Collection: Resist Rebel Revolt

Format: Article

Author: Melissa Nadia Viviana

Date: February 23, 2025

Tags: Language, Pedantic People, Meaning, Communication

Resist Rebel Revolt is a reader-supported publication by Melissa Nadia Viviana; Author, Women's Rights Activist, & Philosopher.

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Here’s the reason I haven’t made a post in a couple of weeks: I now know that we are on the darkest timeline.

The worst thing that could happen, has already begun to happen: which is that the billionaires in America have gone beyond simply wanting to make money.

And now want to remove democracy and replace it with a tech autocracy, instead.

This was not a realization I was prepared for. I was prepared for corruption from billionaires. I just thought it would be the soft power kind. On inauguration day: I wrote a post that said:

The thought occurred to me, a few days ago, that corrupt billionaires and CEOs want Donald Trump in presidency, not just because he will allow them to get tax breaks and continue with exploitive policies.

No. They want him because he makes such a perfect patsy.

He’s universally hated. And that’s why he’s solely blamed.

He pretends he’s all-powerful. He pretends he’s a cult phenomenon. He pretends he can wave his magic wand and make everything happen or nothing happen.

So he’s his own voluntary scapegoat. The perfect scapegoat for a corrupted system.

The more Donald Trump draws ire from his chronic criminality and his sensationalist fascist Tweets - the more he creates the perfect distraction for all of the powerful people and dark money who don’t want us to even know of their existence.

I’m tired of being distracted.

I want to address the root causes of the society we live in. The paradigm of this Consumerist / Capitalist America.

To me, Donald Trump is a loud-mouthed, ugly-faced, sensationalist, reality-tv puppet, whose insides are suspiciously vacuous. Whose power is suspiciously lacking.

There’s a hand holding him up. Putting him on our TVs. Helping him escape criminal consequences. Using him to poison our justice systems with lifetime court appointments.

And that hand doesn’t have a face. Which is why we focus on Donald Trump. He gives us something to hate when we can’t identify the ambiguous shadow puppeteers in the background.

But I won’t spend the next four years distracting myself with my hatred of Donald Trump. Because hating him won’t solve the systemic consequences of this system we’ve created.

I wrote that post around 6AM. By noon, some of those puppeteers had revealed themselves:

Not even I thought they would do so, so soon.

Then, within a week, Musk had marched into federal buildings with a crew of six 20-year old hackers and seized access to federal data systems with private information about the American people.

They unilaterally and illegally shut down agencies that were created by Congress, and can only be dismantled by Congress.

And they illegally collected data on the American people.

They, then, began firing federal workers en-masse, from just about every agency: large and small.

The word coup was quickly used by Ruth Ben-Ghiat & Timothy Snyder.

Who both study fascism, autocracy, and tyranny academically.

What was supposed to be a slow, anti-democratic burn, became an overnight coup.

But what kind of coup would Musk be undertaking? And why does he need our data?

Within a week of Trump’s inauguration, I wrote on Bluesky

The good news? I no longer think we're going to last 4 years. He is clearly aiming to harm just about everyone.

Every institution, government research, schools, farms, hospitals.

He's his own COVID-19. A threat to everyone. Either he will snap. Or we will snap. But this isn't sustainable for 4 years.

A few days later, I wrote:

I said a few days ago that I no longer believed Trump would last 4 years. I now no longer believe Musk won’t end up in jail after 4 years.

These deranged, de-stabilizing, drug-riddled, lunatics have lost their damn minds.

But why did any of these billionaires lose their minds in the first place?

LA Times, NY Times, WaPo were all papers that had catered to liberals and democratic norms for decades. Jeff Bezos spent ten years handing out free bananas to Seattleites.

Mark Zuckerberg was a Jewish Harvard elite. Yet, he sat in an audience, watching Musk give a Nazi salute to a populist president and supported it?

For a long time, it felt like these tech billionaires were on the side of societal progress and innovation.

I’m a progressive too.

But I’m obviously a humanist and a social progressive. I thought tech progressivism and social progressivism were on the same side. Seattle and San Francisco were both known for being liberal bastions.

So why would these Progressive Tech Billionaires suddenly lose their damn minds and begin to support Trump’s Nazism and Fascism?

In fact, since when has a return to fascism and oppression been seen as progress and innovation?

Musk wanted to occupy Mars. He wanted a Green energy revolution.

Why would Nazism and fascism be the way to do this?

Isn’t that just going backwards?

That’s when the truth began sliding out. And an overwhelming amount of information about the Neoreactionary Movement fell into my lap. This information, at a certain period of time, could have been called a conspiracy theory.

It’s an ideology that has loosely been around for 15 years… sometimes on the fringe. Sometimes right out in the open.

Sometimes watered down for the public (but more radical and extreme in private).

And I also think it has slowly radicalized a lot of our “average Bros”

(You know, like average Joes? These are “average Bros”)

A commenter on one of the Youtube videos that introduced me to this fringe ideology said: “This video was once a conspiracy theory. Now, it’s a documentary.”

That’s how well this particular Youtuber (who collected clips of public speeches by these fringe thinkers) outlined what Musk, DOGE, and Trump have already done.

Only she outlined it 3 months in advance, because their playbook was there, but it’s actually deeper and darker than the Project 2025 playbook.

This is the Cult of Technology: an establishment of Tech Autocracy

They have all kinds of names for it: the Dark Enlightenment. The Neoreactionary Movement (NRx). Accelerationism. Tech Monarchy.

But please don’t get distracted from what it aims to become: a Tech Autocracy.

At its darkest point of ideology, they want to replace Democratic governments run by the people… with corporate governments that will privatize and rule the country like a corporation.

If not “rule the country” - then perhaps create new territories that would be considered “network states” with their own governance outside of typical public governments.

But however they imagine it, these governments would be run, unilaterally, by CEOs, (quite possibly with a predominantly AI workforce).

They sometimes call this a Tech Monarchy. But it’s more in line with a Tech Emperor.

However, you should be worried, that if they did establish a Tech Monarchy, then Donald Trump Jr. would be in line to inherit the kingdom from Trump.

Personally, I believe that this is also why Musk brings his kid everywhere.

Musk, himself, believes that he will become a Tech Emperor or a Tech Autocrat in this New World Order.

And thus, he’s grooming his child, very young, to want power and prestige… in order to take over the Tech Empire he plans to build.

We know that I’ve been saying for months, on repeat:

Chaos is the cheapest ingredient in a revolution. It takes zero effort to destroy things. To sabotage, throw a temper tantrum, & burn it all down.

Chaos agents are weak & have too vapid of an ideology to build a functional system. Revolutionaries who come only with chaos, come with nothing.

I truly believed that Musk was not a visionary. (Despite the fact that he’s been hailed as one for his entire tech career).

Musk’s personality screams malignant narcissist. He wants control, and he wants to take credit for other people’s brilliance.

Essentially: he buys the right to the title “tech genius” but has no tech geniusness within him.

And I still believe that’s a fair criticism.

But there are other billionaires with a little bit more vision. They even have websites with manifestos outlining this vision.

And there are books with ideologies that those billionaires subscribe to.

So here’s what I think is happening: Musk is doing what he’s always done: he’s using his money to co-opt someone else’s vision.

He did this with Tesla and SpaceX. He walked into a developed vision and put the money on the table and said: I’d like to buy the right to call this vision my own and take credit for it.

I think the world’s richest man has realized that the chaos that Trump brought to the Republican Party essentially undermined democracy completely.

But he wasn’t the first to realize it. Or to even accelerate it intentionally.

Others, like Peter Thiel, invested in Trump in 2016 precisely because they wanted to use Trump to do this.

But it wasn’t until 2022, that Musk presumably got on board.

This is probably due to the acceleration of AI technology, which led the Tech Megalomaniacs to suddenly go green with greed. Especially by realizing that they can run their governments, their network states, and their corporations with very few actual employees.

In a Tech Autocracy, they don’t even need loyalists. They can replace the entire workforce with an efficient AI government.

And thus, in Musk’s megalomania, he purchased Twitter, and began seizing his moment in history to take a vision he didn’t create––and buy with all the money he has––the right to step in and become the Tech Emperor / Tech Autocrat of this vision.

So what’s the vision that the malignant narcissist, Musk, is currently trying to buy the right to take credit for?

It’s a new age without America’s democracy.

And it’s a deeply fucked up worldview which many people trace to bloggers named Nick Land & Curtis Yarvin.

Curtis Yarvin’s blogging name was Mencius Moldbug. Which makes him sound like a Harry Potter villain. And neither of them photograph well.

If this is sounding like a mix between the worst threads of 4Chan and a poorly written script from the TV show, Elementary… that’s because it essentially is.

Some people have called it “Revenge of the Nerds.”

I didn’t want to write anything about this worldview until I’d gone down the rabbit hole to try to understand it.

Yep. I even purchased their books. I’m sitting next to a book called “The Dark Enlightenment” right now.

I actually haven’t opened it yet. But I have read the back cover:

Neoreaction is not your grandfather’s conservatism, but the web 2.0 era marriage between modern engineering principles and classical anti-democratic thought.

Its central tenet is that the Enlightenment was a mistake, and in The Dark Enlightenment, Nick Land burns progressivism to the ground, salts the earth around its ashes, and raises an altar to anti-humanism in its place.

Needless to say, this research I’m doing is NOT fun, so over the past two weeks, I’ve had to take a lot of pauses to digest and process my reactions to the deep, dark worldview that they possess.

Right now, I actually have a spreadsheet of videos, podcasts, websites, articles, manifestos, and books that are putting the pieces together.

All of which I will gradually return to.

But my first and most important act of clarity is that:

The people in this worldview are two types of people: those who are a-moral and those who are sociopaths.

Why do I say this?

First, because they all hold within them an inherently dark ideology of undermining the entire 250 year experiment of American freedom and shackling the people to an unelected leader they didn’t vote for.

And yet, a lot of them sound and look quite normal.

That’s a BIG red flag.

A person who can be dark on the inside and normal on the outside has mastered the mask. Which is a technique only sociopaths can do.

A good example of someone who falls exactly into this category is J.D. Vance. His master is Peter Thiel (one of the major players in this dark ideology). Thiel founded PayPal with Musk, and that’s why some people call his dark group of Billionaires: the PayPal Mafia.

Peter Thiel funded JD Vance’s senate campaign with $15 million dollars. This was JD Vance’s first foray into politics. Now, two years later, he’s the vice president of the United States. That’s a pretty quick ascent.

Curtis Yarvin (who claims he actually has no personal relationship with Vance) praised him for being “a normie.” He explained that JD Vance had the power to appeal to both the hillbillies and the Yale elite at the same time.

If you got chills watching JD Vance debate Tim Walz last fall, precisely because of his effectiveness at hiding his real emotion and turning on a completely false mask to fool liberals into believing he doesn’t hold a dark ideology within him…

Then you’ve probably met a sociopath and you’ve become good at spotting the body language.

The only thing this guy brings to the table is Thiel’s dark ideology, hidden behind a “normie” mask and a Yale Education.

And it’s why he was chosen.

But overall, even if some of these people are not directly immoral, there’s an allure in each of these pieces of ideology that the PayPal Mafia subscribe to: in that they each present an a-moral history of democracy, feudalism, monarchy, and dictatorships.

Essentially, these people believe that democracy isn’t real, it isn’t true, it doesn’t work, and it isn’t good.

Curtis Yarvin co-opted the “red pill” imagery from the Matrix and claimed that when you took the red pill, you’d be enlightened and woken up from the idea that democracy is a positive force in history.

These are the people who empathize with the Machiavellis––not the revolutionaries who threw the tea over.

And essentially, by going back in history and finding ways to invert and a-moralize the normal historical telling of progress…

These bloggers have outlined a permission structure for all of the dark psychology in the Tech Billionaires to see themselves and their craving for power as necessary and good.

You see?

The bloggers aren’t the ones who want the power. The bloggers are the nerds who have inverted the historical telling of America to make Democracy appear weak and useless.

And thus, allow the power-hungry Tech Autocrats to believe that they should take their rightful place in usurping the entire system of Democracy.

Now, there are more layers to this. And I’d love to dive further, but the many books I’m reading are swimming around in my head and I don’t want to lose the forest for the trees.

I do want to move onto not just what the Tech Autocrats think of themselves, but of what our own pro-Democracy technology and economy writers think of them.

One particular book that I found valuable is called The Tech Coup, by Marietje Schaake (A Dutch politician).

If you can believe it, she doesn’t talk at all about the neoreactionary movement. She talks, instead, about data, AI facial recognition technologies, and cryptocurrency. Essentially, the disruptive technologies that the a-moral corporations have amassed, that can then be leveraged by immoral autocratic leaders.

She talks about how she’s been sounding the alarm since 2010 about the growing technological power of data and surveillance that has already begun to be sold to the highest bidder (even when those were anti-democratic countries in need of controlling their citizens - like China or Iran).

Some of her paragraphs are terrifyingly prescient. For example, she talks about how physical intrusion in privacy and rights are illegal, but data surveillance that monitors us and tracks our every movement is not seen as an intrusion of privacy and rights, because the digital concept of violation doesn’t register the same way as a physical intrusion would.

Thus, lawmakers have a certain blindness to the ways digital intrusions lead to human rights abuses by authoritarian figures.

Marietje Schaake writes:

Corporate leaders and aspiring autocrats alike take advantage of this situational blindness and push the boundaries of the law.

As digitization progresses, we see a gradual shift in responsibility and power away from democratic leaders.

This shift accelerates two trends: growing digital authoritarianism and a wholesale decline in democratic governance.

OUCH. She forking nailed it.

And she may have also given some insight into why Elon Musk is obsessed with Americans’ data.

Why he didn’t bring accountants to the Federal Agencies that he wanted to “audit,” instead, he brought hackers. DATAjust might well be the exact commodity he needs to leverage.

In fact, another important book I’m reading is called, Techno-Feudalism, by the Greek Politician & Economist Yanis Varoufakis.

Both he and Marietje Schaake are European writers who have stood outside of America’s Capitalism ideology warp, and yet, seem to understand so clearly the present dangers of it.

In one particular case, Yanis Varoufakis claims that every time we walk around with our phone, Google Maps is monitoring our movements and this data they extract from us increases their cloud capital.

Essentially, we’re unpaid serfs who work for their company.

By harvesting our private data and the data from our private lives—each piece of data that they extract from us, increases their capital, their power, their stock value, and their overall wealth.

Our lives are commodities that they profit from. And we neither get paid for it, nor do we even realize it.

But Musk doesn’t own Google. So it’s perfectly fair to ask what the hell he plans to do with the immense amounts of our private data that he’s stolen from these federal agencies. Sell it to the highest bidder?

Marietje Schaake talks about how the majority of democratic leaders have had a laissez-faire approach to developing technologies, and have not done enough to rein in their human rights abuses.

She claims that one problem is the over-reliance of governments on private sector development.

Essentially, democracy is under threat because the public sector cannot produce technology faster than private companies that have a net worth larger than the entire GDP of whole countries.

You recall that Peter Thiel has an $823 million dollar U.S. government contract for his technology Palantir. While Musk’s companies have been awarded around $21 billion in government contracts since 2008.

And isn’t this terrifying? That the government was actually using completely anti-democratic tech bros from the private sector to build the technologies that we needed.

This is, surely, why we haven’t been able to rein in their abuses (and why we were able to target Tik Tok, instead).

Essentially, we have to let them do what they want, because we rely on them for government security.

In fact, she quotes Biden as saying, in August 2021, in a security summit with tech CEOs:

“The reality is, most of our critical infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector.”

She then says,

“The U.S. President, arguably the most powerful leader in the world, conceded that the government, alone, cannot protect the homeland, and it needs tech companies to lend a hand.”

And thus, this is the private tech company’s leverage over democracy.

Now you know why Musk got away with murdering the 2024 election.

In fact, she also writes about how Musk unilaterally decided not to turn on Starlink satellites for Ukraine to protect itself from Russian aggression. He claimed that it could “escalate nuclear war.”

A judgment she believes a private businessman should never have had the ability to make in place of military chiefs who need to have total control of protecting a country from invasion.

He even bragged on Twitter, “Between Tesla, Starlink, and Twitter, I may have more real-time economic data in one head than anyone ever.”

Do you see that while the Neoreactionary bloggers give people like Musk and Thiel the “a-moral historical excuse” to seize power…

The missing ingredient is why they think they, of all people, deserve it.

And that’s what Marietje Schaake and Yanis Varoufakis outline.

The immense power shift and disruption that technology has grown to have in the past two decades.

Especially in competition with the Old World Order of power.

For example, cryptocurrency seeks to disrupt the establishment banking system and the Federal Reserve.

And what was the first thing Trump did right before he took office? Introduced a meme coin that peaked at $15 billion dollars on Jan 19.

AP News even reports that

“Truth Social applied to trademark “Truth.fi Bitcoin Plus ETF” and “Truth.fi Bitcoin Plus SMA,” a sign they plan to launch crypto exchange traded funds and separately managed accounts.”

The bottom line being that technology disruption is a major behind-the-scenes player of what overtly pretends to be an anti-immigration Nazi Fascist takeover (in order to please the MAGA base).

But I think the main reason I like Marietje Schaake’s book, is that she’s essentially a level-headed Dutch female who looks at your typical blustering bro culture for what it is: the high of disruption, with no vision for the future.

After reading her chapter on cryptocurrency and how she was invited to Richard Branson’s personal island in 2016 to hear the “crypto evangelists” sing the praises of crypto. Only to see some of the biggest scams

I have a few articles that I want to publish this week… and I’m going to continue to read these books to gain more insight on WHY this Tech Coup is happening.

But I want to jump ahead to the events of the past few weeks, just to tie it all together with how this has to do with Trump’s presidency.

Where does the puppet fit in with the puppetmaster vision?

Someone warned me on Bluesky that Christian Nationalism is on the rise and that 4 out of 10 Americans think that we live in the Biblical End of Times.

Here’s what I told him.

I don't see the Christian Nationalists coming out ahead on this - unless their secret leverage to stop DOGE is the Supreme Court.

Musk's Neoreactionary cult has trillions more in dollars & insane amounts of data & technology - including AI.

Musk & Vance want to use Trump's cabinet to burn the government down and dismantle all of the agencies, then privatize it and sell it for parts, so that they can create their tech autocracy.

While Christian extremism is a tool of repression, Musk has no ideological loyalty to it. Like all kings before him, he'll dump the religion when it doesn't suit him.

The person I was talking to on Bluesky replied:

Well, it remains to be seen which of these factions is on the leash, and which is holding it.

But considering Musk is physically walking into government buildings and dismantling agencies while bypassing lawful Congressional oversight.

And considering Trump is letting him stand next to him in the Oval Office to speak to reporters about how DOGE has the right to do this…

And considering that Musk is the richest man in the world right now…

I think we have our answer already. For the moment, Musk is in control of Trump. And I don’t see any particular Project 2025 architect controlling Musk.

I went on to say:

My theory is that Christian Nationalism funded extremists in the government. Like the Supreme Court and Congressmembers.

But the Neoreactionaries are the ones with government contracts. They wield technological power. And they bought the President & VP.

One thing about their worldview: they don't intend to rule by populism.

They intend to be autocrats and rule by leveraging their technological power over Americans.

While it is true that the Supreme Court and Congress are full of Christian Nationalists… Musk's neoreactionary movement intends to get rid of our democracy altogether.

Thus, the courts & congress won't matter.

He wants to make all of those people in power... have no power. He wants to privatize & own the government under a Tech Autocracy.

This is why Musk is dismantling the agencies & doing mass firings.

It's not about installing Project 2025 loyalists. It's about dismantling the government so that it no longer functions.

Crashing it.

Then he can privatize the agencies so that his billionaire buddies can buy up the United States in parts.

Someone asked, “So why would Congress and the supreme Court be in favor of this?

I answered:

I don't think they are. I think that Musk is hitching a ride on the Project 2025 coup with his own coup.

The Christian Nationalists want Christian Autocracy. Musk saw his chance to hitch a ride. He put billions of dollars & Twitter into the full propaganda campaign in support of Trump’s fascist election.

This helped Project 2025. And the Christian Nationalists said, obviously we'll accept that help.

Because they still think they're in control.

Enter DOGE. Seems innocent. But in that first week we realized that it was always intended to usurp congress completely.

Usurp the cabinet's authority completely.

So what good does it do to have Christian Nationalists in the other branches of power… if they have no power?

Further,

DOGE allows Musk to have access to sensitive data on Americans with no oversight.

To Christians, this means nothing.

To Musk, data is currency & power.

Congress & Supreme Court is filled with Christian Nationalists in support of the coup they think they're in control of.

But I think Musk is doing a Tech coup on top of their Christian coup. And they may not even yet realize it.(Especially the dumb ones like MTG).

In time, Christian Nationalists will wake up & realize they lost the thread of their own coup.

One thing to keep in mind, to the neo-reactionaries, like Musk, MAGA is dispensable.

They have no ideological loyalty to the populist movement behind Trump.

They're not running a populist campaign because they intend to dismantle democracy completely.

They don’t need your votes.

As Trump promised in his campaign: vote for me once, then you’ll never have to vote again.

I believe that Musk tricked MAGA into voting away their democratic rights in order to better dismantle the government & create their Tech Autocracy.

But the populism is just a rouse. They have no intention of satisfying the campaign promises to them.

After I wrote this on Bluesky, I came across an article by WaPo that claimed that Congress had already abdicated their “power of the purse to DOGE.”

Essentially, they supported DOGE, but had to beg Musk to give their states certain funds they needed.

The WaPo wrote:

“Tommy Tuberville, a Republican from Alabama, said that begging for funds may be the new normal, suggesting that lawmakers could lobby Musk to save spending they’ve allocated for their states as he slashes and cancels contracts at agencies.”

Remember when Musk said: some of you will hurt for a while. Then it will get better?

And listen, I don’t know that all of the billionaires have joined this batshit crazy club for a Tech Autocracy. What i do know is that it’s a lot easier to swallow than the fact that all of our left-wing, progressive tech bros have spontaneously become Nazi Fascists.

Technological accelerationism actually makes their actions make sense.

And that specific congressmembers were actually begging DOGE for exceptions. Asking him to "(an unelected billionaire and an agency Congress did not create).

• The Christian Nationalists think they have all 3 branches of government.

But do they?

All 3 branches of government have been made obsolete by DOGE unilaterally dismantling federal agencies.

And thus, Musk is already proving that his vision is working faster and usurping the vision of the Christian Nationalists.

I then asked:

• If they now have to beg Musk for the power they were already supposed to have, then it seems like WaPo thinks the Musk coup on top of the right-wing coup is already complete.

In fact, I kind of wonder if the Project 2025 “theo bros” actually stole their playbook from Yarvin in the first place.

“Yarvin suggests that a would-be American autocrat should campaign on and win an electoral mandate for an authoritarian program. They should purge the federal bureaucracy in a push Yarvin has anagrammatized as Rage (for “retire all government employees”).

The regime in internal exile

What we’re going to do is turn the Trump entourage into a regime in internal exile.

While in exile, this regime will be a larva—a harmless caterpillar. Once duly elected, in office it will not just caper in front of the cameras (in fact, it will not talk at all to the legacy press)—it will spread its wings, and become a beautiful governing butterfly.

Trump himself will not be the brain of this butterfly. He will not be the CEO. He will be the chairman of the board—he will select the CEO (an experienced executive). This process, which obviously has to be televised, will be complete by his inauguration—at which the transition to the next regime will start immediately.

For Trump, being President will be exactly like it was—all the photo-ops and more—without any papers to sign, “decisions” to “make,” etc. The CEO he picks will run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts, probably also taking over state and local governments. Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems. Trump will be monitoring this CEO’s performance, again on TV, and can fire him if need be.

But rebooting America is the easy part. The hard part is the path from egg to larva to imago. We can dream about the butterfly as much as we like, but it lives most of its life as an ugly brown grub. Let us now design this insect.

Congress may pass any bill it likes. The courts may have any opinion they like. It is the job of the executive branch, as a coequal branch of government, to respect these bills and opinions. But respecting the legislative and judicial branches is not the executive’s only job; nor does the Constitution say it is. If the voters feel that the President they elected has done a poor job, let them vote him out. He is accountable to them, and no one else. We call this “representative democracy.”

They should simply ignore any court rulings that seek to constrain them. They should bring Congress to heel, in part by mobilizing their populist base against recalcitrant lawmakers. And liberal or mainstream media organizations and universities should be summarily closed.

Given the post-election period and Trump’s preparation for a return to the White House, Yarvin’s program seems less fanciful then it did in 2021, when he laid it out for Anton.

In the recording of that podcast, Yarvin offers a condensed presentation of his program which he has laid out on Substack and in other venues.

Midway through their conversation, Anton says to Yarvin, “You’re essentially advocating for someone to – age-old move – gain power lawfully through an election, and then exercise it unlawfully”, adding: “What do you think the actual chances of that happening are?”

Yarvin responded: “It wouldn’t be unlawful,” adding: “You’d simply declare a state of emergency in your inaugural address.”

Yarvin continued: “You’d actually have a mandate to do this. Where would that mandate come from? It would come from basically running on it, saying, ‘Hey, this is what we’re going to do.’”