How Peter Thiel Made JD Vance A Weapon

The third world war began in 1954, without a shot fired.

This was no cold war, just an inaudible one. Following two ruinous world wars, humankind’s most industrious and wealthy elites decided to bring scientific rationalism to the world order. No longer would rulers declare war, or would subjects start revolutions: Instead, the world needed a system which was “totally predictable and manipulatable.” To achieve that, Western society had to be conquered without ever knowing it.

This was a sub-dermal war. A conflict to take power, control, and wealth away from the masses, putting it “into the hands of the self-disciplined, responsible, and worthy few.” It would be carried out like a transfer of energy, with logical systems deployed to funnel electricity into a single node. That power would be used to power these silent weapons, to make the system self-perpetuating.

These silent weapons are as powerful as they are subtle. “(A silent weapon) shoots situations, instead of bullets; propelled by data processing, instead of chemical reaction (explosion); originating from bits of data, instead of grains of gunpowder; from a computer, instead of a gun; operated by a computer programmer, instead of a marksman; under the orders of a banking magnate, instead of a military general.”

This war has been waged for three-quarters of a century, and it is still being fought — although one side is clearly winning.

We only know about these silent weapons and this quiet war because of the discovery of Operations Research Technical Manual TW-SW7905.1. It is said that a copy of this manual sat in the archives of U.S. Naval Intelligence since at least the 1960s, but this edition — dated 1979 — was discovered in the memory of an IBM photocopier bought at a surplus sale in 1986. That’s how it made its way into the hands of William Cooper, the Rush Limbaugh of shortwave radio.

This manual was, Cooper declared in his infamous 1991 book Behold a Pale Horse, a secret declaration of war by the Illuminati. And this shadowy group had a name: It was a committee of powerful bloodlines, the Rockefellers and Rothschilds, which met for the first time in 1954 to adopt the plan for this New World Order. They called themselves The Bilderberg Group.

A quarter-century after Cooper exposed the secret machinations of The Bilderberg Group’s quiet war, Technical Manual TW-SW7905.1 is almost entirely forgotten. So effective have these silent weapons been that The Bilderberg Group has nakedly and openly installed one of their puppets onto the presidential ticket.

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, I reveal the powerful Illuminati connections of J.D. Vance and his oligarch master.

Ok, not really.

William Cooper is a crackpot and conspiracy theorist. While determining the actual origins of Operations Research Technical Manual TW-SW7905.1 is virtually impossible, we can say with a pretty high degree of confidence that it is a lazy forgery, republished by Cooper without a second thought.

Behold A Pale Horse is the Old Testament for modern conspiracy theorydom. (Dispatches #3, #52) Everything in the book, from fanciful tales of UFOs making contact with the Pentagon to the shadowy Jewish banking cabal pulling the strings behind society, is scripture for our current paranoid age. It is, in a word, barking mad.

Yet, to read it for the first time today, it’s unbelievably familiar. So much in the book has been ported into the dominant political fantasies: Cooper’s myth-building influence is written all over the QAnon tale, just as his rabidly anti-government ideology is an integral building block for the modern militia movement. Alex Jones considers Cooper as an idol, and has basically co-opted the broadcaster’s playbook.

Where some, like the John Birch Society, believed Communism was the global evil, Cooper saw enemies everywhere. George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope John Paul II: All part of the Illuminati. As were groups like the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the CIA, KGB, the Skull and Bones Society, the Rosicrucians, the Knights Templar, the Nazi Party, and a whole host of other acronyms, secret societies, transnational groups, and think tanks. This wasn’t about ideology or religion, this was about power. “The Communists are not going to be much happier with the New World Order than we,” Cooper wrote in ‘91.

This whole list of conspirators was pretty unwieldy. So, in the years since, his successors went à la carte, picking only the best elements of his meta-theory. They also updated his list of shadowy powerbrokers for our modern age to add George Soros, Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum, and so on.

I’m fascinated by Cooper. I’m fascinated by his world-building, his lasting power for anti-government extremists, and how his legacy permeates conspiracydom today. But I’m just as fascinated by the things in Cooper’s mythos that have been forgotten. In particular, the central organizing committee for the New World World: The Bilderberg Group.

The Group is real. It genuinely met for the first time in 1954. And it still exists today. At their most recent meeting, held in May in Madrid, 130 leaders from across politics, business, and culture gathered from across North America and Europe to discuss the state of AI, the future of warfare, China, the economic headwinds facing the Western world, and much else. Attendees included ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt, the prime ministers of Estonia and the Netherlands, General David Petraeus, the CEO of Pfizer, and a raft of other powerful people.

While we know that The Bilderberg Group is not all-powerful cabal, it’s not hard to see how a conspiracy theorist could make a meal out of these little-known meetings of the minds. So why haven’t they?

Perhaps Bilderberg has lost its allure as an Illuminati front group because its members are, in fact, clients, customers, and patrons of these conspiracy theories. Also present for the Madrid meeting was, for example, Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey and ex-Trump trade advisor Robert Lighthizer — both committed MAGA Republicans.

Also in Madrid was another longtime Bilderberg-er: A globalist so committed to this meeting of captains of industry and political apparatchiks that, for the past ten years, he’s sat on the board for American Friends of Bilderberg, the official American non-profit for the internationalist group. With his fellow globalists, as per their 2023 tax filings, the Friends of Bilderberg “organizes and sponsors conferences which study & discuss significant problems of the Western Alliance. It also collaborates on the Bilderberg Meetings held in Europe & North America.” He’s on the steering committee for the New World Order.

He’s also the architect of J.D. Vance’s political career, one of Donald Trump’s biggest backers, and a financier of paranoia and conspiracy theory par excellence.

His name is Peter Thiel.

Mencius Moldbug is probably the most influential political philosopher you’ve never heard of.

The pseudo-anonymous blogger — real name Curtis Yarvin — was arguably the first to insist that all politics comes down to a specific binary choice: The blue pill, or the red pill.

When he introduced it, Yarvin wasn’t talking about competing visions for a personal tax rate or an either/or choice on a particular election. He was talking about the nature of democracy itself.

As he wrote in 2007, to take the blue pill would be to believe “democracy is inseparable from freedom and law.” But Yarvin invites you to take the red pill: “At best, democracy is sand in the gears of freedom and law. At worst it excludes them entirely, as in Iraq.”

Someone taking the blue pill may believe that “the disasters of fascism and communism demonstrate the importance of representative democracy.” But not Yarvin and his lot, who prefer the red pill: How “fascism and communism are best understood as forms of democracy. The difference between single-party and multiparty democracy is like the difference between a malignant tumor and a benign one.”

A self-described nobody, Yarvin was sketching out a 21st century post-democracy. He imagined his strain of illiberal thought as having the power to wake up the masses, as the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th century moved European peasants from the pews and into the classroom: That’s why he called his movement the ‘Dark Enlightenment.’ (The grandiose ambitions would later be scaled back when his ideology rebranded as the ‘Neo-Reactionary Movement.’)

As he built up his anti-democratic philosophy, Yarvin came to describe the infrastructure that held democracy in place. While William Cooper imagined the deep state as a castle on a hill, filled with shadowy chess masters; Yarvin, instead, sees these powerbase everywhere, as mundane facts of life. The ones keeping our system in place are in academia, the media, and journalism. This triumvirate, in total control of Western political thought, he dubs “The Cathedral.”

Through their stranglehold on the dialectic, The Cathedral imposes this belief in democracy and liberalism, much like Rome imposed Catholic doctrine through much of European modernity. “There is no way to receive a mainstream university education, read the Times every morning, trust both of them, and not be a progressive,” Yarvin writes. “Unless, of course, you’re an idiot.” (The last line is written with a wink.) This prevailing progressivism captures the inherently-status-quo–defending civil service, making The Cathedral all-powerful and, seemingly, immovable.

The alternative, Yarvin believed, was a kind of neo-monarchism. In practise, that looked like state corporatism, where society and government would be led by an unelected professional class helmed by a CEO, not beholden to these messy politics. Said another way: A dictatorship of one. As he wrote in 2010:

Cannot we marvel at what the Third Reich achieved, with the knowledge that it was run by a maniac? In the hands of a non-maniac, what might it have done? In the hands of an (Roman Emperor) Augustus, for instance? Well, somewhere in Germany in 1933, there might have been an Augustus or two. Or even three. But Germany in 1933 was a democracy. And that democracy elected not Augustus, not Frederick the Great, not even Kaiser Bill. It elected – (Hitler)

In an era where political blogging was still a remarkably niche sport, Yarvin’s regularly-updated journal was an exciting and risqué space.

Unsurprisingly, Yarvin remained a largely unknown and un-influential figure. As his day job, he developed Urbit, a decentralized operating platform that allows for peer-to-peer communication that runs entirely on-device. As a concept, it hoped to enshrine the kind of techno-libertarianism promised by the early internet: A weird syncretic jumble of beliefs that married libertarianism, futurism, rationalism, globalism, atheism, pacifism, and so much more.

As a concept, Urbit was promising. And it attracted none other than Peter Thiel, who had exited PayPal, which he founded, a few years earlier. Thiel was spinning up Palantir, his big-data surveillance firm, and investing in mission-aligned start-ups through Thiel Capital.

Thiel became not just a financier of Yarvin’s technology, but a client of his philosophy. And his friend.

In a 2007 essay, Thiel declared “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Whether it’s that belief that led him to Yarvin, or whether Yarvin led him to that belief is unclear. But, as Max Chafkin, Thiel’s biographer, wrote: Yarvin quickly became “a house political philosopher” for Thiel and his gang.

Despite vowing to “escape politics,” Thiel went all-in on Donald Trump in 2016. At his election night party, as everyone watched in disbelief at Trump’s upset win, Yarvin was there, holding court. He would be a fixture of Thiel’s parties for years to come.

Over those years, Thiel put his money behind a select roster of candidates who, he believed, could most effectively do one of two things: Help Trump carry out his mission, or destroy The Cathedral.

One of those Thiel project was John Gibbs. His rise to power was perplexingly swift: With little more experience than being a prolific pro-MAGA tweeter, Gibbs was hired by the Trump administration to serve as assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development in March 2020, right as staff were fleeing the White House. Yet Gibbs hung on: As a reward, in July of that year, he was tapped to head up the Office of Personnel Management — the human resources division of the executive branch. If Trump were re-elected, he would be tasked with rooting out the civil service captured by this dreaded progressivism.

Thrusting Gibbs into the spotlight helped highlight some disquieting facts: He was a prolific conspiracy theorist, a misogynist, and an all-around lunatic. In the years prior to joining the Trump administration, Gibbs equated Islam to terrorism, explicitly endorsed the great replacement theory, and shared the QAnon-y idea that Hillary Clinton and her team were child-sacrificing satanists. (The Senate never voted on Gibbs’ appointment.)

Gibbs left office with Trump and his crew, swearing up and down that the 2020 election was stolen, a nefarious plot orchestrated by a malign deep state of powerful men. No longer after he left Washington, he began plotting his return. Gibbs would mount a primary challenge to a moderate Michigan Republican congressman who had voted to impeach Donald Trump.

But Gibbs had two years to go before the general election. That’s where he got some help from Peter Thiel: According to financial disclosure documents filed with the House of Representatives, Gibbs earned just over $30,000 from Thiel Capital in 2021, plus another $160,000 from the American Cornerstone Institute, a group indirectly funded by Thiel.

Gibbs won his primary, ousting the anti-Trump Republican, but lost the general election. Still, that was a victory for Thiel. He had struck against the Cathedral.

There are a litany of far-right conspiracy theorists who sought office over the past decade with Thiel’s support and cash — Gibbs is just a particularly extreme example.

The most effective protégée, however, was undoubtedly J.D. Vance.

As a student at Yale in 2011, Vance attended a talk by Thiel. In it, Thiel talked about how venture capital could be an avenue for the kind of socio-political change he and his cohort so desired — it’s not hard to see Yarvin’s influence there. Vance was so impacted by the talk that he approached Thiel afterwards: One thing led to another, and the investor gave the student an open-ended job offer. Years later, in 2016, Vance finally took him up on it and joined Thiel’s venture capital firm.

It was at that cushy job (in which Vance, apparently, did very little) that Vance was able to write Hillbilly Elegy. It was through Thiel’s patronage that he began to build up his reputation as a voice of the working man. He decamped from California to Ohio and began fronting a non-profit tasked with fighting the opioid epidemic. (All it did was put money in the pocket of big pharma shills.) It was all gearing up for Vance’s senate run.

When he finally announced his intentions, Thiel was there too: With $10 million. It was a bet that, as we know, paid off.

But Thiel’s approach to funding candidates on a case-by-case basis was simply not working, if it was to fund the end of democracy. He had some fellow travellers, Palmer Luckey, the Bilderberg attendee who has recently endorsed the need of a violent “warrior class” to rule man, and fellow PayPal mafia member David Sacks (Dispatch #105) But, given the Republicans had lost the White House and posted miserable results in the 2022 midterms, it clearly wasn’t working.

Many billionaires make light work. So they set up a secretive group to coordinate their money, crafting silent weapons for a quiet war. But this wasn’t William Cooper’s delusions about The Bilderberg Group, this was a real shadowy cabal: The Teneo Network.

Founded by a Thiel apparatchik, at Thiel’s suggestion, the Network has been around for more than a decade — but only in recent years has it truly found its purpose. A dark money group, which receives the bulk of its funding from another dark money group, it exists to replicate the right-wing success in capturing the U.S. Supreme Court.

Teneo’s members and donors are secret. Its mission is secret. Its existence was secret, until a sprawling ProPublica investigation. As the investigation found:

Teneo aims to help members find jobs, write books, meet spouses, secure start-up financing or nonprofit donors and learn about public service. As described in a “Community Vision” report from 2019, Teneo seeks to distinguish itself by acting as “the Silicon Valley of Conservatism — a powerful network of communities where the most influential young leaders, the biggest ideas, and the most leveraged resources come together to launch key projects that advance our shared belief that the conservative worldview drives human flourishing.”(…)

(One) Teneo board member, wrote that the group had brought together a coalition of Teneans “working with (or serving as) state attorneys general, state financial officers, state legislators, journalists, media executives and best-in-class public affairs professionals” to launch investigations, hold hearings, pull state investment funds and publish op-eds and news stories in response to so-called environmental, social and governance, or ESG, policies at the corporate level. (…)

Another project underway, (co-founder Evan) Baehr explained in a 2020 presentation, was a “surreptitious and exciting” effort to map key institutions in major cities — private schools, country clubs, newspapers, Rotary and so on — and find ways to get Teneo members inside those institutions and help members connect with each other. The initiative has begun by mapping Atlanta and several cities in Texas.

One prominent member of the Teneo Network is J.D. Vance, who signed up not long after coming aboard Thiel’s venture capital firm.

When Vance was invited to speak to the Teneo Network in 2021, he offered a full-throated endorsement of William Cooper’s ideological successor:

I got myself into a little hot water last week, because I made what seemed to me a plainly obvious observation: That Alex Jones, the Infowars guy, is a better source of information than Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC gal. Now, some people said: Well JD you’re just trolling. Well, yeah of course I was just trolling. But that doesn’t mean what I said is in any way untrue, right?

I mean, look, I think there’s a not-terrible chance that that one of you is going to be sharing Cellblock 12a in Premier (Kamala) Harris’ prison detention camp in a few years. If we’re going to all end up in that place, we might as well have a little fun while we get there. It’s okay to troll when you speak fundamental truths. But I do think what I said was correct. Yeah, I was trolling: I was also speaking a truth because.

If you listen to Rachel Maddow every night, the basic worldview that you have is that MAGA grandmas who have family dinners on Sunday and bake apple pies for their family are about to start a violent insurrection against this country. But if you listen to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts too.

Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that’s actually a hell of a lot more true than Rachel Maddow’s view of society.

When I’m asked to lecture or present on the topic of our current paranoid age, I always make sure to underline the same point: Not all conspiracy theories are bad.

Sometimes a conspiracy theory is nothing more than a fun bit of speculative fiction, around which a community forms. Together, its adherents shave the edges from puzzle pieces to help construct a decoupage puzzle of various facts, figures, bits of information, eyewitness testimony, and so on. For many with an inclination towards conspiratorial thought, that’s all this is: A hobby.

Many of Cooper’s fans fall into this camp. His myriad readers may endorse his belief that the financial and societal deck is stacked — Tupac Shakur and the members of Public Enemy amongst them — but they can still go through the world without, as some of his other listeners did, driving a truck full of explosives into a federal building in Oklahoma City.

And then, we know, there are those who let conspiratorial thought engulf their entire world. They are no longer happy enjoying the blue pill life: Now, they know too much. Their mission must be, at least, to resist the conspiracy and, if possible, to destroy it. They have gone through the matrix, and things will never be the same again.

This describes William Cooper himself: A true believer. He took the red pill. His life was in constant conflict because of his radical alienation from society. These delusions ultimately led to his death: In a shoot-out with police in 2002.

There is a third class: Those who weaponize conspiracy theories for their own end. The powerful people who recognize the potent ability that misinformation has to mobilize, alienate, and radicalize. Politicians and powerbrokers who know that there is no better way to convert undecideds than telling them a story, and that there is no better story than shadowy forces operating behind the scenes.

This is Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance. And they are, in a very literal way, the shadowy men behind a nefarious conspiracy. They are out to weaponize their power and influence — billions of dollars, high-level connections, state power, control of the media narrative — to dupe people. They want to siphon the energy of the masses, their attention, votes, and money, to give themselves more power. To enact their grand scheme for society: Call it Project 2025, call it the ‘Dark Enlightenment,’ call it fascism.

You saw it on the vice presidential debate stage last night. Vance refused to accept his party’s loss in the 2020 election, and refused to say if he would concede defeat if he loses this one.

Conspiracies exist. But they are always so much more crude, stupid, sad, pathetic, unambitious, and mean-spirited than they would have you believe.

That’s it for this week.

This dispatch comes out of some research I’ve been doing for an upcoming WIRED feature, on the bizarre nexus between Vance, Project 2025, Thiel, Yarvin, and everything else. So keep on the lookout for that.

For anyone in Toronto: This evening I’m hosting a conversation with former Air Force intelligence officer and thriller writer Brian Morra, about the looming threat of nuclear war: And how to prevent it. It’s free, so come on by!

Thanks this week to

for his copyediting. Any spelling or grammar mistakes in this dispatch, I promise you, were added in after his dutiful proofreading.

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