Curtis Yarvin Concepts

The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

by Gil Durán · 17 Aug 2026 · 317pp · 114,570 words

subsequent decades, his obsession with the book’s thesis led him to cultivate and fund a cultish network of radical anti-democracy thinkers. Among them: Curtis Yarvin, a computer programmer who developed an expansive new theory for dismantling democratic governance, and Balaji Srinivasan, a tech entrepreneur who designed a blueprint for replacing

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joke. Within a few short years, it would evolve from obscure internet subculture into a mortal threat to American democracy. CHAPTER 2 THE ACID STORY Curtis Yarvin and the “Cathedral” Two days before Donald Trump became president of the United States for the second time, vice president–elect JD Vance attended an

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stop you from getting elected,” came the reply. The man Vance had greeted was not a senator, a CEO, or a donor. He was blogger Curtis Yarvin, an honored guest. By late 2024, Yarvin had achieved international notoriety as the key thinker of a movement that sought to dismantle American democracy and

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University in 1973 with a thesis titled “Some Cartesian Questions.” Some saw him as a strict father who controlled every aspect of his sons’ lives. Curtis Yarvin disputes that characterization, calling his father “stubborn,” “intense,” and “formidable”—like “a good manager.” Whatever the case, Herbert Yarvin failed to get tenure as an

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”; its members (including Patri Friedman) found common cause in their disdain for existing governmental structures. “Thiel’s budding movement also had a house political philosopher: Curtis Yarvin, who was then only known by his pen name, Mencius Moldbug,” wrote Max Chafkin in The Contrarian. “Yarvin, like so many in Thiel’s orbit

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, with many broadcasting their plans of whether to attend,” reported the business publication Inc. in a story headlined “Controversy Rages Over ‘Pro-Slavery’ Tech Speaker Curtis Yarvin.” “Some sponsors have dropped out. A website has appeared for an alternative functional programming conference called MoonConf, slated for the same dates and in the

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to run for Senate in 2022. One of his campaign stops was on the Jack Murphy Live podcast in 2021. “So, there’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has written about these things,” said Vance. Murphy, real name John Goldman, had asked Vance how Trump might “rip out the disgusting leadership class

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press attention. Two days before the inauguration, The New York Times Magazine ran a long interview with Yarvin headlined “Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.” “For a long time, Curtis Yarvin, a 51-year-old computer engineer, has written online about political theory in relative obscurity,” wrote David Marchese in

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a dictator, was accompanied by moody black-and-white photos of Yarvin looking pensive in a leather jacket. Politico followed up with a breezy interview—“Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe. Now They’re Coursing Through Trump’s Washington”—where Yarvin bragged about seeing Vance calling him a “reactionary fascist” at Thiel

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seek to install a ‘CEO Monarch’ to rule by technological and financial dominance. This network includes Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, David Sacks, and Curtis Yarvin, among others. Once considered fringe, purveyors of this ideology have now been embedded into the core of government operations.” While Musk and Yarvin reveled in

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on the bright side, it’s not clear whether the fascist oligarchs will be able to kill democracy in one fell swoop. By mid-2025, Curtis Yarvin had declared the Trump regime a tragedy and a failure. He took to weeping during interviews and counseled his fascist allies to make plans to

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absurd to suggest… some consider utopian”: Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound. “He is making a factual statement… committee of men and women”: Curtis Yarvin (as Mencius Moldbug), “Democraphobia Goes (Slightly) Viral,” Unqualified Reservations (blog), May 2009, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/05/democraphobia-goes-slightly-viral/. “They soon

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met for the first time… tech C.E.O.s were their prey”: Ava Kofman, “Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America,” New Yorker, June 2, 2025, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile. CHAPTER 2 THE ACID STORY “Yarvin, you reactionary fascist… from getting elected”: Ian Ward

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, “Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe. Now They’re Coursing Through Trump’s Washington,” Politico, January 30, 2025, https://www.politico

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.com/news/magazine/2025/01/30/curtis-yarvins-ideas-00201552. “I don’t think he meant it”: Ward, “Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe,” Politico. “diplomat’s brat”: Curtis Yarvin, interview by Max Raskin, November 15, 2023, https://www.maxraskin.com/interviews/curtis-yarvin. “He was an atheist Jew… skin turned orange”: Meredith Tanner

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, interview with author, April 28, 2025. “too arrogant,” his son later told a reporter: Ava Kofman, “Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America,” New Yorker, June 2, 2025, https://www.newyorker.com

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/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile. “We were taught to read… his mind as it usually is”: Norman Yarvin, email to author

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, September 4, 2025. “weird, threatening, disturbing alien”: Kofman, “Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America,” New Yorker. “He found more… their posts uninteresting

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”: Kofman, “Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America,” New Yorker. “One thing he liked to do”: Meredith Tanner, interview with author, April 28

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, 2025. “The man who drove America crazy”: “The Acid Story with Curtis Yarvin,” Tim Dillon Show. Yarvin said he had bought: Jacob Siegel

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, “The Red-Pill Prince: How Computer Programmer Curtis Yarvin Became America’s Most Controversial Political Theorist,” Tablet, March 31, 2022, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news

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/articles/red-pill-prince-curtis-yarvin. “In 2002, he left Openwave”: Julia Black, “The Far-Right Guru Who Has Befriended Silicon Valley’s Extreme Factions,” Information, August 9, 2024, https://www.

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theinformation.com/articles/the-far-right-guru-who-has-befriended-silicon-valleys-extreme-factions. “Furthermore, I am a computer programmer”: Curtis Yarvin (as Mencius Moldbug), “A Formalist Manifesto,” Unqualified Reservations (blog), April 24, 2007, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/04/formalist-manifesto-originally-posted/. a superior

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form of “private government”: Yarvin, “Formalist Manifesto.” “The Cathedral consists of… following their lead”: Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), “Patchwork: A Positive Vision,” Unqualified Reservations (blog), November 13, 2008, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-positive-vision-part-1/. “Not

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all humans are born the same… Indians did not”: Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), “From Mises to Carlyle: My Sick Journey,” Unqualified Reservations (blog), February 2010, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/02/from-mises-to-carlyle

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-my-sick-journey/. “I am not exactly allergic”: Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), “Why I Am Not a White Nationalist,” Unqualified Reservations (blog), November 22, 2007, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/11/why-i-am

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-not-white-nationalist/. “America’s actual WASP-Ashkenazi aristocracy”: Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives,” Unqualified Reservations (blog), April 17, 2008, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/04/open-letter-to

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-open-minded-progressives/. “digital feudalism… solution in this context”: Curtis Yarvin, “Urbit Namespace (300K),” GitHub, January 20, 2010, https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/6ac688960687aa9c89d4da6fff49a3125c10aca1/Spec/urbit/3-intro.txt. “I think it is only”: Peter

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state isn’t going anywhere… the appointment of a CEO”: Land, “The Dark Enlightenment.” “And by like 2011 or 2010… right”: “The Acid Story with Curtis Yarvin,” Tim Dillon Show. “Thiel became a direct patron… called Tlon”: Corey Pein, Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon

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://unherd.com/2019/02/techs-dark-overlords/. “Some sponsors have dropped out… you might think so”: Tess Townsend, “Controversy Rages over ‘Pro-Slavery’ Tech Speaker Curtis Yarvin,” Inc., March 31, 2016, https://www.inc.com/tess-townsend/why-it-matters-that-an-obscure-programming-conference-is-hosting-mencius-moldbug.html. “If things

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, February 13, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html. “How dangerous is it… they kinda know it”: Kofman, “Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America,” New Yorker. CHAPTER 3 EXIT “If a company or a country… or to join a competitor”: Balaji Srinivasan, “Silicon Valley’s

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Cities Is Bad,” Guardian, July 27, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/jul/27/paul-romers-charter-cities-idea. Yarvin called Romer a “plagiarist”: Curtis Yarvin (as Mencius Moldbug), “From Cromer to Romer and Back Again,” Unqualified Reservations (blog), August 20, 2009, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/08/from-cromer

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-richard-spencer-white-nationalists-karaoke-bar-a7987486.html. “Not as much… plays it very carefully”: Ava Kofman, “Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America,” New Yorker, June 2, 2025, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile. “Yelp for drugs… Build the future”: Rhett Jones, “Why Did Trump’s Top FDA Pick

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-Pill Prince,” Tablet, March 31, 2022, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/red-pill-prince-curtis-yarvin. “not just a test of our government”: Curtis Yarvin, “Plan A for the Coronavirus,” Medium, April 4, 2020, https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/plan-a-for-the-coronavirus-7db3997490c1. killed over 7 million globally: World Health Organization, “COVID

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YC can make a real difference here…,” Twitter (now X), August 29, 2022, https://x.com/sama/status/1564256798323851265. Yarvin called for a “full reboot”: Curtis Yarvin, “The Butterfly Revolution,” Gray Mirror (blog), Substack, April 7, 2022, https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-butterfly-revolution. “Free speech is essential… adheres to this

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-create-an-imperial-presidency/. “a total shutdown of international relations”: Ava Kofman, “Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America,” New Yorker, June 2, 2025, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile. “His ideas were pretty extreme”: David Marchese, “Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening,” New York Times Magazine, January

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18, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-interview.html. “Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe”: Ian Ward, “Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe. Now They’re Coursing Through Trump’s Washington,” Politico, January 30, 2025, https://www.politico.com/news

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/magazine/2025/01/30/curtis-yarvins-ideas-00201552. “the rapid takeover of federal infrastructure”: “Capture of U.S. Critical Infrastructure by Neoreactionaries,” memorandum, America 2.0, February 5, 2025, https://america2.

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it serves”: “Objection: The AI Tribunal of Truth,” accessed May 4, 2026, https://objection.ai/. “The second Trump revolution… put the administration on the defensive”: Curtis Yarvin, “You Can’t Handle the Truth,” Gray Mirror (Substack), October 5, 2025, https://graymirror.substack.com/p/you-cant-handle-the-truth. “making Argentina another

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–201 communism, 227–28 Confinity, 15, 41–42 Conservative Political Action Conference, 4 Constitution, U.S., 2, 254 “Controversy Rages Over ‘Pro-Slavery’ Tech Speaker Curtis Yarvin,” 69 Corbett, Rachel, 182 cosmists, 117–20 Council for National Policy (CNP), 223 Counsyl, 75, 80 COVID pandemic, 90–98, 147, 148, 157, 196, 227

In the Realm of the Last Man

by Francis Fukuyama · 3 Jul 2026

to hope for some form of Catholic integralism where society would agree on a set of strong moral principles defined by religion. Others, such as Curtis Yarvin and Costin Vlad Alamariu (aka “Bronze Age Pervert”), discard religion and long for a return of hierarchy and strong government. They are joined by some

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

by Quinn Slobodian · 4 Apr 2023 · 360pp · 107,124 words

democracy and capitalism need not go together. Perhaps the most impassioned take on the emirate came from the self-described neo-reactionary and tech worker Curtis Yarvin, who blogged under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug and moved in the same circles as Patri Friedman and Peter Thiel.16 Along with Singapore and Hong

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occupier at the barrel of a Tomahawk missile. Here was Dubai, without democracy, hosting pool parties and brunches, ribbon cuttings and new acquisitions every month. Curtis Yarvin, the blogger yearning for a patchwork of mini-states, was among those who posed them as opposites. In Iraq you had democracy without law, and

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idea of alien rule. If the world’s most prestigious publications could get behind a project of colonialism by invitation, what else might be possible? Curtis Yarvin was, as usual, willing to say the quiet part out loud. He wondered why Romer insisted his charter cities were not colonialism. They were “exactly

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2013 that “maybe we could set apart a piece of the world … where people can try new things.”21 Along with Thiel, Srinivasan invested in Curtis Yarvin’s company Tlon, devoted to building a new internet that would come closer to his vision of society run as a business.22 Srinivasan did

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. Although Yarvin claims not to be a libertarian, many of his writings conform closely to the right-wing anarcho-capitalist tradition described in this book. Curtis Yarvin, “Why I Am Not a Libertarian,” Unqualified Reservations, December 13, 2007, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/12/why-i-am-not-libertarian/. 17. Emphasis

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-and/. 18. In fact, many migrant workers did not receive what was promised in their contract. 19. Brook, A History of Future Cities, 370. 20. Curtis Yarvin, “Neocameralism and the Escalator of Massarchy,” Unqualified Reservations, December 20, 2007, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/12/neocameralism-and-escalator-of/. 21

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. Curtis Yarvin, “Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century,” Unqualified Reservations, November 13, 2008, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-positive-vision-part-1/.

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Asia,” Place Branding and Public Diplomacy 4, no. 265–269 (2008): 268. 89. Ramos, Dubai Amplified: The Engineering of a Port Geography, 117, 29. 90. Curtis Yarvin, “UR’s Plan to Fix Iraq,” Unqualified Reservations, May 16, 2007, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/urs-plan-to-fix-iraq/. 91. Heidi

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, February 22, 2021, 6, 12. 92. Anna Fifield, “Contractors Reap $138bn from Iraq War,” Financial Times, March 18, 2013, Financial Times Historical Archive, Gale. 93. Curtis Yarvin, “A Formalist Manifesto,” Unqualified Reservations, April 23, 2007, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/04/formalist-manifesto-originally-posted/. 94

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. Curtis Yarvin, “Against Political Freedom,” Unqualified Reservations, May 25, 2007, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/08/against-political-freedom/. 95. Yarvin, “A Formalist Manifesto.” CHAPTER 10:

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, 2013, https://nacla.org/news/2013/2/19/reporting-romer%E2%80%99s-charter-cities-how-media-sanitize-honduras%E2%80%99s-brutal-regime. 40. Curtis Yarvin, “From Cromer to Romer and Back Again: Colonialism for the 21st Century,” Unqualified Reservations, August 20, 2009, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/08/from

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power

by Max Chafkin · 14 Sep 2021 · 524pp · 130,909 words

, which is led by Friedman and is seeking to build “charter cities” in developing countries. Thiel’s budding movement also had a house political philosopher: Curtis Yarvin, who was then only known by his pen name, Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin, like so many in Thiel’s orbit, was a verbose and dyspeptic geek

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reporter asked what Thiel thought of an essay, published by the event’s sponsor, The Baffler, that noted Thiel’s fondness for neo-reactionaries, especially Curtis Yarvin, Thiel laughed this off, calling the article, which ran under the title “Mouth-Breathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich,” “vaguely flattering,” but a “full

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’s and the Daily Stormer, and explained ways to keep donations secret. Giesea denied writing the guide. During this time Thiel also drew closer to Curtis Yarvin, who’d become a sort of house philosopher for the alt-right. In late 2014, John Burnham, the idealistic teenager who’d been one of

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’s influence had also shown up in a talk by Thiel’s friend Balaji Srinivasan, a libertarian venture capitalist who’d invested alongside him in Curtis Yarvin’s company. At a Y Combinator event for young entrepreneurs in 2013, Srinivasan had drawn a distinction between democratic engagement—“voice,” he called it—and

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, then CEO of AngelList, was there, as was Luke Nosek, the PayPal cofounder who’d convinced Thiel to back Elon Musk’s SpaceX. So was Curtis Yarvin, the neo-reactionary blogger and then CEO of Tlon, a company in which Thiel had invested. The mood was subdued at first. Chairs had been

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, and his top pick to lead the FDA, was Balaji Srinivasan, the Stanford computer science lecturer and cryptocurrency entrepreneur who’d invested alongside Thiel in Curtis Yarvin’s company and shared Thiel’s views on the wisdom of Silicon Valley elites leaving the country. He’d given a talk in 2013 urging

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conservatives. He’d watched a documentary, The Red Pill, in which a self-described feminist comes to question her beliefs—the film’s title used Curtis Yarvin’s preferred term for enlightenment. He’d also been watching lectures by Jordan Peterson, the controversial Canadian psychologist and self-help author who inveighs regularly

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rise of Barry Goldwater and toward a vision Thiel had been promoting at least since his reactionary investor letters and his cultivation of figures like Curtis Yarvin—a politics of closed borders, mercantile trade policy, and populist industrial policy. The Thielverse was well represented at the nationalist conference. Yarvin was in the

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changed people’s votes and claimed, offering no evidence, that dead people had voted in Milwaukee and Detroit. These all turned out to be false. Curtis Yarvin, the neo-reactionary intellectual and Thiel’s longtime friend, went much further. He published an essay that claimed that voters in “urban communities” had, through

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It Is Not a Democracy,” TechCrunch, September 21, 2020, https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/21/palantir-is-not-a-democracy/. stolen the election for Biden: Curtis Yarvin, “Reflections on the Late Election,” Gray Mirror, November 8, 2020 https://graymirror.substack.com/p/reflections-on-the-late-election. (The emphasis on “outside” was

More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

by Adam Becker · 14 Jun 2025 · 381pp · 119,533 words

and EA community is still shot through with racism and sexism. Perhaps the most alarming connection between the rationalists and far-right racism is through Curtis Yarvin, a software developer who sometimes writes under the pen name Mencius Moldbug. “The proposition that modern human populations are, like dog breeds, the product of

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is Marinetti the only fascist on Andreessen’s list. He also includes Nick Land, a neoreactionary philosopher widely read among the alt-right followers of Curtis Yarvin. (The effective accelerationists also quote Land in their inaugural post.)101 Andreessen put Frederick Jackson Turner on the list too. Turner was a late-nineteenth

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, and at the close of the story he explicitly compares Tlön with the orderly paranoia of Nazism and anti-Semitism. Small wonder, then, that when Curtis Yarvin started a company with Peter Thiel’s backing, he chose Tlön for its name. The comforting lie behind both Tlön and the simulation hypothesis is

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X), January 11, 2023, https://twitter.com/rajiinio/status/1613341900043612160. 140 Bostrom, “Re: Offending People’s Minds.” 141 Thorstad, “Belonging” (emphasis in original). 142 Mencius [Curtis Yarvin], comment on “Nationalist Moral Chauvinism,” by Will Wilkinson, WillWilkinson.net, February 11, 2008, archived August 12, 2013, at the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org

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the record…,” Tumblr, April 8, 2016, https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/142497361345/this-isnt-going-to-work-but-for-the-record-and. 145 Mencius Moldbug [Curtis Yarvin], “Divine-Right Monarchy for the Modern Secular Intellectual,” Unqualified Reservations (blog), March 19, 2010, www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/03/divine-right-monarchy-for-modern

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/. 146 Mencius Moldbug [Curtis Yarvin], “Why I Am Not a White Nationalist,” Unqualified Reservations (blog), November 22, 2007, www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/11/why-i-am-not-white-nationalist

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/. 147 Mencius Moldbug [Curtis Yarvin], “Charles Stross Discovers the Cathedral,” Unqualified Reservations (blog), February 8, 2013, www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/02/charles-stross-discovers-cathedral/. 148 Peter Thiel, “The

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. Now He Wants to Sell You Web Services,” The Verge, February 21, 2017, www.theverge.com/2017/2/21/14671978/alt-right-mencius-moldbug-urbit-curtis-yarvin-tlon; Joseph Bernstein, “Here’s How Breitbart and Milo Smuggled White Nationalism into the Mainstream,” BuzzFeed News, October 5, 2017, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein

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,” Vanity Fair, April 20, 2022, www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets; Andrew Prokop, “Curtis Yarvin Wants American Democracy Toppled. He Has Some Prominent Republican Fans,” Vox, October 24, 2022, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23373795

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/curtis-yarvin-neoreaction-redpill-moldbug. 154 Saini, interview with author. 155 “There’s absolutely no biological difference between races. There’s no genetic support for the idea

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley

by Corey Pein · 23 Apr 2018 · 282pp · 81,873 words

, I owe many thanks to Airbnb. In the same spirit, I must thank those who declined to be interviewed, especially Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, and Curtis Yarvin—my three muses. I’m genuinely grateful to everyone who was interviewed, as well as all those pseudonymous people—roommates, conferencegoers, barflies—whose stories were

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lobbyists. He was also a leading financier of technofeudalist and neoreactionary thinkers, both in Silicon Valley and beyond. Thiel donated to multiple organizations that invited Curtis Yarvin to promote his deranged political ideas, namely the Foresight Institute and an organization now known as the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which is dedicated to

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, whose 2011 massacre in Oslo, Norway, targeted young leftists and whose detailed manifesto circulated in online fascist forums where strategies were set and tactics debated. Curtis Yarvin wrote about Breivik. His objection to the Oslo massacre was that it was insufficient to “free Norway from Eurocommunism.” Terrorist violence—or “folk activism,” in

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of “extropian” futurism, had given a presentation on “cryonics as a bridge to an indefinitely extended life” at the same BIL conference where Thiel donee Curtis Yarvin appeared. The bearded British life extension researcher Aubrey de Grey spoke at BIL that year about his work in “anti-aging bioscience.” De Grey whiled

End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World

by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor · 14 Sep 2026 · 393pp · 124,539 words

, there were no names on the lanyards, and many speakers used pseudonyms. Plenty of names got out anyway, though. Bryan Johnson, the anti-death influencer; Curtis Yarvin, the proud proponent of replacing nation-states with corporate monarchies; Kevin Spacey, the once-canceled actor; Trae Stephens, a Founders Fund partner and executive chairman

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and coal as possible, even though almost everyone in the savvy audience raised their hands when asked whether climate change was a concern. Oh, and Curtis Yarvin seized the opportunity to declare that the United States needs a “Sun King” rather than a president. Patri Friedman was also on the bill. He

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his minions dreamed of gated, shiny cities where constitutional rights are replaced by Terms of Service and the ultrarich can live as ubermenschen. In 2024, Curtis Yarvin floated the idea that Gaza could become “an entirely new charter city on humanity’s oldest ocean, sublime real estate with an absolutely perfect, Apple

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at a Capitol Hill restaurant—a favorite of the MAGA elite—which was decorated in shabby-chic French style. A recent New Yorker profile of Curtis Yarvin described a surreal scene in which the leather-jacketed neo-reactionary visited an aging Camus at his lovingly restored castle in the south of France

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, is an excellent outcome. Another person refusing to be silenced is Alex Kaschuta, the host of the Subversive podcast, who previously interviewed guests such as Curtis Yarvin and spoke at the Thiel-funded National Conservatism conference. When she discussed her disillusionment with the journalist Sam Adler-Bell, Kaschuta connected ICE’s deadly

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

by Jill Lepore · 24 Aug 2026 · 363pp · 122,400 words

a book, funded in part by the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, calling for the founding of technological “stateless nations.”33 The self-described “neo-monarchist” Curtis Yarvin, a onetime computer programmer and Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur whose Substack influenced Thiel, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and U.S. vice president JD Vance, called

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same Latin root as the title Mussolini gave himself, Il Duce.) DOGE drew its inspiration from RAGE—Retire All Government Employees—by the neo-monarchist Curtis Yarvin. Once Trump took office, Musk, often seen in the White House wearing a black T-shirt that read TECH SUPPORT, set about dismantling the federal

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, Your Next Government?: From the Nation State to Stateless Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), xi. 34Ava Kofman, “Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America,” The New Yorker, June 2, 2025; David Marchese, “ ‘The Interview’: Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening,” New York Times, January 18, 2025; Ed Simon, “What We

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Must Understand About the Dark Enlightenment Movement,” Time, March 24, 2025; Ian Ward, “Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe. Now They’re Coursing Through Trump’s Washington,” Politico, January 30, 2025. On Christensen’s gospel, see Lepore, “The Disruption Machine

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

by Jacob Silverman · 9 Oct 2025 · 312pp · 103,645 words

no entrance fee and an open bar—the book-lined basement venue was rumored to be financially backed by Peter Thiel, or by monarchist writer Curtis Yarvin. For some, the event space had acquired an air of right-wing radical chic—a place where one could drink, network, and embrace reactionary ideas

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first, investing in explicitly right-wing companies like Palantir, Rumble, and Anduril, dining with white nationalists such as Kevin DeAnna, sponsoring far-right writers like Curtis Yarvin, and founding startups dedicated to supporting the surveillance state.25 Although he claimed to be a committed libertarian, after 9/11, Thiel spoke frequently of

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of Thiel-ian values. As a leading representative of the so-called New Right, Vance incorporated other ideological influences into his political program. He cited Curtis Yarvin, the reactionary, monarchist writer whom Thiel had sponsored for years and who argued for an American dictator or “CEO.” Vance aligned himself with right-wing

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been inaugurated in 1932. But the rhetoric was not just flattery. It resonated in tech circles where, inspired by Thiel-sponsored figures like the writer Curtis Yarvin, an increasing number of people believed that the US would be better off under a dictatorial CEO figure, not an elected president. It may have

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intelligence apparatus. His companies would surely prosper. Elon Musk, Thiel’s friend and former PayPal colleague, was acting as the potential dictatorial CEO figure that Curtis Yarvin had forecast as an American savior who would put an end to the failed democratic experiment. The day after the election, Musk joined Trump on

How Democracy Ends

by David Runciman · 9 May 2018 · 245pp · 72,893 words

from ‘the Grievance Studies departments of the New England universities’. Land gets much of his philosophy – including the notion of ‘the Cathedral’ – from computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, who writes under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. Land and Yarvin are sometimes described as ‘neo-reactionaries’, but Yarvin says he prefers to be called a