Curtis Yarvin is the guru for a number of major political figures on the right, including Vice President Vance and tech billionaire Peter Thiel. He is hostile to democracy and holds racist views. Yarvin’s anti-democratic views demonstrate how extremist key members of the Republican Party have become.
Yale is demonstrating its commitment to free speech.
A far-right political blogger who has espoused anti-democratic views is set to debate at Yale on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Curtis Yarvin — who has sparked controversy for advocating for a form of American monarchy and for his writings on race, slavery and apartheid — is set to participate in two debates this week, one hosted by the Yale Political Union and the other by the Yale Federalist Society.
“A smart critic like Yarvin can force people to sharpen the case for their views, especially when those views have gotten sloppy over time,” Garett Jones, a professor at George Mason University who will debate Yarvin Wednesday on “for-profit governance” at the Federalist Society’s event, wrote to the News. “And the case for democracy has certainly gotten sloppy over time. Democracy’s defenders, which I count myself among, need to do a better job.”
At the YPU debate Tuesday evening, Yarvin will argue for the resolution “end the democratic experiment” against Jed Rubenfeld, a professor at Yale Law School.
Jones wrote that he believes the debate will be a helpful way to draw out distinctions between his position, which he describes as “10% less democracy” in reference to the title of his published book, and Yarvin’s, which he calls “100% less democracy.”
Neither Rubenfeld nor YPU President Brennan Columbia-Walsh ’26 responded to the News’ request for comment.
Both debate topics land on familiar turf for Yarvin, who has consistently expressed anti-democratic beliefs. Yarvin, who is also known by his pen name Mencius Moldbug, has written about his distrust of the federal bureaucracy and his desire to institute a program called RAGE — retire all government employees.
Ilani Nurick LAW ’27 and Elizabeth Bailey LAW ’27, co-presidents of the Yale Law Democrats, criticized the Yale Federalist Society for sponsoring the event. Yarvin could not be reached for comment.
“We all believe strongly in free speech, but what is the Federalist Society hoping to learn from someone who thinks white people are genetically predisposed to be smarter than other races?” Nurick and Bailey wrote in a joint statement to the News. “Yale Law students are smart enough to know that for-profit governance is not the solution to the problems facing our country without hearing from Curtis Yarvin on the subject.”
Yarvin asserts that American democracy is a failed experiment and that America should instead run like a company with a chief executive officer, which The New York Times characterized as “his friendlier term for a dictator.”
In Yarvin’s view, the U.S. government should be run by a CEO-esque figure. In his 2008 articletitled “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives,” Yarvin proposed the “liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, and the transfer of absolute power” to that CEO-esque figure.
Yarvin’s 2008 article furthered that this process would end the press, dismantle universities and transform the nation’s capital into a “heavily armed” version of a “corporation.”
Additionally, Yarvin has sought to downplay the outcome of the American Civil War. The Times noted that he has previously written, “It is very difficult to argue that the War of Succession made anyone’s life more pleasant, including that of freed slaves.”

So both debaters actually oppose democracy, they’re only nitpicking the details. Great. Just peachy. I know this is a radical idea, but maybe if we had **more** democracy we wouldn’t have been stuck with Trump. It was very clear that neither Biden nor Harris (and certainly not Trump) offered what voters to the left of Liz Cheney were looking for, so they stayed home.
And I hope to hell that issues of “race, slavery and apartheid” are not on the table as those issues are not debatable. Marginalized people should not have to constantly defend their right to exist.
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I just watched Heather Cox Richardson and Gil Duran’s profile on Curtis Yarvin. Richardson noted that his writing often meanders and wondered why he’s become so influential, while Duran pointed out how shaky his history is (FDR a dictator?). But it seems obvious why Yarvin has traction: he’s describing the world the tech titans want to build—a hyper-efficient, hierarchical society run like a corporation. No wonder Peter Thiel wrote the foreword to one of his books. It’s chilling to watch the corporate dystopia that DEVO once satirized edging closer to reality.
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Shame Shame Shame On Yale.
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Yarvin: “….the War of Succession….” Huh, never heard of it, War of Secession sounds better. Yarvin is an incredibly vicious, heartless and nasty piece of work with too much money. He wants to turn us into Russia.
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Just when you think our public discourse can’t go any lower, there’s Yarvin.
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Yarvin echoes the lost cause line when he says no one was better after the civil war. He echoes the lost cause line by calling it a war of “succession”. In other words, Yarvin is doing the same thing the klan did, the same thing white supremacists we’re doing when they caused violence in Willmington, Tulsa, and hundreds of other small lynchings around the country (it wasn’t just the south, Indiana had a race lynching, and laws were passed restricting Blacks across the north as well).
Call it what it is. Yarvin is the slick modern counterpart to the segregationists of the last two centuries. If only we understood his shining brilliance.
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The linked NYT interview is enlightening. Can’t imagine why this guy has a following. Here’s the general gist that runs through his thinking: “whether you want to call Washington, Lincoln and F.D.R. “dictators,” this opprobrious word, they were basically national C.E.O.s, and they were running the government like a company from the top down.” Spoken like a tech bro– which is what he is. Why does anyone refer to him as a historian? He actually refers to himself as an intellectual… I guess that’s because he’s read some philosophical tracts.) I can poke holes in every statement he makes, and I’m no brainiac. I agree with his interviewer Marchese: “I have to say, I find the depth of your background information to be obfuscating, rather than illuminating.”
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Lux et Veritas? Tenebris et Mendacium.
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