Curtis Yarvin helped inspire DOGE. Now he scorns it.
Silicon Valley’s neo-monarchist muse compares the Trump administration’s bureaucracy slashers to an orchestra of chimpanzees.
Before gutting the federal workforce became Elon Musk’s job, it was Curtis Yarvin’s dream.
Yarvin — a Silicon Valley blogger and software developer who argues for replacing American democracy with a dictatorship — spent years outlining an assault on what he calls “the cathedral” of elite power and consensus. Long before the U.S. DOGE Service launched in January, Yarvin coined his own four-letter acronym for bureaucracy-slashing: RAGE, or “Retire All Government Employees.”
Although he says he has never met Musk, Yarvin is a powerful influence among those carrying out DOGE’s radical cost-cutting agenda, two advisers to the effort said. One, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to describe the group’s work, said Yarvin had offered “the most crisp articulation” of what DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, is trying to achieve.
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It’s not every day a neo-monarchist’s Substack helps shape disruptive federal policies. But Yarvin, 51, isn’t celebrating. In fact, in several recent interviews with The Washington Post, he offered a surprisingly harsh assessment of DOGE, comparing it to an orchestra of chimpanzees trying to perform Wagner. He also said the group’s attitude toward federal workers resembles that of a brash but insecure man who repels potential sexual partners.
“In the worst aspects of DOGE, there’s this aspect of the incel who gets mad at the girl who won’t sleep with him,” Yarvin said, using the term for so-called involuntary celibates. “That’s not a powerful attitude.”
The mixing of high and low analogies is characteristic of Yarvin, whose wildly discursive blog posts — which on a given day might analyze American politics with reference to Shakespeare, Stalin and “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension” — have become required reading for the extremely online right. Among the better-known members of his audience are Vice President JD Vance and pro-Trump Silicon Valley investors Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel.
Even in a political culture habituated to extremes, Yarvin plants his flag on the fringe. He has written that the late South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela was a terrorist comparable to the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, admiringly described President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a more effective autocrat than Hitler and argued for replacing the existing global order with thousands of “sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/05/08/curtis-yarvin-doge-musk-thiel/