S2E36 Silicon Valley s Dark Enlightenment Coup with Courtenay Turner

Aaron Day explores Technocracy, Cbdc, Digital Id. is season two, episode thirty six. Tonight, we're going to be talking about the dark enlightenment exposed. And we are going to have back Courtney Turner, who's a great friend of the show and one of the best people on the planet in terms of exposing this entire topic of technocracy. CHAPTERS: 17:44 - Exposing the Dark Enlightenment 22:44 - Technocracy Funding Sources 27:46 - Censorship of Technocracy Discourse 32:49 - Tokenization: A Tool for Freedom 37:50 - Deceptive Promises of Limited Government 47:51 - The Dangers of the GENIUS Act 52:53 - Interpreting the Dark MAGA Movement 1:07:57 - The Unbound Executive Proposal 1:12:58 - Project 2025: Heritage's Technocratic Agenda 1:33:01 - Technocracy's Efficiency Narrative

Welcome back to The Aaron Day Show. This is season two, episode thirty six. Tonight, we're going to be talking about the dark enlightenment exposed. And we are going to have back Courtney Turner, who's a great friend of the show and one of the best people on the planet in terms of exposing this entire topic of technocracy. And this theme tonight is based on an article that she recently had published, which is very timely and lines up with a lot of things that that I've been talking about, well, for the last couple of years, but more importantly, the last sixty to ninety days has been really emphasizing these themes. And so very excited to have her on. Before we get to that, just some housekeeping. I encourage everybody to check out the last episode, season two, episode thirty five. And I'm starting to break these up. I think the general flow is going to be on Monday. We will probably do something that's focused on either exposing technocracy or, you know, something related to, you know, regaining your personal autonomy. And then on Thursday, we're going to make it solutions oriented with, you know, an expose on something related to the Zeno ecosystem and how we can build parallel solutions that are private and outside of the existing system. So we'll see how long, I mean, it's not going to be hard and fast and I'm going to follow to that, but that's generally, uh, the approach that I want to take primarily because at this point, I have to say that what's going on in the last ninety days, technocracy is accelerating so quickly. I mean, in terms of not only the Genius Act and stable coins, the real ID, what we have going on globally with digital IDs being rolled out all over the globe, the UK, seventeen different countries rolling theirs out, passing laws at the same time, representing three billion people. the infiltration of AI in healthcare and kind of, I would argue the hijacking of the Maha movement, it's really going at lightning speed. And on top of that, we have also the emergence of a sovereign wealth fund, which is further consolidation of power in the executive branch, which is kind of a transition point to full-on technocracy. So it's moving so quickly that while it's helpful to expose what's going on. It's also somebody saying the volume is too low. Hold on. Hopefully that's better. So it's important to expose that, but we have to actually build parallel solutions now because they're actively rolling out technocracy. They're no longer planning technocracy. They're no longer just simply talking about these things. This isn't UN Agenda, is a concept. This is digital IDs and Palantir AI surveillance and so forth, all being rolled out. So this is why it's important that we start to hit the exits. And last week, the focus was on Freedom Dollar, which I will get to in a second. The episode before that, season two, episode thirty four, we really focused on this whole digital ID situation, which I highly encourage you to watch. or even just skimmed through the transcripts of, because this one even shocked me. I mean, I followed this technocracy stuff full time, and even I got blindsided by the fact that digital IDs are being rolled out. And while you probably heard about what the UK is doing, and everybody was shocked by that, but that's not the most shocking news. The most shocking news is that real ID is already digital in eleven states. It will be digital in twenty more states by the end of the year. Mexico is rolling out in Q one of next year nationwide digital ID tied to a QR code and biometrics that will be required to be enforced by, in addition to the state, employers. So this is live. And now we have seventeen other countries who work with the same three vendors rolling out digital ID fully by the end of either next year or early twenty-seven. So a lot of people think about this as these as twenty thirty initiatives as if they're going to be live by twenty thirty. And that's actually not the case. So this stuff is moving ahead full steam. And a lot of people were caught off guard by that. And then the previous week we talked about Trump's sovereign wealth fund, which is something that's completely anti-American. The idea that the government is now making investments in companies like Intel and numerous other companies, Lithium Americas, And others and really moving to tokenize the nation's assets and sell those off. Howard Lutnik is in the middle of this. It's a horrifying prospect because sovereign wealth funds control about seven percent of the global wealth. And if you actually look at the breakdown of who controls this, these are usually dictators or monarchs. That's largely the type of regime that's doing this. And they are one of the primary funding sources right now for agenda, so definitely catch up on that because it's a key portion and key element of, of pushing technocracy forward now related to what I talked about in the last episode, I'm giving away. Two hundred and twenty dollars worth of, uh, freedom dollar. Uh, and I'm giving eleven dollars to twenty different people. So basically when a hundred people sign up, I'm going to pick twenty out of the one hundred. So you have a one in five chance of winning. And the reason it's eleven Freedom Dollars and not ten is I want to make sure you had enough to be able to not only receive the Freedom Dollar, but you can actually set up a non-KYC debit card called the ZBIT card, and that's enough to meet the minimum to load onto your card. So what you will be able to do with this giveaway is receive a privacy stablecoin that's not backed by the dollar, and you will be able to load it onto a non-KYC Debit card that you can spend at a hundred million merchants anywhere in the world. And I, to me, this is a powerhouse combination that shows what we can do as we start migrating away from these centralized controlled systems into private alternatives. And so I encourage you to check that out. Let me, if you go to the Aaron day show.com website right now, forward slash register is where you got to set up and I'll, I'll see where we are. So we're at. sign up so far. So we're down to, you know, nineteen left and then that will trigger that. So whenever that happens, I mean, I'm going to do the giveaway, whether that is, you know, today or whether it's tomorrow or the end of the week or whatever happens to be once we hit that trigger number. But I encourage you to share this with your friends and your relatives. All you have to do is register an account and then I'll have your email address and I will pick twenty emails at random. So this is very exciting, exciting news. I'm not being paid to promote this. I'm doing this because everything about the show is about exposing technocracy and then coming up with counters to technocracy. And I think this is one of the best toolkits that we have. I also encourage you to check out the Aaron day show. I did quite a bit of, of updates as if you've been listening to the show, we're gonna be rolling out by the end of this month, five total websites, uh, related to, this is kind of our new strategy moving forward in, in November. And, uh, so I've been working on these things and they've been in various stages of development, but I spent a lot of time on the Aaron day show and, and some of the things that were added over the weekend is a lot of you, uh, requested information about where you can, get the songs and so there's now a music and memes tab on the website and you can actually see a you see this music player you can actually play all the audio songs right there on the site and then you can also scroll down below that and see kind of the video version of it i mean it's not really video it's more of an image with you know kind of an audio visualizer on it some of these i may turn into videos depends on how much how how much people like them But anyway, you can play the music, you can share the music, you can also vote on it. So if you have a registered account, you can actually vote thumbs up or thumbs down on the songs. And in that same area, there's now a memes tab. So I have started to create memes for each episode, as well as the slides that I have, you know, like what we're going through today. I'm going to be putting all of the slides and all of the memes on there as well, which you can also rate up or down or whatever, but also share. So the idea is that, you know, sometimes this podcast goes on for quite some time. It can be, you know, three, four, five hours. Obviously not everybody's gonna listen to that, but we wanna get the content out there in as many different formats as possible. I will also soon be doing clips as well. So there's that also at the website, there's a discussions area. So there's, uh, really the ability to have discussions on all aspects of the site. You can have discussions on the various episode pages. You can have discussions about the means you can have discussions about anything in the site. So obviously I'm doing this Freedom Dollar giveaway to also help promote getting people enrolled in the site. And the reason for that is, and as we're seeing right now with these numbers, we have three hundred fifty seven people live. This is a very small number. And I am being incredibly shadow banned, particularly, you know, I was usually getting three thousand, five thousand on the live stream. And what has happened is, is the more I've talked about technocracy, And the more I've gone directly to the heart of the matter, which is that Elon Musk is a technocrat. The people that control Rumble are technocrats. The people that control the platforms that I'm distributing this on don't like this content. So you may think that you have freedom of speech and that the war was won, but it was not. We have freedom of reach. And while you might be able to talk about COVID because it's a topic that's five years old, you can't talk about the actual tyranny that's going on right now. And that is technocracy. And that is what is going on with the algorithmic censorship. That is what's going on with the enhancement of AI surveillance and digital IDs and trackable stable coins and so forth. And so these are the topics that people should be talking about. But as you've probably noticed, all you ever see outside of content that's just pure bots are is just pure rage bait on whatever the topic of the day is. And so One of the reasons I created this site is, you know, I'm making all the videos available in a way that is censorship resistant, and I want to start pushing the discussions there and really building a community around this so that we don't have to worry about being censored. I actually put out a lot of content. Sound is very echo. That doesn't, all right, I haven't actually changed. I haven't changed any of the settings, so I'm not sure why it would be an echo. Well, I guess we'll keep going. I don't know how to, maybe when we get, when Courtney comes on, I'll play around with the audio a bit. But I'm not, you know, I thought I had the sound figured out and we have a whole new system here. Not sure why that's happening. If anyone else is hearing an echo, please let me know. No echo. So Courtney's not hearing an echo. So I don't know. So it sounds good on my end. I think all the settings are right. So I'm not sure what's happening there. In any event, I want to push more and more of this to not only the Aaron Day Show website, but also the other websites like Freedom Forge and Daylight Freedom Foundation and Oh Nothing and so forth. Simply because I feel like I felt in twenty twenty when I started doing videos in March of twenty twenty, encouraging people to move to decentralized social media because they were going to start censoring due to COVID. And within a week, my reach, which was fifty to one hundred thousand people through the different channels I was broadcasting to, was hard limited at fifty. And I feel like that's beginning to happen again now. So my traffic, if I look at it, it's down eighty percent and it's not the quality of the content. It says, audio sounds okay. It just sounds like you're in a large room. Well, I am in a large room, so I should probably figure out a way to moderate that at some point. So in any event, please check out thearendayshow.com. Please register for the Freedom Dollar giveaway. And I encourage you to get an account and to start commenting. And I'm gonna add more features for registered users. It's completely free. I'm not gonna charge money for this. The purpose of this is not to monetize it. purpose of it is to actually be able to have ongoing conversations and to begin to build a community so the other thing is we have an event coming up which is the brownstone institute annual conference and gala i'll be speaking at that um i think there still are some tickets left but probably not many uh this is going to be all the brownstone events are terrific events and i'm looking forward to this we're actually going to be sponsoring this event uh my wife and i through daylight freedom foundation so We're going to be rolling out these five initiatives and kind of making this our official launch off point. Not that there's anything major that we're doing there differently. We're just going to have a table essentially, but that really marks a transition point. They call it the great transition and that's the great transition as well in terms of really upgrading the work that we've been doing for the last three years and moving into overdrive because As I've said, if you're new to this program, the entire purpose of this program is to fight, we're in the big war, which is technocracy versus freedom. And most people don't know what technocracy is, which is why I'm grateful that we're going to have Courtney on tonight. But, you know, technocracy is an ideology. It's a new way of organizing society where scientists and engineers make decisions for people. And it's not one that values property rights, individual rights, or even free will. And the original idea of it was to have elites pick scientists and engineers, but now the upgraded and expanded view of this is to actually replace the scientists and engineers with AI. And I'm not anti technology at all. In fact, as you know, or if you, you will know, I mean, I use AI very extensively. all over the place but it's a question of who controls the ai and for what ends and i think once you understand the people behind these big companies that are pushing this technocracy once you learn more about palantir and curtis yarvin and x and so forth you'll realize that this is really an assault on free will itself and i'm arguing that tokenization is the battleground I've been working on tokenization since late, which is creating digital tokens that represent assets. But my entire approach has been that tokenization can be a tool to increase freedom because it gets you out of our current system, which is run by centralized databases. Our current system is almost, is almost all largely electronic. Commerce is already largely electronic and it uses centralized databases that can be hacked. and manipulated and the entries changed by third parties. And that happens all of the time. And tokenization offers the ability to get rid of some of those security features and allow for increased trade. However, like everything else and like all technology, it could either be used for freedom or it could be used for tyranny. And unfortunately, the tokenization that's going on right now is tokenization like CBDCs or stablecoins, which are backdoor CBDCs, which are digital tokens that can be programmed, tracked and censored by third parties like government and other third parties. It's not even just limited to government. Some of these industry players have intermediaries like our stock market has something called DTCC. And, you know, the idea behind tokenization was to get rid of those intermediaries. And unfortunately, what's happening is we're getting the tokenization, but we're not getting freedom. We're actually keeping those same third parties involved and they actually have more control over our assets. So one of the things that I've been arguing is there have been changes made contractually. We have given up our rights through what are called click wrap agreements over the last couple of decades. And what these digital tokens are essentially going to represent are these contracts where we've given away our rights. And once everything's moved to this tokenization system, they're going to be able to transfer and shut down our assets. And we will find out that we owe nothing. at the click of a mouse button, although I'm arguing we already, eighty percent don't own anything anyway, and probably have a lack of understanding of what we actually own based on the contracts we've already signed. And so because of this, I've focused a lot of effort on Zeno, which is an ability to tokenize assets where you're tokenizing them privately, you retain custody of the tokens and you can trade them without anybody being able to track your transactions. And so Our efforts are largely in these three areas. One, warning people about technocracy and encouraging people to wake up, which needs to happen now. Again, we're running out of time. Watch the last, I would say, six episodes and you'll see the evidence there and the data piling up, not about what people are talking about doing, but what they've already done or laws that they put into place or technologies that have already been built. The second part of this is really autonomy reboot. And this is probably the most important of all, which is that We have to recognize that we have free will and we have the ability to make decisions for ourselves, control our own thoughts, our own emotions and our own actions. And the problem is that if we're not conscious of the fact that we have free will, we will be subject to be programmed by third parties, whether it is media or entertainment or politics or increasingly. And this is probably the most dangerous of all. social media algorithms and technology, which is basically designed to manipulate our dopamine levels, designed to manipulate us into moving in a certain direction. So realizing that we can opt out of those systems and take back our own free will is the key to any success in this enterprise. And then the third area is the revolution will be tokenized. So this is actually building systems out of private systems. I've got a couple of things here. There's a typo in that other one. I'm going to be announcing and writing some articles up about, I want to put together some scoring systems to show how we're doing. One of the things that I've noticed is that people seem to think that we are a lot freer than we are and that we have more time than we actually have. And one of the things that I have been saying and arguing, particularly after doing a deep dive into Curtis Yarvin, is that there's been a big push to kind of strengthen the executive branch and give the executive branch power. And it's being couched as, which, you know, this part of it is correct. The government has gotten out of control. We have a deep state and an administrative state that isn't called for in the Constitution. There's really no way to manage it. So what people are saying is, well, we need to empower the executive branch to be able to fix those things and to be able to, as Curtis Jarvis says, rage, retire all government employees. And that may sound good in many respects. Some of it sounds good to me as somebody who's for limited government. The problem is the people that are pushing this narrative do not intend to roll back the Constitution. So there are a lot of people right now being fooled into believing that if they help And they help push, you know, and just support and trust the plan and support Bobby and support all these people that what's going to happen is we're going to reduce government and we're going to go back to the way things were. That's not going to happen. And unfortunately, the people that are working on that are not working on building alternative solutions, whereas the technocrats are not only designing their systems and replacement, but they're implementing the systems actively. So I've got a monarchy level system, which I'll outline what the points are, you know, in the different categories and tiers, and I'll put that out for public comment. And I also have a technocracy level. So this is kind of like the DEF CON five system that we have. But I think when you actually see the list of where we really are in terms of what we've already given up, how much surveillance there is, and then what's going on with when I say monarchy level, I mean, we are, you know, we're in a situation right now where the Trump administration is doing so much through executive order, violating and just going beyond the law. And now we have the creation of a sovereign wealth fund where this is being done in a way where it's designed to have control really rest at the executive branch as to how the sovereign wealth fund works. And so this is a building situation. And so what we're going to do is document where we are in this monarchy scale. But keep in mind, I'm not saying that this is a, that Trump's bad and that Trump's trying to be a monarch. In reality, this is all designed and queued up for J.D. Vance. It's not even for Trump, who has been kind of constructed by Peter Thiel and others for this position, groomed for this position to usher in technocracy. And then one more thing before We bring Courtney back up. We've been doing these technocracy roundtables every month. Last month, we covered robotics and we covered sovereign wealth funds. On October the twenty second at six p.m., we're going to cover what I think is probably the most important topic of all, which is where we are with AI and health care today. And if I can, I've been working on the own nothing site, which is the site where, you know, you can basically put in your click wrap agreement that you've signed. You can paste the link or paste the text, and then it will actually show you how, how much you owe, how much, how many, how many of your rights have been taken away. There's a whole scoring system behind it. And I've been working on this. And what I've decided to do is to just launch with healthcare, the healthcare sector, because it's probably the worst and the largest. And with an emphasis on AI healthcare so that you can analyze these agreements because people are not aware of the extent to which AI is already being used to make healthcare decisions to decide claims for insurance. And where it's not only that the AI is being used to determine, to accept or reject the claim, but if you have an appeal, the appeal goes to the AI. There's actually no human intervention. These things are happening now and it's much more wide scale than you would believe. And again, I'm not anti-AI, but there are big questions around who's driving these things and who's governing the policies and what happens if the AI makes a decision. If a person makes a decision, there's liability. Well, what happens if the AI makes a faulty decision and the only person you can actually appeal to is the AI? What do you do with that? So there are profound implications. So that's going to be a very exciting, episode. So tonight we're going to, let me make sure Courtney has the right link. I believe I sent her the right link. Let me see. All right. So we'll bring her up and, you know, Courtney's been on before. If you're not a follower, she's at CourtneyTurner.com. Follow her Substack, Courtney Turner on Substack. Phenomenal content. I subscribed. I recommend being a paid subscriber. Being in this space doesn't pay the technocrats. So I encourage you to follow her work as essentially one of the top people in the world in terms of research and understanding what's going on with technology. Hi, Courtney. Good to have you back. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, no, my pleasure. So, you know, hopefully people out there are liking and sharing this. Last time you were on was on holidays. I think you were on Labor Day. So, I don't know. I'm getting like a choppy. I'm not sure if it's on my end or your end. It might be mine. So, I guess we'll keep talking and see. Sorry. It's just like... Oh, you know, is this any better? It is much better. Yeah. Okay. I'm glad I said something. Oops. Okay. All right. This should be, this should be a lot better. I think I figured out what the problem was. I had a, I had another mic going. Oh, okay. Yeah. Even though it was a way it was set up for Eileen and I didn't, uh, didn't unplug it. So my, my apologies, hopefully that will improve. Excellent. Cool. Yeah. So good to be here. Yeah. Great intro. So yeah, lots, lots of stuff going on. Do you feel that things are accelerating or is it just me? Yeah, I think they're definitely accelerating. I think they feel like they have a lot of the momentum behind them. So I think they feel pressure on one hand, but I think they also feel like the infrastructure is there. And so now they can just like really ream it through. But yeah, as you were saying, like this isn't about, I think a lot of people start to feel like, oh, you're attacking Trump. It's like, no, this infrastructure was in place long before Trump. I think it's just that it would have been harder, I think, to push some of this stuff through if we had the left in office, just because I think a lot of the quote unquote right people you know, or people who may identify as being on the right were more awake to and resistant to the fourth industrial revolution, Klaus Schwab type narrative. So to see it coming from the left, I think they would have been making a lot of noise. But now, you know, we have a Daddy Trump pushing it through. And so there I'm shocked because, you know, some people who I really, you know, respect and would think are would be a little bit more resistant to some of this are, you know, the things that they would never have accepted and tolerated under Obama. They're pretty much cheering now. And it. I've even pointed that out to them like wait so this is literally the same like for instance AI precision medicine I'm like this is the same initiative that Obama had and you were very upset with it under Obama but now that it's RFK it's uh this is great like I how do you yeah how do you comport that how does that make sense in your head I don't know Yeah, this is very tricky. And I think this is, I mean, you bring up the point that, you know, Maha was probably intended to do this, but I know a lot of people that are in the medical freedom community that we're not talking about AI or wearables. And there's a big sense of, well, you know, we're making improvements on vaccines. And so, you know, so people are excited about that, but they're not realizing that what is being implemented behind the scenes is even worse than that. It's a complete takeover of all healthcare and medical data and centralization of it. It's the opposite of medical freedom. And so it's tough because people want to celebrate the wins, but they don't realize that they're fighting the battles of the past while the tyranny of the future is here now. And that's exactly how it works. My friend Stephen Coughlin has this really great graphic where he talks about dialectical political warfare. And he shows like a missile that's flying over. I posted it many times, but it's like a missile flying over. And then there's all these like bombs that get dropped and it's under these missiles. And so the bombs are all these narrative warfare and people are busy fighting. You know, the dialectic is fighting about what happened in the blast zone. five bombs ago, and they're busy planning the next like, twenty bombs, and there are already ten bombs ahead, and everybody's still arguing about, you know, five bombs ago. It's a great, you know, pictorial representation, I think, of exactly what's going on. I see this all the time. It's very, very frustrating. I think a lot of that is, you see that with the culture wars, too. You know, not that I don't think that culture is important. Of course, they do. I think values are very important. But I feel like people get very much trapped in that conversation while they're marching on with policy and, you know, building this digital gulag. And everybody's like, oh, well, you know, my culture is better than yours. Right. OK, great. Go find people who align with your culture and, you know, be merry there. But let's fight against the things they're doing now. Yeah, that is a tough one. And there's also a I think maybe it's they've done such a good job with the marketing of the technocracy here. I mean, because you can say something like, well, we don't have a CBDC. We're not going to be like communist China. And then you pass something. worse like the genius act which takes something that's really popular that people are doing twenty seven trillion dollars a year's worth of transactions which are stable coins and you put it under the control of congress which is the entity that's responsible for financial surveillance and so but because it's complicated and because they're good at branding um they're able to they're able to pull it off to the point where people are cheering it on not realizing it's the exact same thing if not worse than what they were railing against when they thought it was claus schwab and bill gates Yeah. So when you talk about like a Maha, I did think that it was a kind of part of the plan all along. And of course, now he's talking about Make America Biotech Accelerate. And the part Accelerate just kills me, like just saying it every time I can't get over it because It's like, that's the quiet part out loud. They're talking about accelerationism. So when you say, do you feel like things are accelerating and speeding up? I do. I think that's their philosophy. That's the philosophy of Nick Land. Nick Land actually coined the dark enlightenment. It was Nick Land who coined it. you know, building on Yarvin, but accelerationism was his, you know, philosophy long before, you know, Yarvin was even blogging. And so this idea now that Maha really means Maba, we should make America biotech accelerate. I was concerned about it just because I saw him talking about precision AI. And I know A lot of people feel like Nicole Shanahan is, you know, a hero and she's coming out against all of this now, but she was, you know, she's she was married to Sergey Brin and she was a huge proponent of all of this stuff. And I, I know I sound super cynical, but I have a really hard time trusting these people who come out with the very popular narrative and look like they're the The ones who are speaking out, you know, they're the rebels now when they were very involved in helping build it. It's difficult for me. So, you know, hopefully she's really legit and she's had a change of heart. But she was all in for AI precision medicine. yeah i've noticed that too that these people that become the new influencers are the people that were on the wrong side of this their entire life and then just woke up you know within the last six to twelve months and then those are the people that are mainstreamed on all of this it is a bit suspicious for sure and looks a little bit coordinated but Well, before we dive into your article, what made you decide that now is the time to write about the dark enlightenment? I guess it's not just now. You've been talking about this for a while. But why the, I guess, doubling down on the urgency now? Well, so they had asked me to write this. So I've been writing about the Dark Enlightenment for a while. And I guess the New American wasn't, you know, super on top of technocracy for a long time. And I guess they approached Patrick to write some articles. And they were like, we need to cover technocracy. And they were talking about the philosophical movement. And he had recommended, he said, well, Courtney would definitely be the one to try it. tackle that end of it. And so I yeah, so I wrote it. And I figured that the angle that I took, I think you might have had a chance to look at it hasn't come out quite yet. But the angle that I took is really I thought might be very relevant for it's not going to be appealing to everyone. Even they told me they said that when I spoke to one of the editors, he said that he was a little nervous that it might be very difficult for, you know, a lot of people. but that he they really want to take on this type of material i i agree i think people we should elevate not you know cater to the lowest denominator i think that's been part of the problem with our education system everything is it's not that people don't have the capacity i i don't think that you know, the population has intrinsically become on the whole dumber. I think they've intentionally dumbed people down. So their attention spans are more limited. They don't have the foundational tools to be able to build and layer on top of, you know, so that's a byproduct of a failed education system. So I think it's really important that we try to elevate people in terms of, you you know, the vernacular, the types of thought processes. So I thought that the New American would be a good place to drill down some of the founding principles and the metaphysical origins of the founding documents and how this movement, which really did in many ways, I believe, hijack. I don't think that obviously it's not Trump or MAGA that, you know, spawned this. But I think they harness the energy of the MAGA movement to create this dark enlightenment, right? Dark MAGA. And I actually think dark MAGA is a nod. You know, I can't prove this. This is my analysis. This is my interpretation. But I think dark MAGA is a nod to the dark enlightenment. And I talk a little bit about this in the article. There's a great mirror article from Curtis Yarvin on his, that's one of his more recent substacks. You know, he had Unqualified Reservations, which was his blog that he started in quite extensive. I mean, he's written hundreds and hundreds of pages on that blog, and most of it's available online. I think you can buy the physical copy as well, which for people who are interested in this sort of thing, I encourage you to do so because you know anything that's in the digital space can either be scrubbed or edited. So I do encourage people, if you have the means and the interest to purchase the physical copy, you know, yes, that's a patronage to him, but I still think that it's important to have that material. The scholarship should be available for people in the hard copy. But he's been writing for a very long time. Some of it is paywalled or some of it's actually been put scrubbed, but you can still find some of it on the Wayback Machine, which I've made links to for people in many of my articles. But this was his gray mirror. And he talks about, you know, they're always using these sci-fi types of references, the Lord of the Rings references. And he talks about the higher elves, the dark elves and the higher elves. And the whole concept of the dark elves is that they're supposed to seduce the higher elves. That's their role. It was a blog about how you can only lose the culture war. And, again, you know, when it comes to diagnostics, a lot of times I agree with him. You know, he's not always wrong about the diagnosis of the problem. But it's much like the Game B people. A lot of times I think they point out very valid problems. The solutions, we have a difference of opinion on both sides. I'm not aligned with their solutions on either end. But yeah, he talks about how it's the role of these dark elves to seduce the higher elves. And that's kind of what I think the dark MAGA role was, right? You had Elon wearing his dark MAGA hat. And I think it's a signal to the MAGA elite, MAGA initiates, that they're seducing them with this accelerationist kind of philosophy. And that, you know, all the fancy tech that they're bringing and the... The way they present it is that this is going to bring opulence and abundance for everyone. And why would you want to be behind? You don't want to be behind the eight ball on this. You're going to get on board. So it's seductive type of language and seductive type of messaging. And I think that that was their role to seduce elite MAGA. And through that, I think they very much have harnessed the energy of the MAGA movement in order to usher in this very pernicious, and when I say pernicious, I mean it's subversive to everything the United States stands for. So for those hearing dark enlightenment for the first time, how would you summarize it in the simplest of terms? Obviously, we're going to build into this and get into more. But if you were going to give like the thirty second or one minute. The thirty second pitch is that we're going to replace the Constitutional Republic and all its checks and balances. And we're going to create a CEO style monarchical structure that is run by AI. Okay, well, yeah, that's a good, that's a great summary. And I think that the big issue is that a lot of people are aligned with the need to fix the deep state, the administrative state and everything else. And they think that it's a temporary situation being done to restore the Constitution. This is what I see as the biggest issue is that People don't realize they're actually putting their energy towards accelerating technocracy. They actually think that they're putting their energy towards restoring the Constitution. I think that's the heart of the matter. Well, and I think you're absolutely right, and that's why I say they've harnessed the energy of MAGA. So MAGA was sold restoration. That's what, I mean, not everybody, but a lot of people who are cheering MAGA were thinking, we're going to get a restoration of the Constitution. We're going to go back to some of the founding principles, make America great again. What makes America great is that we do have these unique founding documents, you know, that are founded on a Judeo-Christian metaphysics that... codify what it means to be human that means that we have inalienable rights and that the job of those pieces of paper is to say that we are going to defend those inalienable rights using our free will we will exercise our free will to defend life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and that the only role of the government government is a terrible word it should have been a protectorate right that's the only role the government was supposed to serve theoretically, right, was just to protect our inalienable rights so that the government could not infringe. That obviously didn't happen. I think a lot of people who were excited about Make America Great Again were thinking that's what we were going to go closer to. I mean, I don't know if they thought overnight it was going to be a complete restoration, but I think people were thinking we're going to get back to some of those American roots. And so when they started to see, oh, we're having a slashing of bureaucracy and, you know, we're getting transparency of this bloated, you know, ridiculous runaway spending. I think people got very excited. Oh, look, look, it's happening. He's talking about getting rid of the IRS. They forgot. Wait, this is all predicated on dark enlightenment philosophy. You know, Yarvin talks about rage. Retire all government employees. The next part of that is replace them with AI. Yeah. Yeah, that's the important part to realize. Yes, the bureaucracy is bad. Again, as I said in the intro, I think we should replace largely the bureaucracy with nothing, but that's not what they're intending to do. So the actual role of government will expand, even though there won't be as many people involved. it's going in the wrong direction. And a lot of libertarians are even fooled by this. And so it's now, you've mentioned Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land. And I've talked about Curtis Yarvin a fair bit, but I have not talked about Nick Land. And he's, he's really important to understand in all of this and this whole accelerationist movement. Can you give us a quick sketch on who these guys are? Yes. So Nick Land, he's been at this for a very long time. He started the CCRU, which is the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. It was a part of the Warwick University Philosophy Department. And this was back in the early nineties, I think, It was early nineties. I'm not exactly sure. But he started this with a cyberpunk feminist, Sadie Plant. And this is where a lot of these ideas respond. Obviously, you know, centered around things like cybernetics was a huge part of it. He's a huge kind of sci-fi. I honestly, and I really don't mean to sound pejorative when I say this, but this is somebody who's done a lot of drugs. So I feel like he doesn't always adjudicate fact from fiction all that well. And he actually has a term that's called hyperstition, which is like this idea that you're going to manifest the imaginary as a catalyst into reality. So this is somebody who is living very much in the imaginary world and thinks that we can make that reality. And I'm all for, you know, creativity and ingenuity. Those things are great. But, you know, I don't think I can just think things that are fictional into reality. So that's an actual term he uses called hyperstition. So he, they had, he was coming up with a lot of these ideas and he was a big proponent of this philosophy called accelerationism. They're kind of a left and right accelerationist. The left were much more, inspired by people like Deleuze and Girard. And they're much more Marxist in origin. And he originally was part of that branch, but then he became part of what they call the right accelerationists. And they believe in harnessing capitalism, using technology to push capitalism to the nth degree. He actually talks about capitalism as being like this alien force. And I don't know exactly what he means by that. I don't know if he's talking in terms of supernatural or, but he says it's like this alien force and that has like taken this hold and it's going to become apocalyptic. And so he believes that we should just push it to the apocalypse. We want to bring, it's kind of, again, like I talk about technological immunization of the eschaton and that's kind of what he's saying that, you know, we should push, bring about the end times, we're going to bring up about the end times of capitalism, push it as far as it can possibly go until it implodes. And technology is going to be the conduit to do that. So we want to make that happen as soon as possible. And then he wants to bring about essentially, it's a post human future. So he's very You know, while Yarvin talks about AI and this very, you know, autocratic top-down hierarchical, and it is transhuman in nature because there's just no other place it can go. But he still has this notion of, you know, this more of like a philosopher king, scientific dictatorship, where land is actually very post-human. He talks about a concept called technoplastic beings, which is just what it sounds like. It's like the synthetic biology emergence of the bio-digital convergence type of concepts. We're going to have organic material synthesized with inorganic material machines, essentially. And he's an extropian, so he's very much a proponent of human augmentation through technology. He's got some very interesting ideas, and I know they did that episode on Tucker recently, Conrad Flynn. I think that was quite the social engineering project, in my opinion. But even Nick was like, and his response to it, I listened to a podcast where he talked about it, and His response was, what a great storyteller Conrad was. I was like, wow, that says everything. He was, you know, really, you know, lauding him for his storytelling capacity and his talents. And he says, you know, he got some things a little bit wrong, but, you know, we'll clarify. Yeah. But so I think that was the purpose of it is kind of to, you know, I use the ice cream cone analogy. I talk about how there's like a hook gripping lie. That's the ice cream cone. It's really delicious, but it's not made with like real material. You know, it's not the good stuff. It's like chemicals and whatever. poisons, but it's really yummy. You want to eat it. And then they, they sprinkle, you know, the sprinkles and those are the truths. And you get so many sprinkles, like you keep taking bites of this ice cream cone and like, oh, here's the truth. Here's the truth. This must be true. Before you know it, you've eaten the whole ice cream cone with the hook gripping lie. And I find that's kind of how a lot of this stuff works is they've got, you know, it's steering. So there were truths in there, but there were also some fiction. Yeah. So you will see a lot on X people that have E forward slash ACC in their, in their bios. And that stands for effective accelerationism, which my understanding is it's not directly Nick land, but it's kind of from, you know, it emanates from him in a way his intellectual grandchild, I guess. Yes. Um, so it's kind of like, uh, um, What was it? Effective altruism. Yeah, downstream. So, yeah, but it's very, very similar. It's this idea of like, you know, with you're going to get rid of all the government regulations and you're going to accelerate the technology as fast as possible. And a lot of it is much more centered on A.I., I, although I would, I don't know how that's really all that different than accelerationism, but yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty similar. I, I'm trying to look at what was the, I think the big difference has more to do with the political end of it. You know, they, they tend to be more focused on like solving environmental issues. crises narratives uh like you know i i say narrative because you know they've created the the narrative around the climate crisis but you know like the scg's seventeen sustainable development goals it's much more centered around that using technology like green energy um that that's my understanding of it yeah it's more ideologically rooted then accelerationism is really just this idea that we want to push capitalism to its you know apocalyptic state Yeah, I mean, I think more, at least what I've researched is that land is kind of pushing for a post-human singularity, whereas the effect of acceleration is claimed to be post-human, or excuse me, pro-human. So that's... That's one of the things. Well, they claim that we need to support this ideology. Otherwise, the planet's going to go extinct, including the humans. So they're doing it under the auspices of saving the Earth and the humans in it. Whereas, yeah, Nick Land is very post-human. I mean, he really believes in taking us to become technoplastic beings. So to discuss this, and I think why this is particularly relevant, I think you write that this was once a fringe philosophical theory, but it's now really the White House playbook, which is a pretty shocking claim. But again, with what you said, with your short description of what this is, and it's essentially install a monarchy to usher in AI. How did this happen? How did it go from being an obscure thing that people were talking about in Silicon Valley or on blogs to now a White House playboy? Well, before I answer that, I'll just say there is actually another episode or like an article on his gray mirror, Curtis Yarvin. This was back in, when was it? It was before, at the end of Trump's last term. And he was talking about essentially how his vision for Trump winning again and how he could become the CEO monarch. And so this whole plan for Trump to come in and be the unbound executive, and he laid it all out. So I feel like they kind of have created this blueprint. And it's really this concept of an unbound executive. which again, so anti-American. We have three branches of government. It's these checks and balances that are enshrined in our constitution. And he wants to get rid of that. And if you look at project, which I think is more than halfway done now, if you look at the tracker or maybe it's at halfway, it's pretty far along. But remember Trump kept saying, I denounce this, I have nothing to do with it, right? And like all the MAGA influencers are like, yeah, that's just like some sort of anti-Trump probe. Meanwhile, what are we seeing now? I mean, the whole school choice initiative that he wants to make national, which is blatantly unconstitutional, is literally one of their top initiatives for Project Twenty Twenty Five, of course, because it's straight out of the Heritage Foundation. I wanted to add that. So why do I think this happened? I think that, yes, it was very much relegated to very fringe, esoteric. I mean, Nick Land is at Warwick University out of the UK working with this cyberpunk feminist and doing these very kind of, very occult. I mean, he's a huge proponent of people like Ebola and It's very Lovecraftian in his writings, right? And his whole mindset. And when you look at his old, like even that numogram and you look at like his websites, a lot of it's been scrubbed, but he actually has occult sections. It's like in it, he has demonology. I mean, this, this is very, it's straight out of occult. So this is very fringe stuff. This isn't like what the masses, especially not back in the nineties, like mainstream was not, oh, let's look at like esoteric occult philosophies. And then Curtis Yarvin was kind of, you know, he was, he was starting to gain some traction as like an alt-right figure and, A lot of that Bannon crew is kind of adjacent. And I talk about that in my article because he's a traditionalist and a traditionalist with a capital T. So this is, again, Ebola type of philosophy. And they believe in hierarchies. This is a very mystical type of philo

S2E36 Silicon Valley s Dark Enlightenment Coup with Courtenay Turner
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