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Weird. Maybe these are just things you say. But maybe not.
Another group to have visited Prospera in recent weeks are Republicans for National renewal, a MAGA-aligned group founded by Mark Ivanyo, a former staffer in Trump’s first term Department of Justice. They touted Prospera as ‘similar to President Trump’s proposed Freedom Cities’ and also took aim at Castro, saying Prospera was ‘a bastion of pro-Americanism, economic freedom & Bitcoin acceptance in socialist Honduras.’
Prospera was also visited last week by Cremieux, an anonymous twitter account regularly retweeted by Elon Musk (and likely run by more than one white crypto-libertarian type) that helps set the libertarian discourse.
Given these links, it’s inconceivable that Trump hasn’t heard about Prospera and the threats to its existence. Marco Rubio, a man aggressively hostile to anything that looks or smells like socialism in Latin America, almost certainly has as well. It was telling that he didn’t bother visiting Honduras on his recent trip to Latin America, his first outside the US.
Prospera is just one of a number of crypto-based, parallel institution states-within-states that tech oligarchs are trying to establish around the world. With Trump having embraced crypto libertarians as his ticket back to power, we should expect him to defend and advance their interests, not least because of their potential, as in the case of Prospera, to be the tip of the imperial spear in the developing world.
The combination of Rubio as head of the state department and Prospera libertarians in the White House is extraordinarily dangerous for Honduras. The US has always had strategic incentives to see left-wing candidates defeated in Latin America, but now it has very personal incentives as well.
Marc Andreessen, who has been hanging out with Trump and recruiting for DOGE, and his co-investor Thiel are both heavily invested not just financially in Prospera through their VC fund Promonos, but ideologically in the concept of parallel states-within-states. For them to see Prospera fall would be a double hit.
For developing countries like Honduras, Prospera demonstrates the dangers of allowing libertarian American capital the freedom to establish shadow legal entities within your territory. They might provide a few low-paid service industry jobs, but if they turn on you, they’ll threaten to bankrupt you. Or coup you. Or both.
Then there are the moral questions that arise from allowing billionaires to operate zones of exit outside regulatory oversight.
Biohacking and longevity experiments are a central component of Prospera, and regular articles on longevity research now pop up in traditional media, normalising the field. But longevity researchers often appear dangerously enamoured with eugenics.
For example, a presentation this week at Prospera by a professor from George Mason university said that selecting embryos for IQ might soon be possible and could boost global innovation by hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is an outrageous, preposterous statement that rests on two fallacies: IQ exists as a measurable metric (it doesn’t) and creating economic growth (by optimising humans) should be the singular goal of humanity. This is essentially an argument for eugenics-powered capitalism.
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