The Far Right Broligarchy of Yarvin, Thiel and Musk

The philosophical underpinnings, if you can call them that, of the MAGA movements are a potent mixture of libertarianism (masking as of the left) and authoritarianism (not bothering to mask as from the far-right). These take in ideas from Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel and strategy from Steve Bannon, all of whom are a major players along with Elon Musk and JD Vance in the new White House. Few of these people have been in the foreground for the mass of people, but understanding how they see the world is key to understanding what’s just happened and what’s about to happen. These people think American democracy is a failed experiment and want it replaced by a new fascist liberty, ruled by someone akin to a monarch/CEO.

Curtis Yarvin is a programmer turned blogger, who first rose to prominence on the online right while blogging under the pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug.” But he’s often cited as the “house philosopher” of the New Right, chiefly for his promotion of the “neo-reactionary” (or “NRx”) movement. Under his Moldbug pseudonym, Yarvin has talked about “rebooting” the American government. He used it to advocate the acronym “RAGE”, which he defined as “Retire All Government Employees”. His imprint on Trump’s ‘thinking’ could be seen throughout the 2024 campaign. He is quoted as saying: “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.”

In 2007, Yarvin began the blog Unqualified Reservations to promote his political vision. In an early post, he repurposed a phrase from the movie The Matrix, repurposing “red pill” to mean a shattering of progressive illusions. Politico magazine described his thinking:

“Yarvin and his NRx followers reject the quest for “progress” as the core of political life. As Yarvin told Vanity Fair in 2022, “The fundamental premise of liberalism is that there is this inexorable march toward progress. I disagree with that premise.” Instead, Yarvin believes that American democracy has denigrated into a corrupt oligarchy, run by elites who strive to consolidate their power rather than serve the public interest. The solution, Yarvin argues, is for the American oligarchy to give way to a monarchical leader styled after a start-up CEO — a “national CEO,” [or] what’s called a dictator,” as Yarvin has put it — who can de-bug the American political order like a computer programmer de-bugging some bad code.”

Here we look at some of the background thinking and strategies that have been used by these forces from The End of Reality by Jonathan Taplin (see below after the video). The key passage is perhaps Steve Bannon’s quote: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” The idea was not to convince people of a specific policy point but to overwhelm them with disinformation to such an extent that they became disoriented and reality lost all meaning.  For many citizens it was not a matter of denying the truth but rather a deep weariness that the truth was even knowable.” The point is that this reaches into new forms of propaganda using tools and technologies most of us barely understand.

The idea of controlling ‘subpopulations’ “residents who are effectively dependents on the state” looks and sound fascist and dystopian – because it is – but also will not sound too outlandish for anyone who has been following British politics for the last thirty years.

This is what we’re dealing with, which is a fascist, far-right disinformation machine — and it’s chilling. Since it takes a modicum of intelligence to understand what is truly happening, America is in deep trouble. 😳👇 pic.twitter.com/vFRFjaN0B4

— Bill Madden (@maddenifico) November 10, 2024