Will the Tech Bros. Turn on Trump?
The Tech Bros., like Elon Musk and JD Vance puppetmaster Peter Thiel, see Trump as a means to an end: to build their own tech-state fiefdoms as they usher in the A.I. age, at the expense of us peasants. But can this unholy alliance survive Trump’s disastrous trade war? And why do they fetishize hating Ukraine?
This week’s special guest, Adrian Karatnycky, has been on the frontlines fighting for democracy both at home and abroad. In his critically acclaimed book Battleground Ukraine, Adrian traces Ukraine’s struggle for independence from the fall of the Soviet Union to Russia's genocidal invasion today, drawing important lessons for protecting democracies worldwide. He has worked alongside civil rights legend Bayard Rustin and the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in America. He also supported Poland’s Solidarity movement, which helped bring down the Iron Curtain, and played a key role, along with iconic Soviet dissident, writer, and Czech statesman Václav Havel, in preserving Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in the 1990s, when many thought the Cold War had ended.
In part two, we discuss the PayPal Mafia’s war on Ukraine as part of a broader global assault on "wokeism" (a.k.a. Empathy and democracy), Adrian’s impressions of meeting Curtis Yarvin, and how the war in Ukraine can ultimately end. For part one of their discussion, available in the show notes, Andrea and Adrian explore how Europe and the free world can survive the chaos of Trump’s America First isolationism and Russia’s weaponized corruption and election interference.
Thank you to everyone who joined the Gaslit Nation Salon live-taping with Patrick Guarasci and Sam Roecker, senior campaign advisors for Judge Susan Crawford, discussing their victory against Elon Musk in the pivotal Wisconsin Supreme Court race. The recording will be available as this week’s bonus show.
Thank you to everyone who supports Gaslit Nation–we could not make the show without you!
Want to enjoy Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, ad-free episodes, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chat, invites to live events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit!
Download Transcript
Show Notes:
Battleground Ukraine: From Independence to the War with Russia by Adrian Karatnycky https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300269468/battleground-ukraine/
Part I of Our Discussion: Can the Free World Survive Putin and Trump? https://sites.libsyn.com/124622/can-the-free-world-survive-trump-and-putin
EVENTS AT GASLIT NATION:
April 28 4pm ET – Book club discussion of Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower
Indiana-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to join, available on Patreon.
Florida-based listeners are going strong meeting in person. Be sure to join their Signal group, available on Patreon.
Have you taken Gaslit Nation’s HyperNormalization Survey Yet?
Gaslit Nation Salons take place Mondays 4pm ET over Zoom and the first ~40 minutes are recorded and shared on Patreon.com/Gaslit for our community
Andrea Chalupa (00:10):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of Mr. Jones, the journalistic thriller about The Holodomor, Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine, the film the Kremlin doesn't want you to see, so be sure to watch it. Thank you to everyone who came to our Gaslit Nation salon with political strategist Patrick Gracie. He is one of the masterminds behind Judge Susan Crawford's massive in your face victory against Elon Musk in Wisconsin in that pivotal Wisconsin Supreme Court race that we absolutely had to win. And Wisconsin is such a key state in the Far Right's playbook of a laboratory of authoritarianism. The dark money from the Koch political network flooded in there. We had the Scott Walker Horror Show when he was governor and his open war against workers unions. Wisconsin, through grassroots power, through union power, has been clawing its way back from the brink and showing us how to do that nationwide.
(01:22):
So this was a very important discussion. Thank you to everyone who attended. And the recording will be available. The full recording will be on Patreon, and then we'll play a sizable extra of it obviously for you. And thank you to everyone who is on Patreon supporting our show because we could not make Gaslit Nation without you. Now, this week's episode is a continuation of my deep dive discussion with my old friend Adrian Karatnycky. He is amazing, his experience. I learned so much about him in this interview, which I did not know, and I've spent a lot of time with this guy. He visited me on the set of Mr. Jones. He was one of my key supporters in getting that film made, and I'm so grateful to him and his big heart. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book, Battleground Ukraine, which chronicles Ukraine's struggle for independence from the fall of the Soviet Union to Russia's genocidal invasion.
(02:14):
Today, Adrian is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, co-director of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, which was a wonderful scholarship group that studies the long history of Jews in Ukraine. And they produced a beautiful, powerful book on that history going back centuries. And he is the former president of Freedom House. Adrian also worked with civil rights legend, Bayard Rustin, and for the AFLCIO, the largest federation of unions in America. Adrian's remarkable experiences include supporting Poland solidarity movement, which helped bring down the Iron Curtain, and he also worked hard to help save Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, when everyone thought the Cold War was over. Surprise, surprise. It's not. In part two of our discussion, we focus on how to end Ukraine's war, the pathway for this war to finally end, and also the new threat to fascism in recent years, the PayPal Mafia. Why do they hate Ukraine so much and how can we protect democracy worldwide from the tech bros?
(03:27):
How does the war in Ukraine ultimately end?
Adrian Karatnycky (03:36):
Well, I would say if it ends, it will end with a whimper, not a bang as TS Elliot has written, which is to say that if Ukraine is given sufficient resources, and I would argue those resources include the ability to reciprocally take out the power grid for Moscow and St. Petersburg with longer range accurate missiles. Russia will stop the war inside the Ukrainian heartland, meaning the attacks that you see on a daily basis, which kill 20 people one day, 30 people another day, terrible, terrible things, children, small families, et cetera, et cetera, and take out the power and the electricity and the heating of major Ukrainian capitals. 25% of the Russian economy is based in Moscow. If you disrupt Russian power 10% of the year, not a total shutoff by hitting the 60 power plants, minus one, which is a nuclear power plant that will ring Moscow and which are reachable by some of the missiles that the West has provided, but they've provided them at a shorter range than Ukraine needs.
(04:56):
You could take out power 10% of the time. That's two and a half percent of Russian GDP just from Moscow alone. It hit St. Petersburg. I'm not saying that that's what should be done, but the threat and the capacity to do that is I think what would bring Russia to the bargaining table. And I think if Ukraine gets or develops that capacity, that will be the beginning. It won't be Trump being nice to them. And if Trump is not willing to help Ukraine achieve that, if you Ukraine with European help develops and speeds up its own long range missile production, then I think we will get there. It won't be 24 hours. It may not be this year. I mean, I don't entirely exclude that Trump might have a fit because if you think about his psychology, his psychologist, he constantly has to have the appearance of success.
(05:51):
This is constant tension and then constant bragging about whatever he does, even if it's destroying radio broadcasting and efforts to help freedom movements around the world, that's like an attack on corruption and that's an attack on fraud, and that's an attack on waste, and we don't need this and dah, dah, dah, but that's presented as an achievement. If he fails at one of the things he said, he would wrap up in a matter of days and then he turned it into a matter of months and now it's not going anywhere. And if his tariff policies are falling apart, he might have a fit and act tougher against Russia. In any event, if he doesn't, it'll be confirmation of your thesis that he has a different idea of what the US Russia relationship is and freedom and European security be damned.
Andrea Chalupa (06:45):
I want to ask you about Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, because you were involved in that wonderful operation. What impact did Radio Free Europe Radio Free Liberty have? What is the legacy of that US funded government agency and what is the loss of it mean for the world?
Adrian Karatnycky (07:06):
Well, when you have darkness in many countries, like in Belarus and in Russia where free media do not exist, there is stuff in the internet and people can access some of them VPNs, they can access stuff. But even people with VPNs, for example, now YouTube is impossible to reach in Russia, even through VPNs because they're not allowing the bandwidth. They're manipulating so that it's much harder to watch things than to draw in data by certain sources. But the problem isn't just that it's the problem of content. If there are no independent journalists inside the country, you have to have a pool of independent journalists outside the country doing that work. And the radios were always perceived as surrogates, meaning we're bringing, and many of them brought dissident writers who fled the country or former political prisoners who had been sentenced and then expelled from the country.
(08:07):
Those people began to serve as the kind of surrogate voices for what a real independent media would be inside the country. And even in the case of Ukraine where you have a war going on, there's a lot of freedom of speech and all of that, but there's also a kind of a, you're in the middle of a war, there is this patriotic obligation to uphold the spree and the morale of the people. I think you still want some people from the outside looking who come from a Ukrainian perspective, who can be a voice of from the outside, a lot of the things you're doing are right, but you may be doing a few things wrong. And I think that was a very important role that these radios have historically played both for close society. So consider you're a writer. I brought books to writers during the Soviet period to Ukraine who had never seen their books published.
(09:02):
I brought them through Poland after Poland had opened up, and I wasn't checked at the border. I was coming from Poland. And the only way this writer knew that his book had been published as to hear excerpts of it being read on the radio at a report about the fact that the book had been published in Germany or in France or in New York by Emigre publishing houses. So people like Va Hale and some of these other people, they relied on these heroes and Le Lenza, they got their information. If they weren't in prison, they got their information from these radio broadcasts. And they're extremely important for closed societies. They're extremely important for China, they're extremely important for Cuba. We've got a Cuban American Secretary of State,
Andrea Chalupa (09:48):
Marco Rubio.
Adrian Karatnycky (09:49):
And he's, he was sitting on the closing down of Radio Marti. Now, I bet that when he was growing up and he showed some political ambitions, his family was sort of saying, great, get into politics, help the Cuban people, and so on. And he now is the architect of the demise or the attempt to undo and destroy these radios. I think it'll be very interesting to see once the aura of Trump's invincibility and his ratings of his ratings are weakened by the tariffs, whether there'll be some pushback in the next budgetary year. I think there certainly is pushback in the courts, which are restoring some of the broadcasting and some of the funding slowly. But I think the money that was allocated will not be, I think in the main reallocated, maybe a ID may be a tougher thing, but the radios may be fighting.
(10:43):
They did unlock some of the frozen money that was going to the National Endowment for Democracy, which is another important instrument for helping dissidents and freedom fighters and human rights advocates. Is it right to take a look at the radios? Should we be broadcasting everywhere? Do we want to reduce our budgets? That's in the realm of debate. And though I would favor maximum investment in these, because this is a matter of a billion dollars to 2 billion of assistance for radio broadcasting and video and audio content that makes its way through various forms on the internet. The US had 300,000, 350,000 troops in Europe during the Cold War because of solidarity and because of Vaslav Hava and because of the Hungarian freedom movements, which were sustained by these radios, we were down down to about 68,000 or 70,000. Imagine the costs of keeping 280,000 American soldiers on European soil, the massive infrastructure, their families, the size of the military bases, the scale of, and the steep decline. Even with the Iraqi war and the Afghanistan war, which were hugely expensive, the US was spending far less than at the peak of the Cold War because of the Russian, the Soviet military threat. So there was a huge bonus. This billion dollars spent was monetized into hundreds of billions in reduced defense spending if these countries had not become our allies, allies whom we are now alienating.
Andrea Chalupa (12:24):
And what was your involvement specifically? You were president of Freedom House and then you were involved in fighting for the survival of these radio networks.
Adrian Karatnycky (12:33):
Well, at first I was fighting for them not as president of Freedom House. I was an assistant to the president of the AFL-CIO, which was a trade union movement. The president's wife was a refugee of both communist Czech prison camps and of Auschwitz. She was a very young Jewish survivor. He was an anti-communist and also kind of a anti-free trade guy. He wasn't all in on nafta, but he was deeply involved in these issues. And through them, I was involved in supporting the solidarity movement throughout the 1980s.
Andrea Chalupa (13:14):
And the solidarity movement was the democratic uprising in Poland, which eventually won victory in Poland's first democratically free election.
Adrian Karatnycky (13:23):
It was a workers' movement. It was astonishingly a workers' movement and led by workers, and I would say the technical workers and skilled workers. Much of the leadership came from the working class. There were a lot of intellectuals involved, but it was a lot of working class leadership in the structures. So solidarity had a lot to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Lane Kirkland, we were involved in all this, and then came the end of the Cold War, the collapse, the temporary end of the Cold War and the emergence of these. And then there was a discussion, the Clinton administration, with whom I had very good relations, they decided, Congress decided that we need to drastically cut radio broadcasting. Okay, the war, the battle is over. And we said, well, there's still a lot of people grew up under communism. There are a lot of weird ideas out there.
(14:17):
We need to help keep the democratic dialogue going. This should continue until we see a period of stability and so on and so forth before they graduate away from radio free Europe, radio, Liberty. And then we quickly saw reversion in dictatorships emerging in Central Asia, Russia moving in an authoritarian direction with Putin. We saw Belarus moving in an authoritarian direction, Ukraine wobbling between democracy and if not for the street protests and mass civic engagement could have gone the other way. But we lobbied a kind of a solution because of the check connections that Lane Kirkland had. He worked out with Vala Ville that if we moved the radios from Munich, where the dollar was very weak as it's becoming again under President Trump weakening against the Euro, it was very weak against then the Deutschemark, and it was hugely expensive to keep the radios in Munich.
(15:17):
The checks and Slovaks were separating, and there was a palace of, there was both the parliament for the checks. There was a parliament for the Slovak, and there was a parliament for Czechoslovakia, which was slowly disappearing from existence. So HaBO said, we got this big building, it's got all these offices for parliamentarians that no longer exist. You can get it for a dollar a year, and then it's a lot cheaper living costs and so on. And we calculated that even with a major cutback in R-F-E-R-L, if it just relocated, would save the government money and it would allow the Clinton administration not to either close it down or drastically shut it down. So that was negotiated, and now they operate out of prod, which has become more expensive, but it's still not as expensive as it. But, and of course, they have the legacy of not having to pay rent, which is a big deal.
(16:11):
But despite all of that, and despite all the efficiencies that were created, Elon, you hear that this is how a real Doge would operate. You'd look for maximum effective use of resources and support, and you would plan for it. You wouldn't just cut it. There are ways, even now, if the United States is saying, we want to reduce our budget, there's now a discussion within the EU of taking up and paying for the role of these radios because Europeans recognize that this is an extremely important instrument. The radios were important then they're important right now. And I think there are ways intelligently, rather than taking a chainsaw to these budgets, is to think through what can we do more efficiently? You want to cut the budget, okay, you want to cut the budget. It would be better if you cut the budget to reduce the deficit and then to give tax breaks to the very wealthy. If you're going to cut the budget, there are ways you could plan for it, not induce chaos. And in the case of democracy, shutting these things down even for several months is a huge demoralizing thing to Chinese dissidents, to Cuban dissidents, to people around the world who are fighting for freedom or people who have just gotten their freedom and want to feel the connection and don't yet have the kind of media diversity and the media quality that develops over time.
Andrea Chalupa (17:36):
You've had years, decades, of fighting on the front lines for human rights, former president of Freedom House. What do you think is driving this horrible plummeting away from democracy and furthering dictatorship? Do you think it's all coinciding with the social media explosion, Twitter launches, activists use it for fighting for freedom, fighting to get an independent voice on the world, the Arab Spring, me too, all that stuff. But then dictators also learn how to create these bot farms and so on. And now Elon Musk comes along, buys our town square of Twitter and turns it to the largest disinformation platform for Russian Chinese disinformation in the world. So what do you account for this sliding away from freedom towards dictatorship?
Adrian Karatnycky (18:26):
So I think there are several tendencies in the Trump electorate. I think there are normal people who voted for Trump, maybe for reasons where they were caught up in the, I would say the demagogy about immigration. I mean, I think there's a real legitimate case to be made that there was a lot of unregulated movement of populations across our borders, and that needed to be fixed. It was fixed for a while. Then the Republicans didn't want to vote for legislation that would've solved much of that problem. There's a kind of an electorate that I would say is within the normal spectrum of conservatism, the right then there is the maga isolationism plus a belief in a kind of populist, powerful single leader who will just plow forward and do things unchecked. And then I think there's something deeper. There's a group among these tech bros.
(19:22):
There was a book published in the late nineties by two British writers called The Sovereign Individual, which basically says there are two polarities in the world. There is the world of crypto and encryption, and then there's the world of ai. The world of AI creates huge possibilities, but it also allows dictatorships and the planned economy for taking over the dictators will not make arbitrary decisions through a central committee, but we'll defer to the wisdom of the great all powerful Oz in subset of chips to resolve how we allocate resources and what we do and how we plan. On the other hand, for those of us who believe in freedom, there's this other thing. There's crypto where we can live on our own. We can separate out, but both of these are going to erode the nation state because they will make money transferable and decisions will be taken by other factors than the public will.
(20:32):
And then we have this ability to shield our resources through crypto and the secrecy with which we can operate so we can become sovereign from the state. So it'll undermine the nation state and it'll undermine democracy. Why do we undermine democracy? Because democracy undermines the speed at which technology moves. And technology, as Peter Thiel and other of these tech guys have said, has slowed down. There was a big spurt around the internet, and then it kind of slowed down. And now we've got this potential with AI, and maybe we can speed it up again, but to speed it up, we need to have the smart people in the world, the sovereign people in the world who can manage their own affairs to be given as much freedom as possible. And we need powerful leader to unchain us. And I think they saw in Donald Trump this kind of an instrument that would help that unchain them and move to, we're going to go to Mars.
(21:42):
We're going to have robots in every house. It's going to be this AI world of self-driving cars. And then we don't have to listen to the average person. We'll just create some wealth for them. Let us big boys, let us rich boys, let us smart boys create prosperity in the world, figure out how to allocate it, keep the other people happy enough by giving them something. Don't get in our way and don't allow people democratically to adjudicate this because democracy is going to slow things down. And I think that's, they've become attracted to this more authoritarian vision. But now we see that if the authoritarian vision, or even if you don't call it authoritarian, the unchecked executive, so to speak, and that's one of the ideas that they play about with, and people like Curtis Jarvin, who's a tech guy who's become a kind of philosopher of this, that we need a very powerful executive without the meddling of a legislator should have the same power as a CEO of a company.
(22:50):
And every few years the board of directors decides to renew his contract or to kick him out. But the problem is, if the CEO doesn't makes a mistake and a very big mistake because the CEO EO of the United States is much more powerful than a CEO of a company. He has no other competitors within its geography, and the only competitor is public opinion and the media and congress and legislator and local government to kind of stop him from doing the wrong thing. So now we see this guy going on this tear with tariffs, which they don't like. And I think now they're beginning to, I'm not saying the philosophers are doing this, but I think the tech bros are beginning to have the seeds of doubt about their model. Maybe it wasn't such a great idea because you've got guys like Peter Navarro who given the task of Ready Trade policy, that's not quite what they were counting on. They were happy when they were dismantling government, but now when government is doing terrible things to their own companies, to their own future, and also to the pace of technological change, because technological change will move more quickly if people cooperate across borders, because not all the smart people will come to the United States. Some people actually love their countries. They love to live in the places where they live and they can remotely do things. But if you create barriers between them, trade barriers and cost barriers
Andrea Chalupa (24:25):
And visa immigration barriers, and you terrorize foreign students.
Adrian Karatnycky (24:29):
Exactly.
Andrea Chalupa (24:30):
And if you terrorize leading education institutions, if you blackmail them, and not only that, we're at risk here in the US of having our own brain drain. You have Tim Snyder, Marcy Shore, Jason Stanley already moving abroad.
Adrian Karatnycky (24:43):
Well, the bigger brain drain as far as these guys, they could care less about the humanities or political science. But what they will care about is if you're cutting off $400 million to Columbia University, you're not just cutting it off to the English studies faculty or the sociology faculty or to the little enclaves of the Middle East Institute where there may be some, what they would call anti-Semitic scholars or whatever. You're not attacking that. You're attacking engineering, you're attacking robotics, you're attacking medicine, you're undermining. So what will happen with those guys, you'll have the next brain drain, will not just be the humanities people who first felt the pressure. It'll be the ancillary effect of this, that my National Science Foundation grant is no longer there. Canada's offering me something, or France is offering me something, or God forbid China's offering me something, I'm going to go there.
(25:39):
And then how many people who were expelled from universities may turn out to be leading scientists in the future that could help the United States with some discoveries here or some technological innovations. And the irony is that with all this anti-immigrant stuff, Elon Musk is an immigrant. Peter Theil is an immigrant. They're all immigrants who found a productive place in which they could emerge. And as you may know, there's a Ukrainian connection to the tech bros because the fortunes that they created created from the nest egg that emerged from a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant, Max Levchin and WhatsApp, Max Levchin , who came to the United States at age 15 and 16, came was in an elite mathematics institute in high school in cave, came to Indiana to Illinois, went to the University of Illinois, developed the cryptography or whatever it is of PayPal and the PayPal Mafia, not the WhatsApp mafia.
(26:46):
WhatsApp is also a Ukrainian techies creation, but the PayPal Mafia made its first billion, and it was divided. Elon got two or 300 million. Peter Thiel got a couple hundred million. David Sachs got some money, and this young kid from Kiev got his first couple hundred million. And they then were able to create Palantir and Tesla and other companies, and also Reid Hoffman, who's a Democrat who created LinkedIn. But out of this roots, these multi-billionaires had their first investment capital, which meant that they didn't have to dilute their shares. They would all have been very wealthy anyway. But the fact that they had a few hundred million to join with venture capital money meant that they kept much larger stakes in their companies, and then they became multi-billionaires instead of just playing billionaires. The irony is that it's this freedom of movement and the openness of this country to immigrants who are fleeing either oppression or who want to realize themselves. You close off your society to those kinds of people. That's what you get when you buy into the Trump-AFD immigration policies.
Andrea Chalupa (28:02):
You by chance met Curtis Yarvin. Curtis Yarvin is so the philosopher king of this whole Silicon Valley movement. He has written blog posts about how we need a king that the president should defy the courts, and he has a following of Peter Thiel and others. What was your impression of meeting Curtis Yarvin? What do you think is driving him? What do you think he ultimately wants?
Adrian Karatnycky (28:28):
Well, I do think he is a kind of a provocateur by he's trying to normalize a powerful executive. And the way you normalize a powerful executive is to push the edges of what is being discussed. If you're discussing absolute power and then you get FDR plus, you've already achieved what you want. But I think that I can't believe that there isn't some skepticism now about, I'm not talking about him because I think he's more philosophically wedded to this. He doesn't believe in democracy. He believes it retards progress, and it's the least common denominator and compromises, and we need to move. I still think the tech bros believe in that, but I think that the problem is that I don't think they got the philosopher king, so to speak. They didn't get the right king. And I think they're beginning to now maybe think a little bit about whether that, I think is the fundamental flaw.
(29:29):
If you don't get the right king. It's not like a corporation. The head of a corporation doesn't have an intelligence service. He doesn't have the police and the military. It's just the board of directors. They can't be intimidated. They vote him out. He's not producing. They put in a new CEO because he was using also the model, not just of a king, but of a CEO, but a CEO with those kinds of powers, including investigative powers over members of the board of directors and the ability to launch criminal cases against them. I think there would be a problem with that CEO model working if every corporate leader had that kind of authority behind it. So my sense is, I haven't seen it yet, but I think the first sign of it is this dispute over trade policy and Elon Musk's clear dissension from this war against everybody and his desire, he's still holding out the hope that this is just a bargaining point.
(30:28):
We'll very quickly get a deal going, and this is the deal maker Trump and everything will be well. But I think some of the Peter Navarro rhetoric and the rhetoric of the Secretary of Commerce suggests that this, and even the president's own rhetoric, is that this is not just to get them to reduce trade barriers. This is to get people to build factories and to expand our steel industry and to dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And that's a very long-term aim. If you're not going to bargain for three, four years, you're going to have a recession. You might have stagflation. You're definitely going to have a slowdown in AI progress. And that means China is going to China, which is ahead in robotics, but behind an AI is probably going to end up unchained moving forward much more than the United States. So I have a feeling I think we're going to see it. I remember Peter Thiel actually stayed out of this last election. He supported Trump in I think 2016 and maybe even in 2020. This election he was more interested in just the battle of ideas.
Andrea Chalupa (31:35):
Well, he got JD Vance in there.
Adrian Karatnycky (31:37):
Well, yeah, he's playing the long game. You're exactly right.
Andrea Chalupa (31:40):
Well, Palantir is expanding into the US government. It first entered in through Trump's first term. The DOJ became dependent on it, on Palantir, which maps people,
Adrian Karatnycky (31:50):
Palantir, I think you have. There are also nuance differences. So Alex Karp, who is a very wealthy man and the CEO and also a multi-billionaire, he doesn't not have as big a piece as Peter Thiel, but he's delivering for them. I think he has a slightly more, he believes in the free world. He believes in not just freedom of expression for extremist views. I think he's been mugged a little bit by the anti-Israel protests, and he's moved a bit to the right, but he's not all the same, is what I'm saying. And by the way, Palantir has been extremely important to the Ukrainian defense complex.
Andrea Chalupa (32:27):
Really? How so?
Adrian Karatnycky (32:29):
Well, they've been providing Ukraine -- they've been training their technology on the Ukrainian battlefield. They reached out to the Ukrainian military leadership within a month of the beginning of the war. They offered them tens of billions of dollars of free software for the first two years of the war renewing it. And they were extremely important. They were mainly operating as far as I know, through their European, German-based European representatives. But I know that Palantir is all over the war, despite the fact that David Sachs, who's a minority owner, is very anti-Ukrainian, and they're all in with Trump. For them the opportunity to build, and I think they see Ukraine, at least Alex Karp see's Ukraine as a struggle between evil, more free society and a closed society. So not all of them have that kind of view. And I don't think Peter Thiel has any sympathy for the Vladimir Putin version of the world. They may be hostile to democracy, but they want to be titans or demigods operating freely. And I think they understand that in Russia, their equivalent demigods are completely under the thumb of Putin. That model is not one to their liking. They'd rather be calling the shots with the government than the government calling the shots with them.
Andrea Chalupa (33:54):
Yeah. So Alex, cio Palantir, why is Silicon Valley then a lot of these tech bros, Elon Musk, his buddy David Sachs, both in the White House with official positions, and then Peter Thiel, JD Vance, certainly Zelensky said him like, please come to Ukraine. And JD Vance is like, I don't want to go on your propaganda tour. Can you be a bigger asshole than JD Vance? Why do you think this cabal of Silicon Valley tech bros, JD Vance being a creation of them, he owes his political career to Peter Thiel. Why are they anti-Ukraine? They make it their public persona to be anti-Ukraine.
Adrian Karatnycky (34:34):
I think it's because of the Ukrainian desire to be part of the European Union, the Ukrainian desire to be part of the European Union as a matter of security. It's a matter of economic necessity. If you've got Russia as your only other neighbor, you need to be part of something more secure and much more prosperous and so on. And I think they don't like Europe's wokeness. They don't like uS wokeness. They don't like. I think they, oddly enough, they believe in European civilization, but they believe in European civilization as defined like in the 16th century or the 13th century, not the new Europe, which is much more multi-ethnic multicultural
Andrea Chalupa (35:14):
With fiefdoms, with CEO fiefdoms.
Adrian Karatnycky (35:17):
Well, but they do also believe in fiefdoms in the traditional European sense. They want a weak, in essence, they want a weak state, but to get there, they want a strong state. What they don't realize is if you create a strong state, states don't like to go out of business. The people who have all the power, they want to use Trump as an instrument to create their model of the world. But that model of the world Trump's not going to go away. The little city states and little enclaves, they love places like Dubai. They love places like these little experiments of free trade zones, and they love Singapore. They loved Hong Kong. But then a big country came and told Hong Kong, you can no longer be the Hong Kong where you have maximum personal freedom for wealthy and creative people. So I think they need to rethink. We haven't seen it yet, but I think they need to rethink. And I think there are people who have examined their Quinn Lebodan and professor at Wellesley, Canadian of I guess, Ukrainian extraction. He's also written a book about this authoritarianism within, and he's got a new book called Hiyek's Bastards, which I haven't seen yet, but I'm sure it's going to be a great read. Anyway, he discusses some of these things. There's a lot of contradictions in their worldviews. They're very smart people. They're very capable people. They're sometimes very naive politically.
Andrea Chalupa (36:41):
They're incredibly arrogant and ignorant and sexist, misogynistic.
Adrian Karatnycky (36:47):
They're ignorant of a lot of things, but because they've been so successful in a few things, they think they have mastery over everything. They're masters of the universe, to be fair to them, some of them, like Peter Thiel, they are intellectual. They do read, they do have
Andrea Chalupa (37:02):
Like Mein Kampf, modern day literature.
Adrian Karatnycky (37:06):
I wouldn't go that far. But I think they also, a lot of what I find in that world is they do believe in this kind of deep state conspiracy stuff, whereas what they call the deep state, we would call the rule of law, the functioning of institutions, the defense of established ways of doing things. And of course, they're revolutionaries, so they consider what we would call stability. They consider to be the deep state
Andrea Chalupa (37:34):
Revolutionaries in the Bolshevik sense. It's like if the Bolsheviks had billions of dollars.
Adrian Karatnycky (37:38):
French Revolution, Bolshevik Revolution. Their revolutionaries
Andrea Chalupa (37:42):
And both revolutions produced oligarchy.
Adrian Karatnycky (37:45):
Yeah.
Andrea Chalupa (37:46):
When the French had their revolution and beheaded a bunch of people,
Adrian Karatnycky (37:50):
They got what Curtis Yarvin wanted.
Andrea Chalupa (37:52):
They got what Curtis Yarvin wanted. I mean, Napoleon came along, ruled like a king, and Napoleon and Josephine spent far more money than the king and queen of France that were beheaded.
Adrian Karatnycky (38:04):
Exactly. That's a very interesting parallel because I do think we got to watch out where politics will go in the next few weeks, in the next few months, and what happens on this trade stuff. If Trump recedes, then I think he will save himself for at least for another battle. If he stays, I think we're going to be in for a Thermador. We're going to see a much quicker end to this revolution. I'm not saying the worse it gets, the better it gets, but I think it may be better for all concerned that he plow ahead with this, and then there'll be much more resistance within the Republican party. Much more resistance within his electorate, much more resistance from the tech bros. And I think we will see a counter reaction and the reemergence of checks and balances inside the system. If he's smart about how he's playing with this and strikes some bargains, we're going to be in for a lot more Trump.
Andrea Chalupa (39:08):
When to join the conversation, shape the show by becoming a member of Gaslit Nation on Patreon. Join our community of listeners for exclusive q and a sessions. Bonus shows. Get all episodes ad free invites to live events and more. Most importantly, connect with other listeners in our group chat and committees, planting Seeds of change. Sign up at patreon.com/gaslit. Gaslit Nation hosts resilience political salons every Monday at 4:00 PM Eastern Can't make it live. Recordings are available to our community on Patreon. Salons are your space to vent, ask questions, and connect with other listeners who also really, really hate Nazis to help Ukraine with urgently needed humanitarian aid. Join me in donating to Roso for ukraine@rosoforukraine.org to help refugees in conflict zones donate to Doctors Without borders@doctorswithoutborders.org. And if you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate to The Orangutan project@theorangutanproject.org.
(40:16):
Gaslit Nation is produced by Andrea Chalupa. Our editing wizard is Nicholas Torres, and our associate producer is Carlin Dagel. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners and check at our Patreon. It keeps us going. Original music and Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Berg, Nick Farr, Damien Ariaga, and Carlin Daigle. Our logo design was donated to us by Hamish Smite of the New York based Firm order. Thank you so much. Hamish Gaslin Nation would like to thank our supporters at the producer level on Patreon and higher. Todd Dan Milo and Cubby Abby Zavos, TBL 9 2 6 6 6 because we are defeating the Antichrist. Lily Wachowski Iceberg is defiant. Sherry Escobar, Sidney Davies. Work for Better Prep for Trouble. John Scholer. Ellen McGirt. Larry Gusan, Ann Bertino, David East Mark, mark, Sean Berg, Kristen Custer, Kevin Gannon, Sandra Collins, Katie Ma, James D. Leonard, Leo Chalupa, Carol Gold, Marcus j Trent, Joe Darcy, DL Sinfield, Nicole Spear, Abby Road, Jans Ra Brasen, Sarah Gray, Diana Gallagher, Leah Campbell, Jared Lombardo, and Tanya Chalupa. Thank you all so much for your support of the show. We could not make Gaslit Nation without you.