clockwise from top left: Putin, Trump, Peter Thiel, JD Vance, Elon Musk. Curtis Yarvin in center

The Silicon Valley venture capitalists have taken control of the MAGA movement and the new Trump administration. JD Vance was their intermediary. Their goals are actually even more dangerous than what might appear (which is bad enough). These goals include total social engineering through a “hard reset”, which in reality means a global cataclysm, one whose consequences they think they can escape. It is impossible to combat these literal megalomaniacs (which as you will see, is no exaggeration) without fully understanding their rise, how their development has shaped their thinking, and where it leads.

That is what we will discuss in this two part series. The first part will discuss:

• Elon Musk’s background;
• The rise of the Silicon Valley venture capitalists of which Musk is part;
• JD Vance’s links with these venture capitalists and his role linking them with MAGA; 
• MAGA’s original class base and the role of JD Vance in facilitating its capture by the Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

Introduction
In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein describes an effort of the CIA in the 1950s to gain complete psychological control over prisoners of war. Towards that end, they paid a sadist masquerading as a psychiatrist, Dr. Ewan Cameron, to carry out a series of experiments at Canada’s prestigious McGill University.

Dr. Ewan Cameron. His sadistic experiments can serve as a metaphor.

Cameron claimed that what he was going to do was erase the victims’, or as he put it the subjects’, psyche – in other words, erase their personality, and then rebuild it on a “healthy” basis. He did this by depriving them of information and also stimuli through extended periods of drug induced sleep. He used all sorts of drugs from LSD to angel dust. He also use powerful and repeated “shock therapy”, in other words, electric shock torture. The more the victims resisted the more electric shocks they were subjected to. Predictably, what was left was not a personality rebuilt on a healthy basis, but completely shattered psyches, people who never were able to recover. Among other things, they had lost all memory of what was done to them in Cameron’s torture chamber.

These experiments are a perfect metaphor for the vast social engineering experiment that the Trump/Vance/Musk triumvirate is carrying out over all of  U S. society. Cameron’s sadism is matched by his enormous conceit. But his qualities are nothing when compared to the sadism and megalomania of Musk and the Silicon Valley capitalists, from which Musk comes. They think they can replicate what Cameron did, but to an entire society. What Elon Musk and his wing of the capitalist class are trying to do on an indescribably wider scale labels them as being insane – and dangerous – megalomaniacs.

Elon Musk’s background
First, I will discuss who Elon Musk actually is.

Musk got his start with money from his multimillionaire father who owned emerald mines in Africa. Contrary to the myths sold by the capitalist media, as Panther prowler  put it, “Elon Musk is not an inventor. He is an investor. He did not found Tesla. he did not design anything for SpaceX, and he didn’t even found PayPal, the company that he cites as the true start of his career.” Musk was forced out as CEO of PayPal because PayPal’s directors felt he was incompetent.

Next let us consider Tesla: Today Musk campaigns against any sort of government involvement in the economy, but according to the Washington Post,  “Musk and his businesses have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits” of which    11.8 bn went to Tesla.

 “About a third of Tesla’s $35 billion in profits since 2014 has come from selling federal and state regulatory credits to other auto makers…. Without the credit, Tesla would have lost more than $700 million in 2020, marking a seventh-consecutive year with no profits…. and probably would not have survived” without them.

Now let us look at the company that really gives Musk power on the global scale – SpaceX. The same Washington Post article writes “although the company was founded with $100 million dollars from Musk’s own fortune, SpaceX benefited from government advice, and money long before it sent anything into orbit according to public contract, documents and statements from the company leaders…. Though SpaceX had yet to successfully reach space, NASA awarded the company a $278 million contract in 2006.”

In other words, Musk is a bloated parasite.

Silicon Valley venture capitalists
Let us now take a closer look at that whole milieu of the Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Cara Swisher, who reported on Silicon Valley for the Wall Street Journal, had a ringside seat to these people, and she wrote about it in Burn Book. She describes many of them as being “warped“ and “lonely“, which in fact means alienated from society. She calls them “a powerful and rich group of people (with a) warped, self righteousness.” She called Jeff Bezos, for example, “bloodless“ with a “maniacal” laugh. Her description of Jeff Zuckerberg is really significant, exactly because he did not start out as one of those alienated maniacs. She writes about him: “Zuckerberg had equaled Augustus in reshaping the world in his own image, with no need of spear-throwing legions….. No, Zuckerberg wasn’t an asshole. He was worse. He was one of the most carelessly dangerous men in the history of technology who didn’t even know it. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the worst of them. Zuckerberg was awfully unprepared to rein in the power of the digital platform,” that he himself had helped unleash. In other words, some of the Silicon Valley venture capitalists were and are “maniacal“ and alienated right from the start while others started off as simply “naïve“, but in all cases, they became captives of the technology that they had created. And that technology is symbolized by the World Wide Web, which was first launched in 1990. Swisher describes it: “it would be everything, everywhere, all at once, and most importantly, always.” In other words, it has become the 21st century equivalent of god, and its creators think of themselves in this light.

From the “bloodless” and “maniacal” Jeff Bezos to the “naïve” Jeff Zuckerberg, the Silicon Valley venture capitalists have unleashed forces which control them, not vice versa.

In other words, Swisher explains that these venture capitalists tore down and rebuilt in their own image the crucial  communications and entertainment industry. They did to that industry what Ewan Cameron tried to do to individual human beings, and with similarly devastating consequences. Along the way, they crushed any hint of workers rights in Silicon Valley and beyond.

Parallel with that rise was the near complete disappearance, or one should say the crushing, of all the traditions of the workers movements of the 1930s. So that, yes, there were strikes for example, but these strikes never threatened the direction capitalism was taking, much less the grip of capitalism as a whole. In other words, these Silicon Valley venture capitalists’ arrogance was magnified by the vacuum left by the absence of any independent voice of the working class.

The role of this wing of the capitalist class was not a “choice”; it resulted from the very development of the means of production themselves under capitalism (the internet, etc.) And while this wing may be the most megalomaniacal of the capitalists, they simply represent the refined essence – the most determined wing – of their class.

MAGA’s development
Now let us take a look at how MAGA developed, and how it has been transformed: it started off centered around small business people  and their type (the “petit bourgeoisie”), also bringing tens of millions of workers in their tow. It had, of course, the unquestioned leader of their cult, Donald Trump. This petit bourgeois populist movement then performed a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, first in 2016 when it pushed out candidates like Jeb Bush. However, like all petit bourgeois movements, it had to be taken over by at least a wing of the capitalist class, and that is exactly what happened with the Silicon Valley venture capitalists as Trump moved towards reelection in 2024. JD Vance played a vital role in that process.

JD Vance
Until he recently helped to channel Putin in that infamous White House meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, vice president JD Vance has been largely absent from the headlines. But Vance was central in elevating the role of the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and we should look at his career: an article in the Washington Post from July

JD Vance in his startup days in Silicon Valley

of last year explains that it was venture capitalist Peter Thiel who brought Vance into that world in 2011. From 2011 to 2016 Vance immersed himself in that world and made the acquaintance of other such venture capitalists as David Sacks and Jacob Helberg. In 2017 Vance returned to Ohio, partly to build his own political base which included building a base amongst small start-up venture capitalists in the Midwest. He launched a venture capitalist fund called Narya, along with Ohio-based venture capitalist Colin Greenspon. According to the Washington Post, Narya made “ideologically driven bets…. The firm, along with Thiel, became a large investor in Rumble, a YouTube competitor that is popular with right-leaning audiences. Narya and Thiel also funded the Catholic prayer app, Hallow….

“By the time he announced his  U.S. Senate run in 2021, Vance had transformed from never Trump into a MAGA Republican – the result of years of conversations with Thiel, [Blake] Masters [the Ohio-based venture capitalist and unsuccessful 2024 Arizona Republican candidate for the House of Representatives], along with Colin Greenspon and others. Vance is the first prominent tech venture capitalist to win a spot on a major party’s presidential ticket, a sign of the industry’s growing influence.”

The Washington Post also describes these people’s attitude towards the Biden administration: “the Biden administration… has infuriated tech leaders by hindering the crypto industry, attempting to regulate AI and challenging corporate acquisitions – a keypad for startup founders to cash in. Sacks, Musk, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leon, and founders of the prominent venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz have all thrown in with Trump and are donating large sums to a pro-Trump PAC.” According to the Washington Post, David Sacks, Palantir advisor Jacob Helberg, and Peter Thiel all heavily lobbied the Trump campaign to nominate JD Vance as his running mate.

In other words, it was venture capitalist himself JD Vance who brought that wing of the capitalist class into the MAGA movement, where it would inevitably take control. Elon Musk and DOGE represent that process.

This concludes the first part of this article. In the second part we will discuss:

• The dual roles of Trump and Musk in their co-presidency;
• The true depth of the dangers we face as shown by the “philosopher” whose thought is central to this administration – Curtis Yarvin;
• How these megalomaniacs think they can escape the consequences of their own rule;
• Some concluding thoughts.

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clockwise from top left: Putin, Trump, Peter Thiel, JD Vance, Elon Musk. Curtis Yarvin in center