Perched on a hill about halfway up El Boquerón Volcano in San Salvador, the Palestra House is an orange art deco mansion in the Spanish colonial style with three floors, six bedrooms, and a large infinity pool overlooking the San Salvador valley. It was originally conceived, among insiders, as a kind of cross between a Christian “network spirituality” church and a hacker house for an esoteric software project called Urbit—a sprawling start-up turned social network focused on the heady, quite literal goal of rebuilding the internet from scratch, started by the “dark elf” of so-called Dark Enlightenment, Curtis Yarvin.
“It was originally supposed to be like, I don’t know, a biohacked based frog anon, bodybuilder-military cadre,” says Jake Hamilton, a mid-30s polymath engineer and biohacker who lives at the Palestra House. Tanned with reddish skin and barbed Scots-Irish features, Hamilton finished college with a degree in philosophy, but after taking an online course with tech philosopher Nick Land on the philosophy of bitcoin in 2015, he changed his life’s direction and started teaching himself to code: “The moment [Land] said, ‘Bitcoin is monetary critique’…that by removing the need for a trusted third party, bitcoin develops an artificial mirror of ontology, like, I got it. I decided essentially on the spot that this is what it means to continue doing philosophy.” After picking up some basic coding gigs while bartending in New York, Hamilton found his way to Urbit by way of Yarvin’s writing, like many in the Palestra orbit. Then the pandemic hit. Along with a small crew of expats convinced of America’s imminent collapse, he came to El Salvador in 2021 in search of a way out—or, as he calls it, a “crack” in the system (“Bitcoin is a crack, Central America is a crack, and El Salvador is the crack within the crack”). “There was a very specific and contrived and aggressive original notion, which did not really come to pass,” he says, smiling and shrugging his hands. “It was the pandemic.”
Like many of the most eccentric projects of the dissident right, the Palestra House first came to my attention online and specifically on Instagram from a New York writer who was dating one of the original members of the house. The rumor was that, on a recent visit, she’d had dinner with El Salvador’s current president, Nayib Bukele, and that Yarvin was there with a right-wing scenester known online as Future Moldovan Citizen. Moldovan, as he’s known socially, runs the event programming for a place called Sovereign House, a kind of de facto social club for right-wing grifters and burnout poets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Which made me wonder: What did Dimes Square have to do with El Salvador and, particularly, with Yarvin? Was it a coincidence that the world’s most famous monarchist—known for advocating that countries smash “the crappy governments we inherited from history” and replace them with joint-stock corporations run as family businesses—had allegedly been fraternizing with El Salvador’s young president, a hyperonline upstart who’d recently arrested 80,000 people and changed the country’s constitution to eliminate presidential term limits? When Bukele described himself on Twitter as “El Salvador’s dictator CEO,” was it an ironic LARP—an inside joke—or a nod to a practical political theory?
Judging by Bukele’s tweets (his X bio is “Philosopher King”), what was happening in El Salvador suggested the latter. When he changed the constitution to adopt bitcoin as valid legal tender, he blasted a megaphone at the tech world that he was open to “new ideas” (also the name of his new political party). He courted crypto celebrities like Samson Mow and CZ, the billionaire founder of Binance. Bukele convinced a stablecoin provider called Tether to move its offices to San Salvador and build a tower in the heart of the city. And yet, despite his authoritarian style (or perhaps because of it), Bukele had a 90 percent approval rating in his country. He had control of all three branches of government and a firm handle on the gangs. His face was plastered on billboards across Central America. One poll even suggested he was more popular than the pope. “The Bukele model” had become an aspirational meme for leaders across the Latin American world. Donald Trump had dubbed him his favorite president.
Touching down in San Salvador on a tightly packed Airbus, I wanted to know how this all worked in practice. What happens when a network state stops being a fledgling political gambit and becomes the state itself? Was the Bukele model actually functional, as it seemed on the surface, or had he just dampened the sound of dissent?
Of course, to understand El Salvador’s transformation under Bukele, you have to understand its history of violence. Until about three years ago—when Bukele initiated a war on the gangs, rounding up close to 80,000 people and locking them in the megaprisons much reported in Western media—El Salvador was considered the most dangerous place in the world. Perhaps that’s why my mother was terrified when I told her I was going on this trip.
The abridged version of Salvadoran Civil War history is that El Salvador was a victim of the Cold War. A late-’70s uprising in the countryside led to brutal suppression. The Soviets armed the Communist peasants; the Americans armed the suppressors—the government and other guerrilla anti-Communist forces. Common estimates of the total dead in this 13-year period range from 75,000 to 100,000, though the real numbers are likely higher.
Over 1 million Salvadorans fled the country during this period, mainly to Canada and the United States—and to Los Angeles in particular: nearly one in six Salvadorans from a country of 6 million people. There, some of them formed, or were recruited, into two primary gangs: Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha (MS‑13), both named after the L.A. neighborhoods where the gangs originated. But as the U.S. war on drugs began cresting in the early ’90s, the State Department decided it was time to clean the American streets of foreign gangs. It negotiated an end to the civil war and started deporting refugees back to the country. Gang affiliations came with them.
Returning to a country ravaged by war and filled with military equipment, with no clear economic opportunities, the gangs began to recruit. In 2004, there were around 30,000 gang members; by 2012, it was 60,000; by 2022, 80,000 or more. In 2015, El Salvador’s homicide rate reached its highest level since the civil war, with more than 6,650 homicides registered that year. Unlike the Mexican cartels, Salvadoran gangs are not primarily narcos: Their main sources of revenue are extortion and robbery. Which means that, in practice, virtually every person in El Salvador became absorbed into the orbit of the gangs in one way or another: for the wealthy, as a basic cost of doing business, like paying a water or electricity bill; for everyone else, as a constant source of fear.
This was the situation that Bukele inherited when he ran for mayor of San Salvador in 2015. From the start, his focus was transformation, both symbolic and material: changing the street names to wash the memory of the civil war and appointing family members to administrative positions. He put streetlights and video surveillance in territory controlled by the gangs. He started scholarship programs for young kids and began renovating San Salvador’s downtown corridor. In 2017, Bukele was ousted from his party and then announced his intention to run for president under a new one, called Nueva Ideas. A prolific tweeter and social media star, he took to the internet to make his case, enlisting an army of bloggers, YouTubers, and internet trolls.
“I mean, politically, he’s a genius,” says Leonor Selva, a Salvadoran executive who advises organizations like the IMF and World Bank on navigating investment in the country. I met Selva at a coffee shop and coworking space in the city center. Like many of the upscale establishments in San Salvador, the café is hidden behind a large concrete wall covered in rolls of barbed wire, overseen by an armed security guard at the entrance. Just a few years ago, armed guards stood on nearly every corner of the city, Selva tells me, a “siege mentality.”
Bukele won the presidency in 2019, and one of his core promises was that the gangs would be put under control. While he was mayor, he negotiated with the gangs to reduce the violence, like previous administrations had. “But the gangs got greedy and betrayed him,” Selva says. The way the gangs negotiated, she continues, is that “whenever they wanted more money or something, they would up the homicides.” This happened three times. The third time, in March 2022, the gangs murdered 87 people over a single weekend. Days later, Bukele initiated a nationwide state of emergency—an estado de excepción—and started rounding up the gangs, using tattoos as identifiers. According to some estimates, nearly 85,000 people are now in Salvadoran prisons, the vast majority there without trial (or even formal charges).
One thing Westerners take for granted, Selva says, is the government having a monopoly on violence: “For almost 50 years in this country, it didn’t. What we had was political leadership that didn’t want change, that were very comfortable with this stagnant dynamic.” The problem, Selva says, is that the popularity that Bukele earned from cleaning up the country has a shelf life, and it’s not possible to replicate that kind of sudden transformation in living standards. “I always say his challenge is that he has big dreams, but he’s stuck with this small, unsophisticated country,” Selva says. In 2024, El Salvador’s GDP was just over $35 billion—about a 10th of CVS’s annual revenue.
“All he has is the strategy of the nightclub,” Selva says. Before entering politics, Bukele was very successful running a nightclub in San Salvador, and that’s how he runs the country. “The way nightclubs work is that you spend a lot of money attracting people, making a lot of noise, bringing in the pretty girls,” she says. “Because the one client you actually want to attract is a big whale that’s gonna buy everyone’s drinks.” In practice, this has meant making flashy announcements: establishing bitcoin as legal tender, opening a tourism hub on the coast, announcing development of a new airport, reinstating the possibility for mining in the country, which had previously been banned. But the big whale hasn’t come. “I mean, they come explore,” Selva says. “It’s not that it doesn’t work. But they don’t stay. They don’t buy the bottle.”
I’d heard something similar when I spoke to one of the other founders of the Palestra House, an ex-Urbit engineer named Philip Galebach—the son of Stephen Galebach, a deputy assistant at the Department of Justice during the Reagan administration and, in 2000, the lead on one of the largest IPOs in U.S. history. Along with the rest of their family, Phil and Stephen came to El Salvador in 2022 in search of a political context where leaders were actively working to apply new approaches. In the United States, it was nearly impossible to meet with high-level officials—and even if you did, creating meaningful change was unlikely. But when Phil came to El Salvador, the impression was that you could get access to whoever you want. “Table stakes to get access in DC is $100 million,” Phil says, referencing his father’s conversations with DC consultants. “Table stakes to get access in El Salvador is almost nothing.… There’s only one degree of separation from the very top. Which is kinda fun.”
When the Galebachs arrived, they were joined by many other high-profile businesspeople, including CZ of Binance, Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, and a lot of top companies across both crypto and “normal” tech, like Google. Phil says, “You could throw a party, and, like, the exiled prince of Serbia would show up.” And so would the president’s brother Yusef Bukele, one of Nayib’s closest advisers. “But after a while, it became clear that [the Bukeles] weren’t actually able to implement a UAE-, Hong Kong–, Singapore-type system,” Phil continues. “I got a little tired of the gap between the talk and actually creating the necessary conditions for tech.”
Phil’s preferred metaphor for the Bukele model is a start-up. Bukele has been exceptional at top-of-funnel lead generation, and when new leads arrive, he’s great at qualifying them and providing access to the right people. The Bukeles have also made it possible for foreigners to draft legislation; “we were heavily involved with the digital asset bill that they passed,” Phil says. And another American in the Palestra orbit was responsible for writing the country’s new health bill. Bukele can pass these laws because he’s consolidated control over El Salvador’s political institutions. His brothers serve as gatekeepers, information funneling up from them to the top. But when it comes to execution—what you might think of as “API integration,” Phil says—the performance has been less than stellar. And running the country like a monarchy creates another problem: In an effort to consolidate power, the Bukeles have prioritized loyalists over competent people with divergent ideas. Phil mentions Stacy Herbert and Max Keiser, the so-called bitcoin power couple, who both serve as advisers to the Bukele administration. After getting into a shouting match with Herbert—and subsequently being blocked out of decision-making—Phil decided to leave the country in 2024. His family followed shortly thereafter. He’s now in Javier Milei’s Argentina—the “exact mirror image of El Salvador”—where bitcoin isn’t legal but everyone uses it. “I’ve had talks with one of Milei’s top advisers,” Phil continues. “They’re super interested in [network state] stuff.”
Hamilton and I are on our way out of the city, heading toward Bitcoin Beach—the hub of the country’s crypto scene—in a Ford Explorer. In the back seat are Matt Lizak, aka Deng, an ex-Urbit intern who helped organize the Palestra Forum, and Eleanor, aka Ellie, a British meme page admin turned oil trader who speaks perfect Russian and keeps being asked if she is a fed (which she denies, though she also asks me not to use her last name). “Nick Fuentes is definitely a fed, though,” Deng says. “Just think about how valuable that dataset would be…even from a sheer human resources perspective.”
One of the most shocking parts of being around people on the dissident right is learning how closely connected the highest reaches of power are with seemingly normal people. Fighting his way through one of San Salvador’s chaotic roundabouts, Hamilton says, “We used Balaji [Srinivasan] to connect Nayib [Bukele] with Elon [Musk]” a couple of years ago. “That was pretty cool.”
Hamilton explains that Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase and the author of The Network State, was previously on the board of Urbit, so when the president wanted to connect with Musk, he asked someone from Urbit to make the link. “Ultimately, it was about nothing,” Hamilton says with a smirk. “Cross-promotion between El Salvador and Elon’s companies.… But we all had a small field day. Like…Urbit is the fucking Masons.” (He’s referring to the mysterious stonemason guild that’s contributed to the rise and fall of empires throughout history.)
The founding lore of Bitcoin Beach is that it was started after an anonymous bitcoiner donated about $1 million worth of bitcoin to help seed a local bitcoin economy in El Salvador. A California surfer named Mike Peterson, who moved there in the early 2000s, received the anonymous payment and went to work establishing a town where bitcoin could actually function as currency, from the boutique hotel to the butcher. He started paying local Salvadorans in bitcoin to clean up the beach and convincing local farmers to accept bitcoin payments for produce. They established an organization called the Bitcoin Beach Initiative to attract bitcoiners from around the world.
Today, about 3,000 people live around Bitcoin Beach, an area known as El Zonte. Located on the Pacific coast about an hour’s drive from San Salvador, the beach is covered in ash black, volcanic sand with 10- to 12-foot waves perfect for surfing. The social centerpiece of the bitcoin scene is a biweekly farmers market, where people come to buy pupusas and wax candles in bitcoin. (You can also use cash or a credit card.) The Bitcoin Hardware Store sells cryptographic cold-storage wallets and everything you could need to mine bitcoin and store it, as well as trucker hats with slogans like End the Fed and a board game called HODL UP.
The question of whether El Salvador’s experiment with bitcoin has been successful largely hinges on your impression of what it’s aiming to achieve. Stories in Western media tend to emphasize that when Bukele started using El Salvador’s treasury to buy bitcoin, he opened up his country’s volatile finances to an even greater degree of instability. When the price of bitcoin dropped in 2022, critics pointed out that, purely as an investment, the policy had made no return. They argued that the wallet experiment—in which the government distributed about $30 in bitcoin to every Salvadoran citizen—had failed, since most people didn’t continue using bitcoin after the original money was spent. Critics further claimed that, in the process of establishing El Salvador as a bitcoin state, Bukele had reduced his country’s viability as a recipient of traditional financial assistance, such as loans from the IMF and World Bank. His detractors argued that El Salvador was simply positioning itself as another tax haven, like Panama or the Bahamas, and, in the process, courting investors who mostly take and don’t leave much behind.
As you might expect, insiders like Hamilton see it differently. First, although the price of bitcoin did drop in 2022, at the time I was in the country, the price of bitcoin had reached all-time highs of about $123,000 per bitcoin, meaning the overall value of the treasury holdings had increased more than 100 percent. Bukele had also managed to secure a loan from the IMF worth $1.4 billion, despite making concessions to do so, like making private-sector bitcoin acceptance voluntary. While national adoption of bitcoin had been minimal (less than 9 percent of Salvadorans reported bitcoin usage in 2024), the project had created a spate of positive externalities, Hamilton argues, from bitcoin tourism and charity work to the sheer value of putting El Salvador on the map.
For Hamilton—who has netted an eight-figure profit from various crypto projects in the last few years and uses the proceeds to fund biotech and cryptography start-ups—the real value of the bitcoin experiment is philosophical. (He describes himself alternately as a “Heideggerian bitcoiner” and a “market spiritualist with Yarvinic leanings.”) It’s less about tax havens and bubble manufacturing, he says, as crypto is often perceived in America, and more about building the infrastructure of a parallel world—one that can defend against the looming uncertainty and political chaos of the present. “Cryptography is the inverse power of surveillance,” Hamilton says to me quietly as we walk along the volcanic beach, preparing to swim. He points out that, in El Salvador, crypto is often considered a dirty word, representing the American scam culture of shitcoins. Bitcoin is seen as safe and secure.
Hamilton takes off his shirt to reveal a square tan line on his bicep where his nicotine patch had once been. Ellie is running headlong into the ocean. Deng is rubbing in sunscreen that refuses to dissolve despite vigorous kneading. “That’s why I work on Urbit and biotech at the same time,” Hamilton continues. “The part of crypto that’s cyberpunk—that’s the only part of this network state concept that has any value.” Currently, he’s funding a biotech lab in Austin, Texas, which is researching the mechanics of intercellular communication.
If you’re unfamiliar with these terms, it might sound like another confusing bag of neologisms. But underneath the jargon is a tech stack designed to protect against the encroachment of tyrannical governments and corporations: a kind of prepper tech for political polarization. You can think about it this way: Currently, our identities on the internet—and, frankly, IRL—are provided by third parties that give entitlements to certain rights. A driver’s license entitles us to drive in certain places. An Instagram ID allows us to easily sign in to certain websites. But what if those third parties suddenly decide that you’re an enemy and are no longer entitled to the rights those services provide? What if, like Edward Snowden, you reveal state secrets? Or you share content that violates a platform’s terms and conditions? Say, a cutting critique of Israel or a stray nipple? If it’s a private company, you lose your credentials and all the rights that come with it—from speaking to your friends to building your business—with no real form of recourse. If it’s a state, you lose everything, from all your assets to your right to travel to your right to have a bank account.
That’s the focus of Urbit and some of the other projects that Hamilton funds. Given the trajectory of world affairs right now, many technologists believe that more people will inevitably become “thought criminals” as polarization increases. And in that scenario, as states become more desperate to retain control, what will you do to defend yourself? How will you prevent your money from getting stolen? Your identity from being hijacked? Your access to the internet from being revoked? How will you keep your opinions guarded when all the software providers share everything with the state?
The answer to these questions isn’t hypothetical. It’s playing out right now all over the world. It’s happening in Palestine and Ukraine with AI devoted to target elimination. It’s happening in China with its social credit system. It’s happening in the United States with companies like Palantir creating “social listening” devices inspired by (and named after!) the surveillance monstrosity in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. It happened in Canada when the freedom truckers were de-banked.
I ask Hamilton what this has to do with biotech. His eyes bulge, and he swallows a deep breath.
“I mean, eventually, we have to be able to replace our immune system with something artificial and smart and market-connected,” he says. Given an inevitable future of increased chemical exposure, extreme climate events, and toxin diffusion; declining immune function; reduced vaccine effectiveness; and growing resistance to other pharmaceuticals, Hamilton says, “we’re heading toward a biological context in which natural immune systems are no longer sufficient.… That’s not satanic. It’s not evil. It is an evolutionary jump. And so if we can figure out things that Pfizer [and the other mainstream pharmaceutical companies] are systematically incapable of seeing…that’s how we prepare to win back. That’s the plan. We win back.”
He runs into the ocean at full speed while I sit alone smoking a cigarette. The black sand wraps around my toes, and I can feel the salty air on my teeth. After an hour of swimming, we walk through town, which is filled with new construction projects, and take pictures of the campy bitcoin paraphernalia. A plastic garbage can with the bitcoin b. A garage door with a poster that says Fix the Money, Fix the World.
This network state concept, Hamilton says, is not about exiting the system to prove you can. It’s about creating alternative social systems, companies, and contexts capable of functioning outside the gaze of dominant systems. “Crypto itself is the network state,” he says. “But so is El Salvador, which has a traditional passport and a traditional leader.” From Próspera in Honduras to the Freedom Cities that Trump plans to create in America, all these “zones,” Hamilton says, are part of a “sort of qualitatively heterogeneous, like, Frankensteinian, experimental, accelerationist frontier.” It’s totally unclear right now, he says, how “that is going to function as some sort of cohesive juridical whole,” but it starts with creating footholds like El Salvador and working with leaders like Bukele and his brother Yusef, “who’s a total wordcel” (like an incel but for words). “We are back in the age of secret societies,” Hamilton says. And in El Salvador, “Yusef is our guy.”
Eventually, we stumble on an outdoor gym with a silverish statue toward the rear: a computer hacker, sitting cross-legged, on a laptop. “Oh cool, a Satoshi statue,” Deng says, referring to the anonymous founder of bitcoin. From the side, the statue flashes in the sun, its layers of reflective metal stacked like teeth in an industrial shredder. From the front, the layers are suspended like dominoes, spaced out in a row. From the side, the computer hacker is tapping on his laptop. From the front, he’s invisible. You can see right through to the beach.
We are standing on the second-floor balcony of the National Palace in San Salvador, slanted beams of sun pouring over the Roman columns and marble floors. A tall man in a checkered button-down is explaining to me why when a person is racist, it often means they’re stupid. “It takes a certain IQ level to be able to differentiate between different traits,” he says, and low-IQ people tend to view everyone of a particular race as intrinsically the same. Which is stupid, he adds, and that’s why racism is a good proxy for intelligence. “But, to me,” he says, “it’s more of, like, is it gutter racism or the sophisticated Somalian racism of memorizing a thousand different clans that’s almost, like, xenophilic.”
The man in the checkered shirt is Benjamin Braddock, editor-at-large of IM-1776, an online geopolitics and culture magazine for the dissident right. Like nearly half the guests at the National Palace, Braddock has flown into town specially for the Palestra Forum, an annual meeting of the minds that’s become a kind of pilgrimage for people adjacent to Urbit. The other half of the attendees are local: Salvadoran officials and friends of the Bukele family and American technologists who recently moved to El Salvador. Last year, when Yarvin addressed the conference, he started his address with a shout-out to Bukele: “Hello, San Salvador.… It’s great to be here in the only monarchy in the Western Hemisphere.”
This year’s presentations start with a lecture by a man named David Rivard, an American ex-marine in his late 70s, who came to El Salvador for the first time in the early 2000s, after an earthquake killed nearly a thousand people. On the trip, Rivard met Armando Bukele, Nayib’s father, who was then a physicist and businessman, and the pair became close friends and colleagues. When Nayib came to power, Rivard says, he asked Rivard to move to El Salvador and help. And now Rivard is the head of El Salvador’s Agency for the Development and Design of the Nation, tasked with recruiting foreign workers, attracting infrastructure financing, and reforming the Salvadoran agricultural system. Currently, El Salvador imports around 93 percent of its vegetables, and its primary growth crop is sugar cane, typically sprayed with extensive pesticides and herbicides. The result is that, in regions of El Salvador focused on agricultural production, roughly one in four men suffers from chronic kidney disease.
“This is the country, guys,” Rivard says, addressing the room. “This is the country to establish roots. We have agency here. Your craziest ideas can go through proper vetting of truth and applicability.… I want you to remember that this is the place where the leadership is aligned, the stars are aligned. That means greater resources, greater opportunities for us all.”
The other talks are more esoteric in nature, but the general vibe is triumphant: Bolstering power after a decisive win, MAGA goes global and it starts right here. A German entrepreneur, who runs an online course for men focused on “mastering the new skills of civic defense,” speaks about the world’s current “rebirth window” between the parasitic systems of the past and the dawning new age. A Canadian backpacker turned YouTube star speaks about his journey from suicidal drug user to Christ-led philanthropist—he now builds homes in Central America for poor villagers, adding lofts that they can rent out on Airbnb. A millennial mining executive, whose start-up focuses on lowering the cost of explorative drilling for precious metals and other minerals, speaks about integrating software into the geophysics stack. He doesn’t have a contract with the government (yet), he says, but he is interested. His presence at the conference seems pointed. In December 2024, Bukele posted on X that “God placed a gigantic treasure underneath our feet”: gold deposits worth roughly $3 trillion.
So here was the secret society—as Hamilton described the group—the Freemasons emerged from the shadows of the liberal woke regime. One person is running a support group for Canadian “freedom fighters.” Two venture capitalists have flown in from Dallas, representing a fund that they described as a “based VC.” A bitcoiner from Miami is speaking about creating “crypto citadels” in the hills. A lumbering man with a thick, red neck like he’s smoked too many cigarettes introduces himself as Elijah Schaffer, a Christian nationalist “journalist” with nearly a million X followers. He keeps making comments about the Zionist conspiracy, and I later learn that he was banned from Australia for attacking Indigenous people. Schaffer is joined by a guy named Edward Szall, another Christian nationalist and so-called journalist, known for a documentary called Died Suddenly, about the dangers of the Covid-19 vaccine and the Great Reset conspiracy theory.
As the conference breaks for lunch, I think about something else Hamilton said earlier in the week: that the right is not prepared for power. “It doesn’t know how to balance idealism and practicality with the logistics of maintaining a coalition,” he says. “Knowing how to actually govern.” And yet, in the shadow of Trump 2.0, he says, these are people suddenly “turning around the ship of American imperialism.” Braddock mentions that he is being vetted for a position in the U.S. State Department. Szall was a White House correspondent for Mike Lindell’s media network, LindellTV. Ellie was asked to make deals with the Bukeles on behalf of the British Tories. Meritocratic ticket punching counts for little in this world—no one cares about your Harvard or Oxford degree. Instead, it’s Twitter University turned imperial control strategy: making it up as you go along, no idea too outlandish so long as it involves propping up the regime.
Around this time, I notice a skinny guy with a mustache, dressed in all black, surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards. The energy in the room shifts as he sits down alone toward the back of the room, writing in an unlined notebook. I know who he is right away. I recognized his face. It’s the president’s brother Yusef Bukele.
I tell him I’m writing a story for Playboy and ask if he’d speak with me. Within minutes, Palestra’s founder, Mike McCluskey (who goes by Clusk), descends to make sure Yusef knows I’m a journalist. An older Salvadoran woman, connected to the government, comes and sits down too. I joke that I’d been sent to El Salvador to make Playboy based. Yusef smiles and agrees to let me record him. “It’s very dystopic where the world is heading,” he says. As a society, “we’re almost completely assimilated.… People don’t really live anymore.”
This word, assimilated, he repeats multiple times throughout our conversation. I haven’t heard it from anyone else; I wonder if it is a translation issue. It seems to mean something like total mindless absorption into the will of the machine. “Nondeveloped countries are now below replacement rates,” Yusef says. “Why? Because before you had to develop so that modern culture could insert itself into the people. But now everyone’s getting assimilated in one shot. And with AI, it will just be faster.”
Earlier in the week, Selva told me that Yusef and the other three Bukele brothers function as the president’s inner circle, participating in most major strategic decision-making. In 2022, they were the target of an internal corruption investigation called Operation Cathedral (coincidentally, or not, named after one of Yarvin’s core theories). The investigation was killed after Bukele installed a new attorney general. Although he doesn’t have an official position, Yusef was instrumental in El Salvador’s adoption of bitcoin, and he also set up Rivard’s agency for national development. Unlike the president, who’s known for his love of the spotlight, Yusef tends to be media-shy; his online presence is a string of philosophical quotes and screenshots from 20th-century films. His Wikipedia page calls him a businessman and an economist (though he has only an undergraduate degree), but Selva opts to describe him instead as “the artist of the family.”
Our conversation is held in perfect English, and it ranges across topics: the decline of smoking rates in Paris (which he disapproves of); the work of Éric Rohmer, the French filmmaker, and Jean-Luc Godard, his favorite of the French New Wave. We speak about elevated screen times, Big Pharma, the German poet Novalis, and the Salvadoran oligarchy trying to “squish [competition] using their connections and political power.” The event is starting to wind down, so I walk with Yusef toward the exit of the palace. Palestra House is throwing a party, so Yusef offers me a ride in his personal convoy. Two bodyguards—previously hostile-seeming and mean—usher us into an SUV parked in front of the building, opening the door with a smile. The truck begins to cut through the busy rush-hour streets, past the brand-new mega-library donated by China and the central market filled with chickens and fava beans. We pass the American embassy—the largest in the world, used for anti-Communist operations, then for anti-drug-trafficking—and a children’s play zone across the street, poetically named Dreamland.
I ask him how he got involved with Palestra, and he explains that most of them he met on X. He speaks in a matter-of-fact tone as if he were reciting a grocery list. That’s where he met Clusk and Moldovan. That’s where he met Dasha Nekrasova, the cohost of the Red Scare podcast. That’s where he met Yarvin, too, whom he spoke with last year during the Palestra Forum. So here was the link, I realize: the Dark Enlightenment in the Golden Triangle. Dimes Square in the San Salvador valley. It is still unclear whether the dissident right shaped politics for Nayib. I’d have to ask him to know for sure. But there is no doubt that they reached him by proxy. Yusef was the plug: El Salvador’s wordcel in chief.
Back at the Palestra House, I stand with Yusef overlooking the valley, the sharp peak of Las Pavas visible after a torrential rain. “I really think that this is the apocalypse,” he says. “Initial stages could probably last 100 years or 200.… I’m not saying there’s going to be a war and everyone will die. But it’s the assimilation.” He says he also “believe[s] that the Golden Age is not that far off” and that there’s good reason to think it will start here in El Salvador.
“There are several signs, several synchronicities,” Yusef continues. One is the legend of Topiltzin. He is referring to a Toltec priest-king said to have dispelled the traditions of the past and opposed human sacrifice during his reign, a story later woven into Aztec lore. Topiltzin united his people and supposedly settled in El Salvador to usher in an age of wisdom (though the record is divided). Then he went missing, and the legend said he’d eventually return. Yusef says that Topiltzin was white-skinned and bearded and that he landed in El Salvador on a wooden ship. It is clear who Yusef has in mind. I wonder if he knows the other half of the legend: That when Hernán Cortés showed up in Mesoamerica, he took advantage of his white skin and bearded face to pretend he was Topiltzin, using the deception to murder the Aztecs.
“It’s written that there was always going to be a place—even during the apocalypse—there’s always going to be a place where you’ll be able to worship God,” Yusef says. He sounds like a Bond villain, I think to myself. “It could just be a bias, but I see [El Salvador] as the only place that it can be built, some type of ark where humanity survives,” Yusef says. “At least here, I can do [something about it]. In other places, I wouldn’t be able to.”
People start arriving for the party, and Yusef decides to leave. Hamilton tells me he is ordering from “Pepe burger” and walks off with a smirk. Tomorrow, the group is heading to the Bukeles’ country house, but journalists aren’t invited. A tall Salvadoran named Herbert Esmahan, with slicked hair and a tight leather jacket, is speaking about how, when he gives television interviews, he’s filled with the Holy Spirit. Supposedly, he’s next in line for president.
All this talk of apocalypse has me thinking about acceleration. What we’re heading toward, Hamilton said to me earlier in the week, is splinter civilizations: “The systems are so moribund and un-intervenable.… There are so many systems right at the edge of collapse or decay.… That what we’re seeing with crypto, with network states, all the stuff that tech elites talk about, it’s a flight response—the intelligence in the system preparing to flee the body. There is no such thing as ruling, in a time of the great crisis of the species, without having to make decisions that are monstrous. To think anything else is childish.” Hamilton says, “It could happen here,” meaning El Salvador. “It’s already happening in Israel. We are not prepared for the inevitable convulsions of the coming decades.” It is hard to disagree.