He’s anti-democracy and pro-Trump
-- The obscure ‘dark enlightenment’ blogger influencing the next US administration
-- #
Curtis #
Yarvin is hardly a household name in US politics.
But the “neoreactionary” thinker and far-right blogger is emerging as a serious intellectual influence on key figures in Donald Trump’s 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 Trump’s election victory has seen actions and rhetoric from Trump and his lieutenants that closely resemble Yarvin’s public proposals for taking autocratic power in America.
Trump’s legal moves against critics in the media,
Elon Musk’s 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 Yarvin’s 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 “random normie politician I’ve barely even met”
in a July Substack post, in October the Verge reported that “no one online has shaped Vance’s thinking more”.
The growing parallels between the incoming administration’s actions
– especially Vance’s views
– and Yarvin’s 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.
“He didn’t 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,” he said.
“He 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,” Evans continued.
“What’s 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,” he said.
“That’s the novelty of Yarvin and that’s his real accomplishment.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/21/curtis-yarvin-trump?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other