They're Telling You Exactly What They're Doing
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They're Telling You Exactly What They're Doing<br>The Network State, the Pirate Party, and the Playbook for Buying a Democracy
California Pirate Party<br>Jun 03, 2026
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Published by the California Pirate Party
Scott Pelley, fired for telling the truth.<br>On July 4, 2022 — Independence Day, deliberately — Balaji Srinivasan published a book called The Network State. Srinivasan is a former Coinbase CTO and prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist. The book is available for free online. It is not subtle.<br>A Network State, Srinivasan writes, is “a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition.” The strategy: build a network of aligned billionaires, VC firms, media outlets, political movements, and parallel institutions. Accumulate power. Replace the existing order.<br>He published this on July 4th.
The people behind what is happening to America right now are telling you exactly what they’re doing. The destruction of CBS News is not a business decision. The gutting of federal agencies is not cost-cutting. Project 2025 is not a policy wish list. These are nodes in a network, executing a plan that was written down and published.<br>In August 2025, Skydance Media completed its $8 billion acquisition of Paramount. Before the FCC even approved the deal, Paramount settled a $16 million lawsuit Donald Trump had filed against CBS over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Bari Weiss — founder of The Free Press, formerly of the New York Times opinion page — was brought in to run CBS News.<br>Then a 60 Minutes segment examining the treatment of migrants at El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison was pulled hours before broadcast. Correspondent Scott Pelley was fired. His exit memo accused Skydance CEO David Ellison of “casting aside 60 Minutes to curry favor with Trump.” Sharyn Alfonsi was fired six months later.<br>This is what journalist Gil Duran calls the “parallel” strategy: buy an existing institution, gut it, and convert it into a right-wing zombie version of itself. Duran, formerly editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee and San Francisco Examiner, tracks this network in his newsletter The Nerd Reich. The strategy, he writes, is being applied to media, government, education, biotech, and defense tech simultaneously.
The network has a center of gravity. It runs through Peter Thiel.<br>Thiel co-founded PayPal. From that founding team came Elon Musk, now running DOGE inside the federal government. David Sacks — PayPal — is now the White House “AI and Crypto Czar.” JD Vance worked for Thiel at Mithril Capital before launching Narya Capital, backed by Thiel’s Founders Fund, before becoming Vice President of the United States. Jim O’Neill, former CEO of Thiel’s personal foundation, is now Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services.<br>Marc Andreessen of a16z — the venture capital firm behind some of the most powerful technology companies in the world — was reportedly spending half his time at Mar-a-Lago after the 2024 election, advising on tech and economic policy. His firm backs Anduril, which is building AI weapons systems for the U.S. military.<br>These are not separate movements. These are nodes in a network.<br>Curtis Yarvin, a former software programmer who writes under the name Mencius Moldbug, is the ideological architect. Yarvin advocates replacing democracy with what he calls a “CEO-king” — a dictator who can fire the bureaucracy and run the state like a corporation. He is widely read and cited in the Thiel network. Musk and Sacks have both engaged with his work publicly.<br>Project 2025 — the 920-page Heritage Foundation document that outlined the policy framework for Trump’s second term — was written by 40 primary authors from 100+ organizations, 182 of whom had ties to the Trump administration. Nearly half of the collaborating organizations received dark money from networks linked to Leonard Leo, the man who selected the Supreme Court justices who ended Roe v. Wade.<br>Garry Tan, a tech entrepreneur who became president of Y Combinator, stated the goal plainly: replace existing institutions with parallel versions.
The California Pirate Party exists because we understood early that the fight over digital rights was never just about copyright or privacy. It was about who controls information, who controls infrastructure, and who controls the institutions that are supposed to check power.<br>That fight is no longer theoretical. It is here. It is now.<br>What Srinivasan described in The Network State is not a thought experiment. It is a transition already underway. Parallel media. Parallel financial systems. Parallel defense contractors. Parallel universities. A parallel executive branch, staffed with network loyalists, dismantling the one it replaced from the inside.<br>The people doing this are not hiding it. They published the book. They...