New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.
(Correction: There ARE no ‘powerful conservatives’. There ARE powerful Republicans, but that’s a horse of a different color. But Voices of the Crust refuse to Notice it.)
Curtis Yarvin wrote a series of articles under the pseudonym of “Mencius Moldbug”. Highly recommended.
For a long time, Curtis Yarvin, a 51-year-old computer engineer, has written online about political theory in relative obscurity. His ideas were pretty extreme: that institutions at the heart of American intellectual life, like the mainstream media and academia, have been overrun by progressive groupthink and need to be dissolved. He believes that government bureaucracy should be radically gutted, and perhaps most provocative, he argues that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a “monarchy” run by what he has called a “C.E.O.” — basically his friendlier term for a dictator. To support his arguments, Yarvin relies on what those sympathetic to his views might see as a helpful serving of historical references — and what others see as a highly distorting mix of gross oversimplification, cherry-picking and personal interpretation presented as fact.
The ‘others’ in question being Crustian Deep-Staters. Read ’em and make up your own mind.
But while Yarvin himself may still be obscure, his ideas are not. Vice President-elect JD Vance has alluded to Yarvin’s notions of forcibly ridding American institutions of so-called wokeism. The incoming State Department official Michael Anton has spoken with Yarvin about how an “American Caesar” might be installed into power. And Yarvin also has fans in the powerful, and increasingly political, ranks of Silicon Valley. Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist turned informal adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, has approvingly cited Yarvin’s anti-democratic thinking. And Peter Thiel, a conservative megadonor who invested in a tech start-up of Yarvin’s, has called him a “powerful” historian. Perhaps unsurprising given all this, Yarvin has become a fixture of the right-wing media universe: He has been a guest on the shows of Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, among others.
The NYT, of course, equates ‘anti-democratic thinking’ with ‘anti-Democratic thinking’ and is therefore agin it.
I’ve been aware of Yarvin, who mostly makes his living on Substack, for years and was mostly interested in his work as a prime example of growing antidemocratic sentiment in particular corners of the internet. Until recently, those ideas felt fringe. But given that they are now finding an audience with some of the most powerful people in the country, Yarvin can’t be so easily dismissed anymore.
To paraphrase Black Window, if Yarvin could be ‘easily dismissed’, that’s where they’d be; it is, after all, what the Narrative Media do best with CrimeThink.
You will note that the pictures they ran to accompany this interview make Yarvin look like a sociopathic anarchist. That’s the sort of slanted (to the point of falling over) ‘reporting’ that they do to advance the Narrative, and nobody even blinks an eye, because we’ve gotten so accustomed to it.
