The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Sat, 18 Jan 2025
The once-fringe writer has long argued for an American monarchy. His ideas have found an audience in the incoming administration and Silicon Valley.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Full Episode
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. For a long time, Curtis Yarvin, a 51-year-old computer engineer, had been writing online about political theory in relative obscurity. His ideas were pretty extreme, that institutions like the mainstream media and academia have been overrun by progressive groupthink and need to be dissolved.
He believes that government bureaucracy should be radically gutted and that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a monarchy run by what he's called a CEO, which is basically his friendlier term for a dictator.
To support his arguments, Yarvin relies on what sympathetic ears might hear as a helpful serving of historical references, but which others hear as a distorting mix of gross oversimplification, cherry-picking, personal interpretation presented as fact, and just plain inaccuracy. But while Yarvin himself may still be obscure, his ideas are not. Vice President-elect J.D.
Vance has alluded to his notions of forcibly ridding American institutions of so-called wokeism.
You know, there's this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who's written about some of these things.
Incoming State Department official Michael Anton has spoken with Yarvin about how an American Caesar might be installed into power.
I mean, you're essentially advocating for someone to, you know, age-old move, right, which is gain power lawfully through an election, through legal means, and then exercise it unlawfully.
And Yarvin has also found fans in the powerful and increasingly political ranks of Silicon Valley, like Marc Andreessen.
The other lens on this that I think about a lot is Curtis Yarvin, who's also a good friend of mine. And the way he describes the American system, we are living under FDR's personal monarchy.
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