Trump’s dork philosopher

0:00It's Today Explained. What's going on, my boys and in some cases gals? Recently, one of you emailed us with this request. You've got mail. Hello. I'm an avid listener, and I strongly believe you should cover the story of Curtis Yarvin. It's important to explore who he is and how he has influenced the MAGA and the tech bros movement. Curtis Yarvin is a very online far-right philosopher whose ideas include the fascinating, the esoteric, the absurd, the racist, and so on. Six months into the Trump administration, there's evidence that he is influencing the MAGA movement, and even President Trump.

0:34J.D. Vance knows him and likes him. Elon consulted him about this third-party idea. Yarvin can take some credit for inspiring Doge. And as you'll hear ahead, one of Trump's most controversial, doesn't even begin to cover it, ideas may have come from Yarvin or someone who reads his substack. I can almost guarantee you that Trump does not. Everything's computer. That's coming up. Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need.

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2:12This is Today Explained.

2:17Ava Kaufman, Staff Writer at The New Yorker, recently spent some time with Curtis Jarvin for her piece titled Curtis Jarvins Plot Against America. There was a detail in your profile that I thought was really fascinating. In the spring of 2024, Curtis Yarvin writes on Substack, let's expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and turn it into a luxury resort. Then in February of this year, about a year later, President Trump makes this suggestion aloud. I don't want to be cute. I don't want to be a wise guy. But the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so bad. This could be so magnificent.

2:54Trump got all the attention, not surprisingly. But what are we to glean from that? Is Donald Trump reading Curtis Yarvin's Substack? I think Curtis was as surprised as anyone to see his proposal being taken up almost verbatim in this speech that, you know, as Trump's advisers later said, caught them by surprise as well. As far as he understands it, when kind of pressed, his ideas are kind of self-evident. Anyone who kind of sees the world as he does would, of course, come up with the same idea of kind of, you know, fully taking over a country, dispelling its inhabitants and linking it to the blockchain and giving people a kind of meme coin.

3:40I realize that it seems improbable that we would both have the same crackpot idea. No, it is extremely probable because the president and I inhabit the same reality. We are both looking up and noticing that the sky is blue. Most people live in a crackpot world where the sky is green and our present Middle East policy is sane. Reality has started to seep into this crackpot world and the mixture is remarkable. And, you know, Trump isn't reading Yarvin directly, but a lot of his advisers, maybe not his top advisers, but young people eager and working in the administration, I think Curtis calls them kind of lone wolves, are.

4:20And, you know, if you think that, you know, might makes right, the idea of a mass expulsion in this way might seem, you know, entirely plausible for both Yarvin and for Trump. So why is that? What is the appeal when there are so many guys online writing substacks? Why this one? There is this kind of very simple story that he's offering people. And, you know, he's part of this tradition of reactionary thought, which is at heart always a kind of simple story. If we can go back to the past, kind of things will be better. Curtis's version of the story kind of goes like this. All people are not equal.

5:01Therefore, democracy doesn't work. It's a lie to assume it does. And if real people aren't equal in capability, you know, why should they have political power? The world is kind of run by unelected bureaucrats and cultural elites. Those who believe that our society should be ruled by prestige, by prestigious institutions, by civil society, are very, very against authority. But what you notice is that actually those institutions are quite unaccountable. Nobody elected Anthony Fauci. And if we could kind of replace this system with the systems we see in Silicon Valley that are bringing us things like the iPhone and Tesla cars and the Cybertruck, we'd have a much more efficient system and a much more kind of competitive system.

5:51You've probably heard of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Americans of all stripes basically revere FDR. And FDR ran the New Deal like a startup. And so what we need in contrast to the kind of sclerotic bureaucracy that we've been living under and been oppressed by, especially if we're bright, young engineers who want solutions and not deliberation, is this kind of strong CEO leader. Yarvin believes that the United States should be a monarchy. This is like the thing that if you've heard Curtis Yarvin's name, this is what you know about him. He thinks we should have a king. What does he mean by that?

6:29And he wants someone who has absolute authority. And sometimes he calls this a king. Sometimes he calls it a CEO monarch. He knows other people don't like the word strongman, but essentially what he's calling for is a strongman. I think you can learn a lot from Napoleon. His military strategy was perhaps a little aggressive, but Napoleon is perhaps the monarch who's most reminiscent of like a 21st century Silicon Valley CEO. In some ways, Napoleon is really a startup guy. And this would be someone who could abolish the courts and the rule of law, who could transform the government into essentially a corporation.

7:13He calls it a SovCorp, short for Sovereign Corporation, and who could get rid of the existing system almost completely. The idea is not to just kind of become the CEO of, you know, America 2.0, but to really kind of fire all civil servants to scrap the universities we already have and replace them with antiversities, to demolish scientific institutions and to restart from scratch. And this is because, in Yarvin's view, all of these systems are so unsalvageable, so corrupt and so broken that nothing less than what he says, you know, a total reboot, you know, reboot should be in scare quotes, is adequate.

7:56You know, a lot of conservatives sort of have these illusions that these institutions in some ways can be reformed or salvageable or you're just like, how do we get, you know, the Marxists out of Harvard or something like that? You know, which is basically sort of like, OK, you just invaded Germany. How do we get the Nazis out of the SS? His theory on leadership is more or less clear, even if you don't agree with it, even if you're like, no, we don't need a king in this country. But his theory on subjects is less clear. Like he's repeatedly said that black people's lives were better under slavery.

8:34There's a part in your piece where he talks about how church blacks should rule over ghetto blacks. This is like bizarre stuff, but also there's kind of a, I don't know, there's kind of suggestion that he does have a theory of leadership, but he does not actually care very much about people. I think that's spot on. I found that human subjects and even the idea of a kind of human beings, I guess is actually a better way to put it, were largely absent in his work. It often felt like they were kind of sheep to be herded or idiots to be corrected or, you know, marionettes to kind of be controlled.

9:15And when you think about that, that aligns well with a theory in which, you know, you think this kind of benevolent strongman will be able to kind of take care of everyone. If you're not really thinking of people as people, perhaps that theory makes a lot more sense. There's a real kind of who is this for baked into this. The whole deal for Americans is the American dream, right? We have an idea of what ordinary Americans, all Americans should be able to achieve. And he's like, I just want to talk about the people who lead us, which makes it even weirder to me that this somehow crossed over into the political mainstream.

9:54What happened? Yorvin has this blog. What he also has is a startup. And he starts to commercialize it around 2012, 2013. And at that time, he is pitching and meeting with some of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley, some of whom have been reading his blog, like Peter Thiel, who first reads him, it seems like around 2008, maybe earlier. And they meet up around 2009. Um, another fan and early reader is Balaji Srinivasan, who goes on to become a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. There's J.D. Vance, who, according to one source, was reading Yarvin's blog when he was kind of swimming in the very online soup as a undergraduate.

10:46it. President Trump's been in office for six months. He's had time to get done a lot of the things that these young people in his orbit and more influential people like J.D. Vance want him to get done. So how do you think Curtis Yarvin feels about the way that things are going with the second Trump administration? So Yarvin is very quick to emphasize just kind of how disappointed he actually is with Trump. Yervin really wants to separate himself from what Doge and the Trump administration are doing, which he sees as kind of incomplete and imperfect because it's nothing like a complete, you know, radical full takeover of power.

11:28It hasn't gone far enough. I think he'd give the administration a kind of C minus and has said things to the extent of, yes, it's 1 % of a revolution, but, you know, 1 % of a revolution is, you know, worse than no revolution at all because you're just going to provoke backlash if you don't go all the way. And you're just going to encourage the resistance, and you're not going to quash the resistance. And so, you know, for him, anything less than, yeah, this kind of, you know, full reboot, to use his word, is inadequate, is disappointing, is something he even kind of, you know, holds in contempt.

12:02What is the future of this alliance, do you think, if Curtis Yarvin is looking at this and saying, Trump, you haven't gone far enough? Like, do we get J.D. Vance in four years going further? I don't know. I'm speculating. You tell me. That's definitely what Curtis hopes for. I mean, in his initial prediction or wish list, he actually wanted Biden to win again so that people could see just how broken the system was. And then for Vance to take power in 2028. and, you know, to kind of rule with his far more, with greater finesse, I guess, than Trump might and that Trump does. I know he's really clear about what he wants and that if anyone else took the time to think about this, if people really said, you know, okay, I've grown up with just assuming democracy is good, it has all these, you know, positive connotations in the way it's talked about, you know, what if democracy is actually bad?

12:58they would end up on a similar path than he does. I think a lot of people get on board with his ideas because they find diagnosis perhaps to be accurate. If not, the prescriptions, you know, it's another question entirely.

13:22The New Yorker's Ava Kaufman. Coming up, are you a little bit sick of all the anti-democratic nonsense? What if it's on the wane?

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17:32This is Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with Vox's Zach Beauchamp. Zach has been concerned about anti-liberalism for years. And we're not talking about liberalism like left-wing politics. We're talking about liberalism, the political philosophy that centers individual rights and freedoms. That's right. Yeah. In 2019, I wrote an article called The Antiliberal Moment. And the argument here is not that liberalism was in trouble politically. I think that's something that's obvious and doesn't require, you know, an extensive discourse to point out. It's that liberalism was also in trouble intellectually.

18:08is that in an area where it had long been dominant, right, there had been a high-profile spate of anti-liberal arguments, arguments against, you know, liberalism's basic package of rights and freedoms and even democracy, that had become increasingly prominent, and the liberals seemed kind of like they were on the back foot trying to rebut. And so I was worrying in 2019 that some of these ideas were going to end up, that were anti-liberal, were going to end up profoundly shaping our politics, and even more so in a liberal direction. And I think to a degree that's been poured out. But, and here's the twist, the landscape in the intellectual realm is shifting.

18:45And that's strikingly good news. In that these people who seemed like they were setting the terms of the conversation in the world of ideas, right, specifically here I'm talking about, you know, sub stacks, podcasts, magazines, the stuff of American public intellectual life, not necessarily the academy, which is its own thing. they're losing the prominence that they once had. And it's not that people don't know who they are. They do, and they take their ideas seriously. It's just that they're coming up with fewer new ones. They're getting less engagement. People are quitting their camps and declaring sort of that they're rediscovering the virtues of liberal democracy.

19:26It's this very subtle trend, but once I cottoned on to it, in my reporting, it became unmistakable. Now, let me give you an example of what this means. It may sound trivial, but it's interesting. is that David Brooks, who I think is sort of a bellwether for center-right opinion in the United States, had previously been really interested in the ideas of people like Vance and Patrick Deneen. Professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and author of the hugely influential book, Why Liberalism Failed. As the young people like to say, it's time to take the red pill. We must see this jointly created, invented tradition of America as a fundamentally or solely liberal nation as a recent innovation that is in fact a departure from the actual American tradition.

20:15And then this May, he wrote a column about how furious he was at them because their ideas had provided the intellectual backbone to the cruelty of the Trump administration. Trump and Vance aren't just promoting policies. They're trying to degrade America's moral character to a level more closely resembling their own. And I'm not saying as Brooks goes, so goes the nation. I'm saying that if someone like Brooks is turning away from them, that that's a sign of a broader movement in the ideas world. that ideas that were once sort of like fun to play around with and potentially interesting are starting to feel toxic because the Trump administration is showing what they look like when they're actually implemented.

20:59They look like building horrific prisons in Florida that are intentionally and openly cruel or sending people to a Salvadoran concentration camp without any due process. Video taken from inside the facility often shows prisoners tightly packed together with their head shaved. Reports of mosquitoes the size of elephants, no water to clean yourself, and food that has worms in it. Those stomach-churning details come from an inmate inside the new Florida Immigration Detention Center known as Alligator Alcatraz. And these basic violations of core liberal premises are turning mainstream opinion, mainstream intellectual opinion, away from taking these post-liberal ideas as sort of like a fun thing to engage with and more seeing them as kind of harbingers or handmaidens of evil.

21:47And even inside the post-liberal movement, you're seeing a crack up of some of the people inside it. One really striking thing in my reporting was that Sorob Amari, who is the sort of journalistic face of this movement, has abandoned some of its core premises. He wrote an essay last year about how he had decided that American democracy was actually worth fighting for and excoriated Catholics like him, the post-liberal movement's heavily Catholic, who had rejected American democracy's core premises. And when I spoke to him, he told me that he now believed that the current system that we have is the best that's achievable in his lifetime.

22:22And for someone who once wanted to damn the liberal order to hell, his words, paraphrased, because he was so upset about the prospect of a drag queen story hour in Sacramento, that's, I mean, that's a massive turnaround and a sign that something is happening. And when you asked him why, why the turnaround, did he say because Alligator Alcatraz? Like, what is he upset about? Saurabh's story was a little bit different than Brooks's, right? It's not that he's abandoned social conservatism. But he also was somebody who had come to believe, as many post-liberals do, in fact, it's a core part of the movement, that the government also needed to be more interventionist in the economy, redistributing resources away from the wealthy towards the needy, as Catholic social doctrine says you need to.

23:07Well, I mean, look at what the Trump administration has done in that area, right? Look at their big legislative accomplishment, which is like a giant upward redistribution of wealth. Another thing that is really important for him is that you have what he terms the barbarian right, which I believe would include Yarvin and also other people who had said explicitly racist things, people who are obsessed with race and IQ, that kind of thing. And those people are out competing the post-liberal right for the sort of soul of young people. Now, in the sort of right-wing MAGA movement. Now, that is, in some ways, that's bad, right?

23:47Like, these are really, really horrible ideas, and it's bad that they're gaining influence. But they're also ideas that are intellectually uncompelling to really smart people. Say more. Say more. I mean, I don't know. You just did a lengthy segment on Yarvin with a reporter who had done an extraordinary job exposing how shallow his ideas were, how glib and poorly thought out they were, right? And that's to say nothing of the sort of obvious cartoonish racism of some of these internet right-wingers or someone like Nick Fuentes. When I went to Charlottesville and we said Jews will not replace us, it seems like the message is finally getting out there, so.

24:26I don't want touch. I don't want a relationship. You know what I want? Total Aryan victory. Right. Who's not an intellectual, right? That's to dignify you. He's just a gutter anti-Semite, a neo-Nazi, right? Nobody like David Brooks is going to be taking Nick Fuentes seriously. Nobody at universities is going to be writing, hmm, a consideration of Nick Fuentes' ideas. We're debating him the way that even Yarvin got a respectful hearing with Daniel Allen, Right? And I think even that was too generous. But these are not ideas that are going to win the future of the American intellectual scene. And so that doesn't mean that, like, American politics is out of the woods, but it means the American intellectual landscape is looking different.