Peter Thiel's Game of Thrones

Forget Trump. He isn't the threat. JD Vance is.

Introduction

This is not an essay I wanted to write. It is not in the tenor or style of a typical Sundman figures it out! essay. It is heavier on text and lighter on pictures than a typical SFIO! post, and much darker. I post it out of a sense of moral obligation — especially to my 4, soon to be 5, grandchildren, and to every blessed child on Earth — trusting that at least a few hundred longtime readers of this ongoing autobiographical meditation will read this essay to the end, and that at least a few new readers will do so as well. I hope you’re one of them.

Premises, fair warning

The argument I make in this post rests on two premises:

1. Trump has dementia; it is irreversible and rapidly accelerating.

2. Vance and the leaders of the cabal behind him are Nazis hellbent on establishing a new global Reich of which they are the paramount rulers, whatever the cost.

If either of these premises is too extreme for you to contemplate I suggest you stop reading here.

This essay assumes that you’re familiar with at least the broad outlines of Project 2025. That document is deeply chilling, but one might argue that it’s “only” a blueprint for a radically right-wing and authoritarian government, not a plan to create a Nazi Reich. I address this point towards the end of this essay.

Précis

This post is an elaboration of a point implicit in my recent essay I created Peter Thiel, who gave us JD Vance. Sorry about that, which is that a vote for Trump as president is a de facto vote for Vance as president, and that Vance is the cat’s paw of a new and dangerous alliance of Christian nationalists and technofascists whose spiritual home is Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley and whose most prominent leader is Peter Thiel.

In my earlier essay I said that Vance was a bigger danger than most people realized. This essay goes farther than that. Here I’m saying that Vance is the danger, that he represents the equivalent of a category 5 hurricane with sustained winds of 160 miles per hour bearing down on our republic, a hurricane that has dropped fifty millibars in the last ten hours.

I assert that the threat posed to the United States of America, and indeed to all of humanity, by Donald Trump’s candidacy is not a Trump presidency, but the presidency of JD Vance, which, if Trump is elected, I believe will begin before December 31, 2025.

Indeed, if Trump is elected president, Vance’s presidency may start much sooner than the end of 2025 — it may very well begin a few months, if not weeks, after Trump’s inauguration — whether Trump agrees to leave the Oval Office voluntarily or not.

I further assert that if Vance ever becomes President, the Constitution of the United States of America will be a dead letter.

Vance and his clique — which includes people like the Christian nationalist zealot and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, fanatical ‘trad’ Catholics like former United States Attorney General William Bar and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, and a cabal of extremely wealthy Silicon Valley technofascists including Elon Musk and Scott McNealy, and of which Peter Thiel is the closest to Vance — will do whatever they want to do once Vance has been installed as President, and the Constitution be damned.

And finally, I assert that what Thiel, Vance and their fascist gang want to do if and when they have assumed power is much, much, much worse than what most people believe that they intend to do.

Understanding Vance

Before getting to the core of my argument, let me jump ahead and address one extremely obvious objection to my thesis: The objection that Vance is a socially inept dimwit, a virtual nobody, a hollow man, a man with no ‘there’ there; a clown, basically, and not the scary kind of clown either, just a garden-variety buffoon, and hence nobody we should fear as some kind of Hitlerian antichrist mastermind.

Here is how I address that objection:

I agree that Vance is a hollow man, a man with no core beliefs or social skills, a weirdo, an empty vessel who is driven only by resentment and lust for power. But Vance is not stupid. He has a law degree from Yale; he wrote a mega-bestselling memoire, he got himself elected to the U.S. Senate. He is dull, but he is not stupid.

I copied this image from an indispensable essay by Heidi Siegmund Cuda called “‘Who Goes Nazi?’ — An 83-Year-Old Prediction of JD Vance. I cite sections of Cuda’s essay further down in this post. The image is credited to High Fidelity.

Vance is smart, ambitious, and utterly without a moral center. This is exactly why Thiel et al chose him to be their inside man. I come back to this point in greater depth below.

Dementias and ‘sanewashing’

I lost both my mother and my mother-in-law to Alzheimers, my father to dementia related to brain cancer surgery, and one grandmother to vascular dementia. I’m not a neurologist or a psychiatrist but I’ve heard enough from people who are, and I’ve seen enough of dementia up close, to know that Trump’s slide into it is irreversible and accelerating.

I’ll go further: It is evident not just to me, but to anyone paying attention and who still has intact their faculty of critical reason, that Donald J Trump has dementia and that it is accelerating rapidly. I know this, you surely know this, and so do the editors-in-chief of the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, and so on.

A recent Blue Sky thread by Ken “Popehat” White explains sanewashing like this:

I view mainstream coverage of Trump the way I view mainstream coverage of law enforcement:  it can be good when a critical inquiry of the subject is the point of the story, but routinely credulous and bad when it’s not. Take the NYTimes piece this weekend about Trump’s increasing word salad.  That was the sort of critical analysis that the press should do of [all] major candidates.  [But] it happened only because it’s the point of the story. Day to day, the NYT’s approach is to use overly generous interpretations of Trumpian incoherence, “sanewash” it, and turn it into coherent policy statements for him without pointing out that he talks incoherent and crazy.  It’s part of a both-sidesing the press is prone to, plus a fundamental cluelessness of what actual conservatives should sound like. This is what leads the NYT to run a column by senator urging the army to shoot protestors: they are fundamentally clueless about ideas outside their circle and so can’t separate crazy from sane.

Other commenters are not as generous as Popehat is; they attribute the undeniable sanewashing of Trump by legacy media not to an inability to tell the difference between crazy and sane, but to a deliberate choice to help Trump get elected.

I recommend Aaron Rupar and Noah Berlatsky’s recent post Trump's decompensation was the big debate day story: Disoriented and incoherent, he hit new lows of unfitness, and Dean Obeidallah’s October 8th story NY Times finally covers Trump’s dementia but still sanewashes Trump. There are other reputable reporters who routinely document Trump’s sad intellectual decline. But the giant corporate news concerns generally won’t go near it.

I can’t say whether it’s out of blindness, incompetence, cowardice, greed, squeamishness, love of Trump or some other reason. But our media, as Obeidallah keeps reminding us, is failing us.

Thiel, Vance and the emerging techbro/Christian-nationalist fascist alliance, a brief reprise

That Vance has deep connections not only to Thiel and Silicon Valley technofascism, but also, as a recent convert to Catholicism, to arch-conservative, and extremely anti-democracy, factions within that church, was the subject of my recent post: I created Peter Thiel, who gave us JD Vance. Sorry about that. Notes on the origins of the fascist theocrats of Silicon Valley , so I won’t belabor it here.

In that essay, however, I didn’t give much attention to the role that two newish technologies play in shaping the political objectives of the Silicon Valley Trumpists: AI and Crypto. This aspect is very important, but this essay is long enough, so rather than go into all that, I’ll refer you to this recent analysis in The New Yorker:

I would also like to call your attention to a quasi-religious fervor in Silicon Valley for a technopotheistic philosophy that you might call Tescrealism:

Space doesn’t allow me to go into this topic here, but if you do a quick internet search on that term, ‘tescreal,’ especially in conjunction with the name ‘Peter Thiel,’ you’ll soon find lots of interesting, weird and downright scary stuff.

Now, lots of people believe all kinds of wacky shit and so what. The reason that these ‘tescreal’ beliefs are significant in the context of the presidential election is that adherents of Tescrealism are what one might call ‘true believers’ — as sure of their faith as any martyr ever burned at the stake. They are 100% certain, as were Nazis, or the Branch Dividians at Waco, or the cyanide-kool-aid drinkers of Jonestown, Guyana — that they are superior to everyone who is not in their “in” group; that they, and only they, possess the Truth. Just because the things that Tescrealists believe don’t happen to look like traditional religious doctrines, that doesn’t mean that they’re not every bit as fanatical as any religious fundamentalist.

To be explicit, the driving ethos of what I’m calling ‘tescrealism’ is the use of science and technology to engineer superior humans. That may sound innocuous enough — who doesn’t want to use science and technology to increase human potential and reduce human suffering? But, of course, the creation of ‘superior’ humans implies the existence of a great many ‘inferior’ humans. And this is a road humanity has been down before.

Tescrealism adherents very often hold opinions on eugenics that are right in tune with those of the Hitlerian Nazis. Extropianism, after all, is about the perfectibility of human species through, among other things, genetic engineering. These people are serious about this stuff.

Thiel, Vance, et al are bad people with scary ideas. But must we really call them fascists and Nazis?

No, it’s not hyperbole, and yes, we must use the right words or be guilty ourselves of sanewashing. Thiel and Vance and their supporters are openly talking about American kristallnachts, mass deportations, “good genes” and “bad genes,” and concentration camps. Summary executions on public streets of people opposed to the Trump/Vance regime, once it has been installed in January, 2025, are strongly implied.

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, an his essay Vance and the future of the anti-democracy movement, wrote:

Because Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had significant influence with the former president when urging Trump to pick Vance for his vice president.

Why has Thiel been such a strong sponsor of Vance? Because Thiel sees in his protege a future leader of a political movement to turn America away from democracy. “For Peter,” said one of the people familiar with his thinking, “Vance is a generational bet.”

Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.

That’s the point. Thiel and Vance — along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement — believe that the only way true libertarians can win in America is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the American establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.

Yarvin comes as close as anyone to being the intellectual godfather of the anti-democracy movement. He has written that real political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding social order.

In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful; they should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.

How to achieve Yarvin’s vision? The first step, as Vance offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say—” as did Andrew Jackson — that “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

Vance has been anointed by Thiel and the rest of the anti-democracy movement as the post-Trump president, tasked with replacing the American establishment with an authoritarian regime.

Make no mistake: The foundation for America’s first true anti-democracy president is being laid right now.

But although I agree with everything Reich says here I don’t think he goes far enough. You can read his essay and come away thinking that Vance will run for President in 2028; that if we don’t defeat the Republicans in 2024 we’ll get another chance to do so in 2028.

I believe, contra that, that if the Republicans win in 2024 there will be no election in 2028. Heck, Trump, in one of his lucid moments told us that explicitly:

Given the stated beliefs of Elon Musk and his millions of followers; given the wholesale embrace of Trump despite everything he has said and done and promises to do when elected — including setting up camps in deserts that will be, if ever built, concentration camps where many people will surely die — given Trump’s promises to pardon the hundreds of traitors who assaulted the Capitol on January 6; given Trump’s stated intention to fuse fascist stormtroopers like the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers with police forces already infiltrated with white supremacists and thugs — I believe that it is foolish and dangerous to not use impolite words like ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’.

I will leave it to others to catalog all the heinous things Vance has said since becoming the Republican nominee for Vice President that go well beyond the obscene limits of Project 2025.

Instead I will urge you in the strongest possible way to read these two essays by Heidi Siegmund Cuda:

“Who Goes Nazi?” — An 83-Year-Old Prediction of JD Vance

This essay examines the behavior of JD Vance in the light of the 1941 essay in Harper’s Magazine, “Who Goes Nazi?” by Dorothy Thompson, the first American correspondent to be kicked out of Nazi Germany.

Cuda says,

I’m not sure what it is going to take for the Democrats to understand the gravity of our situation, but playing nice with Nazis is not going to save America.

Giving them a national platform to seed their lies into our consciousness is not going to save America. Allowing JD Vance — who hosts internationally banned RT on his Rumble platform — to lie to the world, while trying to minimize Russia’s attacks on the US and mind trick us into believing that defending our nation against covert influence operations is a disruption of free speech, only helps our enemies.

You must read Thompson’s ‘Who Goes Nazi” essay, please, please read it. There’s a link to it in Cuda’s post about it. In spirit of the kind sparrows who came to the assistance of Peter Rabbit when he, like me, was feeling overwhelmed, and echoing the words of Peter’s creator, that angel Beatrix Potter, I implore you to exert yourself.

Here I’ll quote one section of Thompson’s Haper’s piece. Remember, this was published in 1941, before the US had entered WW2:

The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner.

He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him—he despises, for instance, Mr. B—because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity.

Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his language—though they have never met him.

There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a distant and cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal—a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him—intellectual and ruthless. But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.

Does that description remind you of anybody?

The other of Cuda’s essays that I ask you to read (all of her posts are great, I’m just selecting the two that are most relevant to my thesis) is Democracy Vampire — Peter Thiel. If you’re not familiar with Thiel (and even if you are) this essay is an excellent place to start. It paints a truly chilling of Thiel (especially in light of Tescreality).

Democracy Vampire — Peter Thiel concludes with these words (remember, Thiel spent tens of millions of dollars in order to sue the satirical site Gawker out of existence because it had written something critical of him):

In his final column on August 22, 2016, Gawker managing editor Nick Denton wrote: “This is an act of destruction.”

But that was just Thiel’s First Act of Destruction. We’ve already seen Act Two, Act Three, and Act Four of this drama — culminating with the veritable drowning of democracy.

But don’t worry. Peter Thiel will be fine.

There is always another journalist willing to absolve him of the role he has played in the attempted destruction of our world.

The latest media profile assures us Mr. Thiel Has Regrets — so ‘weary’ he has grown from using his money to overthrow democracy.

His replicants are everywhere.

They are in the Senate, in the halls of Congress, in finance, and think tanks, and some even larp as journalists.

I sometimes think of the scene in Blade Runner ‘82 when the prodigal son returns home to meet his maker.

I wonder if Thiel thinks of this, too.

If Trump wins

I predict that if Trump wins or steals the election, Vance will depose him — either by 25th Amendment or coup — and attempt to run the country as a techonopotheistic theocracy backed by a Silicon-Valley techbro/Christian nationalist alliance.

If there is a coup the corrupt majority of Supreme Court radical Catholics will give its blessing, and many citizens will give their tacit approval as well of Vance’s ascendancy, because sooner or later Trump’s dementia will be beyond denial by anyone. It will finally be universally accepted that he is not competent to be President and that something needs to be done.

I quote myself from earlier in this essay:

It is evident to anyone paying attention and who still has intact their faculty of critical reason that Donald J Trump has dementia and that it is accelerating rapidly. I know this, you surely know this, and so do the editors-in-chief of the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, and so on.

If I know that Trump has dementia that is rapidly accelerating, and you know it, and the publisher of the New York Times knows it, don’t you think that JD Vance and Peter Thiel and their cabal know it? Of course they do. To them, Trump’s accelerating descent into dementia is a godsend.

If that is so, you might ask why Thiel will push Vance to become President, even by coup d’etat if that proves necessary, rather than just sit in the Vice President’s office and run things from there?

And I will answer: Because they’re Nazis, and Nazis don’t think like that. Nazis don’t trifle with things like laws or constitutions.

If Trump is elected, at some point Vance will become President. And when he does he will suspend the constitution, declare martial law and rule by diktat.

A fully AI-turbocharged Christianist technopotheistic autocracy

Key to this attempted takeover, of course, are not just the armies of Brown Shirt thugs who will respond to the call to enforce Vance’s decrees, but the enormous technical resources commanded by the likes of Musk, Thiel, et al.

Thiel has made billions providing technology for surveillance and control to police forces, militaries and despots around the world. Zuckerberg has made billions by turning Facebook in to a finely tuned disinformation machine. And so on.

These people have nearly unimaginable capabilities of surveillance and control. They know how to turn the internet on or off, how to control what we see and watch and read. The cops will wear glasses connected to face-recognizing AIs that know everything about. You know that this kind of stuff is routinely done in China, a country five times the size of ours. Don’t you think it can be done here?

They will know who the resisters are, and they will attempt to round us up.

The Mike Johnsons of the world, the Christian nationalists, will find a way to accommodate these developments as a fulfillment of their scripture. Even if Trump gets rubbed out, as Paul Castellano was rubbed out by John Gotti, they will accept it as a sign that he has been called home to Jesus. Their religion, after all, is nothing but a melange of white supremacy, patriarchy, and communal narcissism, and as such it is quite theologically flexible. As long as the US is officially decreed to be a patriarchal Christian nation where Jesus rules over all, where God loves them Best of All, they will adapt their theology to the new reality.

A New World Order?

Abortion will be made illegal throughout the country, and clandestine practitioners will be executed.

Our alliances with democratic countries will be moot as Vance et al find common cause with dictators and strongmen like Putin, Orban, Netanyahu et al. Ukraine will be wiped off the face of the Earth, as will Gaza and possibly much more of the Levant. Progress on addressing the climate crisis will cease, and the catastrophes caused by our overheating planet are barely imaginable. Millions, perhaps billions, will perish.

The worldwide financial system will be turned on its head by the cultish promotion of crypto, a technology made of fairy dust.

There will be turmoil in the ranks of the U.S. Armed Forces. Will they support Vance, or will they support the Constitution? Who can say.

The only thing I can say with full confidence is that lots of things for most of the people on earth will get much, much worse.

Yes, I do understand how paranoid this all sounds.

So you may ask, Do you really think, John, that the Vancists (if we may call them that), will be able to pull this off? That there will be no resistance? That the Armed Forces of the United States will not act to defend and protect the Constitution?

To which I answer: Will the Vancists succeed? Who knows? Maybe?

All I know is that I think some kind of scenario like, this, some kind of bold attempt to turn our Republic into a Christian-technopotheistic hegemony, a fully AI-turbocharged autocracy, is entirely possible. And I would very much prefer that we not give Peter Thiel and his ilk an opportunity to try.

A personal note

Writing about this stuff is the opposite of fun. It’s enervating. It’s depressing. It’s hard. I hate writing about this shit. It horrifies me. It terrifies me.

I’ve stopped working on this post a half-dozen times, telling myself that I don’t have anything new to say about the the Thiel/Vance threat and that writing about it is not worth the stress that it’s causing me or the time it is taking me. I expect to lose subscribers.

But I’m a Silicon Valley refugee; I’ve spent more than fifteen years working for high-tech startups based there. And I’ve been writing novels and essays about ‘Tescreality’ and soulless power-mad megalomaniacs like Thiel, Musk and Vance for twenty-five years. I have worked with people who are just like them. So I guess this is kind my purview.

The Harris and Walz campaign has made the strategic decision to tread very lightly on the possible horrors that would follow a Trump/Vance win.

Yes, they have called attention to ‘Project 2025,’ and they have said that Trump/Vance are a real threat to democracy. But they have rightly decided to focus on joy and hope and competence and decency as the message of their campaign. They know that their focus on optimism, the promise of all they good they can do if elected, is what drives their movement. They have determined that ‘going negative’ will not help them get elected.

And, alas, the traditional media have abundantly demonstrated that, with some notable exceptions, they’re not interested in explaining what the Trump/Vance future, should it happen, will really look like.

Harris and Walz can’t do it; the corporate media won’t do it, courageous independent reporters like Aaron Rupar and Noah Berlatsky need all the help they can get. So it’s up to people like me and you to help raise the alarm, while there is still time — although not very much time — to act.

Please do whatever you can to help prevent this nightmare from becoming reality.

Postscript # 1.

I fixed some minor typos and added the little bit that riffs on words & images from Beatrix Potter, that subtle and kind genius.

Postscript #2. If you liked this post, please check out my culminating Thiel/Vance/Trumpocalypse post “Surfing the Cataclysmic Technopotheistic AI-Turbocharged World-Fascist Tsunami".”