Over recent decades, a computer programmer and prolific internet commenter has risen from the obscurity of forums and pseudonymous blogs to the pages of this newspaper,
as a friend to Vice President JD Vance and as a person who influences many of the people who influence President Trump.

Posting as Mencius Moldbug, #Curtis #Yarvin built a small but influential following among the more reactionary segments of the tech elite,
providing them with an elaborate and conspiratorial vision of a nation under the heel of a tyrannical and suffocating liberalism, a broad group of individuals and institutions he calls “the Cathedral.”

The path to national renewal, Yarvin argues, is to unravel American democracy in favor of rule by a benevolent C.E.O.-monarch drawn from a cadre of venture capitalists and corporate oligarchs.

With views like these, it is not difficult to understand how Yarvin won the admiration of powerful patrons.

He does little more than tell them what they want to hear.

If he had been born a minor noble scrounging for influence in the court of Louis XIV, he would have been among the first to exclaim the absolute authority of the king, to tell anyone who would listen that yes, the state, it’s him.

We do not have kings in the American Republic, but we do have capitalists.

And in particular, we have a set of capitalists who appear to be as skeptical of liberal democracy as any monarch.

They want to hear that they are the indispensable men.

They want to hear that their parochial business concerns are as vital and important as the national interest.

Aggrieved by the give-and-take of democratic life, they want to hear that they are under siege by the nefarious and illegitimate forces of a vast conspiracy.

And hungry for the kind of status that money can’t buy, they want to hear that they deserve to rule.

Yarvin affirms their fears, flatters their fantasies and gives them a language with which to express their great ambitions.

Never mind that the actual substance of his ideas leaves much to be desired.

Take his illuminating interview with The Times, in which he gives readers a crash course in his overall political vision.

He makes a studied effort to appear as learned and erudite as possible. But linger just a little on his answers and you’ll see the extent to which they’re underproofed and overbaked.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/opinion/trump-vance-yarvin-monarchy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

He’s anti-democracy and pro-Trump

-- The obscure ‘dark enlightenment’ blogger influencing the next US administration

-- #Curtis #Yarvin is hardly a household name in US politics.

But the “neoreactionary” thinker and far-right blogger is emerging as a serious intellectual influence on key figures in Donald Trump’s coming administration
-- in particular over potential threats to US democracy.

Yarvin, who considers liberal democracy as a decadent enemy to be dismantled,
is intellectually influential on vice president-elect JD Vance
and close to several proposed Trump appointees.

The aftermath of Trump’s election victory has seen actions and rhetoric from Trump and his lieutenants that closely resemble Yarvin’s public proposals for taking autocratic power in America.

Trump’s legal moves against critics in the media,
Elon Musk’s promises to pare government spending to the bone,
and the deployment of the Maga base against Republican lawmakers who have criticized controversial nominees like Pete Hegseth
are among the measures that resemble elements of Yarvin’s strategy for displacing liberal democracy in the US.

One of the venues in which Yarvin has articulated the strategy include a podcast hosted by #Michael #Anton, a writer and academic whom Trump last week appointed to work in a senior role under secretary of state nominee Marco Rubio.

Although Yarvin once described Vance as a “random normie politician I’ve barely even met”
in a July Substack post, in October the Verge reported that “no one online has shaped Vance’s thinking more”.

The growing parallels between the incoming administration’s actions
– especially Vance’s views
– and Yarvin’s suggestions raise questions about his influence.

Robert Evans, an extremism researcher and the host of the podcast "Behind the Bastards", recorded a two-part series on Yarvin.

“He didn’t fall out of a coconut tree. He emerged into a rightwing media space where they had been talking about the evils of liberal media and corrupt academic institutions for decades,” he said.

“He has influenced a lot of people in the incoming administration and a lot of other influential people on the right.
But a lot of the stuff he advocates is the same windmills Republicans have been tilting at for a while,” Evans continued.

“What’s unique is his way of rebranding or repackaging old reactionary ideas in a way that appealed to libertarian-minded kids in the tech industry,
and in eventually getting some of them to embrace a lot of far-right ideas,” he said.

“That’s the novelty of Yarvin and that’s his real accomplishment.”

-- Jason Wilson

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/21/curtis-yarvin-trump?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other