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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.
