Paid subscribers receive early access to this post. I’ll make it available to everyone on Tuesday. -M
I’m generally against mainstream media outlets giving hate-mongers a platform, but last week the New York Times ran a lengthy interview with Curtis Yarvin, founder of the neoreactionary movement, and I’m glad that they did. It’s the first exposure that many folks have had to Yarvin and his idealogy. He’s an influential figure on the MAGA right, backed by Peter Thiel. Yarvin has many devotees especially in tech, the most famous being Vice President J.D. Vance.
Yarvin is a writer who believes that democracy has been bad for civilization and that a modern monarchy is what’s needed for civilization to advance again. If you’re wondering why Yarvin is so popular in Silicon Valley, well, that’s because he believes that this modern monarchy should come from Big Tech. Or, as Jamelle Bouie put it in his column about Yarvin, “With views like these, it is not difficult to understand how Yarvin won the admiration of powerful patrons. He does little more than tell them what they want to hear. If he had been born a minor noble scrounging for influence in the court of Louis XIV, he would have been among the first to exclaim the absolute authority of the king, to tell anyone who would listen that yes, the state, it’s him.”
The interview makes clear that while Curtis Yarvin might be prolific, he also doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He falsely claimed that Apple, a publicly traded company, was a monopoly and that Franklin Roosevelt had absolute power when he took the oath of office. Yarvin even makes the false claim that the Civil War was bad for freed slaves and that their lives would have been better had it not happened.
His last claim gives the game away. Yarvin’s point of view isn’t anything new or revolutionary. It’s the same racist tripe that right-wingers have sputed for decades, repackaged to tell rich white men in Silicon Valley that actually they should rule the world. Right now, these guys are emboldened, feeling cocky, and their guard is down. They have the biggest audience they’ve ever had, and like Peter Thiel before him, Yarvin is more open in victory about what his ideology really is and how he wants American society forcibly reshaped. Something a lot of Trump voters probably aren’t aware of.
Yarvin and his acolytes think they’re the most brilliant guys in the room and therefore, they should rule the rest of us. They believe in ending America Democracy by any means necessary and using whatever powers they hold in service of that goal. Project 2025, now being implemented across the Federal Government, comes directly from Yarvin and neoreactionism.
Here’s the good news. They’re not smarter than us. They’re not that smart at all. The Executive Orders they’ve crafted for the Trump Administration have been a mess, and a judge has already halted the one ending birthright citizenship as unconstitutional.. As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern has pointed out on Bluesky, the EO’s are “poor, slipshod work obviously assisted by AI.” The Nation’s Courts Correpsobdant, Elie Mystal, offers a line-by-line breakdown of the EO ending birthright citizenship because the errors are that numerous! Does that mean we’re going to triumph in every case where this goes to court? No, but their incompetence should slow down the process in our favor. It gives us more levers to pull.
As someone who has followed Yarvin’s influence for years, I’m terrified at his ascent. Especially since I think the Supreme Court will happily go along with many of the Trump Administration’s efforts to strip America for parts and turn it into a neoreactionary theme park. So, while I don’t want to sugarcoat where things are, this first week has given me hope that we have more ways to fight back than it might seem at first glance.