J.D. Vance calls Curtis Yarvin a 'reactionary fascist'
'I don’t think he meant it in a bad way, but I don’t think he meant it in a good way, either.'
This paywall-free newsletter is brought to you by 308 paid subscribers. They make it all possible!
I'm busy working on something exciting but time-consuming, so I don't have time for a long post today. However, I wanted to share this Politico interview with Curtis Yarvin, the "neoreactionary" writer who wants to see democracy replaced with dictatorship and who laid out the blueprint for government destruction that Elon Musk is now following.
Yarvin says he recently saw Vance at a party and Vance called him a "reactionary fascist."
Politico: You’ve said that your relationship with Vance has been overstated by the press. What is your relationship with him?
Yarvin: I’ve interacted with Vance once since the election. I bumped into him at a party. He said, “Yarvin, you reactionary fascist.” I was like, “Thank you, Mr. Vice President, and I’m glad I didn’t stop you from getting elected.”
Politico: He said that to you?
Yarvin: That’s what he said. I don’t think he meant it in a bad way, but I don’t think he meant it in a good way, either.
The interview was conducted by Ian Ward, who covers the American right for Politico. A sub-headline gingerly describes the interview as "a conversation about JD Vance, Trump’s second term and the end of democracy."
Read the full interview: Curtis Yarvin's Ideas Were Fringe. Now They're Coursing Through Washington, January 30, 2025.
It's mind-blowing that mainstream publications allow Yarvin, a figure known for his controversial and dangerous ideas, to babble on in extended interviews yet refuse to provide a precise analysis of how his ideas for destroying the American government seems to be exactly what's happening now. They view him as an intellectual celebrity, a status he has gained through his provocative and radical views, but don't seem interested in telling the story of how his fascist ideas (according to J.D. Vance) are currently playing out in destructive ways.
This is not just a failure of American journalism, but a potential threat to us all. Many in the journalism establishment seem to approach fascism with a detached objectivity, viewing the potential end of democracy as a mildly interesting story with no serious consequences. But the stakes are unimaginably high, and the consequences will be existential, especially for journalism, which will no longer exist.
I'll have more to say on this later.
Achievement Unlocked
The Nerd Reich's first video production, "Silicon Valley's Playbook to Destroy American Government," has over 9,000 views on YouTube. Not bad for a first try. Please share it with everyone who might be interested, and please don't forget to subscribe to the Nerd Reich YouTube channel. Does the world need another podcast? I'm not sure, but maybe.
NPR Interview
I am very critical of the press and its abject failure to alert the public to the threat of tech fascism. But there have been a few bright spots. Last July, I appeared on NPR's On Point to discuss my work on tech authoritarianism and the 'New Right.' I appeared on the show with Politico's Ian Ward (who conducted the recent interview with Yarvin).
At one point, Ward challenges my analysis. Take a look, consider current events, and let me know which of us called the situation correctly.
You can access the entire episode and transcript by clicking below:
Claire Donnelly
Here's a partial transcript of my appearance:
CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so Ian Ward, stand by here for just a minute because on that front I want to turn to Gil Duran. He's a freelance journalist who writes about tech and politics.
Welcome to On Point.
GIL DURAN: Thanks for having me.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so tell me your view or what your reporting has found out about how much the kind of thinking of the New Right that Ian has been describing is finding support and acceleration within Silicon Valley.
DURAN: Yeah, in my writing, I focus on how there's a dangerous ideology rising out of tech and Silicon Valley.
It views democracy as an enemy, views dictatorship as preferable, and sees billionaires as the savior of humanity. And in 2024, they've made an alliance with the Republican party under Trump, which is also flirting with things like dictatorship, pro-natalism, truth denial. And the idea of being able to seize government and turn it to their own ends.
And so in my writing, I focused on some different rising sort of cult beliefs, something called the network state, which would break up the nation states into much smaller territories run basically by corporate dictatorships and people like Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen, Elon Musk are all at the center of these ideas.
And when I started covering them, I started covering them because they mattered in San Francisco. I could see them making some aggressive political moves to get their people and their leaders and their ideas into our local government. And I thought that eventually they would scale this nationally, but with JD Vance, they've done this all in a very short period of time. They've accelerated far beyond what I assumed they would with these ideas.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let's talk about Peter Thiel more because of course he has a direct relationship with Senator Vance. Gil, remind us just quickly about Thiel and how he made his billions in Silicon Valley.
DURAN: Peter Thiel was part of what is called PayPal mafia, the group of people, including Elon Musk and David Sacks, who founded PayPal. And that was their first major success. He's currently the owner of Palantir, which is a massive surveillance software company with huge government contracts, has become a multi billionaire.
And as he's become wealthier, he's become a louder voice for some very unusual right wing ideas. I'd say he's very much viewed as like the godfather of the New Right. He funds think tanks. He funds people to carry these ideas forward. And I think the most important thing to understand about Peter Thiel is that in 2009, he wrote, "I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible."
So he's been very open about the idea for some new form of government, some new kind of civilization to take over. Once there's some kind of collapse. A lot of these guys have a view that there'll be some kind of collapse that we're heading toward, and they're preparing for that time, and preparing to seize power and have new forms of government once it happens.
And those forms of government are very anti-democratic, more like monarchy or autocracy. And as part of that belief, they see themselves as the supreme people in society who will be the savers of humanity and the leaders once this transformation takes place.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so just so that we know clearly the relationship between Thiel and Vance correct me if I'm wrong Gil, but JD Vance, actually Peter Thiel took him under his wing in the mid 2000s and or actually a little bit later than that. And Vance even started, what, a VC with Thiel's help, is that right?
DURAN: Definitely. JD Vance, I would say is largely the creation of Peter Thiel. He first met Peter Thiel when he heard him speak at Yale Law School in 2011.
Was very impressed by what he said. Spent hours researching him, found an email address, emailed him. Was invited to come to California sometime. And a few years later, JD Vance is in San Francisco working for Mithril Capital. Which is a company co-founded by [Peter Thiel]. When JD Vance decided to move back to Ohio, he started his own firm with help from Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel.
When Vance decides to run for Senate, Peter Thiel drops an unprecedented amount of money into the campaign and gets him the Trump endorsement, even though Vance had previously compared Donald Trump to Hitler, and then Thiel plays a key role in getting Vance on the Trump ticket in 2024.
So at every step of the way over the past decade, you don't have JD Vance without Peter Thiel. And so when you look at what Thiel believes, what he's talked about, what he has said on the record, what he's written, it's pretty terrifying. Someone who might be the vice president of the United States is so close and dependent on this person and his wealth and his beliefs.
CHAKRABARTI: So Ian Ward, let me turn back to you. Because Peter Thiel also essentially underwrote JD Vance's Ohio Senate campaign back in 2021-2022 to the tune of, I don't know, more than $10 million at least. What do you make of the relationship between these two men?
WARD: Yeah, if I can push back a little bit against something Gil said, I think understanding Vance as a creation of Thiel is a bit of a narrow framing to understand his worldview. Certainly, politically, Vance owes a lot to Thiel. As Gil said, he funded his Senate campaign, gave him a career in VC, so on and so forth.
But Thiel is one of the influences that Vance is looking to, to build this worldview, and I think part of what you have to keep in mind when we're talking about these intellectual influences for Vance is these are by and large people who are not offering concrete policy prescriptions, right?
They're people who are offering theoretical justifications. For new regimes, it's an incredibly abstract realm of thought. And so part of what Vance is doing I think when he points to intellectuals like Thiel and others is he's signaling to a certain group of people that he's up on the latest thinking, he's one of them.
He's in this world, he's hip to the latest trends, and the degree to which he's deriving concrete policy descriptions from any one of these people, be it Thiel, or be it Yarvin, or be it the other intellectuals he's thinking about. I'm not sure how much of that we can say, but he's certainly using them to signal his membership in the New Right.
Also, these are contradictory thinkers, a lot of them you can't square Thiel and Yarvin's thought with the thought of someone like the Claremont Institute necessarily. There are real tensions here and those tensions exist within JD Vance's thinking. So I think you need to broaden your frame a little bit to understand the full complexity of Vance's thought.
CHAKRABARTI: Gil, you want to respond to that?
DURAN: I think there is a plan. It's called Project 2025. And that's where all of these things are now merging. A plan to completely seize control of government, to fire up to 500,000 government bureaucrats and make government as a right-wing tool. So there is actually a plan.
And if you look, all of these different groups are converging under the Trump ticket in order to make a lot of this stuff happen. I think there are disagreements. I think there are places where the weird ideology of Silicon Valley doesn't really mesh with the traditional conservative religious based mentality.
But I think they have made an alliance in order to get as far as they can, and they know they're going to get farther under Trump than they are going to get under any Democrat, because this is still considered, would be considered very strange under a Democrat, and having worked in politics for a long time before returning to journalism, I'd say whenever you've got a politician who's hanging out right next to a billionaire for about 10 years, that billionaire is pretty much the boss.
And so I think we can't underestimate the dangerous influence of Peter Thiel on Vance. And not only Peter Thiel. Curtis Yarvin, there's a guy named Balaji Srinivasan, who has also written a lot about these ideas, said that Democrats need to be purged from government, has compared it to De-Ba'athification in Iraq, or Denazification after World War II. And you've got the exact same phrase, De-Ba'athification, Denazification, coming out of JD Vance's mouth, in a talk that he gave on a podcast a few years ago. There's a lot of confluence here. And there are some very specific ideas that recur in both groups, and they very much seem to be captured in many ways in Project 2025.
CHAKRABARTI: Gil, since you mentioned Project 2025, that is of course the project that's come out of the Heritage Foundation, including lots of thinkers both inside of Washington and outside in far-right conservative circles.
Now, the head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, has a new book coming out in September. It's called Dawn's Early Light, and it's essentially Kevin Roberts' version of what's in Project 2025. Senator JD Vance wrote the foreword to Dawn's Early Light. And just yesterday, the New Republic actually published that foreword on their website.
And in it, Vance writes, "We need more than politics that simply removes the bad policies of the past. We need to rebuild. We need an offensive conservatism, not merely one that tries to prevent the left from doing things we don't like." That's from JD Vance himself in the foreword to Dawn's Early Light.
We have a lot more to talk about regarding the new right in just a moment. This is On Point.
Full Episode: JD Vance and the rise of the New Right
