The Geek Squad

The first time many of us heard about Curtis Yarvin was right before the vice presidential debate. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow played a clip of J.D. Vance telling a podcaster that U.S. leadership was dominated by liberal elites that needed to be "ripped out like a tumor" and replaced by "political religion."

When the podcaster, the classic right-wing bro with a Duck Dynasty beard like a carpet runner, asked Vance how that could be done, Vance talked about "this guy Curtis Yarvin."

With his classic nerd looks, Yarvin could play a character in a video game, or maybe a movie inspired by a video game written by the Wachowskis of Matrix and V for Vendetta fame. Born in 1973, his grandparents on his father's side were Jewish communists. His father was in the Foreign Service, and after the family returned to the U.S. in 1985, Yarvin entered Johns Hopkins' longitudinal Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth.

He graduated from Brown University in 1992, then was a graduate student in a computer science PhD program at UC Berkeley before dropping out after a year and a half. He started a software company (as one does) but became known in tech circles for co-founding an anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary movement (NRx). Using the pen name Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin wrote a blog called "Unqualified Reservations" between 2007 until 2014, later moving to Substack, where he argued that democracy is a failed experiment that should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to corporations.

"A national CEO is what's called a dictator...” he told an audience in a videotaped speech. “If Americans want to change their government they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia."

In another era, Yarvin and his crackpot ideas might have been ignored. But his "philosophy" has gained currency with key players among technology's New Rich, including Peter Thiel, the gay "Survival of the Fittest" libertarian who became J.D. Vance's guru in the tech world. (Thiel also bankrolled the campaign of unsuccessful Senate candidate Blake Masters, now reportedly under consideration to head the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in the Trump administration.) Still, Yarvin seemed destined to be an obscure figure, a cult personality enshrined by a handful of nerdy male admirers.

Then came Trump.

The Guardian newspaper writes: "Curtis Yarvin is hardly a household name in US politics. But the 'neoreactionary' thinker and far-right blogger is emerging as a serious intellectual influence on key figures in Donald Trump’s coming administration in particular over potential threats to US democracy....Yarvin, who considers liberal democracy as a decadent enemy to be dismantled, is intellectually influential on vice president-elect JD Vance and close to several proposed Trump appointees.

“The aftermath of Trump’s election victory has seen actions and rhetoric from Trump and his lieutenants that closely resemble Yarvin’s public proposals for taking autocratic power in America."

Foremost among these lieutenants is Michael Anton, who played a minor role in Trump 1.0, but was recently appointed director of policy planning under Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio. A former speechwriter for Rupert Murdoch, Rudy Giuliani, and Condoleezza Rice, Anton has worked as director of communications at Citigroup and as managing director of investing firm BlackRock. But Anton's views, as they have evolved, would probably not be endorsed by his previous employers.

In a March 2016 essay written under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus (after the ancient Roman consul) Anton wrote: "Diversity' is not 'our strength'; it's a source of weakness, tension and disunion." In the same essay, Anton defended Donald Trump's use of the slogan "America First" by arguing that the America First Committee, which included prominent anti-Semites and opposed the United States entering World War II, had been "unfairly maligned." He also argued that Islam "is a militant faith", and that "only an insane society" would take in Muslim immigrants after the 9/11 attacks. He has also accused George Soros of planning a coup.

What Anton has in common with Yarvin, who's been a guest on his podcast, is what one might call The Great Man Theory of Dictatorship. As reported in The Guardian, Anton's 2020 book, The Stakes, was controversial even on the right for its prolonged consideration of autocratic “Caesarism” as a means of resolving American decadence.

In Up from Conservatism, a 2023 anthology of essays, Anton wrote that “the United States peaked around 1965” and that Americans are ruled by “a network of unelected bureaucrats … corporate-tech-finance senior management, ‘experts’ who set the boundaries of acceptable opinion, and media figures who police those boundaries.”

Anton continued the discussion in sections headed" “The universities have become evil”, “Our economy is fake”, “The people are corrupt”, “Our civilization has lost the will to live," all sentiments expressed by both Yarvin and Vance.

Robert Evans, an extremism researcher, pointed out to the Guardian that Yarvin "...didn’t fall out of a coconut tree. He emerged into a rightwing media space where they had been talking about the evils of liberal media and corrupt academic institutions for decades."

“He has influenced a lot of people in the incoming administration and a lot of other influential people on the right. But a lot of the stuff he advocates is the same windmills Republicans have been tilting at for a while.

“What’s unique is his way of rebranding or repackaging old reactionary ideas in a way that appealed to libertarian-minded kids in the tech industry, and in eventually getting some of them to embrace a lot of far-right ideas. That’s the novelty of Yarvin and that’s his real accomplishment.”

Of course, libertarian-minded kids want their Ecstasy - and in Musk's case, ketamine. According to University of North Carolina historian Joshua Tait, "Moldbug imagines a radical libertarian utopia with maximum freedom in all things except politics."

Tait wrote that Yarvin has favored same-sex marriage, freedom of religion, and private use of drugs, and has written against race- or gender-based discriminatory laws, although, according to Tait, "he self-consciously proposed private welfare and prison reforms that resembled slavery."

Tait describes Yarvin's writing as contradictory, saying: "He advocates hierarchy, yet deeply resents cultural elites. His political vision is futuristic and libertarian, yet expressed in the language of monarchy and reaction. He is irreligious and socially liberal on many issues but angrily anti-progressive. He presents himself as a thinker searching for truth but admits to lying to his readers, saturating his arguments with jokes and irony. These tensions indicate broader fissures among the online Right."

Those inconsistencies don't seem to trouble Tech Bros like Balaji S. Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of Coinbase, and former general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, who advocated in a 2013 speech a "society run by Silicon Valley [...] an opt-in society, ultimately outside the U.S., run by technology."

It has long been a concern that technology millionaires and billionaires harbor the mistaken belief that they are geniuses equipped to fix what's wrong in other fields. In fact, most of them just came along at the right time and happened to have the right math skills. And whole lot of them are autistic, or have Aspberger's Syndrome, or at the very least Ayn Rand Syndrome. In her iconic novel Atlas Shrugged, Rand created Howard Ruark, a kind of Nietzschean superman, the darkest side of libertarianism.

Yarvin boasted about educating billionaire Peter Thiel, who bankrolled his software company, about politics.

Steve Bannon is also a fan.

In Anton’s podcast featuring Yarvin, the two men discuss what sounds like the playbook for authoritarians outlined by Ruth Ben-Ghiat in her book Strongmen. Anton says to Yarvin, “You’re essentially advocating for someone to – age-old move – gain power lawfully through an election, and then exercise it unlawfully” adding: “What do you think the actual chances of that happening are?”

Yarvin responded: “It wouldn’t be unlawful,” adding: “You’d simply declare a state of emergency in your inaugural address.”

Yarvin continued: “You’d actually have a mandate to do this. Where would that mandate come from? It would come from basically running on it, saying, ‘Hey, this is what we’re going to do.’”

Susan Zakin is the Journal's editor.

“Democracy is a failed and dying form of governance”

“The masses are too stupid for self-rule”

"All the great crimes of the recent past have been committed by states which portrayed themselves as profoundly ethical actors. Removing this mask, eliminating the ability of the beast to portray itself as good, uninstalls an essential module in this perverse system."

“If democracy is so decrepit and ineffective, one might ask how it is that America became the world’s great superpower and maintained that position for the last century. My answer contains two parts: first, that nothing lasts forever. Second, while American supremacy may once have rested on innovation and growth, the country, now a bloated empire, has been surviving for decades on the power of myth-making and mass illusions.”

"The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology."

(And, yes, there does seem to be a grain in truth in some of these. But note the grandiosity.)

Peter Thiel (with his billions)...hand-picked JD Vance, making him rich as a partner in his VC company and then paying his way into politics. Vance has a parasitic loyalty to Thiel; he is the perfect Manchurian Candidate. The New Right seeks a new order, and Trump will be irrelevant the moment he is elected. Vance is their true Trojan horse.

None of them have the balls to say what they believe out loud, for fear of committing societal and political suicide. Except Curtis Yarvin. He yells it from the rooftops - Democracy has failed, and corporate techno-autocracy is the future, America’s great new shining city on the hill.

To most of us, Yarvin’s world may sound like lunacy. But, given the power and wealth and influence he has accreted around him, we ignore it at our peril. It is not that great a leap from Trump to Yarvin.

But he stands out among right-wing commentators for being probably the single person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the U.S. government could be toppled and replaced — “rebooted” or “reset,” as he likes to say — with a monarch, CEO, or dictator at the helm. Yarvin argues that a creative and visionary leader — a “startup guy,” like, he says, Napoleon or Lenin was — should seize absolute power, dismantle the old regime, and build something new in its place.

The New York Times: "The Right's Would-Be Kingmaker"

The Street on Palantir's nasty doings: "Peter Thiel’s net worth: How the controversial Palantir founder made his money"

Excerpt from Thiel's biography, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, by Max Chafkin, in New York magazine: "Peter Thiel's Origin Story"