Now I have no idea if these conspiracy theories have any basis or not but an article in The New Republic, a long-established American left-of-center magazine, shows that we ought to be very concerned about Vance. The piece is headlined: Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas
Some of it is straight-up insane. The claim is that Vance takes some of his thinking from a nut-job named Curtis Yarvin, a software developer from San Francisco who in 2008 was apparently writing that people he deemed “not productive” should be 'converted into biodiesel, which can help power buses' although he claimed he was just kidding.
But he concluded that the “best humane alternative to genocide” of these non-productive people is to “virtualize” them. That is to imprison them in “permanent solitary confinement” where, to avoid making them insane, they would be connected to an “immersive virtual-reality interface” so they could “experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”
It sounds like a humane alternative that Adolph Hitler could have embraced in 1930s Germany.
Both Thiel and Vance are said to be friends of Yarvin. In a book about Thiel, Yarvin is described as the “house political philosopher” of the “Thielverse,” a term for the people in Thiel’s orbit. The article claims:
"Yarvin is the chief thinker behind an obscure but increasingly influential far-right neoreaction, or NRx, movement, that some call the “Dark Enlightenment.” Among other things, it openly promotes dictatorships as superior to democracies and views nations like the United States as outdated software systems. Yarvin seeks to reengineer governments by breaking them up into smaller entities called “patchworks,” which would be controlled by tech corporations."
In a speech in 2012 on how to 'Reboot the US Government,' Yarvin apparently said: “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.” He has also written favorably of slavery and white nationalists in the late 2000s (though he claims he is not a white nationalist himself). The New Republic article goes on to say that since entering politics, Vance has publicly praised and parroted some of Yarvin’s ideas.
That would be worrying enough for a US senator but Vance "could soon be a heartbeat away from the presidency" and his close ties to Yarvin are quite frankly stunning and alarming.
Vance is Thiel's creation and he is said to owe his "meteoric rise" to the tech billionaire who has employed him and funded his political career.
The NR piece says both Vance and Yarvin are "fond of political purges" and "In a 2021 podcast interview, Vance was asked how to get liberals out of government institutions. 'De-Nazification, De-Baathification,' he replied. 'I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left. And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.'”
"He predicted Trump would run again and win, then offered some advice: 'I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.' He added that Trump should defy any court orders that tried to halt this partisan purge of the civil service."
"Yarvin calls this plan RAGE: Retire All Government Employees. It’s captured perfectly in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, which calls for firing an estimated 500,000 federal employees and dismantling entire agencies. If Trump wins, Vance may well be in charge of executing the plan."
Trump is their stooge but he's old and mentally deranged. They have every incentive to use him and his MAGA followers to win The White House and push him out very soon afterward. It's an opportunity that may never come again and they're going to pump a lot of money and effort into Trump's campaign over the next few months.
We should all pray that the American people come to their senses before November, vote for Kamala Harris and ensure the Democrats win both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
