Trump’s dork philosopher

Speaker 1 It's Today Explained. What's going on, my boys, and in some cases, gals? Recently, one of you emailed us with this request.
You've got mail.

Speaker 2 Hello.

Speaker 3 I'm an avid listener, and I strongly believe you should cover the story of Curtis Yarvin. It's important to explore who he is and how he has influenced the MAGA and the Tech Bros movement.

Speaker 1 Curtis Yarvin is a very online far-right philosopher whose ideas include the fascinating, the esoteric, the absurd, the racist, and so on.

Speaker 1 Six months into the Trump administration, there's evidence that he is influencing the MAGA movement and even President Trump. J.D.
Vance knows him and likes him.

Speaker 1 Elon consulted him about this third-party idea.

Speaker 1 Yarvin can take some credit for inspiring Doge, and as you'll hear ahead, one of Trump's most controversial doesn't even begin to cover it ideas may have come from Yarvin or someone who reads his sub stack.

Speaker 1 I can almost guarantee you that Trump does not.

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Speaker 1 That's coming up.

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Speaker 8 This is Today Explained.

Speaker 1 Ava Kaufman, staff writer at the New Yorker, recently spent some time with Curtis Yarvin for her piece titled Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America.

Speaker 1 There was a detail in your profile that I thought was really fascinating.

Speaker 1 In the spring of 2024, Curtis Yarvin writes on Substack, let's expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and turn it into a luxury resort.

Speaker 1 Then in February of this year, about a year later, President Trump makes this suggestion aloud.

Speaker 9 I don't want to be cute. I don't want to be a wise guy, but the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so bad.
This could be so magnificent.

Speaker 1 Trump got all the attention, not surprisingly, but what are we to glean from that? Is Donald Trump reading Curtis Yarvin's Substack?

Speaker 10 I think Curtis was as surprised as anyone to see his proposal being taken up almost verbatim in this speech that, you know, as Trump's advisors later said, caught them by surprise as well.

Speaker 10 As far as he understands it when kind of pressed, his ideas are kind of self-evident.

Speaker 10 Anyone who kind of sees the world as he does would, of course, come up with the same idea of kind of, you know, fully taking over a country, dispelling its inhabitants, and linking it to the blockchain and giving people a kind of meme coin.

Speaker 11 I realize that it seems improbable that we would both have the same crackpot idea. No, it is extremely probable because the president and I inhabit the same reality.

Speaker 13 We are both looking up and noticing that the sky is blue.

Speaker 11 Most people live in a crackpot world where the sky is green, and our present Middle East policy is sane. Reality has started to seep into this crackpot world and the mixture is remarkable.

Speaker 10 And, you know, Trump isn't reading Yarvin directly, but a lot of his advisors, maybe not his top advisors, but young people eager and working in the administration, I think Curtis calls them kind of lone wolves, are.

Speaker 10 And, you know, if you think that, you know, might makes right, the idea of

Speaker 10 a mass expulsion in this way might seem, you know, entirely plausible for both Yarvin and for Trump.

Speaker 1 So why is that? What is the appeal when there are so many guys online writing sub stacks? Why this one?

Speaker 10 There is this kind of very simple story that he's offering people. And, you know, he's part of this tradition of reactionary thought, which is at heart always a kind of simple story.

Speaker 10 If we can go back to the past, kind of things will be better. Curtis's version of the story kind of goes like this.

Speaker 10 All people are not equal. Therefore, democracy doesn't work.
It's a lie to assume it does.

Speaker 10 And if real people aren't equal in capability, you know, why should they have political power? The world is kind of run by unelected bureaucrats and cultural elites.

Speaker 13 Those who believe that our society should be ruled by prestige, by prestigious institutions, by civil society, are very, very against authority.

Speaker 4 But what you notice is that actually those institutions are quite unaccountable. Nobody elected Anthony Fauci.

Speaker 10 And if we could kind of replace this system with the systems we see in Silicon Valley that are bringing us things like the iPhone and Tesla cars and the Cybertruck, we'd have a much more efficient system and a much more kind of competitive system.

Speaker 17 You've probably heard of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And Americans of all stripes basically revere FDR.

Speaker 17 And FDR ran the New Deal like a startup.

Speaker 10 And so what we need in contrast to the kind of sclerotic bureaucracy that we've been living under and been, you know, oppressed by, especially if we're bright young engineers who want, you know, solutions and not deliberation, is this kind of strong CEO leader?

Speaker 1 Yarvin believes that the United States should be a monarchy. This is like the thing that if you've heard Curtis Yarvin's name, this is what you know about him.
He thinks we should have a king.

Speaker 1 What does he mean by that?

Speaker 10 He wants someone who has absolute authority. And sometimes he calls this a king.
king, sometimes he calls it a CEO monarch.

Speaker 10 He knows other people don't like the word strongman, but essentially what he's calling for is a strong man.

Speaker 16 I think you can learn a lot from Napoleon. His military strategy was perhaps a little aggressive, but Napoleon is perhaps the monarch who's most reminiscent of like a

Speaker 12 21st century Silicon Valley CEO in some ways.

Speaker 16 Napoleon is really a startup guy.

Speaker 10 And this would be someone who could abolish the courts and the rule of law,

Speaker 10 who could transform the government into essentially a corporation. He calls it a SAV corp, short for sovereign corporation,

Speaker 10 and who could get rid of

Speaker 10 the existing system almost completely.

Speaker 10 The idea is not to just kind of become the CEO of, you know, America 2.0, but to really kind of fire all civil servants to scrap the universities we already have and replace them with antiversities,

Speaker 10 to demolish scientific institutions and to restart from scratch.

Speaker 10 And this is because, in Yarvin's view, all of these systems are so unsalvageable, so corrupt, and so broken that nothing less than what he says, you know, a total reboot, you know, reboot should be in scare quotes, is adequate.

Speaker 12 You know, a lot of conservatives sort of have these illusions that these institutions in some ways can be reformed or salvageable, or you're just like, How do we get the Marxists out of Harvard or something like that?

Speaker 12 You know, which is basically sort of like, okay, you just invaded Germany. How do we get the Nazis out of the SS?

Speaker 1 His theory on leadership is more or less clear, even if you don't agree with it, even if you're like, no, we don't need a king in this country. But his theory on subjects is less clear.

Speaker 1 Like he's repeatedly said that black people's lives were better under slavery. There's a part in your piece where he talks about how church blacks should rule over ghetto blacks.

Speaker 1 This is like bizarre stuff, but also there's kind of a, I don't know, there's kind of suggestion that he does have a theory of leadership, but he does not actually care very much about people.

Speaker 10 I think that's spot on. I found that human subjects and even the idea of a kind of human beings, I guess is actually a better way of putting, were largely absent in his work.

Speaker 10 It often felt like they were kind of sheep to be herded or idiots to be corrected or marionettes to kind of be controlled. And when you think about that, that aligns well with a theory in which

Speaker 10 you think this kind of benevolent strongman will be able to kind of take care of everyone. If you're not really thinking of people as people,

Speaker 10 perhaps that theory makes a lot more sense.

Speaker 1 There's a real kind of who is this for baked into this.

Speaker 1 The whole deal for Americans is the American dream, right?

Speaker 1 We have an idea of what ordinary Americans, all Americans should be able to achieve.

Speaker 1 And he's like, I just want to talk about the people who lead us, which makes it even weirder to me that this somehow crossed over into the political mainstream.

Speaker 1 What happened?

Speaker 10 Yarvin has this blog. What he also has is a startup.
And he starts to commercialize it around 2012, 2013. And at that time, he

Speaker 10 is pitching and meeting with some of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley, some of whom have been reading his blog, like Peter Thiel,

Speaker 10 who first reads him, it seems like around 2008, maybe earlier. And they meet up around 2009.

Speaker 10 Another fan and early reader is Balaji Srinivasan, who goes on to become a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. There's J.D.

Speaker 10 Vance, who, according to one source, was reading Yarvin's blog when he was kind of swimming in the very online soup as an undergraduate.

Speaker 1 President Trump's been in office for six months. He's had time to get done a lot of the things that these young people in his orbit and more influential people like J.D.
Vance want him to get done.

Speaker 1 So how do you think Curtis Yarvin feels about the way that things are going with the second Trump administration?

Speaker 10 So, Yarvin is very quick to emphasize just kind of how disappointed he actually is with Trump.

Speaker 10 Yarvin really wants to separate himself from what Doge and the Trump administration are doing, which he sees as kind of incomplete and imperfect because it's nothing like a complete, you know, radical full takeover of power.

Speaker 10 It hasn't gone far enough.

Speaker 10 I think he'd give the administration a kind of C-minus and has said things to the extent of, yes, it's 1% of a revolution, but 1% of a revolution is worse than no revolution at all because you're just going to provoke backlash if you don't go all the way.

Speaker 10 And you're just going to encourage the resistance and you're not going to quash the resistance. And so

Speaker 10 for him, anything less than,

Speaker 10 yeah, this kind of full reboot, to use his word, is inadequate, is disappointing, is something he even kind of holds in contempt.

Speaker 1 What is the future of this alliance, do you think, if Curtis Yarvin is looking at this and saying,

Speaker 1 Trump, you haven't gone far enough? Like,

Speaker 1 do we get J.D. Vance in four years going further? I don't know.
I'm speculating.

Speaker 10 You tell me. That's definitely what Curtis hopes for.

Speaker 10 I mean, in his initial prediction or wish list, he actually wanted Biden to win again so that people could see just how broken the system was and then for Vance to take power in 2028

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 10 to kind of rule with his far more

Speaker 10 finesse, I guess,

Speaker 10 than Trump might, and that Trump does.

Speaker 10 I know he's really clear about what he wants, and that if anyone else took the time to think about this, if people really said, you know, okay, I've grown up with just assuming democracy is good.

Speaker 10 It has all these, you know, positive connotations in the way it's talked about. You know, what if democracy is actually bad? They would end up on a similar path than he does.

Speaker 10 I think a lot of people get on board with his ideas because they find diagnosis, perhaps to be accurate. If not, the prescriptions, you know, it's another question entirely.

Speaker 1 The New Yorkers Ava Kaufman coming up, are you a little bit sick of all the anti-democratic nonsense? What if it's on the wane?

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Speaker 10 This is Today Explain.

Speaker 1 I'm Noel King with Vox's Zach Beacham. Zach has been concerned about anti-liberalism for years.
And we're not talking about liberalism like left-wing politics.

Speaker 1 We're talking about liberalism, the political philosophy that centers individual rights and freedoms.

Speaker 2 That's right. Yeah, in 2019, I wrote an article called The Anti-Liberal Moment.
And the argument here is not that liberalism was in trouble politically.

Speaker 2 I think that's something that's obvious and doesn't require, you know, an extensive discourse to point out. It's that liberalism is also in trouble intellectually.

Speaker 2 Is that in the area where it had long been dominant, right, there had been a high-profile spate of anti-liberal arguments, arguments against liberalism's basic package of rights and freedoms and even democracy that had become increasingly prominent.

Speaker 2 And the liberals seemed kind of like they were on the back foot trying to rebut.

Speaker 2 And so I was worrying in 2019 that some of these ideas were going to end up that were anti-liberal, were going to end up profoundly shaping our politics and even more so in an illiberal direction.

Speaker 2 And I think to a degree, that's been born out. But, and here's the twist, the landscape in the intellectual realm is shifting.
And that's strikingly good news.

Speaker 2 In that these people who seemed like they were setting the terms of the conversation in the world of ideas, right? Specifically here, I'm talking about, you know, Substacks, podcasts, magazines,

Speaker 2 the stuff of American public intellectual life, not necessarily the academy, which is its own thing.

Speaker 2 They're losing the prominence that they once had. And it's not that people don't know who they are.
They do, and they take their ideas seriously. It's just that they're coming up with fewer new ones.

Speaker 2 They're getting less engagement. People are quitting their camps and declaring sort of that they're rediscovering the virtues of liberal democracy.

Speaker 2 It's this very subtle trend, but once I cottoned on to it in my reporting, it became unmistakable.

Speaker 2 Now, let me give you an example of what this means. It may sound trivial, but it's interesting.

Speaker 2 Is that David Brooks, who is, I think, a sort of a bellwether for center-right opinion in the United States, had previously been really interested in the ideas of people like Vance and Patrick Deneen.

Speaker 19 Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and author of the hugely influential book, Why Liberalism Failed.

Speaker 20 As the young people like to say, it's time to take the red pill.

Speaker 20 We must see this jointly created, invented tradition of America as a fundamentally or solely liberal nation as a recent innovation that is in fact a departure from the actual American tradition.

Speaker 2 And then this May, he wrote a column about how furious he was at them because their ideas had provided the intellectual backbone to the cruelty of the Trump administration.

Speaker 14 Trump and Vance aren't just promoting policies. They're trying to degrade America's moral character to a level more closely resembling their own.

Speaker 2 And I'm not saying as Brooks goes, so goes the nation. I'm saying that if someone like Brooks is

Speaker 2 turning away from them, that that's a sign of a broader movement in the ideas world.

Speaker 2 That ideas that were once sort of like fun to play around with and potentially interesting are starting to feel toxic because the Trump administration is showing what they look like when they're actually implemented.

Speaker 2 They look like building horrific prisons in Florida that are intentionally and openly cruel or sending people to a Salvadoran concentration camp without any due process.

Speaker 10 Video taken from inside the facility often shows prisoners tightly packed together with their heads shaved.

Speaker 22 Reports of mosquitoes the size of elephants, no water to clean yourself, and food that has worms in it.

Speaker 22 Those stomach-churning details come from an inmate inside the new Florida Immigration Detention Center known as Alligator Alcatraz.

Speaker 2 And these basic violations of core liberal premises are turning mainstream opinion, mainstream intellectual opinion, away from taking these post-liberal ideas as sort of like a fun thing to engage with and more seeing them as kind of harbingers or handmaidens of evil.

Speaker 2 And even inside the post-liberal movement, you're seeing a crackup of some of the people inside it.

Speaker 2 One really striking thing in my reporting was that Sora Bamari, who is the sort of journalistic face of this movement, has abandoned some of its core premises.

Speaker 2 He wrote an essay last year about how he had decided that American democracy was actually worth fighting for and excoriated Catholics like him, the post-liberal movement's heavily Catholic, who had rejected American democracy's core premises.

Speaker 2 And when I spoke to him, he told me that he now believed that the current system that we have is the best that's achievable in his lifetime.

Speaker 2 And for someone who once wanted to damn the liberal order to hell, his words paraphrased, because he was so upset about the prospect of a drag queen story hour in Sacramento, that's, I mean, that's a massive turnaround and a sign that something is happening.

Speaker 1 And when you asked him why, why the turnaround, did he say because Alligator Alcatraz? Like, what is, what is he upset about?

Speaker 2 Saurabh's story was a little bit different than Brooks's, right?

Speaker 2 It's not that he's abandoned social conservatism, but he also was somebody who had come to believe, as many post-liberals do, in fact, it's a core part of the movement, that

Speaker 2 the government also needed to be more interventionist than the economy, redistributing resources away from the wealthy towards the needy, as Catholic social doctrine doctrine says you need to.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, look at what the Trump administration has done in that area, right? Look at their big legislative accomplishment, which is like a giant upward redistribution of wealth.

Speaker 2 Another thing that is really important for him is that you have what he terms the barbarian right,

Speaker 2 which I believe would include Yarvin and also other people who had said explicitly racist things,

Speaker 2 you know, people who are obsessed with race and IQ, that kind of thing. And those people are out competing the post-liberal right for the sort of soul of young people now

Speaker 2 in the sort of right-wing MAGA movement. Now, that is, in some ways, that's bad, right? Like these are really, really horrible ideas and it's bad that they're gaining influence.

Speaker 2 But they're also ideas that are

Speaker 2 intellectually uncompelling to really smart people.

Speaker 1 Say more. Say more.

Speaker 2 I mean, I don't know. You just did a lengthy segment on Yarvin

Speaker 2 with a reporter who had done an extraordinary job exposing how shallow his ideas were, how glib and poorly thought out they were.

Speaker 2 And that's to say nothing of the sort of obvious cartoonish racism of some of these internet right-wingers or someone like Nick Fuentes.

Speaker 21 When I went to Charlottesville and we said Jews will not replace us, it seems like the message is finally getting out there.

Speaker 2 So I don't want

Speaker 21 touch. I want a relationship.
You know what? I want total Aryan victory.

Speaker 2 Right. Who's not an intellectual, right? That's too dignifying.
He's just a gutter anti-Semite, a neo-Nazi.

Speaker 2 Nobody like David Brooks is going to be taking Nick Fuentes seriously. Nobody at universities is going to be writing, hmm, a consideration of Nick Fuentes' ideas.

Speaker 2 We're debating him the way that even Yarvin got a respectful hearing with Danielle Allen.

Speaker 2 And I think even that was too generous. But these are not ideas that are going to win the future of the American intellectual scene.

Speaker 2 And so that doesn't mean that like American politics is out of the woods, but it means the American intellectual landscape is looking different.

Speaker 2 That is to say, the most compelling right-wing set of ideas challenging liberalism, post-liberalism, is on the decline and the things that are replacing it are not intellectually respectable.

Speaker 1 Is it really on the decline? Because J.D. Vance

Speaker 1 is the vice president.

Speaker 1 David Brooks may be like, I'm no longer into it. In the New York Times, J.D.
Vance is the vice president, Zach. Like, is that decline?

Speaker 2 So this is why I want to draw a sharp distinction. I've tried to in this conversation between politics and intellectual life, right?

Speaker 2 So I'm talking about a decline in the intellectual realm, not in the political realm.

Speaker 2 When something's dominant politically, that doesn't mean it's dominant intellectually, right? And I even hesitate to say that the post-liberal movement is dominant politically.

Speaker 2 Like they have people in positions of power, like fans. What are they accomplishing? They're not getting their economic doctrine.

Speaker 2 It's not clear how much they're winning over people's people's hearts and minds.

Speaker 2 They have a degree of power and influence in the Trump administration, which is shaping policy in the directions that other forces in the Trump administration also wanted to go for the most part.

Speaker 2 But having access to power temporarily does not mean winning a durable stranglehold on the Republican Party, let alone the heart of the United States.

Speaker 2 And to really get what they want, a wholesale transformation of the political system, you either need to wield so much power in the short run that you can lock in basically an authoritarian transformation of the U.S.

Speaker 2 state, or you persuade people in the long run. And, you know, I don't see it.
In fact, I see that path increasingly being denied to them through their own actions.

Speaker 2 In fact, ironically, due to their short-term proximity to power in large part.

Speaker 2 Because if you're, if, if the Trump administration is as toxically unpopular as its poll numbers look, and they're looking worse and worse every second I look into it, there's a real chance that this administration ends up discrediting post-liberalism in the way that the second Bush administration discredited neoconservatism, right?

Speaker 2 And so, while that doesn't mean hawkishness is dead, right? Trump just bombed Iran. Nobody wants to be called a neocon anymore.
It's a slur, right?

Speaker 2 It's something that is seen as synonymous with the disastrous war in Iraq.

Speaker 2 And if the Trump administration ends in disaster or even just severe unpopularity, you could easily see the same thing happening with post-liberalism.

Speaker 1 Vox's Zach Beacham. You can find his work at Vox.com.
Miles Bryan produced today's show and Jolie Myers edited. Patrick Boyd and David Tattishore are our engineers.

Speaker 1 Senior researcher Laura Bullard played the role of listener and check the facts. I'm Noelle King.

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