Mother Night, Daddy Issues.
I think I might have been wrong about something.
Obviously, I’d never admit anywhere that it might get seen, but luckily that makes my Substack the perfect place. Bigfoot, Lord Lucan and I could pose with the disinterred remains of Amelia Earhart in this newsletter and it might get half a dozen clicks.
Nonetheless, I made a prediction and now I’m walking it back: I’m not sure Trump and Musk will have the bitter falling-out that I initially expected. I still fervently hope they will, but I’m doubtful.
I’m coming to this conclusion based on a slight change in perspective. I assumed, like others, that two indescribably fragile manbabies couldn’t exist in the same environment for too long without some sort of spat, but what I hadn’t factored in was that they have so much in common besides their giant, tottering egos. They’re both racist, to varying degrees, they’re both exhaustingly dull at an interpersonal level, but above all else they’re both very stupid. They’re also mutually incapable of listening to anyone else.
Trump, a man who started out not-very-bright and is now turning senile on top of it, has an established adderall addiction and loves to bloviate endlessly about how great he is. He worships the wealthy because, whilst wealthy himself, he’s not anywhere near as rich as he makes out and he’s painfully insecure about this, along with everything else.
Musk, a man who seems to be single handedly attempting to redefine the phrase “an embarrassment of riches”, is a socially awkward pseudo intellectual with a fondness for ketamine and the biggest bank balance in history. The only thing larger than his wallet is his Oedipus complex.
Put these two in a room together and you have one rambling, idiot blowhard who likes to be listened to and who will continue to talk for as long as anyone lets him, especially if he thinks it will impress someone with a lot of money. Sat opposite him is the world’s richest man, on ketmine, a drug that will allow you to stare vacantly into space for hours at a time. Musk also likes to pretend he’s a shrewd, incisive thinker, so he might occasionally ask a fourteen-year-old’s conception of a deep question, sparking more endless bullshit from Donald. Elon won’t mind this at all, as he aches for the approval of a father figure and Donald will bestow this on him for being a good listener.
In the way that strange and often unlikeable people sometimes gravitate towards each other and form unlikely friendships, I think it’s possible that Donald and Elon are perfectly content in their relationship. Spending thirty seconds as a fly on that wall would make any sane person long for the slow death of being the fly in The Fly, but that’s not the point - the point is that they may have achieved a weird kind of harmony.
It would almost be sweet, if it weren’t about to wreck the entire fucking world.
Of course, the reason Elonald hasn’t broken up yet might just be that Elon has been too busy wreaking havoc on America’s finances. He’s been given implicit permission to do whatever he likes in attempts to “cut costs,” and has taken this to mean that he’s allowed to turn up at various federal financial institutions and demand access to all of their files and computers.
Actually, he hasn’t done this himself - he’s sent a bunch of twentysomethings to do it on his behalf, before claiming all the loot and credit, a technique he perfected in video games before unleashing it on the treasury.
It’s hard to escape the feeling that Musk is really just a child seeing what he can get away with. He just wants to transgress and dare people to stop him, and he smirks and feels (wrongly) like he’s achieved something when nobody does.
This is probably the reasoning behind his recent Nazi salute. I don’t think Musk would consider himself an actual Nazi. He’s absolutely aligned with them - I just don’t think that he privately thinks of himself in those terms. But he still wanted to upset the people who keep pointing out that he fits the criteria, rather than reflecting on why people keep saying that in the first place. So he performs Nazi salutes semi-ironically. If I had to estimate, I’d say his zig-heil was twenty percent endorsement of the far right and eighty percent seeing if he could get away with it.
This shouldn’t matter in practical terms. As Kurt Vonnegut cautioned, we are what we pretend to be. So, if we ever arrive at a just conclusion to this whole sorry period of history, maybe we can string Musk up “ironically” alongside the rest of them.
This same lack of self-awareness that allows Musk to pretend to be a Nazi, whilst being supported by Nazis, without ever once questioning why people keep calling him a Nazi, is what makes him useful. He’s an idiot with no boundaries who can be used to break things on behalf of the people we really need to worry about.
How It’s Going To End.
If I’m wrong that the long-established relationship between a Trump and the Musk that follows it isn’t going to dissipate any time soon, how does this bizarrely fart-themed autocracy collapse?
At the risk of being wrong in new and exciting (and ultimately depressing) ways, I think what happens next is going to be less about the people at the front and everything to do with the rear echelon motherfuckers who constitute the true danger. As is often the case, the dumbest people in a room are also the loudest, so while Trump throws whatever tantrum he’s currently throwing in front of the cameras, and Musk charges around destroying infrastructure like a toddler, behind the scenes there’s an actual plan in place.
Neither Trump nor Musk knows that they’re the decoy, of course. That would require self-awareness, or reflection, or other things that they’re pathologically incapable of. But somewhere in the mix, largely forgotten, is the actual Vice President, J.D. Vance.
You might remember Vance as a kind of business school Chucky doll that haunts the White House. Trump picked him as a running mate then summarily ignored him in favour of Elon Musk (rich! starry!) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (famous! rugged!)
The reason Trump made such an unlikely pick for Vice President (aside from the fact that former-VP Mike Pence is unlikely to want to return after Trump supporters attempted to hang him) is that Big Tech wanted Vance to be in the White House. Whether through “donations” or just the malleability of Trump’s Play-Doh brain, Silicon Valley types managed to convince Trump to put Vance where they needed him to be.
Specifically, Peter Thiel, the OTHER repellent South African billionaire from PayPal, has been bankrolling J.D. Vance for quite some time.
Thiel and Vance are fans of an obscure blogger named Curtis Yarvin. He’s obscure to the general public but very popular amongst wealthy tech bros. Yarvin is a neo-monarchist who believes that democracy should be abolished and that the world should devolve into a series of city-states in the manner of ancient Greece, and that each city-state should be ruled by a King/CEO who wields absolute authority.
Again: Silicon Valley CEOs think this is a fantastic idea, for reasons that should be obvious.1
Yarvin, who blogs under the name Mencius Moldbug because some people don’t get kicked in the nuts often enough, has even drawn up a plan for how to dismantle America and set it on the path to this supposedly utopian outcome.
As a sidebar, these fucking dorks (Yarvin and the tech set) are fascinating in the way that they’re so convinced that they’re each the smartest person in the room, and yet all incapable of thinking most issues through past the level of a child. We’ve all had the thought, when confronted with some minor societal nuisance, that the whole world would run better if everyone just did things your way, but the shriekingly obvious next step in that process is to consider any aspect of anything for any amount of time and go “Actually, I’d be terrible at running the world and it would constitute an enormous pain in my ass.”
Seemingly every online billionaire has had the first part of the thought and never arrived at the second, meaning they all believe that they, the brilliant minds behind the Metaverse, the Cybertruck, and the Bored Ape Yacht Club, should each be in charge of an entire fucking nation.
This absolute certainty in their own brilliance was summed up when Yarvin, during an interview, said that academia and journalism in modern society functioned like Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.
What’s actually happened there is that academia - which is comprised of many people who study subjects in great depth, cross-check each other’s work and thereby arrive at conclusions - has come to some conclusions that Yarvin, an idiot, doesn’t agree with. Clearly, because Yarvin is good at tech, he can’t ever be wrong about any other subject ever, or else why would he be rich?! The only conclusion is that academia is engaged in some grand conspiracy of dogma and falsehood, or else it would agree with him in the first place.
They all fucking think this way because again: They’re all children.
Anyway…
Peter Thiel and his pet, J.D., are big fans of Yarvin and they want to make his ideas happen. There’s an illustrative half-hour video HERE about all of this, but to sum up: Yarvin says that the state must be dismantled, the government taken over and the police consolidated into one national force, in order to re-shape society into its new form. Trump and Musk make fantastic blunt instruments for this kind of work, and there is no meaningful opposition to stop them.
So, with all of this preamble out of the way: How does it fall apart?
I’m going to sound like a hippy for a second, but it falls apart because of people power. Just not in the way that is necessarily positive.
The tech oligarchy that is currently cementing its hold on America does not, for one second, respect the average citizen. If normal, everyday people were so smart, they’d all be billionaires too, right? Clearly, the Musks and Thiels and Bezoses (Bezi?) of the world are superior to the rest of us in every way. They’re smarter than normal people and they know what’s best, and if further proof were needed, look how easily they have seized the levers of power.
Yarvin’s manifesto explicitly wants to do away with democracy because letting people vote allows the stupid, lesser mortals to have a say and they don’t deserve one.
Unfortunately, these people have ridden to power on the backs of the exact kind of stupid, reactionary voters they dismiss. These people, as a block, are the same people who want to return to a simpler time and who hate elites in particular and modernity more generally.
Trump has largely out-lived his usefulness to the oligarchy. He’s got them in the door, but past that he’s just a figurehead. It might be the case that the techno-garchy, drunk on their own power, will bump him off so that they can instill their boy Vance as president more quickly. This might be a little rash. It’s equally likely that Trump, horribly unfit, mentally declining and eighty years old, will expire from any number of natural causes in the near future. Either way, the end game is to get President Vance into the Oval Office.
Nobody likes J.D. Vance. His wife visibly detests him. Anyone who’s ever seen so much as a gif of him will already be fomenting a personal dislike. He is a Yale law graduate with no personal charm, backed by a group of super-wealthy internet CEOs, and he will end up in charge of a country in which the poor are angry, heavily armed, hate him and his backers at the abstract and personal levels, and have been spoiling for armed conflict for years. Without their sainted Trump to rally behind, and with their rights and services stripped, it seems likely that the public will turn on Vance et al. If and when they do, it’s going to be carnage.
The same people that fetishize the military and who “back the blue” are the people who take any constraint of their ability to do whatever they please as a personal attack. They hate government whilst waving flags for its enforcers. As soon as those same enforcers are directed to turn on them, it will inevitably cause violence.
The techno-garchy won’t see this coming because they have never considered the public as anything more than an unimportant, amorphous blob. They certainly don’t think that common people have agency. Luigi Mangione shot one healthcare CEO and they were all horrified, not at the murder itself (the meeting that said CEO was arriving for started on time while his body was still being carted away) but at the notion that there could ever be consequences inflicted on them, the Important People, by someone who Didn’t Matter.
If the Yarvin plan continues, and if Trump is no longer available as a front man, my new prediction is that the super-rich will find out very quickly that the people they have never paid attention to are far more capable of affecting their lives than they’d ever dreamed. Whether America, or the wider world, can survive that kind of conflict is not something that even I am going to make predictions about.
Little dicks. It’s because they have little dicks.