The Broligarchs Have Arrived. And They’re Coming For Our Democracy.

The disturbing truth behind the tech bros who are trying to send JD Vance to the White House.

LEFT: Elon Musk. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images. MIDDLE: J.D. Vance. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. RIGHT: Peter Thiel. Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for New York Times.

The selection of JD Vance, 39, the junior senator from Ohio, as the vice presidential candidate of the Republican Party was a huge win for the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, right-wing tech bro billionaires who have sought to reshape American politics in their own preferred image.

It’s not going well.

Vance’s past statements about women—including his bizarre position that childless couples should have fewer votes than those with children—quickly emerged, draining the life out of his approval ratings. He got into public spats with Jennifer Aniston, and cat lady memes attacking his positions have flooded the internet. Vance’s favorables have plummeted in response, fed in part by hilarious rumors about him “pushin’ the cushion” and searching for dolphin porn.

It’s tempting to dismiss Vance and his wealthy tech backers as politically naive lightweights who believe their money can buy them whatever access and influence they need. But behind the cash and the bizarre beliefs lies a far darker agenda, and it’s worth getting out ahead of it before it can metastasize, especially now that Vance could be next in line for the presidency.

In today’s piece, I’ll discuss how Vance has rocketed to national prominence, fueled by the support of wealthy techno libertarians like Thiel. Then I’ll delve a bit deeper into the strange world of the broligarchy and what they are truly after with all their political machinations. I’ll also explore some of the radical beliefs of Vance, including who has influenced him as heir apparent to the promised postliberal order. It’s a toxic stew of baseline misogyny, white panic, and truly out-there, antidemocratic views. 

Bought and groomed

Vance is, even charitably put, Thiel’s dancing puppet. Thiel famously made Vance his protégé, making a place for the Yale law school grad in Silicon Valley, where, as the Washington Post reports, his “omnivorous intellect, mild manner and outsider story of growing up working-class in Ohio” impressed Thiel’s set of tech bro entrepreneurs. Vance became wealthy—a hillbilly no more—and then set his eyes on a senate seat in Ohio.

Thiel bankrolled Vance’s campaign to the tune of $15 million, the largest single donation to a senate campaign in history. Why such a huge amount for just one senate seat? Thiel’s aim all along has been clear: to place someone friendly to the libertarian model of tech dominance—one with little to no government regulation—in Congress.

Imagine his delight when Donald Trump began to narrow down his finalists for the VP spot and Vance found himself among them, his prior scathing remark about Trump being “America’s Hitler” notwithstanding. Thiel and others, including Elon Musk and David Sacks who both personally lobbied for Vance to be the VP pick, saw their chance. They understood that Vance was now in theory one heartbeat and a healthy 39 years away from the ailing ex-president, whose re-election at the time seemed inevitable and unstoppable.

When the Vance decision was announced, Musk congratulated him publicly on Twitter, calling it an “excellent decision” by Trump.

Delian Asparouhov, who is a partner in Thiel’s Founder’s Fund, triumphantly if a tad prematurely tweeted,

IT’S JD VANCE

WE HAVE A FORMER TECH VC IN THE WHITE HOUSE

GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH BABY

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸”

Thiel’s $15 million bet had paid off in a huge way. Said one person familiar with his thinking, “For Peter, Vance is a generational bet.”

Thiel’s push to gain Tech VC access within Congress and the White House, at a time when AI is an emergent technology whose regulation is on the minds of many in Washington, is suspect enough. But even a quick peek behind the curtain to see what men like Thiel, Musk, and Vance really think about society and democracy should set off alarm bells.

Great replacement theory

For Vance, his much-publicized attack upon “childless cat ladies” runs deeper than a judgment about lifestyles, values, and female independence, though on these topics he is certainly far to the right of most Americans. Vance’s concerns are based on a more fundamental fear, one he shares with another tech billionaire, Elon Musk. 

Both Musk and Vance are obsessed with the dangers of falling birth rates in America. Musk himself, who posts frequently about this, has sired at least 12 children, apparently in a personal effort to reverse the trend. Vance raises the issue frequently in public, chastising modern Americans for not having enough kids. And at the recent Republican National Convention, speakers so regularly mentioned the importance of having babies that Times columnist Jess Bidgood wondered whether “Make America Procreate Again” would become a tagline.

The move for “Americans” to have more babies overlaps with conspiracies that Democrats are admitting more immigrants in order to turn them into voters, another falsehood Musk has pushed openly on Twitter to his 180 million followers. Earlier in the year, Musk left pinned to the top of his feed a chart claiming, misleadingly, that more migrants are now arriving at the southern border than there are babies being born to American mothers. (That figure is always higher than birth rates, but Musk neglects to point out that most who arrive are turned away before entry or expelled after detention.)

Vance, who is married to the daughter of immigrants, claims his criticism of the childless, along with his oddball policy proposal to give those with children more votes and greater say in our democracy, have nothing to do with race. But in the same breath, he reiterates the false claims that Democrats believed they could “replace American children with immigrants.”

Freedom from Democracy

Because Peter Thiel is not himself a politician, his stridently anti-democratic views often go unnoticed. But now that he and Musk are throwing tens of millions of dollars around to change the course of elections, it’s important to expose them.

As Prof. Heather Cox Richardson noted, in 2009, Thiel wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” By “freedom,” he presumably means the freedom of billionaires to do as they please without pesky things like taxes and regulations.

“The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics,” Thiel elaborated. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” 

That’s right. Thiel has called into question the wisdom of extending the vote to women. And along with it, he’d be happy throwing out “welfare” benefits established after the Great Depression, including Social Security and Medicare. These ideas are incompatible with his view of how capitalism ought to work. But if it’s between capitalism and democracy, he’d sooner have the former and toss out the latter as not “compatible.” 

Just like Hungary

One of Vance’s intellectual heroes is a man with truly radical ideas. Patrick Deneen is a conservative Catholic professor of political theory at Notre Dame, and he is the author of a book called Regime Change. No really, that was the title. 

Vance appeared beside Deneen, along with Heritage Foundation leader Kevin Roberts, at the book’s launch. As Rolling Stone reported,

At the event, Deneen called for something more radical than January 6th: a complete toppling of the current American order. “I don’t want to violently overthrow the government,” he said. “I want something far more revolutionary.” Deneen proposes an “aristopopulism,” in which the virtuous elite provide order and structure to public life in order to ensure the flourishing of the ordinary citizens who cannot provide it for themselves. 

During the book launch event, Vance called himself a member of the “postliberal right” with a role in Congress that was “explicitly anti-regime.”

What does all this mean, precisely? In Regime Change, Deneen argues for a “peaceful” revolution to establish a “postliberal order” with laws against same-sex marriage, gender-affirming care, and of course abortion. In this new order, such pro-family values, steeped in religious doctrine, would take precedence over liberal ones like the protection of individual rights.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s straight out of the “illiberal” playbook run by Viktor Orbán in Hungary, a buddy of Vladimir Putin who has become the darling and model of the fascist right. Orbán rules through a sham democratic system with restrictions on press freedoms and gerrymandered parliamentary seats, and he has sworn to “return” Hungary to a society based on Christian values, all while keeping out migrants, targeting feminists, and stripping the LGBTQ+ community of its rights.

Monarchy, actually

Thiel and Vance are both admirers of the neo-reactionary, or NRx, activist and author Curtis Yarvin. When I say that name, the most common reaction is, “Who?” And really, that should be where things remain. But as with Thiel, because of Vance’s elevation politically, Yarvin’s ideas need to be exposed to some disinfecting sunlight.

Yarvin and his NRx followers are stridently anti-liberal. Like Orbán, Yarvin openly rejects the basic premise of liberalism, which posits an inexorable march toward progress and ever more democracy and freedom. Yarvin asserts that the U.S. is run by an elitist oligarchy (ironically, of which Thiel, Musk, and Vance are themselves a part), but that the solution isn’t democratic safeguards but rather a strongman to come break it all apart:

The solution, Yarvin argues, is for the American oligarchy to give way to a monarchical leader styled after a start-up CEO — a “national CEO,” [or] what’s called a dictator,” as Yarvin has put it — who can de-bug the American political order like a computer programmer de-bugging some bad code.

How much does Vance dig this? Vance calls Yarvin a friend and has cited him as part of a plan, now memorialized in Project 2025, to replace thousands of civil servants with loyalists should Trump win in November. Vance went on a podcast during his Senate campaign in 2021 to say just that: “There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

The tip of the spear

When you pull all this together, the picture becomes disturbingly clear. JD Vance is the hope of the broligarchs and the monarchists made incarnate. He is a man intentionally placed by the tech billionaires right next to Trump. He is a tool of those prepared to destroy our Republic and replace it with an Orbánian new “postliberal” order. Within that new order, our representative system would give way to a “CEO” authoritarian who would reshape American society into one that views women as procreative tools and democracy as not “compatible” with techno-capitalism.

This all sounds like dystopian fiction, but we would be foolish to dismiss it as mere fantasy. Vance, Thiel, Musk, the Project 2025 extremists, and right-wing revolutionaries like Deneen and Yarvin have said all the quiet parts out loud, but to date we have considered them too fringe to matter. Now that Vance is positioned exactly where they wanted someone like him to be, we had better understand and warn all about their endgame.