Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Curtis Yarvin: The Philosopher Behind J.D. Vance

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Robert concludes the story of Curtis Yarvin, and explains to Ed Helms how he went from pseudonymous weirdo with a blog to part of the right-wing power structure. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube! New videos every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel: Youtube.com/@behindthebastards   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

CAUSOR MEDIA Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst people in all of history. And with us today, someone who, as far as I am aware, is not one of the worst people in all of history. Ed Helms. Ed, have you ever committed a crime? Lots. OK, well, OK, Well, I expected the opposite answer I've only murdered

Jerks You're fine The right side of I'm on I still have like More you're just killing bad people like who's got a problem with that. You're right. Yeah, if you're just killing bad people. Like who's got a problem with that? Jerks. Yeah. Jerks. No, not bad people, jerks. Just jerks.

No, it's like we were talking about earlier. You can't have a black and white like murder's always bad because like what if somebody's a jerk? Just wondering, can I send you a list of names for no apparent reason? As long as they're jerks. Yep. Okay, okay.

This is great info to have. It's great info to have. No apparent reason. As long as they're jerks. Yep. Yep. Okay. Okay. This is great info to have. It's great info to have. Welcome back to the show, Ed Helms. I mean, again, I don't feel like you necessarily need introduction, but I will remind everyone about your excellent podcast, Snafu, and you just had season two drop talking about the wonderful activist burglary of an FBI building in 1971

that led to some of the most important revelations of the burgeoning security state in history. So yeah, great show. People should check it out. Ed, are you ready? I'm ready. As you described season two of Snafu, I couldn't help thinking about how well it connects to our subject matter. Yep, untrammeled authority, yeah.

Because J. Edgar Hoover basically had some degree of unchecked authority within the FBI. And he was doing really awful stuff. He's a great example, because he was this kind of CEO god king of the security state for decades and it didn't end well or middle well or start well. Comes back to that. I think at the beginning of the last episode, I was like, how do you pick the guy?

Right, right. The guy, how can you be sure you got the right guy? It's also this thing of like, I think with Hoover, you really did see a man who he wasn't the same guy at the start of his time running the FBI as he was at the end, you know, because number one, he aged our brains change as we age. We in many cases get worse at some things. The period of time that he had with power, he got used to doing increasingly extreme things with it. There was this constant escalation of his authoritarian impulses. The job was bad for him. It was bad for J. Edgar Hoover. It made him a worse person.

I think that fundamentally guys who advocate for these systems never take that into account, in part because I just don't think they believe it the way that I think most normal people do. You don't have to be on the left or a libertarian or an anarchist to be like, well, yeah, if you give people access to all of the power in the world, they generally do horrible things with it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would. Anyway, huh?

I would, yeah, I would do awful, nightmarish things. Well, I do really fun things, but people might get hurt. I would have a good time, but not everyone would have a good time. I think maybe that's just how these guys think about it, right? I'm gonna be the one having a good time. So, and again, that's part of why we're doing these episodes

because Curtis Yarvin could potentially be on the brink of having a very good time. And I really want to emphasize what a bad idea that would be. Sure. We think of Franklin as the dodging dude flying a kite in the rain. Benjamin Franklin is our subject for a new season with Walter Isaacson. He's the most successful self-made business person in America.

A printer, a scientist, a founding father, but maybe not the guy we think we know. Franklin casts his lot on the side of revolution. And it's another thing that splits the family apart. Listen to On Benjamin Franklin with Walter Isaacson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly every Thursday.

Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ever get the feeling someone's watching you? Well, in 1971, a group of anti-war activists had that feeling. I was in the heart of the dragon and it was my job to stop the fire.

So they decided to do something insane, break in to the FBI and expose J. Edgar Hoover's dirty secrets. We had some idea that this was pretty explosive. I'm Ed Helms. Binge the full second season of Snafu now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was assassinated. podcasts. Listen to Crooks Everywhere starting September 25th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Kay hasn't heard from her sister in seven years. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. What was that? That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. Can Kay trust her sister? Or is history repeating itself?

There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I have referred to Yarvin as a monarchist a few times in these episodes. And I will again, I do think it's important to note he would disagree with me using that title because

he thinks that calling someone a monarchist brings to mind the constitutional monarchies that largely failed in the early 20th century. And he blames that failure on compromises and absolute power. Now we talked last episode about Yarvin's core beliefs. Democracy isn't really real. And if it was real, it wouldn't be a good idea. The cathedral who really runs things are the enemy. And some sort of aristocracy and an absolute CEO monarch paired with the freedom to exit

if you don't like the particular flavor of oppression in your home is the ideal state of governance. As a tech guy though, Jarvan doesn't like to couch his yearning for a king, which is what this is, right? He's a monarchist. He's not the same kind of monarchist that, for example, like guys like Jair or Tolkien were, but he's very much a monarchist. And he doesn't like to seem like the regular people who long for the days of

having a king, right? He's got to be a little bit smarter about it, right? This is where kind of the big tech line of things comes in. His argument, he starts making this in the early period of the Web 2.0 tech boom, you get smartphones, you get apps like Twitter and YouTube and Facebook. There's this period of time, I know it feels very distant to us, but where people thought this was going to enhance democracy around the globe, that all of these connecting technologies were going to be a massive boon for liberatory movements across the planet.

That's not what happened. Yarvin, very early on, isn't just saying that's not what's going to happen. He's saying that's not what should happen. Big tech shouldn't enable democracy around the world. It should take control in a very literal sense. He becomes an advocate of a kind of political philosophy he called neo-cameralism, which Francis Tseng described in an excellent essay as, quote, arguing that the state should be run like a business, i.e. with a CEO at

its head and no democratic mechanisms. Yarvin has always taken pains to express in public his belief that this change can be done peacefully. He thinks we're already not living in a democracy, so there's no reason this has to be painful. But a study of his writing over the years makes it clear that not only is he open to violence, but enthusiastic about it. And this brings me to one of the uglier parts of our story. In 2011, a Nazi named Anders Brevik shot up a summer camp hosted by the Workers Youth

League, a left-wing political organization in Norway. Brevik, who considers himself a member of the Knights Templar, acting to defend his faith and race from evil communists, shot and killed or bombed 77 people. Jarvin wrote about this as well, arguing that terrorism was a legitimate tactic and that Nazi terror had been legitimate. Because it worked. For the Baffler, Corey Payne summarizes, quote, Breveks killing spree, which targeted young Norwegian leftists, was illegitimate because it was insufficient to free Norway from Euro

communism. After all, he only killed 77 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. Yarben wrote on July 23rd, 2011, one day after the terror in Oslo. So that is, I mean, we've gotten now from a guy who is just sort of like preaching his idiosyncratic political system to a guy who is being like, he didn't kill enough kids

for it to matter. Right? Like this is, you know, it's important to not, to lean into the fact that like, this is not just a guy whose politics would lead to bad directions. This is a pretty vile person. Where is he writing this? On his blog, Unqualified Reservations.

Which is just publicly available blog. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's not like in the dark recesses of 4chan. No, no, no, no. This is a publicly available blog. Now it's not, it's not like in the dark recesses of 4chan. No, no, no, no. This is a publicly available blog. Now it's not, it's not, it's very popular with a certain subset of the world and he's writing under a pseudonym. So people don't know his real name in 2011, right?

Now the pseudonym could mean that there's some measure of trolling going on, but not, but, but this is, there's no, there's no, I, there's no kind of like winky irony. I mean, this is some of the most, if it's remotely humorous at an attempt, it is some of the most like wretched, awful and heart wrenching failed humor. But, um, but if again, like, there's no version in which as using a pseudonym, he's being like, Oh, I, yeah, I can't even think of, no, no, this is, this is very much not him fucking around. Like this is, um, cause I mean, you can tell for a degree like the, like talking about

grinding up people for biodiesel. I, I've seen some articles where people mistake that for a serious position. If you read it in context, he's clearly like joking It's thrown out as a joke. This essay is him talking about why the Breivik attack was bad. It's bad not because he killed all those people, but because it's not big enough to destroy the left. That's very much the take that he has on this, which is not really, he's not being satirical. Not that it would be good to be satirical about this, but that's not really what he's doing.

This is this kind of stuff. Part of why people don't catch onto this more often about Yarvin when they write about him for mainstream news sources is that he writes so much. To catch this stuff, I wouldn't have caught all of this stuff if I had just been going, I wouldn't have had time to read all of his archive. Thankfully, guys like Corey Pine did a lot of that work. And so people have been collecting kind of like the worst hits of Curtis Yarfin for a while now.

But it's not immediately easy for people to do. And it gets missed by the people who aren't really like big fans of his a lot of the time, right? Because there's just so much there. And he's got kind of loggeria, diarrhea of the mouth a bit. He's very wordy. So around the same time as he's writing his articles about the Utoja shooting, Yarvin is also pushing an acronym out in his writing to the people who have built this kind of

political circle around him, which is kind of liberally sprinkled with Peter Thiel dollars. The acronym that he starts pushing is RAGE, which means retire all government employees. This is a term that he's come to for this policy plan that he starts pushing among the young conservatives following him, that we need to get a president who is our kind of guy in office and have him forcibly retire the entire like professional cast of the government

and replace them with our people, with people who think, and that's how we shift the- Are they 2025? Yes, yes, yes, exactly. That is, and this is something he is pushing in the early aughts, right? Like, yes. And to be and this is something he is pushing in the early aughts, right? Like, yes. And to be honest, a lot of Project 2025

is people cribbing from Yarvin. And it's because it's people who were influenced by him or influenced by people who were influenced by him, right? But a lot of this intellectually starts with him, you know? Obviously, he's not the only guy thinking about stuff like this, but he's putting it out in a form that is like a cohesive ideology. In the early years, and we're talking kind of the mid-aughts around 2011 up through 2014, his adherents are mostly other tech industry creatures.

One of these people is someone named Justine Tunney. Justine started out as someone who was more progressive. She was an Occupy activist back during Occupy, and she gets hired as a Google engineer. In March of 2014, Justine published a petition on the White House website demanding a national referendum on three points. Number one, retire all government employees. Number two, transfer administrative authority to the tech industry. And number three, appoint Google CEO Eric Schmidt CEO of America.

Now this is a very silly idea. For one thing, who looking at Google today thinks Eric Schmidt should run the country? But in defense of this, Tunney wrote, it's time for the US regime to politely take its exit from history and do what's best for America. The tech industry can offer us good governance and prevent further American decline. Part of why I think Tunney is an interesting case study and followers of mold bug, because she tells people on Twitter who are questioning her about this petition she's put up that they need to read Minchus Moldbug. Tunny's interesting because she doesn't come out of the traditional right.

She's a transgender woman who had built herself as an anarchist earlier in her ideological life prior to finding Moldbug's writing. And so this arc she takes from an economic justice advocate to tech industry monarchist shows how seductive a lot of intelligent people found Yarvin. And the fact that people like Tunney who don't come out of where you would expect someone to wind up believing these far right ideas get enraptured by Yarvin's writing is part of why he starts to get this reputation for almost being this kind of like mental sorcerer, someone whose work has this almost like Lovecraftian pull in twisting people's beliefs and ideals.

And that's very much the reputation that he starts to pick up in like the the odds. There's a philosopher, kind of a reactionary philosopher named Nick Land, who's a fan of Jarvan's writing, who gives it the nickname the dark enlightenment, right? That's the term that he comes up with to refer to these kind of neo-reactionary, anti-democratic, monarchist policies. It's written that way because supposedly once you read Jarvin's arguments for why democracy can't work and this authoritarian system is better, like this, this through the looking glass breaking moment.

I've taken the red pill and I can never go back. Right. Boy, that's really endowing this guy and these writings with a lot of, oh yes, like magical power in a very absurd way. It is. It takes them out of the realm of like intellectual exploration and dialogue and idea sharing and into this like, truly like conspiratorial, like come into the fold,

put on your dark cloak and join the dark enlightenment. Yeah. That's what mold bug wants, right? That's good branding for you. If you're this guy, that's certainly how you want to be seen. Okay. I think that's not really accurate to what's happening to Tony or to what's happening to most of the people following them.

In part because I have a degree of like a professional understanding from my former career writing and analyzing terrorist groups of how people get radicalized. A thing that gets missed a lot, and scholar Scott Atron was the guy who I started reading, who wrote about this a lot, but about how people get radicalized. It always happens, nearly always, in communities. Even if it's not a physical community, if it's online, people don't generally get brought into radical belief systems or extremist politics on their own. They get brought in in part because their circle of friends,

the people they respect and think are cool, get drawn into it. And I think that's what's happening to Tunny. And I think that's a lot of the power that Moldbug's writing has, is that he is telling this Silicon Valley set of people who got a lot of money very quickly when they were young and got kind of lost their minds and their belief about their own genius. He's telling them what they want to hear, that they should run things. They start sharing his stuff with each other.

They start talking like him because of the way he writes. It becomes the cool thing within a certain set in Silicon Valley to be into mold bug. That's a lot of the appeal. It's not that his writing has some sort of magical mind warping effect. It's that this community of people that a lot of folks, especially newer folks coming into the tech who want to get founder money, who want to be part of this in-crowd, it's the cool thing to be talking about, to believe in. That's I think where a lot of the power that he initially has comes from.

I think that's always the case. If you want to look at why a lot of people joined ISIS, a lot of these young communities, it's because ISIS was cool, right? To a lot of these young people, the way that they talk, the slang they use, the media they put out, communities of people got radicalized in part because it was attractive in that way to them, right? It's not like a mind virus. It's kind of the same way fads and trends always work, right? It's not like a mind virus. It's kind of the same way fads and trends always work, right? This is the way that like any fad takes hold, you know, it's just a

much darker example of that, but that is how radicalization tends to occur. And I think that's what's happening with mold bugs writing. Yeah. It's interesting that the, uh, you're, you're saying Tunny Tunny is her name, right? Yes, Justine Tunny. Justine Tunny was sort of brought in, even just talking sort of more generally about radicalization that it's often the product of a community. What about the, what about the Yarvans? Like you think that that was, are they the outlier?

The kind of like- Well, no. Like, do you think that that was, are they the outlier, the kind of like the special beacons of, or did he come from that youth tech community that, you know, from his youth? I think that's a great question, but I do think if you look at kind of his background, you see the community he was radicalized in, right? When he starts working for the tech industry, when he's in the internet in the mid-90s, he starts talking to these guys who are these big Austrian school advocates who are... He admires, these are generally men who are a bit older than him, who are more accomplished

in their careers. They're telling him, oh, you should read Hans Hermann Hopp, you should read Ludwig von Mies, you should read Thomas Carlyle, you should read Murray Rothbard, right? And he reads these guys and he takes their thinking seriously in part because people he respects and thinks are cool are telling him to, right? So I do think it's a version of the same process, right? In part because that's just how human beings adopt ideas, right? Like it's the, if you're, you know, I know people who are like evangelical Christians, right?

And there's a couple of different attitudes towards how you should evangelize. But the one that people I think are generally of goodwill have is that like, well, if you're a really good and admirable person, people will find, will be interested in what you believe. And that's the best way to proselytize, right?

By just actually being kind of rad. And that's how I found, when I got into radical politics, it was because I ran into a bunch of anarchists who were on a regular basis going out and feeding homeless people. And I thought that was dope. And that got me interested in what other things do these people believe? Because I thought they were cool, right? Like that is how, I think it's just like mostly how people work, right? But it's in the interest of a guy like Yarvin to make it feel like his writing has this like lovecraftian power to enrapture and warp minds. Anyway, cool people.

The world's all just high school, right? So Tunny is a good example of these kind of early adherents to mold bug who are mostly young disaffected engineers, software engineers, tech industry people. And when Yarvin kind of, part of where this sort of dark enlightenment turn takes off is that in around 2013, 2014, when mainstream news starts writing about him, the most attractive angle to take with this guy is not here is a trend in a certain subset of like Silicon Valley tech people. Let's look at the reasons why this trend might be popular. It's this dark enlightenment guy whose work has

this dangerous rapture. The media helps create the myth of Jarvan and he manipulates it effectively. I think this is part of why this reinforces his beliefs to an extent about how bad the cathedral is, these media organizations that like, wow, it's so easy for me to manipulate them. is these media organizations that like, wow, it's so easy for me to manipulate them. Anyway, that's kind of what's happening in the late aughts with this guy. One of the people who is going to come to be sort of a follower of him in this later period after he starts to achieve more prominence is JD Vance. It's because Moldbug's writing is really appealing to these people who got a lot of money and power very quickly, often because they were either in venture capital, because they were

in the tech industry or something. They have all this wealth, but they don't come out of academia. They don't have any sort of place in the traditional media hierarchy that demands respect. You may have a lot of money, but why should I care what some software engineer about Google says about politics or whatever? Why should I care about what some finance dude who was really good at gambling on the housing market has to say about politics just because you have a bunch of money? That's where Vance comes out of.

He's one of these guys who's got a background in private equity. He's one of these guys who is angry that that doesn't automatically afford him the respect of what he considers to be an elite in society. Another one of the proponents of Jarvin's thinking about particularly this retire all government employees thing is Blake Masters, who's a twice failed Arizona congressional candidate and another Peter Thiel protege. In an interview with Vanity Fair before the first of his failed campaigns, Masters was asked how he would drain the swamp in practice if he was brought

into Congress. He responded, one of my friends has this acronym he calls RAGE, Retire All Government Employees. He was referring to Jarvan. He and Jarvan are friends just like Vance and Jarvan, go to a lot of the same parties and whatnot. These are all guys who are not just close ideologically, but like are in the same physical spaces a lot of the time talking with each other. That's a important, uh, yeah, aspect of this that's, that's new.

So that doesn't just a, a kind of like, Hey, I read your stuff and, or I read this guy's stuff and I think it's compelling and I'm, I'd like to crib some ideas from this it's stuff and I think it's compelling and I'm, I'd like to crib some ideas from this. It's more, it's also that they're hanging out. Yes. And that, and that, that really starts. We'll talk about this in a little bit, but once Yarvin gets kind of doxed, right?

So people in 2014, I think it is, TechCrunch publishes what his actual name is. Instead of, there's this period of time where there's some backlash against him, but mostly what it does is elevate him. He's not hiding behind a pseudonym anymore, but now he's free to be a public figure in more of a way. He starts publicly showing up at these parties and events where guys like JD Vance and Blake Masters are in attendance.

Where people who are making inroads into the actual political strata of the right are in attendance. That's a thing that's increasingly happening once we hit the Trump era. It's important. The best example of the degree to which Jarvin's thoughts and policies have entered mainstream politics is rage. Is this idea that we need to bring in a guy who's going to fire everyone in the government and replace it with our people.

This is the kind of thing that, not only is this something that guys like Masters and Vance are talking about, Trump tried to do this already in 2020. At the end of his term, he sought to reclassify thousands and thousands of federal employees in order to strip them of job protections and make them at-will employees that he could fire. This was reversed under Biden, but it is the kind of thing that Trump could bring back

and plans to bring back if he wins again, because he has promised that if he takes office again in 2025, one of the first things he's going to do is fire thousands of quote unquote crooked government employees. Trump has repeatedly disavowed project 2025 because it's become kind of a toxic thing politically for him. But he has promised that when he takes office, he's going to clean house within the federal government and put his own people in there. This is very in line with what Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts told the New York

Times he hoped a second Trump term would bring. Quote, people will lose their jobs. Hopefully their lives are able to flourish in spite of that. Buildings will be shut down. Hopefully they can be repurposed for private industry. And that's Kevin Roberts is not a guy who's ever said Curtis Yarvin's name that I can find. But that's Mincius Moldbug, right?

Like that's exactly what he has been talking about for years. Would you draw a direct line from Mincius to these positions? I mean, I know that's not the same, but are you, do you feel very, very confident that Minxess Moldbug is the source of these ideas or was this sort of a general sentiment that Minxess was reflecting among like a certain set? I think it's best to think about it like a garden, right? And what Minxess did was kind of spread fertilizer over that garden that made a climate where a lot

of these ideas, many of which do come directly from his writing, but he also helped set the ideological climate on the far right. As the far right took over the center-right Republican party, it brought a lot of these mold buggy and ideas with it, which is part of why guys like Peter Thiel, who are anti-democratic activists and use a lot of their money to that end, have funded Yarvin. They see him as useful for that sort of thing, right? A lot of these guys who have gone on to work at the Heritage Foundation in the early 2000s, in 2008, 9, 10, 11, were

like kids in high school and college passing around mince mold bug tracks. That's kind of how this has worked. I would see him as he prepared an environment for these kind of politics to grow. I think there is a very direct line between him and a lot of what you see with Project 2025, a lot of the stuff, even though Trump certainly has never read one of these guys' articles, he's surrounded by people who are telling him and who have ideas about how absolute power can be attained that are based on things mold bug has written. I think that that's absolutely something I'm confident arguing.

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This season on the new podcast, Rip Current. Hear episodes of Rip Current early and completely ad free and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing to iHeart True Crime Plus only on Apple podcasts. And we're back. So one of the things I find interesting about Yarvin is there's this degree of insecurity to some of his writing where he definitely is a monarchist and he's definitely someone who feels a sense of nostalgia to some of these old absolute monarchies, but he doesn't want to get lumped in with the guys who are like unironically stands of the Tsar or whatever and think that like, oh, if only we

could bring the Romanovs back to power in Russia, everything would be better. Yarvin isn't a monarchist for shallow reasons, right? He doesn't want to be seen as someone who advocates this because he's nostalgic. He wants to be seen as someone who has run the numbers and concluded there's no alternative to this system. And so whenever he makes his arguments for why things should be this way, he liberally sprinkles them with citations. Now his citations are a bunch of old reactionaries who had like argued against kings and emperors

giving up any power back in like the 1850s and the like. But he has this like kind of belief that any sort of quote from an old dead guy is a primary source that is something people should take more seriously when they're trying to make their minds up about how the world works. He's an autodidact in that he's someone who is self-taught through reading a bunch of books about the things he likes. He's convinced that this is a more ideologically rigorous thing than what people do in academia. The key thing in academia is that if you have ideas or theories or if you're making arguments,

you have to expose them to other people and debate and have them torn down. That's a key part of the way the academic process works. He's only ever existed inside his own head. You get stuff like this 2008 blog post titled An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives where he writes this about primary sources. The neat thing about primary sources is that often, it only takes one to prove your point. If you find the theory of relativity mentioned in ancient Greek documents, and you know the documents are authentic, you know that the ancient Greeks discovered relativity.

How? Why? It doesn't matter. Your understanding of ancient Greece needs to include Greek relativity. Now that's a non sequitur, because like, if you were to find an ancient Greek wrote right about the theory of relativity, that alone wouldn't necessarily argue alter your understanding of ancient Greece because there's a lot of other questions like did anyone else come across this writing at the time?

Was this idea disseminated? Was it adopted on any kind of scale into the dominant theoretical models of the time or was it one cranks weird belief that he laid out in an old letter to a friend? The fact that you might find something that sounds like an argument about relativity in an ancient Greek document doesn't necessarily change your understanding of ancient Greece in a meaningful way. The fact that you could cite that primary source wouldn't be enough to say the ancient Greeks had an understanding of relativity because you don't know that it wasn't just one guy who was viewed widely as a crank,

right? A good example of this kind of thing from real world history, because he's just making up fake history there because again, there's not really a good argument to be made. But I will make an interesting argument. It's about something called the aliophile, which was an ancient steam engine that was first described by Hero of Alexandria in the first century AD. It was actually technically a steam turbine, but it was a precursor to a steam engine that existed in ancient Rome.

Now that's a cool bit of history, but does that mean that the Romans had steam engines and the ability to make trains? No, because this was only ever used as like a party trick. Like a couple of prototypes were made and they were like made to impress people at like gatherings for rich people. No one ever did anything with it. So the fact that technically there was the knowledge to make a steam engine in ancient Rome doesn't change your understanding of ancient Rome because they still didn't have steam power. Right. Yeah. It's like it's like somebody showing off their Aston Martin. Right. Not everybody had Aston Martin's or has asked. Yeah. Some rich guy is like, check it out. Yeah. And then you were to say that like, well, that this meant that the Aston

Martin was the car of the 21st century. And like, no, like, like, like a couple hundred people had them or whatever. I would say, I mean, I would say that he has a point that depending on the assertion by a primary source, sure, it can have like, pretty powerful value in an historical context. Oh, absolutely. But you also, you have to take into account, I think part of it is that he's, he's talking about this in like internet debate terms where like someone makes an argument and you throw in a quote from a source and like, it's probably done because most people don't have the time or the breadth of knowledge to really argue these things in detail as opposed to like

in academia, part of what you would be trying to do is like, not just here's what one source said about this, but like. You want it to be irrefutable. Yeah, here's the balance of sources. Like we can do a survey of all of these different people from the time writing about this moment. And we found you're gonna find conflict, right? Because if you have like 10 people who are all present at the same shooting or car crash or whatever,

you're going to get 10 slightly different accounts, right? Those are all primary sources. A primary source does not mean something is right. It just means it's from someone who was there, you know? But that's not how mold bug thinks about it because he very much has this he thinks about these, these old dead reactionary writers the way he wants to be thought about, right? Which is as someone who is more or less ideologically unimpeachable, right? Because they're his favorite writers. And so I think it behooves us to talk about probably his favorite of these old dead reactionaries,

because it tells us a lot about some of the things that Jarvin believes. And this is who we've talked, we talked about this guy in part one, Thomas Carlyle. Now, Carlyle is writing in the mid 1800s. He's a Scottish writer who, one of the things he wrote about, he was an early writer kind of talking about the plight of the working class under industrialization.

So there's just a degree of what he was writing about that I think was fairly valid, but he was also a massive bigot. And for kind of an overview of that, I found a write up by the Glasgow Museum of Slavery aptly titled Thomas Carlyle, historian, writer, racist, that describes an essay Carlyle wrote. Quote, Carlyle complained that emancipated black people in the West Indies were lazy, working little, but eating well, benefiting from the favorable climate and abundance of tropical fruit while sugar cane on British plantations rotted due to lack of labor. In the context of recession and unemployment back in Britain and the potato famines in Ireland,

this was an emotive accusation. It was also blatantly untrue, according to figures produced by the Anti-Slavery Society in 1847-49, which showed that sugar production had in fact gone up. However, the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire in 1833 had created a labor problem that had cut into profit margins, exacerbated in 1846 when the Sugar Duties Act ended subsidies for British plantation owners. This is the kind of thing, because the Glasgow Museum of Slavery is trying to view things from an academic and an accurate standpoint, they're able to look at what Carlisle said and what he said that was demonstrably not just racist, but we can argue completely factually

wrong about the economics of the system that he was arguing in favor of. Moldbug can't really engage in a lot of these criticisms of Carlyle because the whole reason Carlyle was wrong was that plantation owners, this natural aristocracy, were lazy, corrupt, and incompetent. And that flies in the face of Yarvin's belief system. So instead, when Curtis Yarvin writes an essay on Thomas Carlyle, he writes that slavery is quote, a natural human relationship, like that of patron

and client, and enthuses that Carlyle is the one writer in English whose name can be uttered with Shakespeare's. Like this guy whose big claim to fame is his essay on why slavery is good and natural is is just as as brilliant a thinker as William Shakespeare. Like, again, one, an idea of kind of how vile this guy is. How well was it written? I mean, it's OK. Is it in IAM? Yeah, it's it's it's not it's no, no, it's it's definitely not in IAM. Pentium is not even in Dactylic examiner, you know? Like, come on. Can we back up for one second? Was there anything you said in this open letter

to open-minded progressives that would change a progressive's mind? Or like, what was the gist, what was the logline of that? Cause you got into a quote, but I was just fascinated by this open letter. Yeah. It's largely a series of, it's largely trying to convince people that these sort of ideas of democracy and human progress that are kind of inherent to the progressive tradition, right?

Of this gradual march of progress in terms of pushing for more rights and more justice in society is fundamentally fallacious and flawed. None of this actually works. It only creates new tyrannies. That's his argument. You advocating for your own rights is really you restricting my rights. That's the gist of the argument that he's making there. Wow, that's in 14 chapters.

Everything he says takes too long. Also, slavery is cool. Yeah, yeah. I mean, slavery is a natural relationship, right? Base because, again, he believes that like it can't just be that one group of people were at one time able to exert more violence than another group of people, and so they took them into their possession. Because that makes it sound awful.

It's gotta be that like, no, this group of people are naturally inclined to rule, and this other group are naturally inclined to be ruled. To serve. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So when it comes to talking about Jarvan as this sort of dark enlightenment figure, this guy who's able to enrapture people's minds with this almost magic quality of his prose, I want to kind of, I think we've talked a little bit about why I don't think that's accurate to how his work was appealing to people, but I want to, I want to really puncture

that myth by, by pointing out one of the examples where he was very much in line with kind of like the gutter of the right wing and not at all like this sort of more intellectual side that he tries to present himself as sometimes in articles like that open letter to progressives. In 2008, he published a blog post titled, did Barack Obama Go to Columbia?

And this is written by Yarvin as a serious investigation into whether or not Barack Obama had faked his attendance at Columbia College. And the evidence Yarvin had that Obama had faked his attendance was that several other Columbia grads from the same year said they didn't know him, right? This was a huge thing on like the right at this time.

You would get like Trump and stuff, you know, retweeting this way back in the day that like, well, a bunch of guys who went to Columbia didn't know Barack Obama. Like this man came out of nowhere. He must've faked his attendance at this college. And here's what Yarvin writes about it. So you can get a hint at his like sparkling prose.

So let me ask anyone who cares to comment below, how exactly do we, the American people, Lord help us, know that Barack Obama attended Columbia? Or more precisely, why should we assume on the basis of the evidence we have that he did? Do we seriously believe it is possible for a future president to be unremembered at his alma mater? Now the very next paragraph in that article is, what we know is that a Columbia spokesman

has confirmed that Obama attended Columbia. And like, I would say, well, that's part of how you find out, right? Is you ask the school, did this guy attend? As opposed to ask random people who happened to go to a school with thousands of folks, did you know this guy? Like, it's just such like the logical line there happened to go to a school with thousands of folks, did you know this guy?

It's just such the logical line there is so, it's very much a guy picking the reality he wants to have, right? Which is that Barack Obama is a fraud, right? He's a fraud and he faked his attendance at Columbia. He wants to believe that he finds a couple of other Columbia grads who don't like Obama and say, well, I never knew him. And that's the only facts that Yarvin needs here as opposed to like, well, is there any actual evidence

that he attended? And it turns out that is. And like 30 seconds of Googling, I found an article by a writer in the Jewish journal who attended Columbia at the same time as Obama. And also like all of these guys who were giving interviews to right-wing papers in 2008, didn't remember Barack Obama because it's a big school. But this guy dug through a bunch of his old graduation papers and found a graduation program that lists

Barack Obama by name because he went to Columbia University. This was work people were, people pointed this out at the time. There's pictures of him there. He's on all sorts of documents. He did know people. It was just this like fever dream that spread through the right. And the same way this like myth about Haitians eating people's pets in Springfield, Ohio

is spreading right now, it's deliberate disinformation. And it's disinformation that is believed by people who need an explanation for like how a guy like Obama, who they don't think should be able to do the things that Obama did, was able to do it. Right? These are racists, right? Who need a reason why, how Barack Obama became the president that isn't, well, he's the most

charismatic man in American politics, right? He was really good at elections. He was really good at running a campaign. That's not a thing that works with their belief system. Yarvin has to buy into these fantasies in order to accept this reality because it just doesn't correlate with his racism. Donald Trump was doing all this shit back at the same time. He was like a birther, right? Like this is not any intellectually higher up than birtherism.

But you know, I think it's kind of important to look at this ugly stuff because it contrasts to this dark enlightenment puppet master view of Yarvin and paints a picture as a guy who is not just writing stuff that is influential, but is also going along with the flow and getting caught up in conspiracy theories and bullshit the same way anyone else in that space is right. He's not special and he's not a hyper genius. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. That's dumb. I mean, yeah, I think it's dumb. Yeah.

I think people don't catch it because he his articles are always he like throws in Latin quotes and like references and quotes from like these old, you know, he's got a great backlog of like, witticisms by different historical thinkers. I would describe his writing style as like if Frazier were written by a fascist, right? Like that's how Curtis Yarvin writes. But it very much is kind of just to paper over the fact that he's the same kind of blowhard as like Rush Limbaugh, right? How does this comport with the right sort of fetishization of the constitution? Well, I'll be clear.

Jarvin does not fetishize the constitution. I think he views it, I think is pretty clearly a misstep, right? Because it hands all of this power over to groups that should not, or at least he believes, I think if you were to go back, he would argue that the basic ideas behind a lot of the founders, which is that we should have this Republic that is governed by Elites this like natural elite aristocracy like Jefferson believed in this kind of natural aristocracy of Intelligent white men right that is pretty close to what mold bug believes about the world but obviously as the franchise was extended to larger and larger chunks of people,

as slavery was ended, as we've repeatedly had these movements towards social justice and towards bringing more people in to being able to have a voice in the system, the fact that that was allowable at all was a terrible flaw in the constitution as written. The fact that it included the potential for democratic change was, was kind of its, its fundamental fatal failure. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I don't, I don't know the nature of this, of Yarvin's relationship or, or friendship or whatever you want to call it with JD Vance.

But, um, but it's safe to say, I think a lot of people on the right would, would friendship or whatever you want to call it with JD Vance. But. But it's safe to say, I think a lot of people on the right would, would agree that, that Yarvin is, is taking some seriously un-American views here, espousing some very un-American views, un-American just meaning like. Oh yeah. And so, and yet we have a vice presidential candidate who's an American just meeting like. Oh yeah. And so, and yet we have a vice presidential candidate who's presumably at least hobnobbing. I don't know if they're friends. I don't know if, I don't know if JD Vance would say Yarvin.

Associates. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, associates. Has JD Vance been asked about Yarvin? Has he, has he had any sort of public expression of? Yeah, I mean, there was actually a really good, I think it was a New Yorker article from about two years ago, right before his Senate run, where he was at a conference with Jarvan and at a party with him and talking, was questioned, or the writer of that article talked with

him in part about some of Jarvan's ideas, like this retire all government employees thing. He has been publicly associated with him. I think one of the more interesting points is that Jarvan spent the 2016 election at Peter Thiel's house, watching the returns. He's gotten increasingly publicly plugged into this set of people who have direct connections with power brokers on the right. You're right.

One of the interesting things about him is that he's never become famous in the same way that a guy like JD Vance has, right? Because he is too toxic to like bring out and kind of publicly embrace all his ideas. Yes, yes. But you will get people who will talk about stuff like, you know, Blake Masters and JD Vance are comfortable talking about rage, right? Or talk this idea that really comes out of mold bugs writing. And

so it's, it's, he, he remains kind of toxic enough that you don't want to bring him out too publicly, but he's also popular enough that part of like how you signal to other people who are on this chunk of the right, that like you're one of them is you, you kind of signpost that you believe a lot of the same things that he believes. You show up at the same events at the same conferences and whatnot where he gives speeches. It's not very hard to draw the connections between these people, but Jarvan's not a face man. It's not very hard to draw the connections between these people, but Yarvin's not a face man, right?

He's never going to run for office and you certainly don't want him arguing about his neo-monarchist views on Fox News, right? That's still a little bit too extreme. But if you say, we need a strong executive leader who's going to run the country like a CEO and fire all of these unelected bureaucrats and replace them with people who are going to fight for quote unquote liberty. We need to punish all of our political opponents. We need to lock up members of the lying news media.

All of these are things that you will get a lot of buy-in on, on the Trumpist right. This is all stuff that Trump himself talks about a lot. It's the kind of thing people wonder, how have we gone so far down this road seemingly so quickly? And it's because it didn't all start with Donald Trump, right? People were kind of tilling the ideological soil for years before that point. And like one of those guys is Curtis Yarvin and he's one of the most influential ones of those guys.

Has Yarvin taken a position on Trump publicly? I mean, yeah. Again, he understands there's a degree of toxicity to his endorsement, but he watched the election at Peter Thiel's house and was very excited that Trump had won. He has essentially, he has come out being like, this is, I think, about as close to Hill's house and was very excited that Trump had won. He has come out being like, this is I think about as close to the kind of guy we're going to get to start the process of turning the country in the direction that I want. Now, he's not a guy who wants the entirety of the United States run by one dude.

He seeks this kind of political devolution into these competing corporate city states, but he sees Trump as like a step on that road. This is a guy who will centralize power, who will get these bureaucrats out, who will destroy the left as an organized political force, and that will allow these other kind of interests, these corporate interests to kind of take and centralize more power themselves as kind of the state gets whittled down and we can devolve power to what are effectively like corporate warlords, right? That's kind of the end result of his system.

You can see it in, there's this group of guys in Silicon Valley right now who are trying to start their own city backed by Silicon Valley VC money. Yep. I read that. Yeah. Yeah. And they've talked a lot about-

I think they've given up on that, right? No. No, no, no. That is still very much an effort being made. And there's been efforts to take over local San Francisco politics. And there's a lot of mold bug associated guys in that as well. One of the lead figures there is a big fan of his writing who has been pushing this idea as, again, a step on the road to these corporate controlled city states. This is obviously part of the process of devolving any kind of accountable state

power into the control of what are effectively like CEO kings, right? And yeah, that's kind of where we're going here. But we all get to be Twitters. Yeah, everything gets to be run like Twitter. Isn't that exciting? We get to live in a Twitter. Yeah. Don't you want to live in Twitter?

No. I wish I could just be a tweet that lived in Twitter. Yeah. Exclusive. Yeah. It seems like such a nice place. Speaking of nice places, our sponsors, they'll create a nice little place for your ears to live for like three minutes, however long an ad break is.

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Listen to Senora Sex Ed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This summer, a lone gunman on a rooftop reminded us that American presidents have long been the targets of assassins. Nearly 50 years ago, President Gerald Ford faced two attempts on his life in less than three weeks. A woman years ago, President Gerald Ford faced two attempts on his life in less than three weeks.

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She is 26-year-old Lynette Alice Fromm, nicknamed Squeaky. I always felt like Lynette was kind of his right-hand woman. The other, a middle-aged housewife, an aspiring radical working undercover for the FBI. Identified by police as Sarah Jane Moore. Sarah Jane could enter into these areas that other people couldn't. We're back. of bonus content by subscribing to iHeartTrueCrimePlus only on Apple Podcasts. We're back. So I really debated with myself, like, how much do we get into of like all of the different terrible things he said, like all of each of the different like beliefs Yavin has espoused. And this is a guy who's been writing thousands of words a week on the internet for years. So there's like, there's too much there for us to give a comprehensive look into the man.

Patrick, he just completely summarized all of his writing. Right. I mean, there's enough of it out there that it can do, like, it can give you a decent amount on, on Mold Bug. Although you're going to miss stuff like, you know, some of this, you have to know a little bit more about the far right're going to miss stuff like, you know, some of this, you have to know a little bit more about the far right in order to catch references he makes. Like I was reading one essay of his where he talks about Rhodesia. Do you know what Rhodesia was? The source of the, of those unusual Ridge backed dogs.

It is the source of those dogs. It was also a white ethno state in Africa that was like initially started out as a colony of the UK. They refused to give up like the power of the white minority, which was like 3% of the country and had essentially total electoral power. They became like a pariah. This is like during like the 1970s, a lot of this is happening, and wound up fighting a very long war with like the vast majority of the country in order to like try and maintain the state of white minority rule. It was a very brutal period of time.

This Bush war they executed was where a lot of like early insurgent tactics were carried on. It was carried out in the name of keeping white people in charge of this massive population of black people who had effectively no power. Rhodesia was close to the ideal state for Moldbug. I found an article of his where he writes about Ian Smith, who was the guy who was leading Rhodesia during its war for liberation. He writes, because Smith died a few years back, and Mulbuck wrote this elegy to him that opened with the words, the last great Englishman is dead and fuck who disagrees. And it's basically this piece about how Smith was the last man who was brave enough to fight

for what we all know is the only kind of state that can work, which is one in which a natural biological elite rules over the masses who are unfit to have any sort of power. It ends on these lines, which I think are kind of telling to his ideology. One day we will either be hacked to death in our own beds or some similar or nasty thing, or Ian Smith or Enoch Powell and even our own tail gunner Joe will have another life in bronze. But do you know us? I'm not sure. We have been introduced. We are the Neo McCarthyists. Our motto this time will finish the job." And so what he's saying there is that Smith is like Joe McCarthy. He's one of these guys who embodies the violence

of the politics that we're advocates of, right? And again, he's never gonna come out and say, I think we should kill all the people who disagree with me, but he will harken back to these figures and say, these are my kind of ideological heroes and the movement that I am seeking to incite is going to finish the job. It's going to kill all the communists.

It's going to win where Rhodesia lost, right? Like it's not as direct as saying, you know, I'm a white nationalist and in fact, he will never admit to being a white nationalist. But what is the conclusion when you're talking about the failure of Rhodesia as being a tragedy other than well, you're someone who supports white nationalists, right? You can see kind of like the violence inherent in what he's pushing for there. In that same essay, he praises the novel, The Camp of the Saints, which is a racist book

about migrants from India flooding Europe and destroying civilization, which is Steve Bannon's favorite book. And Steve Bannon is another influe. Yeah. Yeah. It's great replacement stuff, right? Bannon is a big fan of Curtis Yarvin.

Again, all of these people are connected and they're all fans of each other. Like the, the, the, the kind of like ideological simpatico here is a crucial part of the story. Um, now in the last few years, as he's gained more of an influence online, Yarvin has grown Theological simpatico here is a crucial part of the story. Now in the last few years, as he's gained more of an influence online, Yarvin has grown a bigger head. He started referring to himself as the Sith Lord of the modern anti-democratic, right? Because he is a big nerd. He's also, he's the guy who brought the term red pill into right wing politics.

Like taking it from the matrix. Yeah, that's cool, huh? pill into right wing politics, like taking it from The Matrix. Yeah, that's cool, huh? Of that. Yeah, yeah. And he's you know, it's interesting because like obviously The Matrix was a movie written by two trans women in not at all about right wing politics, right? The Matrix is sort of a a great allegory for his beliefs. I do think it is an allegory for his beliefs

and the violence and oppression that they necessitate. I think he tends to take it as realizing that democracy is fake and that all of these social justice movements are inherently evil, flawed attempts like destroy the natural aristocracy. Like that's the matrix, right? Is, you know, people who don't look like him being able to vote, which is much shallower. Yeah. The violence inherent in these systems that you're referring to, it does seem to,

and I hate to armchair psychoanalyze anybody and I'm not equipped to do that. So this is more of a just sort of. We always say we hate it, but we always do a little bit of it. Well, we can't help it, right? Yeah. But no, this is just sort of a pontification,

but does it feel to you, because it does to me a little bit like, like to really take these positions seriously and advocate for these things is in its own way, a kind of enjoyment of violence or an, and in that way, almost like a psychopathy, like violence is wonderful. Yeah, yeah. Is there anything to be found in Jarvan's writings that laments that violence is, or subjugation or the suffering of any humans

is an unfortunate side effect of these systems, but necessary, or is it just sort of like, no, that's just an awesome part of it? It's more like number one, I think a big thing that he tries to do is minimize the degree to which that's necessary. But when it does come up, it is this very full-throated embrace of like,

well, they're communists. You know, like this is what we have to do. Like the terrorism of the Nazis was great because it worked, right? Like, I don't think he's a guy who feels bad at all about the inevitable consequences of his beliefs. And I certainly don't get that hint from his writing that there's any sort of like real regret there. Maybe some like sign postings to regret about the unfortunate, you know, necessities that will come about. But this is, I think you're right on the money. There's a lot of like violent fantasizing here against this is a guy who spends a lot of time obsessed with the things that annoy him in the world and convinced that like the right solution to those things is a terminal force. You get this all over with people who get too wrapped up in the specifics of their ideology

and their anger at its discontents. You can find Maoists and whatnot online who will fantasize about when our revolution takes over, we're going to put people in re-education camps or whatever. It's a, it's a necessary byproduct of not having enough empathy and spending too much time alone in a room obsessing over how right you are. Right? Is anything that kind of inherently conflicts with that as the world in all of its complexity will always do should be solved by the most violence I can bring to bear.

Right? And that's why we need to capture the presidency. Most certain solution, which is. always do should be solved by the most violence I can bring to bear. And that's why we need to capture the presidency. Most certain solution, which is- Yeah. And that's why these guys, that's why their big goal is the presidency, right? Because the way they see it and certainly the way the Supreme Court has set it up, getting the presidency gives you access to the greatest store of violence that has ever existed in human history. That is what the president has access to the greatest store of violence that has ever existed in human history.

That is what the president has access to. People don't like to talk about it that way, but there's no other real way to view it potentially. If you see the president as someone who should have no guardrails, and this is very much what we're going to advocate for as a president that has no restrictions on his power, then what you're looking at is a guy who has the ability to use the most violence ever concentrated in cleansing the world of the people who make it not fit this schema that I've cooked up in my head that I find very attractive. Yeah.

It's good stuff. So if you're looking for writing on, you know, Jarvan to this day, if you're looking at what people have come to call the strain of thought that he helped ignite, the term you'll come across the most is neo-reactionary or NRX. This is how you'll see it written about a lot in blogs by Bay Area techies. This term started to be used more in 2013, 2014, I think is when it really took off. You had some sort of writing by people like Clint Finley at TechCrunch in 2013 that noted that you were seeing a lot of these thought take off among influential people in big tech.

Finley wrote, PayPal founder Peter Thiel has voiced similar ideas and Pat Dickinson, the former CTO of Business Insider, say he's been influenced by neoreactionary thought. It may be a small minority worldview, but it's one that I think shines some light on the psyche of contemporary tech culture. Now it was through TechCrunch in 2014 that Minxious Moldbug was first revealed to be computer scientist Curtis Yarvin. It was revealed that Yarvin was working at a startup funded by Peter Thiel's money called Tlawne.

The name comes from a short story, like a sci-fi short story written by a fellow named Borges in 1940. One summary of the story I found from Francis Tseng writes that it, quote, describes a secret society, Orbis Tertius, that architects an entirely new world, plan by establishing an encyclopedia describing it. Over time, bits of this fictional world begin to emerge in the real world, consuming it. This is kind of how Moldbug thinks of his writing. I am writing the future into being by theorizing it. And this is kind of how Moldbug thinks of his writing, right? I am writing the future into being by theorizing it, right?

That's why like this company is named after it. That's why he finds that story so influential. The kind of process of this is called hyperstition. It's this process of like taking ideas that exist only in people's heads in fiction and like forcing them into the real world. It's one of those premises that seems silly until suddenly a guy who might be the vice president starts ranting about how childless women are psychopaths and we need to fire

the government so Donald Trump can remake it in his own image. This is all very silly seeming until it isn't. And kind of the scariest thing about Yarvin is that he has to an extent been successful in like writing a different world into being. Like he has, he has had more influence in this than you want to believe. Kind of the, the tipping point for Yarvin's influence in culture and for that kind of politics starting to take over the right was 2014. And it happened appropriately enough on the internet with something called Gamergate. Ah, there we are. I was wondering how long it would take for Unopolis to show up.

Gamergate, a lot of the people who are thought leaders in Gamergate, who are some of the early voices behind that and behind that kind of neo-reactionary swell as it enters public consciousness, are fans of Jarvan's. One of them is Steve Bannon. Bannon is a big behind the scenes player in what happens there, as is Milo Yiannopoulos. And Yiannopoulos is kind of a guy who comes to fame through Gamergate as making himself into kind of a voice of the movement. And Yiannopoulos is an adherent of Jarvan's philosophy. The next year after

Gamergate, 2015, Trump descends his escalator to launch his campaign. And in short order, the alt-right is a term. Descends his escalator. Yeah. And the alt-right becomes kind of undeniable to anyone, right? It's not something you can ignore anymore. And figures like Yiannopoulos and Bannon are major faces of the movement. While Jarvan remains kind of obscure still. People who are in the know, who understand

where a lot of the ideas guys like Yiannopoulos are spouting in public come from, know that he's a player in the field, but he's kind of obscured and shadowed by the cloaking factor of his very dense, clumsy prose. Corey Pine at The Baffler is probably the first guy to cohesively suggest that Yarvin's relationship to Peter Thiel and to the folks around him were part of a wider movement towards anti-democratic change. His work was influential enough to get the New York Times to ask Peter Thiel if he was

working to fund a monarchist coup. And Thiel replied in a cryptic fashion, it was a full on conspiracy theory. In truth, there's nobody sitting around plotting the future, though I sometimes think it would be better if people were. Which is like the most sinister way to reply to that, right? So 2016 comes along next, Trump wins the election, and suddenly even normal people who don't spend their free time online looking at fascists on the internet become aware that something is very wrong. In 2017, Buzzfeed News publishes an expose based on leaked emails between a bunch of

members of the alt-right, including Bannon and Yiannopoulos. And I'm going to quote Corey Pine describing these leaks and from some of the most revealing reveals in that piece. Buzzfeed reported that Thiel and Yiannopoulos had made plans to meet during the July Republican National Convention, but much of Yiannopoulos' knowledge of Thiel seemed to come second hand 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 Teal.

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 until this Tuesday. He's fully enlightened. He just plays it very carefully. If you're looking for direct connections, it's something that we only really have because of leaks like that.

These are not conspiracy theory connections that we have to draw between people. We have texts between these guys talking about how they're trying to convince moneyed interests of their plans to end democracy in the United States. They've been doing it for a while. That's most of what I've got to say about Curtis Yarvin. Now, I would be doing you a disservice if I didn't end this by talking at least for a little bit about the other side of his professional life. While he's been writing all of this fascist theorizing and whatnot, he has a career as

a software developer and a project that represents, and he will state, represents his political dreams, Urbint. Now Urbint is, on paper it's supposed to be basically a peer-to-peer social networking tool like Mastodon that allows individual users more control over their information and digital life. When he talks about Irvett, Yardent talks about it as like, this is me building in software a representation of my ideal form of government. He frames it as something that gives you control over your own life and data, not some central company like Twitter that like can be corrupt and used to bad ends. And that's complete bullshit, right?

The reality is that Urbitt is backed by Peter Thiel money and it is an attempt to effectively like build a different kind of social networking infrastructure for the internet that Curtis Yarvin has complete control over. Right? Now the good news is it hasn't actually taken off. This company is largely a failure.

It's generally agreed to be pretty badly coded. I found a pretty good analysis of it by Francis Tseng who runs a website called Distributed Web of Care who points out that while Yarvin tries to frame this as like Macedon, as like, well, you keep control of your data, you're in charge of your digital life, not some company. The way everything is set up is you have these different nodes and there's a limited number of nodes and most of them are controlled by Yarvin and the Urbit company. What he's really trying to do here is set up a landlord scam on the internet, right?

Where he's the big landlord. I think this is kind of revealing, not because Urbit's important, but because it shows, we've kind of been talking this whole time, how much of this does he really believe? How much of this is him kind of dressing it up. And I think you get the real Curtis Yarvin here, which is not a guy with any real high minded intellectual desires beyond, I want to be the one in power, right? Like I want to be the one with the money. I want to be the big landlord, right? He doesn't hate Twitter and Facebook because they ruined his old internet.

He hates it because like he's just another guy in all of those systems. And he wants to be the king, or at least a knight. I think that's kind of like the note to end on, is pointing out underneath it all, and underneath all of the dressing up and intellectualism that he puts on, this is just a guy who's angry that he's not currently the one with all the power, right? And that's really what it's all about. Whoa. Yeah.

Sorry. That's what I've learned. Yeah. I'm not a fan. Yeah, that's good to hear. That's good to hear. But I do want to read up more and get a sense of his tone and maybe I'd love to hear him speak and get a more better sense of his persona and kind of what that-

Oh yes. He's on many podcasts. How does a Bannon reconcile someone openly advocating for the basically just the burning of the constitution with also being a leader for just like Republican ascendancy? Like how do you reconcile those things? I'm so confused by that. Is it a, you know, do you think it's a, like if we were to say JD Vance gets to be president one day, do you think it's a bait and switch?

Are they, like, is it really a, you know, is that Peter Thiel's game to sort of bait and switch the Americans into like, just get them into office and then we're going to make them a dictator or is it, is it a thing where someone like a JD Vance who's participating in American democracy as a candidate is really sort of like, I like some of these ideas. I like the CEO approach to a presidency, but like I still believe in the constitution. I still believe that democracy is our bedrock. I don't think for one thing, just based on a lot of stuff that Bantz has said on some

of these far right podcasts, I don't believe he believes that democracy is our bedrock. I think a lot of what ways these guys will couch it is that saying like, well, I believe in a republic, right? And kind of what they're harkening back to is this very classical idea that, well, only like property owning men should be able to vote, right? Oh, right, right. Sure, there should be some voting, but not the franchise should certainly be.

This is something Vance has embraced when he's talked about how people without children shouldn't have the same degree of electoral say, right? You should have men. If you're the head of a family, you should get to vote, have more votes that basically account for how many kids you have and probably for your wife too, right? These are things Vance has talked about on different podcasts he's appeared on and Bannon has expressed a lot of anti-democratic sentiment. I think part of the problem is that when these people get confronted by the media, there's this inherent impulse that mainstream political

reporters have to normalize them in a way that I think provides them with cover, right? To not talk about them as if they are people who are trying to end democracy, because they very much are. That's not the norm within people who vote for the Republican party. But when we are talking about guys like JD Vance and Steve Bannon and Steve Miller, Trump's former associate, all of these guys, that is the norm among these people. Part of how they see Trump is useful and potentially Vance as useful is not that they're going to get us to this end system that Yarvin theorizes.

And when they take Yarvin's ideas, I don't think most of them want exactly the same kind of system that he does because he's kind of a kook. His system is unworkable and none of them really want to devolve. Most of them don't want to devolve power, right? A guy like Teal may want to devolve some powers so that he can run, you know, effectively his own little city state where he gets to make all of the rules. But there's a degree of like chaos inherent

in the actual thing that Jarvan advocates that like makes it unworkable, but they find ideas that he has very useful. And likewise, I think folks like Yarvin think that a guy like Vance, even if he doesn't back believe everything they believe, would be useful because he brings us closer to this kind of a system.

And then part of how we would do that is by purging the left, by purging and destroying like all of these journalists, by locking up our political opposition. That is a big part of it for them is we want to use the violence that the state has access to to destroy the people who don't want the world to be this way. There very is this kind of yearning for having a free hand to utilize that violence to crush opposition that is key to... That's what binds all these two guys together. As you've stated, and I think this is an important point, it's not like Steve Bannon believes

to the letter in all of the crazy shit that Yarvin writes about. It's not like JD Vance is sleeping with a bunch of printouts of unqualified reservations under his bed. There's some ideas they find useful. They like the way he messages. They think it's especially like rage. They think it's like especially like rage. They think that's good messaging for this thing that we wanna do.

But they're all kind of tied together by we want Supreme Executive power so that we can wield violence against our enemies, right? And that's where they're all simpatico, right? And that's, I think kind of the most important takeaway here is not all of these people have been enraptured by Curtis Yarvin and are like thought zombies to his beliefs. They find some of his ideas useful and likewise he and the people who follow him, like they're all in agreement about one thing and it's who they want to hurt.

Yeah. It's interesting because I've always, I felt there was an article and I think it was New York magazine during the, the, the run up to the 2016 election that said, I think the phrasing was electing Trump would be an extinction level event for the United States. Yeah. A lot of people are scared of a second Trump presidency because they feel like democracy would crumble under Trump.

And that's, that's been a, you know, rallying cry of the left now for quite a while. And I agree to some extent, I do think that he's a threat to democracy. I don't know that he wants to completely topple it, but I do think that how he handled the transition of power was very, very alarming and unnerving and should be disqualifying, but at least for a party to nominate him, if not legally disqualifying. But I've always thought that his threat to democracy

is more his unwieldiness and his sort of lust, Trump's just narcissism and lust for power and lust for staying the center of attention. Like that was almost the most, that's why he's a threat. And that that's just kind of wild and crazy and ridiculous. Of him, of Trump and, but it is, it's dangerous if he gets there, but it's a, but it's a, it's a kind of danger that is almost a cartoonish, like it's, it's just so ridiculous, but what you've been laying out these last two episodes,

as a much more sinister intellectual underpinning with dismantling of democracy, that is arguably a far more serious kind of threat that is arguably a far more serious kind of threat as a doctrine. And I've never perceived Trump as someone driven by a sort of like anti-democratic doctrine. I just thought he was sort of- He definitely isn't. I just was, I just always thought like, oh, he's a dictator just because he's a megalomaniac. Right.

So he will behave, he wants to behave like he wants to have all the power of a dictator just because he's a megalomaniac. Right. And I think that is true. He wants to behave like, he wants to have all the power of a dictator. He wants to behave. He wants to be like, you know, Mel Brooks, like it's good to be the king. That's all he wants. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But here is a group of people or a person with some measure of influence really thinking this stuff through.

You're right that I think this has been generally missed. People have started, and particularly like kind of the mainstream Democratic Party, but also just like centrist, people who are not particularly political, but are, I think most people who are people of goodwill don't want to live in a dictatorship, right? That would be how I would describe a person of goodwill, is you don't wanna institute a dictatorship. What, well, I think that's a key part, right? I think people have started to realize

the intellectual threat and the broader threat that Trumpism has opened the door for with Project 2025. But what has happened with Trump, because I think you're right on the money with your characterization of him, he is not an ideologue. If he thought he could have gotten to power running as a Democrat and still been the big man on top, he would have done that.

That just was not what wound up working for him. He is a Trumpist in that he believes in himself and himself being the guy who is the most important person. But when he started running and when he first took over the Republican Party, he started breaking norms. Sometimes it's good to break norms. It used to be the norm that a huge chunk of this country was segregated. That was something that forcefully had to be broken. The government had to deploy force to do that. In that case, that was very much a good thing.

But when you, when you break norms, it opens up space for people who have extreme views to push those views into the public sphere. And what happened with Trump was as he destroyed the Republican party that had been, he wound up pushing out a lot of people who had been influential in that party. And that opened up space for a whole bunch of people. As long, basically anyone could become an influential part of the Republican party if you could do one key thing, which was bend the knee to Trump

and also get along with him. And so guys like Stephen Miller, right, are people who understood how to do that. That's how, like what JD Vance has done, that's how he became the VP, right, as he started courting Trump. He started like helping out with stuff like when Trump would do like public appearances

after that big chemical spill in East Palestine, like a year or so ago. Like Vance is the guy who handled a lot of the advance work for that. He impressed Trump. He was good at sucking up to him. They did all this consciously, not because they are all believers that Trump should be the most important person in politics, but because they understood that with access to Trump comes the ability to twist the country in this direction.

If you can just convince him, it's the way to go, right? And that is the way this kind of capture of the system, that's how they want it to, like that's what they are very consciously trying to do. And so it's a situation where because of who he is and the things that he has made possible, we do have to confront the fact that these very extreme people who have a very dark vision for what our society should be are kind of at the gates right now. It's unfortunate, but I think at this point, undeniable. I do think it's a thing people kind of have to look at with with with clear eyes,

because it's it's at this point a very immediate threat. Hmm. Anyway, I hope you had a good Friday. And thanks for ruining my day. Maybe it'll be a weekend. I'm going to go home and be like bitter and angry at my family. What are you doing to help save democracy? Dad, I'm three. Yeah, but get out there.

That's kind of a normal reaction after coming on the show, unfortunately. Yeah, yeah. So I'm gonna go home and be mad. I'm gonna be angry all weekend. Well, Ed, I'm gonna be happy all weekend because I got to have a fun time talking with you today. This was fun.

I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Yeah, thanks for being on. People should check out your podcast, Snafu. Season two is great. I haven't listened to season one yet, but I'm sure it's also great.

I'm excited to get into that as well soon. Yeah, Ed, anything else you wanna plug before we roll out today? Snafu! Here we go. And season one. Season one is super fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so check them both out. Check that out. Thank you, Ed, and everyone have a good rest of your week. Thank you, Ed, and everyone have a good rest of your week. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We think of Franklin as the dodging dude flying a kite in the rain. Benjamin Franklin is our subject for a new season with Walter Isaacson.

He's the most successful self-made business person in America. A printer, a scientist, a founding father, but maybe not the guy we think we know. Franklin casts his lot on the side of revolution, and it's another thing that splits the family apart. Listen to On Benjamin Franklin with Walter Isaacson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding.

We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ever get the feeling someone's watching you? Well in 1971, a group of anti-war activists had that feeling.

I was in the heart of the dragon and it was my job to stop the fire. So they decided to do something insane. Break in to the FBI and expose J. Edgar Hoover's dirty secrets. We had some idea that this was pretty explosive. I'm Ed Helms. Binge the full second season of Snafu now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was assassinated.

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