The Tech Fascist Plan for the Presidency
A small group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists – most prominent among them Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk – have taken serious steps to capture the country’s highest offices and have recently succeeded in installing JD Vance as Trump’s VP pick, while funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into their election. Most of the people backing Trump and JD Vance from the venture capital world are associated with Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Founder’s Fund (Peter Thiel’s VC firm)/the PayPal Mafia.
These venture capitalists have been heavily investing in two major, broad-ranging political programs over the past two and a half years: American Dynamism, and the Network State. It is these political agendas that will be foremost in their influence over the election and the presidency itself. It is these programs that motivate their engagement in the democracy and answer the question: what do they want?
The answers suggest that venture capital is looking for more than an exchange of money for favors, but rather that it brings with it a political, ideological, military and cultural agenda that has been fully articulated in the preceding years. This isn’t an exhaustive post, but rather aims to capture significant elements of this conspiracy that are being left out of the press — particularly the military and weapons agenda.
American Dynamism
American Dynamism is a political platform from a16z, joined by Founder’s Fund and cronies, that views America as falling/failed, and proposes a plan for getting it “back on track” by handing large parts of the country over to venture capital, while re-assuming its competitive and military leadership of the world through venture capital-led weapons startups. A new military build-out is central to the plan.
American Dynamism was launched in 2022, with a kick-off blog post from Andreessen Horowitz venture capitalist Katherine Boyle:
“Though the Manhattan Project and the Moon Landing happened when America was arguably at her most dynamic, the technology sector is the only sector of the American economy that has maintained its vibrancy, dynamism, and growth through innovation over the last 25 years. The top six companies by market capitalization in the U.S. are now technology companies, two of which were founded in the 2000s. In 1996, none of the top six companies were technology companies. Indeed, tech has been propping up all other sectors including the institutions that have lost all civic and public trust. In 2020, this fact became so obvious that there isn’t much of a counter argument: From the Moderna vaccine to the uninterrupted service of Amazon Prime, Zoom and Netflix, the scientific and operational excellence of consequential technology companies made up for the shortfall of our flailing governmental institutions.”
American Dynamism argues America is failing and Silicon Valley venture capital is the only thing that can save it. (Even as Silicon Valley is destroying it.) Peter Thiel has previously spoken about the need for the GOP to have a more positive message; American Dynamism fits this bill. It boils down to accelerating venture capital’s investments in defense, energy, AI and biotech, removing regulation from venture capital, moving military development to Silicon Valley tech, and giving them major government contracts and increased autonomy and latitude. Not to mention tax incentives and free reign for their crypto financial system, messaging which Trump adopted after numerous meetings with these same venture capitalists.
American Dynamism as a platform has unfolded via large investments and dedicated funds, conferences and events, media and press, and community development. Venture capital has held numerous American Dynamism-themed defense conferences with founders, start-ups, current and ex-military and current DOD members – including the American Dynamism Summit and the Defense Ventures Summit. You can see videos from the 2022 American Dynamism Summit and the 2024 American Dynamism Summit. There have also been a series of American Dynamism meetups, heavily focused on military development and recruiting software engineers into the ideology. This has resulted in a strand of militant patriotism among some programmers.
After several years of aggressive marketing, Andreessen Horowitz has much of Silicon Valley on board, has lobbied for it in Congress (and recently opened offices in DC), held a dizzying number of events, and had many VC firms and major startups pumping out this messaging for two and a half years, including Lux Capital, DCVC, General Catalyst, Sequoia and 8VC.
Indeed, the most prominent aspect of the American Dynamism program is defense funding. Under the American Dynamism program and funds, a16z, Founder’s Fund and associated firms have been fueling a massive weapons startup boom, most powered by artificial intelligence. Since 2021, venture capitalists have spent more than $100 billion on defense tech startups. There are a number of weapons startups that have been funded by both a16z and Founder’s Fund, including Hadrian, a weapon factory maker; Radiant, a portable nuclear reactor for military sites; and Anduril, a massive weapons startup with over 2,200 employees creating weapons systems for earth, air, sky and water, and aiming to take on existing players like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. The goal is to move most military development to venture capital. This agenda is being almost totally ignored in media coverage about the election, even though many of these weapons startups are being used in the genocide of Palestinians as we speak.
A manifesto from Anduril, “Rebooting the Arsenal”, published in June 2022, states:
“If the allied democracies are to break free from the morass of bureaucracy, embedded habits, and mediocre technology that have failed our men and women in uniform for decades, we will need action at scale. Not just a handful, but dozens of new, innovative companies will be required to modernize our military. Tens of thousands of engineers will have to ask themselves if there is more to their careers than money alone. And our officials in government, without whom this effort will be for naught, will have to listen and to lead…
Software will change how war is waged. The battlefield of the future will teem with artificial intelligence, unmanned systems, which fight, gather reconnaissance data, and communicate at breathtaking speeds… The traditional division between land, air, sea, and space domains will become increasingly anachronistic, as nation states compete for total, all-domain superiority.
Software is finally eating the battlefield, whether the defense industry likes it or not. Whether it is AI-enabled drone swarms, networked weapons systems, real-time situational awareness generated by sensor fusion, or cyberwarfare, software is at the core of the weapon systems of the future. Building world-class software platforms is an engineering challenge akin to building a fighter jet: the next generation of defense companies will invest in doing so accordingly.”
American Dynamism also involves a massive escalation in tension with China, in order to justify the weapons program and technology accelerationism. This is described in the book The Kill Chain, out from a16z + Founder’s Fund company Anduril:
“Whether the weapons in question are digital, hypersonic, or directed energy, they will be arms — means of military action — and the United States and China will compete to amass these weapons in many of the same ways that great powers once competed over battleships and ballistic missiles. That competition could also encompass nuclear arms, especially considering how much China has been emphasizing nuclear forces in its military modernization.”
What is being brought to the election and candidacy by Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel is not just financial backing for the existing agenda, but rather a fully realized, new military strategy that puts military development in the hands of Silicon Valley and leads us further towards hostility and war with China.
Military is not the only thing that American Dynamism wants to Silicon Valley-ize. Its proponents have also talked about dismantling our traditional public schooling systems, in favor of private schools funded by venture capital, replacing public educational institutions with VC-backed schools such as Thiel’s “University of Austin”. The overall model of VC expansion is to make everything function like VC and startups, and that is the crux of the American Dynamism program.
Biotech is also key, with the thrust to accelerate biotech by destroying regulatory bodies and moving faster to human testing. Thiel attempted to compromise the FDA in the last election by getting Balaji Srinivasan appointed as head under Trump. Balaji Srinivasan believes in consent-only medical testing and the dismantling of the FDA. A failed effort then, but especially poignant now, as Trump prepares for his 2nd term backed by these same tech billionaires. Venture capitalists have hundreds of biotech startups that face a key bottleneck in the American regulatory system. In order to escape this, Thiel has run unregulated experimental herpes vaccine trials in St. Kitts. Próspera, the Network State settlement in Honduras backed by Andreessen, Thiel, Srinivasan and Lonsdale, has been conducting highly dubious medical experiments in gene therapy as the medical community of Honduras have united in an uproar to demand a shutdown of these medical experiments.
The Network State
The Network State is a conspiracy by high ranking tech billionaires, most prominently Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan and Patri Friedman, to start their own sovereign nation-state. This is not an outlandish accusation, but rather, what they have said they are doing, what their actions confirm, and where their money is going. The Network State suggests that the ultimate goal of these venture capitalists is not to improve America, but to start their own nation-state, using a mix of expropriated land from the US (see the California Forever project in Solano County), and colonies in the global south, like Próspera. A distributed land mass, but one nation-state.
The Network State has been invested in by Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Balaji Srinivasan, the Winklevoss twins, and Sam Altman. It grew out of early seasteading efforts by Peter Thiel and the Seasteading Institute, a project started by Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman) and Peter Thiel 15 years ago. The goal was to establish sovereignty through floating development projects. While this proved impractical for engineering purposes, the model has now moved into old fashioned colonialism: stealing other people’s land. This suggests a very long trajectory of this idea and program within the same venture capitalists now pushing Trump into a second term.
The “chief evangelist” and marketing face of the Network State is a long-term Andreessen Horowitz partner and former Coinbase (a16z) CTO, Balaji Srinivasan, who wrote the book, “The Network State: How to Start a New Country”, its first endorsement from Marc Andreessen himself. From the book’s summary:
“A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states….
…. As the population and economy of a startup society grow comparable to that of a legacy state, with millions of citizens and billions in income, it should eventually be able to attain recognition from existing sovereigns — and ultimately the United Nations — just as Bitcoin has now become a bona fide national currency.”
Through the venture capital firm, Pronomos Capital, Patri Friedman, Andreessen, Srinivasan, Lonsdale and Thiel have been funding operational colonies in Honduras, Nigeria and other countries in Africa, the Philippines and the Mediterranean, including a yet-announced site called Praxis, that is funded additionally by the Winklevosses and Sam Altman. Their goal is not America per se, but rather, to establish and run their own “parallel”, sovereign nation-state… something that they require America to tolerate and permit.
The carving out of American land for VC to run as its own sovereign territory is the domestic aspect of the Network State. This is what they are doing in Solano County, California, where they have been violently entering via secretive and aggressive tactics in order to get their own venture capital city built, "California Forever"/“East Solano Plan”. This is also reflected in their attempts to carve out their own land and political system in San Francisco and dismantle/attack/ takeover the local government there.
Balaji Srinivasan has provided a particularly chilling image of the Network State operations on American soil, focusing again on these themes of the collapse of America, in a 2023 comment:
“The closer you are to Blue America [Democratic Party-controlled regions] the more the level of state failure … I don’t think all states fail … I think the red states might turn out to be like Eastern Europe or the Baltics… What I think the next step is, is to not simply think of it as just the state versus the network … Another way is the network working with smart people of the state, like Nayib Bukele, like Dubai … red states and purple states [in the U.S.]... Find jurisdictions like El Salvador. Find jurisdictions like Palau. Find places where the state is actually supporting the network. Do deals with them … And then you’ve got state support and you’ve got, you know, a government in your corner.
[Using the movie Pacific Rim as a reference]: So right now, this giant monster has arisen out of the ocean and it is the U.S. Federal Government, and it is attacking all of the crypto banks, it is attacking all the tech banks … it’s attacking every single piece of the future and it’s just going all-out on us… Against the government you cannot fight as an individual or even as a company. To beat this gigantic monster you need a giant robot, a good robot of your own. You need your own government … you need the good states fighting the bad states … now it’s sovereign versus sovereign.”
This indicates that the VC agenda actually sees America and its governments as an enemy and a competing (or, in the best case scenario), partnering sovereign.
Of course, crypto is a major focus as they aim to be allowed to run their own "parallel" financial system without interference from the United States whatsoever. This is dangerous because venture capital is hostile to the existing financial system and has already attacked it, causing the bank run on Silicon Valley Bank after which they were bailed out and significant outflow went into their crypto banks. The Network State flourishes with crypto - a deregulated, billionaire-backed financial system - operating outside an official governing body.
The Network State suggests that venture capitalists are not Republicans participating in the democracy, but rather, anti-democratic forces with their own agendas of sovereignty, envisioning a world of America’s downfall and themselves as the successors.
American Dynamism, and the Network State: these two sweeping, massively funded and staffed programs, indicate the direction and program that is propelling tech billionaire engagement with the government.