April 3, 2024: A Blunder in Gaza

Yarvin on permanent war; Gantz calls for new elections; Mama earth in med school

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The Big Story

Napoleon’s chief of police, Joseph Fouché, is said to have remarked of his boss’s execution of the Duke of Enghien on trumped-up treason charges, “It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” Something similar seems to be the case with the IDF’s deadly drone strikes on a World Central Kitchen (WCK) convoy in Gaza on Monday. 

The WCK incident has provoked a wave of international condemnation—including, as we noted yesterday, from the WCK leadership and from the governments of the dead aid workers. The Biden administration, per usual, issued a raft of contradictory statements, simultaneously defending Israel and pouring fuel on the fire. For the pro-Israel crowd, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby declared in a Tuesday press conference that there was “no evidence” that the strike was intentional—contra the insinuations of a reporter—and, furthermore, that the State Department’s independent investigations have “not found any incidents where the Israelis have violated international humanitarian law.” But later in the day, Joe Biden said in a statement that he was “outraged and heartbroken” by the strikes and stated flatly that Israel “has not done enough to protect aid workers” and “civilians.” Last we checked, Biden outranks Kirby on the org chart, so we’ll consider his response the “official” one. 

Israel, of course, is playing a rigged game in Gaza. Whatever the specifics of the WCK strike, this sort of mistake is a regular feature of the form of war practiced by Western militaries. In a Wednesday blog post, Elder of Ziyon compiled a list of some of the most egregious incidents of U.S. strikes against civilians over the past two decades. These include several deadly strikes on Afghan weddings (killing 47 and 37 civilians, respectively, in two separate strikes in 2008) and the 2015 shelling of a Doctors Without Borders trauma hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, which killed 42 doctors and patients. Such incidents emerged from some combination of bad intelligence, miscommunication, the inherent confusion of war, and mistakes from troops on the ground, which is why claims of American war crimes never got much traction outside the marginal anti-American left. But the United States is sovereign, whereas the Israelis are trapped in a quasi-client relationship with a fickle patron that would rather be friends with Iran, and so they are subjected to a flagrant double standard that preaches humanitarianism while drawing on popular myths about Jews as bloodthirsty psychopaths or grubby ethnic sectarians. That, unfortunately, is why you don’t want to be a client.

Plus, some information has emerged about the incident that may be, if not exculpatory, at least potentially mitigating. The United Kingdom’s i magazine reported that three of the WCK aid workers who died on Monday were ex-British-military personnel, at least two of whom were working with a private intelligence firm that had been hired by WCK to provide security. And a December article in Bloomberg noted that WCK’s chief, celebrity chef José Andrés, hated “bureaucracy” and had a habit of publicly berating employees for requesting even minimal security or safety measures to operate in dangerous areas. Could such an organization have failed to notify the IDF about the presence of armed security? It’s certainly possible. 

But the reaction from Israeli officials suggests an awareness that something went seriously wrong with the strike. In addition to the apologies issued on Tuesday by IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi released a video statement Tuesday evening in which he called the strikes a “grave mistake” and apologized for the “unintentional harm to the members of WCK.” He announced the creation of a new humanitarian-aid command center to “improve the way we coordinate aid distribution in Gaza” and blamed the strike on “a misidentification, at night, during a war, in very complex conditions.” Halevi also reiterated prior Israeli promises to conduct an independent investigation and praised WCK’s work in Gaza. 

An Israeli intelligence source quoted in a Tuesday night story in Haaretz, however, was more scathing, blaming the incident on field commanders acting in violation of IDF regulations. According to the source, IDF regulations require that strikes against “sensitive targets” such as aid organizations must be approved by senior officers such as division commanders or even the chief of staff. The story notes that “it’s not yet clear whether the decision to open fire on the aid convoy was sent to senior commanders for approval,” but the source suggested this was likely the case, telling Haaretz that “in Gaza, everyone does as he pleases” and “every commander sets the rules for himself.” Another “senior Israeli official” told The Times of Israel on Wednesday that the strike was a result of a culture of “shooting first and asking questions later” in certain corners of the IDF. As the official went on to say:

Soldiers are operating under immense pressure in very difficult conditions in which Hamas embeds itself within the civilian population, but the rules of engagement are designed to help deal with such conditions, and they’re too often being ignored.

Given the byzantine political maneuvering currently going on Israel, it’s fair to take those quotations with a grain of salt. But we weren’t seeing those kinds of leaks during previous incidents, such as the stampede at the aid convoy in February. 

Adding to the difficulty for Israel is that, as we noted yesterday, WCK is one of Israel’s preferred partners for aid delivery in Gaza, and indeed the Israeli government had been publicly touting its work with WCK only a few weeks ago. As Times of Israel Editor-in-Chief David Horovitz put it in a Wednesday op-ed:

Israel had a core, declared interest in the work that WCK was doing in Gaza. This is an avowedly nonpolitical, highly efficient humanitarian aid organization, and one that responded swiftly to Israeli civilian organizations’ appeals for experienced assistance in feeding tens of thousands of displaced Israelis in the immediate aftermath of October 7. It had become one of the key organizations that Israel was working with in Gaza, an increasingly central alternative to the reviled, Hamas-riddled UNRWA. And the specific logistics of its operations across the Strip were supposed to be tightly coordinated with the IDF.

The WCK leadership, including Andrés, is now livid about the strike, and has, for the moment, suspended all operations in Gaza. With the United States pressuring Israel to allow for the return of UNRWA and the Palestinian Authority after the war, Israel can ill afford to alienate the groups it would prefer to work with instead. That, in addition to the inherent tragedy of the incident, may help explain the many official apologies. 

More generally, the fiasco of the WCK strike points to the problems with U.S. demands that Israel drag out the war indefinitely to conduct it more humanely—preferences with which the Israelis have largely complied, despite considerable grumbling. War, including “humane” war, involves the death of innocent people, and that is especially true of the type of war Israel is fighting in Gaza: an urban war against hardened targets embedded within civilian infrastructure, against an enemy whose strategy is predicated on maximizing civilian casualties and using these to wage a media war in the court of international public opinion. It is the siege of Mosul—if ISIS were six times larger and had the support of Iran, Qatar, Al Jazeera, large swathes of the international NGO complex, and elements of the U.S. government. 

Israel should, of course, take whatever steps it can to minimize the risk of another incident such as the WCK airstrike. But, ultimately, the only way to stop the killing is to stop the war—and the best way to do that is by winning it as quickly as possible.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Apropos of the first item in The Rest, we’re re-upping Jacob Siegel’s 2023 profile of Curtis Yarvin, America’s most controversial political theorist

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The Rest

→Quote of the Day: 

The bogus 20th-century laws of war that replaced the elegant 18th-century laws of war are a perfect example of this. The logic of perpetual peace is the logic of permanent war—literally, because no one is allowed to win. How is this not obvious? Why is this not screaming at everyone who looks at the problem for a second?

That’s Curtis Yarvin, dark lord of internet reaction, responding to an essay by the communist writer Sam Kriss on what Kriss describes as Israel’s war of “extermination” in Gaza. Yarvin’s response is (as usual) wide-ranging, but he offers a useful reminder that the sort of humanitarian war practiced by the United States—not only in Gaza but also in Afghanistan and Iraq—has a great track record of never solving anything because it regards “winning” as an obsolete concept. Yarvin also notes the destruction generally wrought by the Western desire to role-play as the “protectors” of “oppressed” people in far-flung lands of whom they know nothing. 

Read the rest here:

Gaza and the laws of war

→Israeli War Cabinet member and opposition leader Benny Gantz on Wednesday called for new elections in September—the first time that Netanyahu’s leading U.S.-backed rival has done so since the start of the war. A spokesman for Netanyahu’s Likud Party criticized Gantz’s call as “petty politics” and said that “early elections will lead to paralysis and division” and harm the upcoming Rafah operation. Opposition chairman Yair Lapid, meanwhile, said that September was “too late” for new elections. Recent public opinion polling has painted a contradictory picture, with some polls showing Gantz leading and some showing Netanyahu leading, although the general trend has been a slow but steady improvement in Netanyahu’s numbers.

→Donald Trump is leading Joe Biden in six of seven swing states, according to a Wednesday poll in The Wall Street Journal, and is tied with Biden in the seventh. The poll, of 600 registered swing-state voters, shows Trump with between a two- and eight-point lead in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, while Trump and Biden are tied in Wisconsin. Biden won six of those states in 2020, losing only North Carolina. Respondents rated Trump more highly on the economy, immigration, and “mental and physical fitness needed to be president,” but preferred Biden by a 45-33 margin on abortion. 

→Possibly related to that previous item, The Washington Free Beacon has obtained audio of a speaker in a mandatory “structural racism” class for first-year medical students at UCLA leading the class in chants of “Free Palestine” and thanking native tribes for preserving “this small part of mama earth that the settlers call L.A.” The speaker, a local activist named Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia, appeared on stage with her face obscured by sunglasses, a keffiyeh, and a Puerto Rican-flag snapback and proceeded to inveigh against “white science” and the “crapatalist lie” of “private property.” Gray-Garcia was invited to speak to the “Structural Racism and Health Equity” class, which was made mandatory for medical students as part of the university’s “anti-racism roadmap,” announced in 2020 in response to the George Floyd riots. As the Beacon notes, the same class became the subject of a federal civil rights complaint in January for separating students in race-based affinity groups (a practice adopted by the White House in the wake of the Gaza war) and has also come under fire for teaching units on “settler colonialism” and assigning the essay “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor”—a claim that the world learned the hard way on the morning of Oct. 7. 

Listen to it here: https://freebeacon.com/campus/ucla-med-school-requires-students-to-attend-lecture-where-speaker-demands-prayer-for-mama-earth-leads-chants-of-free-palestine/

→You know American politics are getting strange when we find ourselves agreeing with Brianna Wu, a video-game developer and failed congressional candidate who rose to internet celebrity as a feminist critic of “Gamergate,” but, well, welcome to 2024:

The reference to chanting “Bomb Tel Aviv,” by the way, comes by way of our old friend Abdullah Akl, the Harvard graduate student and field director for Linda Sarsour’s MPower Change, who also serves as a “leader” of Within Our Lifetime (in both roles, he is funded by George Soros). Mr. Akl was captured on video earlier this week leading a crowd in New York City in the chant, in Arabic, “Strike, Strike, Tel Aviv. Abu Obaida, our beloved.” Abu Obaida is the spokesman for Hamas’ military wing. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Poetry After October 7th, by Maxim D. Shrayer

The high arts are becoming an open sewer fueled by antisemitic hate. How can we continue to publish and create?

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Today’s Back Pages essay is an excerpt. Read the full version here.

The Red-Pill Prince

How computer programmer Curtis Yarvin became America's most controversial political theorist

By Jacob Siegel

In his first public appearance after five years of semiofficial banishment, Curtis Yarvin began to cry. It was late February 2020 and Yarvin was the special guest at a live podcast in Los Angeles. A graphic promoting the event shows the computer engineer turned political philosopher, then 46 years old, wearing his black leather motorcycle jacket and wire-framed glasses and staring out with practiced intensity. Over Yarvin’s left shoulder floats a bust of the deceased rapper Lil Peep.

The moody digital aesthetic is called vaporwave. Ma, Pa, have you heard of vaporwave? It is a very of-the-moment style that uses retro computer graphics to evoke the feeling of haunting nostalgia for a vanishing human presence.

The metaphor was apt. In 2014, Yarvin—who had spent seven years blogging about politics and society under the name Mencius Moldbug—went silent, shifting his attention back to his grand project of building a functional software stack called Urbit that promised to revolutionize computing. But his political pronouncements soon caught up to him. In 2016, after the second planned talk at a computer programming conference was canceled on account of his political views, Yarvin found himself writing lines like: “I am not an ‘outspoken advocate for slavery,’ a racist, a sexist or a fascist.” As anyone who’s been on the internet lately can tell you, a person who must publicly deny that they are a fascist has already lost. When the invitations stopped coming, Yarvin didn’t protest.

“When I invited him to be a guest at that event, he was truly radioactive,” the podcast’s organizer, a young intellectual entrepreneur named Justin Murphy, told me recently. The scene brought out LA art hipsters, connoisseurs of civilizational decline, and PayPal founder Peter Thiel. The billionaire, who was one of the first investors in Facebook and has been a longtime patron of Yarvin’s, drank Pabst Blue Ribbon and ate pizza. Thiel’s car idled outside the club, engine on, driver behind the wheel, ready in case the need arose for a sudden exit. Rumor has it that Thiel takes this precaution wherever he goes, but it was not out of place that evening. Murphy, who spent several years in his 20s participating in militant “black bloc” anarchist protests, was worried antifa might show up to protest the event.

The night went off without a hitch. Yarvin had chosen an ideal venue to reemerge, with podcasts providing one of the only channels left to reach the public now that the glossy magazines, publishing houses, and other arteries for circulating new ideas had been choked off by the narrowing band of acceptable opinions.

Depending on what circles you run in, it can seem like everyone now has an opinion about Curtis Yarvin—and that includes me. We were introduced in 2017 when I received a short, unsolicited email from him calling me a “fake writer” working in a “fake century.” The email arrived after I’d published an essay that mentioned Yarvin a handful of times and referred to him as “an architect of antidemocratic, Neoreactionary politics.” The brashness, it turned out, was just Yarvin’s way of getting my attention. Thus began an occasional correspondence that has included a handful of interactions over the last five years. And so, without giving it a great deal of thought, I added myself to the extended network of people being courted, outraged, and shaped by the man and his work.

Like Niccolò Machiavelli, to whom he is sometimes compared, Yarvin defines himself as an amoral realist who invented a new theory of government that upends established doctrines of political morality. Starting in the late 2000s, his name—not his real name, he was still known then by his blogging pseudonym—began to be whispered among some of the most powerful people in the country, a secret society made up of disaffected members of the American elite.

Shortly after Donald Trump entered the White House, reports started to circulate that Yarvin was secretly advising Trump strategist Steve Bannon. His writing, according to one article, had established the “theoretical groundwork for Trumpism.”

Yarvin denied the rumors, sometimes playfully and at other times strenuously. But he was consistent in his criticisms of the Trumpian approach to politics. Mass populist rallies and red MAGA hats struck him as merely a weak imitation of democratic energies that had already died out. “Trump is a throwback from the past, not an omen of the future,” he wrote in 2016. “The future is grey anonymous bureaucrats, more Brezhnev every year.”

What Yarvin is, if one wants to be accurate, is the founder of neoreaction, an ideological school that emerged on the internet in the late 2000s marrying the classic anti-modern, anti-democratic worldview of 18th-century reactionaries to a post-libertarian ethos that embraced technological capitalism as the proper means for administering society. Against democracy. Against equality. Against the liberal faith in an arc of history that bends toward justice.

Instead, neoreactionaries subscribe to the classical idea that history moves in cycles. In an era when the iconic Shepard Fairey portrait of Barack Obama captured the HOPE of the nation, Yarvin and his followers were busy explaining why liberal democracy was already doomed.

Unlike some of the other neoreactionary writers that emerged in the last 20 years, Yarvin possessed a style that, even when discoursing at great length on the gold standard or obscure historical matters, never suggested powdered wigs. He wrote like what he was: a hyperintellectual Ivy League autodidact and wiseass tech geek masking his childhood insecurities with an aura of infallibility, who shared the same set of subcultural and sitcom references found in anyone else his age. At its best, this approach made difficult ideas accessible—not to mention viral. In one of his earliest blog posts, Yarvin birthed the now-ubiquitous meme of “the red pill,” a metaphor he borrowed from The Matrix movies and turned into a worldwide catchphrase describing the revelation of a suppressed truth that shatters progressive illusions and exposes a harsh underlying reality.

In Yarvin’s worldview, what keeps American democracy running today is not elections but illusions projected by a set of institutions, including the press and universities, that work in tandem with the federal bureaucracy in a complex he calls the Cathedral. “The mystery of the Cathedral,” Yarvin writes, “is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.”

Living Americans might be able to glean a sense of the phenomenon Yarvin describes in the current public discourse. It has often seemed in recent years that every few weeks has brought a new instance in which journalists and experts instantaneously, almost magically converged on shared talking points related to the hysteria du jour—cycling through moral crusades to free children from cages at the U.S. border, save the post office from a fascist coup, label the filibuster a tool of white supremacy, and so on. The power of the Cathedral is that it cannot be seen because it is located everywhere and nowhere, baked into the architecture of how we live, communicate, and think.

The night that Yarvin reemerged onto the scene at the LA event, the story that moved him to tears concerned the life of the English writer Freda Utley, who became a communist in 1928—an era, he observed archly, when “anyone who was smart or cool was a communist.” Utley moved to the Soviet Union and a few years later her husband was arrested and shipped to the gulag never to be seen again. She fled to the United States with her infant son and tried to warn her friends that their imagined utopia was really a police state. “Of course, her friends are like, ‘Do I know you?’ Who is this anti-Soviet person knocking at the door? They’re like, ‘Fuck you.’” Yarvin arrived at the moral of his story: “You really shouldn’t expect the material rewards of success to come along with the spiritual rewards of telling the truth.” He swallowed a sob. “You really shouldn’t,” he said, and wiped a tear from his eye.

In Yarvin’s parable, he is both the betrayed figure of Utley, martyred for telling the truth, and the above-it-all narrator explaining how the world really works. To his readers, his immense, fortresslike body of work offers one of the only redoubts where they can glimpse the realities of power behind the political circus. To his skeptics, he is a minor fraud whose claims to be a truth-telling iconoclast belie a fundamental affinity with the status quo. Yarvin’s calls to do away with democracy and turn, say, Elon Musk into America’s new CEO king—that’s just the liberal technocratic system we already have on speed, an acceleration into the most dystopian aspects of the endless neoliberal present. To his critics, he is, as noted, a fascist. They point to a handful of his statements from a decade ago, including one in which he argued that certain races were better suited to slavery than others, and to the fact that the central pillar of his outlook is an avid opposition to the principles of democracy and equality. Yarvin, they say, is not a victim but the sender-off to the gulags; behind his tears, he plots to oppress minorities and tear down whatever remains of liberal democracy.

The essence of Yarvin as a historical figure begins not with his politics but his talents as a computer engineer, or programmer, the latter of which is his preferred label since he sees himself as a builder of things that work, not simply a manipulator of symbols. To separate his roots in technology from the politics he developed is to miss what is most powerful about him—his understanding of the hidden designs behind the systems of knowledge and power that keep both computers and societies running. The universal rule that he deduced is almost mystical in its simplicity: Order is good, not merely in an instrumental sense because it leads to virtuous outcomes; it is good in itself. Whatever leads to more of it is also good, while anything that produces disorder is bad.

While conservatives who have come to embrace Yarvin speak of restoring natural rights and using state power to direct the common good, for him, “it is impossible to go directly from hypocrisy to morality. A cleansing bath of amoral realism must intervene.” Yarvin is not a nationalist or a populist, nor even a conservative. Rather, he is the signature example of a political theorist born after the death of 20th-century mass political movements, on the unsettled terrain of the internet. Whether you like it or not, Yarvin is the philosopher of, at the very least, our near future.

***

The father of neoreaction was raised in the bosom of the American state. His paternal grandparents were Jewish American communists. Yarvin’s father worked for the U.S. government as a foreign service officer, which took his family overseas to Portugal, Cyprus, and the Dominican Republic. His mother was a Protestant from Westchester County who eventually also joined the civil service, as did Yarvin’s stepfather. The progeny of this Jewish-WASP-Stalinist, civil service, Cold War liberal American heritage was a child math prodigy and computer whiz who liked to write poetry. It didn’t make social life easy, especially when his family returned to the United States just as he began high school.

“I had already skipped one grade back in Fairfax County and they did an admission test, so I skipped two more and then I’m 11 in ninth grade,” he told me. “Then we come back to the States and I go to an American public high school in Columbia, Maryland, and I’m a 12-year-old sophomore, which is definitely wack.”

At 15, Yarvin entered college as part of Johns Hopkins’ longitudinal Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. A year later, he transferred to Brown University in Rhode Island as a legacy admission to the Ivy League liberal arts college, where his parents had met in the mid-’60s. After graduating, it was on to a computer science Ph.D. program at Berkeley. He dropped out after a year and a half to take a tech job at the height of the go-go ’90s dot-com era.

In late adolescence, Yarvin had a formative experience on an early internet message board called Usenet. “It was a decentralized system, and more importantly it had this amazing form of admission control because everyone on it was an engineering student or worked at a tech company or something,” Yarvin told me. He participated on forums like talk.bizarre, absorbing the inside jokes and new iterative patterns of thinking that were being developed on the outpost of a still-innovative and experimental digital culture. Occasionally he posted a poem or short piece of fiction to the board.

The end came in 1993 when America Online, the first mass internet provider, offered Usenet access to its subscribers—resulting in a flood of uninitiated, unwashed provincials overrunning the community. “You had this sort of de facto aristocracy that didn't know it was an aristocracy, and then it fell apart.”

“After the dot-com crash, I was left with a newly acquired girlfriend (who would become my wife), a few hundred thousand dollars, and a place in San Francisco,” Yarvin told me of his early career. The buyout came from his job at a mobile software company that was founded in 1996 as Libris before changing its name to Unwired Planet, and then Phone.com. The settlement was “considerably less than ‘fuck you’ money,” Yarvin said, but enough to finance an extended self-education in history and political theory that was attained by searching through Google’s ‘library of everything, ever,’ which was brand new at the time.

“My ideas really came from reading the Austrian School—Mises and Rothbard—and then Hoppe. Hoppe opened a kind of door to the pre-revolutionary world for me,” Yarvin has said. A German-born political theorist and leading proponent of Austrian School economics, Hans-Hermann Hoppe has called himself an anarcho-capitalist, a title borrowed from his mentor Murray Rothbard. Hoppe theorized a distinction between monarchy, which he defined as “privately owned government,” and democracy, classified as “publicly owned government.” In the introduction to his 2001 book, Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe called “the transition from monarchy to democracy” a source of “civilizational decline.”

From Hoppe, Yarvin took the idea that “all organizations, big or small, public or private, military or civilian, are managed best when managed by a single executive.”

If democracy is so decrepit and ineffective, one might ask how it is that America became the world’s great superpower and maintained that position for the last century. Yarvin’s answer contains two parts: first, that nothing lasts forever. Second, while American supremacy may once have rested on innovation and growth, the country, now a bloated empire, has been surviving for decades on the power of myth-making and mass illusions.

Whether or not he can be compared to Machiavelli the man, it is correct to describe Yarvin as a Machiavellian, in the meaning given to that term by the American political writer James Burnham, a one-time follower of Leon Trotsky who later became a committed anti-communist. Like the historical figures chronicled in Burnham’s book The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, Yarvin believes that one of the worst aspects of democracy is the fact that it rarely exists. Because democracy is the rule of the many, and the rule of the many is inherently unstable, democracies rarely last long.

Burnham argues that all complex societies are in effect oligarchies ruled by a small number of elites. To hide this fact and legitimize their rule in the eyes of the masses, oligarchies employ the powers of mystification and propaganda. Indeed, Yarvin believes that America stopped being a democracy sometime after the end of World War II and became instead a “bureaucratic oligarchy”—meaning that political power is concentrated within a small group of people who are selected not on the basis of hereditary title or pure merit but through their entry into the bureaucratic organs of the state. What remains of American democracy is pageantry and symbolism, which has about as much connection to the real thing as the city of Orlando has to Disney World.

In place of a functional democratic system, Yarvin came to believe, there now exists an industrial-scale symbolic apparatus that generates the illusion of political agency necessary for society’s real rulers to carry out their business undisturbed. American voters still go to the polls to pick their leader, but the president is a ceremonial figure beholden to the permanent bureaucracy.

“The structure of democratic societies creates two tiers of power,” observed the French sociologist and eminent defender of liberalism, Raymond Aron, in his appraisal of Burnham’s book. While one tier of power is made up of industrialists, military generals, and other decision-makers operating in the shadows, in public their interests are represented by the second tier made up of “those who know how to talk.” The problem identified by the Machiavellians, says Aron, is that while the talkers are not necessarily competent leaders, they nevertheless gain power because “debating regimes oil the wheels for those who know how to use words.” There you have the two paths to power in a democracy: secrecy for the plutocratic persons of action, or, for those in the public political class, skill at deceit.

While Yarvin’s vision has as much or more in common with left critiques of the state dating back to the 1960s, his solutions are openly reactionary—looking back to the 17th century rather than forward to a promised socialist-utopian future.

***

In 2007, Yarvin, writing as Mencius Moldbug, started his blog Unqualified Reservations. His themes, now clearly established, were reflected in his earliest published work: “Democracy as an Adaptive Fiction,” “Why, When, and How to Abolish the United States,” and “Against Political Freedom.” At the time, Yarvin’s paid work was still with the San Francisco-based Urbit where, with funding from Thiel, he was immersed in a yearslong project to write a new programming language from scratch and decentralize the ownership of data. Even in the Olympian culture of Silicon Valley, where the microdosing transhumanists all had startups promising to engineer a brave new humanity, Urbit’s project was considered wildly ambitious, if not a bit mad.

The initial Moldbug audience was made up of fellow Silicon Valley misfits and disaffected amateur intellectuals with high-speed internet connections, the kind of people interested in his sardonic style and unconventional approach to history and political thought.

Everywhere one looked in the Moldbuggian scheme, things were not what they seemed. Beneath the surface of modern progressivism, for instance, Yarvin found that the sacraments and dogmas of America’s founding Protestant religion had been preserved. The now common criticism that the liberal activist culture of wokeness is a kind of secular religion picks up on arguments Yarvin was making in 2007 about mainstream liberal universalism, which he dubbed “CryptoCalvinism.”

This new techno-monarchist ideology of neoreaction developed in connection with other post-millennial intellectual movements in Silicon Valley like "post-rationalism." By the late-2000s, while the U.S. culture and economy appeared stagnant, if not in outright decline, the technology sector was expanding its power and reach as apparently the only industry left in America still capable of innovation. The ideas coming out of the valley reflected that disparity and a growing feeling there that American liberal democracy was an obsolete operating system, impeding the tech sector’s growth and with it the march of progress.

Other key figures to emerge in neoreaction included the writer Michael Anissimov, and the British philosopher Nick Land, a former Marxist and devotee of French critical theory who gave the title Dark Enlightenment to his extended study of Yarvin’s oeuvre. Adjacent to neoreaction was the digital fascism of the “alternative right,” which emerged a few years later. The alt-right, as it was also known, was another internet-based ideological movement but one that emphasized anarchic nihilism, rabid racism, and demonization of Jews. Neoreactionaries, by contrast, while comfortable expressing their own racial and ethnic bigotries, tended to downplay their political importance and eschewed the online Nazi role-playing of the alt-right as dim-witted and self-destructive. In a series of early essays, “Why I am not a White Nationalist” and “Why I am not an Anti-Semite,” Yarvin offered an analysis of those ideologies that was not entirely unsympathetic before ultimately rejecting them.

How could he be a fascist, Yarvin protested, when he so clearly detested “the masses” and “the people”—two of fascism's most celebrated subjects?

Perhaps the best known of the Silicon Valley democracy skeptics was Thiel. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009. “The great task for libertarians,” he declared, “is to find an escape from politics in all its forms—from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’”

Yet for Yarvin, even though libertarianism may be right about the best way to organize society, it fails because it is unserious about power. An all-powerful state is necessary, a sovereign Leviathan of the kind envisioned by Thomas Hobbes, to impose order by force on a level of such absolute authority that it can then disappear from day-to-day life.

Having concluded that democracy is a failed and dying form of governance, one that increasingly produces more disorder than order, Yarvin provided a vision for what could come next: an enlightened corporate monarchy that would only arrive after a hard reboot of the political system. It was a vision of total regime change, but one achieved without any violence or even activism since those efforts were doomed to fail and would therefore only strengthen the system they sought to overthrow. For those who believed in it, the next step was to generate the ideas that a future elite would use to run the country once it seized power.

Read the rest here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/red-pill-prince-curtis-yarvin