One Blood Clot Away II: René Girard, Curtis Yarvin, and the Billionaires Plan

How Peter Thiel Turned a Philosophy and a Manifesto Into a Vice President

This is Part 2 of an ongoing series. If you haven’t read Part 1 — “America is One Blood Clot Away from Vance” — you should start there. This is where we learned about J.D. Vance and his conversion to Catholicism, about Peter Thiel, and even about the head of the Heritage Foundation Kevin Roberts receiving his weekly guidance from the Opus Dei priests at the Catholic Information Center, just half a mile from the White House.

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Two men have shaped the ideology of J.D. Vance. One is dead. One is not.

Their names are René Girard and Curtis Yarvin.

So, for context, Peter Thiel met Girard at Stanford and never looked at the world the same way again. It was he who introduced Girard’s work to JD Vance. Vance is one blood clot away from taking the reins of America. Vance himself publicly credits both Thiel and Girard for his conversion to Catholicism in an article for The Lamp Magazine.

And Curtis Yarvin — a.k.a Mencius Moldbug — took the philosophy behind Thiel, Vance and Girard and turned it into a plan. What we are seeing in America right now is what that plan looks like in practice. Once you see it, cannot unsee it.

If you’ve never heard these names before, by the end of this article, you will understand why that was not an accident.

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The Dead Man’s Theory & Thiel

René Girard was a French literary critic who became a Catholic philosopher. He spent his career at Stanford developing a single, all-consuming idea. He called it mimetic theory. Peter Thiel followed him and the theory religiously. It starts with the claim that you do not know what you want. Your desires feel original, but Girard said we borrow them. You only want things because you watched someone else want them first.

If your desires are never truly your own, then neither are your politics, your values, or even your identity. All of it is imitation, or at least that is what Girard argued in his magnum opus — Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World — this is the book Peter Thiel recommends to people as an introduction to Girard.

One of the big parts of mimetic theory is called scapegoating. It happens when two people want the same thing — such as power — and they become rivals. That rivalry spreads through a community until the community can no longer hold itself together.

At that point, the group finds someone to blame. One person, one group, destroyed together and in that destruction of that scapegoat, peace returns. Girard called this the scapegoat mechanism and believed it was the foundation of every civilization ever built. Christianity, he argued, was the only religion honest enough to name it. And the mechanism never stops.

To Peter, Girard's theory explained everything about how this happens. It offered no instructions for what to do about it. For that, Thiel needed someone else.

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Curtis Yarvin: The Programmer Who Wants a Corporate King

In the spring of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger called Mencius Moldbug began posting a sprawling manifesto online. The media and the universities, he wrote, speak with one voice. He called it the cathedral.

You have heard that word before. In my last article. I told you that Thiel and Vance refer to universities and media as the “Liberal Cathedral.”

That language does not come from René Girard. It comes from Curtis Yarvin.

Yarvin called for — and I am quoting his own writing here — “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law.”

He proposed that the government should transform into what he described as a heavily armed, ultra-profitable corporation.

Yarvin wanted a president who ran America like a business (and yes, you’ve also heard that out of the mouth of Donald Trump before). Yarvin then argued that America needs someone who would govern like Steve Jobs. He said that the public schools sold off, universities destroyed, the press abolished, and every civil servant fired.

By the end of 2025, every line of Yarvin's plan had a corresponding headline.

Universities lost billions in funding. Trump ordered the Department of Education to be dissolved through executive order. They fired hundreds of thousands of civil servants. NPR and PBS were defunded. The press is actively being sued and abused into silence by the very people who told us they’re there to serve and protect us.

Yarvin actually had named this plan, “R.A.G.E” or ‘Retire All Government Employees.’

Read that again, and then think about what DOGE has done since January 2025. It was March 2025, when Curtis Yarvin had gone to the Washington Post and criticized the work of Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and DOGE. Yarvin wasn't against the purge of federal employees. He was against purging the experts he thought they could use to further their destruction of democracy. The authoritarianism was never the problem. The inefficiency was the problem.

At that point, DOGE had purged 280,253 government employees, and the number grew every day.

This goal is very similar to what Hitler had done with the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in 1933. This is also something explicitly planned in Project 2025. And this is something they’ve been planning since at least November 2023, when Oracle was AI-screening loyalists to Trump and Project 2025 to replace government employees. This happened over a year before the 2024 election.

The guy who built the Trump loyalist database also bought CBS and TikTok. That's Larry Ellison. He fundraised for Trump too, if you were keeping score.

But Yarvin complained, and Musk was willing to listen. Just two months later, Musk consulted Yarvin about a creating third political party called the “America Party.” In their meetings, they disagreed on DOGE once again, but this time because Yarvin believed Musk had not gone far enough. In fact, it was just 2 months ago that Yarvin had taken to Substack to — once again — criticize Trump for not dismantling democracy fast enough.

Of everyone in this story, Yarvin — the man who has been repeatedly cited by J.D. Vance — is the one who wants more, and he wants it now.

Trump responded to Vance’s “America Party” idea by calling Musk a train wreck on Truth Social, and shortly after Musk had folded completely. It's worth asking what exactly Yarvin told him in that meeting, because whatever it was, Musk came out of it writing $20 million dollars in checks to Republican Super PACs and dropping any talk of a third party.

Musk ‘shelved’ the America Party plans, with sources saying he's focused on his companies and specifically, interesting in maintaining ties with JD Vance.

Curtis Yarvin never hid. For years he published what most would call fringe beliefs openly on the internet, and he still does, on his Substack, “Gray Mirror: a portal to the next regime." The movement that grew around his writing came to be known as neo-reaction, or the Dark Enlightenment.

And his most famous rhetorical device — the one that spread fastest — was when he urged his readers to “take the red pill” back in 2007 in a 120,000 word blog post of his.

This was long before it touched any 4Chan board.

But how did a 120,000-word blog written by a programmer in San Francisco reach millions of young men? The answer runs through one of the darker corners of the internet — and through Jeffrey Epstein.

In October 2011, Jeffrey Epstein met with Christopher "moot" Poole, the founder of 4Chan. Poole had previously shut the board “/POL” down, worried it was becoming a neo-Nazi recruiting ground.

Four days after their meeting, one of Epstein's associates (Boris Nikolic) emailed him a news article about 4chan's power to manipulate internet traffic and radicalize its users. "The potential for manipulation is huge," he wrote.

That same week, /pol/ came back online. It was on /pol/ that Yarvin’s red pill metaphor was turned into a weapon.

That phrase spread through the alt-right like wildfire. From Gamergate to the incel movement to Andrew Tate selling it to teenage boys on TikTok, the red pill became the language of male radicalization. It all started with a programmer in San Francisco who believed democracy had failed and America needed a king who ruled like a CEO.

It was not long ago that Yarvin admitted in a New York Times interview that he believed that Vance is surrounded by “intellectual people” and he wants the “common good” and will do whatever is necessary — including destroying democracy — to get it.

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The Billionaire Who The Ideas Together

Now you have two ideas.

In one hand, you’ve got René Girard. Girard looks at the American electorate and doesn't see voters, he sees an echo chamber. The masses are mimetic, and they cannot think for themselves. They copy their desires from whatever institution surrounds them.

Democracy is a sham because the voters are sleepwalking through a cathedral of borrowed beliefs. Only Christianity — specifically, the Catholic intellectual tradition — sees clearly.

In the other hand, you’ve got Curtis Yarvin. He looks at America and says to burn it all down. To Yarvin, you don’t fix democracy; you liquidate it. You hand the government to a single, sovereign executive who runs the country like a Fortune 500 company. You fire every civil servant, sell the schools and abolish the press.

One gives you the theology, the other gives you the political architecture, and the man who fused them together is Peter Thiel.

Thiel studied under Girard at Stanford. He was Girard’s student, his disciple, and he gave the eulogy at Girard’s funeral.

But Thiel was also one of the earliest and most powerful supporters of Curtis Yarvin. Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund, invested in Yarvin’s startup, Tlon.

This is a company Yarvin named after a Jorge Luis Borges story about a secret society that describes an elaborate parallel world which overtakes reality.

The company was named after a fiction about a secret group rewriting reality, and Peter Thiel funded it. Which isn’t all too surprisingly.

Peter Thiel is known for using ominous references from literature for most of his projects — like Palantir (“all-seeing-eye”) and Mithril Capital — are named after lord of the rings references. Completely ignoring that things like the all-seeing "Palantir" and the wealth-generating "Mithril" are Tolkien's cautionary tales about mass surveillance and civilization-destroying hubris.

In 2009, Peter Thiel published an essay in the Cato Institute's policy journal declaring.

“Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Yarvin read Thiel’s article and linked to it approvingly on his blog — Unqualified Reservations — and Peter Thiel took notice. The two met for the first time at Thiel's house in San Francisco.

When journalists began tying them together in 2014, Thiel did not welcome the spotlight and wrote to Yarvin directly, asking, “How dangerous is it that we are being linked?

And then he added, “One reassuring thought: one of our hidden advantages is that these people” — meaning progressives — “wouldn’t believe in a conspiracy if it hit them over the head. This is perhaps the best measure of the decline of the Left. Linkages make them sound really crazy, and they kinda know it.”

Thiel, in his own words, told Yarvin that their greatest advantage is that the public won’t believe the connections are real.

Because it sounds too crazy. Because the idea that a billionaire and a blogger are collaborating to dismantle American democracy sounds like a conspiracy theory, and people have been trained to dismiss conspiracy theories.

That was 2014. It’s not a theory anymore. It’s the government.

Peter Thiel is everywhere. He co-founded PayPal. He was the first outside investor in Facebook. He created Palantir, the surveillance firm that right now — today — holds contracts to help ICE carry out deportations. And when it came time to install a vessel in American politics, Thiel chose J.D. Vance.

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JD Vance: The Vessel

Here is where both threads converge on a single man.

Vance met Curtis Yarvin through Peter Thiel around 2015. Vance was a former employee at one of Thiel’s venture capital firms — Peter Thiel had selectively chosen and built-up Vance after they met during one of Thiel’s speeches at Yale — and once Vance entered politics, just like Thiel, he aligned his ideas right with Yarvin.

Vance entered Thiel's orbit in April 2011, after attending a Thiel speech at Yale that he later called the most important of his time there. He worked at Thiel's firm Mithril Capital, received $15 million from Thiel for his Senate campaign, and once he was in politics, he publicly echoed Yarvin's ideas about dismantling the administrative state.

In a 2021 appearance on a far-right podcast, J.D. Vance — now the Vice President of the United States — actually cited Yarvin by name.

He blatantly admitted that a future Trump administration should fire every single mid-level bureaucrat and every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with loyalists, and if the courts objected, ignore the courts.

That is not even an interpretation. That is what he said. On a recording. That still exists.

And then, at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference, Vance was overheard at a bar talking about Yarvin.

He reportedly said, “Does a normal Ohio voter read Mencius Moldbug? No. But do they agree with the broad thrust of where we think American public policy should go? Absolutely.”

There is a straight line from a ‘fringe political blog’ to the current dismantling of the federal government. Most Americans cannot see it because they were never meant to.

Earlier we talked about Girard's scapegoat mechanism. It is time to come back to it.

Girard’s scapegoat does not have to be innocent. It simply has to be visible.

There is no more visible man on earth than Donald Trump, and the fury directed at him has become almost total. His approval rating sits at 37%. His base is turning on him every single day. The Supreme Court is consistently ruling against him. Americans are watching ICE drag people from their streets and homes, with people being murdered — not only in the streets like Renee Good and Alex Pretti — but in concentration camps on American military bases.

And after all these years, the Epstein files have dropped, and they have given everyone, left and right, something new to be angry about.

Those who break away from the GOP are being called the “new right.” This includes people like Marjorie Taylor Greene who broke alignment with Trump over the Epstein files and is already being discussed as a 2028 presidential candidate. Trump called her a traitor, further fueling the fire.

Republicans across both chambers are “breaking up” with the party.

On the left, we are seeing the largest sustained protest movement in American history. The No Kings protests in October 2025 drew between five and six and a half million people into the streets in a single day. Boycotts brought Tesla sales in Europe down nearly 40% and ultimately pushed Elon Musk out of his DOGE post entirely. When Disney suspended Jimmy Kimmel for telling a joke Trump did not like, 1.7 million people boycotted immediately and Disney reversed course within days.

In 2025, Thiel explicitly told Ross Douthat that Trump — who Thiel had funded himself — was always temporary. In another interview that year, Thiel was asked directly whether Trump was the restraining force against evil or the evil itself — and he refused to answer.

To him, it does not matter, because either way, Trump is speeding up the collapse of the old order and clearing the ground for what comes next.

Vance didn’t just absorb Yarvin’s political architecture. He absorbed Girard’s theology, too, and he did it through Thiel. Vance has publicly credited Peter Thiel and René Girard for his 2019 conversion to Catholicism.

He didn’t convert because he found God in some private moment of grace. He converted because Girard’s framework gave him a worldview that justified everything Yarvin was proposing. The masses are mimetic. Democracy is a lie. The Cathedral has brainwashed the public, and Vance believes only they can lead civilization out of its death spiral.

When Thiel met Trump, he knew he had his scapegoat. Vance was always meant to be the trojan horse.

Girard gave Vance the why. Yarvin gave him the how. Thiel gave him the money. And Trump gave him the office.

So, this is where we part ways, for now.

We know that there is a mix of technocracy and Catholicism, and we need to talk about just about the logistics of this all, and the branch of Catholicism that is unlike any other who focus on the work of St. Aquinas are truly the real “elites” in disguise, and the dark money pipelines they run their money through, and how complex the world of dark money really is… we hear of one or two organizations, but the entire network is complex and hard to follow for a reason. I plan to further break it down in the next article.

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I hope to see you at the next one.