Pandering to the wealthy and powerful is nothing new. Making the wealthy and powerful care even less about the harm they inflict on the public - and offering a “theory” of uncaring as wisdom - is quite clever.
I endured watching a 2-hour interview of Yarvin by Daniel Pinchbeck, and found Yarvin insufferable. He appears to do verbally what you’ve stated he does in his writings - attempt to overwhelm you with anecdotes from various sources and pummel you into submission to his quite boring rants. Pinchbeck is a very thoughtful person who had to yell at Yarvin to get him to stop talking for merely a few moments - and then had to yell at him again, and again. Yarvin is - in a word - rude. Absolutely an egocentric jerk, obsessed with IQ as the core measure of a person. He is not that smart. He is a clever, tricky sociopath. Sociopaths are very smart at manipulating naive people. Sociopaths have no core morals beyond raw control of others to gain advantage.
Beware of naive submission to sociopaths and their politics. They are everywhere these days.
Yes, they are very cunning and you often find them seeking positions of power, because what better place to manipulate lots of people. (Trump, Musk, and Vance all come to mind.)
Yes, agree. It’s frightening to think that sociopaths are now in charge of our government & are doing inestimable damage. And the sociopaths like Yarvin behind them will fund it for their own purposes. Unfortunately, Trump’s performance & its adaption by many of his sycophantic partners, has lead so many to buy into a destructive, nihilistic view of our government, democracy, & world order. It’s war on reality carried out through clever, malignant individuals & where it ends is anyone’s guess.
Yarvin is that guy you went to high school with who is sits in a dark corner of the bar clutching a copy of Nietzsche. A self styled "philosopher" with no training in philosophy, he's read every book in the library and understood none of them.
So I took the bait (though none was actually proferred) and paid a visit to “The Gray Mirror”. [Yarvin’s Substack Blog] Read his “Gaza, Inc.” and “The Pleasure of Error” posts just to get a taste and, not surprisingly given your description of his writing, I immediately and repeatedly screamed to no one in particular, “Just get to the fucking point already”. As someone who practiced law in New York for more than forty years, you always knew that briefs drowning in the kind of verbiage that dominates Yarvin’s writing were written in the hope that the judge and opposing counsel wouldn’t notice that they had nothing to offer in support of their position. Sure there may be tidbits of relevant argument to by mined but the mere fact that one had to dig to find those tidbits meant that on balance opposing counsel had nothing offer value to offer. So, too, is the case with Yarvin.
That is not to say, as you eloquently point out, that many will nevertheless take the use of big words, historical and literary references (often obscure though I do like his reference to Hari Seldon) and coming at the same attempted point from different starting points to believe that something important is being said and attention needs to be paid. And, regrettably, as you note, attention is being paid by.
While I understand his basic premise, the idea that he seems to vest so much in Donald Trump as the tip of his spear is, I believe, a major failing of his attempt to impose his grandiose notions of his supposed intellectual power over a reshaping of American governance. Seeming to draw parallels between FDR and Trump and the former’s ability to get things done because of his competence and “moral energy”. Yarvin seems to believe that Trump is also imbued with the same traits, writing, “Trump 47 is not cutting the Gordian knot. Not yet, anyway! But rather than untangling it gingerly, like a ‘90s Republican, as though it was electrified (it was electrified), **he is grabbing it with both hands and ripping out big hunks.**” (emphasis added). Much of the article expresses the same view of Trump as though he, in fact, is the god-like figure towering over a new Gaza Strip imagined in that sickening video pushing Trump’s vision of a reimagined Gaza (which, by the way, Yarvin completely endorses in his “Gaza, Inc” piece) instead of the damaged human being that he is. Trump, you can be sure, knows nothing of Curtis Yarvin, his theories, his supposed philosophy or the credit he claims for creating the framework within which Trump is operating. Indeed, I would expect Trump to be highly suspicious of Yarvin’s claims because of Yarvin’s claim to being the brains behind the throne. Yarvin, it seems, places an extraordinary reliance upon Trump being able to bring life to his vision and while it should be clear to everyone that Trump is just a mouthpiece…a vehicle for the Russell Voughts and JD Vances of the world to use to further their own agendas (more about Vance in a moment), placing so much reliance on such an imperfect human as Trump is an invitation to failure and, at least in Yarvin’s writings about the current state of affairs that seems to be exactly what he is doing. That is, at least, to a point, given his concluding comment, “When he Trump] gets tired of the Deep State, Trump can print money to build a New State. Legally, according to the Constitution. **Of course, he still needs to win politically…**”
That last comment does appear to recognize that amidst the efforts at obfuscation, Yarvin may recognize that regardless of the coldness of his calculation there is still a human element that cannot be ignored. That unavoidable fact applies to Trump and to Vance who is almost certainly a key player in this nightmarish drama. With Thiel serving as patron for both Yarvin and Vance it is a near certainty that they all expect that at some point, Vance will ascend to the throne that they are in the process of preparing. As with Trump, however, the human element cannot be ignored and the chance of falling short a possibility given Trump’s propensity for, well, being Trump. While the torch may at some point be passed to JD Vance, you can be assured that his chances of winning politically are more problematic than they are for Trump. Indeed, while Trump has millions of adoring fans. I suspect that few hold the same regard for Vance. And, again, therein lies the rub for Yarvin, Thiel et al. It is all well and good to conjure an ideology that transform a democracy into a tech-based feudal state, as Yarvin himself said, “[H]e still needs to win politically”
Well put. The next step is to connect the ideas that Yarvin is spouting, to the PayPal Mafia, especially people like a Peter Thiel. Yarvin’s ideas are being implemented by Musk and others, so we can only assume they only scratched the surface of his thinking as well.
I managed to sit through the first of two interview videos with Thiel, and I was immediately struck by how much he functions on his Neo-Christian faith. He speaks like a true believer, and is expecting the doom spelled out in Revelations to happen. And if he has his way, he wants to accelerate Armageddon’s arrival.
It is a frightening prospect that someone with wealth and influence should be actively seeking the end of days, so that he and the other believers can live in paradise. But if you connect Yarvin’s desire to be the power behind the King, with Thiel’s seeking the Anti-Christ, his actions begin to make sense. By destroying the democratic government of the most powerful nation on the planet, you can set up your own kingdom and be on of the Kings that meets at the plains around Megiddo.
The Q’Anon movement functions in a similar vein. For people who have never been taught philosophy and how to recognize the errors in another person’s thinking and arguments, it becomes an easy sell to make them miss the distinction between fire hose and what’s coming out of it.
I would guess that much of this sort of apocalyptic fantasy is the result of the problems associated with having more wealth and power than the human mind can comprehend. If absolute power corrupts absolutely, I would also say that extreme wealth corrupts the mind extremely.
Again, thank you for your analysis. I look forward to your future writings.
Mike: In this period of time, when our attention span is supposed to be exceptionally short, your writing keeps me riveted. Whenever I finish an article of yours, I feel like more of the smoke has been cleared from my brain. I have had many conversations with my son, who believes our country and political system is rife with corruption, trying to defend the concept of democracy. I wish I could defend my beliefs as eloquently as you do.
Actually, our country and political system >is< rife with corruption - but it's coming from the reichwing, although after that CR vote I'll make an exception for Schumer.
Thanks for cutting through the bulls**t. I moved to Silicon Valley almost 40 years ago from the midwest and am surrounded by people who work in tech. These Yarvin sycophants do not represent us and create a toxic image of Silicon Valley. Their whole theories and musings have a despairing lack of any kind of empathy for humanity or understandings of healthy society. It’s like they are imagining their own video game come to life while not realizing what’s the real end game? They get to create their own cathedral of power? What happens when someone else gets to choose? It’s a fantasy by those who feel they are immune to any kind of consequences either because they are insulated by wealth or their own sociopathic narcissism.
Single best summary of Yarvin I have read. I read a few bits and bobs of him BITD. Came away with a shrug. I even met him briefly at an event in SV. His writing - and entire in-person vibe, came off as historical babble repackaged into siren-songs. They all tell the same basic story: Techno-Billionaires are the glory of creation, and should take over everything, everywhere, all at once.
I think you make an important note here. He is not so much pandering, as auditioning for the Billionaire class. He clearly sees and celebrates that all Billionaires strive to own everything and per the feudal tradition turn every action for the 99.99% into a rent-extraction activity for the Rulers. He then celebrates them in any way he can, and creates artisan word-salads and oddly curated historical dioramas to justify every action that furthers that world view.
Well, I did watch the full 50 minutes, so I guess I'm brilliant <snark>, and my brilliance is demanding that I point out that although Schachtel may have watched the full press conference, he apparently had the volume off for the first 40 minutes -- unless of course he equates Trump's lying and gaslighting with being "very respectful and cordial," and Zelenskyy's honesty and clarity with having "ignited a firestorm."
* Trump spoke about "the tremendous death" that has taken place, without mentioning the context. Zelenskyy provided the context by reminding Trump that "They (Russians) came into our territory." Trump ignored him.
* Trump went on to say, "It (the war) should have never started," while just casually skipping over WHY the war started. Honestly, I don't know how Zelenskyy refrained from grabbing Trump's scrotum and pulling it up over his head.
* And later Trump blathered on about the structural state of Ukraine, and Zelenskyy pointed out that Trump's description was not entirely accurate. Zelenskyy then gave a fuller description of how things are in Ukraine, and then brilliantly reminded everyone that "Maybe it is Putin that is sharing this information that he destroyed us."
Although I know that none of what I've written is the point of Mike's post, I would nevertheless encourage everyone to watch the full press conference. The body language alone is worth your time. But I will warn you, leave time for a shower afterwards.
...and be sure to have plenty of barf bags available. If you're a thinking person, you'll need them.
I suspect Schachtel only hears what he wants to hear, and even that is filtered through some mental process as convoluted as anything that he or Yarvin writes.
I appreciate your efforts to engage with Yarvin but I have to take issue.
The thesis of this piece is that Yarvin's thought is obscure. I'm not sure why you think so. He's long-winded and given to cutesy allusions to his own private concepts, but his ideology is astonishingly simple and (to his credit) he is very clear about it:
- order is good, disorder is bad
- this overrides all other moral principles
- the way to ensure order is with radically centralized power (absolute monarchs or monarch-like CEOs)
- as a corollary, anything that distributes power (like democracy) is bad
That's basically it. While these ideas are terrible and childishly simplistic, there's nothing obscure about them, and he pretty much spells them out.
I think you need to re-read Mike’s essay; he doesn’t say Yarvin ‘is obscure’, he said that Yarvin uses a torrent of rhetorical and often irrelevant flourish and tangential references to *hide* his core illiberal philosophy, that without those flourishes, most people reading them would quickly dismiss them.
OK, maybe this is not worth arguing about, but my point was that he does not really hide his philosophy, it's right out there. I've been tracking this guy since 2007 so maybe my perspective is skewed, but there is really no mystery. If the theorizing about centralization of power isn't clear, the places he puts forth as examples of good governance (Singapore, Dubai, apartheid South Africa, historical monarchies, and the occasional nod to Nazi Germany) should be.
I think most people can't wrap their heads around the idea that an educated person would hold these views, and certainly not that a major political party should be under their influence, but that's where we are.
I think you may be misunderstanding the central argument of my essay. I'm not claiming that Yarvin hides his conclusions or that there's any mystery about what political systems he admires. In fact, I acknowledge that his ultimate goal (essentially advocating for a form of monarchy or corporate governance) is relatively straightforward.
My analysis focuses on something different and more subtle: how his rhetorical approach functions as a mechanism of persuasion that's far more sophisticated than simply stating his preferences for Singapore or historical monarchies.
When I describe Yarvin's writing as a "waterfall" that doesn't persuade but drowns, I'm not suggesting he's hiding his views. Rather, I'm examining how the form of his communication—the overwhelming volume, the labyrinthine references, the strategic complexity—serves to erode readers' critical faculties and democratic commitments before they even encounter his explicit conclusions.
The danger isn't in what Yarvin wants (which, as you correctly point out, he states fairly openly in various essays), but in how he makes readers receptive to those anti-democratic ideas. His writing doesn't just present arguments to be evaluated—it creates an immersive experience that gradually dissolves the reader's capacity for democratic thinking itself.
In my earlier work, I've directly addressed Yarvin's neocameralism and his explicit political preferences. But this essay is specifically examining his rhetorical technique as a form of epistemic manipulation—one that doesn't rely on hiding his conclusions but on exhausting the reader's resistance to them through a torrent of references, cynical observations, and apparent erudition.
The sophistication of Yarvin's approach isn't that he conceals his beliefs, but that he understands something profound about persuasion: changing what people think often requires first changing how they think. His writing serves not just to communicate ideas but to reshape the reader's entire epistemological framework in ways that make his anti-democratic conclusions seem inevitable rather than abhorrent.
That's why understanding his rhetorical strategy matters as much as understanding his explicit political positions. It's not about uncovering hidden views; it's about recognizing how certain rhetorical techniques can function as powerful tools for eroding democratic commitments and critical thinking itself.
You really think so? You are saying that his rhetoric is so persuasive that it convinces people to take up ideas they wouldn't otherwise. This doesn't seem right to me. For one thing, his rhetoric is not that great, he's long-winded and self-satisfied. He's more literate than your average wingnut, and can be clever, but really, how many people have the patience to plow through his incredibly long screeds? As an "immersive experience" it's pretty tedious.
No, his appeal is not due to his magical powers of persuasion, it's in the ideas, and their transgressive power. He's offering a radical worldview which shatters all the pieties of liberal, democratic, polite society, and offering his followers a chance to feel superior to all those boring normies. Now, the ideas aren't really all that great or original, and certainly his writing helps sell them, makes them appear fresh, new, powerful. But I would guess that the people who take them up are not being bamboozled, they understand what he is offering.
Take a couple of his most prominent fans: JD Vance and Marc Andreesen. Do we think they have been swept away by Yarvin's magical waterfall of rhetoric, or have they found for themselves an eloquent proponent of ideas that suit their self-images, their interests, their political purposes? Delivered in a package that seems to have intellectual sophistication of course.
Sorry I don't want to argue this into the ground, we are on the same side after all. There's nothing wrong with taking a closer look at Yarvin's rhetorical techniques.
Why can't both/all of these 'spears' of Yarvin's writings be true at the same time, intended for a range of audiences?
His writings get interpretted and re-distributed down the line and up the line. There undoubtedly are those who read them deeply, others who get sent a few carefully chosen articles and quickly become locked in Because Busy Life, and then there's the rest who are fed the re-articulated version underpinning Project 2025, and then there's the mass who get a few carefully chosen P2025 soundbites and think "Yeah!".
As I said, it's a new (well, reinvented for the 21C) ecosystem of thought just as potent as any other more traditional or liberal or classic-Republican, with various levels of complexity that poke the requisite hot-buttons needed for various levels of the intended audience.
Yes I think that’s right. I think Mike Brock and I have similar reactions to Yarvin’s work (alarmed not just by the content but by its sinister appeal) although perhaps to different aspects of it.
Thank you, Mike for clarifying even more your central point. It is how I understand what you wrote. What Yarvin is attempting is insidious mind control. But, if I showed any of this to people I know who are Trump supporters their eyes would glaze over & they would throw up their hands, thinking I’m a radical, extremist left winger. That’s a big part of Trump’s appeal- he makes it all seem so simple & his supporters aren’t required to very hard. Fox & other outlets amplify that feeling of security without effort. But given a personal situation I’m dealing with (and which Trump & Co might negatively impact), & keeping up with the Trump/Vance//Musk train wreck, I don’t think I can handle reading Yarvin. Frankly, they sound like a bunch of bratty young boys with too much money & time on their hands who sit around fantasizing about being Lord of the Flies.
I think we can make a parallel with cults ideas and systems of thinking. Only that cults are about installing and maintaining domination of a few over a limited community, sucking up this community ressources.
Here, they are playing on a world scale, with the support of top capitalists, international mafias, and main dictatorships ...
I have trouble with the notion that Yarvin's garbage deserves the word "intellectual" or "logic" or even "ideas." He's not using logic, it's pure emotion behind a glittering web of misdirection. Look closely and that glitter is just holes in the fabric.
"In Yarvin's world, [...] there are no moral absolutes, no democratic principles worth defending. There is only power, hierarchy [...]."
And he wants to replace that world with one in which there are no moral absolutes, no democratic principles worth defending. There is only power, hierarchy. Dime-store Nietzsche indeed!
I’m an Australian living in Perth, a small city of 2.5 million and I saw this coming about 5 years ago when I started to read about Thiel (the real power behind the throne I think) and yarvin, sure I studied critical thinking at uni so that helps, but I shouted it to everyone I could on Twitter which perhaps was just a screaming in the void as not many people had either heard of them or cared that much, until it started to become clear that trump was gonna win through musk and skullduggery. Even then, I had a lot of push back that it couldn’t happen to democracy as the US was “too big to fail”, but it has and is falling and the rest of the world leaders are gonna have to get together and cut you loose. You are going to be on your own instead of world leaders like you think. We will have to design a new NATO, perhaps even align with China, as there is now a vacuum for them to fill. Democracy will win in the rest of the world cause we are horrified about what is happening there. We are watching and learning from it, elections are happening around the world, including in Australia in a few months and I’m gonna guess, the left will usurp all these right wing leaders as the electorate is engaged and worried about democracy. Yes, you still matter, but for how long?
Agreed, except about the possibility of reorienting China to a “new western order” that excludes both Russia and the USA, I just can’t see that happening, not with how they and BRICS and now BRICS+ have put so much effort into progressing this ‘multi-polar world order’.
Yes, that is a frightening reality and one would hope that there are a lot of hoops he has to jump before he can get access them or if the brologarchy will kill him off before that so they can install vance as he is the one they want, we all know dumptY thinks he’s gonna be king, but he’s just a useful idiot.
I wouldn’t hold much hope for Vance exercising restraint much more than the other, but let’s hope that despite all evidence to the contrary, cooler heads will prevail.
The world is rapidly seeing what happens when a central power spins out of control.
Everyone is trying to figure out how to establish independent stability. Aligning with China is a straight dive into the wood chipper. Don't fall for the hype that there is any future there. The CCP is as Orwellian as any government has ever been and their demographic collapse is the most severe peaceful decline of a population ever recorded in human history.
It merits repeated emphasizing that Yarvin views his own target audience not as fellow future aristocrats, but as future subjects. All his redpill framing is not intended to awaken the worthy to their rightful power; it's to get them feeling so betrayed by the defenders of democracy that they come to view those who make no pretense about their desire to rule without consent as comparatively virtuous in their transparency.
Yarvin is relying—whether he understands it or not—on an ancient quirk of the brain’s reward system: We respond to, remember, and learn most dramatically from what violates our expectations. Our strongest opinions about people, ideas, and institutions are shaped by the ways in which they surprise us. This dynamic is ripe for exploitation by bad actors. It’s why gambling is addictive. It’s why the asshole boyfriend is hard to leave (he apologizes sometimes, so I know he can change!). It’s why Joe Rogan can say 99 falsities and his audience will only remember the one thing he got right. It’s why grifters like Jimmy Dore can rake in millions accusing Democrats of “selling out” while nakedly advertising his own willingness to do so and making good on that promise the moment NRx sugar daddy Peter Thiel offered him a place in his disaffected-leftist-to-alt-rightoid pipeline.
Reliably good actors, by the same token, are only ever a minor lapse away from outrage. The strong negative feelings of disappointment and betrayal that follow these subversions create profound biases in attention that may be very difficult to see around. A professional journalist can get 99 things right and be tarred irredeemably for the one thing they get wrong. Kamala Harris can be better than Trump for Palestinians on every conceivable metric, but insofar as she’s part of an administration perceived as having already let Gazans down, the desire to punish her—and Biden by extension—will, for many, eclipse any rational concern over what Trump has in store for the region and its people.
This is precisely the sort of response Yarvin is trying to provoke toward democracy. His rhetoric leans heavily on the supposed true motives of the Cathedral elites because he needs his audience rage-blind to the fact that what he’s offering them in democracy's stead is an even worse deal for the vast majority. Let us grant Yarvin’s sweeping cynicism in its totality. Let’s agree that the pageantry of representational governance, of institutional checks and balances, of liberal norms and values is only a fig leaf over the animalistic power-hunger smoldering at the bottom of every human heart. Grant all that. A fig leaf is still a barrier. These norms and institutions really *do* hinder unilateral rule, irrespective of the secret desires of the Cathedralites—hence why Yarvin’s acolytes are so preoccupied with dismantling them in the name of “efficiency” (Efficiency of *what,* exactly? Efficiency for *whom*?).
At the end of the day, the choice offered by NRx is between (1) governance by self-serving elites who want to exploit you but are hobbled by bureaucratic red tape, a largely independent rule of law, and the need to deliver tangible results to the electorate; and (2) governance by self-serving elites who want to exploit you with no such restrictions. Yarvin knows no rational person would choose (2) over (1), so he has to either convince his audience that they’ll be among the new ruling elites or get them so worked up over the “unmasked” selfishness of the current elites that they’d sell their own souls to anyone who can credibly promise heads on pikes.
IMO, Yarvin isn't so much the problem, because there's tons of Yarvin's out there & his ideas are simply recycled & repackaged from other writers & philosophers that inspired him. The problem is the mega rich individuals & corporations (like in the case of Heritage Foundation) who have been funding this BS for yrs. to actually make it happen! People like Theil & Rebecca Mercer who have billions to blow on this shit. Mercer has rolled out the largest underground network of people working to do this to overturn for white nationalists. Some of the white & Christian nationalists have merged w/the NRx ers because their goals are similar enough. It's what the current T admin. is comprised of. A mix of them all who are joining together.
Wow, thanks for taking the time to write this piece. It just made a whole number of things I couldn’t sort out click into clarity. I know a number of very educated and intelligent people - some family - who, whether they know it or not are deeply influenced by this thinking. I’ve been learning about the Yarvin > Thiel > Vance > Trump connection over the last year but didn’t make the leap to understanding why or how these seemingly intelligent people have fallen for this all so deeply. What also freaked me out is I have a friend way out in conspiracy land, a wildly intelligent tech dude who has been off grid for two decades — and your descriptions of Yarvin and pals could BE him 😳 I can barely speak to him without ending up so enraged I want to break things, all that non-stop firehouse of pseudo- intellectual technobabble, condescension and obfuscation of Truths that I will NEVER understand, says he.
Not any more, certainly. It’s hard to completely disconnect from people you have lots of history with but once they go off the rails, it’s better to let them go.
Pandering to the wealthy and powerful is nothing new. Making the wealthy and powerful care even less about the harm they inflict on the public - and offering a “theory” of uncaring as wisdom - is quite clever.
I endured watching a 2-hour interview of Yarvin by Daniel Pinchbeck, and found Yarvin insufferable. He appears to do verbally what you’ve stated he does in his writings - attempt to overwhelm you with anecdotes from various sources and pummel you into submission to his quite boring rants. Pinchbeck is a very thoughtful person who had to yell at Yarvin to get him to stop talking for merely a few moments - and then had to yell at him again, and again. Yarvin is - in a word - rude. Absolutely an egocentric jerk, obsessed with IQ as the core measure of a person. He is not that smart. He is a clever, tricky sociopath. Sociopaths are very smart at manipulating naive people. Sociopaths have no core morals beyond raw control of others to gain advantage.
Beware of naive submission to sociopaths and their politics. They are everywhere these days.
Julianne,
Yes, they are very cunning and you often find them seeking positions of power, because what better place to manipulate lots of people. (Trump, Musk, and Vance all come to mind.)
Best comment of all, Julianne.
Yes, agree. It’s frightening to think that sociopaths are now in charge of our government & are doing inestimable damage. And the sociopaths like Yarvin behind them will fund it for their own purposes. Unfortunately, Trump’s performance & its adaption by many of his sycophantic partners, has lead so many to buy into a destructive, nihilistic view of our government, democracy, & world order. It’s war on reality carried out through clever, malignant individuals & where it ends is anyone’s guess.
Wow. You withstood two hours of his babbling drivel? Without wretching?
You clearly have a superior gut 🙇
Yarvin is that guy you went to high school with who is sits in a dark corner of the bar clutching a copy of Nietzsche. A self styled "philosopher" with no training in philosophy, he's read every book in the library and understood none of them.
Kind of like Ayn Rand but updated. Disturbed, self serving people manipulating others.
Nope. In High School he never got past Ayn Rand.
Yeah, but he doesn't actually >read< Nietzsche. He's just using it to cover his copy of "Mein Kampf" underneath.
So I took the bait (though none was actually proferred) and paid a visit to “The Gray Mirror”. [Yarvin’s Substack Blog] Read his “Gaza, Inc.” and “The Pleasure of Error” posts just to get a taste and, not surprisingly given your description of his writing, I immediately and repeatedly screamed to no one in particular, “Just get to the fucking point already”. As someone who practiced law in New York for more than forty years, you always knew that briefs drowning in the kind of verbiage that dominates Yarvin’s writing were written in the hope that the judge and opposing counsel wouldn’t notice that they had nothing to offer in support of their position. Sure there may be tidbits of relevant argument to by mined but the mere fact that one had to dig to find those tidbits meant that on balance opposing counsel had nothing offer value to offer. So, too, is the case with Yarvin.
That is not to say, as you eloquently point out, that many will nevertheless take the use of big words, historical and literary references (often obscure though I do like his reference to Hari Seldon) and coming at the same attempted point from different starting points to believe that something important is being said and attention needs to be paid. And, regrettably, as you note, attention is being paid by.
While I understand his basic premise, the idea that he seems to vest so much in Donald Trump as the tip of his spear is, I believe, a major failing of his attempt to impose his grandiose notions of his supposed intellectual power over a reshaping of American governance. Seeming to draw parallels between FDR and Trump and the former’s ability to get things done because of his competence and “moral energy”. Yarvin seems to believe that Trump is also imbued with the same traits, writing, “Trump 47 is not cutting the Gordian knot. Not yet, anyway! But rather than untangling it gingerly, like a ‘90s Republican, as though it was electrified (it was electrified), **he is grabbing it with both hands and ripping out big hunks.**” (emphasis added). Much of the article expresses the same view of Trump as though he, in fact, is the god-like figure towering over a new Gaza Strip imagined in that sickening video pushing Trump’s vision of a reimagined Gaza (which, by the way, Yarvin completely endorses in his “Gaza, Inc” piece) instead of the damaged human being that he is. Trump, you can be sure, knows nothing of Curtis Yarvin, his theories, his supposed philosophy or the credit he claims for creating the framework within which Trump is operating. Indeed, I would expect Trump to be highly suspicious of Yarvin’s claims because of Yarvin’s claim to being the brains behind the throne. Yarvin, it seems, places an extraordinary reliance upon Trump being able to bring life to his vision and while it should be clear to everyone that Trump is just a mouthpiece…a vehicle for the Russell Voughts and JD Vances of the world to use to further their own agendas (more about Vance in a moment), placing so much reliance on such an imperfect human as Trump is an invitation to failure and, at least in Yarvin’s writings about the current state of affairs that seems to be exactly what he is doing. That is, at least, to a point, given his concluding comment, “When he Trump] gets tired of the Deep State, Trump can print money to build a New State. Legally, according to the Constitution. **Of course, he still needs to win politically…**”
That last comment does appear to recognize that amidst the efforts at obfuscation, Yarvin may recognize that regardless of the coldness of his calculation there is still a human element that cannot be ignored. That unavoidable fact applies to Trump and to Vance who is almost certainly a key player in this nightmarish drama. With Thiel serving as patron for both Yarvin and Vance it is a near certainty that they all expect that at some point, Vance will ascend to the throne that they are in the process of preparing. As with Trump, however, the human element cannot be ignored and the chance of falling short a possibility given Trump’s propensity for, well, being Trump. While the torch may at some point be passed to JD Vance, you can be assured that his chances of winning politically are more problematic than they are for Trump. Indeed, while Trump has millions of adoring fans. I suspect that few hold the same regard for Vance. And, again, therein lies the rub for Yarvin, Thiel et al. It is all well and good to conjure an ideology that transform a democracy into a tech-based feudal state, as Yarvin himself said, “[H]e still needs to win politically”
Dear Mr. Richman,
Well put. The next step is to connect the ideas that Yarvin is spouting, to the PayPal Mafia, especially people like a Peter Thiel. Yarvin’s ideas are being implemented by Musk and others, so we can only assume they only scratched the surface of his thinking as well.
I managed to sit through the first of two interview videos with Thiel, and I was immediately struck by how much he functions on his Neo-Christian faith. He speaks like a true believer, and is expecting the doom spelled out in Revelations to happen. And if he has his way, he wants to accelerate Armageddon’s arrival.
It is a frightening prospect that someone with wealth and influence should be actively seeking the end of days, so that he and the other believers can live in paradise. But if you connect Yarvin’s desire to be the power behind the King, with Thiel’s seeking the Anti-Christ, his actions begin to make sense. By destroying the democratic government of the most powerful nation on the planet, you can set up your own kingdom and be on of the Kings that meets at the plains around Megiddo.
The Q’Anon movement functions in a similar vein. For people who have never been taught philosophy and how to recognize the errors in another person’s thinking and arguments, it becomes an easy sell to make them miss the distinction between fire hose and what’s coming out of it.
I would guess that much of this sort of apocalyptic fantasy is the result of the problems associated with having more wealth and power than the human mind can comprehend. If absolute power corrupts absolutely, I would also say that extreme wealth corrupts the mind extremely.
Again, thank you for your analysis. I look forward to your future writings.
One has to wonder if Yarvin or one of his acolytes isn't behind QAnon.
After all is said and done, Vance is about as charismatic as, well, a Hillbilly who gets his kicks molesting the couch.
I find Yarvin and any interpretation of him exhausting.
I see good vs evil in how a government, religion, corporation, family or individual treats the vulnerable.
You see clearly.
Mike: In this period of time, when our attention span is supposed to be exceptionally short, your writing keeps me riveted. Whenever I finish an article of yours, I feel like more of the smoke has been cleared from my brain. I have had many conversations with my son, who believes our country and political system is rife with corruption, trying to defend the concept of democracy. I wish I could defend my beliefs as eloquently as you do.
🙏✌️
Actually, our country and political system >is< rife with corruption - but it's coming from the reichwing, although after that CR vote I'll make an exception for Schumer.
Thanks for cutting through the bulls**t. I moved to Silicon Valley almost 40 years ago from the midwest and am surrounded by people who work in tech. These Yarvin sycophants do not represent us and create a toxic image of Silicon Valley. Their whole theories and musings have a despairing lack of any kind of empathy for humanity or understandings of healthy society. It’s like they are imagining their own video game come to life while not realizing what’s the real end game? They get to create their own cathedral of power? What happens when someone else gets to choose? It’s a fantasy by those who feel they are immune to any kind of consequences either because they are insulated by wealth or their own sociopathic narcissism.
Single best summary of Yarvin I have read. I read a few bits and bobs of him BITD. Came away with a shrug. I even met him briefly at an event in SV. His writing - and entire in-person vibe, came off as historical babble repackaged into siren-songs. They all tell the same basic story: Techno-Billionaires are the glory of creation, and should take over everything, everywhere, all at once.
I think you make an important note here. He is not so much pandering, as auditioning for the Billionaire class. He clearly sees and celebrates that all Billionaires strive to own everything and per the feudal tradition turn every action for the 99.99% into a rent-extraction activity for the Rulers. He then celebrates them in any way he can, and creates artisan word-salads and oddly curated historical dioramas to justify every action that furthers that world view.
Well, I did watch the full 50 minutes, so I guess I'm brilliant <snark>, and my brilliance is demanding that I point out that although Schachtel may have watched the full press conference, he apparently had the volume off for the first 40 minutes -- unless of course he equates Trump's lying and gaslighting with being "very respectful and cordial," and Zelenskyy's honesty and clarity with having "ignited a firestorm."
* Trump spoke about "the tremendous death" that has taken place, without mentioning the context. Zelenskyy provided the context by reminding Trump that "They (Russians) came into our territory." Trump ignored him.
* Trump went on to say, "It (the war) should have never started," while just casually skipping over WHY the war started. Honestly, I don't know how Zelenskyy refrained from grabbing Trump's scrotum and pulling it up over his head.
* And later Trump blathered on about the structural state of Ukraine, and Zelenskyy pointed out that Trump's description was not entirely accurate. Zelenskyy then gave a fuller description of how things are in Ukraine, and then brilliantly reminded everyone that "Maybe it is Putin that is sharing this information that he destroyed us."
Although I know that none of what I've written is the point of Mike's post, I would nevertheless encourage everyone to watch the full press conference. The body language alone is worth your time. But I will warn you, leave time for a shower afterwards.
Watched it in full - in no way does reality align with the post from X - that’s gaslighting
Indeed it is.
I couldn't bear to watch it, but my well educated and informed forty-year-old daughter did and came to exactly the same conclusion as you do.
...and be sure to have plenty of barf bags available. If you're a thinking person, you'll need them.
I suspect Schachtel only hears what he wants to hear, and even that is filtered through some mental process as convoluted as anything that he or Yarvin writes.
I appreciate your efforts to engage with Yarvin but I have to take issue.
The thesis of this piece is that Yarvin's thought is obscure. I'm not sure why you think so. He's long-winded and given to cutesy allusions to his own private concepts, but his ideology is astonishingly simple and (to his credit) he is very clear about it:
- order is good, disorder is bad
- this overrides all other moral principles
- the way to ensure order is with radically centralized power (absolute monarchs or monarch-like CEOs)
- as a corollary, anything that distributes power (like democracy) is bad
That's basically it. While these ideas are terrible and childishly simplistic, there's nothing obscure about them, and he pretty much spells them out.
I think you need to re-read Mike’s essay; he doesn’t say Yarvin ‘is obscure’, he said that Yarvin uses a torrent of rhetorical and often irrelevant flourish and tangential references to *hide* his core illiberal philosophy, that without those flourishes, most people reading them would quickly dismiss them.
OK, maybe this is not worth arguing about, but my point was that he does not really hide his philosophy, it's right out there. I've been tracking this guy since 2007 so maybe my perspective is skewed, but there is really no mystery. If the theorizing about centralization of power isn't clear, the places he puts forth as examples of good governance (Singapore, Dubai, apartheid South Africa, historical monarchies, and the occasional nod to Nazi Germany) should be.
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/04/formalist-manifesto-originally-posted/
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/fnargland-grand-challenge/
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/03/divine-right-monarchy-for-modern/
I think most people can't wrap their heads around the idea that an educated person would hold these views, and certainly not that a major political party should be under their influence, but that's where we are.
I think you may be misunderstanding the central argument of my essay. I'm not claiming that Yarvin hides his conclusions or that there's any mystery about what political systems he admires. In fact, I acknowledge that his ultimate goal (essentially advocating for a form of monarchy or corporate governance) is relatively straightforward.
My analysis focuses on something different and more subtle: how his rhetorical approach functions as a mechanism of persuasion that's far more sophisticated than simply stating his preferences for Singapore or historical monarchies.
When I describe Yarvin's writing as a "waterfall" that doesn't persuade but drowns, I'm not suggesting he's hiding his views. Rather, I'm examining how the form of his communication—the overwhelming volume, the labyrinthine references, the strategic complexity—serves to erode readers' critical faculties and democratic commitments before they even encounter his explicit conclusions.
The danger isn't in what Yarvin wants (which, as you correctly point out, he states fairly openly in various essays), but in how he makes readers receptive to those anti-democratic ideas. His writing doesn't just present arguments to be evaluated—it creates an immersive experience that gradually dissolves the reader's capacity for democratic thinking itself.
In my earlier work, I've directly addressed Yarvin's neocameralism and his explicit political preferences. But this essay is specifically examining his rhetorical technique as a form of epistemic manipulation—one that doesn't rely on hiding his conclusions but on exhausting the reader's resistance to them through a torrent of references, cynical observations, and apparent erudition.
The sophistication of Yarvin's approach isn't that he conceals his beliefs, but that he understands something profound about persuasion: changing what people think often requires first changing how they think. His writing serves not just to communicate ideas but to reshape the reader's entire epistemological framework in ways that make his anti-democratic conclusions seem inevitable rather than abhorrent.
That's why understanding his rhetorical strategy matters as much as understanding his explicit political positions. It's not about uncovering hidden views; it's about recognizing how certain rhetorical techniques can function as powerful tools for eroding democratic commitments and critical thinking itself.
You really think so? You are saying that his rhetoric is so persuasive that it convinces people to take up ideas they wouldn't otherwise. This doesn't seem right to me. For one thing, his rhetoric is not that great, he's long-winded and self-satisfied. He's more literate than your average wingnut, and can be clever, but really, how many people have the patience to plow through his incredibly long screeds? As an "immersive experience" it's pretty tedious.
No, his appeal is not due to his magical powers of persuasion, it's in the ideas, and their transgressive power. He's offering a radical worldview which shatters all the pieties of liberal, democratic, polite society, and offering his followers a chance to feel superior to all those boring normies. Now, the ideas aren't really all that great or original, and certainly his writing helps sell them, makes them appear fresh, new, powerful. But I would guess that the people who take them up are not being bamboozled, they understand what he is offering.
Take a couple of his most prominent fans: JD Vance and Marc Andreesen. Do we think they have been swept away by Yarvin's magical waterfall of rhetoric, or have they found for themselves an eloquent proponent of ideas that suit their self-images, their interests, their political purposes? Delivered in a package that seems to have intellectual sophistication of course.
Sorry I don't want to argue this into the ground, we are on the same side after all. There's nothing wrong with taking a closer look at Yarvin's rhetorical techniques.
Why can't both/all of these 'spears' of Yarvin's writings be true at the same time, intended for a range of audiences?
His writings get interpretted and re-distributed down the line and up the line. There undoubtedly are those who read them deeply, others who get sent a few carefully chosen articles and quickly become locked in Because Busy Life, and then there's the rest who are fed the re-articulated version underpinning Project 2025, and then there's the mass who get a few carefully chosen P2025 soundbites and think "Yeah!".
As I said, it's a new (well, reinvented for the 21C) ecosystem of thought just as potent as any other more traditional or liberal or classic-Republican, with various levels of complexity that poke the requisite hot-buttons needed for various levels of the intended audience.
Yes I think that’s right. I think Mike Brock and I have similar reactions to Yarvin’s work (alarmed not just by the content but by its sinister appeal) although perhaps to different aspects of it.
Thank you, Mike for clarifying even more your central point. It is how I understand what you wrote. What Yarvin is attempting is insidious mind control. But, if I showed any of this to people I know who are Trump supporters their eyes would glaze over & they would throw up their hands, thinking I’m a radical, extremist left winger. That’s a big part of Trump’s appeal- he makes it all seem so simple & his supporters aren’t required to very hard. Fox & other outlets amplify that feeling of security without effort. But given a personal situation I’m dealing with (and which Trump & Co might negatively impact), & keeping up with the Trump/Vance//Musk train wreck, I don’t think I can handle reading Yarvin. Frankly, they sound like a bunch of bratty young boys with too much money & time on their hands who sit around fantasizing about being Lord of the Flies.
Hmmmm radically centralized power looking at history alone is unstable , and is disordered .
Very insightfull, thanks.
I think we can make a parallel with cults ideas and systems of thinking. Only that cults are about installing and maintaining domination of a few over a limited community, sucking up this community ressources.
Here, they are playing on a world scale, with the support of top capitalists, international mafias, and main dictatorships ...
Yes, but they are sucking up community resources, self dealing, monetizing the Presidency on a grand scale.
.They are striving for the Russian model of oligarchy.
The elites following him ARE the cult members. Cult members do the bidding of the leader.
I have trouble with the notion that Yarvin's garbage deserves the word "intellectual" or "logic" or even "ideas." He's not using logic, it's pure emotion behind a glittering web of misdirection. Look closely and that glitter is just holes in the fabric.
"In Yarvin's world, [...] there are no moral absolutes, no democratic principles worth defending. There is only power, hierarchy [...]."
And he wants to replace that world with one in which there are no moral absolutes, no democratic principles worth defending. There is only power, hierarchy. Dime-store Nietzsche indeed!
"Dime-store Nietzsche"... is a brilliant summation of Yarvin's psychotic ranting. Thanks.
Captures the poem of his that I read, too.
I’m an Australian living in Perth, a small city of 2.5 million and I saw this coming about 5 years ago when I started to read about Thiel (the real power behind the throne I think) and yarvin, sure I studied critical thinking at uni so that helps, but I shouted it to everyone I could on Twitter which perhaps was just a screaming in the void as not many people had either heard of them or cared that much, until it started to become clear that trump was gonna win through musk and skullduggery. Even then, I had a lot of push back that it couldn’t happen to democracy as the US was “too big to fail”, but it has and is falling and the rest of the world leaders are gonna have to get together and cut you loose. You are going to be on your own instead of world leaders like you think. We will have to design a new NATO, perhaps even align with China, as there is now a vacuum for them to fill. Democracy will win in the rest of the world cause we are horrified about what is happening there. We are watching and learning from it, elections are happening around the world, including in Australia in a few months and I’m gonna guess, the left will usurp all these right wing leaders as the electorate is engaged and worried about democracy. Yes, you still matter, but for how long?
The most terrifying issue with sociopaths being in charge in the US is who has access to a nuclear arsenal. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
Agreed, except about the possibility of reorienting China to a “new western order” that excludes both Russia and the USA, I just can’t see that happening, not with how they and BRICS and now BRICS+ have put so much effort into progressing this ‘multi-polar world order’.
Yes, that is a frightening reality and one would hope that there are a lot of hoops he has to jump before he can get access them or if the brologarchy will kill him off before that so they can install vance as he is the one they want, we all know dumptY thinks he’s gonna be king, but he’s just a useful idiot.
I wouldn’t hold much hope for Vance exercising restraint much more than the other, but let’s hope that despite all evidence to the contrary, cooler heads will prevail.
The world is rapidly seeing what happens when a central power spins out of control.
Everyone is trying to figure out how to establish independent stability. Aligning with China is a straight dive into the wood chipper. Don't fall for the hype that there is any future there. The CCP is as Orwellian as any government has ever been and their demographic collapse is the most severe peaceful decline of a population ever recorded in human history.
It merits repeated emphasizing that Yarvin views his own target audience not as fellow future aristocrats, but as future subjects. All his redpill framing is not intended to awaken the worthy to their rightful power; it's to get them feeling so betrayed by the defenders of democracy that they come to view those who make no pretense about their desire to rule without consent as comparatively virtuous in their transparency.
Yarvin is relying—whether he understands it or not—on an ancient quirk of the brain’s reward system: We respond to, remember, and learn most dramatically from what violates our expectations. Our strongest opinions about people, ideas, and institutions are shaped by the ways in which they surprise us. This dynamic is ripe for exploitation by bad actors. It’s why gambling is addictive. It’s why the asshole boyfriend is hard to leave (he apologizes sometimes, so I know he can change!). It’s why Joe Rogan can say 99 falsities and his audience will only remember the one thing he got right. It’s why grifters like Jimmy Dore can rake in millions accusing Democrats of “selling out” while nakedly advertising his own willingness to do so and making good on that promise the moment NRx sugar daddy Peter Thiel offered him a place in his disaffected-leftist-to-alt-rightoid pipeline.
Reliably good actors, by the same token, are only ever a minor lapse away from outrage. The strong negative feelings of disappointment and betrayal that follow these subversions create profound biases in attention that may be very difficult to see around. A professional journalist can get 99 things right and be tarred irredeemably for the one thing they get wrong. Kamala Harris can be better than Trump for Palestinians on every conceivable metric, but insofar as she’s part of an administration perceived as having already let Gazans down, the desire to punish her—and Biden by extension—will, for many, eclipse any rational concern over what Trump has in store for the region and its people.
This is precisely the sort of response Yarvin is trying to provoke toward democracy. His rhetoric leans heavily on the supposed true motives of the Cathedral elites because he needs his audience rage-blind to the fact that what he’s offering them in democracy's stead is an even worse deal for the vast majority. Let us grant Yarvin’s sweeping cynicism in its totality. Let’s agree that the pageantry of representational governance, of institutional checks and balances, of liberal norms and values is only a fig leaf over the animalistic power-hunger smoldering at the bottom of every human heart. Grant all that. A fig leaf is still a barrier. These norms and institutions really *do* hinder unilateral rule, irrespective of the secret desires of the Cathedralites—hence why Yarvin’s acolytes are so preoccupied with dismantling them in the name of “efficiency” (Efficiency of *what,* exactly? Efficiency for *whom*?).
At the end of the day, the choice offered by NRx is between (1) governance by self-serving elites who want to exploit you but are hobbled by bureaucratic red tape, a largely independent rule of law, and the need to deliver tangible results to the electorate; and (2) governance by self-serving elites who want to exploit you with no such restrictions. Yarvin knows no rational person would choose (2) over (1), so he has to either convince his audience that they’ll be among the new ruling elites or get them so worked up over the “unmasked” selfishness of the current elites that they’d sell their own souls to anyone who can credibly promise heads on pikes.
IMO, Yarvin isn't so much the problem, because there's tons of Yarvin's out there & his ideas are simply recycled & repackaged from other writers & philosophers that inspired him. The problem is the mega rich individuals & corporations (like in the case of Heritage Foundation) who have been funding this BS for yrs. to actually make it happen! People like Theil & Rebecca Mercer who have billions to blow on this shit. Mercer has rolled out the largest underground network of people working to do this to overturn for white nationalists. Some of the white & Christian nationalists have merged w/the NRx ers because their goals are similar enough. It's what the current T admin. is comprised of. A mix of them all who are joining together.
Kind of makes me think of the Churchill (I think?) remark about democracy being the worst form of government, except for all the others.
Wow, thanks for taking the time to write this piece. It just made a whole number of things I couldn’t sort out click into clarity. I know a number of very educated and intelligent people - some family - who, whether they know it or not are deeply influenced by this thinking. I’ve been learning about the Yarvin > Thiel > Vance > Trump connection over the last year but didn’t make the leap to understanding why or how these seemingly intelligent people have fallen for this all so deeply. What also freaked me out is I have a friend way out in conspiracy land, a wildly intelligent tech dude who has been off grid for two decades — and your descriptions of Yarvin and pals could BE him 😳 I can barely speak to him without ending up so enraged I want to break things, all that non-stop firehouse of pseudo- intellectual technobabble, condescension and obfuscation of Truths that I will NEVER understand, says he.
Ugh.
Doesn't sound like a "friend" from your description, Helene.
Not any more, certainly. It’s hard to completely disconnect from people you have lots of history with but once they go off the rails, it’s better to let them go.
Thank you for this one Mike!