You might have noticed, when our reigning techno-fascists are given microphones and some time to talk, that they sound like they're completely out of their fucking minds. 

Indeed if regular people said the sort of things that these oddly-rendered dweebs do on the regular, they'd be held for observation in a mental health facility not bequeathed with nested yachts and infinite wealth. 

But not so with the Masters of our "Dark Renaissance." Turns out if you have infinite wealth, you can say the sort things you'd normally overhear on a full moon at the needle exchange and people won't lock you up for it. 

Just in case you don't know what I'm talking about, here are some clips of some of our most prominent Palo Alto pedo cannibals sounding like they're fresh out of Zyprexa. 

Alex Karp 

Bonked out of his mind even on a good day, where this goes off-the-rails is when he starts talking about Hegelianism. I don't think I've heard word-salad that obtuse since my cousin Randy accidentally ate a fistful of STP gel caps thinking they were gas station boner pills. 

Peter Thiel

Here's an extremely strung out Petey Tinkerbell talking about the Antichrist with a YouTube UFO conspiracist. Like normal people do. 

And yeah, his run-on string of disparate Biblical quotes is theologically inept but how could it not be? Just look at him. If you've been kicked out of the last after-hours at Electric Daisy Carnival to be greeted by the vengeful Vegas midday sun, you know what that look means. 

Marc Andreessen 

No you didn't accidentally set your playback speed to 1.5x. This is just how a Remulakian talks after boofing a gram of Calvin Klein. "We are from Vichy France!"

Elon Musk 

And of course this would not be complete without the King of Fort Dodge, seen here wiping your month's pay worth of powder drugs out of his schnoz before pretending to be a rocket scientist in the company of actual rocket scientists. 

$$$$$

Every one of these men is a multi-billionaire. None of them should be trusted with sharp objects. So what did this to their brains? Were they always this way? Did the money do this? 

From a materialist perspective, it's probably the latter. None of these men started off as idiots. Most were identified as gifted at a young age and excelled in academic environments. Most went to the sort of schools that people born into wealth go to but seldom due to nepotism alone (though nepotism certainly helped). They should at least be... gee, I don't know... coherent? 

But it would also be naive to blame this ONLY on the wealth. Yes, having infinite money means you can pay people to pretend to be your friends -- the kind of friends who never set you straight or talk you down off the ledge -- enablers, in other words -- and surrounding yourself with such people can lead to a tenuous grasp on objective reality. But their consistently Log Lady-coded babble is not the result of a bespoke curated reality alone. This is something more. Something, well... drug-related. 

If you're wondering why I named this piece after the 1970s disco-funk kings who gave us undisputed bangers like "Get Down Tonight,", "I'm Your Boogie Man," and "That's The Way I Like It," I'm about to bring it all back around right now. Uh-huh, uh-huh. 

All of these Nerdzis, to a man, are high as fuck on a cocktail of Ketamine and Cocaine (K and C). They are merely the Sunshine Band. 

If you're wondering how a bunch of pocket protector D&D nerds who were virgins until they had the money to procure sex slaves from a money-laundering Mossad agent wound up on albeit-expensive-but-nonetheless-fairly-heavy drugs, you have to understand Stanford and the culture at Stanford. 

And while not all of these men are direct products of Stanford, they are all the products of that Stanford culture, one where psychedelics, technology, the military-industrial complex, and libertarian think tanks like the Hoover Institution have been members of the same creepy polycule since the 1950s. 

I'm guessing you've heard of MK-Ultra or at least recognize the phrase. It refers to an umbrella of covert experiments kicked off by a team of chemists in the employ of the CIA, who were inspired by experiments carried out by Nazi sicko and Slayer song subject, Dr. Joseph Mengele, and wanted to do some of their own, only on unwitting citizens instead of death camp prisoners. They, like Mengele, believed that illicit drugs were not just an agent of control for the working class but could be weaponized and used against enemies both internal (commies, hippies) and external (commies, hippies). 

Thus MK-Ultra was born. The name is cool but it doesn't really mean anything. Its alleged purpose was to find out whether psychedelics and other hard drugs had any military applications. Truth serums, mind control agents, weapons of mass hysteria... or whatever. 

They played with opiods, stimulants -- really anything they could get their hands on -- but psychedelics and LSD in particular seemed to have the most potential for what they had in mind. So Sidney Gottlieb, CIA head chemist and MK-Ultra overseer, went about procuring THE ENTIRE WORLD SUPPLY OF LSD using $240,000 of US taxpayer money (or about $3 million in today's money). He handed some of his stash over to Big Pharma stalwart Eli Lilly and charged them with replicating the chemical, which made the CIA the world's biggest psychedelic drug dealer… at least until the Grateful Dead came along. But we'll get to that later. 

Stanford, home to experiments like the self-titled Prison one (funded by the Office of Naval Research), was a perfect place to conduct such experiments, situated fairly close to San Francisco, Big Sur, and the mountains above Santa Cruz, all of which having become counterculture havens by the mid-1950s as the literary canon of The Beats can attest. Thus there was no shortage of willing volunteers eager to get "turned on" and paid to do so to boot. 

These experiments attracted a laundry list of counter culture who's-whos such as: Allan Ginsberg, Beat poet and unapologetic NAMBLA member. Ken Kesey, merry prankster and author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And Robert Hunter, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and longtime Jerry Garcia collaborator. 

And speaking of Prison Experiments, over on the east coast prisoners were offered reduced sentences in exchange for MK-Ultra subjectification. One such prisoner happened to be infamous Boston gangster and subject of many the Ben Affleck film, Whitey "Go Bruins" Bulger.

Bulger described his experience thusly and I swear to God I pulled this straight from Encyclopedia Britannica: 

"Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state. Total loss of appetite. Hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me."

(Worth noting: Bulger had never committed a violent crime before the MK-Ultra experiments.)

And at Harvard, Stanford PhD Richard Albert (who later changed his name to Baba Ram Dass) and his colleague, Berkeley alum Dr. Timothy Leary, were using CIA-by-way-of-Lilly-supplied LSD for their own infamous psychedelic experiments which eventually drew the ire of the very same government they were low-key working for (too much hippie spirituality not enough war machine). 

By 1964, partly thanks to Dr. Leary's headline-grabbing infamy, the government had lost interest in psychedelics and focused their attention instead on much-more-on-brand incapacitating nerve agents. Eli Lilly ceased production of the chemical and that's when LSD disappeared from the zeitgeist forever. 

Oh, wait, that's not what happened. Remember when I said I'd bring us back around to the Grateful Dead? Well here it is, so let's get truckin'.

The Grateful Dead's primordial form took shape in Palo Alto, home to previously mentioned Stanford University as well and some of the most punchable billionaire dweebs on the planet. They started, aptly enough, as a jug band, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions (jug bands were to the early 1960s what swing bands were to the mid-1990s). This group morphed into the Wildwood Boys which eventually morphed into The Warlocks, along with a less-juggy and more rock-n-roll oriented sound. 

This iteration is the one that built their reputation as a must-see live band and on any given night, in what we now call Silicon Valley, they could be found tearing it up on the local bar circuit. 

However, as this was before you could Google a potential band name before committing to it, The Warlocks eventually had to change their name yet again, thanks to there being several other bands already using the moniker (including a NYC band that would eventually change their name to Velvet Underground). There are several legends surrounding the selection of their final form but the most reliable, per bassist Phil Lesh, was that Jerry Garcia simply picked up a book from the above-mentioned Encyclopedia Britannica (time is a flat circle) and went with the first thing that caught his stoned-to-the-gills eye: The Grateful Dead. 

The Grateful Dead's first show was in San Jose, California -- now home to Cisco Systems, Adobe, PayPal, eBay, and about a million people living off the fat of USA's Tech industry. It was at an event hosted by Robert Hunter's fellow MK-Ultra subject turned counterculture icon, Ken Kesey, who'd been throwing a series of "Acid Tests"  -- so-named for the LSD that was distributed to party-goers free-of-charge. Since Lilly was no longer producing the drug, Kesey turned to an amateur chemist and former Air Force engineer, one who'd worked on the SM-64 Navaho cruise missile among other nuclear-holocaust-flavored weapons, a man known to many as simply Bear. 

Bear, or Augustus Owsley Stanley as per his birth certificate (why not Stanley Augustus Owsley? We may never know), was by this time and for a long time after, the world's pre-eminent manufacturer of LSD. Seeking to fill the void left by Lilly, Bear hit local libraries to cook up a recipe that would transform his primitive meth lab into a high-class acid factory. Aiding him in his quest was Melissa Cargill, a Berkely grad student and brilliant chemist who'd soon become Bear's primary romantic partner from a polycule that included their lab assistant Rhoney Gissen (who later took Stanley's surname despite never being officially married) and Jefferson Airplane bassist Jack Cassady. 

Through his association with Kesey, and Kesey's association with legendary concert promoter Bill Graham, Bear was able to develop and nurture a devoted clientele for his chemical sundries among the Bay Area counterculture and music scenes. With this came a great deal of money, and he was looking for something to spend it on. When he met Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh after one of Kesey's Acid Tests he offered to help the band any way he could. "We could use a sound man," Lesh told Bear. 

And so was born a cross-promotional match made in Heaven. The Grateful Dead provided the tunes and Bear provided the LSD, as well as mixing the band's live sound and recording many of the classic soundboard "bootlegs" that cork-sniffing Dead Heads collect like bottles of Napa Valley Cabernet. The band's famous "Wall of Sound" -- at the time the most expensive and loudest sound reinforcement system of all time -- was co-designed by Bear, as was the band's iconic skull-and-lightning bolt mascot, "Stealie." Oh, and the "dancing bears" that adorn a great deal of Grateful Dead t-shirts, stickers, and other merch? Indeed a tribute to Owlsey Stanley. 

I'd mentioned Robert Hunter as being a direct link between the CIA -- via MK-Ultra -- and the Grateful Dead. But Robert Hunter was not the only outside lyricist that the Grateful Dead employed. John Perry Barlow was a former Mormon, Harvard law school dropout, screenwriter, and Wyoming rancher who'd been friends with Dead guitarist Bob Weir since he was 15. He was also briefly part of the creative and social circle at Andy Warhol's "Factory" while supporting himself as a cocaine dealer. When Weir's working relationship with Robert Hunter had reached an impasse, he reached out to Barlow and asked him for help. Barlow wound up working with Weir and the Dead for 20 years, co-penning songs like "Cassidy" and "Mexi-Cali Blues." 

Like most of the people within the Grateful Dead's inner circle, Hunter was a frequent user of LSD, having found his way to the drug while at Harvard via Timothy Leary. However, unlike most Grateful Dead insiders, Barlow was a life-long Republican, albeit a libertarian-leaning one. This did not prevent Barlow from finding kindred spirits within the counterculture and even mainstream Democrat political spectrum. Indeed, John F Kennedy Jr. had worked for Barlow at his Bar Cross Ranch. But Barlow's most infamous political association was with Dick Cheney -- yes, THAT Dick Cheney -- who took Barlow on as his campaign coordinator and speech writer. However as he entered the 1990s, Barlow could no longer reconcile his libertarian principles with the neoconservative movement of the Bushes, Cheney, and Rumsfeld (let alone neoliberals like Clinton and Obama). Instead he found kindred spirits (as we all seemed to be doing around this time period) via The Internet. 

However for Barlow it wasn't AOL's gardening message board or a BBS devoted to soap-making where he found his circle. It was a disparate group of entrepreneurs, hackers, and libertarians with whom he formed the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The group was founded to protect the liberties of digital citizens, ostensibly from heavy-handed government regulation or anything else that might tether free-market capitalism. They found kindred spirits in many deep-pocketed big tech celebrities such as Stephen "The Woz" Wozniak (co-founder of Apple Computers) and Mitch Kapor (founder of Lotus 1-2-3 which was Excel before Excel was cool). The EFF's raison d'être — to keep the internet a "wild west" for programmers, hackers, and entrepreneurs — has been credited with allowing Silicon Valley to achieve the massive growth that made it USA America’s premiere industry of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. 

The Shadow of the EFF still hangs over Silicon Valley, and Stanford in particular. Indeed the tech-libertarians of the 1990s paved the way for the tech-fascists of the 2020s, for whom an unregulated tech industry is a lynchpin of their "Dark Enlightenment" ethos. As anyone who's been to Burning Man can tell you, hippies, tech bros, and mind-altering drugs are really all part of the same stew, always together, always inseparable.  And while free love and fascism might seem diametrically opposed, they're really just two sides of the same coin, one where personal liberties for an elite in-group trump the liberties of a free society. Tune in, drop out, get rich, and to hell with everyone else.