JD Vance embraces authoritarian theories spread by neo-reactionaries and billionaires from Silicon Valley.
A victory for Republican Donald Trump in the November election would be the crowning achievement of the neo-reactionary techno-libertarian movement that makes up part of what is called the “New Right” in the United States.
Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, was sponsored by Peter Thiel, one of Silicon Valley’s major billionaires. Thiel and other “tech world” barons, including investors Marc Andreessen (Netscape co-founder), Ben Horowitz and David Sacks, follow and finance Curtis Yarvin, one of the exponents of the neo-reactionary movement.
Just like his patrons, Vance has already endorsed a number of Yarvin’s ideas. The neo-reactionary movement, known as NRx, wants to replace democracy with a quasi-feudal regime in which the ruler would act as a king or CEO with absolute powers over civil servants. It would also put technology at the center of everything.
The neo-reactionaries are opposed to traditional Republicans and their strategy of gradually injecting conservatism into government.
Yarvin, a 51-year-old former programmer and blogger, with the long hair and eyeglasses of a nerd, fights what he calls “the cathedral.” This would be an elite group of government bureaucrats, universities and the major media who would preach progressive values.
He popularized the conceit of the “red pill” (referenced in “The Matrix’), which signifies opening one’s eyes to the reality of what progressives are trying to hide.
“Yarvin is a strange type of monarchist, who wants to have a government made up of visionary CEO kings, heroic figures, who understand the world, and with a substrate of common people who would be conservative subjects,” said Henry Farrell, professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University, who has just published an article on the issue.*
Neo-Reactionism started as a fringe movement on the internet, part of what was called the “alt-right.”** Yarvin gained the spotlight in this niche group in 2010 with his blog written under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug.
The former programmer only earned the status of “prophet Yarvin” after being embraced by Thiel, a friend who helped him finance a startup. It was the fusion of techno-libertarianism and Neo-Reactionism.
Back in 2012, Yarvin coined the acronym RAGE, for Retire All Government Employees, as a first step to overthrow the U.S. government.
That is exactly what is proposed by Project 2025, a government plan festooned with names of people and organizations close to Trump, and a plan from which Trump is trying to distance himself.
And Trump’s running mate, Vance himself, fully endorsed Yarvin’s idea in a 2021 interview on Jack Murphy’s right-wing YouTube channel.
“There’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who’s been writing about this,” Vance said,* proposing what he defined as a program of de-Baathification (the firing en masse of Saddam Hussein’s party, which occupied government positions after the Iraq invasion), or a de-wokification (from the term “woke” used by the right to refer pejoratively to the positions of the extreme left.)
“I think that Trump will run again in 2024 and it is this that he needs to do: Fire all the government bureaucrats, all the civil servants, and substitute our people for them,” Vance said in 2021,* echoing Yarvin. In other remarks, Vance stuck with Yarvin’s conceits relating to the “red pill” and “the cathedral.”
Thiel, Vance and Yarvin’s godfather, crossed Vance’s path in 2011, when the senator studied law at Yale.
After graduating, Vance worked at Thiel’s venture capital fund and then left to open his own fund with billionaire Thiel’s support. The two baptized their businesses with names referring to places and people from “The Lord of the Rings.”
Thiel, one of the first investors in Facebook, was the largest donor to Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign, pouring $15 million into Vance’s candidacy.
Along with Sacks, Elon Musk, another member of what is known as the PayPal mafia including online payment firm founders Andreessen and Horowitz, Thiel declared his support for Trump. They all became major donors to his campaign.
They oppose President Joe Biden’s effort to regulate artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency and social networks, and the antitrust measures against Big Tech. They preach the gospel of the New Right in their crusade to empower the private sector and combat the “deep state,” a term that refers to the supposed bureaucratic elite who defend their own interests.
“It’s as if they build a sense of identity around their companies’ business model and transform this into a philosophy, borrowing ideas from thinkers who are compatible with their ideology, such as Curtis Yarvin,” Farrell said.* Farrell believes these businesses see themselves as heroes, as the engines of humanity’s progress who are being hindered by government bureaucrats.
Andreessen, whose business manages $42 billion in assets, even launched “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” last year, celebrating the “techno-capital machine” and its capacity to bring everything that is good to the world.
“In this vision, wealthy technologists are not just leaders of their business but also keepers of the social order, unencumbered by what Mr. Andreessen labels “enemies”: social responsibility, trust and safety [in social media], and tech ethics . . .” digital strategist Elizabeth Spiers wrote in The New York Times.
At a seminar at the Cato Institute, Thiel even said that he no longer believes “democracy and liberty are compatible.”
Trump and Vance have embraced the New Right’s call for authoritarianism and are betting on an unparalleled centralization of power.
*Editor’s note: Although accurately translated, this quoted remark could not be independently verified.
** Editor’s note: “Alt-right” refers to a white nationalist movement.
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