Latest news with #PassagePress
The Guardian
03-06-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
How the far right seeks to spread its ideology through the publishing world
The far right US publisher Passage Press is now part of Foundation Publishing Group and it is connected via a Foundation director, Daniel Lisi, to Network Press, whose only title to date is an 'effective accelerationist' manifesto by tech-right venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Another rightwing publisher, science fiction publisher Ark Press, appears connected to Chapter House which Lisi, a literary scenester in Los Angeles, originally co-founded as an independent publisher of poetry, sci-fi and esoterica, but which now presents itself as a homeschooling resource. The developments illuminate the far right's efforts to disseminate ideologically charged material as art in the US, and raise questions about its place in the broader culture wars waged by the Trump administration which is carrying out a broad attack on what it sees as liberal culture. Jordan Carroll is author of the book Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, an account of the far right's recent efforts to advance their cause via genre fiction and the fan cultures surrounding it. Carroll pointed to 'a long tradition on the right of creating counter-institutions whose purpose is to develop a popular culture based on reactionary values in order to counterbalance what they have seen as the corrosive influence of the mainstream media, publishing, and academia'. Lisi, the publisher and director, spent years as a face in Los Angeles's diverse and left-leaning literary scene. He has now emerged as a player in a sprawling far-right cultural push, with his role in Foundation, Network, Passage and Ark revealed in company filings, trademarks, open source materials and public records. In a recently self-published book, Lisi effectively laid out a blueprint that is reflected in Passage's efforts to mainstream far-right writers by selling their work, offering high-end editions, and convening public events throughout the country. Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the Guardian it was 'another example of the far right moving to directly impact culture, and especially young people, with extremist and anti-democratic beliefs'. She added: 'These efforts represent another front in the culture wars, one that is pushing America further from democracy and equality and closer to autocratic rule.' The Guardian repeatedly contacted Lisi for comment. He did not respond. However, hours after the last request, a post from Passage's X account, framed as announcement, reflected the information in this reporting. The Guardian previously reported that Passage Press was founded in 2021 by Jonathan Keeperman, at that time a lecturer at the University of California Irvine who had long operated in far-right circles online under the online pseudonym 'L0m3z'. Passage's authors include Curtis Yarvin, whose antidemocratic ideas have influenced the Trump administration, neo-reactionary Nick Land, and Steve Sailer, who has been described as a 'white supremacist' and a 'proponent of scientific racism'. Passage recently announced four new books to its newsletter subscribers whose authors include Taki Theodoracopulos, Charles Cornish-Dale and Paul Gottfried. Theodoracopulos, heir to a Greek shipping fortune, was handed a 12 month suspended sentence for attempted rape by a Swiss court in 2023. Following the conviction–currently under appeal–he resigned as a columnist from UK conservative magazine The Spectator after 47 years. During his Spectator run, Theodoracopulos peppered his column anti-Black slurs, described New York's Puerto Ricans as 'fat, squat, ugly, dirty and unbelievably loud', praised Greece's neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party as 'good old-fashioned patriotic Greeks', and in a column on the 1944 D-Day landings wrote of the Wermacht that 'my heart goes out to those defenders'. A column in which Theodoracopulos claimed that 'Orientals … have larger brains and higher IQ scores. Blacks are at the other pole' forced an apology from his former editor Boris Johnson, then campaigning to be mayor of London. Theodoracopulos also founded paleoconservative publications including the American Conservative and Taki's Magazine; the latter was edited by Richard Spencer, home to white nationalists like John Derbyshire, and was the venue in which Gavin McInnes first announced the formation of the Proud Boys. Alongside a standard edition, Passage is offering a $295 'patrician edition' The Last Alpha Male, a collection of Theodoracopulos's writings. Cornish-Dale is a British 'neofascist lifestyle influencer' who operated under the pseudonym Raw Egg Nationalist until he was identified last year by UK anti-racist advocacy group Hope Not Hate. Gottfried is a paleoconservative academic and the editor in chief of Chronicles Magazine, which the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote in 2017 'caters to the more intellectual wing of the white nationalist movement' though Gottfried has disavowed any connection with white nationalism. With Spencer he coined the term 'alternative right' in 2008 to describe rightwing critics of then mainstream conservative idea. As reported in 2024, as 'L0m3z', Keeperman had become a key influencer in far-right circles. Since that reporting, the publisher has continued exerting influence over the New Right, and Keeperman has emerged as something of a movement celebrity. In January, a Passage-sponsored Coronation Ball celebrating Trump's inauguration attracted wide coverage. In early May, Keeperman garnered a friendly interview on the podcast of New York Times opinion writer Ross Douthat, in which he objected to the 'over-feminization of society' and stifling 'racial taboos', at one point referring to Donald Trump as the 'great father of the American people'. Recent business and trademark filings show Passage has moved under the umbrella of Foundation Publishing Group, connecting it to Lisi and other publishing imprints. US Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO) records reveal that Foundation Publishing Group applied to register Passage Publishing as a trademark on 3 May 2024, an application that was granted on 4 February. The application was filed and signed by Lisi, identified in the filing as vice president of Foundation Publishing Group, and it indicated that Passage was no longer an independent entity, but an assumed business name of Foundation Publishing Group. The filing also implied that Foundation now owns Passage's catalog: the USPTO requires trade mark applicants to provide a specimen of a trademark in use, and Foundation's specimen was the cover of Noticing, the Passage-published anthology of Sailer's often far-right writing. The Glendale address provided in the application is also associated in California company records with at least three other companies: Not A Cult, Tetra House Publishing Group, and Day Job Capital, all of which count Lisi as an officer. Passage has appended the same address to recent emails sent to newsletter subscribers. Information from data brokers indicate that it is also Lisi's home address. Foundation Publishing Group was first registered in California in September 2021 under Lisi's name. A July 2024 statement of information lists Lisi, Keeperman, and Matthew Kahn as member-managers, with Keeperman identified as CEO. A subsequent February 2025 statement of information lists only Keeperman as CEO. Then on 2 April, Keeperman filed a request to dissolve the California entity. Meanwhile, Foundation Publishing Group was registered in Delaware on 12 March, with a branch registered in Oklahoma on 25 March. An online book distribution platforms indicate that the titles formerly published by Not A Cult are now being distributed by Ingram under the banner of Foundation Publishing Group. Ark Press, meanwhile, was launched on 14 January, with science fiction writer DJ Butler reproducing a press release in a post to his X account. Butler is a senior editor at Ark according to his personal LinkedIn, X biography and podcast appearances. The release posted by Butler indicated that the press's pitch would be to 'often-neglected Great American Male Reader'. Also, the imprint would launch 'with the acquisition of New York Times best-selling author Larry Correia, who will begin a new contemporary fantasy series scheduled for 2026'. Like Passage in 2021, Ark launched with a writing competition, directing prospective entrants to a landing page on submission platform Submittable. The URL of the submittable page is and at the time of reporting the banner – which featured an Ark Press logo – linked through to the Chapter House website. A 30 January story in science fiction Substack Fandom Pulse quoted Butler as saying that ''we're in the same corporate group [as Passage Press]. Ark has separate editorial and management from Passage. We wish those guys well, and we hope they feel benevolently disposed toward us.'' The Guardian emailed Butler for comment. Chapter House attracted coverage from Forbes when it was launched in 2022 as a merger between Lisi-founded Not A Cult and Black Ocean, founded by the poet Janaka Stucky. At that time, the new partners had broad ambitions for the merged entity, telling readers that 'Chapter House will also stand up a raft of additional imprints.' A 2023 snapshot of the Chapter House website reflects the plans and direction that Stucky and Lisi laid out for Forbes; at the time of reporting, however, the same website presented a radically different vision. Copy on the website reads, 'Chapter House offers a new home school curriculum rooted in the richness of the Western tradition: its myths and deeds, its heroes and thinkers, its enduring questions and hard-won insights.' The Guardian contacted Stucky for comment. He said that the joint venture had been launched with the hope of 'streamlining operations and consolidating back office overhead'. He added: 'Last year we amicably agreed to end that partnership. I took Black Ocean with me as I exited Chapter House, and incorporated it as a non-profit at the end of 2024 – which felt more aligned with Black Ocean's mission and vision.' Stucky declined to comment on whether Lisi's new, more political ventures had played any role in his decision. Correia, the author Ark launched with, was prominent as the founder of the so-called 'sad puppies', an effort to influence voting in science fiction's Hugo Awards between 2013 and 2017 that in subsequent years became a rightwing anti-diversity campaign . Carroll told the Guardian that Correia was 'a conservative libertarian gun enthusiast' who 'presented his work as an antidote to what he saw as the dull, pretentious, left-leaning bias of contemporary genre fiction that was being recognized by the Hugos'. Although they did not succeed in sweeping the awards, along with the Gamergate campaign happening at the same time, Carroll said that it 'demonstrated that small but well-coordinated groups of online reactionaries can be disruptive even to real-world institutions'. Carroll added: 'Ark Press's web presence contains many signals that it's intended to be a throwback to a prior era,' pointing out that 'there's a long tradition of far-right speculation that casts space exploration in science fiction and the real world as an expression of white men's settler-colonial spirit'. Like Keeperman, Lisi's foray into far-right publishing represents a significant pivot from a long sojourn in a liberal cultural and professional world. By Lisi's own account in A Book About Books, self-published this March, he spent more than a decade in and around Southern California's literary scene, first working in nonprofits and publishing ventures before moving on to start his own publishing companies. Lisi claims early stints of employment in literary ventures: an early internship with Long Beach poet, Derrick C Brown; a 'media and membership manager' at PEN America's Los Angeles chapter, which he says ended in 2013; and more recent experience 'teach(ing) workshops' and 'developing the curriculum' for a publisher's workshop series run by the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB). The Guardian contacted Brown, PEN and LARB for comment on his history with these organizations. In a response, LARB disputed his claims about his work with them. Lisi claims to have spent time 'developing the curriculum for the Los Angeles Review of Books Publishers Workshop, a program targeting graduate students that want to begin their careers in book or magazine publishing', which involved 'years of teaching hundreds of students in real time as I've built the thing I teach about.' LARB spokesperson Irene Yoon wrote in an email that Lisi 'even gets the name of the program wrong: our program is the LARB Publishing Workshop'. She said that the program had been running since 2017, Lisi 'came as a guest speaker to share about Not a Cult for a 90-minute Zoom session in 2021 & 2022', and in 2023 'we invited him to help lead our Book Track, a smaller subset of the program for 30 students that met for 4.5 out of some 30 workshop hours a week.' According to Yoon, Lisi was replaced as course lead in 2024. In 2016, Lisi co-founded the indie publisher Not A Cult according to company filings and press releases. The filings list LA-based artist Hollis Hart as Lisi's co-founder, and she was still part of the venture in 2020 according to media reports. On the current about page of Not A Cult's website, however, only Lisi, Matthew Kahn, and Long Beach based jewelry artist Ian Delucca are named as team members. The Guardian contacted Delucca for comment. While the company published a flurry of books in the late teens, the company website and book retailer sites indicate that its output has slowed since 2022, with only one book released in 2024. The Not A Cult social media accounts also appear moribund, with Only one Instagram post in 2024 and no YouTube posts for almost four years. In A Book About Books, one emphasis in Lisi's advice to aspiring publishers is to run events, which he says support 'the core task of vibemaking'. At one point he writes: 'While capital intensive, there are ways of standing up tours that can have a reasonable target of breaking even with a solid ticketing model,' later adding 'curating a space where an audience can have a good time is probably one of the most valuable things on the planet Earth.' He says that a 'throughline' in his history as a publisher is 'events – avenues where your readership can engage in a meaningful way is the core spirit of publishing in general.' In the last year, Passage has maintained a brisk schedule of events including Sailer's book tour, a debate at Harvard between Curtis Yarvin and Professor Danielle Allen, and a coronation ball at the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC for Trump's inauguration. A Book about Books also promotes a business model that might be exemplified in another Lisi venture, Network Press, which Lisi claims credit for founding on his personal website. He points to the capacity for influencers to act as their own distributors in an attention economy where 'awareness is driven by two forms of fuel: authority and vibes.' Later Lisi writes that technologies that make book production and distribution more efficient open up opportunities for adaptations of older vanity press models that would allow 'publishers and distributors to prove their value-add to … celebrities, influencers, high net worth individuals, and so on.' There is no business entity whose name directly corresponds with that of network press, but the domain was registered in December 2023 according to whois records. Since then, Network has only released one book: the Techno Optimist Manifesto, written by rightwing Silicon Valley venture capitalist Andreessen, which has been credited with touching off broader knowledge of the 'e accelerationist' movement, which rejects all constraints on capitalism and technological development. Although the manifesto was first self-published in 2023, Network offers a $495 founders edition with an 'anodized and engraved titanium sheet pressed into front and back cover' and 'leather wrap on board'.
New York Times
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Virtues of Ideological Art
What is successful right-wing art? I posed that question to Jonathan Keeperman, who runs the far-right publisher Passage Press, on my podcast a couple of weeks ago, and you can tell that it's a tricky question because he took two separate bites at answering it, offering one response in our conversation and a revised one in a subsequent post on his Substack. In the first answer he suggested that we should understand 'right-wing art' as any art that tells the whole truth about the world, free from the ideological strictures and sensitivity reads imposed by contemporary progressivism. To me that seemed conveniently circular — reality has a well-known conservative bias, therefore any truthtelling art is inherently right-wing — and he tacitly acknowledged as much in his follow-up; there he suggested that the very concept of 'right-wing art' might be a category error, since art can't be circumscribed by politics and the artist's job is to be a truthteller and let the political implications take care of themselves. The second answer is the more attractive one for creators and critics, but I don't find it quite satisfying either. Certainly it doesn't resolve the tension inherent in Keeperman's own publishing project, which is trying to break away from the agitprop that often defines right-wing culture in modern America (think Dinesh D'Souza documentaries and Christian message movies), while also trading on the idea that there is special aesthetic value in the forbidden territory of far-right prose, among writers (from H.P. Lovecraft down to Curtis Yarvin) deemed dangerous because of their racism or sexism or authoritarianism. The same tension shows up in more mainstream quests to fix conservatism's broken relationship to the higher forms of culture. In his new book, '13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven't Read),' Christopher Scalia is self-consciously trying to educate conservative readers into a deeper appreciation of literary culture — to add more literary fiction to the works of political theory and history that many right-wing readers favor, and to expand the familiar list of novelists beloved by conservatives beyond 'Lord of the Rings,' 'Atlas Shrugged' and maybe 'Brideshead Revisited.' In doing this he's aware of the risk of instrumentalizing the works he's celebrating, and so he cautions that 'any artist who elevates his political point above the techniques and elements of his craft is creating propaganda, not art.' But he's still urging people to read Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walter Scott and P.D. James because they illuminate a particular philosophical or ideological perspective on the world, not for the sake of their artfulness alone. Which leaves open the question of whether conscious philosophical or ideological motivations can themselves create particular artistic value, rather than yielding inevitably to propaganda. I think the answer has to be yes — that the concepts of 'successful right-wing art' and 'successful left-wing art' are both meaningful descriptions, not just category errors or excuses for agitprop, insofar as both 'right' and 'left' perspectives on the world capture aspects of reality that can be non-propagandistically portrayed. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Extremist blogger to debate Harvard professor at unsanctioned campus event
An extremist blogger, who has become the Trump administration's so-called 'dark enlightenment' sage, is debating a Harvard professor of political philosophy at an unsanctioned event on its campus next week. Curtis Yarvin, who was for a time an obscure darling of Silicon Valley and the broader spectrum of the fringe right wing, has emerged as a major philosophical influence on key Capitol Hill power brokers. He is considered a favorite of Vice-President JD Vance, an ally of the tech mogul Peter Thiel, and having the ear of senior state department official, Michael Anton, among others. Yarvin's outlandish politics vouching for dictatorships and a new 'American Caesar', as he discussed in a 2021 podcast with Anton, in place of liberal democracy has made him both a much-maligned and loved figure. Yarvin has also promoted blatant rightwing extremism, in the present and past: under his pen name Mencius Moldbug, he argued the racist, Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik was no more a terrorist than Nelson Mandela; he has also recently asserted the well-trodden, bigoted and historical trope that Black Americans under slavery in the old south, enjoyed much better living standards as chattel. Last December, Robert Evans, an extremism researcher and podcast host, flagged to the Guardian how Yarvin's writings had swayed the Magaverse. 'He emerged into a rightwing media space where they had been talking about the evils of liberal media and corrupt academic institutions for decades,' said Evans. 'He has influenced a lot of people in the incoming administration and a lot of other influential people on the right.' But now, the mainstreaming of Yarvin's ideas has been taken to new and dangerous platforms with his connections to White House figures and the unsanctioned debate with a respected professor, Danielle Allen, at the most prestigious academic institution in the world. The tête-à-tête between Yarvin and Allen is being staged by Passage Press – a far-right book publishing house that publishes proto-fascist thinkers and other extremist literature. Billed as a discussion on 'American democracy' a Passage Press flyer spread online says it is 'not affiliated with Harvard University', nor is it 'a Harvard University program or activity'. 'Students asked me to participate,' said Allen, when asked about why she was debating Yarvin. Multiple requests for comment sent to Harvard about the debate went unanswered. In a meandering and widely cited interview with the New York Times in January, Yarvin tried laundering his ideas under the guise of advocating for a CEO-led US government, which is shorthand for an unelected dictatorship. Whenever challenged to answer direct questions on some of his most controversial blogs, Yarvin obfuscated. Throughout the interview, it was clear that one of the main sources of his ire was liberal academics and institutions like Harvard. 'We don't worship these same gods,' Yarvin said, referring to the Massachusetts-based university and his cohort of thinkers. Why Yarvin is headed to the belly of his enemy isn't clear. But the symbolism of it in effect validates him in the eyes of his followers and rivals. 'Yarvin is concerned with spreading his reactionary ideology,' said Ed Ongweso Jr, a senior researcher at Security in Context, an international project of scholars housed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 'He believes democracy is inferior to some sort of authoritarian monarchy, that apartheid is better than universal suffrage, and that liberals are feckless enough to let him come into their spaces and preach his nonsense.' Ongweso has written extensively and critically about the neo-fascistic ambitions of the tech bro elite, which has obsequiously warmed up to Donald Trump, in a transparent attempt to use him to create a future political order that favors them. '[The] Trump administration is dominated by three groups of political actors,' said Ongweso citing the historian Quinn Slobodian, 'a Silicon Valley-Wall Street nexus that wants a sleek state to maximize their returns; anti-New Deal conservatives who want a shackled state to abandon social welfare; extremely online anarcho-capitalists, monarchists and fascists who want to shatter the state so they can experiment with decentralized forms of private tyrannies.' Ongweso argued that Yarvin's view of the world virtually satisfied and championed all of those groups. In line with Yarvin's writings clamoring for a conservative rebirth of educational institutions in America, something not so dissimilar to what Viktor Orbán has already done in Hungary, the White House has gone to war with US universities promising to cut funding if they ideologically defy the Maga movement. Part of that has included a lawsuit between Harvard and the justice department as American post-secondary institutions begin to rediscover their backbone. Yarvin's appearance on campus, in effect, seems timed as a coordinated troll of Harvard and adding another arena of battle for neo-conservatives on liberal universities. 'As a person who has spoken against Harvard and higher education as a plague on society, it would be too good of a chance to pass up, especially with a Harvard professor participating,' said Wendy Via, the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPHAE) who specializes in far-right extremism. 'As with others who advocate for a dictatorial/authoritarian government, he knows that capturing education is essential to implementing other aspects of authoritarianism.' Via continued: 'His beliefs would almost demand his presence since Harvard has taken such a strong stance against the administration's coercion, while other institutions have capitulated.' Yarvin is beginning to represent, along with his allies in the rightwing corners of the 'Silicon Reich', the growing calls to destroy American democracy and replace it with a new feudalism; something Vance, the second most powerful person in the US government, seems at the very least to be fascinated with. 'The United States was a barbaric apartheid regime for most of its history,' said Ongweso, who made the point that it has only been decades since a majority of Americans had full access to the democracy enjoyed today. 'It's a fragile development,' he said. 'I'm worried that if Yarvin and his cadre have their way, we'll never get it back.'
New York Times
11-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
In Trump's Washington, a War of Wordplay Takes Hold
Political chaos, George Orwell once wrote, is connected with the decay of language. In Washington, the current political chaos has been connected with a kind of rhetorical warping. An entire lexicon of progressive terminology nurtured by the last administration has been squelched. In its place is a new vocabulary, honed by President Trump and echoed by his many imitators in the capital. It is a vocabulary containing many curious uses of doublespeak. One presidential order titled 'Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government' calls for weaponizing the federal government against itself. Another titled 'Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling' demands that 'patriotic education' be taught to children. 'Forced patriotism is indoctrination, those words are synonyms,' said Lee Rowland, a First Amendment attorney and the executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, a nonpartisan nonprofit devoted to free speech. She said that the education executive order 'is a perfect encapsulation of what we are seeing out of this administration so far, which is to diminish rights, while claiming as a matter of pure rhetoric that they are increasing them.' Across government, a war is being waged in wordplay. It is fought in executive orders, official statements from the White House, press briefings and all manner of communiqués, internal and external. The very language that Mr. Trump and his administration are using to smash the federal bureaucracy is now also the official language of that bureaucracy, because it is being dictated by the man doing the smashing. 'He's coming up with his own executive language which is then directed as a weapon against the supposed internal enemy, which is the structure of government,' said Jason Stanley, a Yale professor whose books include 'How Propaganda Works' and 'The Politics of Language.' 'All language is political,' he added, 'so all politics takes the form of war over language.' The first order of business was to dispense with the oldspeak. Even as the president signed an executive order titled 'Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,' he signed other orders policing language. The language of diversity initiatives was suddenly proscribed. So were words invoking what this administration refers to as 'gender ideology.' Out: 'undocumented.' In: 'alien.' Fear that other words could run afoul of the new edicts led anxious agency officials to come up with lists of potentially problematic words on their own. Entries included: Equity. Gender. Transgender. Nonbinary. Pregnant people. Assigned male at birth. Antiracist. Trauma. Hate speech. Intersectional. Multicultural. Oppression. Such words were scrubbed from federal websites. 'The things they're attacking in these executive orders are sort of loose concepts,' said Jonathan Keeperman, the founder and editor of Passage Press, an independent publisher that is influential among conservative intellectuals. (Among pro-Trump fellow travelers he is more commonly known by his nom de plume, 'Lomez'). 'By focusing on these key terms that the left has grabbed on to,' Mr. Keeperman explained, 'you can, without knowing much else about what you're doing, at the scale of the entirety of the federal budget, basically remove a lot of the rot that you're trying to remove.' This is exactly what critics of the administration fear it is doing. 'They're trying to take down the federal bureaucracy by saying it's all D.E.I.,' as Mr. Stanley put it. Indeed, that phrase seems to have been given a metaphysical, almost magical quality by the president and his officials. They have lately blamed all manner of societal ills and events on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, even the American Airlines crash above the Potomac that killed 67 people last week. (The administration has offered no evidence suggesting that diversity initiatives had anything to do with the tragedy. Investigators are still assessing the cause of the collision.) There have been all sorts of rhetorical wonders out of this White House already. Some seem semicomic (see: 'Gulf of America'); others, deadly serious: The president said he wanted to 'permanently' resettle Gazans. The following day, his press secretary opted for 'temporarily,' a word that means the exact opposite of the one her boss continues to use. The president said he was appointing a 'warrior for free speech' to run the Federal Communications Commission. That free speech warrior immediately launched investigations into NPR and PBS, and then set his sights on CBS and NBC. On Monday, Mr. Trump posted that he was installing one of his most fiercely loyal apparatchiks, Richard Grenell, to run the Kennedy Center in Washington so that there would be no more 'ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA' put on at the performing arts venue. Ms. Rowland allowed that 'the government does have a lot of leeway to set the tone and decide how to use its own voice.' Even still, she said, 'it is very clear that this administration is ushering in a new golden age of propaganda.' On social media, Vice President JD Vance posted a 'memo to the press' explaining that the official definition of the word 'oligarchy' had changed and now meant 'when a president is thwarted by unelected bureaucrats.' Left unsaid: The world's richest man is working inside the administration as perhaps the most powerful unelected bureaucrat in American history. And then there are the linguistic loop-de-loops so breathtaking they might impress even Orwell. The new 'Department of Government Efficiency' is killing off pieces of the government. When the president amplifies false conspiracies on the social media platform he owns — as he has been doing lately about U.S.A.I.D. — his posts are called 'truths.' On Sunday, while aboard Air Force One, he explained that the violent rioters he had pardoned for assaulting the seat of the U.S. government on Jan. 6, 2021, were themselves actually 'assaulted by our government.' He now refers to that date as 'a day of love.' Mr. Trump has been fluent in the ways of doublespeak for decades. Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Mr. Trump's first book, 'The Art of the Deal,' which was published in 1987, concocted the phrase 'truthful hyperbole' to describe his subject's speaking style. As the book states, in Mr. Trump's voice: 'I play to people's fantasies. … It's an innocent form of exaggeration — and it's a very effective form of promotion.' (Mr. Schwartz has said that Mr. Trump loved the phrase). This has always been one of the more beguiling paradoxes about him. He manages to be both erratic communicator (see: 'the weave') and calculating rhetorician. His ability to coin phrases, or even co-opt ones used against him — like 'fake news' — was key to his political rise. Much of his phraseology has seeped deep into the culture by this point. And now his language is being spoken in the halls of power again. 'He just does it intuitively,' said Jeremy Clark, who was a senior official in the Interior Department during the first Trump administration and is now a fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute. 'I think finally people on the left and right are understanding how smart Trump is, even if his strategy isn't always initially obvious to outsiders.' As Mr. Keeperman put it: 'He's sort of a master at this.'
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Curtis Yarvin's Ideas Were Fringe. Now They're Coursing Through Trump's Washington.
On the weekend of Donald Trump's inauguration, the neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin traveled to Washington, D.C., for the Coronation Ball, a glitzy inaugural gala hosted by the ultraconservative publishing house Passage Press. The gathering, hosted in the ballroom of the Watergate Hotel, was designed to celebrate the ascent of the new conservative counter-elite that has risen to power on the tide of Trump's reelection — and Yarvin, who has arguably done more than anyone to shape the thinking of that nascent group, was an informal guest of honor. Even the ball's name spoke to Yarvin's outsize influence over the Trumpian right: For over a decade, Yarvin, an ex-computer programmer-turned-blogger, has argued that American democracy is irrevocably broken and ought to be replaced with a monarchy styled after a Silicon Valley tech start-up. According to Yarvin, the time has come to jettison existing democratic institutions and concentrate political power in a single 'chief executive' or 'dictator.' These ideas — which Yarvin calls 'neo-reaction' or 'the Dark Enlightenment' — were once confined to the fringes of the internet, but now, with Trump's reelection, they are finding a newly powerful audience in Washington. When I called him up recently to talk about the second Trump administration, Yarvin told me that during his trip to Washington, he had exchanged friendly greetings with Vice President JD Vance — who has publicly cited his work — had lunch with Michael Anton, a senior member of Trump's State Department, and caught up with the 'revolutionary vanguard' of young conservatives who grew up reading his blogs and are now entering the new administration. Yarvin is skeptical that Trump can actually carry out the type of regime change that he envisions, but he told me that there are signs the new administration is serious about concentrating power in the executive branch. We spoke before the Trump administration announced a sweeping freeze on federal aid programs, but he pointed to the coming fight over impoundment as a key test of the new administration's willingness to push the bounds of executive authority. And he detected a newfound confidence and aggressiveness in Trump's GOP. 'Every time the old Republicans wanted to do something, it was like the nebbish guy asking the hot prom queen out for a date — they were just terrified that they were going to ask and the answer is going to be 'no,'' he said. 'That attitude does not seem to be present here.' The following has been edited for length and clarity. You were in Washington during Trump's inauguration. How was the mood among the people that you spent time with? The mood is really good. You're definitely dealing with a lot of people who have spent the last four or eight years thinking about why the first Trump administration basically did not achieve anything for its supporters as opposed to its lobbyists. I'm not talking to the high strategic command or whatever, but just my impression from my connections among low- and mid-level people is that they've figured some things out. The first and most important thing they've figured out from a political standpoint is that the situation that Trump is in is a little like Duke Leto and Arrakis. We're talking Dune here. Yeah. There's a little bit of landing on the mostly enemy planet D.C. You're landing there, and one of the general assumptions of the controlled opposition — the old Republican establishment — is that this is not really a symmetric political system. Instead of a left party and a right party, we have an inner party [a bipartisan elite] and an outer party [the anti-establishment insurgents]. This outer party is basically the party that exists to collect and market the votes of unfashionable America. You're saying that the conservative elite in D.C. have become newly aware of themselves as a kind of vanguard of the outer party, and they're starting to act like one? Basically, the deal when you're a Republican in office is that you get a certain number of things to show off to your constituency to prove that you're really Republican, but you're basically there to play ball and help the system work. But what Trump and his team have realized now is that the best defense is a good offense. He's not just doing these little things to scare people and to take home as a chit to his supporters. He's actually trying to move all of the levers of this machine that he can move. From the neo-reactionary vantage point, what is the best-case scenario for a second Trump administration? The way that I think metaphorically about the problem of what can be done with the powers of the presidency is untangling the Gordian knot. I often say, 'Look, D.C. is run by Congress, not by the president.' The president stands in front of it and waves his hands and watches the system go, but the real decisions are funding decisions, and those kinds of decisions are made by Congress or the agencies. Actually, if the White House didn't exist, America would still work. Do you think that a second-term Trump can untie the Gordian knot? I think that is the fundamental question. The answer is interesting, because what he's doing is not at all what I would do with an opportunity like this. But I think that what I would do is probably not possible. What would you do? I would cut the Gordian knot. For example, a straightforward way to cut the Gordian knot is to say, 'Look, the [Federal Reserve] is clearly under executive authority.' It's clearly not part of the legislative branch, it's clearly not part of the judicial branch, so it's clearly part of the executive branch. And because the Fed actually controls the monetary system, I can order it to mint the trillion-dollar coin, or more to the point, I can basically order the Fed to buy assets. And because I can order the Fed to buy assets, I can order the Fed to buy notes issued by new institutions. That allows me to basically come face to face with two very clear facts. One is that the U.S. doesn't really have an executive branch — it has a legislative branch, and it has an administrative branch, which is basically managed not by a monarchical president, but by an oligarchical Congress. The second fact is that, when I look at any part of the federal government as a start-up guy, and I say, 'OK, first, let's take for granted that this is trying to solve [a real] problem,' for almost anything that you can look at, the right way to fix that organization is just to stand up a new one. There are some parts of the U.S. government that have a very clear role and are not politicized in any way. If the president had the exclusive executive power over the Coast Guard, would the right choice be to create a new Coast Guard or to reuse the existing Coast Guard? I'm going to [reuse] the Coast Guard. But when I get to something like the State Department, I'm no longer anywhere near assured of that. Why do you think Trump is unwilling to do what you're suggesting here? I think he's unready. I think that America is unready for that level of change. I want to get your read on the divide that seems to be opening up between the tech right and the populist-nationalist right, or what you've called the 'rationalists' and the 'traditionalists.' How real do you think this divide is, and what do you think is underlying it at a sort of fundamental level? I came up with this sort of Tolkien-esque classification of the social forces in America today, and I identify two kinds of people. Ah yes, the elves. Yes. There are the elves — the blue state, [professional managerial class], ruling-class people — and the hobbits, the ruled-over lower-middle-class. The fear among elves that the hobbits will organize and come and kill them with pitchforks — because there's a lot of goddamn hobbits — has driven a lot of things in the 20th century. But what happens when you have a group of people who are elves either by education or by background — because, of course, we have this remarkable system called 'college' for promoting people in the elf aristocracy — is that you have a certain set of people who, like me, are dark elves who dissent from the [progressive] Obama worldview, right? They don't believe in the state religion anymore. So there's a conflict there [between the dark elves and the hobbits], definitely, but whenever you see a conflict, you should want to heal a conflict, right? I think that where that conflict comes from is that you'll go to something like the Passage Press party, and I'm there, and Steve Bannon is there — who apparently feels like it's appropriate to go to a black-tie event looking like a homeless dude. You're apparently on his enemies list now. Am I on his enemies list? I don't know. Do you see Steve Bannon as an enemy? No, no, my God. I mean, I've never met or talked to him. I don't see him as an enemy. Why would he be an enemy? I mean, it's a little funny to be talking about someone whose revenues come from Seinfeld. But Bannon has a kind organic connection with MAGA world. He has an organic connection with the great American hobbit. He really loved those people, and there's something sort of right about that. The way the relationship between the dark elf and the hobbits should work is [based on the understanding] that [the hobbits] have been pouring their energy and their hope and their fear for decades into shit that doesn't work. Do you think this tension within the MAGA coalition can be managed, or is one side going to have to win? It's entirely able to be managed. What Trump is showing in his effort to sort of reactivate all of these incredibly rusty, broken levers of the top-down control of the New Deal, is just like, 'Wow, the president can do this.' The president can cancel the 1965 affirmative action executive order and nobody questions that legally he can just do that. Imagine if you'd suggested that in a meeting of the Bush administration. You would be on the next plane out. So what I think that the MAGA people are going to see is that shit is happening. You've said that your relationship with Vance has been overstated by the press. What is your relationship with him? I've interacted with Vance once since the election. I bumped into him at a party. He said, 'Yarvin, you reactionary fascist.' I was like, 'Thank you, Mr. Vice President, and I'm glad I didn't stop you from getting elected.' He said that to you? That's what he said. I don't think he meant it in a bad way, but I don't think he meant it in a good way, either. Do you guys talk regularly? No, no, definitely not. And I think that's not really the important relationship. [The New Right] is still a vanguard, which means it's still fundamentally oligarchical in a lot of ways. I don't need to name names, but there's a guy in D.C. who has a big house which a lot of the revolutionary vanguard hangs out in. Are we talking about Peter Thiel? Who are we talking about? No, no, no, this is someone you've never heard of. Who is it? I can't tell you. He's not in government. He's a lawyer. But this is a tradition that goes way back in D.C., with the House of Truth — where Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Hay and those guys hung out [during the Progressive Era]. Always, in a town like [D.C.], you'll have this vibe of a society of young, smart people. When you're at this place, maybe you'll run into a Clarence Thomas clerk or someone like that. There's this whole world of people in their 20s and 30s who are basically arriving to take jobs in D.C. now. And a lot of these dark elf-y people are hanging out in various places. Not that many of these people are not Christians — many of them are Christians, of course, but they're more likely to be like TradCaths than cradle Catholics, right? The important thing is the vibe among the staff and the staffers. You have a bunch of people coming to Washington who don't have this traditional fear of the old establishment. Let's go back to the Gordian knot analogy: I'm like, 'OK, cut the Gordian knot. Where's the sword?' But we're not quite ready for that, so what they're actually doing is they're pulling on the Gordian knot. When you talk about tugging at the Gordian knot, you're saying they're taking incremental steps toward a type of systematic political change — a revolution, for lack of a better word. Yeah, I'm talking about — America just has a really shitty government and needs a new government. Do you think Vance is better suited than Trump for that type of work, by virtue of his background and intellectual orientation? That's a good question. I think they're going to be an amazing team, because basically, in almost every way, JD is perfect. One of the perfect things about him is that he has this deeply American background, and then he was just completely re-socialized into the American elite. It's like, the Marines taught him how to hold a fork or whatever, and then he's graduated from Yale Law School, and he knows exactly how to eat at the right banquets. He's more comfortable with elite liberal Americans than Trump will ever be, and Trump just doesn't care. There's an old blog post of mine from 2011 where I talk about kingship and the vibe of being a king, and I'm basically like, the guy in America who has this vibe is Donald Trump — and this is well before there was any serious talk of him having a political career, if I can pat myself on the back for that. Trump has this incredible energy — he's the guy who Ali G's bullshit doesn't work on. Cutting through bullshit is his strength. What is Vance's strength in that matrix? JD is more analytical. He's much younger, so he has more IQ points left. As you get older, you feel your IQ points going away, but they get replaced by wisdom. And he has more of an appetite to pull on the strings of the knot? JD has a lot of honor — honor goes very, very, very deep, in JD. I don't think he would ever be satisfied with being a grifter. What's so terrible about the outer-party Republicans is that people get into it, and they don't want to be grifters, and then they find that they are grifters. I think even with a professional mercantile class, you can say to them at a certain point, 'Wouldn't it be easier to just be a dark elf?' Think about the elf career track. There's a cursus honorum — a standard path that you follow. If you want to work in government, you go to Harvard, then you go to D.C. to be an intern; you're opening people's mail, you climb your way up the staff after 10 years; you don't write legislation exactly, but you influence the direction of the legislation, et cetera. It's a really hard thing. And then here these guys and girls who by virtue of reading Curtis Yarvin in middle school are getting jobs more easily, because the ratio of people to jobs is a lot smaller. I [recently] had lunch with Mike Anton at a coffee shop across the street from the State Department — Michael Anton, incoming senior State Department official, for the record. Yes, incoming senior State Department official. And I was like, 'Here's this academic position that they can fill, has anyone thought about filling this position?' And they're like, 'I don't think so.' And I'm like, 'What about this guy?' And they're like, 'Oh, he'd be perfect.' And then, you know, bam, bam, bam, it's done. They took your staffing recommendations, is what you're saying? Well, we'll see — but the path is easier. The path from, 'I'm a maverick dark elf' to 'I have a position with this administration' is just suddenly like, 'Whoa — there is a lot less competition.' There's a debate over the scope of your influence in Washington, so I wonder how you measure your own influence, and how you think it compares now to four or eight years ago? It has obviously increased since four years ago, but how I measure my influence is that I try not to. For the first six years when I was blogging, from 2007 to 2014, I barely talked to anyone about this stuff, and then I started to get letters from Washington being like, 'Wow, it seems like you're talking about the same Washington that I work in, and nobody ever talks about it.' All this stuff about the civil service, the deep state, the administrative state — there were academics who knew about it, but it was just not a part of the discourse. Saying, 'Oh, I'm talking to the vice president daily,' or like, 'I got this guy this job' — that is just not my role as an intellectual. There are other people who are better at that. The way to fulfill your duty as an intellectual is to cast your bread upon the water — and actually, the more personal it gets, the worse it is. In practice, a lot of your ideas point toward consolidating a significant amount of power in the executive branch. What would indicate to you that the Trump administration is serious about doing that? There's no question that Donald Trump is completely serious and sincere about saying, 'I'm going to use all the power I have to make America great again.' I think he completely believes that. I don't think he wants to be a grifter in any way, shape or form. I think that the question is the limits of what can be done with that. But what are the practical measures that you're looking for? Is it reviving impoundment authority or what? Yeah, so look at Russ Vought at the Office of Management and Budget — another person whose hand I maybe shook once but who I haven't talked to. Impoundment is a perfect example of an issue where in the first Trump administration, the Office of Legal Counsel would have said, 'Oh, you can't do that — there's a law.' Well, is the law constitutional? I don't think the law is constitutional. I think the law is clearly a straight-up violation of the Constitution. The courts are still a question here, and the idea that we control the court — I think anyone on the Supreme Court would resist that description, certainly the swing centrist bloc on the Supreme Court would resist it. Among his mistakes in his first term was that Trump basically appointed three centrists [to the Supreme Court] — so I don't know if Amy Coney Barrett is going say, 'Hey, let's revisit this birthright citizenship question.' But when it comes to the anti-impoundment act, it seems very plausible you could get that through the Supreme Court. And even if you can't, why not ask? Every time the old Republicans wanted to do something, it was like the nebbish guy asking the hot prom queen out for a date — they were just terrified that they were going to ask and the answer is going to be 'no' and it's going be devastating. That attitude does not seem to be present here. And if the courts say no, then what? I think if the courts say no, you'll see more and more pressure put by the Trump administration on Congress. I think that as the machine gathers strength, victories have to build bigger victories. You win these small things, and then you're just like, 'Wow, we can actually do something bigger.' And before you know it, you're writing bills in the White House and sending them to Congress to be rubber-stamped. Should they defy the court if that's not on the table? That is a question that depends very much on circumstances. Under what circumstances should they do it? I think it has to feel right. If you're going to defy the court, it has to feel unifying above all. If you're going to say, 'Hey, you know what? Marbury v. Madison was wrongly decided, the Constitution actually does not specify the precedence of the branches, judicial review was just this invented thing,' it has to be the right moment. If you're doing that in a situation where the vibe is like, 'This is going to be the first shot in the civil war between red America and blue America' — if you're doing that as part of a divisive path where you have an opposition — I think it's bad. For example: I think they corrected this a little bit, but you know when at the start of the campaign, the Trump team didn't really know what JD was going to be used for, and they tried to use him a little bit like Sarah Palin 2.0? I was like, 'Oh my god, this is terrible.' The thing that JD can do that's amazing is he can go and talk to The New Yorker and he can sit down with the liberal media and basically be like, 'No, get these caricatures out of your head. This is not Hitler 2.0. We're not here to send you to Guantanamo. You can actually get behind what's happening here even if you went to Harvard.' Have you articulated this point of view to him? Um — he knows it's what I think. You said you talked to him once since the election? I texted him once about a small issue, and then I shook hands with him at a party, because it's really important to shake hands with dignitaries. But he knows that your point of view is that he can serve as a kind of unifier to sell what would otherwise be divisive issues to a broad swath of the American public? Yes, and specifically to the American ruling class. Is he on board with that? I don't know. The thing is, when you talk to powerful people, they should be getting to know you — you should not be getting to know them. I'm not a reporter. Can you imagine a scenario in the next four years where an effort to defy a Supreme Court order would be unifying rather than divisive? Let me think. I realize it's a hypothetical. It's hard to picture. I think it would have to come about in a situation in which Trump had done so much through the ordinary course of ripping handfuls out of the Gordian knot that things had visibly changed for people. Fix New York City. Fix San Francisco. What the elves have to realize is that their paranoid Handmaid's Tale fantasy in which hobbits from Ohio establish a new Hobbit fundamentalist regime and their daughters are enslaved or something is not going to happen. Is there a scenario in the next four years where the Republican political elite is able to achieve the type of regime change you're discussing? I think it's very unlikely. I would say that you would have to draw a straight flush on that, or maybe a royal straight flush. But royal straight flushes have been heard of, right? Cards are very random things.
