THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT AND JD VANCE

Start with the Counter-Enlightenments legitimate concerns regarding the anxiety and trauma of universalism, urbanization, industrialization, a cult of rationalism, materialist cultural homogenization, and the destruction of autocratic and traditional institutions that had functioned, in their minds, tolerably well across many cultures and thousands of years of human history.

You CAN end up with fascism, as did the Germans. But you don't have to.

You CAN end up with techno-authoritarianism, as did Yarvin, Thiel, Musk, AND JD VANCE. But you don't have to.

I'm betting that a society that mitigates the "invasive plant" aspect of modernity can best be built under the American constitutional system with its Madisonian separation of powers, its Bill or Rights, and operated by ALL AMERICANS through the free and fair election of representatives.

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"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other things, it openly promotes dictatorships as superior to democracies and views nations like the United States as outdated software systems.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."

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"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-Putin crusader 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."

Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas
https://newrepublic.com/article/183971/jd-vance-weird-terrifying-techno-authoritarian-ideas