Introduction To Series On Curtis Yarvin
Trump acts on his stupid ideas, and on the foolish chatter of whatever loon has his ear. He and his courtiers and henchmen recite crackpot theories to justify working for their own ends, with no pretense of oversight by Trump or Republican legislators.
Some of these weirdo theories, like the tariff gibberish and Christian Nationalism, are well-known. They’ve been discussed in progressive circles for some time, and are occasionally acknowledged in the billionaire media. What I did not know, and what was rarely reported in the media I read, was the influence of a group of anti-democracy advocates.
Recently I began to read about Curtis Yarvin. Heather Cox Richardson mentioned him in one of her Letters To An American, and commenter TruthBtold linked to this substack reporting on Yarvin. Here’s an article in Commonweal, Yarvin’s Case Against Democracy.
In 2012 Yarvin gave a speech titled How To Reboot The US Government. He gave more speeches and interviews on the subject and drew the attention of rich techbros and right-wing politicians like J.D. Vance. It looks like Elon Musk used Yarvin’s ideas first to remake Twitter as a hang-out for creeps, and then as a template for destroying our govenrment from the inside.
Yarvin claims that democracy has failed and that the only way forward is to get rid of it and replace it with a dictatorship, or a monarchy. It’s a view shared by a lot of people on the far right, and for different reasons by the same filthy rich thugs who’ve been wrecking our country out of hatred for the New Deal and all things that make life better for working people. I’ll be looking into Yarvin’s writings in my next series.
Background
This stuff is wild. To orient myself, I read a chapter written by Joshua Tait in a book, Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy. The book is supposedly available through your library. Tait focuses on a blog Yarvin wrote under the name Mencius Moldbug, Unqualified Reservations. He gives an introduction to Yarvin’s theory of neoreaction, and his rejection of democracy.
Neoreaction’s basic assumption is that humans desire power. Interpreting democracy through this framework, Moldbug claims that democracy’s appeal is that it disperses power widely, indulging the mass desire for useless fragments of power. Since power-seeking is pervasive, society trends toward greater division of power and a concomitant erosion of order. Democracy is a “dangerous, malignant form of government which tends to degenerate, sometimes slowly and sometimes with shocking, gut-wrenching speed, into tyranny and chaos.”
Trump and his henchmen don’t acknowledge the anti-democratic aspect of Yarvin’s thought, at least not so far, unless you consider Trump’s third-term garbage. They just follow his plan for destroying the institutions that diffuse power; and work at concentrating power into the hands of Musk and Trump. Yarvin’s views can be seen as justifying the unitary executive theory, and for presidential kingship, as contemplated by John Roberts and his anti-democratic colleagues in Trump v. US.
In his blog Yarvin traces out the development of his theories of history, economics and other matters. The blog ran from 2007 to 2014. He has a substack, Gray Mirror, which began in May 2020 (after Tait’s article) where he posted drafts of his book Gray Mirror: Fascicle I: Disturbance, published January 2025. The title is Yarvin trolling: fascicle is close to fascist, but means something else. I’m reluctant to buy the book so I plan to read from the two online sources first. He shows up on other social media sites, but I’m not going there.
I plan to focus on the anti-democracy material and his views of human nature. We’ll see how that holds up.
Defending Democracy
I won’t defend democracy here. I follow Americans like John Dewey and Richard Rorty. See, e.g. Rorty’s Achieving Our Country. My rationale for defending democracy is my understanding of human nature, which I discussed in my series on individuality.
But I also think that we as a nation have for a long time regarded democracy as background for our lives. We see it as a game we watch on TV. We yell at politicians as we would yell at referees. We don’t think of democracy as making any demands on us, much less as something that requires our constant maintenance and improvement.
Caveat
It’s very difficult to write about material with which you fundamentally disagree. There’s a strong tendency to minimize any good points, and to mock rather than try to understand.
I plan to be very careful about separating Yarvin’s words from my thoughts on how to understand what he’s saying, and to try to indicate where I’m having trouble following an argument, so that readers can check my thinking. That should help with the bias problem.
It’s important to note that Yarvin isn’t some Qanon weirdo cranking out conspiracies. I assume that he’s read the material he cites, and that he has tried to be intellectually honest. That distinguishes him from craven ideologues like the SCOTUS right-wingers and from lazy hacks like David Brooks.
Final thought
Yarvin and the filthy rich idiots he influences are dangerously wrong, wrong in a deeply fundamental way. They think they know what’s best. Not what’s best for you and your family and community. They think they know what’s best for the future of the human race.
Required listening.
https :// open. spotify. com/episode/2n0l9WweTvdcgnIrgkYRNv?si=3QbrFuGrSqCWNAMtlQeFag
[Moderator’s note: please do not drop links without more context than you’ve given. Who/what is it, when was it recorded, why is it in your personal opinion “required listening.” Malware and phishing attacks use links with false or inadequate context; for that reason your link has been “broken” with blank spaces to prevent accidental clickthrough by community members. /~Rayne]
You sound like you have all your background material all lined up, but in case you need any supplemental info, a podcast that I listen to regularly just did a whole episode on Yarvin:
https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes/251-who-is-curtis-yarvin
You’ve already covered the main points: his 2012 speech, Mencius Moldbug alter ego etc.
All I gotta say at the moment is he is one twisted individual using his intellect for nefarious purposes. Like Putin has Alexsandr Dugin providing a philosophical basis for his doings, Peter Thiel in particular and J.D. Vance by association have Curtis Yarvin as their preferred “influencer”. And Trump still has Steve Bannon and Roger Stone and Mike Flynn, though his need for an underlying justifying political philosophy is growing nil, when just acting crazy fills the bill as well in his war against what is starting to seem like the entire world.
Part of the problem may be that the media cover politics, especially elections, like they’re spectator sports, and they’re not.
I don’t remember where I first stumbled upon Curtis Yarvin and his influence but then found a blog by Gil Duran called The Nerd Reich which covers Yarvin. I also found the episodes regarding Yarvin and J.D. Vance on the Behind the Bastards podcast. I continue to think the Trump presidency consists of Trump’s retribution tour, Project 2025 and Musk using some of the Yarvin ideas to shape the government along with Musk’s retribution for government investigations.
I look forward to your posts.
I subscribe to The Majority Report, which over the years has interviewed several people regarding Yarvin and others of his ilk, including Gil Duran if I’m not mistaken. I’m pretty sure I’ve read about Yarvin at Digby’s blog also.
There are people who cover the far right fringe, especially its intellectual underpinnings, but it’s niche outlets. This kind of stuff doesn’t make it to WAPO or CNN.
Yes, I also recommend both of those sources! The Behind the Bastards podcast series has host Robert Evans with celebrity guest Ed Helms to make it more fun (see https://open.spotify.com/episode/2n0l9WweTvdcgnIrgkYRNv).
This is an overview of the Yarvin plan from the Nerd Reich:
https://thenerdreich.com/reboot-elon-musk-ceo-dictator-doge/
It is really shocking how much this plan overlaps with an authoritarian “soft coup” or “administrative coup”, and how much it overlaps with what is actually happening in the US:
(1) install a CEO-dictator, (2) purge the bureaucracy, (3) build a loyalist army, (4) dismantle democratic institutions, (5) Seize control of academia, journalism, social media and (6) consolidate law enforcement
Assume Yarvin’s thoughts all boil down to the old – if the poor figure out the power of voting in a Democracy, they will vote to take all your hard earned money.
This argument by the filthy rich has been a staple since the drafting of the Constitution. It never goes out of fashion.
And how is that any different from Marxism?
if you’re not a magat, you’re a Marxist, right?
Typo alert: “Yarvin’s views cab be seen as..”
Awesome post! And I totally agree with your view on human nature as it relates to democracy. THEY want power, and assume everyone else does too! “That’s never happened in all the history of civilizations!”, they believe. Are these people so insulated from the real world that they don’t get power by definition must be shared, or it’s not really power at all?
I have a staffer that is something of a libertarian, he holds the same jaundiced views, and scoffs at the idea that history shows libertarianism is a non-starter. So, here we are, back to proposing a return to the monarchy.
Excellent read, thank you.
https://thelefthook.substack.com/p/why-musk-and-the-broligarchy-are?
Gil Duran interview.
For starters I believe Yarvin’s organizing premise is just wrong.
Yarvin and his ilk have proven themselves to be totally incapable (due to their own emotional handicaps) of learning how to apply the other 5 forms of social power (reward, legitimacy, expert, referent, informational) and have nothing left but coercive power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_and_Raven%27s_bases_of_power
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Time for a reset
I am abandoning my old domain (mikepage. us) due to a proliferation of spam. It will be nonfunctional in approx 6 months
mike @ tandp.tech is my new email/domain and will be effective until the spam load gets unbearable but it is paid for for another 8 years
before long, any messages you send to mike @ mikepage. us will just drift into the aether and never be received
not sure if you are trying to bind me to mikepage. us or tandp. tech but the latter is correct
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Thank you Ed. Look forward to this entire series. Exposure to sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I’ve been debating whether to read anything by Yarvin, since he seems like Nietzche-Lite and seems to be influencing the billionaire influencers. But I have been reluctant to spend money or time on a book that I most likely would want to throw against the wall after a few pages. And just the neologism “neoreaction” reeks of an attempt to gussy up adolescent thinking and justifies my reluctance. So thank you for doing this series.
Of course democracy is flawed. That’s why the founders wanted to rein in democracy with laws and checks and balances. Any system of government is flawed because it is a human institution and humans are flawed.
Billionaires and their lackeys probably like Yarvin because he makes their greed and lust for power praiseworthy. I don’t know why any of the peons would like to place their freedom into the hands of billionaires who either inherited wealth or found private equity benefactors.
If they really think of dividing us into fiefs, maybe they should read some history. “Game of Thrones” is fantasy but the internecine struggles for power and struggles between fiefdoms were real. Maybe they should watch “Succession” or “Lion in Winter” to find out what happens when the king gets old and his heirs are idiots.
I will listen to the highlights and that will be enough for me.
One might readily prepend that piece of good common sense with “We hold these truths to be self-evident that…” {grin}
And when the government of state is largely concentrated in the (concertina-playing) hands of one individual, all the more likely to gang agley (and badly). Take for example His Late Majesty, George III. These ahistorical ignoramuses want to try an all-American reprise of that?
I find it interesting that so much of the $5 trillion or so of investment in the US that Trump is claiming is around building a Tech-Bro world – data centers, AI, etc.
Unsurprising given the industries responsible in large part for both Trump’s elections, and the sponsors of those industries by entities hostile to an independent U.S., ex. Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s funding of Twitter/X.
Not to mention the occupation of those industries by the same sponsors.
I look forward to reading your series on Yarvin. Thanks! Hopefully as more places talk about him the mainstream news outlets will pick up on him too. Yarvin needs to be put in the sunshine so people can know about him and get a good look at him and know who he influences. The unlikely Trump supporters I know are repulsed by a philosophy like this and what it means for the country but they don’t know it is an actual philosophy and that the ultra rich want to make them live by it.
With “respect” to David Brooks, he’s trying to wipe the egg off his face, not realizing that it’s not egg, but his actual face:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trumpism-maga-populism-power-pursuit/682116/
The title of the nopology is “I should have seen this coming.” Here’s the first ‘graph:
“Charles de Gaulle began his war memoirs with this sentence: ‘All my life I have had a certain idea about France.’ Well, all my life I have had a certain idea about America. I have thought of America as a deeply flawed nation that is nonetheless a force for tremendous good in the world. From Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and beyond, Americans fought for freedom and human dignity and against tyranny; we promoted democracy, funded the Marshall Plan, and saved millions of people across Africa from HIV and AIDS. When we caused harm—Vietnam, Iraq—it was because of our overconfidence and naivete, not evil intentions.”
Lying to yourself is easy when you dissemble for a living. Putting Reagan (who enabled both the SA apartheid regime and the early spread of AIDS) in the same company with Lincoln and Roosevelt displays the patented Brooks willful ignorance that prevented him from seeing the current demolition of America coming, despite it being broadcast by the perps explicitly and years in advance.
What a tool.
David Brooks is too easy a tool to hate. Regarding Vietnam and Iraq, for example, whatever good he claims we intended to do had nothing to do with the Vietnamese or Iraqis. It was all about doing well for a small clique of Americans, while paying lip service to a broader agenda.
Ed – you’re a better man than I am.
The name Yarvin (as well at Chuck Johnson, Thiel, Vance, etc) shows up in this Mother Jones article about the company co-founders of Clearview AI which uses facial recognition and scraped personal information from the internet to identify faces in the crowd, whether at a protest, airport or at the border.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/clearview-ai-immigration-ice-fbi-surveillance-facial-recognition-hoan-ton-that-hal-lambert-trump/
Looking forward to this because the subject for me is connected to my longstanding interest in that subset of political philosophy for which religious ideas are implicated, so, traditionalism(s); feudalism; Guenon; etc.. Long strands.
Familiar with the so-called neo-reactionary (Nrx) movement and some offshoots. And, notable too is the background to the unitary executive that arrived on my radar screen with Bush (II,) the Straussians; the Cheney crew, PNAC.
Take great comfort in Dewey (and Gregory Bateson.)
IMO, you shouldn’t just focus on Curtis Yarvin. “Mencious Moldbug” was a smallish but significant part of the alt-right ferment that has now replaced neoconservatism as the GOP mainstream. Neoreactionarism (NRx), preppers, pick-up artists, anarcho-capitalists, and biological racists flourished on the Internet during the Obama administration, and Trump 2.0 represents the emergence of these forces from the blogosphere shadows into actual positions of civic power. The preferred term was “Dark Enlightenment,” though “alt-right” became the moniker that stuck. Yarvin was just one of the influencers of that movement:
* There’s James Wesley, Rawles (sic), the godfather of the modern prepper movement whose long-running Survivalblog red-pilled a bunch of exurban and rural blue-dog Democrats. Without Rawles, there’s probably no Theonomist enclave in the Pacific Northwest. His brand of libertarian survivalism is also a gateway drug into the Threeper movement.
*There’s Roosh V (real name: Daryush Valizadeh), the most influential voice in the pick-up-artist (PUA) scene. PUAs were essentially con artists catering to disaffected young men with dating issues. They regularly read Roosh’s now-defunct website Return of Kings, where they could both live vicariously through Roosh’s self-reported Bond-movie love life and learn the “one weird trick” to get them into any girl’s pants. Interestingly, Roosh retired from the Internet into Russian Orthodoxy, but PUAs like Andrew Tate continue to carry the flag for the online date-rape-fantasy crowd. If you want to know why Trump’s administration went to the mat for Andrew Tate, this is the answer: Because PUAs and the incels they grift on are Trump’s people.
*There’s Steve Sailer, formerly a National Review writer who drifted farther into radical libertarianism, eventually ending up at Takimag, where he became the Internet’s foremost exponent of “human biodiversity” (HBD). As Sailer never tired of explaining, HBD posits that human evolution has resulted in diverse genetically determined intellectual capacities, so that certain ethnicities (viz. Asians, Jews, and Caucasians) are inherently predisposed to higher average IQs than other ethnicities (viz. sub-Saharan Africans). You might be familiar with this basic thesis from the book The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, but Sailer is an enormously gifted and entertaining writer who successfully ROTFLized Herrnstein and Murray’s turgid academic jargon with bon mots like the tile of his first book, a biography of Barak Obama: America’s Half-Blood Prince. At the Dark Enlightenment’s online peak, he was so influential that the dean of Neocon journalism, Michael Barone, suggested that Sailer provided the roadmap to Trump’s 2016 electoral victory.
*And there’s Gavin McInnes, one-time hipster Svengali of Vice magazine and cartoon voiceover actor, who fused PUAs, HBDs, and the NRxers into an organization called the Proud Boys, the formation of which he announced on the aforementioned Takimag. McInnes’ profile among punk-rock dissidents and pot-smoking Adult Swimmers was important for the growth of the alt-right. Through his regular appearances with Sean Hannity and Greg Gutfeld, McInnes helped transform Vice-reading, Obama-voting twenty-somethings into Fox News-watching thirty-somethings. Then he carried many of those red-pilled former hipsters with him into the Proud Boys as forty-something anti-democratic political activists. In many ways, McInnes’ own life and career is the through line for the whole Dark Enlightenment: Vice to Red Eye to Takimag to January 6.
And those are just a few of the influencers whose screeds and tweets have become the intellectual foundation of the current Republican party. Ever wondered how kooks like Marjorie Taylor Greene ended up in Congress? It’s because this alt-right mélange of apocalypticism, conspiracy theory, and authoritarianism was mediated to once-normie Boomer GOP-voters through Fox News and Breitbart. Rick Santelli turned Bushies worried about their 401(k) into Tea Partiers. Then Glenn Beck turned the Tea Partiers into conspiracy theorists. Finally, Tucker Carlson completed the journey by turning the conspiracy theorists into a authoritarian mob.
And all the time, in the background, Steve Bannon was stoking this conflagration, at Breitbart News, at Cambridge Analytica, in the original Trump campaign, as a faux-martyr in federal prison, and now through his War Room podcast. Crucially, Bannon’s pod platformed many of the 2020 Dominion Voting System truthers now serving as cabinet secretaries. Andrew Breitbart himself once dubbed Bannon “the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party,” and Stevi Bannenstal knew exactly what he was doing: He consciously harnessed all this dissident-right energy to aim Trump like a cruise missile at Big Government. Now, ironically, Bannon himself is wrestling with the dragon he unleashed. He’s a blue-collar Buchananite thirty years past his sell-by date, not a neoreactionary digital native, and he’s been eclipsed by South African billionaires who really buy into Yarvin’s Galt’s-Gulch-on-Mars vision.
The pieces I’ve seen on Curtis Yarvin have mostly come at him from the angle of “meet the computer programmer who became Peter Thiel’s house philosopher.” But that hermetically sealed treatment ignores the larger and more important context of the Dark Enlightenment’s influence on the new political mainstream. Curtis Yarvin isn’t important because he has influenced the Vice President and the ostensible Head of DOGE. “Mencious Moldbug” is important because he was part of a broader movement of right-wing dissidence that has created the voter base that United the Right at Charlottesville, that protested the “Plandemic” at statehouses across the country, that Stopped the Steal at the U.S. Capitol, and that ultimately swept Donald J. Trump back into the Oval Office. Vance and Musk have only been empowered to lecture Greenland and muck about in the Social Security code because the Republican base has been dark-enlightened over the past 18 years.
That’s the story.
Comments over 300 words in length are generally discouraged here as many community members read on mobile devices with smaller displays. However, exceptions are made for comments that are highly informative although supporting evidence in the form of links or citations are preferred. Your comment offers more relevant perspective in spite of being 914 words long.
Welcome to emptywheel.
Long, but fascinating. Thank goodness for paragraph breaks!
The one problem I have with the suggested partial redirection is that the other persons didn’t write what would become Trump’s policy.
Bannon, for example, has claimed to be a Leninist or an anarchist, but he’s never really written enough detailed planning for how his philosophy — which is really Ledeen-ian universal fascism relying on creative destruction — was supposed to work. Instead, Bannon et al act as validators; if Bannon says burn it all down and Yarvin says begin by burning it down, Bannon is support not the source of the plan which continues once the blaze has begun.
And yes, thank goodness for paragraph breaks. If there hadn’t been any I would have spiked it as rambling.
“Long, but fascinating.”
As was Samuel Rutherford. (Or as some know him by Anne Ross Cousin’s tribute, “The Sands of Time Are Sinking.”)
But I have to say, this also brings to mind that storm that Elon Musk claims to have in his head.
Thank you for not spiking it, Rayne. I will conform to community guidelines next time. It wasn’t meant to be a rant!
Here’s some links for those interested in further reading on the “Dark Enlightenment” context, chosen to elide clicks for the figures themselves:
Both “Christian Nationalists” and the Three-Percenters have deep connections to the prepper movement, so reading about the so-called “American Redoubt” is a helpful window into that world:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/wp/2016/08/27/2016/08/27/a-fortress-against-fear/
In the same vein, it’s also worth knowing the name of Douglas Wilson, the most America’s persuasive advocate of Christian Nationalism, whose religious empire is situated within the “Redoubt.” This link, a little dated, is a good place to start:
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/12/28/14710/467
This piece by The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis correctly draws the line between the “Manosphere” and the rise of Trumpism (behind paywall):
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/08/anti-feminism-gateway-far-right/595642/
And here’s a primer on Gavin McInnes from shortly after his founding of the Proud Boys, helpful for seeing how the Manosphere transitioned from picking up hotties to breaking down Capitol barricades:
https://www.metro.us/gavin-mcinnes-explains-what-a-proud-boy-is-and-why-porn-and-wanking-are-bad/
Pat Buchanan. Need I say more?! Well, maybe:
“PR for Hitler” – by Matt McManus, 12/17/24
…..
“The neo-monarchist Curtis Yarvin has cautioned the reactionary right against overtly embracing fascism in a liberal state while insisting that the Axis powers were in fact the rebel alliance fighting the evil empire. And Tucker Carlson recently hosted Darryl Cooper, a Nazi apologist who claims that Winston Churchill, not Hitler, was the chief villain of the Second World War.”
“One of the most influential exponents of this kind of World War II revisionism is Pat Buchanan. Buchanan was an advisor in several Republican administrations, where he developed a reputation for taking a hard line against all kinds of criminals except Nazi war criminals, for whom he seemed to have a soft spot.”
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pr-hitler
I first heard of Yarvin last week in this chilling segment on local public radio (KQED’s Forum):
Is ‘The Nerd Reich’ Taking Over the Government?
Nasty stuff.
The notion that democracy inevitably collapses is classic Aristotle. So nope, nothing new in Yarvin’s “thought.” Haven’t dipped into him, but suspect it’s just another case of a reactionary using a few magic words-in-a-circle, and especially Big Words, to convince his audience that he has Big Thoughts.
I let out a deep sign of relief when I heard Rep. and Constitutional scholar Jamie Raskin mention Curtis Yarvin and the NRx gang in an interview with Brian Taylor Cohen.
It seems to me there are three distinct threats to the country:
A. Trump, who would prefer to die in his bed in the Executive Residence than in a jail cell, and is devoted to treasonous sabotage to that end.
B. Vance and the moneyed techbros led by Peter Thiel, who expect to usher in the Network States project of the Nerd Reich. Musk seems to belong in this group, but perhaps he’s struck out on his own now.
C. Mike Johnson and his Christian army, looking to usher in a glorious theocratic white nationalist revival. One where women don’t continue their education, can’t vote or have any reproductive rights or autonomy.
It’s gonna be epic.
Cults of personality are threatening too. I consider the old line of Qpublicans to be a threat just because they have one foot in the cult even if their lineage is anchored in Reaganism.
Then there is the Roberts court that is a huge threat.
I watched the youtube link and tracked down some of his “references” and the scripture of the Declaration caught my attention. There is always as punch line that is never defended but must be accepted. Wrong
“Many thousands of people who were before good and loyal subjects, have been deluded, and by degrees induced to rebel against the best of Princes, and the mildest of Governments.”
https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/1776-hutchinson-strictures-upon-the-declaration-of-independence
I think this article on Hoan Ton-That and his Clearview facial recognition database by Luke O’Brian in Mother Jones is another piece of the jigsaw.
Also crypto currency is a huge part of all this.
It’s terrifying that these lunatics are positioned to weaponize technology against us.
From article linked…
“Thiel said in 2010, explaining the impetus for PayPal, the e-payment company he co-founded with Musk. “The basic idea was that we could never win an election…because we were in such a small minority. But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world—without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who were never going to agree with you—through a technological means.”
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/clearview-ai-immigration-ice-fbi-surveillance-facial-recognition-hoan-ton-that-hal-lambert-trump/