Curtis Yarvin might be the most important person you’ve never heard of. He is an intellectual lodestar for the Maga movement, serving as a personal inspiration to some of the most influential figures on the US authoritarian right. He is also a self-pitying crybaby, who manages to transmit that sentiment into the political power structure.
When asked how Donald Trump should secure power back in 2021, his future running mate JD Vance knew exactly who to cite. “So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin,” he said, “who has written about some of these things.” He went on to basically outline a plan for a coup. First you “fire every single mid level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people”, he said. Then you refuse to accept the rule of law. Simply ignore court judgements against you.
This was the exact approach taken by the administration four years’ later. The Doge unit tore through Washington’s bureaucratic class. Trump then proceeded to dismiss court orders against him, continuing deportation flights even when explicitly told to halt them by a district court judge. It was “an open secret”, one Doge adviser said, “that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin”.
Finding overlaps between Yarvin’s blogs and Trump administration policy has now become something of a cottage industry. In April 2024, for instance, he proposed that Gaza be turned into a luxury beachfront. “The new Gaza – developed, of course, by Jared Kushner – is the LA of the Mediterranean,” he wrote. “An entirely new charter city on humanity’s oldest ocean, sublime real estate with an absolutely perfect, Apple-quality government.” Months later, Trump unveiled his plan for “the Riviera of the Middle East”.
Who is this man? What does he believe in? And how will he influence the Trump administration in future?
Curtis Guy Yarvin was born in 1973 to a liberal, secular family in Maryland. He was occasionally homeschooled by his mother and ended up skipping three grades, leaving him looking out of place in class. “When you’re much younger than your classmates,” he said, “you’re either an adorable mascot or a weird, threatening, disturbing alien.”
He considered himself the latter. This sense of not being cool enough, or attractive enough, or fashionable enough, seems to permeate his output. A friend explained: “I think he has this sense of not being good enough, that he’s seen as ridiculous or small, and that the only way out is to perform.” Yarvin has been haunted since he was a child by the notion that there is a party he is not invited to. Eventually he would reinterpret this paranoia as an attack on the liberal in-group.
He dropped out of university to join a tech company in the 1990s, but his real career began when he started fiddling around on Usenet, a precursor to online forums. Here he developed his writing style – a bombardment of jokes, advice, poems and “flames” – vicious attacks on people or ideas. To a certain extent, Yarvin developed the modern edgelord style – abuse, combined with emotional detachment, combined with irony – the default language of all the worst people on the internet. As his girlfriend at the time, Meredith Tanner, said: “Don’t get involved with someone just because you’re impressed by how creatively they insult people. They will turn that skill on you.”
He became politically radicalised during the presidential election in 2004 over a conspiracy theory that Democratic candidate John Kerry had not fought in Vietnam. Kerry had, of course, but Yarvin had bought the idea hook, line and sinker. Instead of realising that he had been fooled, he started to question all the other things he had previously thought to be true: that Joseph McCarthy was wrong, that global warming was real, that democracy was benign.
In 2004, he started his own blog, Unqualified Reservations, under the pen name Mencius Moldbug. Within a couple of years, he had won the attention of Peter Theil, one of the richest men in the world, and amassed a serious following with libertarian tech bros, contrarians and self-styled extreme rationalists.
He created his new blog, Gray Mirror, just in time for the peak of the New Right social scene, in the years leading up to the 2024 election. Suddenly a baffling new reactionary culture had emerged, grounded in traditional values, conservative gender roles, Catholicism, a rejection of casual sex and an emphasis on practical skills. This is the broken and regressive social milieu JD Vance operated in, in which Yarvin was called – semi-ironically – Lord Yarvin or Our Prophet.
Yarvin took weight loss drugs and started dressing in leather jackets. Finally, he could aspire to the kind of image he had always lusted after in school. Finally, he was in the in-group.
Pieces about Yarvin tend to ground his philosophical views in a long tradition of right-wing thought – from the Jacobite supporters of James II to Thomas Carlyle’s great man theory of history, to the German academic Hans-Hermann Hoppe. But to present Yarvin in that way is to misrepresent him. He is far too stupid to be placed in any kind of meaningful intellectual heritage.
He uses historical allusions, but he does not understand what they mean. Napoleon, for instance, is defined as a “startup guy”. Shakespeare is downgraded so that his plays were really written by the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. You can fully capture Yarvin’s understanding of the historical method with one sentence: “The neat thing about primary sources is that often, it takes only one to prove your point.”
His philosophy can be disposed of very quickly. He believes in the existence of something called “the Cathedral”. This is the combined influence of the media and universities, forming a kind of institutionalised liberal groupthink. This image seems to be largely based on his lack of popularity as a child. “It’s not just that everyone – at least, everyone cool – is on the same page,” he wrote. “It’s more like: everyone is reading the same book at the same speed.”
The government and the civil service, on the other hand, are bureaucracies. “Bureaucracies leak power,” Yarvin wrote, and therefore start to outsource their functions to the Cathedral.
To prevent this, he proposes an alternate model: dictatorship. This is often described as monarchy or a corporate model. If he wants to look eccentric he calls it a monarchy. If he wants to look non-threatening he calls it a corporation. But what he is referring to is a system in which the leader makes a decision and it is implemented without question or scrutiny. It is a dictatorship.
He envisages that this new type of state, which is called a sovereign corporation, or SovCorp, will then ensure that “democracy is terminated, the Constitution is cancelled, and the government is handed over to an absolute dictator whose first act is to impose martial law”.
From there he veers off into ever more childlike flights of fancy. He imagines a group of trustees with the power to select and recall the chief executive, possibly composed of airline pilots. “A fraternity of intelligent, practical, and careful people who are already trusted on a regular basis with the lives of others,” he wrote. “What’s not to like?” To prevent a chief executive from staging a coup, the board members would have access to cryptographic keys that would allow them to disarm all government weapons, from nuclear missiles down to small arms.
We can safely stop there. His philosophy is a combination of semi-understood political terms, sci-fi novels, authoritarian tendencies, deep-seated personal insecurity and an over-excitable imagination.
Yarvin should be happy now that all his dreams are coming true, but of course he is not. Instead of revelling in the implementation of his ideas, he condemns the manner of delivery, criticising Elon Musk and Trump for attacking government experts rather than seeking their support.
This seems strange. The Washington Post compared it with Karl Marx living long enough “to troll the Bolsheviks for misreading Das Kapital“. But in fact it is perfectly normal behaviour for extremist utopians. They spend their lives insisting that their radical ideas will fix the world. Then, if they are unlucky to live long enough to see their ideas implemented, they must explain why they did not.
How influential is Yarvin really? It’s hard to say. No one really knows what goes on the broken machinery of Trump’s mind. Even senior administration figures who definitely do read Yarvin, like Vance, are probably using him more as an inspiration than as a policy machine. And anyway, his own contrarian disposition makes cooperation difficult.
Yarvin’s real contribution to the Maga movement is to offer it a sense of intellectual underpinning, to allow it to pretend that underneath all the fin-de-siècle gold ballrooms and the thuggish outbursts of cruelty, there is actually an underlying philosophy. And there is a philosophy there, of sorts – just an extremely infantile and poverty-stricken one. It is a yearning for dictatorship, combined with childlike emotional insecurities and semi-articulated sci-fi visions of an imaginary future.
Yarvin is indeed the most intellectual figure that Maga has produced. But he is also, by any normal measure, an idiot.
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