"Why has Thiel been such a strong sponsor of Vance? Because Thiel sees in his protege a future leader of a political movement to turn the US away from democracy. "For Peter," said one of the people familiar with his thinking, "Vance is a generational bet."

Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power."

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"That's the point. Thiel and Vance - along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital's Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement - believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the US is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the US establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup."

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In Yarvin's view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful; they should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major "shareholders" select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure.

Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.

How to achieve Yarvin's vision? The first step, as Vance offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace "every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state ... with our people.

And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say" " as did Andrew Jackson " that "the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it."