Trump losing with the MAGA torch passed to Vance has been a theme here. That's not new, it's been explored. A sidebar listing of past items exists, if you scroll down to them. And there is a site-specific search box.
And Elon Musk's money and platform are out there. With MAGA, with Trump, with Vance who knows? Money against a second Harris term is not a factor, there will be plenty of it.
Ideology, that's different.
So, to the point, but digressing for context. Long-time Minnesota Republican Blogger Gary Gross, a DeSantis supporter before DeSantis' star waned, has days ago posted,
Donald Trump, Elon Musk, D.J. Vance = positive change for this generation (October 6, 2024)
After a few words about Elon (a/k/a super-donor) at Trump's Butler PA, revisit, Gary wrote:
Who cares if Elon isn't eloquent like Obama? Unlike Obama, Elon's getting important things done when a crisis hits. Introducing Dark MAGA:
[embedded video omitted - Dark MAGA being much more than one mediocre Vance syrupy campaign speech, more on that, obviously, later stuff all about it but w/o the Dark MAGA badge. Gary's item continues - ]Then there's Donald Trump. While some people don't like his personality, the truth is that he didn't have to be the disruptor that he's turned into. He's rich. He could've lived a comfortable life without taking the slings and arrows. While there's little doubt that he's got a bad boy streak in him, it's indisputable that he isn't afraid to do the right thing for the little guy. [...] It's time to put Donald Trump, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk in positions of authority.
The point, Gary recognizes the triumverate. Elon the money and X-based support. Elon, who has had success, one of several PayPal profiteers, who went on to Tesla and SpaceX, both successful innovative ventures leading Musk to a fortune.
But Gary does not dig into what they may represent long term. His focus is on days to the election, and he posts a video of a ho-hum campaign speech.
Again, the point is if Trump loses, what then? With the torch passed, it is the JD show. And Dark MAGA. (Trump can be dismissed from the equation, having his past being an anchor keeping him placed.)
So, two items, in reverse-chrono order, to start. Politico first.
Is There More to JD Vance’s MAGA Alliance Than Meets the Eye?--The New Right has a blueprint for taking power. JD Vance could be following it.
Now that Vance is accompanying Trump on the top of the Republican ticket, this paradox has opened Republicans up to fresh criticisms. How populist can Vance really be while cozying up to billionaires in Silicon Valley? What does a Yale-educated attorney and ex-venture capitalist understand about the lives of Trump’s blue-collar voters? Is a guy who owns not one but two million-dollar houses a credible mouthpiece for the GOP’s fledgling economic populism?
But the deeper I’ve dug into the conservative world Vance comes from — often referred to as the “New Right” — the more I’ve come to see Vance’s split identity as a feature rather than a bug for his ideological supporters.
In fact, Vance embodies an archetype that has been theorized about at length in New Right-adjacent books and podcasts (many of which Vance has read and listened to). By forging an alliance between the elite “New Right” and the MAGA masses, Vance, according to this reading, could serve as the leader of a new movement to institute an illiberal and explicitly reactionary political order. Though adopting the rhetoric of conservatism populism, this new order would be a fundamentally elitist one: It would expel America’s current ruling elite in order to replace it with a new, more conservative one, drawn from the ranks of the New Right.
The details of this plan differ between the various writers and thinkers that have influenced Vance — people like the Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, the internet philosopher Curtis Yarvin and the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel. But taken together, their prescriptions amount to a kind of three-step plan for the New Right’s project: Identify a member of the New Right elite who can tap into the energies of an ascendant right-wing populist movement, ride those energies to political power, and then carry out a top-down transformation of American society along illiberal lines. It is, in effect, a plan to accomplish through elite rule what even the MAGA movement has failed to accomplish through democratic control: The creation of a social order built around conservative values, even if those values remain broadly unpopular with the American people.
In fact, Vance has articulated his own political strategy in terms that closely echo those found in the pages of the New Right thinkers who have influenced him.
“One of the ways in which I’m very much populist is that I think people need to have elected representatives [who] try to channel their frustrations into solutions that will make their lives better,” Vance told me when I interviewed him in his Senate office in December 2023. “One of the ways I’m very much not a populist is that I think every populist movement that has ever existed has failed unless it’s captured some subset of the people who are professionally in government.”
Obviously, Elon = money and a platform, and there is Kevin Roberts at Haritage, and the collection of Project 2025 wannabe resumes - Politico continuing:
As Vance hits the campaign trail, parsing this blueprint is essential for understanding his political trajectory — and what underlies his support for Trump. Given his past criticisms of Trump, Vance’s new-found affection for Trumpism and the MAGA movement has been chalked up to a “moral collapse” or rank opportunism. But read against the ideas found in the writings of the conservative intellectuals close to Vance, it begins to appear like something else: the first step in a much broader plan.
On a summer evening in 2023, Vance strode into a marble-lined ballroom at the Catholic University of America, where a crowd of 250 had gathered for the launch of a new book by the Catholic philosopher Patrick Deneen, a political theorist at the University of Notre Dame, hosted by the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Vance, then just a few months into his first term as a United States senator, made a beeline for Deneen and wrapped him in a big hug, both men smiling as they greeted each other like old friends.
That hug served as a vivid metaphor for Vance and the New Right’s embrace of Deneen’s work as a kind of intellectual roadmap for their emerging political movement — a process that Deneen spoke to me about at length for a POLITICO Magazine profile in 2023.
In his breakout book Why Liberalism Failed, published in 2018, Deneen argued that small-L liberalism is inevitably self-destructive; that a political system predicated on the expansion of individual rights and autonomy will eventually undermine the collective institutions — like family, organized religion and local communities — that make political life possible in the first place.
In his next book, Regime Change, Deneen doesn’t embrace the term “illiberal” but lays out a vision of an ideal “postliberal order” that would jettison liberalism’s protection of individual rights in favor of a social order that promotes “the common good” — a purportedly objective set of social conditions, borrowed from Catholic social teaching, that “undergird human flourishing.” According to Deneen, liberalism’s phony commitment to egalitarianism currently provides cover for a corrupt (and left-leaning) elite to pursue its own interests at the expense of the interests of the downtrodden (and right-leaning) masses. In Deneen’s postliberal order, by contrast, a new ruling elite would foster collaboration between “the few” and “the many” in pursuit of the common good. This new order would look the same and be governed by the same institutions as the current one, but it would be infused by a “fundamentally different ethos.”
In practice, Deneen’s policy prescriptions for fostering the common good would be even more far-reaching than Trump’s: sweeping protectionist trade measures to promote domestic industries; aggressive trust-busting of corporate monopolies; a robust “pro-family” welfare policy to promote the formation of traditional families; strict limits on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
The crux of Deneen’s book is his plan for the transition from the liberal order to the postliberal order. This “peaceful” transition, Deneen argued, would not happen on its own. It would require the creation of “a new elite” — a “self-conscious aristoi” (or aristocracy) who could enter the halls of government, academia and the media, take them over and repurpose them toward conservative and illiberal ends. While drawn from the upper echelons of society, this new elite would effectively act as class traitors: Having replaced the old, corrupt liberal elite, they would ally with and rule in the interests of the “many,” using their power to foster conservative values like “stability, order [and] continuity.” Deneen calls this political arrangement “aristopopulism” — an alliance between a “genuinely noble elite” (the “aristoi”) and the populist masses, working together to replace secular liberalism with a postliberal system grounded in a “forthright acknowledgment and renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization.”
Vance — whose background and biography make him a living embodiment of Deneen’s “aristopopulist” vision — has not hid his interest in Deneen’s ideas. During a panel discussion at the launch event for Deneen’s book, Vance — appearing alongside Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts — identified himself as a member of the “postliberal right,” adding that he “sees[s] his role and his voice” in Congress as “explicitly anti-regime.”
In response to a question from the moderator about how he balances the interests of “the few” and “the many” in practice, he answered like a card-carrying member of Deneen’s new elite: “Things in American society are so tilted toward the ‘few’ that I just focus on the ‘many,’” he said, “and let the rest of it figure itself out.”
Curtis Yarvin’s ideas do not garner formal discussions in the marble-lined halls of America’s universities, but they are no less influential in the intellectual ecosystem that has shaped Vance’s worldview.
Yarvin rose to prominence on the online right in the early 2000s as the leading voice of the “neo-reactionary” movement — or what came to be called “NRx” — while blogging under the pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug.” The premise of the movement, which Yarvin unspooled in his signature meandering and irony-laden prose style, was that “democracy is bunk” — both as a philosophical system and as a principle for organizing modern society.
According to Yarvin, America in the 21st century is no longer a democracy in any meaningful sense. Instead, it has degenerated into a corrupt oligarchy run by an interconnected network of academics, media elites and government bureaucrats that Yarvin calls “the Cathedral.” Although most Americans have carried on believing the elections and the popular will continue to be the source of political power and legitimacy, Yarvin argues that the real decision-making in America — including the critical power to determine what is true and what is false — rests with the Cathedral, regardless of who occupies the White House or which party holds a majority in Congress. (At the National Conservatism Conference in 2022, Vance gave a speech titled “The Universities are the Enemy” that was effectively a layman’s explanation of “the Cathedral.”)
To a point, Yarvin’s critique of this system can sound like a more traditional libertarian or conservative critique of the “administrative state” or “the deep state” — the notion that a set of unelected bureaucrats have usurped power from the sovereign American people. But unlike traditional conservatives, Yarvin does not advocate for a return to small or limited government. Instead, he argues that America needs a “national CEO, [or] what’s called ‘a dictator’,’’ who could implement a type of centralized American monarchy, run on the model of a Silicon Valley tech start-up. (Yarvin’s model for this style of leadership is, half ironically, FDR, whose presidency he as described as “a personal executive monarchy.”) Yarvin has laid out an extensive (though not always clear) playbook explaining how a democratically elected president could claim monarchical power — a process that would involve a smartphone app to organize voting, reinforced by police forces in red armbands.
Here and elsewhere, Yarvin’s plans diverge sharply from Deneen’s — and neither Deneen nor Vance have endorsed the explicitly monarchic parts of Yarvin’s vision. But they share one essential element: Like Deneen and Vance, Yarvin believes that the transition away from progressive liberal democracy will be led by a self-conscious cadre of conservative elites who gain power through an alliance with the popular masses — yielding, in Yarvin’s vision, to the rule of a single “national CEO.”
Yarvin’s description of this dynamic is much stranger than Deneen’s. Borrowing from the universe of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Yarvin describes American society as divided into several classes: “Elves,” (the highly educated ruling class); “hobbits,” (the average middle-class red-state American) and “dwarves, orcs and zombies” (the working- and lower-classes). These groupings, Yarvin has written, describe different roles in society, not races or fixed classes: The elves are the people who run the powerful institutions of politics and culture, while the hobbits just “want to grill and raise kids.” (“These roles tend to be hereditary, but do not need to be,” Yarvin has written.)
The elves are almost uniformly liberal, but Yarvin believes that mixed in among the elves are “dark elves” — reactionary elites like Yarvin who oppose “the regime,” sympathize with the plight of the hobbits and understand democracy for what it really is: a cover for a corrupt oligarchy. The only way to realize a “pro-hobbit” regime, Yarvin argues, is for hobbits to form an alliance with the dark elves to defeat the normal elves, and then to allow the dark elves — and eventually a single dark elf — to rule on their behalf.
This is, in effect, a more extreme description of Deneen’s “aristopopulism” in dorkier terms. On a popular conservative podcast in 2021, Vance cited Yarvin — whom he has called “a friend” — in support of his view that a second-term Trump should “fire every mid-level level bureaucrat and every civil servant in the administrative state and replace them with our people,” thereby allowing conservatives to “seize the administrative state for our own purposes.” (Yarvin has recently distanced himself from Vance, calling him “a random normie [politician] whom I’ve barely even met.”)
Vance’s citation of Yarvin has attracted much attention since he landed on the top of the Republican ticket — especially Vance’s suggestion that Trump should ignore the Supreme Court if they step in to block the mass firings. But the public scrutiny has overlooked one critical part of Vance’s plan. When Vance is talking about installing “our people” in the government, it’s fair to assume that he’s not talking about enlisting the hobbits. He’s talking about promoting the dark elves.
All of these threads come together in the thinking of Vance’s primary political patron and close personal friend Peter Thiel.
Thiel and Vance met in 2011 after Vance attended a talk by Thiel at Yale Law School — an encounter that Vance later called “the most important moment of my time at Yale.” Vance later went to work for Thiel’s venture capital firm, Mithril Capital — the VC company is, fittingly, named after Lord of the Rings — and later founded his own fund with Thiel’s backing. Along the way, though, Thiel became a sort of tutor to Vance, introducing Vance to the intellectual influences shaping the politics of Silicon Valley’s right-leaning cohort.
One of those influences was the Austrian libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises and two of his American disciples, Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. That trio formed the core of a group of thinkers known as the “paleolibertarians”: For von Mises, Rothbard and Hoppe, real political freedom required shrinking — and eventually abolishing — the centralized state, making way for an “anarcho-capitalist” system governed exclusively by markets and the forces of social competition.
Even as libertarians gained political momentum and support throughout the 1970s, the paleolibertarians remained relatively marginal on the right, and their followers knew that the program wasn’t popular enough to gain widespread support. By the 1990s, Rothbard in particular had given up on building a broad-based electoral movement based purely on libertarian principles. Instead, he began calling for libertarians to devote their energy to a new style of “right-wing populism,” based on an alliance between libertarian intellectual elites and the middle- and lower-class masses who felt oppressed and disillusioned by contemporary American life. “This two-pronged strategy is (a) to build up a cadre of our own libertarians, minimal-government opinion-molders, based on correct ideas; and (b) to tap the masses directly, to short-circuit the dominant media and intellectual elites,” Rothbard wrote in a 1992 essay titled “Right-Wing Populism,” which the writer John Ganz has called “the Ur-Text of Trumpism.”
Over time, this coalition would consolidate behind “inspiring and charismatic political leadership … who will be knowledgeable, courageous, dynamic, exciting and effective in mobilizing and building a movement,” Rothbard wrote. (The rabid anti-communist Joseph McCarthy offered one historical example of what this leadership might look like, Rothbard argued — but looking to the future, he pinned his hopes on Pat Buchanan.) Once this movement had concentrated power under its charismatic leader, it could seize political control from “the unholy alliance of ‘corporate liberal’ Big Business and media elites,” dismantle the American state and usher in a new hyper-libertarian order.
Under this new order, Rothbard presumed, a natural elite — the people who could win out in a world of unfettered competition — would inevitably rise to the top.
Although the paleolibertarians’ goal was in theory the opposite of a strong centralized state or reactionary monarchy, it nevertheless proved attractive to thinkers with authoritarian inclinations, in part because it espoused a frank skepticism of liberal democracy. For the paleolibertarians, democracy existed to protect markets, and once it had ceased to do that, it became expendable. (Yarvin, for instance, has cited Rothbard and Hoppe as major influences, as have key figures on the alt-right.) This view had a decisive influence to Thiel, who has spoken at an organization founded by Hoppe, and who infamously declared in 2009 that he “no longer believe[d] that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
On the surface, Deneen, Yarvin and Thiel want different things — a postliberal order grounded in Catholic social teaching; a monarchy styled after a tech startup; a stateless techno-libertarian paradise in which the only rights are property rights. But they are united both by their opposition to liberal democracy and by their fundamental elitism — their shared belief that America is and always will be run by elites, but that it is currently ruled by the wrong type of elite. Their goal is not to abolish elite rule but to replace America’s current elite with a purportedly different, more conservative one, and they share a blueprint for doing so. Implicitly recognizing that their ideas are not popular enough to win broad-based political support, they advocate for an alliance between reactionary elites and the alienated masses, channeling popular frustration against the democratic order they hope to eventually replace. The “hobbits” are the engine of this transformation, but they are never its leaders.
Forging this alliance, all these thinkers agree, will take time — but the crucial first step is identifying and cultivating a new conservative elite. This new elite must be made up of people who are steeped in elite culture and reactionary ideas but who understand “the people” and can credibly claim to govern on their behalf. They must have one foot in the world of the elite and one foot in the heartland. They must think like elves but be able to talk like hobbits.
In other words, they must look like JD Vance — and their first task is to build a bridge between the elite reactionary circles and the right-leaning masses.
That is virtually the whole item, images omitted. Thiel is the publicly noted thought leader because Vance was mentored by him in Silicon Valley, but the other two are idea people, defining a new right which Thiel and Vance fit into.
Yarvin deserves attention, and VOX gave it to him two years ago. Our second focus item:
Before quoting more, for those who may not recognize who Blake Masters is, Wikipedia helps:
Blake Gates Masters (born August 5, 1986) is an American venture capitalist and former political candidate.[2][3] Frequently referred to as a protégé of businessman Peter Thiel,[4] Masters co-wrote Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future with Thiel in 2014, based on notes Masters had taken at Stanford Law School in 2012. He later served as chief operating officer (COO) of Thiel's investment firm, Thiel Capital, as well as president of the Thiel Foundation.
In the 2022 United States Senate election in Arizona, Masters defeated state Attorney General Mark Brnovich and businessman Jim Lamon to become the Republican Party nominee. He aligned himself with Thiel, who funded his primary campaign with $15 million, and former president Donald Trump, both of whom endorsed him in June 2022.[5] During his campaign, Masters promoted writings by Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and white supremacist Sam Francis, and touted his endorsement of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.[2] He lost the general election to incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly.
In running for Congress, Masters campaign site noted, " Blake Masters is a former Trump-endorsed U.S. Congress candidate from Arizona. Together, we will make America Safe, Prosperous, and Free again. About News. Blake Masters is the Only Candidate endorsed by Donald Trump And JD Vance."
A kindred soul to Vance, and Thiel. Masters ran again, 2024, losing in the primary.
Back to the VOX item having its focus on Yarvin:
In September 2021, J.D. Vance, a GOP candidate for Senate in Ohio, appeared on a conservative podcast to discuss what is to be done with the United States, and his proposals were dramatic. He urged Donald Trump, should he win another term, to “seize the institutions of the left,” fire “every single midlevel bureaucrat” in the US government, “replace them with our people,” and defy the Supreme Court if it tries to stop him.
To the uninitiated, all that might seem stunning. But Vance acknowledged he had an intellectual inspiration. “So there’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things...”
Nearly a decade earlier, a Stanford law student named Blake Masters, asked by a friend for reading recommendations for a book club, emailed a link to a set of blog posts. These posts made an argument that was quite unusual in the American context, asserting that the democratically elected US government should be abolished and replaced with a monarchy. Its author, then writing pseudonymously, was Yarvin.
Masters is now the GOP Senate nominee in Arizona. At a campaign event last year, according to Vanity Fair’s James Pogue, he was asked how he’d actually drain the swamp in Washington. “One of my friends has this acronym he calls RAGE — Retire All Government Employees,” Masters answered. You’ve probably guessed who the friend is.
In many thousand words’ worth of blog posts over the past 15 years, computer programmer and tech startup founder Curtis Yarvin has laid out a critique of American democracy: arguing that it’s liberals in elite academic institutions, media outlets, and the permanent bureaucracy who hold true power in this declining country, while the US executive branch has become weak, incompetent, and captured.
But he stands out among right-wing commentators for being probably the single person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the US government could be toppled and replaced — “rebooted” or “reset,” as he likes to say — with a monarch, CEO, or dictator at the helm. Yarvin argues that a creative and visionary leader — a “startup guy,” like, he says, Napoleon or Lenin was — should seize absolute power, dismantle the old regime, and build something new in its place.
To Yarvin, incremental reforms and half-measures are necessarily doomed. The only way to achieve what he wants is to assume “absolute power,” and the game is all about getting to a place where you can pull that off. Critics have called his ideas “fascist” — a term he disputes, arguing that centralizing power under one ruler long predates fascism, and that his ideal monarch should rule for all rather than fomenting a class war as fascists do. “Autocratic” fits as a descriptor, though his preferred term is “monarchist.” You won’t find many on the right saying they wholly support Yarvin’s program — especially the “monarchy” thing — but his critique of the status quo and some of his ideas for changing it have influenced several increasingly prominent figures.
Besides Vance and Masters (whose campaigns declined to comment for this story), Yarvin has had a decade-long association with billionaire Peter Thiel, who is similarly disillusioned with democracy and American government. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009, and earlier this year, he declared that Republican members of Congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment after the January 6 attacks were “traitorous.” Fox host Tucker Carlson is another fan, interviewing Yarvin with some fascination for his streaming program last year. He’s even influenced online discourse — Yarvin was the first to popularize the analogy from The Matrix of being “redpilled” or “-pilled,” suddenly losing your illusions and seeing the supposed reality of the world more clearly, as applied to politics.
So these ideas are no longer entirely just abstract musings - it’s unclear how many powerful people may take Yarvin entirely literally, but many do take him seriously. And after the 2020 election crisis, the fall of American democracy seems rather more plausible than it used to. To better understand the ideas influencing a growing number of conservative elites now, and the battles that may lie ahead, then, I reviewed much of Yarvin’s sizable body of work, and I interviewed him.Overall, Yarvin is arguably the leading intellectual figure on the New Right — a movement of thinkers and activists critical of the traditional Republican establishment who argue that an elite left “ruling class” has captured and is ruining America, and that drastic measures are necessary to fight back against them. And New Right ideas are getting more influential among Republican staffers and politicians. Trump’s advisers are already brainstorming Yarvinite — or at least Yarvin-lite — ideas for the second term, such as firing thousands of federal civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists. With hundreds of “election deniers” on the ballot this year, another disputed presidential election could happen soon — and Yarvin has written a playbook for the power grab he hopes will then unfold.
During our lengthy conversation, Yarvin argued that the eventual fall of US democracy could be “fundamentally joyous and peaceful.” Yet the steps President Trump took in that direction after the 2020 election were not particularly joyous or peaceful, and it was hard for me to see why further movement down that road would be.
From obscure “anti-democracy” blogger to New Right influencer
In Yarvin’s telling, his political awakening occurred during the 2004 election. A computer programmer living in Silicon Valley, he was then an avid reader of political blogs, following the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” scandal about whether Democratic nominee John Kerry had lied about aspects of his military service. Yarvin thought it was clear Kerry had lied, and felt the media went to stunning lengths to protect him and smear his accusers. But he also became disillusioned with the conservative response, which he thought amounted to ineffectively complaining about “media bias” and continuing with politics as usual. The problem, he felt, was far deeper.
An intense period of reading old books on political theory and history to contemplate how systems work followed. Eventually, he (as he later put it) “stopped believing in democracy,” comparing this realization to how formerly religious people feel when they stop believing in God. Soon, he began posting blog comments, and then writing a self-described “anti-democracy blog” beginning in 2007, under the pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug.” In these writings — discursive, filled with historical references, wry, and often gleefully offensive — he laid out a sort of grand theory of why America is broken, and how it can be fixed:
- The US government is a sclerotic, decaying institution that can no longer achieve great or even competent things and, as he now puts it, “just sucks.” Constrained by the separation of powers and Congress, the president has “negligible power” to achieve his agenda in contrast to the “deep state” bureaucracy and the nonprofits that are permanent fixtures of Washington’s governing class.
- True power in the US is held by “the Cathedral” — elite academic and media institutions that, in Yarvin’s telling, set the bounds of acceptable political discourse and distort reality to fit their preferred ideological frames. This does not unfold as a centralized conspiracy, but rather through a shared worldview and culture, and it’s his explanation for why society keeps moving to the left through the decades.
- It’s not just the current government that sucks — democracy sucks, too. Sometimes he denounces democracy entirely, calling it a “dangerous, malignant form of government.” Sometimes he says democracy doesn’t even practically exist in the US, because voters don’t have true power over the government as compared to those other interests, which function as an oligarchy. Sometimes he argues that organizations in which leadership is shared or divided simply aren’t effective.
- Far preferable, in his view, would be a government run like most corporations — with one leader holding absolute power over those below, though perhaps accountable to a “board of directors” of sorts (he admits that “an unaccountable autocracy is a real problem”). This monarch/CEO would have the ability to actually run things, unbothered by pesky civil servants, judges, voters, the public, or the separation of powers. “How do we achieve effective management? We know one simple way: find the right person, and put him or her in charge,” he writes.
For years, Yarvin was something of an odd internet curiosity, with his ideas far from most political conservatives’ radar. He gained one prominent reader — Thiel, who had written about his own disillusionment with democracy, became a Yarvin friend, and funded his startup. “He’s fully enlightened,” Yarvin later wrote of Thiel in an email, “just plays it very carefully.” (Thiel did not respond to a request for comment.) Beyond that, ideas bloggers like Robin Hanson and Scott Alexander argued with him, and he gradually got more attention for being a leading figure in the “neoreactionary” movement.
Though his blog was pseudonymous, he had not made a particularly extensive effort to keep his identity secret, appearing in person as Moldbug to give a talk at a conference in 2012. In the following years, journalists began to write about him by name, and though he soon put his blog on hiatus to focus on his startup, outrage over some of his writings continued to follow him. Yarvin was disinvited from one tech conference in 2015 after protests, and his appearance at another in 2016 led several sponsors and speakers to withdraw.
[...]
There is more to the Vox item, readers can check, and added to much Internet commentary about Yarvin, any search will show it, there is what he actually wrote, i.e. original texts: e.g., here, one item at https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/ which is one of Yarvin's recent website.
Also, there is https://graymirror.substack.com/about with this post, among others: "The Buterfly revolution - April 7, 2022" in which Yarvin wrote:
In early 2022, the Trump machine has become a kind of weird regime in exile. Is this strange organism learning? Maybe sort of, though so are its enemies.
Item: in brazen defiance of the historic precedent of US v Humphrey’s Executor (1935), Trump recently called for the White House to be able to fire anyone in the so-called “executive branch.” Such ignorance of black-letter law is not unknown in the man! Trump may never even have heard of the Administrative Procedure Act (1946). And—is it that far from anyone to everyone? Hm.
Already, the voter can have no doubt that such holy and venerated parchments will, if a new Trump administration rears its ugly head, be utterly ravaged and spoiled like a sandcastle sacked by a dog—if Trump in 2024, once elected, can then get his ugly way.
If not, of course, the paperwork will remain unchallenged, and the institutions that rule by these ancient promises will be unharmed. If the status quo is what you’re into, you’ll be popping the champagne!
Will the next Trump administration truly be able to drain the swamp—will it have, once elected, the powers of FDR or more? Or the powers of Julius Caesar—which is more like what he needs? Or the powers of President Camacho—which was about the power the Deep State let “President” Trump get his hands on the first time around?
It is hard to know. But one sure way to not be powerful is to—never be ready for power. Another way is to never try to take power.
Let us imagine a fantasy world into which we could convert the Trump operation, as it is in early 2022, into a truly effective machine for both taking and using power.
Why this is safe
It is important to understand that this is not going to happen—for one reason. Donald J. Trump is not the “Trump” in the story. He is who he is. His capacities are what they are. Of course man must always know hope, but I actually knew the first Trump administration would be a farce once I realized one thing—he wasn’t selling his hotels.
Here is the most important right-wing American politician since Richard Nixon—and dude isn’t even all in. Indeed you get the sense that he recognizes that the Presidency is a kind of decorative honor, like the throne of England, which would actually promote his hospitality and other businesses (licensees, really). Imagine staying in a Windsor branded hotel! The Trump brand, he must have dreamed, could be as strong as that.
Given that the Presidency has actually totally trashed Trump’s brand, he has probably given up on this one. But you never know. The fellow has certainly drunk deeply at the well of the power of positive thinking—which has served him well, up to a point. Alas, Trump 2024, if he wins, will be nothing but another expression of the Peter Principle. Liberals do not need to fear him. Reactionaries can give up all their useless hopes.
Therefore, this document is safe—Trump will never do anything like this. Whew! But I won’t disguise my belief that someone should.
[...]
JD in mind, or just an unanchored hypothetical?