The Neo-Reactionary Regime
Curtis Yarvin wrote the playbook for Donald Trump's rogue administration. What comes next?
Donald Trump calls it “the deep state.” Investor Eric Weinstein calls it the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene calls it the “uniparty.”
The euphemism may change, but the message is the same: Society has been corrupted. And this rot isn’t accidental but intentional, foisted upon the unwitting masses by a secret superstructure. And the only way to Make America Great Again is to demolish it.
Step one in that plan was to elect Donald Trump back into the White House. Implausibly, they achieved that. Even more incredibly, they seized control of both houses of Congress. The MAGA movement now controls, either directly or through sheer political will, the Supreme Court, the conservative media, and increasingly more facets of culture, law, and politics.
But this destructive movement is far from done. Trump and his surrogates have set their sights on the facets of American life which, they believe, conspire to censor, silence, and control conservatives.
Their first order of business, back in power, has been to go after the public health officials, pollsters, journalists, academics, activists, celebrities, and, perhaps most of all, the social media companies who manage the mechanics of this deep state.
But to fully understand how we got here, and exactly how the administration is moving so decidedly and aggressively to dismantle American democracy, it requires understanding the fascist blogger who holds an extraordinary — yet still under appreciated — influence on modern conservative thought.
His name is Curtis Yarvin, the intellectual core of the “neo-reactionary” movement. He has his own metaphor for the liberal order which, he believes, needs to be smashed.
He calls it “The Cathedral.”
This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, we meet the ideological core of Donald Trump’s neo-reactionary regime.
In 2006, Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook’s News Feed. In one go, Zuckerberg was marrying online and offline, the real world and the internet, plugging people’s identities into their online networks. “Rather than building new connections,” the Facebook CEO told WIRED at the time, “what we are doing is just mapping them out."
Zuckerberg was pitching a peer-to-peer internet. One where, he said, "it may no longer be optimal to have a few big media companies in the center controlling the flow of information." Facebook would facilitate inter-personal connections, making us less reliant on multi-national conglomerates to manage our interactions with each other and the world at large. No longer would AT&T rate-limit your ability to talk to loved ones an ocean away, and gone was Fox and NBC’s stranglehold on mass media. Suddenly, Facebook became the world’s best phone plan and every Facebook user became a broadcaster.
Facebook’s users didn’t believe it. They protested the News Feed as an intrusion on their private spaces. They rejected this techno-utopianism, but it didn’t matter. With time the millions, then billions, of users accepted it as a fact of the internet. They became subjects to the opaque and oft-changing algorithm, at the mercy of Facebook’s ad-revenue-obsessed engineers. Similar shifts happened at Google, Twitter, and elsewhere. The companies continued miming a rosy disposition — encouraging democratic engagement, censoring hate speech, insisting they were still forging a humanist internet — but they became the exact oligopolistic intermediaries they had vowed to replace.
Some saw this coming from a mile away, and they wanted out. They wanted an exit.
One such visionary was Ross Ulbricht. He had retreated to a space that no government or corporation controlled: The dark web. And, under the moniker Dread Pirate Roberts, he set up an online forum and marketplace for drug dealers, hackers-for-hire, and self-styled assassins. It was a self-governing space that existed nowhere and everywhere at the same time. And Ulbricht was its pirate king.
What began as a mission to free users from the “thieving murderous mits [sic] of the state” ended in his arrest in 2013 and subsequent conviction on a slew of drug trafficking and money laundering charges.
Another such visionary was Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudo-anonymous founder of Bitcoin. They designed a tough-to-trace currency which would both promote anonymity in online transactions and create a distributed network of digital printing presses. They envisioned an internet where people could “vote with their CPU power.”
But one of the most unsung champions of this exit was Curtis Yarvin. Writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, he had plans to go even further. “If Bitcoin is money,” an early version of his website proclaimed, “Urbit is land.”
Urbit, which Yarvin had been developing since the early 2000s, sought to be a rival internet that would exist without the big internet companies which were coming to dominate the World Wide Web. A peer-to-peer network, Urbit was “designed to become a digital republic: a network of individually owned nodes with no central point of control.”
The start-up attracted a powerful investor: Peter Thiel.
Co-founder and former CEO of Paypal, Thiel had long been obsessed with exit — not just from the internet, or the banking system, but from society at large. In 2008, he pitched a half-million dollars into an effort to create a sovereign community on raised platforms in international waters.
There was a whole movement afoot to make the internet less corporate, more free, and fundamentally democratic. But Yarvin and Thiel were thinking bigger. The internet, they believed, was the technological advancement that would allow society to level up. The tenets of our society — liberalism, progressivism, and democracy itself — had been adopted to manage our chaotic and unmanageable meat space. But now that society had networked itself, none of this was necessary.
Writing on his blog in 2007, Yarvin asked his readers if they could really imagine this new society, “one that saw itself as recovering from democracy, much as Eastern Europe sees itself as recovering from Communism.”
Along with fellow writer and technologist Nick Land, Yarvin sketched out his “neo-reactionary” philosophy. It would be a “dark enlightenment,” a “modernity 2.0.”1
Yarvin believed that the digital age would finally allow for philosopher-kings or übermensch to rise up and lead the world again. He called it “neocameralism,” which he pitched in 2007 as “a refinement of royalism.” Rather than appointing certain bloodlines to lead the state, Yarvin’s ideal society would be run like a corporation. Captains of industry, preferably from the tech world, would rule for the benefit of humanity.
, SNF Agora Professor of International Affairs, argued in a fascinating piece for American Affairs last year that this way of thinking was really the culmination of “exit.”Farrell: Founders were the hidden protagonists of history, the economic class whose particular interests and beliefs mapped onto the future weal of humanity. With their singular visions, they would disrupt the old ways of politics, generating a vast array of start-up societies that ordinary people could choose between, governed by the forces of market competition and the possibility of exit. You could leave your community if you didn’t like it or, if you had enough guts to be a founder, create your own.
It was Yarvin who first popularized the political concept, borrowed from The Matrix, of choosing between the red pill and the blue pill. Taking the red pill, he wrote, means acknowledging that liberal democracy “will be lucky if it lasts another ten years.”
Our current system doesn’t work, Yarvin argues, because it is built on bureaucracy and consultative democracy. These systems fail because they “leak power…decisions at every level are not taken by individuals; they are taken by processes.” What is needed is a form of government that doesn’t leak power, “like an army of a corporation.”
“This system of government has a name,” Yarvin writes. “It is called a monarchy.” Rather, he would later argue, it is a new kind of monarchy. And it would be a system that does not leak power.
Yarvin: In my ideal neocameralist state, there is no political freedom because there is no politics. Perhaps the government has a comment box where you can express your opinion. Perhaps it does customer surveys and even polls. But there is no organization and no reason to organize, because no combination of residents can influence government policy by coercion.
And precisely because of this stability, you can think, say, or write whatever you want. Because the state has no reason to care. Your freedom of thought, speech, and expression is no longer a political freedom. It is only a personal freedom.2
But both Land and Yarvin argue that a bulwark prevented this change. Land railed against “Marxist professors” and concerns about racism as barriers towards this societal evolution. Yarvin gave this vanguard a name: “The Cathedral.”
This Cathedral is composed of the civil servants, the political philosophers (like Farrell), the journalists (like me), and all those who blindly ascribe to the idea that democracy and civil liberties are worth saving. This Cathedral has to be smashed, he argues.
“The Cathedral can’t be repaired,”3 Yarvin explained in a 2021 essay. These defenders of Western thought — artists, elites, journalists, and influencers — fight to maintain the status quo, Yarvin argued, like the church of the middle ages.
Yarvin is perpetually vague about whether or not destroying the Cathedral will require dead bodies. Land is more clear: “Reactionary regression smells of strange fruit,” a grotesque reference to anti-lynching poem popularized by Billie Holiday.
Over the decades where they formulated these ideas, Yarvin and Land could not have been further away from the levers of power. So this was all merely dreaming. But they recognized the scale of the challenge ahead of them. Installing this neo-reactionary regime — destroying The Cathedral — would require nothing less than uninstalling modern notions of women’s equality, civil rights, LGBTQ rights and so on. It would require a factory reset.
To get there, they argued, you needed to present this change as progression instead of what it really is: Reactionary regression.
That’s where the futurist part of this whole affair comes in. The Futurists, an Italian artistic movement, married themselves to Benito Mussolini’s fascist party in the belief that it was a new rational and scientific political movement which would both embrace and enable new technologies for the betterment of humanity. They framed these politics as fundamentally optimistic. (Dispatch #115) So did Yarvin and Land.
“It is an optimism for the future,” Farrell told me last year. “That is based upon a profound pessimism about the systems of the present and their capacity to actually get done what needs to be done… and hence a desire to basically rip that system down completely in the hope, and the presumption that something better can take its place.”
When Donald Trump was first elected president, it seemed like Yarvin’s war on The Cathedral would finally begin.
Yarvin spent election night 2016 at Peter Thiel’s mansion, celebrating the results with his benefactor. He had become, according to Thiel biographer Max Chafkin, a “house political philosopher” for Thiel and his friends.
Where Thiel’s beliefs end and Yarvin’s begin can be hard to suss out. In 2009, Thiel wrote for the Cato Institute: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel’s emerging vision for the world was an “anti-democratic fantasy,” as Noam Cohen wrote in WIRED in 2017, “where tech businesses set policy priorities rather than elected officials.”
At the very least, Yarvin and Thiel were kindred spirits. But, despite Thiel’s wealth and power — both through his security firm Palantir and his role in the Trump transition team — their influence seemed to wane in the chaos and tumult of the first Trump administration.
In a glowing interview on Tucker Carlson’s show in 2021, Yarvin conceded that there was little daylight between his reactionary politics and Trump’s ideology. “The swamp, the deep state, and The Cathedral,” it all referred to the same thing, he said: The “decentralized oligarchy” which runs America. But, he told Carlson, the Trump era had been a let-down — and further proof that democracy can’t work.
Imagine, Yarvin said, how much Trump could have accomplished if the White House had wielded “ten times the power” or if it had been “one hundred times as powerful.”
It may have been a disappointing four years for the neo-reactionaries, but the appetite for exit was growing.
Look at uber-Catholic writer Rod Dreher, who declared that American society had grown so hostile to religion that it was time for Christians to “secede culturally” and accept “internal exile” in America. Bitcoin evangelist Balaji Srinivasan called for “tech Zionism,” which imagines technologists launching a coordinated takeover of cities, states, even countries. There is Marc Andreessen, author of the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” which venerated all technological innovation and decried the “bureaucracy, vetocracy…the ivory tower.”
Both Andreessen and Srinivasan would join Thiel in investing in Yarvin’s company, Urbit. Srinivasan became so friendly with Yarvin that he suggested the blogger sicc his small cabal of dedicated followers on critical journalists. In his manifesto, Andreessen even lists Land as a “Patron Saint of Techno-Optimism.”
Thiel’s patronage put Yarvin in close contact with another of his protégés: J.D. Vance, whom he had hired at his venture capital firm and began grooming for a run for office. It was with ten millions of Thiel’s dollars that Vance won his senate bid. And it was with advocacy from Thiel, Andreessen, and Srinivasan that Vance was added to the presidential ticket last year. (Dispatch #112)
They knew that Trump could not merely rip up the checks on executive power — they needed to wage war on the cultural and political institutions that protected democracy. They began imagining a purge. Or, as Vance described it on a 2021 podcast: A “de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”
J.D. Vance was standing onstage in a room full of Republican voters. “I was railing against big tech,” he recalled on a podcast years later. “They had censored some voice, and I was very fired up about it.“
After his “rager” of a speech, a voter came up to give him the gears. Vance expected to hear a lecture about why government ought to stay out of the market. But that’s not what he heard.
“What he said was: ‘You're right about the problems, but the solution is: Why don't we just throw these guys [tech CEOs] in prison for life?’” Vance said.
The podcast hosts, friends of Vance, began chuckling. “This is where our voters are,” Vance said.
It was actually the second time Vance told the story on this particular podcast, the Moment of Truth. (It got bigger laughs the first time.) It’s an anecdote that Vance uses to illustrate an emerging dynamic in the Republican Party. It’s a trend that not only got him nominated as the Republican candidate in Ohio, but propelled him onto Donald Trump’s presidential ticket.
Republican voters, Vance was arguing, are a lot more radical than the party leadership gives them credit for.
Maybe that average Trump voter isn’t watching videos on right-wing streaming platform Rumble or listening to Youtuber Dave Rubin, he explained, but they are still “speaking the same language” as the movement’s ideological color guard.
“The problem of this movement right now is not our voters,” he continued. “It's not the people: It's the alleged leaders of the movement.” Trump, Thiel, Yarvin, Carlson, and the rest — they have all succeeded, spectacularly, in removing the leaders of the Republican movement. The GOP wing of The Cathedral.
The Republican Party is now slavishly loyal to their political project, and dissent has been effectively squashed. This is already a seismic difference from the first Trump administration.
But capturing the GOP wasn’t enough. They needed to seize the state. That’s where groups like American Moment come in. (Dispatch #105)
American Moment, which produces the Moment of Truth podcast which hosted Vance, is one of the myriad groups which came together to form Project 2025.
Founded with seed money from Thiel, American Moment claims to have built a database of mission-aligned conservatives, unwaveringly loyal to Trump, who are ready to fill jobs in every department and agency in the U.S. government. Today, American Moment nets more than $1 million in annual donations. Strategist Steven Bannon, a big supporter of the group, heralded the interns and staffers it recruited would be the “hoplites” of a new Trump administration. They are just one of several Project 2025 groups known to be financed by Thiel and his fellow techno-optimists.
Also on the Project 2025 board was The Eagle Forum, founded by staunch anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly. They want to take aim at big tech for their role in “censor[ing] conservative and politically incorrect viewpoints,” such as the idea that the 2020 election was stolen. The Center for Renewing America, meanwhile, warns that wi-fi on school buses as a plot “to subsidize big tech and brainwash kids with government funded wifi” and wants to see online pornography companies hit with Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) charges. Also represented is the Malone Institute, founded by Robert Malone, a doctor notorious for spreading COVID-19 misinformation. His institute alleges that social media companies are working with a secret World Health Organization shadow government to enact “psychological bioterrorism” and “crimes against humanity.”
Most of these groups will have no formal involvement in Trump’s government. But they have now, by virtue of their involvement in writing the manifesto of this new illiberal state, a vaunted position in the heart of this new cultural backlash. They are tasked with destroying The Cathedral in their own communities.
Now that we are 100 days in to the second Trump administration, it is that army of ideologues who will be tasked with multiplying the president’s power by tenfold, even a hundredfold. This was relatively easy in the first three months of this new regime, when momentum was on Trump’s side. The real test for these shock troops will be over the next three years, as resistance grows. How will they fare when The Cathedral fights back? Will they stand up when they receive their marching orders?
Saurabh Sharma, former president of American Moment, now works in the presidential personnel office. Russell Vought, former head of Project 2025, is now Trump’s budget director. Brendan Carr, who wrote Project 2025’s chapter about the Federal Communications Commission, now runs the FCC.
Virtually every facet of the Project 2025 policy book speaks to this effort to smash the dominant culture and seize the levers of government, and Trump has dutifully fulfilled those orders. The proposals include mounting a challenge to major social media companies, punishing Big Tech companies which collaborated with law enforcement, opening internet companies to liability for censoring conservatives, reducing the independence of universities, and giving the White House unprecedented power to fire and hire civil servants.
On day two of his administration, Trump pardoned the poster child for exit: Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road marketplace. Despite being convicted on drug trafficking and money laundering charges, sentenced to life in prison — partly because of evidence that he ordered the murder of a state’s witness and three others — Ulbricht became a cause célèbre amongst Trump’s uber-online reactionary base.
At a national level, the Trump administration is working feverishly to bend and break the systems that check executive power. In Congress, the Republican leadership is trying to strangle any sense of independent thought. They are imposing costs on the media and lawyers for opposing his regime. And, online, they are working to cow platforms into become willing participants in their disinformation machine.
It would be wrong to ascribe this illiberal and reactionary operation to just one man. But Curtis Yarvin, perhaps more than anyone else, sketched out this gameplan. Now he’s sitting back and watching it unfold.
Yarvin: Our plan is not a plan to elect a political party, or to implement some policy, or to stall some policy, or etc. It is a plan for a democratic coup—a complete regime change. This cannot be done without actually capturing the government. Clearly, it is anything but a case of conventional democratic politics. However, until the regime change, it works entirely by lawful methods. After the regime change, of course, its word is law. The coup is a political singularity.4
“There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past,” Thiel wrote in the Financial Times earlier this year. “The future demands fresh and strange ideas.”
While he never quite elaborates on those ideas, Yarvin, on the other hand, has continued to be crystal clear about his views. In a bizarre and far-reaching interview with the New York Times, he continued making the case that America is in need of a business-minded monarch to settle its affairs.
“It’s not even that democracy is bad,” he told the paper, “it’s just that it’s very weak.”
In the coming months and years, Donald Trump will govern with the help of an army of die-hard supporters, opportunistic backers, and ambitious ideologues who see his administration as a vehicle for something bigger, more ambitious, perhaps actively dangerous. Together, they intend to expand the power of the executive in aggressive, perhaps unconstitutional, new ways.
Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is already floating the idea of suspending habeas corpus in order to continue their abductions and extraordinary renditions of American residents and citizens. The administration has already expanded executive power in extraordinary ways, basically relegating the other branches of government to subservient.
Some view these developments as the end-point of this regime. They are not. They are merely steps in the process. They are a means to an end. The Trump administration is seeking an exit from liberal constitutional democracy, replacing it instead with a system of strong, powerful, rich men. Men like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Donald Trump. They have been explicit that they want nothing less than to be ruled by a king.
Yarvin, once an irrelevant weirdo posting to a dark corner of the internet, is now regularly interviewed by the Times and Washington Post. He was invited to an institution no less prestigious as Harvard University to debate the resolution: “The long-term stability and flourishing of our society is better secured by concentration of executive authority than by democratic institutions.” He, unsurprisingly, was there to represent the pro side.
Yarvin has written that he believes the software update from democracy to neocameralism will take about 10 years. Asked by the Times if America is on the cusp of becoming a monarchy, Yarvin was ominously coy.
“It’s not exactly time for that,” he told the Times, “yet.”
That’s it for this week.
I’m working hard to get back into the swing of things after last month’s election. In the coming days, I’m going to be firing off a paying-subscribers-only dispatch featuring my longform conversation with Henry Farrell. So lookout for that.
For those keen on some closure from the Chaos Campaign, stay tuned: I have something very exciting to announce soon.
Over at Foreign Policy, I’ve got a long read about the complicated history of America and Canada plotting to invade each other. It’s an interesting read!
Until next time.
The Dark Enlightenment, Nick Land (2012)
Against Political Freedom, Curtis Yarvin (2007)
A brief explanation of the cathedral, Curtis Yarvin (2012)
A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations, Curtis Yarvin (2009)
This is so important for people to be aware of. These techno-autocrats consider themselves to be the Cognitive Elite, and despise the hoi-palloi electorate who they consider idiots. The “masses”. They believe they were born to rule by virtue of their superior intellect and thus this yearning for a monarchy or dictatorship. Democracy is too messy. Yarvin was the inspiration for the DOGE tear down. Seems they were surprised to find most government employees weren’t spending all their time chewing gum and watching cat videos for pay.
I’ve looked into their Network State Prospera in the Honduras, where they’re engaged in (among other things) unregulated medicine. Particularly the Follistan treatment for anti-aging. Techbro Bryan Johnson did it, no surprise.
I hope to see more journalists publishing about the broligarchy in the future. It’s all in plain sight, but people aren’t looking.
I read the underlined articles and my worry is that Jivani being in collusion with JD Vance can help Poilièvre to pursue the same direction, which he has already embarked on. The Conservatives should take heed as well as Liberal politicians. Poilièvre and his gang are playing with fire, stifling his caucus into subservience and trying to do the same with the media. Wevare in for a bigger fight than I thought. Thank you for your service.