Curtis Yarvin, the pseudonymous Moldbug, advocates neocameralism via RAGE to replace democracy with CEO-like rule, influencing Project 2025 and Trump's federal reclassification plans. His ideology, rooted in racist conspiracies like the Obama birther myth and endorsements of Ian Smith, fuels movements from Gamergate to JD Vance's circle. While Trump offers narcissism, Yarvin provides a sinister doctrinal blueprint for dismantling norms, with figures like Stephen Miller actively twisting society toward this dark vision as they seize power. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Ed Helms: Murdering Jerks Only00:06:04
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst people in all of history.
And with us today, someone who, as far as I am aware, is not one of the worst people in all of history.
Ed Helms.
Ed, have you ever committed a crime?
Lots.
Okay.
Well, okay.
Well, I expected the opposite answer.
I've only murdered jerks.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, you know, you're fine.
I feel like I'm on the right side of, I'm on, I still have like moral.
Yeah, if you're just killing bad people, like, who's got a problem with that?
Sure.
Right.
Yeah.
Jerks.
No, no, no, not bad people.
Jerks.
Just jerks.
No, it's like we were, it's like we were talking about earlier.
You can't have a black and white, like, murder's always bad.
Cause like, what if somebody's a jerk?
Just wondering, can I send you a list of names for no, no apparent reason?
Because they're jerks.
Yep.
Yep.
Okay.
Okay.
This is, this is great info to have.
Welcome back to the show, Ed Helms.
I mean, again, I don't feel like you necessarily need introduction, but I will remind everyone about your excellent podcast, Snafu.
And you just had season two drop talking about the wonderful activist burglary of an FBI building in 1971 that led to some of the most important revelations of the burgeoning security state in history.
So yeah, great show.
People should check it out.
Ed, are you ready?
I'm ready.
As you described season two of Snafu, I couldn't help thinking about how well it connects to our subject matter.
Yep.
Untrammeled authority.
Because J. Edgar Hoover basically had some degree of unchecked authority within the FBI.
And he was doing really awful stuff.
He's a great example because he was this kind of CEO god king of the security state for decades and it didn't end well or middle well or start well.
It come back comes back to that.
I think at the beginning of the last episode, I was like, how do you pick the guy?
Right, right.
The guy.
How can you be sure you got the right guy?
It's also this thing of like, I think with Hoover, you really did see a man who he wasn't the same guy at the start of his time running the FBI as he was at the end, you know, because number one, he aged.
Our brains change as we age.
We, we, in many cases, get worse at some things, right?
And like he also, the period of time that he had with power, he got used to doing increasingly extreme things with it, you know, like there was this constant escalation of his authoritarian impulses.
Like the job was bad for him.
Like it was bad for J. Edgar Hoover.
And it was, it made him a worse person.
And I think that kind of fundamentally, guys who advocate for these systems never take that into account in part because I just don't think they believe it the way that I think most normal people do.
Like we, you know, you don't have to be like on the left or a libertarian or an anarchist to be like, well, yeah, if you give people access to all of the power in the world, they generally do horrible things with it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I would.
Anyway, huh?
I would.
Yeah.
I would do awful nightmarish things.
Well, I do really fun things, but people might get hurt.
I would have a good time, but not everyone would have a good time.
I think maybe that's just how these guys think about it, right?
So I'm going to be the one having a good time.
So, and again, that's part of why we're doing these episodes, because Curtis Yarvin could potentially be on the brink of having a very good time.
And I really want to emphasize what a bad idea that would be.
Sure.
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Ray Gillespie and Michael Manchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
How could this ever happen in City Hall?
Tunny's Radicalized Community Power00:15:23
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
So I have referred to Yarvin as a monarchist a few times in these episodes, and I will again, I do think it's important to note he would disagree with me using that title because he thinks that calling someone a monarchist brings to mind the constitutional monarchies that largely failed in the early 20th century.
And he blames that failure on compromises and absolute power.
Now, we talked last episode about Yarvin's core beliefs.
Democracy isn't really real.
And if it was real, it wouldn't be a good idea.
The cathedral who really runs things are the enemy.
And some sort of aristocracy and an absolute CEO monarch paired with the freedom to exit if you don't like the particular flavor of oppression in your home is the ideal state of governance.
As a tech guy, though, Jarvin doesn't like to couch his yearning for a king, which is what this is, right?
He's a monarchist.
He's not the same kind of monarchist that, for example, like guys like JR or Tolkien were, but he's very much a monarchist.
And he doesn't like to seem like the regular people who long for the days of having a king, right?
He's got to be like a little bit smarter about it, right?
And this is where kind of the big tech line of things comes in.
And his argument, he starts making this, you know, in the early period of like the web 2.0 tech boom, you get smartphones, you get like apps like Twitter and YouTube and Facebook.
And there's this period of time, I know it feels very distant to us, but where people thought this was going to enhance democracy around the globe, right?
That all of these connecting technologies were going to be a massive boon for like liberatory movements across the planet.
That's not what happened.
And Jarvin, very early on, isn't just saying that's not what's going to happen.
He's saying that's not what should happen, right?
Big tech shouldn't enable democracy around the world.
It should take control in a very literal sense.
And he becomes an advocate of a kind of political philosophy he called neocameralism, which Francis Tseng described in an excellent essay as, quote, arguing that the state should be run like a business, i.e. with a CEO at its head and no democratic mechanisms.
Yarvin has always taken pains to express in public his belief that this change can be done peacefully.
And, you know, we're not, he thinks we're not already living, we're already not living in a democracy, so there's no reason this has to be painful.
But a study of his writing over the years makes it clear that not only is he open to violence, but enthusiastic about it.
And this brings me to one of the uglier parts of our story.
In 2011, a Nazi named Anders Breivik shot up a summer camp hosted by the Workers' Youth League, a left-wing political organization in Norway.
Brevek, who considers himself a member of the Knights Templar acting to defend his faith and race from evil communists, shot and killed or bombed 77 people.
Jarvin wrote about this as well, arguing that terrorism was a legitimate tactic and that Nazi terror had been legitimate because it worked.
For the baffler, Corey Payne summarizes, quote, Brevek's killing spree, which targeted young Norwegian leftists, was illegitimate because it was insufficient to free Norway from Euro-communism.
After all, he only killed 77 people.
We can note the only thing he didn't screw up.
At least he shot communists, not Muslims.
He gored the matador and not the cape.
Yarvin wrote on July 23rd, 2011, one day after the terror in Oslo.
So that is, I mean, we've gone now from a guy who is just sort of like preaching his idiosyncratic political system to a guy who is being like, he didn't kill enough kids for it to matter, right?
Like this is, you know, it's important to not to lean into the fact that like, this is not just a guy whose politics would lead to bad directions.
This is a pretty vile person.
Where is he writing this?
On his blog, Unqualified Reservations.
Which is just publicly available blog.
Yeah.
Not he's not like in the dark recesses of 4chan.
No, no, no, no.
This is a publicly available blog.
Now, it's not, it's not, it's very popular with a certain subset of the world.
And he's writing under a pseudonym.
So people don't know his real name in 2011, right?
Now, the pseudonym could mean that there's some measure of trolling going on, but not, but, but this is, there's no, there's no, there's no kind of like winky irony.
I mean, this is some of the most remotely humorous at an attempt.
It is some of the most like wretched, awful, and heart-wrenching failed attempt humor.
But But if, again, like there's no version in which as using a pseudonym, he's being like, I can't even think of it.
No, no, this is this is very much not him fucking around.
Like this is, because I mean, you can tell for a degree, like the, like talking about grinding up people for biodiesel.
I've seen some articles where people mistake that for a serious position.
If you read it in context, he's clearly like joking, right?
Like it's thrown out as a joke.
This essay is him talking about like why the Brevek attack was bad.
And it's bad not because he killed all those people, but because it's not big enough to destroy the left, right?
Like that's that's very much the take that he has on this, which is not really, he's not being satirical.
He's not that, you know, it would be good to be satirical about this, but that's not really what he's doing.
And this is this kind of stuff.
Like part of why people don't catch on to this more often about Yarvin when they write about him for like mainstream news sources is that he writes so much.
Like to catch this stuff, like I wouldn't have caught all of this stuff if I had just been going, I wouldn't have had time to read all of his archive.
Thankfully, guys like Corey Pine did a lot of that work.
And so people have been collecting kind of like the worst hits of Curtis Yarvin for a while now.
But it's not immediately easy for people to do.
And it gets missed by the people who aren't really like big fans of his a lot of the time, right?
Because there's just so much there.
And he writes, he's got kind of loggerhea, right?
Diarrhea of the mouth a bit.
He's very wordy.
So around the same time as he's writing his articles about the Utoya shooting, Yarvin is also pushing an acronym out in his writing to the people who are like built this kind of like political circle around him, which is kind of liberally sprinkled with Peter Thiel dollars.
And the acronym that he starts pushing is RAGE, which means retire all government employees.
And this is a term that he's come to for like this policy plan that he starts pushing among the young conservatives following him, that we need to get a president who is our kind of guy in office and have him forcibly retire the entire like professional cast of the government and replace them with our people, with people who think, and that's how we shift.
2025.
Yes, yes, yes, exactly.
That is, and this is something he is pushing in the early aughts, right?
Like, yes.
And to be honest, a lot of Project 2025 is people cribbing from Yarvin.
And it's because it's people who were influenced by him or influenced by people who were influenced by him, right?
But a lot of this intellectually starts with him, you know?
Obviously, he's not the only guy thinking about stuff like this, but he's putting it out in a form that is like a cohesive ideology.
So in the early years, and we're talking kind of the mid-aughts around like 2011 up through 2014, his adherents are mostly other tech industry creatures.
And one of these people is someone named Justine Tunney.
Justine started out as someone who was like more progressive.
She was an Occupy activist back during, you know, Occupy, and she gets hired as a Google engineer.
In March of 2014, Justine published a petition on the White House website demanding a national referendum on three points.
Number one, retire all government employees.
Number two, transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.
And number three, appoint Google CEO Eric Schmidt, CEO of America.
Now, this is a very silly idea.
For one thing, who looking at Google today thinks Eric Schmidt should run the country?
But in defense of this, Tunney wrote, it's time for the U.S. regime to politely take its exit from history and do what's best for America.
The tech industry can offer us good governance and prevent further American decline.
Now, part of why I think Tunny is an interesting case study and like followers of Moldbug, because she tells people on Twitter who are questioning her about this petition she's put up that they need to read Minch's Moldbug.
Tunny is interesting because she doesn't come out of the traditional right.
She's a transgender woman who had billed herself as an anarchist earlier in her ideological life prior to finding Moldbug's writing.
And so this arc she takes from an economic justice advocate to tech industry monarchist shows how seductive a lot of intelligent people found Yarvin.
And the fact that people like Tunney, who don't come out of where you would expect someone to wind up believing these far-right ideas, get enraptured by Yarvin's writing is part of why he starts to get this reputation for almost being this kind of like mental sorcerer, someone whose work has this almost like Lovecraftian pull in twisting people's beliefs and ideals.
And that's very much the reputation that he starts to pick up in like the aughts.
There's a philosopher, kind of a reactionary philosopher named Nick Land, who's a fan of Yarvin's writing, who gives it the nickname the Dark Enlightenment, right?
That's the term that he comes up with to refer to these kind of neoreactionary, anti-democratic monarchist policies.
And it's written that way because supposedly once you read Yarvin's arguments for why democracy can't work and like this sort of authoritarian system is better, it's like this through the looking glass breaking moment.
I've taken the red pill and I can never go back, right?
Boy, that's really endowing this guy and these writings with a lot of magical power in a very absurd way.
It is.
And it takes them out of the realm of like intellectual exploration and dialogue and idea sharing and into this like truly like conspiratorial like, come into the fold, put on your dark cloak and join the dark enlightenment.
Yeah.
And that's what Moldbug wants, right?
That's good branding for you.
If you're this guy, that's certainly how you want to be seen.
Okay.
I think that's not really accurate to what's happening to Tunny or to what's happening to most of the people following them.
In part because I have a degree of like a professional understanding from my former career writing and analyzing terrorist groups of how people get radicalized, right?
And a thing that gets missed a lot, and scholar Scott Atron was kind of the guy who I started reading, who wrote about this a lot, but about how people get radicalized.
It always happens, nearly always, in communities, right?
Even if it's not a physical community, if it's online, people don't generally get brought into radical belief systems or extremist politics on their own.
They get brought in in part because their circle of friends, the people they respect and think are cool, get drawn into it, right?
And I think that's what's happening to Tunny.
And I think that's a lot of the power that Moldbug's writing has is that he is telling this Silicon Valley set of people who got a lot of money very quickly when they were young and got kind of lost their minds in their belief about their own genius.
He's telling them what they want to hear, that they should run things.
They start sharing his stuff with each other.
They start talking like him because of the way he writes.
And it becomes like the cool thing within a certain set in Silicon Valley to be into Moldbug, right?
And that's a lot of the appeal, right?
It's not that his writing has some sort of like magical mind-warping effect.
It's that this community of people that a lot of folks, especially like newer folks coming into the tech who want to be, you know, get founder money, who want to be part of this like in crowd, they all like, it's the cool thing to be talking about, to believe in, right?
Like that's, I think, where a lot of the power that he initially has comes from.
And I think that's always the case.
If you want to look at like why a lot of people joined ISIS, a lot of these young communities, it's because ISIS was cool, right?
To a lot of these young people, the way that they talked, the slang they used, the media they put out, communities of people got radicalized in part because it was attractive in that way to them, right?
It's not like a mind virus.
It's kind of the same way fads and trends always work, right?
This is the way that like any fad takes hold, you know, it's just a much darker example of that.
But that is how radicalization tends to occur.
And I think that's what's happening with Moldbug's writing.
Yeah, it's interesting that the you're saying Tanny, Tanny is her name, right?
Yes, Justine Tunny.
Tunney was sort of brought in, even just talking sort of more generally about radicalization, that it's often the product of a community.
What about the Yarvins?
Like, do you think that that was, are they the outlier, the kind of like the special beacons of, or did he come from that youth community that, you know, from his youth?
I think that's a great question, but I do think if you look at kind of his background, you see the community he was radicalized in, right?
When he starts working for the tech industry, when he, when he's, you know, in the internet in the mid-90s, he starts talking to these guys who are these big Austrian school advocates who are, you know, he admires.
These are generally men who are a bit older than him, who are more accomplished in their careers.
And they're telling him, oh, you should read, you know, Hans Hermann Hoppe.
You should read Ludwig von Mies.
You should read Thomas Carlisle.
You should read Marie Rothbard, right?
Yarvin Enters Mainstream Politics00:09:19
And he reads these guys and he takes their thinking seriously in part because people he respects and thinks are cool are telling him to, right?
So I do think it's a version of the same process, right?
In part because that's just how human beings adopt ideas, right?
Like it's the, if you're, you know, I know people who are like evangelical Christians, right?
And there's a couple of different attitudes towards how you should evangelize.
But the one that people I think are generally of goodwill have is that like, well, if you're a really good and admirable person, people will find, will be interested in like what you believe.
And that's the best way to proselytize, right?
By just actually like being kind of rad.
And that's how I found like when I got into radical politics, it was because I ran into a bunch of like anarchists who were on a regular basis going out and feeding homeless people.
And I thought that was dope.
And that got me interested in what other things do these people believe?
Because I thought they were cool, right?
Like that is how, I think it's just like mostly how people work, right?
But it's in the interest of a guy like Yarvin to make it feel like his writing has this like love crafty and power to enrapture and warp minds.
Anyway, cool people.
The world's all just high school, right?
Like, oh, yeah.
So Tunney is, you know, a good example of these kind of early adherents to moldbug, who are mostly young, disaffected engineers, software engineers, tech industry people.
And when Yarvin kind of, part of where this sort of dark enlightenment term takes off is that in around 2013, 2014, when mainstream news starts writing about him, the most attractive angle to take with this guy is not, here is a trend in a certain subset of like Silicon Valley tech people.
Let's look at the reasons why this trend might be popular.
It's this dark enlightenment guy whose work has this like dangerous rapture.
Like the media helps create the myth of Yarvin and he manipulates it effectively.
And I think this is part of why, you know, he this reinforces his beliefs to an extent about like how bad the cathedral is, these like media organizations that like, wow, it's so easy for me to manipulate them.
Right.
So yeah, anyway, that's kind of what's happening in the late aughts with this guy.
So one of the people who is going to come to be sort of a follower of him in this like kind of later period after he starts to achieve more prominence is JD Vance.
And it's because Moldbug's writing is really appealing to these people who got a lot of money and power very quickly, often because they were either in like venture capital, because they were in the tech industry or something.
And so they have all this wealth, but they don't come out of like, they don't come out of academia.
They don't have any sort of like place in the traditional like media hierarchy that demands respect, right?
You may have a lot of money, but like, why should I care what some software engineer about Google says about politics or whatever, right?
Why should I care about what some like finance dude who was really good at like gambling on the housing market has to say about politics just because you have a bunch of money?
And that's where Vance comes out of.
You know, he's one of these guys who's got like a background in private equity.
And he's one of these guys who is kind of like angry that that doesn't automatically afford him the respect of like what he considers to be an elite in society.
Another one of the proponents of Yarvin's thinking about particularly this retire all government employees thing is Blake Masters, who's a twice-failed Arizona congressional candidate and another Peter Thiel protege, right?
In an interview with Vanity Fair before the first of his failed campaigns, Masters was asked how he would drain the swamp in practice if he was like brought into Congress.
And he responded, one of my friends has this acronym he calls Rage, Retire All Government Employees.
And he was referring to Yarvin.
He and Yarvin are friends just like Vance and Yarvin, you know, go to a lot of the same parties and whatnot.
Like these are all guys who are not just close ideologically, but like are in the same physical spaces a lot of the time talking with each other.
That's an important aspect of this that's that's new.
So that this isn't just a kind of like, hey, I read your stuff and or I read this guy's stuff and I think it's compelling and I'm, I'd like to crib some ideas from this.
It's more, it's also that they're hanging out.
Yes.
Smoozing.
And that really starts, we'll talk about this in a little bit, but once Yarvin gets kind of doxxed, right?
So people in 2014, I think it is, TechCrunch publishes what his actual name is.
And instead of like, there's this period of time where there's some backlash against him, but mostly what it does is kind of elevate him.
Like he's not hiding behind a pseudonym anymore, but now he's free to be a public figure in more of a way.
And so he starts publicly showing up at these like parties and events where guys like JD Vance and Blake Masters are in attendance, where like people who are making inroads into the actual like political strata of the right are in attendance.
And that's a thing that's increasingly happening like once we kind of hit the Trump era.
And yeah, it's kind of important.
The best example of the degree to which Yarvin's thoughts and policies have entered mainstream politics is rage, is this idea that we need to like bring in a guy who's going to fire everyone in the government and replace it with our people.
This is the kind of thing that, like, not only is this something that guys like Masters and Vance are talking about, Trump tried to do this already in 2020.
At the end of his term, he sought to reclassify thousands and thousands of federal employees in order to strip them of job protections and make them at-will employees that he could fire.
This was reversed under Biden, but it is the kind of thing that Trump could bring back and plans to bring back if he wins again, because he has promised that if he takes office again in 2025, one of the first things he's going to do is fire thousands of quote-unquote crooked government employees.
Trump has repeatedly disavowed Project 2025 because it's become kind of a toxic thing politically for him.
But he has promised that when he takes office, he's going to like, you know, clean house within the federal government and put his own people in there.
And this is very in line with what Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts told the New York Times he hoped a second Trump term would bring.
Quote, people will lose their jobs.
Hopefully their lives are able to flourish in spite of that.
Buildings will be shut down.
Hopefully they can be repurposed for private industry.
And that's Kevin Roberts is not a guy who's ever said Curtis Yarvin's name that I can find, but that's Mincius Moldbug, right?
Like that's exactly what he has been talking about for years.
Would you draw a direct line from Minchus to these positions?
I mean, I know that's a good name, but are you do you feel very, very confident that Minchus Moldbug is the source of these ideas or was this sort of a general sentiment that Minchus was reflecting among like a certain set?
I think it's best to think about it like a garden, right?
And what Minchus did was kind of spread fertilizer over that garden that made a climate where a lot of these ideas, many of which do come kind of directly from his writing, but he also helped kind of set the ideological climate on the far right.
And as the far right took over kind of the center-right Republican Party, it brought a lot of these moldbug-in ideas with it, which is part of why guys like Peter Thiel, who are anti-democratic activists and use a lot of their money to that end, have funded Yarvin.
They see him as useful for that sort of thing, right?
And a lot of these guys who have gone on to work at the Heritage Foundation, you know, in the early 2000s, in 2008, 9, 10, 11, were like kids in high school and college passing around Minchius Moldbug tracts, right?
Like that's kind of how this has worked.
So I would see him as he really prepared an environment for these kind of politics to grow.
And I think there is a very direct line between him and a lot of what you see with Project 2025, a lot of the stuff, even though Trump certainly has never read one of these guys' articles.
He's surrounded by people who are telling him and who have ideas about how absolute power can be attained that are based on things Moldbug has written, you know?
I think that that's absolutely something I'm confident arguing and confident in part because there's so many financial ties and direct personal ties between him and people around Trump, you know?
So I know that's dark.
So let's just go to ads and try not to think about it for a second.
Think about these products for a minute.
The Secret Victim Flat Down00:05:32
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
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And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
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You know I.
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Obama Quotes and Internet Debates00:14:58
So one of the things I find interesting about Yarvin is there's this degree of insecurity to some of his writing, where he definitely is a monarchist, and he's definitely someone who feels a sense of nostalgia to some of these old absolute monarchies, but he doesn't want to get lumped in with the guys who are like unironically stands of the czar or whatever and think that like, oh, if only we could bring the Romanovs back to power in Russia, everything would be better.
Yarvin isn't a monarchist for shallow reasons, right?
He doesn't want to be seen as someone who like advocates this because he's nostalgic.
He wants to be seen as someone who has run the numbers and concluded that there's no alternative to this system.
And so whenever he makes his arguments for why things should be this way, he liberally sprinkles them with citations.
Now, his citations are a bunch of old reactionaries who had like argued against kings and emperors giving up any power back in like the 1850s and the like.
But he has this like kind of belief that any sort of quote from an old dead guy is a primary source that is something like people should take more seriously when they're like trying to make their minds up about how the world works.
He has this kind of, he's an autodidact in that he's someone who is self-taught through reading a bunch of books about the things he likes.
And he's convinced that this is sort of like a more ideologically rigorous thing than what people do in academia, right?
And kind of the key thing in academia is that if you have ideas or theories or if you're making arguments, you have to expose them to other people and debate and have them like torn down.
And, you know, that's like a key part of the way the academic process works.
He's only ever existed inside his own head.
And so you get stuff like this 2008 blog post titled An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives, where he writes this about primary sources.
The neat thing about primary sources is that often it only takes one to prove your point.
If you find the theory of relativity mentioned in ancient Greek documents and you know the documents are authentic, you know that the ancient Greeks discovered relativity.
How?
Why?
It doesn't matter.
Your understanding of ancient Greece needs to include Greek relativity.
Now, that's a non-sequitur, because like, if you were to find an ancient Greek write about the theory of relativity, that alone wouldn't necessarily alter your understanding of ancient Greece because there's a lot of other questions, like, did anyone else come across this writing at the time?
Was this idea disseminated?
Was it adopted on any kind of scale into the dominant theoretical models of the time?
Or was it one crank's weird belief that he laid out in an old letter to a friend, right?
The fact that you might find something that sounds like an argument about relativity in an ancient Greek document doesn't necessarily change your understanding of ancient Greece in a meaningful way, right?
The fact that you could cite that primary source wouldn't be enough to say the ancient Greeks had an understanding of relativity, because you don't know that it wasn't just one guy who was viewed widely as a crank, right?
And a good example of this kind of thing from real world history, because he's just making up fake history there, because again, there's not really a good argument to be made.
But I will make an interesting argument.
And it's about something called the aliophile, which was an ancient steam engine that was first described by Hero of Alexandria in the first century AD.
It was actually technically a steam turbine, but it was a precursor to a steam engine that existed in ancient Rome, right?
Now, that's a cool bit of history, but does that mean that the Romans had steam engines and the ability to make trains?
No, because this was only ever used as like a party trick.
Like a couple of prototypes were made and they were like made to impress people at like gatherings for rich people.
No one ever did anything with it.
So the fact that technically there was the knowledge to make a steam engine in ancient Rome doesn't change your understanding of ancient Rome because they still didn't have steam power, right?
Yeah.
It's like somebody showing off their Aston Martin.
Like not everybody had Aston Martins or has Aston Martins.
Some rich guy is like, check it out.
Yeah.
And then you were to say that like, well, that this meant that the Aston Martin was the car of the 21st century.
Like, no, like a couple hundred people had them or whatever.
I would say, I mean, I would say that he has a point that depending on the assertion by a primary source.
Sure.
It can have like pretty powerful value in an historical context.
Oh, absolutely.
But you also, you have to take into account, I think part of it is that he's talking about this in like internet debate terms, where like someone makes an argument and you throw in a quote from a source and like, it's probably done because most people don't have the time or the breadth of knowledge to really argue these things in detail, as opposed to like in academia, part of what you would be trying to do is like, not just here's what one source said about this, but like.
You want it to be irrefutable.
Yeah.
Here's the balance of sources.
Like we can do a survey of all of these different people from the time writing about this moment.
And we found you're going to find conflict, right?
Because, you know, if you have like 10 people who are all present at the same shooting or car crash or whatever, you're going to get 10 slightly different accounts, right?
Those are all primary sources.
A primary source does not mean something is right.
It just means it's from someone who was there, you know?
But that's not how Moldbug thinks about it, because he very much has this, he thinks about these old dead reactionary writers the way he wants to be thought about, right?
Which is as someone who is like more or less ideologically unimpeachable, right?
Because they're his favorite writers.
And so I think it behooves us to talk about probably his favorite of these old dead reactionaries, because it tells us a lot about some of the things that Yarvin believes.
And this is who we've talked.
We talked about this guy in part one, Thomas Carlyle.
Now, Carlyle is writing in, you know, the mid-1800s.
He's a Scottish writer who, you know, one of the things he wrote about, he was an early writer kind of talking about the plight of the working class under industrialization.
So there's a degree of what he was writing about that I think was fairly valid, but he was also a massive bigot.
And for kind of an overview of that, I found a write-up by the Glasgow Museum of Slavery aptly titled Thomas Carlyle Historian, Writer, Racist, that describes an essay Carlyle wrote.
Quote, Carlyle complained that emancipated black people in the West Indies were lazy, working little but eating well, benefiting from the favorable climate and abundance of tropical fruit, while sugar cane on British plantations rotted due to lack of labor.
In the context of recession and unemployment back in Britain and the potato famines in Ireland, this was an emotive accusation.
It was also blatantly untrue, according to figures produced by the Anti-Slavery Society in 1847 to 49, which showed that sugar production had in fact gone up.
However, the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire in 1833 had created a labor problem that had cut into profit margins, exacerbated in 1846 when the Sugar Duties Act ended subsidies for British plantation owners.
And this is the kind of thing, because you know, the Glasgow Museum of Slavery is trying to view things from an academic and an accurate standpoint, they're able to look at what Carlisle said and what he said that was like demonstrably not just racist, but like we can argue completely factually wrong about like the economics of the system that he was arguing in favor of.
Moldbug can't really engage in a lot of these criticisms of Carlisle because the whole reason Carlisle was wrong was that plantation owners, this natural aristocracy, were lazy, corrupt, and incompetent.
And that flies in the face of Yarvin's belief system.
So instead, when Curtis Yarvin writes an essay on Thomas Carlyle, he writes that slavery is quote, a natural human relationship, like that of patron and client, and enthuses that Carlisle is the one writer in English whose name can be uttered with Shakespeare's.
Like this guy whose big claim to fame is his essay on why slavery is good and natural, is just as brilliant a thinker as William Shakespeare.
Like, again, one idea of kind of how vile this guy is.
How well was it written?
I mean, it's okay.
Is it a niambic?
Yeah, it's not, it's no, no, it's, it's definitely non-niambic pentem.
It's not even a dactylic hexameter, you know?
Like, come on.
Um, can we back up for one second?
Was there anything said in this open letter to open-minded progressives that would change a progressive's mind?
Or like, what was the gist?
What was the log line of that?
Because you got into a quote, but I was just fascinated by this open letter.
Yeah, it's largely a series of art.
It's largely trying to convince people that these sort of ideas of democracy and human progress that are kind of inherent to the progressive tradition, right?
Of this like gradual march of progress in terms of like pushing for more rights and more justice in society is kind of fundamentally fallacious and flawed, right?
That like it, none of this actually works, right?
That it only increases it only creates new tyrannies.
That's his argument.
It's this whole your you advocating for your own rights is really you restricting my rights, you know, like that's that's kind of the gist of the argument that he's making there.
Wow, that's in 14 chapters.
Everything he says takes too long.
Also, slavery Slavery is cool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, slavery is a natural relationship, right?
Based, because again, he believes that like, it can't just be that one group of people were at one time able to exert more violence than another group of people.
And so they took them into their possession, right?
Because that makes it sound awful.
It's got to be that, like, no, this group of people are naturally inclined to rule and this other group are naturally inclined to be ruled.
To serve.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So when it comes to talking about Yarvin as this sort of dark enlightenment figure, this guy who's able to enrapture people's minds with this almost magic quality of his prose, I want to kind of,
I think we've talked a little bit about why I don't think that's accurate to how his work was appealing to people, but I want to, I want to really puncture that myth by pointing out one of the examples where he was very much in line with kind of like the gutter of the right wing and not at all like this sort of more intellectual side that he tries to present himself as sometimes, like in articles like that open letter to progressives.
In 2008, he published a blog post titled, Did Barack Obama Go to Columbia?
And this is written by Yarvin as a serious investigation into whether or not Barack Obama had faked his attendance at Columbia College.
And the evidence Yarvin had that Obama had faked his attendance was that several other Columbia grads from the same year said they didn't know him, right?
This was a huge thing on like the right at this time.
You would get like Trump and stuff, you know, retweeting this way back in the day that like, well, a bunch of guys who went to Columbia didn't know Barack Obama.
Like this man came out of nowhere.
He must have faked his attendance at this college.
And here's what Yarvin writes about it.
You can get a hint at his like sparkling prose.
So let me ask anyone who cares to comment below, how exactly do we, the American people, Lord help us, know that Barack Obama attended Columbia?
Or more precisely, why should we assume on the basis of the evidence we have that he did?
Do we seriously believe it is possible for a future president to be unremembered at his alma mater?
Now, the very next paragraph in that article is, what we know is that a Columbia spokesman has confirmed that Obama attended Columbia.
And like, I would say, well, that's part of how you find out, right?
Is you ask the school, did this guy attend?
As opposed to ask random people who happen to go to a school with thousands of folks, did you know this guy?
Like, it's just such like the logical line there is so it's very much a guy picking the reality he wants to have, right?
Which is that Barack Obama is a fraud, right?
He's a fraud and he faked his attendance at Columbia.
He wants to believe that.
He finds a couple of other Columbia grads who don't like Obama and say, well, I never knew him.
And that's the only facts that Yarvin needs here.
As opposed to like, well, is there any actual evidence that he attended?
And it turns out that is.
And like 30 seconds of Googling, I found an article by a writer in the Jewish Journal who attended Columbia at the same time as Obama.
And also, like all of these guys who were giving interviews to right-wing papers in 2008, didn't remember Barack Obama because it's a big school.
But this guy dug through a bunch of his old graduation papers and found a graduation program that lists Barack Obama by name because he went to Columbia University.
This was work people were, people pointed this out at the time.
There's pictures of him there.
He's on all sorts of documents.
He did know people.
It was just this like fever dream that spread through the right.
And the same way this like myth about Haitians eating people's pets in Springfield, Ohio is spreading right now.
It's deliberate disinformation.
And it's disinformation that is believed by people who need an explanation for like how a guy like Obama, who they don't think should be able to do the things that Obama did, was able to do it, right?
Are racists, right?
Who need a reason why how Barack Obama became the president?
That isn't, well, he's the most charismatic man in American politics, right?
He was really good at elections.
He was really good at running a campaign.
That's not a thing that works with their belief system.
So Yarvin has to buy into these fantasies in order to accept this reality because it just doesn't correlate with his racism.
And in this, he's just like, I mean, Donald Trump was doing all this shit back at the same time.
He was like a birther, right?
Like this is not any intellectually higher up than birtherism.
But, you know, I think it's kind of important to look at this ugly stuff because it contrasts to this dark Enlightenment puppet master view of Yarvin and paints a picture as a guy who is not just writing stuff that is influential, but is also going along with the flow and getting caught up in conspiracy theories and bullshit the same way anyone else in that space is, right?
He's not special and he's not a hyper genius.
Yeah.
Corporate Road to CEO Kings00:08:05
Anyway.
Yeah.
That's dumb.
I mean, yeah, I think it's dumb.
Yeah.
I think people don't catch it because he, his articles are always, he like throws in Latin quotes and like references and quotes from like these old, you know, he's got a great backlog of like witticisms by different historical thinkers.
I would describe his writing style as like if Frasier were written by a fascist, right?
Like that's how Curtis Yarvin writes.
But it very much is kind of just to paper over the fact that he's the same kind of blowhard as like Rush Limbaugh, right?
How does this comport with the right's sort of fetishization of the Constitution?
Well, I'll be clear, Yarvin does not fetishize the Constitution.
I think he like he views it, I think, as pretty clearly a misstep, right?
Because it hands all of this power over to groups that should not, like, or at least he believes, I think if you were to go back, he would argue that like the basic ideas behind a lot of the founders, which is that we should have this republic that is governed by elites, this like natural elite aristocracy.
Like Jefferson believed in this kind of natural aristocracy of intelligent white men, right?
That is pretty close to what Moldbug believes about the world.
But obviously, as the franchise was extended to larger and larger chunks of people, as slavery was ended, as we've repeatedly had these movements towards social justice and towards bringing more people in to being able to have a voice in the system, that like that, the fact that that was allowable at all was a terrible flaw in the Constitution as written, right?
The fact that it included the potential for democratic change was kind of its fundamental fatal failure.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know the nature of this, of Yarvin's relationship or friendship or whatever you want to call it with JD Vance.
But it's safe to say, I think a lot of people on the right would agree that Yarvin is taking some seriously un-American views here, espousing some very un-American views.
Un-American just meaning like.
Oh, yeah.
And so, and yet we have a vice presidential candidate who's presumably at least hobnobbing.
I don't know if they're friends.
I don't know if I don't know if JD Vance would say Yarvin.
Associates.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Associates.
Has JD Vance been asked about Yarvin?
Has he had any sort of public expression of?
Yeah, I mean, he's been, there was actually a really good, I think it was a New Yorker article from about two years ago, right before his Senate run, where he was like at a conference with Yarvin and like at a party with him and talking, like, you know, was questioned, you know, in, or the writer of that article talked with him in part about like some of Yarvin's ideas, like this retire all government employees thing.
Like he's, he's, he has been like publicly associated with him.
I think the kind of the one of the more interesting points is that like Yarvin spent the 2016 election at Peter Thiel's house, like watching the returns.
Like he's he's gotten increasingly sort of like publicly plugged into this set of people who have direct connections with power brokers on the right.
And you're right.
One of the interesting things about him is that he's not really directly, he's never become famous in the same way that like a guy like JD Vance has, right?
Because he is too toxic to like bring out and kind of publicly embrace all of his ideas.
Yes, yes.
But you will get people who will talk about stuff like, you know, Blake Masters and JD Vance are comfortable talking about rage, right?
Or this idea that really comes out of Moldbug's writing.
And so it's, it's, he, he remains kind of toxic enough that you don't want to bring him out too publicly, but he's also popular enough that it part of like how you signal to other people who are on this chunk of the right that like you're one of them is you you kind of signpost that you believe a lot of the same things that he believes, right?
And you, you, like you show up at the same events at the same kind of like, you know, like conferences and whatnot where he gives speeches.
These are kind of like you can see the, it's not very hard to draw the connections between these people, but Yarvin's not a face man, right?
He's never going to run for office.
And you certainly don't want him like arguing about like his neo-monarchist views on Fox News, right?
That's still a little bit too extreme.
But if you say we need a strong executive leader who's going to run the country like a CEO and fire all of these unelected bureaucrats and replace them with like people who are going to fight for quote-unquote liberty, right?
And we need to punish all of our political opponents.
We need to like lock up members of the lying news media.
Now, all of these are things that you will get a lot of buy-in on on the Trumpist right, right?
This is all stuff that Trump himself talks about a lot.
And it's the kind of thing people wonder: how have we gone so far down this road seemingly so quickly?
And it's because it didn't all start with Donald Trump, right?
People were kind of tilling the ideological soil for years before that point.
And like one of those guys is Curtis Yarvin, and he's one of the most influential ones of those guys.
Has Yarvin taken a position on Trump publicly?
I mean, yeah, he, again, he understands like there's a degree of like toxicity to his endorsement.
But he watched the election at Peter Thiel's house and was like very excited that Trump had won.
So like he is essentially he has come out being like, this is, I think, about as close to the kind of guy we're going to get to start the process of turning the country in the direction that I want.
Right.
Now, he's not a guy who wants the entirety of the United States run by one dude.
He seeks this kind of political devolution into these competing corporate city-states.
But he sees Trump as like a step on that road.
This is a guy who will centralize power, who will get these bureaucrats out, who will destroy, you know, the left as an organized political force.
And that will allow these other kind of interests, these corporate interests to kind of take and centralize more power themselves as kind of the state gets whittled down and we can devolve power to what are effectively like corporate warlords, right?
That's kind of the end result of his system.
You can see it in, there's this group of guys on Silicon Valley in Silicon Valley right now who are trying to start their own city backed by like Silicon Valley VC money.
Yep, I read it.
Yeah, yeah.
And they've talked a lot about they've given up on that, right?
No, no, no, no.
That is still very much an effort being made.
It's, and there's been like efforts to kind of take over local San Francisco politics.
And there's a lot of moldbug associated guys in that as well.
Like one of the lead figures there is a big fan of his writing who has been kind of pushing this idea as, again, a step on the road to these corporate-controlled city-states, right?
This is obviously like part of the process of devolving any kind of accountable state power into the control of what are effectively like CEO kings, right?
And yeah, that's, that's, that's, uh, that's kind of where we're going here.
Um, we all get to be Twitters.
Yeah, everything gets to be run like Twitter.
Isn't that exciting?
We get to live in a Twitter.
Living Exclusively on Twitter Wishes00:02:48
Yeah, don't you want to live in Twitter?
No.
I wish I could just be a tweet that lived in Twitter.
Yeah, exclusively.
Yeah.
It seems like such a nice place.
Speaking of nice places, our sponsors, they'll create a nice little place for your ears to live for like three minutes, however long an ad break is.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
City Hall Scream Shots Mystery00:02:48
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Olespi and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
Rhodesia Smith Ideological Violence00:09:39
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So I really debated with myself, like, how much do we get into of like all of the different terrible things he said, like all of each of the different like beliefs Yarvin has espoused.
And this is a guy who's been writing thousands of words a week on the internet for years.
So there's like, there's too much there for us to give a comprehensive look into the man.
Completely summarize all of his writing.
Right.
I mean, there's enough of it out there that it can do, like, it can give you a decent amount on Moldbug, although you're going to miss stuff like, you know, some of this you have to know a little bit more about the far right in order to catch references he makes.
Like I was reading one essay of his where he talks about Rhodesia.
Do you know what Rhodesia was?
The source of those unusual ridge-backed dogs?
It is the source of those dogs.
It was also a white ethno-state in Africa that was like initially started out as a colony of the UK.
They refused to give up like the power of the white minority, which was like 3% of the country and had essentially total electoral power.
They became like a pariah.
This is like during like the 1970s.
A lot of this is happening and wound up fighting a very long war with like the vast majority of the country in order to like try and maintain the state of white minority rule.
It was a very brutal period of time.
This bush war they executed was where a lot of like early insurgent tactics were carried out.
And it was carried out in the name of keeping white people in charge of this massive population of black people who had effectively no power.
And Rhodesia was close to the ideal state for Moldbug.
I found an article of his where he writes about Ian Smith, who was like the guy who was leading Rhodesia during its like quote-unquote war for liberation.
And he writes because Smith died a few years back and Moldbug like wrote this elegy to him that opened with the words, the last great Englishman is dead and fuck who disagrees.
And it's basically this piece about how like Smith was the last man who was brave enough to fight for what we all know is the only kind of state that can work, which is one in which a natural biological elite rules over the masses who are unfit to have any sort of power.
It ends on these lines, which I think are kind of telling to his ideology.
And one day we will either be hacked to death in our own beds or some similar or nasty thing.
Or Ian Smith or Enoch Powell and even our own tailgunner Joe will have another life in bronze.
But do you know us?
I'm not sure.
We have been introduced.
We are the neo-McCarthyists.
Our motto, this time we'll finish the job.
And so what he's saying there is that like Smith is like Joe McCarthy.
He's one of these guys who embodies the violence of the politics that we're advocates of, right?
And again, he's never going to come out and say, I think we should kill all the people who disagree with me, but he will harken back to these figures and say, these are my kind of ideological heroes.
And the movement that I am seeking to incite is going to finish the job.
It's going to kill all the communists.
It's going to win where Rhodesia lost, right?
Like, it's not as direct as saying, you know, I'm a white nationalist.
And in fact, he will never admit to being a white nationalist.
But what is the conclusion when you're talking about the failure of Rhodesia as being a tragedy other than, well, you're someone who supports white nationalists, right?
You can see kind of like the violence inherent in what he's pushing for there.
In that same essay, he praises the novel The Camp of the Saints, which is a racist book about migrants from India flooding Europe and destroying civilization, which is Steve Bannon's favorite book.
And Steve Bannon is another influential.
Yeah, it's great replacement stuff, right?
Bannon is a big fan of Curtis Yarvin.
Again, all of these people are connected and they're all fans of each other.
Like the kind of like ideological simpatico here is a crucial part of the story.
Now, in the last few years, as he's gained more of an influence online, Yarvin has grown a bigger head.
He started referring to himself as the Sith Lord of the modern anti-democratic right because he is a big nerd.
He's also, he's the guy who brought the term red pill into right-wing politics, like taking it from the Matrix.
Yeah, that's cool, huh?
Yeah, yeah.
And he's, you know, it's interesting because like, obviously, The Matrix was a movie written by two trans women in not at all about right-wing politics, right?
The Matrix is sort of a great allegory for his beliefs.
I do think it is an allegory for his beliefs and like the violence and oppression that they necessitate.
I think he tends to take it as like realizing that democracy is fake and that like all of these social justice movements are inherently like evil, flawed attempts to like destroy the natural aristocracy.
Like that's the matrix, right?
Is people who don't look like him being able to vote, which is much shallower.
Yeah.
The violence inherent in these systems that you're referring to, it does seem to, and I hate to armchair psychoanalyze anybody.
And I'm not equipped to do that.
So this is more of a just sort of.
We always say we hate it, but we always do a little bit of it.
Well, we can't help it, right?
Yeah.
But no, this is just sort of a pontification.
But does it feel to you?
Because it does to me a little bit like to really take these positions seriously and advocate for these things is in its own way a kind of enjoyment of violence or a an act and in that way, almost like a psychopathy, like a like violence is wonderful.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is there anything to be found in Jarvin's writings that laments the that violence is or subjugation or the suffering of any humans is a is an unfortunate side effect of these systems, but necessary?
Or is it just sort of like, no, this, it, that's just an awesome part of it?
It's, it's more like, number one, I think a big thing that he tries to do is minimize the degree to which that's necessary.
But when it does come up, it is this very full-throated embrace of like, well, they're communists, you know, like this is what we have to do.
Like the terrorism of the Nazis was great because it worked, right?
Like, I don't think he's a guy who feels bad at all about the inevitable consequences of his beliefs.
And I certainly don't get that hint from his writing that there's any sort of like real regret there.
Maybe some like signpostings to regret about the unfortunate, you know, necessities that will come about.
But this is, I think you're right on the money.
There's a lot of like violent fantasizing here against this is a guy who spends a lot of time obsessed with the things that annoy him in the world and convinced that like the right solution to those things is a sort of terminal force.
And you get this all over with people who get kind of too wrapped up in like the specifics of their ideology and their anger at its discontents.
You can find like, you know, Maoists and whatnot online who will fantasize about like when our revolution takes over, you know, we're going to put people in re-education camps or whatever.
It's a it's a necessary byproduct of not having enough empathy and spending too much time alone in a room obsessing over how right you are, right?
Is anything that kind of inherently conflicts with that, as the world in all of its complexity will always do, should be solved by the most violence I can bring to bear, right?
And that's why we need to capture the presidency.
A certain solution, which is that's why these guys, that's why their big goal is the presidency, right?
Because the way they see it, and certainly the way the Supreme Court has set it up, getting the presidency gives you access to the greatest store of violence that has ever existed in human history, right?
Like that is what the president has access to, right?
People don't like to talk about it that way, but there's no other real way to view it potentially.
And if you see the president as someone who should have no guardrails, and this is very much what we're going to advocate for is a president that has no restrictions on his power, then what you're looking at is a guy who has the ability to use the most violence ever concentrated in cleansing the world of the people who make it not fit this schema that I've cooked up in my head that I find very attractive.
Yeah.
It's good stuff.
Yiannopoulos Urbit Gamergate Chaos00:15:35
So if you're looking for a writing on, you know, Yarvin to this day, if you're looking at like what people have come to call the strain of thought that he helped ignite, the term you'll come across the most is neoreactionary or NRX, right?
This is kind of how you'll see it written about a lot in like blogs by Bay Area techies.
And this term started to be used more in like 2013, 2014.
I think it is when it really took off.
You had some sort of writing by people like Clint Finley at TechCrunch in 2013 that noted that you were seeing a lot of this thought take off among influential people in big tech.
Finlay wrote, PayPal founder Peter Thiel has voiced similar ideas.
And Pat Dickinson, the former CTO of Business Insider, say he's been influenced by neoreactionary thought.
It may be a small minority worldview, but it's one that I think shines some light on the psyche of contemporary tech culture.
Now, it was through TechCrunch in 2014 that Minches Moldbug was first revealed to be computer scientist Curtis Yarvin.
And it was revealed that Yarvin was working at a startup funded by Peter Thiel's money called Talon.
Now, Tlan was a the name comes from a short story, like a sci-fi short story written by a fellow named Borges in 1940.
And one summary of the story I found from Francis Sang writes that it, quote, describes a secret society, Orbis Tertius, that architects an entirely new world, Talon, by establishing an encyclopedia describing it.
Over time, bits of this fictional world begin to emerge in the real world, consuming it.
And this is kind of how Moldbug thinks of his writing, right?
I am writing the future into being by theorizing it, right?
That's why, like, this company is named after it.
That's why he finds that story so influential.
The kind of process of this is called hyperstition.
It's this process of like taking ideas that exist only in people's heads in fiction and like forcing them into the real world.
It's one of those premises that seems silly until suddenly a guy who might be the vice president starts ranting about how childless women are psychopaths and we need to fire the government so Donald Trump can remake it in his own image.
This is all very like silly seeming until it isn't.
And kind of the scariest thing about Yarvin is that he has, to an extent, been successful in like writing a different world into being.
Like he has, he has had more influence in this than you want to believe.
Kind of the tipping point for Yarvin's influence and culture and for that kind of politics starting to take over the right was 2014.
And it happened appropriately enough on the internet with something called Gamergate.
Oh, there we are.
I was wondering how long it would take for Yiannopoulos to show up.
Gamergate, a lot of the people who are thought leaders in Gamergate, who are like who are some of the early Voices behind that and behind that kind of neo-reactionary swell as it like enters public consciousness are fans of Yarvin's.
One of them is Steve Bannon.
Bannon is a big behind the scenes player in what happens there, as is Milo Yiannopoulos.
And Yiannopoulos is kind of a guy who comes to fame through Gamergate as like making himself into kind of a voice of the movement.
And Yiannopoulos is an adherent of Yarvin's philosophy.
The next year, after Gamergate, 2015, Trump descends his escalator to launch his campaign.
And in short order, the alt-right is a term.
Yeah.
And the alt-right becomes kind of undeniable to anyone, right?
It's not something you can ignore anymore.
And figures like Yiannopoulos and Bannon are major like faces of the movement, while Yarvin remains kind of obscure still.
You know, people who are in the know, who understand where a lot of the ideas guys like Yiannopoulos are spouting in public come from, know that he's a player in the field, but he's kind of obscured and shadowed by the cloaking factor of his very dense, clumsy prose.
Corey Pine at the Baffler is probably the first guy to cohesively suggest that Yarvin's relationship to Peter Thiel and to the folks around him were part of a wider movement towards anti-democratic change.
His work was influential enough to get the New York Times to ask Peter Thiel if he was working to fund a monarchist coup.
And Thiel replied in a cryptic fashion, it was a full-on conspiracy theory.
In truth, there's nobody sitting around plotting the future, though I sometimes think it would be better if people were.
Which is like the most sinister way to reply to that, right?
So 2016 comes along next.
Trump wins the election, and suddenly even normal people who don't spend their free time online looking at fascists on the internet become aware that something is very wrong.
In 2017, BuzzFeed News publishes an expose based on leaked emails between a bunch of members of the alt-right, including Bannon and Yiannopoulos.
And I'm going to quote Corey Pine describing these leaks and from some of the most revealing reveals in that piece.
BuzzFeed reported that Thiel and Yiannopoulos had made plans to meet during the July Republican National Convention, but much of Yiannopoulos' knowledge of Thiel seemed to come secondhand from other right-wing activists, as well as Curtis Yarvin, the blogger who advocates the return of feudalism.
The story then quotes this exchange.
Yarvin told Yiannopoulos that he had been coaching Thiel.
Peter needs guidance on politics for sure, Yiannopoulos responded.
Less than you might think, Yarvin wrote back.
I watched the election at his house.
I think my hangover lasted in this Tuesday.
He's fully enlightened.
He just plays it very carefully.
And, you know, if you're looking for direct connections, it's something that we only really have because of, you know, leaks like that.
But these are not like conspiracy theory connections that we have to draw between people.
Like we have texts between these guys talking about how they're trying to convince moneyed interests of their plans to like end democracy in the United States.
And they've been doing it for a while.
And that's most of what I've got to say about Curtis Yarvin.
Now, I would be doing you a disservice if I didn't end this by talking at least for a little bit about the other side of his professional life.
Because while he's been writing all of this fascist theorizing and whatnot, he has a career as a software developer and a project that represents, he, and he will state, represents like his political dreams, Urbit.
Now, Urbit is like a peer, on paper, it's supposed to be basically a peer-to-peer social networking tool like Mastodon that allows individual users more control over their information and digital life.
And when he talks about Urbit, Yarvin talks about it as like, this is me building in software a representation of my ideal form of government, right?
And he frames it as like something that gives you control over your own life and data, not some central company like Twitter that like can be corrupt and used to bad ends.
And that's complete bullshit, right?
The reality is that Urbit is backed by Peter Thiel money.
And it is an attempt to effectively like build a different kind of social networking infrastructure for the internet that Curtis Yarvin has complete control over, right?
Now, the good news is it hasn't actually like taken off.
This company is largely a failure.
It's generally agreed to be pretty badly coded.
I found a pretty good analysis of it by Francis Seng, who runs a website called Distributed Web of Care, who points out that like while Yarvin tries to frame this as like Mastodon, as like, well, you keep control of your data.
You're in charge of your digital life, not some company.
The way everything is set up is you have these like different nodes and there's a limited number of nodes and most of them are controlled by Yarvin and the Urbit company.
So what he's like really trying to do here is set up like a landlord scam like on the internet, right?
Where he's the big landlord.
And I think this is kind of revealing, not because Urbit's important, but because it shows we've kind of been talking this whole time, how much of this does he really believe?
How much of this is like him kind of dressing it up?
And I think you get the real Curtis Yarvin here, which is not a guy with any real high-minded intellectual desires beyond, I want to be the one in power, right?
Like I want to be the one with the money.
I want to be the big landlord, right?
He doesn't hate Twitter and Facebook because they ruined his old internet.
He hates it because like he's just another guy in all of those systems and he wants to be the king or at least a knight, right?
I think that's kind of like the note to end on is pointing out like underneath it all and underneath all of the like dressing up and intellectualism that he puts on, this is just a guy who's angry that he's not currently the one with all the power, right?
And that's that's really what it's all about.
Whoa.
Sorry.
And I've learned.
Yeah.
I'm not a fan.
Yeah.
That's good to hear.
That's good to hear.
But I do, I do want to read up more and get a sense of his tone and maybe I'd love to hear him speak and get a more better sense of his persona and kind of what that.
Oh, yes.
He's on many podcasts.
How does a bannon reconcile someone openly advocating for the basically just the burning of the Constitution with also being a leader for just like Republican ascendancy?
Like, how does, how do you reconcile those things?
I'm so confused by that.
Unless there's, unless it's, is it a, you know, do you think it, it's a like if we were to say JD Vance gets to be president one day, do you think it's a bait and switch?
Are they like, is it really a, you know, is that Peter Thiel's game to sort of bait and switch the Americans into like, just get him into office and then we're going to make him a dictator?
Or is it is it a thing where someone like JD Vance, who's participating in American democracy as a candidate, is really sort of like, I like some of these ideas.
I like the CEO approach to a presidency, but like I still believe in the Constitution.
Still believe that democracy is our our, our is our bedrock?
I don't think for one thing.
Just based on a lot of stuff that Vance has said on some of these far-right podcasts, I don't believe he believes that democracy is our bedrock.
Um, I I think a lot of what ways these guys will couch it.
Is that saying like well, I believe in a republic, right and and kind of.
What they're hearkening back to is this very classical idea that well, only like property owning men should be able to vote.
Right like sure, there should be right, some voting, but like not, the franchise should certainly be.
And this is something Vance has, um has embraced when he's talked about how like, people without children shouldn't have the same degree of electoral say right, you should have men, if you're the head of a family, you should get to vote, have more votes that basically account for how many kids you have and probably for your wife too right, um?
These are things Vance has talked about on different podcasts.
He's appeared on and, and Bannon has expressed a lot of anti-democratic sentiment.
I think it part of the problem is that when, when these people get confronted by the media, there's this inherent impulse that, like mainstream political reporters have to normalize them um, in a way that I I don't think is that, I think, provides them with cover, right to not just to not talk about them as if they are people who are trying to end democracy, because they, they very much are.
You know, that's not the normal.
That's not the norm uh within, like people who vote for the Republican Party, but when we are talking about guys like Jd Vance and Steve Bannon, uh and uh uh, Steve Miller, you know, Trump's former uh associate, like all of these guys, that is the norm among these people.
And part of what part of how they see Trump as useful and potentially Vance is useful, is not that they're going to get us to this end system that Yarvin theorizes.
And when they, when they take Yarvin's ideas, I don't think most of them want exactly the same kind of system that he does, because he's kind of a kook and right, his system is unworkable and none of them really want to devolve.
Most of them don't want to devolve power right, a guy like Teal may want to devolve some powers so that he can run, you know effectively, his own little city state where he gets to make all of the rules um, but there's a degree of like chaos inherent in the actual thing that Yarvin advocates.
That like makes it unworkable, but they find ideas that he has very useful.
And likewise, I think folks like Yarvin think that a guy like Vance, even if he doesn't back believe everything they believe would be useful because he brings us closer to this kind of a system.
And part of how we would do that is by purging the left, by purging and destroying, like all of these journalists by, by locking up our political opposition, right like that is a big part of it for them is we want to use the violence that the state has access to to destroy the people who don't want the world to be this way.
Right, and there very is this kind of yearning for having a free hand to utilize that violence to crush opposition.
That is key to that's what binds all these two guys together, like as you've stated, And I think this is an important point.
It's not like Steve Bannon like believes to the letter in all of the crazy shit that Yarvin writes about, right?
It's not like JD Vance is like sleeping with a bunch of printouts of unqualified reservations under his bed.
There's some ideas they find useful.
They like the way he messages.
They think it's like this, especially like rage.
They think that's good messaging for this thing that we want to do.
But they're all kind of tied together by we want supreme executive power so that we can wield violence against our enemies, right?
And that's that's where they're all simpatico, right?
And that's, I think, kind of the most important takeaway here is not all of these people have been enraptured by Curtis Yarvin and are like thought zombies to his beliefs.
They find some of his ideas useful.
And likewise, he and the people who follow him, like they're all in agreement about one thing and it's who they want to hurt.
Yeah.
It's interesting because I've always felt there was an article in, I think it was New York magazine during the run up to the 2016 election that said, I think the phrasing was electing Trump would be an extinction level event for the United States.
Yeah.
A lot of people are scared of a second Trump presidency because they feel like democracy would crumble under Trump.
And that's been a rallying cry of the left now for quite a while.
And I agree to some extent.
Trump Threat Extinction Level Event00:05:12
I do think that he's a threat to democracy.
I don't know that he wants to completely topple it, but I do think that how he handled the transition of power was very, very alarming and unnerving and should be disqualifying, but at least for a party to nominate him, if not legally disqualifying.
So, but I've always thought that his threat to democracy is more his unwieldiness and his sort of lust, Trump's just narcissism and lust for power and lust for staying the center of attention.
Like that was almost the most, that's why he's a threat.
And that, and that that's just kind of wild and crazy and ridiculous of him, of Trump.
And, but it is, it's dangerous if he gets there.
But it's a, but it's a, it's a kind of danger that is almost cartoonish.
Like it's, it's just so ridiculous.
But what you've been laying out these last two episodes, very sort of as a much more sinister intellectual underpinning to dismantling of democracy, that is uh, that is arguably a far more serious kind of threat.
Uh yeah, as a as a doctrine.
Yeah, and i've never perceived Trump as someone driven by a sort of like anti-democratic doctrine.
I just thought he was sort of he definitely isn't.
I just He's always thought like, oh, he's a dictator just because he's a megalomaniac.
Right.
And he will behave.
He wants to behave like he wants to have all the power of a dictator.
He wants to behave.
He wants to be like, you know, Mel Brooks.
Like, it's good to be the king.
Like, that's all he wants.
Yeah.
But here is a group of people or a person with some measure of influence really thinking this stuff through.
You're right that I think this has been generally missed.
You know, people have started, and particularly like kind of the mainstream Democratic Party, but also just like centrists, you know, people who are not particularly political, but are, I think most people who are people of goodwill don't want to live in a dictatorship, right?
That would be how I would describe a person of goodwill is you don't want to institute a dictatorship.
Well, I think that's a key part, right?
I think people have started to realize the intellectual threat and the broader threat that Trumpism has opened the door for with Project 2025.
But what has happened with Trump, because I think you're right on the money with your characterization of him, he is not an ideologue.
If he thought he could have gotten to power running as a Democrat and, you know, still been the big man on top, he would have done that, right?
That just was not what wound up working for him, right?
He is a Trumpist in that he believes in himself and himself being the guy who is the most important person.
But when he started running and when he first took over the Republican Party, he started breaking norms, right?
And sometimes it's good to break norms, right?
It used to be the norm that a huge chunk of this country was segregated, right?
And that was something that we had to very, that was something that forcefully had to be broken, right?
The government had to deploy force to do that.
And in that case, that was very much a good thing.
But when you break norms, it opens up space for people who have extreme views to push those views into the public sphere.
And what happened with Trump was as he destroyed the Republican Party that had been, he wound up pushing out a lot of people who had been influential in that party.
And that opened up space for a whole bunch of people.
Basically, anyone could become an influential part of the Republican Party if you could do one key thing, which was bend the knee to Trump and also get along with him.
And so guys like Stephen Miller, right, are people who understood how to do that.
You know, that's how, like, what JD Vance has done.
That's how he became the VP, right?
As he started courting Trump.
He started like helping out with stuff like when Trump would do like public appearances after that big chemical spill in East Palestine like a year or so ago.
Like Vance is the guy who handled a lot of the advance work for that.
He impressed Trump.
He was good at sucking up to him.
And they did all this consciously, not because they are all believers that Trump should be the most important person in politics, but because they understood that with access to Trump comes the ability to kind of twist the country in this direction.
If you can just convince him it's the way to go, right?
And that is the way this kind of capture of the system, that's how they want it to, like, that's what they are very consciously trying to do.
And so it's, it's a situation where because of who he is and the things that he has made possible, we do have to confront the fact that these very extreme people who have a very dark vision for what our society should be are kind of at the gates right now.
Coolzone Media Weekend Bitterness00:04:50
And you, you know, it's unfortunate, but I think at this point, undeniable.
And I do think it's a thing people kind of have to look at with clear eyes because it's at this point a very immediate threat.
Anyway, I hope you had a good Friday.
Thanks for ruining my day.
Maybe it'll be a fun time.
My entire weekend, I'm going to go home and just be like bitter and angry at my family.
What are you doing to help save democracy?
Dad, I'm three.
Get up and get out there.
That's kind of a normal reaction after coming on the show, unfortunately.
I'm going to go home and be mad.
I'm going to be angry all weekend.
Well, Ed, I'm going to be happy all weekend because I got to have a fun time talking with you today.
This was fun.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thanks for being on.
People should check out your podcast, Snafu.
Season two is great.
I haven't listened to season one yet, but I'm sure it's also great.
I'm excited to get into that as well soon.
Yeah, Ed, anything else you want to plug before we roll out today?
Snafu.
Here we go.
And season one.
Season one is super fun.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So check them both out.
Check that out.
Thank you, Ed, and everyone have a good rest of your week.
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