Trump’s Vice President Could Bring America’s ‘New Right’ to the White House – Watching America

JD Vance embraces authoritarian theories spread by neo-reactionaries and Silicon Valley billionaires.

A victory for Republican Donald Trump in the November election would be the crowning achievement of the neo-reactionary techno-libertarian movement that is part of what in the United States is called the “New Right.”

Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, was sponsored by Peter Thiel, one of Silicon Valley’s biggest billionaires. Thiel and other barons of the “tech world”, including investors Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Netscape), Ben Horowitz and David Sacks, follow and finance Curtis Yarvin, one of the exponents of the neo-reactionary movement.

Like his patrons, Vance has already endorsed some of Yarvin’s ideas. The neo-reactionary movement known as NRx seeks to replace democracy with a quasi-feudal regime in which the ruler acts as a king or CEO with absolute power over officials. It would also put technology at the center of everything.

The neo-reactionaries opposed the traditional Republicans and their strategy of gradually injecting conservatism into government.

Yarvin, a 51-year-old former programmer and blogger with long hair and nerd glasses, is fighting what he calls “the cathedral,” an elite group of government bureaucrats, universities and major media outlets that preach progressive values.

He popularized the idea of ​​the “red pill” (referenced in “The Matrix”), which means opening your eyes to the reality of what progressives try to hide.

“Yarvin is a strange kind of monarchist, who wants a government made up of visionary CEO-kings, heroic figures who understand the world, and with a substrate of ordinary people who would like to be conservative subjects,” said Henry Farrell, a professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University, who just published a paper on the issue.*

Neo-reactionism began as a fringe movement on the Internet, part of what was called the “alt-right.”** Yarvin came to attention in this niche group in 2010 with his blog, which he wrote under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug.

The former programmer only achieved the status of “Prophet Yarvin” after he was embraced by Thiel, a friend who helped him finance a startup. It was the fusion of techno-libertarianism and neo-reactionism.

In 2012, Yarvin coined the acronym RAGE, which stands for Retire All Government Employees, as a first step in overthrowing the US government.

That’s exactly what Project 2025 proposes, a government plan littered with the names of people and organizations close to Trump, and a plan that Trump is trying to distance himself from.

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 a guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has written about this,” Vance* said, proposing what he defined as a program of de-Baathification (the mass dismissal of Saddam Hussein’s party, which held government positions after the invasion of Iraq), or de-wokification (from the term “woke” used by the right to refer pejoratively to the views of the far left.)

“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024 and this is what he needs to do: fire all the government bureaucrats, all the public servants, and put our people in their place,” Vance said in 2021,* echoing Yarvin. In other remarks, Vance stuck with Yarvin’s ideas about the “red pill” and “the cathedral.”

Thiel, godfather to Vance and Yarvin, crossed paths with Vance in 2011, when the senator was a law student at Yale.

After graduating, Vance worked at Thiel’s venture capital fund and then left to open his own fund with the backing of billionaire Thiel. The two named their companies after places and people from “The Lord of the Rings.”

Thiel, an early investor in Facebook, was the largest donor to Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign, investing $15 million in Vance’s candidacy.

Along with Sacks, Elon Musk, another member of what is known as the PayPal mafia, which includes the founders of online payment companies Andreessen and Horowitz, Thiel declared his support for Trump. They all became major donors to his campaign.

They oppose President Joe Biden’s efforts to regulate artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies and social networking, and antitrust measures against Big Tech. They preach the gospel of the New Right in their crusade to strengthen the private sector and combat the “deep state,” a term that refers to the supposedly self-interested bureaucratic elite.

“It’s as if they’re building a sense of identity around their company’s business model and turning it into a philosophy, borrowing ideas from thinkers who are compatible with their ideology, like Curtis Yarvin,” Farrell said.* Farrell believes these companies see themselves as heroes, as engines of human progress who are being stymied by government bureaucrats.

Andreessen, whose firm manages $42 billion in assets, even launched “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” last year, celebrating the “techno-capital machine” and its ability to bring all that is good into the world.

“In this view, wealthy technologists are not just leaders of their companies but also custodians of the social order, unencumbered by what Mr. Andreessen calls “enemies”: social responsibility, trust and security (in social media), and technology ethics…” wrote digital strategist Elizabeth Spiers in The New York Times.

During a seminar at the Cato Institute, Thiel even said that he no longer believes that “democracy and freedom are compatible.”

Trump and Vance embrace the New Right’s call for authoritarianism and push for unprecedented centralization of power.

*Editor’s note: While the translation is correct, this quoted comment could not be independently verified.

**Editor’s Note: “Alt-right” refers to a white nationalist movement.