CONTEXT: Dems Cozy Up To Palantir As Peter Thiel, Humanity's Enemy, Nears Tech Dictatorship Goals
PLUS: Crypto Bro Placed Atop Military, Path Cleared To Assault Protestors. Meanwhile mainstream media refuses to say the name Curtis Yarvin, the 'philosopher' behind Thiel and Musk's fraud.
CONTEXT is a series from Public Enlightenment that gives us all - right, left, center - the context we need to understand the news. Use this post to help provide context to others so that we can all understand the moment and respond accordingly. We’ve got to fight for healthy, fact-based information. In this Context…
Fred Wellman, Gil Duran, Max Kennerly, Sludge, Vox, Capitol Hunters, The Guardian.
In a time when legacy media cannot be trusted to consistently explain reality to us, be sure to follow and subscribe to these essential providers of context.
Over the weekend a Bluesky post from Fred Wellman caught my eye. Wellman was a Public Affairs Officer for six different general officers during his Army career.
In Wellman’s linked article he points out that the firing of the top JAG lawyers means Hegseth has no respect for the military justice system.
The good JAGs are unafraid to speak truth to power and ensure the law is followed to the letter. Pete Hegseth hates those JAGs. This is a man that openly supported and campaigned for the pardons of multiple war criminals who were justifiably prosecuted and convicted based on evidence from fellow service members for the torture and murder of civilians in combat.
Wellman goes on:
…it is clear that the intent is to remove barriers from breaking the laws and military regulations…We know that Project 2025 and Agenda 47 both included references to enacting the Insurrection Act and using military forces to put down public protest and assist in mass deportations and interments. Lawyers with a loose relationship with the law would happily approve actions that skirt the letter of the law and provide legal cover for outrageous uses of our apolitical military against our own people.
To make matters even worse the new, unqualified chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dan Caine, is a crypto bro who will likely enable Musk, Thiel, and Vance’s insane plans for creating a Tech Bro dictatorship.
That’s right. Musk, Thiel, and Vance are all acolytes of Curtis Yarvin. From a piece by journalist Gil Duran:
In 2012, Curtis Yarvin — Peter Thiel’s “house philosopher”—called for something he dubbed RAGE: Retire All Government Employees. The idea: Take over the United States government and gut the federal bureaucracy. Then, replace civil servants with political loyalists who would answer to a CEO-type leader Yarvin likened to a dictator.
There’s more:
Yarvin wrote that in a second term, Trump could appoint a different person to act as the nation’s “CEO.” This CEO would be enabled to run roughshod over the federal government, with Trump in the background as “chairman of the board.” The metaphors clarify the core idea: Run the government as a rogue corporation rather than a public institution beholden to the rules of democracy.
Wellman notes:
This is about creating unfettered and unchecked oligarchy with crypto and tech bros driving an unchecked economy for the rich.
Yes, now a Trump-loving guy in business with Peter Thiel and the Trump family and who is totally unbeholden to pesky military lawyers sits in total control of the military of the United States. He’s literally just been made an advisor to a company that has received investments from Thiel and was founded by Jared Kushner’s brother.
All the stuff in the above Bluesky post really is on Dan Caine’s LinkedIn for everyone, including our supposed best journalists, to see.
MSM Aids The End Of America By Omission
Normalizing coverage by legacy media often omits Thiel and Musk’s fascist endgame. I think more people would be taking to the streets in an attempt to stop these plans if they fully understood their goals.
Devastatingly, our supposed best journalists are turning a blind eye and failing in their responsibility to inform the public of dire threats with the prominence and frequency that their consequentiality requires:
Thankfully, independent journalists like Gil and Fred, as well as newsrooms like Vox and Sludge, are providing the essential context needed in this moment. It’s up to us to spread context far and wide.
For instance, Vox just came out with a piece discussing Musk’s grandfather’s pursuit of a “dictatorship of engineers.” (Democracy Now! also reported on this two weeks ago and I referenced that reporting in this piece.)
And Sludge reported this on Monday:
There are a lot of factors for why the elected Democrats can’t seem to muster a powerful opposition to the administration, one of which is that they have financially tied their political futures to the companies and industries that benefit from it. A recent campaign finance filing that has so far gone unnoticed provides a good case in point.
Still America, For Now
Luckily, even Americans working in the Trump administration are realizing that DODGY (we should all refuse to ascribe legitimacy to ‘DOGE’, even in the language we use to refer to it) is a massive fraud upon the American people by deeply disturbed oligarchs. In time-honored American fashion they are standing up and making their voices heard, publicly resigning in protest to draw attention to the dismantling of our country. From The Guardian:
“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by the Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”
The employees also warned that many of those enlisted by Musk to help him slash the size of the federal government under Donald Trump’s administration were political ideologues who did not have the necessary skills or experience for the task ahead of them.
The mass resignation of engineers, data scientists and product managers is a temporary setback for Musk and the Republican president’s tech-driven purge of the federal workforce. It comes amid a flurry of court challenges that have sought to stall, stop or unwind their efforts to fire or coerce thousands of government workers out of jobs.
It appears the workers who resigned were folded into DODGY when the new administration took over. They previously worked for the United States Digital Service. It’s important to understand these weren’t Musk loyalists who quit while also heeding their warning of our government’s dismantling.
Public Enlightenment provides the context we need to understand the news. When you sign up as a subscriber or pledge a subscription, you're supporting the idea that we are in this trouble because of our toxic information ecosystem and we must fight like hell to improve public understanding. Every single day.
Help spread this far and wide:
Like this post!
Re-stack it using the ♻️ button below!
Share this post on other social media sites:
Join the conversation, add your thoughts and other reporting that contextualizes the current slide towards techno-fascism:
I livestream about media and democracy every Monday at 9pm ET. You can watch me do it live right here on Substack and check out my other content on Twitch and YouTube. Be sure to follow me on TikTok and Instagram. Every like, follow, repost, and subscribe helps me continue the work of changing our information ecosystem to one in which we all achieve healthier outcomes.
What other great pieces of contextualizing information can we share in the comments, gang? Let's help everyone access the healthiest, fact-based information possible. Every day.
This was all very predictable before the election. Biden (and particularly Garland) are seemingly complicit in this tyranny