[CONTENT WARNING: THERE'S A LOT OF WORDS HERE. I COULD PROBABLY USE AN EDITOR.]
I think we've established conclusively that it's just all so fucking stupid. But we haven't spent much time delving into the intellectual underpinnings of the fuckery. That's something we'll rectify today.
We're not talking about anything intellectual related to the President, mind you. That hump has no such foundation. He's 100% id, focused solely and entirely on what's good for him and only him. In him, a group of wealthy and ambitious white men (and they're nearly all white men) found a perfect blank canvas onto which to paint their vision for societal organization.
In 2008, a blogger named Mencius Moldbug wrote an online treatise entitled Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century. In the piece, Moldbug argues for the end of the nation-state, and in its place "a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions."
Democracy out. Corporate hegemony in.
Moldbug went on in later years to coin the notion of the Dark Enlightenment, which refers in his telling to the preferred governance model, that of an anti-democratic social construct ruled by a CEO or monarch not beholden to the grubby masses. He calls for nothing less than the end of democracy in favor of start-up cities.
Cranks have written shit like this since my man Johannes Gutenberg first democratized the printing process. What makes Moldbug's story different is the people who became attracted to his ideology.
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This sweaty motherfucker is probable the
most dangerous person in the world |
People like Peter Thiel, for example. And Elon Musk.
Thiel was one of the first tech titans to publicly embrace a particularly virulent strain of libertarianism, writing in a 2009 essay entitled "The Education of a Libertarian", “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” In Mencius Moldbug, the pen name of a guy named Curtis Yarvin, Thiel found a philosophical ally.
Curtis Yarvin was a software engineer and entrepreneur before he entered the world of right-wing political philosophy. His company, Tlon, was backed by Thiel's venture capital firm in 2013, though it's likely the two knew each other well before that.
In addition to Thiel, Yarvin influenced the worldview of Steve Bannon, and in 2016, his anti-democratic views suddenly found purchase in the White House. Eoin Higgins described that in his book Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, saying,
Steve Bannon, [Trump's] 2016 campaign consiglieri, had served as CEO of a company selling gold in the massive multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. He was part of tech’s far-right underbelly. Once in the White House, Trump turned to the more elite Thiel to serve as liaison to Silicon Valley.
After Trump’s victory, tech leaders came to kiss the ring. Thiel was at his side for the December 14, 2016, meeting. The billionaire investor brought along allies Elon Musk and Alex Karp, even though at the time the respective companies they led, Tesla and Palantir, were not remotely on the same level as Google, Microsoft, Apple, and the others.
Since that time, Silicon Valley's uber-wealthy have increasingly embraced Yarvin's perspective, with Musk, Marc Andreesen, Bill Ackman, and others clearly deciding that business interests outweigh democratic ideals.
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| *This* is your king? |
This does not mean that Yarvin's disciples chose to stay out of the political fray. To the contrary, they sought malleable men (again, nearly all men) with outsized ambition and a willingness to trade principle for power. People like Josh Hawley. And even more potentially frightening, J.D. Vance.
Vance's entire political career has been bankrolled by Thiel, his former boss. In October 2024, Politico ran an article detailing then-candidate Vance's political influences, which included this passage, "Vance has said he considers Yarvin a friend and has cited his writings in connection with his plan to fire a significant number of civil servants during a potential second Trump administration. “There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said on a conservative podcast in 2021, adding: “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024 [and] I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”"
So we know Yarvin's disturbing view of the world influences a number of wealthy and powerful people. And in early 2025, we saw one way that philosophy was made manifest.
At the time, Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid wrote, "It’s hard to overstate how much of Curtis Yarvin’s extremist playbook is being implemented at the highest levels of American government. It’s even harder to understand why so few seem to notice."
Shahid's piece articulated the ways in which Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was systematically following Yarvin's blueprint, saying, "And the public must understand that this isn’t about “efficiency” or “modernization.” This is about replacing democracy with an unelected, unaccountable ruling corporate elite—one that answers only to itself."
Interestingly, Yarvin has recently written that the second Trump administration is a failure, a "tragedy" even. Not because it's a flailing shitshow, but because Team Trump has spent too much time trying to govern and not enough speedrunning regime systematic change. Lord have mercy.
That Yarvin piece (and Shahid's) is worth reading, and it's in our societal interest to better understand the unholy alliance between neo-libertarian wealth and the elites of the MAGA movement. Because we're one clogged artery away from J.D. Vance ascending to the most powerful position in the world, and in his wake a coterie of people who believe you should be serfs to their unquestioned lordship.
Fuckery, indeed.
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