This from a post to the Sam Harris subreddit from user AnomicAge
Are we really headed for such doom and gloom? I’m keeping this post for a review a few years hence.
Where do you see America in 4 years?
Perhaps I’m suffering from trump derangement syndrome… but the catch 22 is that one would have to be suffering from some level of derangement to support agent orange in 2025
In 2016 it was a different story, he was a dark horse in the race – now we all know the staggering extent of his incompetence and his criminality and corruption, and continuing to endorse him is frankly morally unpardonable.
With that said, I cannot envisage anything other than turmoil, civil unrest and economic collapse in Americas near future.
They can lie to people’s faces, they can scapegoat, they can propagandise, they can throw red herrings, they can run every trick in the demagogues playbook but it will not save the country from collapse.
Removing a large number of undocumented but tax paying workers will cripple certain industries and cause prices of essentials to soar out of reach for many folks.
Life saving medications and medical treatments will also become unaffordable for many.
Diseases and epidemics will run rampant placing further strain on the health system
Their newfound isolationism and severing longstanding trade relations with Canada and other historical allies will have untold ripple effects
American consumers will foot the bill for the tariffs
Hollowed out government departments will be unable to meet demand and perform their duties effectively
The clown cabinet will continue to make egregious mishaps such as we’ve seen with the signal scandal and haphazard decisions with catastrophic consequences
Musk, Thiel and the oligarchs will continue to puppeteer and usher in their brave new world aka dark enlightenment capitalising on the economic collapse as an opportunity to expand their tendrils into every industry and every facet of life. Project 2025 will keep unraveling
America will no longer be considered a safe global tourism destination, nor a safe destination for international students or scientists or researchers or any who don’t have right skin colour and creed.
Mass detainments and deportations without due process – sent to brutal foreign prisons or domestic internment camps.
Many us citizens will relocate abroad – the US will become more insular and severe in its ideology
Trump administration will blatantly ignore the courts thus invalidating their existence, and prove that the constitution is meaningless when nobody is willing or eventually able to uphold it.
There will be no democratic election in 2028. Trump Jr will take his father’s mantle when he finally expires as a twisted dynasty, or whoever Musk and co wish to see take the Oval Office.
Congress will remain spineless and acquiescent. The military will fail to uphold the oath they swore to the constitution. Some will try to invoke the second amendment for its intended purpose and pay with their lives.
The party of small government and free speech will suppress all opposition and nonpartisan media, books banned, curtailed personal freedoms and erased privacies that were enshrined in the constitution and bill of rights as well as the declaration of human rights
Widespread animosity and breakdown of relations among families and friends
Destitution and starvation
Welfare denied to the disabled, the physically and mentally ill, veterans, pensioners
Street level crime or desperation skyrockets – prisons overrun – deportations to labour camps and foreign prisons
National parks not properly maintained and protected as a simulacrum of the planet at large
Natural disasters will occur with greater frequency and their consequences more devastating as states squabble for resources
Surge in terrorist attacks both domestic and foreign
Extended periods of martial law declared granting further untrammelled power to the administration
US doesn’t annex Canada or Greenland or Gaza but leaves NATO and allows Russia to do as it pleases
The already abysmal education system will become even more of an indoctrination system raising a generation of mindless myrmidons – tertiary education unaffordable for most. Anti intellectualism reigns supreme
Womens bodily autonomy removed across the country
Contraceptives banned
Widespread disempowerment of women from prominent positions including eventually trumps administration
The Satanic temple and co humanitarian groups labelled terrorist organisations
LGBT+ community designated as mentally ill or criminalised and barred from owning firearms or voting among other forms of disenfranchisement (despite the president being a convicted felon and half the cabinet having scandals and crimes against them)
Americas soft power and influence throughout the world will cease to be – China expands in place
Liberals and foreign forces will continue to be scapegoated for the ills of the administration
Some of the chickens who voted for colonel sanders might have a change of heart at the 11th hour as they’re dragged into the slaughterhouse – many won’t.
Dissenting voices such as Sam Harris and celebrities will be prosecuted or worse. Eventually few will have the courage to publicly criticise the administration
Atheism will be driven underground again despite the sickening antichristian debauchery of those in power
Secret service mutates into something closer resembling Gestapo
Additional assassination attempts
Reddit will be whitewashed and this post will be removed.
I hope I’m wrong but this is the path America is already taking
This was one of the first posts I read this morning. After reading it and watching a video, what’s going on between Trump and Musk and their actions meshes with this.
And I think that one of three things will happen.
Success – Musk (the CEO) and Trump (the Chairman) will overhaul government improving the financial structure of the USA government like we never dreamed possible. But while I remain doubtful this will be achieved, if it does, it will come at a high cost to most USA citizens and a profitable margin for Musk, Trump and some of their oligarchy
Failure – Musk and Trump will be allowed to pursue their agenda with a disastrous outcome. A broken government, high inflation, high unemployment, widespread protests and more. Not a good picture.
Cease & Desist: Government internals and the public will apply enough pressure at many levels to stop Trump and Musk.
The Point: In 2022, one of Peter Thiel’s favorite thinkers envisioned a second Trump Administration in which the federal government would be run by a “CEO” who was not Trump and laid out a playbook for how it might work. Elon Musk is following it.
The Back Story: 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.
“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia,” he said.
Yarvin, a software programmer, framed this as a “reboot” of government.
Elon Musk’s DOGE is just a rebranded version of RAGE. He demands mass resignations, locks career employees out of their offices, threatens to delete entire departments, and seizes total control of sensitive government systems and programs. DOGE = RAGE, masked in the bland language of “efficiency.”
But Musk’s reliance on Yarvin’s playbook runs deeper.
In an essay dated April 2022, Yarvin updated RAGE to something he described as a “butterfly revolution.” In an essay on his paywalled Substack, he imagined a second Trump presidency in which Trump would enable a radical government transformation. The proposal will sound familiar to anyone who has watched Musk wreak havoc on the United States Government (USG) over the past three weeks.
Wrote Yarvin:
We’ve got to risk a full power start—a full reboot of the USG. We can only do this by giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization—with roughly the powers that the Allied occupation authorities held in Japan and Germany in the fall of 1945. This level of centralized emergency power worked to refound a nation then, for them. So it should work now, for us.”
(The metaphor of “full power start” comes from Star Trek and entails a risky process of restarting a fictional spaceship in a way that might cause “implosion.” The World War II metaphor casts the federal government as a conquered enemy now controlled by an outside force.)
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.
Trump himself will not be the brain …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.
This CEO will bring a new radical new style of leadership to the federal government:
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.
Sound familiar?
Yarvin continues: Trump should amass an army of people willing to staff his new regime. Once he wins, this “magnificent army” of “ideologically trained” and Trump-loyal “ninjas” will be unleashed on the federal bureaucracy.
[H]e will throw it directly against the administrative state—not bothering with confirmed appointments, just using temporary appointments as needed. The job of this landing force is not to govern. It is to understand the government. It is to figure out what the Trump administration can actually do—when it assumes the full Constitutional powers given to the chief executive of the executive branch…
The regime must have the capacity to govern every institution it does not dismantle. The Trump regime is not a barbaric sack of America’s institutions. Genghis Khan is not in the building! It is a systematic renewal of America’s institutions. No brand or building can survive. But the new regime must perform the real functions of the old, and ideally perform them much better.
Many institutions which are necessary organs of society will have to be destroyed. These organs will have to be replaced. If they have not already been replaced in the larval stage, or even if they have, to scale—these replacements will need staff.
Government isn’t the only target for this hostile takeover, wrote Yarvin:
Finally, it is not sufficient to have an army of parachute ninjas large or smart to drop into all the agencies in the executive branch. Many institutions of power are outside the government proper. Ninjas will have to land on the roofs of these buildings too—mainly journalism, academia and social media.
The new regime must seize all points of power, without respect for paper protections. Anything can be nationalized—so long as the new regime has the staff, the prize crew as it were, to nationalize it.
Yarvin envisioned a crew of experienced and educated government workers who would be recruited to staff the new regime. Musk appears to have different ideas. As Vittoria Elliott of Wired reports, Musk’s chief lieutenants at DOGE (Destruction of Government by Elon) are very young men with no experience in government.
(Read “The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover,” and please subscribe to Wired, which is doing excellent work.)
Yarvin is not alone in envisioning a massive purge of government. In 2021, J.D. Vance lauded Yarvin’s work and called for a government purge:
I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.
Like Yarvin, Vance compared the federal government to a conquered enemy:
De-Nazification, De-Baathification … I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left. And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.
He added that Trump should defy any court orders designed to stop his purge.
The idea of a massive purge also appears in the writings of Balaji Srinivasan, whose ideas seem primarily derived from Yarvin’s. His core idea, which he clearly got from Yarvin, is a corporate takeover of governments, which will afterward be run like tech companies (specifically, Twitter). Just as Musk took over Twitter and stripped “Blue Checks” of their status, he will now defrock civil servants, experts, and anyone who is loyal to democracy instead of the current regime.
Of course, the plot to destroy the federal bureaucracy also has a partner in the far-right Heritage Foundation. Project 2025, which is clearly being implemented despite mocking Republican denials during the 2024 campaign, calls for a purging and dismantling of government as well. As the Association of Federal Government Employees warned last July:
What could happen to our government and the federal workforce in 2025? A group of conservative organizations have a plan, and it’s not good for federal employees.
The plan is detailed in a blueprint called Project 2025, organized by the far-right Heritage Foundation, and backed by over 100 conservative organizations.
The plan promises a takeover of our country’s system of checks and balances in order to “dismantle the administrative state” – the operations of federal agencies and programs according to current law and regulation, including many of the laws and regulations that govern federal employment.
In September, the Heritage Foundation and particular San Francisco tech interests held a conference called “Reboot 2024: The New Reality.”
The New Reality
Analysis: What once seemed like a fringe theory is now being carried out by the corporate powers that have wholly captured our government. While there are some minor differences between Yarvin’s approach and Musk’s, here’s a summary of what they have in common:
A. Install a CEO Dictator
Yarvin’s Blueprint: Trump appoints a CEO to run the country like a private corporation, bypassing Congress and the courts.
Musk’s Moves: Acts as federal CEO, demands unilateral control over sensitive government programs, positioning himself as an unelected decision-maker as Trump stays in the background.
B. Purge the Bureaucracy
Yarvin’s Plan: “Retire All Government Employees” (RAGE) – fire career civil servants and replace them with loyalists.
Musk’s Moves: DOGE is gutting teams, demanding mass resignations, locking employees out of offices, and threatening mass layoffs in federal government. Meanwhile, DOGE is recruiting inexperienced young men who owe their loyalty to Musk/Thiel.
C. Build a Loyalist Army
Yarvin’s Blueprint: Recruit an “ideologically trained” army to replace experts and enforce the new regime.
Musk’s Moves: Surrounding himself with young, inexperienced loyalists who enforce his will without question. Project 2025 will also provide Republican cadre to run what’s left of the federal government.
D. Dismantle Democratic Institutions
Yarvin’s Blueprint: Strip power from federal agencies, courts, and Congress, centralizing authority under the executive branch.
Musk’s Moves: Undermining the credibility of the federal government, downplaying legal oversight, and defying regulatory authorities. Dismantling government agencies and functions with no plan for their replacement.
E. Seize Media and Information Control to Maintain Power
Yarvin’s Blueprint: Take over government, journalism, academia, and social media to control public narratives.
Musk’s Moves: Buying Twitter, firing journalists, boosting propaganda, and promoting fringe narratives while attacking traditional media. Leading the hostile tech takeover as Trump’s “CEO.”
Did I miss anything?
Conclusion: There is a lot more to say. What surprises me most is how the political press generally fails to inform the public that Musk is taking a systematic approach, one that has been outlined in public forums for years. (Some press outlets, like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, are owned by billionaires keenly interested in kowtowing to Musk and Trump.)
We are witnessing the methodical implementation of a long-planned strategy to transform American democracy into corporate autocracy. The playbook was written in plain sight and is now being followed step by step. Some dismiss the Yarvins of the world as unhinged nuts, but that’s the point. These guys, with their bizarre and dangerous ideas, have gotten very far in 2025. Just look at the news.
Yarvin pitched his vision as a fictional or unlikely scenario. Unfortunately, it now appears to be our new reality. The press’s failure to connect these dots isn’t just a journalistic oversight — it’s a critical missed warning about the systematic dismantling of democratic governance. By the time most Americans understand what’s happening, the “reboot” – the destruction of government – may already be complete.
