The Crisis, No. 2

On the cynical and the craven

I want to tell you about the people who built this.

Not the foot soldiers. Not the masked agents who shot Alex Pretti ten times in the back while he tried to protect a woman on a Minneapolis street. Those men are instruments. They pulled the triggers, and they will answer for it, but they did not design the machine that put them there.

I want to tell you about the architects. The theorists. The men who decided, decades ago, that democracy was an obstacle to be overcome, and who have spent the intervening years building the infrastructure to overcome it.

This is a story about ideology. About money. About the deliberate construction of a parallel power structure designed to compete with—and ultimately replace—constitutional government. It is a story about people you may have heard of, and others you have not, and what they have been doing while the rest of us were distracted.

It is a story about the cynical and the craven. And it ends with blood on their hands.

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Let us begin with a book.

In 1997, William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson published The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age. The thesis was simple: the internet would dissolve the power of nation-states. Digital technology would allow the wealthy to escape the constraints of geography, taxation, and democratic accountability. A new era was dawning—an era in which capital would be sovereign, and those who possessed it would owe nothing to the societies that had made their wealth possible.

The book painted this as inevitable. Deterministic. The logic of technology would produce a world of “cognitive elites” who operated beyond the reach of governments, while the masses—whom the authors regarded with undisguised contempt—would be left to fight over the scraps of the old order.

This was not presented as a dystopia. It was presented as liberation. Liberation for the strong. For the smart. For those who understood where history was going and positioned themselves accordingly.

The Sovereign Individual became a founding text of what would later call itself the “technology elite.” Peter Thiel has cited it as one of the most important books he has ever read. It circulates in Silicon Valley like scripture. It told a generation of wealthy men that their wealth entitled them to exit—to leave behind the obligations of citizenship and build something new. Something better. Something for themselves.

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Exit. That is the key word. That is what they want.

Not exit as in emigration. Not exit as in leaving one country for another. Exit as in departure from the very concept of democratic constraint. Exit from the principle that the people have any right to govern themselves. Exit from the idea that wealth carries obligations. Exit from the social contract itself.

They have built an entire ideology around this word. They call it “the right of exit.” They mean the right of capital to escape accountability. The right of the powerful to refuse the claims of their fellow citizens. The right to take the wealth that was generated within a society and remove it from that society’s reach, while continuing to benefit from the infrastructure, the educated workforce, the legal systems, and the military protection that society provides.

They dress it up in the language of freedom. But it is not freedom. It is feudalism. It is the construction of a world in which those with capital rule, and those without capital serve, and there is no mechanism by which the ruled can constrain the rulers.

They call themselves libertarians. Anarcho-capitalists. Proponents of “network states” and “competitive governance.” But strip away the jargon and you find something very old. You find the belief that the strong should dominate the weak. That the rich should rule the poor. That democracy is a mistake, and the sooner it is dispensed with, the better.

You find fascism with a software update.

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The intellectual architecture runs deep.

Murray Rothbard, the economist who argued that the state itself was illegitimate—that taxation was theft, that public services were tyranny, that the only legitimate social order was one in which property owners exercised absolute dominion over their domains. His work is foundational to the anarcho-capitalist movement.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Rothbard’s student, who went further. Who argued that democracy was incompatible with liberty. Who advocated for a return to monarchy—or better yet, to a world of private “covenant communities” where property owners could exclude anyone they wished and enforce any rules they chose. A world of small dictatorships, sanitized with the language of contract.

Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal theorist, who argued that the essence of politics was the distinction between friend and enemy, and that the sovereign was whoever could declare the exception—whoever could suspend the normal rules and impose their will by force. Schmitt’s ideas have found new life among the tech-right, who see in his work a justification for the kind of power they wish to wield.

These are the thinkers. These are the men whose ideas circulate in the group chats and the private dinners and the conferences where the future is planned. You have not heard of most of them. That is by design. The architecture is meant to be invisible. The buildings are meant to look like they built themselves.

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Now, let us talk about Balaji Srinivasan.

Srinivasan is a former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm. He is a former chief technology officer of Coinbase. He is a bestselling author and a prolific social media presence. He is, by any measure, one of the most influential figures in the technology industry.

He is also the leading evangelist of what he calls “the network state.”

The concept is simple: a network state is a community organized online, bound by shared values and cryptocurrency, that eventually acquires physical territory and seeks diplomatic recognition as a sovereign entity. It is, in other words, a mechanism for the wealthy to build their own countries—countries where they set the rules, where democracy does not apply, where the only franchise belongs to those who hold the tokens.

Srinivasan has written a book about this. He runs bootcamps to train people in building network states. He has, according to people I trust—people who know him personally—renounced his American citizenship and relocated to Singapore, from which he conducts these operations.

I am told that members of DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk’s operation inside the federal government—have attended these bootcamps.

I do not know all the details. But I know enough to understand what is happening. A parallel structure is being built. An infrastructure for exit. A mechanism by which the wealthiest and most powerful can detach themselves from the American republic while continuing to extract value from it.

This is not speculation. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is people doing things in public, writing books about it, running training programs, and staffing the federal government with their acolytes.

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And what do they want this exit for?

They want it so that you cannot tell them what to do.

They do not want you—the citizen, the voter, the participant in democratic self-governance—telling them they cannot feed toxic lies into your children’s brains through algorithms optimized for engagement. They do not want you telling them they must pay taxes on their wealth. They do not want you telling them they cannot pollute, cannot exploit, cannot accumulate without limit.

They want to turn their capital into a dominion. They want a world where money is the source of sovereignty. Where the billionaire is the king, and the rest of us are subjects whose role is to labor and consume and never, ever, make demands. Never that.

They call it freedom. They mean freedom for themselves. They mean your subjugation. You must understand this. It’s important.

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There are two kinds of people in this movement.

The cynical are the architects. The Srinivasans and the Thiels. The men who built the ideology, who wrote the books, who ran the boot camps, who renounced their citizenship and relocated to Singapore. They know exactly what they are doing. They believe they are building a better world—better for themselves, at least. They have a theory of history, and they are executing it with precision.

The craven are the fellow travelers. The tech VCs like Jason Calacanis, who post about “Founder Mode Trump” while claiming to oppose ICE cruelty—as if the cruelty were separable from the project, as if they did not fund it, as if their hands were clean. The venture capitalists who attended the parties nodded along and told themselves it was just ideas, just speculation, just the kind of thing smart people talk about over expensive wine.

The cynical built the machine. The craven provided the capital and the cover. Both are culpable. Both have blood on their hands.

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Because here is where it ends: with Alex Pretti dying in the street.

You may think these things are unconnected. The network state ideology, the bootcamps in Singapore, the arcane theories of Rothbard and Hoppe and Schmitt—what do any of these have to do with a VA nurse being shot ten times in the back in Minneapolis?

Everything. They have everything to do with it.

The men who shot Alex Pretti were instruments of a federal government that has been captured by this ideology. The administration they serve was funded by these people, staffed by these people, advised by these people. The cruelty is not incidental. The cruelty is the point. The cruelty is what happens when you build a movement around the idea that democratic constraints are illegitimate and the strong should dominate the weak.

They wanted a state that would discipline labor, crush regulation, and enforce property rights with violence. They got it. They wanted a state that would be weak where they wanted weakness—unable to tax them, unable to regulate them, unable to hold them accountable—and strong where they wanted strength. Strong enough to shoot a nurse trying to protect a woman. Strong enough to occupy an American city. Strong enough to demand voter databases as ransom.

This is their utopia. This is what they built. This is what they paid for.

And they were all willing to stand behind the men who shot Alex Pretti ten times in the back to bring it about.

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I want you to remember their names.

Not just the foot soldiers. Not just the agents in masks. The architects. The funders. The theorists. The men who built the ideology and the men who bankrolled its implementation.

When this is over—and it will be over, one way or another—there must be an accounting. Not revenge. Accountability. A record of who did what, and why, and what it cost. The names must be remembered. The connections must be documented. The blood must be traced back to the hands that spilled it.

These people want to escape. That is their entire ideology—exit, exit, exit. They want to take their money and go, to build their network states and their sovereign individual fantasies somewhere beyond the reach of justice.

We must not let them.

The American republic is not a platform on which to sell wares in an unregulated abyss. It is not a legacy system to be disrupted. It is not an obstacle to be routed around. It is a covenant. A commitment. A thing that generations of Americans have fought and died to build and preserve.

We have no need of their network states. We have no need of their digital feudalism. We have no need of their exit.

What we need is accountability. What we need is justice. What we need is a republic that enforces its laws against the powerful as well as the weak.

The cynical and the craven have shown us who they are. They have shown us what they want. They have shown us what they are willing to do to get it.

Never forget who these people are. Never forget what they have done.

Their hands are covered in blood.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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