Trump’s Staff is Stuffed with Peter Thiel’s ‘Counter-Elite’ Technocrats

A.I., Big Brother Surveillance, Elon Musk, Government, JD Vance, Technocracy /
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From “technocracy.news”

It is difficult to explain the Dark Enlightenment (Dark MAGA) because it is so other-worldly, especially in contrast to the populism of the MAGA movement. Isn’t Dark MAGA still MAGA? In actuality, they are polar opposites. Followers (all Technocrats) are out to kill Democracy, strip the political system bare, set up a monarchy/CEO, and turn what’s left into a scientific dictatorship run by AI. That’s all. Nothing to see here, right? If these Dark Enlightenment loons prevail, it will be the last rape, pillage, and plunder operation against a formerly free nation. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.

In Technocracy Ascending Part 3, the dots were connected linking together technocracy, UN Agenda 2030, and the environmental movement. This installment investigates how technocracy is encroaching upon American government under Donald Trump.

“America has an ideology, superior to both communism and fascism; it is the militant ideology of a technological imperative —Technocracy.”
– Howard Scott, Technocracy Inc., The Technocrat, June 1951

Howard Scott

Before the formation of Howard Scott’s Technocracy Inc. in 1933, its precursor, the Technical Alliance, sought to document the wastefulness of the capitalist system through its Energy Survey of North America. Despite discovering that the continent was rich in natural resources and capable of producing an abundance of energy, Scott had no practical way to achieve his scientifically governed Technate. Instead, he awaited societal collapse due to a failing economic system, which of course never occurred to the degree he envisioned.

What differentiates today’s technocrats from their predecessors is their willingness to utilize the political process to achieve similar goals. Scott was so apolitical he refused to engage with government to create his Technate, which doomed Technocracy Inc. and other offshoots to historical oblivion. Its official demise came on July 1, 1947 during the Operation Columbia media debacle when its members cruised the roads in their trademark gray cars, forming a motorcade from California to Vancouver.

Technocracy’s corpse was later resurrected by globalist visionaries like David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski (as detailed in parts two and three). At times over the last half century, it has briefly taken root in many countries, especially during crises. Within the past two decades, it has slowly picked up in the U.S. Now, it’s rapidly accelerating to a fever pitch as a technocratic cabal has coalesced in Washington with a very specific agenda.

Technocracy: An Antiquated Fantasy or A New Order for the Ages?

The great seal of the United States has two sides, both legal; the one we are most accustomed to on public documents has the predatory eagle embossed upon its face. The time has come to turn over the great seal of the United States which on the reverse side says ‘Annuit coeptis Novus Ordo Seclorum’— Time Makes Way for a New Order of the Ages.”
– Howard Scott, Technocracy Inc., The Technocrat, June 1951

During his campaign, Trump and Republican Party representatives signaled that he would lead America to a new golden age. Trump declared it during his acceptance speech and reiterated it during his address to Congress in early March.

During the Republican National Convention last July, the stage behind Senator Tim Scott boldly displayed the reverse side of the great seal of the U.S., featuring the phrase Novus Ordo Seclorum. After Trump was elected, his senior advisor Elon Musk posted a photo to his X account celebrating the victory at Mar-a-Lago, invoking the exact same phrase in the caption.

Were these occurrences mere coincidence or could they be connected to Howard Scott’s call to announce a “New Order of the Ages”? Though much conjecture has gone into interpreting them, it’s worth investigating the possible connection between the Trump administration and Scott’s technocracy movement.

The “Broligarchy” Descends on the Potomac

The “Broligarchy” from left to right: Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Sergey Brin, and Tim Cook.

Trump’s second term commenced with a whiz-bang, pleasing many of his supporters and angering his many critics. On his first day in office, he issued a staggering 26 executive orders (EO). Within his first 30 days as president, Trump issued 73 executive orders. As of this writing, that number stands at 92 total EOs. The shock and awe strategy to create chaos, confusion, and massive damage has moved from Middle Eastern battlefields to the White House.

In addition to the exorbitant number of EOs, the Trump regime has been taken over by technocrats much like the Carter presidency was overrun with Trilaterals. During the inauguration ceremony, Trump was flanked by a who’s who of Silicon Valley elites including Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman, Sergey Brin, and Tim Cook.

Prior to retaking office, he met with several of these CEOs, the CEOs of Microsoft and Nvidia, and even Bill Gates at his Florida estate. Musk, Cook, Zuckerberg, and Bezos are four of the five wealthiest people in the world, worth a total estimated $1.35 trillion. Campaign contributions also poured in from venture capitalists (VC) like Marc Andreeson, David Sacks, Doug Leone, and Joe Lonsdale of Palantir. Throughout his reelection bid, Trump gained the support of dozens of key figures in tech and finance including Palmer Lucky, cofounder of Anduril and Oculus; WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum; hedge fund manager Bill Ackman; and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, co-founders of Gemini crypto exchange and alleged co-founders of Facebook.

It should be noted that many of the tech titans now aligned with Trump strongly opposed him during his first term. Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook even banned him from their social platforms. This time around, it seems many are aligning with Trump’s policies and vision for America, as there is plenty of money to be made from new government contracts.

Google recently kowtowed to Trump’s wishes by repealing a policy that prohibited the company from using its AI technology for weapons, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, and eliminating portions of its DEI programs. Likewise, Meta has curtailed its DEI programs, jettisoned its fact-checkers, and installed Trump ally and UFC CEO Dana White as a board member. Washington Postowner Jeff Bezos refused to allow the left-leaning newspaper to endorse Kamala Harris for the presidency.

The collusion between Big Tech and the Trump administration is meant to carry out a specific agenda, one that removes pesky regulations and paves the way for lucrative contracts to develop massive AI data centers and computer chips, avoid costs associated with tariffs, and more.

Trump’s Staff is Stuffed with Peter Thiel’s ‘Counter-Elite’ Technocrats

In addition to the external tech contingent, some 13 billionaires (whose net worth totals at least $460 billion) have been appointed by Trump, with his cabinet alone worth $7 billion. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon are all reported billionaires. Many other Trump administration employees are at least multimillionaires.

Vice President JD Vance. Source: Wikimedia

While far from ultra-wealthy, JD Vance owed his U.S. Senate seat to billionaire Peter Thiel, who funded his campaign to the tune of $15 million in 2022. It’s not a stretch to say that Vance wouldn’t have become Vice President without Thiel’s appeals to Trump on his behalf. The Theil/Vance relationship is well documented dating back to 2011, when Vance met the tech entrepreneur following a talk Thiel gave at Yale Law School. Vance later became a partner at Thiel’s Mithril Capital in 2015 and launched Narya Capital, his own VC firm in 2019 with financial backing from Theil, Marc Andreeson, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Thiel was a part of Trump’s 2016 transition team and donated $1.25 million to his campaign. He also provided $250,000 of additional funding in 2018 to Trump’s joint fundraising committee. In addition, Thiel gave over $35 million to 16 federal Republican candidates including longtime acolyte Blake Masters in 2022. He steered clear of Trump’s reelection campaign in 2020, but did endorse him in 2024, albeit lukewarmly.

In addition to Vance, Thiel has several affiliates who are now part of Trump’s government. David Sacks, who worked with Thiel at PayPal, is now the White House “AI and crypto czar.” Jim O’Neill was the managing director of Thiel’s Mithril Capital and is now the deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Michael Kratsios, current director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, was Thiel’s CFO at Clarium Capital Management and a principal at Thiel Capital. PayPal alum Ken Howery now serves as Trump’s ambassador to Denmark.

I think that Peter Thiel is secretly the most important person in Silicon Valley. He’s this behind the scenes player, who is behind so many of the really important things that have happened over the last two decades.”
– Max Chafkin, TIME

Thiel’s wealth is valued at close to $16 billion. Many of the aforementioned tech bros also have deep ties to Thiel. He’s the co-founder of PayPal along with Elon Musk, Max Levchin, and Luke Nosek. Thiel also co-founded Palantir, the giant data mining company funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm and whose first client was the CIA. Since its establishment in 2003, Palantir has obtained contracts from over a dozen U.S. government agencies including the FBI, DHS, NSA, CDC, and more. Palantir CEO Alex Karp recently stated how the software is used to kill enemies (possibly referring to its use by Israel in the Gaza war) and “cut the heads off” of those resisting the company’s attempts to remake the U.S. government.

Peter Thiel speaking with attendees at the 2022 Converge Tech Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona. Photo by Gage Skidmore

Thiel and his cohorts also funded and helped establish companies such as Facebook, SpaceX, LinkedIn, Yelp, YouTube, and Stripe through his Founders Fund VC firm. The Thiel Foundation and Thiel Fellowship dole out grants to young people supportive of his vision of “technology as salvation.”

He believes that government should be replaced by technology, the U.S. dollar must be replaced with digital currency, and that corporate monopolies are desirable and good. Furthermore, he’s a Bilderberg steering committee member along with Alex Karp, funder of companies like Clearview AI (facial recognition) and Anduril (autonomous weapons), and beneficiary of multimillion dollar intelligence, health, and military contracts for Palantir. He once stated:

We could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority, but maybe you could unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through technological means, and this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics” (emphasis added).
— Peter Thiel

Once a libertarian, Thiel later abandoned the ideology, stating in a 2009 essay that he no longer believed “freedom and democracy are compatible.” As the recognized head of the “PayPal mafia,” his views over time evolved from the fringes of conservativism to what is known as Dark Enlightenment.

A Primer on Dark Enlightenment

In 2014, Justine Tunney, Occupy Wall Street activist and Google software engineer, petitioned the White House to arrange for the retirement of all government employees, give the tech industry all administrative authority, and appoint then Google CEO Eric Schmidt as the CEO of America. The petition addressed to President Obama further stated, “It’s time for the U.S. Regime to politely take its exit from history and do what’s best for America. The tech industry can offer us good governance and prevent further American decline.”

The ideas and suggestions Tunney petitioned for were shaped by her reading of Curtis Yarvin, an influential blogger writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug.

Curtis Yarvin in the garden of St Paul’s Cathedral. Photo by David Merfield

Curtis Yarvin was born in 1973 and attended Brown University from 1988 to 1992. In the 90’s he attended U.C. Berkeley but dropped out to join a tech company and become a software engineer. Yarvin was strongly influenced by Silicon Valley’s libertarian culture and Australian School economic theorists like Ludwig Von Mises and Murray Rothbard. He later formed his own ideas and began writing as Mencius Moldbug on the Unqualified Reservations blog, where he is credited for founding the Neoreaction (NRx) movement focused on reevaluating democracy and securing effective government. Yarvin is esteemed as the “philosophical master” of the alt-right movement.

Moldbug is full of controversial ideas. In his world, feudalism is good while democracy is vilified. Human rights aren’t actually rights, but services. Corporations mirror kingdoms with high IQ (perhaps even cyborg) CEOs functioning as sovereign actors. Corporate power is society’s organizing force rather than the power of the people. Existing elite rulers are resented and must be replaced. Perhaps his most salient thought pertaining to the present circumstances came during his 2012 presentation on rebooting the US Government where he blurted out, “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.”

The term “Dark Enlightenment” was coined by Nick Land in an online manifesto written in 2012, in which he quotes Mencius Moldbug. Land is a British academic who traded his job as a philosophy professor at Warwick University in 1998 for work pioneering experimental cyber culture as part of the “Cybernetic Culture Research Unit.” After later emerging as a right-wing political figure, he began writing about anti-democratic themes. While espousing his thoughts on replacing democracy, Land wrote:

Firstly, it is essential to squash the democratic myth that a state ‘belongs’ to the citizenry… Unless ownership of the state is formally transferred into the hands of its actual rulers… the democratic farce will continue… Once the universe of democratic corruption is converted into a (freely transferable) shareholding in gov-corp the owners of the state can initiate rational corporate governance, beginning with the appointment of a CEO… Gov-corp would concentrate upon running an efficient, attractive, vital, clean, and secure country…”

Land is also known for popularizing the concept of accelerationism, which journalist Andy Beckett described as those who:

…argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified — either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative. Accelerationists favor automation.”

Land and Yarvin have taken the technocratic ideas of Howard Scott, radical for their time, in wild new directions. Yarvin’s concept of Patchworks suggests that the federal government, or “the cathedral,” should be broken up into smaller entities and controlled by tech corporations. The corporations would be governed by sovereign joint-stock companies given carte blanche to wield complete authority. His philosophy of neo-cameralism argues that states are really businesses that own countries and should be fiscally responsible, efficient, and minimize waste. Yarvin’s ideas on deposing democracy are ruthless, and at times Machiavellian. His lack of regard for philosophical opponents has led to repeated calls for their removal from government and positions of authority.

Yarvin’s influence on Peter Thiel is undeniable as reflected in the following statements.

“The best e66emocracy makes people uncomfortable.”

– Peter Thiel

Thiel believes great companies can conspire to change the world and should be structured as monarchies. He’s all in on complete corporate control. As his companies continue to pioneer data collection and pervasive surveillance, his contractual involvement with military and intelligence agencies is laying the groundwork for a techno-feudal state. As if the march to dystopia couldn’t get any weirder, Thiel even backed Yarvin’s startup company Urbit, which reporter Jessica Klein identified as “a [blockchain-based] peer-to-peer network made up of personal servers that aims to let users genuinely own their own digital identities.”

Upending Democracy and Installing a CEO Dictator

Many of Trump’s policies and overall vision for Making America Great Again (MAGA) align with the tenets of Dark Enlightenment and were published in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 transition plan. Trump’s power doesn’t derive from MAGA supporters in flyover states, but from Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires bent on dismantling the current bureaucracy in favor of a CEO-led corporate government. Yarvin calls this role the “Delegate” of the sovereign corporation who “exercises undivided sovereign authority, as in divine-right monarchy.”

In 2022’s The Butterly Revolution, Yarvin wrote about Trump’s role if reelected, predicting that:

“Trump himself will not be the brain of this butterfly. He will not be the CEO. He will be the chairman of the board—he will select the CEO (an experienced executive). This process, which obviously has to be televised, will be complete by his inauguration—at which the transition to the next regime will start immediately.

For Trump, being President will be exactly like it was—all the photo-ops and more—without any papers to sign, “decisions” to “make,” etc. The CEO he picks will run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts, probably also taking over state and local governments. Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems.”

In this scenario, it seems as if Elon Musk is playing the role of the CEO Yarvin discusses. Perhaps this is why he changed his official Tesla title to Technoking, mirroring Howard Scott’s dreams of a continental director for his North American Technate. Musk’s connection to technocracy links back to his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, who became a leader of Technocracy Inc. in Canada during the 1930s. When Canada banned the organization in 1940, Haldeman was arrested for his involvement. Apparently, he was known for expressing undemocratic, racist, and even anti-Semitic views, and in 1950 moved his family to South Africa where he defended the apartheid regime.

As Trump’s senior advisor and leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk is firing federal employees at will, attempting to shut down entire agencies, and installing Yarvin’s “new and efficient systems” in the form of AI and potentially blockchain technology to run most government functions. Really, it’s hard to tell the difference between Musk’s “Dark Maga” and Land’s “Dark Enlightenment.”

Musk’s moves are straight from the Yarvin playbook termed RAGE: Retire All Government Employees. In a 2022 podcast interview with Jack Murphy, JD Vance also promoted the RAGE plan, declaring:

“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… And when the courts stop you… stand before the country… and say the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

Later in the Butterfly Revolution, Yarvin mentions that Trump (acting as an American Caesar) must construct an alternate regime to replace the current one that “must appeal to all populations in the country.” He further elucidates that Trump should broker peace and end all civil wars, race wars, gender wars, and culture wars. Trump’s speeches at campaign rallies, the RNC, addresses to the nation, and executive orders have reflected parts of this strategy, though he’s yet to broker peace and stop the culture wars, and in some cases has exacerbated them. Yarvin further stated that, “The energy of the alternate regime must be unlimited. In power, it must be ready to reorganize all of public life—to change America as much as Atatürk changed Turkey.”

Arguing that the U.S. Constitution allows presidential dictators, Yarvin urges Trump to be truthful with voters regarding the intentions for authoritarian rule in Politics of the Deep Right, writing:

“Imagine giving the President power to hire or fire, fund or defund, organize or reorganize any department in DC. Imagine making Donald Trump the literal CEO of the executive branch…

The only form that can power a regime change is democracy. But the only form that can operate the next regime is monarchy… Politically, democracy is required because only democracy has the political power to put a monarchy in place. That is: winning an election, with a mandate to truly rule…. What’s cool is that this is actually completely legal. Even if it wasn’t, we could do it any time…

In 20th-century terminology, therefore, a healthy US monarchy will be “isolationist.” It will abandon its current empire—not at all unlike Gorbachev discarding the Soviet empire—and lovingly tend its own garden.”

Right on cue, Trump is isolating America by alienating European allies, bullying neighboring countries like Canada and Mexico, bidding to retake the Panama Canal using the military, attempting to annex Greenland, trying to secure minerals from Ukraine, and threatening to take over Gaza. His actions are reminiscent of the CEO of a major company gobbling up the competition until there is no competition left!

Understanding the ideas behind Dark Enlightenment may explain why Trump implored Christians to vote for him, proclaiming that after this time “You won’t have to do it anymore…You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

It could also explain why Musk retweeted a post regarding Trump’s “clear mandate from the people.” In Trump’s mind, this “clear mandate” gives him unlimited authority to do whatever is required to transition America’s constitutional republic into a modern day monarchy.

Trump is barely two months into his second term and a republican think-tank called the Third Term Project is seeking ways to have him remain in office beyond his current stint, which expires in 2028. They’re working on amending the Constitution to enable this possibility. Their promotional items depict Trump as a Roman Caesar.

Coincidentally, Musk posted that “America is New Rome” last November. Is Musk envisioning the Trump administration as the equivalent to Augustus’ Pax Romana (Roman Peace) that was run on slave labor and featured aggressive territorial expansion? Or is he in favor of the society where Caesars ruled with an iron fist and dissent could result in removal and/or execution? Or is it a blend of the two? Trump’s forays into limiting free speech for criticizing Israel and labeling Tesla vandals as domestic terrorists provides clues as to where we’re heading.

Techno-feudalism and Surveillance

Is Trump really fighting the deep state and draining the swamp? Or is he just replacing one set of swamp creatures with another?

Like a bull in a china shop, technocrats have begun tearing apart many elements of U.S. governance structure while installing the mechanisms to create a techno-feudal state. The best example is the $500 billion Stargate Project Trump announced in January.

Stargate’s goal is to build colossal data centers for AI infrastructure and create new forms of personalized mRNA vaccine technology for treating cancer and anything else they dream of. The partnership with Larry Ellison’s Oracle, Sam Altman’s OpenAI, and Masayoshi Son’s Softbank will build its first mega data centers in Abilene, Texas with more to follow in other states. Other partners include multinational corporations Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Arm.

Trump’s Stargate announcement coincided with the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2025 conference in Davos where the theme was “Collaboration for the Intelligent Age.” During his speech to the Davos crowd, Trump asserted that the U.S. will be the “world capital of artificial intelligence and crypto.” It’s essential to point out that increased AI development is seen as the key to advancing the United Nations’ goal of bringing about global AI governance. The WEF’s AI Governance Alliance is also working toward the same goal for business and industry.

Trump’s deregulation policies and overturning of Biden’s executive order on AI could allow Big Tech and other industries to go unchecked, leading to potentially dangerous consequences regarding human freedom, health, and prosperity.

Trump wants to “drill, baby drill” to get the necessary energy to fuel the move toward AI-powered everything and increase cryptocurrency mining. Stargate and other major efforts to build AI data centers is part of the move to create a complete control grid where digital currency and digital identity take center stage. Stargate partner Larry Ellison not only wants all the world’s health data in a single, unified platform, but also voiced his approval of an advanced surveillance state in a company chat session, where he mentioned:

The police will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly watching and recording everything that’s going on…Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times… Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

It may come as no surprise that Yarvin is fully on board with this surveillance nightmare too. In Patchworks, he describes how it could work in the San Francisco area (aka “Friscorp”), writing:

All residents, even temporary visitors, carry an ID card with RFID response. All are genotyped and iris-scanned. Public places and transportation systems track everyone. Security cameras are ubiquitous. Every car knows where it is and who is sitting in it, and tells the authorities both. Residents cannot use this data to snoop into each other’s lives, but Friscorp can use it to monitor society at an almost arbitrarily detailed level.”

You'll Own Nothing and Be Happy

He also echoes the sentiments of Mark Zuckerberg, Klaus Schwab, and Yuval Noah Harari regarding life in the digital realm or metaverse, asserting that:

The best humane alternative to genocide I can think of is not to liquidate the wards—either metaphorically or literally—but to virtualize them. A virtualized human is in permanent solitary confinement…This would drive him insane, except that the cell contains an immersive virtual-reality interface which allows him to experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”

A Call to Vigilance

The new order of technocrats is playing both the long and short game in their attempt to own all resources, transform the government into an AI techno-monarchy, control the new digital currency, and place all citizens under continual surveillance.

If you believe in MAGA, is this what you voted for? Does Trump’s reshaping of the government into a CEO-led tech corporation meet your approval?

Trump is like a magician using sleight of hand to lull people into false hope. With one hand, he’s busy showing his supporters how much winning he’s doing by taking out his woke leftist opponents. With the other hand, he’s busy dismantling the American republic, mocking the Constitution, and helping his techno-oligarch buddies get rich off the fire sale of the U.S. economy.

Though Trump may have kept some of the many promises his constituents desired, he must be held accountable for Constitutional and other violations, lest we continue the march toward Yarvin’s vision of a U.S. corporate monarchy. It’s time to stop indulging in left vs. right political theater and take a long, hard look at what’s really happening. Blind loyalty to a man, movement, political party, or ideology spells society’s death knell. Don’t let it happen!

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