Peter Thiel’s Antichrist lectures have been rejected by theologians and mocked by comedians, but he still cannot stop talking about the Antichrist. This week, the billionaire delivered his trademark four-part Antichrist lecture at a private venue within sight of the Vatican.

At the height of his power—with his companies and allies embedded in Trump’s fascist regime and his protégé, JD Vance, a heartbeat from the presidency—Thiel has launched a campaign to herald the Antichrist. He is on an Antichrist world tour, having given his talks in Austin, San Francisco, England, Austria and, now, Rome.

The Vatican was in no mood to play games with the would-be prophet from Palantir. Paolo Benanti, a priest who has advised Pope Francis and Pope Leo on AI and tech ethics, called out Thiel as a “political theologian operating at the very heart of the Silicon Valley ecosystem” and delivered a scathing rebuke of Thiel’s religious delusions:

Thiel’s entire action can thus be read as a prolonged act of heresy against the liberal consensus: a challenge to the very foundations of civil coexistence, which he now considers outdated.

Benanti hit Thiel where it hurts, zooming in on his persistent efforts to pervert religious ideas into justifications for greed, monopoly, and authoritarianism. He exposes Thiel’s obsessive focus on achieving “the pathological radicalization” of “competition, technology, the individual” to argue against democratic society itself.

Curtis Yarvin has befriended Alexander Soros, son of George Soros and chair of the Open Society Foundation, at a fancy conference in southern Bavaria.

A new profile of Yarvin in the German publication Die Zeit captures Yarvin guzzling wine (and weeping, as he has a habit of doing lately) at an intellectual confab for “distinguished political thinkers” at a five-star Schloss Elmau spa and hotel in February.

Yarvin described Soros as “actually smart,” while Soros described Yarvin as “very nice.” On Saturday, Yarvin posted pictures of himself with Soros, embracing and smiling like the best of friends.

It’s a strange sight—the son of the man long credited as liberalism’s greatest patron, arm in arm with one of today’s leading architects of neofascism. But Yarvin has always had a talent for cultivating men with more money than sense.

Withdrawal from NATO. Abolishing the Federal Reserve. Ending aid to Ukraine. These are fringe positions that sound familiar to those tracking the desires of a certain diminutive dictator who lives in Moscow. But they are also the singular obsessions of one Congressman, Thomas Massie (R-KY), who has gained prominence (and an audience) in recent months for demanding government transparency with the Epstein files.

Massie, along with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and now former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) were the primary sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act (H.R. 4405, passed in November 2025) which required the Department of Justice to release its records, without unnecessary redactions, within a thirty day deadline. After missing the initial deadline, the government has largely complied, with over three million documents released so far — and another potential three million or so still withheld.

This would seem to be a great victory for transparency over a case that has harmed thousands of victims and upended American democracy and global politics. The public is understandably and rightly outraged that Epstein — a sex pest, pervert, racist, and manipulator — would have such outsized influence over the realms of business and government. And we should seek both answers and justice.

But few have paid attention to Massie's record in Congress, which reveals a longstanding commitment to Moscow's policy agenda.

Recent reporting in The New York Times revealed that lawyer J. Stanley Pottinger and Jeffrey Epstein had worked together in the early 1980's as partners in a short-lived venture to develop tax avoidance schemes for wealthy clients.

The prior connection between the two men is noteworthy as Pottinger later partnered with Florida attorney Bradley Edwards in representing several of Epstein's victims. Pottinger's background also shows an ongoing pattern of involvement in sensitive intelligence matters.

Was Pottinger's association with Edwards part of a “controlled burn” strategy designed to protect Epstein's network?

One of Silicon Valley’s most storied venture capital firms has emerged as a hidden hand steering artificial intelligence policy in Washington, as President Donald Trump embraces the industry’s relentless push into the emerging technology.

Andreessen Horowitz is now regularly the first outside call that top White House officials and senior Republican congressional aides make when considering moves that could affect tech companies’ AI plans, according to current and former White House and congressional aides.

Their sounding board is the firm’s chief lobbyist in the nation’s capital, Collin McCune. The firm, colloquially known by the shorthand a16z for the 16 letters between the A and Z in its name, arguably has veto power over any AI-related proposals, according to one former White House official.

“They are an absolute lobbying juggernaut and probably the most powerful single company that I’ve seen in recent years,” said Doug Calidas, top lobbyist with Americans for Responsible Innovation, a group that has opposed a16z’s push to curtail state AI laws.

The firm’s ascent in Washington has been fueled by massive influence spending, co-founder Marc Andreessen’s close ties to Trump, and a network of former firm partners working in key administration positions. It’s also benefited from savvy casting of its portfolio of insurgent startups as exemplars of the kind of free-market innovation celebrated by Republican Washington’s reigning conservative ideology.

Andreessen Horowitz’s bold, maximalist approach and deregulatory zeal have buttressed the administration’s view that most government-imposed guardrails on AI endanger US competitiveness in a fast-developing technology that has helped power the country’s recent economic growth. It has been a key driver of the Trump White House’s moves to thwart state governments’ efforts to regulate AI.

https://archive.is/53yLF

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to at least one-third of the value of the entire U.S. stock market. Late last year, you couldn’t escape a chilling billboard campaign, meant to be cheeky, from an artificial intelligence start-up: “Stop Hiring Humans.” And on Saturday, somebody tried to AstroTurf a trollish Billionaires March through the city in defense of Silicon Valley’s 21st-century robber barons. Only a few dozen people showed up, heckled along the way by passers-by.

The billionaires themselves also seem to be on the move. In recent months, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have all purchased homes outside California, potentially bringing their hundreds of billions of dollars with them. Others have spent the past few months raging about the injustice of the state’s new politics of class warfare.

Why? A proposal — supported by the local congressman Ro Khanna but not the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and currently floating in limbo as a potential ballot initiative tentatively scheduled for the fall — that would impose a one-time 5 percent wealth tax on the state’s billionaires, whose wealth has soared since the pandemic.

This isn’t exactly pitchforks in the streets, the nightmare entertained by every generation of aristocrats and oligarchs as a supremely flattering form of status paranoia. But about the symbolism, at least, the horrified billionaires and would-be billionaires are basically right. There has never been a tax of this kind so seriously considered in the United States before, and the policy would mark a genuinely new era of the politics of extreme wealth in this country.

https://archive.is/Wzkt4

In December, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale called for public hangings in the United States. The Texas-based billionaire, a longtime associate of Peter Thiel, is a major Trump supporter who believes the 2020 election was stolen and the “deep state” is responsible for the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol.

So, why is Lonsdale—who says public executions will bring back “masculine leadership”—funding a Democratic candidate in the California governor's race? New public filings reveal that Lonsdale has given the maximum donation of $78,400 to a little-known California politician named Matt Mahan. (That’s more than he donated to Steve Hilton, a right-wing former Fox host also running for governor.)

Mahan, currently serving his first term as mayor of San José, made a late entry into the crowded governor’s race in January. He’s polling in the single digits and, historically, it’s pretty hard for anyone to go directly from a mayor’s office to the governor's office. The last mayor to pull it off was James “Sunny Jim” Rolph, who went from San Francisco City Hall to the governor's office in 1931—and later became infamous for endorsing the public lynching of two men by a mob in San José. Nearly a century later, a San José mayor wants to make the same leap, bankrolled by a billionaire who wants to bring back public hangings. History does weirdly rhyme sometimes...but, I digress.

Mahan’s chances appear slim, but he has a secret weapon: he worked in tech and has the backing of many of the same tech oligarchs, like Lonsdale and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who now stand behind Donald Trump. Also backing Mahan: Y Combinator president Garry Tan, a Palantir alumnus (he claims to have created the company’s logo) and a member of the Network State cult, which hopes to replace democratic nations with tech-run dystopias. In January 2024, Tan got drunk and tweeted “die slow motherfuckers” at seven members of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in a tirade that triggered actual death threats against them.

As I wrote in the New Republic at the time, Tan is spearheading a tech-funded campaign to seize control of San Francisco’s government, using what he calls a “parallel political machine” that he bragged about at the 2023 Network State Conference. Like Mahan, Tan is a “Democrat” with nothing much to say about how Trump and his tech billionaire backers—Tan’s friends—are ripping apart American democracy.

The latest batch of Epstein documents released by the US Department of Justice is a bewildering assortment of correspondence, ephemera, and other artifacts. After archiving as much of the sources as possible, we can start to build a portrait of Epstein himself as well as his motivations, attitudes, and interests.

What we have learned so far is startling in its scope and specificity, even as many details could use more sunlight.

1. Epstein was first and foremost about Epstein. His money, real estate, travel, appetites, personnel, network, scientific interests, and medical concerns all flowed together in a continuous feedback loop.

2. He and Steve Bannon were partners in crime for several years until his death. Certainly the first Trump administration was deeply shaped by their shenanigans, as was the European far right movement. And their work is still shaping things now.

3. Epstein considered Putin his fixer. Whenever he had a hard problem, he put in a call to either Sergei Belyakov (a FSB agent), a friend of Putin’s, Putin’s people, or Ehud Barak, who knew Putin.

4. Epstein traveled to Russia repeatedly over the course of at least two decades, getting visas year after year starting in at least 2002. One visa was sponsored by MOO Vympel, a “public organization” for veterans of Vympel, an elite FSB unit specializing in assassinations and foreign operations. He would not have received this without FSB cooperation.

5. Epstein was a secular Jew, worked with many Jews, and code-switched for that audience, but didn’t like Israel as a place. When invited to go there in 2017 with “his girls” by Deepak Chopra, Epstein said, “Another destination. I do not like Israel. AT ALL.” His interests in Israel were more abstract.

6. His sex crimes seem to have been primarily a product of his own personal pathology. With some reports of his needing “three fresh girls a day” and constant chatter about medical testing and treatment for herpes and various other sex-related conditions and conundrums, he was obsessed with sex and it weighed on him. He would have been far more effective at his day job without this distraction.

7. There is evidence that Epstein coordinated travel and visas for many young women he invited to events, but the files reveal relatively meager information about trafficking women to others. While there is a raft of unverified allegations from the public after his highly publicized August 2019 death, many of them bear hallmarks of being shaped by press coverage and of coming from people without first hand knowledge. Some seem more authentic and deserve additional investigation, to the extent not already done.

8. The breadth of his reach into US, UK, and other European power networks is unparalleled. This suggests access to virtually unlimited funds and intelligence. He may have received that primarily from his Kremlin channels, through other partners, and also through his own entrepreneurial activities with people like venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

9. Silicon Valley is deeply compromised by Russian influence. Through investors like Yuri Milner and Thiel, and Epstein’s assistant turned VC Masha Drokova Bucher, there is a clear, concerted effort to drill into Silicon Valley’s tech networks for capture, control, and wealth generation.

10. Russia created Epstein. Russia exposed Epstein. This is a clear strategy of demoralization. No one has heaped more praise on Rep. Thomas Massie (the primary sponsor of the law that forced the release of these documents) than Russia’s proxies. Russia knew that the files would reveal Epstein’s geopolitical manipulations. The hope is that we lose faith in elites, in government, and in democracy. This sets the stage for escalation. We should be careful about falling for this trap.

Will tech billionaires get rid of democracy by getting rid of people?

In this episode of The Nerd Reich podcast, I talk with renowned historian Quinn Slobodian, author of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism and Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and The Dream Of A World Without Democracy.

Slobodian’s work helped inspire my own, so it was great to interview him. His writing illuminates the extremist ideas underlying billionaire fantasies of “exit” from democracy.

In this episode, we explore:

• The Hong Kong Blueprint: How a colonial relic became the template for 21st-century capitalism.
• Authoritarian Capitalism: Why Silicon Valley elites are obsessed with models of control.
• The Post-Human Zone: Why the future of “sovereignty” might belong to Manhattan-sized data centers, not citizens.
• The Octavia Butler Reality: What if future isn't about escaping the “company town,” but fighting to get into one?

Jeff Bezos has owned the Washington Post since 2013. For almost a decade, he was about as good of a steward as you could hope for. He hired Marty Baron and left the journalists to be in charge of the actual journalism. When the paper lost money, he wrote a check.

There was a time when this looked like a flawed-but-workable model for the future of news. Journalism is a public good. Public goods require some form of subsidy — the marketplace, alone, will by definition leave them underprovided. The best form of subsidy is pretty clearly public funding (think BBC, PBS, NPR). But significant public funding in the United States hasn’t been on the table given the political dynamics of the past 20+ years. So the largesse of otherwise-disinterested billionaires seemed like a viable backup plan.

A funding system like this has a single point of failure: the owner might turn out to be a moral cretin. He might decide to demolish the news to further his own interests.

Jeff Bezos, it turns out, is a moral cretin.

Make no mistake: the Post didn’t just fire 300 (out of 800) journalists because it was losing too much money. As Peter Baker points out, Bezos’s net worth has increased $55.4 billion since 2024 alone.

No, the thing that has changed is that Jeff Bezos has developed a political agenda. He is on Team Billionaire. Team Billionaire thinks that billionaires are brilliant, wise, and omnicompetent. It can’t stomach leaving journalists in charge of the journalism, because surely the billionaire owner has better instincts and deeper insights. Team Billionaire thinks the public needs to stay in line and respect their betters. Team Billionaire thinks the government should stay on the sidelines (at least until its bailout time, that is).

Being a hands-off media mogul was fine when it didn’t cause any trouble. But under authoritarianism, it can be such a headache. Better to just ether the whole thing and curry favor with the regime.

An investigation by America 2.0 reveals that Donald Trump's “Board of Peace,” ratified last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, has filed applications for two trademarks with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

This would not be unusual except for the fact that the organization itself, which has no legally defined status, is not the holder of the trademarks. The marks are owned by the USPTO itself, marking an unprecedented use of executive branch power to protect the rights of an ambiguously defined supranational entity.

The Board of Peace was created as a result of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) adoption of Resolution 2803 on November 17, 2025, which authorized the organization as a “transitional administration with international legal personality” intended to “set the framework and coordinate funding for the redevelopment of Gaza.” However, the organizational charter revealed in Davos is light on details and makes no mention of Gaza. This has caused many to believe the organization may be intended as a shadow-UN that could ultimately replace it.

Donald Trump’s obsession with Greenland has escalated into a full-blown international crisis. He is threatening military action against NATO ally Denmark and imposing tariffs on European countries that don’t support his quixotic quest to own the icy island.

Meanwhile, Greenlanders have taken to the streets in protest to make it clear they are not for sale. Polls show a majority of Americans oppose stealing Greenland through military force—with even 68% of Republicans opposing military action, according to Quinnipiac.

But there is one constituency that shares Trump’s Arctic fever: tech billionaires. Writing for the New Republic, Casey Michel exposes how a handful of tech oligarchs have a deep interest in Greenland’s natural resources.

Donald Trump’s fixation on seizing Greenland has generated plenty of confusion, hand-wringing, and alarm. But one question has always stood at the center: Why? Why has Trump perseverated so heavily, and so suddenly, on this distant island, with its few people and even fewer connections to the United States?

According to Trump, much of it has to do with national security. “We have to have it,” the president has said time and again. As Trump claims—and in direct contradiction to any evidence at hand—Greenland is apparently crawling with Russian and Chinese ships, presenting a national security crisis that annexation alone will solve. Seizing Greenland is also part of the emerging “Donroe Doctrine,” in which the U.S. has the right to intervene, and even seize, any lands within the Western hemisphere that it feels like taking.

But there’s another element to this Greenland obsession that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention—and it is just as important to Trump’s designs on plundering Greenland and claiming the island as America’s: money. Specifically, the money set to be gained by the kinds of oligarchic interests that have long backed Trump, and that now stand to benefit from American suzerainty over Greenland. To update another phrase, which we’ve seen recently race to the fore in Venezuela: It’s about looting the resources, stupid.

But even here, there’s more than meets the eye. Buried within the kind of crony capitalist network that has propelled Trump’s imperialism is something far stranger, and far darker, than simply seizing Greenland’s resources for financial gain. It’s about the opening salvos in a world in which any restrictions on American oligarchy—any oversight, any democratic checks, any hurdles whatsoever—are removed, and a golden, pro-oligarchic age reigns, centered on, but by no means limited to, Greenland.

To give everyone a feel for these weekly conversations, and because it’s important to understand the ideas and protagonists of what tech journalist Gil Durán calls Silicon Valley fascism, I am making available to everyone the video of my conversation with Gil, who writes The Nerd Reich newsletter which focuses on extremist tech politics, and is writing the book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Global Democracy.

I am also including a roundup of my writings on Fascist biopolitics and on Musk and DOGE’s danger to democracy. I believe that knowledge of history and, in my case, how autocrats think and act, allows you to separate the signals from the noise while things are unfolding in the present. I have found it also helps me to forecast what may develop in the future. I feel it is important to “show my work” and document my early intuitions and thoughts about what we could expect from the Trump administration.

Being prepared mentally is important to effective resistance efforts, and Lucid aims to help with that.

Less than one week after American military forces conducted an illegal raid to kidnap the authoritarian president of Venezuela, some want to build a Network State there.

Mark Lutter, executive director of the Charter Cities Institute, has issued a public call for Trump to put a “freedom city” in Venezuela:

Venezuela doesn’t need to become another Iraq. It needs a Freedom City.

The mission is not endless war. It is to end a criminal regime without another trillion-dollar disaster.

Reality: the old system is still there—corrupt courts, cartels, broken institutions. Fixing everything at once won’t work.

So don’t fix everything. Start with one city that actually works.

A Freedom City = new land, new rules, real property rights, real rule of law—jointly built with the U.S.

Freedom city is Trump’s word for a network state—a new sovereign territory ruled by corporations. The concept keeps popping up these days. From Gaza to Greenland, from Honduras to Ukraine, all of Trump’s aggressive foreign policy moves seem to come with a side of Network State ideology. Suddenly, the United States has been seized by a spirit of colonial conquest, seeking to plant flags and build strange new cities everywhere.

An investigation by America 2.0 has revealed that Vladimir Putin has been attempting to influence Donald Trump to seize both Venezuela and Greenland since at least 2017. The effort, rooted in Putin's ambitions in Ukraine, hinged on American embrace of the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 policy framework that focused American influence within the Western Hemisphere.

Putin's reasoning, according to witnesses familiar with the proposals, is simple: if Trump would agree to disengage in Ukraine, Putin would agree to give Trump control in Venezuela. Each country is in the other's “backyard,” the story went, so if Trump got relief in his backyard, Putin could expect reciprocation in his.

Rather than approach Trump outright with an explicit quid-pro-quo arrangement, Putin arranged a series of dangles and provocations that he hoped might prompt Trump to follow Putin's plan.

Silicon Valley venture capital isn’t just funding technology. It’s also building an escape plan from democracy.

In this episode of The Nerd Reich, Gil Duran is joined by Olivier Jutel (University of Otago) to examine what can only be described as a tech cult: a small, ideologically aligned group of venture capitalists who have become the de facto state planners of American capitalism.

As many VC funds underperform, leading figures—from Peter Thiel to Marc Andreessen—are turning toward increasingly radical political projects. These include network states, charter cities, special economic zones, crypto-enabled sovereign zones, and heavy investment in AI, surveillance, and war technologies.

The goal is no longer innovation, but power—and a strategy Jutel describes as “exit through the state.”

This conversation breaks down:

• How venture capital actually makes money (and why “risk-taking” is largely a myth)
• Why VC is clustering around AI, crypto, surveillance, and militarization
• What the “network state” really is—and why it’s a political threat
• How Trump-era politics fit into VC’s long-term strategy
• Why “abundance” narratives collapse under real economic incentives
• What’s at stake for democracy, labor, and the future itself

Venture capital is a political cult project—one increasingly willing to dismantle democratic systems to preserve its own power.

Tech billionaires in California are furious. A new proposal for a wealth tax on the super rich has them packing their bags and threatening to leave the Golden State for good. (Again.)

Oligarchs regularly make such threats and fail to follow through, so we must take such antics with a grain of salt. But the possibility of a new tax on super wealth shows that backlash against the fat cat class is coming, and the billionaires’ threats to flee show just how much they fear fairness and accountability.

The Service Employees International Union-United Health Workers union is pushing a ballot measure to impose a one-time 5% tax on California billionaires. If approved by voters, it would apply retroactively to anyone living in the state on January 1, 2026.

Billionaires including Peter Thiel, the tech venture capitalist, and Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, are considering cutting or reducing their ties to California by the end of the year because of a proposed ballot measure that could tax the state’s wealthiest residents, according to five people familiar with their thinking.

Page (net worth: $258 billion) would owe $12 billion, reports the NYT, while Thiel would owe $1.2 billion. About 200 billionaires total would contribute roughly $100 billion to offset the federal budget cuts their preferred political project is about to unleash on the country, according to the union.

Billionaires regularly threaten to abandon California. It’s a go-to move any time they don't like a law or policy. The right-wing media, like Chicken Little, has spent decades crying that the sky is falling in California. “Everyone leaving California” is one of their favorite storylines.

If the billionaires are this scared, we can assume that polls show strong support for the tax. A recent poll by the Economist/YouGov found that 60% of Americans think billionaires don't pay enough in taxes and 80% think rich people have too much power. Those numbers will likely be much higher in California.

Even Ro Khanna, Silicon Valley’s congressman, has jumped on the bandwagon. “I echo what FDR said with sarcasm of economic royalists when they threatened to leave, ‘I will miss them very much,’” Khanna, who is cozy with some of the worst billionaires in tech, wrote on X.

This drew howls of protest from several tech zillionaires, who are now threatening to fund a primary challenge against him. These billionaires have openly supported Trump’s authoritarian regime because they can’t fathom the idea of being held accountable for their actions. But the future is coming fast, and with it a tremendous backlash against the evils and excesses of Silicon Valley.

If I have one criticism of this proposal, it’s that the tax doesn't go far enough. It’s quite modest compared to the scale of wealth extraction we’re witnessing and the existential threat these billionaires pose to democratic governance. But it’s a start.

Journalist Gil Duran explores the strange alliance between JD Vance, Silicon Valley and Christian Nationalists.

Experts say they are converging on the same anti-democratic playbook. From the Seven Mountains Mandate to "Network State" projects like Highland Rim, we expose how figures like JD Vance, Peter Thiel, and Doug Wilson are planning a theocratic-technocratic future.

Gil Duran speaks with Prof. Matthew Boedy, author of "The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy":

Billionaires had a great thing going. The ruling in the 2010 Citizens United case, among others, invited the super rich to exert all the influence on policy and politics that their money could buy — and then enjoy all the wealth that influence secured for them in return. Thanks to ever-more-obliging tax policies, the billionaire class grew absurdly rich over the years that followed. In the last five years alone, the wealthiest 20 Americans increased their net worth from $1.3 trillion to $3 trillion, Forbes reported.

And they did it in many cases without the rest of us even having a clue. It took the investigative reporter Jane Mayer five years of relentless digging to figure out how the Koch brothers gained a chokehold on the Republican Party. The title of her 2016 book, “Dark Money,” became synonymous with a particularly effective form of influence that was all but untraceable. The billionaires could have kept on like that forever. All they had to do was keep their mouths closed. Today, billionaires are still flooding politics with their money and still reaping the benefits, but they won’t stop yapping about it.

Elon Musk bragged about his support for President Trump, to whose campaign and allied groups he donated more than $250 million. He loudly attempted to buy votes in Pennsylvania. Then he leveraged it all into a cruel and chaotic effort to dismantle federal agencies. Marc Andreessen’s tech-heavy venture capital firm publicly pledged $100 million to target lawmakers who attempt to regulate artificial intelligence; Mr. Andreessen then mocked the pope for suggesting some ethical guardrails around the technology. Bill Ackman announced that he and his pals were prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat Zohran Mamdani, and urged Mr. Trump to call in the National Guard if that effort failed and Mr. Mamdani’s mayoralty met his worst expectations.

And all the while they’re out there lecturing us about their fitness routines, their weird personal philosophies, their conspicuous consumption and more. Jeff Bezos staged a three-day, celebrity-packed, $50 million wedding to Lauren Sánchez, the whole cringe affair optimized for global paparazzi interest. Mr. Ackman is advising young men to try the line, “May I meet you?”, a strategy that in his own experience, he says, “almost never got a no.” Owning the world isn’t enough for these people; they must also go in search of the cheap high of influencer culture.

But no amount of auramaxxing can hide the new reality. Just six years ago, 69 percent of respondents to a Cato Institute poll agreed that billionaires “earned their wealth by creating value for others.” An only slightly smaller majority agreed with the statement “we are all better off when people get rich.” Today, one poll after another shows that Americans want the rich to be taxed at higher, even much higher rates. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have attracted an increasingly large national following with an anti-billionaire message that previously would have sounded extremist. And New York City, the richest metropolis in the nation, just elected a democratic socialist who thinks billionaires shouldn’t exist at all.

The billionaires have only themselves to blame.

https://archive.is/flW5m

Does being worth billions make you happy? Will it buy you love? If America’s current generation of centibillionaires are any guide, storied wealth is a one-way ticket to hell.

Humanity’s only hope of saving itself is to move to Mars, according to Elon Musk. The Anti-Christ is coming, says Peter Thiel. Crypto is your only security against a collapsing US dollar, says pretty much every bitcoin pusher in the neighbourhood. Many of today’s dystopian plutocrats are the same people who promised utopia in the earlier phases of the internet. Something chemical must have changed since then in Palo Alto’s water supply. Instead of the lure of community and being connected, we are being sold cataclysm and apocalypse. The enlightenment has given way to the even more profitable “dark enlightenment”.

Like many people, I toggle between feeling amused by the adolescent nonsense that you hear from so many tech titans and deep foreboding about their tightening grip on our world. On the one hand, you get people naming their companies after fantasy fiction tropes, especially from Tolkien, and whose idea of a political movie is The Matrix. Their world consists of super villains and super heroes. They seem to have confused masculinity with childishness — petulance, aggression and self-obsession being their idea of maleness. On the other hand, their sway over the federal machinery of state has gone from tangential to central at remarkable speed. We should not be amused by the fact that Thiel’s acolytes are in charge of key nodes of Washington’s power ministries, not just the Pentagon.

Any Europeans puzzled about the level of transatlantic ferocity in last week’s US National Security Strategy document should listen more closely to the broligarchs. Their arch-enemy is the EU and its digital privacy and digital services acts, which they want swept away. Brussels bureaucracy, and woke member state governments, are what is standing between them and domination of the rest of the west. In the coming months, the Trump administration will assuredly step up its attack on EU regulations and make their dilution or abolition central to the future of the western alliance. The US federal government is playing the roles of lawyer, promoter, hitman and agent for Palantir, xAI, Meta and the rest.

As Paul Krugman noted in an incisive recent Substack, America has become a “digital narco state”. While Australia offers an alternative path of banning social media companies from doing business with under-16s, the Trump administration is pushing their toxins into every corner of society. Trumpian populism may be the story of our age but I am increasingly persuaded that we are underplaying the tech-authoritarian elephant in the room.

If you want insight into the broligarch mindset watch this Andrew Ross Sorkin interview with Alex Karp, Palantir’s chief executive. Karp suffers from no shortage of self-regard. “If people listened to me more proactively we’d have a better world,” he says. “I am running the most important tech company in the world.” “We are the backbone of US deterrence.” “If the Democrats ran someone who agreed with me they would win.”

Apart from the fact that Karp cannot sit still for a moment, my key takeaway was his sense of persecution. Here is a modern hero who wants to save western civilisation but people don’t show him the love he deserves. Don’t dare ask him about Palantir’s role in helping ICE target and deport illegal immigrants (its platform is called Immigration OS). Karp writes off criticism as “derangement syndrome”. In his mind, Palantir is all that stands between US democracy and its collapse. Please, Swampians, watch this and reassure me that we are in safe hands. You might also spare a couple of minutes to look at this illuminating “Authoritarian stack” compiled by the University College of London’s Francesca Bria. It provides detailed maps of the network of state capture both in the US and increasingly Europe.

I was also struck by this piece by my colleague Hannah Murphy, who was reporting on Balaji Srinivasan’s recent Network State Conference in Singapore. These are the chiefly Thiel-funded libertarians who want to escape the bonds of democracy by setting up corporate city states and even sovereign societies in which governance is decided by the corporation not their inhabitants. It is from Hannah’s piece that I borrowed the phrase “elite victim complex”. I am thus turning to Hannah this week with a couple of questions. Hannah, you work in San Francisco, which has become a byword for liberal misgovernance. How much of the tech elite’s disdain for the left derives from their experience of that (until recently) woefully misgoverned city? Second, should we take the broligarch worldview literally and seriously? If so, it is hard to feel optimistic about the future of democracy.

https://archive.is/mDwsO

I recently joined Paris Marx on the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast. We discussed how Peter Thiel is putting a Christian mask on tech accelerationist ideas, why Silicon Valley is trying to claim the mantle of Christianity while violating everything for which Christ stood, and how tech billionaires are like an alien invasion that poses an existential threat to humankind.

The Trump administration's National Security Strategy document, published Friday, went off like a bomb, finally making clear to ever-optimistic Europeans that the United States under Donald Trump has no intention of standing with Europe or Ukraine in either the short or the long term.

Worse, it is becoming increasingly clear that this is not some temporary aberration peculiar to Trump himself, but reflects the views of a growing faction within the administration. The document (which I'm hearing was drafted by people close to J.D. Vance) reflects positions jointly held by the Kremlin and by Vance's network of PayPal ‘libertarians’ who have adopted isolationist and nationalist worldviews.

It is clear that the transatlantic alliance between the United States and Europe which formed the backbone of the post-war order is being assaulted in ways that are new and, to many, unexpected. But we must not abandon it or reach the conclusion that it is unnecessary or obsolete. To the contrary, as America is captured and in distress, Europe is in a position to play a key role in promoting democratic values in its own borders as well as helping the United States to throw off its current antidemocratic infection. Here are some key steps Europe must take now to advance democracy globally.

• Build European internal security and resilience. Europe should be able to defend itself against Russia and other threats even when America is an unreliable partner. Increasing internal capacity means Europe can contribute more to (and distribute risks and costs across) the NATO alliance.
• Reject corporate tech hegemony. The world's largest technology companies (most of which are American) now operate more like nation states. Companies like Meta, X, and Google, have amassed billions of users and present a real challenge to the sovereignty of individual countries and to the European Union. Recent actions by the European Commission (EC) to regulate X over its trade practices (which are not censorship of any kind) exemplify the kinds of actions Europe can take to resist toxic, anti-democratic corporatist influence. European leadership here can serve as an example for US regulators who also need to curb antidemocratic corporatist influence. Notably, regulating American companies can be done without stoking broad-stroke anti-Americanism.
• Resist creeping anti-American populism. With America seeming more like an enemy than an ally in Europe, it's understandable that many people might be tempted to turn on the United States and the transatlantic alliance, but we must resist this urge on both sides of the ocean. America is capable of not only being a good ally but of exhibiting real leadership that fosters productive peace. And we can do it again. But we need to throw off our current infection to do it. Europe can help by expecting America to be a reliable ally, even as it can strive for self-sufficiency when we cannot.

Balaji Srinivasan, former chief technology officer of Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, turns to address the hundreds of tech workers and investors filling a darkened arena in Singapore — all there to learn how to build empires.

It is early October and Srinivasan is hosting what he’s called the Network State Conference, an event targeting “those interested in founding, funding and finding new communities”.

For years, the entrepreneur has preached to clubby tech gatherings that they should gather their online comrades and set up a physical homeland — a network state, be that a city or a country — by joining together to buy land. He has hailed this as the “ultimate exit” by Silicon Valley from “failing” US institutions and democracy.

But what was a fringe concept a matter of years ago is now attracting more interest as scrappy start-up chief executives and aggrieved billionaires contemplate the allure of tech-friendly havens unbound by legacy rules and regulation. While some are aspirational, reliant on their founders securing hard-to-come-by special economic zone status, there are now about 120 “start-up societies” in the works, according to an open-source database shared by Srinivasan. A few have received hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital from funds backed by the likes of investors Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, OpenAI founder Sam Altman and Brian Armstrong, Coinbase chief executive.

For proponents, the initiatives offer the opportunity to address all that they believe has caused a decline in American dynamism, from monetary policy to taxation. San Francisco, in particular, has for years been affected by high levels of homelessness and crime, prompting an exodus of tech workers during Covid.

But the movement’s toughest critics — of whom there is no short supply — cast it as either a bid to play god or an attempt to avoid red tape, more opportunistic than idealistic. Others argue it is part of a broader rise in techno-fascism, or a form of authoritarian rule by technocrats. Either way, they assert, the movement is born from an elite victim complex.

Thiel, who has a net worth of $27bn and is one of the biggest funders of the space, gave a series of Manichaean lectures in recent weeks about the “Antichrist”. In between arguing that AI sceptics and Greta Thunberg were Satan, he complained that wealth gives the “illusion of power and autonomy but you have this sense it could be taken away at any moment”.

“Can you imagine being that rich and that miserable?” says Olivier Jutel, a lecturer at the University of Otago in New Zealand and an expert in cyberlibertarianism. “They think they are the grand solutionists that can fix all the problems, but it’s so insular. But just because it’s stupid doesn’t mean it won’t inherit the Earth.”

https://archive.is/uVbU7

Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire member of the “PayPal Mafia” who is also a co-founder of Palantir, wants a return to draconian punishment and public executions in the United States.

Wrote Lonsdale on X yesterday:

If I'm in charge later, we won't just have a three strikes law. We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others.

Our society needs balance. It’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.

The venture capitalist was responding to a writer who had criticized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s enthusiastic tweets about murdering people on boats in the Caribbean.

On December 4, Andrew Kolvet—a spokesman for Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA—praised Hegseth for his bombing campaign against fishing boats, which he accuses of drug smuggling. Critics say the bombings, which have killed scores of people without due process, may constitute murder or war crimes.

“Every new attack aimed at Pete Hegseth makes me want another narco drug boat blown up and sent to the bottom of the ocean,” wrote Kolvet.

“Your wish is our command, Andrew. Just sunk another narco boat,” replied Hegseth.

When Australian writer Claire Lehmann criticized Hegseth’s post as “grotesque,” Lonsdale responded, declaring that sinking the boats “helps publicly deter others” and “killing bad guys” is Hegseth’s job.

“Masculine truth: bold, virtuous men deter evil,” wrote Lonsdale.

In his subsequent post, he unveiled his fantasy of a future in which he, put in charge, erodes due process, expands the use of the death penalty, and revives public hangings.

This public fetishization of state violence—framed explicitly as “masculine truth” and virtuous protection—suggests tech elites are entering a more dangerous and desperate phase of radicalization.

For months, Peter Thiel guru Curtis Yarvin has been squawking about the need for more severe measures to cement Trump's authoritarian rule. Peter Thiel is ranting about the Antichrist in a global tour. And now Lonsdale—a Thiel protégé—is fantasizing about a future in which he will have the power to unleash state violence at mass scale.

The meme is spreading. Where is it heading?