Speaker 1: Also media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
Speaker 1: about the worst people in all of history and with
Speaker 1: us today, someone who, as far as I am aware,
Speaker 1: is not one of the worst people in all of history.
Speaker 1: Ed Helm's, Ed, have you ever committed a crime?
Speaker 2: Lots?
Speaker 1: Okay? Well, okay, well I expected the opposite answer.
Speaker 2: I've only murdered jerks. Yeah, you know, you're fine.
Speaker 1: I'm on the right side of I still have like
Speaker 1: if you're just killing bad people, like, who's got a
Speaker 1: problem with that? Right? Yeah? Just jerks. It's like we
Speaker 1: were It's like we were talking about early. You can't
Speaker 1: have a black and white like murders always bad because
Speaker 1: like what if somebody's a jerk? Just wondering? Can I
Speaker 1: send you a list of names for note no apparent
Speaker 1: reason they're jerks? Yeah? Okay, okay, this is great info
Speaker 1: to have it. Welcome back to the show, Ed Helms.
Speaker 1: I mean again, I don't feel like you necessarily need introduction,
Speaker 1: but I will remind everyone about your excellent podcast SNAFU
Speaker 1: and you just had season two drop talking about the
Speaker 1: wonderful activist burglary of an FBI building in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: one that led to some of the most important revelations
Speaker 1: of the burgeoning security state in history. So yeah, great show.
Speaker 1: People should check it out. Ed, are you ready?
Speaker 2: I'm ready here more. As you described season two of SNAFU,
Speaker 2: I couldn't help thinking about how how well it connects
Speaker 2: to our subject matter.
Speaker 1: Yep, untrammeled authority.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because Jagar Hoover basically had some degree of unchecked
Speaker 2: authority within Yeah. Oh yeah, and he was doing really
Speaker 2: awful stuff.
Speaker 1: Well, he's a great example because he was this kind
Speaker 1: of ceo god king of the security state for decades
Speaker 1: and it didn't end well or middle well or start
Speaker 1: well come back.
Speaker 2: Comes back to that. I think at the beginning of
Speaker 2: the last episode, I was like, how do you pick
Speaker 2: the guy right? Right? The guy? How can you be
Speaker 2: sure you got the right guy.
Speaker 1: It's also this thing of like I think with Hoover,
Speaker 1: you really did see a man who he wasn't the
Speaker 1: same guy at the start of his time running the
Speaker 1: FBI as he was at the end, you know, because
Speaker 1: number when he aged, our brains change as we age,
Speaker 1: we in many cases get worse at some things, right,
Speaker 1: And like he also the period of time that he
Speaker 1: had with power, he got used to doing increasingly extreme
Speaker 1: things with it, you know, like there was this constant
Speaker 1: escalation of his authoritary impulses, like the job was bad
Speaker 1: for him, like it was bad for j Edgar Hoover,
Speaker 1: and it was it made him a worse person. And
Speaker 1: I think that kind of fundamentally, guys who advocate for
Speaker 1: these systems never take that into account, in part because
Speaker 1: I just don't think they believe it the way that
Speaker 1: I think most normal people do. Like we you don't.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be like on the left or
Speaker 1: a libertarian or an anarchist to be like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you give people access to all of the power
Speaker 1: in the world, they generally do horrible things with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah I would anyway, huh. I would. Yeah. I would
Speaker 1: do awful, nightmarish things. I do really fun things, but
Speaker 1: people might get hurt. I would have a good time,
Speaker 1: but not everyone would have a good time. I think
Speaker 1: maybe that's just how these guys think about it, right,
Speaker 1: I'm going to be the one having a good time.
Speaker 1: So and again, that's part of why we're doing these episodes,
Speaker 1: because Curtis Yarvin could potently be on the brink of
Speaker 1: having a very good time, and I really want to
Speaker 1: emphasize what a bad idea that would be. So I
Speaker 1: have referred to Yarvin as a monarchist a few times
Speaker 1: in these episodes, and I will again. I do think
Speaker 1: it's important to note he would disagree with me using
Speaker 1: that title because he thinks that calling someone a monarchist
Speaker 1: brings to mind the constitutional monarchies that largely failed in
Speaker 1: the early twentieth century, and he blames that failure on
Speaker 1: compromises in absolute power. Now, we talked last episode about
Speaker 1: Yarvin's core beliefs democracy isn't really real, and if it
Speaker 1: was real, it wouldn't be a good idea. The cathedral
Speaker 1: who really runs things are the enemy, and some sort
Speaker 1: of aristocracy in an absolute CEO monarch paired with the
Speaker 1: freedom to exit if you don't like the particular flavor
Speaker 1: of oppression in your home is the ideal state of governance.
Speaker 1: As a tech guy, though Yarvin doesn't like to couch
Speaker 1: his yearning for a king, which is what this is, right,
Speaker 1: he's a monarchist. He's not this the same kind of
Speaker 1: monarchists that, for example, like guys like JR. R. Tolkien were,
Speaker 1: But he's very much a monarchist, and he doesn't like
Speaker 1: to he doesn't like to seem like the regular people
Speaker 1: who long for the days of having a king. Right,
Speaker 1: He's got to be like a little bit smarter about it, right,
Speaker 1: And this is where kind of the big tech line
Speaker 1: of things comes in and his argument. He starts making this,
Speaker 1: you know, in the early period of like the web
Speaker 1: two point zero tech boom, you get smartphones, you get
Speaker 1: like apps like Twitter and YouTube and Facebook, and there's
Speaker 1: this period of time, I know it feels very distant
Speaker 1: to us, but where people thought this was going to
Speaker 1: enhance democracy around the globe, right, that all of these
Speaker 1: connecting technologies were going to be a massive boon for
Speaker 1: like liberatory movements across the planet. That's not what happened.
Speaker 1: And Jarvin very early on isn't just saying that's not
Speaker 1: what's going to happen. He's saying that's not what should happen. Right,
Speaker 1: Big tech shouldn't enable democracy around the world. It should
Speaker 1: take control in a very literal sense. And he becomes
Speaker 1: an advocate of a kind of political philosophy he called
Speaker 1: neo cameralism, which Francis Sang described in an excellent essay
Speaker 1: as quote, arguing that the state should be run like
Speaker 1: a business ie with a CEO at its head and
Speaker 1: no democratic mechanisms. Jarvin has always taken pains to express
Speaker 1: in public his belief that this change can be done peacefully,
Speaker 1: and you know, we're not. He thinks we're not already living,
Speaker 1: We're already not living in a democracy, so there's no
Speaker 1: reason this has to be painful. But a study of
Speaker 1: his writing over the years makes it clear that not
Speaker 1: only is he open to violence, but an enthusiastic about it.
Speaker 1: And this brings me to one of the uglier parts
Speaker 1: of our story. In twenty eleven, a Nazi named Anders
Speaker 1: Brevik shot up a summer camp hosted by the Workers
Speaker 1: Youth League, a left wing political organization in Norway. Brewick,
Speaker 1: who considers himself a member of the Knights Templar, acting
Speaker 1: to defend his faith and race from evil communists, shot
Speaker 1: and killed or bombed seventy seven people. Jarvin wrote about
Speaker 1: this as well, arguing that terrorism was a legitimate tactic
Speaker 1: and that Nazi terror had been legitimate because it worked
Speaker 1: for the baffler. Corey Payne summarizes quote Breviks killing spree,
Speaker 1: which targeted young Norwegian leftists was illegitimate because it was
Speaker 1: insufficient to free Norway from euro Communism. After all, he
Speaker 1: only killed seventy seven people. We can note the only
Speaker 1: thing he didn't screw up. At least he shot Communists,
Speaker 1: not Muslims. He gored the Matador and not the cape.
Speaker 1: Jarvin wrote on July twenty third, twenty eleven, one day
Speaker 1: after the terror in Oslo. So that is I mean,
Speaker 1: we've gotten now from a guy who is just sort
Speaker 1: of like preaching his idiosyncratic political system to a guy
Speaker 1: who was being like he didn't kill enough kids for
Speaker 1: it to matter, right, Like this is you know, it's
Speaker 1: important not to lean into the fact that like this
Speaker 1: is not just a guy whose politics would lead to
Speaker 1: bad directions. This is a pretty vile person. Where is
Speaker 1: he writing this on his blog Unqualified Reservus, which is
Speaker 1: just publicly available blog.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, not, He's not like in the dark recesses
Speaker 2: of four chan.
Speaker 1: No no, no, no. This is a publicly available blog.
Speaker 1: Now it's not. It's not. It's very popular with a
Speaker 1: certain subset of the world, and he's writing under a pseudonym,
Speaker 1: so people don't know his real name. In twenty eleven.
Speaker 2: Right now, the pseudonym could mean that there's some measure
Speaker 2: of trolling going on, but not. But but this is
Speaker 2: there's no, there's no, there's no kind of like winky irony.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is some of the most if it's
Speaker 2: remotely humorous at an attempt, it is some of the
Speaker 2: most like wretched, awful and heart wrenching. It failed at humor.
Speaker 2: But but if again, like there's no version in which
Speaker 2: as it's using a pseudonym, he's being like, I can't even.
Speaker 1: Think of no, no, this is this is very much
Speaker 1: not him fucking around like this is because I mean
Speaker 1: you can tell for a degree, like the like talking
Speaker 1: about grinding up people for biodiesel. I've seen some articles
Speaker 1: where people mistake that for a serious position if you
Speaker 1: read it in context, he's clearly like joking, right, Like
Speaker 1: it's thrown out as a joke. This essay is him
Speaker 1: talking about like why the Brevic attack was bad, and
Speaker 1: it's bad not because he killed all those people, but
Speaker 1: because it's not big enough to destroy the left, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's that's very much the take that he has on this,
Speaker 1: which is not really he's not being satirical, he's not
Speaker 1: not that you know, it would be good to be
Speaker 1: satirical about this, but that's not really what he's doing.
Speaker 1: And this is this kind of stuff. Like part of
Speaker 1: why people don't catch on to this more often about
Speaker 1: Jarvin when they write about him, for like mainstream news sources,
Speaker 1: is that he writes so much like to catch this stuff,
Speaker 1: like I wouldn't have caught all of this stuff if
Speaker 1: I had just been I wouldn't have had time to
Speaker 1: read all of his archive. Thankfully, guys like Corey Pine
Speaker 1: did a lot of that work, and so people have
Speaker 1: been collecting kind of like the worst hits of Curtis
Speaker 1: Yarfin for a while now, but it's not immediately easy
Speaker 1: for people to do, and it gets missed by the
Speaker 1: people who aren't really like big fans of his a
Speaker 1: lot of the time, right, because there's just so much there.
Speaker 1: And he writes he's got kind of log area, right,
Speaker 1: diarrhea of the mouth a bit, he's very worthy. So
Speaker 1: around the same time as he's writing his articles about
Speaker 1: the Yetoya shooting, Jarvin is also pushing an acronym out
Speaker 1: in his writing to the people who are like built
Speaker 1: this kind of like political circle around him, which is
Speaker 1: kind of liberally sprinkled with Peter Thiel dollars. And the
Speaker 1: acronym that he starts pushing is rage, which means retire
Speaker 1: all government employees. And this is a term that he's
Speaker 1: come to for this policy plan that he starts pushing
Speaker 1: among the young conservatives following him, that we need to
Speaker 1: get a president who is our kind of guy in
Speaker 1: office and have him forcibly retire the entire professional cast
Speaker 1: of the government and replace them with are people with
Speaker 1: people who think, and that's how we.
Speaker 2: Shift twenty five.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes, exactly, that is and this is something
Speaker 1: he is pushing in the early aughts, right, like yes,
Speaker 1: And to be honest, a lot of Project twenty twenty
Speaker 1: five is people cribbing from Yarvin, and it's because it's
Speaker 1: people who were influenced by him or influenced by people
Speaker 1: who are influenced by him, right. But a lot of
Speaker 1: this intellectually starts with him. You know, obviously he's not
Speaker 1: the only guy thinking about stuff like this, but he's
Speaker 1: putting it out in a form that is like a
Speaker 1: cohesive ideology. So in the early years, and we're talking
Speaker 1: kind of the mid aughts around like twenty eleven up
Speaker 1: through twenty fourteen. His adherents are mostly other tech industry creatures,
Speaker 1: and one of these people is someone named Justine Tunney.
Speaker 1: Justine started out as someone who was like more progressive.
Speaker 1: She was an occupy activist back during you know occupy,
Speaker 1: and she gets hired as a Google engineer. In March
Speaker 1: of twenty fourteen, Esteem published a petition on the White
Speaker 1: House website demanding a national referendum on three points. Number one,
Speaker 1: retire all government employees, number two, transfer administrative authority to
Speaker 1: the tech industry, and number three appoint Google CEO Eric
Speaker 1: Schmidt's CEO of America. Now, this is a very silly
Speaker 1: idea for one thing who's looking at Google today thinks
Speaker 1: Eric Schmidt should run the country like But in defense
Speaker 1: of this, Tunney wrote, It's time for the US regime
Speaker 1: to politely take its exit from history and do what's
Speaker 1: best for America. The tech industry can offer us good governance,
Speaker 1: prison and prevent further American decline. Now part of why
Speaker 1: I think Tunny is an interesting case study and like
Speaker 1: followers of Moldbug, because she tells people on Twitter who
Speaker 1: are questioning her about this petition she's put up that
Speaker 1: they need to read mensious. Moldbug Tunny is interesting because
Speaker 1: she doesn't come out of the traditional right. She's a
Speaker 1: transgender woman who had built herself as an anarchist earlier
Speaker 1: in her ideological life, prior to finding Mouldbugs writing, and
Speaker 1: so this arc she takes from an economic justice advocate
Speaker 1: to tech industry monarchist shows how seductive a lot of
Speaker 1: intelligent people found Yarvin. And the fact that people like Tounny,
Speaker 1: who don't come out of where you would expect someone
Speaker 1: to wind up believing these far right ideas get enraptured
Speaker 1: by Jarvin's writing is part of why he starts to
Speaker 1: get this reputation for almost being this kind of like
Speaker 1: mental sorcerer, someone whose work has this almost like lovecrafty
Speaker 1: and pull in twisting people's beliefs and ideals. And that's
Speaker 1: very much the reputation that he starts to pick up
Speaker 1: in like the aughts. There's a philosopher, kind of a
Speaker 1: reactionary philosopher named Nick Land who's a fan of Jarvin's writing,
Speaker 1: who gives it the nickname the Dark Enlightenment, right, that's
Speaker 1: the term that he comes up with to refer to
Speaker 1: these kind of neo reactionary, anti democratic, monarchist policies. And
Speaker 1: it's written that way because supposedly, once you read Jarvin's
Speaker 1: arguments for why democracy can't work and like this sort
Speaker 1: of authoritarian system is better, it's like this through the
Speaker 1: looking glass breaking moment. I've taken the red pill, and
Speaker 1: I can never go back right.
Speaker 2: Emally endowing this sky and these writings with a lot
Speaker 2: of oh yes, like magical power in a very absurd
Speaker 2: way it is, and it takes them out of the
Speaker 2: realm of like intellectual exploration and dialogue and idea sharing
Speaker 2: it into this like truly like conspiratorial, like come into
Speaker 2: the fold, put on your dark cloak and join the
Speaker 2: dark enlightenment.
Speaker 1: And that's what Moldbug wants. Right. That's good branding for
Speaker 1: you if you're this guy, that's certainly how you want
Speaker 1: to be seen. Okay, I think that's not really accurate
Speaker 1: to what's happening to Tony or to what's happening to
Speaker 1: most of the people following them, in part because I
Speaker 1: have a degree of, like a professional understanding from my
Speaker 1: former career writing and analyzing terrorist groups of how people
Speaker 1: get radicalized, right, and a thing that gets missed a lot,
Speaker 1: and scholar Scott Atron was kind of the guy who
Speaker 1: I started reading who wrote about this a lot. But
Speaker 1: about how people get radicalized, it always happens nearly always
Speaker 1: in communities, right, even if it's not a physical community,
Speaker 1: if it's online. People don't generally get brought into radical
Speaker 1: belief systems or extremist politics on their own. They get
Speaker 1: brought in in part because there's circle of friends that
Speaker 1: people they respect and think are cool get drawn into it, right.
Speaker 1: And I think that's what's happening to Tunny, And I
Speaker 1: think that's a lot of the power that Mouldbugs writing
Speaker 1: has is that he is telling the Silicon Valley set
Speaker 1: of people who got a lot of money very quickly
Speaker 1: when they were young and got kind of lost their
Speaker 1: minds and their belief about their own genius. He's telling
Speaker 1: them what they want to hear, that they should run things.
Speaker 1: They start sharing his stuff with each other, they start
Speaker 1: talking like him because of the way he writes, and
Speaker 1: it becomes like the cool thing within a certain set
Speaker 1: in Silicon Valley to be into Moldbug, right, And that's
Speaker 1: a lot of the appeal, right. It's not that his
Speaker 1: writing has some sort of like magical mindwarping effect. It's
Speaker 1: that this community of people that a lot of folks,
Speaker 1: especially like newer folks coming into the tech who want
Speaker 1: to be you know, get founder money, who want to
Speaker 1: be part of this like in crowd, they all like
Speaker 1: it's the cool thing to be talking about to believe in. Right,
Speaker 1: Like that's I think where a lot of the power
Speaker 1: that he initially has comes from. And I think that's
Speaker 1: always the case. If you want to look at like
Speaker 1: why a lot of people joined ISIS a lot of
Speaker 1: these young communities, it's because Isis was cool, right to
Speaker 1: a lot of these young people, the way that they talk,
Speaker 1: the slang they use, the media they put out. Communities
Speaker 1: of people got radicalized in part because it was attractive
Speaker 1: in that way to them. Right, It's not like a
Speaker 1: mind virus. It's kind of the same way fads and
Speaker 1: trends always work. Right, This is the way that like
Speaker 1: any fad takes hold. You know, it's just a much
Speaker 1: darker example of that. But that is how radicalization tends
Speaker 1: to occur. And I think that's what's happening with moldbugs writing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's interesting that the you're saying Tonny Tunny is
Speaker 2: her name, right, Yes, Justine Tunny in Tunny was sort
Speaker 2: of brought in even just talking sort of more generally
Speaker 2: about radicalization that it's often the product of a community.
Speaker 2: What about the what about the Jarvins, Like do you
Speaker 2: think that that was Are they the outlier the kind
Speaker 2: of like the well no special beacons of or or
Speaker 2: did he come from that youth community that you know,
Speaker 2: from his youth.
Speaker 1: I think that's a great question. But I do think
Speaker 1: if you look at kind of his background, you see
Speaker 1: the community he was radicalized in. Right when he starts
Speaker 1: working for the tech industry, When when he's you know,
Speaker 1: in the internet in the mid nineties, he starts talking
Speaker 1: to these guys who are these big Austrian school advocates,
Speaker 1: who are you know he admires. These are generally men
Speaker 1: who are a bit older than him, who are more
Speaker 1: accomplished in their careers, and they're telling him, Oh, you
Speaker 1: should read you know, hansrmon Hop, you should read Ludwig
Speaker 1: von mess you should read Thomas Carlyle, you should read
Speaker 1: Murray Rothbard, right, And he reads these guys and he
Speaker 1: takes their thinking seriously, in part because people he respects
Speaker 1: and thinks are cool are telling him to write. So
Speaker 1: I do think it's a version of the same process, right,
Speaker 1: in part, because that's just how human beings adopt ideas, right,
Speaker 1: Like it's the if you're you know, I know people
Speaker 1: who are like evangelical Christians, right, And there's a couple
Speaker 1: of different attitudes towards how you should evangelize, But the
Speaker 1: one that people I think are generally of good will
Speaker 1: have is that like, well, if you're a really good
Speaker 1: and admirable person, people will will find will be interested
Speaker 1: in like what you believe. And that's the best way
Speaker 1: to prostlytize, right by just actually like being kind of
Speaker 1: rad And that's how I've found, Like, when I got
Speaker 1: into radical politics, it was because I ran into a
Speaker 1: bunch of like anarchists who were on a regular basis
Speaker 1: going out and feeding homeless people, and I thought that
Speaker 1: was dope, and that got me interested in what other
Speaker 1: things do these people believe because I thought they were cool? Right, Like,
Speaker 1: that is how I think it's just like mostly how
Speaker 1: people work. Right. But it's in the interest of a
Speaker 1: guy like Jarvin to make it feel like his writing
Speaker 1: has this like love crafty and power to enrapture and
Speaker 1: warp minds anyway, cool people and all the world's all
Speaker 1: just high school right, Like, oh so tunny is you
Speaker 1: know a good example of these kind of early adherents
Speaker 1: to Moldbug, who are mostly young, disaffected engineers, software engineers,
Speaker 1: tech industry people. And when Yarvin kind of part of
Speaker 1: where this sort of dark Enlightenment turn takes off is
Speaker 1: that in around twenty thirteen twenty fourteen, when mainstream news
Speaker 1: starts writing about him, the most attractive angle to take
Speaker 1: with this guy is not, here is a trend in
Speaker 1: a certain subset of like Silicon Valley tech people. Let's
Speaker 1: look at the reasons why this trend might be popular.
Speaker 1: It's this dark enlightenment guy whose work has this like
Speaker 1: dangerous rapture. Like the media helps create the myth of Yarvin,
Speaker 1: and he manipulates it effectively, And I think this is
Speaker 1: part of why you know, this reinforces his beliefs to
Speaker 1: an extent about like how bad the cathedral is these
Speaker 1: like media organizations that like, wow, it's so easy for
Speaker 1: me to manipulate them. Right, So yeah, anyway, that's kind
Speaker 1: of what's happening in the late aughts with this guy.
Speaker 1: So one of the people who is going to come
Speaker 1: to be sort of a follower of him in this
Speaker 1: kind of later period after he starts to achieve more
Speaker 1: prominence is JD. Vance. And it's because moldbugs writing is
Speaker 1: really appealing to these people who got a lot of
Speaker 1: money and power very quickly, often because they were either
Speaker 1: in like venture capital, because they were in you know,
Speaker 1: the tech industry or something, and so they have all
Speaker 1: this wealth, but they don't come out of like they
Speaker 1: don't come out of academia. They don't have any sort
Speaker 1: of like place in the traditional like media hierarchy that
Speaker 1: demands respect. Right, you may have a lot of money,
Speaker 1: but like, why should I care what some software engineer
Speaker 1: about Google says about politics or whatever? Right, why should
Speaker 1: I care about what some like finance dude who was
Speaker 1: really good at like gambling on the housing market has
Speaker 1: to say about politics just because you have a bunch
Speaker 1: of money. And that's where Vance comes out of. You know,
Speaker 1: he's one of these guys who's got like a background
Speaker 1: in private equity, and he's one of these guys who
Speaker 1: is kind of like angry that that doesn't automatically afford
Speaker 1: him the respect of like what he considers to be
Speaker 1: an elite in society. Another one of the proponents of
Speaker 1: Jarvin's thinking about particularly this retire all government employees thing,
Speaker 1: is Blake Masters, who's a twice failed Arizona congressional candidate
Speaker 1: and another Peter Teel protege right. In an interview with
Speaker 1: Vanity Fair before the first of his failed campaigns, Masters
Speaker 1: was act asked how he would drain the swamp in
Speaker 1: practice if he was like brought into Congress, and he responded,
Speaker 1: one of my friends has this acronym he calls rage
Speaker 1: retire all government employees. And he was referring to Yarvin.
Speaker 1: He and Yarvin are friends, just like Vance and Yarvin,
Speaker 1: you know, go to a lot of the same parties
Speaker 1: and whatnot. Like these are all guys who are not
Speaker 1: just close ideologically, but like are in the same physical
Speaker 1: spaces a lot of the time talking with each other.
Speaker 2: That's an important, yeah, aspect to this. That's that's new.
Speaker 2: So that this just a a kind of like, Hey,
Speaker 2: I read your stuff and or I read this guy's stuff,
Speaker 2: and I think it's compelling and I'd like to crib
Speaker 2: some ideas from this. It's more it's also that they're
Speaker 2: hanging out. Yes, it's moving, and that really starts. We'll
Speaker 2: talk about this in a little bit, But once Jarvin
Speaker 2: gets kind of docked, right, so people in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 2: I think it is tech Crunch publishes what his actual
Speaker 2: name is and instead of like there's this period of
Speaker 2: time where there's some backlash against him, but mostly what
Speaker 2: it does is kind of elevate him.
Speaker 1: Like he does it. He's not hiding behind a pseudonym anymore,
Speaker 1: but now he's free to be a public figure in
Speaker 1: more of a way. And so he starts publicly showing
Speaker 1: up at these parties and events where guys like jd
Speaker 1: Vance and Blake Masters are in attendance, where like people
Speaker 1: who are making inroads into the actual like political strata
Speaker 1: of the right are in attendance. And that's a thing
Speaker 1: that's increasing happening, like once we kind of hit the
Speaker 1: Trump era, and yeah, it's it's kind of important. The
Speaker 1: best example of the degree to which Jarvin's thoughts and
Speaker 1: policies have entered mainstream politics is rage. Is this idea
Speaker 1: that we need to bring in a guy who's going
Speaker 1: to fire everyone in the government and replace it with
Speaker 1: our people. This is the kind of thing that, like,
Speaker 1: not only is this something that guys like Masters and
Speaker 1: Dvans are talking about. Trump tried to do this already
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty at the end of his term. He
Speaker 1: sought to reclassify thousands and thousands of federal employees in
Speaker 1: order to strip them of job protections and make them
Speaker 1: at well employees that he could fire. This was reversed
Speaker 1: under Biden, but it is the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: Trump could bring back and plans to bring back if
Speaker 1: he wins again, because he has promised that if he
Speaker 1: takes office again in twenty twenty five, one of the
Speaker 1: first things he's going to do is fire thousands of
Speaker 1: quote unquote crooked government employees. Trump has repeated disavowed Project
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five because it's become kind of a toxic
Speaker 1: thing politically for him, But he has promised that when
Speaker 1: he takes off as he's going to like, you know,
Speaker 1: clean house within the federal government and put his own
Speaker 1: people in there. And this is very in line with
Speaker 1: what Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts told The New York
Speaker 1: Times he hoped a second Trump term would bring quote
Speaker 1: people will lose their jobs, hopefully their lives are able
Speaker 1: to flourish. In spite of that, buildings will be shut down.
Speaker 1: Hopefully they can be repurposed for private industry. And that's
Speaker 1: Kevin Roberts is not a guy who's ever said Curtis
Speaker 1: Yarvin's name that I can find. But that's Menschus moldbug, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's exactly what he has been talking about for years.
Speaker 2: Would you draw a direct line from Minshus to these positions?
Speaker 2: I mean, and I know absolutely aim, But are you
Speaker 2: do you feel very very confident that moldbug is the
Speaker 2: source of these ideas or was this sort of a
Speaker 2: general sentiment that Minsches was reflecting among like a certain set.
Speaker 1: I think it's best to think about it like a garden, right,
Speaker 1: And what Minschus did was kind of spread fertilizer over
Speaker 1: that garden. That made a climate where a lot of
Speaker 1: these ideas, many of which do come kind of directly
Speaker 1: from his writing, but he also helped kind of set
Speaker 1: the ideological climate on the far right. And as the
Speaker 1: far right took over kind of the center right Republican Party,
Speaker 1: it brought a lot of these mold buggy and ideas
Speaker 1: with it, which is part of why guys like Peter
Speaker 1: Teel are anti democratic activists and use a lot of
Speaker 1: their money to that end, have funded yarbin Is. They
Speaker 1: see him as useful for that sort of thing, right,
Speaker 1: And a lot of these guys who have gone on
Speaker 1: to work at the Heritage Foundation, you know, in the
Speaker 1: early two thousands, in two thousand and eight, nine, ten eleven,
Speaker 1: where like kids in high school and college passing around
Speaker 1: minshus Moldbug tracts, right, Like, that's kind of how this
Speaker 1: has worked. So I would see him as he really
Speaker 1: he prepared an environment for these kind of politics to grow.
Speaker 1: And I think there is a very direct line between
Speaker 1: him and a lot of what you see with Project
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five, a lot of the stuff. Even though
Speaker 1: Trump certainly has never read one of these guys articles,
Speaker 1: he's surrounded by people who are telling him and who
Speaker 1: have ideas about how absolute power can be attained that
Speaker 1: are based on things Moldbug is written. You know, I
Speaker 1: think that that's absolutely something I'm confident arguing and confident
Speaker 1: part because there's so many financial ties and direct personal
Speaker 1: ties between him and people around Trump, you know, So
Speaker 1: I know that's dark. So let's just go to ads
Speaker 1: and try not to think about it for a second,
Speaker 1: think about these products for a minute, and we're back.
Speaker 1: So one of the things I find interesting about Jarvin
Speaker 1: is there's this degree of insecurity to some of his
Speaker 1: writing where he definitely is a monarchist, and he's definitely
Speaker 1: someone who feels a sense of nostalgia to some of
Speaker 1: these old absolute monarchies. But he doesn't want to get
Speaker 1: lumped in with the guys who are like unronically stands
Speaker 1: of the czar or whatever and think that, like, oh,
Speaker 1: if only we could bring the Romanovs back to power
Speaker 1: in Russia, everything would be better. Jarvin doesn't isn't a
Speaker 1: monarchist for shallow reasons, right. He doesn't want to be
Speaker 1: seen as someone who advocates this because he's nostalgic. He
Speaker 1: wants to be seen as someone who has run the
Speaker 1: numbers and concluded that there's no alternative to this system.
Speaker 1: And so whenever he makes his arguments for why things
Speaker 1: should be this way, he liberally sprinkles them with citations. Now,
Speaker 1: his citations are a bunch of old reactionaries who had
Speaker 1: like argued against kings and emperors giving up any power
Speaker 1: back in like the eighteen fifties and the like. But
Speaker 1: he has this kind of belief that any sort of
Speaker 1: quote from an old, dead guy is a primary source.
Speaker 1: That is something like people should take more seriously when
Speaker 1: they're like trying to make their minds up about how
Speaker 1: the world works. He has this kind of he's an
Speaker 1: autodide act and that he's someone who is self taught
Speaker 1: through reading a bunch of books about the things he likes.
Speaker 1: And he's convinced that this is sort of like a
Speaker 1: more ideologically rigorous thing than what people do in academia, right,
Speaker 1: and kind of the key thing in academia is that
Speaker 1: if you have ideas or theories, or if you're making arguments,
Speaker 1: you have to expose them to other people and debate
Speaker 1: and have them like torn down. And you know, that's
Speaker 1: like a key part of the way the academic process works.
Speaker 1: He's only ever existed inside his own head, and so
Speaker 1: you get stuff like this two thousand and eight blog
Speaker 1: post titled an open Letter to open Minded Progressives, where
Speaker 1: he writes this about primary sources. The neat thing about
Speaker 1: primary source is is that often it only takes one
Speaker 1: to prove your point. If you find the theory of
Speaker 1: relativity ancient Greek documents, and you know the documents are authentic.
Speaker 1: You know that the ancient Greeks discovered relativity. How why
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter your understanding of ancient Greeks needs to
Speaker 1: include Greek relativity. Now that's a non sequitur, because, like,
Speaker 1: if you were to find an ancient Greek wrote write
Speaker 1: about the theory of relativity, that alone wouldn't necessarily alter
Speaker 1: your understanding of ancient Greece, because there's a lot of
Speaker 1: other questions, like did anyone else come across this writing
Speaker 1: at the time, was this idea disseminated, was it adopted
Speaker 1: on any kind of scale into the dominant theoretical models
Speaker 1: of the time, or was it one cranks weird belief
Speaker 1: that he laid out in an old letter to a friend. Right,
Speaker 1: the fact that you might find something that sounds like
Speaker 1: an argument for about relativity in an ancient Greek document
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily change your understanding of ancient Greece in a
Speaker 1: meaningful way. Right. The fact that you could cite that
Speaker 1: primary source wouldn't be enough to say the ancient Greeks
Speaker 1: had an understanding of relativity, because you don't know that
Speaker 1: it wasn't just one guy who was viewed widely as
Speaker 1: a crank, right, and a good example of this kind
Speaker 1: of thing from real world history, because he's just making
Speaker 1: up fake history there. Because again there's not really a
Speaker 1: good argument.
Speaker 2: To be made.
Speaker 1: But I will make an interesting argument, and it's about
Speaker 1: something called the Alio file, which was an ancient steam
Speaker 1: engine that was first described by Hero of Alexandria in
Speaker 1: the first century AD. It was actually technically a steam turbine,
Speaker 1: but it was a precursor to a steam engine that
Speaker 1: existed in ancient Rome. Right Now, that's a cool bit
Speaker 1: of history. But does that mean that the Romans had
Speaker 1: steam engines and the ability to make trains? No, because
Speaker 1: this was only ever used as like a party trick,
Speaker 1: Like a couple of prototypes were made and they were
Speaker 1: like made to impress people at like gatherings for rich people.
Speaker 1: No one ever did anything with it. So the fact
Speaker 1: that technically there was the knowledge to make a steam
Speaker 1: engine in ancient Rome doesn't change your understanding of ancient
Speaker 1: Rome because they still didn't have steam power.
Speaker 2: Right. Yeah, it's like somebody's showing off their Aston Martin like, right,
Speaker 2: not everybody had Aston Martin's or has asked, Yeah, some
Speaker 2: rich guy is like check it out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And then you were to say that, like, well,
Speaker 1: that this meant that the Aston Martin was the car
Speaker 1: of the twenty first century. Like no, like like like
Speaker 1: a couple hundred people had them or whatever, you.
Speaker 2: Know, I would say, I mean, I would say that
Speaker 2: he has a point that depending on the assertion by
Speaker 2: a primary source, sure it can have like pretty powerful
Speaker 2: value in an historical context.
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, But you also you have to take into account.
Speaker 1: I think part of it is that he's he's talking
Speaker 1: about this in like internet debate terms, where like someone
Speaker 1: makes an argument and you throw in a quote from
Speaker 1: a source and like it's probably done because most people
Speaker 1: don't have the time or the breadth of knowledge to
Speaker 1: really argue these things in detail, as opposed to like
Speaker 1: in academia. Part of what you would be trying to
Speaker 1: do is like not just here's what one source said
Speaker 1: about this.
Speaker 2: But wanted to be irrefutable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, here's the balance of sources. Like we can do
Speaker 1: a survey of all of these different people from the
Speaker 1: time writing about this moment, and we found you're gonna
Speaker 1: find conflict, right, because you know, if you have like
Speaker 1: ten people who are all present at the same shooting
Speaker 1: or car crash or whatever. You're gonna get ten slightly
Speaker 1: different accounts, right, those are all primary sources. A primary
Speaker 1: source does not mean something is right. It just means
Speaker 1: it's from someone who was there, you know. But that's
Speaker 1: not how Mouldbug thinks about it, because he very much
Speaker 1: has this. He thinks about these these old dead reactionary
Speaker 1: writers the way he wants to be thought about, right,
Speaker 1: which is as someone who is like more or less
Speaker 1: ideologically unimpeachable, right, because they're his favorite writers. And so
Speaker 1: I think it behooves us to talk about probably his
Speaker 1: favorite of these old dead reactionaries, because it tells us
Speaker 1: a lot about some of the things that Yarvin believes.
Speaker 1: And this is who we've talked. We talked about this
Speaker 1: guy in part one, Thomas Carlyle. Now Carlyle is writing
Speaker 1: in the mid eighteen hundreds. He's a Scottish writer who
Speaker 1: you know. One of the things he wrote about, he
Speaker 1: was an early writer, kind of talking about the plight
Speaker 1: of the working class under industrialization. So there's a degree
Speaker 1: of what he was writing about that I think was
Speaker 1: fairly valid. But he was also a massive bigot and
Speaker 1: for kind of an overview of that, I found a
Speaker 1: write up by the Glasgow Museum of Slavery aptly titled
Speaker 1: Thomas Carlyle Historian Writer Racist, that describes an essay Carlyle wrote. Quote.
Speaker 1: Carlyle complained that emancipated black people in the West Indies
Speaker 1: were lazy, working little bit, eating well, benefiting from the
Speaker 1: favorable climate and abundance of tropical fruit, while sugarcane on
Speaker 1: British plantations rotted due to lack of labor. In the
Speaker 1: context of recession and unemployment back in Britain and the
Speaker 1: potato famines in Ireland, this was an emode of accusation.
Speaker 1: It was also blatantly untrue, according to figures produced by
Speaker 1: the Anti Slavery Society in eighteen forty seven to forty
Speaker 1: t nine, which showed that sugar production had in fact
Speaker 1: gone up. However, the emancipation of slaves in the British
Speaker 1: Empire in eighteen thirty three had created a labor problem
Speaker 1: that had cut into profit margins, exacerbated in eighteen forty
Speaker 1: six when the Sugar Duties to Act ended subsidies for
Speaker 1: British plantation owners. And this is the kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Because the Glasgow Museum of Slavery is trying to view
Speaker 1: things from an academic and an accurate standpoint, they're able
Speaker 1: to look at what Carlyle said, and what he said
Speaker 1: that was like demonstrably not just racists, but like we
Speaker 1: can argue completely factually wrong about like the economics of
Speaker 1: the system that he was arguing in favor of. Moldbug
Speaker 1: can't really engage in a lot of these criticisms of
Speaker 1: Carlyle because the whole reason Carlyle was wrong was that
Speaker 1: plantation owners, this natural aristocracy, were lazy, corrupt and incompetent,
Speaker 1: and that flies in the face of Jarvin's belief system.
Speaker 1: So instead, when Curtis Jarvin writes an essay on Thomas Carlyle,
Speaker 1: he writes that is quote a natural human relationship like
Speaker 1: that of patron and client and enthusias. That Carlyle is
Speaker 1: the one writer in English whose name can be uttered
Speaker 1: with Shakespeare's. Like this guy who's big claim to fame
Speaker 1: is his essay on why slavery is good and natural,
Speaker 1: is just as as brilliant a thinker as William Shakespeare.
Speaker 1: Like again, one an idea of kind of how vile.
Speaker 2: This guy is how well was it written?
Speaker 1: I mean it's okay, yeah, it's it's it's not it's no, no,
Speaker 1: it's it's definitely non Niamic pentemy. It's not even in
Speaker 1: dactyla texameter. You know, Like, come on, can we back
Speaker 1: up for one second? Was there anything yeah said in
Speaker 1: this open letter to open minded progressives that was that
Speaker 1: would change a progressive's mind?
Speaker 2: Or like what was the gist? What was the logline
Speaker 2: of that? Because you got into a quote, but I
Speaker 2: I was just fascinated by this open letter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's largely a series of art. It's really largely
Speaker 1: trying to convince people that these sort of ideas of
Speaker 1: democracy in human progress that are kind of inherent to
Speaker 1: the progressive tradition. Right of this like gradual march of
Speaker 1: progress in terms of like pushing for for more rights
Speaker 1: and more justice in society is kind of fundamentally fallacious
Speaker 1: and flawed, Right that, like none of this actually works, right,
Speaker 1: that it only it only creates new tyrannies. That's his argument.
Speaker 1: It's this whole you advocating for your own rights is
Speaker 1: really you restricting my rights? You know, Like that's that's
Speaker 1: kind of the gist. Of the argument that he's making there. Wow,
Speaker 1: that's in fourteen chapters. Everything he says takes too long.
Speaker 2: Also, slavery is cool, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, slave, I mean, slavery is a natural relationship, right
Speaker 1: based because again he believes that, like, it can't just
Speaker 1: be that one group of people were at one time
Speaker 1: able to exert more of violence than another group of
Speaker 1: people and so they took them into their possession, right,
Speaker 1: because that makes it sound awful. It's got to be that, like, no,
Speaker 1: this group of people are naturally inclined to rule in
Speaker 1: this other group are naturally inclined.
Speaker 2: To be ruled, you serve.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So, when it comes to talking about Jarvin as
Speaker 1: this sort of dark Enlightenment figure, this guy who's able
Speaker 1: to enrapture people's minds with this almost magic quality of
Speaker 1: his pros, I want to kind of I think we've
Speaker 1: talked a little bit about why I don't think that's
Speaker 1: accurate to how his work was appealing to people. But
Speaker 1: I want to really puncture that myth by pointing out
Speaker 1: one of the examples where he was very much in
Speaker 1: line with kind of like the gutter of the right
Speaker 1: wing and not at all like this sort of more
Speaker 1: intellectual side that he tries to present himself as, sometimes
Speaker 1: in articles like that open letter to Progressives. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, he published a blog post titled did
Speaker 1: Barack Obama go to Colombia? And this is written by
Speaker 1: Jarvin as a serious and investigation into whether or not
Speaker 1: Barack Obama had faked his attendance at Columbia College. And
Speaker 1: the evidence Yarvin had that Obama had faked his attendants
Speaker 1: was that several other Columbia grads from the same year
Speaker 1: said they didn't know him. Right, this was a huge
Speaker 1: thing on like the right at this time. You would
Speaker 1: get like Trump and stuff, you know, retweeting this way
Speaker 1: back in the day that like, well, a bunch of
Speaker 1: guys who went to Colombia didn't know Barack Obama. Like
Speaker 1: this man came out of nowhere. He must have faked
Speaker 1: his attendance at this college. And here's what Jarvin writes
Speaker 1: about it, so you can get a hint at his
Speaker 1: like sparkling prose. So let me ask anyone who cares
Speaker 1: to comment below, how exactly do we the American people,
Speaker 1: lord help us know that Barack Obama attended Columbia, or
Speaker 1: more precisely, why should we assume, on the basis of
Speaker 1: the evidence we have that he did, do we serious belief,
Speaker 1: seriously believe it is possible for a future president to
Speaker 1: be unremembered at his alma mater. Now, the very next
Speaker 1: paragraph in that article is what we know is that
Speaker 1: a Columbia spokesman has confirmed that Obama attended Columbia. And like,
Speaker 1: I would say, well, that's part of how you find out, right,
Speaker 1: as you asked the school did this guy attend, as
Speaker 1: opposed to ask random people who happened to go to
Speaker 1: a school with thousands of folks did you know this guy? Like,
Speaker 1: it's just such like the logical line there is. So
Speaker 1: it's very much a guy picking the reality he wants
Speaker 1: to have, right, which is that Barack Obama is a fraud. Right,
Speaker 1: He's a fraud and he faked his attendants at Columbia.
Speaker 1: He wants to believe that he finds a couple of
Speaker 1: other Columbia grads who don't like Obama and say, well,
Speaker 1: I never knew him, and that's the only facts that
Speaker 1: Jarvin needs here, as opposed to like, well, is there
Speaker 1: any actual evidence that he attended? And it turns out
Speaker 1: that is, and like thirty seconds of googling, I found
Speaker 1: an article by a writer in the Jewish Journal who
Speaker 1: attended Columbia at the same time as Obama. And also,
Speaker 1: like all of these guys who were giving interviews to
Speaker 1: writing papers in two thousand and eight didn't remember Barack
Speaker 1: Obama because it's a big school. But this guy dug
Speaker 1: through a bunch of his old graduation papers and found
Speaker 1: a graduation program that lists Barack Obama by name because
Speaker 1: he went to Columbia University. This was where were people
Speaker 1: pointed this out at the time. There's pictures of him there,
Speaker 1: He's on all sorts of documents. He did know people.
Speaker 1: It was just this like fever dream that spread through
Speaker 1: the right and the same way this myth about Haitians
Speaker 1: eating people's pets in Springfield, Ohio is spreading right now.
Speaker 1: It's deliberate disinformation, and it's it's disinformation that is believed
Speaker 1: by people who need an explanation for like how a
Speaker 1: guy like Obama, who they don't think should be able
Speaker 1: to do the things that Obama did, was able to
Speaker 1: do it right. These are racists right who need a
Speaker 1: reason why, how how Barack Obama became the president that isn't. Well,
Speaker 1: he's the most charismatic man in American politics, right, he
Speaker 1: was really good at elections, he was really good at
Speaker 1: running at campaign. That's not a thing that works with
Speaker 1: their belief systems. So Jarvin has to buy into these
Speaker 1: fantasies in order to accept this reality because it just
Speaker 1: doesn't correlate with his racism. And in this he's just like,
Speaker 1: I mean, he's Donald Trump was doing all this shit
Speaker 1: back at the same time, he was like a birther right, Like,
Speaker 1: this is not any intellectually higher up than Bertherism. But
Speaker 1: you know, I think it's kind of important to look
Speaker 1: at this ugly stuff because it contrasts to this dark
Speaker 1: Enlightenment puppet master view of Yarvin and paints a picture
Speaker 1: as a guy who is not just writing stuff that
Speaker 1: is influential, but is also going along with the flow
Speaker 1: and getting caught up in conspiracy theories and bullshit the
Speaker 1: same way anyone else in that space is right, he's
Speaker 1: not special and he's not a hyper genius. Yeah anyway, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's dumb. I mean, yeah, I think it's dumb. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think people don't catch it because his articles are
Speaker 1: always he like throws in Latin quotes and like references
Speaker 1: and quotes from like these old You know, he's got
Speaker 1: a great backlog of like witticisms by different historical thinkers.
Speaker 1: I would describe his writing style as like if Fraser
Speaker 1: were written by a fascist, right, Like that's how Curtis
Speaker 1: Jarfin writes. But it very much is kind of just
Speaker 1: to paper over the fact that he's the same kind
Speaker 1: of blowhard as like rush Limbaugh.
Speaker 2: Right, how does this comport with the right sort of
Speaker 2: fetishization of the Constitution.
Speaker 1: Well, I'll be clear, Jarvin does not fetishize the Constitution.
Speaker 1: I think he views it I think is pretty clearly
Speaker 1: a misstep, right, because it hands all of this power
Speaker 1: over to groups that should not like or at least
Speaker 1: he believes. I think if you were to go back,
Speaker 1: he would argue that, like the basic ideas behind a
Speaker 1: lot of the founders, which is that we should have
Speaker 1: this republic that is governed by elites, this like natural
Speaker 1: elite aristocracy, like Jefferson believed in this kind of natural
Speaker 1: aristocracy of intelligent white men. Right, that is pretty close
Speaker 1: to what Moldbug believes about the world. But obviously, as
Speaker 1: the franchise was extended to larger and larger chunks of people,
Speaker 1: as slavery was ended, as we've repeatedly had these movements
Speaker 1: towards social justice and towards bringing more people into being
Speaker 1: able to have a voice in the system like that.
Speaker 1: The fact that that was allowable at all was a
Speaker 1: terrible flaw in the Constitution as written right, The fact
Speaker 1: that it included the potential for democratic change was kind
Speaker 1: of its its fundamental fatal failure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I don't know the nature of this,
Speaker 2: of Jarvin's relationship or friendship or whatever you want to
Speaker 2: call it with JD. Van's, but it's saved to say.
Speaker 2: I think a lot of people on the right would
Speaker 2: would agree that that Yarvin is is taking some seriously
Speaker 2: on American views here, espousing some very un American views,
Speaker 2: un American just meeting like oh yeah and so, and
Speaker 2: yet we have a vice presidential candidate was presumably at
Speaker 2: least hobnobbing. I don't know if they're friends. I don't
Speaker 2: know if if I don't know if Jady Vance would
Speaker 2: say Jarvin.
Speaker 1: Associates, Yeah, yeah, I don't know, associates.
Speaker 2: Has Jadie Vance been asked about Jarvin? Has he has
Speaker 2: he take. Has he had had any sort of public
Speaker 2: expression of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean he's been there was actually really good.
Speaker 1: I think it was a New Yorker article from about
Speaker 1: two years ago, right before his Senate run, where he
Speaker 1: was like at a conference with Yarvin and like at
Speaker 1: a party with him and talking like you know, was questioned,
Speaker 1: you know, or the writer of that article talked with
Speaker 1: him in part about like some of Jarvin's ideas, like
Speaker 1: this retire all government employees thing like he's he's he
Speaker 1: has been like publicly associated with him. I think the
Speaker 1: kind of the one of the more interesting points is
Speaker 1: that like Jarvin spent the twenty sixteen election at Peter
Speaker 1: Teel's house like watching the returns, like he's he's gotten
Speaker 1: increasingly sort of like publicly plugged into this set of
Speaker 1: people who have direct connections with power brokers on the right.
Speaker 1: And you're right, one of the interesting things about him
Speaker 1: is that he's not really directly He's never become famous
Speaker 1: in the same way that like a guy like JD.
Speaker 1: Vance has right because he is too toxic to like
Speaker 1: bring out and and kind of publicly embroder his ideas. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: but you will get people who will talk about stuff
Speaker 1: like you know, Blake Masters and Jdvanser are comfortable talking
Speaker 1: about rage, right, this idea that really comes out of
Speaker 1: mouldbugs writing. And so it's it's he remains kind of
Speaker 1: toxic enough that you don't want to bring him out
Speaker 1: too publicly, but he's also popular enough that part of
Speaker 1: like how you signal to other people who are on
Speaker 1: this chunk of the right that like you're one of them,
Speaker 1: is you kind of signpost that you believe a lot
Speaker 1: of the same things that he believes, right, and you
Speaker 1: like you show up at the same events at the
Speaker 1: same kind of like you know, like conferences and whatnot
Speaker 1: where he gives speeches. These are kind of like you
Speaker 1: can see the it's not very hard to draw the
Speaker 1: connections between these people. But Jarvin's not a face man, right,
Speaker 1: He's never going to run for office, and you certainly
Speaker 1: don't want him like arguing about like his neo monarchist
Speaker 1: views on Fox News, Right, that's still a little bit
Speaker 1: too extreme. But if you say, we need a strong
Speaker 1: executive leader who's going to run the country like a
Speaker 1: CEO and fire all of these unelected bureaucrats and replace
Speaker 1: them with like people who are going to fight for
Speaker 1: quote unquote liber right, and we need to punish all
Speaker 1: of our political opponents. We need to like lock up
Speaker 1: members of the lying news media. Now, all of these
Speaker 1: are things that you will get a lot of buy
Speaker 1: in on on the trump Ist right. Right. This is
Speaker 1: all stuff that Trump himself talks about a lot, And
Speaker 1: it's the kind of thing people wonder, how did how
Speaker 1: have we gone so far down this road seemingly so quickly,
Speaker 1: And it's because it didn't all start with Donald Trump, right.
Speaker 1: People were kind of tilling the ideological soil for years
Speaker 1: before that point. And like one of those guys is
Speaker 1: Curtis Yarvin, and he's one of the most influential ones
Speaker 1: of those guys.
Speaker 2: As the Jarvin taken a position on Trump publicly.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, he again he understands like there's a
Speaker 1: degree of like toxicity to his endorsement, but he watched
Speaker 1: the election at Peter Teal's house and was like very
Speaker 1: excited that Trump had won, so like he is essentially
Speaker 1: he has come out being like this is I think
Speaker 1: as close to the kind of guy we're going to
Speaker 1: get to start the process of turning the country in
Speaker 1: the direction that I want right now, He's not a
Speaker 1: guy who wants the entirety of the United States run
Speaker 1: by one dude. He seeks this kind of political devolution
Speaker 1: into these competing corporate city states. But he sees Trump
Speaker 1: as like a step on that road. This is a
Speaker 1: guy who will centralize power, who will get these bureaucrats out,
Speaker 1: who will destroy you know, the left as an organized
Speaker 1: political force, and that will allow these other kind of interests,
Speaker 1: these corporate interests, to kind of take and centralize more
Speaker 1: power themselves as kind of the state gets whittled down
Speaker 1: and we can devolve power to what are effectively like
Speaker 1: corporate warlords.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That's kind of the end result of his system. You
Speaker 1: can see it in there's this group of guys on
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley, in Silicon Valley right now who are start
Speaker 1: trying to start their own city backed by like Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley VC money. Yeah. Yeah, And they've talked a lot about.
Speaker 2: They they've given up on that, right.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, that is still very much an
Speaker 1: effort being made. It's and there's there's been like efforts
Speaker 1: to kind of take over local San Francisco politics, and
Speaker 1: there's a lot of Moldebug associated guys in that as well,
Speaker 1: Like one of the lead figures there is a big
Speaker 1: fan of his writing who has been kind of pushing
Speaker 1: this idea as again a step on the road to
Speaker 1: these corporate controlled city states. Right, this is obviously like
Speaker 1: part of the process of devolving any kind of accountable
Speaker 1: state power into the control of what are effectively like
Speaker 1: ceo kings, Right, and yeah, that's that's that's uh, that's
Speaker 1: kind of where we're going here.
Speaker 2: But we all get to be Twitter's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, everything gets to be run like Twitter. Isn't that exciting?
Speaker 2: We get to live in a Twitter?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Don't you want to live in Twitter?
Speaker 2: No? I wish I could just be a tweet that
Speaker 2: lived in Yeah exclusively.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it seems like such a nice place. Speaking of
Speaker 1: nice places, our sponsors all, they'll create a nice little
Speaker 1: place for your ears to live for like three minutes,
Speaker 1: however long an ad break is. We're back. So I
Speaker 1: kind I really debated with myself, like how much do
Speaker 1: we get into of like all of the different terrible
Speaker 1: things he said, like all of each of the different
Speaker 1: like beliefs. Yarvin has a spouse and this is a
Speaker 1: guy who's been writing thousands of words a week on
Speaker 1: the internet for years, So there's like there's too much
Speaker 1: there for us to give a comprehensive look into the man.
Speaker 2: He just completely summarize all of his writing, right, I.
Speaker 1: Mean, there's enough of it out there that it can do,
Speaker 1: Like it can give you a decent amount on mold bug,
Speaker 1: although you're going to miss stuff, like you know some
Speaker 1: of this you have to know a little bit more
Speaker 1: about the far right in order to catch references he makes.
Speaker 1: Like I was reading one essay of his where he
Speaker 1: talks about Rhodesia. Do you know what? Rhodesia was.
Speaker 2: The source of the of those unusual ridge backed dogs.
Speaker 1: It is the source of those dogs. It was also
Speaker 1: a white ethno state in Africa that was like initially
Speaker 1: started out as a colony of the UK. They refused
Speaker 1: to give up like the power of the white minority,
Speaker 1: which is like three percent of the country and had
Speaker 1: essentially total electoral power. They became like a pariah. This
Speaker 1: is like during like the nineteen seventies, a lot of
Speaker 1: this is happening, and wound up fighting a very long
Speaker 1: war with like the vast majority of the country in
Speaker 1: order to try and maintain this state of white minority rule.
Speaker 1: It was a very brutal period of time. This bush
Speaker 1: War they x acuted was where a lot of early
Speaker 1: insurgent tactics were carried on, and it was carried out
Speaker 1: in the name of keeping white people in charge of
Speaker 1: this massive population of black people who had effectively no power.
Speaker 1: And Rhodesia was close to the ideal state for Moldbook.
Speaker 1: I found an article of his where he writes about
Speaker 1: Ian Smith, who was like the guy who was leading
Speaker 1: Rhodesia during its like quote unquote war for liberation. And
Speaker 1: he writes because because Smith died a few years back,
Speaker 1: and Moldbook like wrote this elegy to him that opened
Speaker 1: with the words the last great Englishman is dead and
Speaker 1: fuck who disagrees, And it's basically this piece about how
Speaker 1: like Smith was the last man who was brave enough
Speaker 1: to fight for what we all know is the only
Speaker 1: kind of state that can work, which is one in
Speaker 1: which a natural biological elite rules over the masses who
Speaker 1: are unfit to have any sort of power. It ends
Speaker 1: on these lines, which I think are kind of telling
Speaker 1: to his ideology, and one we will either be hacked
Speaker 1: to death in our own Beds or some similar or
Speaker 1: nasty thing, or Ian Smith or Enoch Powell, and even
Speaker 1: our own tailgunner Joe will have another life in bronze.
Speaker 1: But do you know us, I'm not sure we have
Speaker 1: been introduced. We are the neo mccarthyists. Our motto this
Speaker 1: time will finish the job. And so what he's saying
Speaker 1: there is that like Smith is like Joe McCarthy. He's
Speaker 1: one of these guys who embodies the violence of the
Speaker 1: politics that we're advocates of. Right and again, he's never
Speaker 1: going to come out and say I think we should
Speaker 1: kill all the people who disagree with me. But he
Speaker 1: will harken back to these figures and say, these are
Speaker 1: my kind of ideological heroes. And the movement that I
Speaker 1: am seeking to incite is going to finish the job.
Speaker 1: It's going to kill all the communists, it's going to
Speaker 1: win where Rhodesia lost. Right, Like, it's not as direct
Speaker 1: as saying, you know, I'm a white nationalist, and in fact,
Speaker 1: he will never admit to being a white nationalist. But
Speaker 1: what is the conclusion when you're t talking about the
Speaker 1: failure of Rhodesia as being a tragedy other than well,
Speaker 1: just someone who supports white nationalists. Right, you can see
Speaker 1: kind of like the violent, inherent violence inherent in what
Speaker 1: he's pushing for.
Speaker 2: There.
Speaker 1: In that same essay, he praises the novel The Camp
Speaker 1: of the Saints, which is a racist book about migrants
Speaker 1: from India flooding Europe and destroying civilization, which is Steve
Speaker 1: Bannon's favorite book. And Steve Bannon is another influent Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's great replacement stuff, right. Bannon is a big fan
Speaker 1: of Curtis Jarvin. Again, all of these people are connected
Speaker 1: and they're all fans of each other. Like the kind
Speaker 1: of like ideological simpatico here is a crucial part of
Speaker 1: the story. Now, in the last few years, as he's
Speaker 1: gained more of an influence online, Jarvin has grown a
Speaker 1: bigger head. He started referring to himself as the sith
Speaker 1: Lord of the modern anti democratic right because he is
Speaker 1: a big nerd. He's also he's the guy who brought
Speaker 1: the red pill into right wing politics, like taking it
Speaker 1: from The Matrix. Yeah that's cool, huh that yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And he's you know, it's interesting because like obviously The
Speaker 1: Matrix was a movie written by two trans women in
Speaker 1: not at all about right wing politics.
Speaker 2: Right, the matrix is sort of a great allegory for
Speaker 2: his beliefs.
Speaker 1: I do think it is an allegory for his beliefs,
Speaker 1: and like the violence and depression that they necessitate. I
Speaker 1: think like he tends to take it as like realizing
Speaker 1: that democracy is fake and that like all of these
Speaker 1: social justice movements are inherently like evil, flawed attempts to
Speaker 1: like destroy the natural aristocracy. Like that's the matrix, right
Speaker 1: is you know, people who don't look like him being
Speaker 1: able to vote, which is much shallower.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the violent its inherent in these systems that that
Speaker 2: you're referring to. It does it does seem to And
Speaker 2: I hate to armchair psychoanalyze anybody, and I'm not equipped
Speaker 2: to do that. So this is more of a just sort.
Speaker 1: Of we always say we hate it, but we always
Speaker 1: do a little bit.
Speaker 2: Oh we can't help it, right, Yeah, but no, this
Speaker 2: is just sort of a pontification. But does it feel
Speaker 2: to you because it does to me a little bit,
Speaker 2: like like to really take these these positions seriously and
Speaker 2: advocate for these things is is, in its own way
Speaker 2: a kind of enjoyment of violence or a an and
Speaker 2: in that way, almost like a psychopathy, like a like
Speaker 2: violence is wonderful? Yeah, yeah, Is there is there anything
Speaker 2: to be found in Arvin's writings that is that that
Speaker 2: laments the that violences or subjugation or the suffering of
Speaker 2: any humans, is a is an unfortunate side effect of
Speaker 2: these systems but necessary? Or is it just sort of
Speaker 2: like no, that's just an awesome part of it.
Speaker 1: It's more like number one. I think a big thing
Speaker 1: that he tries to do is minimize the degree to
Speaker 1: which that's necessary. But when it does come up, it
Speaker 1: is this very full throated embrace of like, well they're communists,
Speaker 1: you know, like this is what we have to do.
Speaker 1: Like the terrorism of the Nazis was great because it worked, right, Like,
Speaker 1: I don't think he's a guy who feels bad at
Speaker 1: all about the inevitable consequences of his beliefs. And I
Speaker 1: certainly don't get that hint from his writing that there's
Speaker 1: any sort of like real regret. There maybe some like
Speaker 1: sign postings to regret about the unfortunate you know, necessities
Speaker 1: that will come about, But this is I think you're
Speaker 1: right on the money. There's a lot of like violent
Speaker 1: fantasizing here. Against this is a guy who spends a
Speaker 1: lot of time obsessed with the things that annoy him
Speaker 1: in the world world and convinced that like the right
Speaker 1: solution to those things is a sort of terminal force.
Speaker 1: And you get this all over with people who get
Speaker 1: kind of too wrapped up in like the specifics of
Speaker 1: their ideology and their anger at its discontents. You can
Speaker 1: find like you know, maoists and whatnot online who will
Speaker 1: fantasize about like when our revolution takes over, you know,
Speaker 1: we're going to put people in re education camps or whatever.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a necessary byproduct of not having enough
Speaker 1: empathy and spending too much time alone in a room
Speaker 1: obsessing over how right you are? Right is anything that
Speaker 1: kind of inherently conflicts with that as the world, in
Speaker 1: all of its complexity, will always do should be solved
Speaker 1: by the most violence I can bring to bear right.
Speaker 1: And that's why we need to capture the presidens.
Speaker 2: So certain solution which is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's why these guys, that's why their big
Speaker 1: goal is the presidency right, because the way they see it,
Speaker 1: and certainly the way the Supreme Court is set it up,
Speaker 1: getting the presidency gives you access to the greatest store
Speaker 1: of violence that has ever existed in human history. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: that is what the president has access to. Right. People
Speaker 1: don't like to talk about it that way, but there's
Speaker 1: no other real way to view it, potentially, And if
Speaker 1: you see the president as someone who should have no
Speaker 1: guard rails, and this is very much what we're going
Speaker 1: to advocate for, as a president that has no restrictions
Speaker 1: on his power, then what you're looking at is a
Speaker 1: guy who has the ability to use the most violence
Speaker 1: ever concentrated in cleansing the world of the people who
Speaker 1: make it not fit this schema that I've cooked up
Speaker 1: in my head that I find very attractive. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: good stuff. So if you're looking for a writing on
Speaker 1: you know, Jarvin to this day, if you're looking at
Speaker 1: like what people have come to call the strain of
Speaker 1: thought that he helped ignite, the term you'll come across
Speaker 1: the most is neo reactionary or NRX. Right, this is
Speaker 1: kind of the how you'll see it written about a
Speaker 1: lot in like blogs by Bay Area techies. And this
Speaker 1: term started to be used more in like twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen. I think it is when it really took off.
Speaker 1: You had some sort of writing by people like Clint
Speaker 1: Finley at tech Crunch in twenty thirteen that noted that
Speaker 1: you were seeing a lot of these this thought take
Speaker 1: off among influential people in big tech. Finley wrote PayPal
Speaker 1: founder Peter Teal his most voice similar ideas, and Pat Dickinson,
Speaker 1: the former CTO of Business Insider, say he's been influenced
Speaker 1: by neo reactionary thought. It may be a small minority worldview,
Speaker 1: but it's one that I think shines some light on
Speaker 1: the psyche of contemporary tech culture now. It was through
Speaker 1: tech Crunch in twenty fourteen that Minsius Moldbug was first
Speaker 1: revealed to be computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, and it was
Speaker 1: revealed that Yarvin was working at a startup funded by
Speaker 1: Peter Teal's money called Tlawn. Now Tlawn was the name
Speaker 1: comes from a short story like a sci fi short
Speaker 1: story written by a fella named Borges in nineteen forty
Speaker 1: and one summary of the story I found from Francis
Speaker 1: Saying writes that it quote describes a secret society Orbis
Speaker 1: Tertius that architects an entirely new world Plawn by establishing
Speaker 1: an encyclopedia describing it. Over time, bits of this fictional
Speaker 1: world begin to emerge in the real world, consuming it.
Speaker 1: And this is kind of how Muldbug thinks of his writing. Right,
Speaker 1: I am writing the future into being by theorizing it.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That's why this company is named after it. That's why
Speaker 1: he finds that story so influential. The kind of process
Speaker 1: of this is called hyperstition. It's this process of like
Speaker 1: taking ideas that exist only in people's heads in fiction
Speaker 1: and like forcing them into the real world. It's one
Speaker 1: of those premises that seems silly until suddenly a guy
Speaker 1: who might be the vice president starts ranting about how
Speaker 1: childless women are psychopaths and we need to fire the
Speaker 1: government so Donald Trump can remake it in his own image.
Speaker 1: This is all very like silly seeming until it isn't.
Speaker 1: And kind of the scariest thing about Jarvin is that
Speaker 1: he has to an extent been successful in like writing
Speaker 1: a different world into being like he has. He has
Speaker 1: had more influence in this than you want to believe.
Speaker 1: Kind of the tipping point for Jarvin's influence and culture
Speaker 1: and for that kind of politics starting to take over
Speaker 1: the right was twenty fourteen, and it happened appropriately enough
Speaker 1: on the Internet with something called gamer Gate.
Speaker 2: H and there we are.
Speaker 1: I was wondering how long it would Takejanopolis to show
Speaker 1: up gamer Gate. A lot of the people who are
Speaker 1: thought leaders in Gamergate, who are like, like, who are
Speaker 1: some of the early uh like voices behind that and
Speaker 1: behind that kind of neo reactionary swell as it enters
Speaker 1: public consciousness are fans of Yarvins. One of them is
Speaker 1: Steve Bannon. Bannon is a big behind the scenes player,
Speaker 1: and what happens there as is Milo Yanopolis, and Yanopolis
Speaker 1: is kind of a guy who comes to fame through Gamergate,
Speaker 1: as like making himself into kind of a voice of
Speaker 1: the movement, and Yanopolis is an adherent of Yarvin's philosophy.
Speaker 1: The next year, after Gamergate twenty fifteen, Trump descends his
Speaker 1: Escalator to launch his campaign, and in short order, the
Speaker 1: alright is eternal. Yeah, and the alright becomes kind of
Speaker 1: undeniable to anyone. Right, It's not something you can ignore anymore,
Speaker 1: And figures like Janopolis and Bannon are major like faces
Speaker 1: of the movement, while Jarvin remains kind of obscure still,
Speaker 1: you know, people who are in the know, who understand
Speaker 1: where a lot of the ideas guys like Eanopolis are
Speaker 1: spouting in public come from, know that he's a player
Speaker 1: in the field, but he's kind of obscured and shadowed
Speaker 1: by the cloaking factor of his very dense, clumsy prose.
Speaker 1: Corey Pine at The Baffler is probably the first guy
Speaker 1: to cohesively suggests that Jarvin's relationship to Peter Teel and
Speaker 1: to the folks around him were part of a whider
Speaker 1: movement towards anti democratic change. His work was influential enough
Speaker 1: to get The New York Times to ask Peter Teal
Speaker 1: if he was working to fund a monarchist coup, and
Speaker 1: Teal replied in a cryptic fashion, it was a full
Speaker 1: on conspiracy theory. In truth, there's nobody sitting around plotting
Speaker 1: the future, though I sometimes think it would be better
Speaker 1: if people were, which is like the most sinister way
Speaker 1: to reply to that. Right, So twenty sixteen comes along.
Speaker 1: Next Trump wins the election, and suddenly even normal people
Speaker 1: who don't spend their free time online looking at fascists
Speaker 1: on the internet become aware that something is very wrong.
Speaker 1: In twenty seventeen, BuzzFeed News publishes an expose based on
Speaker 1: leaked emails between a bunch of members of the alt right,
Speaker 1: including Bannon and Yanopolis, and I'm going to quote Corey
Speaker 1: Pine describing these leaks and from some of the most
Speaker 1: revealing reveals. In that piece, BuzzFeed reported that Teal and
Speaker 1: Eanopolis had made plans to meet during the July Republican
Speaker 1: National Convention, but much of Eanopolis's knowledge of seems to
Speaker 1: come secondhand from other right wing activists, as well as
Speaker 1: Curtis Jarvin, the blogger who advocates the return of feudalism.
Speaker 1: The story then quotes this exchange. Jarvin told Yanopolis that
Speaker 1: he had been coaching Teal. Peter needs guidance on politics,
Speaker 1: for sure. Yanopolis responded, less than you might think, Jarvin
Speaker 1: wrote back, I watched the election at his house. I
Speaker 1: think my hangover lasted in this Tuesday, He's fully enlightened.
Speaker 1: He just plays it very carefully. And you know, if
Speaker 1: you're looking for direct connections, it's something that we only
Speaker 1: really have because of you know, leaks like that. But
Speaker 1: these are not like conspiracy theory connections that we have
Speaker 1: to draw between people, like we have texts between these
Speaker 1: guys talking about how they're trying to convince moneyed interests
Speaker 1: of their plans to like end democracy in the United States,
Speaker 1: and they've been doing it for a while. And that's
Speaker 1: that's most of what I've got to say about Curtis Yarvin. Now,
Speaker 1: I would be doing you at a service if I
Speaker 1: didn't end this by talking at least for a little
Speaker 1: bit about the other side of his professional life, because
Speaker 1: while he's been writing all of this fascist theorizing and whatnot,
Speaker 1: he has a career as a software developer and a
Speaker 1: project that represents he and he will state represents like
Speaker 1: his political dreams.
Speaker 2: RBIT.
Speaker 1: Now, RBIT is like a period on paper. It's supposed
Speaker 1: to be basically a period of peer social networking tool
Speaker 1: like masted on that allows individual users more control over
Speaker 1: their information in digital life. And when he talks about ERBIT,
Speaker 1: Jarvin talks about it as like this is me building
Speaker 1: in software a representation of my ideal form of government, right,
Speaker 1: And he frames it as like something that gives you
Speaker 1: control over your own life and data, not some central
Speaker 1: company like Twitter that like can be corrupt and used
Speaker 1: to bad ends. And that's complete bullshit, right. The reality
Speaker 1: is that Rbit is backed by Peter Thiel money, and
Speaker 1: it is an attempt to effectively like build a different
Speaker 1: kind of social networking infrastructure for the Internet that Curtis
Speaker 1: Yarvin has complete control over. Right now, the good news
Speaker 1: is it hasn't actually taken off. This company is largely
Speaker 1: a failure. It's generally agreed to be pretty badly coded.
Speaker 1: I found a pretty good analysis of it by Francis Saying,
Speaker 1: who runs a website called Distributed Web of Care, who
Speaker 1: points out that, like, while Jarvin tries to frame this
Speaker 1: as like Mastodon, is like, well, you keep control of
Speaker 1: your data. You're in charge of your digital life, not
Speaker 1: some company. The way everything is set up is you
Speaker 1: have these like different nodes, and there's a limited number
Speaker 1: of nodes, and most of them are controlled by Jarvin
Speaker 1: and the Herbit company. So what he's like really trying
Speaker 1: to do here is set up like a landlord scam,
Speaker 1: like on the Internet, right where he's the big landlord.
Speaker 1: And I think this is kind of revealing, not because
Speaker 1: herb it's important, but because it shows we've kind of
Speaker 1: been talking this whole time. How much of this does
Speaker 1: he really believe? How much of this is like him
Speaker 1: kind of dressing it up, and I think you get
Speaker 1: the real Curtis Jarvin here, which is not a guy
Speaker 1: with any real high minded intellectual desires beyond I want
Speaker 1: to be the one in power, right, Like I want
Speaker 1: to be the one with the money. I want to
Speaker 1: be the big landlord. Right. He doesn't hate Twitter and
Speaker 1: Facebook because they ruined his old Internet. He hates it because,
Speaker 1: like he's just another guy in all of those systems
Speaker 1: and he wants to be the king or at least
Speaker 1: a night right. I think that's kind of like the
Speaker 1: note to end on is pointing out, like, underneath it
Speaker 1: all and underneath all of the like dressing up in
Speaker 1: intellectualism that he puts on, this is just a guy
Speaker 1: who's angry that he's not currently the one with all
Speaker 1: the power, right, And that's that's really what it's all about.
Speaker 2: Whoah, sorry, because that I've learned. Yeah, I'm not a fan.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's good to hear. That's good to hear.
Speaker 2: But I do I do want to read up more
Speaker 2: and get a sense of his tone and and and
Speaker 2: maybe well I'd love to hear him speak and get
Speaker 2: a more better sense of his persona and kind of
Speaker 2: what that.
Speaker 1: Oh, yes, he's on many podcasts.
Speaker 2: How does that Bannon reconcile someone openly advocating for the
Speaker 2: the basically just the burning of the Constitution with also
Speaker 2: being a leader for for just like Republican ascendancy, Like,
Speaker 2: how does how do you reconcile those things? I'm so
Speaker 2: confused with that unless there's unless it's is it a
Speaker 2: you know, do you think it's a like if we
Speaker 2: were to say JD. Vance gets to be president one day,
Speaker 2: do you think it's a bait and switch? Are they like,
Speaker 2: is it really a you know, is that Peter Thiel's
Speaker 2: game to sort of bait and switch the Americans into
Speaker 2: like just get him into office and then we're going
Speaker 2: to make him a dictator? Or is it?
Speaker 1: Uh?
Speaker 2: Is it a thing where someone like a JD. Vance
Speaker 2: who's participating in American democracy as a candidate, is really
Speaker 2: sort of like I like some of these ideas. I
Speaker 2: like the CEO approach to a presidency, but like, I
Speaker 2: still believe in the Constitute. I still believe that democracy
Speaker 2: is our our is our bedrock.
Speaker 1: I don't think for one thing, just based on a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff that Vance has said on some of
Speaker 1: these far right podcasts. I don't believe he believes that
Speaker 1: democracy is our bedrock. I think a lot of what
Speaker 1: ways these guys will couch it is that's saying, like, well,
Speaker 1: I believe in a republic, right, and kind of what
Speaker 1: they're hearkening back to this very classical idea that well,
Speaker 1: only like property owning men should be able to vote. Right, Like, sure,
Speaker 1: there should be right some voting, but like not the
Speaker 1: franchise should certainly be And this is something Vance has
Speaker 1: has embraced when he's talked about how like people without
Speaker 1: children shouldn't have the same degree of electoral say, right,
Speaker 1: you should have men, If you're the head of a family,
Speaker 1: you should get to vote, have more votes that basically
Speaker 1: account for how many kids you have, and probably for
Speaker 1: your wife too. Right. These are things Vance has talked
Speaker 1: about on different podcasts he's appeared on, and Bannon has
Speaker 1: expressed a lot of anti democratic sentiment. I think part
Speaker 1: of the problem is that when these people get confronted
Speaker 1: by the media, there's this inherent impulse that like mainstream
Speaker 1: political reporters have to normalize them in a way that
Speaker 1: I don't think is that I think provides them with
Speaker 1: cover right to not just to not talk about them
Speaker 1: as if they are people who are trying to end democracy,
Speaker 1: because they very much are. You know, that's not the normal.
Speaker 1: That's not the norm within like people who vote for
Speaker 1: the Republican Party. But when we are talking about guys
Speaker 1: like JD. Vance and Steve Bannon and Steve Miller, you know,
Speaker 1: Trump's former associate, like all of these guys, that is
Speaker 1: the norm among these people. And part of what part
Speaker 1: of how they see Trump as useful and potentially Advance
Speaker 1: is useful, is not that they're going to get us
Speaker 1: to this end system that Jarvin theorizes. And when they
Speaker 1: when they take Yarvin's ideas, I don't think most of
Speaker 1: them want exactly the same kind of system that he does,
Speaker 1: because he's kind of a kook, and right his system
Speaker 1: is unworkable, and none of them really want to devolve.
Speaker 1: Most of them don't want to devolve power. Right, A
Speaker 1: guy like Teal may want to devolve some powers so
Speaker 1: that he can run, you know, effectively his own little
Speaker 1: city state where he gets to make all of the rules.
Speaker 1: But there's a degree of like chaos inherent and the
Speaker 1: actual thing that Yarvin advocate that makes it unworkable, but
Speaker 1: they find ideas that he has very useful. And likewise,
Speaker 1: I think folks like Jarvin think that a guy like Vance,
Speaker 1: even if he doesn't back believe everything they believe, would
Speaker 1: be useful because he brings us closer to this kind
Speaker 1: of a system. And part of how we would do
Speaker 1: that is by purging the left, by purging and destroying
Speaker 1: like all of these journalists, by by locking up our
Speaker 1: political opposition, right, Like that is a big part of
Speaker 1: it for them, is we want to use the violence
Speaker 1: that the state has access to to destroy the people
Speaker 1: who don't want the world to be this way, right,
Speaker 1: And there very is this kind of yearning for having
Speaker 1: a freehand to utilize that violence to crush opposition. That
Speaker 1: is key to that's what binds all these two guys together. Like,
Speaker 1: as you've stated, and I think this is an important point.
Speaker 1: It's not like Steve Bannon, like believes to the letter
Speaker 1: and all of the crazy shit that Jarvin writes about, right,
Speaker 1: It's not like JD. Vance is like sleeping with a
Speaker 1: bunch of printouts of unqualified resid under his bed. There's
Speaker 1: some ideas they find useful. They like the way he messages,
Speaker 1: They think it's like, especially like rage. They think that's
Speaker 1: good messaging for this thing that we want to do.
Speaker 1: But they're all kind of tied together by we want
Speaker 1: supreme executive power so that we can wield violence against
Speaker 1: our enemies, right, And that's where they're all simpatico. Right,
Speaker 1: And that's I think kind of the most important takeaway
Speaker 1: here is not all of these people have been enraptured
Speaker 1: by Curtis Jarvin and are like thought zombies to his beliefs.
Speaker 1: They find some of his ideas useful, and likewise, he
Speaker 1: and the people who follow him like they're all in
Speaker 1: agreement about one thing, and it's who they want to hurt.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's interesting because I've always I felt that there
Speaker 2: was an article and I think it was New York
Speaker 2: Magazine during the run up to the twenty sixteen election
Speaker 2: that said, I think the phrasing was electing Trump would
Speaker 2: be an extinction level event for the United States. Yeah,
Speaker 2: a lot of people are scared of a second Trump
Speaker 2: presidency because they feel like democracy would crumble under Trump.
Speaker 2: And that's that's been a you know, rallying cry of
Speaker 2: the left now for quite a while. And I agree
Speaker 2: to some extent I do think that he's a threat
Speaker 2: to democracy. I don't know that he wants to completely
Speaker 2: topple it, but I I do think that how he
Speaker 2: handled the transition of power was very very alarming and
Speaker 2: unnerving and should be disqualifying, but at least to be
Speaker 2: for a party to nominate him, if not legally disqualifying. So,
Speaker 2: but I've always thought that his his threat to democracy
Speaker 2: is more his unwieldiness and his sort of lust. Trump's
Speaker 2: just narcissism and lust for power and lust for staying
Speaker 2: the center of it, tension like that was almost the
Speaker 2: most That's why he's a threat, and and that and
Speaker 2: that that's just kind of wild and crazy and ridiculous
Speaker 2: of him, of Trump, And but it is it's dangerous
Speaker 2: if he gets there. But it's a but it's a
Speaker 2: it's a kind of danger that is almost cartoonish, like
Speaker 2: it's it's just so ridiculous. But what you've been laying
Speaker 2: out these last two episodes, Yeah, very sort of as
Speaker 2: a much more sinister intellectual underpinning with dismantling of democracy,
Speaker 2: that is, uh, that is arguably far more serious kind
Speaker 2: of threat. Uh as a as a doctrine. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: I've never perceived Trump as someone driven by a sort
Speaker 2: of like anti democratic doctrine. I just thought he was
Speaker 2: he isn't. I just was always thought like, oh, he's
Speaker 2: a dictator just because he's a megalomaniac and he wants
Speaker 2: to behave like he wants to have all the power
Speaker 2: of a dictator. He wants to behave he wants to
Speaker 2: be like you know mel Brooks, like it's good to
Speaker 2: be the king, Like that's all he wants. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: But here is a group of people or a person
Speaker 2: with some measure of influence. Uh, really thinking this stuff through?
Speaker 1: You're right that I think this is has been generally missed.
Speaker 1: You know, people have started in particularly like kind of
Speaker 1: the mainstream Democratic party, but also just like like centrists,
Speaker 1: you know, people who are not particularly political, but are
Speaker 1: I think most people who are people of goodwill don't
Speaker 1: want to live in a dictatorship. Right. That would be
Speaker 1: how I would describe a person of goodwill is you
Speaker 1: don't want to institute a dictatorship. What?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: I think that's a key part, right. I think people
Speaker 1: have started to realize the intellectual threat and the broader
Speaker 1: threat that trump Ism has opened the door for. With
Speaker 1: Project twenty twenty five. But what has happened with Trump?
Speaker 1: Because I think you're right on the money with your
Speaker 1: characterization of him. He is not an ideologue. If he
Speaker 1: thought he could have gotten to power running as a
Speaker 1: Democrat and you know, still been the big man on top,
Speaker 1: he would have done that, right. That just was not
Speaker 1: the what wound up working for him.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: He is a Trumpist, and that he believes in himself
Speaker 1: and himself being the guy who is the most important person.
Speaker 1: But when he started running and when he first took
Speaker 1: over the Republican Party, he started breaking norms, right. And
Speaker 1: sometimes it's good to break norms, right. It used to
Speaker 1: be the norm that, you know, a huge chunk of
Speaker 1: this country was segregated, right, and that was something that
Speaker 1: we had to very that was something that forcefully had
Speaker 1: to be broken, right. The government had to deployee forced
Speaker 1: to do that. And in that case that was very
Speaker 1: much a good thing. But when you break norms, it
Speaker 1: opens up space for people who have extreme views to
Speaker 1: push those views into the public sphere. And what happened
Speaker 1: with Trump as he destroyed the Republican Party that had
Speaker 1: been he wound up pushing out a lot of people
Speaker 1: who had been influential in that party, and that opened
Speaker 1: up space for a whole bunch of people as long. Basically,
Speaker 1: anyone could become an influential part of the Republican Party
Speaker 1: if you could do one key thing, which was been
Speaker 1: to the knee to Trump and also get along with him.
Speaker 1: And so guys like Stephen Miller, right, are people who
Speaker 1: understood how to do that. You know. That's how like
Speaker 1: what jd. Vance has done, that's how he became the VP.
Speaker 1: Right as he started courting Trump, he started like helping
Speaker 1: out with stuff like when Trump would do like public
Speaker 1: appearances after that big chemical spill in East Palestine like
Speaker 1: a year or so ago. Like Vance is the guy
Speaker 1: who handled a lot of the advance work for that.
Speaker 1: He had pressed Trump. He was good at sucking up
Speaker 1: to him. And they did all this consciously, not because
Speaker 1: they are all believers that Trump should be the most
Speaker 1: important person in politics, but because they understood that with
Speaker 1: access to Trump comes the ability to kind of twist
Speaker 1: the country in this direction if you can just convince
Speaker 1: him it's the way to go right, and that is
Speaker 1: the way, this kind of capture of the system, that's
Speaker 1: that's how they want it to like that's what they
Speaker 1: are very consciously trying to do. And so it's it's
Speaker 1: a situation where, because of who he is and the
Speaker 1: things that he has made possible, we do have to
Speaker 1: confront the fact that these these very extreme people who
Speaker 1: have a very dark vision for what our society should
Speaker 1: be are kind of at the gates right now. And you,
Speaker 1: you know, it's unfortunate, but I think at this point undeniable,
Speaker 1: and I do think it's it's a thing people kind
Speaker 1: of have to look at with with with clear eyes,
Speaker 1: because it's it's at this point a very immediate threat. Anyway,
Speaker 1: you had a good Friday, ruining my day, Maybe it'll
Speaker 1: be up.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna go home and be like bitter and angry
Speaker 2: at my family. What are you doing to help save democracy?
Speaker 1: Dad?
Speaker 2: I'm three, but get out there.
Speaker 1: That's kind of a normal reaction after coming on the show.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately. Yeah, I'm gonna go home and be mad.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be angry all weekend. Well Ed, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: be happy all weekend because I got to have a
Speaker 1: fun time talking with you today.
Speaker 2: This was fun. I really appreciate thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, thanks for being on. People should check out
Speaker 1: your podcast, Snap Who Season two is great. I haven't
Speaker 1: listened to season one yet, but I'm sure it's also great.
Speaker 1: I'm excited to get into that as well soon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I had anything else you want to plug before we
Speaker 1: roll out today?
Speaker 2: Snap and season one Season one is super fun. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 2: yeah yeah, so Jack, You're both out that out.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Ed and everyone have a good rest of
Speaker 1: your week. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our
Speaker 1: website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.