Peter Thiel's VP

FtWorthHorn07 · 2024-07-23T17:26:36-0500

So, a discussion came up the other day about JD Vance prompted by my mentioning that he followed a race science purveyor on Twitter and was trying to clean up his online presence. The general consensus was this:

hornin nyc said:
The fact that he followed him proves nothing. Following someone is not an association. I obviously don't know Vance and perhaps he has changed to the worst, I don't know, but what he said in his book about blacks is diametrically at odds to that post

Based on what I know about him I would be stunned if he was racist or anti black. He has other faults for sure

The fact the he followed him is not relevant to me.

hornin nyc said:
I would even argue it doesn't matter. It's sort of tedious. Are we saying Vance is an racist against all evidence to the contrary? (I know you are not)

If one was a democrat supporter and want to go after Vance there will be far more profitable areas to do so imo

Which, on its own, fine. I disagree (the example @Pho King Master provided was someone following Trump - but he was the President and a candidate, not a guy giving his thoughts on why certain races are less capable with no other motive to listen to him).

But this elided a much more interesting background on Vance, which I think people are only vaguely aware of. As the title of the thread indicates, his primary political benefactor is Peter Thiel. Has been for his entire career, even before politics. So to understand Vance and the intellectual cohort he belongs to, we need to understand Thiel's project. The godfather of this group is probably Curtis Yarvin.

Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas

Yes, Peter Thiel was the senator’s benefactor. But they’re both inspired by an obscure software developer who has some truly frightening thoughts about reordering society.

newrepublic.com

Here's the opening of that article:

In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym, proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed “not productive”: “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.”

Yarvin, a self-described reactionary and extremist who was 35 years old at the time, clarified that he was “just kidding.” But then he continued, “The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass. However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide.”
He then concluded that the “best humane alternative to genocide” is to “virtualize” these people: Imprison them in “permanent solitary confinement” where, to avoid making them insane, they would be connected to an “immersive virtual-reality interface” so they could “experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”

Yarvin’s disturbing manifestos have earned him influential followers, chief among them: tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his onetime Silicon Valley protégé Senator J.D. Vance, whom the Republican Party just nominated to be Donald Trump’s vice president. If Trump wins the election, there is little doubt that Vance will bring Yarvin’s twisted techno-authoritarianism to the White House, and one can imagine—with horror—what a receptive would-be autocrat like Trump might do with those ideas.

That gives you a little flavor of what this guy is about and how he conceptualizes other people. They're worthless, a problem to be solved. Anyway, rest of the article is interesting, but I found this one to be a better glimpse into the scene they are part of, and Vance plays a starring role:

Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets

They’re not MAGA. They’re not QAnon. Curtis Yarvin and the rising right are crafting a different strain of conservative politics.

www.vanityfair.com

Open in an incognito tab if paywalled.

Here's a key quote from this one:

Yarvin was the central early figure in a world of “neo-reactionary” writers, publishing his poetry and political theory on the Blogger site under the name Mencius Moldbug.

As Moldbug, Yarvin wrote about race-based IQ differences, and in an early post, titled “Why I Am Not a White Nationalist,” he defended reading and linking to white nationalist writing. He told me he’d pursued those early writings in a spirit of “open inquiry,” though Yarvin also openly acknowledged in the post that some of his readers seemed to be white nationalists. Some of Yarvin’s writing from then is so radically right wing that it almost has to be read to be believed, like the time he critiqued the attacks by the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik—who killed 77 people, including dozens of children at a youth camp—not on the grounds that terrorism is wrong but because the killings wouldn’t do anything effective to overthrow what Yarvin called Norway’s “communist” government. He argued that Nelson Mandela, once head of the military wing of the African National Congress, had endorsed terror tactics and political murder against opponents, and said anyone who claimed “St. Mandela” was more innocent than Breivik might have “a mother you’d like to ****.”

So we're getting some pretty strong indications of how this group think about race, and Vance's connections to it, from these pieces. Also let me just drop this nugget:

"I didn’t see a single Black person under the age of 50, though there were attendees of South Asian and Middle Eastern descent."

Both articles are good, particularly the VF piece. I recommend reading them fully. But by the end, some of the "why are you guys calling Trump fascist?" questions become confusing, because his VP admits it!

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Those, IMO, are a pretty good overview of what this group is thinking. Here are a couple of more plainly-critical articles (FYI, Mencius Moldbug is Yarvin's pen name):

Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich

One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national…

thebaffler.com

The Moldbug Variations | Corey Pein

Three years ago, Peter Thiel called me a conspiracy theorist.

thebaffler.com

There are some important quotes here that tell you who Yarvin is. Like these, which include his connection to Thiel:

"This plea for autocracy is the essence of Yarvin’s work. He has concluded that America’s problems come not from a deficit of democracy but from an excess of it—or, as Yarvin puts it, “chronic kinglessness.” Incredible as it sounds, absolute dictatorship may be the least objectionable tenet espoused by the Dark Enlightenment neoreactionaries."
...
“I am not a white nationalist, but I do read white-nationalist blogs, and I’m not afraid to link to them . . . I am not exactly allergic to the stuff,” Yarvin writes. He also praises a blogger who advocated the deportation of Muslims and the closure of mosques as “probably the most imaginative and interesting right-wing writer on the planet.” Hectoring a Swarthmore history professor, Yarvin rhapsodizes on colonial rule in Southern Africa, and suggests that black people had it better under apartheid. “If you ask me to condemn [mass murderer] Anders Breivik, but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you’d like to ****,” Yarvin writes.
...
His jargon may be novel, but whenever Mencius Moldbug descends to the realm of the concrete, he offers familiar tropes of white victimhood. Yarvin’s favorite author, the nineteenth-century writer Scot Thomas Carlyle, is perhaps best known for his infamous slavery apologia, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.” “If there is one writer in English whose name can be uttered with Shakespeare’s, it is Carlyle,” Yarvin writes. Later in the same essay Yarvin calls slavery “a natural human relationship” akin to “that of patron and client.”
...
Yarvin told Yiannopoulos that he had been “coaching Thiel.”

“Peter needs guidance on politics for sure,” Yiannopoulos responded.

“Less than you might think!” Yarvin wrote back. “I watched the election at his house, I think my hangover lasted into Tuesday. He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”
...
Yarvin’s Dark Enlightenment dogma also is steeped in pseudoscientific racism. Yarvin preaches that intelligence is determined in large part by the laws of “human biodiversity”—which hold, in his telling, that white people are congenitally smarter than black and brown people, and that Chinese people may be the smartest of all. It takes no great stretch of the imagination to see how a blood-and-soil white nationalist like Bannon and a racist bomb thrower like Donald “Good Genes” Trump would find a great deal of reassurance in this toxic philosophy. [ed. note - see why Vance having an Indian wife doesn't quite settle this issue?]

Hmm. Wonder...wonder which people he thinks shouldn't be participating in democracy?

So, in conclusions, you're welcome to ignore Vance following Steven Sailer on Twitter and excuse it as "just some thing he did on the internet" or whatever. But to do so ignores the entire context of his political life. These guys aren't just internet weirdos anymore - they go to conferences together, they advance a communal political project designed to put a select group of people in charge, and now they have chosen the Republican VP nominee.

PS - one of the funniest through-lines of all of this is that they are obsessed with "red pill stuff." That is an allegory for transitioning by a pair of trans directors, and they hate that stuff. Just so on the nose.

Pho King Master · 2024-07-23T20:05:58-0500