Triumph of the Cod Philosophers and their Dark Enlightenment

Contra Trump

遷臣逐客

If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.

— Curtis Yarvin

America is not a software company. And letting a thin-skinned, Ketamine-fueled, video-game cheating, Nazi apologist billionaire take over the machinery of the United States is not something that anyone voted for.

— Clara Jeffrey, Nobody Voted for Elon Musk, Mother Jones, 3 February 2025

There’s a sense in the warnings about “overreaching” that, if he angers too many Americans, Trump will be forced to conduct himself less autocratically. Why, though? Consult history: When authoritarians grow paranoid about losing popular support, do they tend to liberalize—or to behave more oppressively to protect their hold on power?

—Nick Catoggio, The New Deep State — like before but worse, The Dispatch, 11 February 2025

 

In this chapter of Contra Trump we focus on Mencius Moldbug, a blogger whose time has come in American politics. Behind the pen name lurked a cod philosopher by the name of Curtis Yarvin (1973-) who, along with Nick Land, another DIY thinker based in Shanghai, is a coparent of the Dark Enlightenment, a ‘neo-reactionary movement’, a term abbreviated as NRx. Their project shares a number of traits with China’s century old Dark Enlightenment discussed in China Heritage. Whereas the neo-autocracy of Xi Jinping is grounded in stifling top-down state control, proponents of America’s Dark Enlightenment are radical privatisation of the public good. Both favour elitist rule and their programs entrench special interests, hidden manipulation and populist agitprop. In the name of reform they promote a Great Leap Backward.

The ‘reboot’ of government championed by the Dark Enlightenments on either side of the Pacific Ocean bring to mind another cod philosopher who had a long-term impact: Zhang Chunqiao 張春橋, the vizier behind Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Both profoundly bigoted figures — Zhang advocated the elimination of class enemies and Yarvin is an unabashed racist. Their fanatical utopianism is married to profound inhumanity, Zhang was, however, at least a clear (if dastardly) thinker, Curtis Yarvin concocted a twisted action plan of an autodidact.

Of course, students of modern Chinese history will hear echoes of the New Authoritarianism in the late 1980s proffered as a path to a more enlightened future. What they ended up with decades later was a Chinese CoE — a Chairman of Everything. For more on this, see Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium.

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This chapter contains four sections:

For a preliminary study of the devastation wrought by Yarvin-Musk, see:

And, for an line by line discussion of some of the nonsense spouted by Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel, listen to these episodes from the Decoding the Gurus podcast:

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
14 February 2025

Related Material:

David Marchese, Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy is Done, 18 January 2025, The New York Times

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Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich

Corey Pein

19 May 2014

One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows:

1. Retire all government employees with full pensions.
2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.
3. Appoint [Google executive chairman] Eric Schmidt CEO of America.

This could easily be written off as stunt, a flamboyant act of corporate kiss-assery, which, on one level, it probably was. But Tunney happened to be serious. “It’s time for the U.S. Regime to politely take its exit from history and do what’s best for America,” she wrote. “The tech industry can offer us good governance and prevent further American decline.”

Welcome to the latest political fashion among the California Confederacy: total corporate despotism. It is a potent and bitter ideological mash that could have only been concocted at tech culture’s funky smoothie bar—a little Steve Jobs here, a little Ayn Rand there, and some Ray Kurzweil for color.

Tunney was at one time a prominent and divisive fixture of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Lately, though, her views have . . . evolved. How does an anticapitalist “tranarchist” (transgender anarchist) become a hard-right seditionist?

“Read Mencius Moldbug,” Tunney told her Twitter followers last month, referring to an aggressively dogmatic blogger with a reverent following in certain tech circles.

Tunney’s advice is easier said than done, for Moldbug is as prolific as he is incomprehensible. His devotees, many of whom are also bloggers, describe themselves as the “neoreactionary” vanguard of a “Dark Enlightenment.” They oppose popular suffrage, egalitarianism and pluralism. Some are atheists, while others affect obscure orthodox beliefs, but most are youngish white males embittered by “political correctness.” As best I can tell, their ideal society best resembles Blade Runner, but without all those Asian people cluttering up the streets. Neoreactionaries like to see themselves as the heroes of another sci-fi movie, in fact, sometimes boasting that they have been “redpilled,” like Keanu Reeves’s character in The Matrix—a movie Moldbug regards as “genius.”

“Moldbug.” The name sounds like it belongs to a troll who belches from the depths of an Internet rabbit hole. And so it does. Mencius Moldbug is the blogonym of Curtis Guy Yarvin, a San Francisco software developer and frustrated poet. (Here he is reading a poem at a 1997 open mic.)

According to Yarvin, the child of federal civil servants, he dropped out of a graduate computer science program at U.C. Berkeley in the early 1990s (he has self-consciously noted that he is the only man in his immediate family without a PhD) yet managed to make a small pile of money in the original dot-com bubble. Yarvin betrayed an endearingly strange sense of humor in his student days, posting odd stories and absurdist jokes on bulletin board services, contributing to Wired and writing cranky letters to alternative weekly newspapers.

Yet even as a student at Brown in 1991, Yarvin’s preoccupations with domineering strongmen were evident: “I wonder if the Soviet power ladder of vicious bureaucratic backbiting brings stronger men to the top than the American system of feel-good soundbites,” he wrote in one board discussion.

Yarvin’s public writing tapered off as his software career solidified. In 2007, he reemerged under an angry pseudonym, Moldbug, on a humble Blogspot blog called “Unqualified Reservations.” As might be expected of a “DIY ideology . . . designed by geeks for other geeks,” his political treatises are heavily informed by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and George Lucas. What set Yarvin apart from the typical keyboard kook was his archaic, grandiose tone, which echoed the snippets Yarvin cherry-picked from obscure old reactionary tracts. Yarvin told one friendly interviewer that he spent $500 a month on books.

Elsewhere he confessed to having taken a grand total of five undergraduate humanities courses (history and creative writing). The lack of higher ed creds hasn’t hurt his confidence. On his blog, Yarvin holds forth on everything from the intricacies of Korean history to contemporary Pakistani politics, from the proper conduct of a counterinsurgency operation to macroeconomic theory and fiscal policy, and he never gives an inch. “The neat thing about primary sources is that often, it takes only one to prove your point,” he writes.

In short, Moldbug reads like an overconfident autodidact’s imitation of a Lewis Lapham essay—if Lewis Lapham were a fascist teenage Dungeon Master.

Yarvin’s most toxic arguments come snugly wrapped in purple prose and coded language. (For instance, “The Cathedral” is Moldbuggian for the oppressive nexus of liberal newspapers, universities and the State Department, where his father worked after getting a PhD in philosophy from Brown.) By so doing, Moldbug has been able to an attract an audience that welcomes the usual teeth-gnashing white supremacists who haunt the web while also leaving room for a more socially acceptable assortment of “men’s rights” advocates, gun nuts, transhumanist libertarians, disillusioned Occupiers and well-credentialed Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

When Justine Tunney posted her petition online, the press treated it like comic relief that came from nowhere. In fact, it is straight Moldbug. Item one, “retire all government employees,” comes verbatim from a 2012 talk that Yarvin gave to an approving crowd of California techies (see video below). In his typical smarmy, meandering style, Yarvin concluded by calling for “a national CEO [or] what’s called a dictator.”

“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia,” Yarvin said in his talk. He conceded that, given the current political divisions, it might be better to have two dictators, one for Red Staters and one for Blue Staters. The trick would be to “make sure they work together.” (Sure. Easy!)

“There’s really no other solution,” Yarvin concluded. The crowd applauded.

This plea for autocracy is the essence of Yarvin’s work. He has concluded that America’s problems come not from a deficit of democracy but from an excess of it—or, as Yarvin puts it, “chronic kinglessness.” Incredible as it sounds, absolute dictatorship may be the least objectionable tenet espoused by the Dark Enlightenment neoreactionaries.

Moldbug is the widely acknowledged lodestar of the movement, but he’s not the only leading figure. Another is Nick Land, a British former academic now living in Shanghai, where he writes admiringly of Chinese eugenics and the impending global reign of “autistic nerds, who alone are capable of participating effectively in the advanced technological processes that characterize the emerging economy.”

These imaginary übermensch have inspired a sprawling network of blogs, sub-Reddits and meetups aimed at spreading their views. Apart from their reverence for old-timey tyrants, they espouse a belief in “human biodiversity,” which is basically racism in a lab coat. This scientific-sounding euphemism invariably refers to supposed differences in intelligence across races. It is so spurious that the Wikipedia article on human biodiversity was deleted because, in the words of one editor, it is “purely an Internet theory.” Censored once again by The Cathedral, alas.

“I am not a white nationalist, but I do read white-nationalist blogs, and I’m not afraid to link to them . . . I am not exactly allergic to the stuff,” Yarvin writes. He also praises a blogger who advocated the deportation of Muslims and the closure of mosques as “probably the most imaginative and interesting right-wing writer on the planet.” Hectoring a Swarthmore history professor, Yarvin rhapsodizes on colonial rule in Southern Africa, and suggests that black people had it better under apartheid. “If you ask me to condemn [mass murderer] Anders Breivik, but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you’d like to fuck,” Yarvin writes.

His jargon may be novel, but whenever Mencius Moldbug descends to the realm of the concrete, he offers familiar tropes of white victimhood. Yarvin’s favorite author, the nineteenth-century writer Scot Thomas Carlyle, is perhaps best known for his infamous slavery apologia, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.” “If there is one writer in English whose name can be uttered with Shakespeare’s, it is Carlyle,” Yarvin writes. Later in the same essay Yarvin calls slavery “a natural human relationship” akin to “that of patron and client.”

As I soldiered through the Moldbug canon, my reactions numbed. Here he is expressing sympathy for poor, persecuted Senator Joe McCarthy. Big surprise. Here he claims “America is a communist country.” Sure, whatever. Here he doubts that Barack Obama ever attended Columbia University. You don’t say? After a while, Yarvin’s blog feels like the pseudo-intellectual equivalent of a Gwar concert, one sick stunt after another, calculated to shock. To express revulsion and disapproval is to grant the attention he so transparently craves.

Yet the question inevitably arrives: Do we need to take this stuff seriously? The few mainstream assessments of the neoreactionaries have been divided on the question.

Sympathetic citations are spreading: In the Daily Caller, The American Conservative and National Review. Yet the conservative press remains generally dismissive. The American Spectator’s Matthew Walther calls neoreactionism “silly not scary” and declares that “all of these people need to relax: spend some time with P.G. Wodehouse, watch a football game, get drunk, whatever.”

TechCrunch, which first introduced me to Moldbug, treats the “Geeks for Monarchy” movement as an Internet curio. But The Telegraph says, yes, this is “sophisticated neo-fascism” and must be confronted. Vocativ, which calls it “creepy,” agrees that it should be taken seriously.

The science fiction author David Brin goes further in his comment on a Moldbug blog post, accusing the blogger of auditioning for the part of Machiavelli to some future-fascist dictator:

The world oligarchy is looking for boffins to help them re-establish their old – pyramidal – social order. And your screeds are clearly interview essays. “Pick me! Pick me! Look! I hate democracy too! And I will propagandize for people to accept your rule again, really I will! See the fancy rationalizations I can concoct????”

But your audition materials are just . .  too . . . jibbering . . . loopy. You will not get the job.

As strange as it sounds, Brin may be closest to the truth. Neoreactionaries are explicitly courting wealthy elites in the tech sector as the most receptive and influential audience. Why bother with mass appeal, when you’re rebuilding the ancien régime?

Moldbuggism, for now, remains mostly an Internet phenomenon. Which is not to say it is “merely” an Internet phenomenon. This is, after all, a technological age. Last November, Yarvin claimed that his blog had received 500,000 views. It is not quantity of his audience that matters so much as the nature of it, however. And the neoreactionaries do seem to be influencing the drift of Silicon Valley libertarianism, which is no small force today. This is why I have concluded, sadly, that Yarvin needs answering.

If the Koch brothers have proved anything, it’s that no matter how crazy your ideas are, if you put serious money behind those ideas, you can seize key positions of authority and power and eventually bring large numbers of people around to your way of thinking. Moreover, the radicalism may intensify with each generation. Yesterday’s Republicans and Independents are today’s Libertarians. Today’s Libertarians may be tomorrow’s neoreactionaries, whose views flatter the prejudices of the new Silicon Valley elite.

In a widely covered secessionist speech at a Silicon Valley “startup school” last year, there was more than a hint of Moldbug (see video below). The speech, by former Stanford professor and Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan, never mentioned Moldbug or the Dark Enlightenment, but it was suffused with neoreactionary rhetoric and ideas. Srinivasan used the phrase “the paper belt” to describe his enemies, namely the government, the publishing industries, and universities. The formulation mirrored Moldbug’s “Cathedral.” Srinivasan’s central theme was the notion of “exit”—as in, exit from democratic society, and entry into any number of corporate mini-states whose arrival will leave the world looking like a patchwork map of feudal Europe.

Forget universal rights; this is the true “opt-in society.”

An excerpt:

We want to show what a society run by Silicon Valley would look like. That’s where “exit” comes in . . . . It basically means: build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the US, run by technology. And this is actually where the Valley is going. This is where we’re going over the next ten years . . . [Google co-founder] Larry Page, for example, wants to set aside a part of the world for unregulated experimentation. That’s carefully phrased. He’s not saying, “take away the laws in the U.S.” If you like your country, you can keep it. Same with Marc Andreessen: “The world is going to see an explosion of countries in the years ahead—doubled, tripled, quadrupled countries.”

Srinivasan ticked through the signposts of the neoreactionary fantasyland: Bitcoin as the future of finance, corporate city-states as the future of government, Detroit as a loaded symbol of government failure and 3D-printed firearms as an example of emerging technology that defies regulation.

The speech succeeded in promoting the anti-democratic authoritarianism at the core of neoreactionary thought, while glossing over the attendant bigotry. This has long been a goal of some in the movement. One such moderate—if the word can be used in this context—is Patri Friedman, grandson of the late libertarian demigod Milton Friedman. The younger Friedman expressed the need for “a more politically correct dark enlightenment” after a public falling out with Yarvin in 2009.

Friedman has lately been devoting his time (and leveraging his family name) to raise money for the SeaSteading Institute, which, as the name suggests, is a blue-sea libertarian dream to build floating fiefdoms free of outside regulation and law. Sound familiar?

The principal backer of the SeaSteading project, Peter Thiel, is also an investor in companies run by Balaji Srinivasan and Curtis Yarvin. Thiel is a co-founder of PayPal, an original investor in Facebook and hedge fund manager, as well as being the inspiration for a villainous investor on the satirical HBO series Silicon Valley. Thiel’s extreme libertarian advocacy is long and storied, beginning with his days founding the Collegiate Network-backed Stanford Review. Lately he’s been noticed writing big checks for Ted Cruz.

He’s invested in Yarvin’s current startup, Tlon. Thiel invested personally in Tlon co-founder John Burnham. In 2011, at age 18, Burnham accepted $100,000 from Thiel to skip college and go directly into business. Instead of mining asteroids as he originally intended, Burnham wound up working on obscure networking software with Yarvin, whose title at Tlon is, appropriately enough, “benevolent dictator for life.”

California libertarian software developers inhabit a small and shallow world. It should be no surprise then, that, although Thiel has never publicly endorsed Yarvin’s side project specifically, or the neoreactionary program in general, there is definitely a whiff of something Moldbuggy in Thiel’s own writing. For instance, Thiel echoed Moldbug in an infamous 2009 essay for the Cato Institute in which he explained that he had moved beyond libertarianism. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote.

Thiel’s eponymous foundation funds, among other things, an institute to advance the ideas of a conservative Stanford academic, René Girard, under whom Thiel studied as an undergraduate. In 2012 Thiel delivered a lecture at Stanford that explained his views regarding the divine rights of Silicon Valley CEOs. The lecture did address some of Girard’s ideas about historical “mimetics,” but it also contained a heavy dose of Moldbuggian thought. Thiel says:

A startup is basically structured as a monarchy. We don’t call it that, of course. That would seem weirdly outdated, and anything that’s not democracy makes people uncomfortable. We are biased toward the democratic-republican side of the spectrum. That’s what we’re used to from civics classes. But the truth is that startups and founders lean toward the dictatorial side because that structure works better for startups.

Might a dictatorial approach, in Thiel’s opinion, also work better for society at large? He doesn’t say so in his Stanford lecture (although he does cast tech CEOs as the heirs to mythical “god-kings” such as Romulus). But Thiel knows where to draw the line in mixed company. Ordinary people get so “uncomfortable” when powerful billionaires start talking about the obsolescence of participatory government and “the unthinking demos,” as he put it in his Cato essay. Stupid proles! They don’t deserve our brilliance! “The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom,” Thiel wrote.

It is clear that Thiel sees corporations as the governments of the future and capitalists such as himself as the kings, and it is also clear that this is a shockingly common view in Thiel’s cohort. In a 2011 <a “href=”http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/28/111128”>New Yorker profile, George Packer wrote:

Thiel and his circle in Silicon Valley may be able to imagine a future that would
never occur to other people precisely because they’ve refused to leave that stage of youthful wonder which life forces most human beings to outgrow . . . . He wants to live forever, have the option to escape to outer space or an oceanic city-state, and play chess against a robot that can discuss Tolkien, because these were the fantasies that filled his childhood imagination.

Packer is perhaps too generous to his subject. But he captures the fundamental problem with these mouthbreathers’ dreams of monarchy. They’ve never role-played the part of the peasant.

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Source:

The ‘fully enlightened’ Peter Thiel at the DEMO conference

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The Moldbug Variations

Feudalism is the new conservatism

Cory Pein

9 October 2017

 

WELL, WELL, WELL.

Three years ago, Peter Thiel called me a conspiracy theorist at a Baffler-hosted debate in New York between him and David Graeber. What prompted the characteristically winking and dismissive Thielian deflection was a question from a New York Times reporter, concerning a story on this very blog by yours truly. The story detailed connections between the democracy-loathing venture capitalist and a prolific, flowery neo-feudalist blogger who called himself Mencius Moldbug.

Moldbug was comfortably anonymous, with a modest but influential following in Silicon Valley circles, until TechCrunch revealed his identity as Curtis Yarvin, a San Francisco software engineer whose strange and quixotic startup, Tlön, had garnered some investment capital from Thiel. Moldbug’s moribund blog remains one of the ur-texts of the “neoreactionary” movement, a subset of what is now euphemistically termed the alt-right, but which I characterized at the time—more accurately, I think—as the mouthbreathing Machiavellis of the silicon reich.

Yarvin suffered some modest career setbacks and conference disinvitations once his identity as Moldbug became common knowledge, but Thiel stood fast. I did not outright accuse Thiel of plotting some kind of monarchist coup with Yarvin, but in 2014 Thiel was apparently quite sensitive to the suggestion he might be in cahoots with the alt-right underground.

“Actually, I found that vaguely flattering,” Thiel told the Times. “It was the full-on conspiracy theory. In truth, there’s nobody sitting around plotting the future, though sometimes I think it would be better if people were.”

Note that in his comment, Thiel denied nothing. Indeed, part of him seemed to enjoy the attention. I certainly delighted in the irony of being called a conspiracy theorist by a wealthy and well-connected serial conspirator—even though at the time, Thiel had yet to be exposed as the financier behind a covert legal campaign to defund and destroy his journalistic nemesis, Gawker Media, from existence.

Now let’s jump ahead to the first week of October 2017. BuzzFeed published a long expose based on leaked emails that revealed further coordination between alt-right personalities such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Steve Bannon, the heir to the late Andrew Breitbart’s online propaganda empire and, more important, a key adviser to Donald Trump.

The full story is worth your time. But a careful reader drew my attention to this exchange concerning Thiel and Yarvin, which took place some time after May 2016—the exact timing is unclear. In any case, BuzzFeed reported that Thiel and Yiannopoulos had “made plans to meet during the July Republican National Convention. But much of Yiannopoulos’s 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 into Tuesday. He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”

There’s a lot going on here. For a start, it’s unclear whether Yarvin’s long hangover was emotionally or chemically induced. I assume he was high on victory.

More substantively, this is further confirmation that Thiel and Yarvin are not merely business associates—Thiel never bothered to claim as much and, if he had, who would have believed him?—but ideological comrades. Their relationship clearly pivots on observing and discussing politics—as friends do. It is, again, unclear exactly which election Yarvin watched at Thiel’s house, but given the rough timeline, we can take for granted that it featured Trump as a candidate for president of the United States.

In other words: a smoking gun, exposing the full-on conspiracy! I can’t say I’m surprised. After the Baffler event with Thiel in 2014, Yarvin emailed me to offer his congratulations on my new book deal. It was strange, because I hadn’t even signed a contract yet, much less told my friends about the possibility of publishing a book on the dark politics of Silicon Valley. I had, however, told some people at The Baffler, one of whom told Thiel at the event—who in turn, I figured, related the news to Yarvin. So I knew the two of them talked. Yarvin suggested getting lunch if I was ever in San Francisco. It never worked out.

Second, it’s noteworthy in the Milo correspondence that Yarvin considers himself a political adviser to Thiel. There was obviously a bit of boastfulness in that comment, and I’m skeptical that Thiel really calls on him for close-in tactical counsel in the sense that Trump relies on men like Bannon. However, I don’t doubt that Yarvin is a valued voice in Thiel’s circle of friends. And it’s a matter of record that Thiel is a valued voice in Trumpland—we’re talking about someone who was reportedly offered his choice of cabinet positions, and who the White House called upon to produce names for nominees and appointees to federal agencies.

Which leads us to the third, and probably most disturbing, point here: Yarvin considers Thiel “fully enlightened.” What does that mean, coming from a founder of the “Dark Enlightenment” movement?

Yarvin believes there is no such thing as democracy—and Thiel has said as much, as well. Yarvin’s stunted political imagination prizes strict hierarchies—despotisms, monarchies, and experimental new feudalism via a “patchwork” of corporate fiefdoms managed by absolute dictators who might be appointed by a vote of property-owning “shareholders.” Unlike some advocates of Silicon Valley secessionism, Yarvin has never been shy in acknowledging that this amounts to a revolution and would require the forcible overthrow of the established order. He advised, for instance, that the new dictator of California should throw the old elected governor in Alcatraz, and then briskly proceed to pack the government with Google guys.

Yarvin’s Dark Enlightenment dogma also is steeped in pseudoscientific racism. Yarvin preaches that intelligence is determined in large part by the laws of “human biodiversity”—which hold, in his telling, that white people are congenitally smarter than black and brown people, and that Chinese people may be the smartest of all. It takes no great stretch of the imagination to see how a blood-and-soil white nationalist like Bannon and a racist bomb thrower like Donald “Good Genes” Trump would find a great deal of reassurance in this toxic philosophy.

Yarvin’s idea of enlightenment also means believing that history as we’ve come to know it is a lie. It means believing that the Soviet Union was the greater evil in the Second World War and that Nazi Germany acted in preemptive self-defense against the nefarious scheming of Stalin and FDR. It also means believing that ever since that war, upstanding American fascists have been unjustly persecuted by the state, and that the United States has been ruled by a conspiracy of wealthy establishment Communists and a “ruling underclass” of violent black mobs who are their eager pawns.

To be enlightened, in Yarvin’s world, means forming an uncomfortable alliance with street Nazis—the Stormfront set—and other déclassé white nationalists. The same goes for right-wing terrorists such as Anders Behring Breivik, whom Yarvin denounced, but only in the most limited and depraved terms possible. Yarvin wrote that Breivik should be condemned because his 2011 massacre in Oslo was ineffective as terrorism, which Yarvin considers a legitimate military tactic. Nazi terror was legitimate because it worked, Yarvin wrote. Breivik’s killing spree, which targeted young Norwegian leftists, was illegitimate because it was insufficient to “free Norway from Eurocommunism.” After all, he only killed ninety-two 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 23, 2011, one day after the terror in Oslo, and five years before going to Thiel’s house to hang out and watch their guy, Trump, get closer to power.

As Yarvin evidently sees Thiel as his project, Thiel presumably sees Trump as a useful vehicle to achieve his “enlightened” vision.

It’s worth considering that Thiel is not just another wealthy Trump adviser. He is a contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and the Homeland Security Department, through his Big Data surveillance startup, Palantir. (The name is a Lord of the Rings reference; like many big race theorists in Silicon Valley Thiel and Yarvin adore J.R.R. Tolkien, which can be read as an epic glorification of a winner-take-all race war. Tolkien’s trilogy also conveniently doubles as a regressive fantasy universe where heroic Nordic souls either gain power by force or come into it via birthright—in both scenarios, a lineage that leaves them untroubled by the irksome niceties of democratic procedure.)

If things weren’t going so badly, we might hold out hope that the federal inspectors general, and any straight shooters in the relevant counterintelligence offices, might deign to review Thiel’s associations and political beliefs. They also could, while they’re at it, reconsider the wisdom of paying his companies to develop expansive databases with sensitive details on hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, of people, along with life-or-death military secrets. Imagine what a committed anti-democrat might do with that kind of power. Sauron would be jealous.

As long as we’re fantasizing, we might also hope that the other members of Facebook’s board of directors—where Thiel, an original investor in Mark Zuckerberg’s world-conquering platform, continues to serve in the bogus interests of “viewpoint diversity”—will recognize the harm of tainting the company’s already beleaguered brand with such associations, and act appropriately.

But what’s the point? No one in corporate America ever does the right thing. The idea is so laughably preposterous, I actually had a hard time typing out the last couple of paragraphs. As for the government—particularly this government, with the aforementioned bomb-throwing racist troll in charge—ha! There are few points on which Thiel and Jimmy Carter and I are in complete agreement, but one of them is that Americans do not live in a functioning democracy.

Granted, I’m not clear about exactly what in the present set of power arrangements is not to Thiel’s liking. He is a fully licensed oligarch, richer than god, with many fawning acolytes and access to as much youthful, revitalizing blood as he desires. Perhaps he imagines that with a proper feudal society in place, he would finally have the one thing his vast fortune can never buy: respect.

The good news is that many millions of people remain determined that Yarvin and Thiel and Trump won’t succeed in remaking the world in accordance with their whims. But insofar as they’ve set out to permanently alter the direction of the political right, they have already won. The kids, as they say, are alt-right. Feudalism is the new conservatism. The ideological assumptions of the capitalist elite, the Christian right, and the living remnants of the old European aristocracy have reverted from postwar neoliberalism to the premodern ancien régime. Armed with all the influence, tastemaking prowess and cash that comes with a power base among an aggrieved and endlessly indulged Silicon Valley power elite, the high priests of digital innovation have built a bridge to the thirteenth century.

The Onion, 3 February 2025

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Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe. Now They’re Coursing Through Trump’s Washington.

“In almost every way, JD is perfect,” he says in a conversation about JD Vance, Trump’s second term and the end of democracy.

Ian Ward

30 January 2025

On the weekend of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin traveled to Washington, D.C., for the Coronation Ball, a glitzy inaugural gala hosted by the ultraconservative publishing house Passage Press. The gathering, hosted in the ballroom of the Watergate Hotel, was designed to celebrate the ascent of the new conservative counter-elite that has risen to power on the tide of Trump’s reelection — and Yarvin, who has arguably done more than anyone to shape the thinking of that nascent group, was an informal guest of honor.

Even the ball’s name spoke to Yarvin’s outsize influence over the Trumpian right: For over a decade, Yarvin, an ex-computer programmer-turned-blogger, has argued that American democracy is irrevocably broken and ought to be replaced with a monarchy styled after a Silicon Valley tech start-up. According to Yarvin, the time has come to jettison existing democratic institutions and concentrate political power in a single “chief executive” or “dictator.” These ideas — which Yarvin calls “neo-reaction” or “the Dark Enlightenment” — were once confined to the fringes of the internet, but now, with Trump’s reelection, they are finding a newly powerful audience in Washington.

When I called him up recently to talk about the second Trump administration, Yarvin told me that during his trip to Washington, he had exchanged friendly greetings with Vice President JD Vance — who has publicly cited his work — had lunch with Michael Anton, a senior member of Trump’s State Department, and caught up with the “revolutionary vanguard” of young conservatives who grew up reading his blogs and are now entering the new administration.

Yarvin is skeptical that Trump can actually carry out the type of regime change that he envisions, but he told me that there are signs the new administration is serious about concentrating power in the executive branch. We spoke before the Trump administration announced a sweeping freeze on federal aid programs, but he pointed to the coming fight over impoundment as a key test of the new administration’s willingness to push the bounds of executive authority. And he detected a newfound confidence and aggressiveness in Trump’s GOP.

“Every time the old Republicans wanted to do something, it was like the nebbish guy asking the hot prom queen out for a date — they were just terrified that they were going to ask and the answer is going to be ‘no,’” he said. “That attitude does not seem to be present here.”

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

You were in Washington during Trump’s inauguration. How was the mood among the people that you spent time with?

The mood is really good. You’re definitely dealing with a lot of people who have spent the last four or eight years thinking about why the first Trump administration basically did not achieve anything for its supporters as opposed to its lobbyists. I’m not talking to the high strategic command or whatever, but just my impression from my connections among low- and mid-level people is that they’ve figured some things out.

The first and most important thing they’ve figured out from a political standpoint is that the situation that Trump is in is a little like Duke Leto and Arrakis.

We’re talking Dune here.

Yeah. There’s a little bit of landing on the mostly enemy planet D.C. You’re landing there, and one of the general assumptions of the controlled opposition — the old Republican establishment — is that this is not really a symmetric political system.

Instead of a left party and a right party, we have an inner party [a bipartisan elite] and an outer party [the anti-establishment insurgents]. This outer party is basically the party that exists to collect and market the votes of unfashionable America.

You’re saying that the conservative elite in D.C. have become newly aware of themselves as a kind of vanguard of the outer party, and they’re starting to act like one?

Basically, the deal when you’re a Republican in office is that you get a certain number of things to show off to your constituency to prove that you’re really Republican, but you’re basically there to play ball and help the system work. But what Trump and his team have realized now is that the best defense is a good offense. He’s not just doing these little things to scare people and to take home as a chit to his supporters. He’s actually trying to move all of the levers of this machine that he can move.

From the neo-reactionary vantage point, what is the best-case scenario for a second Trump administration?

The way that I think metaphorically about the problem of what can be done with the powers of the presidency is untangling the Gordian knot. I often say, “Look, D.C. is run by Congress, not by the president.” The president stands in front of it and waves his hands and watches the system go, but the real decisions are funding decisions, and those kinds of decisions are made by Congress or the agencies. Actually, if the White House didn’t exist, America would still work.

Do you think that a second-term Trump can untie the Gordian knot?

I think that is the fundamental question. The answer is interesting, because what he’s doing is not at all what I would do with an opportunity like this. But I think that what I would do is probably not possible.

What would you do?

I would cut the Gordian knot. For example, a straightforward way to cut the Gordian knot is to say, “Look, the [Federal Reserve] is clearly under executive authority.” It’s clearly not part of the legislative branch, it’s clearly not part of the judicial branch, so it’s clearly part of the executive branch. And because the Fed actually controls the monetary system, I can order it to mint the trillion-dollar coin, or more to the point, I can basically order the Fed to buy assets. And because I can order the Fed to buy assets, I can order the Fed to buy notes issued by new institutions.

That allows me to basically come face to face with two very clear facts. One is that the U.S. doesn’t really have an executive branch — it has a legislative branch, and it has an administrative branch, which is basically managed not by a monarchical president, but by an oligarchical Congress.

The second fact is that, when I look at any part of the federal government as a start-up guy, and I say, “OK, first, let’s take for granted that this is trying to solve [a real] problem,” for almost anything that you can look at, the right way to fix that organization is just to stand up a new one.

There are some parts of the U.S. government that have a very clear role and are not politicized in any way. If the president had the exclusive executive power over the Coast Guard, would the right choice be to create a new Coast Guard or to reuse the existing Coast Guard? I’m going to [reuse] the Coast Guard. But when I get to something like the State Department, I’m no longer anywhere near assured of that.

Why do you think Trump is unwilling to do what you’re suggesting here?

I think he’s unready. I think that America is unready for that level of change.

I want to get your read on the divide that seems to be opening up between the tech right and the populist-nationalist right, or what you’ve called the “rationalists” and the “traditionalists.” How real do you think this divide is, and what do you think is underlying it at a sort of fundamental level?

I came up with this sort of Tolkien-esque classification of the social forces in America today, and I identify two kinds of people.

Ah yes, the elves.

Yes. There are the elves — the blue state, [professional managerial class], ruling-class people — and the hobbits, the ruled-over lower-middle-class. The fear among elves that the hobbits will organize and come and kill them with pitchforks — because there’s a lot of goddamn hobbits — has driven a lot of things in the 20th century.

But what happens when you have a group of people who are elves either by education or by background — because, of course, we have this remarkable system called “college” for promoting people in the elf aristocracy — is that you have a certain set of people who, like me, are dark elves who dissent from the [progressive] Obama worldview, right? They don’t believe in the state religion anymore.

So there’s a conflict there [between the dark elves and the hobbits], definitely, but whenever you see a conflict, you should want to heal a conflict, right? I think that where that conflict comes from is that you’ll go to something like the Passage Press party, and I’m there, and Steve Bannon is there — who apparently feels like it’s appropriate to go to a black-tie event looking like a homeless dude.

You’re apparently on his enemies list now.

Am I on his enemies list? I don’t know.

Do you see Steve Bannon as an enemy?

No, no, my God. I mean, I’ve never met or talked to him. I don’t see him as an enemy. Why would he be an enemy? I mean, it’s a little funny to be talking about someone whose revenues come from Seinfeld. But Bannon has a kind organic connection with MAGA world. He has an organic connection with the great American hobbit. He really loved those people, and there’s something sort of right about that.

The way the relationship between the dark elf and the hobbits should work is [based on the understanding] that [the hobbits] have been pouring their energy and their hope and their fear for decades into shit that doesn’t work.

Do you think this tension within the MAGA coalition can be managed, or is one side going to have to win?

It’s entirely able to be managed. What Trump is showing in his effort to sort of reactivate all of these incredibly rusty, broken levers of the top-down control of the New Deal, is just like, “Wow, the president can do this.” The president can cancel the 1965 affirmative action executive order and nobody questions that legally he can just do that. Imagine if you’d suggested that in a meeting of the Bush administration. You would be on the next plane out. So what I think that the MAGA people are going to see is that shit is happening.

You’ve said that your relationship with Vance has been overstated by the press. What is your relationship with him?

I’ve interacted with Vance once since the election. I bumped into him at a party. He said, “Yarvin, you reactionary fascist.” I was like, “Thank you, Mr. Vice President, and I’m glad I didn’t stop you from getting elected.”

He said that to you?

That’s what he said. I don’t think he meant it in a bad way, but I don’t think he meant it in a good way, either.

Do you guys talk regularly?

No, no, definitely not. And I think that’s not really the important relationship. [The New Right] is still a vanguard, which means it’s still fundamentally oligarchical in a lot of ways. I don’t need to name names, but there’s a guy in D.C. who has a big house which a lot of the revolutionary vanguard hangs out in.

Are we talking about Peter Thiel? Who are we talking about?

No, no, no, this is someone you’ve never heard of.

Who is it?

I can’t tell you. He’s not in government. He’s a lawyer. But this is a tradition that goes way back in D.C., with the House of Truth — where Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Hay and those guys hung out [during the Progressive Era]. Always, in a town like [D.C.], you’ll have this vibe of a society of young, smart people. When you’re at this place, maybe you’ll run into a Clarence Thomas clerk or someone like that. There’s this whole world of people in their 20s and 30s who are basically arriving to take jobs in D.C. now. And a lot of these dark elf-y people are hanging out in various places. Not that many of these people are not Christians — many of them are Christians, of course, but they’re more likely to be like TradCaths than cradle Catholics, right?

The important thing is the vibe among the staff and the staffers. You have a bunch of people coming to Washington who don’t have this traditional fear of the old establishment.

Let’s go back to the Gordian knot analogy: I’m like, “OK, cut the Gordian knot. Where’s the sword?” But we’re not quite ready for that, so what they’re actually doing is they’re pulling on the Gordian knot.

When you talk about tugging at the Gordian knot, you’re saying they’re taking incremental steps toward a type of systematic political change — a revolution, for lack of a better word.

Yeah, I’m talking about — America just has a really shitty government and needs a new government.

Do you think Vance is better suited than Trump for that type of work, by virtue of his background and intellectual orientation?

That’s a good question. I think they’re going to be an amazing team, because basically, in almost every way, JD is perfect. One of the perfect things about him is that he has this deeply American background, and then he was just completely re-socialized into the American elite. It’s like, the Marines taught him how to hold a fork or whatever, and then he’s graduated from Yale Law School, and he knows exactly how to eat at the right banquets. He’s more comfortable with elite liberal Americans than Trump will ever be, and Trump just doesn’t care.

There’s an old blog post of mine from 2011 where I talk about kingship and the vibe of being a king, and I’m basically like, the guy in America who has this vibe is Donald Trump — and this is well before there was any serious talk of him having a political career, if I can pat myself on the back for that. Trump has this incredible energy — he’s the guy who Ali G’s bullshit doesn’t work on. Cutting through bullshit is his strength.

What is Vance’s strength in that matrix?

JD is more analytical. He’s much younger, so he has more IQ points left. As you get older, you feel your IQ points going away, but they get replaced by wisdom.

And he has more of an appetite to pull on the strings of the knot?

JD has a lot of honor — honor goes very, very, very deep, in JD. I don’t think he would ever be satisfied with being a grifter. What’s so terrible about the outer-party Republicans is that people get into it, and they don’t want to be grifters, and then they find that they are grifters.

I think even with a professional mercantile class, you can say to them at a certain point, “Wouldn’t it be easier to just be a dark elf?” Think about the elf career track. There’s a cursus honorum — a standard path that you follow. If you want to work in government, you go to Harvard, then you go to D.C. to be an intern; you’re opening people’s mail, you climb your way up the staff after 10 years; you don’t write legislation exactly, but you influence the direction of the legislation, et cetera. It’s a really hard thing. And then here these guys and girls who by virtue of reading Curtis Yarvin in middle school are getting jobs more easily, because the ratio of people to jobs is a lot smaller.

I [recently] had lunch with Mike Anton at a coffee shop across the street from the State Department —

Michael Anton, incoming senior State Department official, for the record.

Yes, incoming senior State Department official. And I was like, “Here’s this academic position that they can fill, has anyone thought about filling this position?” And they’re like, “I don’t think so.” And I’m like, “What about this guy?” And they’re like, “Oh, he’d be perfect.” And then, you know, bam, bam, bam, it’s done.

They took your staffing recommendations, is what you’re saying?

Well, we’ll see — but the path is easier. The path from, “I’m a maverick dark elf” to “I have a position with this administration” is just suddenly like, “Whoa — there is a lot less competition.”

There’s a debate over the scope of your influence in Washington, so I wonder how you measure your own influence, and how you think it compares now to four or eight years ago?

It has obviously increased since four years ago, but how I measure my influence is that I try not to. For the first six years when I was blogging, from 2007 to 2014, I barely talked to anyone about this stuff, and then I started to get letters from Washington being like, “Wow, it seems like you’re talking about the same Washington that I work in, and nobody ever talks about it.” All this stuff about the civil service, the deep state, the administrative state — there were academics who knew about it, but it was just not a part of the discourse.

Saying, “Oh, I’m talking to the vice president daily,” or like, “I got this guy this job” — that is just not my role as an intellectual. There are other people who are better at that. The way to fulfill your duty as an intellectual is to cast your bread upon the water — and actually, the more personal it gets, the worse it is.

In practice, a lot of your ideas point toward consolidating a significant amount of power in the executive branch. What would indicate to you that the Trump administration is serious about doing that?

There’s no question that Donald Trump is completely serious and sincere about saying, “I’m going to use all the power I have to make America great again.” I think he completely believes that. I don’t think he wants to be a grifter in any way, shape or form. I think that the question is the limits of what can be done with that.

But what are the practical measures that you’re looking for? Is it reviving impoundment authority or what?

Yeah, so look at Russ Vought at the Office of Management and Budget — another person whose hand I maybe shook once but who I haven’t talked to. Impoundment is a perfect example of an issue where in the first Trump administration, the Office of Legal Counsel would have said, “Oh, you can’t do that — there’s a law.” Well, is the law constitutional? I don’t think the law is constitutional. I think the law is clearly a straight-up violation of the Constitution.

The courts are still a question here, and the idea that we control the court — I think anyone on the Supreme Court would resist that description, certainly the swing centrist bloc on the Supreme Court would resist it. Among his mistakes in his first term was that Trump basically appointed three centrists [to the Supreme Court] — so I don’t know if Amy Coney Barrett is going say, “Hey, let’s revisit this birthright citizenship question.” But when it comes to the anti-impoundment act, it seems very plausible you could get that through the Supreme Court. And even if you can’t, why not ask?

Every time the old Republicans wanted to do something, it was like the nebbish guy asking the hot prom queen out for a date — they were just terrified that they were going to ask and the answer is going to be “no” and it’s going be devastating. That attitude does not seem to be present here.

And if the courts say no, then what?

I think if the courts say no, you’ll see more and more pressure put by the Trump administration on Congress. I think that as the machine gathers strength, victories have to build bigger victories. You win these small things, and then you’re just like, “Wow, we can actually do something bigger.” And before you know it, you’re writing bills in the White House and sending them to Congress to be rubber-stamped.

Should they defy the court if that’s not on the table?

That is a question that depends very much on circumstances.

Under what circumstances should they do it?

I think it has to feel right. If you’re going to defy the court, it has to feel unifying above all. If you’re going to say, “Hey, you know what? Marbury v. Madison was wrongly decided, the Constitution actually does not specify the precedence of the branches, judicial review was just this invented thing,” it has to be the right moment. If you’re doing that in a situation where the vibe is like, “This is going to be the first shot in the civil war between red America and blue America” — if you’re doing that as part of a divisive path where you have an opposition — I think it’s bad.

For example: I think they corrected this a little bit, but you know when at the start of the campaign, the Trump team didn’t really know what JD was going to be used for, and they tried to use him a little bit like Sarah Palin 2.0? I was like, “Oh my god, this is terrible.” The thing that JD can do that’s amazing is he can go and talk to The New Yorker and he can sit down with the liberal media and basically be like, “No, get these caricatures out of your head. This is not Hitler 2.0. We’re not here to send you to Guantanamo. You can actually get behind what’s happening here even if you went to Harvard.”

Have you articulated this point of view to him?

Um — he knows it’s what I think.

You said you talked to him once since the election?

I texted him once about a small issue, and then I shook hands with him at a party, because it’s really important to shake hands with dignitaries.

But he knows that your point of view is that he can serve as a kind of unifier to sell what would otherwise be divisive issues to a broad swath of the American public?

Yes, and specifically to the American ruling class.

Is he on board with that?

I don’t know. The thing is, when you talk to powerful people, they should be getting to know you — you should not be getting to know them. I’m not a reporter.

Can you imagine a scenario in the next four years where an effort to defy a Supreme Court order would be unifying rather than divisive?

Let me think.

I realize it’s a hypothetical.

It’s hard to picture. I think it would have to come about in a situation in which Trump had done so much through the ordinary course of ripping handfuls out of the Gordian knot that things had visibly changed for people. Fix New York City. Fix San Francisco.

What the elves have to realize is that their paranoid Handmaid’s Tale fantasy in which hobbits from Ohio establish a new Hobbit fundamentalist regime and their daughters are enslaved or something is not going to happen.

Is there a scenario in the next four years where the Republican political elite is able to achieve the type of regime change you’re discussing?

I think it’s very unlikely. I would say that you would have to draw a straight flush on that, or maybe a royal straight flush. But royal straight flushes have been heard of, right? Cards are very random things.

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Diagram by Christina Pagel

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‘Reboot’ Revealed: Elon Musk’s CEO-Dictator Playbook

Gil Duran

5 February 2025

 

The Point: In 2022, one of Peter Thiel’s favorite thinkers envisioned a second Trump Administration in which the federal government would be run by a “CEO” who was not Trump and laid out a playbook for how it might work. Elon Musk is following it.

The Back Story: In 2012, Curtis Yarvin — Peter Thiel’s “house philosopher”—called for something he dubbed RAGE: Retire All Government Employees. The idea: Take over the United States government and gut the federal bureaucracy. Then, replace civil servants with political loyalists who would answer to a CEO-type leader Yarvin likened to a dictator.

“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia,” he said.

Yarvin, a software programmer, framed this as a “reboot” of government.

Elon Musk’s DOGE is just a rebranded version of RAGE. He demands mass resignations, locks career employees out of their offices, threatens to delete entire departments, and seizes total control of sensitive government systems and programs. DOGE = RAGE, masked in the bland language of “efficiency.”

But Musk’s reliance on Yarvin’s playbook runs deeper.

In an essay dated April 2022, Yarvin updated RAGE to something he described as a “butterfly revolution.” In an essay on his paywalled Substack, he imagined a second Trump presidency in which Trump would enable a radical government transformation. The proposal will sound familiar to anyone who has watched Musk wreak havoc on the United States Government (USG) over the past three weeks.

Wrote Yarvin:

We’ve got to risk a full power start—a full reboot of the USG. We can only do this by giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization—with roughly the powers that the Allied occupation authorities held in Japan and Germany in the fall of 1945. This level of centralized emergency power worked to refound a nation then, for them. So it should work now, for us.

(The metaphor of “full power start” comes from Star Trek and entails a risky process of restarting a fictional spaceship in a way that might cause “implosion.” The World War II metaphor casts the federal government as a conquered enemy now controlled by an outside force.)

Yarvin wrote that in a second term, Trump could appoint a different person to act as the nation’s “CEO.” This CEO would be enabled to run roughshod over the federal government, with Trump in the background  as “chairman of the board.” The metaphors clarify the core idea: Run the government as a rogue corporation rather than a public institution beholden to the rules of democracy.

Trump himself will not be the brain …He will not be the CEO. He will be the chairman of the board—he will select the CEO (an experienced executive). This process, which obviously has to be televised, will be complete by his inauguration—at which the transition to the next regime will start immediately.

This CEO will bring a new radical new style of leadership to the federal government:

The CEO he picks will run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts, probably also taking over state and local governments. Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems. Trump will be monitoring this CEO’s performance, again on TV, and can fire him if need be.

Sound familiar?

Yarvin continues: Trump should amass an army of people willing to staff his new regime. Once he wins, this “magnificent army” of “ideologically trained” and Trump-loyal “ninjas” will be unleashed on the federal bureaucracy.

[H]e will throw it directly against the administrative state—not bothering with confirmed appointments, just using temporary appointments as needed. The job of this landing force is not to govern. It is to understand the government. It is to figure out what the Trump administration can actually do—when it assumes the full Constitutional powers given to the chief executive of the executive branch…

The regime must have the capacity to govern every institution it does not dismantle. The Trump regime is not a barbaric sack of America’s institutions. Genghis Khan is not in the building! It is a systematic renewal of America’s institutions. No brand or building can survive. But the new regime must perform the real functions of the old, and ideally perform them much better.

Many institutions which are necessary organs of society will have to be destroyed. These organs will have to be replaced. If they have not already been replaced in the larval stage, or even if they have, to scale—these replacements will need staff.

Government isn’t the only target for this hostile takeover, wrote Yarvin:

Finally, it is not sufficient to have an army of parachute ninjas large or smart to drop into all the agencies in the executive branch. Many institutions of power are outside the government proper. Ninjas will have to land on the roofs of these buildings too—mainly journalism, academia and social media.

The new regime must seize all points of power, without respect for paper protections. Anything can be nationalized—so long as the new regime has the staff, the prize crew as it were, to nationalize it.

Yarvin envisioned a crew of experienced and educated government workers who would be recruited to staff the new regime. Musk appears to have different ideas. As Vittoria Elliott of Wired reports, Musk’s chief lieutenants at DOGE (Destruction of Government by Elon) are very young men with no experience in government.

(Read “The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover,” and please subscribe to Wired, which is doing excellent work.)

Yarvin is not alone in envisioning a massive purge of government. In 2021, J.D. Vance lauded Yarvin’s work and called for a government purge:

I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.

Like Yarvin, Vance compared the federal government to a conquered enemy:

De-Nazification, De-Baathification … I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left. And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.

He added that Trump should defy any court orders designed to stop his purge.

The idea of a massive purge also appears in the writings of Balaji Srinivasan, whose ideas seem primarily derived from Yarvin’s. I’ve written much about Srinivasan in this newsletter, so I won’t quote him at length here. But his core idea, which he clearly got from Yarvin, is a corporate takeover of governments, which will afterward be run like tech companies (specifically, Twitter). Just as Musk took over Twitter and stripped “Blue Checks” of their status, he will now defrock civil servants, experts, and anyone who is loyal to democracy instead of the current regime.

Of course, the plot to destroy the federal bureaucracy also has a partner in the far-right Heritage Foundation. Project 2025, which is clearly being implemented despite mocking Republican denials during the 2024 campaign, calls for a purging and dismantling of government as well. As the Association of Federal Government Employees warned last July:

What could happen to our government and the federal workforce in 2025? A group of conservative organizations have a plan, and it’s not good for federal employees.

The plan is detailed in a blueprint called Project 2025, organized by the far-right Heritage Foundation, and backed by over 100 conservative organizations.

The plan promises a takeover of our country’s system of checks and balances in order to “dismantle the administrative state” – the operations of federal agencies and programs according to current law and regulation, including many of the laws and regulations that govern federal employment.

Longtime readers may recall that back in September, the Heritage Foundation and particular San Francisco tech interests held a conference called “Reboot 2024: The New Reality.”

The New Reality

Analysis: What once seemed like a fringe theory is now being carried out by the corporate powers that have wholly captured our government. While there are some minor differences between Yarvin’s approach and Musk’s, here’s a summary of what they have in common:

1. Install a CEO Dictator

  • Yarvin’s Blueprint: Trump appoints a CEO to run the country like a private corporation, bypassing Congress and the courts.
  • Musk’s Moves: Acts as federal CEO, demands unilateral control over sensitive government programs, positioning himself as an unelected decision-maker as Trump stays in the background.

2. Purge the Bureaucracy

  • Yarvin’s Plan: “Retire All Government Employees” (RAGE) – fire career civil servants and replace them with loyalists.
  • Musk’s Moves: DOGE is gutting teams, demanding mass resignations, locking employees out of offices, and threatening mass layoffs in federal government. Meanwhile, DOGE is recruiting inexperienced young men who owe their loyalty to Musk/Thiel.

3. Build a Loyalist Army

  • Yarvin’s Blueprint: Recruit an “ideologically trained” army to replace experts and enforce the new regime.
  • Musk’s Moves: Surrounding himself with young, inexperienced loyalists who enforce his will without question. Project 2025 will also provide Republican cadre to run what’s left of the federal government.

4. Dismantle Democratic Institutions

  • Yarvin’s Blueprint: Strip power from federal agencies, courts, and Congress, centralizing authority under the executive branch.
  • Musk’s Moves: Undermining the credibility of the federal government, downplaying legal oversight, and defying regulatory authorities. Dismantling government agencies and functions with no plan for their replacement.

5. Seize Media and Information Control to Maintain Power

  • Yarvin’s Blueprint: Take over government, journalism, academia, and social media to control public narratives.
  • Musk’s Moves: Buying Twitter, firing journalists, boosting propaganda, and promoting fringe narratives while attacking traditional media. Leading the hostile tech takeover as Trump’s “CEO.”

Did I miss anything?

Conclusion: There is a lot more to say. What surprises me most is how the political press generally fails to inform the public that Musk is taking a systematic approach, one that has been outlined in public forums for years. (Some press outlets, like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, are owned by billionaires keenly interested in kowtowing to Musk and Trump.)

We are witnessing the methodical implementation of a long-planned strategy to transform American democracy into corporate autocracy. The playbook was written in plain sight and is now being followed step by step. Some dismiss the Yarvins of the world as unhinged nuts, but that’s the point. These guys, with their bizarre and dangerous ideas, have gotten very far in 2025. Just look at the news.

Yarvin pitched his vision as a fictional or unlikely scenario. Unfortunately, it now appears to be our new reality. The press’s failure to connect these dots isn’t just a journalistic oversight — it’s a critical missed warning about the systematic dismantling of democratic governance. By the time most Americans understand what’s happening, the “reboot” – the destruction of government – may already be complete.

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秦 qín, in the hand of Wang Xizhi 王羲之