We live in the shadow of a decaying empire, run not by presidents or parliaments, but by a transnational oligarchy that merges finance, fossil fuel, and digital surveillance into a single, unified machine of domination. This is not the rule of ideas—it is the dictatorship of capital. To confront it, we must understand it—not in abstraction, but in its living, breathing form. We must name the dynasties, expose the infrastructure, and trace the lineage of power.

This series is an investigative and theoretical breakdown of the U.S. white ruling class—divided historically into three dominant factions:

The Yankees – the liberal-financial elite rooted in East Coast dynasties, foundations, and Ivy League institutions;
The Cowboys – the reactionary settler-capitalist class, built on oil, land theft, militarism, and evangelical whiteness;
The Digerati – the newest faction, born of Silicon Valley, intelligence-backed research labs, and a vision of algorithmic rule.

Each of these factions has its own history, geography, and ideological framework. But over the past 40 years, and especially in the post-2008 period, they have been driven—by crisis, contradiction, and rebellion—toward political-economic fusion. This fusion has given birth to a new regime: technofascism—a form of hyper-capitalist rule that merges AI surveillance, imperial war, and financial expropriation into a seamless matrix of control.

This series begins with an in-depth examination of each faction, and culminates in a structural analysis of their merger and the political form it has produced. Each part will be followed by multiple deep-dive articles unpacking the individuals, families, institutions, and systems that embody this power structure.

To name them is not to fear them—but to prepare for their defeat.

We begin where the empire was first engineered: in the East Coast citadels of capital. The dynasties of old money. The bankers of war. The merchants of empire. The Brahmins of finance. The architects of the world system.

Part I: The Yankees — Aristocracy of Finance, Architects of Empire

From slavers and smugglers to central bankers and asset managers: the East Coast dynasties who rule the empire through credit, contracts, and crisis.

“Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.” — Mayer Amschel Rothschild (attributed)

The Yankees are not just a class—they are an empire unto themselves. Cloaked in liberalism, housed in East Coast mansions, and fortified by Ivy League credentials, these are the high priests of finance capital. Unlike the Cowboys who rule with oil rigs and rifles, or the Digerati who engineer their empires through algorithms and surveillance, the Yankees operate from the boardrooms of BlackRock, the policy suites of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the tax-free citadels of the Rockefeller Foundation. Their power is quiet, clinical, and centuries old.

I. Genocide, Slavery, and the Birth of a Class

The Yankee faction of the U.S. ruling class is not simply a group of wealthy East Coast elites—it is the direct descendant of the original settler-colonial aristocracy. They are the heirs of Mayflower Puritans, British East India agents, Caribbean slavers, land speculators, and genocidal governors who turned stolen land and enslaved labor into capital, and then converted that capital into banks, trusts, and transgenerational dynasties.

The first Yankee fortunes were not made on Wall Street—they were forged through:

Enclosure and conquest of Native land in New England
Slavery—both in the South and through New England’s Caribbean plantations
The Atlantic slave trade, with families like the Browns and DeWolfs profiting directly
Opium smuggling, especially by Boston Brahmin families like the Delanos and Forbes

Banks like Bank of New York Mellon, J.P. Morgan, and Citibank all have roots in this colonial economy. The endowments of Harvard, Yale, and Brown are soaked in blood money from this era.

II. Naming the Dynasties: From Plantations to Portfolios

The Delano Family (FDR’s maternal line): Built wealth through opium smuggling into China as part of Russell & Company. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” liberalism was rooted in narcotic imperialism.

The Brown Family (Brown University): James and John Brown financed slave voyages. Their profits helped found Brown University.

The Forbes Family: Another opium dynasty, connected to John Kerry. Profits helped seed Boston finance networks.

The Astors: Built a fur and real estate empire on stolen Indigenous land, cementing New York’s oligarchy.

The Morgans: Financiers of war and monopolies, J.P. Morgan was instrumental in shaping the modern capitalist state and suppressing labor uprisings.

III. The Slave Trade, Capital Formation, and Modern Banking

Major U.S. banks and insurance companies—including Aetna, New York Life, Citibank, and Chase—admit profiting from slavery. Slave-backed mortgages, insuring enslaved people as “property,” and plantation financing helped build the infrastructure of modern finance.

The Ivy League was bankrolled by this economy. The U.S. Treasury’s dependency on banking dynasties like Morgan, and the establishment of the Federal Reserve, created a Yankee-controlled financial oligarchy that persists today.

IV. From Merchant Kings to Empire Managers

Today’s Yankee elite doesn’t wield whips—it wields derivatives, debt, and philanthropic soft power.

BlackRock (Larry Fink): Controls $10 trillion. Serves as de facto global central bank. Manages crises for governments worldwide.

Carlyle Group (David Rubenstein): Private equity empire linked to defense contracts and post-9/11 warfare expansion.

Rockefeller Foundation: Promotes neoliberal development, NGO penetration of the Global South, and climate “solutions” aligned with financial interests.

Council on Foreign Relations: The Yankee brain trust for imperial strategy. Serves as a revolving door for technocrats, diplomats, and corporate imperialists.

V. Yankee Ideology: Liberalism as a Weapon

The Yankees do not speak in the crude language of fascism—they speak in human rights, rule of law, and ESG frameworks. But behind this liberal mask lies a machinery of class war, racial management, and neocolonialism.

They produce:

DEI and drone strikes
NGOs and economic warfare
Think tanks and soft coups
Development loans and privatization programs

Whether funding public health or manufacturing consent, the Yankees deploy liberalism as an imperial logic—not a democratic ideal.

VI. Crisis Management and Class Dictatorship

Since the 2008 financial collapse, Yankees like BlackRock have stepped in to manage national economies. They profit from crisis—controlling real estate, bond markets, and social infrastructure.

Financialization, asset bubbles, and austerity regimes have replaced productive investment. They don’t build—they discipline.

VII. Unmasking the Empire’s Brain

The Yankee ruling class did not vanish—they evolved. They no longer wear top hats. They wear cardigans and speak at Davos. They manage war through development loans. They manage revolt through think tanks. They mask theft with philanthropy.

We name them not to mythologize them—but to prepare for their defeat.

Part II: The Cowboys — Fossil Barons, Death Merchants, and the Machinery of Settler Power

From the plantation to the pipeline, the Cowboy faction represents the imperial class of extraction, militarism, and revanchism.

I. Who Are the Cowboys?

The Cowboy faction of the white ruling class is the organized force of settler violence, fossil capital, and Christian reaction. They are the oil barons, arms dealers, real estate dynasties, and mercenary contractors who build empire with pipelines, prisons, and bullets. Where the Yankees rule through credit, and the Digerati through code, the Cowboys rule through crude—the oil barrel and the gun barrel.

Their base of power lies in the Sunbelt: Texas, Florida, Arizona, Louisiana—regions built on stolen Indigenous land, enslaved Black labor, and extractive settler colonial capitalism. Their class project is racial fascism disguised as freedom, frontier individualism masking state-backed monopoly.

II. Origins in Blood and Land: The Settler Warlords

The Cowboy class emerged from slaveholders, land thieves, and Indian killers. After the Civil War, former Confederates, plantation owners, and Southern elites migrated westward, entrenching their wealth through oil, cattle, and state repression.

The Hunt Family (Texas) – Oil magnates who funded segregationist and anti-communist crusades.
The Koch Family – Fossil capital empire and architects of the modern libertarian-right. Their money controls academia, politics, and think tanks.
The DeVos-Prince Dynasty – Christian nationalist billionaires behind public school privatization and global mercenary warfare (via Blackwater).

III. Cowboy Power Structures: Oil, War, and Settler Law

1. Fossil Capital

ExxonMobil, Chevron, Halliburton – Transnational corporations driving climate collapse and U.S. foreign policy.
Pipeline politics – Infrastructure like Keystone XL and Dakota Access serve as extractive colonial projects enforced by militarized police.

2. Military-Industrial Complex

Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, DynCorp – Profiteers of endless war, controlling U.S. foreign policy through weapons contracts.
Blackwater/Constellis – Private armies used for counterinsurgency abroad and suppression at home.

3. Land, Property, and Policing

Real estate barons – Sunbelt landlords and developers who finance political reaction and fund settler militia networks.
Prison-industrial complex – Private prisons, immigrant detention centers, and police unions form the domestic repressive arm of Cowboy capital.

4. Ideological Apparatus

Heritage Foundation, ALEC, Federalist Society – Cowboy think tanks producing legal strategies to dismantle civil rights and worker protections.
Fox News, NRA, Evangelical megachurches – Media and religious institutions weaponizing whiteness and anti-Blackness as mass mobilization tools.

IV. Politics of Race and Religion

The Cowboys rely on Christian nationalism, racial terror, and settler entitlement to maintain their base. Their ideology fuses property rights with divine mandate, capitalism with bloodlines, and violence with virtue.

Anti-Black policing and incarceration
Anti-migrant terror and border militarization
Anti-communism and attacks on labor
Culture war fascism and white patriarchal nostalgia

V. 21st Century Consolidation: Trumpism and Fossil Fascism

Donald Trump was the Cowboy regime in full expression. His cabinet was a cartel of oil executives, real estate moguls, and private military CEOs. Under his banner, the Cowboy-Digerati fusion began to solidify, using digital infrastructure to amplify settler violence.

Rex Tillerson (ExxonMobil) – Secretary of State
Rick Perry (Energy) – Fossil capital loyalist
Stephen Miller – Architect of white supremacist immigration policy
Erik Prince – Military contractor and regime-change operative

VI. Cowboy-Digerati Hybrids and Emerging Threats

Elon Musk embodies the Cowboy-Digerati hybrid: a settler technocrat who builds rockets and pipelines while cosplaying as a libertarian messiah. Starlink satellites aid imperial war, while Tesla hoards lithium from neocolonial mines in the Global South.

Expect more fusions: predictive policing, automated drone warfare, AI-controlled borders—all built on fossil energy and settler logic.

VII. Cowboy Capitalism Is Counterinsurgency

The Cowboy faction is the blunt instrument of empire. They are the prison, the rifle, the wall. They are the myth of the free settler—armed, angry, and backed by state violence. But they are not invincible. Their violence reveals their fear. Their domination signals their desperation.

To understand U.S. fascism, we must understand the Cowboys—not as rebels, but as ruling class enforcers.

Part III: The Digerati — Lords of the Digital Plantation

From DARPA to DeepMind, from counterinsurgency to cloud computing—the Digerati are the high priests of algorithmic control and AI imperialism.

I. The Birth of a Faction: Cybernetic Roots of Empire

The Digerati are the newest faction of the white ruling class—emerging not from plantations or banks, but from code, data, and surveillance infrastructure. They are the cybernetic capitalists: the engineers of digital control, predictive policing, and planetary-scale behavior management.

But their origins aren’t as “disruptive” as they claim. The Digerati were born in state laboratories:

DARPA: The Pentagon’s advanced research wing, creator of the internet (ARPANET).
RAND Corporation: Cold War nerve center for nuclear modeling and counterinsurgency theory.
Stanford, MIT, Berkeley: University-military pipelines producing elite data scientists and defense contractors.

The Digerati inherited the tools of empire and repackaged them as apps, platforms, and “smart” solutions.

II. Names, Nodes, and Networks

This faction is diffuse, hidden behind brands and buzzwords. But their architecture of control is material and visible.

Peter Thiel: Co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, eugenics proponent, technofascist ideologue.
Eric Schmidt: Former Google CEO; now designs Pentagon AI war programs.
Elon Musk: Cowboy-Digerati hybrid; runs Tesla, Starlink, X (Twitter), and interfaces with U.S. and Israeli militaries.
Sam Altman: CEO of OpenAI; key player in mainstreaming AI governance tools under elite control.
Marc Andreessen: Silicon Valley VC who openly advocates hierarchy and domination in his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”

III. Corporate Power Structures

Platform Capitalism:

Google/Alphabet: AI supremacy, mass surveillance, adtech dominance.
Amazon/AWS: Cloud backbone of the Pentagon and CIA. Logistics god.
Meta/Facebook: Social graph weaponized for behavioral control.
Microsoft: Pentagon partner and investor in OpenAI.

Surveillance + War:

Palantir: Predictive policing, ICE raids, counterinsurgency analytics.
Anduril: Thiel-backed autonomous weapons, border surveillance.
Scale AI: Training military-grade AI using mass data.

IV. Ideology: Technosolutionism as Totalitarianism

While the Yankees speak liberalism and the Cowboys preach nationalism, the Digerati chant “innovation.” But their ideology is no less brutal:

Neo-Malthusianism: A belief in elite governance and population control through data.
Libertarian fascism: An open hostility to democracy, and a desire for algorithmic rule.
Eugenics and optimization: A revival of race science in the language of biohacking, nootropics, and AI.
Colonial futurism: Mars fantasies, technocratic globalism, and digital neocolonialism.

V. What They Are Building: The Technofascist Toolkit

Digital feudalism: Services become subscriptions. Access is mediated by platform lords.
AI governance: Algorithms decide credit scores, arrests, parole, benefits, even life and death.
Cybernetic counterinsurgency: Predictive policing and social media surveillance deployed against dissent.
Autonomous war: Drones, sensors, and battlefield AI systems used to maintain U.S. global hegemony.

VI. Nexus with the State

The Digerati pose as private innovators—but they are deeply embedded in state violence:

Google’s Project Maven: Pentagon AI for drone targeting.
Microsoft’s JEDI contract: Pentagon cloud infrastructure.
Meta’s internet colonialism: Free basics programs in Africa + Asia for data extraction.
Starlink satellites: Used in Ukraine, Gaza, and other zones of imperial warfare.

VII. Global Tech-Colonialism: The Digital Plantation Expands

From India’s Aadhaar biometric system to drone testing in Africa, the Digerati are globalizing digital colonialism:

Biometric ID systems for the poor, with elite exemptions.
AI-powered surveillance in “development zones.”
Weaponized social media for regime change and behavioral manipulation.

The Global South is the testing ground. The empire is now a database.

VIII. Unmask the Datalords

The Digerati are not revolutionaries. They are aristocrats of a new empire—one built on surveillance, algorithmic suppression, and digital dispossession. They serve no freedom. They serve capital.

We name them: Thiel, Musk, Altman, Schmidt, Andreessen, Hoffman.

We trace their systems: Palantir, Anduril, OpenAI, AWS, Google Cloud, Meta AI.

We expose their logic: Digital feudalism, predictive suppression, and cybernetic counterinsurgency.

Part IV: Capital in Crisis — The Fusion of Factions and the Rise of Technofascism

A historical overview and a map for the path ahead.

Over the course of this essay, we have examined the major factions of the white ruling class: the Yankees of finance and foundations, the Cowboys of fossil fuel and settler violence, and the emergent Digerati of digital control and surveillance. Each of these forces emerged from different moments of imperial history, built on distinct foundations of power, and promoted different political strategies for capitalist rule.

Yet we do not face them as separate camps. We face their fusion.

I. The Historical Tendency Toward Consolidation

Driven by the deepening contradictions of global capitalism—ecological collapse, multipolar resistance, labor unrest, and a terminal crisis of legitimacy—the once-fractured ruling class has begun to merge. This is not a peaceful alliance, but a strategic convergence: a final reorganization of capital to preserve its domination under conditions of systemic instability.

Their merger has taken the form of a new regime: technofascism.

Technofascism is the contemporary political form of U.S. imperial capitalism in decline. It fuses finance, fossil fuel, and digital infrastructure into a militarized, cybernetic system of governance. Its features include:

AI-driven population control and predictive policing
Imperial war carried out through drones, satellites, and sanctions
Mass surveillance, censorship, and algorithmic repression of dissent
Militarized border regimes and prison-industrial management of surplus populations
Centralized corporate-state fusion backed by crisis management tools like BlackRock and OpenAI

This is not the fascism of old—it is a technological class dictatorship with global scope, rooted in empire, and tested first on the colonized and racialized poor.

II. The Role of Trumpism

Trumpism is not the cause of this transformation—it is its symptom and strategic expression. Trump 1.0 was a Cowboy-Digerati insurgency against Yankee hegemony. Trump 2.0 represents the consolidation of all three factions around the imperative to manage crisis, suppress rebellion, and reassert U.S. dominance under new conditions.

This regime will survive even if Trump falls. Technofascism is no longer tied to one man—it is the bipartisan logic of empire under collapse.

III. The Structure of the Series

This series will now pivot from introductory exposition to deeper strategic analysis. Each faction—Yankee, Cowboy, Digerati—will become the focus of its own multi-part subseries, featuring the following:

Historical Origins – tracing the class lineage, material base, and ideological formation
Key Individuals and Dynasties – detailed profiles of families, financiers, and figureheads
Institutions and Infrastructure – think tanks, corporations, universities, and agencies
Contradictions and Evolution – factional conflicts, shifts in strategy, moments of rupture
Current Operations – how each faction functions under technofascism today

We will also produce a strategic synthesis exploring the mechanics of factional fusion and how this new ruling bloc operates as a totalizing force of imperial crisis management.

IV. Revolutionary Implications

Our task is not just to understand them—but to unmask them, name them, and undermine them. This series will culminate in a revolutionary framework for confronting the technofascist state, rooted in the struggle of the colonized, the dispossessed, and the global working class. Every diagram of their power must become a strategy for its destruction.

The enemy is not just a system—it is a class. It is a network. It is a dynasty. And it must be overthrown.

We move forward faction by faction. Name by name. Wire by wire. Algorithm by algorithm.