The Seditionists: Yarvin and the Machinery of Democratic Collapse

On being proven right about something you desperately hoped to be wrong about

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

Let me begin with the bitter satisfaction of vindication mixed with the horror of accuracy—and the searing contempt for those who could have prevented this catastrophe but chose the luxury of ignorance instead.

Four months ago, I wrote The Plot Against America, documenting how a dangerous ideology born from libertarian fever dreams had metastasized from internet forums into the beating heart of American government. Every tech oligarch who now pretends surprise, every venture capitalist who dismissed these warnings as irrelevant, every status-hungry fool who acts like a weathervane in their social circle—they all had access to the same information. They all chose to look away.

Now Ava Kofman's extraordinary New Yorker profile of Curtis Yarvin reads like the forensic report on a seditious conspiracy I predicted but that others deliberately ignored. Every detail I traced—Yarvin coaching Peter Thiel on media manipulation, J.D. Vance citing him on destroying the civil service, tech oligarchs treating his blog as sacred text—it's all there, documented with devastating precision. The systematic implementation of anti-democratic theory through the actual machinery of state power. The intellectual architecture of our collapse, laid bare for all to see.

What we're witnessing isn't just political disagreement or ideological capture. It's sedition—the systematic attempt to overthrow constitutional governance by people who explicitly reject democratic legitimacy. And it's being orchestrated by a cabal that includes a disturbing number of fifty-something white South Africans who grew up under apartheid and seem determined to recreate its hierarchical certainties on American soil.

I should feel triumphant. Instead, I feel a white-hot rage at the willful blindness that made this preventable catastrophe inevitable.