Our liberal friends were obsessed for a moment over Unelected President Elon Musk. But do you know, Google is hiding it. I checked Google Search and it was really hard to find a search result of some Democrat accusing Musk of being the Unelected President. But “constitutional crisis?” No problem: pages and pages of search results. So I guess our Democratic friends are looking to their judicial friends on the bench to stop the Trump Train. Because the Constitution.
Still, I understand the concern of our liberal friends. If we shut down all the liberal grifts at USAID and the Department of Education that DOGE is discovering with its AI and LLM tools, then thousands of liberal grifter NGOs and their CEOs will go broke and house prices in D.C. and northern Virginia will collapse. Oh no! It’s already started!
Of course, as usual, our liberal friends are wrong. They have been watching the wrong TV channel. The Unelected President is not Elon Musk, who, to me, is more of a StarShip on its way to Occupy Mars. No, the guy to watch is tech lord Marc Andreessen, as I have written at AT already. When he was on the Lex Fridman Podcast he accused the Democrats of breaking the deal with tech: “basically broke every part of that deal for people in my world,” the meanie jelly beanies.
But that was then. I recently discovered that Marc Andreessen had done an interview with the New York Times’ Ross Douthat back in December 2024. Marc & Co. went to the White House in May 2024 to talk about AI. The Bidenoids told them:
We will implement [AI] in the Biden administration and in the second term. We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups.
So how did the tech lords react? Not well, from the point of view of the Democratic Party.
And that’s the day we walked out and stood in the parking lot of the West Wing and took one look at each other, and we’re like, “Yep, we’re for Trump.”
Hello Unelected President Marc! But that’s not the end of the story. Last week Vice <img alt captext="Gage Skidmore” class=”post-image-right” src=”https://conservativenewsbriefing.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/who-is-the-real-unelected-president.jpg” width=”450″>President JD Vance took the slow boat to Europe and read the Riot Act to the Euros on overregulation of AI. Then he went to the Munich Security Conference and told the assembled Euros a few home truths, about the “extraordinary blessings of liberty,” as in
The freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, to invent, to build.
WHAT! What’s this! “Surprise” is a George Gilder thing! Does JD Vance know about Gilder and “Surprise”? I checked, and George Gilder’s got a new book out: Life After Capitalism. Here he is waving his hands about it.
[My book’s] foundational documents are Claude Shannon’s information theory where he identified information passing through a network as measured by its “surprisal,” unexpected bits. In other words, if everything I tell you you already know, zero information is being transmitted in Shannon’s terms.
Did you understand that? I don’t, but I believe, because the whole digital internet is transmitting information based on the assumption that Shannon’s theory works. Gilder was onto this in his 1989 book Microcosm. But it wasn’t until Knowledge and Power in 2013 that he wrote about applying information theory to the economy. The book is incredibly dense, and I barely understand a word. But the name of the game is the entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurship is devoted to creation of new goods and services. Creativity is always surprising.
But how did politician JD Vance get the word on surprise as upstream from “invent?” It’s obvious. He got it from Unelected President Peter Thiel, who “hired Vance at his global investment firm in 2017.” And somewhere along the line, I suspect, Peter Thiel got it from George Gilder. Oh look: here are Thiel and Gilder debating in 2012.
I give you Gilder’s critique of present conventional wisdom on the economy in an interview on “Socrates in the City.” The conventional wisdom says that:
humans are manipulable, that the world isn’t driven by genius producing unexpected truths, that somehow we can see the truth and manipulate human beings to achieve economic growth.
You mean like having AI planned by wise staffers out of the White House?
Wrong! Says Gilder:
Since information is surprise you can’t really plan it.
All this is very exciting and encouraging. It means the new Trump administration has at least half a clue!
But it also tells us that the real Unelected President is not Elon Musk. It’s not Marc Andreessen. It’s George Gilder. Thank goodness that our liberal friends don’t have a clue about it.
But I think it is best not to tell our liberal friends about all this. DEI experts agree that it would make them feel “unsafe.”
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Image: Gage Skidmore
