we’re all just autonomous individuals trying to self-actualize and maximize our own interests.”

Among Vance's other current intellectual influences, Vance cites Thiel's friend the reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, a 48-year-old ex-programmer who has done more than anyone to articulate the world historical critique & popularize the key terms of the New Right.

Max Chafkin published a biography of Thiel, titled The Contrarian, in which he described Yarvin as the “house political philosopher” for a network often called the Thielverse.

Understand Yarvin & you better understand the dangerous situation we're now in.
time.com/6092844/peter-…

Chafkin’s account suggests Thiel isn’t a visionary at all, but someone defined only by what he (& other billionaire libertarians) is against: so-called 'liberal elites' & multiculturalism - it's the basic narrative of the contemporary nativist far-right across the western world.

Yarvin is known, along with philosopher Nick Land, for founding the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary movement (NRx).

populismstudies.org/Vocabulary/dar…

One of the most influential terms Yarvin first popularized in the political context was that of the red pill ('Redpilling').

Yarvis argues US democracy is a failed experiment & should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to the governance structure of corporations.

Yarvin has been described as a "neo-reactionary" and "neo-monarchist" who "sees liberalism as creating a Matrix-like totalitarian system and who wants to replace American democracy with a sort of techno-monarchy." archive.ph/CsGLC

A decade ago, Yarvin wrote under the alias Mencius Moldbug about race-based IQ differences, and in an early post, titled “Why I Am Not a White Nationalist,” he defended reading and linking to white nationalist writing. tabletmag.com/sections/news/…

Some of Yarvin’s writing from then is terrifying: he critiqued the attacks by far-right terrorist Anders Breivik not on the grounds that terrorism is wrong but because the killings wouldn’t do anything effective to overthrow what Yarvin called Norway’s “communist” government.

Yarving argued that Nelson Mandela, once head of the military wing of the African National Congress, had endorsed terror tactics & political murder against opponents, & said anyone who claimed “St. Mandela” was more innocent than Breivik might have “a mother you’d like to fuck.”

Yarvin has consistently argued that conservatives waste their energy on fights over issues like gay marriage or critical race theory, because liberal ideology holds sway in the important institutions of prestige media & academia—an intertwined nexus he calls “the Cathedral.”

You won’t hear people use the Cathedral term a lot in public, although right-wing Twitter lit up with delight when Yarvin sketched out the concept on Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation show in 2021.

To truly be red-pilled, you have to 'understand the workings of the Cathedral'.

And the way conservatives can actually win in America, Yarvin has argued - and what Trump seems to be all about - is for a Caesar-like figure to take power back from this 'devolved oligarchy' and replace it with a monarchical regime run like a start-up.
#Project2025

Yarvin proposed the acronym RAGE—Retire All Government Employees—as a shorthand for a first step in the overthrow of the American “regime.” What we needed, Yarvin thought, was a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.”

https://x.com/docrussjackson/status/1812779276179001555

In a podcast interview Vance had conducted with Jack Murphy in 2021, the big, bearded head of the grotesque 'manosphere' Liminal Order men’s group, Murphy asked how it was that Vance proposed to rip out America’s leadership class.

newreligiousmovements.org/l/liminal-orde…

I should mention here that in 2015, Murphy informed his readers that ‘feminists need rape’ to solve the ‘problem’ of man’s ‘natural tendency towards dominance and women to passivity and submission’.

dailykos.com/stories/2021/1…

Vance described two possibilities that many on the New Right imagine—that the current system will either fall apart naturally, or that a great leader will assume semi-dictatorial powers. “So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said.

Murphy chortled knowingly. “So one [option] is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself,” Vance said, “So the task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved,” waiting for the “inevitable collapse” of the current order.

Vance said he thought this was pessimistic. “I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said. “And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a 'de-wokeification' program.”

This is #Project2025

Vance correctly predicted that “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024. I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

“And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, & say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

This is a description of a coup.

https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1812944729224716747

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

“Indeed,” Murphy replied.

Vance is a leading critic of U.S. support for Ukraine.

“I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” Vance told Steve Bannon in an interview in 2022.

reuters.com/world/europe/e…

“If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl... It does look intentional. It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him.”

https://x.com/TimRyan/status/1579621027101179906

In June 2023, serial liar Vance put a hold on all Biden administration appointments to the Justice Department to protest the indictments of Donald Trump. He has called Trump’s hush-money trial in New York a “threat to American democracy.”

politifact.com/factchecks/lis…

This year, Vance said if he'd been VP in 2021, he would not have certified the 2020 election results: “If I'd been VP, I'd have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia & so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors.”
#Project2025

https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1812927576626896914

Vance has encouraged Trump to defy the Supreme Court if the justices prevent him from firing executive branch officials.

Steve Bannon has said “I’m sure he’ll run for the presidency one day.”

https://x.com/TheTNHoller/status/1812964025539699153

Vance: “Trump will, at most, serve four years in the White House. There is a big question about what comes after him.”

Vance says a lot of controversial things - like Trump, often, but not always, to elicit the attention that we give to all demagogues.

https://x.com/btpanko/status/1812980631145750874

Why should we in Britain care?

What happens in the US often happens in the UK shortly after. We've already had a narrow escape when Truss was kicked out after being groomed, briefed & installed with help from #Project2025 authors, the Heritage Foundation.

https://x.com/docrussjackson/status/1780131590368075776

Why should we in Britain care if right-wing extremists Donald Trump & his would-be Vice president JD Vance win the election, introduce the barbaric #Project2025 drafted by the #HeritageFoundation, & then replace democracy with authoritarian kleptocracy?!

https://x.com/AdamBienkov/status/1813084295780790773

In summary:

https://x.com/docrussjackson/status/1813487343484997633

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts is the driving force behind #Project2025.

He has said of JD Vance that he “is absolutely going to be one of the leaders — if not THE leader — of our movement.”

In 2023, Roberts spoke at London's #NatCon:

https://x.com/docrussjackson/status/1658489118098337794

Nancy MacLean, Professor of History & Public Policy & author of the terrifying award-winning bestseller Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, spells out the history, context & implications of #Project2025:

https://x.com/docrussjackson/status/1815057590230917478