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- [00:00]
Derek Barris
Foreign hey everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Derek Barris.
- [00:24]
Matthew Rubsky
I'm Matthew Rubsky.
- [00:25]
Julian Walker
I'm Julian Walker.
- [00:26]
Derek Barris
You can find us on Instagram and Threads Inspirituality Pod as well as individually on Blue Sky. You can search our names there. You can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on patreon@patreon.com conspirituality you can find our Monday bonus episodes if you are an Apple Podcast user via Apple subscriptions. As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
- [01:01]
Julian Walker
If Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia. So said neoreactionary philosopher Curtis Yarvin in a public Talk back in 2012, where he also outlined a strategy that is eerily similar to how Trump and Musk are now destroying our government. The Dark Enlightenment blogger, long a transgressive darling of the New Right, has in the last two months enjoyed a fresh round of mainstream exposure. He was hosted controversially on the New York Times podcast and has since been the subject of pieces in Politico, Time, Newsweek, Financial Times, and Common Dreams. This has led to a flood of messages to us asking who is Curtis Yarvin? Well, it turns out I covered him for a bonus episode that drops on August 12th of last year due to his influence on then candidate JD Vance and his Silicon Valley billionaire mentor Peter Thiel. Yarvin is just the guy who believes that democracy is dead, black people are genetically well suited to slavery and America should be run by an all powerful king who rules like a tech CEO. And he has the ear of those who are reshaping the world at breakneck.
- [02:14]
Unknown
Speed.
- [02:21]
Derek Barris
This week in Spirituality this past weekend, RFK Jr. Spoke at an event with Republican Governor Patrick Morrissey of West Virginia and I wanted to play a clip for you guys of what he said.
- [02:35]
Unknown
I got to know. I said to Dr. Morris or Governor Morrissey the first time I saw him, I said, you look like you ate Governor Morrissey. And and there was a lot of talk about getting healthy again and I'm very happy that he's invited me to be his personal trainer. I am going to put him. I'm going to put him on a really rigorous regimen and we're going to put him on a carnivore diet. Going to make him do. Raise your hand if you want Governor Morrissey to do a public Weigh in once a month. And then when he's lost 30 pounds, I'm going to come back to the state and do a celebration in a public way.
- [03:31]
And with him, oh, the humiliation. What jumped out at me here is Bobby repeatedly referencing the idea of a public weigh in, as you heard there.
- [03:39]
Julian Walker
For the governor, like he's a boxer or more to the point, an MMA fighter in the ufc. See the organization ruled over by Dana White, who spoke at Trump's convention and.
- [03:48]
Unknown
Is now on the board at Facebook.
- [03:50]
Julian Walker
But Kennedy's also, even though he's joking, he's positioning himself as a kind of personal trainer to the too fat governor. And not only do we see his transformation or Bobby's complete from being a fringe anti vax crackpot to now being the head of hhs, but you also see how in his mind, his role is very much like a health influencer, like a personal trainer who gives diet and fitness advice on social media will get him on a carnivore diet, and who then cajoles public figures into being becoming more like he man fighters who have to strip down to their undies in front of the crowd on the big stage and step on the scale. Right.
- [04:30]
Derek Barris
Well, it makes sense that he's aligned with Jillian Michaels now. Right. When she appeared in front of Congress during the Ron Johnson congressional hearing, it was like, well, she was a bit of an outlier because she wasn't really in the wellness circle. But this is what Jillian did for years on the Biggest Loser. At least in that situation, she was working out with them and chiding them to work out, which, as much as I don't agree with, as a former fitness instructor, some people do take to it. It's a little bit different when you're on the stage in front of this man's constituents and you're belittling him like that.
- [05:03]
Matthew Rubsky
Yeah, I think we've been pretty good at identifying the ableism and fatphobia that runs through Bobby's brain, like, forever, and how hypocritical the meritocracy mindset is, given his family privilege and all of the luck he had in recovering from his own addiction issues. But there's another element that always picks at me, which is the raw rudeness of this stuff. Like, this is a crowd of people that are willing to say the shittiest things out loud. There's no real sense of privacy or propriety. I'm always wondering, why are they like that? I mean, I think we use simple terms like bully and so on. But then I came across this Quote from Heinrich Himmler at his wedding speech in 1928. And he says something quite profound about this way of thinking. He's talking about sexuality here, but you can substitute health in for sex, he says. Some people say to us, what I do is no one's business. It is my affair, my private life. No, anything relating to sexuality is not a private matter, but signifies the life or death of a people world. Power or insignificance, like those are the two options. So in other words, like, for folks like this and in, you know, a fascist movement more broadly, there isn't any private life, there aren't any personal concerns. There's no dignity in just being who you are, you know, whether you're fat or whatever. Like every aspect of your existence is a political statement or a handle. That's just has to be fair game.
- [06:44]
Derek Barris
I published an article yesterday. We were recording this on Tuesday, the day that HHS health cuts are, are coming in, by the way. And apparently some of the workers are only firing out. They were fired because when they got to work, their security cards aren't working. And in this article, I focused on just the jock mentality that I thought we left behind in high school, but it just perpetuates itself and it just, it just keeps gaining power in some ways. And we've seen it, Rogan and many of the biohackers. But to now see it front of the OR being the face of public health is disorienting. And you know, Matthew, you had asked me when I shared the clip at first a few days ago how the governor reacted and how my question is, how are you going to react in such a, such a situation? Maybe they did talk about it beforehand, but to actually be on stage and for Bobby to pull out in front of hundreds of people and then to have them laugh at you is just indicative of how poorly thought out everything that this man does really is. Because, you know, if you want to have that discussion with him behind the scenes and help him to lose some weight, totally fine with that. But to pull that out in front of people and to have the chiding, and this is at a time like just as a quick recap over the last week of what's happening at HHS, they're firing an additional 10,000 employees, as I just flagged, bringing up the total to over 20,000 overall. Bobby gutted vaccine advocacy and HIV prevention departments. He's disbanded the OR is disbanding the Administration for Community Living, which is an agency that provides over 261 million meals to older adults who need assistance and they also provide assistance to 1.5 million family caregivers and a quarter million people with disabilities as of 2022. Bobby infamously now his agency has buried a measles report that shows that the worst outbreaks are occurring in under vaccinated regions. The irony of that one is that the spokesperson said everyone knows this stuff already anyway. Why are we just repeating it? And given that we've had increasing non intake of vaccines, especially in kindergartens and children's in the recent years, I don't think everyone actually knows it. He plans on ending an entire infectious disease department. And then of course you have Dr. Peter Marks who was the top vaccine official at the fda, the person who was behind Operation Warp Speed. He resigned last week from the agency and he warned that Kennedy has no interest in working with scientists. This is a quote from him. It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.
- [09:42]
Matthew Rubsky
Well, at least he got a really good exit line. That was good.
- [09:46]
Derek Barris
Well, I'm sure Maha Stans thinks that he's now part of the deep state.
- [09:50]
Matthew Rubsky
For sure. For sure.
- [09:51]
Julian Walker
Yeah, we're in such deep trouble.
- [10:00]
Matthew Rubsky
Get caught. A couple weeks ago in the Kings of Pain episode, we talked about how Trumpian tariffs and firings and austerity discourse were taking on the somatic metaphors like detoxing. And in this rhetoric there's this promise of purification and even pleasure on offer for what the administration openly acknowledges will be painful for even MAGA voters. And I pointed out that part of the function of rationalizing economic pain is undergirded by two other kind of perverse themes. So first of all, when Trump proxies like Dana White welcome a sex assaulter like Andrew Tate back to the US and then give him front row tickets at sporting events, they're saying what taboo dominating and exploiting women is part of what we do and no wokists are going to take that away. And then secondly, when the White House X account puts out slick music video style orgy stuff over the Venezuelan deportees and pain positions film and shows them humiliated as they're clean shaven or they put out an ASMR video of rattling chains as they're taken off into airplanes, they are eroticizing violence and humiliation. Now none of that was enough for former South Dakota governor and current DHS secretary Kristi Noem. This is the person who bragged in her memoir about killing her misbehaving 14 month old hunting dog back in that innocent era when a lot of us thought that taking a dog to a gravel pit and shooting it in the head would torpedo her career. But I think like RFK Jr. Chainsawing the head off a whale, it probably helped.
- [11:37]
Unknown
Yeah, it's super relatable here at Secot.
- [11:39]
Today and visiting this facility. And first of all, I want to thank El Salvador and their president for their partnership with the United States of America to bring our terrorists here and to incarcerate them and have consequences for the violence that they have perpetuated in our community. I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face. First of all, do not come to our country illegally. You will be removed and you will be prosecuted. But know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.
- [12:11]
Matthew Rubsky
Okay, so there she is in a viral video stunt from the mega prison known as Secot, which is El Salvador's terrorism confinement center, where 268 Venezuelan men deported under the Trump administration's invocation of the Alien Enemies act are being held in limbo on zero charges, most of which are held because they simply have tattoos. And this is on the invitation of the Bukele administration, which has basically intimidated the judiciary there into accepting holding foreign nationals for cash payments. Nome is standing in front of a cage where hundreds of prisoners are packed into stacking bunks that are three stories high. And by doing a propaganda selfie in front of prisoners, a lot of legal observers have pointed out that she might be violating the Geneva Conventions. So this is all kinds of gross, but I just want to underline that she's also a general all around maga ghoul. She supports the Muslim ban. She has endorsed the stripping of DACA protections from dreamers. She wants to dismantle asylum processes. And of course, you know, she's all in favor of these mass deportations. Now she's talking about cost cutting by eliminating fema, which is an insane idea that would fragment disaster relief efforts into what, 50 state agencies and just totally have to, you know, replicate all of these services everywhere. But I want to ping friend of the Pod, Jeff Charlotte's description and analysis of the stunt here and link to his great short piece on it. It's called that's Kristi Noem and Fascism's Sadistic Eroticization of Power. So he writes. I've got a couple of quotes here, Julian. Maybe you can help me with Them.
- [13:55]
Julian Walker
Kristi Noem in tight athleisure, white top, drawstring gray pants.
- [14:01]
Matthew Rubsky
So he's describing the outfit that she wears, and it's kind of a Whole Foods to yoga class look.
- [14:07]
Julian Walker
In front of a prison cell packed with mostly shirtless men, Noem's hair cascades out of her navy DHS cap. The men appear to be wearing loose white patient pants. Noem wears a heavy gold and silver watch.
- [14:20]
Matthew Rubsky
Okay. And according to Washing post, it's an 18 karat gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona, which sells for about $50,000.
- [14:27]
Julian Walker
The men's arms are at their sides or clasped in front as if they've been told to stand at attention.
- [14:33]
Matthew Rubsky
Now, they've also been told to remove their shirts and stand close to the bars, because in a longer video clip, we see her enter the complex. And at first the men are clothed, so they've obviously been ordered to disrobe to show their bodies and tattoos. Because she has entered, Noem's cap is.
- [14:51]
Julian Walker
Pulled low so we can't really see her ey. Instead, her face appears comprised mainly of lips. The men's heads have been shaved. There's lighting on Gnome, but they're in the murk, hard to distinguish from one another.
- [15:04]
Matthew Rubsky
Okay, so Charlotte spotlights the lips. And if you haven't seen any of the very smart pieces on Gnome's cosmetic transformations over the years, I'll link to the best one. Suffice to say, this is a person who has transformed her image from Prairie Home Companion like farm mom to contestant in Trump's Hot Maga mom reality TV Apprentice show. And it's not that she talks openly about the fillers and diets that a lot of folks speculate about. But she did do a 4 minute infomercial for Texas Smile, which is a cosmetic dentistry business that recapped her teeth last March. And she was sued over that post on suspicion that she was receiving an illegal kickback. But no evidence for that has turned up. She apparently just wanted to talk about her dental upgrade, which is arguably the most socially acceptable form of modification. Let's just keep in mind that this is someone who also rejects gender ideology, as if she isn't living it. And Charlotte is great on this contradiction.
- [16:04]
Julian Walker
Trumpist rhetoric from Trump on down is rife with the idea that their women are sexier than left or liberal women. This rhetoric is as common amongst right wing women as among men. And even as it celebrates body modification, there's no shame in plastic surgery on the fascist right. It frames itself via a topsy turvy idea of authenticity. Trump women, goes the thinking, are real precisely because they try hard to perform woman. Liberal and left women are not real women because in this logic, feminism makes them rebel against their natural roles.
- [16:41]
Matthew Rubsky
It's such a great article. And he also is pointing at something deeper, which is this weird scene of quasi bdsm, which has long overlapped with fascist aesthetics. This is a feature of MAGA spaces that I've explored with Esme Providence Brown in our discussion of Kelly Brogan getting into pole dancing and what she thinks of as therapeutic bdsm. And what Esme points out is that what you really have to do with reactionary, anti or post feminism is to still make it hot while playing different roles. And the challenge for Noem, I think, and all of the women in Trump's sphere is how to play the perfect kind of gendered role of deference to the patriarchal cabal of sex assaulters at the top, but then also be able to turn around and punch down at everyone beneath them. And a really efficient way of doing that is through gendered and sexualized flexing. And there's a long history of this dominator role in fascist theme scenes and, you know, a big psychoanalytic literature on what it does, how it functions, how it expresses a dissociation between fantasy and reality. It makes things permissible. Like the consensus there is that aesthetic allure, like Hugo Boss did the Nazi uniforms. And maybe we can say Lululemon is. Is the dresser, the stylist for Maha Mama uniforms. And the stylized violence of BDSM allow participants to abstract the fascist symbolism from what it actually does, from its atrocities. And Susan Sontag in 1975 said somewhat the same thing. She said that fascist aesthetics are often reduced to camp or theatricality so that they can be divorced from their ideological origins. So the dominator can therefore play with the energies of the terror of fascist authority from the top, but then also the surrender inherent to BDSM from below. So they can be powerful in one role and powerless in another. But as Charlotte points out, Kristi Noem isn't playing at all. And that's why he calls the whole spectacle bait.
- [19:03]
Julian Walker
Curtis Yarvin was born in 1973. He grew up in Maryland and was a math whiz kid who went to Brown and then Berkeley studying computer science. He dropped out of his PhD program in around 1993 to work in tech and eventually founded his own computer networking platform called Urbit in 2002. This led to a San Francisco based company called plon, founded in 2013 with funding from Peter Thiel. But before that, in 2007, Jarvan used the goofy pseudonymous Mencius Moldbug to start a blog called Unqualified Reservations. This championed the ideas of reactionary political philosophers and economists who disparaged democracy. He claimed in an interview to have watched the 2016 election results on TV with Peter Thiel and said that he was coaching Thiel, who was, quote, fully enlightened on his ideas. And this tracks given Thiel's infamous 2009 essay, which stated that freedom and democracy are incompatible and decried both social welfare and women having the right to vote. Now Thiel's fellow tech billionaire Marc Andreessen, who has been acting as an informal advisor to Trump this year, has spoken approvingly of Yarvin's work, as has his associate cryptocurrency kingpin Biology Srinivasan, who echoes Yarvin's techno monarchist ideas. Yarvin's influence also extends to Peter Thiel protege and current American VP JD Vance, who referenced Yarvin's strategy of firing all government employees who are not MAGA loyalists in a 2024 interview. We now see Doge enacting that mission, which is leading to a slew of media outlets digging into Yarvin's dark enlightenment thinking for the first time to try to get a handle on what is going on. How connected is he to the new administration, you may ask? Well, Politico reported that Yarvin was the informal guest of honor at an inauguration gala fittingly called the Coronation Ball. Royal Overtones. There it was held at the Watergate Hotel. More overtones by the repugnant far right publishing house Passage Press. Politico actually interviewed Yarvin about his D.C. visit, and he talked about bumping into Vance, who apparently jokingly referred to him as a reactionary fascist. How are you, you reactionary fascist, you? And of quote, catching up with the revolutionary vanguard of young conservatives who grew up reading his blog and are now entering the government. We'll turn now to the unlock of my August 2024 piece on Yarvin. It was titled at that time JD Vance's Dictator Fetish as it explored Yarvin's ideas and their influence on who is now our vice president and warned of what we are in fact seeing under Trump 2.0.
- [22:04]
J.D. Vance
You know, one of the things that consistently comes up in my campaign, because I was one of these people who didn't quite get Donald Trump in the beginning, I didn't sort of fully appreciate where he was coming from or what he was about, and now I very much do, is this concept of red pilling. And if you ever heard this term, it comes from the movie the Matrix, which as I understand it, is made by a couple of people who do not share the politics of the people in this room. But the basic idea is that once you see the way that knowledge is transmitted, once you see the way that public policy works in this country, it's very hard to unsee it. And so there's this scene in the movie the Matrix where the chief protagonist is given an opportunity to take the blue pill or the red pill. And he takes the red pill. And the red pill effectively reveals to him the fundamental corruption that laid at the heart of the society that he lived in.
- [22:54]
Unknown
That's J.D. vance in November of 2021 talking at NATCON, a gathering of what is sometimes called the New right. He was running for Senate at that time, not Vice President as he is now. Of course, we all had heard this right wing co opting of being red pilled for at least a couple years at this point. But as far back as 2007, before MAGA, before QAnon, and even before Candace Owens launched her YouTube channel Red Pill Black in 2017, an obscure online blogger who went by the pen name Mencius Moldbug was the first to repurpose the red pill metaphor from the science fiction classic the Matrix In April of 2007, the year before the election of Barack Obama would represent to so many that Martin Luther King Jr. S arc of the moral universe had bent more toward justice and equality than ever before. In 2007, Moldbug wrote an article titled the Case Against Democracy. Its subtitle 10 red pills. So here he is now talking about how he came up with the idea and what it meant to him.
- [24:15]
Matthew Rubsky
Okay, what would happen if you basically.
- [24:17]
J.D. Vance
Turned this thing around and actually to.
- [24:19]
Matthew Rubsky
Be right wing was to be red pilled, which is clearly very far from the intention of that movie. What it meant to me was first.
- [24:27]
J.D. Vance
Of all sort of a complete negation of the whole frame of thinking about.
- [24:34]
Matthew Rubsky
Politics and history that I was brought up in, which really had to be.
- [24:39]
J.D. Vance
Every bit the equal of sort of the frame breaking that you would have.
- [24:43]
Matthew Rubsky
To do if you'd grown up under Soviet Communism.
- [24:45]
Unknown
As with Neo being initiated in the movie by Morpheus into waking up from the Matrix by taking the red pill and seeing that what he believed to be reality was in fact a lie. Moltbug describes an awakening from belief in the goodness of democracy, an awakening that he compares to being deprogrammed from Soviet propaganda. Now in the original article he addresses the reader as someone who still naively believes that democracy is good and its alternatives are really bad. His 10 red pills are edgy assertions that say things like communism and fascism are forms of democracy. The difference between a single party and a multi party system is akin to the difference between a malignant and a benign tumor. He says things like Rather than the blue pilled notion that democracy is inseparable from freedom and law, the red pilled truth is that democracy is sand in the gears of freedom and law. It gets in the way. So that's already disturbing. But before we go any further, who is Mencius Moldbug and what is his connection to J.D. vance? Well, that quirky and ominous sounding pen name belongs to someone called Curtis Yarvin, who J.D. vance considers a friend and who has jokingly been referred to as Lord Yarvin and our prophet in the New Right circles that intersect with a loosely affiliated movement around his work, referred to sometimes as the Dark Enlightenment or the Neo Reactionary movement. We will get into some of his key ideas and outrageous statements in a minute, but here's one to whet your appetite. In 2011, Curtis Jarvin criticized the Norwegian neo Nazi terrorist Anders Breivik, not for his killing of 77 people, mostly children, but for that act not being an effective step toward bringing down what Yarvin falsely called the communist government of Norway. It brings me great pleasure to welcome.
- [27:06]
Matthew Rubsky
Mr. Peter Thiel to give the inaugural.
- [27:08]
Unknown
Address of the Oxford Union's Bicentenary year. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Mr. Peter Thiel.
- [27:18]
Peter Thiel
Well Charlie, thank you so much for that terrific introduction and a lot of different things to cover. I'm always reminded of a question a colleague of mine like to ask. What is the antonym of diversity? What word is the single antonym of diversity? And university thinking about the crisis of the university, the crisis of the west, the crisis of classical liberalism. There are elements of this that are of course timeless and eternal. And then of course there are parts of it that are always, you know, there's always sort of a kaleidoscopic newness and effervescence to it as well. You know, I framed my talk as anti, anti, anti anti classical liberalism. So you have a double negative that's kind of a positive. A quadruple negative is also kind of a positive. And, and I'm going to try to sort of outline as I see the argument as well as the best arguments against the university classical liberalism. You know, sort of the free Western world.
- [28:24]
Unknown
Now, Yarvin has significant influence over tech billionaire and increasingly important political player Peter Thiel. He claimed in a text message revealed by buzzfeed to Milo Yiannopoulos. You may remember him.
- [28:40]
Matthew Rubsky
I mean, who would want Twitter and you know, to say nothing of what you know, look, Twitter is systematically having.
- [28:44]
Unknown
A go at conservatives.
- [28:45]
Matthew Rubsky
There's even chatter online of them having a race problem. You know, there are people saying that.
- [28:49]
Unknown
Twitter has a race problem.
- [28:50]
Matthew Rubsky
It doesn't like white people very much. It's got this black supremacist Black Lives Matter hashtag up in its San Francisco offices.
- [28:55]
Unknown
Okay, so that's Milo Yiannopoulos, in case you forgot about him. It's during his brief stint in the spotlight, he's on CNBC being asked to define what the alt right is. And Curtis Yarvin, in a text message to Milo Yiannopoulos, claimed to have watched the 2016 election results with Peter Thiel. He referred to him as fully enlightened. Just plays it very carefully when Milo said that Thiel needed political guidance from Yarvin. JD Vance's existence as a political figure is largely the creation of Peter Thiel, who employed him as the principal in his venture capital firm, Mithril. He also funded Vance's own venture capital firm, Narya, and then bankrolled his Senate campaign to the tune of $15 million. Thiel's most infamous quote from 2009, that I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible, came on the heels that same year of Yarvin having written the Socialism and fascism produce a mix of substandard and disastrous results for a simple Both originate in democracy, a pre cancerous growth always pregnant with some malignancy. Curtis Yarvin and his fellow Dark Enlightenment thinkers see democracy as a failed experiment that leads only to disaster when its core values are followed. They advocate instead for a strongman dictator who rules like a combination of a startup CEO and a king by seizing power and defying constitutional checks and balances. We'll come back around to that vision shortly. But first, here's the 411 on Peter Thiel and his track record in politics. Peter Thiel, along with Elon Musk, was one of the co founders of PayPal. He was also the first outside investor in Facebook, and that investment turned a half million dollars into over a billion in the course of eight short years. He's also been a wildly successful venture capitalist, but his current brainchild is called Palantir. It's a data analytics company named after the all seeing magic crystal stones in the Lord of the Rings. Palantir's technology services have been the subject of multiple controversies and lawsuits involving government intelligence, medical and immigration data surveillance and warfare, applications of robotics and artificial intelligence in multiple countries. It's all too much to go into detail on today that would warrant its own episode, but I do want to flag Palantir had a hand in the Cambridge Analytica Facebook data harvesting activities utilized by Steve Bannon to exert illegal influence over the 2016 election. Now, for the most part, analysts feel that it didn't make that much of a difference. But this was a pretty big news story in its time, and part of the whistleblower revelations about Cambridge Analytica had to do with how Palantir was working hand in hand with them on creating these kinds of strategies. These were initially used to try to give Ted Cruz an edge in the presidential primaries after Thiel had helped fund his 2012 Senate election as a Tea Party candidate. Cambridge Analytica was co founded by Steve Bannon and billionaire Robert Mercer, his former employer at Breitbart and a Republican megadonor. Palantir, Peter Thiel's company is a contractor with tentacles deep into American government agencies, including intelligence, immigration, policing and defense. They are similarly involved with governments in England, Israel, Ukraine, Norway and Denmark that we know of. They also have a partnership with Amazon that optimizes Amazon web services using the same software that Palantir provides for British Petroleum. So I guess you could say they are big time players after Thiel used his tech background in the service of helping Trump come to power in 2016 by collaborating with Bannon and Mercer to illegally harvest Facebook user data. To that end, this is the Cambridge Analytica scandal. He would then get even more involved in politics. Peter thiel spent over $20 million for the 2022 election campaign to back 16 Senate and congressional candidates, many of whom endorsed Trump's false claim about election fraud in the 2020 election.
- [34:02]
Derek Barris
Blake Masters is an America first fighter. I endorse Blake because he's strong on everything needed to keep Arizona first.
- [34:10]
Julian Walker
Blake Masters has my complete and total endorsement.
- [34:14]
Matthew Rubsky
I'm Blake Masters and I approve this message.
- [34:17]
Unknown
Amongst that group was a former COO of Thiel's investment firm named Blake Masters, who lost very badly after a series of extraordinary gaffes, including invoking the Great Replacement Theory and naming Unabomber Ted Kaczynski as an underrated subversive thinker. In a podcast interview, he clarified that he did not endorse the man's bombings, but thought his manifesto had a lot of correct insight and included in that group of Thiel backed candidates was the successful Senate candidate J.D. vance. Thiel donated $15 million through a super PAC to his campaign. Robert Mercer also contributed an undisclosed amount. Like Blake Masters, J.D. vance had previously been in charge of Peter Thiel's venture capital firm, Mithril Capital. Here we are just two years later and Vance is Trump's vice president pick, reportedly via the influence of his sons, who most people on the right are regretting him having listened to. Vance's announcement, however, did bring in a slew of Silicon Valley endorsements and big donations for the Trump campaign in the following days and weeks via the Elon Musk created America Pack. Funders have included the Palantir co founder, crypto billionaires and venture capital companies associated with Peter Thiel. This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. It's tax season and we're all a bit tired of numbers. But here's one you need to $16.5 billion. That's how much the IRS flagged for possible identity fraud last year. Now here's a good number. 100 million. That's how many data points Lifelock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed. Save up to 40% your first year@lifelocked.com podcast terms apply okay, this may seem like a big tangent so far. What does all of this have to do with Curtis Yarvin? Well, we've already covered examples, brief examples of his philosophical influence on J.D. vance and Peter Thiel. We also see Yarvin's influence in a quote from Vance publicly praising his ideas in 2021 on a now defunct conservative podcast. In that instance, he made a reference to an idea of Yarvin's that as of 2024 reads as identical to what Project 2025 promises to do turn over 50,000 non partisan civil servant jobs into loyalist party political appointments. Yarvin himself used the acronym RAGE for Retire All Government Employees whenever he brought up this idea starting in 2012. And then Vance repeated it and credited Yarvin with the idea on a podcast in 2021. And they say philosophers have no power or influence in today's world. Now RAGE or Retire all government employees, as described by Yarvin and now as codified as part of Project 2025's policy plan, is really a way to ram through what Steve Bannon previously called dismantling the administrative state. And we know that conservatives love to talk about small government and getting rid of the bloat of big government. But what's the real purpose here? Well, as far as I can tell, it's the good old corporate crony deregulation battle cry on everything from pollution and climate to minority and union protections to healthcare, access to contraception and any limitations either on conservative Christian power or absolute capitalist exploitation or the executive authority of an all powerful president. That kind of absolute authority is aligned with Curtis Yarvin's assertion that the only way forward is to have a CEO like Monarch. In that same 2012 talk that included his reference to rage, he said if Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia. But it's not just Yarvin's anti democratic tech overlord king fetish. It's not just his idea that America should be broken up into a series of one party city states or that he has said that something he dubs the Cathedral reinforces a liberal democratic matrix like worldview through cultural institutions and the media. The Cathedral obscuring as well what he refers to as the mythologizing of World War II, without which we might see that Hitler's invasions may have been acts of self defense. Yeah, it's not just those things. Here's Curtis Yarvin in his own words on yet another alarming topic. Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others it is more suited to slavery, and others still are badly suited to either. These characteristics can be expected to group differently in human populations of different origins. Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by genetic differences, he goes on. This is under the pen name Mencius Mouldbug on the blog he started in 2007 called Unqualified Reservations. A person makes a good slave if he is loyal, patient, and not exceptionally bright or stubborn. But even great intelligence is not necessarily a bar to a good experience in slavery, as the experience of many Greek slave philosophers such as Epictetus, shows. A slave must carry the unique burden of personal dependency and obedience, which we are all used to expressing only toward impersonal government agencies. Yarvin wrote those words in July of 2009. They're an excerpt on his blog for free from an ebook he has for sale up on Amazon, and we'll talk more about the subject of that ebook In a minute. But are you worried yet? I mean, I think sometimes on the left we can start to sound hyperbolic or hysterical. You know, according to both sides, every election for a good 30 years has always been the most important in American history. And the opponent has always been framed as an absolute threat to all that we hold dear. And when that's already how the stakes are discussed, they have to be further escalated. They have to be cranked up each year, and the 247 cable news cycle has to play along with that game. And I think this is why many on the right and those who have been persuadable in the center have latched onto this completely inane notion that liberals have developed Trump Derangement Syndrome. I think the sheer magnitude of lies, hate rage, incoherence, clueless incompetence, and brazen criminality that Trump brought to the national stage has meant that the only way to counter the never ending material he provides for normal news reporting on how outrageous it has all been has been for the right to cast it as a kind of biased and feverish liberal overreaction. But we're not overreacting. I don't have to tell you this. And in fact, it is the explicit ideology of those poised to exert even greater influence in a second Trump administration that makes words like authoritarianism and fascism so appropriate, even though in the last few weeks, Democrats have leaned back a little into just saying those guys are weird and creepy. Well, they are. They're weird, creepy fascist authoritarians. Of course, Curtis Yarvin would say, no, no, no. Fascism is just another form of democracy. I'm a cameral monarchist or a formalist. He has all of these coded words for describing what essentially is a one party state ruled over by a strongman. I said before that the quotes about the genetics that supposedly predispose Africans more so than, say, Native Americans to be good slaves to white Europeans was published on his blog as an excerpt from a digital publication he sells on Amazon. It is titled Mold Bug on Carlyle. The Carlyle in question here is Thomas Carlyle. He's a Scottish philosopher and essayist who lived from 1795 to 1881. The blog post itself is titled why Carlyle Matters, and it sings the man's praises as akin to Shakespeare, practically superhuman, and a true anti progressive reactionary in a way, he says, much more strange, ancient and wild than a communist, a fascist, or a monarchist. So who is Thomas Carlyle? He's a towering literary figure in the Victorian era. His history of the French Revolution published less than 50 years after those events, was highly influential and admired by luminaries like Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was even quoted in speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. But perhaps unbeknownst to King, as his career and life unfolded, Thomas Carlyle would become associated with the conservative and militaristic Prussianism that carried the seeds of what would become German National Socialism. He also supported the Confederate side in the American Civil War. He was opposed to voting rights being extended to Jews in Britain, being one of those right wing voices who at the time supported Zionism as a way to deport all those troublesome Jews to Palestine. He also expressed anti Semitic and racist attitudes. He was quoted, for example, in the book Conversations with Carl Weil by Charles Duffy as saying that, and I quote, the black man could not be emancipated from the laws of nature and neither could the Jew. Thomas Carlyle published several historical biographies, one of them the History of Frederick the Great, who is a central figure in Prussianism, that nationalist militaristic philosophy that would lead eventually to Nazism. And his history of that, despite being Scottish, was revered in Germany. Portions of it were taught in schools to children, and passages from it, as it turns out here, were read by Joseph Goebbels as consolation to Adolf Hitler in his bunker as defeat and suicide were closing in at the end of World War II. Curtis Jarvin calls Thomas Carlyle his favorite author, but it's not correct to call Yarvin a Nazi. He is, after all, as he's fond of saying about himself, a New York Jew. But he has written that while he is not himself a white nationalist, he is, I quote, not exactly allergic to the stuff. And he has said that the U.S. civil rights programs quoting here applied to people with recent hunter gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber has resulted in absolute human garbage. Now this style of writing and speaking can often provide for plausible deniability, especially in our age of trolling and irony and the kind of owning the libs and drinking their tasty salty tears by violating taboos just for the lulz that ushered in the 4chan presidency of Donald Trump and the normalization of conspiracy theories, the right wing and heterodox anti censorship campaign fully blossomed now on Elon's version of Twitter seems to mostly have made bigotry, propaganda and conspiracism great again. It also provided a rationale for independent media, you know, edgy YouTube channels and podcasts and substack blogs to characterize any limits on what public figures can say that would disqualify them from being appropriate interview subjects as merely being cancel culture. Indeed, being canceled, which really now just means being strongly criticized for saying or doing awful things, is the doorway into becoming celebrated on many of these platforms and asked to opine at length about just why you're being censored and persecuted by the woke elite for your bold courage to think outside the box in this bizarre inversion of moral reality. Alex Jones, Bret Weinstein, Russell Brand and a long list of others are so good for clicks, for views, for ad revenue that no matter how despicable or harmful their actions or beliefs have demonstrably been, they are still valuable sources for the fire hose of transgressive content that makes famous and enriches those independent new media figures in the process. It also illustrates a transformation from left to right wing political commentary for formerly legitimate journalists who have followed the money, regardless of whether or not their new conspiracy mongering endangers America itself itself by slandering government agencies and university think tanks. And to the extent that they're willing to cooperate, big tech platforms desperately trying to identify and thwart the successful disinformation campaigns of authoritarian foreign governments who specifically want to destabilize America by sowing confusion and chaos. And this is all entirely in keeping with the fact that no matter how many felonies the man is indicted or convicted of, no matter how offensive, incompetent and dishonest his every statement is, and no matter the facts of his attempts to overturn democracy, around half of Americans still think Donald Trump is their guy in this election. That's the world into which an openly anti democratic race like Curtis Yarvin can play Alexander Dugan in the ear of Peter Thiel and Josh Hawley, whose fist pump to the insurrectionists we remember from the hours before the events of January 6th climaxed. And now vice presidential candidate J.D.
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Julian Walker
Vance.