"For a long time, Curtis Yarvin, the 51-year-old computer engineer, had been writing about political ideology in relative obscurity. His ideas were extreme: that instutitions like the mainstream media and academia have been overrun by oppressive group-think and need to be dissolved. He believes that government bureacracy should be radically gutted and that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a monarchy run by what he calls a "CEO," which is basically his friendlier term for a dictator."
So begins The Daily's podcast for Saturday, January 18, 2025.
It is a collective condemnation of society that we are in a place where learning about a man like this is necessary in order to understand the direction of our nation with the rise of the right-wing. So let me preface this by saying: Curtis Yarvin/Moldbug is attached to some real powerful figures such as JD Vance and Peter Thiel.
He was hanging out with Thiel on election night 2016, texting Milo Yiannopoulos from that shithole site Breitbart, which was instrumental in turning the losers fixated on "GamerGate" into Trumpers and used to be partially owned by Robert Mercer. These people have a lot of money and, now, a lot of power and are biting at the champ to use it to hurt the people they think need some hurting.
"We are living under FDR's personal monarchy," according to another quote included in this beginning bit, because God knows: all these billionaires with their superyachts, unimaginable wealth, and undeserved power that's so often inherited are nothing but powerless. Because our entire country fell under the spell of goddamn trickle-down fantasies instead of real economics.
Shockingly, unregulated billionaires do not create jobs, nor do they bother to follow one of the the fundamental concepts of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: honest trades meant for mutual benefit, along with an economy built on high wages and low profits instead of the opposite. It's one of the major problems of the non-falsifiable and least-academically rigorous Austrian school of economics, the soft science pretending to be a hard science like physics or math.
Poor and middle-class people who get a sudden influx of cash or a raise are more likely to use it within their communities: home repairs, furniture, electronics, grocery trips, etc., that will spur further expansion and growth and a mutual feeling of satisfaction. Billionaires will sit on the money, use it for their pleasures while palling around with creeps, and waste it on shit like superyachts—look at Bezos' ~$500 million Koru, so large it almost required the dismantling of a historic bridge to get out to sea.
But I digress. From the introduction above, you can see we're not headed for a piece of hard-hitting media, Marchese decides to be effectively worthless. He begins with a softball allowing a giggly Yarvin to downplay the severity of Americans needing to "get over dicator-phobia... dictator is the way to go... why is democracy so bad? ...why would having a dictator solve the problem?"
"Let me answer that in, I think, a way that would be relatively accessible to average readers of The New York Times..."
And no. Yarvin is an unreliable narrator. Giving him this bully pulpit is—well, it's about what I'd fucking expect from the Times over the last few years.
So, with a few quibbles, Marchese lets him begin to spill his tale of woe—about how the good part of FDR was him behaving "like a dictator."
He cites a specific meeting where he claims FDR "humiliated" Frances Perkins and—honestly, it's not worth your time. I've read multiple books on FDR, so let me demystify things: FDR came from a wealthy family and was part of the upper-class. He wasn't behaving "like a CEO," he was behaving as an upper-crust member of society who grew up in the Victorian Age with Little Lord Fauntleroy locks would.
This is part of why HW Brands' biography's title is a reference to Alice Roosevelt, daughter of Teddy, remarking that FDR was a "traitor to his class." FDR was a warm and charming man by most accounts; if you listen to Yarvin, you're more likely to come across thinking be was the Andrew Tate incel-type who was negging Perkins to assert dominance. Given the misogyny of the right, I think it goes without saying why Curtis chose to select the first female Cabinet member to be so denigrated. This sort of thing is called "dog whistling."
The comparison is also inapt due to—I could go on, but the continued FDR=CEO claims just don't hold water. (Neither does his claim that Alexander Hamilton was a "tech bro." Him saying, "You know, I'm an intellectual," for me, conjures up an image of Ralph from The Simpsons grabbing Chief Wiggum's gun and saying, "I'm a police officer now!")
Don't worry, our intrepid host isn't here to be an interviewer and ask hard-hitting questions. He's here to rephrase fascism into a neat, palatable package: "So, as I understand it, the point you're trying to make is that we have had something like a dictator in the past in American history and, therefore, it's not something to be afraid of now?"
I guess it's no surprise Marchese is a worthless questioner—he's a goddamn celebrity interviewer best known for a conversation with Quincy Jones that alluded to an alleged affair between Marlon Brando and Richard Pryor. I can't help but think of Anders Holm's character confronting Seth Rogen's in The Interview: "Yeah, but we do real journalism, you get all the fun stuff like who got a new boob job..."
So the interview just gets worse from there, and it didn't take long before I found myself thinking, well, the Stones put it better in that borrowed title.
The Daily and the Times shit the bed, per usual; they even mange to allow Yarvin to take shots at them for inviting him on. A decent investigative journalist could rip Yarvin to shreds. That's why he won't go talk to them and instead sticks to cockroaches online or settles for celebrity "journalists" who surely make Murrow turn even faster in his grave.
Let's take a better look at Yarvin.
One of Yarvin's big things is cultivating an image of himself as some kind of "Sith/Dark Lord" type who is so genius that once you read him, you'll be swept away by his logic and see how absolutely correct he is.
Personally, I think this is a real condemnation of the rich sitting on their asses. You've got all that time and money and this guy is the best writer you can come up with? There are so many good philosophers out there, but I guess in a world where the richest man thinks "f u retard" is a clever rejoinder, that many multisyllabic words must be a real daunting hurdle.
This is an active choice on his part and there's a reason his acolytes refer to him this way. You can dress shitty ideas up if you attack a thesaurus with the ferocity of a wolf going at bloody, raw meat. Hell, I used to do that when I wrote. Admittedly, it was when I was writing Fang the Dragon for Mrs. Rios' class in elementary school, not when I was an adult play-acting at being a philosopher, but we all grow up at different paces. I've still got the shitty writing down, at least.
He likes to present himself as some enigmatic figure of the dark side because in reality, he's a greasy haired fuck who considers himself the to be of the "natural aristocracy" and looks not too far distantly descended from Charles II, Incest's Poster Boy Before Alabama.
While The New York Times has gone to shit as the newspaper of record, thankfully we've still got people who actually do their research, so while I've picked up bits and pieces on this creep over the years, the brunt of credit goes to Robert Evans and Behind the Bastards. Sure, you're going to get a lot longer of a runtime, but instead of a spineless reporter giving a half-assed interview, you've got a pair who actually know their stuff and Andy from The Office in there too (who—yeah, I'm actually not at all surprised Ed Helms comes across as a real bright and insightful guy).
The fundamentals of Yarvin's philosophy aren't entirely off from the way they were described by The Daily, but without all the bubbly sound effects and cheery demeanor, it seems less like "Coffee With the Kook, How Fun!" and more like analysis with some quips. As stated, he believes that democracy as a concept is overrated and needs to be done away with in favor of a monarch-like CEO. Sometimes, the term "feudalism" is preferred, take your pick.
That whole thing about the media and academia and stuff? Most people have heard of that in some form before. Yarvin calls it "The Cathedral." This is a common feature in modern nutcase groups from QAnon to whatever garden variety Y'All Qaeda member is running around your neighborhood in tacticool gear: some call this the Deep State, some the NWO, some say ZOG (arguably a predecessor to NWO, considering both are barely-veiled antisemitism), it's kinda a common thing between both cults and extremist groups—in the Children of God, the Government was the System.
The point remains the same: Yarvin maybe slapped a more academic sounding name on it, but you're talking about the exact same bottom-of-the-barrel, baseless shit; generally, people flush shit so it doesn't become Moldy. As Evans notes in Behind the Bastards: sometimes Moldbug slips, as in his essay questioning whether Obama attended Columbia, and when he doesn't hit the thesaurus hard enough to dress up his words, he loses his faux-academic edge and instead just comes across as the unhinged, reactionary lunatic he tries to hide.
Another method of covering his shortcomings is a fallacious semi-argument from authority, as Evans also notes. Yarvin/Moldbug likes to sprinkle in quotes throughout his work with the basic assumption that anything written by a dead guy in a dusty book is valuable. So, for example, we find out one of his favorite philosophers is the Scottish Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle believed, like Yarvin, in a natural aristocracy and—well, what does a natural aristocracy require?
Natural servants.
This is why Carlyle and Yarvin both argue that slavery is a "natural" human relationship. This will be carried further with Rhodesia. Yarvin is so impressed by Carlyle's defense of slavery he compares him to Shakespeare—who, he insists, would have hated democracy too, based on extant writings.
We don't know really anything about Shakespeare's politics beyond speculation, so this is a complete crock of shit. We know so little about Shakespeare we can't even place his proper birthday, some people think he didn't exist (lol as if), and if memory serves from Russell Fraser's biography: any chance of finding lost writings of Shakespeare probably disappeared a few centuries ago. Apparently at one point, someone got cold and used them for kindling without realizing in a few hundred years, a lot of people would, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, widely come to regard this as a "bad move."*
And, for my part, if we're going with Scottish philosophers, we're better off with David Hume:
"Heaven and hell suppose two distinct species of men: the good and the bad. But the greater part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue."
That sort of philosophy isn't profit-centered, however... so Yarvin's solution is to bust up the country into a ton of smaller states, each independent and run by a monarch-CEO with his servants. As these monarch-CEOs have absolute authority, "rights" will vary based on their choices. "Rights," as such, might not even exist, as rights/liberties come from the Liberal Enlightenment and this guy is the head of the "Dark Enlightenment." Don't cut yourself on all that edge and—I have mentioned their ideology is basically a thirteen year old with power fantasies who gets handed a thesaurus?
Calling it an ideology or a philosophy at all, frankly, is laughable. I imagine most parents don't sit down with a toddler having a temper tantrum to discuss what philosophical outlook has led them to lashing out this way. The kid who used to refuse to eat because it's healthy now refuses to get a vaccine because it's healthy and becomes a super-spreader; the kid who got away with being a bully now can't face legal consequences when he oversteps and blames it on "political correctness."
It's like grown-up temper tantrums because of toddler attitudes in adult bodies.
Toxic masculinity is a big problem, especially with guys—I'm no exception.
I digress: these "move fast, break things" types are used to doing so within the context of a safety net—or should I say a golden parachute?—to protect them from ramifications. Now, with more cash, they're even more insulated. And while an idea like Soylent Green Gasoline might be easy to laugh off as a joke now, well—it's not like the CEO-monarch is going to just come out and say that's what's happening.
A little willful ignorance goes a long way.
"For surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must indeed be faced if we are to survive. ...I began by saying that our history will be what we make it. If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us."
—Murrow
We needn't imagine something as farfetched as a dystopian future with people turned into biodiesel. Let's just consider Yarvin's baseline plan of splitting up the government into many, much smaller states roughly the size of large cities and giving absolute power to the wealthy to rule as they see fit (with some slight feedback from a Board of Executives).
Do these independent city-states trade peacefully? Or do they decide to buy out other cities? If those cities refuse, do they send in the military/security apparatus to get the takeover done? If there's no centralized governmental power to oversee these conflicts, what is supposed to happen? Instead of a Buffettesque corporate merger or Hoovering up a diverse portfolio, I think we'd be talking something more akin to a Icahnian hostile takeover, in stock lingo.
In real person lingo, that means a lot of innocent dead people. It's not like big business is foreign to shitty things—remember the Banana War?
Chiquita is ordered to pay millions to families of death squad victims in Colombia
I could spin off all the rhetorical questions, but they boil down to this: after long-term degradation (or just some dipshit setting off a nuke without considering the big-scheme consequences) decent chance we'd be resetting society to where we were right around the time of the Agricultural Revolution.
Roving hunter-gatherers and settlements. (In typical American fashion, the wealthy would probably be among the hunter-gatherers, continually pillage successful settlements, and then wonder why the land stopped producing after they'd killed all the people and salted all the fields). Agriculture is, of course, one of the most basic and rudimentary forms of a nation developing wealth, per Wealth of Nations.
This leads to the first stage of government growth as an economy, based around agriculture: warriors to defend from marauders and farmers to till the land. This'll last you with old-school warfare up until mercantilism takes over, then the industrial revolution will escalate society and.... wait a second!
I recognize this pattern; I remember it from Finnegans Wake and The Wall: "...we came in?/Isn't this where..."
Or maybe the Who? "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss!"
Nothing changes if we don't address the root cause of the problem. Yarvin views the root of society's problem as monarchs losing absolute power; his problem is with the oppressed masses who rise up and refuse to be treated that way anymore.
The Enlightenment pushed for individual freedom and liberty and against a monarch's absolute power to rule.
These foundations are irreconcilable.
Now, it shouldn't be a surprise I'm a skeptic of this monarch-CEO approach. Having your life managed by your boss is shit: look at Twitter's changes, discussed in an earlier post on Character Limit. Personally, I can draw on my own experiences where my old man always put profit first. There's a difference between private profit and public good and we need to recognize that. People often don't, and I credit Professor Nathan from UW with taking the time to really make us think about this once in our consumerism class (really hope he's gotten tenured by now, that guy deserves it; fun note, I did not do well in either class I took with him. When I sent him a thank you a couple years back, I lightheartedly told him he really tanked my GPA, but it was worth it).
The purpose of a corporation is to make money. Full-stop.
The purpose of a public good—like public education, healthcare, or the government—means it should be run differently from its outset because we are not trying to make a profit, we are trying to create a society where people can live equitable, fulfilling lives. You don't punch the time clock for that, it's a constant and ongoing effort like that proverb about how a society grows great when the elderly plant trees they'll never sit in the shade of.
But our obsession with short-term profit is leading us, both as individuals and as a society, to approach life in quite a different way.
Let's consider another hero of Yarvin's. On the death of Rhodesia's Ian Smith, Yarvin bitched and moaned like a hysterical stuck pig, "The last great Englishman is dead and fuck who disagrees," before sobbing about the "tragedy of Rhodesia." The tragedy, presumably, being that Rhodesia wasn't able to—what, keep up a white-minority rule with Black slaves? Ending that doesn't seem like a tragedy to most anyone.
Now, prior to recently, I had a grand total of one guy talk to me about Rhodesia. Corey was his name, he used to work Produce with me at Freddy's (well, I was in Grocery). He told me that his buddy back in Concrete had a Rhodesian Ridgeback they called his "n— hunting dog."
That's the kind of country Rhodesia was. Like a stunted, should've-been abortion. It's very similar to apartheid South Africa, another of the most abhorrent nations out there: a white-minority violently oppressed the Black majority, harming or killing millions, while running a dictatorship with no concept of human rights. Smith falls into the category of people the world would have been better off without. I suppose that explains why Yarvin supports him.
Another person who falls into this category is Anders Breivik. Remember him?
He blew up a van and killed eight people, then went on to shoot up a summer youth camp and bring his death toll up to 77.
Yarvin believes terrorism like this works and is a "legitimate tactic" to apply in politics. Don't worry, though, he doesn't consider Breivik a hero or anything! Isn't that a relief?
Oh, wait. The reason he doesn't consider Breivik a hero is because his actions were "insufficient" to stop "Eurocommunism" as he had "only" killed 77 people. He does praise Breivik, though, because he "gored the matador and not the cape"—by this, Yarvin means to indicate Yarvin shot up so-called "communists" instead of "Muslims," who are just a convenient channel for hatred (I remember a certain reich that applied a similar dehumanization method...).
So, hey, maybe Soylent Green Gasoline is a joke, but this is Yarvin a day after the attack being genuine.
And a lot of the ideas originally propounded by Yarvin have made their way into the right-wing and republican sphere so much that Project 2025, which is soon to be our nation's republican playbook, is heavily inspired by him.
Evans is absolutely right in comparing Yarvin's writing to the Christchurch shooter's manifesto: parts seem serious, parts seem joking or wrapped up in in-jokes, innuendo, and shitty online memes that are often just regurgitated shit from /b/. This kind of 'ideology' (I still struggle to call this that: chaos isn't really an ideology, it's just spinning a roulette wheel and betting on your ability to land on your feet) also is a constant threat: it appeals to violent, unhinged lunatics who are inclined to go out and commit stochastic terrorism.
He further notes that Yarvin will not explicitly call for violence—but the calls are very clearly veiled and present. It's just enough to provide plausible deniability.
There's a lot more to discuss but I suppose I would like to return to and emphasize most primarily: Yarvin's whole "Dark Enlightenment" thing is, to quote Jim Morrison on astrology, "a buncha bullshit." He intentionally cultivates this aura of mystique around him and tries to get his followers to speak of him that way—a jouralist-become-Yarvinite mentioned by Behind the Bastards exemplifies this. But if you take a look at it, it's really just puffed up, bloviating shit.
If there's one thing that should be learned from Yarvin, it's that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who want to be told they're pretty and special and their shit don't stink are just as prone to snake-oil salesmen telling them what they want to hear as anyone. I suppose a spicy remark deserves a similar ending from the master:
"If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a. glimpse of the world as it was at the beginning, not just after we got through with it."
—Lyndon B. Johnson.
Or maybe ol' El BJ's overrated and politically correct with wanting to build a Great Society. No one ever accused the guy of not having a good time—and he made it fun. You didn't hear about him begging a flight attendant for a handjob; he'd laugh about how he'd slept with more women by accident than JFK had on purpose, calling his tailor up to ask for more room for his massive elephant trunk, swimming nude with world leaders or intimidating Senators with the Johnson Treatment at the urinals so they knew who literally had the largest dick in the room, and, on at least one occasion, sliding into bed with a secretary at his ranch while saying, "Move over. This is your President speaking."
Now, I'm not saying LBJ was perfect. He's got Vietnam on his hands, after all. He was completely foul-mouthed, but he used his language as a tool. He also cared and that really comes through when you study him. He was the same man who, realizing he wasn't a good teacher, decided he still wanted to help schools and so he became a politician; I believe Dallek's one-volume abridgment is the source of this.
We get fuckin' losers like this, who see being foul-mouthed as an end in and of itself:
This Cat Can Pick Stocks Better Than Most Investment Managers
—
*On a less joking note, politics and Shakespeare don't mix for a reason. Back then, people from the lower classes who interfered in politics had a bad habit of ending up with a case of "being dead."
In the US, we don't spend much time on English history—hell, we barely understand history at all, even our own. I only took honors and AP classes and I can barely believe how ignorant I was about history in general when I graduated.
Shakespeare was born into the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen. Elizabeth takes power about a decade after Henry VIII. Yes, that one—most famously known for the English Reformation because the Pope was sick and tired of Henry running around playing out the part of Bluebeard what with the executed wives and all.
Henry's death plunges England into a decade of turbulence—frankly, I need to refresh my memory—but Bloody Queen Mary comes in here, you got back-and-forths going on with Catholics and Protestants. This ends when Protestant Elizabeth comes to power but her control is still under question, which leads to extensive spy networks and the like in the midst of religious warring. (Read a biography of Francis Walshingham, her spymaster, once but I was, uh, I was really drunk at the time. Thankfully, the Marlowe biography I read I was sober during—albeit in the first month or two of sobriety, when my memory and gray matter in my brain were still pretty fried and my info retention was weak).
Anyway, Elizabeth extends British power and is quite well-regarded as a queen; for her time, she's pretty tolerant. Things like England defeating the Spanish Armada (Catholics) don't hurt. As the Virgin Queen, however, the question of succession comes—1603 is when she passes and the throne is passed to King James VI and I (he was the sixth King James of Scotland and the first King James of England). This is why my Shakespeare classes were split into Before- and After-1603. Later on, of course, Charles I will succeed his father and, literally, lose his head before Cromwell takes over for a while and earns his place as one of England's most controversial figures (and one of Ireland's most hated).
There's an argument to be made for whether the dramas or the histories would be the "best" avenue to try and find politics in Shakespeare—and while I found John Julius Norwich's Shakespeare's Kings a shockingly sprightly read, I don't recall there being a lot about politics in there. Whatever changes were made were done to 'telescope' events and characters for the sake of simplicity in writing, or else to avoid upsetting people in power and get past censors.
Speaking of politicization, let me quote Kit Marlowe:
"Midas' brood shall sit in honor's chair
To which the Muses' sons are only heir..."
Would this have been considered political back then?
Would it be today, considering the overlap of politics and money?
—I would hope this goes without saying, but the soon-to-be VP listens to this guy so let us clarify what should be a middle school understanding of civics. Yarvin complains continually about the "inefficiency" of government and how this would could be fixed by a monarch with total power.
The United States was intentionally designed with a system of checks and balances built into the Constitution to prevent such a concentration of power in one person or branch.
Read the Constitution. The President is not supposed to be an all-powerful executive. Legislation goes to the Executive Branch (President) after Congress (The House of Representatives and the Senate) passes it. The President signs it into law. The President has a few other powers. The Supreme Court in the Judicial Branch, thanks to Marshall, had to kinda grow on its own—but it opened up Judicial Review and essentially weighs the constitutionality of laws.
This is called a tripartite system of government (Three Branches: Legislative, Executive, Judicial) and a bicameral legislature (two houses—the Senate and the House, drawing on the British Parliamentary system).
Remember again, as elementary school teaches us, we were rebelling against a king we thought had too much power. The Constitution was created specifically to prevent a President from accruing the kind of unbounded power Yarvin wants a monarch-president-CEO to have.
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