This is one of the best, most concise expressions I’ve seen of the very real patterns many of us are starting to recognize, what looks like chaos or incompetence is too consistent to be either. It aligns almost perfectly with a framework I’ve been developing on the emergence of fascist elements within the American oligarchy, and how deliberate destabilization is being used as a strategy to dismantle democracy from within.
You’re absolutely right: The general public doesn’t know what hit them, and the absurdity of the truth becomes a kind of shield for those orchestrating it. Thank you for putting this into words.
I believe that you are correct. I have been trying to raise awareness about this possibility. I keep seeing mainstream media, the general public, and even our elected officials expressing exacerbation and confusion, chalking this up to an extreme amount of incompetence--questioning "how could every move this administration make seem to have no rational outcome but to increase economic and geopolitical instability and institutional dysfunction?" I think if we keep doing this, we give them a tremendous advantage. If EVERY decision and policy move they make seems to have no rational outcome but to increase instability and dysfunction, it is not irrational to conclude that--particularly because Yarvin, Land, and even some of Russia's plans for dismantling democracy call for this--that is *exactly the intended effect*. Even the rhetoric that seems so random and insane as to annexing Canada, purchasing Greenland, taking back the Panama Canal has express roots in this theories. The push for increasing governmental involvement in cryptocurrency is expressly rooted in this as a major step in decentralizing finance. The fact that DOGE seems to be, sometimes even accidentally, revealing all sorts of mistake, fraud, corruption, and even evidence of a corrupt surveillance state--all goes to creating a crisis of public faith in our institutions. All of this culminates in creating public panic, fear, confusion--and a perception that our democratic institutions are irreparably broken, dysfunctional, and vulnerable to corruption, making the public more receptive to accepting a new form of governance once they have pushed on the fault lines enough to bring those institutions to the brink of inevitable collapse.
Even the realignment with Russia and the alienation and antagonization of our allies is expressly aligned with this--this ideology believes the era of nation-states is over: they think the wealthy and powerful should be able to acquire and use land and resources at will without any limitation imposed by law, regulation, or norm. They don't just want American democracy to die, they don't just believe American democracy is inefficient, they believe the *liberal democratic order in general* is inefficient and in terminal decline. Russia shares this exact prerogative--in fact, the father of neo-Eurasianism and traditionalism that defines and drives Putin's Russia, Aleksandr Dugin--sometimes called "Putin's brain" because of the influence his philosophies have on Putin's policy decisions--has since December of this year gone on the record several time commending Trump, Vance, and Musk--as well as Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin (!)--for this policy moves, for finally seeing enlightenment liberalism for what it is and abandoning it and the corrupt, fraudulent liberal globalist world order that Putin's Russia has been intent on destroying for decades. Dugin draws clear conclusions and analogies to all of this, crediting Thiel for his financial influences in making it happen and crediting Yarvin and Land and other such thinkers for contributing to the development and rise of illiberal far-right reactionary philosophies in the US. Russia as a whole is celebrating this, saying they foresee a great multipolar world in which both "Great America" and "Great Russia" can end the liberal, democratic hegemony once and for all.
There comes a point where the coincidences grow so plentiful that you have to, instead, call it "pattern recognition." I believe that the aburdity and fringe nature of this philosophy--the fact that the mainstream/general public has barely heard of its existence--is a huge advantage to them and threat to democracy because even once you try to tell people about this, they immediately discredit it as some insane sci-fi conspiracy. But, as the Silicon Valley tech people freely acknowledge and revel in on social media (you just have to find your way into their corners of the internet) the general public really is decades behind them in terms of awareness of technological advancements--but also unaware of the cultural and ideological trends among them as well. And the leaders of that industry are among--if not *the*--wealthiest and most influential individuals in the world: no matter how absurd and fringe their ideas are, with enough planning and strategic investments, we should not doubt that they would be able to compromise the highest levels of our government. And the tech elite like Thiel, Musk, Zuckerburg, Bezos, Sacks, Andreessen, etc., have not been shy about quite publicly and on the record expressing their anti-democracy beliefs. They have been telling us all along.
Curtis Yarvin’s historical anecdotes are typically deeply ahistorical, to the point of outright fabrication. His writing is full of misrepresentations, cherry picked examples, and bizarre anachronisms to lie about history to try and sell a version of aristocratic order that never really existed. His supposed insights into historical governance structures, such the Roman Empire (and, like, which version as there were effectively several), or 19th c European monarchies, are factually incorrect and selectively edited, and in some important ways even completely imagined. Whats more telling is his relentless promotion of Elite Theory, a theory thats been full of holes since its inception and was substantively torn apart in American discourse when it first made the rounds in the early 20th century. The American Old Republic both disproves it and proves a cognitively superior governance architecture based around democracy. The pre-centralization United States had deeply decentralized political, economic, scientific, and institutional structures with a political system dominated by decentralized and publicly accessible mass member parties that not only allowed for widespread participation but also wildly outperformed the kinds of aristocratic and hierarchical systems Yarvin calls for. And I would reiterate, his historical narratives, including about America, are verifiably false.
The technate wants to checkmate America. They are setting up the playing board and most are still unaware and worse, paralyzed by confusion and disorganized opposition.
Ok yeah sorry this is conspiracy theory nonsense. Summary: “all these bad people talk to each other and sometimes cooperate on some of their evil plans”. Apart from a cartoon summary of some of the openly stated goals of these individuals, this article is nothing. It’s SPLA-level self-evident-guilt-by-association intellectual circle-jerk.
guilt by association, sure. Guilt by association of being the people in charge, doing the things they said they were going to do, which to me logically implies they are chasing the end goals they have publically pledged allegiance to.
Thanks for stopping by, it tells me I'm on the right track.
To avoid presenting a circular argument that’s really just an ad hominem, it is useful to make your priors and assumptions explicit. In this case you need to start but arguing - or at least explicitly stipulating - Peter Thiel is a bad person and a force for evil, he hates good in all its forms, he is basically Morgoth and Musk is Sauron, etc. If you don’t do that then all you’re doing is presenting a pseudo-analysis that will make people who already agree with feel good about themselves and think you’re one of the good guys, but all you will have actually achieved is to set up a circle jerk.
I greatly respect that you are attempting to be rigorous which is why I am giving you some tough love.
i appreciate the thoughtful response. especially that you are using specificity which gives me something focused to think about. Honestly, i think we’re pretty aligned in wanting clarity and rigor. however, just to clarify where i’m coming from: i’m not making a moral argument, and i’m not assuming anyone involved is “evil.” i’m not even trying to position myself as one of the “good guys.”
my goal with pieces like this, the longer, more serious ones, is simply to lay out the landscape as i see it, as calmly and clearly as possible. i don’t try to inject outrage or drama. if the facts presented reflect poorly on certain people or ideas, i think the burden of explanation is on them, not on me to soften the picture.
that’s a bit different from the tone of my daily reports, which are more fast-and-loose, kind of end-of-day brain dumps. those tend to be scrappier and more instinctive, more stream-of-consciousness. but when i sit down to do a more focused piece like this, i try to strip all that out and let the connections and implications speak for themselves.
i totally agree it's important to avoid circular reasoning and I'm sure this and many other pieces I've written are fully of glaring journalistic tragedies but I'm not convinced that circular reasoning is one of my failings here.
i think it’s fair to raise concern when niche ideologies gain traction in influential spaces. whether or not we assign moral weight to that, i do think it’s worth understanding what those ideas are and how they move, and how they are connected. My main assumption is that 'this is the only context that matters' which I do say up front.
I may be wrong, but to me, when the people who have all conspired in this very specific way are now the ones in power, it leaves little left to rationalize. I am very new to the Yarvin/NRx context. But for me, when I finally learned about it, it really helped my anxiety just to have a name and a box and a framing to put all the chaos into. That allowed me to start settling down and making sense of some of the really outlandish things that are happening. I only hope to bring other people the same kind of grounding.
Again, thanks for the 'tough love' and i will be thinking about this type of perspective as I continue writing in the future. Hopefully you will see some 'improvement'? :)
Agreed. I deeply wanted this piece to be interesting, but halfway through all that had been described was, frankly, typical networking behavior. Useful to know, but also not unique.
Though I guess I’d have to admit that the point of the piece doesn’t seem to be in grappling with any specific viewpoint, I hate writing that does everything it can to make something seem scary while not actually describing the thing at all. Additionally, no analysis like the one this piece wants to be is going to be complete by just focusing on the last 10 years. There’s always the question of, “why has this happened?”. I’ve noticed liberals don’t really like to engage on this front: why don’t we trust institutions any more? Why has the last 15 years made liberals so unliked? I can tell ya it’s not MAGA - that theory puts the cart before the horse.
Curtis Yarvin’s historical anecdotes are typically deeply ahistorical, to the point of outright fabrication. His writing is full of misrepresentations, cherry picked examples, and bizarre anachronisms to lie about history to try and sell a version of aristocratic order that never really existed. His supposed insights into historical governance structures, such the Roman Empire (and, like, which version as there were effectively several), or 19th c European monarchies, are factually incorrect and selectively edited, and in some important ways even completely imagined. Whats more telling is his relentless promotion of Elite Theory, a theory thats been full of holes since its inception and was substantively torn apart in American discourse when it first made the rounds in the early 20th century. The American Old Republic both disproves it and proves a cognitively superior governance architecture based around democracy. The pre-centralization United States had deeply decentralized political, economic, scientific, and institutional structures with a political system dominated by decentralized and publicly accessible mass member parties that not only allowed for widespread participation but also wildly outperformed the kinds of aristocratic and hierarchical systems Yarvin calls for. And I would reiterate, his historical narratives, including about America, are verifiably false.
The oligarchs clearly got spooked by Occupy and Thiel saw the mimetic rivalry written on the wall. There’s nothing unique about the most recent iteration of tyranny, NRx is just an armchair philosophy produced by bodies that never leave the chair. Thiel thinks he’s smart but if you read his writing he’s a pure unoriginal ideologue looking for anything he can to justify his capital accumulation heaped on top of the accumulated pile he inherited from mommy and daddy. None of these people knows what’s it like to have feet of clay yet they’re pushing a “might is right” philosophy because they sit at the top protected by a system that was designed to be an oligarchy disguised as a democratic republic. They already have the system they want, it’s always been there; now they’re just getting wet over their desire for cruelty.
As an Australian watching on from afar I’ve also been doing a deep dive into this topic and I agree with your assessment. There are also lots of easily accessible evidence in the writings, actions and interviews of the “tech bros” - im their own words. And I think they benefit from people thinking Trump is stupid and irrational or whatever. It just surprises me that people do y seem to push beyond that reaction and “follow the money”. Everyone I see online from America seem so confused when the answer has been provided already - by Trump, Vance, Thiel etc etc. Even the DEI bullshit has been written about by Thiel (who was funded by Republicans when at University in the 90s). There are regular conferences and seminars within Silicon Valley to promote a technocrat agenda. Then there is Palantir. And the AI bubble that will eventually pop - unless they make the entire government reliant on their inefficient tech. Trump has checked out, he wants to Golf. He is happy to act like the leader. Musk thinks he is in control but he is just the clown out the front who will take the fall (whilst creating damage and stealing the info required for the Ai to takeover fed govt admin systems). They aren’t even hiding it - i can’t believe so few people are talking about it and acting like trump and musk are just flailing. It’s a plan. Not well thought out or executed and destined to fail - but tech boys don’t care about that. They move fast and break things. They belief in their own genius in a way that they believe they are best equipped to be the new masters of the universe. We all know they will fail, but will leave destruction in their wake - they are selling a nightmare wrapped as a dream and they’ve never cleaned up their own messes, they are warped by wealth and have no idea how to run a nation with complex and conflicting interests and the importance of some of their trade and strategic alliances or the enormous value of the knowledge base of government employees. They have never made a decision that wasn’t self serving. It’s terrifying and comedic all at once.
The fact that they don’t know how to run a nation is a non-issue for them. They simply want to skip over that whole messy part & get to the king of the hill part which they think they have a right to anyway. They seem to be sociopaths which I suppose is foundational to setting up & maintaining the extreme type of control they envision. The colossus climbing to the top on the backs of human beings they deem unworthy. How many times has history described this? This is the same power grab but carried out with hyper technology, media saturation, insidious infiltration. Hitler would be so envious.
However we must also be alert as it is more subtle here in our part of the world, but it's still happening. Our pm literally calls himself the CEO of NZ and the deputy is owned by big atlas money ideology.
this is not a purely American thing. This is something that billionaires have their fingers in all over the world. I don't know that they are trying to 'take over the world', but maybe. Also possible that they have more money than 7 gods so they can just put out feelers and attempts everywhere all at once and see who flinches first. Currently, unbelievably, it looks like US. :(
I've now gone through my second reading of this piece - it is a clear application of the work done by many examiners, but few have ever treated the works of Thucydides so reverently.
What I see is a clear need for far greater awareness in the public eye of your work and that of others willing to expose the greater truths to the light of day.
Your quote from The Nation regarding the actual closing of the Window is exactly where we are right now. Will public protest suffice to stop these days and nights from their "final" destination?
Your left-to-right pipeline theory for individuals is equally explained by the left itself shifting ever further left. How do you distinguish these two explanations? The burden would be on you, since the individuals themselves generally give this explanation.
There is a potential “geocentric fallacy” here that you need to prove out.
totally fair to bring up that people often say they’re moving right because “the left left me,” and yeah, no doubt there’s a lot of shifting happening across the spectrum. but for me, i’m zooming in on a very specific and very intentional dynamic—yarvin and folks like sacks have been pretty explicit about wanting to guide disaffected centrists further right. and when you look at the rhetoric, the media strategy, the funding, and how neatly some of these trajectories line up with that ideology, it’s hard to ignore.
i’m not claiming it’s the only factor, but it feels like one of the most consistent and motivating ones driving certain public figures from center-left to hard right. and yeah, i get that our whole political range here in the u.s. is kind of squished into the top-right quadrant of the larger compass, so none of these labels are perfect.
and your point about geocentric fallacy is fair, and it’s good practice to test and question our frameworks regularly. Sometimes i get a bit hyper focused, so I appreciate the attempt at perspective. even so, in thi scase the alignment between articulated ideologies and observable outcomes provides strong evidence that, even if not exclusively explanatory, this dynamic is indeed significantly influential.
thanks again for not simply ‘liking’ and leaving but for shining a critical light. It will take all of us. and I welcome the help.
This is a good point and I do believe I have a good answer (tangential to the person who replied to this) but I am out of town for a few days and do not have a good schedule for sitting down and focusing. I will try to circle back here in a few. Thank you for the criticism.
He does mention the idea this is more an opportunism by the thiel faction than anything. Its like yarvin is a convenient philosopher for this silicon valley, while Nrx is a convenient faction for a wayward republican party who was left in soul searching in dire straights after obama. Something that can unite silicon valley and the GOP where previously they were not.
Just finished a piece on the Dark Enlightenment and its one of the most pressing issues for modern day politics due to its inability to create new culture or identity and can only destroy due to a nihilistic hatred born out of institutional rejection. Look at curtis yarvin or Peter Thiel, most of these mens ideology were formed due to them being outcasts within their specific fields in silicon valley. Being rejected from these fields make these men want to burn it all down, the "counter elites" and goofy LARP monikers embody this
Not convinced that this simplistic and repetitive narrative posing as a well informed argument is not just another effort to emphasize the “death of democracy” fear associated with Trump. Nevertheless, I am grateful for this effort to furnish the discussion with another take on what’s happening. Thank you.
These Silicon Valley technofascists should keep in mind that the US got to be the greatest power & #1 in the world in most measures of prosperity & well-being, & people from all over the world have wanted to immigrate here, because of our democracy. These technofascists got so wealthy in large part due to the opportunity provided by the liberal California environment. Our recent decline has been due to corporatization & the concomitant erosion of our democracy, widening the chasm in wealth & power between rich & poor. What Trump & the technofascists are doing is greatly exacerbating this divide & harming our overall well-being.
nice! the classic drive-by sneer from someone who spends their nights toggling between anonymous burner accounts, podcasts about “masculine order,” and 7,000-word blog posts on why democracy was a mistake. must be exhausting pretending irony is a personality while waiting for the west to collapse just so you can feel something.
“he said technofascism, how cute.” honestly iconic. i’m printing it out and pinning it next to that graph you people love about testosterone levels in frogs. maybe i’ll light a candle.
thanks for bringing that trademark mix of smugness and zero original thought. It was getting a little boring in here what with all the constructive criticism and budding civil conversation.
Reporting done by Gil Duran, Jim Stewartson and Dave Troy bring this ideology into focus as well. There are certainly strange bedfellows with this Neo reactionary ideology shift to the Right. The tech bros riding on the MAGA wave with Trump to usher in deregulation in AI and Crypto, and Trump staying out of jail while the Christian Nationalists/Heritage Foundation ilk have their conservative agenda pushed through. They all have overlapping interests to restructure and/or end democracy. While money and power ultimately seem to be a common denominator, one has to wonder how long it will take for infighting to arise and cause dissension in the ranks.
I owe a lot to Duran but have not dug deeply into the other two. I am relatively new to the Yarvin knowledge. Its amazing how much has been going on in broad daylight, yet completely off the radar. I like to think of myself as generally pretty aware of what's going on, but I totally missed this.
The closest I got was a few years ago when I was following along with the Flannery Group mystery. But once it was solved, I never dug any deeper. That is really my biggest concern At risk of exposing my arrogance, I figure if I can be completely clueless about this then what chance does your average joe have to get a piece of the puzzle and put it together. It's incredibly open and transparent, yet invisible at the same time.
Another commenter brought up Cardinal Richelieu and his 'grey eminence' which I have recently learned was François Leclerc du Tremblay. There is some interesting correlation between this and present day NRx/Yarvin influence.
I will have to take time later (probably much later) to dig into 17th century france, but even a quick wikipedia scan shows a lot of other avenues that are tangential so I believe it to be worthwhile rabbit hole for context. Possibly more so even than tracing back through Nick Land and further (James Buchanan, ect).
While those provide a direct 'pedigree' to today's thought leaders, I think historical context of how the 'shadow princes' operate through history might provide more useful tools to us in the present day than simply knowing where it all 'came from'. Thanks for the comments.
I wonder if there's a connection there with the 'greys'. His personal blog is also currently called 'the grey mirror'. I've heard the name Richelieu before but the term 'grey eminence' is a new one. I just did a quick surface read on it. interesting and thank you for bringing that up.
Grey Tribe is from Balaji (he’s on here, you should read him, he’s tied into this web as well) - neither red nor blue, black nor white. It's the term for the people who want to live in the colorblind oligarchy he calls the Network State. But this crew all think of themselves as the man-behind-the-man-behind-the-man. It's the exerting of power without accountability for the consequences.
Richelieu is a fascinating character. I’m writing something about his use of spies and propaganda now, so he is on my mind.
This is one of the best, most concise expressions I’ve seen of the very real patterns many of us are starting to recognize, what looks like chaos or incompetence is too consistent to be either. It aligns almost perfectly with a framework I’ve been developing on the emergence of fascist elements within the American oligarchy, and how deliberate destabilization is being used as a strategy to dismantle democracy from within.
You’re absolutely right: The general public doesn’t know what hit them, and the absurdity of the truth becomes a kind of shield for those orchestrating it. Thank you for putting this into words.
Thank you for this. Good to know I'm not the only one screaming into the void here.
YES! you are NOT alone, man.
I believe that you are correct. I have been trying to raise awareness about this possibility. I keep seeing mainstream media, the general public, and even our elected officials expressing exacerbation and confusion, chalking this up to an extreme amount of incompetence--questioning "how could every move this administration make seem to have no rational outcome but to increase economic and geopolitical instability and institutional dysfunction?" I think if we keep doing this, we give them a tremendous advantage. If EVERY decision and policy move they make seems to have no rational outcome but to increase instability and dysfunction, it is not irrational to conclude that--particularly because Yarvin, Land, and even some of Russia's plans for dismantling democracy call for this--that is *exactly the intended effect*. Even the rhetoric that seems so random and insane as to annexing Canada, purchasing Greenland, taking back the Panama Canal has express roots in this theories. The push for increasing governmental involvement in cryptocurrency is expressly rooted in this as a major step in decentralizing finance. The fact that DOGE seems to be, sometimes even accidentally, revealing all sorts of mistake, fraud, corruption, and even evidence of a corrupt surveillance state--all goes to creating a crisis of public faith in our institutions. All of this culminates in creating public panic, fear, confusion--and a perception that our democratic institutions are irreparably broken, dysfunctional, and vulnerable to corruption, making the public more receptive to accepting a new form of governance once they have pushed on the fault lines enough to bring those institutions to the brink of inevitable collapse.
Even the realignment with Russia and the alienation and antagonization of our allies is expressly aligned with this--this ideology believes the era of nation-states is over: they think the wealthy and powerful should be able to acquire and use land and resources at will without any limitation imposed by law, regulation, or norm. They don't just want American democracy to die, they don't just believe American democracy is inefficient, they believe the *liberal democratic order in general* is inefficient and in terminal decline. Russia shares this exact prerogative--in fact, the father of neo-Eurasianism and traditionalism that defines and drives Putin's Russia, Aleksandr Dugin--sometimes called "Putin's brain" because of the influence his philosophies have on Putin's policy decisions--has since December of this year gone on the record several time commending Trump, Vance, and Musk--as well as Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin (!)--for this policy moves, for finally seeing enlightenment liberalism for what it is and abandoning it and the corrupt, fraudulent liberal globalist world order that Putin's Russia has been intent on destroying for decades. Dugin draws clear conclusions and analogies to all of this, crediting Thiel for his financial influences in making it happen and crediting Yarvin and Land and other such thinkers for contributing to the development and rise of illiberal far-right reactionary philosophies in the US. Russia as a whole is celebrating this, saying they foresee a great multipolar world in which both "Great America" and "Great Russia" can end the liberal, democratic hegemony once and for all.
There comes a point where the coincidences grow so plentiful that you have to, instead, call it "pattern recognition." I believe that the aburdity and fringe nature of this philosophy--the fact that the mainstream/general public has barely heard of its existence--is a huge advantage to them and threat to democracy because even once you try to tell people about this, they immediately discredit it as some insane sci-fi conspiracy. But, as the Silicon Valley tech people freely acknowledge and revel in on social media (you just have to find your way into their corners of the internet) the general public really is decades behind them in terms of awareness of technological advancements--but also unaware of the cultural and ideological trends among them as well. And the leaders of that industry are among--if not *the*--wealthiest and most influential individuals in the world: no matter how absurd and fringe their ideas are, with enough planning and strategic investments, we should not doubt that they would be able to compromise the highest levels of our government. And the tech elite like Thiel, Musk, Zuckerburg, Bezos, Sacks, Andreessen, etc., have not been shy about quite publicly and on the record expressing their anti-democracy beliefs. They have been telling us all along.
Curtis Yarvin’s historical anecdotes are typically deeply ahistorical, to the point of outright fabrication. His writing is full of misrepresentations, cherry picked examples, and bizarre anachronisms to lie about history to try and sell a version of aristocratic order that never really existed. His supposed insights into historical governance structures, such the Roman Empire (and, like, which version as there were effectively several), or 19th c European monarchies, are factually incorrect and selectively edited, and in some important ways even completely imagined. Whats more telling is his relentless promotion of Elite Theory, a theory thats been full of holes since its inception and was substantively torn apart in American discourse when it first made the rounds in the early 20th century. The American Old Republic both disproves it and proves a cognitively superior governance architecture based around democracy. The pre-centralization United States had deeply decentralized political, economic, scientific, and institutional structures with a political system dominated by decentralized and publicly accessible mass member parties that not only allowed for widespread participation but also wildly outperformed the kinds of aristocratic and hierarchical systems Yarvin calls for. And I would reiterate, his historical narratives, including about America, are verifiably false.
Right on. "the good old days" were never all good, even the ones I fondly remember
How has elite theory been "torn apart"?
The technate wants to checkmate America. They are setting up the playing board and most are still unaware and worse, paralyzed by confusion and disorganized opposition.
Ok yeah sorry this is conspiracy theory nonsense. Summary: “all these bad people talk to each other and sometimes cooperate on some of their evil plans”. Apart from a cartoon summary of some of the openly stated goals of these individuals, this article is nothing. It’s SPLA-level self-evident-guilt-by-association intellectual circle-jerk.
guilt by association, sure. Guilt by association of being the people in charge, doing the things they said they were going to do, which to me logically implies they are chasing the end goals they have publically pledged allegiance to.
Thanks for stopping by, it tells me I'm on the right track.
To avoid presenting a circular argument that’s really just an ad hominem, it is useful to make your priors and assumptions explicit. In this case you need to start but arguing - or at least explicitly stipulating - Peter Thiel is a bad person and a force for evil, he hates good in all its forms, he is basically Morgoth and Musk is Sauron, etc. If you don’t do that then all you’re doing is presenting a pseudo-analysis that will make people who already agree with feel good about themselves and think you’re one of the good guys, but all you will have actually achieved is to set up a circle jerk.
I greatly respect that you are attempting to be rigorous which is why I am giving you some tough love.
i appreciate the thoughtful response. especially that you are using specificity which gives me something focused to think about. Honestly, i think we’re pretty aligned in wanting clarity and rigor. however, just to clarify where i’m coming from: i’m not making a moral argument, and i’m not assuming anyone involved is “evil.” i’m not even trying to position myself as one of the “good guys.”
my goal with pieces like this, the longer, more serious ones, is simply to lay out the landscape as i see it, as calmly and clearly as possible. i don’t try to inject outrage or drama. if the facts presented reflect poorly on certain people or ideas, i think the burden of explanation is on them, not on me to soften the picture.
that’s a bit different from the tone of my daily reports, which are more fast-and-loose, kind of end-of-day brain dumps. those tend to be scrappier and more instinctive, more stream-of-consciousness. but when i sit down to do a more focused piece like this, i try to strip all that out and let the connections and implications speak for themselves.
i totally agree it's important to avoid circular reasoning and I'm sure this and many other pieces I've written are fully of glaring journalistic tragedies but I'm not convinced that circular reasoning is one of my failings here.
i think it’s fair to raise concern when niche ideologies gain traction in influential spaces. whether or not we assign moral weight to that, i do think it’s worth understanding what those ideas are and how they move, and how they are connected. My main assumption is that 'this is the only context that matters' which I do say up front.
I may be wrong, but to me, when the people who have all conspired in this very specific way are now the ones in power, it leaves little left to rationalize. I am very new to the Yarvin/NRx context. But for me, when I finally learned about it, it really helped my anxiety just to have a name and a box and a framing to put all the chaos into. That allowed me to start settling down and making sense of some of the really outlandish things that are happening. I only hope to bring other people the same kind of grounding.
Again, thanks for the 'tough love' and i will be thinking about this type of perspective as I continue writing in the future. Hopefully you will see some 'improvement'? :)
I will continue to follow with interest. I will in no way claim to have the answers myself.
You're a clown, on the right track. Next stop - circusville. 🤦🏼♂️
Agreed. I deeply wanted this piece to be interesting, but halfway through all that had been described was, frankly, typical networking behavior. Useful to know, but also not unique.
Though I guess I’d have to admit that the point of the piece doesn’t seem to be in grappling with any specific viewpoint, I hate writing that does everything it can to make something seem scary while not actually describing the thing at all. Additionally, no analysis like the one this piece wants to be is going to be complete by just focusing on the last 10 years. There’s always the question of, “why has this happened?”. I’ve noticed liberals don’t really like to engage on this front: why don’t we trust institutions any more? Why has the last 15 years made liberals so unliked? I can tell ya it’s not MAGA - that theory puts the cart before the horse.
They are actively gutting our govt. ala Curtis Yarvin, Thiels philosophy— letting people die of disease— they want 25-40% to die—- See Peoject 2025
And Project 2025 is axiomatically evil, why? (You don’t know, you haven’t read it, you’re repeating what someone else told you to think about it).
Curtis Yarvin’s historical anecdotes are typically deeply ahistorical, to the point of outright fabrication. His writing is full of misrepresentations, cherry picked examples, and bizarre anachronisms to lie about history to try and sell a version of aristocratic order that never really existed. His supposed insights into historical governance structures, such the Roman Empire (and, like, which version as there were effectively several), or 19th c European monarchies, are factually incorrect and selectively edited, and in some important ways even completely imagined. Whats more telling is his relentless promotion of Elite Theory, a theory thats been full of holes since its inception and was substantively torn apart in American discourse when it first made the rounds in the early 20th century. The American Old Republic both disproves it and proves a cognitively superior governance architecture based around democracy. The pre-centralization United States had deeply decentralized political, economic, scientific, and institutional structures with a political system dominated by decentralized and publicly accessible mass member parties that not only allowed for widespread participation but also wildly outperformed the kinds of aristocratic and hierarchical systems Yarvin calls for. And I would reiterate, his historical narratives, including about America, are verifiably false.
This explains the smug self confidence of the public faces.
The oligarchs clearly got spooked by Occupy and Thiel saw the mimetic rivalry written on the wall. There’s nothing unique about the most recent iteration of tyranny, NRx is just an armchair philosophy produced by bodies that never leave the chair. Thiel thinks he’s smart but if you read his writing he’s a pure unoriginal ideologue looking for anything he can to justify his capital accumulation heaped on top of the accumulated pile he inherited from mommy and daddy. None of these people knows what’s it like to have feet of clay yet they’re pushing a “might is right” philosophy because they sit at the top protected by a system that was designed to be an oligarchy disguised as a democratic republic. They already have the system they want, it’s always been there; now they’re just getting wet over their desire for cruelty.
As an Australian watching on from afar I’ve also been doing a deep dive into this topic and I agree with your assessment. There are also lots of easily accessible evidence in the writings, actions and interviews of the “tech bros” - im their own words. And I think they benefit from people thinking Trump is stupid and irrational or whatever. It just surprises me that people do y seem to push beyond that reaction and “follow the money”. Everyone I see online from America seem so confused when the answer has been provided already - by Trump, Vance, Thiel etc etc. Even the DEI bullshit has been written about by Thiel (who was funded by Republicans when at University in the 90s). There are regular conferences and seminars within Silicon Valley to promote a technocrat agenda. Then there is Palantir. And the AI bubble that will eventually pop - unless they make the entire government reliant on their inefficient tech. Trump has checked out, he wants to Golf. He is happy to act like the leader. Musk thinks he is in control but he is just the clown out the front who will take the fall (whilst creating damage and stealing the info required for the Ai to takeover fed govt admin systems). They aren’t even hiding it - i can’t believe so few people are talking about it and acting like trump and musk are just flailing. It’s a plan. Not well thought out or executed and destined to fail - but tech boys don’t care about that. They move fast and break things. They belief in their own genius in a way that they believe they are best equipped to be the new masters of the universe. We all know they will fail, but will leave destruction in their wake - they are selling a nightmare wrapped as a dream and they’ve never cleaned up their own messes, they are warped by wealth and have no idea how to run a nation with complex and conflicting interests and the importance of some of their trade and strategic alliances or the enormous value of the knowledge base of government employees. They have never made a decision that wasn’t self serving. It’s terrifying and comedic all at once.
The fact that they don’t know how to run a nation is a non-issue for them. They simply want to skip over that whole messy part & get to the king of the hill part which they think they have a right to anyway. They seem to be sociopaths which I suppose is foundational to setting up & maintaining the extreme type of control they envision. The colossus climbing to the top on the backs of human beings they deem unworthy. How many times has history described this? This is the same power grab but carried out with hyper technology, media saturation, insidious infiltration. Hitler would be so envious.
Watching from NZ I see it the same.
However we must also be alert as it is more subtle here in our part of the world, but it's still happening. Our pm literally calls himself the CEO of NZ and the deputy is owned by big atlas money ideology.
this is not a purely American thing. This is something that billionaires have their fingers in all over the world. I don't know that they are trying to 'take over the world', but maybe. Also possible that they have more money than 7 gods so they can just put out feelers and attempts everywhere all at once and see who flinches first. Currently, unbelievably, it looks like US. :(
I've now gone through my second reading of this piece - it is a clear application of the work done by many examiners, but few have ever treated the works of Thucydides so reverently.
What I see is a clear need for far greater awareness in the public eye of your work and that of others willing to expose the greater truths to the light of day.
Your quote from The Nation regarding the actual closing of the Window is exactly where we are right now. Will public protest suffice to stop these days and nights from their "final" destination?
I find a flame of hope left.
Your left-to-right pipeline theory for individuals is equally explained by the left itself shifting ever further left. How do you distinguish these two explanations? The burden would be on you, since the individuals themselves generally give this explanation.
There is a potential “geocentric fallacy” here that you need to prove out.
totally fair to bring up that people often say they’re moving right because “the left left me,” and yeah, no doubt there’s a lot of shifting happening across the spectrum. but for me, i’m zooming in on a very specific and very intentional dynamic—yarvin and folks like sacks have been pretty explicit about wanting to guide disaffected centrists further right. and when you look at the rhetoric, the media strategy, the funding, and how neatly some of these trajectories line up with that ideology, it’s hard to ignore.
i’m not claiming it’s the only factor, but it feels like one of the most consistent and motivating ones driving certain public figures from center-left to hard right. and yeah, i get that our whole political range here in the u.s. is kind of squished into the top-right quadrant of the larger compass, so none of these labels are perfect.
and your point about geocentric fallacy is fair, and it’s good practice to test and question our frameworks regularly. Sometimes i get a bit hyper focused, so I appreciate the attempt at perspective. even so, in thi scase the alignment between articulated ideologies and observable outcomes provides strong evidence that, even if not exclusively explanatory, this dynamic is indeed significantly influential.
thanks again for not simply ‘liking’ and leaving but for shining a critical light. It will take all of us. and I welcome the help.
This is a good point and I do believe I have a good answer (tangential to the person who replied to this) but I am out of town for a few days and do not have a good schedule for sitting down and focusing. I will try to circle back here in a few. Thank you for the criticism.
Thank you, looking forward to it.
He does mention the idea this is more an opportunism by the thiel faction than anything. Its like yarvin is a convenient philosopher for this silicon valley, while Nrx is a convenient faction for a wayward republican party who was left in soul searching in dire straights after obama. Something that can unite silicon valley and the GOP where previously they were not.
That’s more what I believe.
Just finished a piece on the Dark Enlightenment and its one of the most pressing issues for modern day politics due to its inability to create new culture or identity and can only destroy due to a nihilistic hatred born out of institutional rejection. Look at curtis yarvin or Peter Thiel, most of these mens ideology were formed due to them being outcasts within their specific fields in silicon valley. Being rejected from these fields make these men want to burn it all down, the "counter elites" and goofy LARP monikers embody this
Not convinced that this simplistic and repetitive narrative posing as a well informed argument is not just another effort to emphasize the “death of democracy” fear associated with Trump. Nevertheless, I am grateful for this effort to furnish the discussion with another take on what’s happening. Thank you.
These Silicon Valley technofascists should keep in mind that the US got to be the greatest power & #1 in the world in most measures of prosperity & well-being, & people from all over the world have wanted to immigrate here, because of our democracy. These technofascists got so wealthy in large part due to the opportunity provided by the liberal California environment. Our recent decline has been due to corporatization & the concomitant erosion of our democracy, widening the chasm in wealth & power between rich & poor. What Trump & the technofascists are doing is greatly exacerbating this divide & harming our overall well-being.
Wow! He said technofascist! That’s cute.
nice! the classic drive-by sneer from someone who spends their nights toggling between anonymous burner accounts, podcasts about “masculine order,” and 7,000-word blog posts on why democracy was a mistake. must be exhausting pretending irony is a personality while waiting for the west to collapse just so you can feel something.
“he said technofascism, how cute.” honestly iconic. i’m printing it out and pinning it next to that graph you people love about testosterone levels in frogs. maybe i’ll light a candle.
thanks for bringing that trademark mix of smugness and zero original thought. It was getting a little boring in here what with all the constructive criticism and budding civil conversation.
Reporting done by Gil Duran, Jim Stewartson and Dave Troy bring this ideology into focus as well. There are certainly strange bedfellows with this Neo reactionary ideology shift to the Right. The tech bros riding on the MAGA wave with Trump to usher in deregulation in AI and Crypto, and Trump staying out of jail while the Christian Nationalists/Heritage Foundation ilk have their conservative agenda pushed through. They all have overlapping interests to restructure and/or end democracy. While money and power ultimately seem to be a common denominator, one has to wonder how long it will take for infighting to arise and cause dissension in the ranks.
I owe a lot to Duran but have not dug deeply into the other two. I am relatively new to the Yarvin knowledge. Its amazing how much has been going on in broad daylight, yet completely off the radar. I like to think of myself as generally pretty aware of what's going on, but I totally missed this.
The closest I got was a few years ago when I was following along with the Flannery Group mystery. But once it was solved, I never dug any deeper. That is really my biggest concern At risk of exposing my arrogance, I figure if I can be completely clueless about this then what chance does your average joe have to get a piece of the puzzle and put it together. It's incredibly open and transparent, yet invisible at the same time.
Another commenter brought up Cardinal Richelieu and his 'grey eminence' which I have recently learned was François Leclerc du Tremblay. There is some interesting correlation between this and present day NRx/Yarvin influence.
I will have to take time later (probably much later) to dig into 17th century france, but even a quick wikipedia scan shows a lot of other avenues that are tangential so I believe it to be worthwhile rabbit hole for context. Possibly more so even than tracing back through Nick Land and further (James Buchanan, ect).
While those provide a direct 'pedigree' to today's thought leaders, I think historical context of how the 'shadow princes' operate through history might provide more useful tools to us in the present day than simply knowing where it all 'came from'. Thanks for the comments.
This is a better write up of Yarvins thinking than anything Yarvin himself has produced.
Thiel himself reminds me Richelieu, the grey eminence both revealing and concealing his powers, depending on the situation.
Great work.
I wonder if there's a connection there with the 'greys'. His personal blog is also currently called 'the grey mirror'. I've heard the name Richelieu before but the term 'grey eminence' is a new one. I just did a quick surface read on it. interesting and thank you for bringing that up.
Grey Tribe is from Balaji (he’s on here, you should read him, he’s tied into this web as well) - neither red nor blue, black nor white. It's the term for the people who want to live in the colorblind oligarchy he calls the Network State. But this crew all think of themselves as the man-behind-the-man-behind-the-man. It's the exerting of power without accountability for the consequences.
Richelieu is a fascinating character. I’m writing something about his use of spies and propaganda now, so he is on my mind.
indeed. I touched on the reds, blues and greys in the 'part II' to this article about network states. linked in this article.
Very familiar with Balaji, as he is one of the most (if not most) vocal about the literal end-game plans they are gunning for.