The Zany Zeitgeist of the Silicon Valley Cognitive Elite (Part 2)
The Silicon Valley cognitive elite took me down a rabbit hole where one thing led to others and those to more still. Network-state enthusiasts and techno-optimists rub shoulders with MAGA stalwarts and neoreactionary bloggers. They are united by an antigovernment, antidemocratic ethos, deep feelings of persecution by liberal tyranny, and hatred of taxation. A sense of civic and social responsibility is nowhere to be found. In its stead is naïve faith that the free market and technology unleashed from government rules and regulation will produce the best of all possible worlds. To this end they would lay waste to the administrative state, leaving behind a skeletal government that functions as if the world were unchanged since 1787.
As far back as 2017 Steve Bannon, then White House chief strategist, was reportedly reading and in contact with neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin (Johnson, Stokols, What Steve Bannon; Gray, (Behind). Yarvin is a computer programmer, tech startup founder, and blogger influential among Republican politicians and staffers. Republican senator J.D. Vance cited Yarvin when he “urged Donald Trump, should he win another term, to ‘seize the institutions of the left,’ fire ‘every single midlevel bureaucrat’ in the US government, ‘replace them with our people,’ and defy the Supreme Court if it tries to stop him.” Blake Masters, venture capitalist, Arizona congressional candidate, and Peter Thiel protégé, recommended Yarvin’s blog years ago when he was a Stanford law student (Prokop, Curtis Yarvin wants).
Andrew Prokop and Rosie Gray discuss Yarvin’s ideas and influence at Vox (Who Is Curtis Yarvin) and The Atlantic (Behind the Internet's Anti-Democracy Movement), respectively. Per Prokop, Yarvin holds that real power in this country rests with elite academic and media institutions and calls for drastic measures to “reboot” or “reset” the US government “with a monarch, CEO, or dictator at the helm…a creative and visionary leader—a ‘startup guy,’ like, he says, Napoleon or Lenin was—[who] should seize absolute power, dismantle the old regime, and build something new in its place.”
That creative and visionary leader sounds a lot like a fascist strongman and Yarvin’s agenda blogger windbaggery. Nonetheless there is an audience for it. By way of example, Yarvin’s proposal to purge the federal bureaucracy differs in scope but little else from Trump’s executive order that would reclassify as many as 50,000 civil servants in middle management as political appointees who could be fired and replaced by presidential loyalists and the Heritage Foundation Project 2025’s plan for its implementation upon Trump’s restoration to power.
Techno-optimist Marc Andreessen joined Niall Ferguson, Bari Weiss, Peter Boghossian, Joe Lonsdale, and others to hatch the idea of the University of Austin (UATX) at a meeting in May 2021 (UATX Vision & Timeline). UATX is committed to “freedom of inquiry,” the “fearless pursuit of truth,” and reversing “the rising tide of illiberalism and censoriousness prevalent in America’s universities” (UATX FAQs).
Boghossian is one of five Founding Faculty Fellows designing the UATX curriculum. He is a controversial former professor of philosophy at Portland State University who resigned from his position in 2021, citing the university’s transformation “into a Social Justice factory” in his resignation letter, which Weiss published on her Substack. Many UATX founders have participated in conservative think tanks such as the Hoover Institution, “contributed to The Free Press, the digital paper founded by Bari Weiss in 2021,” and are “friends or fans of Jordan Peterson” (Rawlings, An American Education).
These connections are a clue to UATX’s ideological slant as reported by Noah Rawlings in An American Education, published last month in The New Inquiry. In the interim between its conception and the launch of its undergraduate program offering a B.A. in Liberal Studies this fall, “UATX established weeklong programs [in the summers of 2022 and 2023] where students at other institutions could attend seminars and lectures by ‘world-class scholars and knowledge creators’…Title: Forbidden Courses” (Rawlings). In March 2023 Rawlings submitted an application with a cover letter, essay questions, and a writing sample “speckled” with references to Harold Bloom and Nietzsche. He was accepted and attended a Forbidden Course in June.
The summer programs were held at an office complex in Dallas owned by Harlan Crow, the very generous friend of Clarence Thomas. Rawlings describes the fifty or so participants during the week he attended as predominately computer science students with some business students in the mix, from places like Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, Penn. Around 80 percent were white and 70 percent male. The school’s “true target audience” consists of
young neoconservatives who seemed to think trans athletes and immigrants were the greatest threat to the Union, whose high school tuition had cost 4x a degree from a public university, who nodded at UATX speakers with graduate degrees from Berkeley or UChicago as they railed against “elites” and “elite culture” on the office complex of a billionaire.
Richard Hanania, Kevin D. Williamson, Joe Lonsdale, Marc Andreessen, and Bari Weiss are other world-class scholars and knowledge creators who delivered lectures at the summer program. Hanania is author of The Origins of Woke, pseudonymous posts on white supremacist and misogynist websites he has since disavowed, and more recently “tweets supporting eugenics and calling for ‘more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people.’” At his UATX lecture he went off on woke and delivered “frantic invective” against affirmative action and DEI. Williamson, a former writer and editor at The National Review, “riffed” about journalism for thirty minutes and advised his audience to read the Bible and get an eighth-grade grammar book instead of a journalism degree. Lonsdale, a venture capitalist who was one of Palantir’s founders (Peter Thiel was another), and Andreessen Zoomed in to pitch AI.
Weiss “had difficulty” when asked “why a school that promised ‘constructive debate’ had failed to invite any speakers who were left-of-center.” She “dodged the student’s question. Perhaps, she speculated, the left was just less interested in debate.”
Rawlings found that “UATX quite clearly embraces some ‘truths’ over others.”
There was only the most superficial range to the opinions and ideas held. Almost all the speakers droned smugly on about the same points. DEI is ruining higher education. Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies are worthless. “Gender ideology” is destroying America’s social and moral fabric. IQ is the best measure of merit.
Network staters and techno-optimists have powerful allies at the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which hears appeals from Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The subtitle of Jeffrey Toobin’s article Circuit Breakers says it all: “Judges on the Fifth Circuit…are attempting to transform the law and challenge the very structure of American government.” The court has seventeen active judges, twelve appointed by Republicans, five by Democrats.
President Trump named six judges to the Fifth Circuit. They represent a new breed of judicial activists, steeled and trained at the conferences of the conservative Federalist Society, who are attempting to transform the law on a wide range of issues…Its judges have an expansive notion of the right to bear arms and an aversion to the separation between church and state. But the most striking part of the court’s emerging agenda involves the usually staid realm of administrative law, where it is challenging the very structure of American government. The judges of the Fifth Circuit are seeking, it appears, to declare significant parts of the executive branch unconstitutional.
Rulings severely curtail the authority of administrative agencies by decreeing that their authority extends only to powers explicitly delegated by Congress. If authority in a particular case is not specifically spelled out in legislation, it is not allowed. This overturns judicial practice dating back to the New Deal era, when
the Supreme Court came to recognize that the federal government required modern, flexible tools to address the needs of a vast and complex country. Ever since 1936 or so, the justices have largely taken the judicial branch out of the business of checking the regulatory authority of administrative agencies. But the Fifth Circuit is bringing it back.
Ability to come up with a nifty title is not one of my talents. I typically consider several options and impulsively settle for the one with which I am least dissatisfied. That is how it went with part 1 of this two-part essay. If I had it to do over, I might strike “zany,” with its suggestion of something somewhat wacky, absurd, amusing, but not altogether serious. The people I have been examining offer up their share and more of zaniness, absurdity, wackiness, goofiness, but it would be a mistake to dismiss them as inconsequential on that count. Their ideas circulate among a wild patchwork of bizarre bedfellows. Some of them will have a voice in the next Trump administration if that comes to pass.
The Silicon Valley techno-optimists and network-staters have immense wealth with which come power and influence to pursue their vision of
a world in which great men are free to work their will on society, unconstrained by government or regulation or “redistributionist economics” that would impinge on their wealth and power—or any obligation, really, to the rest of humanity. (Gellman, Peter Thiel)
This vision overlaps with the agendas of neoreactionaries, the Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, and other far-right think tanks, and MAGA in both its elite, e.g., Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Elise Stefanik, and heartland incarnations. More mob than coalition, this alliance of the moment may splinter into disparate elements if they manage to seize power and vanquish their oppressors. The streak of libertarianism in the loose sense of desire to live with minimal interference from the state that runs through the ranks of network-staters and techno-optimists is hard to square with the Christian nationalist faction of MAGA that dreams of a theocratic state under Biblical law as they understand and interpret it. More than a few would surely chafe under the rule of a neoreactionary strongman. For now their aim is squarely targeted on common adversaries.
The primary season in progress already confirms what has long been evident to anyone paying attention. The Republican Party is now the MAGA Republican Party and Donald Trump is its strongman leader. I will not be foolish enough to predict what will happen in November. Wishful thinking wars with eternal pessimism. A Trump restoration would gravely imperil constitutional governance and rule of law and may well go beyond that. In the better case scenario of Trump’s defeat at the ballot box, no one will be surprised if that precipitates chaos when he refuses to concede and the MAGA Republican Party, from congressional members to cadres in the street, stands with his refusal to accept the results.
I write these words with hope that Joe Biden’s State of the Union address tonight will build on his honorable statement affirming a place for Nikki Haley’s supporters in his campaign after her withdrawal from the race for the Republican nomination:
I know there is a lot we won’t agree on. But on the fundamental issues of preserving American democracy, on standing up for the rule of law, on treating each other with decency and dignity and respect, on preserving NATO and standing up to America’s adversaries, I hope and believe we can find common ground.
Hope that we can find common ground amid disagreement should be unremarkable. That it is not speaks to the state of the nation today. Now is the time to put aside our differences, of which I have an abundance with Biden and the Democratic Party. We can get to them later. Today the greater threat lies with a Republican Party those candidate for president incited an insurrection against the US government and campaigns on a pledge of retribution against anyone who has tried to hold him accountable for his misdeeds. My recollection is that my teachers in a little schoolhouse in the South Carolina countryside more than fifty years ago taught us that in America no one is above the law, not even the president. Some of us still believe in that principle and stand up for it after our own often imperfect fashion.
Keep the faith. Stand with Ukraine. yr obdt svt
References and Related Reading
Marc Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, October 16, 2023
Bill Chappell, The Pentagon Has Never Passed An Audit. Some Senators Want To Change That, NPR, May 19, 2021
Andrew Cockburn, The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Problem: How Big Tech is losing the wars of the future, Harper’s, March 2024
Barton Gellman, Peter Thiel Is Taking a Break from Democracy, The Atlantic, November 9, 2023
Rosie Gray, Behind the Internet's Anti-Democracy Movement, The Atlantic, February 10, 2017
Eliana Johnson, Eli Stokols, What Steve Bannon Wants You to Read, Politico, February 7, 2017
Adrienne LaFrance, The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism, The Atlantic, March 2024
Chris Lehman, The Reactionary Prophet of Silicon Valley, The Nation, October 27, 2022
Antonio García Martínex, To Live and Die for the Network State, Tablet, August 3, 2022
Meerah Powell, Longtime PSU instructor quits, citing harassment, lack of free speech, Oregon Public Broadcasting, September 9, 2021
Andrew Prokop, Curtis Yarvin wants American democracy toppled. He has some prominent Republican fans, Vox, October 24, 2022
Noah Rawlings, An American Education: Notes from UATX, The New Inquiry, February 19, 2024
Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State, self-published, 2022
Mike Stone, Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row, Reuters, November 15, 2023
Kaitlyn Tiffany, Meet Me in the Eternal City, The Atlantic, March 2024
Jeffrey Toobin, Circuit Breakers, The New York Review of Books, March 7, 2024
2025 Presidential Transition Project (Project 2025), organized by the Heritage Foundation