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⚯ Michel de Cryptadamus ⚯brutal but entirely accurate review of Balaji's¹ book "The Network State" that is regarded as something of a blueprint for a future government by the <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/broligarchs" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#broligarchs</a> currently running the country.¹ Balaji is a crypto con artist who has also been a partner at Marc Andreessen's <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/a16z" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#a16z</a> as well as CTO of <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/Coinbase" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Coinbase</a>.<a href="https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/the-tech-barons-have-a-blueprint" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank">https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/the-tech-barons-have-a-blueprint</a><a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/NerdReich" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NerdReich</a> <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/NetworkState" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NetworkState</a> <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/Coinbase" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Coinbase</a> <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/MarcAndreessen" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#MarcAndreessen</a> <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/a16z" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#a16z</a> <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/DOGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#DOGE</a> <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/elonmusk" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#elonmusk</a> <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/uspol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#uspol</a> <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/fascism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#fascism</a> <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/techfascism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#techfascism</a> <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/davekarpf" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#davekarpf</a> <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a>

Chuck DarwinTech billionaire <a href="https://c.im/tags/Marc" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Marc</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Andreessen" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Andreessen</a> is reportedly getting involved with <a href="https://c.im/tags/DOGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#DOGE</a>. He’s also invested in the “network state” movement led by <a href="https://c.im/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Srinivasan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Srinivasan</a>, which aims 2 build crypto-based countries within existing states via the creation of “parallel institutions” like X. Listen. 1/ <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/jennycohn.bsky.social/post/3lc4wwzofo22v" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank">https://bsky.app/profile/jennycohn.bsky.social/post/3lc4wwzofo22v</a>

Kriszta Satori<a href="https://journa.host/tags/BBCNews" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#BBCNews</a> - <a href="https://journa.host/tags/OpenAI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#OpenAI</a> whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0el3r2nlko" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0el3r2nlko</a> <a href="https://journa.host/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a> <a href="https://journa.host/tags/ChatGPT" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#ChatGPT</a>

Chuck DarwinA former <a href="https://c.im/tags/OpenAI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#OpenAI</a> employee, <a href="https://c.im/tags/Suchir" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Suchir</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a>, was recently found dead in his San Francisco apartment, according to the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In October, the 26-year-old AI researcher raised concerns about OpenAI breaking copyright law when he was interviewed by The New York Times.“The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has identified the decedent as Suchir Balaji, 26, of San Francisco. The manner of death has been determined to be suicide,” said a spokesperson in a statement to TechCrunch. “The OCME has notified the next-of-kin and has no further comment or reports for publication at this time.”After nearly four years working at OpenAI, Balaji quit the company when he realized the technology would bring more harm than good to society, he told The New York Times. Balaji’s main concern was the way OpenAI allegedly used copyright data, and he believed its practices were damaging to the internet.“We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news today and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time,” said an OpenAI spokesperson in an email to TechCrunch.Balaji was found dead in his Buchanan Street apartment on November 26, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Police Department tells TechCrunch. Officers and medics were called to his residence in the city’s Lower Haight district to perform a wellness check on the former OpenAI researcher. No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation, according to police.“I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them,” said Balaji in a tweet from October. “I initially didn’t know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies. When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense for a lot of generative AI products, for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they’re trained on.”<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/13/openai-whistleblower-found-dead-in-san-francisco-apartment/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank">https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/13/openai-whistleblower-found-dead-in-san-francisco-apartment/</a>

Chuck DarwinImagine you could choose your citizenship the same way you choose your gym membership. That’s a vision of the not-too-distant future put forward by <a href="https://c.im/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Srinivasan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Srinivasan</a>. Balaji – who is mostly just known by his first name – is a rockstar to the <a href="https://c.im/tags/cryptobros" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#cryptobros</a>. A serial tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist who believes that pretty much everything governments currently do, tech can do better.I watched Balaji outline his idea last autumn, at a vast conference hall on the outskirts of Amsterdam. “We start new companies like Google; we start new communities like Facebook; we start new currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum; ❓can we start new countries?” ❓ he asked, as he ambled on stage, dressed in a slightly baggy grey suit and loose tie. He looked like a middle manager in a corporate accounts department. But Balaji is a former partner at the giant Silicon Valley venture capital firm <a href="https://c.im/tags/Andreessen" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Andreessen</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Horowitz" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Horowitz</a>. He has backers with deep pockets.“Imagine a thousand different startups, each of them replacing a different legacy institution,” Balaji told the audience. “They exist alongside the establishment in parallel, they’re pulling away users, they’re gaining strength, until they become the new thing.”If startups could replace all these different institutions, Balaji reasoned, they could replace countries too. He calls his idea the “<a href="https://c.im/tags/network" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#network</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/state" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#state</a>”: startup nations. Here’s how it would work: communities form – on the internet initially – around a set of shared interests or values. Then they acquire land, becoming physical “countries” with their own laws. These would exist alongside existing nation states, and eventually, replace them altogether.You would choose your nationality like you choose your broadband provider. The network state movement doesn’t just want pliant existing governments so that companies can run their own affairs. It wants to replace governments with companies.<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyl171lyewo" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyl171lyewo</a>

Chuck DarwinThe next morning, wrecked, I put on sweatpants and a hoodie and tried to smuggle myself out of the hotel without having to talk to anyone. I gave my chit to the valet and looked around to find Vance and Yarvin standing there waiting for cars. “How do you guys feel?” Yarvin asked. Vance was wearing a hoodie too and looked like I felt. “I feel horrible,” he said. “Not good.”Yarvin asked what I’d thought of everything. I said it would take a long time for me to figure that out. We all shook hands, and they waved as I got into my car and we all resumed our usual battle stations in the American info-wars. <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kyle" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kyle</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rittenhouse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rittenhouse</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Unabomber" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Unabomber</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kaczynski" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kaczynski</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dasha" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dasha</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Nekrasova" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Nekrasova</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Srinivasan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Srinivasan</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Coinbase" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Coinbase</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Koch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Koch</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Milo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Milo</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yiannopoulis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yiannopoulis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Steve" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Steve</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bannon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NRx" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NRx</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/RAGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#RAGE</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/authoritarianism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#authoritarianism</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/monarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#monarchy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/crypto" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#crypto</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/decentralized" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#decentralized</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/internet" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#internet</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lydia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Lydia</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Laurenson" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Laurenson</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/BDSM" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#BDSM</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mencius" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Mencius</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Moldbug" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Moldbug</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielverse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielverse</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cruz" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Cruz</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hawley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hawley</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rod" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rod</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dreher" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dreher</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Walter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Walter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kirn" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kirn</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/worldview" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#worldview</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/dystopian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#dystopian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/hell" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#hell</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Peter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NatCon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NatCon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielbucks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielbucks</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Blake" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Blake</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Foundation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Foundation</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/New" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#New</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Curtis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Curtis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/incels" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#incels</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hammer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hammer</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Michael" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Michael</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Chris" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Chris</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Arnade" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Arnade</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Sohrab" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Sohrab</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Ahmari" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Ahmari</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Compact" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Compact</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertine" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertine</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/left" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#left</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertarian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertarian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/kook" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#kook</a>

Chuck Darwin“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”“Indeed,” Murphy said. “Among some of my circle, the phrase ‘extra-constitutional’ has come up quite a bit.”I’d asked Vance to tell me, on the record, what he’d like liberal Americans who thought that what he was proposing was a fascist takeover of America to understand.He spoke earnestly. “I think the cultural world you operate in is incredibly biased,” he said —against his movement and “the leaders of it, like me in particular.” He encouraged me to resist this tendency, which he thought was the product of a media machine leading us toward a soulless dystopia that none of us want to live in. “That impulse,” he said, “is fundamentally in service of something that is far worse than anything, in your wildest nightmares, than what you see here.”He gave me an imploring look, as though to suggest that he was more on the side of the kind of people who read Vanity Fair than most of you realize.If what he was doing worked, he said, “it will mean that my son grows up in a world where his masculinity —his support of his family and his community, his love of his community —is more important than whether it works for fucking McKinsey.”At that, we called it, and the crowd of young men who wanted to talk to him immediately descended on the couches. People kept bringing drinks, and there was a lot of shit talk, and it went on late. I remember thinking at one point how strange it was that in our mid-30s Vance and I were significantly older than almost everyone there, all of whom thought they were organizing a struggle to change the course of human history, and all of whom were now going to get sloppy drunk. <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kyle" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kyle</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rittenhouse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rittenhouse</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Unabomber" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Unabomber</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kaczynski" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kaczynski</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dasha" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dasha</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Nekrasova" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Nekrasova</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Srinivasan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Srinivasan</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Coinbase" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Coinbase</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Koch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Koch</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Milo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Milo</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yiannopoulis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yiannopoulis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Steve" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Steve</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bannon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NRx" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NRx</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/RAGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#RAGE</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/authoritarianism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#authoritarianism</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/monarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#monarchy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/crypto" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#crypto</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/decentralized" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#decentralized</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/internet" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#internet</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lydia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Lydia</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Laurenson" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Laurenson</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/BDSM" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#BDSM</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mencius" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Mencius</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Moldbug" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Moldbug</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielverse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielverse</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cruz" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Cruz</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hawley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hawley</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rod" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rod</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dreher" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dreher</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Walter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Walter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kirn" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kirn</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/worldview" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#worldview</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/dystopian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#dystopian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/hell" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#hell</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Peter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a 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class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Chris</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Arnade" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Arnade</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Sohrab" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Sohrab</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Ahmari" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Ahmari</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Compact" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Compact</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertine" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertine</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/left" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#left</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertarian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertarian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/kook" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#kook</a>

Chuck DarwinYarvin and Laurenson bounded out of the crowd as the cheers were still ringing. They were giggling, seeming to have had some wine. “Nixon—Nixon!”Laurenson said, still laughing. I couldn’t tell if she was delighted or horrified.A couple of hours later I found Vance standing up by the bar, surrounded by a circle of young and identical-looking fanboys. I went over. He asked what I’d thought of the speech, and he suggested we find somewhere to talk.He asked me to turn my recorder off so we could speak candidly. I agreed, with regret, because the conversation revealed someone who I think will be hugely influential in our politics in the coming years, even if he loses his Senate primary, as both of us thought was possible.It also revealed someone who is in a dark place, with a view that we are at an ominous turning point in America’s history. He didn’t want to describe this to me on the record. But I can show it anyway, because he already says it publicly, and you can hear it too.That night, I went up to my hotel room and listened to a podcast interview Vance had conducted with Jack Murphy, the big, bearded head of the "Liminal Order" men’s group. Murphy asked how it was that Vance proposed to rip out America’s leadership class.Vance described two possibilities that many on the New Right imagine —that our system will either fall apart naturally, or that a great leader will assume semi-dictatorial powers.“So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said. Murphy chortled knowingly. “So one [option] is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself,” Vance went on. “And so the task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved,” waiting for the “inevitable collapse” of the current order.He said he thought this was pessimistic. “I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said. “And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say —” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order —“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”This is a description, essentially, of a coup. <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kyle" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kyle</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rittenhouse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rittenhouse</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Unabomber" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Unabomber</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kaczynski" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kaczynski</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dasha" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dasha</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Nekrasova" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Nekrasova</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Balaji" class="mention 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rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NRx</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/RAGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#RAGE</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/authoritarianism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#authoritarianism</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/monarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#monarchy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/crypto" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#crypto</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/decentralized" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#decentralized</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/internet" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#internet</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lydia" class="mention 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target="_blank">#Walter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kirn" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kirn</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/worldview" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#worldview</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/dystopian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#dystopian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/hell" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#hell</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Peter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NatCon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NatCon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielbucks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielbucks</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Blake" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Blake</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Foundation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Foundation</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/New" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#New</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Curtis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Curtis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/incels" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#incels</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hammer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hammer</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Michael" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Michael</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Chris" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Chris</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Arnade" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Arnade</a> <a 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Chuck DarwinOn the last afternoon of NatCon, a few hours before he was set to give the keynote address, Vance showed up. He spotted me drinking a beer at the bar and came over to say hello. “I still have no idea what I’m going to say,” he said, though he didn’t seem worried.I wandered down to the ballroom to wait and ended up sitting with the U.S. correspondent for the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. I knew that some of the reporters there might have been under the impression that this was all mostly just tweedy MAGA pageantry. He had a more complex view, having just spoken to Yarvin, and asked me to explain his philosophy. I found myself at a loss. I said that there were these things called the regime and the Cathedral and that Yarvin was “sort of a monarchist.”“A monarchist?”he asked. He seemed taken aback to learn that what this hero figure of the New Right dreamed of was a king.Vance showed up, wearing a suit and bright red tie, looking relaxed for a person who was about to give a speech to hundreds of people who viewed him as possibly a last great hope in saving the American nation from global corporatist subjugation. He’d shot up in the polls and at that moment was second in his primary, helped by regular invitations from Carlson.I asked how he was feeling about the speech. He looked impish. “I think I’ve got a good topic,” he said. “I’m going to talk about college.”What he meant was that he was about to give a genuinely thunderous speech, titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” People immediately pointed out that it was a variation on something that Richard Nixon said to Henry Kissinger on White House tapes back in 1972. Vance denounced elite colleges as enemies of the American people; he has long proposed cutting off their federal funding and seizing their endowments. The speech was later linked in alarmed op-eds to “anti-intellectual” movements that had attacked institutions of learning. But that doesn’t quite reckon with what an apocalyptic message he was offering. Because Vance and this New Right cohort, who are mostly so, so highly educated and well-read that their big problem often seems to be that they’re just too nerdy to be an effective force in mass politics, are not anti-intellectual. Vance is an intellectual himself, even if he’s not currently playing one on TV. But he thinks that our universities are full of people who have a structural, self-serving, and financial interest in coloring American culture as racist and evil. And he is ready to go to extraordinary lengths to fight them. <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kyle" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kyle</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rittenhouse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rittenhouse</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Unabomber" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Unabomber</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kaczynski" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kaczynski</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dasha" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dasha</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Nekrasova" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Nekrasova</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Srinivasan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Srinivasan</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Coinbase" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Coinbase</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Koch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Koch</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Milo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Milo</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yiannopoulis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yiannopoulis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Steve" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Steve</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bannon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NRx" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NRx</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/RAGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#RAGE</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/authoritarianism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#authoritarianism</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/monarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#monarchy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/crypto" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#crypto</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/decentralized" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#decentralized</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/internet" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#internet</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lydia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Lydia</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Laurenson" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Laurenson</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/BDSM" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#BDSM</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mencius" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Mencius</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Moldbug" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Moldbug</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielverse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielverse</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cruz" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Cruz</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hawley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hawley</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rod" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rod</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dreher" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dreher</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Walter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Walter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kirn" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kirn</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/worldview" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#worldview</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/dystopian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#dystopian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/hell" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#hell</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Peter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NatCon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NatCon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielbucks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielbucks</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Blake" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Blake</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Foundation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Foundation</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/New" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#New</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Curtis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Curtis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/incels" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#incels</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hammer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hammer</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Michael" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Michael</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Chris" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Chris</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Arnade" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Arnade</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Sohrab" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Sohrab</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Ahmari" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Ahmari</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Compact" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Compact</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertine" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertine</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/left" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#left</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertarian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertarian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/kook" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#kook</a>

Chuck DarwinWe drove a long way into the desert before we arrived at the campaign meet-and-greet, which was being hosted by a former CIA official in a comfortable retirement community. The crowd of a few dozen was mostly sweater-wearing retirees, immersed in a media culture in which the people who repeated the most incendiary and Trumpist talking points tended to gain attention and political support. This kind of groupthink was not just a phenomenon of the liberal media, and this fact has hampered the campaigns of both Masters and Vance, who are often seen as Trump-aligned culture warriors, and who have had a lot of trouble working their more complicated policy ideas into our fervid political conversation. He talked through his proposal to regulate tech companies as common carriers, like America once regulated phone companies. The crowd seemed interested but hardly electrified. When he took questions at the end, they were mostly the usual ones about the supposedly stolen 2020 election —a view that Masters did not push back on —the border wall, vaccine mandates. One man raised his hand to ask how Masters planned to drain the swamp. He gave me a sly look. “Well, one of my friends has this acronym he calls RAGE,” he said. “Retire All Government Employees.” The crowd liked the sound of this and erupted in a cheer. <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kyle" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kyle</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rittenhouse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rittenhouse</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Unabomber" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Unabomber</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kaczynski" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kaczynski</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dasha" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dasha</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Nekrasova" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Nekrasova</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Srinivasan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Srinivasan</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Coinbase" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Coinbase</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Koch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Koch</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Milo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Milo</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yiannopoulis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yiannopoulis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Steve" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Steve</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bannon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NRx" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NRx</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/RAGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#RAGE</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/authoritarianism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#authoritarianism</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/monarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#monarchy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/crypto" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#crypto</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/decentralized" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#decentralized</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/internet" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#internet</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lydia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Lydia</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Laurenson" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Laurenson</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/BDSM" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#BDSM</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mencius" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Mencius</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Moldbug" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Moldbug</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielverse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielverse</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cruz" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Cruz</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hawley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hawley</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rod" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rod</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dreher" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dreher</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Walter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Walter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kirn" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kirn</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/worldview" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#worldview</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/dystopian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#dystopian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/hell" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#hell</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Peter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NatCon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NatCon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielbucks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielbucks</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Blake" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Blake</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Foundation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Foundation</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/New" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#New</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Curtis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Curtis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/incels" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#incels</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hammer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hammer</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Michael" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Michael</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Chris" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Chris</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Arnade" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Arnade</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Sohrab" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Sohrab</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Ahmari" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Ahmari</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Compact" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Compact</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertine" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertine</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/left" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#left</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertarian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertarian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/kook" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#kook</a>

Chuck DarwinI asked Masters whether he thought the core of his project was a fight against a consumerist techno-dystopia that many on the left have also come to fear. He said yes. I asked why, if this was the case, it almost never came across in his mainstream media appearances. “That’s interesting feedback,” he said. “That it’s not coming through.”“I go on, and it’s the tail end of the B block, and I’ve got two minutes to talk about <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kyle" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kyle</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rittenhouse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rittenhouse</a>,” he’d said earlier, talking about his spots on Fox News. “And it’s like, ‘Well, the left is insane, and this kid shouldn’t have been on trial, and they’re punishing him for being a white guy who defended himself with an AR-15.’ ” Conservative media seems to thrive on culture-war touch points as much as all the rest of it. “I feel like I’m willing to go there,” he said. “But you can’t do that on Laura Ingraham sound bites.”He was a little less rosy about the future with some interviewers than he was with me. “We need someone with their hand on the tiller who understands where we’ve been and where we need to go,” he told the podcaster Alex Kaschuta recently. “Otherwise we will get just totally owned by the progressive left. And the progressive left just remains the enemy. It’s the enemy of true progress. It’s the enemy of everything that is good.”I asked if he could give me a vision of what he thought victory for his side would look like.“It’s just families and meaningful work,” he said, “so that you can raise your kids and worship and pursue your hobbies and figure out what the meaning of it all is.” Pretty much anyone could agree with this. And pretty much anyone could wonder how it is that this sort of thing has come to seem radical, or distant from the lives of many people growing into adulthood today. “It just feels so networked,” he said. “It’s so in-the-matrix.” <a href="https://c.im/tags/Unabomber" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Unabomber</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kaczynski" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kaczynski</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dasha" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dasha</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Nekrasova" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Nekrasova</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Srinivasan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Srinivasan</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Coinbase" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Coinbase</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Koch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Koch</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Milo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Milo</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yiannopoulis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yiannopoulis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Steve" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Steve</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bannon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NRx" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NRx</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/RAGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#RAGE</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/authoritarianism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#authoritarianism</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/monarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#monarchy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/crypto" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#crypto</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/decentralized" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#decentralized</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/internet" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#internet</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lydia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Lydia</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Laurenson" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Laurenson</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/BDSM" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#BDSM</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mencius" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Mencius</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Moldbug" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Moldbug</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielverse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielverse</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cruz" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Cruz</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hawley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hawley</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rod" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rod</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dreher" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dreher</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Walter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Walter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kirn" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kirn</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/worldview" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#worldview</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/dystopian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#dystopian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/hell" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#hell</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Peter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NatCon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NatCon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielbucks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielbucks</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Blake" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Blake</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Foundation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Foundation</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/New" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#New</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Curtis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Curtis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/incels" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#incels</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hammer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hammer</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Michael" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Michael</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Chris" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Chris</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Arnade" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Arnade</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Sohrab" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Sohrab</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Ahmari" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Ahmari</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Compact" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Compact</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertine" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertine</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/left" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#left</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertarian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertarian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/kook" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#kook</a>

Chuck Darwin“ ‘The regime’ sounds really sexy, right?” Masters said to me. “It’s a tangible enemy —if you could just grapple with it in the right way, you can topple it. And I think it’s actually just a lot less sexy and a lot more bureaucratic,” he said. “But I’ve read that stuff, and I see what it means.”I asked him about the term Thielbucks, and how true it was that the Thiel Foundation was funding a network of New Right podcasters and cool-kid cultural figures as a sort of cultural vanguard.“It depends if it’s just dissident-right think-tank stuff,” he told me, “or if anyone actually does anything.”“I don’t know how that became a meme,” he said about Thielbucks. “I think I would know if those kids were getting money.”“We fund some stuff,” he told me. “But we’re not funding an army of meme posters.” He told me that he and Thiel had met with Khachiyan, one of the cohosts of Red Scare. “Which was cool,” he said. “Their podcast is interesting.”I asked if there was a world in which they might get funding from Thiel. “Maybe, yeah,” he said. “We fund some weird stuff with the Thiel Foundation.”We drove together to a campaign event, talking about everything from how technology is reshaping our brains to environmental policy, both of us circling from different political directions to an apocalyptic place. “I do think we’re at a moment of crossroads,” he said. “And if we play it wrong, it’s the Dark Ages.” Masters has publicly said he thinks “everybody should read” the <a href="https://c.im/tags/Unabomber" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Unabomber</a>’s anti-tech manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” which may sound strange for a young tech executive running to serve in the United States Senate. But to Masters, <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kaczynski" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kaczynski</a>’s critique was a useful analysis of how technology shapes our world and how “degrading and debasing” it could be to human lives. <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dasha" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dasha</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Nekrasova" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Nekrasova</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Srinivasan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Srinivasan</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Coinbase" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Coinbase</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Koch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Koch</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Milo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Milo</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yiannopoulis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yiannopoulis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Steve" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Steve</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bannon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NRx" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NRx</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/RAGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#RAGE</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/authoritarianism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#authoritarianism</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/monarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#monarchy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/crypto" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#crypto</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/decentralized" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#decentralized</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/internet" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#internet</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lydia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Lydia</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Laurenson" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Laurenson</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/BDSM" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#BDSM</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mencius" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Mencius</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Moldbug" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Moldbug</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielverse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielverse</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cruz" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Cruz</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hawley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hawley</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rod" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rod</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dreher" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dreher</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Walter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Walter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kirn" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kirn</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/worldview" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#worldview</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/dystopian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#dystopian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/hell" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#hell</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Peter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NatCon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NatCon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielbucks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielbucks</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Blake" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Blake</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Foundation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Foundation</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/New" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#New</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Curtis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Curtis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/incels" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#incels</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hammer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hammer</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Michael" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Michael</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Chris" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Chris</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Arnade" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Arnade</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Sohrab" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Sohrab</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Ahmari" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Ahmari</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Compact" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Compact</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertine" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertine</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/left" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#left</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertarian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertarian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/kook" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#kook</a>

Chuck DarwinA few weeks after NatCon, I drove from California to Tucson to meet Masters, a very tall, very thin, very fit 35-year-old. I wanted to see how all this might translate into an actual election campaign, and I’d been watching a lot of Fox News, including Yarvin’s streaming interview with Carlson in which he gave a swirling depiction of how the Cathedral produced its groupthink. “Why do Yale and Harvard always agree on everything?” he asked. “These organizations are essentially branches of the same thing,” he told a mesmerized Carlson. “You’re like, ‘Where are the wires?’ ” He sketched his vision of (as he calls it) a “constitutional” regime change that would take power back from this oligarchy —so diffuse most people hardly knew it was there. “That’s what makes it so hard to kill,” he said.At a coffee shop near the house he’d bought when he moved back home to Tucson from the Bay Area, Masters and I went through the tenets of his nationalist platform: on-shoring industrial production, slashing legal immigration, regulating big tech companies, and eventually restructuring the economy so that one salary would be enough to raise a family on. I mentioned Yarvin and his line of arguing that America’s system had become so sclerotic that it was hopeless to imagine making big systemic changes like these. “In a system where state capacity is very low…” I started the question.“Alas,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.“Do we need a crisis to get there?” I asked him.“Maybe, maybe, maybe,” he said. It wasn’t where his immediate thinking was. “I’ll have the proverbial machete,” he said. “But yeah, it may take some kind of crisis to get us there.”He paused. “But we’re already sort of in one, right?”Masters often says he’s not as black-pilled and pessimistic as some in the New Right spheres. He seems, unlike many New Righters, to still earnestly believe in the power of electoral politics. But he does think that the culturally liberal and free-market ideology that has guided America’s politics in recent years is a hopeless dead end. “A country is not just an economy,” Masters told the dissident-right outlet IM—1776 recently. “You also need a conception of yourself as a nation, as a people, and as a culture. And that’s what America is increasingly lacking today.”“It’s true that I’m incredibly hopeful,” he said to me. “I think it’s really bleak, I think the default is continued stagnation, and maybe you get the crisis in 5 years or maybe it’s 30 years from now.”He told me that he didn’t like to use terms like the Cathedral and used “the regime” less often than Vance, although I later noticed that he used this latter phrase frequently with interviewers on the dissident right. <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dasha" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dasha</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Nekrasova" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Nekrasova</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Srinivasan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Srinivasan</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Coinbase" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Coinbase</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Koch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Koch</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Milo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Milo</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yiannopoulis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yiannopoulis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Steve" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Steve</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bannon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NRx" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NRx</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/RAGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#RAGE</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/authoritarianism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#authoritarianism</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/monarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#monarchy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/crypto" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#crypto</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/decentralized" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#decentralized</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/internet" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#internet</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lydia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Lydia</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Laurenson" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Laurenson</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/BDSM" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#BDSM</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mencius" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Mencius</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Moldbug" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Moldbug</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielverse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielverse</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cruz" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Cruz</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hawley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hawley</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rod" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rod</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dreher" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dreher</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Walter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Walter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kirn" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kirn</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/worldview" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#worldview</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/dystopian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#dystopian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/hell" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#hell</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Peter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NatCon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NatCon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielbucks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielbucks</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Blake" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Blake</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Foundation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Foundation</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/New" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#New</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Curtis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Curtis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/incels" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#incels</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hammer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hammer</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Michael" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Michael</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Chris" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Chris</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Arnade" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Arnade</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Sohrab" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Sohrab</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Ahmari" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Ahmari</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Compact" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Compact</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertine" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertine</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/left" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#left</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertarian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertarian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/kook" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#kook</a>

Chuck DarwinLike Levy, Milius is in the funny position of being at the intersection of many of these crosscurrents, having worked in mainstream politics but appearing on so-called dissident podcasts and being on the periphery of a cultural scene where right-wing politics have taken on a sheen approximating cool.She said she was too “black-pilled” —a very online term used to describe people who think that our world is so messed up that nothing can save it now —to think much about what it would look like for her side to win. “I could fucking trip over the curb,” Milius said, “and that’s going to be considered white supremacism. Like, there’s nothing you can do. What the fuck isn’t white supremacism?”“They’re going to come for everything,” she said. “And I think it’s sinister —not that I think that people who want to pay attention to race issues are sinister. But I think that the globalization movement is using these divisive arguments in order to make people think that it’s a good thing.”This is the Cathedral at work. <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dasha" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dasha</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Nekrasova" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Nekrasova</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Srinivasan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Srinivasan</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Coinbase" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Coinbase</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Koch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Koch</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Milo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Milo</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yiannopoulis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yiannopoulis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Steve" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Steve</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bannon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NRx" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NRx</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/RAGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#RAGE</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/authoritarianism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#authoritarianism</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/monarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#monarchy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/crypto" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#crypto</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/decentralized" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#decentralized</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/internet" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#internet</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lydia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Lydia</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Laurenson" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Laurenson</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/BDSM" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#BDSM</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mencius" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Mencius</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Moldbug" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Moldbug</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielverse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielverse</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cruz" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Cruz</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hawley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hawley</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rod" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rod</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dreher" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dreher</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Walter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Walter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kirn" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kirn</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/worldview" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#worldview</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/dystopian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#dystopian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/hell" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#hell</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Peter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NatCon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NatCon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielbucks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielbucks</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Blake" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Blake</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Foundation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Foundation</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/New" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#New</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Curtis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Curtis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/incels" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#incels</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hammer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hammer</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Michael" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Michael</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Chris" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Chris</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Arnade" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Arnade</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Sohrab" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Sohrab</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Ahmari" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Ahmari</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Compact" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Compact</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertine" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertine</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/left" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#left</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertarian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertarian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/kook" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#kook</a>

Chuck DarwinYarvin has mused that the liberal regime will begin to fall when the “cool kids” start to abandon its values and worldview. There are signs that this may be happening, though not all the so-called cool kids involved in this vibe shift would want to be colored as the vanguard in a world historical rebellion against the global order.“I’m not, like, into politics,” the writer Honor Levy, a Catholic convert and Bennington grad, told me when I called her. “I just want to have a family someday.”Levy, who was a leftist recently enough that she cried when it became clear that Bernie Sanders wouldn’t be the Democratic presidential nominee, is friendly with Yarvin and has had him on the podcast she cohosts, "Wet Brain"—“Yeah, the Cathedral and blah blah,” she said when we got to talking about political media. But she said she’d never even heard of J.D. Vance or Blake Masters.Levy is an It girl in a downtown Manhattan scene —The New Yorker has published her fiction; she is named in a New York Times story that tries to describe that scene —where right-wing politics have become an aesthetic pose that mingles strangely with an earnest search for moral grounding. “Until like a year and a half ago I didn’t believe good and evil existed,” she told me, later adding: “But I’m not in a state of grace, I shouldn’t be talking.” I asked if she would take money from Thiel and she cheerily said, “Of course!” She also described her cohort as a bunch of “libertines,” and on her podcast you can get a window into a world of people who enjoy a mind-bendingly ironic thrill by tut-tutting each other for missing church or having premarital sex. “Most of the girls downtown are normal, but they’ll wear a Trump hat as an accessory,” she said. The ones deep into the online scene, she said, “want to be like Leni Riefenstahl – Edie Sedgwick.” <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dasha" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dasha</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Nekrasova" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Nekrasova</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Srinivasan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Srinivasan</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Coinbase" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Coinbase</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Koch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Koch</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Milo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Milo</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yiannopoulis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yiannopoulis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Steve" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Steve</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bannon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NRx" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NRx</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/RAGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#RAGE</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/authoritarianism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#authoritarianism</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/monarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#monarchy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/crypto" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#crypto</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/decentralized" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#decentralized</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/internet" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#internet</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lydia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Lydia</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Laurenson" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Laurenson</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/BDSM" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#BDSM</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mencius" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Mencius</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Moldbug" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Moldbug</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielverse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielverse</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cruz" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Cruz</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hawley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hawley</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rod" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rod</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dreher" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dreher</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Walter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Walter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kirn" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kirn</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/worldview" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#worldview</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/dystopian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#dystopian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/hell" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#hell</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Peter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NatCon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NatCon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielbucks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielbucks</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Blake" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Blake</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Foundation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Foundation</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/New" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#New</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Curtis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Curtis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/incels" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#incels</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hammer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hammer</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Michael" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Michael</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Chris" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Chris</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Arnade" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Arnade</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Sohrab" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Sohrab</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Ahmari" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Ahmari</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Compact" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Compact</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertine" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertine</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/left" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#left</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertarian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertarian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/kook" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#kook</a>

Chuck DarwinThe Red Scare hosts both started out as diffident socialists, back when it was still possible to think that socialism represented an edgy political stance, in the little interlocking spheres of America’s media and political set. One of them, Nekrasova, actually became known in media circles for a clip that went megaviral in 2018, when she cut dead a reporter for Alex Jones’s Infowars trying to ambush Bernie Sanders supporters at a festival in Austin. “I just want people to have health care, honey,” she deadpanned. “You people have, like, worms in your brains. Honestly.”Fast-forward to November 2021, and Nekrasova and her cohost Anna Khachiyan were posting photos of themselves with Jones’s arms wrapped around them under an evening Texas sun. Nekrasova now has a role on HBO’s Succession, playing a P.R. rep working with Kendall Roy; the show itself set “right-wing Twitter” —a sphere heavily populated by 20-somethings who work in tech or politics and seem to disproportionately live in D.C. and Miami —alight with delight when an episode in the latest season included a litany of key New Right phrases such as “integralist” and “Medicare for all, abortions for none.”The Red Scare hosts are only the best-known representatives of a fashionable dissident-y subculture, centered in but not exclusive to downtown Manhattan. “Everyone dresses like a duck hunter now,” a bewildered friend of mine texted recently. People use the derisive term “bugman” to describe liberal men who lack tangible life skills like fixing trucks or growing food —guys who could end up spending their lives behind the bug-eyed screen of a V.R. headset. Women wear clothes from Brandy Melville, which you can hear described ironically as fashionwear for girls with “fascist leanings,” and which named one of its lines after John Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. People are converting to Catholicism. “It’s a good thing I have a girlfriend,” my friend texted. “Because casual sex is out.” <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dasha" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dasha</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Nekrasova" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Nekrasova</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Srinivasan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Srinivasan</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Coinbase" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Coinbase</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Koch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Koch</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Milo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Milo</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yiannopoulis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yiannopoulis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Steve" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Steve</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bannon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NRx" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NRx</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/RAGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#RAGE</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/authoritarianism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#authoritarianism</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/monarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#monarchy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/crypto" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#crypto</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/decentralized" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#decentralized</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/internet" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#internet</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lydia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Lydia</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Laurenson" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Laurenson</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/BDSM" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#BDSM</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mencius" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Mencius</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Moldbug" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Moldbug</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielverse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielverse</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cruz" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Cruz</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hawley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hawley</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rod" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rod</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dreher" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dreher</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Walter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Walter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kirn" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kirn</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/worldview" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#worldview</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/dystopian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#dystopian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/hell" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#hell</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Peter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NatCon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NatCon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielbucks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielbucks</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Blake" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Blake</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Foundation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Foundation</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/New" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#New</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Curtis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Curtis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/incels" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#incels</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hammer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hammer</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Michael" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Michael</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Chris" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Chris</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Arnade" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Arnade</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Sohrab" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Sohrab</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Ahmari" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Ahmari</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Compact" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Compact</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertine" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertine</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/left" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#left</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertarian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertarian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/kook" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#kook</a>

Chuck DarwinMilius was a sardonic and constant presence, easy to find smoking as Yarvin stood and talked at warp speed in his unmistakable voice. She was by far the most strikingly dressed person there, favoring Gucci and Ralph Lauren and lots of gold jewelry and big sunglasses. She is the daughter of the conservative director John Milius, who cowrote Apocalypse Now and directed Red Dawn. She grew up in Los Angeles, and it turned out that we’d both gone to the same tiny liberal arts college in Manhattan, so, like pretty much all the people there, she was used to living in social spaces where conservative views were considered strange if not downright evil. She thought something had radically changed since 2015, after she went to film school at USC and started working in Hollywood, before she suddenly dropped everything to work for Trump’s campaign in Nevada, eventually landing a job in his State Department.“What this is,” she said, “is a new thought movement. So it’s very hard to put your finger on and articulate what it is outside of Trumpism. Because it really is separate from the man himself, it has nothing to do with that.”She argued that the New Right, or whatever you wanted to call it, was, paradoxically, much less authoritarian than the ideology that now presented itself as mainstream. “I get the feeling, and I could be wrong,” she said, “that the right actually at this point is like almost in this live-and-let-live place where the left used to be at.” What she meant specifically: “The idea that you can’t raise your kids in a traditional, somewhat religious household without having them educated at school that their parents are Nazis.” This apparent laissez-faire obscures somewhat the intense focus that some people in this world have on trans issues —or what they might say is the media’s intense focus on trans issues, one of a suite of “mimetic viruses,” as Kaschuta, the podcaster, put it, that spread a highly individualistic liberal culture that is destructive to traditional ways of life. But the laissez-faire has helped win unlikely converts. Milius brought up "Red Scare", a podcast that has become the premier example of this attraction —she’d actually cast one of the hosts, <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dasha" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dasha</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Nekrasova" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Nekrasova</a>, in the film she made as her senior thesis in directing school at USC. <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Srinivasan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Srinivasan</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Coinbase" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Coinbase</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Koch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Koch</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Milo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Milo</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yiannopoulis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yiannopoulis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Steve" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Steve</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bannon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NRx" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NRx</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/RAGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#RAGE</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/authoritarianism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#authoritarianism</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/monarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#monarchy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/crypto" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#crypto</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/decentralized" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#decentralized</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/internet" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#internet</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lydia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Lydia</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Laurenson" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Laurenson</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/BDSM" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#BDSM</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mencius" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Mencius</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Moldbug" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Moldbug</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielverse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielverse</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cruz" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Cruz</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hawley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hawley</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rod" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rod</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dreher" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dreher</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Walter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Walter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kirn" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kirn</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/worldview" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#worldview</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/dystopian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#dystopian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/hell" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#hell</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Peter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NatCon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NatCon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielbucks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielbucks</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Blake" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Blake</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Foundation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Foundation</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/New" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#New</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Curtis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Curtis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/incels" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#incels</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hammer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hammer</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Michael" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Michael</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Chris" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Chris</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Arnade" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Arnade</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Sohrab" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Sohrab</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Ahmari" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Ahmari</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Compact" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Compact</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertine" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertine</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/left" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#left</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertarian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertarian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/kook" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#kook</a>

Chuck DarwinYarvin had given people a way to articulate a notion that somehow felt subversive to say out loud in America —that history was headed in the wrong direction. “Somebody said something earlier that captured it for me,” Laurenson said, just before they had to leave to go to a slightly hush-hush private dinner with Vance and a few others. “They said, ‘You can be here and know you’re not alone.’ ”People at the conference seemed excited about being in a place where they weren’t alone. I skipped most of the talks —which ranged from sessions about confronting the threat of China to the liberal influence on pop culture to “Worker Power.” Hawley gave a keynote on the “assault on the masculine virtues,” and Cruz offered up a traditional stump speech, evoking Reagan and saying he thought conservatives would soon prevail at the ballot box. “I’m pretty sure a lot of the 20-somethings rolled their eyes at that,” Yarvin said to me afterward with a smirk. The 20-somethings had a bigger vision.Up by the bar every night, hordes of young men, mostly, would descend to drink and bear-hug and spot favorite podcasters and writers. You could see <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dave" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dave</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rubin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rubin</a>, and <a href="https://c.im/tags/Jack" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Jack</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Murphy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Murphy</a>, who hosts a popular New Right–ish YouTube channel and is trying to build a fraternal group of men who believe in “positive masculinity” that he calls the "Liminal Order. "Pretty much everyone had the same trimmed beard and haircut —sides buzzed short, the top longer and combed with a bit of gel to one side.I didn’t see a single Black person under the age of 50, though there were attendees of South Asian and Middle Eastern descent. In March, the journalist <a href="https://c.im/tags/Jeff" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Jeff</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Sharlet" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Sharlet</a> (a Vanity Fair contributing editor who covers the American right) tweeted that the 🔸“intellectual New Right is a white supremacist project designed to cultivate non-white support,” 🔸and he linked it to resurgent nationalist and authoritarian politics around the world: 🔸“It’s part of a global fascist movement not limited to the anti-blackness of the U.S. & Europe.” 🔸Yet♦️ many on the New Right seem increasingly unfazed by accusations that they’re white nationalists or racists. ♦️Masters in particular seems willing to goad commentators, believing that the ensuing arguments will redound to his political advantage: “Good luck [hitting] me with that,” Masters told the podcaster Alex Kaschuta recently, 🔹arguing that accusations of racism had become a political bludgeon used to keep conservative ideas outside the political mainstream. 🔹“Good luck criticizing me for saying critical race theory is anti-white.” But for all the chatter of looming dystopia, no one I spoke to raised one of the most dystopian aspects of American life: our vast apparatus of prisons and policing. Most people seemed more caught up in fighting what they perceived as the cant and groupthink among other members of the political media class, or the hypocrisy of rich white liberals who put up Black Lives Matter signs in front of multimillion-dollar homes, than they were with the raw experience that has given shape to America’s current racial politics. <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Srinivasan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Srinivasan</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Coinbase" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Coinbase</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Koch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Koch</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Milo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Milo</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yiannopoulis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yiannopoulis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Steve" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Steve</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bannon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NRx" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NRx</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/RAGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#RAGE</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/authoritarianism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#authoritarianism</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/monarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#monarchy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/crypto" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#crypto</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/decentralized" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#decentralized</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/internet" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#internet</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lydia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Lydia</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Laurenson" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Laurenson</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/BDSM" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#BDSM</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mencius" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Mencius</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Moldbug" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Moldbug</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielverse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielverse</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cruz" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Cruz</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hawley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hawley</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rod" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rod</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dreher" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dreher</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Walter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Walter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kirn" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kirn</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/worldview" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#worldview</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/dystopian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#dystopian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/hell" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#hell</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Peter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NatCon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NatCon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielbucks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielbucks</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Blake" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Blake</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Foundation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Foundation</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/New" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#New</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Curtis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Curtis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/incels" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#incels</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hammer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hammer</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Michael" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Michael</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Chris" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Chris</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Arnade" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Arnade</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Sohrab" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Sohrab</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Ahmari" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Ahmari</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Compact" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Compact</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertine" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertine</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/left" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#left</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertarian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertarian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/kook" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#kook</a>

Chuck DarwinBy the time TechCrunch publicized Yarvin’s identity, in 2013, he had become influential in a small circle of the disaffected elite. In 2014, The Baffler published a lengthy look at his influence, titled “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich.” The piece warned that Yarvin’s ideas were spreading among prominent figures like <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> and <a href="https://c.im/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Srinivasan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Srinivasan</a>, formerly the CTO of <a href="https://c.im/tags/Coinbase" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Coinbase</a>, and that it was possible for an intellectual fringe to “seize key positions of authority and power” and “eventually bring large numbers of people around,” just as the <a href="https://c.im/tags/Koch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Koch</a> brothers once had with their pro-business libertarianism, a position that Thiel was quickly moving away from.In 2017, BuzzFeed News published an email exchange between Yarvin and <a href="https://c.im/tags/Milo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Milo</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yiannopoulis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yiannopoulis</a> in which Yarvin said that he’d watched the 2016 election returns with Thiel. “He’s fully enlightened,” Yarvin wrote. “Just plays it very carefully.” Masters soon had an office in Trump Tower. He and Thiel worked, generally without success, to install figures like Srinivasan, whom they proposed to head the FDA, and who himself often talked about the “paper belt,” in an echo of Yarvin’s Cathedral concept, and made common cause with figures like <a href="https://c.im/tags/Steve" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Steve</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bannon</a>, who wanted to pick apart the administrative state, an idea that at least had a hint of Yarvin’s RAGE proposal. Yarvin eventually stopped working as a programmer and left the Bay Area, moving with his wife and two children to Nevada. His wife died in April 2021, and he seems to have been devastated, publishing searching poems about her. But last September, a month before we spoke, he posted a dating call, inviting women who were “reasonably pretty and pretty smart,” as he put it, and “have read my work and like it,” and who thought that “the purpose of dating is to get married and have kids,” to email him so they could set up a Zoom date.“His writing doesn’t really represent who he is,” Laurenson told me. “So I answered this email and I was just like, ‘Hi, I’m a liberal, but I have a high IQ. And I want kids, and I’m actually just really curious to talk to you.’ ” The two are now engaged.Laurenson told me she’d had a gradual awakening that accelerated during the upheavals of the early pandemic and the protests of the summer of 2020. “I started really getting drawn to <a href="https://c.im/tags/NRx" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NRx</a> ideas,” she said, using a common online abbreviation for the neo-reactionary fringe, “because I was tracking the riots,” by which she meant the violence that erupted amid some of the Black Lives Matter protests.“I have a background in social justice,” she said. But she was “horrified” by “how the mainstream media covered the riots.… It was just such a violation of all of my values.”She’d had a strange realization after she and Yarvin started dating, discovering that some of her friends had been reading him for years. “I found out that all these people had been reading NRx stuff just like me. They just never told anyone about it,” she said. “It has been very striking to me,” she said, “how cool this world is becoming.” <a href="https://c.im/tags/RAGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#RAGE</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/authoritarianism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#authoritarianism</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/monarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#monarchy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/crypto" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#crypto</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/decentralized" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#decentralized</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/internet" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#internet</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lydia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Lydia</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Laurenson" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Laurenson</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/BDSM" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#BDSM</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mencius" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Mencius</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Moldbug" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Moldbug</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielverse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielverse</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cruz" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Cruz</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hawley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hawley</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rod" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rod</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dreher" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Dreher</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Walter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Walter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kirn" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Kirn</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/worldview" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#worldview</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/dystopian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#dystopian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/hell" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#hell</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Peter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NatCon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NatCon</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thielbucks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thielbucks</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Blake" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Blake</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Masters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Masters</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Foundation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Foundation</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/New" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#New</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Curtis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Curtis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/incels" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#incels</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Josh" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Josh</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hammer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hammer</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Michael" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Michael</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Anton</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Chris" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Chris</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Arnade" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Arnade</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Sohrab" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Sohrab</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Ahmari" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Ahmari</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Compact" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Compact</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertine" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertine</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/left" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#left</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/libertarian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#libertarian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/right" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#right</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/kook" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#kook</a>

Chuck DarwinTo fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to <a href="https://c.im/tags/Balaji" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Balaji</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Srinivasan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Srinivasan</a>. Before you do, steel yourself for what’s to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balaji’s 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories. I mentioned Balaji’s ideas in two previous stories about Network State–related efforts in California —a proposed tech colony called California Forever —and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco’s government.Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless. Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference. <a href="https://c.im/tags/Garry" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Garry</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Tan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Tan</a> —the current Y Combinator CEO who’s attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Francisco —participated in an interview with Balaji and cast the effort as part of the Network State movement. Tan, who made headlines in January after tweeting “die slow motherfuckers” at local progressive politicians, frames his campaign as an experiment in “moderate” politicsBut in a podcast interview one month before the conference, Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision.What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over.“Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What does that mean? That’s, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman’s son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.”<a href="https://c.im/tags/NetworkState" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NetworkState</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/grayshirts" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#grayshirts</a> <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank">https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat</a>

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