Curtis Yarvin: 10 things to know about 'mad philosopher' behind Trump 2.0

Time of India

2 days ago

Once upon a meme, in a faraway land called the Internet, a man named Curtis Yarvin wrote 120,000 words calling for the end of democracy. Most people would've laughed. But billionaires don't laugh—they fund.
And now, the man who once described San Francisco's underclass as potential biodiesel is being taken seriously by people who carry nuclear briefcases. Yarvin—formerly Mencius Moldbug, currently the "Dark Elf" of the dissident right—isn't just an edgelord with a blog. He's the house philosopher of Silicon Autocracy. From whispering sweet nothings to Peter Thiel to influencing J.D. Vance's wet dreams of a bureaucracy-free America, Yarvin has become the Rasputin of the red-pilled.
If you're still catching up, here are 10 things you need to know before the crown lands on his head.
1. The Blogger Who Would Be King
Yarvin's empire began with a blog—and a manifesto longer than War and Peace.
Back in 2008, when Obama still symbolised hope and change, Yarvin was quietly uploading screeds under the alias Mencius Moldbug. His pièce de résistance? An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives—a 120,000-word hand grenade tossed into the cathedral of liberal consensus.
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Yarvin argued that democracy was a bug, not a feature; the American Revolution a tragic mistake; and that we'd be better off under a corporate monarchy.
His ideal ruler? Not Plato's philosopher-king, but a startup bro with nukes and a board of directors.
2. The Cathedral Must Burn
Yarvin's biggest idea is that liberalism is a religion—and Harvard is its Vatican.
According to him, America isn't ruled by elected officials. It's ruled by 'The Cathedral'—an unholy alliance of media, academia, and bureaucracy.
Not through conspiracy, but through soft consensus. NPR, Yale, the Times, and your HR department are all saying the same thing, because they all worship the same gods: Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion. And like any heretic, Yarvin wants the Cathedral razed, its priests defrocked, and its temples converted into data centres.
3. From Nerd to Neo-Reactionary
He was once a liberal coder with a ponytail. Then he took the red pill—and never came back.
Yarvin didn't always fantasise about abolishing elections. He started as a leftie tech bro who dropped acid, read Foucault, and dated sex-positive feminists from Craigslist. His pivot to fascist adjacent came post-9/11, post-Iraq, and post-pat-on-the-head career path. Disillusioned with liberal consensus and wired on Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Yarvin stumbled into the Dark Enlightenment—an internet rabbit hole where monarchy, race science, and Austrian economics coexisted peacefully, like tax havens and startup founders.
4. Urbit: Coding the Kingdom
He didn't just want to build a regime—he wanted to program one. Literally.
Urbit was Yarvin's dream of a digital feudalism: a decentralised computer network where every user owns a 'planet,' governed by a new coding language he invented himself. Investors like Andreessen Horowitz gave him millions. It didn't work. Urbit is now mostly a libertarian Discord with stars and galaxies. But the point wasn't usability—it was theology.
Like Yarvin's politics, Urbit is elegant in theory, cultish in practice, and unusable by anyone with a day job.
5. Philosopher to Billionaires
Peter Thiel liked what he saw. So did Vance. Now Yarvin's whisper is public policy.
Thiel gave Yarvin his nod of approval, Marc Andreessen calls him a friend, and J.D. Vance openly cites him as inspiration. For the first time in modern politics, someone who believes elections should be abolished is influencing people who can abolish them.
When DOGE—Trump's Department of Government Efficiency—purged civil servants en masse, it echoed Yarvin's RAGE plan: Retire All Government Employees. When Trump called Gaza 'the Riviera of the Middle East,' it sounded suspiciously like a Yarvin Substack post.
6. The Red-Pilled Rasputin
He wants to seduce the elite—one 'high elf' at a time.
In Yarvin's Tolkien-infused self-image, he's not a tyrant—he's a Dark Elf, sent to whisper forbidden truths into the ears of beautiful elites.
Liberals are 'high elves,' conservatives are 'hobbits,' and he is the enigmatic sage showing them how to burn down Mordor and replace it with a charter city. He doesn't want MAGA rallies. He wants salons with QR-coded footnotes and neoreactionary art hoes sipping biodynamic wine.
7. He Cries at Lunch, But Fantasises About Genocide
His affect is fragile intellectual. His policies would give Genghis Khan pause.
Yarvin cries. A lot. He cries about Baltimore's homeless, about his kids' future, and sometimes while quoting obscure 18th-century monarchists.
But behind the tears lies a worldview in which the state should have the power to exile, isolate, or digitally sedate entire populations. He once suggested putting San Francisco's underclass in solitary VR to avoid 'the moral stigma of genocide.' His ideas are brutalist architecture for the soul: cold, sharp-edged, and antiseptically inhumane.
8. The Style Is the Substance
Yarvin isn't read for truth. He's read for transgression.
You don't read Yarvin to be convinced.
You read him to feel naughty. His prose is baroque, sarcastic, and full of italicised rants that feel like a very smart person talking down to you at a BDSM dinner party. He doesn't argue—he overwhelms. Like a one-man DDOS attack on liberal sensibility. He weaponises footnotes, memes, and 19th-century philosophers to convince a disaffected Zoomer that maybe, just maybe, freedom was a mistake.
9. Courtier to a Counter-Establishment
He failed at building a product.
So he built a vibe.
Urbit flopped. His blog fizzled. But Yarvin thrives in the cultic vibe economy of the dissident right: Dimes Square, Substack, Thiel-funded salons, and MAGA masquerades. He reads poetry at fascist-adjacent film festivals. He writes love letters to crypto-lords. He poses for moody portraits while decrying democracy as 'a lie told by clerics to peasants.' And like any good aristocrat, he never lets anyone forget that he's read more books than you.
10. The Joke's Over. He's in the Room Now.
For a while, Yarvin was performance art. Then the performance became policy.
In 2008, he was the punchline. In 2025, his ideas echo from the Oval Office to ICE holding cells to Harvard funding withdrawals. Trump's blitzkrieg of civil society, Elon's reign over federal agencies, and Vance's plans to bulldoze the courts all bear his fingerprints. The dissident right no longer needs to form a vanguard. It is the establishment.
The Dark Elf got invited into the tower—and now he's rearranging the furniture.
Postscript: The Philosopher-King of Nothing
Yarvin is a man of ideas with no workable blueprint. His brilliance lies in diagnosing the rot, not fixing the structure. He romanticises kings, cosplays monarchism, and mourns Enlightenment liberalism like an ex-girlfriend he'd still insult in group chats. But give him credit: he saw the appetite for authoritarianism long before the rest of us. And while liberals were busy fact-checking, Yarvin was vibes-crafting.
In the age of aesthetics, the crown goes not to the competent—but to the most convincingly unhinged.