To whom it may concern, Thank you for taking the time to review my application. For the past several years, I co-founded a startup that operated across two continents, counted senior officials and hedge funds as clients, and confronted some of the most irreducibly complex political challenges that exist in the world today. However, it is my uncompromising belief in the maximization of human liberty, free expression, local self-government, and the power of open and competitive markets as the unrivaled engines of progress that has led to this application. Born and raised in the decay of the San Francisco Bay Area, I understand too well how the reformation of our institutions and political discourse is poisoned by identarian Marxism. This fundamentalist gospel and its interpretations fuel hostility towards individual identity and self-determination, while furthering a fatal notion: that it is only through the centrally directed collective that society’s work may be morally performed, and its character derived. When paired with the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, the inevitable result of this medieval orthodoxy is a savage tribal delirium or a panoptical statist tyranny. Through my extensive experience in closed, unstable societies I have seen this collectivist path taken to its logical conclusion. There, the introduction of emerging technologies, in relation to the level of development within the countries, constitute something akin to discontinuous technological progress that has utterly overwhelmed their institutional coping mechanisms and resulted in perpetual social chaos. Conversely, I have also seen sophisticated authoritarian regimes co-opt these networks and tools, once believed to be harbingers of utopia, to impose a degree of control and uniformity over a population not thought possible without sacrificing economic growth. Most importantly, having worked in places where the political process reliably leads not to contentious yet peaceful partisan rivalry, but to mass slaughter at the hands of the victims’ own neighbors, illustrated for me with extreme clarity Goethe’s meaning concerning the survival of liberty when he stated, “What you have inherited from your fathers, earn over again for yourselves or it will not be yours.” The events of the past two years have only marked the end of the 21st Century’s first chapter and though the next installment may yield an unprecedented future of freedom and prosperity, it is equally capable of delivering a horrifyingly dark and degenerate one; an inevitability if we fail to do the difficult work that all free people must do if they wish to remain free. If we manage to successfully navigate this brave new world with our traditions and Constitutional order intact, it will be in no small part due to the efforts of committed conservatives. In brief, it means those who are willing to do what is necessary in order to defend our way of life from those with an impassioned determination to destroy it. It is not hyperbole to say that we are in a fight for the vary soul of Western civilization and our defeat is not an option. Without a doubt in my mind, to play a role in this struggle would not be a career, it would be a genuine privilege. Thank you once more for your time and consideration. Sincerely, Elias Gilman
