joemad wrote:

President Trump Suggests He’s Above the Law in Social Media Post Invoking Napoleon: If you haven’t started worrying yet about Trump’s plan to destroy democracy and crown himself king, start now.

Here’s a little uncheerful op-ed. Lots of active links in the original.

Democracy Is Done: The Rise of Corporate Monarchy
The Real Agenda Behind Elon’s Coup & Trump’s Chaotic First 3 Weeks
Shane Almgren
Feb 14, 2025
Alright, it’s finally time to answer the million-dollar question that’s on everyone’s mind: WHY IS ALL THIS INSANITY HAPPENING IN OUR GOVERNMENT ALL OF A SUDDEN???

If you don’t know what the ultimate agenda is, this first 3 weeks of Trump’s presidency sure looks like a chaotic, haphazard, nonsensical 3-ring circus dumpster fire.

Absolutely none of it makes any sense.

Only it actually does…in a terrifying sort of way.

The first thing to remember is that real life isn’t like a movie where the bad guys are all part of the same unified organization trying to take over the world. There are a number of bad actors with secret goals, and the one thing we may have working in our favor is that the ones we do know about clearly have different objectives, so it’s entirely possible they sabotage each other before any of them successfully pull off their own batty agendas.

First, we’ve got Project 2025, whose long game seems to be implementing a sort of far-right extremist, quasi-authoritarian political regime within the current American political structure, where Conservative ideologies are shoved down everyone’s throats whether they like it or not. The current immigrant roundup is part of this agenda, as was the ending of Roe v Wade, banning trans people, dismantling gay marriage (coming soon), insisting climate change isn’t real, and waging non-stop culture war issues on mostly non-existent problems (see: CRT, cat litter in classrooms, and anything involving pronouns. Most of Trump’s more controversial Executive Orders not involving Elon and DOGE are part of the Project 2025 agenda.

Then we’ve got the Christian Reconstructionists (see also: Dominionists and the New Apostolic Reformation), whose long game is re-jiggering the Constitution to make America less of a democratic republic and more of a Christian theocracy. Based on the teachings of R.J. Rushdoony—whose chief disciple Mike Johnson currently sits third in line for the presidency as Speaker of the House—this agenda acknowledges that

the secularists are actually correct that the Founding Fathers never set America up as a “Christian nation founded on Christian principles, and

the Founding Fathers got it wrong in that regard. America was SUPPOSED to be a Christian nation, and it’s their God-given duty to “fix” what the Founders screwed up.

This group wants to install Christian Nationalism and legislate Biblical morality (according to their very narrow interpretation of it). Project 2025 wants to outlaw gays. The Reconstructionists want to execute them. They’re basically the American Taliban for Jesus. Thankfully, they remain on the fringe and haven’t had much success implementing their backwards agenda, other than minor victories like mandating the Ten Commandments and Bibles in every classroom in places like Louisiana and Oklahoma where no one knows how to read anyway.

Finally, we’ve got a third group—the one that’s responsible for all the chaos Elon and DOGE are causing. Their agenda is actually FAR MORE extreme than either Project 2025 or the Reconstructionists. And the scary thing is, they’re already implementing their freakish plan at warp speed while most of the country is busy bickering about all the quaint Project 2025 garbage (and Trump’s usual unending fire hose of idiotic nonsense).

There’s a few key players we’re gonna have to cover some backstory for, namely Elon Musk, JD Vance, a guy you might’ve heard of by the name of Peter Thiel, and a guy you almost certainly haven’t, Curtis Yarvin. These guys are all connected in a mildly horrifying way and we’re about to unpack it all…

Once upon a time in the 90’s, Elon Musk founded a small company called X.com (No, not Twitter—a different X.com. Dude just has an inexplicable fixation with the letter X). X was a fledgling digital banking service that allowed people to transact with vendors and each other without cash, checks, or plastic.

At the same time Musk was building out X, another young entrepreneur, a German immigrant named Peter Thiel, was building a very similar money-transfer service right across town called Confinity. Rather than compete with each other, Musk and Thiel decided to merge their two companies in 1999, with Musk named CEO of the new company. Shortly after the merger, Musk was fired as CEO by the board, who replaced him with Thiel. After Thiel took over, the company’s name was changed to “PayPal.” You may have heard of it.

Peter Thiel
PayPal attracted some of the most promising young talent in Silicon Valley, and its early members wielded so much power and influence in the tech space that they became collectively known as the “PayPal Mafia.”

Besides Musk and Thiel, the PayPal Mafia included:

• Steven Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim (co-founders of YouTube)

• Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman (co-founders of Yelp)

• Max Levchin (current CEO of Affirm)

• Roelof Botha (partner at Sequoia Capital)

• David Sacks (Founder of Geni.com and Yammer, Trump’s new “AI/Crypto Czar”)

• Reed Hoffman (founder of Linkedin, early investor in Facebook, currently on the board at Microsoft)

• Jack Selby (co-founder of Clarium Capital with Peter Thiel)

• Yishan Wong (CEO of Reddit, founder of Terraformation Inc)

• Premal Shah (founder of Kiva, on the board at Change.org)

Plus a dozen others. The PayPal Mafia churned out a Who’s Who in the Big Tech space, with nearly everyone involved becoming billionaires many times over. Today, it’s one of the wealthiest and most influential collection of individuals, not just in America, but in the entire world.

The “Paypal Mafia,” Fortune Magazine cover (2007)
In 2002, eBay acquired Paypal for $1.5 billion. Although no longer officially with PayPal after being ousted, Elon still held around 10% of the company shares and netted roughly $160 million in the sale.

So that’s the Peter Thiel-Elon Musk connection–they co-founded PayPal together.

Now let’s see how JD Vance is tied into this crew.

In 2011, Peter Thiel gave a talk at Yale where JD Vance was attending law school, changing the course of Vance’s life, as JD recounts it. Vance called Thiel “possibly the smartest person” he ever met, and decided to pivot from a career in law to one in venture capitol. In 2015, JD joined the Thiel-founded Mithril Capital, with Thiel as his personal mentor.

Vice President JD Vance
In 2016, Vance published “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” thrusting his name into the national spotlight for the first time. It was at this same time that Vance, unencumbered by any political aspirations or pretense and therefore free to speak his actual mind, sent his Yale roommate an email regarding America’s leading presidential candidate, Donald Trump, that read: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?”)

I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. – JD Vance
Vance left Thiel’s firm in 2017 and joined a D.C.-based investment firm. Then he launched his own VC firm, Narya Capital, in 2019 with financial backing from Thiel, billionaire VC capitalist Mark Andreessen, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

For reasons we’ll get to in just a minute, around the time the pandemic was starting to wind down, Peter Thiel decided it was finally time for him to own a U.S. Senator and start pulling some long-awaited political strings. He figured that since he’d funded Vance’s VC firm and essentially owned Vance already, he’d just migrate that ownership from the private sector to the public.

Because JD Vance had been an open critic of Donald Trump during Trump’s entire first term, Thiel invited Vance down to Mar A Lago to smooth things over in hopes of getting an endorsement from Orange Jesus. Thiel informed Vance of his plans to make him a Senator, so Vance scrapped all his previous principles, decided power was “more gooder” than having any convictions, kissed Trump’s ring, and earned the endorsement.

Thiel, for his part, poured an ungodly amount of his own money into Vance’s Senate campaign—about $15 million—marking the largest donation to a single Senate candidate in American history. In addition to his personal $15 mil, Thiel also recruited 10 major donors for Vance, including a couple old tech buddies from the PayPal Mafia who chipped in a million each.

So, if you ever found yourself wondering how the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” a lawyer-turned-venture capitalist with no political experience or aspirations and a vocal critic of Donald Trump came out of nowhere and managed to snag Trump’s endorsement and win a Senate seat in his first foray into politics, there’s your explanation: Peter Thiel orchestrated, arranged, and funded the entire thing. A tech billionaire bought himself a Senator.

Now, the next question is: WHY?

This is where it starts to get scary.

It’s time to meet the final character in our story, Curtis Yarvin.

Yarvin is a software developer and tech entrepreneur who started the Unqualified Reservations blog in 2003 under the pen name Mencius Moldbug. He’s perhaps best known for founding the anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary movement (NRx).

Curtis Yarvin a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug
Like most people, Yarvin sees a ton of problems in society. But unlike most people, the problems he sees—and his solutions to those problems—are dystopian fringe at best, and democracy-ending suicide at worst.

In a nutshell, Yarvin’s Dark Enlightenment political worldview is that the REAL power in the U.S. resides in an informal collaboration of universities and the mainstream media (that he calls “the Cathedral”) which collude to sway public opinion. He admires the former Chinese Communist leader Deng Xiaoping for his “pragmatic and market-oriented authoritarianism,” believes America’s commitment to equality and justice “erodes social order,” and advocates for an American “monarch” to dissolve elite academic institutions and media outlets asap.

A regular speaker at various Libertarian and techno-fascist conferences, Yarvin’s position is that democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful and should be replaced with sovereign corporations whose “shareholders” elect an executive with total power over the country/corporation. As Yarvin explains it, “Unencumbered by liberal-democratic procedures, the executive could rule like a CEO-Monarch.”

And just in case it still isn’t abundantly clear what Curtis Yarvin thinks is the solution to what ails America, here it is in his most straightforward phrasing: “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator-phobia.”

Yes, Curtis Yarvin is an unapologetic proponent of dictatorships since “there’s no real difference between a dictator and a CEO, and corporations under the rule of a CEO appear to work just fine.” As he puts it, “Nations like the United States are outdated software systems” that need to be “broken up into smaller entities called ‘patchworks’ which would be controlled by tech corporations.”

“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator-phobia.” – Curtis Yarvin
As he put it in an interview with the NY Times on Jan 18, “Democracy is done.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking.

“Shane, this Yarvin dude is clearly off his rocker. Nobody in their right mind would take this “Corporate Monarchy” nonsense seriously. Why are you wasting everyone’s time explaining in detail the techno-fascist-manifesto ramblings of some internet pop philosopher who calls himself ‘Mencius Moldbug?’ Dude sounds like he’s living in some Matrix-meets-Hunger-Games dystopian fantasy world. Surely NOBODY takes this dude’s crazy ideas seriously!”

That’s where you would be wrong.

Perilously wrong.

Two of Curtis Yarvin’s biggest disciples and advocates for his technocratic ideas are…

Peter Thiel and Vice President JD Vance, the MAGA heir apparent.

“Democracy is done.” – Curtis Yarvin
The three of them have been friends since at least 2009 after Yarvin’s writings and ideologies became super popular within the PayPal Mafia circle. (If you’ve got an hour and a half to waste, here’s Vance on the Jack Murphy Live Podcast name-dropping Yarvin and spewing a few of his more sinister ideas.)

See, people forget that billionaires have political ideologies just like everyone else. And remember, most peoples’ political ideologies are generally tailored to improve the life of the person holding them. Democracy sounds great if you’re a peasant living under a king with no say in how things are run. But in what way would democracy improve your life if you’re a multi-billionaire who can buy politicians? Once you’re up that high on the food chain, democracy is no longer a step UP, it’s a step DOWN.

So, all these filthy rich, filthy powerful tech bros have jumped on board with turning America into a corporation run by a CEO with authoritarian power. According to them, the masses don’t need to be voting – the masses are idiots. (Or as Yarvin puts it, “The masses are asses.”) The PayPal Mafia has no interest in becoming beholden to the whims of a bunch of blue collar workers from Appalachia. If they’re gonna be free to live their best lives, they’re gonna need to unshackle themselves from the “masses who can’t even figure life out enough to afford groceries.”

Put bluntly, those who can write a check for a few $billion and not even notice it’s gone are not interested in the opinions of those whining about the cost of 12 eggs.

As Peter Thiel once wrote in a Cato essay, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” – Peter Thiel
Now, supposing they were actually going to attempt to pull this techno-coup off, what would that look like in practice?

Thankfully, Yarvin has had the plan mapped out for years with a little strategy he’s given the acronym RAGE: Retire All Government Employees.

It would look exactly like what we’re all looking at.

Elon’s “haphazard, chaotic coup” of federal agencies is anything but. This has been the plan all along by these Yarvin acolytes: gut the federal workforce—either by mass firings or incentivizing them to resign—crippling the entire government in the process, at which point Big Tech corporate solutions that just so happen to already be on hand can step in and take over the reigns of running our government.

Since you could never get away with doing this as a blatant hostile takeover, you just frame the entire exercise as an “audit to weed out fraud and corruption,” then watch the gatekeepers roll out the red carpets and cheer the whole takeover on!

I know it sounds like tin-foil-hat conspiracy, but LOOK at what’s happening in front of your eyes.

Isn’t it a little weird that JD Vance came out of nowhere to win a Senate seat? And weirder still that Peter Thiel managed to convince Trump to make this virtual nobody his running mate even though Vance was the most unpopular VP pick in polling history?

Wasn’t it a bit strange that Donald Trump told a bunch of Evangelicals at a rally, “Vote for me this one time and I’ll make sure you never have to vote again?” What the hell did that mean?

Isn’t it slightly too coincidental that Peter Thiel’s original business partner Elon Musk is currently running roughshod through the American government doing EXACTLY what Curtis Yarvin said needs to happen?

This isn’t conspiracy land at this point. These dudes told everyone what they wanted to do, and then they started doing it while we all watch dumbfounded. The Left is going, “Surely they can’t be doing what it sure as hell looks like they’re doing—taking over the government!” and the Right is just…cheering them on because it “makes the libtard snowflakes cry.”

So there’s your explanation.

Elon Musk, JD Vance, and Peter Thiel are executing a long-planned agenda to take over the government. Donald Trump is just a dementia-addled old man along for the ride, ranting about windmills and magnets and taking over canals, and content to just sign large pieces of papers for the TV cameras all day.

Hopefully, the chaos makes a little more sense now.

I told you you weren’t gonna like it.

zn wrote:

joemad wrote:

Rams have the window open right now, just need a little more consistency from Rozeboom and Reeder.

Or to draft a true high caliber ILB.

Though what I’ve read so far says this is a weak draft for LBs.

It’s supposed to be a great year at WR and CB and good at OT.

BTW…both of you…I think that the 49ers are going to have to let Dre Greenlaw walk. I’ve been thinking about this, and they have to sign Purdy. And Fred Warner already sucks up a lot of the cap at the LB position.

I doubt that the Rams invest what he will end up eventually costing, but just throwing that out there. He’s not going to get what he thinks he is worth, though. He might be open to a short term “prove it” deal.

I actually don’t take any of this terribly seriously. I can’t imagine why the Rams would move Stafford.

Maybe to Detroit for Goff and a couple of 1st round picks, but nothing less. There are all these trade scenarios out there where the Rams trade him for moving up a few slots in the draft in round 2, or whatever. I mean…there’s no reason to do that. Stafford is really good. And sure he’s mortal, and the Rams will have to replace him some day, but the Rams are a Super Bowl contender with Stafford. They aren’t without him.

So any trade for him would have to be good enough to appreciably increase the Rams’ chances in 2026 and beyond. You don’t close a SB window for marginal improvement. You would only do it for definite, longer-lasting improvement.

I was giving this the full spectrum of my attention this morning as I commuted to work (Narrator: No, he wasn’t), and I decided that the only trade I would do for Stafford would be…

for Joe Burrow.

This is just one of thousands of harrowing stories told about the U.S. Government abandoning Americans abroad in the USAID shutdown. This is Benghazi times a million. 1/

— Mueller, She Wrote (@muellershewrote.bsky.social) 2025-02-12T16:58:47.793Z

wv wrote:

I know Philly looked amazing against KC, but I still dunno if the Eagles are better than a healthy Detroit team.

Rams played well against the top two NFC teams. Looking forward to seeing what Snead has in mind this offseason.

w
v

I hope he signs that Japanese guy who plays both offense and defense.

zn wrote:

Zooey wrote:

, baseball shares the World Series trophy more widely than the NFL shares the Lombardi.

Is there an equivalent in baseball to having a top 3 or 4 coach, plus a top 3 or 4 qb, plus a very solid (top 10 or near it) defense? Because what we see in the NFL is that the teams that have those 3 items dominate the postseason.

They also repeat in the postseason. So for example, after KC had Reid + Mahomes + the Spags defense … and they had all 3 as of 2019 … they won 5 out of 6 conference games and then won 3 out of the 4 super bowls they have played so far.

My bet is that the MLB teams that repeat the most often year after year in the playoffs are the big money teams.

I think what you say is true about coach + QB + Defense. And there is no equivalent in baseball. I was thinking about that yesterday when considering your post. There are some really good managers, sure. The best ones are good tactically – managing substitutions etc. – and in building chemistry in the clubhouse. And defense matters in baseball, especially in the postseason. We saw an example of that this past WS. And because baseball is a series of 1-on-1 matchups, a robbed hit on the one hand, or an inexcusable error on the other can make the difference in a game. I think the closest thing in baseball to a QB is the entire pitching staff. The thing people look for, going into the playoffs, is 3 really solid starters, and a “slam-the-door-shut” closer. Most playoff teams come close to that, but don’t “quite” have that. But baseball being the beast that it is, one team’s pitching staff can have a guy rise up and get hot at just the right time, and there you go. That’s just one of the variables, though, that opens the door wider.

Looking at the long haul, as I said to wv, yeah – I bet the Yankees get a ticket into the playoffs more often than the Pirates. I just think that that margin is a lot smaller than people think it is. And it’s been 25 years since a team won back-to-back.

For example, the Yankees, going back to 2001, have been in the Top 3 spenders every single year, with the exception of 2018, when they had the 7th-highest payroll. They spent the most 14 of those years, 2nd-most 7 of those years, and 3rd-most 2 of those years. They have one championship to show for it.

Here is last year’s salary table. The red arrows denote playoff teams. The blue arrows denote teams that got knocked out in their first round matchup. The Guardians made it to the AL Championship round.

Here is the payroll ranking for each world series champion since 2001.

So having a higher payroll helps, but I don’t think it’s as decisive as the common fan thinks it is. I think it’s another ingredient in the mix, like manager, pitching, and defense. But imo, having a strong farm system is more important than payroll size. It’s the equivalent of hitting on Day 3 draft picks. MLB is absolutely littered with high-spending teams that got nothing in return. The Dodgers, meanwhile, have had one of the most productive farm systems in the league. Good player development.

zn wrote:

I think the NFL it works this way. Parity is real. But with parity throughout the league, a singular advantage puts you above the parity-driven norm. The clearest and most absolute advantage goes to teams that combine a great head coach, a great qb, and a very solid defense. Which btw would describe the Patz and KC.

That combination is actually hard to get. One of the top 3 or 4 coaches, with one of the top 3 or 4 qbs, with a very solid defense.

With parity in the NFL, what does change year to year is not the super bowl, it’s the playoffs. In the last 3 years 22 teams have made the postseason. 2/3rds of the league in 3 years. If you go back 5 years it’s 29 teams. All but 3.

The longest playoff drought in MLB belongs to the Angels (a Los Angeles team) at 10 years. The NY Jets have a 14-year drought going right now.

I will also point out that the NFL always sent a higher percentage of their teams into the playoffs. Baseball has only recently begun to expand the pool of teams to make the postseason, and I think in the future, baseball fans won’t feel as “locked out” as they do right now. And even given the disparity between the % of teams that make the postseason in their respective leagues, baseball still stacks up favorably to the NFL.

In the past 3 years, 20/30 baseball teams have played in the postseason: 2/3rds. Same as the NFL. If you go back 5 years, it’s 27 teams. All but 3.

That’s certainly comparable. In fact, it’s damn near identical. And, again, baseball shares the World Series trophy more widely than the NFL shares the Lombardi.

Zooey wrote:

So I guess I am not pissed at the NFL for removing that slogan when putting it out there was about as low-effort as it gets in the first place.

And let’s not forget that the NFL which painted “End Racism” on the end zone also blacklisted Colin Kaepernick. So.

That wasn’t the Fearsome Foursome singing. That was Rosey Grier backed up by some amazing dancers. I had no idea Grier could sing as well as tackle QBs, RBs, and assassins.

Zooey wrote:

They won’t get a goddam thing for him.

If all they could get for Robert Woods was a 6th, and basically nothing for Ernest Jones, with those $ numbers on Kupp’s deal, they’re probably going to have to sweeten the pot.

Kupp and a 3rd round pick for a 2nd round pick.

I hate this planet.

I’ll bet they don’t even get that much, actually.

zn wrote:

The Rams are the Meryl Streep of football.

Wherever they go, somebody wins an academy award.

Who is on here twice?

I may be the only non-KC fan to be pulling for the Chiefs. I did not see the games last Sunday, and Championship Sunday is usually my favorite weekend (unless the Rams are in the SB). I punched into the NFC game near the end of the 1st half, and there was pushing, shoving, and facemask pulling, followed by replays of earlier animosities, and I was suddenly filled with hatred for the Eagles. Dunno why them, particularly. I think the fact that WA has changed its name, and Snyder is gone, and Snyder is rooting against WA, and the fact that WA never really did any serious damage to the Rams, coupled with the arrogance of Eagles’ comments before they beat the Rams…

I’m for the Chiefs. I have no reason to hate them. Reid is just good. Spags is good. Mahomes is good. They don’t deflate footballs, or illegally film opponents’ practices.

And. Like I said earlier, Brady never won 3 in a row. So that’s that.

I can’t help but think that I would be more interested in this weekend if the Rams were playing the Commanders.