It Could Happen Here - Democratic Insiders Are Sharing A Warning About Curtis Yarvin, Elon Musk & Neoreactionaries

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

Robert walks the audience through a document being shared by DNC employees and think tank workers about the threat Curtis Yarvin and Elon Musk pose to democracy. Read Robert's full piece on Substack: https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/democratic-insiders-are-sharing-aSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is John Cameron Mitchell and my new fiction podcast series, Cancellation Island, stars Holly Hunter as Karen, a wellness influencer who launches a rehab for the recently canceled. In the future, we will all be canceled for 15 minutes, but don't worry, we'll take you from broke to woke or your money back. Cancellation Island's revolutionary rehab therapies like Bad Touch Football, Anti-Racism Spin Class, and mandatory Ayahuasca ceremonies are designed to force the cancel to confront their worst impulses. But everything starts to fall apart when people start disappearing. Karen, where have you brought us?

Cancellation Island, where a second chance might just be your last. Listen to Cancellation Island on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? How? Go slower? From Blumhouse TV, iHeart Podcasts, and Ember 20 comes an all-new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi. And what's the way to find a missing person? Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously. Listen to The Hook Up on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Mark Seale. And I'm Nathan King. This is Leave the Gun, Take the Canole. The five families did not want us to shoot that picture. This podcast is based on my co-host Mark Seale's best-selling book of the same title. Leave the Gun, Take the Canoli features new and archival interviews with Francis Ford Cobola, Robert Evans, James Kahn, Talia Shire, and many others. Yes, that was a real horse's head. Listen and subscribe to Leave the Gun, Take the Canoli

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if mysterious drones appeared over your hometown? I started asking questions. What do you remember happening on that night of December 16th? It actually rotated around our house, looking as if it was peering in each window of our home. I'm Gabe Linners from Imagine, iHeart Podcasts and Leonard's Entertainment. Listen to Obscureum, Invasion of the Drones, wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

Hey everybody. Welcome to It Could Happen here. This is Robert Evans and I have an episode for you. It's also an article I wrote for our substack, Shatter Zone. So I'm just going to get into that. Since February 5th, 2025, a document has been circulating among Democratic Party staffers and liberal think tank experts warning about Curtis Yarvin and the Silicon Valley-led coup to end U.S. democracy.

The document is titled, The Imminent Neoreactionary Threat to the American Republic. It opens with a statement that the brief was, quote, iteratively and collectively compiled by a broad, bipartisan, and decentralized network of experts who wish to remain anonymous due to concerns about being targeted. The full document is here. The table of contents is split into three main areas. One, the new shape of threats to the American Republic. Two, understanding recent events in the context of threats to the American Republic.

And three, a list of appendices. The title of the actual file when I received it was, Evidence Brief for Journalists, and the introduction describes its aim as, quote, explaining the nature of the current political crisis to journalists who are attempting to inform the public. However, I spoke with two sources who are members of these groups and received the document. They told me that to their knowledge, the document was not mostly spread to journalists, but instead among networks of think tank employees and DNC staffers, people you might refer to broadly as policy wonks.

One source I interviewed explained, "...it is a thing for think tanks to frame overviews for laypeople as briefs for journalists or Congress, see the IPCC reports. Part of me thinks the framing for journalists is just a shortcut for this is somewhat specialized knowledge broken down." The paper opens by acknowledging the scope of the executive power grab being perpetuated under President Trump and the destabilization wrought by Elon Musk and his Doge team. It then notes, the threat is an order of magnitude beyond just a presidential power grab. It states that Musk is tied to a quote, broader group of Silicon Valley tech elites, including

Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen. Curtis Yarvin is labeled as a thought leader in this group, quote, called the neoreactionaries. I'll stop here to note that this summary is accurate enough for mass consumption, but I have some issues with it. Musk probably would not label himself a neoreactionary, and he doesn't have much of a history with Yarvin. Peter Thiel does, but it's more a relationship of patronage than mutual influence. It would be more accurate to say that Thiel and Andreessen find Yarvin useful, because

of his success in spreading to a lot of young techie kids the idea that tech CEOs should run the world. Musk, I feel, has largely jumped on this bandwagon with the neoreactionaries because those tech kids are useful foot soldiers. Yarvin's ideas about retiring all government employees and destroying the independent media and academia are convenient for Musk's own ambitions. This context may be unnecessary for explaining the overall danger of the neoreactionaries and Musk to regular people, but I also think it's a mistake to credit Yarvin with more

power than he holds, the document refers to him as the leader of the neoreactionary movement, and I think that gets across kind of the wrong idea about how all of this works. That said, the document does do a pretty good job of summing up the threat that we face. Quote, the neo-reactionaries have openly stated their aims to destroy the nation state and the constitutional order and replace them with a newly privately owned corporate state to be run by a CEO dictator. Citizens become subjects owned by the state, state slaves in Yarvin's terms, because everything rots when it has no owner, human beings included." That last quote is

also one of Yarvin's. From here, the document argues that Musk and his team are attempting to bring about this dystopia by taking over the quote, nervous system of the state, another Yarvin quote. These would be the data and communication systems that Doge is trying to centralize in its unaccountable hands. Next, the authors of this document make a call to action. The most dramatic reversals of democratic breakdown—1977 India, 2022 Brazil, 2023 Poland—have been accomplished by radically large-tent cross-ideological coalitions with little in common except a desire for the continuation of a constitutional order.

Evidence suggests that the present threat to American democracy is dire enough that such a broad-tent approach focused on Musk and his associates may be required. And I think this is the most interesting and hopeful part of the whole document for me. For one thing, I believe it does accurately state what's needed in the present moment, a popular front against autocracy and dictatorship. I would add to their list of relevant examples of popular fronts, the original, which is France from 1934 to 1938. So it's heartening to see evidence that this understanding has started to grow within

DNC policy circles and the people around them. The source who sent me this document in the first place described themselves as a member of, quote, a few unofficial networks of climate activists who are high ranking in the government and policy think tank circles. They noted that these are normally, quote, very milk toast lib spaces, but, quote, they're being radicalized rapidly. Both sources I interviewed for this requested anonymity. The second person I talked to gave an explicit reason.

They stated, quote, I've suspected for a while a lot more things in DNC stuff was compromised than people were comfortable with. In other words, they believe the Republican Party has spies within the DNC, and people they know have made statements to that effect. They were worried that these quote GOP moles might reveal their identity, but more so they were worried that these moles might have planted the document itself and put false information inside it, with the goal of provoking a reaction from Democrats that would be useful politically to Republicans. I do think this caveat is worthwhile, it's certainly not impossible, and I think the

frank admission that the DNC likely has Republican spies inside it is also really worth stating. But I should note that when it comes to the actual accuracy of this document, I don't really see much to take issue with. I've spent more time than most people studying Curtis Yarvin and the neoreactionaries. I would not describe myself as a top expert in the matter, but I do have a good base of knowledge here, and nothing that I've read in this document struck me as obviously false or incorrect, nor did the overall tone seem hysteric or unreasonable. So I asked my sources if over the last month they'd seen more people talking about Yarvin

in their daily lives within sort of the circles that they work in and around, because again they communicate with a lot of DNC staffers and politicians. They said respectively no and quote, that's kind of one of the odd things to be frank. This guy, Yarvin, is being brought to big events in DC. He's been referenced by Bannon and Vance. I have heard his talking points come from Republican mouths, but he's largely not tracked. That concern comports with some of fears that I had late last year about Yarvin and the neoreactionaries.

Namely, I had believed for some time that Yarvin and the people kind of aligned with him, largely a lot of these Silicon Valley folks with money, had become much more influential among Trump and his tight inner circle than was widely understood at the time. Ultimately, I wrote and researched two episodes of Behind the Bastards because I thought it was valuable to bring more attention to the subject. I really had kind of a gut feeling that this was going to become much more relevant very soon. Which is why I picked it as the topic for the episode we did with Ed Helms, who's by

a pretty good margin the biggest celebrity we've had on the show so far. And I hope that that would help kind of get we were talking about out to a wider audience. And it did. The episodes did very well. I think between YouTube and our downloads and the podcast, we're probably at something like a million listens for them at this point. But our listener base is a mix of leftists and progressive liberals, right? Their interests are not representative of the Democratic Party at large. It is noteworthy, and perhaps even important, that influential individuals in the policy

space, with connections to Democratic politicians and the DNC as an organization, have started a grassroots effort to spread the word about Yarvan as a threat, and that's what this document represents. It's even more noteworthy that this document is unsparing about the danger and the fact that a clock is currently ticking over all of our heads. Here's another quote, "...if non-governmental actors, by which we mean unelected, unratified, unvetted, untrained, unconstrained and or unaccountable actors, gain access to key digital infrastructure,

they can seize control of critical functions of government in ways that will be difficult or impossible to reverse." And speaking of things that can't be reversed, my love for our sponsors. ["The First Night I Came Over Here"] Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? How goes lower?

From Blumhouse TV, iHeart Podcasts, and Ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend. And Santi was gone. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi. And what's the way to find a missing person? Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously. Pillow talk. The most unwelcome window into the human psyche.

Follow our out of his element hero as he engages in a series of ill-conceived, investigative hookups. Mama always used to say, God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. And as I was about to learn, no amount of showering can wash your hands of a bad hookup. Now, take a big whiff, my brah.

Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Have you ever looked into the night sky and wondered who or what was flying around up there? We've seen planes, helicopters, hot air balloons and birds. But what if there's something else, something much more ominous that appears under the cover of night, silent, unseen, watching? They may be right above your car late one night as you cruise down the road or look like mysterious lights hovering above your home?

Drones, or are they? We used to work drone because it was comfortable to other people. One minute it was there and one minute it wasn't. Oh, that is beyond creepy. Do you feel like this drone was targeting you specifically? Yes, absolutely. Listen to Obscurum, Invasion of the Drones, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is John Cameron Mitchell, and my new fiction podcast series Cancellation Island stars Holly Hunter as Karen a wellness influencer who launches a rehab for the recently cancelled In the future we will all be cancelled for 15 minutes, but don't worry We'll take you from broke to woke or your money back cancellation islands revolutionary rehab therapies like Bad Touch Football, Anti-Racism Spin Class and mandatory ayahuasca ceremonies are designed to force the cancel to confront their worst impulses but everything starts to fall apart when people start disappearing. Karen, where have you brought us?

Cancellation Island where a second chance might just be your last Listen to Cancellation Island on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Some people won't give you the real talk on drugs, but it's time we know the facts Fentanyl is often laced into illicit drugs and used to make fake versions of prescription pills. You can't see it, taste it, or smell it. Suppliers mix fentanyl into their products because it's potent and cheap, and the dealer might not even know.

Keep yourself and others safe by knowing the real deal on fentanyl. Get the facts. Go to realdealonfentanyl.com. This message is brought to you by the ad council. We're back. So to continue from this document, there's a section next titled National Security, and the focus shifts from Yarvin and his neoreactionaries to Musk, who it claims, quote, poses a uniquely significant security risk. This in its argument is because Musk and Doge espouse, quote, anti-constitutional ideologies and, quote, are under the influence of America's principal foreign adversaries, China and Russia.

It goes on at some length about Musk's foreign business interests and how they might compromise him. Now, I don't disagree that Musk is compromised, but I see his actions as very much consistent with those of a man seizing power for himself. I do understand why people speaking to an audience that is largely, you know, when it's bipartisan, it's folks who are kind of more on the centrist side of things in the policy space and otherwise largely a lot of like Democratic Party employees and politicians. I understand why you focus on the China and Russia of it all with them. But when it comes to both accurately stating the threat and getting a lot of people to

care, I really don't think that's the right strategy to take. I think it's an issue to focus popular messaging around how this all empowers quote America's principle for an adversary is because most Americans don't really think that way or particularly care about that. And beyond that, the larger issue is that the primary adversary Musk has empowered is not in fact the Russian or Chinese governments. It's himself, and he personally as an individual, is currently a greater threat to every citizen of the United States than any foreign government. I think that's undeniable, and I think again it's an error not to frame it that way. The next section of the paper lays out the definition of a coup. In essence, a coup is a, number one, rapid seizure of state power by unelected actors,

who acquire that power by, two, seizing critical government infrastructure, and, three, weaponizing it to neutralize legitimate government actors' efforts to stop them. The unelected actors then use this power to, four, remake the rules of the political game in a way that cannot easily be checked or undone through democratic processes. It argues convincingly that all four of these steps are underway now. One thing I found compelling is the way in which this document recognizes the threat that cryptocurrency represents right now, and how it can and will be used by the new regime to cement their power in ways that sidestep the present legal system.

Quote, without canceling elections, for example, cryptocurrency can be used to create informal but powerful new levers of political influence. Politicians can sell personal coins to unknown buyers who vote on public policy on the basis of their shareholder power, shielded from public view. I think that's a real thing to be concerned with, and I also think it's very clearly part of the goal of this project. Now next we have a summary of the neo-reactionary agenda, which lists some additional names among the Silicon Valley elite currently championing an overthrow of democracy.

These include David Sachs, Vlaagy Srinivasan, and JD Vance. Also name dropped is a political theorist named Nick Land, who is in fact referenced twice in this paper. He is quoted directly as having said in his paper The Dark Enlightenment, quote, For the hardcore neoreactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative. Land has had a huge impact on a lot of these guys, although he's not really a Yarvin-like figure as in, he's not this kind of guy who sees himself as, or I think really wants to be, a shadowy puppet master orchestrating the overthrow of democracy from behind the

scenes. He's really someone stating what he believes to be inevitable concepts and realities about our present historical moment that happen to comport with a lot of the things that these guys believe. The author's next layout, Yarvin's concept of the Butterfly Revolution, which is based on an essay he wrote in 2022 in which he laid out how a full reboot of the US government could be accomplished. Yarvin's seven part Butterfly Revolution has been roughly summarized as follows. 1.

Have Trump run for president on the platform of getting rid of an efficient system. 2. Once he wins, purge the bureaucracy, rage, retire all government employees. 3. Ignore the courts through declaring states of emergency. 4. Co-opt Congress. 5.

Centralize the police, federalize the National Guard, create a national police force that absorbs local ones. Number six, shut down the elites, the media and the universities who make up the cathedral. Number seven, get people on the streets whenever there is any obstruction by a government agency. And obviously, all of that we've seen Trump and his people make moves towards in the last

couple of weeks, right? And that's in fact what the next chunk of the document is. Subsequent pages summarize the first days of the Trump administration and Doge activity, and they show how it comports with the Butterfly Revolution blueprint. Now we've all lived that in real time, so I'm not going to summarize their arguments here. So the document ends with a section on actions and rhetoric to watch. Those are listed as quote government contracts which fund many of Musk's companies at present

and the next is Greenland and Mars quote a core tenant of neoreactionary ideology is the replacement of nation states with network states. But states require territory. Technocracy Inc., a predecessor to the neo-reactionary movement whose one-time director was Elon Musk's grandfather, proposed a North American technate where the entire continent of North America would be united under one technocratic superstate. There is currently a Peter Thiel-backed network state project called Praxis in Greenland. Musk's public statements about colonizing Mars can also be read as part of a territorial project.

Lastly, it lists crypto, which the authors primarily seem to fear as a method of deniably bribing Trump. Now, I think most of this is pretty credible, although I feel differently about Musk's talk about colonizing Mars. I think that's been more about PR than anything. I do think there's a good chance he's just delusional enough to think that that's something feasible on any kind of close in timeframe

that we start building persistent colonies on Mars. I think the science suggests that if that ever happens, it won't be anytime soon. And I think he knows that. I think he's largely understands hype well and how to use it, and Mars has been an easy way for him to do that over the years. Overall, I'd say the document is fairly thorough in its layout of the neo-reactionary ecosystem, and the actual plan currently being acted to end US democracy.

It includes a section that lists several of the earliest known Doge employees, and it quotes extensively from Yarvin and somewhat less extensively from Land. The paper's ultimate conclusion is that Musk is using this moment to turn himself into the kind of unitary, all-powerful executive that Yarvin longs for. This is an executive who rules alongside a largely ceremonial president, as well as courts and a legislative system that are equally ceremonial. After laying out the bulk of the actual threat, the article promises that, quote, Section 3 articulates what Congress and other actors can do in order to stop this threat.

However, the document in its present form does not include any Section 3 or any comprehensive list of solutions Congress and other actors might carry out in order to stop the present assault on democracy. And perhaps there's a later version of the document that I don't have access to that includes that. Perhaps this is just a statement that wasn't edited out. I have to say, heartening as I find the way in which this document talks about the threat that we're facing and the fact that I think it's overall good that people in positions

of influence and around the DNC are talking about this stuff, it's also kind of perfect that at the end they're like, hey, you know, don't worry, we've included some tips on how to defeat these guys. And then they just don hey, you know, don't worry, we've included some tips on how to defeat these guys and then they just don't, you know, if the situation weren't so dire, it would be a lot funnier. But unfortunately, it is pretty dire. Now, if you want to take a look at the full document itself, it's quite a bit longer than what I've read to you now, but it is really worth reading, especially if you have been hearing about this Curtis Yarvin guy or the Neoreactionaries,

and you kind of want to know how this all fits together with what Musk is doing in more detail. If you go to my sub stack at Shatter Zone, the most recent article is the text of this, and I include a couple of different points, links to the full document, which I have uploaded to Scribd, and you can read the whole thing if you want. It has not been altered since I have received it. And again, yeah, I think it's worth getting out there and spreading to more people. So that's the episode.

We will be back tomorrow with something else. Until then, folks, I don't know. Keep an eye on this shit. Bye. If What Happened Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. In the future, we will all be canceled for 15 minutes. But don't worry, we'll take you from broke to woke, or your money back.

Cancellation Island's revolutionary rehab therapies like Bad Touch Football, Anti-Racism Spin Class, and mandatory Ayahuasca ceremonies are designed to force the canceled to confront their worst impulses. But everything starts to fall apart when people start disappearing. Karyn, where have you brought us? Cancellation Island, where a second chance might just be your last. Listen to Cancellation Island on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? Ow, goes lower? From Blumhouse TV, iHeart Podcasts, and Ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend.

I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi. What's the way to find a missing person? Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously. Listen to The Hook Up on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What would you do if mysterious drones appeared over your hometown? I started asking questions.

What do you remember happening on that night of December 16th? It actually rotated around our house, looking as if it was peering in each window of our home. I'm Gabe Linners. From Imagine, iHeart Podcasts, and Linners Entertainment, listen to Obscura, Invasion of the Drones, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. I'm Mark Seale. And I'm Nathan King. This is Leave the Gun, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. I'm Mark Seale.

And I'm Nathan King. This is Leave the Gun, Take the Canole. The five families did not want us to shoot that picture. This podcast is based on my co-host Mark Seale's best-selling book of the same title. Leave the Gun, Take the Canole features new and archival interviews with Francis Ford Cobola, Robert Evans, James Kahn, Talia Shire, and many others.

Yes, that was a real horse's head. Listen and subscribe to Leave the Gun, Take the Canole on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.