Latest news with #Yarvin
&w=3840&q=100)
First Post
4 days ago
- Politics
- First Post
Curtis Yarvin: Blogger who called for autocratic rule in US shaping Trump policies, says report
Curtis Yarvin, a blogger known for advocating autocratic rule and criticising liberal democracy is reportedly influencing Trump's second-term policy agenda. His ideas on civil service purges and West Asia strategy are gaining traction among Trump allies like Peter Thiel and JD Vance. read more Curtis Yarvin, a once-fringe political blogger better known by his pen name Mencius Moldbug is emerging as an influential figure in shaping Donald Trump's policy agenda for a potential second term, according to a new profile published by The New Yorker. Yarvin, long known for advocating the replacement of liberal democratic institutions with autocratic rule has gained traction among key figures in Trump's orbit. His once-controversial ideas, dismissed as extreme are now reportedly informing major policy blueprints from mass firings of civil servants to radical proposals for West Asia peace. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD The report details how Yarvin's writings which call for a top-down reordering of government and a deep skepticism of bureaucratic power, have caught the attention of venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance. Both men are considered central to the intellectual and strategic direction of a second Trump administration. Among the most striking parallels between Yarvin's ideas and Trump's current proposals is the concept of a sweeping purge of federal civil servants. Trump allies have proposed replacing career bureaucrats with loyalists, citing the need to 'drain the swamp', a move that reflects Yarvin's long-standing critique of the so-called 'deep state.' Equally eyebrow-raising is a reported policy proposal to transform Gaza into the 'Riviera of the Middle East', an idea that mirrors Yarvin's provocative vision for resolving intractable geopolitical conflicts through heavy-handed, top-down development schemes. The New Yorker article suggests that Yarvin's ascent is part of a broader trend: the growing influence of far-right intellectuals and online theorists in American conservative politics. Once relegated to obscure blogs and Reddit threads, Yarvin's ideas are now being openly discussed in elite conservative circles and quietly making their way into policy drafts. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Critics warn that mainstreaming such radical theories poses a threat to constitutional governance and democratic accountability. But to his supporters, Yarvin offers a bold framework for dismantling what they see as a bloated and unaccountable administrative state. The growing visibility of Yarvin and his theories underscored a major shift in the ideological arena of the American right, one that could shape the future of US governance if Trump returns to the White House.
Time of India
7 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Curtis Yarvin: 10 things to know about 'mad philosopher' behind Trump 2.0
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. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Esse novo alarme com câmera é quase gratuito em São Paulo (consulte o preço) Alarmes Undo 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.
Time of India
03-06-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Who is Curtis Yarvin? Meet the ‘intellectual source code' of the second Trump administration
Curtis Yarvin, a tech entrepreneur turned political theorist, has emerged as one of the most controversial and influential minds behind the radical ideological shift shaping Donald Trump's second presidency. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Known online by his former pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin champions a vision of government that replaces democracy with a CEO-style autocracy. Once confined to obscure blogs, his ideas are now seeping into mainstream conservative politics, embraced by figures close to Trump's inner circle. Yarvin's journey from Silicon Valley coder to anti-democracy philosopher offers insight into the new authoritarian playbook being tested in real time in Washington. Curtis Yarvin's influence on Trump's second term While Yarvin has never held public office, his ideas have penetrated Trump-aligned circles in striking ways. The Trump administration's second-term playbook featuring the purge of career civil servants, erosion of checks and balances, and elevation of loyalist executives bears strong resemblance to Yarvin's vision of streamlined, top-down control. Often described as the 'intellectual source code' of this new governance model, Yarvin has provided the ideological framework for dismantling liberal democratic norms. Figures such as Vice President J.D. Vance have echoed his call to dismantle the so-called 'deep state,' while tech billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have embraced Yarvin-esque principles of elite rule, efficiency over democratic process, and corporate-style governance. Musk's expanding influence in areas from space to education has even led some to describe him as an unelected 'czar' — a real-world manifestation of Yarvin's authoritarian, CEO-led state. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now From math prodigy to tech dropout Born in 1973 into a liberal, secular family, Curtis Yarvin was raised in Maryland by a diplomat father and a Protestant mother. His paternal grandparents were Jewish-American communists, marking a sharp contrast to the ideology he would later adopt. A child prodigy, he entered Johns Hopkins's Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth and graduated high school by age 15. He studied at Brown University and briefly pursued a PhD in computer science at UC Berkeley before dropping out to join the 1990s tech boom. Immersed in Silicon Valley's libertarian culture, he became increasingly drawn to right-wing philosophy. The birth of a radical ideology Yarvin's intellectual transformation was heavily shaped by libertarian thinkers like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, whose distrust of empiricism and belief in rule-by-logic appealed to his analytical mind. In the mid-2000s, writing under the name Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin began articulating a new political philosophy that would become known as the 'neo-reactionary' or 'dark enlightenment' movement. At its core, Yarvin's ideology calls for the abolition of democracy, which he considers corrupt, inefficient, and irredeemable. He proposes replacing it with a CEO-style government led by a singular, powerful executive much like a monarch or corporate boss who rules without elections or opposition. Yarvin also supports a rigid social hierarchy, rejecting the notion of political equality in favour of order, elitism, and stratification. Key concepts: The Cathedral and patchwork rule One of Yarvin's most influential concepts is 'the Cathedral', his term for the network of universities, media, and bureaucracies that he believes enforces liberal ideology and suppresses dissent. According to Yarvin, these institutions maintain cultural dominance in the West and must be overthrown to enable true political reform. Yarvin also advocates for 'patchwork sovereignty', a model in which the world is divided into autonomous, city-sized 'sovereign corporations' (SovCorps). Each one would be run like a business, governed not by public vote but by executive fiat. In this vision, citizens would act as customers rather than voters free to exit but without democratic input or protections. Controversy, criticism, and legacy Yarvin is frequently criticised for promoting 'human biodiversity', a euphemism for race-based intelligence theories. Though he denies being a white nationalist, his work is widely condemned as providing intellectual cover for racist and elitist worldviews. His admiration for authoritarian regimes in China and Rwanda, which he describes as 'efficient,' has raised alarm about his disregard for civil liberties and human rights. Critics argue that Yarvin's work is a pseudo-intellectual justification for totalitarianism, masking authoritarian ambitions in dense, provocative prose. He often uses irony and satire to deflect responsibility for the more extreme interpretations of his writing, but the impact is real: his language, metaphors, and frameworks are now reflected in mainstream policies and talking points on the American right. Why he matters now Curtis Yarvin is no longer a marginal internet theorist. His anti-democratic, elitist vision is shaping real-world policy in one of the world's most powerful democracies. By calling for the destruction of democratic institutions, the elevation of an unelected elite, and the transformation of government into a hierarchical corporate structure, Yarvin has become the intellectual vanguard of a post-democratic future. In the second Trump administration, that future may no longer be hypothetical.
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The anti-woke right won in 2024. Now they're turning on each other.
It's been a rough week in the world of the online intellectual right, which is currently in the midst of two separate yet related blowups — both of which illustrate how the pressures of power are cracking the elite coalition that aligned behind President Donald Trump's return to power. The first fight is really a struggle over who should determine the philosophical identity of MAGA, pitting a group of anti-woke writers against a wide group of illiberal or post-liberal figures. The lead figure in the anti-woke camp, the prominent pundit James Lindsay, has been attacking his enemies as the 'woke right' for months. In his mind, this group's emphasis on the importance of religion, national identity, and ethnicity is the mirror image of the left's identity politics — and thus an existential threat both to American freedom and the MAGA movement's success. In response, his targets on the right — which range from national conservatives to white nationalists — have started firing back aggressively, arguing that Lindsay is not only wrong but maliciously attempting to fracture the MAGA coalition. This might seem like a niche online fight, but given that niche online discourse has been a major influence on the second Trump administration's thinking, it might end up mattering quite a bit. The same could be said about the second fight, which revolves around Curtis Yarvin — the neo-monarchist blogger who has influenced both Vice President JD Vance and DOGE. A recent post by rationalist author Scott Alexander accused Yarvin of 'selling out' — aligning himself with Trump even though he had long denounced the kind of 'authoritarian populism' that Trump embodies. Yarvin defended himself with some fairly bitter attacks on Alexander, drawing in defenders and critics from the broader right-wing universe in the process. Each of these fights is telling in their own right. The 'woke right' contretemps shows just how deep the divisions go inside the Trump world — between anti-woke liberals, on the one hand, and various different forms of 'postliberals' on the other. The Yarvin argument is a revealing portrait of how easy it is to get someone to compromise their own beliefs in the face of polarization and proximity to power. But put together, they show us just how hard it is to go from an insurgent force to a governing one. The 'woke right' debate first came on my radar back in December, when the anti-woke pundit James Lindsay tricked a Christian nationalist website, American Reformer, into publishing excerpts of The Communist Manifesto edited to sound like a critique of modern American liberalism. It might seem to make little sense to describe a 19th-century text on resistance to capitalism as an example of 21st-century identity politics. But Lindsay, who sees himself as a right-wing liberal, is using an idiosyncratic understanding of 'wokeness' that equates it with collectivism — the idea that the politics should be understood through the lens of interests of groups, be it the proletariat or Black Americans, rather than treating all citizens purely as individuals. Thus, for Lindsay, communism is a form of wokeness, even if the term 'woke' postdates Marx by nearly 200 years. This broad definition also allows there to be right-wing forms of wokeness. Neo-Nazism, Christian nationalism, Catholic integralism, even certain forms of anti-liberal conservative nationalism — all of these doctrines give significant weight to group identity in their understanding of what matters in the political realm. Thus, for Lindsay, they are threatening to American liberalism in exactly the same way as their left-wing peers. 'Woke Right are 'right-wing' people who have mostly adopted an identity-based victimhood orientation for themselves to bind together as a class,' he writes. 'Like the Woke Left, then, they happily offer the trade-off usually used to describe Marxists: people who will ask you to trade some of your liberty so that they might hurt your enemies for you.' Personally, I find Lindsay's definition of 'wokeness' so broad that it ceases to operate as a meaningful category (if it ever was one in the first place). But the charge has clearly stung his antagonists on the right, where calling someone 'woke' is basically the worst thing you can say about them. Prominent figures on the illiberal right, ranging from Tim Pool to Mike Cernovich to Anna Khachiyan, shot back at Lindsay — calling him a 'grifter' out to undermine the MAGA movement. Meanwhile, Lindsay's allies, including biologist Colin Wright and Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, accused them of being the true traitors to MAGA. The most interesting intervention in this debate is an essay recently posted on X by the Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony. Hazony's main project, the National Conservatism conference, has served as a hub connecting various different strands of illiberalism to each other and to power. Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have all given notable speeches there. Hazony sees opposition to 'wokeness' as the rallying cry that brought disparate strands of the right together. Whatever their philosophical or policy disagreements, they could all agree that the social left needed to be stopped by whatever means necessary. This term is so potent, in his mind, that deploying it in internecine warfare actively poisons the possibility for political coalition. 'The term 'woke right' really has outraged many nationalist conservatives,' Hazony argues. 'Because of its strong connotations of intentional humiliation and provocation, betrayal, and the destruction of shared symbols, getting this term into wide circulation is the best weapon anyone has come up with yet to make sure that anti-Marxist liberals and nationalist conservatives will truly despise one another and do everything possible to avoid working together from here on.' In Hazony's assessment, the emergence of 'woke right' as a term is a reflection of a sense of victory. Comparing the 2024 election to the fall of the Berlin Wall, he argues that Lindsay and company are engaged in a kind of triumphalism — convinced that true wokeness has been defeated and thus moving on to purging their enemies on the right from the MAGA movement. 'They think (mistakenly) that the war on 'woke' is basically over and that our side has already won. They think (mistakenly) that they can safely turn their attention to trying to remove nationalists and genuine conservatives from whatever positions [of] influence they've succeeded in gaining in the last ten years,' he writes. This power struggle — and that's what the debate over 'woke right' really is — is thus downstream from the sense that the Trump coalition is ascendant. Curtis Yarvin would certainly be on Lindsay's 'woke right' — indeed, he recently weighed in on the debate to denounce Lindsay. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has become famous for his 'neoreactionary' arguments for replacing democracy with a kind of corporate monarchy, Yarvin has directly influenced figures like Vance and Peter Thiel. In the past week, Yarvin has gotten into his own bitter feud — this time, with someone who helped put him on the intellectual map. The man in question is Scott Alexander, a prominent writer aligned with the rationalist and effective altruist movements covered by my colleagues at Future Perfect. Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Alexander wrote a series of pieces attempting to critically and fairly examine neoreactionary ideas. Alexander brought significant attention to Yarvin's ideas — it's how I first heard about them — and thus played a role in spreading said ideas outside of the online techie hothouses where they were born. Alexander, like Lindsay, is a liberal deeply skeptical of 'wokeness.' However, his criticisms of the left are far more informed and less fanatical. For that reason, perhaps, he has always been deeply opposed to Trump. And, he believes, Yarvin should be too. This is the essential argument of Alexander's blistering new essay on Yarvin, titled 'Moldbug Sold Out.' He argues that Yarvin's arguments about the nature of politics back in the Moldbug days are mutually exclusive with supporting Trump today. Back then, Yarvin wrote quite a lot about the pathway from democracy to a kind of enlightened monarchy. He proposed that would-be monarchists begin with the creation of a 'shadow government,' basically a privately created mock-up of a new political system. This shadow government would be staffed by such impressive and brilliant people proposing such good ideas that the people would voluntarily choose to shift their allegiances. He proposed this scheme, in part, because he recognized that elected authoritarians had a very poor track record. In his view, the kind of 'authoritarian populist' who could win through normal elections would likely look like a Hitler or Mussolini — a violent buffoon who could never be trusted to stand-up the well-meaning despotism of Yarvin's dreams. Trump, of course, is an authoritarian-inclined populist who won power through elections — yet Yarvin has boarded the Trump train anyway. Thus, Alexander charges, Yarvin has sold out: betrayed his own beliefs in order to gain access to power. 'The MAGA movement was exactly what 2000s [Yarvin] feared most — a cancerous outgrowth of democracy riding the same wave of populist anger as the 20th century dictatorships he loathed. But in the hope of winning a temporary political victory, he let them wear him as a skinsuit — giving their normal, boring autocratic tendencies the mystique of the cool, edgy, all-vulnerabilities-patched autocracy he foretold in his manifestos,' Alexander writes. In response, Yarvin posted a long series of posts on X that basically concede Alexander's main point: that Yarvin's current stance contradicts his previous one. Yarvin now believes that he used to be naïve: 'a libtard and a coward,' in his characteristically insulting phrasing. The current liberal regime is so awful, so demonstrably dangerous, that the first political task should be its destruction. 'Authoritarian populism,' he writes, 'is the only force with the power to end it.' Both the 'woke right' and Yarvin debates revolve fundamentally around power — specifically, how it should be wielded once you have it. The 'woke right' debate is, at heart, about what the ultimate ends of the Trump administration should be. While both sides agree that the 'woke left' should be wiped out, they disagree on what an alternative vision should look like. Lindsay and his allies argue for a restoration of some kind of right-wing liberal individualism; Hazony and his camp believe that the task is replacing liberalism with some kind of hazy alternative rooted in religious or ethno-cultural identity. This debate is taking place on purely abstract grounds — there's almost never any reference to concrete policy disagreements — but it reflects an assumption that there are very real implications of this argument for the next four years of American politics. Lindsay has repeatedly argued, in tweets and interviews, that the rise of the 'woke right' threatens to derail the entire MAGA project and return power to the left. The Yarvin debate poses a related, but more introspective, question about power: How corrosive is it for intellectuals to be in proximity to it? Alexander, the most intellectually rigorous person in either debate, suggests the answer is 'very.' In Yarvin, he sees someone who he long took seriously as tainted by access — by, for example, Vance citing Yarvin as an influence in a podcast appearance. Yarvin's own conduct in their debate vindicates his assessment. Put together, these debates point us to two major themes worth watching throughout the remainder of the Trump administration. First, how much the administration's policy choices intensify the fractures in its elite coalition. Hazony is right that hostility to the left is what brought disparate groups together under the Trump banner. But now, in a world where the administration has to govern, some of those factions are bound to feel like they're losing or even betrayed. Second, how warped the right's ideas become when they go through the policy meatgrinder. We already saw a version of Yarvin's original vision of a CEO-monarch in Elon Musk's reign of terror at DOGE. But that went so poorly that Yarvin himself disavowed it. This embarrassment wasn't enough to turn him off the Trump project altogether — power still has its lure. But the inevitable difficulty of translating ideas into actual policy, and the specific incompetencies of Trump's attempts to do so, are already alienating some previously aligned thinkers. Yarvin may not have a breaking point, but others like him may. This story was adapted for the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.
Vox
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Vox
The anti-woke right won in 2024. Now they're turning on each other.
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here. It's been a rough week in the world of the online intellectual right, which is currently in the midst of two separate yet related blowups — both of which illustrate how the pressures of power are cracking the elite coalition that aligned behind President Donald Trump's return to power. The first fight is really a struggle over who should determine the philosophical identity of MAGA, pitting a group of anti-woke writers against a wide group of illiberal or post-liberal figures. The lead figure in the anti-woke camp, the prominent pundit James Lindsay, has been attacking his enemies as the 'woke right' for months. In his mind, this group's emphasis on the importance of religion, national identity, and ethnicity is the mirror image of the left's identity politics — and thus an existential threat both to American freedom and the MAGA movement's success. In response, his targets on the right — which range from national conservatives to white nationalists — have started firing back aggressively, arguing that Lindsay is not only wrong but maliciously attempting to fracture the MAGA coalition. This might seem like a niche online fight, but given that niche online discourse has been a major influence on the second Trump administration's thinking, it might end up mattering quite a bit. The same could be said about the second fight, which revolves around Curtis Yarvin — the neo-monarchist blogger who has influenced both Vice President JD Vance and DOGE. A recent post by rationalist author Scott Alexander accused Yarvin of 'selling out' — aligning himself with Trump even though he had long denounced the kind of 'authoritarian populism' that Trump embodies. Yarvin defended himself with some fairly bitter attacks on Alexander, drawing in defenders and critics from the broader right-wing universe in the process. Each of these fights is telling in their own right. The 'woke right' contretemps shows just how deep the divisions go inside the Trump world — between anti-woke liberals, on the one hand, and various different forms of 'postliberals' on the other. The Yarvin argument is a revealing portrait of how easy it is to get someone to compromise their own beliefs in the face of polarization and proximity to power. But put together, they show us just how hard it is to go from an insurgent force to a governing one. The 'woke right' redux The 'woke right' debate first came on my radar back in December, when the anti-woke pundit James Lindsay tricked a Christian nationalist website, American Reformer, into publishing excerpts of The Communist Manifesto edited to sound like a critique of modern American liberalism. It might seem to make little sense to describe a 19th-century text on resistance to capitalism as an example of 21st-century identity politics. But Lindsay, who sees himself as a right-wing liberal, is using an idiosyncratic understanding of 'wokeness' that equates it with collectivism — the idea that the politics should be understood through the lens of interests of groups, be it the proletariat or Black Americans, rather than treating all citizens purely as individuals. Thus, for Lindsay, communism is a form of wokeness, even if the term 'woke' postdates Marx by nearly 200 years. This broad definition also allows there to be right-wing forms of wokeness. Neo-Nazism, Christian nationalism, Catholic integralism, even certain forms of anti-liberal conservative nationalism — all of these doctrines give significant weight to group identity in their understanding of what matters in the political realm. Thus, for Lindsay, they are threatening to American liberalism in exactly the same way as their left-wing peers. 'Woke Right are 'right-wing' people who have mostly adopted an identity-based victimhood orientation for themselves to bind together as a class,' he writes. 'Like the Woke Left, then, they happily offer the trade-off usually used to describe Marxists: people who will ask you to trade some of your liberty so that they might hurt your enemies for you.' Personally, I find Lindsay's definition of 'wokeness' so broad that it ceases to operate as a meaningful category (if it ever was one in the first place). But the charge has clearly stung his antagonists on the right, where calling someone 'woke' is basically the worst thing you can say about them. Prominent figures on the illiberal right, ranging from Tim Pool to Mike Cernovich to Anna Khachiyan, shot back at Lindsay — calling him a 'grifter' out to undermine the MAGA movement. Meanwhile, Lindsay's allies, including biologist Colin Wright and Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, accused them of being the true traitors to MAGA. The most interesting intervention in this debate is an essay recently posted on X by the Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony. Hazony's main project, the National Conservatism conference, has served as a hub connecting various different strands of illiberalism to each other and to power. Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have all given notable speeches there. Hazony sees opposition to 'wokeness' as the rallying cry that brought disparate strands of the right together. Whatever their philosophical or policy disagreements, they could all agree that the social left needed to be stopped by whatever means necessary. This term is so potent, in his mind, that deploying it in internecine warfare actively poisons the possibility for political coalition. 'The term 'woke right' really has outraged many nationalist conservatives,' Hazony argues. 'Because of its strong connotations of intentional humiliation and provocation, betrayal, and the destruction of shared symbols, getting this term into wide circulation is the best weapon anyone has come up with yet to make sure that anti-Marxist liberals and nationalist conservatives will truly despise one another and do everything possible to avoid working together from here on.' In Hazony's assessment, the emergence of 'woke right' as a term is a reflection of a sense of victory. Comparing the 2024 election to the fall of the Berlin Wall, he argues that Lindsay and company are engaged in a kind of triumphalism — convinced that true wokeness has been defeated and thus moving on to purging their enemies on the right from the MAGA movement. 'They think (mistakenly) that the war on 'woke' is basically over and that our side has already won. They think (mistakenly) that they can safely turn their attention to trying to remove nationalists and genuine conservatives from whatever positions [of] influence they've succeeded in gaining in the last ten years,' he writes. This power struggle — and that's what the debate over 'woke right' really is — is thus downstream from the sense that the Trump coalition is ascendant. Is Curtis Yarvin a sellout? Curtis Yarvin would certainly be on Lindsay's 'woke right' — indeed, he recently weighed in on the debate to denounce Lindsay. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has become famous for his 'neoreactionary' arguments for replacing democracy with a kind of corporate monarchy, Yarvin has directly influenced figures like Vance and Peter Thiel. In the past week, Yarvin has gotten into his own bitter feud — this time, with someone who helped put him on the intellectual map. The man in question is Scott Alexander, a prominent writer aligned with the rationalist and effective altruist movements covered by my colleagues at Future Perfect. Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Alexander wrote a series of pieces attempting to critically and fairly examine neoreactionary ideas. Alexander brought significant attention to Yarvin's ideas — it's how I first heard about them — and thus played a role in spreading said ideas outside of the online techie hothouses where they were born. Alexander, like Lindsay, is a liberal deeply skeptical of 'wokeness.' However, his criticisms of the left are far more informed and less fanatical. For that reason, perhaps, he has always been deeply opposed to Trump. And, he believes, Yarvin should be too. This is the essential argument of Alexander's blistering new essay on Yarvin, titled 'Moldbug Sold Out.' He argues that Yarvin's arguments about the nature of politics back in the Moldbug days are mutually exclusive with supporting Trump today. Back then, Yarvin wrote quite a lot about the pathway from democracy to a kind of enlightened monarchy. He proposed that would-be monarchists begin with the creation of a 'shadow government,' basically a privately created mock-up of a new political system. This shadow government would be staffed by such impressive and brilliant people proposing such good ideas that the people would voluntarily choose to shift their allegiances. He proposed this scheme, in part, because he recognized that elected authoritarians had a very poor track record. In his view, the kind of 'authoritarian populist' who could win through normal elections would likely look like a Hitler or Mussolini — a violent buffoon who could never be trusted to stand-up the well-meaning despotism of Yarvin's dreams. Trump, of course, is an authoritarian-inclined populist who won power through elections — yet Yarvin has boarded the Trump train anyway. Thus, Alexander charges, Yarvin has sold out: betrayed his own beliefs in order to gain access to power. 'The MAGA movement was exactly what 2000s [Yarvin] feared most — a cancerous outgrowth of democracy riding the same wave of populist anger as the 20th century dictatorships he loathed. But in the hope of winning a temporary political victory, he let them wear him as a skinsuit — giving their normal, boring autocratic tendencies the mystique of the cool, edgy, all-vulnerabilities-patched autocracy he foretold in his manifestos,' Alexander writes. In response, Yarvin posted a long series of tweets on X that basically concede Alexander's main point: that Yarvin's current stance contradicts his previous one. Yarvin now believes that he used to be naïve: 'a libtard and a coward,' in his characteristically insulting phrasing. The current liberal regime is so awful, so demonstrably dangerous, that the first political task should be its destruction. 'Authoritarian populism,' he writes, 'is the only force with the power to end it.' What the two fights reveal about the Trump era Both the 'woke right' and Yarvin debates revolve fundamentally around power — specifically, how it should be wielded once you have it. The 'woke right' debate is, at heart, about what the ultimate ends of the Trump administration should be. While both sides agree that the 'woke left' should be wiped out, they disagree on what an alternative vision should look like. Lindsay and his allies argue for a restoration of some kind of right-wing liberal individualism; Hazony and his camp believe that the task is replacing liberalism with some kind of hazy alternative rooted in religious or ethno-cultural identity. This debate is taking place on purely abstract grounds — there's almost never any reference to concrete policy disagreements — but it reflects an assumption that there are very real implications of this argument for the next four years of American politics. Lindsay has repeatedly argued, in tweets and interviews, that the rise of the 'woke right' threatens to derail the entire MAGA project and return power to the left. The Yarvin debate poses a related, but more introspective, question about power: How corrosive is it for intellectuals to be in proximity to it? Alexander, the most intellectually rigorous person in either debate, suggests the answer is 'very.' In Yarvin, he sees someone who he long took seriously as tainted by access — by, for example, Vance citing Yarvin as an influence in a podcast appearance. Yarvin's own conduct in their debate vindicates his assessment. Put together, these debates point us to two major themes worth watching throughout the remainder of the Trump administration. First, how much the administration's policy choices intensify the fractures in its elite coalition. Hazony is right that hostility to the left is what brought disparate groups together under the Trump banner. But now, in a world where the administration has to govern, some of those factions are bound to feel like they're losing or even betrayed. Second, how warped the right's ideas become when they go through the policy meatgrinder. We already saw a version of Yarvin's original vision of a CEO-monarch in Elon Musk's reign of terror at DOGE. But that went so poorly that Yarvin himself disavowed it. This embarrassment wasn't enough to turn him off the Trump project altogether — power still has its lure. But the inevitable difficulty of translating ideas into actual policy, and the specific incompetencies of Trump's attempts to do so, are already alienating some previously aligned thinkers. Yarvin may not have a breaking point, but others like him may.
