Part One: Curtis Yarvin: The Philosopher Behind J.D. Vance | BEHIND THE BASTARDS

Power corrupts; people who gain absolute power gradually become used to exercising it and increasingly willing to harm those who annoy them, which is a well-documented historical pattern that Yarvin does not adequately address in his monarchist theory.

“I think he doesn't believe something that you and I believe and that I think most rational people believe which is that like power corrupts so like even if you are not the kind of guy who would throw people in a dungeon when you become king just the fact that being a King is deranging right having that kind of power you will eventually get used to exercising it and doing things like punishing people who just annoy you and we know that this happens because we have a lot of examples of like when people are made dictators how folks who were at least more normal at one point become like more violent and dangerous to be around”

Yarvin launched his political blog 'Unqualified Reservations' under the pseudonym 'Mencius Moldbug' in 2007, where he developed a series of essays arguing for reorganizing society away from democracy and toward enlightened one-man rule, deliberately peppered with casual slurs and crude jokes.

“so in 2007 he breaks out of this kind of Chrysalis of reading that he's put himself in and he comes up with a Blog under a pin name minus mold bug and it's under this pin name that he's going to start writing a bunch of essays of political theory”

JD Vance's venture capital company was named after one of the Rings from Lord of the Rings, and Peter Thiel's surveillance company is named Palantír (another LOTR reference), demonstrating that these tech oligarchs self-consciously use Tolkien's language of aristocratic fantasy to frame their worldview.

“can I ask a question yeah so like if you're an absolute monarch are you delegating anything and then who are you delegating to like what are the struct what is the is is is the like do you have to be just like an insane micromanager to be I I think because you have to have a bureaucratic structure under you yeah but but I I think the key is the key is to him the difference would be like a bureaucratic structure wherein there are other centers of power right”

Eternal September—when USENET opened to anyone with an internet connection in late 1993—was catastrophic to Yarvin's worldview because it destroyed the natural aristocracy of early internet users, replacing an elite meritocratic system with democratic access, which directly motivated his later anti-democratic ideology.

“in one interview with tablet magazine he complained you had this sort of deao aristocracy that didn't know it was an aristocracy and then it fell apart he these are all big Lord of the Rings guys so I'll use the Lord of the Rings analogy they talk about this like the like the the the the the period of time when the elves ruled everything before Sauron had his big war right like before the breaking of the world that's that's Eternal September that ruins this kind of like more noble golden age and brings about this dirty grubby age of men”

In his Moldbug essays, Yarvin deliberately includes slurs and satirical statements about killing poor people (like turning them into biodiesel fuel), which while technically jokes, serve as gatekeeping that attracts young men interested in 'forbidden knowledge' and creates an in-group language similar to 4chan culture.

“unlike most philosophers yarvin Peppers his essays with casual slurs in Reading one where he talks about World War II he refers to the Japanese repeatedly by a common slur at the time and in another he makes a satiric statement about how the Indigent poor should be destroyed and turned into biodiesel fuel”

Yarvin introduced the term 'the Cathedral' to refer to an interconnected conspiracy of liberal media, academia, and career government employees—the enemies his idealized monarch would destroy—and this term became a key rhetorical tool for dismissing any institutional opposition to authoritarian ideology.

“the term Cathedral is going to be really influ important for yaran he's going to come to use it as a term to refer to the news media the political establishment uh and Academia right everyone who annoys him right is the cathedral and this is sort of like the evil uh regime that he's going to set himself to the task of destroying”

Yarvin's father was the son of Jewish American Communists who had to work to achieve his position in the US foreign service and higher government ranks, making his family a clear example of social mobility that contradicts Yarvin's belief in fixed hierarchies—yet Yarvin advocates for closing the very doors that allowed his family's ascent.

“his dad wasn't born in into that role he was the son of Jewish American Communists who like came to this country and he had to like fight to make a place for himself in the higher rungs of society which is an a very clear example of like mobility and the fact that we have a reasonably open society that allows for some Mobility which he doesn't want to exist”

Unions represent a natural and powerful expression of free speech because collective bargaining is workers using speech and assembly to oppose concentrated corporate power, yet libertarians who claim to defend free speech often oppose unions—a contradiction in their own ideology.

“I I find the anti-union rhetoric so it's so hilarious to me because the formation of a union to collectively bargain with a CEO is the most like the the most natural expression of of free free speech it is it is such a natural and and so to be like you know Free Speech I'm a I'm a constitutional you know libertarian or whatever and then also in the same breath be like unions are should be illegal it's the math doesn't add up”

Curtis Yarvin advocates for changing America into an effective dictatorship with a single ruler who would govern like a CEO, based on his belief that monarchy—defined as privately owned government—is superior to democracy, which he calls publicly owned government.

“Curtis yarvin is sort of the profet of taking America down a completely authoritarian path he is an advocate uh for changing this country into what is effectively a dictatorship”

Yarvin describes his family's social class using the Hindu caste metaphor of 'Brahmin,' arguing that inequality is fundamental and immutable—people are genetically unequal in intelligence and ability, and therefore social stratification justified by inevitable difference is morally justified.

“yarvin today describes the social social class of his birth as rahen referring to the highest cast in Hindu society and he does this because he thinks that inequality is a fundamental and immutable thing right people are unequal fundamentally and so any sort of social stratification in society is justified by that”

The Swift Boat Veterans scandal of 2004, where critics of John Kerry's Vietnam service (who later became an anti-war activist) successfully attacked his military record despite journalists confirming his valor, convinced Yarvin that the entire American media complex was corrupt and fundamentally evil, and therefore the 'Cathedral' (media, academia, career bureaucrats) needed to be destroyed.

“the final straw for jarvan's tolerance of democracy came in 2004 as a result of the Swift boats veteran for Swift boat Veterans for truth Scandal uh you remember this I'm sure right oh yeah of course yeah yeah this is back in the 2004 election John krey with the Democratic nominee”

The alt-right's fantasy of Trump as a 'god-king' is not original thinking but rather a direct application of concepts that originated with Curtis Yarvin, showing how his intellectual work has shaped contemporary authoritarian fantasy.

“and that's kind of the thinking that is going to lead directly into the alt-right and its Embrace of Donald Trump yarvin is one of the key ideological pieces there he is he is building a bridge that is eventually going to lead to how a lot of these people think about what Trump should be right it's it's part of why there's a lot of this joking not joking talk about wanting Trump to be like a god king right is it's a lot of these guys who are knowingly or unknowingly parodying or paring uh thoughts that kind of came initially into the right from yarvin”

Yarvin has given speeches at conservative clubs and educational institutions where he explicitly advocated that 'Americans need to get over their dictator phobia' and that authoritarian rule is 'the only solution,' directly promoting the overthrow of democratic governance to young, ideologically-forming audiences.

“and yarvin kind of as a result he starts getting shared almost like people are like handing out drugs to each other like like we want to keep this on the down low you don't want like people too many people to know publicly that you're reading mold bug but like have you read this latest article if you checked out this blog right um and he starts getting invited to give talks uh and he starts saying things in these talks like speeches at these schools to these conservative clubs and the like like if Americans want to change their government they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia there's really no other solution”

Libertarian thought appeals to technologically-skilled men because it uses engineering and computer systems as metaphors for society, suggesting that government could be 'fixed' through rational design the way software can be optimized, but this approach fails to account for human irrationality and complexity that cannot be engineered away.

“Engineers like yarvin are typically sorted through competitive academic programs which they consider analogous to the competition imagined in a libertarian societ Society their world is rational rule-bound and solvable within the subculture computer software and Hardware are the dominant metaphors for society such thinking dovet tales with the Ironclad assumptions about human and Market behavior of the a of the Austrian School of Economics led by Ludwig von me Tech culture systems Focus also Accords with libertarianism concentration on efficiency and solving government”

Yarvin's ideal system of government is modeled on how Facebook is run, where there is technically a board of directors but Zuckerberg owns enough stock to prevent anyone from forcing him out, giving him absolute power while maintaining a veneer of corporate governance.

“his ideal system of government that he kind of comes around to is like the way Facebook is run right where you do have like a board of directors technically but Zuckerberg has enough control of stock that like no one can force him out the buck stops with him like he ultimately has all of the power in that organization that's how yarvin thinks country should be run right”

Yarvin fails to study history in any rigorous academic fashion and relies on a simplified historical understanding that ignores how actual authoritarian regimes function, which undermines the credibility of his political prescriptions.

“it's also like a failure these guys all consider themselves historians but they don't study history in any kind of like rigorous academic fashion and like every time I hear this argument about well people would just leave I think about like what happened to Jewish people in Nazi Germany”

Tech industry culture and the worldview of engineers (systems-focused, efficiency-obsessed, rule-bound, with computer systems as the dominant metaphor for organization) naturally aligns with libertarian and later authoritarianmonarchist thinking because both see complex human societies as solvable engineering problems.

“Engineers like yarvin are typically sorted through competitive academic programs which they consider analogous to the competition imagined in a libertarian societ Society their world is rational rule-bound and solvable within the subculture computer software and Hardware are the dominant metaphors for society such thinking dovet tales with the Ironclad assumptions about human and Market behavior of the a of the Austrian School of Economics”

Peter Thiel has been Yarvin's primary financial backer and early promoter, investing in tech ventures started by Yarvin and helping spread his ideas among venture capitalists and young tech men, establishing Yarvin as the intellectual godfather of techno-authoritarianism.

“it's just 2 years after moldbug starts his blog that Peter teal gives a speech about democracy being incompatible with liberty and teal starts putting money yarvan's way right he's he's probably the number one guy sending money towards yarvin backing he backs a tech company uh that yarvin starts and he's he's just generally sort of like like his early sort of moneyed backer right”

Yarvin either deliberately understands that his proposed system would inevitably involve killing or imprisoning people who try to leave with their assets but doesn't care, or he is genuinely dishonest about the obvious implications of his ideology while maintaining it anyway.

“I think it's it's also like a failure of these guys all consider themselves historians but they don't study history in any kind of like rigorous academic fashion I think it's also kind of it's one of those there's no point in paying lip service to it which is at least more honest than a lot of these guys um now the major pivot point which leads to him dropping his libertarian trappings and embracing this more authoritarian belief system hinges on the place that he was and kind of remains his mental home which is the early internet the old days of uset were a a simul laum of what is today yin's ideal society”

Yarvin showed minimal interest in the humanities as an undergraduate at Brown University, taking only five undergraduate courses in history and related subjects, while focusing on mathematics and engineering, establishing a pattern of narrow technical thinking applied to political philosophy.

“while he is at College yarvin shows minimal interest in the humanities he only takes five undergraduate courses in these subjects focused on history”

The Christchurch shooter's manifesto employed Yarvin-derived tactics: wrapping serious white supremacist ideology in forum troll language, in-group jokes, and transgressive humor to make extremism legible and attractive to online communities while maintaining plausible deniability about seriousness.

“if you want to look at kind of the ultimate uh uh like evolution of this these sort of tactics I think a great touch point would be the Christ Church Church Shooters Manifesto which included a lot of these like inside jokes a lot of like Forum troll language um wrapped around serious Arguments for like why people should carry out white supremacist attacks and it's it's a kind of tactic that is really what gave us the alt-right as a political force and it's still very much how these people communicate now”

Murray Rothbard, the anarcho-capitalist theorist, argued that anyone advocating for civil rights is secretly trying to place themselves at the top of a new hierarchy of power, framing civil rights advocacy as a disguised power grab rather than a response to oppression—an argument that became foundational to modern conservative thinking about the left.

“rothbart is one who who feels like basically that the state the primary reason the state is unethical is that it stops people from doing what they want to do with their money right whereas an anarchist would be like well the reason that the state isn't ethical is that states can do a lot of harm to people at scale right um anyway none of that really matters to the point which is that he gets really interested in this guy rothbard um and rothbard one of the things he writes uh about is this kind of anger at the concept of people advocating for civil rights right”

Yarvin has never killed anyone (in any legally actionable sense) or broken the law, but he advocates for the overthrow of democracy and installation of a dictatorship that would by necessity imprison and kill large numbers of people.

“Curtis has never killed anybody uh in any legally actionable sense or advocated for murder and as far as I'm aware he has never broken a law but he advocates for the overthrow of democracy and the installation of a dictatorial regime that would by necessity kill and imprison large numbers of people”

People who spend time theorizing about how the world should be without dealing with how people actually are inevitably end up with nonsense, and when people actually implement these theories, the nonsense becomes catastrophic—as demonstrated by absolute monarchies collapsing into World War I and authoritarian communism producing Stalin.

“anytime you've got people who spend all of their time like theorizing about the way things ought to be as opposed to like dealing with the way people are yeah you're going to wind up with with nonsense right and like that's that unfortunately every now and then we get to see like what that non sense looks like you know when when people actually put it in place you know in the case of like absolute monarchies like this we got the trenches in World War One in the case of like a very authoritarian communism you know we got Stalin”

Exposing the crude language and transgressive humor that Yarvin's followers use among themselves (as the Tim Walz campaign attempted) is effective at shifting mainstream perception of these ideologues, showing how truly alienating their in-group communication styles are to normal people, though it also validates their sense of being persecuted for 'forbidden knowledge.'

“I think it started to hurt them recently the whole the the weird stuff that Tim Walls began pulling out has actually been a really effective thing because when you actually like take the way these people Talk Amongst each other and put it up in front of an audience it's deeply off-putting to most people um but it it also kind of led to this establishment of like an internal language for these folks that that kind of led to a uh an acific of their ideolog ideological Tendencies right we're all using the same kind of terms and words that we've come to recognize as like dog whistles for different things right”

JD Vance holds extreme authoritarian views beyond Trump's stated positions, believing that democracy is a mistake and that social progress including women's suffrage and the Civil Rights Movement were fundamentally misguided because they gave 'too many regular people' say in how they are governed.

“he's a guy whose entire career has been bankrolled by Peter teal who's the Facebook billion he made a lot of money on Facebook made a lot a lot of money on PayPal and he sunk about 15 million in Vance's Congressional Campaign”

During the early 2000s, Yarvin became deeply interested in Austrian School economists, particularly Ludwig von Mises and later Murray Rothbard (an anarcho-capitalist), whose thinking about the state as inherently unethical and antagonistic to individual liberty deeply influenced his later monarchist philosophy.

“now yarvin had made some friends during his Tech years and he'd gotten interested in Austrian School economists mostly because of this University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds who was like an early blogger who had gotten yarvin interested on a guy named Ludwig von me uh and eventually through this yarvin gets interested in a a fan of me another theoretician named Marie rothbard”

Moldbug's ideas took off primarily among Silicon Valley tech workers and young men online in the mid-2000s who shared his work like 'passing drugs'—keeping it on the down-low as forbidden knowledge while gradually spreading it through tech and conservative circles.

“it's just 2 years after moldbug starts his blog that Peter teal gives a speech about democracy being incompatible with liberty and teal starts putting money jarvan's way right he's he's probably the number one guy sending money towards yarvin”

The Boomer generation's radical utopian idealism, combined with the tech industry's rise in Silicon Valley, created conditions for young men in that industry to be receptive to Yarvin's blend of libertarianism, Austrian economics, and monarchism as a supposed solution to cultural chaos.

“it's probably not surprising mold bug's theories take off among specifically a lot of Silicon Valley young men right um who are excessively online”

Curtis Yarvin and JD Vance are connected through Yarvin's intellectual work and writings; Thiel and Vance both explicitly quote Yarvin's philosophies and refer to his concepts, making Yarvin probably the most influential theoretician of the radical right in the US today.

“teal and Vance they're not just kind of reactionaries when they express those things they are quoting a guy they are referring to the work of a political philosopher named Curtis yarvin uh who they first encountered when he blogged under a uh a pseudonym minus mold bug”

Yarvin never achieved full logical consistency between different parts of his ideology, and he addressed the historical failure of absolute monarchies by arguing they failed because they made too many democratic compromises (gave too much freedom to non-monarchs), rather than admitting that absolute monarchy is inherently unstable.

“we could talk about like the Saudi royal family too right entirely propped up by oil Roman Emperor like literally most of the monarchies that have ever been have like collapsed as a result of the fact that that's also an inherently destructive thing you know some of that just comes down to human nature but um yeah so he is you know and he's not he he winds up kind of he does he does try to deal with this the fact that monarchies clearly don't work the way that he thinks that they should um and he thinks that a big part of the issue is that you've you they all make too many compromises right all of these monarchies that collapsed around the turn of the century had allowed some democratic elements into society”

Technology company founders and venture capitalists like Yarvin, Thiel, and Vance generally attribute their success to inherent superiority and genetic factors rather than to the structural advantages provided by publicly-funded education, infrastructure, government contracts, and open markets that enabled their rise.

“I think it's because they do believe that like there's a that their success was not purely based on the fact that they came up in a system where they gained certain benefits that were the result of like public spending right like all of these guys who made money in the tech industry went to schools that were generally publicly funded at least at some point you know their parents drove on roads that were public they benefited from like the security infrastructure that exists in this country in a lot of different ways and they their companies all benefited to some extent from government spending and incentives but they see that their success was like the result of something inherently Superior within themselves and often in like a genetic level in some ways”

Elon Musk recently shared a post suggesting that only high-testosterone 'alpha males' and neurotypical people should be allowed to vote, which reflects Yarvin-influenced thinking about genetic determinism and aristocratic rule.

“Elon Musk who several days ago shared a post where a reader suggested only high testosterone alpha males and a neurotypical people should be allowed to vote this is also a thought with some yarin DNA behind it”

In recent political moments like the Tim Walz opposition research effort, taking the way right-wing extremists communicate amongst each other and putting it in front of mainstream audiences has proven effective at alienating those figures from broader support.

“I think it started to hurt them recently the whole the the weird stuff that Tim Walls began pulling out has actually been a really effective thing because when you actually like take the way these people Talk Amongst each other and put it up in front of an audience it's deeply off-putting to most people”

Yarvin's ideal monarchist system argues that monarchs will govern more efficiently and think long-term because they cannot be destructive in the short term (since they own their property, the state) the way democratic leaders can be, who only care about their limited terms—but this ignores historical evidence that monarchies collapse through mismanagement, as exemplified by World War I and the Saudi royal family.

“so the kind of the the system that he pulls out of this period where he's just like get reading everything he can get his hands on is that monarchs are the a monarchy is the ideal kind of system of government because it's the best at maximizing long-term profits within a society because monarchs have to think long-term right they can't be destructive in the short term like you know leaders in a democracy are because they have a limited term limit”

Yarvin's ideal system proposes small city-states, each ruled by a single monarch, where citizens have the freedom to emigrate to other monarchies they prefer—attempting to solve the historical problem of absolute monarchies' tendency to collapse by introducing exit options similar to how employees can leave companies.

“the last piece of this ideology he's putting together is he has to explain why a lot of these real World feudalist governments that fell apart all fell apart and part of it is obviously they gave too much freedom to people who weren't the Monarch but the other thing he comes up with is that old monarchies denied citizens the freedom to exit and so in this Ideal World he supposes countries will be small like the size of a city in most cases and they'll compete with citizens who would have the freedom to leave right”