Heâs anti-democracy and pro-Trump
-- The obscure âdark enlightenmentâ blogger influencing the next US administration
-- #
Curtis #
Yarvin is hardly a household name in US politics.
But the âneoreactionaryâ thinker and far-right blogger is emerging as a serious intellectual influence on key figures in Donald Trumpâs coming administration
-- in particular over potential threats to US democracy.
Yarvin, who considers liberal democracy as a decadent enemy to be dismantled,
is intellectually influential on vice president-elect JD Vance
and close to several proposed Trump appointees.
The aftermath of Trumpâs election victory has seen actions and rhetoric from Trump and his lieutenants that closely resemble Yarvinâs public proposals for taking autocratic power in America.
Trumpâs legal moves against critics in the media,
Elon Muskâs promises to pare government spending to the bone,
and the deployment of the Maga base against Republican lawmakers who have criticized controversial nominees like Pete Hegseth
are among the measures that resemble elements of Yarvinâs strategy for displacing liberal democracy in the US.
One of the venues in which Yarvin has articulated the strategy include a podcast hosted by #
Michael #
Anton, a writer and academic whom Trump last week appointed to work in a senior role under secretary of state nominee Marco Rubio.
Although Yarvin once described Vance as a ârandom normie politician Iâve barely even metâ
in a July Substack post, in October the Verge reported that âno one online has shaped Vanceâs thinking moreâ.
The growing parallels between the incoming administrationâs actions
â especially Vanceâs views
â and Yarvinâs suggestions raise questions about his influence.
Robert Evans, an extremism researcher and the host of the podcast "Behind the Bastards", recorded a two-part series on Yarvin.
âHe didnât fall out of a coconut tree. He emerged into a rightwing media space where they had been talking about the evils of liberal media and corrupt academic institutions for decades,â he said.
âHe has influenced a lot of people in the incoming administration and a lot of other influential people on the right.
But a lot of the stuff he advocates is the same windmills Republicans have been tilting at for a while,â Evans continued.
âWhatâs unique is his way of rebranding or repackaging old reactionary ideas in a way that appealed to libertarian-minded kids in the tech industry,
and in eventually getting some of them to embrace a lot of far-right ideas,â he said.
âThatâs the novelty of Yarvin and thatâs his real accomplishment.â
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/21/curtis-yarvin-trump?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
a publication of the powerful rightwing #Claremont #Institute,
where Anton is a senior fellow,
and whose growing influence during the Trump era has seen it described as the ânerve center of the American rightâ.
đĽOn 8 December, Trumpâs transition team announced that Anton would be appointed director of policy planning at the state department.
Anton also served in a communications role in Trumpâs first-term national security council from February 2017 until April 2018,
resigning the day before neoconservative John Bolton assumed the role of national security adviser.
After leaving the first Trump administration, Anton did not abandon Trump,
but continued writing about US liberal democracy in bleak terms.
In "Up from Conservatism",
a 2023 anthology of essays edited by the executive director of Claremontâs "Center for the American Way of Life", Arthur Milikh,
Anton wrote that
âthe United States peaked around 1965â,
and that Americans are ruled by
âa network of unelected bureaucrats ⌠corporate-tech-finance senior management, âexpertsâ who set the boundaries of acceptable opinion,
and media figures who police those boundariesâ.
Anton continued the discussion in sections headed
âThe universities have become evilâ,
âOur economy is fakeâ,
âThe people are corruptâ,
âOur civilization has lost the will to liveâ.
His and Yarvinâs conversation was ostensibly about his 2020 book,
"The Stakes".
That book was controversial even on the right for its prolonged consideration of autocratic âCaesarismâ
as a means of resolving American decadence.
In the book, he defined #Caesarism as a âform of one-man rule:
halfway ⌠between monarchy and tyrannyâ.
He adds, though, that
âCaesarism is not tyranny, which, strictly understood,
is a regime that usurps a legitimate and functioning governmentâ,
whereas Caesarism implements âauthoritarian one-man rule partially legitimized by necessityâ
â that is,
âthe breakdown of republican, constitutional ruleâ,
adding that
âa nation no longer capable of ruling itself must yet be ruledâ.
He writes that a
đĽâRed Caesarâ could be attractive to
âthe redsâ in the Republican coalition,
who he says are
âunder constant rhetorical, political, and, increasingly, physical attack,
especially in blue statesâ,
-- making them âmore likely to turn to a Caesarâ.
Anton stops short of openly calling for authoritarian rule,
but in general, he writes that the advantages of Caesarism include
âcontinuity and stabilityâ
and âthe prospect of avoiding conflictâ,
and that it âtends to engender calmâ.
#CurtisYarvin #MichaelAnton
#RedCaesar