"If Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator-phobia."
That's neo-reactionary philosopher Curtis Yarvin in 2012, when he outlined a strategy that's eerily similar to how Trump and Musk are now destroying our government. The "dark enlightenment" blogger, long a transgressive darling of the New Right, has in the last two months enjoyed a fresh round of mainstream exposure.
We look at a man who has the ear of those who are reshaping our world at breakneck speed.
Show Notes
That's Bait - by Jeff Sharlet
Kristi Noem Gets a MAGA Makeover - The New York Times
Kristi Noem’s New Teeth Are Blowing Up in Her Face | Vanity Fair
Venezuela-hired lawyers file petition in El Salvador aimed at freeing Venezuelans deported by US | AP News
Kristi Noem’s El Salvador Prison Photo Op Might Have Violated the Geneva Convention
Trump wants FEMA gone. But that could be its own kind of disaster.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem posed in front of El Salvador prisoners wearing $50k watch
Will Stancil: "The El Salvador government is using its concentration camp as a kind of Disneyland thrill ride for right-wing influencers”
Kelly Brogan’s Divine Dungeon: Pt 1 (feat/Esme Providence Brown)
Kelly Brogan’s Divine Dungeon: Pt 2 (feat/Esme Providence Brown)
‘All life is a service’: The Contested Erotics of Fascism from Foucault to Frost – Retrospect Journal
Cathedrals of Erotic Misery • Ill Will
Politico Yarvin Interview
Financial Times on Dark Enlightenment
TIME on Dark Enlightenment
Common Dreams on Dark Enlightenment/DOGE
NYT Podcast End of Democracy
Jennifer Kollmer, 1971-2021 — Yarvin’s obit poem, TW on the rest of the blog!
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Refsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
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If Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia.
So said neo-reactionary philosopher Curtis Yarvin in a public talk back in 2012, where he also outlined a strategy that is Eerily similar to how Trump and Musk are now destroying our government.
The dark enlightenment blogger, long a transgressive darling of the new right, has in the last two months enjoyed a fresh round of mainstream exposure.
He was hosted controversially on the New York Times podcast and has since been the subject of pieces in Politico, Time, Newsweek, Financial Times, and Common Dreams.
This has led to a flood of messages to us asking, who is Curtis Yarvin?
Well, it turns out I covered him for a bonus episode that drops on August 12th of last year due to his influence on then VP candidate J.D. Vance and his Silicon Valley billionaire mentor, Peter Thiel.
Yarvin is just the guy who believes that democracy is dead, black people are genetically well-suited to slavery, and America should be run by an all-powerful king who rules like a tech CEO.
And he has the ear.
of those who are reshaping the world at breakneck speed.
This past weekend, RFK Jr. spoke at an event with Republican Governor Patrick Morrisey of West Virginia, and I wanted to play a clip for you guys of what he said.
I got to know, I said to Dr.
Morris, or Governor Morris, the first time I saw him, I said, you look like you ate Governor Morrissey.
And there was a lot of talk about getting healthy again, and I'm very happy that he's invited me to be his personal trainer.
And I am going to put him on a really rigorous regimen.
And we're going to put him on a carnivore diet.
We're going to make him do...
Raise your hand if you want Governor Morrissey to do a public weigh-in once a month.
And then when he's lost 30 pounds, I'm going to come back to the state and do a celebration and a public weigh-in with him.
Oh, the humiliation.
What jumped Out at me here is Bobby repeatedly referencing the idea of a public weigh-in, as you heard there, for the governor.
Like he's a boxer, or more to the point, an MMA fighter in the UFC.
The organization ruled over by Dana White, who spoke at Trump's convention, and is now on the board at Facebook.
But Kennedy's also, even though he's joking, he's positioning himself as a kind of personal trainer to the too-fat governor.
And not only do we see his transformation, or Bobby's, Complete from being a fringe anti-vax crackpot to now being the head of HHS.
But you also see how, in his mind, his role is very much like a health influencer, like a personal trainer who gives diet and fitness advice on social media.
We'll get him on a carnivore diet.
And who then cajoles public figures into being, becoming more like He-Man fighters who have to strip down to their undies in front of the crowd on the big stage and step on the scale, right?
Well, it makes sense that he's aligned with Jillian Michaels now, right?
When she appeared in front of Congress during the Ron Johnson congressional hearing, it was like, well, she was a bit of an outlier because she wasn't really in the wellness circle.
But this is what Jillian did for years on The Biggest Loser.
At least in that situation, she was working out with them and chiding them to work out, which as much as I don't agree with as a former fitness instructor, some people do take to it.
It's a little bit different when you're on the stage in front of this man's constituents and you're belittling him like that.
Yeah. I think we've been pretty good at identifying the ableism and fat phobia that runs through Bobby's brain like forever and how hypocritical the meritocracy mindset is given his family privilege and All of the luck he had in recovering from his own addiction issues.
But there's another element that always picks at me, which is the raw rudeness of this stuff.
Like, this is a crowd of people that are willing to say the shittiest things out loud.
There's no real sense of privacy or propriety.
Like, I'm always wondering, why are they like that?
I mean, I think we use simple terms like Bully, and so on.
But then I came across this quote from Heinrich Himmler at his wedding speech in 1928, and he says something quite profound about this way of thinking.
He's talking about sexuality here, but you can substitute health in for sex.
He says, some people say to us, what I do is no one's business.
It is my affair, my private life.
No. Anything relating to sexuality is not a private matter, but signifies the life or death of a people, world power, or insignificance.
Those are the two options.
So in other words, for folks like this, and in a fascist movement more broadly, there isn't any private life.
There aren't any personal concerns.
There's no dignity in just being who you are, whether you're fat or whatever.
Every aspect of your existence is a political statement or a handle that just has to be fair game.
I published an article yesterday, we were recording this on Tuesday, the day that HHS health cuts are coming in, by the way, and apparently some of the workers are only firing out they were fired because when they got to work, their security cards aren't working.
And in this article, I focused on Just the jock mentality that I thought we left behind in high school, but it just perpetuates itself and it just keeps Yeah.
power in some ways, and we've seen it in Rogan and many of the biohackers, but to now see it in front of the, or being the face of public health is disorienting.
And Matthew, you had asked me when I shared the clip at first a few days ago, how the governor reacted.
And my question is, how are you going to react in such a situation?
Maybe they did talk about it beforehand, but to actually be on stage and for Bobby to pull out in front of hundreds of people.
To have them laugh at you is just indicative of how poorly thought out everything that this man does really is.
Because if you want to have that discussion with him behind the scenes and help him to lose some weight, totally fine with that.
But to pull that out in front of people and to have the chiding, and this is at a time, just as a quick recap over the last week of what's happening at HHS.
They're firing an additional 10,000 employees, as I just flagged, bringing up the total to over 20,000 overall.
Bobby gutted vaccine advocacy and HIV prevention departments.
He's disbanded the, or is disbanding the Administration for Community Living, which is an agency that provides over 261 million meals to older adults who need assistance.
And they also provide assistance to 1.5 million family caregivers and a quarter million people with disabilities as of 2022.
Bobby, infamously now, his agency has buried a measles report that shows that the worst outbreaks are occurring in under-vaccinated regions.
The irony of that one is that the spokesperson said, everyone knows this stuff already anyway.
Why are we just repeating it?
And given that we've had increasing Dr. Peter Marks, M.D. Well,
rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.
at least he got A really good exit line.
That was good.
Well, I'm sure Maha Stans thinks that he's now part of the Deep State.
For sure.
For sure.
Yeah, we're in such deep trouble.
Music.
A couple weeks ago in the Kings of Pain episode, we talked about how Trumpian tariffs and firings and austerity discourse were taking on the somatic metaphors like detoxing.
And in this rhetoric, there's this promise of purification and even pleasure on offer for what the administration openly acknowledges will be painful for even MAGA voters.
And I pointed out that part of the function of rationalizing economic pain is undergirded by two other kind of perverse themes.
First of all, when Trump proxies like Dana White welcome a sex assaulter like Andrew Tate back to the U.S. and then give him front row tickets at sporting events, they're saying, what taboo?
Dominating and exploiting women is part of what we do, and no wokists are going to take that away.
And then secondly, when the White House ex-account puts out slick music video style Orgy stuff over the Venezuelan Deportees in Pain Positions film and shows them humiliated as they're clean-shaven, or they put out an ASMR video of rattling chains as they're taken off into airplanes.
They are eroticizing violence and humiliation.
Now, none of that was enough for former South Dakota Governor and current DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.
This is the person who bragged in her memoir about killing her misbehaving 14-month-old hunting dog.
Back in that innocent era when a lot of us thought that taking a dog to a gravel pit and shooting it in the head would torpedo her career.
But I think like RFK Jr. chainsawing the head off a whale, it probably helped.
That's super relatable.
Here at Seacott today and visiting this facility.
And first of all, I want to thank El Salvador and their president for their partnership with the United States of America to bring our terrorists here and to incarcerate them and have consequences for the violence that they have perpetuated in our communities.
I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face.
First of all, do not come to our country illegally.
You will be removed and you will be prosecuted.
But know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.
Okay, so there she is in a viral video stunt from the mega prison known as CICOT, which is El Salvador's terrorism confinement center, where 268 Venezuelan men We're good to
go. into stacking bunks that are three stories high.
And by doing a propaganda selfie in front of prisoners, a lot of legal observers have pointed out that she might be violating the Geneva Conventions.
So this is all kinds of gross, but I just want to underline that she's also a general all-around mega ghoul.
She supports the Muslim ban.
She has endorsed the stripping of DACA protections from DREAMers.
She wants to dismantle asylum processes.
And of course, you know, she's all in favor of these mass deportations.
Now she's talking about cost-cutting by eliminating FEMA, which is an insane idea that would fragment disaster relief efforts into, what, 50 state agencies and just totally have to, you know, replicate all of these services everywhere.
But I want to ping friend of the pod Jeff Charlotte's description and analysis of the stunt here and link to his great short piece on it.
It's called That's Bait, Kristi Noem and Fascism's Sadistic Eroticization of Power.
So he writes, I've got a couple of quotes here, Julian, maybe you can help me with them.
Kristi Noem in tight athleisure, white top, drawstring, gray pants.
So he's describing the outfit that she wears.
And it's kind of a Whole Foods to yoga class look.
In front of a prison cell packed with mostly shirtless men.
Noam's hair cascades out of her navy DHS cap.
The men appear to be wearing loose white patient pants.
Noam wears a heavy gold and silver watch.
Okay, and according to Washington Post, it's an 18 karat gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona, which sells for about $50,000.
The men's arms are at their sides or clasped in front, as if they've been told to stand at attention.
Now, they've also been told to remove their shirts and stand close to the bars because in a longer video clip, we see her enter the complex and at first the men are clothed.
So they've obviously been ordered to disrobe to show their bodies and tattoos because she has entered.
Noam's cap is pulled low, so we can't really see her eyes.
Instead, her face appears, comprised mainly of lips.
The men's heads have been shaved.
There's lighting on Gnome, but they're in the murk, hard to distinguish from one another.
Okay, so Charlotte spotlights the lips.
And if you haven't seen any of the very smart pieces on Gnome's cosmetic transformations over the years, I'll link to the best one.
Suffice to say, this is a person who has transformed her image from prairie home companion, like farm mom, to contestant in Trump's hot MAGA mom reality TV apprentice show.
And it's not that she talks openly about the fillers and diets that a lot of folks want.
People speculate about, but she did do a four-minute infomercial for Texas Smile, which is a cosmetic dentistry business that recapped her teeth last March, and she was sued over that post on suspicion that she was receiving an illegal kickback, but no evidence for that has turned up.
She apparently just wanted to talk about her dental upgrade, which is arguably the most socially acceptable form of modification.
Let's just keep in mind that this is someone who also rejects gender ideology as if she isn't Living it.
And Charlotte is great on this contradiction.
Trumpist rhetoric from Trump on down is rife with the idea that their women are sexier than left or liberal women.
This rhetoric is as common amongst right-wing women as among men.
And even as it celebrates body modification, there's no shame in plastic surgery on the fascist right.
It frames itself via a topsy-turvy idea of authenticity.
Trump women, goes the thinking, are real, precisely because they try hard to perform woman.
Liberal and left women are not real women, because in this logic, feminism makes them rebel against their natural roles.
It's such a great article.
And he also is pointing at something deeper, which is this weird scene of quasi BDSM, which has long overlapped with fascist aesthetics.
This is a feature of MAGA Spaces that I've explored with Esme Providence-Brown in our discussion of Kelly Brogan getting into pole dancing and what she thinks of as therapeutic BDSM.
And what Esme points out is that what you really have to do with reactionary anti- or post-feminism is to still make it hot while playing different roles.
And the challenge for Nome, I think, and all of the women in Trump's sphere, is how to play The perfect kind of gendered role of deference to the patriarchal cabal of sex assaulters at the top, but then also be able to turn around and punch down at everyone beneath them.
And a really efficient way of doing that is through gendered and sexualized flexing.
And there's a long history of this dominator role in fascist theme scenes.
And, you know, a big psychoanalytic literature on what it does, how it functions, how it expresses a dissociation between fantasy and reality.
It makes things permissible.
Like, the consensus there is that aesthetic allure, like Hugo Boss did the Nazi uniforms, and maybe we can say Lululemon is the dresser, the stylist for Mahamama uniforms.
And the stylized violence of BDSM allow participants to abstract the fascist symbolism from what it actually does, from its atrocities.
And Susan Sontag in 1975 said somewhat the same thing.
She said that fascist aesthetics are often reduced to camp or theatricality so that they can be divorced from their ideological origins.
So the dominator can therefore play with the energies of the terror of fascist authority from the top, but then also the surrender inherent to BDSM from below, so they can be powerful in one role and powerless in another.
But as Charlotte points out, Kristi Noem isn't playing at all.
And that's why he calls the whole spectacle bait.
you.
Curtis Yarvin was born in 1973.
He grew up in Maryland and was a math whiz kid who went to Brown and then Berkeley studying computer science.
He dropped out of his PhD program in around 1993 to work in tech and eventually founded his own computer networking platform called Urbit in 2002.
This led to a San Francisco-based company called Tlon founded in 2013 with funding from Peter Thiel.
But before that, in 2007, Jarvan used the goofy pseudonym Mencius Moldbug to start a blog called Unqualified Reservations.
This championed the ideas of reactionary political philosophers and economists who disparaged democracy.
He claimed in an interview to have watched the 2016 election results on TV with Peter Thiel and said that he was coaching Thiel, who was, quote, fully enlightened on his ideas.
And this tracks, given Thiel's Infamous 2009 essay which stated that freedom and democracy are incompatible and decried both social welfare and women having the right to vote.
Teal's fellow tech billionaire Mark Andreessen, who has been acting as an informal advisor to Trump this year, has spoken approvingly of Yarvin's work, as has his associate cryptocurrency kingpin Balaji Srinivasan, who echoes Yarvin's techno-monarchist ideas.
Jarvan's influence also extends to Peter Thiel protege and current American VP J.D. Vance, who referenced Jarvan's strategy of firing all government employees who are not MAGA loyalists in a 2024 interview.
We now see Doge enacting that mission, which is leading to a slew of media outlets digging into Jarvan's dark enlightenment thinking for the first time to try to get a handle on what is going on.
How connected is he to the new administration, you may ask?
Well, Politico reported that Yarvin was the informal guest of honor at an inauguration gala, fittingly called the Coronation Ball.
Royal overtones there.
It was held at the Watergate Hotel.
More overtones.
By the repugnant far-right publishing house, Passage Press.
Politico actually interviewed Yarvin about his DC visit.
And he talked about bumping into Vance, who apparently jokingly referred to him as a reactionary fascist.
How are you, you reactionary fascist, you?
And of, quote, catching up with the revolutionary vanguard of young conservatives who grew up reading his blog and are now entering the government.
We'll turn now to the unlock of my August 2024 piece on Yarvin.
It was titled at that time, J.D. Vance's Dictator Fetish, as it explored Yarvin's ideas and their influence on 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 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 Menchus 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 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 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?
Well, that quirky and ominous-sounding pen name belongs to someone called Curtis Yarvin, who J.D. Vance considers a friend, and who has jokingly been referred to as Lord Yarvin.
and our prophet in the New Right circles that intersect with a loosely affiliated movement around his work, referred to sometimes as the Dark Enlightenment or the Neo-Reactionary movement.
We will get into some of his key ideas and outrageous statements in a minute, but here's one to whet your appetite.
In 2011, Curtis Yarvin criticized the Norwegian Neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Breivik.
Not for his killing of 77 people, mostly children, but for that act not being an effective step toward bringing down what Yarvin falsely called the Communist government of Norway.
It brings me great pleasure to welcome Mr. Peter Thiel to give the inaugural address of the Oxford Union's bicentenary year.
Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Mr. Peter Thiel.
Well, Charlie, thank you so much for that terrific introduction and a lot of different things to cover.
I'm always reminded of a question a colleague of mine liked to ask.
What is the antonym of diversity?
What word is the single antonym of diversity?
University. Thinking about the crisis of the university, the crisis of the West, the crisis of classical liberalism, there are elements of this that are, of course, timeless and eternal.
And then, of course, there are parts of it that are always, you know, there's always sort of a kaleidoscopic newness and effervescence to it as well.
You know, I frame my talk as anti-anti-anti-anti-classical liberalism.
So you have a double negative that's kind of a positive, a quadruple negative is also kind of a positive.
And I'm going to try to sort of outline, as I see, the argument, as well as the best arguments against the university, classical liberalism, you know, sort of the free Western world.
Now, Yarvin has significant influence over tech billionaire and increasingly important political player Peter Thiel.
He claimed in a text message revealed by BuzzFeed to Milo Yiannopoulos, you may remember him.
I mean, who would want Twitter?
And, you know, to say nothing of what, you know, look, Twitter is systematically having a go at conservatives.
There's even chatter online of them having a race problem.
You know, there are people saying that Twitter has a race problem.
It doesn't like white people very much.
Okay, so that's Milo Yiannopoulos, in case you forgot about him.
It's during his brief stint in the spotlight, he's on CNBC, being asked to define what the alt-right is.
And Curtis Yarvin, in a text message to Milo Yiannopoulos, claimed to have watched the 2016 election results with Peter Thiel.
He referred to him as fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully when Milo said that Thiel needed political guidance from Yarvin.
J.D. Vance's existence as a political figure is largely the creation of Peter Thiel.
Who employed him as the principal in his venture capital firm, Mithril.
He also funded Vance's own venture capital firm, Naria, and then bankrolled his Senate campaign to the tune of $15 million.
Thiel's most infamous quote from 2009, that, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible, came on the heels that same year of Yarvin Curtis
Yarvin and his fellow Dark Enlightenment thinkers see democracy as a failed experiment We'll come back around to that vision shortly.
But first, here's the 411 on Peter Thiel and his track record in politics.
Along with Elon Musk was one of the co-founders of PayPal.
He was also the first outside investor in Facebook and that investment turned a half million dollars into over a billion in the course of eight short years.
He's also been a wildly successful venture capitalist but his current brainchild is called Palantir.
It's a data analytics company named after the all-seeing magic crystal stones In the Lord of the Rings.
Palantir's technology services have been the subject of multiple controversies and lawsuits involving government intelligence, medical and immigration data surveillance, and warfare applications of robotics and artificial intelligence in multiple countries.
It's all too much to go into detail on today that would warrant its own episode, but I do want to flag this.
Palantir had a hand in the Cambridge Analytica Facebook data harvesting activities utilized by Steve Bannon to exert illegal influence over the 2016 election.
Now, for the most part, analysts feel that it didn't make that much of a difference, but this was a pretty big news story in its time.
And part of the whistleblower revelations about Cambridge Analytica had to do with how Palantir was working hand in hand with them on creating these kinds of strategies.
These were initially used to try to give Ted Cruz an edge in the presidential primaries after Thiel had helped fund his 2012 Senate election as a Tea Party candidate.
And Cambridge Analytica was co-founded by Steve Bannon and billionaire Robert Mercer, his former employer at Breitbart and a Republican megadonor.
Palantir...
Peter Thiel's company is a contractor with tentacles deep into American government agencies including intelligence, immigration, policing, and defense.
They are similarly involved with governments in England, Israel, Ukraine, Norway, and Denmark that we know of.
They also have a partnership with Amazon that optimizes Amazon Web Services using the same software that Palantir provides for British Petroleum.
So I guess you could say they are big-time players.
After Thiel used his tech background in the service of helping Trump come to power in 2016 by collaborating with Bannon and Mercer to illegally harvest Facebook user data to that end, this is the Cambridge Analytica scandal, He would then get even more involved in politics.
Peter Thiel spent over $20 million for the 2022 election campaign to back 16 Senate and Congressional candidates, many of whom endorsed Trump's false claim about election fraud in the 2020 election.
Blake Masters is an America first fighter.
I endorse Blake because he's strong on everything needed to keep Arizona first.
Blake Masters has my complete and total endorsement.
I'm Blake Masters and I approve this message.
Amongst that group was a former COO of Teal's investment firm named Blake Masters, who lost very badly after a series of extraordinary gaffes, including invoking the Great Replacement Theory, and naming Unabomber Ted Kaczynski as an underrated subversive thinker in a podcast interview.
He clarified that he did not endorse the man's bombings, but thought his manifesto had a lot of correct insight.
And included in that group of Teal-backed candidates was the successful Senate candidate J.D. Vance.
Teal donated $15 million through a super PAC to his campaign.
Robert Mercer also contributed an undisclosed amount.
Like Blake Masters, J.D. Vance had previously been in charge of Peter Thiel's venture capital firm, Mithril Capital.
Here we are just two years later, and Vance is Trump's vice president pick, reportedly via the influence of his sons, who most people on the right are regretting him having listened to.
Vance's announcement, however, did bring in a slew of Silicon Valley endorsements and big donations for the Trump campaign in the following days and weeks via the Elon Musk-created AmericaPak.
Funders have included the Palantir co-founder, crypto billionaires, and venture capital companies associated with Peter Thiel.
Okay. This may seem like a big tangent so far.
What does all of this have to do with Curtis Yarvin?
Well, we've already covered examples of his philosophical influence on J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel.
We also see Yarvin's influence in a quote from Vance publicly praising his ideas in 2021 on a now-defunct conservative podcast.
In that instance, he made a reference to an idea of Yarvin's that As of 2024 reads as identical to what Project 2025 promises to do.
Turn over 50,000 non-partisan civil servant jobs into loyalist party political appointments.
Yarvin himself used the acronym RAGE for retire all government employees whenever he brought up this idea starting in 2012.
And then Vance repeated it and credited Yarvin with the idea on a podcast in 2021.
And they say philosophers have no power or influence in today's world.
Now rage or retire all government employees as described by Yarvin and now as codified as part of project 2025's policy plan is really a way to ram through what Steve Bannon previously called dismantling The Administrative State.
And we know that conservatives love to talk about small government and getting rid of the bloat of big government, but what's the real purpose here?
Well, as far as I can tell, it's the good old corporate crony deregulation battle cry on everything from pollution and climate to minority and union protections to healthcare, access to contraception, and any limitations Either on conservative Christian power, or absolute capitalist exploitation, or the executive authority of an all-powerful president.
That kind of absolute authority is aligned with Curtis Yarvin's assertion that the only way forward is to have a CEO-like monarch.
In that same 2012 talk that included his reference to rage, he said, If Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia.
But it's not just Yarvin's anti-democratic tech overlord king fetish.
It's not just his idea that America should be broken up into a series of one-party city-states.
Or that he has said that something he dubs the Cathedral reinforces a liberal-democratic matrix-like worldview through cultural institutions and the media.
The Cathedral obscuring as well what he refers to as the mythologizing of World War II.
Without which we might see that Hitler's invasions may have been acts of self-defense.
Yeah, it's not just those things.
Here's Curtis Yarvin in his own words on yet another alarming topic.
"Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery.
For others it is more suited to slavery, and others still are badly suited to either.
These characteristics can be expected to group differently in human populations of different origins.
Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not.
This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by genetic differences." He goes on, this is under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, On the blog he started in 2007 called Unqualified Reservations.
A person makes a good slave if he is loyal, patient, and not exceptionally bright or stubborn.
But even great intelligence is not necessarily a bar to a good experience in slavery, as the experience of many Greek slave philosophers such as Epictetus shows.
A slave must carry the unique burden of personal dependency and obedience, Which we are all used to expressing only toward impersonal government agencies.
Yarvin wrote those words in July of 2009.
They're an excerpt on his blog for free from an e-book he has for sale up on Amazon.
And we'll talk more about the subject of that e-book in a minute.
But are you worried yet?
I mean, I think Sometimes, on the left, we can start to sound hyperbolic or hysterical.
You know, according to both sides, every election for a good 30 years has always been the most important in American history.
And the opponent has always been framed as an absolute threat to all that we hold dear.
And when that's already how the stakes are discussed, they have to be further escalated.
They have to be cranked up each year.
And the 24-7 cable news cycle has to play along.
With that game.
And I think this is why many on the right and those who have been persuadable in the center have latched onto this completely inane notion that liberals have developed Trump derangement syndrome.
I think the sheer magnitude of lies, hate, rage, incoherence, clueless incompetence, and brazen criminality that Trump Trump brought to the national stage has meant that the only way to counter the never-ending material he provides for normal news reporting on how outrageous it has all been has been for the right to cast it as a kind of biased and feverish liberal overreaction.
But we're not overreacting.
I don't have to tell you this.
And in fact, It is the explicit ideology of those poised to exert even greater influence in a second Trump administration that makes words like authoritarianism and fascism so appropriate.
Even though in the last few weeks, Democrats have leaned back a little into just saying, those guys are weird and creepy.
Well, they are.
They're weird, creepy, fascist authoritarians.
Of course, Curtis Yarvin would say, no, no, no.
Fascism is just another form of democracy.
I'm a cameral monarchist or a formalist.
He has all of these coded words for describing what essentially is a one-party state ruled over by a strongman.
I said before that the quotes about the genetics that supposedly predispose Africans more so than, say, Native Americans, to be good slaves to white Europeans, was published on his blog as an excerpt from a digital publication he sells on Amazon.
It is titled Mold Bug on Carlyle.
The Carlyle in question here is Thomas Carlyle.
He's a Scottish philosopher and essayist who lived from 1795 to 1881.
The blog post itself is titled Why Carlyle So who is Thomas Carlyle?
He's a towering literary figure in the Victorian era.
His history of the French Revolution, published less than 50 years after those events, was highly influential and admired by luminaries like Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
It was even quoted in speeches by Martin Luther King Jr.
But perhaps unbeknownst to King, as his career and life unfolded, Thomas Carlyle would become associated with the conservative and militaristic Prussianism that carried the seeds of what would become German National Socialism.
He also supported the Confederate side in the American Civil War.
He was opposed to voting rights being extended to Jews in Britain, being one of those right-wing voices who at the time supported Zionism as a way to deport all those troublesome Jews to Palestine.
He also expressed anti-Semitic and racist attitudes.
He was quoted, for example, in the book, Conversations with Carlisle, by Charles Duffy, as saying that, and I quote, the black man could not be emancipated from the laws of nature, and neither could the Jew.
Thomas Carlisle published several historical biographies.
One of them, A History of Frederick the Great, Who is a central figure in Prussianism, that nationalist, militaristic philosophy that would lead eventually to Nazism.
And his history of that, despite being Scottish, was revered in Germany.
Portions of it were taught in schools to children.
And passages from it, as it turns out here, were read by Joseph Goebbels as consolation to Adolf Hitler in his bunker as defeat and suicide were closing in at the end of World War II.
Curtis Yarvin calls Thomas Carlyle his favorite author.
But it's not correct to call Yarvin a Nazi.
He is, after all, as he's fond of saying about himself, a New York Jew.
But he has written that while he is not himself a white nationalist, he is, I quote, Not exactly allergic to the stuff.
And he has said that the U.S. civil rights programs, quoting here, applied to people with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber, has resulted in absolute human garbage.
Now this style of writing and speaking can often provide for plausible deniability.
Especially in our age of trolling and irony and the kind of owning the libs and drinking their tasty salty tears by violating taboos just for the lulz that ushered in the 4chan presidency of Donald Trump and the normalization of conspiracy theories.
The right-wing and heterodox anti-censorship campaign fully blossomed now on Elon's version of Twitter.
...
seems to mostly have made bigotry, propaganda, and conspiracism great again.
It also provided a rationale for independent media, you know, edgy YouTube channels and podcasts and sub-stack blogs, to characterize any limits on what public figures can say that would disqualify them from being appropriate interview subjects, as merely being cancel culture.
Indeed, being cancelled, which really now just means being strongly criticized for saying or doing awful things, is the doorway into becoming celebrated on many of these platforms and asked to opine at length about just why you're being censored and persecuted by the woke elite for your bold courage to think outside the box.
In this bizarre inversion of moral reality, Alex Jones, Bret Weinstein, Russell Brand, and a long list of others are so good for clicks, for views, for ad revenue, that no matter how despicable or harmful their actions or beliefs have demonstrably been,
they are still valuable sources for the firehose of transgressive content that makes famous and enriches those independent new media figures in the process.
It also illustrates a transformation from left to right-wing political commentary for formerly legitimate journalists who have followed the money, regardless of whether or not their new conspiracy mongering endangers America itself by slandering government agencies and university think tanks,
and to the extent that they're willing to cooperate, big tech platforms, Desperately trying to identify and thwart the successful disinformation campaigns of authoritarian foreign governments who specifically want to destabilize America by sowing confusion and chaos.
And this is all entirely in keeping with the fact that no matter how many felonies the man is indicted, or convicted of, no matter how offensive, incompetent, and dishonest his every statement is, and no matter the facts of his attempts to overturn democracy, around half of Americans still think Donald Trump is their guy in this election.
That's the world into which an openly anti-democratic racist like Curtis Yarvin can play Alexander Dugan in the ear of Peter Thiel, And Josh Hawley, whose fist pump to the insurrectionists we remember from the hours before the events of January 6th,