By Kurt Nimmo
“If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law,” declares Palantir co-founder, multi-billionaire (net worth: $3.6 billion), and Trump supporter Joe Lonsdale. “We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others. Our society needs balance. It’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.”
Lonsdale’s desire to publicly execute criminals “quickly”—apparently minus the ability to appeal or petition for post-conviction relief—harkens back to the Middle Ages when public executions were common, particularly in England where the monarch Henry VIII executed nearly 60,000 people. According to the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria (On Crimes and Punishments, 2009), “the death penalty is not useful because of the example of atrocity it gives to men.” Public executions largely ended in the 19th century, with significant legal reforms occurring in various countries. Following these reforms, executions were conducted behind prison walls. “As ideas about natural rights and human dignity took hold across Europe,” writes Claire Lehmann,
support for public torture and state-sanctioned killing waned. By the mid-to-late 19th century, public executions no longer occurred across most of Europe, and if capital punishment was carried out, it was done behind closed doors. By the mid-20th century, most European nations had abolished capital punishment altogether.
Mr. Lonsdale has fallen back on a more brutal concept of justice. He evidently believes gruesome public hanging sends a message to criminals, although this has been consistently refuted. Experts agree that public executions do not deter criminals.
“The psychological mind-set of the criminal is such that they are not able to consider consequences at the time of the crime,” notes Dr. Jonathan Groner, an associate professor of surgery at Ohio State University College of Medicine and Public Health. “People who commit these crimes are not in a normal state of mind—they do not consider the consequences in a logical way.”
Despite this evidence, Lonsdale argues public execution indeed prevents violent crime.
“Yes, hanging the repeat-violent-bad-guys solves their violence, deters others, and protects the innocent,” he tweeted on December 6 in a follow-up to his original tweet. “Not that complicated unless you’re an idiot leftist.”
Lonsdale’s desire to execute criminals conforms to his radical rightwing political views. He is a member of the board of trustees of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute, has been involved in the “libertarian” Koch network, and is a supporter of Elon Musk’s America PAC, a super PAC backing Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. America PAC canvasses for conservatives in battleground states. The PAC can accept and spend unlimited amounts of money to influence voters. “If you sit this election out, Kamala and the crazies will win,” warned an America PAC broadside prior to Trump’s election victory.
As Trump threatens Venezuela, Lonsdale favors murdering accused “narcoterrorists” without the benefit of due process or trial.
“Sinking narco boats publicly helps deter others. As does hanging repeat violent criminals,” he posted to X on December 5. “Killing bad guys is DoW [Department of War] job. He [Pete Hegseth] should brag more. Masculine truth: bold, virtuous men deter evil.”
For Lonsdale the venture capitalist, “feminine energy” and “mercy and kindness” have broken the judicial system in the United States.
Rule of the Unwashed Masses by Platonic Billionaire Aristocrats
According to the Palantir co-founder, America should be ruled by aristocrats. Lonsdale is “the closest thing you’ll find to a Roman senator, someone who acts courageously in politics, commerce, and the military informed by a classical understanding of virtue,” Johnathan Bi posted to X on October 3.
In De Re Publica, inspired by Plato’s Socratic dialogue, the Republic, the Roman statesman Cicero argued that “excessive liberty soon brings the people, collectively and individually, to an excessive servitude.” The solution to rule by a “vulgar mob” is the rule of an enlightened aristocracy, in other words rule by the few. Lonsdale cites the aristocratic philosophy of America’s founders in his essay, Jefferson and America’s Lost Idea: Natural Aristocracy.
For Lonsdale, venture capitalist entities, specifically those under his wing (the Cicero Institute and 8VC), represent the financial aristocracy that will save America. Individuals representative of the aristoi cited by Lonsdale include Stripe CEO and multi-billionaire Patrick Collison (net worth: $101 billion), hedge fund magnate John Arnold ($2.9 billion), Home Depot founder Ken Langone ($9.84 billion), and hedge fund manager Stan Druckenmiller ($9.3 billion).
The “classical understanding” of aristocracy was interpreted by the guru of the neoconservative movement, Leo Strauss. According to Strauss, the best form of government is one that effectively selects the most capable individuals for leadership. Shadia Drury, author of Leo Strauss and the American Right (1999), writes that Strauss and his acolytes believed “the masses are too ignorant to comprehend what’s happening,” so they must be lead by a platonic elite of “capable individuals.” For Lonsdale and his circle, the capable individuals are rightwing tech billionaires.
In an interview with Danny Postel, Drury explains that the ancient philosophers
whom Strauss most cherished believed that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty, and that giving them these sublime treasures would be like throwing pearls before swine. In contrast to modern political thinkers, the ancients denied that there is any natural right to liberty. Human beings are born neither free nor equal. The natural human condition, they held, is not one of freedom, but of subordination and in Strauss’s estimation they were right in thinking so.
Drury explains that, for Strauss, there is no such thing as natural rights, only “the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many.” For Lonsdale, this attitude translates into “masculine leadership,” that is to say a rejection of political theory and practice viewed as feminine (or “nonbinary”), inclusive, and emotional. In other words, autocratic rule dominated by an “enlightened” patriarchy.
Tech Oligarchs Poised to Influence American Politics
Joe Lonsdale is a member of what might be considered “Rightwing Tech Barons,” a caste of reactionary billionaires that includes Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (cofounder of the CIA-backed Palantir), and also Marc Andereseen (co-founder of of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz), billionaire David Sacks (crypto investor with stakes in Meta, Uber, Lyft, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, X, Airbnb, and dozens of other companies), Sam Altman, venture investor and CEO of OpenAI (net worth: $1.8 billion), and “tech centibillionaire” Larry Ellison of Oracle (the corporation’s surveillance software, according to Ellison, will ensure “Citizens will be on their best behavior”).
Joe Lonsdale’s outlandish demand that criminals be put to death in public display is but the tip of a reactionary tsunami, especially in regard to militaristic imperialism. He believes America must prepare for conflict, especially with China. He argues that the US must maintain a strong military presence and invest in advanced technologies to deter adversarial actions.
Sam Biddle writes for The Intercept:
Trump’s election marks an epochal victory not just for the right, but also for a growing conservative counterrevolution in American tech that has successfully rebranded military contracting as the proud national duty of the American engineer, not a taboo to be dodged and hidden.
Despite all the “tech bro” hoopla, there is growing apprehension over their influence within the MAGA movement, specifically in regard to Trump’s AI czar, David Sacks, a billionaire crypto investor. Earlier this month, former investment banker and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon hosted an AI critic on his War Room podcast. Joe Allen took to task a Trump plan to cancel an AI moratorium.
“If President Trump signs this executive order, he will incur the outrage of everyone who believed in him to defend legacy Americans against not only immigrants, but the tech companies who are probably a greater threat to their jobs and to their rights,” Allen told War Room co-host Natalie Winters.
The billionaire tech oligarchy is alarmed by MAGA resistance to the proposed dominance of artificial intelligence, as it will put a damper on the wild valuations and circular investments of an emerging AI bubble. The tech elite turned away from Democrat support after Democratic lawmakers leveled serious accusations against the industry. Then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was “repeatedly dragged before Congress and accused of conspiring to overturn democracy, abuse children,” Robby Soave reported for Reason. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook were singled out for criticism. President Biden accused the social media platform of “killing people” due to Zuckerberg’s reluctance to allow the state to control content moderation. The Biden administration brought antitrust cases against Amazon, Google, and other large tech companies. Additionally, the Democrats proposed a new tax on the “unrealized gains” of the billionaires.
Soave explains that Musk, Thiel, and Andreeseen have “been full MAGA for a while,” and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Zuckerberg “are now officially seeking political neutrality while dipping their toes in rightist waters,” realizing that dependence on Democrats to protect emerging AI and social platforms from government regulation is a losing proposition. Facebook and Amazon alone have a net worth in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars.
As a prize for their newfound fealty to a manifestly narcissistic Donald Trump, Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg—the world’s three richest men—were given prime seats at Trump’s inauguration.
“The symbolism is unmistakable. Those seats are usually reserved for family members, former presidents, and prominent politicians. Giving those seats to billionaires signals loudly that this is a new era of oligarchy,” writes Amanda Marcotte.
The Threat of Technofascism
Becca Lewis of The Guardian notes that despite “the industry’s often undeserved reputation for liberalism, its reactionary foundations were baked in almost from the beginning. As Silicon Valley enters a second Trump Administration, the gendered roots of its original reactionary movement offer insight into today’s rightward turn.”
The historian Janis Mimura compares the reactionary Silicon Valley tech barons to “the élite bureaucrats who seized political power and drove Japan into the Second World War.” Mimura describes the emergence of “techno-fascism,” a form of tech-based authoritarianism that embraces misogynist and hierarchical attitudes about achievement and social roles, an attitude present from the beginning of the so-called technological revolution. “American techno-fascism is no longer a philosophical abstraction for Silicon Valley to tinker with,” notes Chayka. “It is a policy program whose constitutional limits are being tested right now.”
Lonsdale and the tech oligarchy formed an opportunistic alliance with Trump. They are based in Austin, Texas, and Northern California, and are highly interconnected, sharing not only a political alliance but also social ties, investment opportunities, anti-regulatory ideas, and geographic proximity. Dozens of “tech figures are now orbiting in Trump’s gravity, as either informal advisers, government officials-in-waiting or supporters pushing Trump’s agenda from outside Washington.”
The increasing influence of a few wealthy individuals raises concerns about democracy and equal access to opportunities. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Peter Thiel declared in 2009. For Thiel, “freedom” is the ability to build a technocratic future while accumulating massive wealth without public oversight and government regulation. Democracy, the will of the people, no matter how constrained, is anathema to “cryptolibertarians.” According to Elon Musk’s apartheid-supporting grandfather, the democratic electoral system must be dismantled and replaced with a technocracy of “benevolent scientists” such as Joe Lonsdale, the Trump supporter in favor of public execution.
“Dark MAGA,” represented by the black “Make America Great Again” hat worn by Musk at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland, has pulled away from the rightwing populism of the larger MAGA movement. Steve Bannon called Musk “parasitic” and “evil,” but this observation has not diminished the threat posed by the technocratic oligarchy. The tech “plutocrats don’t just want the power with the end game to repair the country; their ultimate desire is the ability to reconstruct it,” warns Tvisha Joshi.
“This growing embrace of the plutocracy,” Joshi adds, “signals trouble ahead for America’s future, one where the working people suffer due to lack of basic government aid and an unchecked executive branch” that embraces a dystopian future of unchecked AI surveillance, draconian social policies, and rule by an “enlightened aristocracy” of “muscular” billionaires.
Leave a Reply