Reboot: Project 2025, Peter Thiel and right-wing San Francisco

The Point: San Francisco's right-wing tech community and the Heritage Foundation (the organization behind Project 2025) are joining forces to produce a conference on remaking American government.

"Reboot 2024: The New Reality" takes place at Fort Mason in San Francisco today and tomorrow. The collaboration reveals some interesting aspects of the growing alliance between SF tech and the far right – a vision of the politics to come.

Curiously, many of the conference's top funders are listed as "anonymous" on its website. But the Heritage Foundation is listed a major backer, as is Sovereign House, a right-wing New York venue known as a favorite hangout of Curtis Yarvin, the Peter Thiel "house philosopher" who has been influential on the thinking of J.D. Vance. (Multiple writers say Thiel funded Sovereign House, but I could not immediately find confirmation of this.)

The Manhattan Institute, another major promoter, of right-wing politics in the Bay Area, is also on the roster of funders.

The Foundation for American Innovation appears to be the main group behind the event. Its recent publications include staff-written pieces with headlines like "Tech for Trump," "What Could a Trump-Musk Government Efficiency Commission Solve?" and "It's the Elites, Stupid."

Here are some quick notes on this most unusual event (I am not in attendance):

The Backstory: San Francisco tech plutocrats like Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan deny that they are right-wingers in disguise. They insist that they are actually Democrats, and their Republican policy ideas generally get passed off as "moderate" by the press.

But it's now become impossible to deny the unholy alliance between certain tech people in SF and the extreme far right in American politics. This year's Reboot conference seems like a big coming out party for SF tech's alliance with the extremist Heritage Foundation.

It's hard to imagine a scenario in which Democratic groups would partner with the authors of Project 2025 on a conference about remaking government. But the Heritage Foundation apparently has a lot in common with certain SF tech figures.

Reboot 2024 will feature panels and talks focused on how Silicon Valley will change government and politics. Although his name doesn't appear on the list of speakers, Peter Thiel's fingerprints are all over Reboot 2024. There are so many connections to him that his absence from the roster seems rather conspicuous...

More on that in a moment. But first, here's how Reboot 2024 describes its purpose on its website:

The New Reality is here. It's just not evenly distributed. You can see it everywhere. Across media, politics, education, and global affairs, new technologies and players are laying waste to incumbents and making possible new enterprises and ways of building. Political pressure and popular opinion are moving from stagnation to revolution, from doom loop to boom loop.

This isn’t incremental improvement. It's reality transformation.

But the Old Reality won't go without a fight. Legacy organizations and personalities will try to write their privileges and cash flows into law faster than New Reality technologies and founders can overtake them. It's a classic strategy, employed by every guild and elite. It will work, until it doesn't.

Tech will be at the center of the fight. The printing press didn't have a politics, but printers, readers, and thinkers did. And today, after decades of pretending that Washington didn't exist, Silicon Valley has woken up to politics, recognizes the stakes, and is playing to win.

This is some pretty dramatic and cultish language. It asserts that tech is overthrowing the old order and remaking the world in its own image.

Well, that's pretty much been the thesis of my reporting on the Network State cult, headquartered in SF, which seeks to replace democracy with tech-run governments. For example, Network State leader Balaji Srinivasan preaches about the need for tech to create "parallel" institutions – media, political parties, universities – that serve tech interests and supplant existing versions. The "new reality" language on the Reboot 2024 website captures this idea perfectly.

The goal is for Silicon Valley to use its wealth and influence to completely remake US government in its own image. And in 2024, the Network State cult's goals apparently align with the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025.

Peter Thiel Fan Club

Thiel's acolytes and employees play prominent roles in Reboot 2024.

Yarvin, who popularized the use of "reboot" for remaking government, has been described as Thiel's "house philosopher."

Tan was an early employee at Palantir, a tech surveillance company co-founded by Thiel. Mike Solana, who will appear on a panel with Tan, is a vice president at Founders Fund, a venture capital firm founded by Thiel. Solana also runs Pirate Wires, a parallel "media" institution that acts as a lapdog for tech. (In his long podcast screed which called for purging Democrats from San Francisco, Srinivasan envisions Solana as a key leader of the tech "Gray Tribe" that will rule the city.)

Trae Stephens, a partner at Founders Fund, is on the roster of speakers. So is John Coogan, an "entrepreneur in residence" at Founders Fund.

So while Thiel doesn't appear on the website, Reboot is essentially a meeting of the Peter Thiel Alumni Association. Interestingly, the top funder of the conference is listed only as "anonymous." And the program says an unnamed "special guest" will be showing up for a discussed titled "Tech and the American Republic."

Does Thiel have the guts to show his face? Or will he hide behind his acolytes? Earlier this year, he did make the odd choice of participating in a discussion of "political theology" with Tan at a converted church near Dolores Park. We'll see...

Right-wing SF meets Heritage Foundation

So what will the SF Thiel bros and the Heritage Foundation talk about in San Francisco?

The schedule of events provides a good idea of where they find common ground. Here are a few highlights:

Project 2025 Co-Author Keynote

Brendan Carr, a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) official who literally helped write an entire chapter of Project 2025, will headline the Reboot 2024 gala event. From a story headlined "Democrats Question FCC Commissioner's Role in Project 2025" that was published in The Hill:

More than a dozen House Democrats sent a letter to the inspector general of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Wednesday, questioning Commissioner Brendan Carr’s role in helping craft Project 2025, a conservative policy document.

The letter, led by Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), claims Carr violated ethics rules and may have misused his office.

Carr appears to be the only government official speaking at this year's conference.

Pronatalism

There will be a panel on "Population Implosion," which is a key obsession of people like JD Vance and Elon Musk.

The panel features Lyman Stone of something called the Institute for Family Studies, a right-wing think tank. In July, Stone wrote on Twitter:

...i'd like to see more sweeping anti-abortion legislation in Kentucky– i also understand that under the US constitutional system certain things just are the way they are, and making local criminal codes for offenses that aren't crossing state lines is not DC's job.

To be clear, abortion is banned in Kentucky (with very few exceptions.)

Stone is currently heading something called the Pronatalism Initiative, which is funded by something called Emergent Ventures, a grant program of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Emergent Ventures started with $1 million in funding from – drum roll, please – Peter Thiel.

The right-wing has a growing and well-documented obsession with birth rates. This explains why people like Vance and Musk are constantly whining about the need for women to dedicate their lives to increasing baby production. And, of course, it partly explains why Republicans are working hard to strip women of their reproductive rights.

Weapons development

A panel titled "Rebuilding the Arsenal of Democracy" will feature Trae Stephens of the Anduril drone company (and Thiel's Founders Fund) along with Michael Kratsios, a former White House official whose Wikipedia page describes him as having been "Donald Trump's top technology advisor."

SF tech has gotten very excited about weapons technology lately. Y Combinator recently announced its first investment in weapons company. From Fortune:

Y Combinator—the startup incubator that helped launch DoorDash, Airbnb, Reddit, and Instacart—is backing a weapons maker for the first time, betting that it could shake up the defense industry with low-cost, anti-ship missiles.

The goal, according to Y Combinator's Jared Friedman, is to become the SpaceX of missiles. From Business Insider:

Ares Industries, he says, could do for missiles what Elon Musk's SpaceX did for the rocket industry.

"When SpaceX entered space launch vehicles in 2002, Lockheed Martin and Boeing had formed a duopoly. Similarly, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are the only two big players that supply cruise missiles today," he wrote on X last week.

Weapons technology is very important to the Network State ideology. In his techno-fascist vision of a San Francisco ruled by a tech Gray Tribe, Balaji Srinivasan envisioned Anduril drones flying above police as they marched through the streets of the city in a "Gray Pride Parade."

Weapons development is also a key way for tech to tap the spigot of federal money. As they have become increasingly oppositional to the US government, both Elon Musk and Thiel have also become major government contractors, providing a roadmap for others in tech.

Crypto Politics

As far as I can tell, the politics of crypto are simple. First, the crypto cartel seeks legitimacy in order to part a greater number of people from their wealth. Second, it wants "sovereignty" in order to evade world governments and laws as it amasses ungodly amounts of wealth to become a rival power in a post-democracy world. After that, world domination. (I'm workshopping this definition.)

It's easy to see why crypto and MAGA (along with most authoritarian movements) have so much in common. And so the Reboot conference features a panel on "The New Politics of Crypto," which notably features Jessica Anderson, the former executive director of Heritage Action for America, the Heritage Foundation's lobbying arm. Anderson is also the former "Associate Director of Intergovernmental Affairs and Strategic Initiatives in the Trump Administration," according to her LinkedIn profile.

At first glance, Anderson's connection to crypto wasn't entirely clear. But Twitter solved the riddle. In July, a crypto company called Multicoin Capital pledged to match $1 million in donations to Heritage Action to help with efforts to elect pro-crypto politicians. Anderson celebrated with the following post:

Republicans in Congress have been working hard to fight the anti-crypto Left and allow the industry to flourish.

When the industry flourishes, America flourishes.

But the only way to truly win is by sending anti-crypto senators like Sherrod Brown, Bob Casey and Jon Tester home.

Of course, Donald Trump himself called crypto a "scam" before suddenly pivoting to get on the side of the crypto PAC money...and his flunkies are following suit.

SF Gray Tribe

To be sure, there are some Democrats and others taking part in the Reboot conference, but the overall theme is decidedly a mashup of Thiel/Heritage. One might expect such a pairing in some place like Texas or Georgia, but it looks pretty weird in San Francisco. Or does it?

I've argued that Tan's whole project in trying to take over SF City Hall has been about the creation of a new reality in which so-called Democrats adopt Republican ideas and work with Republicans to defeat progressives. And the new reality is that these guys aren't really Democrats at all, but a weird third thing.

This seems like a clear emergence of what Balaji calls the "Gray Tribe" – a tech faction aligned with Republicans ("Reds") against the Democrats ("Blues") to create a post-democratic era of plutocratic domination.

...Brought to you by San Francisco's "little tech" community, with generous funding from the Heritage Foundation – a partnership with a shared vision of the future.

Y Combinator responds

Last night, I criticized the conference on X-Twitter:

Tomorrow in San Francisco!

The people who brought you Project 2025 (the Heritage Foundation) and the Peter Thiel Alumni Association present: Reboot 2024, a conference about how SF tech and the far-right are collaborating to reshape US government in their favor.

This drew a response from Luther Lowe, head of public policy for Y Combinator:

Speakers at the annual Reboot conference over the years: @StenyHoyer, @mignonclyburn, @sethmoulton, @doctorow, @matthewstoller, @HalSinger, @putorti/@resistbot, etc.

So pretty much a mashup of the Bilderberg Meeting x RNC x Bohemian Grove. Get to the bottom of it, Gil!

But this only accentuates my point. I doubt many of those people would participate in a conference so heavily branded as a Heritage Foundation production just months before the most consequential election in American history.

I'll likely have more to say on this. But his has gotten long enough for what started out as a short post!