Curtis Yarvin Fears His Authoritarian Fantasy Is Flopping
Dark Enlightenment guru sees his desired revolution unraveling under the weight of its own stupidity
Advisory: This post discusses genocide and mass murder.
The Point: Yarvin Sees Doom and Failure Ahead
The accelerated destruction of the United States, the global economy, and the modern liberal democratic order is underway. Yet Curtis Yarvin – Peter Thiel’s “house philosopher,” who has been advocating such extremism for years – is disappointed. The San Francisco software programmer behind the so-called Dark Enlightenment doesn't seem to be enjoying the fruits of his own revolution. In fact, he sees failure ahead.
The Back Story: Fear and Loathing in Washington D.C.
It’s April 2025 and President Elon Musk – the CEO-dictator of the United States – is busy dismantling government. This demolition comes straight out of Yarvin’s playbook, which calls for a CEO-dictator to conduct a mass purge of government employees.
Gil Duran
Though regarded by many as a mere internet troll, Yarvin – who Vice President J.D. Vance affectionately calls a “reactionary fascist” (and often quotes) – is now getting his due. His extreme theories on replacing democracy with corporate dictatorship are finally being tested in Washington. The Financial Times, the New York Times and Time Magazine have all paid homage to his role in shaping our current reality.
But there’s a problem: Yarvin is unfulfilled. Musk’s destruction of government apparently does not meet the vaunted Dark Enlightenment guru’s standards. In fact, he gives the effort a mediocre grade and says it will likely fail:
After six weeks, is Trump 47 going well? It is and it isn’t. Frankly, I give it a C-. While still far below its potential, it at least has not failed. Which is frankly amazing.
What is frustrating about this administration is that it has the opportunity to win and the strength to win, but neither (it seems) the will or the understanding to win. So, it’s going to lose. But it is not yet fated to lose.
The key issue: Yarvin doesn’t think Musk has the competence to carry out a revolutionary transformation of American government. “Not only can Elon not manage an operation on this basis – God himself could not manage it,” he writes.
Despite the ongoing destruction in Washington, Yarvin complains it’s simply not enough:
Unless the spectacular earthquakes of January and February are dwarfed in March and April by new and unprecedented abuses of the Richter scale, the Trump regime will start to wither and eventually dissipate. It cannot stay at its current level of power—which is too high to sustain, but too low to succeed. It has to keep doing things that have never been done before. As soon as it stops accelerating, it stalls and explodes.
Yarvin is a long-winded writer. This paragraph comes from a bloated, 7,000-word monstrosity titled “Barbarians and Mandarins,” published on March 6. A competent editor would slash it by 90 percent – maybe more.
The essay brims with false dichotomies, logical inconsistencies, half-baked metaphors, and allusions to genocide. It careens from Romanian tractor factories to Harvard being turned “into dust. Into quarks” with the coherence of a meth-addled squirrel.
Yarvin's fetish for authoritarian governance matches his prose: undisciplined, self-indulgent, and ultimately impotent. But I digress...
Analysis: Three Causes of Yarvin's Disappointment
Allow me to summarize Yarvin’s whiny gobbledygook in three main points:
1. He's upset that Musk/Trump aren't being authoritarian enough
While most Americans are shocked by how the current administration is breaking norms, Yarvin thinks it’s a middling effort. He wants full dictatorship:
First, the government needs to be run top-down from the Oval Office. This is why we call it the “executive” branch. “Executive” is a literal synonym of “monarchical”—from “mono,” meaning “one,” and “archy,” meaning “regime.” “Autocratic” is fine too. The “executive branch” is the “autocratic branch,” or should be if English is English. Libs: if these words don’t mean what they mean, what do they mean?
According to Yarvin:
Power creates power. The more power you use, the more power you have...
In his view, half-measures are worse than nothing at all. Musk/Trump must increase the severity of “things that have never been done before” or watch their regime “wither and eventually dissipate.” The real point, he declares, is to “take power from the libs, then keep it.”
Apparently, Musk/Trump are falling short:
Unless the monarch is ready to actually genocide the nobility or the masses, he has to capture their loyalty – or, in liberal parlance, obtain their consent. That’s just how it works. You’re not going to foam these people, like turkeys with bird flu. Right? That means your only option is to convince them to love you, right?
Notice the casual mention of genocide. For good measure, he links to the Wikipedia entry for foam depopulation:
Foam depopulation or foaming is a means of mass killing farm animals by spraying foam over a large area to obstruct breathing and ultimately cause suffocation. It is usually used to attempt to stop disease spread.
Yarvin has a penchant for evoking frames of genocide and violence (even though he looks like a guy who’d surrender his lunch money with nary a whimper). He stops short of calling for literal genocide – but keeps reaching for the language of it: mass death, institutional purging, systemic annihilation. And he rarely seems to notice – or care – just how grotesque that really is.
More on this is the next section.
2. He thinks the entire system needs to be “cremated” – and then rebuilt – not reformed
Yarvin has no patience for simple budget cuts and bureaucratic layoffs. He wants total destruction, followed by a radical rebuilding. Or something like that.
“DC does not need better policies,” he insists. “It needs a complete reboot—as complete as the denazification of Germany in 1945.”
For example: "Every existing institution of science, outside the scientists and the labs themselves, must be fully cremated in a nuclear autoclave."
Again with the flippant use of violent imagery. First, foaming, now crematories. Are we talking about a Holocaust?
Yarvin again uses a mass murder metaphor to describe the firing of employees at the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health:
Someone in DOGE hacked the law (hacking is good, taking dramatic actions is good) by realizing that a certain class of administrative employees in NSF and NIH, so-called ‘probationary employees,’ could be legally shot without a trial. A review of unused drainage ditches in Bethesda showed adequate excess capacity. DOGE acted. The customer service records show few or no complaints about seepage, odors, etc…
Seepage and odors? Not only does Yarvin use a killing metaphor to describe the fates of federal employees – he also fantasizes about them rotting in mass graves. A healthy mind does not do such things, and these regular invocations of death and violence say much about Yarvin. He bathes his brain in the putrefying flesh of imaginary bureaucrats. Oh, and – in a positively flaming Freudian backflip – his parents were career federal employees.
Yarvin contradicts himself often. For example, he wants everything nuked – buildings included. Yet he's oddly miffed that Musk/Trump want to shut down the Department of Education:
Why do you want to shut down the Department of Education? Don’t you want to be the one writing the “Dear Colleague” letters? Doesn’t education in the US need to be completely rebooted – from kindergarten to university? How else are you going to do that, except with all the dotted lines that come out of the Department of Education?
Apparently, it's very frustrating to be a reactionary fascist theorist without also being a reactionary fascist dictator. If you want authoritarianism done right, you must do it yourself.
3. He's learning that “revolutionaries” make terrible administrators
After years of theorizing about the overthrow of democracy, Yarvin has discovered that turning theory into practice is much harder than it looks.
Those of us with experience in government and politics already knew this. Getting a single, simple change can take years. Overthrowing the entire U.S. government? Not a task for addled, inarticulate amateurs.
Yarvin seems shocked that Musk (with zero government experience except for a reliance on government contracts) is doing such a poor job. He also seems chagrined at Trump's specific actions, like tariffs, which are throwing markets into chaos. In political terms, the whole thing is a total disaster. By early 2025, millions of Americans are marching in streets and even Republican voters are showing up at town halls to express seething anger.
Yarvin seems to have come to a stark realization: If Musk/Trump fail to destroy the democratic system, extreme anti-government pseudo-intellectuals may face a bleak future. He urgently warns them against half-assing the revolution – and reveals his own fear of what might happen when the pendulum swings in the other direction:
But in the end, it is the road toward winding up in the foam yourself—probably with me, for all my troubles. (This is what usually happens to right-wing intellectuals, actually.)
Conclusion: Yarvin Fears The Foam
Yarvin sees his desired revolution unraveling under the weight of its own stupidity. He pines for intensified destruction, but it's not clear that will happen – at least not to the extent he considers necessary. So, in creeps the fear.
In early 2025, Yarvin is coming to terms with the towering mediocrity of his ideas. His complaints about the CEO-Dictator system prove exactly why it's inferior to American democracy. Despotism is a dog with no name. Once you let it go, you can't call it back.
Ironically, Yarvin may soon find himself grateful for the very institutions – democracy, bureaucracy, and laws – he enjoys deriding. Our liberal system, imperfect as it may be, does not stack its citizens in mass graves for having terrible ideas.
The only foam Yarvin needs to fear is the flecks on the corners of his mouth. May they serve as cruel reminders of the hysteria that led him here.
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