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At the outset of the year, Curtis Yarvin—the blogger whose vision of a new, autocratic U.S. is reportedly gaining traction within the Trump administration—leapt back into the mainstream spotlight, with a New York Times interview headlined: “Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.” The article was accompanied by a moody monochromatic portrait that exaggerates Yarvin’s jowls like a veristic bust. One animated version of the photo shows Yarvin ominously drumming his fingers on a table. The implication seems clear: Do those restless fingertips contain the fate of the nation?
Increasingly, Yarvin has been touted by the media as a key to understanding the American New Right—a Steve Bannonesque figurehead, but for its tech faction rather than its nativist-populist one. He’s a computer engineer who’s been blogging away for decades in the strange world of online ‘neoreaction’ under the dusty fairytale pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug,” and is best known for his idea that American democracy should be replaced by a monarchy that runs the country like a start-up and grants generous privileges to the tech-industrialist elites.
This has won Yarvin friends in high places. His relationship with billionaire venture capitalist mega-donor Peter Thiel is well publicized. Marc Andreessen and J.D. Vance have cited his work approvingly. Now, with Trump settling back into the White House and indebted to the Bay Area robber barons that helped put him there, it feels as though Yarvin’s public profile has decisively shifted—from geeky fringe blogger to a political-philosopher éminence grise who is laying the discursive groundwork for an “American Caesar.”
Clearly, this is how Yarvin wants to be perceived. But take him at face value, and you’re playing a losing game. You’re not going to find a Schmitt or a Machiavelli here, and the joke’s on you for expecting that. Instead, Yarvin is best understood as a kind of spokesperson for ten million brain-fried Twitter anons, a cohort he’s described as the “new public intellectuals” of our “digital age,” and whose scattershot, stream-of-consciousness tub-thumping is currently being reflected in some punchy U.S. government policy. Whether that’s down to Yarvin is hard to discern. It seems unlikely. Yet what’s undeniable is that he finds himself arriving into a cultural moment for which he feels precision-engineered. In Yarvin, Big Tech has found the perfect preachertroll to exalt the deliberate insanity of the ‘move fast and break things’ ethos it’s bringing to nation building, one who knows how to exploit “meme magic” to dream up new truths about the world. In times past, people would’ve called this ‘throwing lots of shit at a wall and seeing what sticks.’ Today, they call it disruption, hyperstition, accelerationism, the future.
This is why the whole thing makes more sense if you understand Yarvin as a Gen X tech geek playing the part of a poet-guru; someone who can help Silicon Valley sheath its scary, transhumanist vision of the future in ancient mysticism and boomer cool. Look: he’s trying to be Gabriele D’Annunzio in a leather jacket. He’s trying to harness the infinite sexuality of the poète maudit. He wants us to understand that he’s a prophet who has visions; that with his musings on the nature of elves, he’s somehow hallucinating the polity of the future. His swagger is a bit awkward. He’s a socialite who attracts a following of eccentrics. Some people have told me that it’s Yarvin who was responsible for redpilling a lot of the Silicon Valley fat cats, persuading them to indulge their god complexes, insisting that it’s actually chic to openly flirt with immiserating elites and outmoded racial theories, as a way of priming them to support Trump and whoever comes next.
In his interview with the NY Times, Yarvin displays some of the shifty mannerisms you might expect of a contrarian online troll, an identity that to his credit he has partly owned. His habit of peppering italics through his writing is a way of signposting profundity where more often than not, there isn’t any. If you were to lay out his political program in his own style, it could be abridged such: America needs to stop edging and gooning and elect a bareback President, one who is given free rein to be orders of magnitude more powerful. Sounds delectably depraved, doesn’t it? And yet what he really means by that is none other than FDR— ‘And you libs like FDR, don’t you?’ he snickers. The fans are in on the joke but the outsiders tend to give up in frustration—there’s no ‘there’ there, they complain; it’s incoherent and contradictory, it’s childish, it’s a testament to the intellectual vacuity of fascism, there’s no way this sophist charlatan can have any real influence, and so on. Open the schools!
Over the past few years I’ve had a bunch of funny encounters with Yarvin in New York, which he visits somewhat regularly, as if to make routine pilgrimage to the ancestral home of the Beat Generation. The first was a sunny summer day in 2022, at a meetup he had scheduled for his Substack subscribers in a park by the Hudson River. (He sometimes sends out newsletters advertising meetups in various cities; he once even put out a dating call to meet “someone of childbearing age.”) Dozens of Oxford shirt-wearing College Republicans surrounded the master, whose shoulder-length hair rested on his loose, half-buttoned saffron shirt that reminded me of the robes of Theravada monks. He stood in the grass and ruminated on Garibaldi. The disciples asked him questions like, “Who is the most overrated monarch in history?” The crowd was almost entirely male, and I remember some of the guys being disappointed, though not surprised, that no quirked-up cocquettecore girlies with bad politics were in attendance.
Later, in the fall, I saw Yarvin debate the playwright Matthew Gasda on the Shakespeare authorship controversy at a smoky salon in Greenwich Village. If you’re not familiar with this ongoing argument, there’s an “Oxfordian” thesis that the 17th century aristocrat Edward de Vere was the true author of Shakespeare’s works, and that Shakespeare had actually just been De Vere’s rentboy. This was the position Yarvin was arguing; to him, there is simply no way that a lowly, common-born fellow like Shakespeare could ever have portrayed the machinations of aristocratic life so accurately. Gasda—a sort of earnest Belle and Sebastian conservative himself—was arguing the widely accepted “Stratfordian” position, and had studied all night so he was ready to defend the Bard’s honor. Yarvin’s approach was more flippant. “Suppose a corpus of witty, erudite academic novels, set in an unnamed Ivy League English department,” he posited, “is published under the name of an illiterate immigrant from Ghana, who sells sunglasses on a blanket on the street in Morningside Heights?”
It was a line that sounded familiar, because Yarvin had already published it in a blog on his Substack. Clearly, the Ghanaian immigrant analogy is his go-to line on this subject. In his closing arguments, he went on to suggest that De Vere couldn’t put his own name to his works of genius because he was part of an Elizabethan bohemia of poet-spies who ran psyops for the Queen. Whether the Oxfordian thesis is actually true isn’t so important to Yarvin. What is? Hyperstitioning alternate histories to sow disbelief in the institutions of liberal modernity, ideally in the flippant manner of a social media shitposter. And who better to lap up these myths than the chain-smoking Dimes Square beatniks in the audience?
“The mainstream framing of Yarvin as the brains behind an imminent post-democratic America is one destined to fail, as it takes his bait on some level”
In the following years, I’d run into Yarvin every now and then at salons in other downtown basements. Sometime around Christmas 2023 I went to a reading where the venue hosts, fearing antifa-Dadaist direct action, had hired a bouncer to ensure the poet’s safety. In his signature winter look of all-black jeans and leather jacket, he read works from favorites like W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, and Robinson Jeffers, as well as some original writing. I found one poem of his—“War”—particularly striking, for how it tried to channel the Futurist ecstasy of combat though the experience of looking at your phone:
“I spend too much time
On Twitter, following
The war—probably
On the wrong side—
Nothing is in me to care”
From there, the speaker in Yarvin’s poem—presumably Yarvin himself—is mesmerized in a kaleidoscope of disinterested transhistorical enjoyment. The angel of history goonscrolls reality, which in 2025 is a titillating and contextless succession of thirst traps and snuff videos from the front. We learn that war is full of paradoxes—war is pointless but it’s also the only eternal thing in human existence, (“all else fades from the clays”); it’s cool as hell; it’s the worst thing ever; it’s all a big lie, but lies are cool (“The highest art is propaganda” begins another of Yarvin’s poems)—no, it’s peace that is fake; peace disappoints; peace is unsexy; it’s the opposite of love. Of course, this ode to war was probably written in comfortable conditions in Northern California, but the author knows what he’s playing at. The intense traumatic-erotic experience of industrial slaughter is the libidinal origin of fascism, and seems to be a model for Yarvin’s New Right ideology of the future. Yet crucially, the intensity is lacking; these horrors are something the poet and his audience can mostly only experience vicariously, through the internet.
What my experiences in New York tell me is that the mainstream framing of Yarvin as the brains behind an imminent post-democratic America—even when intended as ridicule—is one destined to fail, as it takes his bait on some level, validating the idea of his real proximity to power. Even as Trump seems to be attempting some version of the RAGE (Retire All Government Employees) plan that Yarvin has laid out in his blogs, the actual writing is less a guidebook of practical decisions for the American Caesar than a word soup of dazzling lies intended to chip away at the received wisdom of liberal modernity itself.
Case in point: When Yarvin suggests that the wellbeing of Black Americans actually declined after slavery, he’s not interested in a good-faith historical argument. What he seeks to do is undermine the idea that All Men Are Created Equal. He certainly doesn’t need to convince Trump of that one, and it’s not like what Yarvin has to say will be of any direct help in the administration’s coming attempts to destroy the Civil Rights Act. It’s the nativist faction, the intra-administration rivals of Yarvin’s benefactors, who have that covered.
Yarvin has a much different function. His dream is to win over the lookers-on: the College Republicans, the Silicon Valley elites, and in New York’s bars and smoke-filled salons the clouted “cool kids” who will one day be in positions of media power great enough to help rewrite history—and maybe let Yarvin fulfill his destiny as the great prophet of a new age of illiteracy, tyranny, and digital psychedelia.
Follow Michael Crumplar @mcrumps
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