Back in the Obama years, says Ava Kofman in The New Yorker, a little-known blogger calling himself Mencius Moldbug began making waves in Silicon Valley. Egalitarianism, Moldbug argued, had caused most of the world’s ills. What was needed was “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law”, and the appointment of a CEO-in-chief to transform the government into an “ultra-profitable corporation”. Moldbug acknowledged the risks. “Clearly, if he or she turns out to be Hitler or Stalin,” he wrote, “we have just recreated Nazism or Stalinism.” But he felt that any system which sought legitimacy from the people was doomed to instability. Critics called him a techno-fascist. “He preferred to call himself a royalist.”

Moldbug turned out to be a 40-year-old tech entrepreneur living in San Francisco called Curtis Yarvin. He soon became friends with Silicon Valley titans such as Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, who unsurprisingly “shared his view that the world would be better off if they were in charge”. JD Vance, who worked at Thiel’s VC fund, is another fan: at an inauguration party, he amiably greeted Yarvin with the words, “You reactionary fascist!” And the Trump administration has acted on a lot of Yarvin’s proposals: tearing apart the administrative state, which he calls “the Cathedral”; discontinuing foreign aid; attacking Harvard. Yarvin’s big concern is that this government overhaul isn’t going far enough, dismissing it as a “vibes coup”. It’s typical of a man who has never lacked ambition. “The other day I was tinkering around in my garage,” he wrote in the first post on his blog in the early 2000s, “and I decided to build a new ideology.”

🚴🪖 Yarvin was a child prodigy, graduating from Brown by age 18 before starting a PhD course at the University of California, Berkeley. His peers remember him for his intellectual peacocking online, and for wearing a bike helmet to lessons. Classmates called him “helmet-head”.

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