Storming the Cathedral: Curtis Yarvin
19th December 2025
Curtis Yarvin is an American political thinker, essayist, and software engineer known for his concept of the ‘Cathedral,’ his description of the modern West’s informal nexus of media, academia, and bureaucracy. Writing under the name Mencius Moldbug in the 2000s, he became one of the formative voices of the neoreactionary or postliberal movement. Combining historical erudition with irony and intellectual independence, Yarvin argues that Western democracy has ossified into a managerial order and that genuine renewal requires a return to first principles of authority and legitimacy.
Here is the dirty secret of campus race politics: it isn’t actually about race. No one cares about ‘black conservatives.’ There is nothing ‘historic’ about Clarence Thomas or Condoleezza Rice.
The point of ‘affirmative action’ is that it oversamples ideology. Race communism (communism, but with the workers and peasants replaced by people of color) is the central ideology of the Cathedral, and always has been. The word ‘progressive’ has been used in the same way for a century, from the Old Left to the New Left. Say ‘racial progressivism,’ and a progressive might even agree.
The real purpose of the admissions officers is to maintain ideological and political hegemony. This is hardly hard—most peoples’ instinct is normally to support the powers that be. But it’s always best to keep power in shape.
Without the ability to stack the political deck by using race as a proxy, the commissars will just have to select even harder for more hardcore communism itself. Here we see, for instance, sexual minorities taking the front seat over racial minorities.