Curtis Yarvin: Alex Jones with hair

22 January 2025 0 Comments

After years of semi-obscurity, blogger Curtis Yarvin, "philosopher of the Dark Elightenment" and the bad kind of weirdo is in the media spotlight as the seer, philospher and genius intellect behind the Silicon Valley broligarchs of the new Trump order. But in truth Curtis Yarvin is nothing special. He's Alex Jones with a larger vocabulary and a lot more hair.


 Perhaps you've heard of Curtis Yarvin. Don't feel out of the loop if not - I hadn't heard of him until a few  months ago, and I spend endless hours per week in political discussions and reading long form journalism, time that might be better spent doing absolutely anything else. 


Yarvin, the philosopher of the Dark Elightenment, has been labouring away in relative obscurity for years under the psuedonym  Mencius Moldbug, posting millions of words in support of his central thesis:  that “the masses are too stupid for self-rule” and democracy must be scrapped in favour of a system of dictatorship controlled by a national CEO who, unlike the general public, will be smart enough to rule the country efficiently. Along the way he's gained such fans as Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and possibly Elon Musk; men who see themselves as just the type to make excellent national CEOs, dreaming that one day they will be the leaders of a Silicon Reich.


Yarvin has however mostly avoided attracted national publicity which was how he liked it; he doesn't care what the unwashed masses think of him. But with the rise of Trump two point no, Yarvin has decided it's time to take to the national stage. His works influence some of the most powerful members of the new administration, and journalists are lining up to perform acts of sane washing. Sure, Yarvin may have some whacky views - such as that Utøya massacre gunman Anders Brevik was an ineffective terrorist because he didn't kill enough people, that those that don't or cant contribute to the economy should be trapped in cells and left to live or die, that some classes of people (he describes himself as a Brahmin) are just naturally superior and born to rule - but hey, he's very smart (he coined the term take the red pill!) so we should listen to what he's got to say.


In that vein, The New York Times treated Yarvin to an extended interview this week, Yarvin falls back on the old trope of the New York Times being the vanguard of left wing progressive thought. a position no leftist (not to be confused with liberal) believes. Curtis Yarvin, in fact, has a fundamental misunderstanding of progressiveism:

When a person who lives within the progressive bubble of the current year looks at the right or even the new right, what’s hardest to see is that what’s really shared is not a positive belief but an absence of belief. We don’t worship these same gods. We do not see The New York Times and Harvard as divinely inspired in any sense, or we do not see their procedures as ones that always lead to truth and wisdom. We do not think the U.S. government works well.


Journalists know that Curtis Yarvin is very smart because he tells them so, and who are they to question the word of a very smart man like Curtis Yarvin? Yarvin fans meanwhile can reassure themselves that, by appreciating Yarvin's writings, they too are very smart (although Yarvin fan Tucker Carlson has lamented not “hav[ing] the necessary IQ” to fully comprehend Yarson's work; we believe you, Tuck). Either way Curtis Yarvin also adds an intellectual glister to their own white supremacist views and genocidal impulses, and they like to refer to Yarvin as Lord Yarvin, or Our Prophet.


But a deeper look at Yarvin's writing's reveals he's not that smart at all. In fact Yarvin is merely Alex Jones with a full head of hair and a sticky glaze of pseudointellectualism; he peddles conspiracy theories and amplifies toxic nonsense. And in case you're worried that Yarvin's vision for the future of society may be precient, a look at his past predictions reveals that much of the time, he just gets things wrong. 


Years before Donald Trump was demanding to see Barak Obama's birth certificate, Yarvin called into question whether Obama attended Columbia University, where he graduated with a degree in political science in 1983, at all. Yarvin then spins from the racist to the ridiculous, wondering if, instead of completing his undergraduate studies, Obama was in New York to serve as a gopher and catamite of Bill Ayres and the Weather Underground leadership. (A catamite, if you're not familiar with the term, was in Ancient Greece and Rome a young boy in a sexual relationship with an older man; the word was beloved by L. Ron Hubbard, who included catamites extensively in his latter day work of fiction, Mission Earth).


You might be wondering, 



Trust me, so was I when I first read Yarvin's take on this. There's no need to delve into the historical student records here, just an awareness that the Weather Underground officially dissolved in 1977; Obama first met Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn in 1995; and New York in the early 1980s was an extremely risky time for a young man to be engaged in multiple sexual relations with other men, yet if Obama engaged in this role, he somehow ended up just fine. 


Oh, and then there's the covert racism of the sexualisation of black men. A young black man couldn't possibly be engaged in academic work at an elite university - he must be there for sex.


(Yarvin, of course, would rely on the first two of the triumvate of right wing defences of their putrid bile: I was only joking and I'm just asking questions, along with the classic if you disagree with me, it's because you're too dumb to understand what I say). 


This is a conspiracy theory too dense to have been spun by the addled brain of Alex Jones, but it deserves to be taken no more seriously than Jones ranting about Democrats eat babies and smell like sulphur. 


Alex Jones rants as an indie folk song. 





But lest I be accused of lacking the intellect myself to appreciate the genius of Curtis Yarvin, I took a deep dive into his work to see if there was any profound insight I was lacking. I went with one of his earlier pieces,  Moldbug on Carlyle from 2009, recommended by archivists of his early writings as " more advanced than the introductory volumes but represent[ing] some of Moldbug’s finest work", again appealing to the intellect of the audience. Moldbug on Carlyle is a manifesto of sorts where Yarvin gushes of his love for Thomas Carlyle, "the Victorian Jesus", a Scottish historian and philosopher who espoused the Great Man theory that some were born to rule whilst others were destined for the "precious thing" that was slavery (I won't spoil the ending by telling you to what races Carlyle assigned these distinctions), and that right makes might in maintaining such distinctions. 


Yavin opens by stating that he is a royalist or more specifically something he calls a Carlylean (I went to school with a girl called Carly Lean; I could only envy her skills at double dutch skipping).  Yarvin lovingly declares "it is no daring literary act to exalt Carlyle as superhuman", before launching into many, many thousands of words of historical non sequitirs, misstatements, pointless discursions, and just plain errors of fact.


And I read every damn one of them. I admit I did find Moldbug on Carlyle difficult to read, not for any intellectual rigour but just because it was so damn tedious. If you want a summary of Curtis Yarvin's writing, imagine a boot stomping Facebook comments on a human face - forever. 


Like any good commentator on a Facebook local history group, Curtis Yarvin is convinced, in spite of all evidence, that things used to be better than they are now. As an example of what a dreadful place England has become compared to the days of Sherlock Holmes, "Official statistics confirm that crime in England has increased roughly by a factor of 50 since Conan Doyle wrote." The report Yarvin cites is from 1997 - when crime rates had already begun the dramatic decline we've seen in recent decades, as the most criminal cohort - the Baby Boomers - aged out of criminal offending. Indictable offences per thousand population were 2.4 in 1900 and 89.1 in 1997, already down from the 1992 peak of 109.4. The report also notes that underreporting was a significant factor in earlier decades, a fact Yarvin doesn't raise (and the murder rate has shown no dramatic shift, from 9.6 per million in 1900 to 14.1 per million in 1997. The murder rate in 2023 was 9.9 per million, scarcely more than in Holmes's day). Nevertheless, Yarvin proclaims:


[A]n English government of the Victorian era—without DNA testing or closed-circuit TV—managed to largely abolish crime.

 

I humbly suggest he take a break from Carlyle to read some Charles Dickens. But he doesn't limit his terrible history to Britain. He proclaims his love of monarchy by unfavourably contrasting Stalin's dictatorship with Tsardom: "Stalin has the power of the Tsars, but not the security of the Tsars". Security? Do you know what happened to Nicholas II, his brother Mikhail who he left his throne to, and his son and heir Alexei? 


Back to Britain, though:


Britain lost her Empire and most of Ireland, and became a political satellite of America. Her industries declined and largely disappeared. Her crime rate rose by a factor of 50—not 50%. ... Her lower classes, generously augmented by the dregs of the late Empire, achieved levels of squalor, ignorance and degradation perhaps unsurpassed in human history.


(Once again, I'm begging you, read some fucking Dickens). 


And worst of all, most appalling of all—Britons do not feel they have a problem. Quite the contrary. They have never been better governed.   


Yarvin wrote these words in 2010. A mere six years later, in 2016, Britons voted for the most massive change to their system of government - to leave the European Union, which came to be known as Brexit. It's true voter turn out was low, the leave votes . But the vote would not have happened in the first place if there were not public clamour for a change of government; it wouldn't have passed if the change was not desirable. It's true that Brexit has been a massive disaster, largely because the vote took place when Brexit only existed as a nebulous idea without any plan or policy to back it up. (Such failure to accurately prophesise the future is nothing new for Yarvin. In 1990, he praised the Soviet leadership ladder of vicious bureaucratic backbiting as creating a stronger class of leader than America's mealy mouthed sound bites. Within months, the Soviet Union had collapsed. Whoopsie. 


Yarvin praises Carlyle as a prophet who foresaw the problems of 150 years hence but failed to apprehend the mood of Britain or guess at the imminent outcome. Once again, his fans should ask themselves what else is he wrong about? And the mealy mouthed excuse "I don't agree with everything he says" won't do. What parts do you agree with and why?




But Yarvin does get one thing right in his New York Times interview, when he states Trump won't be able to get much done to establish the Yarvin world view in his second slump around the White House: "He can block things, he can disrupt it, he can create chaos and turbulence, but he can’t really change what it is." This brings to mind another anti-intellectual right wing blowhard, Rush Limbaugh, and the first cracks that became the chasm of modern America. Modern right wing political ideology developed from several movements in the 1970s - Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics, the anti abortion movement, the general sense America had lost its way and a strong conservative movement was needed to get things back on track. 


By the 1990s, when Limbaugh was establishing himself as a conservative radio super power, it was becoming apparent that conservative economic policy was a failure. Limbaugh picked up on this, changing the narrative from espousing conservative policies to an ideology of simply opposing whatever the left was in favour of. It mattered not if Republican governments achieved anything for their consituents, enacted any policies that made people's lives better; it was enough that whatever progressives were for, they were against. Limbaugh pioneered this stance by slandering, mocking, and outright lying about his opponents. Rush Limbaugh is thankfully dead but his legacy lives on in the raft of executive orders issued by Trump in the wake of his inauguration. The Trump administration will end recognition of trans people, rename Mt. Denali and the Gulf of Mexico, withdraw from the WHO, and "advance the policy that Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces", whatever the hell that entails and who gets to decide. But no policies to actually make life easier or better for ordinary Americans (even policies that pretend to protect safety of the public, like curtailing entry of illegal drugs at the southern border with the aim of reducing drug deaths, ignores that most fentanyl and other synthetic opioids are produced in Asia. '


Curtis Yarvin doesn't just want to tear down democracy. He has a plan for its replacement, a terrifying "GovCorp"  authoritarian regime where individual citizens have no say in what is happening to them other than by up and leaving - to a different GovCorp. But Donald Trump won't be establishing Yarvin's hive of autocratic city states. He'll be too busy owning the Libs. There are plenty of ways Trump has, and will continue to, make life difficult or impossible for his chosen enemies. But creating Yarvin's personal Utopia won't be one of them. Curtis Yarvin is Alex Jones for a (mostly male) crowd who debate Caesar's conquests instead of mods to their F150s. It gives their fans something to do, but Jones and Yarvin are both just a joke. 

 

Coda to remind ourselves that just because these men are a joke, doesn't mean they aren't still dangerous. Parents whose children were brutally murdered in the Sandy Hook shooting had to go into hiding due to harassment from deranged Alex Jones fans who believed his rantings that the whole thing was staged. Elon Musk jumped around at Trump rallies like a preschooler to snuck a gulp of red bull when you weren't looking, and now he's normalising the Nazi salute.


Curtis Yarvin's dehumanising rhetoric, painting those like himself as gods and the rest of us only worth our contribution to the economy - even less if he doesn't like your skin colour - certainly is dangerous. But he's nothing special. Curtis Yarvin is just one of thousands of far right blowhards peddling the same pustulent drivel. And that might be the scariest thing of all).

0 Comments

Post a Comment

Back to Top