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FTR#1378 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: Highlighting the rise of what many call “Techno-Fascism,” this broadcast begins with discussion of fascism in Manchuria and Japan under Nobusuke Kishi. Kishi’s “Manchurian legacy” is a dominant consideration in Korea and should be reflected on against the background of what is happening in both Korea and the U.S.
Supplementing discussion of Kishi, we detail analysis of another form of “Techno-Fascism,” rooted in the Silicon Valley and featuring the ideological precepts of Curtis Yarvin, aka “Menscius Moldbug.”
For all its apparent novelty, this ideology is a high-tech version of Mussolini’s Corporate State.
” . . . . Instead of advocating for a constitutional republic with minimal government, this new strain of thought pushes for a private, post-democratic order, where those with the most resources and technological control dictate the rules. In this vision, power doesn’t rest with the people—it belongs to the most competent ‘executives’ running society like a CEO would run a company. . . .”
1.“Techno-Fascism Comes to America” by Kyle Chayka; The New Yorker; February 26, 2025.
. . . . The historian Janis Mimura saw something more ominous: a new, proactive union of industry and governmental power, wherein the state would drive aggressive industrial policy at the expense of liberal norms. In the second Trump Administration, a class of Silicon Valley leaders was insinuating itself into politics in a way that recalled one of Mimura’s primary subjects of study: the élite bureaucrats who seized political power and drove Japan into the Second World War. “These are experts with a technological mind-set and background, often engineers, who now have a special role in the government,” Mimura told me. The result is what, in her book “Planning for Empire” (2011), she labelled “techno-fascism”: authoritarianism driven by technocrats. Technology “is considered the driving force” of such a regime, Mimura said. “There’s a sort of technicization of all aspects of government and society.”
In the nineteen-thirties, Japan colonized Manchuria, in northeastern China, and the region became a test ground for techno-fascism. Nobusuke Kishi, a Japanese commerce-ministry bureaucrat, was appointed to head the industrial program in Manchuria, in 1936, and, with the collaboration of a new crop of the Japanese conglomerates known as zaibatsu, he instituted a policy of forced industrial development based on the exploitation of the local population. When Kishi returned to national politics in Japan, in 1939, along with a clique of other Japanese technocrats who had worked in Manchuria, he pursued similar strategies of state-dictated industrialization, at the expense of private interests and labor rights. This fascistic regime would not be structured the same way as Mussolini’s or Hitler’s, with power concentrated in the hands of a single charismatic leader, although Kishi had travelled to Germany in the nineteen-twenties, as the Nazi movement expanded, and drew inspiration from German industrialization for his Manchurian project. Instead, Mimura said, Japan “kind of slid into fascism” as bureaucrats exercised their authority behind the scenes, under the aegis of the Japanese emperor. As she explained, techno-fascist officials “acquire power by creating these supra-ministerial organs and agencies, subgroups within the bureaucracy that are unaccountable.” Today, Elon Musk’s DOGE is the Trumpian equivalent. . . .
2.“The Plot Against America” by Mike Brock; Notes From The Circus; Feb. 08, 2025.
How a Dangerous Ideology Born From the Libertarian Movement Stands Ready to Seize America
As I write this in early 2025, a quiet revolution is unfolding within the U.S. government. Inside the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), teams of young tech operatives are systematically dismantling democratic institutions and replacing them with proprietary artificial intelligence systems. Civil servants who raise legal objections are being removed. Government databases are being migrated to private servers. Decision-making power is being transferred from elected officials and career bureaucrats to algorithms controlled by a small network of Silicon Valley elites. This isn’t a spontaneous coup—it’s the culmination of a dangerous ideology that has been meticulously developed since the 2008 financial crisis, one that sees democracy itself as obsolete technology ready to be “disrupted.” To understand how we reached this critical moment, and why it threatens the very foundation of democratic governance, we need to trace the evolution of an idea: that democracy is not just inefficient, but fundamentally incompatible with technological progress.
DOGE is not about efficiency. It is about erasure. Democracy is being deleted in slow motion, replaced by proprietary technology and AI models. It is a coup, executed not with guns, but with backend migrations and database wipes.
What follows is not speculation or dystopian fiction. It is a carefully documented account of how a dangerous ideology, born in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, has moved from the fringes of tech culture to the heart of American governance.
The story of how it begins starts sixteen years ago.
On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, marking the largest failure of an investment bank since the Great Depression. This event catalyzed the global financial crisis, leading to widespread economic hardship and a profound loss of faith in established institutions.
In the aftermath of the crisis, several key figures emerged who would go on to shape a new movement in American politics.
Curtis Yarvin, writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, had been developing a critique of modern democracy on his blog Unqualified Reservations since 2007. As the financial crisis unfolded, Yarvin applied his unconventional analysis to the economic turmoil.
In a 2008 post, “The Misesian explanation of the bank crisis,” Yarvin wrote:
Briefly: the fundamental cause of the bank crisis is not evil Republicans, lying Democrats, ‘deregulation,’ ‘affirmative-action lending,’ or even ‘ludicrous levels of leverage.’ A banking system is like a nuclear reactor: a complicated piece of engineering. If it’s engineered right, it works 100% of the time. If it’s engineered wrong, it works 99.99% of the time, and the other 0.01% it coats the entire tri-state area in radioactive strontium.
Yarvin argued that the crisis was fundamentally an engineering failure caused by a deviation from what he called “Misesian banking,” based on principles outlined by economist Ludwig von Mises. This approach advocates for a strict free-market system with minimal government intervention in banking. He contrasted this with the prevailing “Bagehotian” system, named after Walter Bagehot, which supports central bank intervention during financial crises. Yarvin argued that this interventionist approach was inherently unstable and prone to collapse.
Yarvin’s writings during the crisis period continued to develop his broader critique of modern political and economic systems. His ideas, while not mainstream, began to resonate with a growing audience disillusioned with traditional institutions and seeking alternative explanations for the economic turmoil.
For decades, libertarian thinkers had argued that free markets, left unrestrained, would naturally outperform any system of government. But what if the problem wasn’t just government interference in markets—what if the very concept of democracy itself was flawed?
This was the argument put forward by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a student of Mises’s protégé Murray Rothbard, who took libertarian skepticism of the state to its extreme conclusion. His 2001 book Democracy: The God That Failed landed like a bombshell in libertarian circles. Published at a moment when many Americans still saw democracy as the “end of history,” Hoppe argued that democracy was an inherently unstable system, one that incentivized short-term decision-making and mob rule rather than rational governance. His alternative? A return to monarchy.
But this wasn’t the monarchy of old. Hoppe envisioned a new order—one where governance was privatized, where societies functioned as “covenant communities” owned and operated by property-holders rather than elected officials. In this world, citizenship was a matter of contract, not birthright. Voting was unnecessary. Rule was left to those with the most capital at stake. It was libertarian thought taken to its most extreme conclusion: a society governed not by political equality, but by property rights alone.
By the 2010s, Hoppe’s radical skepticism of democracy had found an eager audience beyond the usual libertarian circles, but through a different mechanism than simple market disruption. While Silicon Valley had long embraced Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation—where nimbler companies could outcompete established players by serving overlooked markets—a more extreme form of techno-solutionism had begun to take hold. This mindset held that any societal problem, including governance itself, could be “solved” through sufficient application of engineering principles. Silicon Valley elites who had built successful companies began to view democratic processes not just as inefficient, but as fundamentally irrational—the product of what they saw as emotional decision-making by non-technical people. This merged perfectly with Hoppe’s critique: if democracy was simply a collection of “feeling-based” choices made by the uninformed masses, surely it could be replaced by something more “rational”—specifically, the kind of data-driven, engineering-focused governance these tech leaders practiced in their own companies.
Peter Thiel, one of the most outspoken erstwhile libertarians in Silicon Valley, put this sentiment in stark terms in his 2009 essay The Education of a Libertarian: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel had already begun funding projects aimed at escaping democratic nation-states entirely, including seasteading—floating cities in international waters beyond government control—and experimental governance models that would replace electoral democracy with private, corporate-style rule. Hoppe’s vision of covenant communities—private enclaves owned and governed by elites—provided an intellectual justification for what Thiel and his allies were trying to build: not just alternatives to specific government policies, but complete replacements for democratic governance itself. If democracy is too inefficient to keep up with technological change, why not replace it entirely with private, contractual forms of rule?
The notion that traditional democratic governance was inefficient or outdated resonated with those who saw themselves as disruptors and innovators.
This intellectual throughline—from Mises to Hoppe to figures like Yarvin and Thiel—helps explain the emergence of what some have called “techno-libertarianism.” It represents a dangerous alignment of anti-democratic thought with immense technological and financial resources, posing significant challenges to traditional conceptions of democratic governance and civic responsibility.
From Silicon Valley to Main Street: The Spread of Techno-Libertarian Ideas
2008 did not just destroy the economy—it shattered faith in democratic institutions themselves. Libertarians saw an opportunity. And in Silicon Valley, a new belief took hold: democracy wasn’t just inefficient—it was obsolete. Over the next decade, the ideas incubated in this period would evolve into a coherent challenge to the foundations of liberal democracy, backed by some of the most powerful figures in technology and finance.
As millions of Americans lost their homes and jobs in the years following the crisis, these ideas began to gain momentum. The Tea Party movement emerged in 2009, channeling populist anger against government bailouts and the Obama administration’s response to the crisis.
As the Tea Party gained momentum, it fostered a broader cultural shift that primed many Americans to be receptive to alternative political and economic theories. This shift extended beyond traditional conservatism, creating an opening for the tech-libertarian ideas emerging from Silicon Valley.
The movement’s emphasis on individual liberty and skepticism of centralized authority resonated with the anti-government sentiment growing in tech circles. As a result, concepts like cryptocurrency and decentralized governance, once considered fringe, began to find a more mainstream audience among those disillusioned with traditional political and financial systems.
The convergence of populist anger and techno-utopianism set the stage for more radical anti-democratic ideas that would emerge in the following years. The Tea Party, while not directly advocating for these ideas, inadvertently prepared a segment of the population to be more open to the notion that traditional democratic institutions might be fundamentally flawed or obsolete.
However, the ideological impact of Silicon Valley’s economic performance on movements like the “New Right” was not immediate or direct. The tech industry’s growing economic and cultural influence gradually became more pronounced in the 2010s as tech leaders like Peter Thiel began to more actively engage in political discourse and funding.
The financial crisis didn’t just create political movements like the Tea Party—it spawned entirely new media platforms that would help spread these anti-democratic ideas far beyond their original circles. One of the most influential was Zero Hedge, founded in 2009 by Daniel Ivandjiiski. The site, which adopted the pseudonym “Tyler Durden” for all its authors—a reference to the anti-establishment character from Fight Club—initially focused on financial news and analysis from a bearish perspective rooted in Austrian economics.
Zero Hedge’s evolution from a financial blog to a political powerhouse exemplified how anti-democratic ideas could be laundered through technical expertise. The site gained initial credibility through sophisticated critiques of high-frequency trading and market structure, establishing itself as a legitimate voice in financial circles. But this technical authority became a vehicle for something more radical: the idea that democratic institutions themselves were as broken as the markets they regulated.
By 2015, Zero Hedge was advancing a comprehensive critique of democratic governance that paralleled Yarvin’s, but packaged for a mainstream audience. Its technical analysis of market failures seamlessly evolved into broader arguments about the failure of democratic institutions. When the site argued that central banks were rigging markets, it wasn’t just making a financial claim—it was suggesting that democratic institutions themselves were inherently corrupt and needed to be replaced with more “efficient” mechanisms.
This methodology—using technical financial analysis to justify increasingly radical political conclusions—provided a blueprint that others would follow. The site demonstrated how expertise in one domain (financial markets) could be leveraged to advocate for sweeping political change. When Zero Hedge declared that markets were manipulated, it wasn’t just criticizing policy—it was building the case that democracy itself was a failed system that needed to be replaced by technical, algorithmic governance.
What made Zero Hedge particularly effective was how it straddled multiple worlds. As Bloomberg noted in 2016, it remained an “Internet powerhouse” with real influence in financial circles even as The New Republic characterized it as “a forum for the hateful, conspiracy-driven voices of the angry white men of the alt-right.” This dual identity—technically sophisticated yet politically radical—made it a crucial bridge between mainstream financial discourse and emerging anti-democratic ideologies.
The site’s true innovation wasn’t just in mixing finance and politics—it was in suggesting that technical, market-based solutions could replace democratic processes entirely. This aligned perfectly with Silicon Valley’s emerging worldview: if markets were more efficient than governments at allocating resources, why not let them allocate political power as well?
While InfoWars would later adopt some of Zero Hedge’s anti-establishment positioning, it abandoned the pretense of technical expertise entirely. But Zero Hedge’s more sophisticated approach—using financial expertise to justify anti-democratic conclusions—proved more influential in tech circles, where it reinforced the growing belief that democracy was simply an inefficient way to make decisions compared to markets and algorithms.
Zero Hedge’s transformation from financial analysis to anti-democratic ideology previewed a broader pattern that would define the next decade: how technical expertise could be weaponized against democracy itself. While Zero Hedge used financial analysis to undermine faith in democratic institutions, InfoWars would take a cruder but arguably more effective approach: pure epistemic chaos.
As media scholar Yochai Benkler noted in a 2018 study, this period saw the emergence of a “propaganda feedback loop,” where audiences, media outlets, and political elites reinforce each other’s views, regardless of the veracity of the information. Zero Hedge was an early example of this dynamic in action, demonstrating how traditional gatekeepers of information were losing their influence. This erosion of trust in established institutions, combined with the proliferation of alternative information sources, set the stage for what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt would later describe as “a kind of fragmentation of reality.”
As we moved into the 2010s, this fragmentation accelerated. Social media algorithms, designed to maximize engagement, amplified sensational and divisive content. The resulting flood of competing narratives made it increasingly difficult for citizens to discern truth from fiction, with profound implications for democratic discourse and decision-making.
The Zero Hedge model—mixing expert analysis with speculative political commentary—became a template for numerous other outlets, contributing to insular information ecosystems where narrative consistency trumped factual accuracy. This presaged how information would be produced, consumed, and weaponized in the age of social media and algorithmic content distribution.
While Zero Hedge pioneered this approach, InfoWars took it to the extreme. Founded by Alex Jones in 1999, InfoWars gained significant traction after the 2008 financial crisis, abandoning any pretense of conventional expertise in favor of sensationalism and conspiracy theories.
“The financial crisis created a perfect storm for outlets like InfoWars,” explains media scholar Whitney Phillips. “People were looking for explanations, and InfoWars offered simple, if outlandish, answers to complex problems.”
By 2015, InfoWars was generating an estimated $80 million annually, monetizing its audience directly through the sale of supplements and survival gear. This business model, which saw sales spike during crises, demonstrated how post-truth narratives could be converted into profit.
InfoWars’ impact extended beyond its immediate audience, providing a playbook for a new generation of alternative media outlets. However, its promotion of baseless conspiracy theories had real-world consequences, from harassment of Sandy Hook victims’ families to the spread of health misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. As these tactics were adopted by a wide range of actors, the post-truth era posed unprecedented challenges to democratic discourse.
The parallel evolution of Zero Hedge and InfoWars revealed two complementary strategies for undermining democracy. Zero Hedge showed how technical expertise could be used to delegitimize democratic institutions from within, while InfoWars demonstrated how raw chaos could make democratic deliberation impossible. But it was Silicon Valley that would combine these insights into something even more dangerous: the argument that democracy’s replacement by technical systems wasn’t just desirable—it was inevitable.
This epistemic chaos wasn’t an accident—it was a crucial tactic in undermining democracy itself. As Curtis Yarvin and his neoreactionary allies saw it, political legitimacy depended on the existence of a shared reality. Break that consensus, and democracy becomes impossible. Steve Bannon called it “flooding the zone with shit.” And by the time Trump entered office, the full strategy was in motion: destabilize public trust, replace expert analysis with endless counter-narratives, and ensure that the only people who could wield power were those who controlled the flow of information itself.
Figures like Yarvin didn’t just critique democracy—they sought to undermine the very conditions in which democratic deliberation is possible. By weaponizing media fragmentation, they hacked the cognitive foundations of democracy itself, ensuring that political power would no longer rest on reasoned debate but on the ability to manipulate information flows.
The Sovereign Individual: Blueprint for a Post-Democratic World
But destroying consensus was only the first step. The true revolution would come through technology itself. In 1999, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg published a book that would become the blueprint for this technological coup: The Sovereign Individual. Published at the height of the dotcom boom, the book read like science fiction to many at the time: it predicted the rise of cryptocurrency, the decline of traditional nation-states, and the emergence of a new digital aristocracy. Taxes will become voluntary. Regulations will disappear. The most successful people will form their own private, self-governing communities, while the rest of the world is left behind.
Libertarianism, when fused with this kind of technological determinism, takes a sharp turn away from classical liberal thought. If you assume that government will inevitably be outcompeted by private networks, decentralized finance, and AI-driven governance, then trying to reform democracy becomes pointless. The more radical conclusion, embraced by the figures at the forefront of this movement, is that government should be actively dismantled and replaced with a more “efficient” form of rule—one modeled on corporate governance rather than democratic participation.
This is precisely where libertarianism morphs into neoreaction. Instead of advocating for a constitutional republic with minimal government, this new strain of thought pushes for a private, post-democratic order, where those with the most resources and technological control dictate the rules. In this vision, power doesn’t rest with the people—it belongs to the most competent “executives” running society like a CEO would run a company.
This is how Curtis Yarvin’s argument that democracy is an outdated, inefficient system became so appealing to Silicon Valley elites. It wasn’t just a philosophical argument; it aligned with the way many in the tech industry already thought about disruption, efficiency, and control. If innovation constantly renders old systems obsolete, then why should governance be any different?
Figures like Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan took this logic a step further, arguing that rather than resisting the decline of democratic institutions, elites should accelerate the transition to a new order—one where governance is voluntary, privatized, and largely detached from public accountability. The rhetoric of “exit” and “network states” became the libertarian justification for abandoning democracy altogether.
This wasn’t just theoretical—there were actual attempts to implement these ideas, like the Peter Thiel-backed “network state” project called Praxis in Greenland.
This mindset is deeply ingrained in Silicon Valley, where disruption is seen as not just a business model, but a law of history. Entrepreneurs are taught that old institutions are inefficient relics waiting to be displaced by something better. When applied to government, this logic leads directly to Yarvin’s argument: democracy is outdated “legacy code” that can’t keep up with modern complexity. The future, he and others argue, will belong to those who design and implement a superior system—one that runs more like a corporation, where leaders are chosen based on competence rather than elections.
This is why neoreactionary ideas have found such a receptive audience among tech elites. If you believe that technology inevitably renders old systems obsolete, then why should democracy be any different? Why bother fixing the government if it’s doomed to be replaced by something more advanced?
This is where the transition from libertarianism to neoreaction becomes clear. Classical libertarians at least paid lip service to democracy, arguing that markets should exist within a limited but functioning democratic system. But the Silicon Valley version of libertarianism, shaped by The Sovereign Individual and reinforced by the rise of cryptocurrency, started to see democratic governance itself as an obstacle. The question was no longer “How do we make government smaller?” but rather “How do we escape government altogether?”
The answer, for people like Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and Balaji Srinivasan, was to replace democracy with a new system—one where power belongs to those with the resources to exit and build something better. And as we are now seeing, they aren’t waiting for that transition to happen naturally.
Srinivasan, like others in this movement, had undergone an ideological evolution that exemplifies a broader trend in Silicon Valley. As a former CTO of Coinbase and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he initially approached cryptocurrency from a techno-libertarian perspective, viewing it as a tool for individual empowerment and market efficiency.
However, his thinking increasingly aligned with neo-reactionary ideas, particularly around the concept of “exit”—the ability to opt out of existing political structures entirely. This shift from techno-libertarianism to neo-reactionary thought isn’t as large a leap as it might seem. Both ideologies share a deep skepticism of centralized authority and a belief in the power of technology to reshape society.
The pipeline from techno-libertarianism to neo-reaction often follows a predictable path: It begins with a libertarian critique of government inefficiency and overreach. This evolves into a broader skepticism of all democratic institutions, seen as slow and irrational compared to the speed and logic of technology. Eventually, this leads to the conclusion that democracy itself is an outdated system, incompatible with rapid technological progress. The final step is embracing the idea that democracy should be replaced entirely with more “efficient” forms of governance, often modeled on corporate structures or technological systems.
Srinivasan’s journey along this ideological pipeline is reflected in his evolving views on cryptocurrency. What started as a tool for financial freedom became, in his vision, the foundation for entirely new forms of governance outside traditional state structures. This transformation—from seeing crypto as a means of individual empowerment within existing systems to viewing it as a way to build entirely new political entities—mirrors the broader shift from techno-libertarianism to neo-reaction in Silicon Valley.
As I wrote last year, what makes the Sovereign Individuals’s influence particularly concerning is its epistemically authoritarian nature. By presenting technological change as an unstoppable force that would inevitably dissolve traditional democratic institutions, the book provided Silicon Valley with a deterministic narrative that justified the concentration of power in the hands of tech elites as historically inevitable rather than a choice that deserved democratic deliberation.
This is what makes the convergence of crypto, AI, and neo-reactionary ideology so dangerous. If people can’t agree on basic facts, who gets to decide what’s true? The answer, in Yarvin’s world, is the sovereign executive—a singular, unchallenged ruler whose legitimacy derives not from elections, but from sheer control over the information landscape.
James Pogue’s remarkable piece of investigative journalism—Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets—traces the movement of these ideas fringes into a sophisticated political movement backed by some of the most powerful figures in technology.
Reporting from the 2022 National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Pogue encounters everyone from “fusty paleocon professors” to mainstream Republican senators, but his focus on the younger cohort is particularly illuminating. They are highly educated young elites who have absorbed Yarvin’s critique of democracy and are working to make it political reality.
As Pogue documents, Yarvin’s writings during the crisis period didn’t just diagnose economic problems—they offered a comprehensive critique of what he called “the Cathedral,” an interlocking system of media, academia, and bureaucracy that he argued maintained ideological control while masking its own power.
The fusion of Austrian economics, techno-libertarianism, and Yarvin’s critique of democracy found its perfect vehicle in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. As Pogue documents in Vanity Fair, Balaji Srinivasan emerged as a key figure who helped translate these abstract ideas into a concrete vision for restructuring society.
This vision resonated deeply with Silicon Valley elites who had been influenced by Yarvin’s critique of democracy but were seeking concrete mechanisms to implement alternative governance structures. Cryptocurrency offered not just a way to circumvent state monetary control, but also a model for how digital technology could enable new forms of sovereignty.
As Pogue documents, figures like Peter Thiel began to see cryptocurrency not just as a new financial instrument, but as a tool for fundamentally restructuring society. The technology offered a way to make the abstract ideas of Yarvin and The Sovereign Individual concrete. If traditional democracy was hopelessly corrupt, as Yarvin argued, then perhaps blockchain could enable new forms of governance built on immutable code rather than fallible human judgment.
This vision found its perfect technological expression in Bitcoin. Launched in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis by an anonymous creator using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin seemed to validate The Sovereign Individual’s core thesis—that technology could enable individuals to opt out of state monetary control. The timing was perfect: just as faith in traditional financial institutions had been shattered, here was a system that promised to replace human judgment with mathematical certainty.
Bitcoin’s philosophical underpinnings drew heavily from Austrian economics and libertarian thought, but it was Saifedean Ammous who most explicitly merged these ideas with reactionary politics in his 2018 book The Bitcoin Standard. What began as an economic argument for Bitcoin based on Austrian monetary theory evolved into something far more radical in its later chapters. Particularly telling was Ammous’s critique of modern art and architecture, which mirrors almost precisely the fascist aesthetic theory of the early 20th century. When he rails against “degenerate” modern art and architecture in favor of classical forms, he’s invoking—whether intentionally or not—the exact language and arguments used by fascists in the 1930s. One German friend’s observation to me is that it is “far more striking in the original German.”
The Bitcoin community’s embrace of figures like Ammous reveals how cryptocurrency became not just a technology or an investment, but a vehicle for reactionary political thought. The idea that Bitcoin would restore some lost golden age of sound money merged seamlessly with broader reactionary narratives about societal decline and the need for restoration of traditional hierarchies.
While figures like Ammous attempted to claim Bitcoin for a reactionary worldview, the technology itself—as Bailey, Rettler and their co-authors argue in Resistance Money—can equally serve liberal and democratic values. The key distinction lies in how we understand Bitcoin’s relationship to political institutions.
Where reactionaries see Bitcoin as a tool for replacing democratic governance entirely, the liberal perspective presented in Resistance Money understands it as a check against overreach and a means of preserving individual autonomy within democratic systems. This frames Bitcoin not as a replacement for democratic institutions, but as a technological innovation that can help protect civil liberties and human rights—particularly in contexts where traditional financial systems are used as tools of surveillance or oppression.
This tension between reactionary and liberal interpretations of Bitcoin reflects a broader pattern we’ve seen throughout our narrative: technological innovations that could enhance human freedom being co-opted into anti-democratic frameworks. Just as Yarvin and others attempted to claim the entire trajectory of technological development as inevitably leading to the dissolution of democracy, figures like Ammous tried to present Bitcoin’s monetary properties as necessarily implying a broader reactionary worldview.
From Theory to Practice: The Implementation of Anti-Democratic Ideas
From Yarvin’s early writings during the financial crisis to today’s constitutional crisis, we can trace a clear intellectual evolution. What began as abstract criticism of democratic institutions has become a concrete blueprint for dismantling them. But the key accelerant in this process was cryptocurrency—it provided both a technological framework and a psychological model for opting out of democratic governance entirely.
But what makes this vision dangerous is not just its hostility to democracy—it’s the way it frames the collapse of democratic governance as an inevitability rather than a choice. This is precisely what I have described as epistemic authoritarianism. Rather than acknowledging that technology is shaped by human agency and political decisions, the Network State vision assumes that technological change has a fixed trajectory, one that will naturally dissolve nation-states and replace them with digitally mediated governance structures. This deterministic thinking leaves no room for public debate, democratic decision-making, or alternative paths for technological development. It tells us that the future has already been decided, and the only choice is whether to embrace it or be left behind.
This deterministic framing also explains why so many libertarians found themselves drifting toward reactionary politics. If democracy is doomed, then why bother defending it? If technology is going to replace governance, then why not accelerate the process? This is how techno-libertarianism became a gateway to neoreaction—it replaced the classical liberal commitment to open debate and incremental progress with an absolutist vision of history that justified abandoning democratic ideals entirely.
When Musk gains control of Treasury payment systems, or Trump declares he won’t enforce laws he dislikes, they’re implementing ideas incubated in the crypto world. The notion that code can replace democratic institutions, that technical competence should override democratic negotiation, and that private power should supersede public authority—these ideas moved from crypto theory to political practice.
Both Srinivasan’s “network state” and Yarvin’s critique of democracy see technology as a means of escaping democratic constraints, but they approach it differently. Yarvin advocates for capturing and dismantling democratic institutions from within, while Srinivasan proposes building parallel structures to make them irrelevant. We’re now witnessing the convergence of these approaches—using technological control to simultaneously capture and bypass democratic governance.
These ideological frameworks might have remained abstract theorizing if not for a unique convergence of factors that made their implementation suddenly possible. The rise of Trump—a figure simultaneously hostile to democratic institutions and eager to embrace tech oligarchs—presented an unprecedented opportunity. Here was a potential autocrat who didn’t just accept Silicon Valley’s critique of democracy, but embodied it. His contempt for constitutional constraints, his belief that personal loyalty should override institutional independence, and his view that government should serve private interests aligned perfectly with Silicon Valley’s emerging anti-democratic worldview. When combined with unprecedented technological control over information flows, financial systems, and social networks, this created a perfect storm: the ideology that justified dismantling democracy, the political vehicle willing to do it, and the technological capability to make it happen.
The financial crisis created the conditions for anti-democratic thought to take root in Silicon Valley, but the actual transformation occurred through a series of distinct phases, each building on the last. Let’s trace this evolution carefully:
The institutional context for this transformation is crucial. Gallup polls show trust in the media fell from 72% to 31% between 1976 to 2024, while distrust in government hit 85% post-2008, according to Pew Research. This erosion of institutional trust created fertile ground for alternative power structures. As the Brookings Institution noted in a 2023 analysis: “Tech leaders increasingly adopt neo-feudal framing of users-as-serfs, reflecting a broader shift away from democratic conceptions of citizenship.”
The danger lies not just in what these operatives are doing, but in how their actions systemically dismantle their capacity for democratic resistance. What we are seeing is an exact implementation of Curtis Yarvin’s “RAGE” doctrine—Retire All Government Employees—that he first proposed in 2012. But what makes this moment particularly significant is how it combines multiple strands of neoreactionary thought into coordinated action. When Yarvin wrote about replacing democratic institutions with corporate governance structures, when he argues that technical competence should override democratic process, he is describing precisely what we’re now watching unfold.
Consider how this maps to Yarvin’s blueprint: First, remove career officials who might resist on legal or constitutional grounds. Then, install private technical infrastructure that makes oversight impossible.
The goal isn’t just to change who runs government agencies—it’s to fundamentally transform how power operates, shifting it from democratic institutions to technical systems controlled by a small elite.
But what makes this implementation particularly dangerous is how it combines Yarvin’s institutional critique with Balaji Srinivasan’s technological vision. Where Yarvin provided the theoretical framework for dismantling the democratic institutions, Srinivasan’s “network state” concept provided practical tools and training. Many of these young operatives came through programs explicitly designed to build parallel governance structures outside of democratic control, operated by Srinivasan.
What we’re witnessing isn’t just a power grab—it’s the culmination of an ideology that has been incubated, tested, and refined for over a decade.
First, these thinkers argued that democracy was inefficient. Then, they created technological tools—cryptocurrency, blockchain governance, and AI-driven decision-making—to bypass democratic institutions entirely. Now, they’re no longer experimenting. They are seizing control of government infrastructure itself, reprogramming it in real-time to function according to their vision.
This is why focusing solely on the technical aspects of what’s happening inside agencies misses the deeper transformation underway. Every unauthorized server, every AI model, every removed civil servant represents another step in converting democratic governance into what Yarvin called “neocameralism”—a system where society is run like a corporation, with clear ownership and control rather than democratic deliberation. The infrastructure being built isn’t meant to serve democratic ends—it’s meant to make democracy itself obsolete.
The strategy of “flooding the zone with shit” was never just about controlling the news cycle—it was about reshaping the conditions of governance itself. The goal was not just to mislead, but to create an environment so chaotic that traditional democratic decision-making would become impossible.
First, they disrupted journalism, replacing truth with engagement-optimized feeds. Now, they are disrupting governance itself. Your news, your politics, your very reality—automated, privatized, and controlled by those who own the network.
And then, once the public lost trust in government, the tech elite could present the solution: a new, AI-driven, algorithmically optimized form of governance. One that wouldn’t be subject to human irrationality, democratic inefficiency, or the unpredictability of elections. Just like social media companies replaced traditional news with algorithmic feeds, these technocrats sought to replace democratic governance with automated decision-making.
What’s happening inside the Department of Government Efficiency is the final phase of this plan. The old democratic institutions, weakened by years of deliberate destabilization, are being replaced in real-time by proprietary AI systems controlled not by elected officials, but by the same network of Silicon Valley operatives who engineered the crisis in the first place.
We are not heading toward this future—we are already living in it.
Government functions that once belonged to democratically accountable institutions are already being transferred to proprietary AI systems, optimized not for justice or equality, but for efficiency and control. Already, decisions about financial regulation, law enforcement priorities, and political dissent are being made by algorithms that no citizen can vote against and no court can oversee. Your rights are no longer determined by a legal framework you can appeal—they are dictated by a set of terms of service, changeable at the whim of those who control the network.
Resistance and Alternatives
Despite the growing influence of these anti-democratic ideas, they have not gone unchallenged. Scholars like Evgeny Morozov have critiqued the “technological solutionism” that underpins much of this thinking. Grassroots movements advocating for digital rights and democratic control of technology have gained traction. Some tech workers themselves have begun organizing against the more extreme visions of their employers.
However, these resistance efforts face an uphill battle against the immense resources and influence of those pushing for a post-democratic future.
And if we do not act now, we may wake up one day to find that democracy was not overthrown in a dramatic coup—but simply deleted, line by line, from the code that governs our lives.
And yet, the most terrifying part? Donald Trump, the supposed strongman at the heart of it all, is oblivious. He has no grand ideological project beyond his own power. He does not understand the system being built around him, nor the fact that his own presidency is merely a vehicle for forces that see him as a useful, temporary battering ram against democracy.
But those around him? They understand perfectly.
J.D. Vance, the Vice President in waiting, has studied Curtis Yarvin’s work. Peter Thiel, his longtime patron, has been funding this vision for over a decade. Balaji Srinivasan is writing the blueprint. Elon Musk is laying the infrastructure. And the young operatives now wiring AI models into the Treasury Department—disbanding civil service, bypassing traditional government, and replacing democratic accountability with technological sovereignty—are working toward a future that will long outlast Trump himself.
This is not about Trump. This is about what comes after him.
Actuarial realities do not favor an aging leader with a declining grasp on policy. But they favor the thirty- and forty-somethings laying the foundation for the post-democratic order. The men who have spent the past decade engineering an exit from democracy are no longer whispering in the dark corners of the internet. They are in power, with money, AI, and a plan. And democracy, in its current form, has never been closer to the brink.
Vox Populi, Vox Dei, Elon Musk declares from his digital throne—the voice of the people is the voice of God.
But in the world they are building, the people have no voice. The algorithms speak for them. The executives decide for them. The future is optimized, efficient, and entirely out of their hands.
Vox Populi, Vox Dei. They whisper it, as they lock the gates.
The Future: Technology, Theocracy and the Thousand Year Reich
Here’s a pair of pieces about the DOGE surveillance state currently under construction. Or rather, the DOGE/Palantir surveillance state. Yes, as we’re going to see, not only is DOGE seemingly attempting to build some sort of ‘master database’ on everyone in the US but Palantir appears to be the firm that has been tapped to actually construct it. Which is more or less what we should have expected.
First, the New York Times just had an op-ed by investigative journalist Julia Angwin warning about the growing evidence that DOGE hasn’t just been tasked with ‘dismantling the administrative state’, a core goal of Project 2025. It’s not just destruction. DOGE is building things too. Building something awful: the “database of ruin”.
That’s the term coined back in 2009 by Georgetown law professor Paul Ohm who envisioned the implications of the merger of all of the different databases of the US federal government into a single master database. A database that would contain the most sensitive information on everyone in on location. “Almost every person in the developed world can be linked to at least one fact in a computer database that an adversary could use for blackmail, discrimination, harassment or financial or identity theft,” as Ohm put it. That was 16 years ago. Here we are.
And as Angwin also warns, while the construction of such a ‘database of ruin’ would most likely violate federal privacy laws, those laws don’t actually include any forms of punishment for breaking them. Judges lack the ability to levy meaningful fines or easily halt illegal actions and no enforcement agency exists to investigate violations. It’s a law in name only. That’s what protecting the US public from wild abuses of privacy with their federal data.
And that warning by Angwin bring us to another recent story from last week about DOGE’s big immigration plans. An immigration plan that just happens to involve fusing a number of federal databases into one master database that can be used for rapidly generating immigrant “targeting lists”. But while whistleblowers have already come forward warning about DOGE employees showing up with backpacks of laptops — each one containing a database from a different federal agency — for the purpose of merging them, it doesn’t sound like it’s the DOGE employees who will be building and maintaining this master database. That job will be going to Palantir. Which is hardly a surprise given the role Palantir played during President Trump’s first term providing immigration database services. Except, of course, there’s no reason to assume this master database is going to be limited to immigrants or immigration-related activities. What that article is describing is effectively the use of immigration enforcement as the pretext for building the “database of ruin”. Built and managed by Palantir.
Ok, first, here’s Julia Angwin warning. A warning that DOGE isn’t just building a surveillance state that will be watching all of us going forward. It’s building a tool that can be used to look back in time and find some, anything, compromising on virtually anyone:
“President Trump could soon have the tools to satisfy his many grievances by swiftly locating compromising information about his political opponents or anyone who simply annoys him. The administration has already declared that it plans to comb through tax records to find the addresses of immigrants it is investigating — a plan so morally and legally challenged, it prompted several top I.R.S. officials to quit in protest. Some federal workers have been told that DOGE is using artificial intelligence to sift through their communications to identify people who harbor anti-Musk or ‑Trump sentiment (and presumably punish or fire them).”
An AI-powered federal surveillance state. That’s the nightmare situation that appears to be emerging out of all this DOGE madness. Or as Georgetown law professor Paul Ohm described such a database back in 2009, a “database of ruin”, which also happens to be an authoritarian dream:
And as the article sadly reminds us, while the creation of such a ‘master database’ would likely be illegal and in violation of the Federal Privacy Act of 1974, there’s no real enforcement mechanism for the privacy law. Judges can’t impose fines or easily halt illegal actions. So yeah, it’s likely against the law and also going to happen anyway:
And that alarming op-ed brings us to the following piece about the “master database” currently being constructed by DOGE. Well, DOGE and Palantir. As we’re going to see, it appears that Palantir has been tapped as the go to entity for building these DOGE databases, ostensibly for immigration enforcement purposes much like the role Palantir played during Trump’s first term. And while the generation of “targeted lists” of individual immigrants appears to be the current plan, there’s obviously nothing stopping DOGE (and Palantir) from generating whatever “targeted lists” they choose once this “master database” is constructed. Sure, there are already whistleblowers warning about DOGE employees recklessly working to combine sensitive information from Social Security, IRS, HHS and other departments into a single, cross-agency database, it’s not like there’s realistically going to be any repercussions...unless we’re talking about repercussions for the whistleblowers:
“The goal is to create a massive repository of data pulled from various agencies, according to sources familiar with the project who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to talk about it. The administration has previously sought to centralize information from a number of agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration and Health and Human Services, among others.”
A massive repository of data pulled from various agencies. That sure sounds a lot like the foundations for “database of ruin”. And look who happens to be tasked with actually constructing this database of ruin: Palantir. It’s more or less what we should have expected. And as we can see, one of the official plans for this master database Palantir is constructing is the rapid building of “targeting lists”. Ostensibly just for immigration enforcement purposes. But, of course, there’s going to be nothing stopping preventing “targeting lists” of pretty much any variety desired. As long as the data is capable of generating a list, those lists will likely be generated. At least when a lawless administration is doing the generating. And that ignores all the targeting lists Palantir will be able to generate for its own purposes:
And as we can see can, despite all the focus on immigration enforcement, President Trump himself “because we want to find waste, fraud, and abuse, and want to cut our costs.” And then he went on to dismiss the possibility that this database would be used for deportations. Which only underscores the reality that this ‘targeting list’ capability will potentially be weaponizable against anyone in the US, citizen or not:
And then we get to the reporting on DOGE’s ‘hostile takeover’ of the IRS. And, oh look, it’s Palantir right there, ready to help facilitate this hostile takeover:
And that hostile takeover of the IRS brings us to the highly alarming whistleblower allegations by government employees that, again, sure sound like attempt to build a database of ruin. Information from Social Security, the IRS, HHS, and other departments are being merged into a single, cross-agency database, with DOGE staffers literally showing up with backpacks full of laptops, each containing a separate agency’s databases. And basically no one is overseeing this:
Taking backpacks full of laptops filled with highly sensitive federal databases and merging them sure sounds like a massive violation of the Federal Privacy Act of 1974. It would be nice if someone enforced it. Oh well. Database of ruin here we come.
We got another disturbing DOGE update. A highly predictable disturbing update since we were already warned this was coming: First, recall those reports we got back in April warning that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was merging government databases and building the kind of master database that could easily be weaponized into a tool for targeting and surveilling political enemies. A ‘Database of Ruin’, as one expert called it. And as we also saw, Palantir has already been exploiting these new DOGE-built master databases for the purpose of generating “target lists” of immigrants for deportation. Well, it appears Palantir is going to be playing a much bigger role in building that database of ruin. And its applications won’t be restricted to immigration.
That’s the DOGE update we got from a recent New York Times report describing plans by the Trump administration to significantly expand Palantir’s presence in many of the federal agencies housing the highly sensitive information on the US public, with Palantir’s Foundry platform already in use in the Social Security Administration, the IRS, DHS, and HHS. In fact, the IRS is reportedly looking into permanently incorporating Palantir into its operations. In other words, if the ‘database of ruin’ is built, it’s going to be Palantir building and managing it. And all indications are that the Trump administration really is very interested in building it. Database of ruin here we come. Brought to you by Palantir.
Interestingly, these latest DOGE-related contracts have triggered something we rarely see from Palantir: employees speaking out about their ethical concerns. In fact, last month, 13 former employees signed a letter urging Palantir to stop its work for the Trump administration. “Data that is collected for one reason should not be repurposed for other uses,” as one signee put it. “Combining all that data, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse.” It’s going to be grimly interesting to see how a company like Palantir deals with potential whistleblowers.
But when it comes to the role Palantir is playing with the construction and maintenance of a ‘database of ruin’ that enables the rapid creation of ‘targeting lists’ for all sorts of nefarious reasons, it’s important to keep in mind that Palantir’s DOGE work is just one in a slew of highly lucrative and troubling contracts the company has with the US government. In other words, if Palantir does end up building the technology powering a next-generation fascist state, that effort will probably involve the merger of a number of different government projects that Palantir has been working on.
Which brings us to a second highly disturbing update about Palantir’s contracts with the US government: Project Maven — a contract to build AI-powered autonomous targeting systems for the Pentagon — has been substantially expanded. A $480 million contract with Palantir signed in 2024 just got a $795 million addition. And that’s just one example of Palantir’s growing presence in the defense sector. Recall how, back in 2020, President Trump installed Michael Kratsios, a close associate of Peter Thiel, as the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in a move that was described as good news for “the Peter Thiel portion of Silicon Valley.”
And, of course, if we’re talking about a company assembling both autonomous targeting AI technology for the military AND a ‘database of ruin’ that will allow President Trump to rapidly generate ‘target lists’ of Americans for all sorts of reasons including just being political opponents, there’s the obvious question about whether or not we should expect drone-based lethal targeting of the people on those ‘target lists’. Because these drones wouldn’t just have weapons. They would have access to Palantir’s panoptic streams of data that likely makes tracking almost anyone down trivial. Imagine if Trump could just press a button and an army of drones swarms the country, hunting down all of his perceived enemies. How many times would he have pressed that button by now?
And that drone army nightmare scenario brings us to another recent update about Palantir’s role in the US government: Back in December, Palantir and Anduril announced they would working on forming a coalition of Silicon Valley firms that would jointly bid on Pentagon defense contracts. Thiel is a significant investor in Anduril, a company that specializes in building autonomous weapons systems and announced plans to build a “hyperscale” drone plant in Ohio back in January. Vice President JD Vance also happens to be an Anduril investor. The stated goal of this new consortium is to supplant traditional defense contractors like Lockheed Martin in the bidding wars for the next-generation defense platforms like AI-powered autonomous military drones. The other firms they were planning on incorporating into the consortium include Elon Musk’s SpaceX, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, autonomous-ship builder Saronic and artificial intelligence data group Scale AI.
We’ll see how this consortium does in their quest to build to the next generation of military autonomous drones. But it’s pretty clear that Palantir is betting big on playing a central role in future of autonomous warfare. And the stars just keep aligning for Palantir so it’s hardly a fanciful goal. We have every reason to assume Palatir will be managing autonomous military drones somewhere around the planet sooner or later. The big question is whether or not that drone army will be in place and ready to go while President Trump is still in office and still intent on ‘leaving his mark’ through escalating vindictiveness. We don’t know if all of these pieces will be assembled and ready to go while Trump is still kicking. They are terrifyingly close but building an autonomous killer drone army capable of disposing of a large portion of the US population is still going to take some time. So time will tell if Trump gets his Palantir-built killer drone army in time to push that button. But they are working on it. And in the mean time, Trump can target his enemies the old fashioned way after Palantir is done built its DOGE-enabled ‘database of ruin’:
“Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.”
There’s a lot of disturbing elements of this plan that we’re learning but perhaps the most disturbing part is how the Trump administration is being so quiet about it. This is an administration that has almost defined itself on the open authoritarian and corruption. It’s as if they’ve adopted a strategy of just overwhelming everyone with an avalanche of abuses of power. But not when it comes to these plans for Palantir. It’s as if the Trump administration is building a giant database on all Americans but doesn’t want the public to know about it. At least not yet.
Adding to the alarm is the fact that Palantir was reportedly initially tasked with creating a single searchable database for the IRS but now that contract has expanded, with talks of a permanent Palantir contract with the IRS. What are the odds the IRS is the only agency that ends up with a permanent Palantir contract in coming months?
And, of course, as we’ve already seen, one of the other major projects that has included as huge Palantir component happens to be DOGE. We’ve already got a warning back in April about the potential for Palantir to build a ‘database of ruin’ master database on all Americans using DOGE data. Now we’re getting confirmation that the ‘database or ruin’ is actually happening. That didn’t take long:
And we get to another major red flag in this story: Palantir employees are already speaking up about the potential for abuses. This isn’t exactly a company known for whistleblowing incidents. Something about this new Trump proposal has Palantir employees freaking out:
And then we get this detail: the $113 million Palantir has receive in federal contracts in recent months doesn’t include the $795 million contract just signed with the Pentagon recent weeks:
And as the following report in Defense Scoop points out, that new $795 million contract with the Pentagon is on top of an existing $480 million contract signed last year. This is actually a $1.3 billion contract with the Pentagon. A contract to incorporate AI into modern warfare, with a focus on autonomous systems:
“The Pentagon originally launched Project Maven in 2017 to pave the way for wider use of AI-enabled technologies that can autonomously detect, tag and track objects or humans of interest from still images or videos captured by surveillance aircraft, satellites and other means.”
AI-enabled platforms for the Pentagon. It’s not hard to see why the military might be extremely eager to incorporate AI despite the glaring risks. But it’s also not hard to see this going far beyond just AI for autonomous tagging and targeting of interest. It’s not going to take much of a technological leap to translate that autonomous targeting into autonomous firing. That’s the chilling context of this now rapidly growing Pentagon contract with Palantir. We are watching the creation of autonomous weapons platforms, with Palantir behind all that ‘autonomous’ AI:
And then we get this little detail: it’s not just the Pentagon. A contract to build “Maven Smart System NATO” has already been inked:
And that recently update on Palantir’s latest Pentagon contract brings us to the following Financial Times piece from back in December about Palantir’s strategy for not just winning more Pentagon contracts but literally replacing the traditional defense contractor’s like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing: Palantir and Anduril — the AI firm founded by Palmer Luckey with Thiel as a major investor — announced a joint effort to form a joint bidding consortium for winning Pentagon contracts. But this consortium wouldn’t just be Palantir and Anduril. The companies claimed they were in talks with about a dozen companies to form this consortium. Companies that include Elon Musk’s SpaceX, along with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, autonomous-ship builder Saronic and artificial intelligence data group Scale AI. Palantir isn’t just angling to increase it’s contracts provide AI services to Pentagon. The company is planning on leading a defense contractor consortium that will build the Pentagon’s autonomous army of the future:
“US defence procurement has long been criticised as slow and anti-competitive, favouring a small number of decades-old primes, such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing. These vast conglomerates typically produce ships, tanks and aircraft that are costly and take years to design and manufacture.”
Yes, Pentagon contracting is notorious for a lot of reasons, including being anti-competitive and favoring a small number of established contractors. So it appears the plan to ‘disrupt’ that system is the creation of a new consortium of Silicon Valley giants that won’t be competing with each other:
And as we can see, there are already examples of not just Palantir integrating its “AI Platform” into Anduril’s autonomous software, but Anduril also also merged its counter-drone defense systems with OpenAI’s AI models. Which is a reminder that this future of warfare based on cheap autonomous drone is likely to include highly modular designs that allow for the relatively easy swapping out of one AI for another. In other words, while we might hear all sorts of assurances from the Pentagon about the safety of all the upcoming autonomous drone armies its planning on building, keep in mind that it’s probably not going to be very difficult to swap those ‘safe’ autonomous AIs for much more lethal autonomous AIs that include a capacity to autonomously ‘neutralize’ identified targets:
And while it’s unclear when Anduril’s recently announced “hyperscale” drone plant in Ohio will be ready for production, keep in mind that the plan is to create a infrastructure capacity to rapidly build swarms of autonomous military drones. So when that capacity is finally there, it’s not going to take long before we go from “wow, there’s a brand new autonomous military drone plant”, to “wow, there’s swarms and swarms of military drones ready to be deployed at the push of a button”. Eventually to be followed up with, “there a drone outside my home asking to interview me about my love of Dear Leader.” What happens next will be up to the drones.
Is this kayfabe? Just pro-wrestling-style theatrics? Or are President Trump and Elon Musk truly feuding? It’s a question that has captivated political audiences this week as the Trump/Musk meltdown has played out across social media in a spat that sure feels real. Musk did accuse just publicly Trump of directly intervening in the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, after all. That’s not the kind of accusation one does during a fake fight.
But that’s what Musk just tweeted: a declaration that Trump “is in the Epstein files,” adding, “That is the real reason they have not been made public.” And while Musk has since deleted that tweet, we all saw it. There’s no taking it back. Democrats are already pouncing on the political opportunity and calling for a clarification of Trump’s role in the Epstein disclosures, which makes this a good time to remind ourselves of the fact that Trump was already president for four years and had plenty of time to quietly address which files are available for eventual public release.
But that high profile spat brings us to another major set of Epstein-related updates: we’re now learning that Epstein invested in Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures fund back in 2015 and 2016.
On one level, this is exactly the kind of update we should have been expecting all along. As we’ve seen, Thiel and Epstein have an enormous overlap in interest, especially when in comes to the technology sector. Epstein was serving as a kind of technology philanthropist prior to his 2008 prosecution. Philanthropic activity that continued even after that conviction. Epstein was also remarkably close to Bill Gates. Both Thiel and Epstein long served as leading financiers for ‘transhumanist’ projects like longevity and artificial intelligence. Both have a history of sponsoring scientists working in these areas. Both appeared to have very similar interests and moved in the same circles and yet there has still been relatively little reporting on Thiel and Epstein’s relationship.
At the same time, it’s not like there’s been no prior reporting on Epstein’s ties to Thiel. Recall how Epstein was getting introduced to major Silicon Valley titans back in 2015, including a dinner party in August of 2015 where Epstein was a guest alongside Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel. Reid Hoffman organized the dinner. Also recall how 2015–16 was around the time when Epstein was involved with a variety of technology investments including a technology company, Carbyne, founded by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack. And as we also saw, one of the other investors in Carbyne was Peter Thiel. In fact, Carbyne’s board of advisors included Palantir employee Trae Stephens, who was a member of the Trump transition team. Reporting on Thiel’s ties to Epstein or Epstein’s interest in technology aren’t new. And yet this relationship has been under-reported and remains largely opaque. That’s part of the context of this new reporting on Epstein’s investments with Thiel: there is likely a lot more under this rock and we’re now getting another peek. We’re also learning that Thiel and Epstein reportedly first with a Valar representative in 2014. So when Thiel had that 2015 dinner with Epstein, the year Epstein first started investing in Valar, that relationship had started the prior year, at least on a business level.
But the new report on Epstein’s investment in Thiel’s technology fund included another major update in this story. The kind of shocking update that we should have expected all along: it turns out hundreds of millions of dollars is being left to Epstein’s estate instead of being pursued by prosecutors to disburse to Epstein’s victims. Yep. It turns out Epstein’s death effectively ended his federal prosecution. And while federal prosecutors had the option of continuing to pursue Epstein’s assets under a civil forfeiture claim, they chose to just drop the prosecution and leave the remaining assets to Epstein’s estate. Those remaining assets include the investments in Valar.
Now, why did federal prosecutors decide to just end the case entirely and leave all of that money with Epstein’s estate? Well, we are told that federal prosecutors made that decision because civil forfeiture might have delayed settlement payments to victims. It’s a rather confusing explanation given that we are also told the bulk of the victim settlements have already been paid out and those settlements included the signing of broad releases that gave up the right to bring future claims. Plus, the only remaining lawsuit is a potential class action filed on behalf victims who haven’t yet settled with the estate. “While we are grateful for the government’s prosecution of Epstein and Maxwell, the truth is that, both before and afterwards, the government was largely asleep at the switch,” according to the lawyer behind that suit, David Boies.
So what’s going to happen to all those remaining assets? That will be up to the secret trust that will be managing all of these assets. A secret trust established in the will signed by Epstein just days before his ‘suicide’. Little is known about the trust other than the fact that it was named Trust 1953, after the year Epstein was born. Two of Epstein’s long-time advisers, Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, will serve as the co-executors of the estate. Beneficiaries of the trust are expected to include Epstein’s former girlfriend, Karyna Shuliak, along with Indyke and Kahn. As of March 31, the total value of the remaining assets was listed at $131 million, but that is likely a significant underestimate due to the fact that the value for the investment in Valar is listed at what it was at in 2019 at the time of Epstein’s death. So all indications are that the secret trust set up by Epstein days before his death and managed by his long-time advisors will ultimately have much more than $131 million to use in a manner of their choosing. Which makes this a good time to recall the extensive evidence that Epstein is an intelligence asset. How many intelligence operation will this secret trust be financing in the decades to come?
Oh, but there’s one more part of this story that is worth covering at this point: it turns out Peter Thiel wrote an opinion piece for the Financial Times back in January, shortly before the start of the second Trump administration, where Thiel calls for exactly the kind of mass declassification task force that was subsequently established in the opening days of the second Trump administration. In that piece, Thiel argues for an “apokálypsis”: a revealing of government secrets. Thiel argues that such an apokálypsis could serve as the most peaceful means of ‘resolving the old guard’s war on the internet’. A war waged by the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organizations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation.
That’s the framing Thiel is taking with this call for an apocalypse of state secrets. It’s not about revealing the ‘deep state’. It’s about fighting media organizations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs. In fact, Thiel argues that President Trump shied away from declassification during his first term “because it still believed in the rightwing deep state of an Oliver Stone movie. This belief has faded.” Think about what Thiel is writing there. He’s either arguing that a rightwing deep state doesn’t actually exist, or that it does exist but Trump is no longer fearful of it. It’s the kind of assertion that becomes all the more interesting in light of the Trump administration’s now-established track record of declassification disappointments. After all, what could a rightwing deep state have to fear from a second Trump administration? It’s just more coverups, except now with the fig-leaf of some sort of mass declassification. And let’s not forget that if anyone alive today is a member of the ‘deep state’, it’s Peter Thiel. He’s like the living embodiment of the deep state.
Oh, and one last detail about Thiel’s piece: He includes the statement, “It may be too early to answer the internet’s questions about the late Mr Epstein,” while also calling for the full declassification of the origins of COVID-19. Epstein died months before the COVID-19 pandemic. All that said, it’s hard to argue with Thiel’s general assertion that some sort of truth and reconciliation really is the best path forward. Including all the truth about Jeffrey Epstein and his many deep state friends:
“* Trump “is in the Epstein files,” Musk wrote Thursday in a post on X, adding, “That is the real reason they have not been made public.””
If this is kayfabe that’s some pretty intense kayfabe. Kayfabe doesn’t typically include accusations with weight behind them, like Trump being “in the Epstein files”. Plus, it really would be kind of shocking of President Trump didn’t show up repeatedly in any serious investigation of Epstein’s history of sex trafficking. Epstein did refer to Trump as his best friend for a decade, after all. And then there’s the sudden mysterious recent death of Virginia Giuffre. Giuffre wasn’t just the star witness in the case against Epstein. She was recruited by Epstein while she was working at Mar-a-Lago. And now we are being told by the FBI that Epstein really did commit suicide. The Trump administration was always going to have to tiptoe around this story but there’s no denying that Musk chose a particularly sensitive time to publicly level this charge. And now the top Democrat on the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets are following Musk’s cue and demanding to know why the Trump administration still hasn’t release the Epstein files as promised:
But the Democrats aren’t just asking for an explanation regarding the administration’s stonewalling of the Epstein files. They are asking for information on what role Trump himself might be personally playing in that whole process:
Those now-glaring questions about what role President Trump has been playing in the declassification of the Epstein brings us to the other major Epstein story to break in recent days: Epstein had been an investor with Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures technology fund since 2015. Investments still held by the Epstein estate to this day. But don’t assume that the investment will eventually go to Epstein’s victims. Those payouts appear to be over. No, the remaining assets in Epstein’s estate, which includes the Valar investments, will be handled according to the terms of the will Epstein signed just days before his highly suspicious death in a federal prison. A will that established a secret trust to be run by Epstein’s long-term advisers. So how did Epstein’s estate end up with all of this wealth despite the abundance of victims? Well, it appears Epstein’s death presented the federal prosecution with the option of further pursuing Epstein’s assets via civil forfeiture. Or they could just drop the case entirely and leave the remaining assets to Epstein’s estate and the secret trust, which is the option federal prosecutors chose. Because of course:
“In 2015 and 2016, Mr. Epstein put $40 million into two funds managed by Valar Ventures, a New York firm that was co-founded by Mr. Thiel. Today that investment is worth nearly $170 million, according to a confidential financial analysis of the late Mr. Epstein’s estate reviewed by The New York Times and a statement provided by a Valar spokesman.”
A $40 million investment with Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures in 2015 and 2016 now worth $170 million. That’s quite a return. It would appear Epstein’s relationship with Thiel is a lot deeper than previously known. And yet, hardly a surprise. As we also saw, Epstein’s role as a kind of technology philanthropist was extensive prior to his 2008 prosecution and yet that philanthropic activity continued even after that conviction. Epstein was also remarkably close to Bill Gates. And as we’ve seen, 2015–16 was around the time when Epstein was involved with a variety of technology investments including a technology company, Carbyne, founded by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack. And as we also saw, one of the other investors in Carbyne was Peter Thiel. In fact, Carbyne’s board of advisors included Palantir employee Trae Stephens, who was a member of the Trump transition team, and former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. And then we got reports on how Epstein was getting introduced to major Silicon Valley titans back in 2015, including a dinner party in August of 2015 where Epstein was a guest alongside Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel. Reid Hoffman organized the dinner. Reporting on Thiel’s ties to Epstein or Epstein’s interest in technology aren’t new. And yet, as we also saw both Thiel and Epstein appear to have been leading financiers for ‘transhumanist’ projects like longevity and artificial intelligence. Both have a history of sponsoring scientists working in these areas. Both appeared to have very similar interests and moved in the same circles and yet there has still been relatively little reporting on Thiel and Epstein’s relationship. That’s all part of the context of this new report on Epstein’s Valar investments. We’ve heard about Epstein’s ties to Thiel before but it’s still an under-reported story:
And then we get to the latest outrageous revelation about the federal government’s persistent kid-glove treatment of the Epstein case: federal prosecutors chose to leave Epstein’s estate with a large pool of cash when they declined to pursue civil forfeiture after Epstein killed himself. And as a result, the Epstein estate will likely end up disbursing tens of millions of dollars, perhaps hundreds of millions, according to people like Epstein’s former girlfriends or long-term advisers. We are told authorities decided against pursuing further charges in order to expedite settlement payments to victims. And yet, according to David Boies, who represented several of Mr. Epstein’s victims, “while we are grateful for the government’s prosecution of Epstein and Maxwell, the truth is that, both before and afterwards, the government was largely asleep at the switch.” So Epstein’s death ended the criminal prosecution of Epstein and gave prosecutors the opportunity to drop the whole thing, letting a will Epstein signed days before his death guide the fate of that wealth, and federal prosecutors took that opportunity. It’s another wrinkle in Epstein’s suicide. He didn’t die until this very important loose end — a new will — was ready to go:
And then we get to this detail regarding the value of the assets held by the Epstein estate: it was worth $131 as of March 31, 2025, but that valuation only values the Valar investment at the 2019 value when Epstein died. Which is a reminder that Epstein’s estate is still invested in Valar and when the estate is finally allowed to cash out of that investment odds are the overall value of the Epstein estate will be substantially higher. Epstein’s Valar investments are a substantial portion of the remaining Epstein estate. It’s also worth recalling how the New Zealand citizenship Thiel secretly acquired was only revealed after New Zealand journalists discovered that Valar — the chief investment vehicle for Thiel’s New Zealand investments — had engaged in local investments that were effectively fleecing the New Zealand taxpayers. So that fleecing of the New Zealand tax payers is potentially inflating the value of the Epstein estate. It’s a small detail in this story but emblematic of the overall sleaziness here. Highly profitable sleaziness:
But it’s not only the case that this fortune is being left to the Epstein estate. It also turns out that estate consists of a secret trust set up in the will Epstein signed days before his death. The 1953 Trust, which will be managed by Epstein’s long-term advisers Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn. What will this secret trust be doing with all that money? We don’t get to know. That’s the incredible state of affairs thanks, in large part, to the decision by federal prosecutors to not pursue civil forfeiture. Which also makes this a good time to recall the extensive evidence that Epstein has deep intelligence ties. What are the odds some of that left over secret trust cash ends up getting used for intelligence purposes?
And then we get to this remarkable fact: It was just back in January, days before the start of the second Trump term, when the Financial Times published an opinion piece by Thiel where he called for the Trump administration to finally publicly deal with a range of state secrets, including all the questions surrounding Jeffrey Epstein:
Now let’s take a look at that opinion piece, where the billionaire pined for a kind of “apocalypse” in the form of the revealing of major state secrets. And as Thiel explains, the reason President Trump neglected to follow through on his declassification pledges during his first term is that Trump feared a “rightwing deep state of an Oliver Stone movie”. But that is no longer the case:
“South Africa confronted its apartheid history with a formal commission, but answering the questions above with piecemeal declassifications would befit both Trump’s chaotic style and our internet world, which processes and propagates short packets of information. The first Trump administration shied away from declassifications because it still believed in the rightwing deep state of an Oliver Stone movie. This belief has faded.”
The first Trump administration shied away from declassifications because it still believed in the rightwing deep state of an Oliver Stone movie — an obvious reference to Stone’s JFK — but now that belief has faded. That was Peter Thiel’s message to the world back in January, just a couple of weeks before Trump launched the congressional declassification task force led by Representative Anna Paulina Luna. It’s a remarkable admission: the Trump administration no longer fears a right-wing deep state and the associated consequences of pissing it off through the declassification process. Instead, Thiel frames the challenges of declassification as a kind of battle with the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organizations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation. Thiel is framing this entire declassification process — which promised to deliver revelations on topics ranging from JFK to Epstein to COVID-19 — as a battle against Distributed Idea Suppression Complex because a right-wing deep state doesn’t exist. That’s the framing here. And note this amusing detail: Thiel suggests that “It may be too early to answer the internet’s questions about the late Mr Epstein”, before suggesting that it’s not too early for the range of other issues, like COVID-19 (which unfolding after Epstein’s death):
Peter Thiel was calling for apocalyptic revelations just five months ago. Maybe not revelations about Epstein but revelations about a host of other topics, including the JFK assassination. And according to Thiel, President Trump has no fear of a rightwing deep state standing in his way. He had that fear before, but not anymore. And here we are, with one disclosure disappointment after another and no real revelations. In that sense, it really has been revelatory, albeit exactly the kind of revelations we should have expected all along. There’s plenty to be learned from apocalyptic kayfabe.
@Pterrafractyl–
Guess who is the head of Palantir’s UK unit?
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/military-technology-database-palantir-royal-navy-war-fn0gb9rjb
I doubt this is without significance.
Best,
Dave
Are Donald Trump and Elon Musk making nice again? Time will tell, but it appears the Trump/Musk public squabble wasn’t a complete rift: President Trump decided to keep in place the Starlink terminal that was installed at the White House. It’s a move that, if nothing else, signifies a degree of trust Trump must still have in Musk. After all, he’s effectively granted Musk ongoing access to the communications flowing into and out of White House. It appears it’s going to take a lot more than a public spat to end this historic bromance.
Of course, it’s important to keep in mind that genuine affect for each other is hardly a required ingredient for the Trump/Musk alliance to continue. They have been co-conspirator in numerous DOGE-related high crimes, after all. This is a mutually assured destruction kind of relationship. Which brings us back to that very interesting decision by Trump to retain a Starlink connection that was set up just months ago as part of DOGE. Because as we’re going to see, those Starlink connections after been popping up across the federal bureaucracy. Specifically, it appears Starlink has played a critical role in the cover exfiltration of data from government agencies, bypassing the standard data-transfer controls. Including at the White House, where IT experts have grown increasingly alarmed over the massive security risks creating by a Starlink terminal that was installed over the objection of White House IT staffers, initially without even alerting the staffers that it was happening at all. And this arrangement doesn’t just prevent IT staff from keeping track of data moving out of White House networks. Data entering the networks, including malware, can also travel through this giant security hole too.
And it’s not just White House, of course. All sorts of government agencies have reported a similar experience, including the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the government agency filled with all sorts of highly sensitive data involving labor-related whistleblowers and government investigations into private companies. Including companies like SpaceX and Tesla.
Which brings us to a report from back in April about the apparent mass exfiltration of data by DOGE staffers at the NLRB. As we’re going to see, while this report didn’t mention Starlink, it turns out Starlink was indeed installed at the NLRB.
The warnings about the mass data theft at the NLRB comes to us thanks to an IT staff whistleblower, Daniel Berulis, who was hired last year to help the agency get up to speed with implementing “zero trust” principles of data management. One only gets access to the data they absolutely need to do their job, according to “zero trust”. As we can imagine, the DOGE ransacking of the NLRB was a complete violation of this principle. Berulis describes how DOGE staffers not only had tracking and auditing software turned off but they apparently even deleted event logs when they were done. That’s cover up behavior.
Another very intriguing security event took place within minutes after DOGE first accessed the NLRB’s systems: someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log into the system using one of the newly created DOGE accounts. With the correct username and password. The login attempts were automatically blocked but the fact that we don’t have an explanation for what happened just adds to the criminal-seeming nature of this DOGE activity. Perhaps a DOGE staffer had already had their personal devices penetrated by a third party, which was monitoring their activity and able to quickly make a login attempt in real-time. Although if that’s the case, it’s curious that this third party would make the login attempt appear to come from Russia and not, say, a server in Washington DC. That’s just hapless. Or perhaps this DOGE employee, who was tasked with exfiltrating all of this data without telling anyone, made an initial thwarted attempt to log in from a server in Russia, only to find that logins from that location aren’t possible. We don’t know, but the fact that this happened and we have no explanation is a sign of just how perilous the cybersecurity situation really is throughout the federal government right now. Also keep in mind that this report was from back in April so this perilous situation has been ongoing for months now.
One DOGE staffer at the NLRB, Jordan Wick, even created an account at the popular GitHub website — a portal for software code repositories — for a software tool they were making called “NxGenBdoorExtract”, which is an incredibly provocative name for the tool. The in-house database at the NLRB is called “NxGen”, so Wick was literally using a tool seemingly named after the backdoor extraction of data from NxGen. Even more remarkable is the fact that Wick left this GitHub code repository public, which is how someone eventually spotted it and posted about it. It’s the kind of detail that suggests Wick we either very incompetent at cover his tracks or was operating with such confidence that he wouldn’t face any consequences that he was having fun just trolling the world. And, of course, Berulis did indeed find that 10 gigabytes of NxGen data had been removed, but he couldn’t determine what that data was or who did it because of all the destroyed evidence.
Interestingly, Berulis also observed evidence that data was exfiltrated from the NLRB using a technique hackers deploy for covertly removing data called “DNS tunneling”. The technique involves corrupting the server housing the data you want to remove so that it sends a little chunk of the data every time a different server implements a domain name system (DNS) request with the corrupt server. DNS requests are normally very common and innocuous, thus allowing the target data to be removed covertly through a series of DNS requests. Someone deployed that technique at the NLRB during DOGE’s period there. We don’t know who exactly, although it seems like Jordan Wick is an obvious suspect.
Notably, DOGE seemingly completed its work after about a just week. And all of the special high-access accounts created for these employees were deleted. It was only at that point that Berulis and the other NLRB IT staffers were allowed to investigate the damage. That’s when he discovered that the logs tracking what data was sent and by whom were all deleted. And the account that deleted them was, itself, deleted. There was no record of what was removed and who removed it. The NLRB staff ended up launching a formal breach investigation which included a request for assistance from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). That investigation was thwarted for unknown reasons. Days later, Berulis discovered a threatening anonymous letter taped to his door. The letter included personal information and overhead videos of him walking his dog that appeared to have been taken from a drone. That’s mobster behavior. And also not the first instance of DOGE-related whistleblower intimidation we’ve heard of in recent months.
So what was the official NLRB response to these whistleblower allegations? Well, according to Tim Bearese, the NLRB’s acting press secretary, the agency conducted an investigation in response to Berulis’s allegations and “determined that no breach of agency systems occurred.” Berulis also denied that the NLRB granted DOGE access to his systems and even asserted that DOGE hadn’t even requested access in the first place. That gross denial of the available facts is also part of the this story. This isn’t just a cover up. It’s a trollish ‘in your face’ cover up. In keeping with the Trump brand.
It’s that weird ‘in your face’ cover up that also serves as part of the context for these reports suggesting a thawing a warming of relations between Trump and Musk. All indications are that Trump and Musk have been jointly engaged in one of the largest acts of data theft in history. Perhaps the largest. And it’s still ongoing. Again, this is a relationship built on mutually assured destruction. These are mob bosses in business with each other. That’s what made the public fighting so surprising. And why the decision to keep Starlink at the White House after all the fighting is so unsurprising under the circumstances. This is an ongoing joint crime that remains very dependent on Starlink providing backdoor access into and out of government networks. And the White House and NLRB are just two of the many agencies where this is undoubtedly happening. The relationship has to continue whether Trump and Musk like each other or not. Criming takes priority:
““I may move the Tesla around a little bit, but I don’t think we’ll be doing that with Starlink. It’s a good service,” Trump told reporters, referring to the satellite internet company that provides high-speed broadband access. It is a unit of Musk’s SpaceX.”
Boy, Trump sure seems to love Starlink. Why is that? It’s not as if the White House lacked internet service. What is it about Starlink that makes it so coveted by this White House? That’s the alarming question looming over this story. An alarming question with very alarming obvious answers, like the fact that Starlink’s many security concerns might be exactly what you are looking for if the secret exfiltration of massive amounts of government data is one of the primary goals:
“The Starlink roof installation, initially reported by the New York Times, triggered a confrontation between DOGE employees and the Secret Service. The opposition by White House staff has not been previously reported.”
A confrontation between White House staff and DOGE employees over the installation of Starlink that the DOGE employees clearly won. And that was apparently after the DOGE employees unilaterally installed the Starlink terminal at the White House without even informing the staff who were managing White House communications:
And then there’s the fact that the accounts used to connect to this White House Starlink terminal involve zero tracking of what’s been transferred and who did the transferring, completely bypassing the White House’s controls. It’s as if the Trump White House was arranging for the undetected theft of its own data:
And then there’s the reminder that this security catastrophe in the making isn’t just happening at the White House. Starlink terminals are being installed all over the federal government at agencies brimming with highly sensitive confidential information. Agencies like the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB):
And that warning about the Starlink installations at other government agencies, including the NLRB, serves as a reminder of a story we got back in April about a truly alarming account of mass data theft at the agency. A story that didn’t mention Starlink. But now we know Starlink was part of this story too:
“But according to an official whistleblower disclosure shared with Congress and other federal overseers that was obtained by NPR, subsequent interviews with the whistleblower and records of internal communications, technical staff members were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It’s possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets — data that four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending.”
Mass data exfiltration was detected. We don’t know what they took. We don’t know who took it. And we don’t know where it was sent and what it was being used for. We just know it was taken. And according to experts, there is no plausible valid reason from that data removal. It’s theft. Oh, and it’s pretty clear at this point that the Trump administration has zero interest in investigating this data theft. As we can see, the official line from the NLRB is that an investigation was conducted and “determined that no breach of agency systems occurred.” That determination is obviously a lie. Which makes this a story about both the theft of data by DOGE and the subsequent cover-up by the Trump administration:
But that official determination that “no breach of agency systems occurred” also flies in the face of the fact that the DOGE staffers demanded the kind of access that wouldn’t leave a trail of their activities. In other words, they preemptively destroyed the evidence that would have been necessary to determine whether or not a breach had occurred. The Trump team currently managing the NLRB is effectively in on whatever crime transpired. Or at least helping to cover it up:
And then there’s the ‘in your face’ behavior by DOGE staffer Jordan Wick, who literally created a publicly viewable software project on the GitHub code repository called “NxGenBdoorExtract”, a name that literally refers to creating a “backdoor” for extracting the “NxGen” in-house data stored at the NLRB. It’s the kind of behavior that begs the question of whether or not Wick and the other DOGE staffers were already offered pre-emptive presidential pardons. The whole DOGE operation certainly behaves that way:
Also note the speed with which this all took place: after just a week of work, the DOGE staffers left the NLRB and deleted their accounts. This was like a smash and grab robbery. And it was only then that agency staffers like Berulis could attempt to assess the damage. And he found around 10 gigabytes of data had left the NxGen in-house data repository. But, again, we don’t know which files. That’s all a mystery thanks to all the steps DOGE took to cover their tracks:
Worse, when Berulis and the other staffers made an attempt to deduce which files had been exfiltrated, they found that the logs had been deleted by a now-deleted account. They launched a formal investigation that would include CISA, but that got thwarted. Instead, days after Berulis and his colleauges prepared a request for CISA help, Berulis found the threatening note pinned to his door:
And then we get this evidence of a “DNS tunneling” approach to exfiltrating data surreptitiously. A technique that requires compromising the NLRB servers so data can be quietly sent out in small chunks at a time. Which is an indication that the people carrying out this data exfiltration operation had knowledge of hacker techniques:
Now, obviously, the Starlink terminal that was reportedly installed the NLRB played a role in this untrackable data exfiltration operation. So it’s notable that someone apparently also disabled controls that would prevent insecure or unauthorized mobile devices from logging on to the system without the proper security settings along with an interface exposed to the public internet. Were those insecure devices all connected to Starlink by chance?
And then we get to this fascinating collection of evidence: within minutes after DOGE accessed the NLRB’s systems, someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log into the system using one of the newly created DOGE accounts. With the correct username and password. While these attempts were blocked, it’s the kind of incident that suggests either the DOGE team has already been compromised or the DOGE team initially had plans on making it looks like some sort of Russian hack took place. But also keep in mind that when we read how “while it’s possible the user was disguising their location, it’s highly unlikely they’d appear to be coming from Russia if they wanted to avoid suspicion,” that same logic would apply to Russian hackers who could also disguise their own tracks. And as we saw above, whoever was exfiltrating this data was disguising the destination of the data too. The DOGE team knew how to spoof locations. Also keep in mind that, with all of the evidence of the active destruction of evidence in order to cover their tracks, the DOGE team may have simply gotten sloppy and neglected to delete the logs of these login attempts because they were never successful:
And that warning about the compromise of other agencies brings us to warning we got from another government agencies tasked with housing the kind of highly sensitive data private companies might be very interested in getting their hands on: the former chief technology officer at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has already warned that the same experience of DOGE employees turning off auditing and event logs happened there too. The cybersecurity experts were even put on administrative leave:
And, again, this story is from back in April. And, if anything, it’s only gotten worse. With more time to destroy evidence of stolen data and more time to threaten and intimidate anyone who dares expose the crime. And more time for Trump and Musk to make up and play nice while they plot their next grand crime together.
Welp, he said it: MIGA. Less than a day after ordering US strikes against Iranian nuclear sites, President Trump is already talking about regime change in Iran and ‘Making Iran Great Again’. We don’t know where exactly this is headed, but we can be confident that a much larger and more sustained conflict is on the way. And while this might be dire now for the overall global state of affairs and a possible prelude to a WWIII-like scenario, it’s also unambiguously wonderful news for US defense sector. A sector that, we’ve seen, is increasingly incorporating the AI technologies under development by Silicon Valley, hence the new Palantir-led efforts to create a new AI-centric defense contracting consortium.
And those increasingly lucrative prospects for Silicon Valley, and Palantir in particular, brings us to the following set of stories about the deepening mutual reliance between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon. Well, not just the Pentagon. As we’ve seen, the UK Navy has even begun embedded Palantir employees on ships as part of a trial “forward deployment” program. The Palantir employees won’t just be assisting with the Navy’s direct logistical needs in terms of staffing and equipment. It sounds like part of the mission for the Palantir employees will be long-term modeling of the UK’s personnel for the purpose of ensuring the kind of skills and leaders needed for the future of naval warfare. A future that will presumably increasingly revolve around the implementation of Palantir’s services across the UK Navy.
Oh, and guess who heads of Palantir’s London office: Louis Mosley, grandson of Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists. Yes, Palantir is going to be modeling who gets prioritized for retainment by the UK Navy, with Louis Mosley presumably playing a leading role. As the article also notes, the Ukrainian military also uses Palantir’s systems, so don’t be shocked if this kind of “forward deployment” of Palantir employees ends up getting applied to Ukraine’s military too. Although that would obviously be a much more dangerous forward deployment.
But as far as the embedding of tech employees in the military goes, that forward deployment of Palantir employees isn’t even the most aggressive new program. It turns out the Pentagon has a program of its own for embedding tech staff directly in military operations: Silicon Valley executives are being drafted into a new “Detachment 201” program that turns them into military reserve officers. In fact, they will be sworn in as lieutenant colonels, but them in immediate senior leadership roles. No basic training will be required. Instead, they will be expected to spend 120 hours a year in military service, where they will be advising on AI-powered systems and assisting the Defense Department in recruiting other high-tech specialists. In other words, Silicon Valley executives are going to be recruiting their staff into the military. Which is the kind of goal that suggests we’re going to be seeing a lot more “forward deployment” type of arrangements between Silicon Valley firms in branches of the military. Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, Palantir’s CTO, Shyam Sankar, and OpenAI executives Kevin Weil and Bob McGrew are all set to join the Detachement 201 program.
We’re also told that these tech executives will have direct input on military strategies. So what about the massive conflicts of interest in having Silicon Valley executives playing senior leadership roles in crafting military strategies that will potentially rely on hardware and services provided by their own firms? Well, we are told the executives won’t work on any projects directly involving their own companies. Keep in mind that technologies like AI are going to be hard to compartmentalize into specific projects. Also keep in mind that having these executives advising on projects that involves their competitors’ products and services also constitutes a pretty obvious conflict of interest. Oh well, apparently.
And that blasé attitude about the glaring conflicts of interest — and the real world risks created by those conflicts of interest — bring us to the final update on military procurement affairs: the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation just had its budget gutted and staff roughly cut in half. An office dedicated to providing a final measure of quality control on new military hardware and that has reportedly frequently found issues defense contractors hadn’t caught. In fact, the office was established in the 1980s in response to complaints about defense contractors provided hardware that didn’t live up to the advertisements. Overall, the office has long a means of combating the dreaded ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’, and been seen as being highly effective at it. That’s the office that just saw its staff gutted. At the same time tech executives are getting sworn in a senior officers so they can advise on the best strategies for the next generation of AI-assisted warfare. What could possibly go wrong?
Ok, first, here’s that report from back in September about the new forward deployments of the Palantir employees in the UK Navy. A project that puts Palantir not only at the heart of the UK’s day-to-day Naval logistics but also providing the vision for who should be leading the UK Navy of the future. Led by Oswald Mosley’s grandson:
“The Times can now reveal that Palantir’s software engineers, many of them youngsters with degrees in computer science or mathematics, have been “forward deployed” into the Royal Navy as part of a three-year contract that began in 2022. They are helping the navy ensure it has both the manpower and the ships in place for a conflict of the future.”
Palantir employees have been “forward deployed” with the UK Navy since 2022. Palantir is managing to make itself even more embedded in Western military affairs. And look who happens to be serving as the head of Palantir’s London office: Louis Mosley, grandson of British fascist leader Oswald Mosely. Yes, the grandson of the founder of Britain’s fascist party is now leading the office that’s embedding Palantir staff on UK Naval ships:
Interestingly, it doesn’t sound like the embedding of Palantir’s software in the UK military is being used for the execution of battlefield logistics and analysis. Instead, Palantir is engaging in some sort of modeling of Naval operations for the purpose of ensuring a steady flow of not just parts and maintenance but also personnel. So if you have long-term career ambitions with the UK Navy, now is the time to become extremely overt with some pro-Palantir sentiments:
Also note how the software the Royal Navy uses is the same as the Ukrainians. Which suggests that similar “forward deployment” of Palantir staff with the Ukrainian military is also be something would could see in the future if this becomes a trend. Although that would probably require some extraordinary hazard pay:
Bu as we’re going to see in the following piece, the embedding of Palantir employees in the UK Navy was just the start of this trend. The US military has taken it to the next level: Silicon Valley executives are being made lieutenant colonels in the Army’s inaugural “Detachment 201” program. Yes, tech executives are being made senior military officers in the US military. They won’t be going through basic training, but they will be participating in military strategic planning. The program simply requires they spend 120 hours a year, advising on AI-powered systems and assisting the Defense Department in recruiting other high-tech specialists. So it sounds like recruiting AI specialists into the military will be a big part of their role as senior military officers.
And what about the clear conflicts of interest? Well, we are also being assured that the executives won’t be working on any programs that directly involved their employers. Which seems like an increasingly impossible limit to impose on their roles when you consider how widespread technologies like AI are likely to become in the military’s operations. But those are the assurances we are getting. The kind of assurance that should have us confident that Silicon Valley will become even Pentagon-centric in coming decades. And vice versa:
“Executives from Meta, OpenAI, and Palantir will be sworn in Friday as Army Reserve officers. OpenAI signed a $200 million defense contract this week. Meta is partnering with defense startup Anduril to build AI-powered combat goggles for soldiers. ”
This isn’t just Palantir employees getting forward deployed inside military units. Tech executives are being made into military officers. Lieutenant colonels, specifically. They won’t have to undergoing basic training. Instead, they’ll just have to serve 120 hours a year (roughly 2 1/2 hours a week on average). So what about the the obvious conflicts of interest for these tech executives and their growing number of defense contracts? Well, we are assured that these newly minted Silicon Valley senior officers won’t be working on projects involving their own employers, which seems like a rather absurd assurance when considering on widely utilized some of these technologies are likely to be, like artificial intelligence. And at the same time, we are told they’ll have direct input on military strategy, something will obviously have an impact on the military’s procurement priorities. It’s not hard to seeing these executives ‘strategically’ preferring methods of warfare that benefit their firms:
And then we get to this truly ominous development: we are told that part of the underlying economic rationale behind this Silicon Valley embrace of defense contracting is the growing cost of AI-related research and development. Simply put, the cost of developing next generation AI models has grown so much, consumer revenue can no longer viably finance it. In other words, future generations of AI will have to be built for military purposes first and foremost. The economics demand it. Consumer applications will be secondary considerations:
And then we get this reminder: the incorporation of tech executives directly into senior military leadership positions coincides with the gutting of the Pentagon’s independent testing office. Which presumably means the Pentagon will be even more reliant on the assurances of the companies building the weapons:
So what was the pretext for the Trump administration’s decision to gut the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation? Reducing a “reducing bloated bureaucracy and wasteful spending in favor of increased lethality.” Of course, as we should have probably expected, it turns out this office was literally formed for the purpose of reducing “waste, fraud, and abuse”. Specifically, the waste, fraud, and abuse found in defense contracting that results in weapons not performing as advertised. That’s the review process that has just been gutted:
“As part of a string of moves aimed at “reducing bloated bureaucracy and wasteful spending in favor of increased lethality,” Hegseth cut the size of the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation in half. The group was established in the 1980s—following orders from Congress—after criticisms that the Pentagon was fielding weapons and systems that didn’t perform as safely or effectively as advertised. Hegseth is reducing the agency’s staff to about 45, down from 94, and firing and replacing its director. He gave the office just seven days to implement the changes.”
The Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation was created for no reason. It was formed into response to weapons systems not performing as advertised. An office literally formed to prevent “waste, fraud, and abuse”. That’s the office that just had its staff gutted:
Yes, the signal being sent to Silicon Valley is pretty clear at this point between the gutted of this office and the direct recruiting of tech executives. A signal to get ready for the greatest defense contracting ‘bust out’ in history. A guardrails-free splurge of military spending on anything AI-related. And don’t forget that AIs aren’t just going to be guiding these companies in providing services like long-term personnel management. The increasingly sophisticated AIs will presumably also be available to assist these companies in generating even more Pentagon-related contracts and other military contracts around the world. Like devices products and services that will, eventually, lead to an even greater military reliance on the company. All sorts of AI-powered profit-oriented long-term modeling and strategizing is undoubtedly already underway. It’s going to be an AI-powered defense sector bust out. Which is sort of what passes for progress these days.
The Trump administration has a new word of the day: denaturalization. It sounds like the Trump administration is going to start prioritizing the revocation of US citizenship for naturalized citizens found to have committed a now expanded list of crimes or violations. The new focus appears to be a response to the strong primary win in the Democratic primary for New York City’s mayoral race by naturalized citizen Zohran Mamdani, with President Trump now explicitly threatening to have Mamdani’s citizenship revokes over arguments that Mamdani is a communist who supports terrorism. The long-expectation threat of mass denaturalization under a second Trump administration is already here. A threat that, as we saw, had been long championed by key Trump advisor Stephen Miller, under the term “remigration”. Stephen Miller’s “remigration” plans are already taking shape.
But as we’re going to see in the following pair of articles, the Trump administration’s embrace of the politics of remigration isn’t limited to loosening the conditions for having someone’s citizenship revoked. There are much larger plans. The kind of plans that, in years past, would have likely sparked some sort of libertarian outcry among conservative Americans: the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is building a centralized list of American citizens.
While many might assume such a list already exists, but that’s not the case. The US has long resisted the creation of such a list for a variety of reasons including privacy concerns. But as we’ve seen, those concerns appear to have largely evaporated among conservatives as DOGE has proceeded to build what has been terms the ‘database of ruin’: a highly detailed master database filled with highly sensitive data, rife for targeted abuses by an authoritarian regime. The database of ruin is now being built and run by Palantir.
And now we’re learning about a new national citizenship database that will likely play a very complementary role when it comes to the application of big data for authoritarian purposes: Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE). The new SAVE system is effectively a major upgrade of a system that has existed since the 1980s. The original system allowed for checking the citizenship status of an individual, which is often necessary for naturalized citizens when voting because the voter rolls at departments of motor vehicles don’t always get updated in a timely manner. And while some states had been using that legacy system to check voter rolls for non-citizen voters, they found it to be a laborious process for each individual. In other words, the legacy system couldn’t be used to just mass-check all of the people on a state’s voter rolls. Several Republican-led states sued the Biden administration in 2024 over the inadequacies of the system, arguing that the Biden administration was failing to help states verify their voters’ citizenship status. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency that manages this system, began working on the upgrades at the end of the Biden administration. DOGE got involved with that upgrade after Trump took office, and at this point it appears the SAVE system is going to be ready for mass citizenship checks of voter rolls.
As experts warn, systems like this are only going to work as well as the data that it contains and the accurate of SAVE’s data remains unclear. Beyond that, it’s also unclear what other purposes the data will be used for, with immigration-related raids being an obvious possible application. And it will be up to individual states to provide that voter roll data. That ambiguity has experts wonder if we’re going to see a kind of partisan divide on which states end up using the new system, with Republican-led states embracing it while Democratic-led states take a much slower, more cautious approach.
But let’s not forget one of the biggest possible impacts of this new system: it could potential prove, or disprove, long-standing Republican claims about mass non-citizen voting in favor of Democrats. Claims that were a lot easier to make when there was no means of actually answering that question. And given the reality that the evidence for mass non-citizen voting is non-existent, we have to ask how the conservative movement handle this rather crucial detail.
And while it remains to be seen how exactly the Republican Party is planning on handling what should be a very delicate issue, we’re already seeing signs that some sort of bad faithed scheme is in the works. Because it turns out the Election Integrity Network hosted a virtual event on June 12 with David Jennings, the government employee who oversees the SAVE system. And the Election Integrity Network is, of course, the outfit run by key Council for National Policy (CNP) operative Cleta Mitchell that specializes in making claims of Democratic election fraud. As we’ve seen, it was Mitchell who laid much of the groundwork for the election denialism that led up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection. So when we learn about the head of SAVE meeting with Mitchell’s outfit, that should be seen as a very big red flag regarding the actually integrity of SAVE. In fact, Mitchell herself is reported to have spoken about Jennings at an Election Integrity Network event back in May. “He is in charge of the SAVE database that has the citizenship data for, you know, everybody,” according to Mitchell. “And he is in the process of reconfiguring the entire [thing] so that we can actually determine who on the voter rolls is and is not a citizen.” On the one hand, it’s potentially great if the US can finally address these decades-old claims of mass voter fraud by non-citizen voters. But not if that ‘reveal’ is ultimately corrupt. What is Mitchell planning? It can’t simply be
Adding to the alarm over Cleta Mitchell’s apparent embrace of SAVE is the praise given to SAVE by conservative activist Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, an organization that emerged during the Tea Party era focused on promoting narratives about mass Democratic voter fraud, including claims the 2020 election was stolen. As we’ve seen, Cleta Mitchell has served as True the Vote’s legal counsel. Engelbrecht recently praised SAVE in a group newsletter. Although, interestingly, she also previously warned about Palantir’s ‘database of ruin’, so there does appear to be at least some remaining conservative discomfort over the unprecedented consolidation of data on virtually everyone in the US. But it’s pretty tepid discomfort at this point.
That’s all part of the context of Trump administration’s new obsession with revoking citizenship: with the unfurling of a new system that could effectively disprove Republican claims about non-citizen voting, it’s not hard to imagine Republicans using mass denaturalization as a means of effectively changing the narrative and making all sorts of claims about ‘improper citizens’ or ‘fake citizens’ voting for Democrats. Instead of a ‘non-citizens are voting for Democrats!’ narrative, it will be a ‘Democrats are giving bad people citizenship!’ narrative. In other words, we could see the lack of evidence for non-citizen voting used as an excuse for mass denaturalization. And the more this new SAVE system has the potential to reveal the big lie about non-citizen voting, the more aggressively we should expect the conversation to shift to ‘fake citizens’ and denaturalization. This is where we are heading.
Ok, first, here’s a report from back in early June, before we got the news about this big new SAVE upgrade, describing the conservative outcry over reports on DOGE’s construction of the ‘database of ruin’ to be managed by Palantir. Outcry from online influencers like Nick Fuentes, the reactionary Catholic neo-Nazi who infamously had dinner with Donald Trump and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago back in November 2022 and held a still-unexplained day of meetings in October 2023 at the office of a top Texas Republican strategist who serves as the top operative for Texas theocratic billionaire Tim Dunn. Nick Fuentes, sadly, has real clout in the MAGA movement. And he wasn’t happy about Palantir, a company Fuentes characterized as a CIA/Mossad cutout. As Fuentes put it, “Seriously, if Palantir isn’t the deep state, then what is?” Even MAGA diehards like Fuentes are starting to get uncomfortable with the unprecedented consolidation of power at the federal level. Which is going to make the unveiling of the new SAVE system a potentially volatile phenomena. Because, on the one hand, if SAVE ends up someone proving Republican claims of mass voter fraud, it’s not hard to imagine critics like Fuentes coming around to the idea of centralized federal databases on the population. And quite a betrayal if that ‘proof’ doesn’t appear:
“Numerous pro-Trump voices expressed dismay and feelings of betrayal across social media platforms like X.”
It’s a betrayal. At least for a subset of the the MAGA base, which includes Nick Fuentes, the reactionary Catholic neo-Nazi who infamously had dinner with Donald Trump and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago back in November 2022 and who held a day of meetings at the office of a top Texas Republican strategist in October 2023. Nick Fuentes is an online leader of the contemporary MAGA movement, whether that movement wants to admit it or not. And even he’s pissed about this national ‘database of ruin’. And the fact that it’s Palantir tasked with building and managing it. As Fuentes ask, “Seriously, if Palantir isn’t the deep state, then what is?” It’s a long overdue question for the supposedly anti-‘deep state’ MAGA base. If only it was being asked by more than just a disgruntled Nazi influencer:
And that report from a month ago on the palpable sense of betrayal among the MAGA base brings us to the following NPR report about the ongoing efforts to build centralized national databases of everyone in the US: DOGE is building a national citizenship database. The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system. But SAVE isn’t just built for checking whether or not an individual has citizenship. Such a system for individual queries has existed for decades. SAVE, on the other hand, is build for checking entire voter roles. And as we’re going to see, while such a system has experts worried about the possible abuses that could arise should this database not contain accurate information, there’s another group who should possibly be worried this system: right-wing purveyors of myths about mass non-citizen voting, a core belief among the MAGA die-hards. So the fact that one of the people managing this new system reportedly held a private briefing about it with none other than Cleta Mitchell, the CNP’s leading election denier and a key figure in the efforts to overturn the 2020. And as experts also warn, while this centralized mass citizenship database will have obvious applications for routine election tasks like cleaning voter rolls, that doesn’t mean its applications will end there. A centralized citizenship database is being built with little oversight and for uses yet to be determined (or yet to be revealed):
“Such integration has never existed before, and experts call it a sea change that inches the U.S. closer to having a roster of citizens — something the country has never embraced. A centralized national database of Americans’ personal information has long been considered a third rail — especially to privacy advocates as well as political conservatives, who have traditionally opposed mass data consolidation by the federal government.”
An unprecedented centralization of federal databases allowing for the creation of the kind of national citizen database. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about a new unprecedented database emerging from the ‘DOGE’ efforts. We’ve already been warned about the ‘database of ruin’ — an integrated federal database comprised of highly sensitive data on virtually everyone in the US — that Palantir is reportedly creating. But this the first we’ve heard of a national citizenship database, something that the immigration-obsessed Trump administration will undoubtedly find many uses for. Whether those uses are technically legal or not. As the article notes, no public notice has been issued regarding this new citizenship-application of Social Security data, contrary to the Privacy Act of 1974. But, oh well, it’s happening anyway:
It sounds like the Trump administration has built this new tool by effectively ramping up the usability of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement (SAVE) system of databases have used for the verification of immigration status since the 1980s. Over the last decade some states have been using the system to verify voter rolls, typically for people with department of motor vehicle records indicating they’re a non-citizen who voted. It was a relatively sparingly used system designed for targeted searches of individuals. Not mass voter roll scrubbing:
Then, in 2024, the Republican-led states of Texas, Ohio, and Florida sued the Biden administration arguing the administration was failing to help states verify their voter rolls. Plans for such an upgrade started at the end of the Biden administration. Then, in March, President Trump signed an executive order requiring DHS to give states access to the system at no cost. DOGE was further ordered to assist in the process. By May, SAVE has been upgraded to allow for the verification of citizenship status for everyone on the voter lists, not just foreign-born citizens or non-citizens:
And the upgrades to the SAVE system aren’t done yet. The ability to query using just the last 4 digits of a Social Security Number combined with a name and birthday is coming too, making full citizenship checks of all voter rolls available to virtually every voting officials. In other words, we should expect the impact of this new system by the next round of elections:
Of course, a system for verifying voter citizenship status can be used for a lot more than just verifying voters. Like mass deportation. Which experts point out is one of the reasons we might expect Democratic-led states to approach this new system with a degree of caution. Because the data that gets input into this system could be the key ingredient needed for mass federal deportation raids:
At the same time, while this upgraded SAVE system has obvious appeal to immigration-obsessed Republican officials, there is one glaring danger for Republicans under this system: it threatens to expose the long-standing Republican myth about mass voting by non-citizens for Democrats. So while Democratic-led states are likely to be wary about importing information into this system that could be weaponized for mass deportation purposes, there’s also going to be quite an incentive to have this federal system effectively verify for the world that non-citizens aren’t voting in their state:
At the same time, it’s pretty notable that it was nine Republican-led states that previously rejected the use of a system previously built for checking voter rolls, the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), over viral false claims emanating from the far right about the dangers of such of system. And two of those states, Texas and Louisiana, appear quite eager to use SAVE. Which is a huge warning sign. What is it about the system currently being constructed by DOGE that has these states assured?
And that disturbing question about what it is that is assuring Republican states about SAVE when they rejected the ERIC system brings us to the concerns voiced by experts: can we actually trust this system? Will it have up to date data? Or will it be flagging erroneously high levels of ‘non-citizen’ for valid voters? And what about the potential deportation abuses? Is this a recipe for an ‘oops, we accidentally deported millions of people who should not have been, too late now’ kind of scheme? Will partisan audiences even believe it?
And that obvious application of the upgraded SAVE system to effectively debunk long-standing Republican claims about non-citizen voters brings us to one of the more remarkable, and ominous, details in this story: a DHS staffer gave a private full briefing on the new SAVE system to none other than Cleta Mitchell, the CNP’s leading election denier and one of the key figures behind the efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network hosted a virtual event with David Jennings, the person overseeing the SAVE system. The conservative movement’s leading election denier appears to be on board with SAVE, a system that, if working properly, is highly likely to debunk precisely the kind of claims Mitchell has long made. That’s a red flag:
Finally, we get to the fact loud silence coming from conservatives over the SAVE program. Silence made all the more remarkable given the opposition to ERIC. Interestingly, the article was able to find one conservative activist who wasn’t comfortable with the idea behind Palantir’s ‘database of ruin’ but who was also supportive of SAVE: Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder of the nonprofit True the Vote. As we’ve seen, True the Vote — an organization that got started in the Tea Party movement — not only aggressively pushed the ‘2020 election was stolen’ member but has retained Cleta Mitchell as its legal counsel. True the Vote has a long track record of operating in bad faith. And it’s supportive of SAVE. That’s a red flag:
Engelbrecht is all onboard with SAVE, a system that promises to answer the kind of mass non-citizen voter fraud claims her group has been making for over a decade now. Claims that have never had substantive evidence behind them. What is it about this system that has Engelbrecht excited? Grifters don’t generally enjoy watching their grifts revealed. What’s the real story here? Time will tell. But try not be shocked when the ‘non-citizen voting’ narrative is suddenly all about a ‘fake citizens’ epidemic. And a ‘remigration’ solution.