Cut Covid Booster Access

FDA to Cut Covid Booster Access, Excluding In-Home Carers

By restricting vaccinations, “the FDA creates a dangerous public health gap.”

Julia Métraux

On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration announced that Covid booster shots will be limited to people over 65 and those with pre-existing health conditions that would put them at higher risk of acute complications.

The FDA’s move is not surprising, given that Trump-appointed Covid contrarians Vinay Prasad, the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, and Marty Makary, the recently confirmed FDA commissioner, have openly advocated for such restrictions since before the initial vaccine was even approved. “The FDA will approve vaccines for high-risk persons and, at the same time, demand robust, gold-standard data on persons at low risk,” the two wrote in a New England Journal of Medicine article that was published on Tuesday.

Many groups of people face new or added risks as a consequence of the FDA’s decision; notably, the agency has not signaled any intention to establish carveouts for caregivers of people who still qualify for Covid vaccines under its new rules. People who qualify for the vaccine, including disabled children, those with cancer, and aging adults, may rely on the support of caregivers to keep them healthy and help them function in day-to-day life. Even with masking and other protective measures, added immunity for people caring for those with Covid, or at risk of contracting it, is important in reducing the odds of infection and of subsequently contracting Long Covid, which 20 million people in the US have been diagnosed with.

“By restricting vaccine access to caregivers who don’t meet age or high-risk criteria,” said Jason Resendez, CEO of the National Alliance for Caregiving, “the FDA creates a dangerous public health gap, as unvaccinated caregivers face increased risk of contracting and transmitting Covid-19 to the older adults and seriously ill individuals who depend on their care.”

Beth Connor, who lives in North Carolina—which also enacted a mask ban in 2024—is the mother of a six-year-old with a chronic lung disease who has had a tracheostomy. Her son requires round-the-clock care, which is provided by her, her husband, and a nurse; they would not be eligible for vaccines under the FDA’s new policy.

“If one of us were to get sick, it would really impact our ability to care for our son, who is very dependent on us for meeting all of his basic needs and keeping him safe,” Connor told me.

Anna Sanders, who is based in Texas, lost her dad following a kidney transplant after one of his nurses came to work with Covid. Sanders, now assisting in care for her 71-year-old mother, is concerned that “limiting access to the vaccine will only cause more situations like this.”

Other options—like traveling to Canada to get vaccinated—are much less practical for families like Connor’s, with a child who has complex health issues. Other full-time caregivers are in the same boat.

Like Sanders, Connor is concerned that limiting who can get the Covid vaccine, and thereby lowering herd immunity, would limit what her family is able to do for and with her son.

“Once we got [the Covid vaccine] and more people getting it, it felt like we could actually go to a playground, go to a library, just things that our kid enjoys,” Connor said. “If people are not able to get it, that really impacts our ability just to be in the community.”

DOJ Fired Her

She Denied Mel Gibson a Gun—Then Trump’s DOJ Fired Her

Former US Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer describes “damaging and destructive” policies happening behind the scenes at the Justice Department.

Reveal

When Liz Oyer was appointed US pardon attorney in 2022 by President Joe Biden, she’d landed her dream job. As a longtime public defender, Oyer was now in a position to advise the president on the backlog of thousands of individuals seeking presidential clemency. But earlier this year, her dream job ended abruptly.

In March, Oyer was asked to make a recommendation to Attorney General Pam Bondi to reinstate actor Mel Gibson’s gun rights, which were rescinded after a domestic violence conviction in 2011. Oyer reviewed the case and refused. Within hours, she says she was terminated. 

Last month, Oyer testified about her firing in front of Congress. She not only accused the Department of Justice of “ongoing corruption” and abuses of power, but she also said the administration tried to send armed US marshals to her home carrying a letter warning her against testifying. Oyer says it felt like “an attempt to display the power of the Department of Justice” and “make me afraid of telling the truth about the circumstances leading up to my termination.” 

In a statement, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche called Oyer’s allegations about her firing erroneous and said her decision to voice those accusations is “in direct violation of her ethical duties as an attorney and is a shameful distraction from our critical mission to prosecute violent crime, enforce our nation’s immigration laws, and make America safe again.”

On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Oyer sits down with host Al Letson to discuss the details of her firing, the role of the US pardon attorney, and how an advocate and defender of January 6 insurrectionists took her place inside the Justice Department.

Messier 63

A bright spiral galaxy of the northern sky, Messier 63 is nearby, about 30 million light-years distant toward the loyal constellation Canes Venatici. Also cataloged as NGC 5055, the majestic island universe is nearly 100,000 light-years across, about the size of our own Milky Way. Its bright core and majestic spiral arms lend the galaxy its popular name, The Sunflower Galaxy. This exceptionally deep exposure also follows faint loops and curling star streams far into the galaxy's halo. Extending nearly 180,000 light-years from the galactic center, the star streams are likely remnants of tidally disrupted satellites of M63. Other satellite galaxies of M63 can be spotted in the remarkable wide-field image, including dwarf galaxies, which could contribute to M63's star streams in the next few billion years.

What is in it for him?????

Why Warren Davidson voted against the House GOP megabill

Davidson was one of only two Republican “no” votes.

By Nicholas Wu and Katherine Tully-McManus

Two Republicans cast votes in opposition to the House GOP megabill Thursday morning. One — Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky — was expected, given his long history of criticism of Republican leaders’ approach to the legislation.

The other — Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio — was somewhat more surprising. A devout fiscal hawk, he has not been among the House Republicans most vocal in pushing for changes to the sprawling party-line bill.

The former member of the Freedom Caucus has long aligned himself with the right flank of the GOP caucus and — like Massie — had signaled he was concerned about long-term deficit spending.

Davidson was among the holdouts on the budget blueprint that set up consideration of the bill earlier this year, but he came around in support after he said he received “assurances” on cuts to discretionary spending.

But Davidson couldn’t get to yes on Thursday’s early morning vote, mainly because of what he views as a failure to enact enough cost reduction.

“While I love many things in the bill, promising someone else will cut spending in the future does not cut spending. Deficits do matter and this bill grows them now,” Davidson posted on X just after 6 a.m. Thursday. “The only Congress we can control is the one we’re in. Consequently, I cannot support this big deficit plan.”

Still, his opposition had flown under the radar. He sits on the Financial Services Committee, which did not have a central role in crafting the bill. Members of the Budget, Ways and Means, and Energy and Commerce panels had more influence over the course of the legislation.

Warren is no stranger to being a rebel, even among the iconoclasts in his own party. He was ousted from the House Freedom Caucus late last year after backing John McGuire in a primary battle against Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.). He first came to prominence by winning former Speaker John Boehner’s House seat when he retired, then immediately joining the Freedom Caucus that had long plagued Boehner.

Leadership said they weren’t blindsided, with House Majority Leader Steve Scalise telling reporters he wasn’t surprised by Davidson’s vote. Davidson’s fellow Hill conservatives had tried unsuccessfully to flip his vote but came to acknowledge he was dug in.

“I was talking to him but … I wasn’t going to get Massie to yes, either,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who’s close to Davidson.

“He indicated he was going to vote no for quite some time. He was locked in on a no,” added Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.).

And others who held out on the megabill signaled they might come down on Davidson’s side in the long run.

“Warren’s a principled man. And history may bear out that Warren and Thomas were the wise men in this course,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas).

More shit is coming.......

Musk huddles with Energy and Commerce GOP

It comes a day after the Trump ally and head of the Department of Government Efficiency initiative met with Senate Commerce Republicans.

By Ben Leonard and Anthony Adragna

Elon Musk met with House Energy and Commerce Republicans Thursday morning to discuss energy issues and artificial intelligence, according to a person with direct knowledge of the confab.

It came a day after President Donald Trump’s ally and head of the Department of Government Efficiency initiative met with Senate Republicans — many of them on the Commerce Committee — on similar issues, including bolstering competitiveness with China.

Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) has taken a keen interest in artificial intelligence — including proposing a 10-year moratorium on state and local regulation of AI models in his portion of Republicans’ domestic policy package that passed the House on Thursday morning, and honing in on ways to tackle the technology’s high level of energy use.

After the meeting, Guthrie said Musk’s conversation with lawmakers focused on the energy needs for further AI development in the U.S: “It’s a national security issue, and we’re going to fix it — and we’re going to have to find a way to work bipartisan, to do it.”

“We’re dependent on China for so many things,” he continued, adding that this dynamic “has to be the focus” for how Congress proceeds in the policy arena.

Undiscussed during the meeting, according to Guthrie, was Musk’s role in President Donald Trump’s Washington going forward — even as the billionaire tech mogul has receded from public view.

“Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to get into that,” Guthrie said. “We would have liked to have.”

Scores of GOP committee members were present for the session, which took place mere hours after the House advanced the party’s megabill in a marathon legislative session. Guthrie joked: “I think everybody’s ready to take a nap now.”

Musk, wearing a Tesla bomber jacket, posed for pictures with members inside the committee room, but did not respond to shouted questions as he exited.

Not everyone indicated they’d learned a ton from the session with Musk.

“Just typical AI talk — how we need energy, what we’re going to need, how we’re going to get it,” said Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.). “Kind of boring, to be honest with you.”

Testy exchange

‘I don’t work for you’: Jeffries’ broadside against GOP megabill included testy exchange

The House Democratic leader spoke for roughly 37 minutes, framing his party’s attacks on the legislation.

By Mia McCarthy and Nicholas Wu

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries sketched out Democrats’ attacks on the Republican megabill before it passed early Thursday morning — and engaged in a brief testy exchange after he was admonished for his remarks.

Jeffries, who as a party leader is allowed to speak for an unlimited amount of time during debate, spoke for roughly 37 minutes starting around 5:30 a.m., calling the sprawling party-line legislation “an assault on the economy, an assault on health care, an assault on nutritional assistance, an assault on tax fairness and an assault on fiscal responsibility.”

In one fiery moment, the Republican presiding over the debate — Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas — told Jeffries to direct his comments to the chair rather than referring to Republicans as “you.”

Jeffries then suggested he was not being given the same treatment as Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who had just wrapped up his own extended speech.

“You know what’s interesting? Every time I come on this floor, I can use sharp language, [Scalise] can use sharp language, you choose to admonish me,” he added. “I don’t work for you, sir. I work for the American people.”

Womack again urged him to respect House “decorum"; Jeffries shot back that he’d add 15 minutes to his remarks every time he is interrupted.

Jeffries went on to frame the attacks that Democrats plan to make over the coming 18 months as they prepare for the 2026 midterms. He focused especially on cuts to funding for safety-net programs and shared stories of people who rely on these programs from Republican districts, some of which Democrats are hoping to flip next year.

“Children will get hurt. Women will get hurt. Older Americans who rely on Medicaid for nursing home care and for home care will get hurt. People with disabilities who rely on Medicaid to survive will get hurt. Hospitals in your districts will close. Nursing homes will shut down. And people will die,” he said. “That’s not hype. That’s not hyperbole. That’s not a hypothetical.”

“We’re here to say as House Democrats ... if your representatives won’t fight for you, we will,” he continued.

That rhetoric stirred an angry response from Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.), who called the Democratic leader “pathetic” for “fear mongering” during his speech. Van Orden, whose district has been targeted by Democrats, referred to Jeffries — who is the first Black congressional party leader — with a crude reference to Barack Obama, the first Black president.

“Pretendabama is currently lying his ass off again,” Van Orden said in a post on X. “Fear mongering with our seniors, hungry children, veterans, and all Americans who are most in need.”

Jeffries in his remarks said Democrats would have the last word at the ballot box.

“This day may very well turn out to be the day that House Republicans lost control of the United States House of Representatives,” he said. “Because the American people are paying attention. They are smarter than you think, and they know when they are being hurt, they know when their interests are not being served, and they know when they have been lied to and deceived.”

Kind of a win.......

Deadlocked Supreme Court won’t allow nation’s first public religious charter school

But the 4-4 judgement sets no precedent for officials around the country.

By Josh Gerstein and Juan Perez Jr.

The Supreme Court deadlocked Thursday on whether openly religious schools are entitled under the Constitution to receive public money through state charter-school programs.

By splitting 4-4 on the question, the justices left in place a lower-court ruling in Oklahoma denying public funding to what would have been the nation’s first religious public charter school. But the high court’s deadlock sets no precedent on the issue to guide officials in the rest of the country.

The court was short-handed because Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who has ties to a clinic at Notre Dame Law School that advised the Catholic Oklahoma school, recused from the case. It’s unclear whether she would participate if the issue came before the court again in another case.

The court’s one-page judgment did not specify how individual justices voted, but it appears likely that a conservative justice sided with the court’s three liberal justices to produce the deadlock.

The diarrhea slides down the leg of congress..

House Republicans pass ‘big, beautiful bill’ after weeks of division

The sweeping measure heads to the Senate, where Republicans are expected to make changes.

By Katherine Tully-McManus and Jennifer Scholtes

House Republicans came together to pass their domestic policy megabill early Thursday, after weeks of internal conflict and last-minute intervention from President Donald Trump.

The 215-214 vote is a major victory for Speaker Mike Johnson, who largely kept his conference together after days of around-the-clock negotiations with holdouts. He kept his promise of passing the measure before next week’s Memorial Day recess. The bill includes a fresh round of tax cuts sought by Trump, as well as hundreds of billions of dollars in new funding for the military and border security.

The vote went almost entirely along party lines. Two Republicans joined Democrats in voting no: Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, whose opposition was expected, and Warren Davidson of Ohio, a somewhat surprising defection. The chair of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, voted present. Two other Republicans missed the vote.

In a rare all-nighter for the House, GOP leaders gaveled the chamber back into session just after 11 p.m. Wednesday evening, forcing lawmakers to work through debate and procedural votes until the bill passed just before 7 a.m. Thursday morning.

“And after a long week and a long night, and countless hours of work over the past year — a lot of prayer and a lot of teamwork — my friends, it quite literally is again ‘morning in America,’” Johnson said in his final floor speech before the passage vote, in a nod to former President Ronald Reagan’s signature 1984 campaign ad.

The speaker called the bill “historic,” “nation-shaping” and “life-changing,” while claiming that it is the “most consequential legislation that any party has ever passed, certainly under a majority this thin.”

Now heading to the Senate, the bill is titled the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” at Trump’s suggestion.

“This is arguably the most significant piece of Legislation that will ever be signed in the History of our Country!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Thursday morning. “Great job by Speaker Mike Johnson, and the House Leadership, and thank you to every Republican who voted YES on this Historic Bill! Now, it’s time for our friends in the United States Senate to get to work, and send this Bill to my desk AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!”

Democrats have their own names for the measure, including “the GOP tax scam” and “one big, ugly bill.” Minority party leaders are deriding the bill by pointing to nonpartisan forecasts that it would increase the federal deficit by trillions of dollars and cause more than 10 million people to lose health care coverage, while shifting resources away from the lowest-income households and to the wealthiest.

In a lengthy closing speech ahead of the final vote, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries accused Republicans of bankrolling tax cuts for the rich with cuts to safety-net programs like Medicaid and SNAP food assistance.

“And people will die. That’s not hype. That’s not hyperbole. That’s not a hypothetical,” Jeffries said, before a heated exchange about “decorum” with the Republican presiding over the floor.

The bill’s path to passage was smoothed by a 42-page amendment that the House Rules Committee approved after spending more than 21 hours on a markup. The package of changes was loaded with hand-tailored provisions to woo Republican holdouts.

Trump also made commitments beyond what is in the bill, including to take executive action to reduce “waste, fraud and abuse” in Medicaid, according to fiscal hawks who came around to supporting the measure in the final hours before the vote.

Revisions include moving up the start date of Medicaid work requirements from Jan. 1, 2029, to Dec. 31, 2026, and expanding the criteria for states that could lose a portion of their federal payments if they offer coverage to undocumented people.

The eleventh-hour changes would also weaken the clean electricity investment and production tax credits created by the Democrats’ 2022 climate law, a change that clean energy developers warn would make them largely unusable.

Republicans from blue states won a bigger boost to the cap on state and local tax deductions to $40,000 per household, with an income limit set at $500,000. Fiscal hawks hated the so-called SALT increase but swallowed it in exchange for the Medicaid changes.

The bill now heads to the Senate, where Republicans are expected to tear up many of the policy provisions sought by House GOP hard-liners.

Rep. Chip Roy said after the House passage vote that he will be laying out ultimatums for what the bill needs to look like when it bounces back from the Senate. The Texas Republican will oppose the measure if it is projected to increase the federal deficit over the next five years, he said, even if the price-tag balances out over a decade.

“I think the 10-year window is bullshit. So that’s why I’m still not happy with the bill,” Roy told reporters. “I’ll go ahead and draw one of my red lines.”

The stupid insane shit knows nothing of the law........

Vance says Roberts is ‘profoundly wrong’ about judiciary’s role to check executive branch

By Kit Maher

Vice President JD Vance called Chief Justice John Roberts’ comments earlier this month that the judiciary’s role is to check the executive branch a “profoundly wrong sentiment” and said the courts should be “deferential” to the president, particularly when it comes to immigration.

“I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment. That’s one half of his job, the other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch. And you cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the courts tell the American people they’re not allowed to have what they voted for,” Vance told New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat on the “Interesting Times” podcast, which was taped on Monday.

Vance was responding to Roberts’ remarks at an event in Buffalo, New York, where the chief justice stressed the importance of judicial independence. “The judiciary is a coequal branch of government, separate from the others with the authority to interpret the Constitution as law, and strike down, obviously, acts of Congress or acts of the president,” Roberts said at the event.

The judiciary’s role, Roberts added, is to “decide cases but, in the course of that, check the excesses of Congress or of the executive and that does require a degree of independence.”

Vance’s interview with The Times, which was taped in Rome after he attended the inaugural mass for Pope Leo XIV, also delved into the vice president’s Catholic faith and how it shapes his role as a political leader.

While Vance said he believes the administration has “an obligation to treat people humanely,” he also said it’s an “open question” how much due process is “due” to undocumented immigrants.

“I’ve obviously expressed public frustration on this, which is yes, illegal immigrants, by virtue of being in the United States, are entitled to some due process,” Vance said. “But the amount of process that is due and how you enforce those legislative standards and how you actually bring them to bear is, I think, very much an open question.”

On Friday, the Supreme Court blocked President Donald Trump from moving forward with deporting a group of immigrants in northern Texas under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act – a win for Venezuelans who feared they were going to be removed under the wartime authority. The administration invoked the powers earlier this year to speed deportations of alleged gang members and has cited national security concerns.

Asked about the justification for using those legal authorities to deport people, Vance conceded that “we don’t have 5 million uniform combatants.” But he pointed to thousands of migrants who he said, without evidence, “intentionally came to the United States to cause violence” to argue that courts need to be deferential to the president on what he called a “public safety” issue.

“I think that the courts need to be somewhat deferential. In fact, I think the design is that they should be extremely deferential to these questions of political judgment made by the people’s elected president of United States,” Vance said. “People under appreciate the level of public safety stress that we’re under when the president talks about how bad crime is.”

When asked how he would define success on immigration after Trump’s term, Vance also pointed to the courts.

“Success, to me, is not so much a number, though, obviously I’d love to see the gross majority of the illegal immigrants who came in under Biden deported,” Vance said. “Success, to me, is that we have established a set of rules and principles that the courts are comfortable with and that we have the infrastructure to do that, allows us to deport large numbers of illegal aliens when large numbers of illegal aliens come into the country.”

Vance acknowledged he’s sometimes had to reconcile his faith with the administration’s policy decisions while going on to defend its actions on immigration.

“I understand your point and making these judgments, if you take the teachings of our faith seriously, they are hard. I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t struggled with some of this, that I haven’t thought about whether, you know, we’re doing the precisely right thing,” Vance told Douthat.

“The concern that you raise is fair, there has to be some way in which you’re asking yourself as you go about enforcing the law – even, to your point, against a very dangerous people – that you’re enforcing the law consistent with, you know, the Catholic Church’s moral dictates and so forth.”

Douthat interjected, “And American law and basic principles.”

“Most importantly, American law,” Vance said.

Asked about his disagreements on immigration with Popes Francis and Leo, Vance – who said he was wearing a tie Francis gifted him before his death – said that you have to “hold two ideas in your head at the same time” about enforcing border laws and respecting the dignity of migrants.

“I’m not saying I’m always perfect at it. But I at least try to think about, okay, there are obligations that we have to people who, in some ways, are fleeing violence or at least fleeing poverty. I also have a very sacred obligation, I think, to enforce the laws and to promote the common good of my own country, defined as the people with the legal right to be here,” Vance said.

“I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly,” he added. “And so that’s not because I hate the migrants, or I’m motivated by grievance. That’s because I’m trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation.”

CEO-led American monarchy

Trump’s reign fits Curtis Yarvin’s blueprint of a CEO-led American monarchy. What is technological fascism?

Story by Luke Munn

The plan was simple. It started by retiring all government employees by offering them incentives to leave and never return. To avoid anarchy and keep authority, the police and military would be retained.

Government funds would be seized and the money redirected to more worthwhile pursuits. Court orders pushing back against these measures as “unconstitutional” should be summarily ignored. The press should be massaged and censored as necessary. Finally, universities, scientific institutions, and NGOs should also be snapped off, their funding terminated.

These moves resemble many made (or attempted) in the first 100 days of the second Trump administration. But they were all laid out in 2012 by a single person: Curtis Yarvin.

In the past five years, Yarvin’s reactionary blueprints for governance have found powerful backers in both Silicon Valley and Washington circles.

His ideas have been taken up and repeated in various ways by Peter Thiel (PayPal), Elon Musk (X, Tesla), Alexander Karp (Palantir) and other founders, CEOs and thought-leaders within the broader tech industry. He was a guest at Trump’s Coronation Ball in January.

Perhaps most directly, vice president JD Vance has praised him by name and echoed his ideas, asserting the need for a “de-wokification programme” that “strikes at the heart of the beast”.

Yarvin’s current newsletter, Grey Room, now boasts 57,000 subscribers. “Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe,” cautioned a recent article, “Now They’re Coursing Through Trump’s Washington.”

Yarvin, a 51-year old computer engineer, has been publishing his thoughts on politics for close to 20 years. His original blog, launched in 2007, introduced his potent blend of “the modern engineering mentality, and the great historical legacy of antique, classical and Victorian pre-democratic thought”. Last week, The Washington Post called it “required reading for the extremely online right”.

Democracy was dead and doomed from the beginning, Yarvin argued in his blog, in quippy, Reddit-style prose. Governance should look to other mechanisms (tech) and modes (monarchism) for inspiration.

The state needs a “hard reboot,” asserted Yarvin. “Democratic elections are entirely superfluous to the mechanism of government” he argued. “A vote for democratic or republican matters a little bit,” he admitted, but “basically if the whole electoral system disappeared, Washington would go on running in exactly the same ways”.

For Yarvin, then, it is not just the government that must change – a superficial swap of parties and politicians – but something far more fundamental: the form of government. Democracy was beta tested and failed to deliver. The political operating system must be ripped out and replaced.

While elements (like the term “red pill”) travelled far beyond its pages, Yarvin’s ideas remained on the fringes until recently, with their growing popularity pushing him into the limelight. Last week he hit the headlines due to his debate at Harvard, a place that has become a “symbol of resistance to Trump”, with political theorist Danielle Allen, a democracy advocate.

Allen, who debated Yarvin to provide students with “help thinking about intellectual material”, wrote after the debate that he correctly diagnoses a problem, but not its causes or solutions:

He is right that our political institutions are failing. He is also right that their members have failed to see the depth of our governance problems and their own contributions to them through technocracy and political correctness. […] But Mr. Yarvin leads them astray with his vision of absolute monarchy and racial cleansing.

A technological republic

For Yarvin and others like him, democracy’s fatal flaw is the demos (or, people) itself. Trusting the agency and ability of citizens to govern through representation is naive, Yarvin believes. Alexander Karp, CEO of Palantir, a firm that provides military and intelligence agencies with big data “intelligence”, agrees.

“Why must we always defer to the wisdom of the crowd when it comes to allocating scarce capital in a market economy?” Karp asked in his recent bestseller, The Technological Republic.

For Yarvin, Karp, Thiel and the other elites that embrace these ideas, the people are idiots. A favourite quote (likely apocryphal) is from Churchill, stating the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

If a legacy republic was one by the people and for the people, Karp argues a technological republic will “require the rebuilding of an ownership society, a founder culture that came from tech but has the potential to reshape government”.

In this vision, the state shapeshifts into something sleeker, more successful, more like a startup: the corporation. “A government is just a corporation that owns a country,” Yarvin stresses. Musk has echoed this line: “the government is simply the largest corporation”.

But if this is true, it is a pathetic one, according to its hyper-capitalist detractors: bloated with waste, saddled with debt and slowed by regulation. The state is a dinosaur which makes incremental change and must tread with caution, bending to the needs of its constituents. Founders dictate their commands and impose their will.

Dark enlightenment

“Once the universe of democratic corruption is converted into a (freely transferable) shareholding in gov-corp the owners of the state can initiate rational corporate governance, beginning with the appointment of a CEO,” explains philosopher Nick Land.

“As with any business, the interests of the state are now precisely formalized as the maximization of long-term shareholder value.” In this model, the president becomes the CEO king; the citizen becomes the customer or user.

Land, more than any other, has provided the philosophical cachet around this movement, taking Yarvin’s quippy but fuzzy prose and formalising it into the political and philosophical formation known as neoreaction or the “Dark Enlightenment”, with a sprawling 2014 essay that moves from the death of the west to racial terror, the limits of freedom and the next stage of human evolution.

Land, variously regarded as a cybernetic prophet or scientific racist, has long held anti-humanist and anti-democratic views. “Voice”, or representation – the key tenet of liberal democracy – has been tried and failed, Land argues. The only viable alternative is “exit”: flight from failed governance altogether, into a post-political and post-human future.

To simplify drastically: democracy’s naive belief in equality for all – propped up and policed by the array of humanitarian organisations, government agencies and woke culture warriors that Yarvin sneeringly dubs “The Cathedral” – has held capitalism back from its true potential.

Technological fascism

For Land, Yarvin and others, optimal rule would be both hypercapitalist and hyperconservative: a hybrid political order I’ve begun to research and conceptualise as technological fascism.

Technological fascism gazes to the future and past for inspiration. It couples, in the words of writer Jacob Siegel:

the classic anti-modern, anti-democratic worldview of 18th-century reactionaries to a post-libertarian ethos that embraced technological capitalism as the proper means for administering society.

In this vision, the best form of governance marries reaction and information, Machiavelli and machine learning, aristocracy and artificial intelligence, authoritarianism and technosolutionism.

To revive the glorious traditions of the past, its champions believe, we must leverage the bleeding-edge innovations of tomorrow.

Governing like a monarch

This culture is already infiltrating Washington. Trump is governing like a monarch, making unilateral decisions via hundreds of executive orders, bulldozing through opposition and legislation.

Musk and his DOGE minions stress they need to “delete entire agencies”, commandeering offices and allegedly stealing data under the pretext of eliminating “waste”.

A recent study of over 500 political scientists found “the vast majority think the US is moving swiftly away from liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism”.

In the vision laid out by Yarvin – and taken up more and more by a growing political vanguard – government is either a political inconvenience or a technical problem. Increasingly, the authoritarian imperative to impose absolute rule and the Silicon Valley mantra of “moving fast and breaking stuff” dovetail into a disturbing single directive.

Luke Munn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.