'Maddow Just UNCOVERED A Major HIDDEN Trump SCANDAL' 11 min.

[Joinfortmill]

My words: The Vance/Thiel Connection.

[Tommy Carcetti]

1. Cliff's Notes--what is it?

TIA.

[Joinfortmill]

3. Cliff note Rachel?

[eShirl]

8. yes please

thank you

[Joinfortmill]

18. It's a video. Best to watch.

[HereForTheParty]

6. Nothing new here

Peter Thiel groomed and bankrolled Vance into his Senate seat.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jd-vance-trump-vp-peter-thiel-billionaire/

Thiel has made comments such as “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." He's a libertarian on steroids.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/11/peter-thiel-2024-election-politics-investing-life-views/675946/

[Joinfortmill]

17. Thank you for posting.

I think it was new to some of us. Not sure why the negativity.

[OneGrassRoot]

24. Hopefully she'll mention Curtis Yarvin soon, if she hasn't already. n/t

[enough]

29. It's clear from the responses that some people weren't aware of this,

even if you were.

[HereForTheParty]

30. 'Maddow Just UNCOVERED A Major HIDDEN Trump SCANDAL'

My post was more directed at the headline on the video. It's ridiculous.

[samplegirl]

2. Just Wow!

Hard to believe we are stuck with him.

[gordianot]

5. I am not shocked, I do believe.

Our dystopian nightmare is spooling up we were warned and it is imminent.

[Botany]

4. Dear God they want to burn it to the ground and install a dictator as they fire all governmental employees

America July, 4th 1776 to November, 5th 2025. And now that they have proven that they
can control elections and the media that is what they are doing add in a little Christo Fascism
and ties to international criminals such as Vlad Putin and we have “it.”

[haele]

10. Yup. All to the ground. True Believer Evangelicals want a biblical Patriarchy...

Wealthy Incels want a Feudalist Technocracy, Corporate Leaders want an Oligarchy, while Venture Capital, *rump and the Russian Mob/GOP in general wants a kleptocracy.

Democracy requires cooperation of all the other "little people", not the rule of the Masters or Heroes in their own mind.

[Botany]

14. It is like the ramblings of a stoned right wing college student about the way things "should be."

Watch how fast they have Trump declare a national emergency, burn our country to the ground
by shitting on the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution, making crypto currency the coin of the realm,
going full on Nazi instead of blaming the Jews but blaming illegal immigrants & trans people for
all of our problems, and throwing bones to the Christo Fascist evangelicals to keep a solid base.

[bluesbassman]

21. "Stoned right wing college student". Pretty much describes Yavin.

That guy was radicalized a long time ago and has just gotten worse as time goes on.

[Botany]

22. Reminds me of some freak back in the day who was always taking about the danger from "Free Masons"

as he did another bong hit. “America has to get over its fire of dictator.” What kind of shit says
that kind of garbage? And what is Russia/Vlad angle in this shit show?

[bluesbassman]

23. He's a billionaire fan boy. Believes they're smarter than everyone else because they're rich.

It’s a common fallacy in this country no matter how often it’s proven wrong.

Someday, if we survive, we may become enlightened enough as a society to reject such nonsense. We’re unfortunately not anywhere close to that at this time.

[karin_sj]

7. Chilling

This video is short and well worth watching because it shows what's coming for our government and its citizens. It actually made me a little sick to my stomach by the end of the video. According to Yarvin, who apparently is the inspiration for all the steps Trump is taking to destroy our country, says right out loud in a speech that Americans need to get over their "dictator phobia" and install a CEO of the country (which Yarvin says is the same as a dictator). Everything they are currently doing has this as its goal. How can they be stopped?

Who will stop them? Democrats need to get their heads out of their asses and realize these people cannot be "worked with" and bipartisanship at this point is a pointless futile exercise. Jesus, how did we get to this point?

[littlemissmartypants]

9. This should surprise absolutely no one.

They have made no secret of their intentions. If only more of us were paying attention.

[peacebuzzard]

11. how closely related is cryptocurrency in this scheme?

Or am I totally off base?
Peter Thiel is far more evil than I have thought.

[karin_sj]

12. Yarvin and his horrific vision of the future

Last edited Thu Jan 30, 2025, 04:55 PM - Edit history (1)

From a New Republic article written by Gil Duran from July 2024. I hope it's ok to put the entire article here. I feel like it's really important to know all this.

"In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym, proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed “not productive”: “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.”Yarvin, a self-described reactionary and extremist who was 35 years old at the time, clarified that he was “just kidding.” But then he continued, “The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass. However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide.”He then concluded that the “best humane alternative to genocide” is to “virtualize” these people: 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.”

Yarvin’s disturbing manifestos have earned him influential followers, chief among them: tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his onetime Silicon Valley protégé Senator J.D. Vance, whom the Republican Party just nominated to be Donald Trump’s vice president. If Trump wins the election, there is little doubt that Vance will bring Yarvin’s twisted techno-authoritarianism to the White House, and one can imagine—with horror—what a receptive would-be autocrat like Trump might do with those ideas.

Trump’s first campaign was undoubtedly a watershed moment for authoritarianism in American politics, but some thinkers on the right had been laying the groundwork for years, hoping for someone to mainstream their ideas. Yarvin was one of them. Way back in 2012, in a speech on “How to Reboot the US Government,” he said, “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.” He had also written favorably of slavery and white nationalists in the late 2000s (though he has stated that he is not a white nationalist himself).Both Thiel and Vance are friends of Yarvin. In The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, reporter Max Chafkin describesYarvin as the “house political philosopher” of the “Thielverse,” a term for the people in Thiel’s orbit. In 2013, Thiel invested in Tlön, a software startup co-founded by Yarvin. In 2016, Yarvin attended Thiel’s election night party in San Francisco where, according to Chafkin, champagne flowed once it became clear that Thiel’s investment in Donald Trumpwould pay off.

Since entering politics, Vance has publicly praised—and parroted—Yarvin’s ideas. That was worrying enough when Vance was only a senator. Now that he could soon be a heartbeat away from the presidency, his close ties to Yarvin are more alarming than ever. Superficial analyses of why certain tech billionaires are aligning with Trump tend to fixate on issues like taxes and regulations, but that’s only part of the story. Tech plutocrats like Thiel and Elon Musk already have money. Now they want power—as much as money can buy.Stories about Vance tend to focus on his hardscrabble Ohio roots, but his relationship with Thiel—and his stint in San Francisco—are key to understanding his politics. Vance owes his meteoric rise to Thiel, who largely bankrolled it. As a Yale Law student in 2011, he heard Thiel give a speech in which he suggested that smart people should be working in tech instead of wasting their time at elite schools. Afterward, Vance emailed Thiel, who invited him to California.Following a brief stint as a lawyer, Vance moved to San Francisco. Eventually, he landed at Mithril Capital, a company co-founded by Thiel. He finished writing Hillbilly Elegy while there, and Thiel wrote a blurb praising it. When Vance moved back to Ohio and eventually started his own fund, Narya Capital, both Thiel and Marc Andreessen invested. When Vance ran for U.S. Senate in 2022, Thiel spent an unprecedented$15 million on the campaign and persuaded Trump to endorse him (Vance had previously compared Trump to Hitler). In 2024, Thiel led the charge to convince Trump to pick Vance as V.P.

Vance is a Thiel creation. And like his billionaire benefactor—who once wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”—Vance embraces a radical ideology hell-bent on destroying government as we know it. And they got these ideas, at least in part, from Yarvin.
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.“The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions,” he wrote in Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century.

Each patchwork would be ruled by a “realm”: a corporation with absolute power. Citizens would be free to move, but every other realm would also be ruled by corporate governments with chilling impunity. For example, Yarvin says the tech overlords of the San Francisco realm could arbitrarily decide to cut off its citizens’ hands with no fear of legal consequences—because they’re a sovereign power, beholden to no federal government or laws.
The realm, having sovereign power, can compel the resident to comply with all promises. Since San Francisco is not an Islamic state, it does not ask its residents to agree that their hand will be cut off if they steal. But it could. And San Francisco, likewise, can promise not to cut off its residents’ hands until it is blue in the face—but, since it is a sovereign state, no one can enforce this promise against it.

In “Friscorp,” as Yarvin calls the San Francisco realm, an all-seeing Orwellian surveillance system would enforce public safety: “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.”Vance has not advocated for realms—yet—but some of his most extreme ideas echo Yarvin. They’re both fond of political purges, for instance. 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.Vance did not get this extremist ideology from his Appalachian upbringing or—needless to say—Yale Law. It was incubated in America’s tech capital, San Francisco, where he forged crucial ties with Thiel, Yarvin, and David Sacks, the longtime Thiel associate and pro-Putincrusader who recently hosted a Trump fundraiser at his mansion in Pacific Heights. And if Vance ends up in the White House, it will be with $45 million in monthly campaign contributions from Musk, who already made a $44 billion in-kind contribution by gutting San Francisco-based Twitter and transforming it into a right-wing misinformation weapon.

In a fateful twist, San Francisco also launched the political career of Kamala Harris, who is set to inherit the task of saving American democracy from tech authoritarianism."

https://newrepublic.com/article/183971/jd-vance-weird-terrifying-techno-authoritarian-ideas

[highplainsdem]

16. Just link to it with an excerpt - there's no paywall, and it's been posted here before. Please give Gil Duran credit

for writing it. He and other journalists have been covering this for a long time before Rachel, who knew about it then, finally got around to covering it, incredibly late.

[multigraincracker]

13. And if the dictator dies, how is he replaced?

I think the real word is Kind. Replaced with eldest son....Donnie Jr.?

[highplainsdem]

15. Sigh. Rachel DIDN'T uncover it. She's been VERY LATE covering this, years later than other journalists.

She was ALREADY very late covering it when she gave it some coverage the night before the vice presidential debate last fall, which she probably thought was great timing but in fact was much too late to make it a topic for questions during the debate.

She admitted then that she'd known about Yarvin for a while. I vaguely recall her giving some sort of excuse for not talking about him earlier. IIRC, it was something like what she said last night about this seeming just too crazy.

Whatever her excuses, she was LATE. YEARS LATER than other journalists.

And for her to act now as if this is an important piece of information people HAVE to have, when she knew about it much earlier but DIDN'T talk about it - deliberately chose NOT to use her platform to talk about it - is more than a little disappointing.

I'm glad she's FINALLY talking about something she should have been raising an alarm about much earlier.

But she didn't cover it much earlier when she could have made much more of a difference.

[orangecrush]

25. The Biden campaign had to know about this.

Why wasn't this hammered on in political commercials?

[highplainsdem]

28. The Harris campaign. And I don't know why they didn't use this.

[orangecrush]

31. Biden and then Harris.

The techligarchs are the new robber barons.

[Oopsie Daisy]

19. BIG YELLOW ARROW and IMPACT FONT 🟰 Clickbait Nothingburger

99% of the time.

[Joinfortmill]

20. Ok, but not this time.

[orangecrush]

26. Definitely not this time.

[Ursus Rex]

27. LOL it's been covered for months

she even mentioned it, almost in passing, a couple times several months ago and then dropped it.

[malthaussen]

32. Oh, BFD. Wake me up when he actually *pays* for anything.

I don't need chapter and verse on his many "scandals," grifts, and outright criminal activities. I want to hear that something is being done about them.

-- Mal

[LetMyPeopleVote]

33. Here is a free link to a NYT story on Yarvin

Here is a good article on this asshole

Link to tweet

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/opinion/trump-vance-yarvin-monarchy.html?unlocked_article_code=1.rk4.Lq6V.pG7tbHj7P2lp&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

The truth is that Yarvin is a stock character. Theophrastus identified his type as “the flatterer,” the person “who will say as he walks with another, ‘Do you observe how people are looking at you? This happens to no man in Athens but you.’” Plutarch warned his readers of those who are “merely reflecting the image of other people’s emotions and manners and feelings,” of those who besiege “with praise the ears of those who are fond of praise.” From Shakespeare, we have Regan; from J.R.R. Tolkien, Gríma.

There’s no there there — only an obsequious commitment to the interests of the powerful. Yarvin serves exactly one purpose, and that is to spread the idea that this country would be better served by a dictatorship of capital, spearheaded by tech elites and their allies in government.

Vance is a protégé of Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and occasional ally of President Trump. Sitting close to the action at Trump’s inauguration on Monday were the members of his cabinet. Just in front of them, in full view of the cameras, were Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sánchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk, the richest man in the world.

Yarvin is a charlatan, but he has done his job. His patrons are in power.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

34. In 2012 Yarvin proposed an acronym: Rage, or Retire All Government Employees.

Vance and trump are trying to implement the plan of an asshole named Curtis Yarvin to reduce the size of the Federal government

Link to tweet