FEBRUARY 11, 2025 – (Cont.) Better than a year ago I expressed concern about how Trump 2.0 might unfold very differently from Trump 1.0. The latter was a clown circus starring Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, Don Jr., Eric and others, not to mention the Charlatan in Chief himself, along with dark wingmen such as Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller. An assortment of advisors, administrative appointees, and other gatekeepers came and went. Many of them, as we later learned, tried to erect guard rails around the circus tent—with varying degrees of success. In the final analysis, beyond the stain of January 6, Trump 1.0 seemed to be wall-to-wall crazy town; a political aberration. Say what you will about Biden, his policy directions, personnel choices, decision-making, administrative ability, overall judgment—okay, and his age—but his presidency brought a return of normalcy.
What concerned me about Trump 2.0 was that various dark and powerful forces had learned from Trump 1.0. With Trump 2.0 these forces weren’t about to accept the role of spectators. The next time around they would be ready and organized to take full advantage of the iconoclastic Mad Man from Manhattan. None of the interests lying in wait were democratically minded. In fact, they were out to cancel democracy. In fact, they were out to extinguish government—after they manipulated it to support their nefarious designs for a Brave New World.
What I got totally wrong was that I didn’t think that Trump 2.0 would materialize.
Recently, a friend in Helsinki who is a former journalist, sent me a link for a summary of what a cadre of self-styled tech-Libertarian-futurists with billions of dollars envision for the world; or more precisely, for themselves: a “network world” in which traditional nations and their currencies become obsolete, to be replaced by city states, in effect, managed as stock companies with CEOs and directors but no franchised “voters” and subject to no sovereign power. They will be protected by paramilitary security forces and use cryptocurrency. They will be techcentric in the extreme, moving at light speed ahead of the yesteryear Ayn Randian utopia wherein traffic intersections were controlled by coin-operated traffic lights that were voluntary.
Democrats—and other poor, lazy, unproductive people—need not apply for a residency permit or even a visitor’s visa to the Libertarian oases (or Martian bases) planned by these people.
I’d heard of this crew—Peter Thiel, Marc Andressen, Ben Horotwitz, Brian Armstrong, David Sacks and naturally, Trump’s co-president, Elon Musk. What I hadn’t fully appreciated was their connection to the radical so-called philosophers, Balaji Srinivasan and Curtis Yarvin. Nor did I realize that JD Vance is an enthusiastic adherent and perfectly willing agent.
These people are organized and even more critically, they have the power and the connections to advance their agenda completely outside the bounds of our traditional framework and rule of law. With the elected president of the United States serving as a willing doorman, this group of men now have access to the levers and switches of our government to catapult us all to a place none of us could’ve contemplated when Trump first announced that he wanted to be president.
What’s particularly disturbing is the match-up between what these people have said on record and what they’ve embraced in the form of Yarvin’s “Butterfly Revolution” manifesto, which has seven steps:
- Campaign on Autocracy,
- Purge the Bureaucracy,
- Ignore the Courts,
- Co-Opt the Congress,
- Centralize Police Powers,
- Shut Down Elite Media and Academic Institutions,
- Turn Out the People.
I gulped upon reading about the convergence of Yarvin’s “Butterfly Revolution” and Project 2025. I shudder in the contemplation of what power the tech billionaires possess and are wielding over us—and our political and economic systems—while we go round and round in our daily cages, striving to hold on to what we have and perhaps adding a bit more sawdust to insulate us from the cold.
Howard Zinn’s long bitter critique of American history seems naive by contrast to what the mega rich have extracted from the present and aim to do to our future. I imagine a torn faded coffee-stained copy of A People’s History of the United States bouncing roughly on the floor of an oxcart with oaken wheels grinding slowly down a rutted lane while the tech billionaires are whirling around this planet and the next by hologram, their billions in cryptocurrency jingling through cloud-based blockchain. (Cont.)
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
