The Fellowship of Silicon Valley - Frodo Vance Makes the Perilous Journey With the One Ring of Power to the White House - Part 1

The rise of JD Vance and how the Lord of the Rings is influencing American politics

* This article started to get a bit long so I have divided it into two parts. *

Part 1

After the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at the weekend, James David Vance was nominated as Trump’s running mate at the Republican National Convention on Monday.

Vance, who is only 39, has made the unbelievable journey from graduation to potential vice president of the United States in just over a decade. Literally unbelievable.

So how did this political newcomer, who grew up in America’s Rust Belt and only entered the Senate last year, spectacularly rise to power: from a childhood of poverty and abuse to the possibility of being the next president in 2028? Of course, Vance helps Trump to win key swing states but is there more to it? And what does the Lord of the Rings have to do with it all?

Growing up in Middletown, Ohio, Vance did not have any of the privileges usually associated with future presidents. He and his sister were primarily raised by his grandparents due to his mother’s struggle with drug addiction. However, Vance, who is clearly a bright guy, had the motivation to make something of his life. He graduated from high school, joined the Marine Corps as a combat correspondent and worked his way up the ladder before leaving to attend Ohio State University in 2007.

After graduating with a degree in political science and philosophy, Vance attended Yale Law School on a scholarship. His tutor in his first year was Amy Chua whose books include ‘World on Fire: How exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability’ and ‘Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance - and Why They Fall’. Apparently Chua encouraged him to write his memoir, ‘Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis’.

I think a 23 year old writing their memoirs sounds rather precocious but perhaps that’s just me. Nevertheless, by 2016, ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ became a bestseller and in 2020 it was adapted into a film directed by Ron Howard. Hollywood always leads the way and this looks like the first nudging of human subconsciousness to prepare for the rise of Vance.

Whilst at Yale, Vance attended a life-changing talk by kingmaker, Peter Thiel - so much so that Vance, a staunch atheist, converted to Catholicism. His talk tried to connect a stagnating technological society and group of professional elites with Silicon Valley’s failure to deliver revolutionary innovations. Thiel blamed government bureaucracy and liberal ideology for this. The talk, labelled as an “intimate lunch seminar for select students” was also attended by Vance’s friend, Vivek Ramaswamy - small world!

Ramaswamy went on to work at a hedge fund, where he managed the firm’s biotech portfolio. He then founded Roivant Sciences Ltd, a company focused on applying technology to drug development and its subsidiary, Sio Gene Therapies which does what it says on the tin. Ramaswamy stepped down as CEO of these pharmaceutical companies to focus on his presidential campaign.

Around the same time, Ramaswamy started saying that he regretted taking the Covid vaccine, trying to distance himself from Big Pharma. Days before he announced his presidential bid, Ramaswamy paid a Wikipedia editor to remove information about a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship (George’s older brother) and his close relationship with a scientist who helped to pioneer mRNA vaccines.

Back to Vance - three years after graduating from Yale he joined Peter Thiel’s firm, Mithril Capital, before moving to Revolution LLC in 2017, an investment firm founded by Steve Case who cofounded AOL. Only six years after graduating from Yale, Vance co-founded Narya Capital with financial backing from Thiel, Eric Schmidt of Google fame and Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape.

Narya Capital has invested in video platform Rumble and Hallow, a Catholic prayer app promoted by Russell Brand. The venture capitalist firm, as well as Vance himself, also invests in a biotech start-up called AmplifyBio whose mission is “Advancing Science for Humankind”. AmplifyBio, amongst other things, supports mRNA therapeutic developers.

Peter Thiel

Thiel is a very clever guy. I recently wrote how things can look like conspiracies when a complex system takes on a life of its own. I said that most of the time there isn’t a group of men sitting in a darkened room, planning every future move. However, if you understand that complex system, then it is possible to use that knowledge to manipulate the hive-mind. You don’t need to order every individual move, just plant a seed into the system and watch it manifest. Thiel is one of those guys who knows how to do that.

Born in Germany, before moving to South Africa and then settling in California as a young boy, Thiel was valedictorian of his graduating class. He studied philosophy at Stanford University where he co-founded a conservative and libertarian newspaper. At Standford, Thiel was introduced to Rene Girard whose work influenced everything he did from then on. But more on Girard later.

At school Thiel was a chess champion and ranked seventh in the US by the age of 12. He holds the title of Life Master but stopped competing in 2003, clearly moving on to 4D chess in the world of politics.

In 1998, Thiel co-founded Paypal and later merged it with Elon Musk’s X.com. After the company was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, Thiel used the money to create a hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management. This is wear he adopted a peak-oil thesis believing that global oil production would soon reach its maximum rate. His peak oil theories reflect his broader concerns about economic stagnation and the need for significant technological breakthroughs.

The following year, Thiel incorporated Palantir Technologies, a big data analysis company whose first backer was, unsurprisingly, In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. Palantir provides data-mining services to government intelligence agencies.

You will be shocked to learn that after the CIA became involved with Palantir, Thiel gave $500,000 to a Harvard sophomore who had never been able to hold a job down - Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook and all your data was now safely in the hands of the CIA. But you would be less likely to question a private company versus a US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project called LifeLog which “captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person’s experience in and interactions with the world” to “trace the ‘threads’ of an individual’s life in terms of events, states and relationships” and to “take in all of a subject’s experience, from phone numbers dialed and e-mail messages viewed to every breath taken, step made and place gone”. Fortunately, LifeLog didn’t last long enough to spy on us because it was shut down on the very same day Facebook started.

Other companies Thiel has invested in early on include Airbnb, LinkedIn, Spotify, Quora and Stripe. Every single click you make on the internet has been filed, examined, analysed and stored by Thiel’s companies, via the CIA. All to be used against you at some later stage if needs be.

His links with the intelligence services seem to contradict his libertarian views but Thiel believes that just societies can’t survive without espionage. In his fascinating 30 page essay - The Straussian Moment - Thiel mentions Echelon, the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as a decisive path to achieving a global pax Americana. He sees the erosion of civil liberties as necessary for the protection of society.

Thiel is quite critical of democracy. It is likely that his views on this stem from a 1997 book by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg called ‘The Sovereign Individual’. The book claims that because democratic nation states force taxation on its citizens, they act like criminal cartels. However, the internet is liberating individuals and very soon governments won’t be able to intervene in private transactions. This inability to tax citizens will mean governments will lose control causing worldwide chaos. Out of the ashes will rise a new world order with “cognitive elites” in charge.

A bit like the Great Reset.

The Silicon Valley tech bros are so convinced of this impending apocalyptic vision that they are buying up vast areas of New Zealand and building doomsday bunkers. Thiel bought 477 acres in 2011 which was kept secret because, although he had only spent 12 days in the country, the New Zealand government made him a citizen, therefore allowing him to make the purchase. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company, has an arrangement with Thiel that when the collapse of capitalism and the West occurs, they will both fly to Thiel’s bunker where they will get ready to re-emerge once the dust has settled.

In 2007 Gawker Media outed Thiel as being gay. In response, Thiel funded Terry Bollea’s (Hulk Hogan) lawsuit against Gawker which had published parts of a Bollea sex tape. Bollea was awarded $140 million which bankrupted Gawker but Thiel’s funding was only revealed a decade later. Is it any surprise that Hulk Hogan is now a main feature at Trump rallies?

Also in 2007, Thiel became a Young Global leader of the World Economic Forum. Since then Thiel has become a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group.

Thiel has also been a major investor in artificial intelligence, investing heavily in OpenAI (ChatGPT), DeepMind (acquired by Google) and Clearview AI, a facial recognition technology company.

* Part 2 will connect Vance and Thiel to the Lord of The Rings. By looking at Thiel’s deepest thoughts and concerns and by explaining how Girard influenced Thiel, we can begin to see what it is really happening in the world and why Vance, out of nowhere, may be on his way to the White House. *