Part Two: Curtis Yarvin: The Philosopher Behind J.D. Vance

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
about the worst people in all of history and with
us today, someone who, as far as I am aware,
is not one of the worst people in all of history.
Ed Helm's, Ed, have you ever committed a crime?

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Lots?

Speaker 1 (00:23):
Okay? Well, okay, well I expected the opposite answer.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
I've only murdered jerks. Yeah, you know, you're fine.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
I'm on the right side of I still have like
if you're just killing bad people, like, who's got a
problem with that? Right? Yeah? Just jerks. It's like we
were It's like we were talking about early. You can't
have a black and white like murders always bad because
like what if somebody's a jerk? Just wondering? Can I

(00:58):
send you a list of names for note no apparent
reason they're jerks? Yeah? Okay, okay, this is great info
to have it. Welcome back to the show, Ed Helms.
I mean again, I don't feel like you necessarily need introduction,
but I will remind everyone about your excellent podcast SNAFU

(01:19):
and you just had season two drop talking about the
wonderful activist burglary of an FBI building in nineteen seventy
one that led to some of the most important revelations
of the burgeoning security state in history. So yeah, great show.
People should check it out. Ed, are you ready?

Speaker 2 (01:39):
I'm ready here more. As you described season two of SNAFU,
I couldn't help thinking about how how well it connects
to our subject matter.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
Yep, untrammeled authority.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Yeah, because Jagar Hoover basically had some degree of unchecked
authority within Yeah. Oh yeah, and he was doing really
awful stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
Well, he's a great example because he was this kind
of ceo god king of the security state for decades
and it didn't end well or middle well or start
well come back.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Comes back to that. I think at the beginning of
the last episode, I was like, how do you pick
the guy right? Right? The guy? How can you be
sure you got the right guy.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
It's also this thing of like I think with Hoover,
you really did see a man who he wasn't the
same guy at the start of his time running the
FBI as he was at the end, you know, because
number when he aged, our brains change as we age,
we in many cases get worse at some things, right,
And like he also the period of time that he

(02:50):
had with power, he got used to doing increasingly extreme
things with it, you know, like there was this constant
escalation of his authoritary impulses, like the job was bad
for him, like it was bad for j Edgar Hoover,
and it was it made him a worse person. And
I think that kind of fundamentally, guys who advocate for

(03:12):
these systems never take that into account, in part because
I just don't think they believe it the way that
I think most normal people do. Like we you don't.
You don't have to be like on the left or
a libertarian or an anarchist to be like, well, yeah,
if you give people access to all of the power
in the world, they generally do horrible things with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(03:34):
yeah I would anyway, huh. I would. Yeah. I would
do awful, nightmarish things. I do really fun things, but
people might get hurt. I would have a good time,
but not everyone would have a good time. I think
maybe that's just how these guys think about it, right,
I'm going to be the one having a good time.

(03:55):
So and again, that's part of why we're doing these episodes,
because Curtis Yarvin could potently be on the brink of
having a very good time, and I really want to
emphasize what a bad idea that would be. So I
have referred to Yarvin as a monarchist a few times
in these episodes, and I will again. I do think

(04:16):
it's important to note he would disagree with me using
that title because he thinks that calling someone a monarchist
brings to mind the constitutional monarchies that largely failed in
the early twentieth century, and he blames that failure on
compromises in absolute power. Now, we talked last episode about
Yarvin's core beliefs democracy isn't really real, and if it

(04:37):
was real, it wouldn't be a good idea. The cathedral
who really runs things are the enemy, and some sort
of aristocracy in an absolute CEO monarch paired with the
freedom to exit if you don't like the particular flavor
of oppression in your home is the ideal state of governance.
As a tech guy, though Yarvin doesn't like to couch
his yearning for a king, which is what this is, right,

(04:58):
he's a monarchist. He's not this the same kind of
monarchists that, for example, like guys like JR. R. Tolkien were,
But he's very much a monarchist, and he doesn't like
to he doesn't like to seem like the regular people
who long for the days of having a king. Right,
He's got to be like a little bit smarter about it, right,
And this is where kind of the big tech line
of things comes in and his argument. He starts making this,

(05:22):
you know, in the early period of like the web
two point zero tech boom, you get smartphones, you get
like apps like Twitter and YouTube and Facebook, and there's
this period of time, I know it feels very distant
to us, but where people thought this was going to
enhance democracy around the globe, right, that all of these
connecting technologies were going to be a massive boon for

(05:43):
like liberatory movements across the planet. That's not what happened.
And Jarvin very early on isn't just saying that's not
what's going to happen. He's saying that's not what should happen. Right,
Big tech shouldn't enable democracy around the world. It should
take control in a very literal sense. And he becomes
an advocate of a kind of political philosophy he called

(06:06):
neo cameralism, which Francis Sang described in an excellent essay
as quote, arguing that the state should be run like
a business ie with a CEO at its head and
no democratic mechanisms. Jarvin has always taken pains to express
in public his belief that this change can be done peacefully,
and you know, we're not. He thinks we're not already living,

(06:26):
We're already not living in a democracy, so there's no
reason this has to be painful. But a study of
his writing over the years makes it clear that not
only is he open to violence, but an enthusiastic about it.
And this brings me to one of the uglier parts
of our story. In twenty eleven, a Nazi named Anders
Brevik shot up a summer camp hosted by the Workers
Youth League, a left wing political organization in Norway. Brewick,

(06:49):
who considers himself a member of the Knights Templar, acting
to defend his faith and race from evil communists, shot
and killed or bombed seventy seven people. Jarvin wrote about
this as well, arguing that terrorism was a legitimate tactic
and that Nazi terror had been legitimate because it worked
for the baffler. Corey Payne summarizes quote Breviks killing spree,

(07:11):
which targeted young Norwegian leftists was illegitimate because it was
insufficient to free Norway from euro Communism. After all, he
only killed seventy seven people. We can note the only
thing he didn't screw up. At least he shot Communists,
not Muslims. He gored the Matador and not the cape.
Jarvin wrote on July twenty third, twenty eleven, one day

(07:32):
after the terror in Oslo. So that is I mean,
we've gotten now from a guy who is just sort
of like preaching his idiosyncratic political system to a guy
who was being like he didn't kill enough kids for
it to matter, right, Like this is you know, it's
important not to lean into the fact that like this
is not just a guy whose politics would lead to

(07:53):
bad directions. This is a pretty vile person. Where is
he writing this on his blog Unqualified Reservus, which is
just publicly available blog.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
Yeah, yeah, not, He's not like in the dark recesses
of four chan.

Speaker 1 (08:08):
No no, no, no. This is a publicly available blog.
Now it's not. It's not. It's very popular with a
certain subset of the world, and he's writing under a pseudonym,
so people don't know his real name. In twenty eleven.

Speaker 2 (08:20):
Right now, the pseudonym could mean that there's some measure
of trolling going on, but not. But but this is
there's no, there's no, there's no kind of like winky irony.
I mean, this is some of the most if it's
remotely humorous at an attempt, it is some of the
most like wretched, awful and heart wrenching. It failed at humor.

(08:44):
But but if again, like there's no version in which
as it's using a pseudonym, he's being like, I can't even.

Speaker 1 (08:54):
Think of no, no, this is this is very much
not him fucking around like this is because I mean
you can tell for a degree, like the like talking
about grinding up people for biodiesel. I've seen some articles
where people mistake that for a serious position if you
read it in context, he's clearly like joking, right, Like
it's thrown out as a joke. This essay is him
talking about like why the Brevic attack was bad, and

(09:18):
it's bad not because he killed all those people, but
because it's not big enough to destroy the left, right, Like,
that's that's very much the take that he has on this,
which is not really he's not being satirical, he's not
not that you know, it would be good to be
satirical about this, but that's not really what he's doing.
And this is this kind of stuff. Like part of

(09:38):
why people don't catch on to this more often about
Jarvin when they write about him, for like mainstream news sources,
is that he writes so much like to catch this stuff,
like I wouldn't have caught all of this stuff if
I had just been I wouldn't have had time to
read all of his archive. Thankfully, guys like Corey Pine
did a lot of that work, and so people have
been collecting kind of like the worst hits of Curtis

(09:59):
Yarfin for a while now, but it's not immediately easy
for people to do, and it gets missed by the
people who aren't really like big fans of his a
lot of the time, right, because there's just so much there.
And he writes he's got kind of log area, right,
diarrhea of the mouth a bit, he's very worthy. So
around the same time as he's writing his articles about

(10:20):
the Yetoya shooting, Jarvin is also pushing an acronym out
in his writing to the people who are like built
this kind of like political circle around him, which is
kind of liberally sprinkled with Peter Thiel dollars. And the
acronym that he starts pushing is rage, which means retire
all government employees. And this is a term that he's

(10:42):
come to for this policy plan that he starts pushing
among the young conservatives following him, that we need to
get a president who is our kind of guy in
office and have him forcibly retire the entire professional cast
of the government and replace them with are people with
people who think, and that's how we.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
Shift twenty five.

Speaker 1 (11:04):
Yes, yes, yes, exactly, that is and this is something
he is pushing in the early aughts, right, like yes,
And to be honest, a lot of Project twenty twenty
five is people cribbing from Yarvin, and it's because it's
people who were influenced by him or influenced by people
who are influenced by him, right. But a lot of
this intellectually starts with him. You know, obviously he's not

(11:26):
the only guy thinking about stuff like this, but he's
putting it out in a form that is like a
cohesive ideology. So in the early years, and we're talking
kind of the mid aughts around like twenty eleven up
through twenty fourteen. His adherents are mostly other tech industry creatures,
and one of these people is someone named Justine Tunney.

(11:47):
Justine started out as someone who was like more progressive.
She was an occupy activist back during you know occupy,
and she gets hired as a Google engineer. In March
of twenty fourteen, Esteem published a petition on the White
House website demanding a national referendum on three points. Number one,
retire all government employees, number two, transfer administrative authority to

(12:11):
the tech industry, and number three appoint Google CEO Eric
Schmidt's CEO of America. Now, this is a very silly
idea for one thing who's looking at Google today thinks
Eric Schmidt should run the country like But in defense
of this, Tunney wrote, It's time for the US regime
to politely take its exit from history and do what's

(12:33):
best for America. The tech industry can offer us good governance,
prison and prevent further American decline. Now part of why
I think Tunny is an interesting case study and like
followers of Moldbug, because she tells people on Twitter who
are questioning her about this petition she's put up that
they need to read mensious. Moldbug Tunny is interesting because

(12:53):
she doesn't come out of the traditional right. She's a
transgender woman who had built herself as an anarchist earlier
in her ideological life, prior to finding Mouldbugs writing, and
so this arc she takes from an economic justice advocate
to tech industry monarchist shows how seductive a lot of
intelligent people found Yarvin. And the fact that people like Tounny,

(13:15):
who don't come out of where you would expect someone
to wind up believing these far right ideas get enraptured
by Jarvin's writing is part of why he starts to
get this reputation for almost being this kind of like
mental sorcerer, someone whose work has this almost like lovecrafty
and pull in twisting people's beliefs and ideals. And that's

(13:37):
very much the reputation that he starts to pick up
in like the aughts. There's a philosopher, kind of a
reactionary philosopher named Nick Land who's a fan of Jarvin's writing,
who gives it the nickname the Dark Enlightenment, right, that's
the term that he comes up with to refer to
these kind of neo reactionary, anti democratic, monarchist policies. And

(13:59):
it's written that way because supposedly, once you read Jarvin's
arguments for why democracy can't work and like this sort
of authoritarian system is better, it's like this through the
looking glass breaking moment. I've taken the red pill, and
I can never go back right.

Speaker 2 (14:16):
Emally endowing this sky and these writings with a lot
of oh yes, like magical power in a very absurd
way it is, and it takes them out of the
realm of like intellectual exploration and dialogue and idea sharing
it into this like truly like conspiratorial, like come into

(14:40):
the fold, put on your dark cloak and join the
dark enlightenment.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
And that's what Moldbug wants. Right. That's good branding for
you if you're this guy, that's certainly how you want
to be seen. Okay, I think that's not really accurate
to what's happening to Tony or to what's happening to
most of the people following them, in part because I
have a degree of, like a professional understanding from my
former career writing and analyzing terrorist groups of how people

(15:08):
get radicalized, right, and a thing that gets missed a lot,
and scholar Scott Atron was kind of the guy who
I started reading who wrote about this a lot. But
about how people get radicalized, it always happens nearly always
in communities, right, even if it's not a physical community,
if it's online. People don't generally get brought into radical

(15:30):
belief systems or extremist politics on their own. They get
brought in in part because there's circle of friends that
people they respect and think are cool get drawn into it, right.
And I think that's what's happening to Tunny, And I
think that's a lot of the power that Mouldbugs writing
has is that he is telling the Silicon Valley set

(15:52):
of people who got a lot of money very quickly
when they were young and got kind of lost their
minds and their belief about their own genius. He's telling
them what they want to hear, that they should run things.
They start sharing his stuff with each other, they start
talking like him because of the way he writes, and
it becomes like the cool thing within a certain set

(16:14):
in Silicon Valley to be into Moldbug, right, And that's
a lot of the appeal, right. It's not that his
writing has some sort of like magical mindwarping effect. It's
that this community of people that a lot of folks,
especially like newer folks coming into the tech who want
to be you know, get founder money, who want to

(16:34):
be part of this like in crowd, they all like
it's the cool thing to be talking about to believe in. Right,
Like that's I think where a lot of the power
that he initially has comes from. And I think that's
always the case. If you want to look at like
why a lot of people joined ISIS a lot of
these young communities, it's because Isis was cool, right to
a lot of these young people, the way that they talk,

(16:56):
the slang they use, the media they put out. Communities
of people got radicalized in part because it was attractive
in that way to them. Right, It's not like a
mind virus. It's kind of the same way fads and
trends always work. Right, This is the way that like
any fad takes hold. You know, it's just a much
darker example of that. But that is how radicalization tends

(17:19):
to occur. And I think that's what's happening with moldbugs writing.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
Yeah, it's interesting that the you're saying Tonny Tunny is
her name, right, Yes, Justine Tunny in Tunny was sort
of brought in even just talking sort of more generally
about radicalization that it's often the product of a community.
What about the what about the Jarvins, Like do you

(17:46):
think that that was Are they the outlier the kind
of like the well no special beacons of or or
did he come from that youth community that you know,
from his youth.

Speaker 1 (17:59):
I think that's a great question. But I do think
if you look at kind of his background, you see
the community he was radicalized in. Right when he starts
working for the tech industry, When when he's you know,
in the internet in the mid nineties, he starts talking
to these guys who are these big Austrian school advocates,
who are you know he admires. These are generally men
who are a bit older than him, who are more

(18:21):
accomplished in their careers, and they're telling him, Oh, you
should read you know, hansrmon Hop, you should read Ludwig
von mess you should read Thomas Carlyle, you should read
Murray Rothbard, right, And he reads these guys and he
takes their thinking seriously, in part because people he respects
and thinks are cool are telling him to write. So
I do think it's a version of the same process, right,

(18:43):
in part, because that's just how human beings adopt ideas, right,
Like it's the if you're you know, I know people
who are like evangelical Christians, right, And there's a couple
of different attitudes towards how you should evangelize, But the
one that people I think are generally of good will
have is that like, well, if you're a really good

(19:05):
and admirable person, people will will find will be interested
in like what you believe. And that's the best way
to prostlytize, right by just actually like being kind of
rad And that's how I've found, Like, when I got
into radical politics, it was because I ran into a
bunch of like anarchists who were on a regular basis
going out and feeding homeless people, and I thought that
was dope, and that got me interested in what other

(19:27):
things do these people believe because I thought they were cool? Right, Like,
that is how I think it's just like mostly how
people work. Right. But it's in the interest of a
guy like Jarvin to make it feel like his writing
has this like love crafty and power to enrapture and
warp minds anyway, cool people and all the world's all

(19:49):
just high school right, Like, oh so tunny is you
know a good example of these kind of early adherents
to Moldbug, who are mostly young, disaffected engineers, software engineers,
tech industry people. And when Yarvin kind of part of
where this sort of dark Enlightenment turn takes off is
that in around twenty thirteen twenty fourteen, when mainstream news

(20:13):
starts writing about him, the most attractive angle to take
with this guy is not, here is a trend in
a certain subset of like Silicon Valley tech people. Let's
look at the reasons why this trend might be popular.
It's this dark enlightenment guy whose work has this like
dangerous rapture. Like the media helps create the myth of Yarvin,

(20:35):
and he manipulates it effectively, And I think this is
part of why you know, this reinforces his beliefs to
an extent about like how bad the cathedral is these
like media organizations that like, wow, it's so easy for
me to manipulate them. Right, So yeah, anyway, that's kind
of what's happening in the late aughts with this guy.

(20:57):
So one of the people who is going to come
to be sort of a follower of him in this
kind of later period after he starts to achieve more
prominence is JD. Vance. And it's because moldbugs writing is
really appealing to these people who got a lot of
money and power very quickly, often because they were either

(21:20):
in like venture capital, because they were in you know,
the tech industry or something, and so they have all
this wealth, but they don't come out of like they
don't come out of academia. They don't have any sort
of like place in the traditional like media hierarchy that
demands respect. Right, you may have a lot of money,
but like, why should I care what some software engineer

(21:41):
about Google says about politics or whatever? Right, why should
I care about what some like finance dude who was
really good at like gambling on the housing market has
to say about politics just because you have a bunch
of money. And that's where Vance comes out of. You know,
he's one of these guys who's got like a background
in private equity, and he's one of these guys who
is kind of like angry that that doesn't automatically afford

(22:03):
him the respect of like what he considers to be
an elite in society. Another one of the proponents of
Jarvin's thinking about particularly this retire all government employees thing,
is Blake Masters, who's a twice failed Arizona congressional candidate
and another Peter Teel protege right. In an interview with
Vanity Fair before the first of his failed campaigns, Masters

(22:25):
was act asked how he would drain the swamp in
practice if he was like brought into Congress, and he responded,
one of my friends has this acronym he calls rage
retire all government employees. And he was referring to Yarvin.
He and Yarvin are friends, just like Vance and Yarvin,
you know, go to a lot of the same parties
and whatnot. Like these are all guys who are not

(22:47):
just close ideologically, but like are in the same physical
spaces a lot of the time talking with each other.

Speaker 2 (22:54):
That's an important, yeah, aspect to this. That's that's new.
So that this just a a kind of like, Hey,
I read your stuff and or I read this guy's stuff,
and I think it's compelling and I'd like to crib
some ideas from this. It's more it's also that they're

(23:15):
hanging out. Yes, it's moving, and that really starts. We'll
talk about this in a little bit, But once Jarvin
gets kind of docked, right, so people in twenty fourteen,
I think it is tech Crunch publishes what his actual
name is and instead of like there's this period of
time where there's some backlash against him, but mostly what

(23:36):
it does is kind of elevate him.

Speaker 1 (23:37):
Like he does it. He's not hiding behind a pseudonym anymore,
but now he's free to be a public figure in
more of a way. And so he starts publicly showing
up at these parties and events where guys like jd
Vance and Blake Masters are in attendance, where like people
who are making inroads into the actual like political strata
of the right are in attendance. And that's a thing

(23:59):
that's increasing happening, like once we kind of hit the
Trump era, and yeah, it's it's kind of important. The
best example of the degree to which Jarvin's thoughts and
policies have entered mainstream politics is rage. Is this idea
that we need to bring in a guy who's going
to fire everyone in the government and replace it with

(24:20):
our people. This is the kind of thing that, like,
not only is this something that guys like Masters and
Dvans are talking about. Trump tried to do this already
in twenty twenty at the end of his term. He
sought to reclassify thousands and thousands of federal employees in
order to strip them of job protections and make them
at well employees that he could fire. This was reversed

(24:43):
under Biden, but it is the kind of thing that
Trump could bring back and plans to bring back if
he wins again, because he has promised that if he
takes office again in twenty twenty five, one of the
first things he's going to do is fire thousands of
quote unquote crooked government employees. Trump has repeated disavowed Project
twenty twenty five because it's become kind of a toxic

(25:03):
thing politically for him, But he has promised that when
he takes off as he's going to like, you know,
clean house within the federal government and put his own
people in there. And this is very in line with
what Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts told The New York
Times he hoped a second Trump term would bring quote
people will lose their jobs, hopefully their lives are able

(25:24):
to flourish. In spite of that, buildings will be shut down.
Hopefully they can be repurposed for private industry. And that's
Kevin Roberts is not a guy who's ever said Curtis
Yarvin's name that I can find. But that's Menschus moldbug, right, Like,
that's exactly what he has been talking about for years.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
Would you draw a direct line from Minshus to these positions?
I mean, and I know absolutely aim, But are you
do you feel very very confident that moldbug is the
source of these ideas or was this sort of a
general sentiment that Minsches was reflecting among like a certain set.

Speaker 1 (26:00):
I think it's best to think about it like a garden, right,
And what Minschus did was kind of spread fertilizer over
that garden. That made a climate where a lot of
these ideas, many of which do come kind of directly
from his writing, but he also helped kind of set
the ideological climate on the far right. And as the

(26:23):
far right took over kind of the center right Republican Party,
it brought a lot of these mold buggy and ideas
with it, which is part of why guys like Peter
Teel are anti democratic activists and use a lot of
their money to that end, have funded yarbin Is. They
see him as useful for that sort of thing, right,

(26:43):
And a lot of these guys who have gone on
to work at the Heritage Foundation, you know, in the
early two thousands, in two thousand and eight, nine, ten eleven,
where like kids in high school and college passing around
minshus Moldbug tracts, right, Like, that's kind of how this
has worked. So I would see him as he really
he prepared an environment for these kind of politics to grow.

(27:07):
And I think there is a very direct line between
him and a lot of what you see with Project
twenty twenty five, a lot of the stuff. Even though
Trump certainly has never read one of these guys articles,
he's surrounded by people who are telling him and who
have ideas about how absolute power can be attained that
are based on things Moldbug is written. You know, I
think that that's absolutely something I'm confident arguing and confident

(27:32):
part because there's so many financial ties and direct personal
ties between him and people around Trump, you know, So
I know that's dark. So let's just go to ads
and try not to think about it for a second,
think about these products for a minute, and we're back.

(27:54):
So one of the things I find interesting about Jarvin
is there's this degree of insecurity to some of his
writing where he definitely is a monarchist, and he's definitely
someone who feels a sense of nostalgia to some of
these old absolute monarchies. But he doesn't want to get
lumped in with the guys who are like unronically stands

(28:16):
of the czar or whatever and think that, like, oh,
if only we could bring the Romanovs back to power
in Russia, everything would be better. Jarvin doesn't isn't a
monarchist for shallow reasons, right. He doesn't want to be
seen as someone who advocates this because he's nostalgic. He
wants to be seen as someone who has run the
numbers and concluded that there's no alternative to this system.

(28:37):
And so whenever he makes his arguments for why things
should be this way, he liberally sprinkles them with citations. Now,
his citations are a bunch of old reactionaries who had
like argued against kings and emperors giving up any power
back in like the eighteen fifties and the like. But
he has this kind of belief that any sort of

(28:58):
quote from an old, dead guy is a primary source.
That is something like people should take more seriously when
they're like trying to make their minds up about how
the world works. He has this kind of he's an
autodide act and that he's someone who is self taught
through reading a bunch of books about the things he likes.
And he's convinced that this is sort of like a

(29:20):
more ideologically rigorous thing than what people do in academia, right,
and kind of the key thing in academia is that
if you have ideas or theories, or if you're making arguments,
you have to expose them to other people and debate
and have them like torn down. And you know, that's
like a key part of the way the academic process works.
He's only ever existed inside his own head, and so

(29:43):
you get stuff like this two thousand and eight blog
post titled an open Letter to open Minded Progressives, where
he writes this about primary sources. The neat thing about
primary source is is that often it only takes one
to prove your point. If you find the theory of
relativity ancient Greek documents, and you know the documents are authentic.

(30:03):
You know that the ancient Greeks discovered relativity. How why
it doesn't matter your understanding of ancient Greeks needs to
include Greek relativity. Now that's a non sequitur, because, like,
if you were to find an ancient Greek wrote write
about the theory of relativity, that alone wouldn't necessarily alter
your understanding of ancient Greece, because there's a lot of

(30:25):
other questions, like did anyone else come across this writing
at the time, was this idea disseminated, was it adopted
on any kind of scale into the dominant theoretical models
of the time, or was it one cranks weird belief
that he laid out in an old letter to a friend. Right,
the fact that you might find something that sounds like
an argument for about relativity in an ancient Greek document

(30:45):
doesn't necessarily change your understanding of ancient Greece in a
meaningful way. Right. The fact that you could cite that
primary source wouldn't be enough to say the ancient Greeks
had an understanding of relativity, because you don't know that
it wasn't just one guy who was viewed widely as
a crank, right, and a good example of this kind
of thing from real world history, because he's just making

(31:06):
up fake history there. Because again there's not really a
good argument.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
To be made.

Speaker 1 (31:11):
But I will make an interesting argument, and it's about
something called the Alio file, which was an ancient steam
engine that was first described by Hero of Alexandria in
the first century AD. It was actually technically a steam turbine,
but it was a precursor to a steam engine that
existed in ancient Rome. Right Now, that's a cool bit

(31:32):
of history. But does that mean that the Romans had
steam engines and the ability to make trains? No, because
this was only ever used as like a party trick,
Like a couple of prototypes were made and they were
like made to impress people at like gatherings for rich people.
No one ever did anything with it. So the fact
that technically there was the knowledge to make a steam
engine in ancient Rome doesn't change your understanding of ancient

(31:56):
Rome because they still didn't have steam power.

Speaker 2 (31:58):
Right. Yeah, it's like somebody's showing off their Aston Martin like, right,
not everybody had Aston Martin's or has asked, Yeah, some
rich guy is like check it out.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
Yeah, And then you were to say that, like, well,
that this meant that the Aston Martin was the car
of the twenty first century. Like no, like like like
a couple hundred people had them or whatever, you.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
Know, I would say, I mean, I would say that
he has a point that depending on the assertion by
a primary source, sure it can have like pretty powerful
value in an historical context.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
Oh absolutely, But you also you have to take into account.
I think part of it is that he's he's talking
about this in like internet debate terms, where like someone
makes an argument and you throw in a quote from
a source and like it's probably done because most people
don't have the time or the breadth of knowledge to
really argue these things in detail, as opposed to like
in academia. Part of what you would be trying to

(32:56):
do is like not just here's what one source said
about this.

Speaker 2 (32:59):
But wanted to be irrefutable.

Speaker 1 (33:02):
Yeah, here's the balance of sources. Like we can do
a survey of all of these different people from the
time writing about this moment, and we found you're gonna
find conflict, right, because you know, if you have like
ten people who are all present at the same shooting
or car crash or whatever. You're gonna get ten slightly
different accounts, right, those are all primary sources. A primary

(33:23):
source does not mean something is right. It just means
it's from someone who was there, you know. But that's
not how Mouldbug thinks about it, because he very much
has this. He thinks about these these old dead reactionary
writers the way he wants to be thought about, right,
which is as someone who is like more or less
ideologically unimpeachable, right, because they're his favorite writers. And so

(33:47):
I think it behooves us to talk about probably his
favorite of these old dead reactionaries, because it tells us
a lot about some of the things that Yarvin believes.
And this is who we've talked. We talked about this
guy in part one, Thomas Carlyle. Now Carlyle is writing
in the mid eighteen hundreds. He's a Scottish writer who

(34:09):
you know. One of the things he wrote about, he
was an early writer, kind of talking about the plight
of the working class under industrialization. So there's a degree
of what he was writing about that I think was
fairly valid. But he was also a massive bigot and
for kind of an overview of that, I found a
write up by the Glasgow Museum of Slavery aptly titled
Thomas Carlyle Historian Writer Racist, that describes an essay Carlyle wrote. Quote.

(34:35):
Carlyle complained that emancipated black people in the West Indies
were lazy, working little bit, eating well, benefiting from the
favorable climate and abundance of tropical fruit, while sugarcane on
British plantations rotted due to lack of labor. In the
context of recession and unemployment back in Britain and the
potato famines in Ireland, this was an emode of accusation.
It was also blatantly untrue, according to figures produced by

(34:57):
the Anti Slavery Society in eighteen forty seven to forty
t nine, which showed that sugar production had in fact
gone up. However, the emancipation of slaves in the British
Empire in eighteen thirty three had created a labor problem
that had cut into profit margins, exacerbated in eighteen forty
six when the Sugar Duties to Act ended subsidies for
British plantation owners. And this is the kind of thing.

(35:18):
Because the Glasgow Museum of Slavery is trying to view
things from an academic and an accurate standpoint, they're able
to look at what Carlyle said, and what he said
that was like demonstrably not just racists, but like we
can argue completely factually wrong about like the economics of
the system that he was arguing in favor of. Moldbug

(35:40):
can't really engage in a lot of these criticisms of
Carlyle because the whole reason Carlyle was wrong was that
plantation owners, this natural aristocracy, were lazy, corrupt and incompetent,
and that flies in the face of Jarvin's belief system.
So instead, when Curtis Jarvin writes an essay on Thomas Carlyle,
he writes that is quote a natural human relationship like

(36:03):
that of patron and client and enthusias. That Carlyle is
the one writer in English whose name can be uttered
with Shakespeare's. Like this guy who's big claim to fame
is his essay on why slavery is good and natural,
is just as as brilliant a thinker as William Shakespeare.
Like again, one an idea of kind of how vile.

Speaker 2 (36:24):
This guy is how well was it written?

Speaker 1 (36:27):
I mean it's okay, yeah, it's it's it's not it's no, no,
it's it's definitely non Niamic pentemy. It's not even in
dactyla texameter. You know, Like, come on, can we back
up for one second? Was there anything yeah said in
this open letter to open minded progressives that was that

(36:49):
would change a progressive's mind?

Speaker 2 (36:51):
Or like what was the gist? What was the logline
of that? Because you got into a quote, but I
I was just fascinated by this open letter.

Speaker 1 (37:00):
Yeah, it's largely a series of art. It's really largely
trying to convince people that these sort of ideas of
democracy in human progress that are kind of inherent to
the progressive tradition. Right of this like gradual march of
progress in terms of like pushing for for more rights
and more justice in society is kind of fundamentally fallacious

(37:21):
and flawed, Right that, like none of this actually works, right,
that it only it only creates new tyrannies. That's his argument.
It's this whole you advocating for your own rights is
really you restricting my rights? You know, Like that's that's
kind of the gist. Of the argument that he's making there. Wow,
that's in fourteen chapters. Everything he says takes too long.

Speaker 2 (37:44):
Also, slavery is cool, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:47):
Yeah, slave, I mean, slavery is a natural relationship, right
based because again he believes that, like, it can't just
be that one group of people were at one time
able to exert more of violence than another group of
people and so they took them into their possession, right,
because that makes it sound awful. It's got to be that, like, no,

(38:07):
this group of people are naturally inclined to rule in
this other group are naturally inclined.

Speaker 2 (38:12):
To be ruled, you serve.

Speaker 1 (38:14):
Yeah, So, when it comes to talking about Jarvin as
this sort of dark Enlightenment figure, this guy who's able
to enrapture people's minds with this almost magic quality of
his pros, I want to kind of I think we've
talked a little bit about why I don't think that's
accurate to how his work was appealing to people. But

(38:35):
I want to really puncture that myth by pointing out
one of the examples where he was very much in
line with kind of like the gutter of the right
wing and not at all like this sort of more
intellectual side that he tries to present himself as, sometimes
in articles like that open letter to Progressives. In two
thousand and eight, he published a blog post titled did

(38:55):
Barack Obama go to Colombia? And this is written by
Jarvin as a serious and investigation into whether or not
Barack Obama had faked his attendance at Columbia College. And
the evidence Yarvin had that Obama had faked his attendants
was that several other Columbia grads from the same year
said they didn't know him. Right, this was a huge
thing on like the right at this time. You would

(39:18):
get like Trump and stuff, you know, retweeting this way
back in the day that like, well, a bunch of
guys who went to Colombia didn't know Barack Obama. Like
this man came out of nowhere. He must have faked
his attendance at this college. And here's what Jarvin writes
about it, so you can get a hint at his
like sparkling prose. So let me ask anyone who cares

(39:38):
to comment below, how exactly do we the American people,
lord help us know that Barack Obama attended Columbia, or
more precisely, why should we assume, on the basis of
the evidence we have that he did, do we serious belief,
seriously believe it is possible for a future president to
be unremembered at his alma mater. Now, the very next

(39:58):
paragraph in that article is what we know is that
a Columbia spokesman has confirmed that Obama attended Columbia. And like,
I would say, well, that's part of how you find out, right,
as you asked the school did this guy attend, as
opposed to ask random people who happened to go to
a school with thousands of folks did you know this guy? Like,

(40:20):
it's just such like the logical line there is. So
it's very much a guy picking the reality he wants
to have, right, which is that Barack Obama is a fraud. Right,
He's a fraud and he faked his attendants at Columbia.
He wants to believe that he finds a couple of
other Columbia grads who don't like Obama and say, well,
I never knew him, and that's the only facts that
Jarvin needs here, as opposed to like, well, is there

(40:43):
any actual evidence that he attended? And it turns out
that is, and like thirty seconds of googling, I found
an article by a writer in the Jewish Journal who
attended Columbia at the same time as Obama. And also,
like all of these guys who were giving interviews to
writing papers in two thousand and eight didn't remember Barack
Obama because it's a big school. But this guy dug

(41:04):
through a bunch of his old graduation papers and found
a graduation program that lists Barack Obama by name because
he went to Columbia University. This was where were people
pointed this out at the time. There's pictures of him there,
He's on all sorts of documents. He did know people.
It was just this like fever dream that spread through

(41:24):
the right and the same way this myth about Haitians
eating people's pets in Springfield, Ohio is spreading right now.
It's deliberate disinformation, and it's it's disinformation that is believed
by people who need an explanation for like how a
guy like Obama, who they don't think should be able
to do the things that Obama did, was able to

(41:44):
do it right. These are racists right who need a
reason why, how how Barack Obama became the president that isn't. Well,
he's the most charismatic man in American politics, right, he
was really good at elections, he was really good at
running at campaign. That's not a thing that works with
their belief systems. So Jarvin has to buy into these

(42:06):
fantasies in order to accept this reality because it just
doesn't correlate with his racism. And in this he's just like,
I mean, he's Donald Trump was doing all this shit
back at the same time, he was like a birther right, Like,
this is not any intellectually higher up than Bertherism. But
you know, I think it's kind of important to look

(42:28):
at this ugly stuff because it contrasts to this dark
Enlightenment puppet master view of Yarvin and paints a picture
as a guy who is not just writing stuff that
is influential, but is also going along with the flow
and getting caught up in conspiracy theories and bullshit the
same way anyone else in that space is right, he's
not special and he's not a hyper genius. Yeah anyway, yeah, yeah, yeah,

(42:56):
that's dumb. I mean, yeah, I think it's dumb. Yeah.
I think people don't catch it because his articles are
always he like throws in Latin quotes and like references
and quotes from like these old You know, he's got
a great backlog of like witticisms by different historical thinkers.
I would describe his writing style as like if Fraser

(43:17):
were written by a fascist, right, Like that's how Curtis
Jarfin writes. But it very much is kind of just
to paper over the fact that he's the same kind
of blowhard as like rush Limbaugh.

Speaker 2 (43:29):
Right, how does this comport with the right sort of
fetishization of the Constitution.

Speaker 1 (43:36):
Well, I'll be clear, Jarvin does not fetishize the Constitution.
I think he views it I think is pretty clearly
a misstep, right, because it hands all of this power
over to groups that should not like or at least
he believes. I think if you were to go back,
he would argue that, like the basic ideas behind a
lot of the founders, which is that we should have

(43:57):
this republic that is governed by elites, this like natural
elite aristocracy, like Jefferson believed in this kind of natural
aristocracy of intelligent white men. Right, that is pretty close
to what Moldbug believes about the world. But obviously, as
the franchise was extended to larger and larger chunks of people,

(44:18):
as slavery was ended, as we've repeatedly had these movements
towards social justice and towards bringing more people into being
able to have a voice in the system like that.
The fact that that was allowable at all was a
terrible flaw in the Constitution as written right, The fact
that it included the potential for democratic change was kind

(44:39):
of its its fundamental fatal failure.

Speaker 2 (44:43):
Yeah, I mean, I don't know the nature of this,
of Jarvin's relationship or friendship or whatever you want to
call it with JD. Van's, but it's saved to say.
I think a lot of people on the right would
would agree that that Yarvin is is taking some seriously

(45:07):
on American views here, espousing some very un American views,
un American just meeting like oh yeah and so, and
yet we have a vice presidential candidate was presumably at
least hobnobbing. I don't know if they're friends. I don't
know if if I don't know if Jady Vance would
say Jarvin.

Speaker 1 (45:28):
Associates, Yeah, yeah, I don't know, associates.

Speaker 2 (45:31):
Has Jadie Vance been asked about Jarvin? Has he has
he take. Has he had had any sort of public
expression of.

Speaker 1 (45:42):
Yeah, I mean he's been there was actually really good.
I think it was a New Yorker article from about
two years ago, right before his Senate run, where he
was like at a conference with Yarvin and like at
a party with him and talking like you know, was questioned,
you know, or the writer of that article talked with
him in part about like some of Jarvin's ideas, like

(46:02):
this retire all government employees thing like he's he's he
has been like publicly associated with him. I think the
kind of the one of the more interesting points is
that like Jarvin spent the twenty sixteen election at Peter
Teel's house like watching the returns, like he's he's gotten
increasingly sort of like publicly plugged into this set of

(46:23):
people who have direct connections with power brokers on the right.
And you're right, one of the interesting things about him
is that he's not really directly He's never become famous
in the same way that like a guy like JD.
Vance has right because he is too toxic to like
bring out and and kind of publicly embroder his ideas. Yes, yes,

(46:47):
but you will get people who will talk about stuff
like you know, Blake Masters and Jdvanser are comfortable talking
about rage, right, this idea that really comes out of
mouldbugs writing. And so it's it's he remains kind of
toxic enough that you don't want to bring him out
too publicly, but he's also popular enough that part of

(47:08):
like how you signal to other people who are on
this chunk of the right that like you're one of them,
is you kind of signpost that you believe a lot
of the same things that he believes, right, and you
like you show up at the same events at the
same kind of like you know, like conferences and whatnot
where he gives speeches. These are kind of like you

(47:31):
can see the it's not very hard to draw the
connections between these people. But Jarvin's not a face man, right,
He's never going to run for office, and you certainly
don't want him like arguing about like his neo monarchist
views on Fox News, Right, that's still a little bit
too extreme. But if you say, we need a strong
executive leader who's going to run the country like a

(47:52):
CEO and fire all of these unelected bureaucrats and replace
them with like people who are going to fight for
quote unquote liber right, and we need to punish all
of our political opponents. We need to like lock up
members of the lying news media. Now, all of these
are things that you will get a lot of buy
in on on the trump Ist right. Right. This is
all stuff that Trump himself talks about a lot, And

(48:15):
it's the kind of thing people wonder, how did how
have we gone so far down this road seemingly so quickly,
And it's because it didn't all start with Donald Trump, right.
People were kind of tilling the ideological soil for years
before that point. And like one of those guys is
Curtis Yarvin, and he's one of the most influential ones

(48:35):
of those guys.

Speaker 2 (48:36):
As the Jarvin taken a position on Trump publicly.

Speaker 1 (48:42):
I mean, yeah, he again he understands like there's a
degree of like toxicity to his endorsement, but he watched
the election at Peter Teal's house and was like very
excited that Trump had won, so like he is essentially
he has come out being like this is I think
as close to the kind of guy we're going to

(49:03):
get to start the process of turning the country in
the direction that I want right now, He's not a
guy who wants the entirety of the United States run
by one dude. He seeks this kind of political devolution
into these competing corporate city states. But he sees Trump
as like a step on that road. This is a
guy who will centralize power, who will get these bureaucrats out,

(49:26):
who will destroy you know, the left as an organized
political force, and that will allow these other kind of interests,
these corporate interests, to kind of take and centralize more
power themselves as kind of the state gets whittled down
and we can devolve power to what are effectively like
corporate warlords.

Speaker 2 (49:46):
Right.

Speaker 1 (49:46):
That's kind of the end result of his system. You
can see it in there's this group of guys on
Silicon Valley, in Silicon Valley right now who are start
trying to start their own city backed by like Silicon
Valley VC money. Yeah. Yeah, And they've talked a lot about.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
They they've given up on that, right.

Speaker 1 (50:06):
No, no, no, no, that is still very much an
effort being made. It's and there's there's been like efforts
to kind of take over local San Francisco politics, and
there's a lot of Moldebug associated guys in that as well,
Like one of the lead figures there is a big
fan of his writing who has been kind of pushing

(50:27):
this idea as again a step on the road to
these corporate controlled city states. Right, this is obviously like
part of the process of devolving any kind of accountable
state power into the control of what are effectively like
ceo kings, Right, and yeah, that's that's that's uh, that's

(50:48):
kind of where we're going here.

Speaker 2 (50:50):
But we all get to be Twitter's.

Speaker 1 (50:52):
Yeah, everything gets to be run like Twitter. Isn't that exciting?

Speaker 2 (50:55):
We get to live in a Twitter?

Speaker 1 (50:58):
Yeah? Don't you want to live in Twitter?

Speaker 2 (51:00):
No? I wish I could just be a tweet that
lived in Yeah exclusively.

Speaker 1 (51:08):
Yeah, it seems like such a nice place. Speaking of
nice places, our sponsors all, they'll create a nice little
place for your ears to live for like three minutes,
however long an ad break is. We're back. So I

(51:31):
kind I really debated with myself, like how much do
we get into of like all of the different terrible
things he said, like all of each of the different
like beliefs. Yarvin has a spouse and this is a
guy who's been writing thousands of words a week on
the internet for years, So there's like there's too much
there for us to give a comprehensive look into the man.

Speaker 2 (51:52):
He just completely summarize all of his writing, right, I.

Speaker 1 (51:56):
Mean, there's enough of it out there that it can do,
Like it can give you a decent amount on mold bug,
although you're going to miss stuff, like you know some
of this you have to know a little bit more
about the far right in order to catch references he makes.
Like I was reading one essay of his where he
talks about Rhodesia. Do you know what? Rhodesia was.

Speaker 2 (52:15):
The source of the of those unusual ridge backed dogs.

Speaker 1 (52:21):
It is the source of those dogs. It was also
a white ethno state in Africa that was like initially
started out as a colony of the UK. They refused
to give up like the power of the white minority,
which is like three percent of the country and had
essentially total electoral power. They became like a pariah. This

(52:42):
is like during like the nineteen seventies, a lot of
this is happening, and wound up fighting a very long
war with like the vast majority of the country in
order to try and maintain this state of white minority rule.
It was a very brutal period of time. This bush
War they x acuted was where a lot of early
insurgent tactics were carried on, and it was carried out

(53:03):
in the name of keeping white people in charge of
this massive population of black people who had effectively no power.
And Rhodesia was close to the ideal state for Moldbook.
I found an article of his where he writes about
Ian Smith, who was like the guy who was leading
Rhodesia during its like quote unquote war for liberation. And

(53:24):
he writes because because Smith died a few years back,
and Moldbook like wrote this elegy to him that opened
with the words the last great Englishman is dead and
fuck who disagrees, And it's basically this piece about how
like Smith was the last man who was brave enough
to fight for what we all know is the only

(53:44):
kind of state that can work, which is one in
which a natural biological elite rules over the masses who
are unfit to have any sort of power. It ends
on these lines, which I think are kind of telling
to his ideology, and one we will either be hacked
to death in our own Beds or some similar or
nasty thing, or Ian Smith or Enoch Powell, and even

(54:06):
our own tailgunner Joe will have another life in bronze.
But do you know us, I'm not sure we have
been introduced. We are the neo mccarthyists. Our motto this
time will finish the job. And so what he's saying
there is that like Smith is like Joe McCarthy. He's
one of these guys who embodies the violence of the
politics that we're advocates of. Right and again, he's never

(54:30):
going to come out and say I think we should
kill all the people who disagree with me. But he
will harken back to these figures and say, these are
my kind of ideological heroes. And the movement that I
am seeking to incite is going to finish the job.
It's going to kill all the communists, it's going to
win where Rhodesia lost. Right, Like, it's not as direct

(54:52):
as saying, you know, I'm a white nationalist, and in fact,
he will never admit to being a white nationalist. But
what is the conclusion when you're t talking about the
failure of Rhodesia as being a tragedy other than well,
just someone who supports white nationalists. Right, you can see
kind of like the violent, inherent violence inherent in what
he's pushing for.

Speaker 2 (55:13):
There.

Speaker 1 (55:14):
In that same essay, he praises the novel The Camp
of the Saints, which is a racist book about migrants
from India flooding Europe and destroying civilization, which is Steve
Bannon's favorite book. And Steve Bannon is another influent Yeah, yeah,
it's great replacement stuff, right. Bannon is a big fan
of Curtis Jarvin. Again, all of these people are connected

(55:36):
and they're all fans of each other. Like the kind
of like ideological simpatico here is a crucial part of
the story. Now, in the last few years, as he's
gained more of an influence online, Jarvin has grown a
bigger head. He started referring to himself as the sith
Lord of the modern anti democratic right because he is

(55:57):
a big nerd. He's also he's the guy who brought
the red pill into right wing politics, like taking it
from The Matrix. Yeah that's cool, huh that yeah, yeah,
And he's you know, it's interesting because like obviously The
Matrix was a movie written by two trans women in

(56:22):
not at all about right wing politics.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
Right, the matrix is sort of a great allegory for
his beliefs.

Speaker 1 (56:29):
I do think it is an allegory for his beliefs,
and like the violence and depression that they necessitate. I
think like he tends to take it as like realizing
that democracy is fake and that like all of these
social justice movements are inherently like evil, flawed attempts to
like destroy the natural aristocracy. Like that's the matrix, right

(56:51):
is you know, people who don't look like him being
able to vote, which is much shallower.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
Yeah, the violent its inherent in these systems that that
you're referring to. It does it does seem to And
I hate to armchair psychoanalyze anybody, and I'm not equipped
to do that. So this is more of a just sort.

Speaker 1 (57:15):
Of we always say we hate it, but we always
do a little bit.

Speaker 2 (57:19):
Oh we can't help it, right, Yeah, but no, this
is just sort of a pontification. But does it feel
to you because it does to me a little bit,
like like to really take these these positions seriously and
advocate for these things is is, in its own way
a kind of enjoyment of violence or a an and

(57:42):
in that way, almost like a psychopathy, like a like
violence is wonderful? Yeah, yeah, Is there is there anything
to be found in Arvin's writings that is that that
laments the that violences or subjugation or the suffering of
any humans, is a is an unfortunate side effect of

(58:07):
these systems but necessary? Or is it just sort of
like no, that's just an awesome part of it.

Speaker 1 (58:15):
It's more like number one. I think a big thing
that he tries to do is minimize the degree to
which that's necessary. But when it does come up, it
is this very full throated embrace of like, well they're communists,
you know, like this is what we have to do.
Like the terrorism of the Nazis was great because it worked, right, Like,
I don't think he's a guy who feels bad at

(58:36):
all about the inevitable consequences of his beliefs. And I
certainly don't get that hint from his writing that there's
any sort of like real regret. There maybe some like
sign postings to regret about the unfortunate you know, necessities
that will come about, But this is I think you're
right on the money. There's a lot of like violent
fantasizing here. Against this is a guy who spends a

(58:57):
lot of time obsessed with the things that annoy him
in the world world and convinced that like the right
solution to those things is a sort of terminal force.
And you get this all over with people who get
kind of too wrapped up in like the specifics of
their ideology and their anger at its discontents. You can
find like you know, maoists and whatnot online who will

(59:19):
fantasize about like when our revolution takes over, you know,
we're going to put people in re education camps or whatever.
It's a it's a necessary byproduct of not having enough
empathy and spending too much time alone in a room
obsessing over how right you are? Right is anything that
kind of inherently conflicts with that as the world, in
all of its complexity, will always do should be solved

(59:43):
by the most violence I can bring to bear right.
And that's why we need to capture the presidens.

Speaker 2 (59:47):
So certain solution which is.

Speaker 1 (59:49):
Yeah, And that's why these guys, that's why their big
goal is the presidency right, because the way they see it,
and certainly the way the Supreme Court is set it up,
getting the presidency gives you access to the greatest store
of violence that has ever existed in human history. Right, Like,
that is what the president has access to. Right. People

(01:00:09):
don't like to talk about it that way, but there's
no other real way to view it, potentially, And if
you see the president as someone who should have no
guard rails, and this is very much what we're going
to advocate for, as a president that has no restrictions
on his power, then what you're looking at is a
guy who has the ability to use the most violence
ever concentrated in cleansing the world of the people who

(01:00:31):
make it not fit this schema that I've cooked up
in my head that I find very attractive. Yeah, it's
good stuff. So if you're looking for a writing on
you know, Jarvin to this day, if you're looking at
like what people have come to call the strain of
thought that he helped ignite, the term you'll come across

(01:00:53):
the most is neo reactionary or NRX. Right, this is
kind of the how you'll see it written about a
lot in like blogs by Bay Area techies. And this
term started to be used more in like twenty thirteen,
twenty fourteen. I think it is when it really took off.
You had some sort of writing by people like Clint
Finley at tech Crunch in twenty thirteen that noted that

(01:01:16):
you were seeing a lot of these this thought take
off among influential people in big tech. Finley wrote PayPal
founder Peter Teal his most voice similar ideas, and Pat Dickinson,
the former CTO of Business Insider, say he's been influenced
by neo reactionary thought. It may be a small minority worldview,
but it's one that I think shines some light on
the psyche of contemporary tech culture now. It was through

(01:01:40):
tech Crunch in twenty fourteen that Minsius Moldbug was first
revealed to be computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, and it was
revealed that Yarvin was working at a startup funded by
Peter Teal's money called Tlawn. Now Tlawn was the name
comes from a short story like a sci fi short
story written by a fella named Borges in nineteen forty

(01:02:04):
and one summary of the story I found from Francis
Saying writes that it quote describes a secret society Orbis
Tertius that architects an entirely new world Plawn by establishing
an encyclopedia describing it. Over time, bits of this fictional
world begin to emerge in the real world, consuming it.
And this is kind of how Muldbug thinks of his writing. Right,

(01:02:25):
I am writing the future into being by theorizing it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:29):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
That's why this company is named after it. That's why
he finds that story so influential. The kind of process
of this is called hyperstition. It's this process of like
taking ideas that exist only in people's heads in fiction
and like forcing them into the real world. It's one
of those premises that seems silly until suddenly a guy

(01:02:51):
who might be the vice president starts ranting about how
childless women are psychopaths and we need to fire the
government so Donald Trump can remake it in his own image.
This is all very like silly seeming until it isn't.
And kind of the scariest thing about Jarvin is that
he has to an extent been successful in like writing
a different world into being like he has. He has

(01:03:13):
had more influence in this than you want to believe.
Kind of the tipping point for Jarvin's influence and culture
and for that kind of politics starting to take over
the right was twenty fourteen, and it happened appropriately enough
on the Internet with something called gamer Gate.

Speaker 2 (01:03:29):
H and there we are.

Speaker 1 (01:03:30):
I was wondering how long it would Takejanopolis to show
up gamer Gate. A lot of the people who are
thought leaders in Gamergate, who are like, like, who are
some of the early uh like voices behind that and
behind that kind of neo reactionary swell as it enters
public consciousness are fans of Yarvins. One of them is

(01:03:52):
Steve Bannon. Bannon is a big behind the scenes player,
and what happens there as is Milo Yanopolis, and Yanopolis
is kind of a guy who comes to fame through Gamergate,
as like making himself into kind of a voice of
the movement, and Yanopolis is an adherent of Yarvin's philosophy.
The next year, after Gamergate twenty fifteen, Trump descends his

(01:04:14):
Escalator to launch his campaign, and in short order, the
alright is eternal. Yeah, and the alright becomes kind of
undeniable to anyone. Right, It's not something you can ignore anymore,
And figures like Janopolis and Bannon are major like faces
of the movement, while Jarvin remains kind of obscure still,

(01:04:35):
you know, people who are in the know, who understand
where a lot of the ideas guys like Eanopolis are
spouting in public come from, know that he's a player
in the field, but he's kind of obscured and shadowed
by the cloaking factor of his very dense, clumsy prose.
Corey Pine at The Baffler is probably the first guy
to cohesively suggests that Jarvin's relationship to Peter Teel and

(01:04:57):
to the folks around him were part of a whider
movement towards anti democratic change. His work was influential enough
to get The New York Times to ask Peter Teal
if he was working to fund a monarchist coup, and
Teal replied in a cryptic fashion, it was a full
on conspiracy theory. In truth, there's nobody sitting around plotting
the future, though I sometimes think it would be better

(01:05:19):
if people were, which is like the most sinister way
to reply to that. Right, So twenty sixteen comes along.
Next Trump wins the election, and suddenly even normal people
who don't spend their free time online looking at fascists
on the internet become aware that something is very wrong.
In twenty seventeen, BuzzFeed News publishes an expose based on

(01:05:40):
leaked emails between a bunch of members of the alt right,
including Bannon and Yanopolis, and I'm going to quote Corey
Pine describing these leaks and from some of the most
revealing reveals. In that piece, BuzzFeed reported that Teal and
Eanopolis had made plans to meet during the July Republican
National Convention, but much of Eanopolis's knowledge of seems to

(01:06:00):
come secondhand from other right wing activists, as well as
Curtis Jarvin, the blogger who advocates the return of feudalism.
The story then quotes this exchange. Jarvin told Yanopolis that
he had been coaching Teal. Peter needs guidance on politics,
for sure. Yanopolis responded, less than you might think, Jarvin
wrote back, I watched the election at his house. I
think my hangover lasted in this Tuesday, He's fully enlightened.

(01:06:23):
He just plays it very carefully. And you know, if
you're looking for direct connections, it's something that we only
really have because of you know, leaks like that. But
these are not like conspiracy theory connections that we have
to draw between people, like we have texts between these
guys talking about how they're trying to convince moneyed interests

(01:06:46):
of their plans to like end democracy in the United States,
and they've been doing it for a while. And that's
that's most of what I've got to say about Curtis Yarvin. Now,
I would be doing you at a service if I
didn't end this by talking at least for a little
bit about the other side of his professional life, because
while he's been writing all of this fascist theorizing and whatnot,

(01:07:08):
he has a career as a software developer and a
project that represents he and he will state represents like
his political dreams.

Speaker 2 (01:07:15):
RBIT.

Speaker 1 (01:07:16):
Now, RBIT is like a period on paper. It's supposed
to be basically a period of peer social networking tool
like masted on that allows individual users more control over
their information in digital life. And when he talks about ERBIT,
Jarvin talks about it as like this is me building
in software a representation of my ideal form of government, right,

(01:07:39):
And he frames it as like something that gives you
control over your own life and data, not some central
company like Twitter that like can be corrupt and used
to bad ends. And that's complete bullshit, right. The reality
is that Rbit is backed by Peter Thiel money, and
it is an attempt to effectively like build a different

(01:08:02):
kind of social networking infrastructure for the Internet that Curtis
Yarvin has complete control over. Right now, the good news
is it hasn't actually taken off. This company is largely
a failure. It's generally agreed to be pretty badly coded.
I found a pretty good analysis of it by Francis Saying,
who runs a website called Distributed Web of Care, who

(01:08:23):
points out that, like, while Jarvin tries to frame this
as like Mastodon, is like, well, you keep control of
your data. You're in charge of your digital life, not
some company. The way everything is set up is you
have these like different nodes, and there's a limited number
of nodes, and most of them are controlled by Jarvin
and the Herbit company. So what he's like really trying

(01:08:45):
to do here is set up like a landlord scam,
like on the Internet, right where he's the big landlord.
And I think this is kind of revealing, not because
herb it's important, but because it shows we've kind of
been talking this whole time. How much of this does
he really believe? How much of this is like him
kind of dressing it up, and I think you get
the real Curtis Jarvin here, which is not a guy

(01:09:08):
with any real high minded intellectual desires beyond I want
to be the one in power, right, Like I want
to be the one with the money. I want to
be the big landlord. Right. He doesn't hate Twitter and
Facebook because they ruined his old Internet. He hates it because,
like he's just another guy in all of those systems
and he wants to be the king or at least

(01:09:29):
a night right. I think that's kind of like the
note to end on is pointing out, like, underneath it
all and underneath all of the like dressing up in
intellectualism that he puts on, this is just a guy
who's angry that he's not currently the one with all
the power, right, And that's that's really what it's all about.

Speaker 2 (01:09:49):
Whoah, sorry, because that I've learned. Yeah, I'm not a fan.

Speaker 1 (01:10:00):
Yeah that's good to hear. That's good to hear.

Speaker 2 (01:10:04):
But I do I do want to read up more
and get a sense of his tone and and and
maybe well I'd love to hear him speak and get
a more better sense of his persona and kind of
what that.

Speaker 1 (01:10:17):
Oh, yes, he's on many podcasts.

Speaker 2 (01:10:21):
How does that Bannon reconcile someone openly advocating for the
the basically just the burning of the Constitution with also
being a leader for for just like Republican ascendancy, Like,

(01:10:41):
how does how do you reconcile those things? I'm so
confused with that unless there's unless it's is it a
you know, do you think it's a like if we
were to say JD. Vance gets to be president one day,
do you think it's a bait and switch? Are they like,

(01:11:03):
is it really a you know, is that Peter Thiel's
game to sort of bait and switch the Americans into
like just get him into office and then we're going
to make him a dictator? Or is it?

Speaker 1 (01:11:16):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (01:11:17):
Is it a thing where someone like a JD. Vance
who's participating in American democracy as a candidate, is really
sort of like I like some of these ideas. I
like the CEO approach to a presidency, but like, I
still believe in the Constitute. I still believe that democracy

(01:11:38):
is our our is our bedrock.

Speaker 1 (01:11:42):
I don't think for one thing, just based on a
lot of stuff that Vance has said on some of
these far right podcasts. I don't believe he believes that
democracy is our bedrock. I think a lot of what
ways these guys will couch it is that's saying, like, well,
I believe in a republic, right, and kind of what
they're hearkening back to this very classical idea that well,

(01:12:03):
only like property owning men should be able to vote. Right, Like, sure,
there should be right some voting, but like not the
franchise should certainly be And this is something Vance has
has embraced when he's talked about how like people without
children shouldn't have the same degree of electoral say, right,
you should have men, If you're the head of a family,
you should get to vote, have more votes that basically

(01:12:26):
account for how many kids you have, and probably for
your wife too. Right. These are things Vance has talked
about on different podcasts he's appeared on, and Bannon has
expressed a lot of anti democratic sentiment. I think part
of the problem is that when these people get confronted
by the media, there's this inherent impulse that like mainstream
political reporters have to normalize them in a way that

(01:12:50):
I don't think is that I think provides them with
cover right to not just to not talk about them
as if they are people who are trying to end democracy,
because they very much are. You know, that's not the normal.
That's not the norm within like people who vote for
the Republican Party. But when we are talking about guys

(01:13:10):
like JD. Vance and Steve Bannon and Steve Miller, you know,
Trump's former associate, like all of these guys, that is
the norm among these people. And part of what part
of how they see Trump as useful and potentially Advance
is useful, is not that they're going to get us
to this end system that Jarvin theorizes. And when they

(01:13:32):
when they take Yarvin's ideas, I don't think most of
them want exactly the same kind of system that he does,
because he's kind of a kook, and right his system
is unworkable, and none of them really want to devolve.
Most of them don't want to devolve power. Right, A
guy like Teal may want to devolve some powers so
that he can run, you know, effectively his own little
city state where he gets to make all of the rules.

(01:13:55):
But there's a degree of like chaos inherent and the
actual thing that Yarvin advocate that makes it unworkable, but
they find ideas that he has very useful. And likewise,
I think folks like Jarvin think that a guy like Vance,
even if he doesn't back believe everything they believe, would
be useful because he brings us closer to this kind

(01:14:16):
of a system. And part of how we would do
that is by purging the left, by purging and destroying
like all of these journalists, by by locking up our
political opposition, right, Like that is a big part of
it for them, is we want to use the violence
that the state has access to to destroy the people
who don't want the world to be this way, right,

(01:14:36):
And there very is this kind of yearning for having
a freehand to utilize that violence to crush opposition. That
is key to that's what binds all these two guys together. Like,
as you've stated, and I think this is an important point.
It's not like Steve Bannon, like believes to the letter
and all of the crazy shit that Jarvin writes about, right,
It's not like JD. Vance is like sleeping with a

(01:14:58):
bunch of printouts of unqualified resid under his bed. There's
some ideas they find useful. They like the way he messages,
They think it's like, especially like rage. They think that's
good messaging for this thing that we want to do.
But they're all kind of tied together by we want
supreme executive power so that we can wield violence against
our enemies, right, And that's where they're all simpatico. Right,

(01:15:20):
And that's I think kind of the most important takeaway
here is not all of these people have been enraptured
by Curtis Jarvin and are like thought zombies to his beliefs.
They find some of his ideas useful, and likewise, he
and the people who follow him like they're all in
agreement about one thing, and it's who they want to hurt.

Speaker 2 (01:15:38):
Yeah, it's interesting because I've always I felt that there
was an article and I think it was New York
Magazine during the run up to the twenty sixteen election
that said, I think the phrasing was electing Trump would
be an extinction level event for the United States. Yeah,

(01:16:03):
a lot of people are scared of a second Trump
presidency because they feel like democracy would crumble under Trump.
And that's that's been a you know, rallying cry of
the left now for quite a while. And I agree
to some extent I do think that he's a threat
to democracy. I don't know that he wants to completely

(01:16:24):
topple it, but I I do think that how he
handled the transition of power was very very alarming and
unnerving and should be disqualifying, but at least to be
for a party to nominate him, if not legally disqualifying. So,

(01:16:46):
but I've always thought that his his threat to democracy
is more his unwieldiness and his sort of lust. Trump's
just narcissism and lust for power and lust for staying
the center of it, tension like that was almost the
most That's why he's a threat, and and that and

(01:17:06):
that that's just kind of wild and crazy and ridiculous
of him, of Trump, And but it is it's dangerous
if he gets there. But it's a but it's a
it's a kind of danger that is almost cartoonish, like
it's it's just so ridiculous. But what you've been laying
out these last two episodes, Yeah, very sort of as

(01:17:30):
a much more sinister intellectual underpinning with dismantling of democracy,
that is, uh, that is arguably far more serious kind
of threat. Uh as a as a doctrine. Yeah, And

(01:17:52):
I've never perceived Trump as someone driven by a sort
of like anti democratic doctrine. I just thought he was
he isn't. I just was always thought like, oh, he's
a dictator just because he's a megalomaniac and he wants
to behave like he wants to have all the power
of a dictator. He wants to behave he wants to
be like you know mel Brooks, like it's good to

(01:18:13):
be the king, Like that's all he wants. Yeah. Yeah,
But here is a group of people or a person
with some measure of influence. Uh, really thinking this stuff through?

Speaker 1 (01:18:28):
You're right that I think this is has been generally missed.
You know, people have started in particularly like kind of
the mainstream Democratic party, but also just like like centrists,
you know, people who are not particularly political, but are
I think most people who are people of goodwill don't
want to live in a dictatorship. Right. That would be
how I would describe a person of goodwill is you
don't want to institute a dictatorship. What?

Speaker 2 (01:18:49):
Well?

Speaker 1 (01:18:50):
I think that's a key part, right. I think people
have started to realize the intellectual threat and the broader
threat that trump Ism has opened the door for. With
Project twenty twenty five. But what has happened with Trump?
Because I think you're right on the money with your
characterization of him. He is not an ideologue. If he
thought he could have gotten to power running as a

(01:19:11):
Democrat and you know, still been the big man on top,
he would have done that, right. That just was not
the what wound up working for him.

Speaker 2 (01:19:17):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:19:18):
He is a Trumpist, and that he believes in himself
and himself being the guy who is the most important person.
But when he started running and when he first took
over the Republican Party, he started breaking norms, right. And
sometimes it's good to break norms, right. It used to
be the norm that, you know, a huge chunk of
this country was segregated, right, and that was something that

(01:19:40):
we had to very that was something that forcefully had
to be broken, right. The government had to deployee forced
to do that. And in that case that was very
much a good thing. But when you break norms, it
opens up space for people who have extreme views to
push those views into the public sphere. And what happened
with Trump as he destroyed the Republican Party that had

(01:20:02):
been he wound up pushing out a lot of people
who had been influential in that party, and that opened
up space for a whole bunch of people as long. Basically,
anyone could become an influential part of the Republican Party
if you could do one key thing, which was been
to the knee to Trump and also get along with him.
And so guys like Stephen Miller, right, are people who

(01:20:24):
understood how to do that. You know. That's how like
what jd. Vance has done, that's how he became the VP.
Right as he started courting Trump, he started like helping
out with stuff like when Trump would do like public
appearances after that big chemical spill in East Palestine like
a year or so ago. Like Vance is the guy
who handled a lot of the advance work for that.

(01:20:46):
He had pressed Trump. He was good at sucking up
to him. And they did all this consciously, not because
they are all believers that Trump should be the most
important person in politics, but because they understood that with
access to Trump comes the ability to kind of twist
the country in this direction if you can just convince
him it's the way to go right, and that is

(01:21:08):
the way, this kind of capture of the system, that's
that's how they want it to like that's what they
are very consciously trying to do. And so it's it's
a situation where, because of who he is and the
things that he has made possible, we do have to
confront the fact that these these very extreme people who
have a very dark vision for what our society should
be are kind of at the gates right now. And you,

(01:21:33):
you know, it's unfortunate, but I think at this point undeniable,
and I do think it's it's a thing people kind
of have to look at with with with clear eyes,
because it's it's at this point a very immediate threat. Anyway,

(01:21:54):
you had a good Friday, ruining my day, Maybe it'll
be up.

Speaker 2 (01:22:02):
I'm gonna go home and be like bitter and angry
at my family. What are you doing to help save democracy?

Speaker 1 (01:22:10):
Dad?

Speaker 2 (01:22:10):
I'm three, but get out there.

Speaker 1 (01:22:15):
That's kind of a normal reaction after coming on the show.

Speaker 2 (01:22:18):
Unfortunately. Yeah, I'm gonna go home and be mad.

Speaker 1 (01:22:22):
I'm gonna be angry all weekend. Well Ed, I'm gonna
be happy all weekend because I got to have a
fun time talking with you today.

Speaker 2 (01:22:29):
This was fun. I really appreciate thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:22:32):
Yeah, yeah, thanks for being on. People should check out
your podcast, Snap Who Season two is great. I haven't
listened to season one yet, but I'm sure it's also great.
I'm excited to get into that as well soon. Yeah,
I had anything else you want to plug before we
roll out today?

Speaker 2 (01:22:49):
Snap and season one Season one is super fun. Yeah yeah,
yeah yeah, so Jack, You're both out that out.

Speaker 1 (01:23:01):
Thank you, Ed and everyone have a good rest of
your week. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool
Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our
website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part Two: Curtis Yarvin: The Philosopher Behind J.D. Vance