JD Vance-Peter Thiel-Curtis Yarvin 2024: The Neoreactionary Dream Team
by Melissa Ryan
| July 22, 2024
JD Vance, a 39-year-old whose resume makes Sarah Palin seem experienced, is officially on the Trump ticket. The faux-hillbilly turned venture capitalist turned US Senator is now vying to be the next Vice President of the United States. This week, let’s focus on the men ultimately responsible for Vance, Project 2025, and the infusion of Silicon Valley cash to bolster Trump’s campaign – Curtis Yarvin and his billionaire patron Peter Thiel.
Longtime readers will be familiar with Curtis Yarvin, who blogged for years as Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin founded neoreactionism AKA the Dark Enlightenment, a political movement popular among certain tech circles. Neoreactionism calls for the fall of democracies and a return to monarchy and aristocracy. Shockingly, neoreactionaries believe that new aristocracy should come from tech and business. Yarvin’s writing fixates on the power of the so-called “Cathedrals”: media, academia, and government institutions which he and his followers believe shape public opinion and rule America. (It’s worth noting that Yarvin’s parents were government civil servants.)
A Vox profile from 2022 explains Yarvin’s deal pretty well:
But he stands out among right-wing commentators for being probably the single person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the U.S. government could be toppled and replaced — “rebooted” or “reset,” as he likes to say — with a monarch, CEO, or dictator at the helm. Yarvin argues that a creative and visionary leader — a “startup guy,” like, he says, Napoleon or Lenin was — should seize absolute power, dismantle the old regime, and build something new in its place.
To Yarvin, incremental reforms and half-measures are necessarily doomed. The only way to achieve what he wants is to assume “absolute power,” and the game is all about getting to a place where you can pull that off. Critics have called his ideas “fascist” — a term he disputes, arguing that centralizing power under one ruler long predates fascism and that his ideal monarch should rule for all rather than fomenting a class war as fascists do. “Autocratic” fits as a descriptor, though his preferred term is “monarchist.” You won’t find many on the right saying they wholly support Yarvin’s program — especially the “monarchy” thing — but his critique of the status quo and some of his ideas for changing it have influenced several increasingly prominent figures.
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Came upon this article at Daily Kos
The mind behind Vance
Just when you think conservatives can’t get any crazier. This!
So we now get a peek inside who really controls Trump.
Ya no!