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.