“Dark Enlightenment” in the White House. JD Vance and the IT elite under the influence of the blogger
Curtis Yarvin is a blogger, a propagator of the “dark enlightenment”, called by the media – the Machiavelli of Big Tech and an ideologist of Donald Trump's camp. He calls for the overthrow of democracy, the closure of universities and the media, and encourages the administration to allow Putin to overthrow the liberal order of Europe.
“Everyone responsible for (government) policy has read Yarvin.”
A US administration adviser from DOGE (Department of State Efficiency) told the Washington Post that it was no secret that “everyone responsible for (government) policy read Yarvin.” Bulwark quotes a senior White House adviser who said that Yarvin created the most coherent, substantive “articulation” of the MAGA political project.
Vice President JD Vance, who shares his opinion that the current political system must collapse, speaks with approval of the self-proclaimed philosopher's thoughts. The Verge website puts forward the thesis that “nobody online has shaped Vance's thinking as much as Yarvin.” Yarvin is held in special esteem by Silicon Valley elites.
“A reactionary blogger's calls for a monarch to rule the country once seemed like a joke. Now the right has bent the knee to him,” wrote Ava Kofman, a journalist at The New Yorker, in an article entitled “Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America.”
This “conspiracy” may go further, given that Yarvin called on Trump to allow Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to dismantle the liberal order “not only in the Russian-speaking territories, but all along the route to the English Channel,” Kofman reminds.
Programmer, blogger and right-wing ideologue
Yarvin, 52, a software developer and founder of technology companies, began his career as a right-wing ideologue as the author of a blog under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. There, he presented at the beginning the thesis from which he derived the rest of his political quasi-philosophy: people are not equal, and egalitarianism is responsible for most of the problems of the modern world.
Selected individuals are created to rule, and the majority of society – to submit to this authority. In an interview with the French magazine “Le Grand Continent”, Yarvin said that “America's main lie” is that “all people are created equal”, which – in his opinion – is contradicted by scientific discoveries about human DNA.
Power for the king
If people are not equal, then democracy is a flawed system. Yarvin therefore calls in his writings for “the abolition of democracy, the constitution and the rule of law” and the transfer of power to a monarch-executivewhich, like American corporations, would be loosely supervised by the supervisory board. It would prevent such moves as a military coup by simply depriving him of control over the armed forces and weapons using a cryptographic key, Kofman reports.
A king/executive is needed because authoritarian rule will produce “better political results than democratic mob rule,” Yarvin declared during a debate at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And Trump is a man “biologically predestined” to play the role of the American monarch.
In Yarvin's opinion, the guardian of the evil liberal democratic order and the propagator of pernicious egalitarian views is what he called the “Cathedral” – a decentralized leftist complex composed of universities, media and scientific institutes. All in all, thanks to the leftist “Cathedral” and the egalitarian order, “we live in times of apocalypse,” Yarvin said in an interview for Le Grand Continent.
Starting from such assumptions, the blogger-ideologist postulates: closing universities, eliminating free media, dismantling all social protectionsselling public schools to private companies and imprisoning “uncivilized populations,” or eliminating them in a “humane way,” reports the New Yorker.
It's actually about a complete “reset” of the social order and the introduction of authoritarian rulewhich will turn the government “into a heavily armed, ultra-profitable corporation” that will suspend foreign policy, including “security guarantees, foreign aid and mass immigration,” Yarvin writes on his blog.
When asked by “Le Grand Continent” whether the US should intervene if Putin reached Paris, the blogger denied it and emphasized that America's foreign policy should be determined by the Monroe Doctrine, and the West itself is to blame for the Kremlin's aggressive policy because it moves NATO too close to Russia's borders.
Technofascist with the support of Silicon Valley tycoons
Although Yarvin is called a technofascist by critics, he enjoys the support of many Silicon Valley tech magnates, and his admirers, largely IT libertarians, have become “shock troops of an intellectual online movement that has been called neo-reactionary or Dark Enlightenment,” Kofman writes.
The neoconservative website Bulwark estimates that Yarvin's claims to the status of a thinker or political philosopher are absolutely groundless, and he himself could be treated as “a clown whose ideas do not deserve analysis” if it were not for the fact that he created one of the theories “used to justify the fact that the Trump administration is violating (current) norms”, which also “explains (behavior of) Trump”.
The US administration read Yarvin
As Kofman puts it: Yarvin “became one of America's most influential illiberal thinkers, an intellectual source code engineer for the second Trump administration.”
The neo-reactionary blogger is also responsible for social “consent” to letting Big Tech barons into politicswho very actively support Trump's political plans – Bulwark continues.
The Guardian emphasizes that Yarvin has a great intellectual influence on the vice president and many other figures in the US administration, and his demand to create authoritarian power in America largely explains Trump's “actions and rhetoric.”
Before the president returned to the White House, Yarvin demanded that he get rid of federal officials and replace them with his loyalists, and that if the courts tried to stop him from implementing his plans, he should simply ignore them. He proposed that Trump subjugate Congress and justify radical moves by introducing a state of emergency.
Kofman explains that Yarvin was inspired by the book “Democracy: God That Failed” by economist Hans-Herman Hoppe, a supporter of monarchy and the “physical elimination” of gays and people opposed to a strict social order. “Time” also points to the influence of the British philosopher Mick Land, an opponent of democracy and a supporter of a system in which “big people” supported by algorithms and AI will take over the power in the country.
And so inspired, Yarvin created his first blog, in which the first entry read: “I decided to create a new ideology.”
Marta Fita-Czuchnowska (PAP)
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