People often struggle with what to make of Thiel’s involvement in this ecosystem.

Last year the journalist Max Chafkin published a biography of Thiel, titled
"The Contrarian"
in which he described #Yarvin as the
“house political philosopher” for a network often called the #Thielverse.

The book focuses heavily on Thiel’s political maneuverings,
describing how he evolved from being a
hyper-libertarian to someone who now makes common cause with
nationalists and populists.

And it explains how Thiel helped both #Cruz and #Josh #Hawley on their paths to the Senate.

The Contrarian ends with a dark picture of the billionaire trying to extend his political reach ever more overtly
by funding and shepherding the campaigns of #Masters and #Vance.

“Masters and Vance are different from Hawley and Cruz,” Chafkin writes;
the former two are “extensions” of Thiel.

This is only partly true. It would be just as accurate to say that Thiel has been influenced by the intellectual currents and political critiques of the "New Right" that he’s now helping to support.

Many of these people are friendly with Thiel, or admire him,
but are by no means beholden to him.

And many of them hold views that would seem to make Thiel,
a tech oligarch currently worth around $8 billion who recently resigned from the Meta—née Facebook—board of directors,
their natural enemy.

This New Right is heavily populated by people with graduate degrees,
so there’s a lot of debate about who is in it and whether or not it even exists.

🔹At one end are the NatCons, post-liberals, and traditionalist figures like "Benedict Option" author #Rod #Dreher, who envision a
🔸conservatism reinvigorated 🔸
by an embrace of localist values,
religious identity,
and an active role for the state in promoting everything from
marriage to
environmental conservation.

🔹But there’s also a highly online set of
Substack writers, podcasters, and
anonymous Twitter posters
—“our true intellectual elite,” as one podcaster describes them.

This group encompasses everyone from
rich crypto bros and
tech executives to
back-to-the-landers to
disaffected members of the American intellectual class,
like "Up in the Air" author #Walter #Kirn,
whose fulminations against groupthink and
techno-authoritarianism have made him
an unlikely champion to the dissident right and heterodox fringe.

🔹But they share a the basic #worldview:
🔸that individualist liberal ideology,
increasingly bureaucratic governments,
and big tech
🔸are all combining into a world that is at once
tyrannical,
chaotic,
and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning
—as Blake Masters recently put it,
a “#dystopian #hell-world.”

#Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

Part of why people have trouble describing this
"New Right" is because it’s a bunch of people who believe that the system that organizes our society and government,
which most of us think of as normal,
is actually bizarre and insane.

Which naturally makes them look bizarre and insane to people who think this system is normal.

You’ll hear these people talk about our globalized consumerist society as “clown world.”

You’ll often hear the worldview expressed by our media and intellectual class described as
“the matrix” or the
“Ministry of Truth,”
as Thiel described it in his opening keynote speech to NatCon.

It can be confusing to turn on something like the influential underground podcast "Good Ol Boyz"
and hear a figure like #Anton talk to two autodidact Southern gamers about the makeup of the regime,

if only because most people reading this probably don’t think of America as the kind of place that has a regime at all.

But that’s because,
as many people in this world would argue,
we’ve been so effectively propagandized
that we can’t see how the system of power around us really works.

This is not a conspiracy theory like QAnon,
which presupposes that there are systems of power at work that normal people don’t see.

This is an idea that the people who work in our systems of power are so obtuse that they can’t even see that they’re part of a conspiracy.

“The fundamental premise of liberalism,” #Yarvin told me,
“is that there is this inexorable march toward progress.

I disagree with that premise.”

He believes that this premise underpins a massive framework of power.

“My job,” as he puts it,
“is to wake people up from the Truman Show.”

#Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

We spoke sharing a bench outside in the dark one evening,
a few days into the NatCon conference.

#Yarvin is friendly and solicitous in person,
despite the fact that he tends to think and talk so fast that he can start unspooling,

reworking baroque metaphors to explain ideas to listeners who have heard them many times before.

Strange things can happen when you meet him.

I’d gotten in touch with him through a mutual friend,
a journalist I knew from New York who once had a big magazine assignment to write about him.

The piece never came out.

“They wanted him to say I was really evil and all that,” Yarvin told me.

“He wouldn’t do it and pulled the piece. And I thought, Okay, that’s a cool guy.”

This friend has now made a bunch of money in #crypto,
works on a project Yarvin helped launch to build a #decentralized #internet,
and lives hours out into the desert in Utah, where he’ll occasionally call in to New Right–ish podcasts.

He recently had dinner with Thiel and Masters
—both Masters and Vance have raised money by offering donors a chance to dine with Thiel and the candidate.

Yarvin has a pretty condescending view of the mainstream media:

“They’re just predators,” he has said,
who have to make a living attacking people like him.

“They just need to eat.”

He doesn’t usually deal with mainstream magazines
and wrote that he’d been “ambushed” at the last NatCon, in 2019, by a reporter for Harper’s
—where I also write
—who made him out to be a bit of a loon
and predicted that the NatCons’ populist program would soon be
“stripped of its parts”
by the corporate-minded Republican establishment.

But the winds are shifting.
He told me about how he’d gone to read poetry in New York recently,
at the Thiel-funded NPC fest.

“A bunch of lit kids showed up,” he said, grinning.

I had grown into adulthood in the New York lit-kid world;
even a few years ago, there was no question that anything like this could have happened.

But now Yarvin is a cult hero to many in the ultrahip crowd that you’ll often hear referred to as the “downtown scene.”

“I don’t even think
bothered showing up,” Yarvin said.

“What would they do? It was an art party.”

Yarvin had asked his new girlfriend,
#Lydia #Laurenson,
a 37-year-old founder of a progressive magazine, to vet me.

The radical right turn her life had taken created complications.

“One of my housemates was like
—‘I don’t know if I want Curtis in our house,’ ” she told me.

“And I’m like, ‘Okay, that makes sense. I understand why you’re saying that.’ ”

Laurenson had been a well-known blogger and activist in the #BDSM scene back when Yarvin was the central early figure in a world of “neo-reactionary” writers,

publishing his poetry and political theory on the Blogger site under the name #Mencius #Moldbug.

#Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

As Moldbug,
Yarvin wrote about race-based IQ differences,
and in an early post, titled
“Why I Am Not a White Nationalist,”
he defended reading and linking to white nationalist writing.

He told me he’d pursued those early writings in a spirit of “open inquiry,”
though Yarvin also openly acknowledged in the post that some of his readers seemed to be white nationalists.

Some of Yarvin’s writing from then is so radically right wing that it almost has to be read to be believed,
like the time he critiqued the attacks by the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik
—who killed 77 people, including dozens of children at a youth camp
—not on the grounds that terrorism is wrong

but because the killings wouldn’t do anything effective to overthrow what Yarvin called
Norway’s “communist” government.

He argued that Nelson Mandela,
once head of the military wing of the African National Congress,
had endorsed terror tactics and political murder against opponents,
and said anyone who claimed
“St. Mandela” was more innocent than Breivik might have
“a mother you’d like to fuck.”

He’s tempered himself in middle age
—he now says he has a rule never to
“say anything unnecessarily controversial,
or go out of my way to be provocative for no reason.”

Many liberals who hear him talk would probably question how strictly he follows this rule,

but even in his Moldbug days, most of his controversial writings were couched in thickets of irony and metaphor,

a mode of speech that younger podcasters and Twitter personalities on the highly online right have adopted
—a way to avoid getting kicked off tech platforms or having their words quoted by liberal journalists.

He considers himself a reactionary, not just a conservative
—he thinks it is impossible for an Ivy League–educated person to really be a conservative.

He has consistently argued that conservatives waste their time and political energy on fights over issues like gay marriage or critical race theory,

because liberal ideology holds sway in the important institutions of prestige media and academia
—an intertwined nexus he calls
“the Cathedral.”

He developed a theory to explain the fact that America has lost its so-called state capacity,
his explanation for why it so often seems that it is not actually capable of governing anymore:

The power of the executive branch has slowly devolved to an oligarchy of the educated
who care more about competing for status within the system than they do about America’s national interest.

#Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

"No one directs this system,
and hardly anyone who participates in it believes that it’s a system at all.

Someone like me who has made a career of writing about militias and extremist groups might go about my work thinking that all I do is try to tell important stories
and honestly describe political upheaval.

But within "the Cathedral", the best way for me to get big assignments and win attention is to identify and attack what seem like threats against the established order,

which includes nationalists,
antigovernment types,
or people who refuse to obey the opinions of the Cathedral’s experts
on issues like vaccine mandates,
in as alarming a way as I possibly can.

This cycle becomes self-reinforcing and has been sent into hyperdrive by Twitter and Facebook,

because the stuff that compels people to click on articles or share clips of a professor
tends to affirm their worldview, or frighten them, or both at the same time.

The more attention you gain in the Cathedral system, the more you can influence opinion and government policy.

Journalists and academics and thinkers of any kind now live in a desperate race for attention
—and in Yarvin’s view,
this is all really a never-ending bid for influence,
serving the interests of our oligarchical regime.

So I may think I write for a living. But to Yarvin, what I actually do is more like a weird combination of intelligence-gathering and propagandizing.

Which is why no one I was talking to at NatCon really thought it would be possible for me to write a fair piece about them.

You won’t hear people use the "Cathedral" term a lot in public,
although right-wing Twitter lit up with delight when Yarvin sketched the concept on Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation show last September.

People who’ve opened their eyes to this system of control have taken the red pill,
a term Yarvin started using back in 2007,
long before it got watered down to generally mean supporting Trump.

To truly be red-pilled, you have to understand the workings of the Cathedral.

And the way conservatives can actually win in America, he has argued,
is for a Caesar-like figure to take power back from this devolved oligarchy

and replace it with a monarchical regime run like a start-up.

As early as 2012, he proposed the acronym #RAGE
—Retire All Government Employees
—as a shorthand for a first step in the overthrow of the American “regime.”

What we needed, Yarvin thought, was a
“national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.”

Yarvin now shies away from the word "dictator" and seems to be trying to promote a friendlier face of #authoritarianism as the solution to our political warfare:

“If you’re going to have a #monarchy, it has to be a monarchy of everyone,” he said.

#Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

By the time TechCrunch publicized Yarvin’s identity, in 2013,

he had become influential in a small circle of the disaffected elite.

In 2014, The Baffler published a lengthy look at his influence, titled “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich.”

The piece warned that Yarvin’s ideas were spreading among prominent figures like #Thiel and #Balaji #Srinivasan, formerly the CTO of #Coinbase,

and that it was possible for an intellectual fringe to
“seize key positions of authority and power”
and “eventually bring large numbers of people around,”
just as the #Koch brothers once had with their pro-business libertarianism,
a position that Thiel was quickly moving away from.

In 2017, BuzzFeed News published an email exchange between Yarvin and #Milo #Yiannopoulis in which Yarvin said that he’d watched the 2016 election returns with Thiel.

“He’s fully enlightened,” Yarvin wrote.

“Just plays it very carefully.”

Masters soon had an office in Trump Tower.

He and Thiel worked,
generally without success,
to install figures like Srinivasan,
whom they proposed to head the FDA,
and who himself often talked about the
“paper belt,”
in an echo of Yarvin’s Cathedral concept,

and made common cause with figures like #Steve #Bannon, who wanted to pick apart the administrative state,
an idea that at least had a hint of Yarvin’s RAGE proposal.

Yarvin eventually stopped working as a programmer and left the Bay Area,
moving with his wife and two children to Nevada.

His wife died in April 2021, and he seems to have been devastated,

publishing searching poems about her.

But last September, a month before we spoke, he posted a dating call,
inviting women who were “reasonably pretty and pretty smart,” as he put it,

and “have read my work and like it,” and who thought that “the purpose of dating is to get married and have kids,”

to email him so they could set up a Zoom date.

“His writing doesn’t really represent who he is,” Laurenson told me.

“So I answered this email and I was just like,
‘Hi, I’m a liberal, but I have a high IQ. And I want kids, and I’m actually just really curious to talk to you.’ ”

The two are now engaged.

Laurenson told me she’d had a gradual awakening that accelerated during the upheavals of the early pandemic
and the protests of the summer of 2020.

“I started really getting drawn to #NRx ideas,” she said,
using a common online abbreviation for the
neo-reactionary fringe,

“because I was tracking the riots,” by which she meant the violence that erupted amid some of the Black Lives Matter protests.

“I have a background in social justice,” she said.

But she was “horrified” by “how the mainstream media covered the riots.… It was just such a violation of all of my values.”

She’d had a strange realization after she and Yarvin started dating,
discovering that some of her friends had been reading him for years.

“I found out that all these people had been reading NRx stuff just like me.

They just never told anyone about it,” she said.

“It has been very striking to me,” she said, “how cool this world is becoming.”

#RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

Milius was a sardonic and constant presence,
easy to find smoking as Yarvin stood and talked at warp speed in his unmistakable voice.

She was by far the most strikingly dressed person there,
favoring Gucci and Ralph Lauren and lots of gold jewelry and big sunglasses.

She is the daughter of the conservative director John Milius,
who cowrote Apocalypse Now and directed Red Dawn.

She grew up in Los Angeles, and it turned out that we’d both gone to the same tiny liberal arts college in Manhattan,

so, like pretty much all the people there, she was used to living in social spaces where conservative views were considered strange if not downright evil.

She thought something had radically changed since 2015,

after she went to film school at USC and started working in Hollywood,

before she suddenly dropped everything to work for Trump’s campaign in Nevada,

eventually landing a job in his State Department.

“What this is,” she said, “is a new thought movement.

So it’s very hard to put your finger on and articulate what it is outside of Trumpism.

Because it really is separate from the man himself, it has nothing to do with that.”

She argued that the New Right, or whatever you wanted to call it,
was, paradoxically, much less authoritarian than the ideology that now presented itself as mainstream.

“I get the feeling, and I could be wrong,” she said, “that the right actually at this point is like almost in this live-and-let-live place

where the left used to be at.”

What she meant specifically:

“The idea that you can’t raise your kids in a traditional, somewhat religious household without having them educated at school that their parents are Nazis.”

This apparent laissez-faire obscures somewhat the intense focus that some people in this world have on trans issues
—or what they might say is the media’s intense focus on trans issues,
one of a suite of “mimetic viruses,” as Kaschuta, the podcaster, put it,
that spread a highly individualistic liberal culture that is destructive to traditional ways of life.

But the laissez-faire has helped win unlikely converts.

Milius brought up "Red Scare",
a podcast that has become the premier example of this attraction
—she’d actually cast one of the hosts, #Dasha #Nekrasova, in the film she made as her senior thesis in directing school at USC.

#Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

The Red Scare hosts both started out as diffident socialists,
back when it was still possible to think that socialism represented an edgy political stance,
in the little interlocking spheres of America’s media and political set.

One of them, Nekrasova,
actually became known in media circles for a clip that went megaviral in 2018,
when she cut dead a reporter for Alex Jones’s Infowars trying to ambush Bernie Sanders supporters at a festival in Austin.

“I just want people to have health care, honey,” she deadpanned. “You people have, like, worms in your brains. Honestly.”

Fast-forward to November 2021, and Nekrasova and her cohost Anna Khachiyan were posting photos of themselves
with Jones’s arms wrapped around them under an evening Texas sun.

Nekrasova now has a role on HBO’s Succession,
playing a P.R. rep working with Kendall Roy;
the show itself set “right-wing Twitter”
—a sphere heavily populated by 20-somethings who work in tech or politics and seem to disproportionately live in D.C. and Miami
—alight with delight when an episode in the latest season included a litany of key New Right phrases
such as “integralist” and “Medicare for all, abortions for none.”

The Red Scare hosts are only the best-known representatives of a fashionable
dissident-y subculture,
centered in but not exclusive to downtown Manhattan.

“Everyone dresses like a duck hunter now,”
a bewildered friend of mine texted recently.

People use the derisive term “bugman” to describe liberal men who lack tangible life skills like fixing trucks or growing food
—guys who could end up spending their lives behind the bug-eyed screen of a V.R. headset.

Women wear clothes from Brandy Melville,
which you can hear described ironically as fashionwear for girls with “fascist leanings,”
and which named one of its lines after John Galt,
the hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

People are converting to Catholicism.
“It’s a good thing I have a girlfriend,” my friend texted. “Because casual sex is out.”

#Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook