Curtis Yarvin celebrated in San Francisco — and at 'Harvard'

Gil Duran

22 Apr 2025 — 3 min read

Dark Enlightenment/NRx Guru Curtis Yarvin feted at 'Harvard.' Well, kinda.

Yesterday, the San Francisco Standard named Curtis Yarvin to the “SF100,” the publication’s list of the city’s most influential people.

“If democracy has felt precarious lately, that’s by design,” declared the Standard in a brief description of Yarvin that labeled him “MAGA’s house philosopher.” “Specifically, by Curtis Yarvin’s design.”

The blurb gives Yarvin credit as an architect of the Donald Trump/Elon Musk destruction of the American government, citing his Retire All Government Employees (RAGE) plan.

screenshot of Curtis Yarvin's picture in the San Francisco Standard — Yarvin in the *San Francisco Standard*'s SF100

None of this is news to readers of this newsletter. Yarvin, the main thinker of the so-called Dark Enlightenment/NeoReactionary (NrX) movement, is a frequent subject of The Nerd Reich. Interestingly, however, this was apparently the first and only mention of Yarvin in the Standard, a relatively new publication owned by tech billionaire Michael Moritz.

This was a breakthrough. Finally, a Bay Area newspaper writes about the San Francisco computer programmer whose extremist political ideas have become highly influential in Washington. Historians — if they still exist in the future — will likely regard the emergence of this dangerous anti-democratic ideology as a very consequential development.

Of course, a single paragraph in a glib Top 100 list hardly seems the proper way to introduce readers to such a loaded subject. But let’s take it as a sign that this subject has become impossible to ignore.

Given the number of interviews and background conversations I’ve been having lately, I think this story will soon reach a wider audience. Mainstream news organizations are starting to understand that they missed something crucial. There is simply no way to accurately explain what is happening in Washington today without understanding the ideological rot emanating from tech. It is, in fact, the main political story of our time.

Media failure is a big part of this story, and I plan to address it at length. How did nearly every major (and not so major outlet) miss this sinister movement slithering out of San Francisco and Silicon Valley? In a recent interview with Imara Jones of the TransLash podcast, I delivered an assessment:

I think the problem is that mainstream journalism and mainstream Democratic politics reward conventional thinking. Everything has to be poll tested to be safe, everything has to be something that we know people will respond to or know about. And we live in an era where unconventional thinkers have seized power. And if you’re a conventional thinker in a system that rewards conventional thinking, it’s going to be really hard for you to see and understand what’s actually happening. and it’s going to seem like a conspiracy theory to you. But it’s not a theory if it’s happening. It’s not theory if it's the only explanation for what otherwise seems like indescribable, senseless, illogical chaos. And it’s not a theory if it is what these guys have been saying they’re going to do for years, if not decades.

I encourage you to listen to the entire episode, in which we also discuss why tech fascism has a particular need to demonize and persecute trans people:

Yarvin at Harvard

Speaking of the strangely glib normalization of Curtis Yarvin: On May 5, the Dark Enlightenment troll will engage Harvard Prof. Danielle Allen in a conversation “on American democracy.”

A poster for the event lists its location as “Harvard Sqaure” (sic) but makes clear that “Event is not associated with Harvard University, nor is a Harvard University program or activity.”

Allen is a highly-regarded classicist and political scientist who is the James Bryan Conant University Professor at Harvard. The event’s host: Passage Press, a publisher of extremist material including “books from a German nationalist, anti-democracy monarchists, and white supremacists promoting ‘human biodiversity,’” according to the Atlantic.

Perhaps this explains why Yarvin gets top billing over the esteemed Harvard professor — at Harvard, no less. Commentators on BlueSky report that tickets have sold out.