Mike Solana’s Selective Populism
There’s a new species of populism emerging from Silicon Valley: billionaires performing outrage on behalf of the people they exploit. Not the crude demagoguery of the past, but something more sophisticated—venture capital cretins convinced their position in oligarchic infrastructure grants them special insight into what ordinary Americans need, certain their wealth makes them philosopher-kings qualified to defend liberty against democratic constraint.
Let’s be precise about what Solana is doing: weaponizing legitimate concerns about government overreach to delegitimize any democratic constraint on concentrated wealth, deploying rhetoric sophisticated enough to sound principled until you notice it exclusively protects one class from accountability to all others.
This is the venture capital cretin as philosopher-king. The pattern is familiar because it’s institutional. When Solana’s peer at Sequoia Capital, Shaun Maguire, posted that New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani “comes from a culture that lies about everything” to advance his “Islamist agenda,” the firm faced a choice. Their chief operating officer—a Muslim woman—complained this created a hostile environment. Sequoia chose Maguire. Not because they examined the claims and found them justified, but because his SpaceX bet netted them $4 billion on paper. The Muslim COO left. The partner trafficking in bigotry stayed. Institutional neutrality means profit over principle when returns are good enough.
This is the culture Solana inhabits and defends—where calling a sitting elected official a liar advancing religious extremism is just “disagreement” that strengthens the firm, where “a lot of rope” gets extended to partners whose bigotry alienates sovereign wealth funds and prompts a thousand founders to demand accountability, so long as the portfolio performs.
When these venture capital cretins call themselves philosopher-kings, they mean the right to say anything, offend anyone, violate any norm, so long as the line goes up. And when democratic forces suggest extreme wealth concentration might be a problem, these same philosopher-kings perform as populists defending “the groundlings” they privately hold in contempt.
Solana writes that “hating billionaires is about hating billionaires. It’s a socially acceptable way to request horrible things happen to people who own a lot of things you want, which is a practice that has always been attractive to lower vibration humans.”
Lower vibration humans. The groundlings. People incapable of passing the marshmallow test. This is what he actually thinks about the Americans whose property rights he claims to defend. Not capable of genuine political reasoning—just base envy of their betters.
But when California proposes taxing 200 billionaires to fund healthcare, suddenly Solana is Thomas Paine defending the common man. “If a wealth tax passes, you’re next,” he warns. The slippery slope from taxing extreme wealth to seizing your shirt.
This would be more compelling if Solana applied the same logic to wealth concentration itself. When monopolies form, they don’t stop at one sector—where’s his warning? When billionaires capture one institution, they move to the next—where’s his concern? When platform owners control information flows, then expand into commerce, payments, identity—where’s the alarm?
The framework appears principled until you notice it only ever protects one direction of power flow. Democratic constraint on wealth is tyranny’s opening act. But wealth’s constraint on democracy? That’s just the market working.
Solana blames California’s budget crisis on “free healthcare for illegal immigrants” costing $9.5 billion. Let’s note what he won’t: California billionaires’ combined wealth could cover that cost hundreds of times over. The proposed wealth tax would raise approximately $5 billion annually from just 200 people—individuals who’ve accumulated more than millions of workers combined, whose wealth depends entirely on infrastructure those workers funded.
But he wants you focused on “Honduran fentanyl dealers in the Tenderloin” getting strep tests. Not a sick child. Not a working immigrant. A fentanyl dealer—because that’s how you build consent for oligarchy. The actual extraction—billionaires capturing democratic institutions, buying favorable policy, preventing workers from sharing in productivity gains—remains invisible. The fake extraction—immigrants using healthcare—becomes the crisis.
This is fascist scapegoating with libertarian vocabulary. The intellectual infrastructure Solana inhabits—Thiel’s rejection of democracy, Yarvin’s frameworks for monarchy, Maguire’s casual bigotry, Sequoia’s calculation that profit justifies anything—produces exactly this outcome. A class of venture capital cretins convinced their success makes them philosopher-kings, certain their wealth grants them insight the groundlings lack, unable to recognize they’re not defending liberty but building the architecture of their own reign.
Let’s lay it all out. Mike Solana works for Peter Thiel, who believes democracy and freedom are incompatible. He runs a publication that mysteriously always attacks democratic accountability while defending oligarchic interests. And when asked to justify why billionaires’ unlimited accumulation deserves protection while democratic constraint deserves contempt, he calls you stupid for not understanding that “lower vibration humans” just hate success.
That’s not philosophy. That’s what happens when venture capital cretins mistake their position in oligarchic infrastructure for wisdom about human flourishing. When people whose entire professional existence depends on concentrated wealth remaining unaccountable convince themselves they’re brave truth-tellers rather than sophisticated servants of power. It’s pathetic, really.
The groundlings Solana dismisses understand something he can’t see from inside Founders Fund: when 200 people control more wealth than hundreds of millions combined, when democratic constraints on that power get labeled “the end of property,” when journalists in oligarchic employment perform as populists while defending the indefensible—something is deeply broken.
They might not pass his marshmallow test. But they can smell what he’s selling. And they’re done buying it.
And when the groundlings stop buying, the throne collapses.
Go Deeper into the Circus
Laura Ingraham Tries to Repair the Simulation. Hilarity Ensues.
Within twenty-four hours of Republicans getting crushed in elections they’d convinced themselves were winnable, Fox News deployed the counter-move.
Tucker Carlson Just Showed Us the Future—And It’s Worse Than We Thought
Tucker Carlson sat down with Nick Fuentes yesterday. Not to challenge him. Not to expose him. To platform him. To normalize him. To introduce millions of Americans to a 26-year-old Holocaust denier who calls for “Total Aryan Victory” and leads crowds chanting “Christ is King” as a weapon against Jews.
I'll keep saying it:
"In our civilized societies we are rich. Why then are the many poor? Why this painful drudgery for the masses? Why, even to the best paid workman, this uncertainty for the morrow, in the midst of all the wealth inherited from the past, and in spite of the powerful means of production, which could ensure comfort to all, in return for a few hours of daily toil?
"The Socialists have said it and repeated it unwearyingly. Daily they reiterate it, demonstrating it by arguments taken from all the sciences. It is because all that is necessary for production—the land, the mines, the highways, machinery, food, shelter, education, knowledge—all have been seized by the few in the course of that long story of robbery, enforced migration and wars, of ignorance and oppression, which has been the life of the human race before it had learned to subdue the forces of Nature. It is because, taking advantage of alleged rights acquired in the past, these few appropriate to-day two-thirds of the products of human labour, and then squander them in the most stupid and shameful way. It is because, having reduced the masses to a point at which they have not the means of subsistence for a month, or even for a week in advance, the few can allow the many to work, only on the condition of themselves receiving the lion's share. It is because these few prevent the remainder of men from producing the things they need, and force them to produce, not the necessaries of life for all, but whatever offers the greatest profits to the monopolists. In this is the substance of all Socialism."
(Peter Kropotkin, "The Conquest of Bread")
"A dollar gained through the sale of a share, bond or piece of real property bestows exactly the same economic power as a dollar gained through employment or operating a business. The equity principles we hold dictate that both should be taxed in exactly the same way. To tax the gain on the disposal of property more lightly than other kinds of gains or not at all would be grossly unfair."
(Royal Commission on Taxation, Report, 1966, Volume 1, Introduction, Kenneth Carter, Chair)