Seducing the billionaires

It's time to capture a new generation of elites. We need them. They need us.

The time is right for dissidents to secure meaningful elite support. Elites are aware of our ideas and beginning to explore advocating for them.

Marc Andreessen

is posting BAP memes and recommending authors including Fustel De Coulanges, Burnham, Gottfried, and Cuddihy. Peter Thiel is backing

Curtis Yarvin

and a cadre of others. Elon Musk is promoting

Bennett's Phylactery

. Tucker Carlson is evangelizing the work of

Darryl Cooper

.

This support largely remains in a nascent and exploratory stage: occasional social media shares and Substack subscriptions. It’s easy to blame the billionaires (and the multi-millionaires) for this: if they know what time it is, why aren’t they putting big money behind dissidents against progressive orthodoxy and managerialism?

But to blame the donor class would be misguided. The dissident sphere lacks trustworthy philanthropic infrastructure for donors to engage with. We must correct this. The key point: the production of this infrastructure would benefit them as much as it would benefit us.

Stephanie Rew

Elites have world-visions which they desire to bring to reality, but also have professional commitments which prevent them from focusing on the necessary tactical steps to enact radical societal change. More than mere tactical support: they need help to dream. They have good instincts, but require inspiration about the art of the possible and an understanding of the hidden sociological and historical mechanics at play in creating our present situation. Hence the Thiel-Yarvin relationship, for example.

Elites have capital waiting to be productively deployed, and good intentions to make use of it. Old charities are irrelevant to their concerns and often antithetical to their values. Unfortunately, because progressive organizations still have a monopoly on established philanthropic infrastructure, this is what they still default to when they fulfill their charitable obligations (this is presumably the reason why Andreessen made donations to bizarre waste-of-time organizations like Trans*H4CK and Lesbians Who Tech).

The time is now to change this. Annual philanthropic donations continue to significantly decline in America. This is what we’d expect in the context of a growing misalignment between potential donors and legacy non-profit infrastructure, as well as the effects of an overall decline in societal trust and cohesion.

Consider the opportunity which we can present this new generation of donors: our civilization is at a pivotal point. Now is the time that the next Rockefellers and Carnegies - era-defining philanthropists - will be written into history. By establishing the right projects, we can help our donors achieve this status.

We must go about this the right way. High-end philanthropy rarely involves blank cheques, or the direct patronage of vague creative projects. It is not about artists making demands and rich people fulfilling them.