why i hate curtis yarvin.
he BRICed up.
Recently I was invited to an Urbit meetup. There, I was told that I am “the most creative right-wing author” of 2026, and similar to Curtis Yarvin.1 Hopefully, if you take the time to read this 10 minute article, you will be disabused of this very silly notion.
For those of you with ADHD who can’t read for more than 30 seconds, here are six quick differences between us:
Yarvin hates NATO. (I love NATO.)
Yarvin hates Lincoln. (I love Honest Abe.)
Yarvin is a geopolitical “realist.”2
— (I am of the internationalist-idealist school of Zbigniew Brzezinski.)
Yarvin supported lockdowns, then claimed that COVID demonstrated the unique malevolence and incompetence of liberalism.
— (I never supported lockdowns, and don’t think Russia, China, or the Gulf did any better.)
Yarvin claims that “wokeness” is the greatest threat to civilization.
— (I see mismanagement in Russia, China, and the Gulf States as worse.)3
Yarvin wants to eliminate the “word-priest idealogue” in favor of rule by engineers and technocrats.
— (I think that’s retarded.)
Yarvin’s PROPAGANDA
Yarvin is a storyteller, a networker, a schmoozer: entertaining billionaires, throwing parties, and forming patronage networks. He is sociable, likable, and personally generous. But his “ideology” is a hodgepodge of misinformation, conspiracies, hyperbole, and resentment. It’s cynical, obtuse kvetching.4 Maybe it was entertaining ten years ago, but after hearing the same story about Queen Victoria and the Waffen-SS for the 100th time, his spiels have become profoundly boring.
Yarvin is Tucker Carlson for nerds.5 He nitpicks, spits on, denigrates, and deconstructs every aspect of America: our Protestantism, our Founding Fathers, our war to preserve the Union, and even our war against the Nazis. He is an effective Duginist, an agent of demoralization. He undermines the Deep State, sows distrust in institutions, and pushes resentment toward our elite. The end result, should he succeed, will be a Soviet-style collapse of the American Empire.
Here are nine examples of Yarvin’s propaganda:
TAXES: America practices “race communism,” where whites are taxed to death.
INDUSTRY: Unlike “real economies” with industrial production, the American service economy is fake, composed of OnlyFans scams, porn, and Netflix.
ORDER: The subway is filled with hostile, breakdancing schizophrenics.
CRIME: Crime is a race war against white Americans.
IDEOLOGY: Colleges are fanatically liberal, and fanatics build death camps.6
IMMIGRATION: Mass immigration will lead to genocide (involving death camps).
DEI: Race communism will cause bridges to collapse and planes to crash.
UKRAINE: Liberals risk nuclear war through incompetence and hyper-idealism.
GAZA: Liberal tears are “pathologically altruistic” and anti-white.
My counter-points are as follows:
TAXES: America’s prosperity is impressive given its size, its relatively high fertility for a developed country, its racial diversity, and its growth rate. If you control for race, white Americans are richer than any other group on planet Earth, and they continue to get richer. If you’re worried about government spending, focus on Boomers (Social Security and Medicare), not the small percentage that goes toward housing or food stamps.
INDUSTRY: Despite Yarvin’s assertions about “Russia’s real economy vs NATO’s fake economy,” Russia is not winning the war in Ukraine. Unless you plan to fight China over Taiwan, it is not desirable to decouple industrially from China. NATO still has the highest quality of technical production in the world, between jets, semiconductors, and AI data centers.
ORDER: In San Francisco, sanitation has improved with the implementation of a stricter gate system. This did not require the destruction of democracy.
CRIME: Yarvin implies that blacks are launching raids into wealthy suburban neighborhoods, but even interracial crime is intra-communal, not inter-communal. By the most recent FBI estimate, 533 whites are killed by blacks each year. Most murders result from disputes between friends, neighbors, coworkers, lovers, and family members. These whites are disproportionately married to, dating, friends with, or have children with blacks.7 This doesn’t ever justify murder, but it does cast doubt on the “race war” and “white genocide” narrative that Yarvin is peddling.
IDEOLOGY: Equating American liberalism in 2026 with the French Revolution or Pol Pot is hysterical.
IMMIGRATION: Hawaii, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas are minority white. No indication of race war.
DEI: If your concern is over the quality of labor, the main problems are visa restrictions and Boomerism8 — not “race communism.”
UKRAINE: Ukraine neuters Russian territorial ambitions and provides a pool of cheap labor. Ukrainian drone warfare has provided Europe with invaluable field data.9
GAZA: The Israeli state has been captured by ethno-narcissistic right-wing populists, who embrace rhetoric about starving civilians, and cutting off water and power. Even if Israel has not yet made good on this rhetoric, concern over Gaza is justified.
Yarvinism as Unfalsifiable Dogma
Yarvin’s history is mystical. He scapegoats Calvinist liberalism for all the problems of the modern day, ranging from race communism to transgenderism. Yet empirically, Calvinist and liberal Europe, stretching from Scotland to Switzerland (including its descendent10 in America), has produced the most productive cultural sphere in world history. The undeniable superiority of Protestant European culture has only two explanations:
Protestantism helped accelerate modernization by empowering secular governments, increasing mass literacy, and liberalizing laws against “usury” and allodial property.
Protestantism didn’t help, but it didn’t hurt much either.
According to Yarvin, underneath this illusory prosperity and dynamism, Protestantism has been breeding rot and decay, which will soon become apparent. (after 500 years, or so…)
When Protestantism took hold in North Europe, it appears to have ushered in an age of innovation — but Yarvin tells us this secretly sowed the seeds for civilizational collapse.11
When the American Revolutionaries rebelled against the king, Yarvin claims this was a mistake — despite going on to conquer the continent.12
Yarvin claims that Lincoln destroyed everything good about the early Republic. But the five decades following Lincoln were America’s best by any metric — it was a time of incredible expansion and progress.
Yarvinism ignores proximate empirical results and clings to a multi-century, quasi-conspiratorial13 ideological genealogy.14 He ignores every advance in technology, lifespan, or wealth correlated with the advance of “leftism” and proposes that a Catholic Monarch would have magically made everything even better.
But we have examples of countries, like Spain or Sicily, where Catholic monarchy persisted much longer, and they do not seem to have fared better. Yarvinism is an unfalsifiable dogma, but without the attractive and comforting substance of real religion. It is empty and hollow, the sneering, snide sarcasm of an arrogant and pompous intellect, divorced from reality.15
CONCLUSION
There are areas where I would agree with Hitler, Stalin, and Gandhi, so I’m bound to agree with Yarvin in some areas as well. Ironically, I agree with Yarvin on his most controversial descriptive premises:
Calvinism is deeply leftist;
The Founding American mythos is deeply leftist;
Classical Liberalism is deeply leftist.
Where I disagree is the part where he says, “and that’s a bad thing!” Prescriptively, we are opposites.
Greatness is not measured by the quantity of bubblegum we scrape from the sidewalk. The destiny of America is, together with a united Europe, to bring about globalism, spreading the English language, Anglo-Saxon law, fashion, political philosophy, music, and culture, transforming the genetic foundations of our species.16
NATO is a monumental, world-historical achievement.17 By contrast, Yarvin’s neurotic obsession with petty crime and subway sanitation reflect a janitorial, hall-monitor mindset. Yarvinism has the flawless skin of a Botox treatment, and the soul of a North Korean shopping mall.
Yarvin, like Nick Fuentes, thrives in ambiguity, and blathers on endlessly, so there’s plenty of material where he contradicts himself and covers all sides of an issue for maximum appeal. Like a slippery lizard-person, he shapeshifts, standing for nothing but dissident.18
I argued with the defense contractor over the question of idealism. What exactly is idealism? What does it mean to be an idealist? He gave me his vision:
Imagine space colonization, in which trillions of humans live across the solar system. With trillions of humans living a middle-class lifestyle, we will have a lot of smart people doing cool things.
This inability to understand the meaning of idealism is not a problem of intelligence — it’s an unwillingness to think outside of materialism.
(like David Sacks, John Mearsheimer, and Jeffrey Sachs.)
After controlling for IQ, they are grossly incompetent. Russia is BTFOed by Ukraine; China is poorer than its East Asian neighbors; Gulf States dump billions into fake luxury projects like “the Line” and cannot hold their own against Iran.
Yarvin claims to hate the American mythos, but loves “the people.” I have the opposite opinion. If America’s pure founding stock was reduced to 3% of the population, with the other 97% was replaced with immigrants, I would still be loyal to the American ideal.
Yarvin’s “people” is meaningless, since he eschews both ethnonationalism and the American mythos. Yarvin isn’t an Anglo-Saxon Protestant; he’s not a white nationalist. “The People” is a platitude filling the emptiness of his ideology.
Yarvin promotes prophecies of white genocide, claims Eisenhower’s “death camps” were a Shoah, and praises the Waffen-SS. But if you push Yarvin on any of these issues, he will relent. He isn’t really a scary white nationalist — some of his best friends are Indian! He doesn’t really admire the SS — he’s Jewish! He’s everything and nothing.
Yarvin is a higher-brow version of Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Tucker Carlson, and Thomas Massie. He’s just asking questions. He doesn’t stand for anything, he only stands against the current order.
Yarvin gripes that we don’t really have freedom of speech. How could we, when 99% of academics are liberal Democrats? This is because the left is exclusive, while the right is inclusive. You’ve seen the graph:
Leftism is a cohesive and dogmatic set of institutions centered on academia, while rightism is a hodgepodge of dissident interests which are excluded from academia.
Among English faculty, the ratio of Democratic to Republican donors is 244:1. Among the more conservative field of Economics, it is 17:1. In percentage terms, this means that Democrats make up between 95% to 99.59% of academia.
If academics are like priests, and liberalism is like a religion, you might come to the conclusion that liberalism is a fairly normal religion. For example, shouldn’t we expect something like 99.59% of Catholic priests to believe in the Catholic church? Ryan Burge has investigated this question, and found that our Christian clergy are much less certain about Christian dogma than our academics are about liberalism.
Perhaps the most important test of an ideological-religion’s strength is this question: Do you believe that all people would be better off if they believed what you believed? Liberals firmly believe so; Catholic clergy can’t even reach a 2/3rds majority.
According to Yarvin, this level of ideological conformity will inevitably lead to death camps, because that’s what fanatics do: they build death camps. The only way to prevent this inevitability is to destroy these ideological institutions from the top-down, by introducing a monarchy, and/or a strict meritocracy.
This means flooding Harvard with so many Indians and Chinese that wokism drowns. Indians and Chinese have very high IQs, and unlike white liberals, they don’t care about BLM or trans pronouns or silly things like Gaza.
Yarvin proposes the destruction of idealism and replacing it with ruthless pragmatism. The trains will run on time, the subway will be clean and safe, and homelessness will be abolished. Idealism is just a wizard-word of the parasitic bureaucracy to distract from a more efficient form of economization. Idealism is not only impossible, but morally abhorrent.
In his debate with Hanania in 2024, Yarvin suggested we make Tim Cook CEO of America. Yarvin’s “monarch” is a convenient filler. He has no backstory; no tribe; no pedigree. He’s a gay iPhone CEO — what more do you need?
But “Tim Cook is CEO of America” is not an ideal. “More efficiency, less bureaucracy” is not an ideal. A state without idealism is soulless. A purely economic state is a mercenary state. Men do not sacrifice or die for “practical reality.” In crisis, ideals are all that remain.
This is a vapid and meaningless program of Vaishya tyranny. In the Indo-European tripartite class system, there are Kshatriya, the statesmen who conduct war, the Brahmin, the priests who administer religious dogma and ritual, and the Vaishya, those who control the economy.
It is easier to transform from one idealism to another than to completely crush all idealism under the tyranny of pragmatism, and then to resurrect it from the ashes. Once the idealism of a state is lost, corruption is the rule; every man is for himself. This is why the Yarvinite crowd are so interested in crypto. They like the idea of a society which does not need any trust or idealism — one that can be run on pure mathematical certainty. Yarvin’s ideology flattens everything into a formula. Trillions of humans living in the suburbs, but on MARS!
My idealism does not mean irrationalism. I endorse “common sense” reforms, such as the gutting of Social Security. I have no hatred of Ezra Klein, Noah Smith, or Matthew Yglesias. But when you combine Yarvin’s pragmatism with his cynicism, the result is demoralization without any positive value.
They choose to live in black neighborhoods because that is where they are socially integrated. They tend to be lower income and lower in education level.
If we invested less in Boomers, and more in Zoomers, we’d reap the benefits. For example, affirmative action for young people.
Yarvin can’t have it both ways: he cannot simultaneously claim the mantle of “realist” and “bleeding-heart humanitarian.”
Russia is a pitiful, pathetic, oligarchic and corrupt state run by civic nationalists, which relies heavily on China. It is importing Muslims at 50% the rate of western Europe, and killing off its younger generation. How anyone could see that country as a “right-wing” model to be emulated, and not something to be opposed, is difficult for me to understand.
Yarvin seems to believe that it would have been better to allow Nazi Germany to take over Russia in 1941. This subject would be better left to another article, but a German superpower would have created a much more dangerous “Cold War,” favoring the Germans.
Descendant is the correct spelling, and descendent is an archaic and traditional form. I prefer descendent here because I’m not talking about physical biology or genealogy, but “that which descends.”
The evidence? George Floyd!
Yarvin believes that the American Revolution was instigated by fanatical liberal terrorists, and that things would have been better off if the British Empire had remained in control of the 13 colonies. This ignores a very practical matter, which is that the British were restricting westward expansion out of fear of expensive Indian wars. Had westward expansion been delayed, the French or Mexicans could have more firmly established themselves west of the Mississippi, dividing the American continent into two or three competing blocs.
It’s like when James Lindsay claims that wokism is “gnosticism,” or when E. Michael Jones claims that communism is secretly Judaism, or Alex Jones claims that elites are secretly Satanists. Any empirical test of Yarvinism can be waved away with another non sequitur diatribe on some obscure historical tidbit.
Yarvin measures liberalism not by proximate fruits, but in his certainty that it was always headed toward white genocide and communism. Calvinism led to Washington, who led to Lincoln, who led to FDR, who led to Obama, who led to George Floyd, who will inevitably next lead to white genocide.
Yarvin blames Calvinism for every bureaucratic inefficiency and dogmatic fanaticism. But if we’re going to engage in such sweeping teleologies, we should also give leftism credit for secularism, science, and progress.
There are societies which never embraced leftism: they can be found deep in the jungles of the Amazon or the Congo. Leftism is a western phenomenon, and only spread into Asia as a result of “westernization.” The genius of western civilization is tied to the uniqueness of leftism as a political phenomenon.
Leftism is a personality type: the revolutionary spirit. This spirit combines two attributes:
A disagreeable, individualistic attitude, which prefers war and death over slavery and conformity;
Openness to new ideas.
This “leftist personality type” is responsible for the innovation of the modern world. Only since 1848 has leftism been conflated with the industrial proletariat through the religion of Marxism. As automation erases the industrial worker, and genetic technology revolutionizes the relationship between man and technology, a progressive leftism will reemerge.
Just as the Neolithic is marked by the expansion of Anatolian and Zagrosian farmers into Europe and India, the Eurolithic will be an archaeological horizon in which European ancestry becomes a basal feature of all human populations.
The NATO question is my friend-enemy distinction. I may disagree with Democrats on rent-control or Social Security, but those who recognize the existential necessity of an American-led international order are my allies.
I can be accused of “misrepresenting Yarvin” because I haven’t read Berakhot 2b of Unqualified Reservations, where he reveals his inner esoteric doctrine, far from the prying eyes of proles like me. This is a classical Marxoid-Rabbinic strategy, where you create such a large volume of esoterica, that any critique can be deflected with accusations of laziness or stupidity.
Ask him what he thinks about FDR on two different days, before two different audiences, and you’ll get two different answers. Yarvin vacillates between calling FDR “capeshit” and praising him, because he is inconsistent and purposefully ambiguous— it’s part of his “magician” strategy.
It’s like this with everything: communism, Naziism, George Washington, etc etc. He never comes out and makes any definitive statements, just vibes and suggestions which can be bent and flipped to suit his ephemeral rhetorical nihilism.
“He undermines the Deep State”
Is nothing sacred to this man?
I’m not going to read this and just assume it’s the jacket