As it becomes clear the acolytes of Technocrat and faux-libertarian Peter Thiel will wield power in the second Trump administration, it is increasingly important to understand some of the influences behind Thiel and his fellow Technocrats.

One of the largest influences on Thiel’s thinking is a man named Curtis Yarvin, sometimes known by his pen name Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin and fellow philosopher Nick Land founded the school of thought known as the Dark Enlightenment, or the Neo-Reactionary movement.

While Yarvin’s writing and influence has mostly been on the edges of the mainstream, in the last decade his appeal has grown to the point that he is now being interviewed by the NY Times and cited as the philosopher influencing the MAGA movement.

A Brief History of Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas

From 2007 to 2014, Yarvin outlined his views of Dark Enlightenment on his blog Unqualified Reservations. Specifically, Yarvin has argued that American Democracy has failed and should be replaced by a monarchy with similarities to corporate governance structures. He has called for a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.”

In 2017, BuzzFeed News published an email exchange between Yarvin and Milo Yiannopoulis. In these emails, Yarvin describes watching the results of the 2016 Presidential election with Peter Thiel. “He’s fully enlightened,” Yarvin told Yiannopoulis. “Just plays it very carefully.”

Thiel’s venture capital fund, the Founders Fund, also invested in Yarvin’s company Tlön Corp in 2013.

I first became aware of Yarvin and his ideas in 2016 when I noticed what was then known as the “Alt-Right” infiltrating American libertarian circles. In my 2017 essay, Removing the Alt-Right Infection on the American Libertarian Movement, I detailed what I saw as a pipeline from the the libertarian movement to the alt-right as self-professed libertarians, voluntaryists, and anarchists joined the burgeoning Trump movement.

I noted that prominent conservative libertarian theorist Hans Herman Hoppe described the genealogy of the Alt-Right through it’s connection to him and the Property and Freedom Society (which he founded to express his conservative views):

“Many of the leading lights associated with the Alt-Right have appeared here at our meetings in the course of the years. Paul Gottfried, who first coined the term, Peter Brimelow, Richard Lynn, Jared Taylor, John Derbyshire, Steve Sailer and Richard Spencer. As well, Sean Gabb’s name and mine are regularly mentioned in connection with the Alt-Right, and my work has been linked also with the closely related neo-reactionary movement inspired by Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) and his now defunct blog Unqualified Reservations.”

I tried (unsuccessfully) to point out these connections to different libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who support Hoppe. They refused to see that the Paleolibertarian movement founded by Murray Rothbard, the founder of American Libertarianism, and Hoppe’s “rational” justifications for this type of thinking influenced thinkers like Curtis Yarvin, who is seen as the pre-Alt-Right neo-reactionary movement.

Read More