What Would Nellis Say?
Dark Enlightenment
dark enlightenment
By Rick Stiller
While the media churns with endless in-depth stories about Trump’s involvement in the Epstein scandal, defunding supplement health insurance premiums, cancelling nutritional assistance, eliminating Medicaid for millions, tariffs that are starting to dramatically boost inflation, corrupt personal and family business deals with foreign countries and untraceable crypto exchanges, blackmail of companies that need government approval of mergers or acquisitions, and the murder of more than 95 mariners without proof that they are guilty of anything, or permission under the War Powers Resolution which requires the President to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying forces and cease military action within 60-90 days unless Congress approves an act of war and under no circumstances do our laws permit murdering shipwreck survivors…
A secret intellectual subculture of technocratic billionaires is publicly conspiring and organizing to do away with democracy in favor of “Aristopopulism,” which combines rule by a corporate monarchy run by “select, capable” elites and justified by marketing rhetoric designed to ensure support from the remnants of Trump’s MAGA faithful bigots.
Billionaire Peter Thiel, a "technocratic monarchist,” made his fortune with early investments in Facebook and partnering with Elon Musk in PayPal and Alex Karp in Palantir, has written that freedom (for the wealthy) and democracy are incompatible. He and venture capitalist Chris Buskirk held a strategy meeting in 2019 in Rockbridge, Ohio, with heavyweight contributors to initiate a plan to maintain control of the MAGA apparatus in the “Post Trump” era…which does not necessarily mean waiting until someone else is elected.
They named their organization The Rockbridge Network and released a brochure that included…
The group’s publicly stated objectives include “building a political coalition that will win national elections with 55% of the popular vote,” by “building a new conservative ecosystem” through elimination of the “free press” by funding various media initiatives (think, in addition to the Fox propaganda machine which, beside the television networks, owns the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, Larry and David Ellison’s takeover of Paramount which owns and forced a radical shift in political bias at traditionally neutral CBS, massive investments to control American TikTok operations and messaging - whose enormous primary audience is under 30, and soliciting Trump’s help in their hostile bid for Warner Brothers, which owns CNN.
That fanatical influence is inflated by more than 200 local TV stations owned by right-wing Sinclair Broadcasting and Nexstar, and the hundreds of local newspapers that were bought up and reduced to propaganda vehicles in support of radically conservative ideology and MAGA candidates in towns and cities across the nation.
The ” Rockbridge Transition Project” is preparing a “government-in-waiting” staffed with ultra-conservative technocrats ready to launch the next, far more radical version of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to dismantle the legislative state, institute extreme gerrymandering of the electoral maps in every district in the country, support white “Christian” nationalism through the arrest without warrants or charges, incarceration under inhumane conditions, and deportation of minorities. They intend to continue transforming public education into privately funded “charter schools” with curricula based on the teachings of the Bible and a racist rewriting of history, and the elimination of rights and benefits that the American people depend on. Their candidate of choice as our next president/dictator is Peter Thiel’s puppet, J.D. Vance.
In 2011, Yale law student J.D. Vance attended a talk by venture capitalist Peter Thiel, which he characterized as “the most significant moment of my life.” He later said that Thiel was “possibly the smartest person” he had ever met and that his Christian faith “defied the social template I had constructed – that dumb people were Christians and smart people atheists.”
With a job offer from Thiel, he changed course to join Thiel’s Mithril Capital as a partner in 2015. His 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” created a following that allowed him to begin planning a political career. He joined Revolution, an investment firm in Washington, D.C., before launching his own venture capital firm, Narya Capital, in 2019 with financial backing from Thiel and other billionaires, including Marc Andreessen and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Thiel introduced him to Donald Trump in 2021, secured an endorsement from the former president, and invested a record-breaking $15 million in Vance’s Senatorial campaign, soliciting millions more from his venture capitalist associates, paving the path to the vice-presidential nomination three years later, even though he has no qualifications for the office.
The expanded Rockbridge Network named their technocratic monarchist movement “Neoreaction” (NRx) or the Dark Enlightenment, which proposes that governance should be guided by technocratic elites rather than by public voting. This fanatical philosophy is based on the writings of software engineer turned radical philosopher Curtis Yarvin, whose theory “Dark Enlightenment is nothing less than a full-scale assault on the foundational values of modern liberalism: representative democracy, the rule of law, civil rights, public opinion, and the separation of powers.” and English philosopher Nick Land, who coined the term “accelerationism” - "Land wants the processes of capitalism to accelerate so that biological human intelligence is abolished in favour of something far greater." He also endorses slavery, noting that “some races are better suited for it” than others, believes that feudalism is superior to democracy, and that future “kingdoms” will resemble and be run like corporations.
Journalist and pundit James Kirchick says in an article that “although neo-reactionary thinkers disdain the masses and claim to despise populism and people more generally, what ties them to the rest of the alt-right is their unapologetically racist element, their shared misanthropy and their resentment of mismanagement by the ruling elites.”
They support anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian forms of government like absolute monarchies or authoritarian capitalist city-states, rejecting the concept of mass rule, "scientific racism" (which they refer to as "human biodiversity") and white nationalism, a general hatred or distrust of humanity or human nature, and oppose what they call "the Cathedral," a term the alt-right uses to describe the contemporary liberal institutions, media, and academia that they believe promote progressivism and political correctness.
They even have a “Neoreaction” flag to replace the stars and stripes
The ultimate objective is to abolish elections, concentrate power in the hands of the “enlightened elite”, and neutralize political and social dissent in a world without “participation, popular sovereignty, or a shared morality.”
Palantir Technologies (named after Tolkien’s “seeing stone”) was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale, Nathan Gettings, and is run by Alex Karp. The company develops intelligence tools for military and government security systems and surveillance through artificial intelligence and facial recognition.
As a result of the massive theft of our most private information by Elon Musk’s DOGE techno-thugs, Palantir now has a complete dossier on every American. Palatir Gotham is an intelligence tool used by militaries and counter-intelligence analysts to expand government surveillance. ICE and the Border Patrol are using those Gotham Ai databases to identify, capture, and deport tens of thousands of legal and illegal refugees from this country. The next phase of the Rockbridge Project’s itinerary is employing those files to eliminate anyone who opposes their rule.
The American public ignored the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which was published more than a year before the 2024 elections. It outlined the specific objectives and policies being pursued and enacted by the current Republican administration. As we have seen, those included dismantling vital government agencies, neutralizing Congressional oversight and power, packing the courts with radically “conservative” (can we say fascist?) judges who ignore precedents and Constitutional restraints to rule in favor of the elites while suppressing the rights and benefits of the vast majority of citizens of this country.
“Neoreaction” is the next very organized and coordinated step in the march towards an authoritarian regime that will answer to no one in the quest to enrich their sponsors. The fanatics running this administration are currently dismantling our democratic government, eliminating our rights and benefits, deporting black and brown people without warrants or charges, demolishing healthcare, rewriting history and substituting propaganda for fact-based curriculums in our children’s schools, manipulating our economy to favor the rich while destroying the middle class, reducing restrictions on pollution in favor of corporate profits, and gerrymandering our electoral system.
To ignore this threat is to concede the demise of everything our country stands for before the real battle has begun. The richest men in the world have decided that their wealth entitles them to lord over the rest of our population, and they are making no secret of their intention to do just that.
Anyone who has been paying attention to the constant unintelligible blabbering of our president understands that his mental capacity is failing, he is rapidly losing his grip on reality, and is incapable of fulfilling the demands of his office.
It seems reasonable to assume that the players behind this impending coup will not hesitate to declare Trump incompetent, replace him with their chosen surrogate J.D. Vance, declare a national emergency, and cancel the 2026 elections. They cannot chance a blue wave replacing MAGA power in Washington and in every statehouse across the country.
The No Kings protests have been massive and impressive in their peaceful resolve to expose the truth about Republican control and the MAGA coup. World history has shown that the critical threshold for change is 3.5% of the population. Recent protests were attended by a little over 2%. The movement needs far more enthusiastic and dedicated volunteers to fill the streets every day until this regime is removed and the conspirators are overthrown.
This is our Dark Enlightenment, the moment when we need to turn the lights back on to illuminate the arrogance of their campaign to replace democracy with feudalism, freedom with servitude, hope and promise with darkness. The time has already passed to confront and eliminate American Fascism, and only you and everyone you know can make that difference. This is when We The People have to stand up, speak out, and take back our power.
Thanks for your support! I look forward to your thoughts, appreciate your dedication to freedom and democracy, and hope you will share these opinions with everyone you know!
To read more essays or the first chapters of more than a dozen of my novels, including Peachtree - a fast romp through the torrents of the Sixties, the perfect read for the Boomers in your life, visit: www.rickstiller.com, and for a moment of calm, enjoy my new portfolio of floral portraits from this season in Kelian’s Garden at www.rickstillerart.com. Beautiful prints and gorgeous merchandise make great holiday gifts!
PS – If you know any immigrants who have been, are, or might be subject to arrest for attending required court hearings, a group of volunteers, based out of the USC Dornsife program, has established a free hotline to help those with in-person immigration hearings file motions to move their appointments online.
The hotline is available for use by anyone, anywhere, and may be reached at 888-462-5211. Services are available in both English and Spanish. For the full article, please visit: https://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2025/06/18/usc-agents-of-change-establishes-hotline-to-help-move-immigration-hearings-online/.
