The Art of the Steal

November 14, 2024

A gradual takeover of the White House by the “New Right” is underway. Its public face is Elon Musk, who entered politics by purchasing Twitter in 2022 and turning it into a giant megaphone for himself and Republican political propaganda. This year, he campaigned with Trump and has become the elected president’s policy whisperer. He will reign as secretary of everything in the new cabinet. The two egos may clash and part, but it won’t matter because Musk already “bought” the Vice Presidency for his disciple J.D. Vance, who will stay behind. This represents a sea-change, or the de facto “acquisition” of America by Musk and other tech tycoons, who are as wealthy as nation-states and have decided to upend America’s government. These rich guys believe America’s a mess, and they also know it’s for sale. One of Musk’s pals, Reid Hoffman (founder of Linkedin), published the tech business plan: “In the matrix of people supporting Trump…`Are they purchasable?’ Biden and Harris are not purchasable, and Trump is the most purchasable president in our lifetime.” As it turned out, Hoffman was right. He donated to Harris, but Musk and fellow Paypal founder Peter Thiel backed Trump and have “bought” the Oval Office.

South African-born Musk and German-born Thiel

Political capture is nothing new. Mark Twain penned: “America has the best politicians that money can buy.” The U.S. political system remains corrupt because there are no limits on contributions, no disclosure requirements, and no barriers. The country’s political class is for sale to the highest bidder, individually or collectively. That’s why it’s little wonder that America’s democracy has been subjected, over the years, to waves of extremists or philosophical fads. This latest “New Right” infiltration is nothing new except that it’s concentrated in the hands of only a few people. The Democrats were in the grip of the “squad” and “progressives,” who convinced the party to be more concerned about pronouns and political correctness than about fixing the border or stoking the economy.

Now, a tail will still wag the dog, except the “New Right” dances to the tune of a mysterious software engineer blogger named Curtis Yarvin. It should come as no surprise that MAGA maestro Steve Bannon is also a Yarvin fan and that Yarvin believes that democracy, or rule by the people, doesn’t work or result in good decisions. He believes that democracy is a “destructive” form of government and that a techno-monarchy should run the place with a national chief executive who knows what he’s doing. Yarvin is close to Thiel, who’s close to Musk, who’s close to Trump.

Curtis Yarvin

Thiel made his first high-profile move into politics in 2022 by becoming a Republican Kingmaker and the most significant donor during those mid-term elections. He specialized in efforts to unseat moderate GOPs who voted to impeach Trump for his role in the Capitol insurrection. He spent $15 million getting J.D. Vance elected to the Senate that year. But Thiel had dabbled before, quietly giving millions to libertarian Ron Paul in 2012, then in 2016, he publicly endorsed Trump in a keynote speech at the Republican convention. By 2020, he had abandoned Trump after spending months inside his dysfunctional administration, a disappointment that led to the decision by these tech giants to insert Musk inside the regime to ensure quality “control.” The result is that Elon Musk is currently the “shadow president.”

This week, Trump announced that Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would lead a “Department of Government Efficiency.” He said it would be “the Manhattan Project” of this era, driving “drastic change” throughout the government with significant cuts and new efficiencies in bloated federal bureaucracy agencies by July 4, 2026. (Ramaswamy sought the Republican nomination against Trump. He promised to eliminate the Education Department, the F.B.I., and the Internal Revenue Service. He proposed to axe 75 percent of all federal jobs and slash foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.)

It’s also important to note that Trump’s two sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, facilitated this tech takeover. They convinced their father to appoint Vance as his Vice Presidential running mate and to meet Musk and others. Now they are part of the tech world: Eric runs a cryptocurrency start-up, and Donald Jr. just announced he would join the same Thiel venture capital firm that trained Vance and made him rich. That firm also owns a piece of Tucker Carlson’s media company. Thus, Silicon Valley billionaires are forming a Yarvin-style “monarchy,” complete with an aristocracy of useful “princes” and a succession plan.

(By the way, everyone involved in this tech cabal has also made a killing. Musk’s shares in Tesla and Space X have soared by tens of billions, and Silicon Valley’s considerable stakes in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have rocketed upward. Even better, their tech-bro coup d’etat will eliminate the cost to all tech giants of fending off Congress's pesky onslaughts about the sector’s anti-competitive, predatory, and unethical practices.)

So here’s where America is headed. The mastermind is Thiel, who explained his beliefs in a 2009 libertarian blog: “I remain committed to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself `libertarian.’ But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically in terms of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Behind their philosophy is Yarvin, whose beliefs are described as “radical libertarianism,” “anti-progressive,” “anti-egalitarian,” and “anti-democratic.” But essentially, he believes in an enlightened dictatorship run by an elite, which would presumably include himself and his tech buddies. Weirdly, he also refers to the U.S. ruling regime as “the cathedral” and blames academics and journalists for propping up the current system. In Trump-talk, this translates into “fake news.”

The Trump tech bros

Yarvin believes this “cathedral” must be destroyed. He also writes about RAGE, his acronym for Retire All Government Employees. This underpins Musk’s goal to slash $2 trillion from government overheads, which can only be realistically achieved by dismantling the Pentagon and cutting Medicare and Social Security obligations.

Finally, Yarvin’s centrally managed economy is led by a monarch who acts like a corporate CEO and can bypass all governmental procedures. All this “theology” underpins the “New Right” takeover and, frighteningly, gives new meaning to the alarming statement Trump made in July at a campaign rally: “Get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed and fine; you won’t have to vote anymore if you vote for me.” (When a Fox News journalist asked whether this meant he wouldn’t leave the Presidency in four years if he won, he said he would. “I left it the last time.” )

However, everyone knows that Trump fought to remain in the Presidency in 2020. He launched litigation, made threats, and helped organize a riot at the Capital Building that killed four and injured 174 to stay in power. Another worry is that Yarvin is also a revisionist. He has blamed democracy for electing Hitler and World War II when the facts are that Hitler won only 30 percent of the votes and stole the Chancellorship of Germany by hoodwinking an aging, demented German aristocrat, President Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler’s takeover wasn’t an example of democracy’s shortcomings. It revealed the danger of elitism without checks and balances — a history that German-born Peter Thiel surely knows and that America must avoid.