Democracy Is Done: The Rise of Corporate Monarchy

The Real Agenda Behind Elon's Coup & Trump's Chaotic First Weeks

Alright, it's finally time to answer the million-dollar question that's on everyone's mind: WHY IS ALL THIS INSANITY HAPPENING IN OUR GOVERNMENT ALL OF A SUDDEN???

If you don't know what the ultimate agenda is, this first 3 weeks of Trump's presidency sure looks like a chaotic, haphazard, nonsensical 3-ring circus dumpster fire.

Absolutely none of it makes any sense.

Only it actually does...in a terrifying sort of way.

The first thing to remember is that real life isn't like a movie where the bad guys are all part of the same unified organization trying to take over the world. There are a number of bad actors with secret goals, and the one thing we may have working in our favor is that the ones we do know about clearly have different objectives, so it's entirely possible they sabotage each other before any of them successfully pull off their own batty agendas.

First, we've got Project 2025, whose long game seems to be implementing a sort of far-right extremist, quasi-authoritarian political regime within the current American political structure, where Conservative ideologies are shoved down everyone's throats whether they like it or not. The current immigrant roundup is part of this agenda, as was the ending of Roe v Wade, banning trans people, dismantling gay marriage (coming soon), insisting climate change isn't real, and waging non-stop culture war issues on mostly non-existent problems (see: CRT, cat litter in classrooms, and anything involving pronouns. Most of Trump's more controversial Executive Orders not involving Elon and DOGE are part of the Project 2025 agenda.

Then we've got the Christian Reconstructionists (see also: Dominionists and the New Apostolic Reformation), whose long game is re-jiggering the Constitution to make America less of a democratic republic and more of a Christian theocracy. Based on the teachings of R.J. Rushdoony—whose chief disciple Mike Johnson currently sits third in line for the presidency as Speaker of the House—this agenda acknowledges that

1. the secularists are actually correct that the Founding Fathers never set America up as a "Christian nation founded on Christian principles, and

2. the Founding Fathers got it wrong in that regard. America was SUPPOSED to be a Christian nation, and it's their God-given duty to "fix" what the Founders screwed up.

This group wants to install Christian Nationalism and legislate Biblical morality (according to their very narrow interpretation of it). Project 2025 wants to outlaw gays. The Reconstructionists want to execute them. They're basically the American Taliban for Jesus. Thankfully, they remain on the fringe and haven't had much success implementing their backwards agenda, other than minor victories like mandating the Ten Commandments and Bibles in every classroom in places like Louisiana and Oklahoma where no one knows how to read anyway.

Finally, we've got a third group—the one that's responsible for all the chaos Elon and DOGE are causing. Their agenda is actually FAR MORE extreme than either Project 2025 or the Reconstructionists. And the scary thing is, they're already implementing their freakish plan at warp speed while most of the country is busy bickering about all the quaint Project 2025 garbage (and Trump's usual unending fire hose of idiotic nonsense).

There's a few key players we're gonna have to cover some backstory for, namely Elon Musk, JD Vance, a guy you might've heard of by the name of Peter Thiel, and a guy you almost certainly haven't, Curtis Yarvin. These guys are all connected in a mildly horrifying way and we're about to unpack it all...

The Elon Musk-Peter Thiel Connection

Once upon a time in the 90's, Elon Musk founded a small company called X.com (No, not Twitter—a different X.com. Dude just has an inexplicable fixation with the letter X). X was a fledgling digital banking service that allowed people to transact with vendors and each other without cash, checks, or plastic.

At the same time Musk was building out X, another young entrepreneur, a German immigrant named Peter Thiel, was building a very similar money-transfer service right across town called Confinity. Rather than compete with each other, Musk and Thiel decided to merge their two companies in 1999, with Musk named CEO of the new company. Shortly after the merger, Musk was fired as CEO by the board, who replaced him with Thiel. After Thiel took over, the company's name was changed to "PayPal.” You may have heard of it.

Peter Thiel

The PayPal Mafia

PayPal attracted some of the most promising young talent in Silicon Valley, and its early members wielded so much power and influence in the tech space that they became collectively known as the "PayPal Mafia."

Besides Musk and Thiel, the PayPal Mafia included:

• David Sacks (Founder of Geni.com and Yammer, Trump’s new “AI/Crypto Czar”)

• Ken Howery (former PayPal CFO who became a partner at Founders Fund. Currently Trump's Ambassador to Denmark)

• Steven Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim (co-founders of YouTube)

• Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman (co-founders of Yelp)

• Max Levchin (current CEO of Affirm)

• Roelof Botha (partner at Sequoia Capital)

• Reed Hoffman (founder of Linkedin, early investor in Facebook, currently on the board at Microsoft)

• Jack Selby (co-founder of Clarium Capital with Peter Thiel)

• Yishan Wong (CEO of Reddit, founder of Terraformation Inc)

• Premal Shah (founder of Kiva, on the board at Change.org)

Plus a dozen others. The PayPal Mafia churned out a Who's Who in the Big Tech space, with nearly everyone involved becoming billionaires many times over. Today, it's one of the wealthiest and most influential collection of individuals, not just in America, but in the entire world.

The “Paypal Mafia,” Fortune Magazine cover (2007)

In 2002, eBay acquired Paypal for $1.5 billion. Although no longer officially with PayPal after being ousted, Elon still held around 10% of the company shares and netted roughly $160 million in the sale.

So that's the Peter Thiel-Elon Musk connection–they co-founded PayPal together.

Now let's see how JD Vance is tied into this crew.

The Peter Thiel-JD Vance Connection

In 2011, Peter Thiel gave a talk at Yale where JD Vance was attending law school, changing the course of Vance's life, as JD recounts it. Vance called Thiel "possibly the smartest person" he ever met, and decided to pivot from a career in law to one in venture capitol. In 2015, JD joined the Thiel-founded Mithril Capital, with Thiel as his personal mentor.

Vice President JD Vance

In 2016, Vance published "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis," thrusting his name into the national spotlight for the first time. It was at this same time that Vance, unencumbered by any political aspirations or pretense and therefore free to speak his actual mind, sent his Yale roommate an email regarding America's leading presidential candidate, Donald Trump, that read: "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler. How's that for discouraging?")

“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler.” – JD Vance

Vance left Thiel's firm in 2017 and joined a D.C.-based investment firm. Then he launched his own VC firm, Narya Capital, in 2019 with financial backing from Thiel, billionaire VC capitalist Mark Andreessen, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

For reasons we'll get to in just a minute, around the time the pandemic was starting to wind down, Peter Thiel decided it was finally time for him to own a U.S. Senator and start pulling some long-awaited political strings. He figured that since he'd funded Vance's VC firm and essentially owned Vance already, he'd just migrate that ownership from the private sector to the public.

Because JD Vance had been an open critic of Donald Trump during Trump's entire first term, Thiel invited Vance down to Mar A Lago to smooth things over in hopes of getting an endorsement from Orange Jesus. Thiel informed Vance of his plans to make him a Senator, so Vance scrapped all his previous principles, decided power was “more gooder” than having any convictions, kissed Trump's ring, and earned the endorsement.

Thiel, for his part, poured an ungodly amount of his own money into Vance's Senate campaign—about $15 million—marking the largest donation to a single Senate candidate in American history. In addition to his personal $15 mil, Thiel also recruited 10 major donors for Vance, including a couple old tech buddies from the PayPal Mafia who chipped in a million each.

So, if you ever found yourself wondering how the author of "Hillbilly Elegy," a lawyer-turned-venture capitalist with no political experience or aspirations and a vocal critic of Donald Trump came out of nowhere and managed to snag Trump's endorsement and win a Senate seat in his first foray into politics, there's your explanation: Peter Thiel orchestrated, arranged, and funded the entire thing. A tech billionaire bought himself a Senator.

Now, the next question is: WHY?

This is where it starts to get scary.

It's time to meet the final character in our story.

Curtis Yarvin

Yarvin is a software developer and tech entrepreneur who started the Unqualified Reservations blog in 2003 under the pen name Mencius Moldbug. He's perhaps best known for founding the anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary movement (NRx).

Curtis Yarvin a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug

Like most people, Yarvin sees a ton of problems in society. But unlike most people, the problems he sees—and his solutions to those problems—are dystopian fringe at best, and democracy-ending suicide at worst.

In a nutshell, Yarvin's Dark Enlightenment political worldview is that the REAL power in the U.S. resides in an informal collaboration of universities and the mainstream media (that he calls "the Cathedral") which collude to sway public opinion. He admires the former Chinese Communist leader Deng Xiaoping for his "pragmatic and market-oriented authoritarianism," believes America's commitment to equality and justice "erodes social order," and advocates for an American "monarch" to dissolve elite academic institutions and media outlets asap.

A regular speaker at various Libertarian and techno-fascist conferences, Yarvin's position is that democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful and should be replaced with sovereign corporations whose "shareholders" elect an executive with total power over the country/corporation. As Yarvin explains it, "Unencumbered by liberal-democratic procedures, the executive could rule like a CEO-Monarch."

And just in case it still isn't abundantly clear what Curtis Yarvin thinks is the solution to what ails America, here it is in his most straightforward phrasing: "If Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator-phobia."

Yes, Curtis Yarvin is an unapologetic proponent of dictatorships since "there's no real difference between a dictator and a CEO, and corporations under the rule of a CEO appear to work just fine." As he puts it, "Nations like the United States are outdated software systems" that need to be "broken up into smaller entities called 'patchworks' which would be controlled by tech corporations."

"If Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator-phobia." - Curtis Yarvin

As he put it in an interview with the NY Times on Jan 18, "Democracy is done."

Now, I know what you're thinking.

"Shane, this Yarvin dude is clearly off his rocker. Nobody in their right mind would take this "Corporate Monarchy" nonsense seriously. Why are you wasting everyone's time explaining in detail the techno-fascist-manifesto ramblings of some internet pop philosopher who calls himself 'Mencius Moldbug?' Dude sounds like he's living in some Matrix-meets-Hunger-Games dystopian fantasy world. Surely NOBODY takes this dude's crazy ideas seriously!"

That's where you would be wrong.

Perilously wrong.

Two of Curtis Yarvin's biggest disciples and advocates for his technocratic ideas are...

Peter Thiel and Vice President JD Vance, the MAGA heir apparent.

“Democracy is done.” – Curtis Yarvin

Yarvin and Thiel have been friends since at least 2009 after Yarvin's writings and ideologies became super popular within the PayPal Mafia circle. Thiel brought Vance into the fold in the process of mentoring him at Mithril Capital. (If you’ve got an hour and a half to waste, here’s Vance on the Jack Murphy Live Podcast name-dropping Yarvin and spewing a few of his more sinister ideas.)

See, people forget that billionaires have political ideologies just like everyone else. And remember, most peoples' political ideologies are generally tailored to improve the life of the person holding them. Democracy sounds great if you're a peasant living under a king with no say in how things are run. But in what way would democracy improve your life if you're a multi-billionaire who can buy politicians? Once you're up that high on the food chain, democracy is no longer a step UP, it's a step DOWN.

So, all these filthy rich, filthy powerful tech bros have jumped on board with turning America into a corporation run by a CEO with authoritarian power. According to them, the masses don't need to be voting – the masses are idiots. (Or as Yarvin puts it, "The masses are asses.") The PayPal Mafia has no interest in becoming beholden to the whims of a bunch of blue collar workers from Appalachia. If they're gonna be free to live their best lives, they're gonna need to unshackle themselves from the "masses who can't even figure life out enough to afford groceries."

Put bluntly, those who can write a check for a few $billion and not even notice it's gone are not interested in the opinions of those whining about the cost of 12 eggs.

As Peter Thiel once wrote in a Cato essay, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” - Peter Thiel

Now, supposing they were actually going to attempt to pull this techno-coup off, what would that look like in practice?

Thankfully, Yarvin has had the plan mapped out for years with a little strategy he's given the acronym RAGE: Retire All Government Employees.

It would look exactly like what we're all looking at.

Elon's "haphazard, chaotic coup" of federal agencies is anything but. This has been the plan all along by these Yarvin acolytes: gut the federal workforce—either by mass firings or incentivizing them to resign—crippling the entire government in the process, at which point Big Tech corporate solutions that just so happen to already be on hand can step in and take over the reigns of running our government.

Since you could never get away with doing this as a blatant hostile takeover, you just frame the entire exercise as an "audit to weed out fraud and corruption," then watch the gatekeepers roll out the red carpets and cheer the whole takeover on!

I know it sounds like tin-foil-hat conspiracy, but LOOK at what's happening in front of your eyes.

Isn't it a little weird that JD Vance came out of nowhere to win a Senate seat? And weirder still that Peter Thiel managed to convince Trump to make this virtual nobody his running mate even though Vance was the most unpopular VP pick in polling history?

Wasn't it a bit strange that Donald Trump told a bunch of Evangelicals at a rally, "Vote for me this one time and I'll make sure you never have to vote again?" What the hell did that mean?

Isn't it slightly too coincidental that Peter Thiel's original business partner Elon Musk is currently running roughshod through the American government doing EXACTLY what Curtis Yarvin said needs to happen?

This isn't conspiracy land at this point. These dudes told everyone what they wanted to do, and then they started doing it while we all watch dumbfounded. The Left is going, "Surely they can't be doing what it sure as hell looks like they're doing—taking over the government!" and the Right is just...cheering them on because it "makes the libtard snowflakes cry."

So there's your explanation.

Elon Musk, JD Vance, and Peter Thiel are executing a long-planned agenda to take over the government. Donald Trump is just a dementia-addled old man along for the ride, ranting about windmills and magnets and taking over canals, and content to just sign large pieces of papers for the TV cameras all day.

Hopefully, the chaos makes a little more sense now.

I told you you weren't gonna like it.

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If you enjoyed this article, here’s my follow-up piece: The Network State: Peter Thiel, Donald Trump, and Silicon Valley’s Quest for Greenland