The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … ” [...] Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. [...]

In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays. Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example: “Did you want to take the sign off of Elon’s building?”

Once an officer joins the Grays, they get a special uniform designed by their tech overlords. The Grays will also donate heavily to police charities and “merge the Gray and police social networks.” Then, in a show of force, they’ll march through the city together. [...]

“You have the A.I. Flying Spaghetti Monster. You have the Bitcoin parade. You have the drones flying overhead in formation.... You have bubbling genetic experiments on beakers.… You have the police at the Gray Pride parade. They’re flying the Anduril drones …” [...]

Those who try to downplay Balaji’s importance in Silicon Valley often portray him as a “clown.” But Donald Trump taught us that clowns can be dangerous, especially those with proximity to influence and power. In the nearly 11 years since his secession speech at Y Combinator, Balaji’s politics have become even more stridently authoritarian and extremist, yet he remains a celebrated figure in key circles.

The podcasters, bro-ish anonymous Twitter posters, online philosophers, artists, and amorphous scenesters in this world are variously known as “dissidents,” “neo-reactionaries,” “post-leftists,” or the “heterodox” fringe—though they’re all often grouped for convenience under the heading of America’s New Right. They have a wildly diverse set of political backgrounds, with influences ranging from 17th-century Jacobite royalists to Marxist cultural critics to so-called reactionary feminists to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, whom they sometimes refer to with semi-ironic affection as Uncle Ted. Which is to say that this New Right is not a part of the conservative movement as most people in America would understand it. It’s better described as a tangled set of frameworks for critiquing the systems of power and propaganda that most people reading this probably think of as “the way the world is.” And one point shapes all of it: It is a project to overthrow the thrust of progress, at least such as liberals understand the word.

Vance’s other critical political connection — and his primary political patron — can be found 3,000 miles to the west of Washington in Los Angeles. In recent years, Peter Thiel, whose venture capital firm Vance worked for before running for Senate, has become the chief financier of the New Right ecosystem. And Thiel’s idiosyncratic brand of techno-libertarianism — which combines an abiding skepticism of liberal democracy with a belief in national restoration through utopian modes of technological innovation — has become a touchstone of intellectual discussions on the New Right.

In his biography of Thiel, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, Max Chafkin writes, “The Thiel ideology is complicated and, in parts, self-contradictory, and will take many of the pages that follow to explore, but it combines an obsession with technological progress with nationalist politics—a politics that at times has seemingly flirted with white supremacy.” Let’s see, we’ve go some futurism, nationalism, maybe a little bit of racism here and there…hmm, what does that all add up to? What a mystery this guy is! [...]

He combines the ideology of white collar, petit-bourgeois intermediary class with its emphases direct management techniques and closely-held ownership with the grandiose, world-spanning designs of an industrial titan. There’s really no contradiction within Peter Thiel’s politics, they are quite consistent: he’s just realized, more clearly than his opponents often, that there’s ultimately a contradiction between the rule of capital and democracy, and the way to deal with this contradiction, as far as he’s concerned, is to do away with democracy.