Tech billionaire Peter Thiel claims “freedom and democracy are incompatible.” Mentor and $15M donor behind JD Vance’s political career, Peter Thiel also has an influence: Mencius Moldbug, computer programmer and lead philosopher of the “Dark Enlightenment,” or “neoreactionary” movement.
Moldburg says, “if Americans want their government to change, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.” Erstwhile pen-name of Curtis Yarvin, “Moldburg” is openly anti-democratic, advocating for one-party city-states ruled by CEO-kings. His takes on race, slavery, and the Nazis are equally alarming.
Vance has also publicly praised and cited his work, and Thiel gave $1.1 million to Yarvin’s tech start-up. Julian digs into the toxic pseudo-intellectual philosophy behind the next wave of MAGA authoritarianism.
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You know, one of the things that consistently comes up in my campaign, because I was one of these people who didn't quite get Donald Trump in the beginning, I didn't sort of fully appreciate where he was coming from or what he was about, and now I very much do, is this concept of redpilling.
And if you've ever heard this term, it comes from the movie The Matrix, which as I understand it, is made by a couple of people who do not share the politics of the people in this room.
But the basic idea is that once you see the way that knowledge is transmitted, once you see the way that public policy works in this country, it's very hard to unsee it.
And so there's this scene in the movie The Matrix where the chief protagonist is given an opportunity to take the blue pill or the red pill.
And he takes the red pill.
And the red pill effectively reveals to him the fundamental corruption that laid at the heart of the society that he lived in.
That's J.D.
Vance in November of 2021 talking at NatCon, a gathering of what is sometimes called the New Right.
He was running for Senate at that time, not vice president as he is now.
Of course, we all had heard this right-wing co-opting of being red-pilled for at least a couple of years at this point.
But as far back as 2007, before MAGA, Before QAnon, and even before Candace Owens launched her YouTube channel Red Pill Black in 2017, an obscure online blogger who went by the pen name Mencius Moldbug was the first to repurpose the red pill metaphor from the science fiction classic The Matrix.
In April of 2007, the year before the election of Barack Obama would represent to so many that Martin Luther King Jr's arc of the moral universe had bent more toward justice and equality than ever before, in 2007, Moldbug wrote an article titled, The Case Against Democracy.
Its subtitle?
10 Red Pills.
So here he is now talking about How he came up with the idea and what it meant to him.
Okay, what would happen if you basically turned this thing around and actually to be right wing was to be red pilled, which is clearly very far from the intention of that movie.
What it meant to me was first of all, sort of a complete negation of the whole frame of thinking about politics and history that I was brought up in, which really had to be every bit The equal of sort of the frame-breaking that you would have to do if you'd grown up under Soviet communism.
As with Neo, being initiated in the movie by Morpheus into waking up from the Matrix by taking the red pill and seeing that what he believed to be reality was in fact a lie.
Moldebug describes an awakening from belief in the goodness of democracy.
An awakening that he compares to being deprogrammed from Soviet propaganda.
Now in the original article, he addresses the reader as someone who still naively believes that democracy is good and its alternatives are really bad.
His ten red pills are edgy assertions that say things like, communism and fascism are forms of democracy.
The difference between a single party and a multi-party system is akin to the difference between a malignant and a benign tumor.
He says things like, rather than the blue-pilled notion that democracy is inseparable from freedom and law, the red-pilled truth is that democracy is sand in the gears of freedom and law.
It gets in the way.
So, that's already disturbing.
But before we go any further, who is Mencius Moldbug?
And what is his connection to J.D.
Vance?
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