Obscene Privilege - My Own Private Sarawak: Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner & The White Rajahs of America

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Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more James Brooke is the template for our current crop of power-mad oligarchs. Greg Olear Jun 9 Indian Creek Island is a gated community situated on an artificial barrier island in Biscayne Bay, eight miles from Miami’s South Beach. Most of the island is occupied by a private golf course. The only link to the mainland is a single bridge, connecting the eastern shore to 91st Street in Surfside. Indian Creek even has its own constabulary—not that there’s much for the cops to do but keep out the riffraff. The island is secure, surrounded by what is effectively a moat. It is private; what happens on Indian Creek Island stays on Indian Creek Island. It is secluded, hidden from the prying eyes of paparazzi and hoi polloi. And that’s how its 84 residents like it. Indian Creek Island is known, with good reason, as “Billionaire Bunker.” On the east, south, and west coast of the island, arrayed in the shape of a “U,” are some three dozen of the most exclusive properties in the world. Among the owners of these mansions—“estates” is a more accurate term, or, perhaps, “compounds”—are Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Carl Icahn, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, Tom Brady, Julio Iglesias, former Philadelphia Eagles owner and longtime Marco Rubio benefactor Norman Braman, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. During Kushner’s four years working at the White House, per a financial analysis by CREW, the ghoulish twosome generated between $172 million and $640 million in outside income (which is approximately $172-640 million more than Hunter Biden made during his father’s lone term, but that’s another story). And that was before the Saudi investment capital came calling. They are loaded. In April of 2021, three months after Jared spent J6 hiding in the shower, the power couple plunked down $24 million for a home on “Billionaire Bunker.” Given that Zuckerberg paid seven times that for his mansion five years later, this stands as one of Jared’s better real estate investments. “The 1.8-acre estate sits along the island’s eastern waterfront, with direct bay views and a long private drive,” reports a post from the Jills Zeder Group, a local real estate firm, on the Kushner manse. “Since purchasing the property, they’ve completed a full two-year renovation, transforming it into a modern estate. The updates were kept quiet, but aerial shots show clean lines, white stonework, and a layout designed for privacy.” Jared and Ivanka have generational wealth—so-called “fuck you” money. Their privileged children will inherit vast fortunes. They live in one of the most sought-after addresses in the country, in a “modern estate.” There is presumably so much security at Indian Creek Island that it would take SEAL Team Six to penetrate it, so the blest pair can sleep soundly at night without worrying about angry peasants showing up with burning torches and pitchforks. Plus, all two of their friends live nearby.¹ Riddle me this, Batman: If you already have a gorgeous estate on a private isle that’s safe, secure, and secluded, why on earth do you need to acquire an island off the coast of Albania? Why do you have to raze one of the last undeveloped places in the region—a National Marine Park, home to pink flamingoes—for yet another luxury resort? Because that’s what Jared and Ivanka are fixin’ to do. On May 31, Ivanka spoke with David Senra on his Founders podcast, where she explained, in that breathy Jessica Rabbit voice of hers, that Sazan Island is “an unbelievable, beautiful 1,400 hectare private island in the middle of the Mediterranean,” which is all true, except the part about its location, because it’s actually where the Adriatic and the Ionian Seas converge. “We were on a friend’s boat”—the friend is Nat Rothschild, come to find out, and the “boat” is a big fucking yacht—“and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that’s how we found it,” Ivanka claimed. “We swam to the islands. We went on a hike barefoot all the way up to the top and we were just captivated. And it stayed with us ever since. And over the course of many years, we developed the opportunity to help realize its potential and transform it, but with a lot of restraint and care, because the land is so beautiful, that really the architecture has to be fully integrated into it, almost rise from it.” (I forgot to mention that the title of the podcast episode is “Building an Authentic Life.” Because if there’s one word that describes Ivanka Trump, it’s “authentic.”) She explained that “it’s not even a business for me, despite the scale of it….For me, this feels more like a challenge than anything else. The culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live, and trying to really build something that’s a tangible manifestation of that.” Yeah, okay, fine—but, like, can Ivanka really not live the way she wants to live on the beautiful island where she already lives? How are people “wanting to live,” in her estimation? Which people? What the fuck is she talking about? What’s Sazan Island got that Indian Creek Island doesn’t? Well, for one thing, unlike “Billionaire Bunker,” Sazan Island has actual bunkers. Thousands of them, like heavy concrete set pieces from Alderaan, all built to withstand a nuclear attack. Enver Hoxha, who ruled Communist Albania for four decades, was, like all strongmen, crazy paranoid. The guy was obsessed with bunkers. And he built them all over the country. Bunkers in Albania are like bodegas in New York City. It’s a thing. Because of Sazan’s strategic geographical importance, Hoxha really went to town on the island, constructing a “vast network of underground tunnels and bunkers,” per The Spaces. So it may be that Jared and Ivanka are simply planning ahead, making sure they have a safe space to wait out the looming apocalypse kickstarted by her father. But: why build new bunkers when perfectly good ones already exist? And in such a lovely, scenic spot, no less? There has to be more to it than that. Because it ain’t just Boy Plunder and the Bride of Slenderman who are active in this niche real estate market. A number of Silicon Valley libertarian oligarch types seem fixated on gobbling up remote islands. Look at what’s happening in Honduras, on Roatán Island. On that tropical paradise, in St. John’s Bay, is a place called Zona Próspera—“the first modern charter city with world-class institutions,” according to the literature of the corporation that founded it, Honduras Próspera Inc. As I wrote back in April, Zona Próspera is not actually a city. Not yet. Technically, Zona Próspera is a ZEDE—a Zona de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico, or, in English, a Zone for Employment and Economic Development. Zona Próspera is basically an autonomous enclave—part United Fruit Company banana plantation 2.0, part tax haven, part crypto cult, part corporate utopia, part fiefdom, part deregulated medical laboratory, and part Ayn Rand fan fiction. The founding father of the ZEDE is the American economist Paul Romer, a Nobel Prize winner who was a senior VP at the (insidious) World Bank. Imagining a 21st-century twist on Hong Kong, he coined the term “charter city” in a 2009 TED Talk that became popular with the John Galt set. “The key to the project is a charter city,” Romer explained to Freakonomics that same year, “which starts out as a city-sized piece of uninhabited territory and a charter or constitution specifying the rules that will apply there. If the charter specifies good rules (or in our professional jargon, good institutions) millions of people will come together to build a new city.” A Barry Goldwater Field of Dreams, in other words. ZEDEs became legal in Honduras in 2013. The legislation was championed by the president, who was—you guessed it!—Orlando Hernández. By law, JOH was required to set up an advisory committee, which he did. And the dude gets points for creativity. Among the ZEDE advisors are, as Rachel Corbett noted in her 2024 New York Times feature, “a granddaughter of the final Austrian emperor and a band of Republicans from the U.S. that included the former Reagan speechwriter Mark Klugmann, the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, the former Reagan aide Faith Whittlesey, the libertarian economist Mark Skousen and Ronald Reagan’s son Michael Reagan.” … Próspera [Corbett continues] has become particularly well known for the zone’s experimental medical facilities, which run clinical trials unburdened by F.D.A. standards. The week of my visit, Patri Friedman, grandson of the economist Milton Friedman and the founder of a start-up-cities fund that invested in Próspera, had a chip with his Tesla key implanted into his hand. On a previous trip he brushed his teeth with genetically modified bacteria purported to prevent cavities. Another time he was injected with a protein booster intended to make him “stronger and faster,” as he put it at a conference in Roatán that weekend. I mean, a descendent of Milton Friedman—the late Chicago School doyen whose reactionary economic theories, when implemented IRL in Chile, gave us Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship…implanting a microchip…in his hand, Revelations-style…that controls the electric automobile built by Elon Musk’s company…which is itself heavily subsidized by the U.S. government…and thus, theoretically, anathema to Friedman? You can’t make this shit up. Kurt Vonnegut couldn’t make this shit up. If you’re still on the fence, there’s also the fact that Próspera’s investors include Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, and Balaji Srinivasan, whose 2022 book, The Network State, helped flesh out the concept. Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, and Balaji Srinivasan? That’s a quintet more ruthless and terrifying than the starting lineup of the 2001 L.A. Lakers. “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 from pre-existing states.” He also offers a more detailed definition: A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition. What a robust ZEDE network state would look like in the real world remains to be seen. What its overlords would want to do there—far from pesky government regulators; where no one can hear you scream—is anybody’s guess. But given the Thiel crew’s dual obsession with immortality and genetic engineering, it’s not hard for one’s imagination to wander into dark, dark places. Edith Romero of Truthout sums it up neatly: These ZEDEs are a project of Praxis, a tech billionaire-funded start-up that aims to create libertarian city-states to “restore Western Civilization.” The ZEDEs are allowed to have their own government, police force, courts, laws, and any taxes collected would not be paid to the Honduran government but to the ZEDEs themselves. ZEDEs are a tech billionaire’s dream: unbridled power, tech fantasy, and resource hoarding, where the government is run by AI and cryptocurrency is the main currency. That sounds like bad science fiction, I realize, like a shitty William Gibson knock-off, but in actuality, there have been extra-governmental organizations that maintained their own administrations, law enforcement, courts, laws, and tax collection…and that also enjoyed the right to raise armies, sign treaties, crush popular uprisings, and execute enemies of the (corporate) state. The East India Company had all of that power. Chartered in 1600, the most powerful corporation that ever existed grew and grew, eventually controlling ruling over vast swaths of India. Curious what it would be like if a vast and populous country was run by an actual corporation? The EIC provides a helpful historical example. It exploited and extracted on a galactic scale. It engaged in the slave trade. It wasn’t shy about sending its own private proto-ICE to rough up the locals. It tortured citizens to get them to pay their taxes. It brought widespread poverty to the subcontinent. Oh, and it was directly responsible for some 10 million Indians starving to death during the Great Bengal Famine of 1770. But don’t worry, friends, I’m sure our future AI overlords will prove much more compassionate than the heartless London stuffed shirts who called all the shots in India from their well-appointed corporate offices halfway around the world. James Brooke kind of looks like Clint Eastwood. James Brooke, the restless, adventurous son of a British magistrate, marveled at the might of the East India Company. Born outside of Calcutta in 1803, he had a front-row seat to the EIC’s sinister machinations. He envied its wealth and its power. He wanted it for himself. When his father passed away, he inherited the equivalent of $3 million—enough to live on comfortably for the rest of his days. But this did not satisfy him. He wanted something more. Something bigger. He didn’t want a small fortune. He wanted a large one. And he wasn’t afraid to travel to the ends of the earth to get it, if that’s what was required. Brooke was certainly well-off, but hardly the scion of a British robber baron. Nor did he work at some cushy desk job. He was a professional soldier and seafarer. He was enterprising. He was bold. And he was opportunistic. Adventuring in the East Indies, he found himself doing mercenary work for the Sultan of Brunei—putting down uprisings and blowing up pirate ships and saving the Sultan’s uncle from assassination attempts. As gifted as he was at taking out pirates, Brooke was positively elite—Epstein-like, one might even say—at currying favor with the rich and powerful. From the Sultan, Brooke received the governorship of Sarawak, the Malaysian slice of northern Borneo. In 1841, he was given sovereign power over the region, as well as a new title: Rajah of Sarawak. It’s kind of nuts, in hindsight. An upper-middle-class Englishman, a white guy, became head of state of a new nation in the East Indies! And it wasn’t some bogus title, either. Brooke cannily allied himself with Britain, so while he enjoyed absolute power, he also had the world’s most powerful navy to protect him when he needed it—the best of both worlds. He issued currency, putting his portrait on the coins and banknotes. He established a hereditary monarchy, the White Rajahs of Sarawak, that only ended because the Japanese overran Borneo in the Second World War. Like Peter Thiel, Brooke was gay. Unlike Peter Thiel, Brooke was by nature benevolent. He was good to his subjects, raising their standard of living. He abolished slavery and all but eliminated piracy. He left Sarawak in a better place than how he found it. He was succeeded by his nephew, Charles Johnson Brooke, who was succeeded in turn by Sir Charles Vyner de Windt Brooke, the last White Rajah, who abdicated in 1946. The dynasty lasted over a century! James Brooke, I submit, is the template for the Elon Musks, Peter Thiels, Alex Karps, Sam Altmans, and Jared Kushners of the world. He is why they are investing in real estate in far-flung locales (see also: Thiel in Argentina). They all want to be White Rajahs, it says here. They all want to know what real absolute power feels like. And how else can that be achieved, if not by carving out their own private Sarawaks? Elon Musk can exert influence over presidents and prime ministers, as we’ve seen. But he can’t be a president or a prime minister—much less a prince or potentate. Neither can Peter Thiel or Jared Kushner. And even Trump, the leader of an extant state, is having difficulty putting his mug on the money; you think Donald isn’t jealous of King Charles, who holds no real power but has his portrait on the coinage? This isn’t the eleventh century, when restless Franks could repulse the Turks from the Holy Land and set up shop in, say, Antioch. Jared Kushner ain’t Tancred of Galilee. The only way to establish a hereditary monarchy, in this day and age—and in this economy—is to build one from scratch. Like Thiel and his tech-bro comrades want to do in Honduras. Like Jared and Ivanka want to do in Albania. That, I believe, is what Ivanka meant when she talked about doing “a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live, and trying to really build something that’s a tangible manifestation of that.” This is consistent with what we know about her imperial ambitions. In my May 2020 interview with Noel Casler, who while working on The Celebrity Apprentice spent a lot of time with Donald Trump’s favorite daughter, he said, “Ivanka runs the show and plays her father like a fiddle. She and Jared are using him to gain power. I don’t fear Trump; I’m terrified of them getting control of this country—and I believe that is their plan. As I often say: ‘Trump wants music to play when he walks in a room, he wants to get high and he wants to grab women; Ivanka & Jared want to rule the world.’” They can’t rule the world. But they could certainly rule Sazan Island. There’s a template for this. Making deals with the likes of Edi Rama, the prime minister of Albania, and Juan Orlando Hernández, the then-president of Honduras, and Javier Milei, the Nazi-adjacent president of Argentina, our aspiring Rajahs are doing exactly what James Brooke did with the Sultan of Brunei. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to any of these monstrous sociopaths spending the rest of their lives on some faraway island. I’d just rather it was St. Helena. Or Île d’If. Or the Bagne de Cayenne. Or, better yet, since Donald is so gung-ho about reviving the place, Alcatraz.