In the first part of this series we showed how the Silicon Valley venture capitalists had led their class in taking over the MAGA movement and Trump’s second presidency. We showed how they disassembled and then rebuilt the vital communication/entertainment industry under their near total control, and how this created a social megalomania. In Part 2, 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 (who might be the most important person you never heard of);
• How these megalomaniacs think they can escape the consequences of their own rule;
• Some concluding thoughts.

We emphasize Curtis Yarvin, because he somewhat personifies Project 2025 on steroids. Fewer people know his name than knew about Project 2025 leading up to the election. And just as Trump kept P 2025 at a certain arms length distance, the Trump/Vance/Musk triumvirate does that even more so with Yarvin, whose views are the pure, distilled essence of P 2025, and he is influential with the base, the rank and file foot soldiers who are entering this administration.

Trump and Musk
It is from this point of view that we can understand the basic thrust of the Trump/Musk co-presidency:

Trump is basically a hollow shell that is filled in part with the right wing rabble. His accomplishment in his first few months of his second term has been to move to emasculate Congress by “impounding” funds that were voted on and passed by Congress – in other words to nullify laws passed by congress. The most prominent of these impoundments is ending US AID. To what extent the Supreme Court will accept that is not clear at this point, but the main point is that a precedent has been set, and Trump will continue to push at those boundaries. The action of his which most clearly shows his intent is his attempt to end birthright citizenship. Again, it is not clear that the Supreme Court will accept that, but already first one op-ed and then a second in the Wall Street Journal defended the legal basis for that action. This means that it is probable that at least a couple of Supreme Court (in)Justices will find legal ground to side with Trump. The president has also set himself up as having total personal control over a federal law enforcement, that is to say the department of justice, and the US attorney for the DOJ in Washington DC Ed Martin has directly referred to himself  and the rest of the DOJ attorneys as as “President Trump‘s lawyers”. In other words, Trump is setting himself up to have unlimited power.

The other part of Trump’s empty shell is filled by dictators, Putin first and foremost. (Trump has a long history as a money launderer for the Russian oligarchs. See Money Launderer in Chief.) Trump has absorbed from Putin the view that the world can be completely dominated by three super capitalists. Putin will control Europe; Trump gets the entire Atlantic, including North, Central and South America, and Xi can have Asia. Netanyahu and Bin Salman can divide up Southwest Asia/North Africa. (And, yes, Trump does see it in just such personal terms.) As for sub-Saharan Africa, Trump doesn’t care. According to him, they are just “shithole nations” anyway. This redivision of the world is what motivates Trump’s imposition of tariffs, through which he uses as extortion to try to bend Canada and Mexico to his will. Key to his approach was the comment he made in his address to congress. Talking about Greenland falling under U.S rule, he ad libbed  “one way or another, we’re going to get it.”  Trump’s attempt to end U.S. AID means abandoning all effort to influence Asia and Africa. As for Latin America, Trump thinks he can absolutely dominate through tariff extortion and simple military intervention.

Co-president Elon Musk, acting on behalf of the Silicon Valley venture capitalists, is playing a complementary but somewhat different role. DOGE is slashing employment in one federal agency after another. This is partly just pure corruption, pure self interest, as with his move to destroy the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This agency is vital for the agricultural industry as well as for public safety in the parts of the country that are subject to hurricanes or tornadoes. But NOAA depends on a series of satellites, and if and when it is destroyed, then its services will be privatized, contracted out to Musk’s Starlink. Overall, however, the role of DOGE is to sow turmoil in the federal government and actually in society as a whole. Not only social, but also economic chaos as tens of thousands of workers lose their jobs.

They are trying to repeat on a mass scale what the sadistic psychiatrist Emeron Cameron did to individuals – wipe the slate clean and rebuild it according to their views.

As opposed to the simple-minded Trump, they have a vast social engineering program thought out. Let’s consider what that program is:

Curtis Yarvin. He is clear and open about his authoritarian views.

Curtis Yarvin
An understanding of that program requires us to look at a figure who is on the fringes while simultaneously at the center of the goals and ideology of Musk and the Silicon Valley venture capitalists. That is  Curtis Yarvin, who is a small-time Silicon Valley venture capitalist himself, but is better known as a political philosopher. Yarvin is on the fringes because he is so clear and open on his views and goals. As a result, public figures cannot afford to be openly associated with him. For example, he does not have direct daily contacts with people like JD Vance or Elon Musk, although at least Vance does know him and Yarvin clearly has helped shape Vance’s thinking. Yarvin is also organizationally central, because he has helped to clarify, and therefore to shape, the thinking of a whole layer of new, young appointees to the Trump musk administration. Wikipedia  sums up his ideas as “neo reactionary” “neo Monarchist” “Neo feudalist… he has defended the institution of slavery and has suggested that certain races may be more naturally inclined toward servitude than others.

“Yarvin critiques the attacks by the Norwegian far right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik who killed 77 people, mainly children, at a youth camp, not on the grounds” of opposing what he did, but just simply on the grounds that it was not effective. It is in this light that we should consider the shakeup of the FBI. They will now back off from keeping tabs on far right would-be terrorists here in the U.S.

“Yarvin contends that society needs a ‘hard reset’ “or a ‘rebooting’, not a series of gradual political reforms”. In this, his thinking resembles that of the “traditionalists” such as Russian fascist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. Like Yarvin, Dugin exerts his influence indirectly, by influencing the thinking of the entire milieu surrounding Putin. These traditionalists hold that society has gone through four eras – the golden era, silver era, bronze era, and the dark era in which we are now. They believe that then will come a cataclysm after which society will return to a new golden era. The main distinction between these different eras is the degree to which society is rigidly hierarchically structured with a ruling class that controls everything from the top. Yarvin’s call for a “hard reset“ is Silicon Valley speak for Traditionalist Dugin’s cataclysm. The main difference between the two lies in the superficial “thinking” of the layer of the U.S. capitalist class and their hangers-on whom Yarvin represents, compared to the historical world view of Dugin, whose view may be twisted and fascist (as is Yarvin’s), but is a historical worldview nevertheless.

A full understanding of Yarvin really requires an understanding of Dugin. We recommend Oaklandsocialist’s Aleksandr Dugin: Alchemist of “Traditionalism”, mysticism and fascism Next let us consider how Yarvin directly wields his influence in the Trump administration.

A recent article in politico.com was entitled “Curtis‘s ideas were fringe. Now they’re coursing through Trump‘s Washington.” The article writes that “Yarvin, who has arguably done more than anyone to shape the thinking of that group [around the Trump administration], was an informal guest of honor (at Trump’s 2025 inaugural ball).” Yarvin understood that the previous Trump administration was held in check by the old line conservatives, including the military officers such as Mark Milley and John Kelly, and even his most extreme Attorney General, Bill Barr. It was also held in check in part by his own party, the Republican party. Yarvin explains that his role is not to directly impact the appointment nor the thinking of top officials, but to help open the door to a whole layer of lower level officials who actually implement, and therefore influence the policies of those above them.

He explains how things really work in Washington DC when he discusses the house of a Washington DC lawyer whose name he refuses to reveal: “a lot of the revolutionary vanguard hangs out in [that house]…. When you’re at this place, maybe you will run into a Clarence Thomas clerk or someone like that. There is this whole world of people in their 20s and 30s who are basically arriving to take jobs in DC now.”

As opposed to the past, the ones who are flocking to Washington DC to get jobs in the Trump administration are getting them “by virtue of reading Curtis Yarvin in middle school,” according to this article.

Curtis Yarvin is one of the two guiding lights for both Elon Musk and JD Vance. They may not be in direct contact with him, but he expresses what they think but cannot say aloud. By doing so, Yarvin helps clarify their thinking. He buttresses this by placing a layer of young appointees around them.

Yarvin is a uniquely American figure who combines aspects of a stealth version of Tsar Nicholas II’s Rasputin, Aleksandr Dugin, and Project 2025 on steroids.

Escape?
One would think that these capitalists would fear being destroyed in the cataclysm they seek to create, but there is a further aspect to their thinking. On the one hand there is Elon Musk who has had an obsession for several years now about “getting people to Mars, and, you know, get out there and (create a) space based civilization,” as he put it in this youtube interview.   In other words, he actually thinks that he and his capitalist system can escape a cataclysm here on earth. Nor is the decades required to establish capitalism on Mars a barrier to their own personal salvation:

l: Elon Musk; r: Peter Thiel. Thiel is one of the leaders in the Silicon Valley venture capitalists’ attempt to achieve immortality. Musk is undoubtedly at least aware of these attempts.

Immortality
The other aspect of the thinking of the Silicon Valley venture capitalists is that they think they can in effect live forever – literally – or at least extend the human lifespan (meaning their lives) for literally thousands of years. A recent article in Mother Jones explained, “open AI’s Sam, Jeff, Bezos, Larry, Ellison, and Peter Thiel [are] among the would-be immortals, sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into startups and research based on the notion, as fellow tech bro Peter Demond put it, that ‘aging is a disease’ that ‘can be slowed, stopped, and perhaps even reversed’. Another tech founder, Brian Johnson, famously, transfused himself with the blood of fit young people, including his teenage son, for six months last year.” (Maybe next these ghouls will sire children in order to harvest their body parts.) The same article outlined how these capitalists are also spending money for reforming the laws so that their wealth would still belong to them even after they die so that they can have it once they return to life.

As far as  Musk himself, some of his thinking, is probably influenced by the fact that he is by his own admission  a frequent user of ketamine, which tends to induce dissociative thinking. There are also reports of his use of other drugs, including cocaine. Certainly, some of his antics – leaping around and screening on stage, dressing himself up like Darth Vader even in the Oval Office – do nothing to discredit these reports.

There is only one way of understanding the thinking of those who, on the one hand, think they can replicate human society outside of planet Earth, and on the other hand, think they can practically live forever: That is the thinking of people who think they are God, or something close to it, people who think that not only the laws of society, but even the laws of nature do not apply to them. This is literally insane, but since when has sanity been the dominant thought process in the bigoted, reactionary, antiscience mentality whose hold is increasing in multiple Societies around the world?

Conclusion
As we pointed out in the first part of this article, the Silicon Valley venture capitalists are not some anomaly of capitalism. They represent the most “advanced” sector of their class and they are integrated into finance capital as a whole. Not only that, but the rest of their class is only too happy to take advantage of Trump’s cutting what regulations on them remain and what few taxes remain on them. This was shown in the rest of their class tending to gravitate towards Trump around the time of the election.

That may be changing now. However, especially as they see Trump’s tariffs threatening their profits. Also, the fact that Trump is clearly an asset of a rival capitalist power – Russia – concerns them greatly. A recent article  in the New York Times outlined how capitalist who had previously supported Trump because he was better for the bottom line may be now starting to move away from him. That means the beginning of a process of splits at the top. Meanwhile, at the bottom, we are starting to see increased ferment as shocks are starting to reverberate throughout the working class and beyond. That is the prescription for a movement from below. The job of socialist in such a movement will be, of course, to encourage and help build it, and also to explain the necessity for working class political independence, which means among other things combating the influence of the union bureaucracy and the non-profiteers. In other words, to provide clarity. Essential to that clarity is a clear understanding of the enemy.

Coming soon:
An op-ed  in the San Francisco Chronicle says that signs point towards Trump preparing to invoke the Insurrection Act. Whether that is an immediate or longer term perspective, it is in the cards. Trump tried to do that in 2020 and has set himself up to do so during this term. In a future article, Oaklandsocialist will discuss the perspectives for such an event and its possible outcome. We urge readers to consider subscribing to our blog to be sure to get this and other important coverage.